Chapter Four

The silence in the front room of Bryan Camfield’s house was disturbed only by the feint noise of a small piece of paper being rolled between fingers, and the virtually noiseless buzzing of a small fruit fly called Neville. With deft and experienced fingers, Bryan was putting together a spliff of quite prodigious proportions. He had smoked one already and it was doing rather splendid things to the synapses in his brain. This sequel was likely to open up his mind to all sorts of possibilities, but it was likely to prove one spliff too far for poor Neville. Neville had spent the previous 15 minutes flying in and out of the smoke Bryan had exhaled and currently believed himself to be a Sun God called “Piwommi” from 14th Century Peru, rather than the rather plain and ordinary fruit fly that he was in reality. Everything in the room he was buzzing round just seemed so alive and vibrant, nothing more so than the Fair Trade bananas in their bowl which he had been dive-bombing on and off for the previous couple of minutes.
Through Bryan’s muzzy brain he heard a bell ringing. What was it? A message from the other side? The tolling of the bell of lament for all those lost souls over the years? When the sound came again, it turned out to be his front door bell. Bryan slowly ejected himself from his almost unfeasibly squashy sofa and achieved his full height of something like six feet and three inches. He had a shaggy unkempt beard and long well groomed hair, all of which was mostly very dark brown to black, but with the occasional hint of grey sneaking in around the temples. The door bell rang again.
“Alright!” He walked towards the door, muttering and swearing under his breath in a mile-wide Wiltshire accent. He opened the door to the dazzling day light, and there was Drood, a slight sweat upon his brow but looking decidedly pale. “What’s the matter, you seen a ghost or something?”
“Don’t you bloody start…” said Drood. “Can I come in, Bryan? I need your help…” Bryan ushered him into the cool dark room, just as Neville plummeted into the bananas again.
“Well, you know my saying…” said Bryan, spliff between lips and on the point of being lit. “A friend in need…can go screw himself, really.” And he wheezed with laughter at his own joke. His Zippo lighter flared in his hand and he puffed away merrily on his roll-up as Drood dropped into a chair of almost equal squishiness as the sofa. Through the banks of smoke escaping his lips, Bryan could see not a trace of a smile or laugh crossing Drood’s face. “Oh, come on! You’re not still embarrassed about chucking up in that litter bin last night?” Drood wiped a hand across his moist brow and silently shook his head.
“I don’t know, Bryan. I think I’m going mad…”
“Well about bloody time too. I’ve been urging you to do that for years.” Bryan offered him the joint, something Drood would rarely accept. He fairly snatched it from his hand, brought it to his lips and inhaled deeply. Drood let his head loll back a little and blew out the smoke with a low satisfied sigh.
“Let me run this past you Bryan, and then you tell me if I’m in need of sectioning.” Drood handed him back the spliff. Bryan shrugged in a non-committal sort of way, and sat back on the squashy sofa, long legs neatly crossed. “OK, wake up this morning…” Bryan immediately imitated a Muddy Waters blues riff. The look on Drood’s face stopped him in his tracks, and he mumbled an apology before ushering Drood to continue with the story. “Right, wake up this morning, bit of a hangover, as expected. Go down to Mr Letts’ shop, all my usual stuff. Back to the back garden, reading the personals in the Hulke and Silston Gazette and there are a series of messages for me. They are urging me to look in my wood burning stove. In the stove is a hand-written message telling me to check my bank balance, so I check it and it turns out I am a millionaire. I go for a beer to celebrate in the Bakers Arms and there is another hand-written note in there for me telling me to go to the Priory and wait by the north walk to meet someone. I go there and while I am there a beautiful woman materializes out of thin air in front of me, says “the meeting place” and then vanishes. What do you think? Am I going Tonto or is this some sort of wild dream?” Bryan had been nodding sagely through all of this, as though Drood was simply recounting a recent trip to the supermarket; however his reply came completely out of left field.
“Could you buy me a jet ski?” He beamed, spliff jammed in the corner of his mouth. Drood was stunned.
“What?”
“Now you’re a millionaire, could you buy me a jet ski? I’ve always wanted to have a bash on one of them…” Drood let out a sigh of Biblical proportions and let his head flop back on the cushion of the chair.
