The Vinyl Detective--Flip Back, page 27
Nevertheless, Pete Loretto soon began to write, with a horrible forced jolliness, about the approaching date of Perky’s dispatch and transformation into pork for the larder. Pete put a heavy-handed emphasis on the humane—that word again—approach he’d use this time.
It dawned on me that he was addressing these comments as much to Sarita as to any supposed audience out there on the Internet. In fact, I was willing to bet that by now this was the only way the couple were communicating with each other.
Pete’s lumbering attempts at humour also concerned the heatwave that even then had been going on for weeks. Evidently Pete and Sarita were suffering in a farmhouse that had been built purely for comfort in cold weather. I reflected that the rising temperature could only have added to the rising marital tensions.
Pete Loretto tried to patch things up between them by buying a very expensive and elaborate air conditioning unit—but it hadn’t worked. Either as a cue for a reconciliation, or indeed as an air conditioner. And his efforts to strike a lighthearted tone became increasingly strained as he related his attempts, and his continued failure, to get the complicated apparatus to operate properly.
The only one who’d been surviving the heat in some degree of comfort was Perky himself. Sarita had set aside a corner of their garden for him, digging up the lawn and hosing down the exposed earth to create a mud hole, where Perky wallowed ecstatically. There were some wonderful photos of the grateful porker liberally covered in mud. He actually seemed to be smiling.
Accompanying these, Sarita gave a lucid account of temperature regulation in Sus scrofa domesticus—the expression ‘sweating like a pig’ is nonsense, because pigs don’t have sweat glands. Their only cooling mechanism is to coat themselves in something like mud. Although most pigs live in such terrible conditions that good clean mud is never an option.
As the heatwave continued, to the increasing discomfort of everyone except Perky, cracks definitely began to show in the marriage. And the two streams of posts diverged wildly in content.
Sarita’s had settled back into a humorous and affectionate—even loving—diary recording details of Perky’s life. The pig had by now got over the loss of Porky and had bonded more deeply than ever with Sarita.
Perky also began to feature again in Pete’s writings. Indeed, they were both now concerned with the fate of the pig, but they had dramatically different ideas about how they should proceed…
Sarita obviously wanted Perky to remain alive. Indefinitely, or at least until fate finally took a hand. As, she pointed out, that it would eventually, in the fullness of time, for everyone. Death would in due course come calling for all concerned… including her.
And of course her husband.
I felt a distinct chill on reading this.
Meanwhile, said husband was still jauntily planning Perky’s demise, although he wanted it to be different this time. For a start, it must take place at home without the trauma of travel. So Pete Loretto would do the killing and subsequent ‘dressing’ of the carcass himself, and for this purpose he’d ordered a set of specialist knives. Crucially, he also vowed to make the dispatch of poor Perky less of a bloody disaster this time.
To that end, he hinted, he would go about securing something more reliable than the hideous bolt gun that the idiot hippy had wielded.
Nothing more was actually said about this particular initiative on the blog, which wasn’t surprising. Because, as the police had later established, what Pete Loretto had done was to source a highly illegal handgun from somewhere. No doubt the Internet had been involved.
Finally the fateful night arrived. It was supposed to be a fateful morning, but postponements and feet-dragging meant that it was suitably dark, and still swelteringly hot, by the time the ugly business commenced.
Perhaps surprisingly, Sarita was determined to attend the event. But she felt she had to be there, to provide moral support for Perky. “I can’t let him die alone,” she declared in her final post… in which she also let slip that even at this late stage she was determined that Perky shouldn’t die at all.
She was resolute that she’d talk her husband out of his course of action.
At that point, the blog ended.
And there were two different versions of what happened next.
In one Sarita had indeed passionately tried to sway Pete to spare Perky, he had stubbornly refused, they had argued, and fought over the gun. And Sarita had got hold of it and either deliberately or accidentally shot Pete dead. Then, overcome with remorse, she’d shot herself.
This was the story subsequently endorsed by the police.
The other account was largely similar, except with the important difference that Sarita had been swayed by the influence of a demonic spirit that had possessed the pig. With some variants claiming that the demon pig had come into being as a consequence of Pete Loretto’s dabbling in black magic.
Both versions agreed that Perky, a.k.a. the demon pig, had fled the scene during or after the shooting and was now at large somewhere in the wilds of the island, hiding in the considerable band of forest that clad its slopes. He was either scared and on the run or waiting with malevolent patience to do some more demonic stuff, according to your preference.
I switched off the monitor, finished my coffee and washed the mug in the sink. Then, checking that I had the map and the key in my pocket, I went out the French windows and crossed the garden, smugly reflecting that there was no way anyone waiting in the street could see what was going on back here.
I climbed the stepladder and just as I was about to step over the garden wall I glanced back towards the house. I saw Miss Bebbington was awake and standing at her bedroom window. She smiled at me and waved with one hand. With the other she was holding her phone to her ear.
I waved back and went over the wall.
