Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

It was the tiniest slab of medieval stonework. Just a metre long, yellow and old, and inset into the nineteenth-century bricks. And into the stone the Templars or their masons had carved several symbols.

The stone was so high up that Adam could barely see what was inscribed on it. He swore at his lack of binoculars. He looked again. It took him a few seconds to visually compute. On the right was some complex symbol. Squares in circles? He had no idea what that was. The middle symbol could have been a Grail, or maybe not. But the symbol on the far left was much more easily interpreted.

It was a pentagram. An angular, five-pointed star.

Nina was writing in the book, trying to shield its pages from the rain with her arm as she did so. Adam was thinking as hard as he had ever thought, and furiously searching the net on his phone.

A pentagram, a pentacle, a pentagram. What did that symbolize?

The wounds of Christ.

The five senses, the symbol of health. The key of Solomon. Maybe the elements.

And the devil. The pentagram symbolized the devil.

Rodez, France

They slept in an Ibis hotel off the autoroute in Rodez. And then it became a kind of blur as they raced the freeways of France, careering down the Autoroutes du Sud. Sometimes it rained, sometimes it didn’t — sometimes there were sudden gashes of vivid blue in the steely winter sky. Then they stopped for diesel. Twitching. Nervous. There were Garfield cartoons plastered on the petrol dispensers.

And onwards. Etape de trucks. Piquenique spot. Toilettes. Two hundred kilometres whirred past. Nina asked him about his childhood to pass the hours and kill the tension. He gave her the precis: boozy brawling father, fragile intelligent mother, a decent school. Then journalism school. Then fistfights with his drunken father, which had left them estranged. Then Sydney. University. Parties. Alicia. And then Alicia dead. The only woman he had ever loved.

Nina was silent, Adam asked, ‘Have you ever been in love?’

The question was intrusive, but it didn’t seem to matter any more; they were so deep into this, together, there was no need for concealment.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Yes, when I was twenty. For a year or two. It scared me.’

‘How?’

‘Because it’s a kind of death, isn’t it?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Love.’ Her voice was soft, and resigned. ‘You lose a bit of yourself, in the other, so it’s a kind of dying. It’s frightening.’

‘But that’s the point,’ said Adam. ‘Without it, we are atomized, whole but alone…’

He paused. The word alone was too much, Adam immediately realized. Nina was alone. She had lost her father, and now her sister. At once he wanted to say sorry, but that, he thought, might compound his error, so he said nothing. Nina was quiet: lost in her grief, probably. He glanced along the autoroute.

The sign said L’Espagne. Spain.

The afternoon was already dwindling, the dark clouds over the Pyrenees were a grey blanket threatening to drench. Suddenly, she said, ‘Do you want to hear about my suicide?’

Adam shrugged his awkwardness. Antonio Ritter had mentioned this: her suicide attempt a year ago. Obviously Ritter had been researching them. Adam had not mentioned it since. ‘Well — uh — Nina — only if you want to.’

Nina stared ahead. ‘I want to. I want to talk. Stops me thinking. About Hannah.’

‘OK.’

‘It was just the once, it was… I’m not sure how serious it was. I took some pills — it was right at the edge of my breakdown. In the worst part, the blackest place. I was drinking and drugging and… y’know. Despair. So I popped some wee helpers and someone found me and my stomach was pumped. And there it fucking is and I will never ever do anything like that again. Because it is so incredibly selfish, now I see what the possibility of my father’s killing himself has done to me. It’s the most selfish act. You have to fight on, even if you can’t. The best way out is always through. Robert Frost.’

Her speech concluded, she sat back and looked at the atlas.

Adam wondered if he should take the chance, and talk about Hannah’s ‘suicide’. Nina had refused to believe this when the police had told her. Maybe he could approach it obliquely, now she had truly opened up. It might be cruel, but maybe he had no choice.

‘Nina. Do you believe what the police say, about… Hannah being in some kind of cult?’

Her reply was unfazed, but unbelieving. ‘Ach, no.’

‘You sure? How can you be sure?’

‘Just am. She was not that kind of girl. Just not. A swinger? Sex parties? No, not Hannah. She was pure vanilla. A sweetheart.’

Adam glanced across the gear well. Her eyes were wet and shining, staring at the dark mountains ahead.

‘So what connects her to the other suicides? You know what, um, what Mark Ibsen said?’

‘I don’t know. I do know the police are not infallible!’ Her voice was cracked. ‘A sex-and-death cult? In London? Including my dad? Linked to Peru? How much sense does that make, Ad?’

‘It makes sense given that it is the only explanation that covers all the bases… all the many…’ He swallowed the awkwardness like a tiny fishbone. ‘Like the… you know…’

‘The fact my sister wanted to be raped? Aye. By a psycho. Thank you. Thank you so very fucking much.’

Her bitterness and anger filled the entire car. Perhaps, Adam felt, this was necessary. Let it all out.

It was dark now, and silent, and so he could hear her quiet, half-suppressed sobs and so he said nothing. He turned on the radio as they ascended the Pyrenees; the cold air of the mountains surrounded them, even colder than the frigid Aveyron hills.

The tense and waiting silence lasted an hour. Adam was just beginning to think about places to stop, another little hotel, a pension in the hills, somewhere near the frontier, discreet, when she spoke. ‘Let’s just drive through the night.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s just get into fucking Spain. The next place my dad visited was Sierra de Gata. That’s almost two days away, right across Spain, in Extremadura near Portugal. A thousand miles. We need to keep going.’

They were up in the high mountains now, off the motorway, and driving through some large but grimy Pyrenean town. His headlights picked out posters and adverts, a sign for Monsieur Bricolage. Christmas decorations swung dangerously back and forth, above the roads, in the wind. Joyeux Noel.

‘But…’

‘Wasn’t that the agreement — keep moving?’

He saw the logic; he nodded and yawned as he drove. The sky was high and black. Stars glittered down, the moon shone placidly on the concrete warehouses of Carrefour. The countryside returned. And with it the scent of a hard, cold, tangy mountain night. Adam inhaled, deeply, trying to keep himself awake, and not entirely succeeding.

‘Let me drive Adam, you must be knacked.’

He was grateful for the offer; on a little meander of the mountain road he pulled up, and they swapped seats. She drove on, not as fast as him but he didn’t mind. He wanted to sleep. He was exhausted and glad they were leaving France.

The border was barely there; a few flags fluttered in the ski centres and villages, on either side. The blue and red and white of France, then the red and gold of Spain, with its royal crest. The red and gold of blood and sand.

They were soon descending through long steep cold moonlit valleys. At last Adam slept, properly and for several hours.

When he woke up it had all changed. The mountains had gone, the green valleys had disappeared. The scenery was brown and flat and ugly: the lower Navarre, the sere and sullen Spanish interior. They drank cafes con leche in a noisy Spanish motorway service station with fatted hams hanging from the ceiling and truck drivers in thick coats watching a recorded Real Madrid football match on a crap TV and downing tiny glasses of alcohol with their morning cortados.