Gethsemane Hall Read online

  No such luck. The screen of his laptop turned into a collection of blurry runes. He circled around the nightmare, trying to find solid ground on which to dismiss it. It wouldn’t let him. It hag-rode him, digging up questions that he had thought buried for good and all a long time ago. They were rotting, but still potent. He had lost his faith over thirty years ago. He’d been raised nominally C of E, his family going to Easter services and the occasional carol ceremony. His religion had been a thing of background noise, unquestioned because he’d never thought about it. He’d been confirmed because it was the done thing, an exercise in trivia memorization that he had found enjoyable for the pomp but no more meaningful than a good television show. Still, there had been a certain comfort to his belief. It was part of life’s solid bedrock. It would always be there. It didn’t occur to him that the foundations might crack.

  A year after his confirmation, the seismic tremors began. The distant early warning signs were some puzzling over the nature of Hell, logical inconsistencies in the Bible stories as he knew them, and a vague awareness of pretzel-form rationalizations. The catalyst was religion’s great nemesis. From his first infatuation with dinosaurs at the age of four, he’d loved science, and he hadn’t imagined a conflict between it and his taken-for-granted faith until the earthquake came during his fourth form. He’d been researching a science project on black holes. He couldn’t even recall the name of the book he’d read. It was a general readership text, setting out an equation-free introduction to the subject. All very straightforward, except that in the first chapter, the author went off on a tangent, taking the concept of black holes as a jumping-off point to demonstrate the complete irrationality behind the mere concept of a deity. The questions he had asked on the rare occasions he had thought about God at all became fully formed doubts. Within a year, the doubts had become convictions.

  By the time he started university, the nonsensicality of any form of spirituality was, to him, so transparently self-evident that he found any sort of belief that would not or could not subject itself to empirical testing to be frustrating, almost to the point of a personal affront. There had been a time, at the beginning of his twenties, when he thought that a sufficiently well-backed argument should be enough to purge people of their irrational tenets. When he looked back at that younger, activist self, he knew he’d been as naive as the ten-year-old believer. If anything, he’d been worse, possessed by the same fervour as the most dogmatic born-again Christian. He liked to think he had a more jaundiced view of himself and his activities now. He might have begun his debunking odyssey in an effort to show the faithful the errors of their ways. He didn’t for a moment believe that he was rolling back superstition in the minds of the true believers anymore. If somewhere out there was a mind that was just questioning enough to be touched by his work, well and good, but he didn’t look for that. He was still a creature of his convictions. He was old enough to know that, now. What interested him was not so much curing people of bizarre beliefs, but why they held the beliefs in the first place. He’d loved true ghost stories as a child. He still did. He found what was behind them even more fascinating. The thrill of discovering that stories of haunting were not just the products of overheated imaginations, but could be attributed to actual, physical, measurable phenomena, was evergreen. He hoped there was something at Gethsemane Hall. It would be too disappointing if the house’s reputation was based entirely on hearsay.

  One more effort at self-honesty, now. Go just a little deeper. Aren’t you going to derive just a little, eensy-weensy bit of satisfaction in publishing a complete demystification of the Hall? Aren’t you imagining the faces of the place’s most fervent and ill-informed propagandists? Well, yes. Just a bit. Just one small bit.

  The purity of his motives wasn’t what was bothering him. It was that awful nightmare that had left no memory but much trouble of the spirit. You are alone. Of course they were. He hadn’t woken with any new conviction. But it was as if a hammer had come and smashed the nail of his belief all the way home. He knew that there was no all-loving father watching over the world. He knew that dead is dead, and gone is gone, but now he felt those truths in a new way. They hurt. They made him uncomfortable. The full abyss of gone was yawning wide. The true coldness of the universe was reaching into him, just at an age when he thought he had long-since come to terms with the idea. He didn’t appreciate what felt like fresh, visceral knowledge. His unwelcome reactions to it included a half-formed hope, shut down and demolished as soon as it appeared, that maybe he had been wrong for the last three decades.

