Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

Stourport eyeing him balefully now, sitting up in the chair.

‘Somebody’s been talking, have they?’

‘I was just thinking Crowley … Templars …’

‘Crowley was into them, yeah.’

‘And Mat Phobe was into Crowley?’

Stourport said. ‘You want a drink?’

‘No, thanks, I’m working tonight.’

‘All the more reason, my dear.’

‘Not when you’re your own roadie.’

‘Jeez, you poor, sad bleeder. Why do you bother?’

Lol shrugged. Stourport was quiet for a while, looking up at the cherubs with their trumpets. Then he got up and went over to a Chinese lacquer cabinet with dragons on it, came back with a heavy glass and a squat bottle of tequila.

‘All right.’ He sat down again. ‘But don’t take any of this as gospel – I was only half there.’

It was clear that the rambling reminiscence was over. Hayter was being monitored by Stourport now, and there was more care, less free-flow as he talked about Mat Phobe telling them how the Order of the Poor Knights had been officially stamped out, its churches closed, its assets seized, its leaders burned.

How, in spite of this, it had never really gone away. The Templars had gone underground under different names, their secrets passed on through Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry and some of the magical orders which had manifested in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yeah, including the OTO.

‘He said he could show us,’ Stourport said. ‘He said we’d never look back. That was when Pierre split. He’d had a bad experience. We got up one morning and he was flailing around, saying we were all evil and we were laying ourselves open to eternal damnation – he’d been brought up as a Catholic and it taints you for life.’

‘What had you done?’

Stourport shook his head. Lol thought about the girl called Cola French, who had worked in a bookshop.

‘The OTO was into sex magic.’

Cola French had said, You use the build-up to an orgasm to channel and focus energy for a particular purpose and then … boom .

‘With women,’ Lol said, ‘or men. Or on your own.’

‘Two out of three was good enough for me. Mat said we could employ supernatural … this sounds like utter shit now, but you have to remember the chemicals we were absorbing. He said we could follow a path to enlightenment. Focus our will-power, strengthened by sexual tension. Like, for instance, the Templars had this girdle kind of thing they wore in bed as an aid to chastity. He showed us how to use something similar, only this was to prolong an orgasm.’ Hayter smiled ruefully. ‘A guy who thinks he can show you how to come for ever, you’ll follow him anywhere.’

‘What was his background?’

‘Never knew. Narcotics make you incurious. He was just there, you know? And, yeah, we might have plumbed what some people may consider the depths of depravity, except it didn’t seem like depravity at the time. Me, I was up to here with peace and lerve and ready to get steeped in the dirty stuff.’

‘I’m not really getting this,’ Lol said. ‘How it ties in to the location … the Master House. How was this leading you to whatever you wanted to find?’

Lord Stourport sipped his tequila. Sun flooded one of the vast Gothic windows.

‘You call something up and you ask it. A spirit, a demon. You do a ritual to invoke whatever you think can tell you what you want to know. I remember there was a blood sacrifice once – Mat sent Mickey Sharpe to steal a cockerel from one of the farms. I didn’t care too much for that, fucking blood was everywhere. That was when Siggi split. I think Mat was glad. Siggi was getting a little flaky.’

‘So that was just the two of you left? You and Mat Phobe. Two men?’

‘Oh, none of that stuff, old boy. Anyway, other people were there by then. Mickey had discovered a source of …’ he smiled ‘… Farm girls.’

Lol said, ‘A source ?’

‘Country girls who knew their way around. Country girls are undervalued, as if they’re naive or something compared to your hard-nosed city chicks. Not the case. Bulls and cows, rams and ewes, they’ve lived with it since they could walk. Not easily shocked, is what I’m saying. We were not corrupting innocents.’

‘Who was this? You, Mat … this Mickey?’

‘I remember Mickey thought that, given the circumstances, he ought to be paid more. I remember that.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Paid him, of course. After all, we were paying the girls.’

‘Paying them to …?’

‘Go a little further. And keep their mouths shut … well …’ Hayter chuckled. ‘Some of the time. No problems there, like I said. They’d never seen that kind of money before. I want to stress this: no corruption of innocents.’

‘You make it sound like they were … working girls.’

‘And that wouldn’t happen in the sticks, would it?’ Stourport put his glass down on the edge of the stone fireplace. ‘Don’t knock it, Robinson, it has its uses.’

So they were paying local girls to take part in ceremonial magic involving sexual practices – the kind of practices you wouldn’t get your own girlfriend into no matter what she’d taken.

He said, ‘How could you be sure they wouldn’t talk about it?’

‘Put it this way: they never did. You wouldn’t want to, would you? Not if you’d been paid more for a couple of nights than you’d normally earn in a month. And like I said, country girls … and none of it was illegal, they weren’t under age. I was more worried about the men. I didn’t want any more men, but Mat … there was one guy Mat was keen to involve. I thought he was a pain in the arse. Fortunately, he didn’t live in.’

‘Local guy?’

‘Oh yeah. His family used to own the house. Had a name that was ridiculously Welsh. He didn’t sound Welsh. Mat soft-pedalled him for a while, until it was clear he was up for it. He didn’t smoke so we gave him pills and got one of the girls to bake hash brownies, which loosened him up a lot. We got him talking about the house and what had happened there … I remember one night, him saying to me, “You think you ’re a nob … I’m royalty, man.” He was a pompous shit. Bloody Welsh and their upside-down inferiority complex. Didn’t even sound Welsh.’

‘What did he mean, royalty?’

‘Oh … his family was descended from the Welsh princes, all this bollocks. But Mat was interested. He constructed some kind of ritual this bloke had to be at the centre of. Some necromantic thing, to put him in touch with his ancestors. We taped it. Candles and incense and a magic circle and a tape recorder. He went into some sort of trance, and all this balls came out in Welsh. He swore he couldn’t speak Welsh. Actually quite shattered, I remember, when we played it back to him.’

‘This was in the house?’

‘This was in the main room, yeah. Maybe you need to talk to him . Wish I could remember his name. William something-unpronounce-ably-Welsh? Tell your lady to talk to him, if he’s still alive. Make the bastard squirm.’

‘So did you ever manage to contact his ancestors?’

‘I don’t know. I had to go back to London to meet my father who I did not want coming down to Garway. Get out the suit, drive up to London. Would’ve stayed in London, if I’d had any sense, but I was keen to get back. Still had the hots for one of the girls, who’d been away and come back.’

‘One of the farm girls?’

‘Nah.’ Stourport sniffed. ‘The farm girls, they were … they didn’t … they weren’t bothered. They weren’t fazed . They just accepted it. And the money, of course. No, this was actually a black girl. Strange as it may seem, I’d never had a black girl. At the time.’