The Magus of Hay(49)

‘I suppose what was worrying Peter the night he phoned me was the possibility of a worm in the apple. Someone studying or helping at the centre undercover, as it were. A disaffected follower of what he’d perceived to be the Rector philosophy. Perhaps using techniques he was learning there to expand the parameters of his own negative theology. Poisoning the pond, essentially. Peter couldn’t prove it, but was increasingly conscious of things going wrong. Arguments. Dissent. A clouding of the atmosphere. When something’s functioning on a rarified level, it doesn’t take much to tip it the other way, and even if the problem’s expunged the equilibrium is never quite restored.’

‘What was he doing up there that was harmed?’

‘Not for me to say.’ Miss White wiped a dismissive hand through a ball of frantic midges. ‘The ironic thing is that Peter Rector’s writing had shown these people how to present it in a far more… honourable light. In their terms. Thus, for example, the so-called Detritus are seen as acceptable victims for blood sacrifice or ritual execution. Performing a human sacrifice is viewed not only as ethnic or social cleansing but as a form of initiation.’

‘But surely it never—’

‘Never happens? How do we know that it never happens? All right, evidence of a human sacrifice would lead to a police hunt on a frightful scale. But if some denizen of cardboard city, some anonymous doorway-sleeper – some detritus – were to disappear… who would know?’

No answer to that.

‘They also dislike Christians. Your turn-the-other-cheek primitive socialism, your creepy humility, your abhorrence of violence, the delusion that love conquers all. If you’re ever unfortunate enough to encounter someone following this path, you’ll see a person who, endeavouring to reach a new level of humanity, has effectively jettisoned all the finer qualities of this one.’

‘OK, I get the point.’

‘I’m not sure you do. It vaguely parallels the way a psychopathic serial murderer is often shown to have begun with small animals. By the time he progresses to human beings, the act of killing has become almost routine, and he’s looking to raise the bar. He’ll kill with abandon, increasingly at random, believing himself invulnerable. But if there’s magical ritual involved, the impulse will be fuelled by what you would call psychic energy so that the act is done in such a state of higher consciousness that—’

‘Please…’ Merrily put her hands up. ‘I’m getting it.’

There was a silence.

‘He had a breakdown,’ Miss White said.

‘Rector?’

‘When I say breakdown, you couldn’t begin to understand the profundity of it. I mean a severe psychic breakdown. Periods of days without sleep… vivid hallucinations causing bouts of inner self-mutilation. At its core, a conviction that he’d been the tool of the demonic. Crying out in the night for a cleansing death. If he hadn’t been among the right people he would have been dead, or spending the rest of his days in the psychiatric system.’

‘And this was… when?’

‘Around nineteen eighty, maybe a year or two earlier, I don’t keep a diary. No one spoke about it. The Centre puttered along in his absence. Frenzied activity behind the scenes to hold him together, to dispel what was seen as a psychic attack.’

‘By whom?’

‘Names would mean nothing to you, but he had enemies, as you can imagine, people who felt he was betraying them. When he returned, still shaky, he wound it all up very quickly, sold the property to some adventure holiday company, left the country for a while. Came back a year later. With a sense of mission.’

‘To Cusop?’

‘To Cusop. To throw himself into what he considered his last redemptive project.’

Merrily waited, felt the first spots of lukewarm rain.

‘And you really can’t say what that is.’

‘No. It was his magical baby, and he believed it was working. Spectacularly.’

‘His Cusop group – these were the people who’d helped him through his breakdown?’



‘Mainly.’

‘And nobody else knew he was here.’

‘He didn’t drive. Banked via the Internet. Changed his appearance. Walked the hills and along the brook and the Wye, but rarely went into Hay where he might just have been recognized.’

‘But everyone knows now.’

‘Yes.’

‘And they’ll know about you, Athena.’

Miss White smiled sadly into the midges.

‘I wonder if he even thought of that. He hadn’t seen me in years. I wouldn’t let him. I was off the map. Out of the picture. Just a voice on the phone. I realize he’d have an image of me as I was. Quite a bit younger than he was. Invulnerable.’