by Tony Whitehead and Phil Smith.
No one kills an angel. Mandi Lyon changed that. Though it was never her intention to upset the balance of so many worlds on the morning she arrived back in the county of her birth. Raised by adoptive parents, from whom she had drifted away after college when work took her far and wide, eventually to the profitable reaches of the US media world, she was returning now to the camp site on which she had first grown up.
In the States she had had to grow up all over again. So, this would be her third advance on adulthood.
Anne and Bryan Widger had been killed instantly on a single carriageway stretch of the A308. It was a head-on collision with a Porsche driver anxious to get out of the West Country. The end had come suddenly, brutally, and without fanfare or premonition. Curled up against the window of the Paddington train, Mandi was trying to focus on the passing folds of Wiltshire hills, but the heads of her adoptive parents resolutely smashed through the glass of the windscreen again and again, the pieces of broken shield tearing the soft flesh from the bones of their faces and popping eyes from their sockets, until their leering death’s heads zoomed around above the neat fields and clanged against the side of the train. Mandi closed her eyes and they came for her in the burgundy darkness.
It was no great surprise then, when she saw the bleeding angel.
The last thing she had seen, before closing her eyes against the cruelty, was a white horse carved into the chalk of the hills and racing piles of white limestone heaped onto a freight train sat in its siding. In the inner cinema of her fitful state, the wagons were full of teeth. A rolling ossuary, crossing the country, displaying its relics. Mandi could feel her own pearly whites working themselves loose; like she should add them to the inter-city reliquary. She was getting older, her skin was drying out, dark patches had appeared beneath her eyes; it had come the time to give something back to the country… she snapped into sharp wakefulness. Maudlin dreaming was more painful than loss.
This time, when she looked out of the muggy carriage, the flashbacks to the phone call and the instantaneous image of the crash had receded, replaced by an ache of foreboding as Mandi pictured her parents’ camp rushing towards her across the fields, the formerly mobile homes torn from their fibrous umbilical cords, the shower block lumbering on its shallow foundations. Among the architectural spectres was a medieval looking figure in an icy costume, geometrical hair and blood streaming down her chin. It smiled; then she saw its mouth full of shattered, violated teeth, vandalised ruins of a Jewish graveyard. Somehow, though the blood streamed from between the remains of broken catafalques of dentistry and fell in dark gobbets from the angel’s chin, the cold and perfect surfaces of her shift were left untouched, stainless. Her wings slowly spread up, glittering, into the clouds.
Mandi threw her head back into the seat. A wave of nausea rose through her throat and into the back of her nose. She was torn between snorting out the pressure and swallowing it as best she could, struggling to keep another violent movement from again stirring in her brains with the wire brush of her hangover. She began to gag on rising acid. Behind her eyes, the blood was white and hot, her throat lined with sand. She tried to distract herself by thinking through the one and a half bottles of Prosecco, and the something else there was before and the something else there had been after, and what might have happened around these stimulants to leave a bruise on her wrist and a tear in one of her barely justifiable shoes.
She strained to remember a conversation, more of an oration, she had delivered to the poor sucker; forget him, what was the idea? It had been brilliant, usable… it was at the after show party, or it may have been a PV, some sort of conceptual… anyway, there was a buffet of sorts with a band and… something to do with reliance and then something darker, spicier… she had been going on about snowflake companies, trying to pass off their responsibilities to individuals, that wasn’t freedom, packaging manufacturers who are less than keen to pay a share of recycling costs, her idea was green but brutal, holding a knife to company information campaigns about individual responsibilities… she was going to turn that around on them. In the US, company law designates business institutions… yes, that was it, it was coming back, the genius hinge in her idea! In the US, companies are legally regarded as individuals, but unlike human individuals they are incapable of dying, until externally wound up… so, like sea urchins… for some reason she knew this, about sea urchins, of all things, that they are immortal if left to their own devices… sea urchins had nothing to with it! Demons, that was it! Companies are demons, individuals that are immortal, but have no human soul. She would advocate ecologically-sound demon-slaughter, exorcism of the accountants, staking the heart of state capitalism, the disciplining of the executives… a wild hunt… she smiled in her daydream. Outside the golden carriage, flames somehow bright with darkness licked by at speed. In the centre of the furnace was a figure slashing at all around her with a laptop… her hair was alight, smoke billowed from under her skirts and… her teeth, her teeth… uuuuu… mmmmm…
She abruptly opened her eyes; an hour or more had passed and the countryside beyond the window was kinder and dimmer. The queasily rolling green of the giant fields had given way to a more stable patchwork. The train wooshed past a village, a canal with a pub perched on its bank, some narrow boats, and lines of old cottages flanked by something like recent suburbs, an anonymous factory on the village boundary, brick and corrugated iron farm buildings, some ruined walls in a field. All this skewered and held together by the plain symmetrical gothic of the church, built in mottled stone and sitting squat like an aged toad, content among the stone fungi of the cemetery. The wide West Door was generously open to all comers, and among its shadows, stood the angel with the smashed mouth.