  He was going down paths that weren’t productive. He gave up trying to channel his thoughts into something that passed for work. He shut down the word processor and opened a game of solitaire.

  Sturghill woke up just after the train stopped at Yeovil Junction. Meacham had introduced him to the magician just before heading down to Roseminster. Crawford had been impressed by the breadth of her knowledge. “You know a lot more about science than I do about magic,” he had told her.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t pretend to tread on your turf,” she had replied.

  “Please, feel free to do so. Any extra insight will be a huge help. I’m not one of those scientists so arrogant he believes he can see through magic tricks just because he knows the laws of physics.”

  She’d grinned; they’d shaken hands and forged Reason’s Alliance.

  Now she yawned and stretched. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  Crawford smiled. “Too excited?”

  She shook her head. “Unbelievable nightmare.”

  Crawford’s smile went rigid.

  Six o’clock. The curtain rose.

  Meacham wouldn’t have put Gray down as having a flair for the theatrical. The brooding, hounded widower she had spoken to in the Stag had seemed a long way from irony and fun. The appearance had been misleading. He was getting his own back on all of them. She could see a twinkle, small but present, in his eyes, as if he were a man in the first stages of resurrection. She didn’t blame him for his amusement. The scene was pretty damn funny. She was exhausted after the hell-suite of the night before, but she could still summon a chuckle or two.

  They were standing with their backs to the gate, still closed, to the grounds of Gethsemane Hall. Gray was speaking to the reporters, chatting buddy-buddy with the people who’d chased him, swinging pitchforks and torches, into the Stag the day before. They were listening, polite as hell, not interrupting. Meacham and the others were standing behind him. He introduced each of them. Crawford and Pertwee were fun to watch when each realized who the other was. Crawford looked tired, too — they all did — but he was eyeing Pertwee with a humour that was dancing on the edge of contempt. Pertwee was giving him the cold-fish stare. Her sidekick, Edgar Corderman, looked like all he needed was the word from his mistress to leap at Crawford’s throat.

  Pertwee’s face sank even further into unhappiness and hostility when Gray introduced Sturghill as a magician. Gray threw some mischief around by playing coy with a couple of the introductions. He left out Corderman completely, as if he hadn’t even noticed he was there. He gave Meacham’s name, but not her profession. There was one more omission. Meacham looked around and spotted Patrick Hudson hanging around just beyond the scrum, on the sidelines with the gathered curious of Roseminster. Meacham had met Hudson on the walk down to the gate. He had told her that he would be at the Hall too, and that he was a friend of Gray’s. He had peeled off from the group as they reached the site of Gray’s theatre. He didn’t want to play, and it looked like Gray was respecting his wishes. The rest weren’t Gray’s friends. They were using him to reach the house. No special consideration for them. Just a little bit of vengeance.

  Gray twisted the knife a bit further. “But I shouldn’t presume to answer for the experts,” he said. “I should do them the courtesy of letting them speak for themselves.” And so he threw them to the wolves.

  Pertwee jumped in fir
st. She was the fish closest to being in water. She started to blather on about the spiritual fountainhead that the house was, yadda yadda yadda. Meacham found herself tuning out, realizing that she would now be hearing variations on this theme for days on end. The reporters were looking bored, too. They knew the refrain by heart, it had no beat, and they couldn’t dance to it. One of them threw a spanner into Pertwee’s works. “But if you believe there are supernatural forces in this house, isn’t it possible that they caused the death of Peter Adams?”

  “No.” Pertwee quivered with the force of her denial. “It is simply not credible that the spirits could cause anyone harm.”

  “Why not?” another asked. “There are good people and bad people. Why not good and bad ghosts?”

  “That isn’t the way the spirit realm works,” Pertwee began.

  “What about Hell?”

  Meacham realized the questions weren’t serious. They were just giving Pertwee the gears.

