Their reactions to the material could not have been more different; it was akin to one man shrivelling with fear at the sight of a large snake, while another declared it a beautiful creature.
Mark Fry closed a file and replaced it on the table in Seb’s hotel room. He picked up another and began to read, his lips and head moving as he consumed the text.
No sooner had Seb led Mark to the treasury boxes that held the files than the man had become elbow deep, before gazing at the documents with a mixture of wonder and nervous excitement. ‘This is amazing stuff. The mastery of the super-consciousness. It’s coming through at a glance. That’s what Hazzard was after.’
Seb had met Mark Fry at five in the hotel bar, and though incapable of putting people at ease because he came over like a box of scissors electrified by static, he’d invited Mark up to his room. And now stood to one side, content with watching the man’s rapture. ‘Super-consciousness?’ he prompted.
Mole-like, his head shaved but silvery at the sides, his skin naturally dark, Mark nodded his head rapidly, blinking his small watery eyes behind silver-framed spectacles just as fast. As his black denim jacket swung open, Seb got a better look at Mark’s T shirt: Neurosis, Through Silver in Blood, now faded black and stretched by a loose stomach that exceeded his belt. ‘He was looking to control his super-consciousness in order to find the paradise belt. The celestial spheres.’
Mark struck Seb as a naturally amiable character so the sudden intensity was a surprise. The presence of the SPR files were also making the man jitter.
‘There’s not much in there about him,’ Seb offered. ‘But I sense the people have been guided or tutored, and been given a terminology to frame their experiences.’
Mark agreed with a nod. ‘At least he didn’t try and turn the SPR into a religion. I think he had that in his favour. He kept it pseudo-scientific too, even if it was for the sake of appearances to get funding. He never believed science or cosmology were ready for his discoveries, which couldn’t be observed or measured by conventional means. I’m guessing most of these case studies were written by women too.’
‘Most don’t offer a name. But maybe they are, from what you’ve said about his methods.’
‘He was a con man. A total narcissist.’
‘I find it difficult to take seriously. I can’t help wondering why so many did. It’s the terminology. Soul-bodies. Vehicles of vitality. The double. Astral body. And my friend, Ewan, used the same terms, so I’m certain he had contact with the SPR, or whatever has assumed its ideas. He was a fervent believer in the soul too. That death wasn’t an end.’
‘They all were. You said I can take these away?’
‘Of course. I need to take them back with me, so copy or scan them tomorrow, if you can. I don’t know for how long I’ll have them.’
‘Thanks! I want to go through them all, carefully.’
The only way Seb could think of disentangling himself from whatever Ewan had embroiled him in, was to arrange some kind of handover of the files with the odd woman who had appeared beside him in King Street. The thought of it made him feel ill, but he’d been unable to come up with another plan. Assuming she had a connection to Hunter’s Tor Hall, he felt far better paying her a visit than waiting for her to appear near his home again. He’d take his cheque book too, in case a donation might both improve his standing and hasten his exit strategy.
He finally popped the question that was burning through his mind. ‘Mark, I know you think the SPR members were delusional, but can I ask you what you made of Hazzard’s hinderers?’
Seb imagined that Mark had never enjoyed more than a limited audience, because he immediately relished the opportunity to expound. ‘Oh, now you’re getting somewhere. The hinderers. Marvellous! It’s quite complicated, but in his stories, Hades and paradise kind of interpenetrate the earth. In the same way that we are supposed to have these corresponding forms, the body, the vehicle, and soul-body, that interpenetrate each other, these other realms are also here at the same time as us.
‘So the inhabitants of Hades and paradise are never far away from us in the real world, but you can’t measure the distance physically. And Hazzard believed that discarnate soul-bodies are all around us, all of the time, but most of us can’t see them. The incarnate and discarnate are all overlapping, all of the time, in different spheres that exist simultaneously in the same place, but don’t interact.