31
MAGNA MATER
The little house on Avenell Road, Finsbury Park, had been painted a hideous shade of mauve since he was last here. The bell didn’t work and the knocker seemed to be welded to the door, so Bryant tried to rattle the letterbox, only to find that this too was stuck fast. Looking around the chaotic front garden (home to a mangle, a half-burnt chest of drawers, a gigantic dead aspidistra and a table lamp made out of a cow’s leg), his gaze alighted on a hanging basket blighted with a single sickly nasturtium. The front-door key was sticking out of the pot, so he let himself in.
‘None of your door-furniture works,’ he complained to Maggie Armitage, the white witch from the coven of St James the Elder who had helped unit members so many times in the past, although not always in the way they expected or desired.
‘Ah, no, it wouldn’t,’ she called back. ‘I hired a Polish gentleman to decorate my hall, and he proved rather over-enthusiastic. He painted over my knocker, the bell, the letterbox and my fanlight.’
‘So how do you know when anyone’s calling?’
‘I always know, you foolish man, I’m a witch. Give me a hand with this.’ Maggie appeared dragging a large fibreglass statue of a child in callipers through her hall. ‘Remember these charity boxes? They used to have them outside shops. Quite collectors’ items now, apparently. This was from a grateful client. So I thought until I opened it, anyway. I’d successfully located her lost Yorkshire terrier, but had forgotten to tell her it wasn’t alive anymore. A technicality, from my point of view, but she wasn’t pleased. I gave her a voucher for a free séance.’
‘Let me help you with that.’
‘Perhaps it’s not such a good idea, with your knees. Go and put the kettle on.’ Maggie set the collection box aside and patted her fiery red perm back in place. She had chiming incense balls and a necklace of little plastic babies around her neck, pencils and bits of tinsel in her hair, miniature bunches of bananas dangling from her ears and what appeared to be a bell-ringer’s cord tied around the waist of a blue-and-yellow-striped skirt. She looked like a deckchair piled with seaside knick-knacks, but Bryant had learned not to be surprised by her sartorial choices.
‘Come here,’ said Bryant, reaching forward and wiping Maggie’s cheek. ‘You’ve got mascara all over you.’ He brushed harder. ‘And pollen.’
‘Maureen and I were conducting a spring spell to bring back the bees,’ she explained. ‘I did miss you.’ The white witch was a source of goodness in a dark world, forever on the move, using positive energy to banish despair. If Bryant could have had his way, Maggie would have been available as a service on the National Health.
‘I missed you too,’ he said tenderly. ‘You’ve always been there for me, Maggie. I’m not very appreciative, am I? You’re always sending me things, thinking of me. I presume it was you who sent me the postcard of Merlin’s prophecies with the Get Well Soon message. London shall mourn for the death of twenty thousand, and the river Thames shall be turned to blood—cheered me up no end.’ She had stapled the card inside the envelope and he had torn it to pieces trying to get it out.
‘Yes, that was me. The last of Merlin’s edicts, and the only one yet to come true. I thought you should be warned, at least.’ She smiled up at him, her eyes vanishing to crescent moons. ‘It’s good to have you back, Arthur, I felt your aura ebbing.’ She clapped her hands together. ‘Oh, I meant to tell you: I found something odd in the cellar. Come and look.’
‘What do you keep down here?’ Bryant followed her down an unstable narrow staircase.
‘I’m looking after Maureen’s scuba equipment until she’s had her operation. She can’t risk getting into a wet suit with her bladder. Look at this.’ She pulled out a huge photo album filled with faded Polaroids. ‘There seem to be pictures of me in a Playboy Bunny costume. You don’t suppose I was a Bunny Girl in a past life, do you?’
‘You were a Bunny Girl in this life, you silly woman,’ Bryant snapped. ‘I know it was a long time ago, but how could you have forgotten?’ There were few careers Maggie Armitage had not tried in her time. She had been a nightclub hostess, a teacher, a carnival burlesque dancer and, for a brief period in the 1980s, the astrological advisor to Number 10, Downing Street. Some of her insights displeased Margaret Thatcher, but it was not the first time the incumbent Prime Minister had been compared to Beelzebub.