  Pertwee tried again. “That’s a fundamental misunderstanding. As I hope to show here, the only danger is when people react badly and harm themselves.”

  Booooring. They were looking for new juice, not finding it. A couple of questions flew Crawford’s way, but they were half-hearted, pure rote. Did he think Gethsemane Hall was haunted? “I have yet to encounter a single authentic instance of haunting,” he answered. “But I will withhold judgement until I’ve completed my study.”

  A bright young thing, clearly pleased beyond measure with the way his shirt looked on him, turned to Meacham. “And is the CIA’s position that the reports of ghosts here are —”

  “Fucking horseshit,” she said, and smiled sweetly. Christ, this was fun. To Gray she said, “Can we go in now?”

  He must have had his finger on a remote. She still jumped a bit when the gate opened. Before her, the drive descended from the early evening light to a black tunnel of trees. The hollow of dark stared into her, expectant.

  chapter ten

  the grand tour

  Meacham thought, Here we go. She heard the gate close behind her. The sound was a restrained latching of metal, but it felt like the hollow boom of a vault door. After twenty yards, the gravel drive’s steep gradient dropped into the trees. The oaks reached across to each other, making a roof and blocking the sunlight. Meacham had thought tunnel just before they walked through the gate, but now, as they approached, she kept thinking funnel, and then, before she could stop herself, throat. You, she told herself, have the willies. When was the last time that had happened? The most recent memories were from childhood, too faded to carry emotional weight. The closest thing to fear in her adult life had been in Geneva, when everything had gone wrong in ways so inexplicable and surreal, and on a scale so colossal, the balls-up had seemed almost supernatural. This was different. This was the creeps. This was looking at dark woods and not really wanting to go in.

  This was also idiotic. The dream was the culprit, she decided. It was still bothering her. Its insidious and nasty nothingness had her heart pinching. Her gut had been hollowed out by a visceral crash course in existentialism. She resented the merry havoc games of her subconscious. She knew what she believed, and that was already close enough to nothing for government work. She shouldn’t be having sucker-punch aftereffects from a dream, for Chrissake. She put her overreaction down to a lack of sleep. The nightmare had finished her for the night. She was never at her best when sleep-deprived. No one was. Decisions were unreliable, responses irrational under those conditions. The history of the Agency was a testament to the effects of too much coffee and nerves, and not enough sleep and reflection.

  They passed under the shadow of the oaks. The underbrush was night-thick. The trunks were fuzzy with moss. Meacham could hear the green. She looked to the right and left of the drive, but her view stopped a few yards into the mass of trees and ferns. Hardly unusual, she reminded herself. Typical English vegetation, which made up for its limited space by mightily concentrating its resources. She stared into the woods, armed with the knowledge of the mundane. The gloom stared back, and she blinked first. Crawford had told her: specific environmental factors could trigger unease or worse. She hung on to that fact. (And you’re tired — you’re overtired.) She walked a bit faster, stepping a bit harder than she had to, encouraging the real-world crunch of gravel under her heels.

  She caught up to Hudson. Do your job, she told herself. Be useful. Know these people. Gather the intel. She’d read a file on Hudson. She had the breakdown on everyone she was going to be staying with at Gethsemane Hall. At one point she had considered using Hudson to approach Gray, but she had discarded the idea once word starting coming back that the two weren’t working together anymore. She also doubted, given Hudson’s causes, that he’d be open to collaboration. Knowing him now had a different importance. She knew what most of the agendas in the group were. She didn’t have his filed away yet. “I noticed you didn’t speak at the press conference,” she said.

  Hudson had been frowning at the woods. He looked at her now, as if relieved she had drawn his attention. “I don’t have a public interest in the results of the investigations.”

  “How about a private one?”

  He thought that one over. “I suppose so.”

  Meacham caught him looking at Gray. The lord of the manor was several paces ahead of the rest of the group and moving fast. (Wee wee wee, all the way home.) “You’re worried about him,” she guessed.

