Elizabeth Hand - Wylding Hall

I didn’t think she was that unusual — you couldn’t throw a rock in the King’s Road and not hit some Pre-Raphaelite teenybopper. Pale and interesting. Still, I suspect it raised a few eyebrows with the punters in the Wren.

But with her, it wasn’t makeup. I saw that when she walked over, after the set. She was the palest creature I’d ever set eyes on. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, same way I felt about Julian. When the two of them stood beside each other, you didn’t know where to look.

Patricia Kenyon

There’s an old West Country ballad called “The Lady of Zennor.” Will turned me onto it when I interviewed him for that long piece I did for Mojo about Windhollow’s legacy. It’s based on a legend about a mermaid. Zennor’s a fishing village in Cornwall. I visited it after talking to Will; he told me there was a memorial in the village church. I thought he was having me on, but damned if it wasn’t the truth.

The story goes that there was a young man in the village who sang in the church choir. His voice was so beautiful that every Sunday, a mermaid would come out of the sea and walk up to the church and sit in the back just to hear him. I don’t know how she walked with a tail — they didn’t go into that. Eventually she converted to Christianity so she could marry him. The church is ancient, twelfth century, and when you go inside, you can see where she sat — someone made a special little wooden pew for her, with a mermaid carved on each end. I sat in it — no one was there to stop me. The church was empty and I could have walked out with it if I wanted, it was so small. She must have been tiny.

I asked Will why he was telling me about this particular legend and song. Obviously I knew why, but I wanted to hear him say it, even if it was off the record. He wouldn’t.

Lesley

No, I didn’t like her, not that I had time to get to know her. I didn’t trust her. I knew too many male singers, and you didn’t have to be Jimmy Page to get a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls hopping into bed with you.

I also knew that Tom Haring would pitch a fit when he found out. Which he did. The whole point of us being at Wylding Hall was to avoid distractions, and groupies are definitely a distraction. God knows how she knew we were there. Someone must have heard about Ashton and me singing at the pub, and blabbed it around.

She certainly wasn’t from the village — every guy in that place just about keeled over when he saw her, even Jonno.

And yes, of course I was jealous. Anyone would have been. She was like some hippie wet dream: platinum blonde in that slinky white dress. Not even a dress — it was a white slip; it might have been a hundred years old. It was sheer enough you could see she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

This is all we need, I thought, to get run out of town because some naked teenager shows up at the pub.

But Jonno, god bless him, he had the sense to give her his cape to cover up. And yes, he did wear a cape, a long sky-blue velvet cape that cost a fortune. It looked a lot better on her. What the hell’s a drummer going to do with a freaking cape? Jonno threw it over her and pulled her over to our table. Which, fortunately, was in the back corner. They all just fawned around her like she was the Queen or some such shit — Will and Ashton and Jonno.

And Julian, of course. Soon as he finished that song, he jumped up, grabbed his guitar and — I swear, I never saw him move so fast. He raced over and grabbed her hand, and just stared down at her.

My first thought was they knew each other, like she was an old girlfriend or someone from school. Yet he wasn’t looking at this girl like he knew her. It was more like he was totally amazed. For a second, I even thought she was someone from the press or maybe a rock star, some bigwig he’d invited but hadn’t imagined would really show up.

But it immediately became obvious she wasn’t. I can’t describe it, but she gave off this weird vibe. You know how you’ll see a crazy person in the street, and even though they’re not acting overtly crazy — like, they’re talking to themselves, so maybe they’re on a cellphone. But you just know there’s no cellphone. You just know, that person is nuts.

That’s how I felt about her. Like maybe she was on drugs and might pull a knife, or god knows what. She looked strung out. Didn’t know where she was, didn’t know her name. Ashton kept asking her, “Who are you, who are you?” until Julian told him to shut the fuck up.

That alone was enough of a warning. Julian never lost his temper. Ever.

Whoever she was, I didn’t want her anywhere near me.

Ashton

Well , I thought, where’s Julian been hiding this ? Still waters run deep! Here’s this drop-dead gorgeous wisp of a girl comes running up to him. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Also, she was just about starkers. When Jonno wrapped his idiotic cape around her, I wanted to throttle him — doesn’t hurt to look! But I suppose it was for the best.

Clearly, she and Julian knew each other. They clung together like kids; you couldn’t have slid a penny between them. After about five minutes, it got to be a bit much.

“All right,” I said. “Time, gentleman, time.”

I put my hand on Julian’s shoulder, and he jumped like I’d given him an electric shock.

“What did you say?” he demanded. He had actually gone white.

“Just a joke,” I said. I looked over and saw good old Les had been the first to do something sensible. “Look, here’s Les with a round, let’s drink up and head back home, what do you think?”

Julian took the girl by the hand. “She’s coming with me.”

“Of course she is. ” I handed him a pint. Lesley had only brought five, I noted.

“We didn’t get much money,” she said. She looked angry. “I had to buy a round for Reg.”

Just as well, the wee girl didn’t seem like she’d be able to handle her drink. Seemed a bit stunned, deer in the headlamps.

I glanced around to see if anyone in the pub recognized her. She might have been someone’s kid. That wouldn’t go over well — rock and rollers coming in to kidnap their women and children.

But no one seemed to know her. If anything, they seemed to be making a point of not looking at her. Because of how she was dressed, I thought at the time. Or undressed. There were bits of stuff stuck to her feet. Dead leaves, I thought, but when I looked closer — and I wanted to look closer, believe me — it wasn’t leaves, but feathers.

That’s weird , I thought. Someone’s been in the henhouse .

I assumed she was some local character — you know, local halfwit or drug casualty, a poor thing everyone recognized but never spoke about. Not to her face, anyway. That’s why I thought only a couple quid got tossed in the hat.

It wasn’t because of Julian’s set, I’ll tell you that. He was magnificent. Even the punters were impressed; I heard them talking once they found their voices. They’d never heard the like. I’d never heard the like, and I saw Jimi Hendrix at an afterhours once with Jeff Beck and Sandy Denny. That night, Julian fucking blew them out of the water.

Tom Haring

Unsurprisingly, Lesley was the one blew the whistle on that gig. Very early Monday morning I got a phone call from her. Way too early for an ordinary phone call, not that I received many of those from anyone in Windhollow. I thought they’d run out of money again.

But that wasn’t why she rang. She gave me the rundown, said this strange girl had shown up two nights earlier at a pub gig and disappeared with Julian into his room. The two of them hadn’t been seen since.