MW 12 - The Magus of Hay Read online

  The Magus of Hay

  Also by Phil Rickman

  THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

  The Wine of Angels

  Midwinter of the Spirit

  A Crown of Lights

  The Cure of Souls

  The Lamp of the Wicked

  The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

  The Smile of a Ghost

  The Remains of an Altar

  The Fabric of Sin

  To Dream of the Dead

  The Secrets of Pain

  The Magus of Hay

  THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

  The Bones of Avalon

  The Heresy of Dr Dee

  OTHER TITLES

  Candlenight

  Curfew

  The Man in the Moss

  December

  The Chalice

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2013 by Corvus,

  an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2013

  The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 0 85789 865 4

  E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 867 8

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  My father had a seven-year-old boy killed.

  It had to be done. I understand this fully.

  Earlier, he’d murdered the boy’s father.

  On Christmas Day.

  Perfect timing.

  The slaughter reveals important qualities in my father: he did what was necessary, untroubled by accusations of cruelty and bleatings about mercy, and he clearly had little regard for the Christian religion which has held back the progress of mankind for so long (although all the signs are that it won’t survive much longer).

  My father understands the role of violence in mankind’s striving for perfection. Who amongst us would not respect a man of pure descent from a northern race bred to kill and prosper?

  I speak of my father in the present tense because he lives on in me. My aim is to restore to him what was his. When the time is right I shall make a blood sacrifice in his name, and this will be my ascendance to the Fourth Degree.

  What I am saying to you in this article is that you should search for your own true father. Search through old records or, if you have the money, employ a genealogist to find the ancestor with whom you should connect in order to fulfil your earthly destiny.

  Somewhere in your ancestry your father is waiting, sword drawn, for your summons.

  from an article by Frater J.

  in the newsletter ‘Dark Orb’,

  Autumn, 1985

  Contents

  Part One

  1 A rebuilding… maybe

  2 Without light

  3 The crown

  4 Needs

  5 Fix it

  6 Formless conceit

  Part Two

  7 Sad case

  8 No strings

  9 Old habits

  10 A better place

  11 Without comfort

  12 Cripple

  13 Protocol and courtesy

  14 A hollow in time

  15 Catered for

  16 The unknowable

  17 Putrid

  18 The word

  19 Small obsession

  20 Transition

  Part Three

  21 An extremely brief affair

  22 Worm in the apple

  23 Victims

  24 We shall come again

  25 The quiet

  26 Nemesis

  27 Orange spine

  28 Report it

  29 Nail bar

  30 Blowtorch

  31 Treats

  32 Plea of insanity

  Part Four

  33 The N‐word

  34 Niceties

  35 Cold history

  36 The Wire

  37 The full Lazarus

  38 Take the money

  39 Convoy

  40 Mephista

  41 Into the hearth

  42 Unfinished

  43 Weight of bone

  44 The mountains and the word

  45 Third-class citizens

  46 Naked talk

  47 Blinded to the rest

  48 Messiah

  49 Superstition

  50 Spartan

  51 Received wisdom

  Part Five

  52 The last redemptive project

  53 Right-hand path

  54 Poppet

  55 Out of blood

  56 Vision and need

  57 English corruption

  58 A dark symmetry

  59 Poltergeists

  60 Name of my father

  61 Look what you made me do

  62 Symbol of intent

  63 The case for atheism

  64 Physical things

  65 The darknesses

  66 A social basis

  67 Crystal tulip

  68 Martyr

  69 Spirit rising

  70 An occasion

  Notes & Credits

  PART ONE

  MAY

  ‘Hay-on-Wye remains as it was in the fifteenth century – a tightly-walled medieval city.’

  RICHARD BOOTH

  My Kingdom of Books

  (Y Lolfa1999)

  … by 1460, the castle was described as ‘ruinous, destroyed by rebels and of no value’. In 1498, a survey reported that the town, as well as the castle, was ruinous. The whole area within the town walls was described by John Leland in 1538 as ‘wonderfully decaied’.

  WELSH CHRONICLES ONLINE

  1

  A rebuilding… maybe

  IT WAS THE kind of place they just never would have considered living in. At one time. When he’d loved the empty hush of a cold night and the whingeing of old timbers in a gale. Oh… and when he could walk across the yard without a goddamn stick.

  He said, kind of tentatively, ‘Don’t you love it… just a little?’

  Facing Betty in the curve of the alley, where there was a café and sandwich bar with outside tables, people having morning tea and fooling themselves this was summer.

  ‘“Love”’s not quite the right word,’ Betty said. ‘Though little certainly fits.’

  It was a stone building, maybe a former outhouse, somewhere between a stable block and a pigsty. Most of its ground floor seemed to be a bookstore.

