Elizabeth Hand: Wylding Hall

So, there was a lot of tension about that, too. There was tension about everything. Those last few weeks at Wylding Hall were pretty miserable, all around.

The weather came down, too. All summer there’d been no rain; all of a sudden, it’s cold and pissing rain nonstop. The place was freezing, and water came in everywhere. We started seeing rats and mice and voles running through the halls, flushed out by the rain. It was like a biblical curse.

I finally rang up Tom and said, “I’m done.” It wasn’t the end of the month yet, but I could see nothing was going to happen down there, except maybe we’d kill each other out of frustration and sheer bad vibes. As I recall, he didn’t argue.

But he didn’t offer to drive down and help us pack up, either, or put a check in the post. I rang off with him, then rang Nancy and said, Come get me soon as you can. Bless her, she came the next day.

I told the others I’d help them pack whatever they wanted into the van, but after that I was gone. I was done. Done, done, done.

Ashton

Everything fell apart after Julian left, especially when we tried to rehearse. We were all thrown off-balance. As a person, Julian was so quiet, but his guitar moved under and within all we did. It was like a hidden tributary, and we didn’t know how much it gave to all of us until he was gone.

Will split first. We were all beginning to get paranoid around each other. Suspicious. There was a sense that any of us might have been to blame for Julian going missing. Did I say something that upset him? Did Lesley, or Jonno, or Will? It never crossed my mind that one of us might have hurt him — I mean, really hurt him. It was the police came up with that mad idea when they questioned Les. They talked to all of us, but they came down hardest on her.

And you can see why. She was the only one of us who might have had a motive to kill him, out of jealousy. A crime of the heart. Mind you, I never thought that, none of us did, except for the Alton police detective.

So Will left, and Les soon after. Will shacked up with Nancy at her flat in Brixton. Lesley didn’t have a place to stay, so she moved in with them. Jonno and I stuck around for another week or so. One morning, we just looked at each other and said, “Well that’s it, then.” We packed up whatever was left, which wasn’t much, threw it into the van and hit the road. I siphoned some petrol from Julian’s Morris Minor and left a note inside telling him I’d pay him back when I saw him. As far as I know, his car’s still there.

Billy

I was back at school after the summer holidays. This would have been end of September. I joined the camera club. It met once a fortnight, and at the first meeting they told everyone to shoot a roll of film, develop it, then bring the prints to the next meeting. One or two people had a darkroom, but I didn’t, and the school didn’t.

My camera was a little Instamatic. It had color film that came in a cartridge. Very convenient. The photo quality was crap, but what did I know? I went with my mum when she went into Alton to do her shopping, dropped off my film at Snappy Snaps, then picked it up the next weekend.

I was so excited! But the film quality truly was crap. Very bright, super-saturated colors, high contrast. Cheap and cheerful. The colors were a bit surreal — a sort of psychedelic feeling. The frame size was square, which as it turned out was perfect for an album cover.

You got twenty frames to a roll. They printed out as neat little squares. If you blew them up they were very, very grainy. But they were snapshots, not professional photos, so no one blew them up.

I looked at the photos right away in the car — my mother was driving. I told you that I didn’t know what I was doing with that camera, and there was the proof in front of me. The first ten photos, you couldn’t even tell what they were supposed to be of. It looked like I’d been taking pictures inside a cave. All blurred and dark. The ones that weren’t dark were so overexposed it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off, except you could see my thumb in the corner.

So, the first ten of the twenty photographs were a dead loss, and I wasn’t optimistic about the rest. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to buy another roll of film at Snappy Snaps. I thought I’d be screwed come the next camera club meeting. I turned over the next photo and was so stunned, I swore out loud — in front of my mother, which I never did! She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. For a second, I thought maybe I had, too.

Tom Haring

One Saturday afternoon at the end of September, Billy Thomas rings me up at the Larkspur office, so excited he can hardly speak. I had to ask him to slow down, and even then all I could make out was something about a stranger at Wylding Hall. I thought he was ringing because the place had been burgled.

Finally I get it out of him that he’d processed the roll of film he’d taken at Wylding Hall the day I’d brought the mobile unit down. Something had shown up in the photos and he wanted me to see it. He needed me to see it — he was thinking of taking the photographs to the police.

“Whoa, there!” I said.

Actually, what I said should not be repeated. I’d already begun to have some dealings with the police, after Mr. and Mrs. Blake notified them that Julian was missing. I’d sunk almost every penny I had into Windhollow Faire’s summer vacation at Hell Hall, and now I had nothing to show for it but a runaway guitarist and some psychedelic field recordings.

And now there’s some yokel telling me he’s got photos he wants to take to the police. I thought he was blackmailing me, so I told him I’d take him to the police if he tried to contact me again, and I hung up. He tried ringing back, but I told my secretary not to answer. I considered calling my solicitor as a protective measure, in case this kid really did have some incriminating photos.

Next thing I know, the following morning I’m alone at the Moonthunder office, trying to salvage something from the entire Windhollow Faire disaster, and who shows up at the door but Bill-the-lad with an envelope of color snapshots.

“I’m calling the police,” I told him.

“I’m not blackmailing you!” He stuck his foot in the door before I could slam it in his face. “Ask Jonathan, I spoke to him last night!”

At that moment, right on cue, the phone rings. And it’s Jonno.

“Listen, Tom, “ he says, “I have no idea what this kid’s been smoking, but he sounds harmless. Probably he just wants a job. Hear him out and look at his photos and send him on his way home. There’s a train at noon.”

Well, as you know, Jonno has a heart as big as the national debt. So I sigh and ring off with him and tell the boy he has five minutes to say his piece before I throw him out and get back to juggling the books.

“We use professional photographers here for anything having to do with the bands, and graphic designers,” I told him. I’d already spoken to Hipgnosis, hoping they could do the album cover art. Since it was seeming like there wouldn’t be any album, this was turning into a moot point.

“Just look,” he said.

He clears off a desk and lays out ten photos like a deck of tarot cards. Very, very carefully, like he’s putting them in a special order. When he’s finished, he points to me and says, “Look.”

They were the pictures he’d taken in the garden at Wylding Hall. Informal photos — everyone at their mike stands, singing or playing in the sunlight. A few photos of them messing around, tossing roses at each other.

The last three just showed them all looking up at the sky. Ashton was to the left of the frame. Jonno stood in front of his drum kit. Will and Les were side by side, both shading their eyes. Julian was slightly off by himself to the right, neck craned as he stared up.