Mandi looked away; struggling to find her i-pod, then remembered she had picked up the wrong one in her rush. Irritated that she would have to get back in touch with the disposable crutch from last night to recover her own music. The Last Thing she wanted to be thinking about right now. She tried Shuffle and gave in to a dire hauntological melange of Kemper Norton, English Heretic, The Advisory Circle and some other dreary Anglo-centric droning 60s nostalgia merchants pretending to be bitter and difficult. Fortuitously, it seemed about right for the soundtrack to planning a funeral for people you were only ever semi-connected with. Over the years she had paid flying visits to the camp. Mostly though, the three of them had met at gastro-pubs halfway between their homes; her adoptive parents refusing to let her pay the bills. She had never let them come to London; keeping them, guiltily, at arm’s length from her work at the Childquake charity where she had recently been promoted to CEO. Maybe she was reinventing the memory now, but she had some idea that when the phone rang she had been thinking of inviting Anne and Bryan… to what?
The chance had gone. Mandi argued with herself about getting some alcohol from the trolley. Decided against, then gave in. The first sip reminded her why there was an argument. The thin red wine lifted up the doubleness of her memories of Anne and Bryan; her angry dissatisfaction at their pseudo-parenting, their on-off, intimate and distracted nurturing. The nights of loneliness when they let her have ‘her own space’. She knew that these were balances that no one gets right, balances she had never wished to have the chance to get wrong, and yet all that had never made her love them any less. Or love them very much. But she had never told them one way or the other; too busy raging at their carefulness, at their refusal to be clumsily intrusive, and, now, their disappearance just when she might have been willing and able to be clumsy herself. No, she was deluded. Clever people, they had brought up a child too clever for her own good; others, less loving than them, had read her flawed intelligence and she had been played again and again. She had learned how to turn her vulnerability into a facade, a baited hook, drawing in the powerful and playing them for all they were (considerably) worth. Well that was going to stop, she thought, a moment before the Merlot drained her resolve and the headache snake ate again into the top of her neck.
She enjoyed a sliver of relief just from the thought that London was receding behind her; she could entertain for a while the fantasy that she was leaving the place forever on her way to total disappearance. That she could throw off the double ankle manacles she wore; always the deadline, and always the faint marinating fear that someone would finally have worked her out, caught on to her imposter trick, dug up the dead bodies and found they were made up of bragging, uncovered the e-mail trail that contained nothing of interest to anyone, flicked through ancient social media posts and cross-checked with CCTV and found almost less than zero.
The train entered a tunnel. Mandi felt the air push in through her ears, and a broken windscreen swallow her mind. In the jump cut from bright natural light to the dull bluey lamps of the First Great Western, the other passengers, positioned in the tableau of seating, were transformed into bit-part players in a haunting. With a sigh the sliding door at the end of the carriage drew back. The iconic wedge of train drove through the darkness. Behind a returning service trolley, decked with Quavers, Yorkie bars and shortbread fingers, the steward barked offers of hot drinks and alcohol. Responding to a request, she bent over a diaphanous elderly woman at a table, and when she smiled her teeth were smashed and blood ran down her chin into the waxed cardboard cup she was holding. Flash. Out of the tunnel and light drove all this nonsense away. Mandi gazed out of the window, where London was just a bad memory; a footprint the express escaped every day into soft hills and odd figurations in the fields: the great planes of solar panels, concrete pinball machines, orange dinosaurs, and weather-blanked adverts propped against wheelless trucks. Passing through slow comforts; the solid handle that held the cutting edge to the meat. Ahead of this stolid country, lay utopia and change, she hoped. Mandi tipped her cup and three small bottles of red wine into the flapping plastic bag of the passing cleaner; the bottles clinking on something at the bottom of the translucence. Hope hit her like a hammer and she wanted to turn back.
This is an extract (Chapter 2) from a fantasy novel ‘Bonelines’; a hybrid novel with elements of historical, ecological, folkloric and characters themes. It is a mix of fantasy narrative and literary mystery novel in which a typed manuscript labelled “LOVECRAFT” turns up in the papers of a recently and violently deceased couple, owners of a seaside campsite. The couple’s adopted daughter (Mandi, a combative, libertarian blogger and lobbyist) returns from London to her childhood home and, while organising her parents’ funeral and putting their affairs in order, slowly uncovers traumatic and extraordinary events, including those of her own childhood, that will eventually entangle her in a magical ‘battle for ideas’ around the ‘Lovecraft Villages’ in South Devon. While replete with eerie landscapes and covert action, with both realistic and unreal characters, all the historical references and the key landmarks are real ones and the many stories (literary, psychological and folkloric) are drawn from local research.