  Robin was silent, looking up over the roofs of the shops to the castle’s ivy-stubbled stone, his fingers curling with the need to paint it. She must’ve seen him catch his breath when they drove over the long bridge across the Wye that was like a causeway between worlds.

  There weren’t many towns left in this overloaded country that you could see the whole of from a distance, nesting in wooded hills, the streets curling up to the castle, warm grey walls under lustrous clouds. He’d been here a dozen times but never before with that sense of electric anticipation, that sense of intent, Jesus, that sense of mission.

  ‘So, could you maybe like… grow to
love it?’ he said.

  Betty gave him the long-suffering look.

  ‘I know what you love about it. You love how close it is to the castle. If it wasn’t for the castle you wouldn’t even consider living up an alley in the middle of a town.’

  Ah, damn, she knew him too well. Robin took a step back. Here, in this alley, the castle was so close that one of its walls seemed to be growing out of the roofs of shops. Including this shop, virtually in its foundations. If he could hop, he’d be hopping. Come on. How often did you get a chance like this, to be almost part of a castle?

  And make money. How could they not?

  ‘And let’s be honest.’ Betty looked up. ‘As castles go, it’s not the most scenic. Some medieval walls, most of a tower. A knackered Jacobean mansion somebody built inside, only it keeps burning down. But then – I keep forgetting – you’re American.’

  Two young guys walking down from the main road gave Betty long glances, the way guys did faced with a lovely fresh-faced blonde. She had on the shocking-pink fleece with the naive flower motif that made her look sixteen, unzipped to below her breasts, swelling the tight T-shirt underneath. Robin couldn’t see her expression because the sun was suddenly dazzling him through a split in the rainclouds, and she was spinning around, canvas bag springing from her shoulder on its strap.

  ‘Bugger! We’re overdue.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Car park. Ten forty-six on the ticket. They’re complete bastards now, apparently.’

  Shouldering her bag and stomping off up the alley, away from the café, towards the main road. Robin didn’t move, not ready to lose the ambience of a different era. An old lady was ambling past wearing a tweed cap. She was whistling. He didn’t recognize the tune, but how many places did you actually encounter an old lady whistling? He hissed and tightened his fists until his nails dug into his palms, then limped off after Betty. A tug on his hip as he drew level.

  ‘I suppose they’re not actually bastards in themselves,’ Betty said, ‘they’re just – according to that woman in the ice cream parlour, you probably weren’t listening, you were gazing around – they’re under orders from the council that anybody gets a ticket, even if they’re only a minute over. Councils are so desperate for cash they’re mugging tourists.’

  ‘Betty!’ Robin was wringing his hands. ‘Fuck the goddamn parking wardens! Fuck the council! Whatta we do here?’

  She didn’t answer. He followed her out to the main road which was called Oxford Road, although it in no way could be said to lead to Oxford on account of Oxford had to be something like a hundred miles away and comparable to Hay only in its book-count.

  Across this road, over the chain of vehicles and beyond the wide, sloping parking lot prowled by bastards, hills of pool-table green were snuggled into the Black Mountains. The hills between the mountains and the river. The flesh between the bones and the blood. And in the middle of this right now, the centre of everything, was the grey-brown town, the only actual urban space where Robin had ever totally wanted to be since leaving the States. They could make it here. Get something back. Maybe not all of it, but some of it. A start. A rebuilding. Maybe.

  Betty said, ‘I think it was bullshit.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘You only had to look at his face when he smiled. He wanted to cause trouble. Not for us, for the guy in the shop. That’s my feeling.’

  Betty’s feelings. You did not lightly ignore Betty’s feelings.

  ‘We could at least ask,’ Robin said. ‘Not like we got anything to lose.’

  Betty stood with her back to the sign that said Back Fold and another bookstore on the corner. Three bookstores in this one short, twisting alley with a pole at its centre, phone or power cables spraying from it like ropes from a maypole. Robin looked back down towards the third bookstore, its window unlit. The shelves inside had seemed far from full. It had looked like a bookstore waiting to die.

  Or get reborn…

  ‘OK.’ Betty threw up her arms. ‘We’ll get another parking tick— no, I’ll get it. You go back. There might even be nobody in there.’

  ‘Said Open on the door.’

  Over the door it said Oliver’s Literary Fiction. Robin walked back down there, peered into the window, saw a short rack of hardback novels by Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood and like that. He tried the door. It didn’t open.

  Why was that woman always right? He shouted after her.

  ‘Bets!’

  But she’d gone. He hated that his wife could now move so much faster. Hated how old ladies would cut him up in a supermarket aisle.

  But then the door of Oliver’s Literary Fiction opened, and…

  Oh my God.

  The man in the doorway, in his collarless, striped shirt with the brass stud, his severe half-glasses, looked like nobody so much, Robin thought, as the guy with the pitchfork in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. It was the kind of face that only promised more humiliation.

