This is the opening section of The Fool, an occult thriller novella in the Fragments collection.
Maryam Michael woke as she always did, in the dark. She left her curtains open so that when she
woke, the night was in the room with her.
Sometimes this meant she awoke in perfect darkness with a cloudy sky
robbing all the night of light. At other
times she woke in brilliant moonlight, so bright she could see her reflection
in her dressing table mirror. This
morning the shallow dark of a star-studded sky greeted her, and she rose and
stared out her window, beginning her day with starlight and chanting. Here, in the quiet of her country retreat,
there was no artificial light on the horizon, nothing to interfere with the sky
and her communion with it.
After so many years enclosed, she had come to love the
expanse of an unfettered sky. When she
had left her cell behind, with all its quiet memories and soul devoted
comforts, she had immediately relished the freedom of the sky. For years her sky had been small, distant,
dissected into squares. A thing that she
could glimpse now and then but which was out there, outwith the walls of her
inner life. Now she embraced it as an
equal, although she shied from that as an analogy; how could any single,
insignificant human soul be equal to the sky?
Like everything in her new life, her routine, her habit, was
a mixture of old and new. Carefully
preserving the aspects that she’d found useful, adding to them new rituals and
experiences that enriched who she now was.
Therefore when she finished her chanting and had rung the temple bell
that hung at her window three times, she bowed to the sky and went through to
her toilette. A warm shower, the body
washed and the hair cleaned through, she returned to her boudoir to dress. Rather than the ritual of prayer that once
accompanied the taking off of her night attire and its immediate replacement
with her day attire, she relished the freedom to sit naked at her mirror and
dance cosmetics across her skin. The
lightest of touches of moisturisers and foundation, a faint blush to the
cheeks, a perfect contour of shade across her storm grey eyes, the lick of dark
mascara defining her long lashes and a minute sheen of soft colour across her
lip.
Her hair, as short as it ever had been, fell into perfect
layers, a testament to scissors as sharp as the talent of the hairdresser that
had yielded them. It required but one
comb through to settle smoothly, revealing her cheekbones in a way striking to
any women of her age. A cloistered youth
had left her with excellent skin and when she had taken off her coif her shock
of silver hair had been a surprise. Then
it had been unusual for a woman to go gray so completely by the time she had
entered her 40s. Now she was unusual
only in that she choose not to colour it to mimic youth. Her youth still came from inside. She found that her age gave her a gravitas
that she had sorely needed early in her life and valued tremendously now it had
arrived. It was not something she was
prepared to deny or to hide.
She dressed in delicate satin and lace underwear, bespoke to
her slender body, and finished with house pyjamas and a long house coat in
linen. Today would be spent in paperwork
and she would appreciate the soft warmth and flow of the casual lines. She had always enjoyed the feel of cloth as
she moved and relished that she could now indulge her tastes in any fabric and
colour.
Although she rarely chose colour: her pyjamas were black and
her housecoat grey. Monochrome was still
a feature of her attire. She slipped
soft leather slippers on and went downstairs to the kitchen. The aroma from the coffee maker drew her in
and she poured herself a bowl. The timer
was set so that she invariably arrived just as the last few precious drops
trickled into the jug. She breathed in
the warmth, holding the bowl in both hands and tip-toed over the flagstone
floor, slipping into her study without waking up the Irish wolfhound that slept
across the back door. Edith, her
housekeeper, would wake the behemoth when she pushed open the door in a couple
of hours. Once, Cullain would have woken
the second she rose and would have been at the kitchen door whining and
scratching when she came down. Now, even
the gurgling of the machine barely caused an eyelid to flutter. He was getting old and knew he would be
ignored until she’d eaten. So he stayed
asleep and she got more work done: it suited them both.
She had two reports to file for the Vatican and two articles
to translate from Aramaic, both for an American university. The Aramaic texts were proving to be
difficult and she put her just awake mind to them first. After an hour, when her forehead had begun to
pound, she fetched more coffee and switched to sorting out the references. She hated referencing her work and always had
to make herself do it as she went, in order to prevent two weeks of agony at
the end. Referencing was always a time
for her to consider her faults and sins; she often felt doing them was some
sort of penance.
By the time Edith arrived two hours after that, bringing
fresh croissants and bread, Maryam was grey with fatigue. It was good fatigue, but her head hurt and
her eyes stung. Edith tutted at her as
she called her through for a warming bowl of sweet oatmeal. Maryam ignored the tutting, eating her
portion whilst scratching the back of Cullain’s hairy ears. Edith was not backward in coming forward with
her ideas about how hard work, tiny amounts of food and very little sleep would
ruin a person’s health. Maryam, who’d
found that slightly less sleep than you needed, combined with slightly less
food than you needed and a good solid day’s work kept you agile and fit,
ignored her. Edith fed Cullain his
breakfast as Maryam finished hers by dunking a croissant in another bowl of hot
coffee: sweet indulgence was good for the body and the soul.
