The Magus of Hay(91)

Merrily gazed across the nave at the little mouse on the font lid. Thought it might have moved.

‘And did she come?’

Emrys Walters, a non conformist minister from some plain, cold chapel, had turned his head away towards the east window, a hand shaking with the memory of something.

‘Some folks reckon so. Aye.’





40

Mephista


‘I DIDN’T EXPECT that,’ Merrily said. ‘I didn’t expect any of it. How come we never heard about it at the time? Even you.’

Huw looked at her like she’d just come out of an egg, reminding her that these things still happened, or were perceived as happening, day-to-day, and nobody knew this more than they did, the medieval hackers at the spiritual coalface.

‘It gets blanked out,’ Huw said. ‘Even by the Church. A whole level of human experience trashed as loony-fodder – doesn’t happen, can’t happen, nobody’s that gullible any more. Also, this is Capel-y-ffin, where it were blanked out here the first time because it didn’t fit the religious order of things.’

They watched Emrys Walters getting into his van in front of the farm where the sheepdogs had started barking. The questions Merrily wasn’t sure she wanted to ask were stacking up.

‘You met any of the others who thought they’d seen it?’

‘Nobody else – not round here – wants to talk about it. They don’t know what they saw. They want to forget it. The way they wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been summoned by a combination of rich buggers and mushroom-heads from the hated Convoy.’

‘What did it look like?’

‘Accounts vary. Some say grey, smudgy, soiled, indistinct. No more than a discolouring of the morning mist. Others… radiant. I don’t know, it’s all subjective and I were still up north at the time.’



Emrys’s van rattled into life, coughed out blue smoke. He beeped his horn at them as the van pulled away, and they stood at the side of the lane and considered the possibility of Peter Rector conducting a psychological experiment to see if, through meditation and combined visualization, an image of the Lady of Llanthony might be made perceptible again, nearly a century after its first alleged appearance.

Huw stood staring at the clouds.

‘And how do you feel about that yourself?’ Merrily asked.

‘I think… that Peter Rector was, at that time, still a darker man. A man who wanted to play with the elements, if he could, and people’s minds, which he knew he could. Happen for its own sake, or his own gratification or his own psychic development. I can’t see as it’d be for anybody’s good.’

‘And was this when the girls went missing?’

‘You see why it were important for you to know the background first?’ Huw said.

The girls had been from the convoy. One was sixteen, the other in her twenties. They’d vanished while the convoy was camped on Hay Bluff, picking mushrooms. Not the most peaceful gathering; there had been regular confrontations with the police, under pressure from the farmers and a proportion of the towns-folk of Hay to move them on.

Generally speaking, Hay, like all towns, didn’t like the Convoy people. They came down from the Bluff to collect their state benefits, buy their cheap cider, drink it in the streets. Sometimes there was trouble. Shops banned them to protect their stock.

‘And both girls had been to Rector’s gatherings?’

‘As far as I can ascertain, only one,’ Huw said. The younger one. The daughter of what you might call holiday hippies. Owd hippies who wanted to recapture the excitement of their youth, in the Summer of Love. They’d buy an owd bus and join the convoy for a few weeks. Usually they’d be welcomed by the regular convoy, not least because they had more money. Mephista’s parents… they were in the writer-and-poet bag.’

‘She was really called Mephista?’

‘Kind of name hippies gave their kids. Her dad were a freelance writer who was supposed to be planning a book about life on the road with the Convoy. Her mother took the photos. They might’ve had the heart to finish it if they’d ever seen their daughter again.’

‘Vanished? Just like that?’

‘Mephista were a problem. She didn’t relate to the New Age traveller thing. She wanted city life, clubs – discos as it would’ve been then. The parents dragged her along to Rector’s place if only to keep an eye on her. They were very keen on Rector – well, you would be if you were doing a book. But then one day Mephista was gone and the older woman, too. The older one came and went a lot, used to get lifts into Hay and might not come back for a day or two. Thought to be on the game. So it would’ve been a while before they found out she was gone, too. The camp wasn’t exactly tightly organized, as you can imagine.’