looking all this old stuff out?’
Susan rehearsed her excuse. ‘Beloved chose Alder as the site of His community. It wasn’t a random decision. This is a place of power. He wants to make us all aware of that. Brother Mick has asked me to prepare a dossier on local hauntings, psychic phenomena, spiritual things…’
‘But what have ghosts got to do with Beloved?’
‘Look again at the burning-man pages, Jenny.’
The girl flipped back.
‘It’s a local story. Most of these clippings are from the 1880s, but Winthrop found other records, going back earlier. Alder has its ghosts. But the burning-man isn’t usually classed as one.’
Jenny found a line drawing, an artist’s impression based on Dr Skilton’s testimony. A beautiful man in a loincloth stood in flame, a circle of fire around his head, crudely sketched wings spreading behind him.
‘He was supposed to be an Angel.’
For a moment, Susan thought she sensed a trace of recognition in the girl’s mind.
‘Not just any ghost, Jenny. A Holy Ghost.’
5
H e had typed ‘The Secular Apocalypse: The End of the World in Turn-of-the-Century Fiction by Paul Forrestier’ at the top of too many sheets of A4. He used to put ‘ fin-de-siècle’ rather than ‘turn-of-the-century’, but now rejected that as a frenchified frill. Five variant opening paragraphs and more than forty complete or incomplete first sentences on folded pages were now in use as bookmarks. Large chunks of the thesis were written, waiting to be cannibalized from the last three years’ worth of essays. He just needed to join them up and smooth over the cracks. But there were always ways of putting off real work: books to be read and reread and annotated; the shop to be looked after when Hazel was too busy; telephone calls to be made to parents and friends; the desk to be kept tidy and usable; Hazel to be lived with, however remotely…
The sun ground down, making the blank page in the IBM painfully bright even through shades. Hazel had started a tan in Brighton, and sunbathed in her lunch break and after work. He traced her bikini marks in bed. He hadn’t brought sunglasses, and the only pair he could find in the house were antique mirror goggles that made him look like the Man with X-Ray Eyes. Hazel said they were creepy, but he got used to them. He thought she thought he used them to hide what he was thinking.
Yesterday, he had done real work. Vaulting over his sticky opening, he whipped the conclusion into shape. Discussing Arthur Machen’s The Terror and Haggard’s When the World Shook in the light of the religious revival that came during the Great War, he pointed out that post-1914 fictions return the responsibility for the end of the world to supernatural forces. His central argument was that after Darwinism, writers of scientific romances saw the apocalypse as a result of evolutionary decay (The Time Machine), virulent diseases (Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, London’s The Scarlet Plague), high-tech weaponry and global war (War in the Air, Shiel’s The Yellow Danger), passing comets or cosmic phenomena (Flammarion’s La Fin du Monde, Doyle’s The Poison Belt), invading Martians, or other natural or man-made forces. But while the Age of Doubt was going at full sceptical blast, there were still plenty of religious maniacs running about between 1875 and 1900 proclaiming the End of All Things. It always happens as centuries close. He could guarantee that before 2001 there would be a lot of Armageddon nuts about. If, as it sometimes seemed, he got The Secular Apocalypse out around the end of the century, he would be able to cash in on the furore.
‘At most, terrestrial man fancied there might be other men on Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves, and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise,’ Paul read again, consulting his much pencilled-in War of the Worlds paperback, with the album-cover artwork. ‘Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the
Susan rehearsed her excuse. ‘Beloved chose Alder as the site of His community. It wasn’t a random decision. This is a place of power. He wants to make us all aware of that. Brother Mick has asked me to prepare a dossier on local hauntings, psychic phenomena, spiritual things…’
‘But what have ghosts got to do with Beloved?’
‘Look again at the burning-man pages, Jenny.’
The girl flipped back.
‘It’s a local story. Most of these clippings are from the 1880s, but Winthrop found other records, going back earlier. Alder has its ghosts. But the burning-man isn’t usually classed as one.’
Jenny found a line drawing, an artist’s impression based on Dr Skilton’s testimony. A beautiful man in a loincloth stood in flame, a circle of fire around his head, crudely sketched wings spreading behind him.
‘He was supposed to be an Angel.’
For a moment, Susan thought she sensed a trace of recognition in the girl’s mind.
‘Not just any ghost, Jenny. A Holy Ghost.’
5
H e had typed ‘The Secular Apocalypse: The End of the World in Turn-of-the-Century Fiction by Paul Forrestier’ at the top of too many sheets of A4. He used to put ‘ fin-de-siècle’ rather than ‘turn-of-the-century’, but now rejected that as a frenchified frill. Five variant opening paragraphs and more than forty complete or incomplete first sentences on folded pages were now in use as bookmarks. Large chunks of the thesis were written, waiting to be cannibalized from the last three years’ worth of essays. He just needed to join them up and smooth over the cracks. But there were always ways of putting off real work: books to be read and reread and annotated; the shop to be looked after when Hazel was too busy; telephone calls to be made to parents and friends; the desk to be kept tidy and usable; Hazel to be lived with, however remotely…
The sun ground down, making the blank page in the IBM painfully bright even through shades. Hazel had started a tan in Brighton, and sunbathed in her lunch break and after work. He traced her bikini marks in bed. He hadn’t brought sunglasses, and the only pair he could find in the house were antique mirror goggles that made him look like the Man with X-Ray Eyes. Hazel said they were creepy, but he got used to them. He thought she thought he used them to hide what he was thinking.
Yesterday, he had done real work. Vaulting over his sticky opening, he whipped the conclusion into shape. Discussing Arthur Machen’s The Terror and Haggard’s When the World Shook in the light of the religious revival that came during the Great War, he pointed out that post-1914 fictions return the responsibility for the end of the world to supernatural forces. His central argument was that after Darwinism, writers of scientific romances saw the apocalypse as a result of evolutionary decay (The Time Machine), virulent diseases (Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, London’s The Scarlet Plague), high-tech weaponry and global war (War in the Air, Shiel’s The Yellow Danger), passing comets or cosmic phenomena (Flammarion’s La Fin du Monde, Doyle’s The Poison Belt), invading Martians, or other natural or man-made forces. But while the Age of Doubt was going at full sceptical blast, there were still plenty of religious maniacs running about between 1875 and 1900 proclaiming the End of All Things. It always happens as centuries close. He could guarantee that before 2001 there would be a lot of Armageddon nuts about. If, as it sometimes seemed, he got The Secular Apocalypse out around the end of the century, he would be able to cash in on the furore.
‘At most, terrestrial man fancied there might be other men on Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves, and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise,’ Paul read again, consulting his much pencilled-in War of the Worlds paperback, with the album-cover artwork. ‘Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the
Similar Books