She changed into her outside clothes and donned her thick
boots and took Cullain out for his morning tramp through the woods and
hills. It was brisk and none too warm,
clouds scudded by and wind pulled at them both, but it was refreshing. Cullain came alive on his walks and there was
great pleasure in watching him enjoy the scents and intrigues of other wildlife
and the undergrowth. Her legs were
aching when she returned two hours later and the aroma of the quail Edith was
preparing for luncheon was delectable. A
shower, and then an hour or so of more translation before eating... and then
she could spend the afternoon reading for leisure. As she started up the stairs the phone
rang. Edith popped her head around the
kitchen door as she answered and tutted.
The switch to Italian and her tone were unmistakable. Edith returned to the kitchen, clanging pots
and pans. Madame was going on her
travels again, and this lunch and the dinner she was half way through preparing
would now be fed to the beast. How on
earth was she going to get her layabout son to walk Madame’s wolf dog at this
time of year?
When Maryam finished the conversation, she phoned the local
taxi company and requested they pick her up in thirty minutes, to drive her to
Marseille. Edith did some more banging
as she packed a decent lunch for Madame.
Thirty minutes was tight, but she could make one of the
afternoon’s TGVs to Lille if she hurried.
Maryam downloaded the files the Cardinal promised had been sent through,
and packed up her electronics and their all important leads: laptop, phone,
chargers and electricity converters for the various European voltages. She showered the sweat off, dressed, and
packed her clothing and personal items in under ten minutes. Her work kit was always full and ready to go;
Edith took the three cases outside whilst she hugged Cullain goodbye. Cullain whimpered and look sorrowful but was
asleep before she left the kitchen. She
picked up her heavy wool coat with its scarves and gloves in the pockets as she
left. The driver was eager, intent on
carving a few minutes off the hour drive; the local drivers loved to compete on
such runs. Edith looked grim as Maryam
waved goodbye to her and Maryam felt that grimness inside: she detested being
called to work on a murder.
She munched on her luncheon as they drove, sharing it with
Alain, the driver. Edith had packed
enough for three. They made the TVG
comfortably and Maryam booked through to London on the train she had aimed
for. Lille was a faster journey and
transfer than Paris; she should be in London by late evening. She set up in the business lounge before they
left and was able to call ahead and give her estimated arrival time before
switching her phone off.
Her slender frame in the luxurious chairs allowed her to
settle diagonally into her chair, with the laptop screen facing away from the
casual eye. She’d positioned herself at
the far end of the carriage, able to see all who approached in one direction
and the opening door to her side warning her in the other. She closed the screen down at the stations:
nothing of what she was viewing could, or should, be seen by the casual eye.
What she was viewing was disturbing enough in print;
thankfully there were few photographs.
That there were photographs at all warned her that some political
connection had already been brought into play.
The murder had occurred in the Church of the Mother of All
Sorrows, in Peckham, London. A young man
had been spread out on the altar and his body slashed. He was naked and had been laid out in the
shape of the crucifixion. A series of
long cuts had caused a bleed out. The
photos showed blood running off the altar and pooling on the floor. From the amount of blood, Maryam was sure the
young man had died from exsanguination: he’d literally bled to death on the
altar. He was seventeen years old.
The slashes were neither random nor without meaning. They slid in shallow swoops that had
encouraged slow, deliberate, bleeding.
They were also words that had been scrawled onto his flesh. It wasn’t English or Latin, or even Greek,
but Arabic script. The translation she’d
received from Rome suggested that the writing stated that the man had died as
he was a pig and therefore unclean. Not
entirely trusting either the transcription from the wounds, or the translation,
she spent a good hour working through the photos and sketches made by the
police, piecing together what she hoped was a rather more accurate
version. The script claimed that the man
had been cleansed and made mention of a Jinn.
There were also random words on his limbs: swine, defiler, heretic, but
the gist was that he had been killed to cleanse him of his stain. She was unsure if it was ‘stain’, and hoped
she could get a clearer understanding of the writing at some point.