  Humiliation. How all this had begun, on a cold, rainy day when spring was an ailing baby squirming feebly out of winter’s womb. Just under a week ago.

  They weren’t broke, but they weren’t far off.

  Robin’s income had been smashed around the same time as his bones. They’d sold a house in the sticks, into a falling market, for less than they paid for it. They’d taken out a mortgage on a humbler dwelling. Now they were having difficulty paying the premiums and Betty had to work checkout at the Co-op.

  One day Robin had been sitting, feeling hopeless, staring at the wall.

  The wall was all books. Like all the other walls in the living room. And the hallway and the bedroom. And he was thinking, We’re never gonna read all these books again.

  Collecting a rueful smile from Betty who, it turned out, had been thinking pretty much the same for several months, wary of approaching the issue because some of those books had great personal significance. They’d each brought a few hundred into the relationship and they’d bought one another more books, over the years, as inspirational presents.

  But, hell, there it was. Circumstance.

  So they’d driven over to Hay, the second-hand book capital of the entire universe and gone into the first shop they found with a sign that said BOOKS BOUGHT.

  The name over the shop was G. Nunne. Robin had walked in with a holdall full of books, dumped it on the counter, told the guy there was another fifteen hundred back where they came from. All on the same subject. A collection.

  The guy took a cursory look. He was built like an old-fashioned beer keg and had one of those red wine-stain birthmarks down one side of his face.

  ‘All more or less like this?’

  Robin, who’d brought along what he judged to be the most valuable, beautifully produced, hard-to-find volumes on their shelves, had nodded.

  The guy had rolled his head around on cushions of fat.

  ‘Market en’t good.’

  He had, surprisingly, a local accent. Robin had figured that all the booksellers here were, like, London intellectuals.

  ‘See, you can get most of these as e-books for a few quid,’ G. Nunne said. ‘Nothing’s out of print these days. So… I’d need to take a look, but I’m guessing…’ blowing his lips out, considering ‘… three, four hundred, the lot?’

  ‘You mean these… these here…?’

  ‘No, the lot. Fifteen hundred, you said?’

  ‘What?’ Close to dropping the stick and dragging the guy across the counter by the lapels. ‘You’d make ten times that much. Hell, what am I saying? Twenty times… thirty times… maybe more…’

  ‘But even if that were true, I’d have to sell them all, wouldn’t I? How long you think it takes to even get your money back? What percentage of customers are looking for weird books? You think that’s so bloody easy in a double-dip recession, you try it.’

  Big silence. Betty drawing a long, hissy breath. Robin leaning forward on his stick with the ram’s head handle.

  ‘Y
ou know what?’ Robin had said. ‘We might just fucking do that.’

  Betty going, ‘Robin…’

  G. Nunne looking unperturbed.

  ‘Fifteen hundred books en’t a bad start. It’s how most of us got going, flogging our own. Then you wind up like me.’ A toothy wheeze. ‘Life sentence.’

  G. Nunne was like walled in by books, all the shelves loaded up, hundreds more stacked up either side of his chair. He scratched his nose.

  ‘Nice little shop gonner be up for rent soon, I reckon. Back Fold. Have a look. Small but perfectly formed. Like its owner.’

  And then he’d done the smile.

  They hadn’t checked it out. Not that day. Too annoyed. Too deflated.

  No smile from Mr-American-Gothic-but-actually-painfully- English pitchfork guy.

  ‘And who told you that?’

  Who tewld you? Now, here was a London intellectual.

  ‘Just a… guy in town.’ Robin followed him inside. ‘He said the store might be up for rent. Soon.’

  ‘Bookseller, was it?’

  The cold stare over the glasses.

  The guy switched on lights, an antique gas mantle, electrified, a magnesium glow over mainly empty shelves. It certainly looked like an outlet for old books. You could spend a week cleaning and dusting and it would still smell musty. You could replace the gas mantle with halogen spots and it would still look Dickensian-drab.

  Which was kind of good. Wasn’t it?

  ‘And you’re looking for an outlet, are you?’

  ‘Could be,’ Robin said.

  ‘A bookshop?’

  ‘You even get a choice in this town?’

  Though evidently you did have a choice now. Driving slowly down the main street with its painted hanging signs which were probably newer than they looked, he’d noticed two new womenswear stores and an outward-bound emporium. Most likely by-products of the new wealth the book trade had brought.

  ‘So it is gonna be available for rent, Mr, um…’

  ‘Oliver. Let me say from the outset that we have never offered this shop for rent and anyone who told you otherwise is being deceitful and possibly malicious.’

  ‘Malicious?’

  Jeez.

  ‘There’s a small but pernicious element here that seeks to cause unrest.’

  Mr Oliver’s short, sandy hair was parted in a Victorian way over a thin, scholarly face on which disapproval was always just a blink away.