25. FARMHOUSE
On the other side of the garden wall was a wooden ladder, which seemed to be permanently stationed there. I climbed down it and found myself in an area of several acres covered with a patchwork of allotments—small gardens allocated to the island dwellers to grow fruit, vegetables or flowers. Over the years Miss Bebbington had bought up a number of plots from her neighbours and now had extensive space for what she called her vegetable patch immediately on the other side of her wall. Hence the well-established stepladder routine.
I walked among the allotments with the sun shining down on me, bringing out first the intense scent of a dense green mass of tomato vines that I brushed past, and then the perfume of a tall, unruly patch of lavender I skimmed my hand through. I breathed these in deeply and happily. It was a beautiful day, a wonderful day for a walk, and the pleasure was only intensified by knowledge that we were hoodwinking Stinky Stanmer, good and proper.
On the far side of the allotments was a gate in the centre of the brick wall. It was a crude wooden affair with a Yale lock high on the right-hand side. I inserted the key Miss Bebbington had given to me, opened it, stepped through and made sure it clicked locked behind me. I didn’t want to be responsible for any vegetable theft.
After I’d been walking for about thirty minutes, moving steadily uphill, I came to a place where the trees became sparse and then ceased. In front of me was a field bounded by a barbed wire fence. I consulted my map, oriented myself, then climbed carefully over the fence and struck off to my left. Moving in this direction I came to an irregular and ancient-looking stone wall, and felt a little pang of excitement.
I’d reached the Lorettos’ farm.
It wasn’t a working farm anymore, not since being purchased by the drummer in his years of affluence. I climbed the wall and found myself in what was effectively a very large and somewhat neglected garden. Of course, there’d been no one to look after it of late, but it showed signs of having begun to be neglected long before that.
There were fruit trees, which provided some much needed patches of shade. But mostly it was grass. What had once been lawn was overgrown and painfully dry and yellow. Over to one side I saw a large blotch of brownish earth standing out raw among the grass and I realised with a start that this must have been the site of the pig’s mud bath. Nearby was a trough, in an area enclosed by a sagging and partially collapsed wire fence.
The Lorettos’ house was wide and rambling, only one storey, made of rough grey stone spotted with yellow lichen. It looked ancient, until you saw the windows, which were modern and double-glazed. The roof was red shingles and the guttering was painted an odd shade of yellow, perhaps to match the lichen.
The front of the house was ringed by dense beds of poppies, which looked to have been deliberately planted, and then gone exuberantly wild and spread. They looked rather lovely. Somewhere I heard the buzzing of bees. The wind fluttered through the fruit trees with a sound like rain where there was no rain, and hadn’t been for weeks.
The whole place was sunny, breezy and peaceful.
And the white and blue police tape twisting in the wind provided an attractive contrast to the red mass of poppies.
* * *
I had been quite prepared to smash a window to get into the house, although the double-glazing would have made that problematical. But luckily the front door opened readily when I turned the handle. Maybe locking up after themselves hadn’t been the top priority of the local constabulary.
It was hot and airless in the house, and smelled stale, with an indeterminate but spicy and slightly unpleasant scent pervading the place. I was tempted to leave the front door wide open and let a fresh breeze blow through, but on the whole I thought that was inadvisable.
I stood and looked around.
What hadn’t come across in the blog I’d read, but had come across in conversations with just about everybody I’d spoken to, was Pete Loretto’s fixation with the occult.
And this didn’t waste any time in making itself evident. I was in a hallway with a wooden floor painted black and rough whitewashed walls. Opposite the front door was a bookcase of dark wood built into the wall but jutting out just enough to provide a narrow lip of shelf at the top.
Sitting on this shelf were framed photographs of irregular size and shape. They were all black and white pictures of the faces of men. A couple I recognised right away. Aleister Crowley, well-known sorcerer and charlatan. And John Blacklock, less well known and basically a low-budget version of Crowley. I’d learned about him when I’d been involved in the search for a record by Valerian. I took a step closer and inspected the photos.
A careful study of the other men in the pictures told me nothing, though judging by the wacky headwear of a couple of them, they were also in the black magic racket.
I lowered my gaze and examined the books in the bookcase itself. They were a mixture of hardbacks and paperbacks, pristine copies and beaten-up volumes that were falling apart. There was a large selection by Arthur Machen, with titles like The House of Souls, The Great God Pan and Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. There was also a substantial number of anthologies—In the Dead of Night, I Can’t Sleep at Night, My Blood Ran Cold, Weird Shadows from Beyond—which contained stories by an assortment of authors, including Machen.
To the left of the bookcase was a small alcove in the wall at just over waist height. In it were three black candles—Of course, black candles, I thought—half burned, in antique silver holders, and what looked like the bones of a bird, resting on a square of purple cloth. They hadn’t got that decorating tip from the IKEA catalogue.
I looked away from the bookcase and turned to my right, and froze.
There was a doorway in the whitewashed wall, but that wasn’t what I was looking at. Hanging on the wall beside the doorway was a large photo behind glass in an ebony frame. It was square, about two feet high. And it was the image from Wisht.
