“Fuck, man!” Hanson took Walter again in his theatrical bear hug; then he held him at a distance with two strong arms. “Crow was right. This is really heavy shit.”
He had echoed Crow, but with an entirely different angle: it was clear he thought he had discovered the Holy Grail.
A clap of thunder shakes the horizon, even the clouds seem to shudder. Lightning sizzles as it flashes, earthing down to the steeple of the distant church, barely visible through the teeming rain and blown spray. Huge trees crack, branches falling. Wind buffets the windows, rattling them with deadened thumps as though large wet cushions were being hurled at them. There is nothing to see; there is only a grayness, a kind of darkness illuminated by sound. The wind carries flotsam, leaves, sticks, fir cones that crash against walls and trees, and it all splashes into the lake. Small buildings, sheds and the like, are blown down, and then their fragile parts lifted up into the sky to spin and whirr until they clatter down. Over the lake the rain drives down onto the surface of the water so powerfully that it flattens the spray it generates as soon as it has whipped it up. Hailstones clatter on the tin roofs of the remaining barns; the animals are uneasy, cows, sheep, horses, pigs, moaning and frightened. The collies from the farm begin to howl, tethered in the open as absurdly it is still summer. They are drenched, huddled down, utterly miserable. Dozens of blinding flashes of lightning illuminate the underside of the trees as they bounce, reflected up from the lake and lighting up the black and deep gray clouds at the same time. The clouds seem to be moving, folding and unfolding at high speed, like a fast movie. The wind whips water off the grass near the house and hurls it at the windows so hard it sounds like metal chains being lashed at the building. Water overruns the gullies, backs up the drains, washes over the brick pathways, and runs in rivulets over the grass. Thunderclaps sound in machine-gun series, impossibly rapid, impossibly deep, impossibly impossible. A freak wave of water so monstrous it seems as large as a huge meteor crashing in from outer space drops from the sky and hits the ground so violently that time itself seems to miss a beat, then recovers and ticks on relentlessly. Space is being bent, curved, by the lightning, the rain, and the thunder. Nature, created by some manifestation of God, is challenging that very same God to stop her, to snicker at her: “This too will pass.” For it seems as though this storm will never, can never pass; since it began it has only grown in intensity and volume, without a second of let-up, not a hint it might desist. Then, the most frightening single clap of thunder ever heard since the beginning of time, louder than any that has gone before, seems to burst our ears, and the storm is over.
Chapter 16
I found myself in the dear old Caprice a few days later having lunch with Selena. Permissible, I think. I was a single man. I felt flattered by her invitation and her company, and I was pleased to see the envious looks of the men around me and the evil glares of their female companions. Selena was quite clearly half my age. She was one of those extraordinary women who seemed to rise above the aging process. She had never looked young, even when she was young, and now she didn’t look any older, despite having made no apparent effort with her hair or makeup. At the age of thirty-six, she simply looked slightly overweight, but still beautiful. I felt smug, I suppose, sitting in a quiet banquette against the mirrored wall in the bustling Caprice.
She had been the one to summon me. She wanted me to know she was not with Crow. She had slept with him just once, and she knew I knew. Was that all? I wondered. There was more. She told me that Walter had an “entity.” That is, a disembodied soul tagging along, living vicariously through him whenever it got the chance. Like Ronnie’s entity? No, not like Ronnie. And she was very serious. Walter, she felt I must have known, was the one lifelong love of her life. That was how she put it. She knew I would understand, where others would not. I worked with artists who claimed to be visited by angels, or demons, or heard voices. I took them and their work seriously; surely I could see that Walter was subject to the same kind of possession? Something had happened to change him; a door of perception had opened in him that he had been unable to handle. That’s why he had quit being creative fifteen years before, except in his garden.
Selena could be difficult to read. I could see her obsession with Walter was still strong, but why was she turning to me? It was almost as though she were giving me a warning, to prepare me for something terrible she could see ahead.
I am an art dealer, but I can’t pretend that I understand what the people I represent are going through. I had my own experiences, of course, and I knew that it was too easy to put everything down to drugs. Drugs had opened a door for me too, and slowly, as that door had closed, I settled down and managed to live a more normal life. But I could not forget what I had seen, what I had experienced. I could not set aside the fact that the practical Rain, a journalist no less, had followed a trail leading from the walnut bedhead with all its screaming faces right back to the brutal and appalling inquisitions of the Pope in the thirteenth century. Intuition and psychic rawness had operated in me at some level, and the facts gathered by Rain seemed to support that; the facts followed the feelings. It was irrefutable evidence as far as I was concerned.
So was it possible Walter was “possessed” as Selena claimed? Who was I to argue? I wasn’t entirely sure it mattered as long as Walter was alive and reasonably content. Yes, it was true Walter was struggling with his new art, battling with the rigors of his return to composing, albeit in collaboration with his brilliant father. But why would Selena be so solicitous? Selena, who always said she could see angels, who was not getting a little overweight but was instead “pregnant” with forthcoming angelic expositions, the backed-up logjam, she said, of voices attempting to speak to a wayward society, lost souls. I understood what Selena was saying—after all, I represented Nik and I took seriously the visions he had seen up on Skiddaw—but what the hell did she want me to do?
Selena must have noticed my mind wandering. The waiter had brought my main course a few minutes before and I hadn’t touched it.
She leaned closer to me as though to block out the chatter of the other customers in the Caprice, her pretty face inches from my own as her voice dropped to a paranoid and conspiratorial whisper.
“Floss,” she breathed, “has secrets.”
I was more unsettled by this idea than the image of Walter with an “entity” following him around.
“What secrets can Floss possibly have?”
As far as I could tell Floss was a simple soul, a jolly girl who bred horses, albeit with a diamond in her front tooth.
Selena settled back in her chair and I thought with a flash of anger that I would probably get no more out of her.
“What about Walter?” I asked. “What do you want to do? What do you want me to do?”
She shook her head as though to indicate that I needn’t worry about Walter. “Floss might need you, Louis,” she warned. “She might need you very soon.”
She turned away and took a sip of wine as though the action might offend me. It was dismissive.
“Why? What would make Floss turn to me?”
I was getting irritated by this all-knowing seeing-eye charade.
“Oh, I think you and Floss share a very special bond, don’t you?” She leaned toward me again, not quite so close this time, and lowered her voice once more. “And Floss might need you and your support because… well, I am—at last—going to steal Walter away from her.”