Feeling both repulsed, and so terribly sad for the young man
and his stolen life, she switched everything off and sat, her eyes closed,
feeling the rhythm of the train as it shot through the countryside. She’d learned that when faced with horror,
with death and blood and violence, that meditating was the way to find
safety. Once, she’d have prayed; prayed
so hard that she would partially achieve an out of body feeling, a sense of
spiritual release and ecstasy. She’d
found, however, that this could be an emotion just as deceiving as despair;
different edges of the same blade. Calm
and lack was a more fitting home for the troubled spirit. A core of emptiness from which to observe and
record; catalogue and process as opposed to feel. Prayer was feeling; meditation was absence. In absence, there was room for logic to
examine the horror: to allow deliberation upon it that could leave her essence
untouched.
It was also useful for alerting her to something she’d
missed. When she went back to the images
and the reports, after rising to walk around a few moments and request some
fresh coffee, she noticed that the corpse lay upon what looked like thin paper
sheets. Tiny segments could be seen, if
you looked, lost in the shadow and blood stains. She magnified the image but could not discern
much on a laptop. After an hour of
fiddling with images, she was sure she could make out one small line of
writing. Almost. Her instinct told her what was probably on
the leaves. Her intellect told her what
that might mean: it certainly made sense of why the crime had been passed
straight up to Major Crimes by the local borough unit.
There was no mention of the sheets of paper anywhere in the
reports. She did some research on the
internet, found the phone number she needed, switched her phone on and sent a
text.
She then closed down all the murder scene details and
concentrated on the background report.
The body had been found by a young priest, Father Wyn Jones. She clicked up a copy of his grainy passport-sized
photo and stared at the face, trying to see what sort of man he was. Even in this old photo from his application
form he was striking: handsome and virile.
He was thirty-one years old and on his first posting as a fully ordained
priest. Born in Cardiff, Wales, he had
studied in London at Allen Hall, the Diocese of Westminster’s own
Seminary. He was, according to the file,
a gifted and passionate priest who had expressed his desire to work with the disadvantaged
youth of the world. He had been
delighted with his placement into the Archdiocese of Southwark and his posting
to the Mother of All Sorrows Church in gang-ridden, crime-rife Peckham. She stopped work on the people and switched
to the internet to examine the locale.
Peckham was an old South London parish of dereliction and despair. It had been the scene of a dreadful murder a
few years ago; a ten-year-old boy left to bleed to death in the streets,
attacked needlessly by a couple of slightly older boys. The world was never good when children killed
children.
She explored further and found that in recent months massive
amounts of European funding had been pumped in to help combat both the violence
and the decay. It was a good placement
for a young priest with lots of drive and a desire to achieve something. Energy and money always made things happen,
for good or ill.
Father Jones had worked relentlessly for good. He reinstated the Church youth group and set
up a youth choir modelled on the Southern Baptist style song and dance of USA
churches. It had been highly successful
and there had been real connections made with the younger teenagers, who were
in constant danger of being drawn into the gang infrastructure. There were also plans to set up a Church
youth soccer team and he’d begun fundraising to pay for it. All in all, Father Jones had made a
substantial contribution to his new parish in the fourteen months since he’d
been assigned. The old parish priest,
Father Edwards, who had been retired once and then dragged back out to keep the
church doors open, had no doubt found the young man to be a blessing. The Bishop had been delighted and the parish
had shown signs of recovery. Services
had seen a congregation where not only was the average age under 60 years old,
but there was talk of a toddler group being viable if the numbers of families
with young children continued to rise.
Father Jones was working on the simple truth that if you gave purpose
and hope to the lives of the children, the parents would follow.
All had been well until about three months prior when the
Mother of All Sorrows had become the target of a vicious graffiti and vandalism
campaign. Parishioners had taken to
nightly patrols round the closed Church and the graveyard, as no matter how
much cleaning and restoration was done during the day, it would all reappear as
soon as it was dark. Obscenity had been
the main feature of the graffiti with graphic drawings of what was supposed to
be Father Jones in sexual congress with children, animals, and corpses from the
graves. Various classic motifs of
defilement and occult paraphernalia had been left in both the Church, and the
graveyard, all no doubt inspired by horror movies. Cats were found strung up on the headstones
and a chicken was beheaded at the Church door, with its blood used to draw an
inverted pentagram. The Archdiocese and
the police had sealed it down with the help of the outraged parishioners and a
local animal charity. CCTV had been
upped and a couple of the youths from one of the local gangs had been arrested
and charged with defacing Church property.
All had gone quiet until Father Jones had opened up the
Church doors yesterday morning and found the body upon the altar.
Unfortunately, the young man who was dead, and spread across
the stones, was known to Father Jones.
Just the day before, they had been involved in a fist fight on the
Church steps. They both still wore the
bruises and cuts they had given each other.
In fact, Father Jones had been the last person to see the young man
alive.
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