Laurie King - The Language of Bees

Forty feet from the house, my shoes touched gravel; off to the left I caught the reflection off polished metal and window-glass: Several motor-cars were parked there. I circled the house in the other direction until the grass resumed underfoot, allowing me to get close to its walls.

The drawing room windows, also open to the night but behind curtains, had been well off the ground. I took a detour into the outhouses in the yard at the back, and found what I had hoped in the second one: a large bucket with sturdy sides, although its bottom was a bit dubious.

Bucket in hand, I walked soft-footed back up the neglected garden-beds to the lighted rooms at the front. Long before I came near, I could hear voices, overlapping chatter from a mixed group of men and women. I settled the bucket top into the baked earth, let my kit slide to the ground beside it, and cautiously balanced myself on the metal rims.

If I went onto my toes, I could see a narrow slice of the room through a space in the centre of curtains so old, their lining showed cracks and tears. What I saw amounted to little more than movement and sparkle: the back of a head here, a hand with a glass half-full of greenish liquid there. It was not worth the leg-strain, so I lowered myself back to the rims and listened to what sounded like a group of ten or twelve, more than half of them women. The murmur I heard earlier had begun to pick up, in volume and in speed.

I bent my head, concentrating on the sounds. With an effort I could unpick the threads of conversation to reveal that they were talking about a person:

“-think she would have known that-”

“-charming, really, but I always wondered about-”

“-can't have had anything to do with it, can he?”

“-know artists, there's no telling-”

They were talking about Yolanda's death, and Damian's involvement. Considering that they had all been here by eight o'clock and it was now half past, they were past the first stage of discussing their shock and sadness and well into the I-told-you-so and she-brought-it-on-herself stage. It was, I decided, a process furthered by the liquid in their glasses, which was not the fruit punch it looked like-or if it was, then someone had spiked it. Laughter rose, was cut off, and then started again a few minutes later; this time it was not stifled. Soon, the talk had left Yolanda entirely and was about handbags, school tuition, a sister's baby, and horse-racing; soon, twelve people were sounding like twice that number.

Nine o'clock approached; the voices grew ever merrier; my ankles grew ever tireder. I stepped down from the bucket to ease the strain of the unnatural pose, and rested my shoulders against the brick under the window, hearing not one thing of any interest.

Then the village clock struck nine, and in moments, the noise from within grew to a crescendo that I feared meant they were about to take their leave, until I realised that to the contrary, they were greeting a newcomer.

No-one had come down the gravel drive, on foot or wheel, which meant that the new arrival had entered from the house itself. I craned to peer through the slit, but the man who belonged to the voice that was now dominating the room had his back to me. All I could see were three individuals with identical rapt expressions.

I bent to my bag and took out the sheer silk mottled scarf, tying it loosely around my entire head. With the danger of reflection off my spectacles thus lessened, I patted around until I found a twig, then climbed back up on the bucket and stretched out as far as I could reach. The twig caught in the soft lining, allowing me to cautiously ease the curtain a fraction of an inch to one side.

There were now nearly two inches of crack between the fabric, and the speaker's back came into view.

Or, partly into view. He was a stocky man with a few grey threads in his dark hair, wearing an expensively cut black suit. When he turned to the right a little, I caught a glimpse of English skin darkened by the tropics. His voice was low and compelling, a perfect blend of friendship and authority. He was from the north originally, a touch of Scots buried under English and overlaid by a stronger version of the clipped tones I had heard in Damian's voice.

Who are you? I asked. And what are you doing in Damian Adler's life?

I had no doubt at all: This was The Master.

He greeted his followers, thanked them for their work during the past weeks, and apologised for his recent absences. He singled out “our sister Millicent,” for her especial efforts, and I stretched around until she came into view, pink and pleased. He then spoke about Yolanda, another “sister,” expressing his grief over her death and his hope that the Circle, and the Children as a whole, would only be strengthened by having known her.

He sounded insincere to me, but then, I was prepared for insincerity: Religion has proved the refuge of so many scoundrels, one begins by doubting, and waits to be proven wrong.

The Master spoke for ten or twelve minutes, most of it touching lightly on phrases and images from Testimony , causing his admirers to nod their heads in appreciation.

Nothing that he said could be in the least construed as information. All his ideas, and many of his phrases, reflected the book that I could see lying open on an altar between two candelabra set with black candles. It might as well have been Millicent Dunworthy reading aloud, but for his compelling presence.

Even that, I found hard to understand. Perhaps I was simply outside his gaze and immune to the timbre of his voice, but the people in the room were not. They hung on every syllable, their pupils dark as if aroused, smiling obediently at any faint touch of cleverness or humour in his words. From my perch, I watched his effects on five congregants: Millicent Dunworthy was one, wearing a dull green linen dress that did nothing for her complexion, and with her two women in their fifties, one thin, one stout, both in flowered frocks-the stout one, I realised, was the woman whom I'd imagined as a nurse, who with her brother had set up the altar on Saturday night. Slightly apart from them stood the sharp-nosed woman I had spoken with, wearing a skirt and tailored blouse, her hair waved in a fashion that had been popular ten years earlier. Beside her was a stout, red-faced man in his fifties wearing a suit and waistcoat far too warm for the room. Millicent, the nurse, and the sharp-nosed woman all wore the gold rings on their right hands.

I wondered if any of them also had tattoos on their stomachs.

Then I saw a sixth listener, in the dim back corner, and wondered that I had taken so long to pick him out-this man did not belong in the same room as the others. He was big all over in a grey summer-weight suit that was slightly loose in the body but snug over his wide shoulders and heavy thighs; his face would have looked more at home above a convict's checks.

He may have imagined that his thoughts were invisible, hidden from the believers behind a straight face. But one did not need a bright light to know that there would be scorn in his eyes and a curl to his lips as he surveyed the backs of these people worshipping the man in the black suit. His very stance, leaning against the glass-fronted bookshelves, shouted his superiority and contempt. He looked like the bodyguard of a mobster; he looked the very definition of shady character.

Marcus Gunderson?

My leg muscles were quivering, and now the meeting began to break up-or no, merely changing. The group deposited their empty glasses on nearby tables, then moved towards the chairs that had been set up to face the altar. The black back walked away, but I stretched a fraction higher, because in a moment, he would turn to face them, and me.

“YAPYAPYAP!” exploded through the night, and my heart leapt along with my body. My shoes lost their precarious hold on the bucket rims and I fell, onto the shrubs with one foot inside the rotten bucket. My fall set off an even louder volley of yelps from somewhere in the vicinity of my heels.