But whereas the album cover had been tinted in a range of unreal and trippy colours, this was a luminous and brooding black and white. Clearly it wasn’t some kind of reproduction of the cover, but had been made from the original negative. Which suggested that it had been created in the darkroom personally by a man who had once tried to kill me. I noticed a squiggle of handwriting in blue ink in the lower right-hand corner and moved closer to read it. Yes, it was Nic Vardy’s signature.
A signed original of a classic album cover. This would normally have spurred me to covetous thoughts, but now I just wanted to get the hell away from the thing as soon as possible.
I could see my own reflection in the glass, the shock showing clearly on my face.
I turned away and went through the door, entering a dining room dominated by a large oval antique table made of a reddish wood. The room was silent and warm and musty. The walls were painted a kind of Wedgwood blue and hanging on them were framed prints, small but immensely detailed watercolour illustrations of mushrooms and toadstools. They looked like they were pages carefully cut from a book.
To my left was a grandfather clock, taller than I was and standing in a shadowed corner just inside the door. It seemed to be made of the same wood as the table.
As I walked past it, the silent clock suddenly started ticking…
Obviously the vibration of my footsteps had caused something in the mechanism to shift and brought it back to life.
But this sudden reawakening didn’t exactly have a beneficial effect on my nerves.
Nor did the rambling, chaotic floor plan of the house, which meant I found it impossible to work out where I was in relation to anywhere else, and that I had no idea what room I’d wander into next.
As it happened, the room I wandered into next was the late Pete Loretto’s home studio, which was equipped with an impressive drum kit and a large selection of unusual percussion instruments. But no records.
From here I passed through another door, this one oddly low, so I had to duck to avoid banging my head on the rough-hewn rustic lintel beam. It seemed I had entered an older section of the farmhouse. And one in which the windows were either the originals or had been added at considerable expense. Because instead of being double-glazed and modern, they were made of stained glass in roughly diamond-shaped panes edged with strips of black lead, and looked very old indeed. They glowed with candied colours—red, blue and yellow—but didn’t allow much in the way of useful light in. And the slightly crude look of them, which should have impressed me with how traditional and handmade they were, actually seemed peculiarly ugly and unappealing.
This room didn’t have any obvious function. It was painted black and was small and very oddly shaped—a hexagon. The two sides of the hexagon on my right had the windows in them, forming a gently V-shaped niche, which had a green leather bench running across it. An assortment of silverware had been left spread out on the bench, on a black cloth.
The side of the room opposite the doorway through which I had entered had a further door in it, which led uninvitingly into shadows. I could hear the distinct ticking of the grandfather clock back in one of the rooms behind me, measured and patient and resonant.
The two sides of the hexagon to my left were fitted with black wooden shelves, which ran from floor to ceiling except for central gaps in which hung two matching brass mirrors. They were circular and were topped with oddly unpleasant-looking birds—eagles, judging by their beaks and talons. The mirrors reflected the colours of the stained glass—red, blue and yellow lozenges with the sunlight behind them, boiled sweets from the days when no one worried about using poisonous food colouring.
The shelves were covered with small white shapes, difficult to make out in the dimness of the room. I stepped closer to see what they were, and then rather regretted I had.
Skulls of small animals. The first one I saw looked like it had belonged to a weasel. I didn’t bother examining the others closely.
In the centre of the room was a hexagonal table, surfaced with green leather. From where I stood it was largely concealed by a high-backed antique chair made of black wood, upholstered with the same green leather. I felt no desire at all to sit in that chair and take a load off my feet.
I had the odd certainty that this was Pete Loretto’s inner sanctum. I turned away from the wall of weasel skulls and looked at the cutlery spread out on the bench.
And then I saw it wasn’t cutlery. It was heavy-duty knives and cleavers. I suddenly realised it was the set of pig butchery blades that Pete Loretto had blogged about so proudly. They looked brutal and lethal.
I turned away from them. I had now moved further into the room and I could suddenly see what was on the table.
An old, wrinkled and dog-eared manila folder lay there. On its discoloured brown cover, written in spidery, angular black handwriting, were the words How to Return.
I looked at it for a long time.
I was remembering what Gareth, the Mormon Hipster, had said the night of our farewell to Kind of Blue. About Pete Loretto working on ways to come back from beyond the grave.
Despite myself I felt a shudder of disquiet.
I looked around at the animal skulls, all of which suddenly appeared to be watching me with their sightless eyes. Then I looked back at the folder.
How to Return.
Just because it was nonsense didn’t mean that he hadn’t believed it…
The hair at the back of my neck writhed and stood up. I stepped around the table and got out of the room quickly through the door opposite. I was now in a windowless and shadowy corridor with dim light at either end. It was hot and smelled of dust and it was very quiet. I could hear my heart thumping in my chest. I hurried down the corridor, away from Pete Loretto’s sanctum.
Then I stopped.
I stood there for a long time, breathing in the darkness.
Then I forced myself to turn around and go back.
I’m not sure if it was bravado or curiosity that drove me, but I think it was mostly that I didn’t want to be the guy who was ruled by fear.