  Hudson didn’t seem concerned or surprised that she’d read him. “Yes,” he said.

  “About his health?”

  “His spiritual health.” He gave Meacham a wry smile. “I don’t think that’s uppermost on your mind.”

  “No,” she admitted. “It isn’t. But why are you worried?”

  “There’s something wrong with the house.”

  “You think the place is haunted?”

  “No. If you accept the tenets of Christianity and really think them through, there isn’t really room for the idea of homeless spirits.”

  “Then ...”

  “A place doesn’t need ghosts to be spiritually unhealthy. Take Abu Ghraib, for example.” He paused, and Meacham caught a twinkle. “Even if the place were closed down and empty, I don’t think anyone could spend time there without suffering some sort of damage.”

  “I didn’t realize Gethsemane Hall had that kind of reputation.” She glanced over her shoulder. Pertwee was out of earshot, thank God. She was bringing up the rear with Corderman, walking behind Crawford and Sturghill. The ghost hunter was talking with Corderman and still glaring death beams at Crawford’s neck.

  “It doesn’t.”

  “What makes you think there’s a problem, then?”

  Hudson nodded towards Gray. His face was twisted for a moment by needle-sharp worry and hurt.

  Meacham purged the levity from her tone. “You’ve been friends a long time?” She knew they had been, but better to let Hudson open up and tell her more than she could glean from dry analysis and summaries of dates.

  “I was his best man.”

  “Have you spent a lot of time here?”

  “Never. He hasn’t been here for years. He came when he was younger, but I don’t think he liked it much. Now he doesn’t want to leave.”

  “People change.” She spread her arms to take in the trees as they funnelled them down. Cool air rose like breath to meet them. “After what happened to him, if he wants to be alone, this is a good place.”

  “I know.”

  “So?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. He was shattered and bitter before he decided to come down. Now there’s something off about him. I don’t think his staying here alone is healthy.”

  “He won’t be alone now.”

  Hudson nodded, looking relieved as well as worried.

  But then the drive made a sharp bend, and they hit the transition between the untended woods and the gardens. The variety of tree species multiplied. Oak, elm, chestnut, willow, and pine line
d the circumference of the grounds and protected the isolation of the Hall in its cleft. Then there were the yew trees. Meacham had never seen so many. They were the forward guard of the perimeter, a force of massive, twisted age. Their branches were a confusion of pythons, their trunks thick as history. Their roots were coiled high on the ground, ready to propel them forward if the need arose. They were England, and they were watching. At first, Meacham could only see fragments of the house through the branches, but the drive made its final descent free of the trees.

  Gray paused on the elevation, waiting for everyone to catch up, the proud host presenting the first real view of his home. Gethsemane Hall was an exercise in architectural stratification, arranged around a central courtyard. Authentic half-timbered Elizabethan gables with strangely placed mullioned windows became faux Elizabethan Victoriana whose timbers were too regular and clean. Bursting in between was medieval stonework that was built for defence, not aesthetics. The house showed the history of its renovations like tree rings. A massive gatehouse tower dominated the west front. It was one with the foundations, works that made everything more recent look like a temporary afterthought. The house was surrounded by a moat. To the right, the gardens spread out over two levels split in half by a fifteen-foot change in elevation. The half nearest the house was formal. Exuberant flower arrangements bordered the moat wall. On the other side of the drive, which followed the wall, was a lawn, wide open except for a huge scotch pine that twisted as if agonized by its own height. Its branches pushed against a phantom west wind.

  The upper level of the gardens was a planned wilderness. The trees ran riot. Willows drooped over a lake, and a monkey puzzle burst, incongruous, between them. The lake fed a cascade nestled in the rise between the two halves of the grounds. The cascade spilled into a rectangular pond. From this distance, the pond seemed still. Meacham looked from it to the moat. She noticed that the moat’s water wasn’t stagnant at all and guessed that the pond must feed into it underground.