‘I think you’re right, it is me.’ Maggie pulled a chopstick out of her hair and scratched her décolletage idly with it. ‘I asked Maureen to hypnotise me because there were things I wanted to forget, but I think she overdid it, and now I can’t remember the name of my first husband or where I’ve put the pressure cooker. The line between past and present is so easily erased.’ The curse of her unusual talents had not led her to an easy existence. She had often been drawn to harmful people in a desire to save them. ‘Let’s get that tea, shall we?’
‘We’ve moved into King’s Cross now,’ Bryant called over his shoulder, heading for the kitchen to search for two vaguely clean cups. ‘ Two thirty-one Caledonian Road. It’s got upright goats on the walls and a pentacle on the floor. Any idea why that might be?’
‘Well, of course I have,’ said Maggie, appearing in the cluttered kitchen. She shifted a pile of dolls’ heads from a chair and sat down. ‘Two thirty-one was the address of the Occult Revivalists’ Society of Great Britain. They split away from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in order to write their own magical rituals. The original founders of the Golden Dawn all lived in King’s Cross until the members of the Lodge of the Isis-Urania Temple fell out with each other. Self-governing societies are a nightmare when no-one can agree on the founding rules.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The splinter group set up on the Cally Road. They shunned the former Imperator, W. B. Yeats, and ran things on their own for quite a few years, but it eventually collapsed and the rozzers closed the place down. There was a court case, if memory serves. It transpired there was a fair amount of licentiousness going on, quite a few naked ladies happily offering themselves as sacrifices, that sort of thing. The News of the World exposed them, and jail sentences were doled out. The building’s also on a major confluence of ley lines. There are definitely mystical upheavals associated with it. And some kind of scandal in the fifties that I can’t quite recall.’
Bryant considered the information. Yeats, Blake and Hardy, all visitors to St Pancras Old Church, mystics and occultists operating nearby, the seeds of Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus springing up in the local graveyard. Once again he felt himself moving at a tangent, drawn to areas of exploration he knew he should shun. ‘Let me get this clear in my head. The town of Battlebridge, later to become King’s Cross, is built on a pagan site that’s a mound from which the sunrise can be seen. Battlebridge’s forests give rise to legends of Jack-in-the-Green and it becomes associated with fertility, hunting and the great god Pan. The surrounding areas become Christian, but the church is built on the pagan site and the neighbourhood remains forever associated with the occult, right up to the present day when our stag-man attempts to turn public attention back to ancient traditions.’
‘Common knowledge,’ said Maggie, dunking a homemade seaweed biscuit into her tea.
‘But there’s something else. They’ve just unearthed pre-Christian carvings of severed heads in the vault of St Pancras Old Church. I suspect it indicates that worshippers of Pan made likenesses of their sacrificial victims. If they did so then, why couldn’t someone be doing the same now? Here.’ He fiddled with his cell phone and handed it to Maggie.
The white witch donned her reading glasses and squinted at the screen. ‘This is a picture of you in a party hat covered in streamers,’ she told him. ‘You’ve got cake all over you.’
‘Oh, sorry, that was me at our coroner’s wake.’ He moved the camera album on a few frames. ‘That’s better. Janice sent me this picture of the stag-man. The next shot is of the stone head in the crypt.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Maggie climbed on her chair and dragged down a paving slab of a book that was wedged on top of her fridge. It was entitled Myths & Legends of Ancient Londinium. Thumbing through it, she showed Bryant a drawing of a head that was remarkably similar to the one on his cell phone. ‘It’s not a victim; it’s Bran, the Raven God. That’s not a nose, it’s a beak.’
‘Bran?’ said Bryant, disbelieving. ‘I thought he was Welsh.’
‘Yes, but his head was buried in London, and the story goes that as long as it stayed facing France, Great Britain was safe from invasion. Bran’s the model for King Arthur’s Fisher King, the keeper of the Holy Grail. His head was kept in the White Tower, which is why the ravens in the Tower of London have their wings clipped, to prevent the fall of London if they should ever leave. When the Grail was sought, it turned into a human head. So the primal god Bran is forever associated with the cult of the severed head.’ She tapped the page with a wise smile. ‘Well done, Arthur, you’ve hit the big time. You’ve arrived at the heart of the city’s most venerable mystery.’