“Bryan! I really do need your help! I am utterly confused and…” here his voice stumbled a little, “…I’m fucking scared mate…” Bryan nodded slowly again, before reaching out with his long arm to offer Drood the spliff again. Drood shook his head slowly.
“Well, we need to look at this rationally.” And as if to emphasise this point, he gently stubbed out the spliff in his ashtray, but not terminally, it might be nice to re-light it later. “Let’s see what old Lethbridge has to say about this sort of thing…”
“Lethbridge?” Drood looked up and wiped a stray tear away from the corner of his eye. “Who’s Lethbridge?” Bryan was now up on his feet, feverishly running his hands over the spines of the rows of dark musty old books that inhabited the shelves in the dark corner of his front room. These are the largely anonymous looking old books you would see in charity shops and immediately skip past to something else more interesting. But not Bryan Camfield. Bryan collected old books about Hulke and the surrounding districts, but more specifically about the darker and more mysterious side of Hulke’s murky past. He selected one particularly hefty tome from the shelves and brought it down amid a shower of dust and cobwebs. He blew on the spine and coughed a little.
“Lethbridge?” He looked at Drood and then indicated the book in his hand. “Lethbridge.” He said this as though this explained everything. Drood leant forward in his chair and reached for the book. He repeated his earlier question.
“Bryan, who is Lethbridge?” Bryan handed him the book and began to explain.
“Lethbridge was the Reverend Alastair Gordon Lethbridge, parish priest for St Robert’s in Holmes Street and investigator of all things paranormal in Victorian Hulke. A sort of 19th century Fox Mulder.” Bryan gestured towards the book in Drood’s hand. “This was his masterwork, The Dark Arts in Hulke’s Pagan Past, published in 1888. It was also his undoing.” Drood had begun flicking through the book. On the inside there was a photographic plate of the author who looked as much like David Duchoveny as Drood looked like Ursula Andress. His reputation as the 19th century Fox Mulder must be on his ability to work out bizarre happenings than on his looks. He looked more like a cross between Arthur Lowe in Dad’s Army and the Duke of Edinburgh on a bad hair day.
“Why was this his undoing?” asked Drood, looking up momentarily from the ghastly picture of the author.
“As you can imagine, Victorian Hulke wasn’t exactly a very cosmopolitan, easy-going place. When his parishioners read about his book they were not best pleased. He was accused of being a Black Magician and some other very serious allegations are thrown his way.” Bryan inevitably re-lit the spliff and inhaled deeply. He blew smoke out in a long luxurious exhale. “But before he could be de-frocked, or de-dog collared, he disappeared.” Drood looked up again from the book.
“Disappeared?”
“Yep” said Bryan. “Just simply vanished off the face of the Earth and was never heard of again.” He smiled widely and wildly. “Pretty far fucking out, eh?” Drood nodded while continuing to look through the musty book. Lethbridge was certainly thorough if nothing else. He had listed nearly every single bizarre happening and paranormal event to have occurred in Hulke since Roman times. From 52AD when one of Vespasian’s rampaging troops had nearly soiled his toga when being confronted by an apparition on the site where the Priory now rests, to a Miss Gertrude Nathan-Turner who had seen bizarre lights in the sky over the Priory ruins in 1884, and had fallen into a swoon and not recovered for six months. “So you seeing some weird shit at the Priory – it’s nothing new mate.” Drood gently shut the book in his hands. His mind was still racing and the recent introduction of some of Bryan’s illegal substances had started it going off in some quite remarkable directions. But it was the girl he had seen at The Priory – her face and those eyes; they still burnt inside his own mind.
“So what about the girl I saw at The Priory?” He handed the book back to Bryan.
“What exactly did she say to you?” Asked Bryan, as he reached up to return the Lethbridge book to its usual place on the shelf. Drood wracked his brain.
“It was something like an apology at first, for being underhand, or something. Then she told me there was very little time.” Bryan listened intently as Drood recounted this.
“Nothing else?”
“Hang on, she did say ‘the meeting place’ and then went pop.” Drood paused mid-sentence. “Well, not literally. But she made that sort of noise as she disappeared.” Bryan stuffed his tin of tobacco and illegal substances into pocket of his leather jacket, and then slid it over his shoulders.
“Then I guess we’d better go there…”