‘John will kill me,’ muttered Bryant despondently. ‘I can’t go back and tell him that we’re looking for the seeker of the Holy Grail.’
‘Oh, you don’t have to do that,’ said Maggie. ‘The story is a load of old cobblers. These tales share common roots that aren’t meant to be taken literally. The French have twelfth-century poems woven from the same source. Bran kept a cauldron that brought the dead back to life. You haven’t found that by any chance, have you?’
‘Mercifully, no.’
‘A pity. We tried to revive Daphne’s tortoise once but the spell didn’t take.’
‘What happened?’
‘It exploded. You mustn’t get caught up by all this, you know. It’s tempting to imagine that everything that happens in London is somehow related to events in the past, but you’ll be led into blind alleys. It’s happened to you often enough before.’
‘You’re right, Maggie; I can’t afford to do it this time. John is investing a lot of faith in me.’
‘Then whatever you may be tempted to believe, you must treat it as a sceptic. I say this because I don’t want anyone to make a fool of you. How long have we known each other? One more mistake could destroy you.’
‘Even if I’m sure there’s a connection?’
‘Arthur, there are invisible roads crisscrossing this city, thousands of passageways layered on top of each other so thickly that the bottom ones have been crushed to the tiniest shards. Their power wanes, so they aim to deceive. Follow the wrong one and you become hopelessly lost.’
‘You believe this?’
‘Absolutely. If you want to see the real nature of things, study them in decline. You say you’re seeking a follower of Pan, but you could equally be looking for an acolyte of Merlin. I must have been thinking of him when I sent you the postcard. He has connections to the area too, because he predicted that Bran’s head would be dug up, which it was, by King Arthur. Merlin had a cave in King’s Cross. There’s still a street named after him. Back when the town was a spa, there was an underground passage leading from the cave—later the site of the Merlin’s Cave pub in Margery Street—all the way to the Penton, and to a deep well connected to the river known as Black Mary’s Hole. It was supposedly lined with the heads of great leaders, who would guide others between this world and the next.’
Bryant knew that Maggie’s belief in the spirit world had the power to infect him like flu germs when he was feeling susceptible. ‘Was there really a tunnel?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes, it was only boarded up a few years ago. It connects to a second tunnel, leading from St Pancras Old Church to the site of Tothele Manor, but I think that one collapsed in the mid-1800s, killing some anti-royalists.’
Bryant could feel the unseen strands of London gathering about him like a web. ‘I think we should stop there,’ he said decisively.
‘Then perhaps I can help you find a way out of the maze,’ said Maggie. ‘Let’s see what they say about the church.’ She ran her finger down the book’s index and turned to another page. ‘Here we are. St Pancras Old Church, the Magna Mater, the mother of all Christian churches, founded by the emperor Constantine three hundred years after the birth of Christ. In the seventeenth century it was used for illegal marriages and fighting duels.’ She looked up from the page. ‘And finally this sacred place was desecrated by something no conqueror could ever envision.’
‘What happened?’
‘The railway happened, Arthur. Against all the force of public opinion, the railway destroyed the churchyard, which was filled with over thirty thousand graves. Progress arrived in the form of the steam train, and shattered its sacred spirit forever. Now you understand why someone is fighting back.’
‘I understand that there’s no vengeful god at work,’ said Bryant, ‘but an ordinary human being.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Maggie. ‘If he’s aiming to halt a multimillion-pound development by re-enacting an ancient ritual, I’d hardly call him ordinary. What are you planning to do?’
‘I’m not sure yet. I’ve got my old staff back together.’ He checked his watch. ‘I have to be off.’
‘Including that detective sergeant, the one who looks like Diana Dors?’
‘Janice? Yes.’
‘Tell me, has she discovered yet that she has the Gift?’
‘She hasn’t mentioned anything to me.’
‘No, she wouldn’t. Most people never realise until it’s too late. I keep seeing her in connection with Merlin, for some peculiar reason. Well, stay in touch and let me know what happens.’
‘I thought you’d already know, being a witch.’
‘It doesn’t make me clairvoyant, although I have my moments.’ She slapped him playfully. ‘I can’t even read your tea leaves today; I’ve only got bags.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Bryant, ‘if I don’t get a break in this case soon, I can tell exactly what’s going to happen, and it won’t be pleasant.’