Last Days

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  Very best wishes,

  The Tor UK team & our authors

  For mom, dad, my brother, Simon, and sister, Melissa. The best kind of family.

  I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

  The Yellow Wallpaper

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  THE PROCESS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  HELTER SKELTER

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  WHITE NIGHT

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE TEMPLE OF THE LAST DAY

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  PROLOGUE

  DENVER. 3 MARCH 2011

  And the woman could hear those old friends moving in the distant, and not so distant rooms of her home. Old friends she tried to forget for longer than she had the strength to remember. Until she understood her life had been one long wait for them to show up and commence with whatever business they were so eager to finish. Because the old friends never forgot. They arrived without invitation and appeared with little warning. They visited after dark and they never let go.

  Of late, the old friends were bolder and stronger. More skilled at getting inside. At passing over. Tonight, their movements suggested the visit was conclusive; the endgame to an incremental reunion.

  Closing her eyes, the woman sighed and supported her weight with one hand against the door frame. Then looked up, her body rigid with enough determination to take one step inside the house. Then another. And another after that.

  Stood at the foot of the stairs in her unlit house, still wearing her coat and shoes, she looked up and into the darkness concealing the top of the stairs. And listened with all the straining concentration the ears of the frightened can command. But she also listened with the resignation of the weary.

  Only the thinnest peripheral glow from the closest street lamp provided any light, and that never penetrated far inside the hallway before the open front door. In the distance a car accelerated and she wished she were inside it. She turned her head and looked at the deserted street. And was gripped with a powerful urge to run for somewhere where the lights would still be on and where the faces of people would be engaged in their smiles or their talk, or just their silence. She wanted to be with them, and part of their unexceptional lives so much it hurt. She tensed in anticipation of her usual flight taking hold. Moved one foot towards the open door. But not the other. She stood still. Stood her ground.

  Because she was as damned as a ghost on the last day of its occupation. A wraith with little to haunt besides the empty rooms of an unpeopled existence. A shade watching the world from another place, half in this world and half in another, listening to the sound of all the bright, clear voices, but never offering up her own. She’d fought harder than the rest. She had endured when others had gone under.

  Into her came a sudden invasion of regret, and its attendant hopelessness. Living with the consequences of actions committed before reason and experience had much say in anything felt familiar enough to be tedious. No matter how many times she revisited the past and added presumptions, or extracted details, it remained unmovable and always promised to deliver her right to where she currently stood, alone. She reckoned she was about ready for that time. She swallowed and removed the cold weight of the .38 from her handbag. And to think she was one of the lucky ones.

  This was the third house the woman had rented in the past five months under a false name, and she had lost her deposit on each property because of the walls and the signs the old friends had put upon them. Three days back, she came downstairs from her bedroom to a cold house without power. Scents of bad water and the ashes of a fire soaked by overnight rain had seeped up the basement stairs into the hallway. She’d found wires chewed through under the fuse box in the basement. And the wall behind the damaged cables was stained by unidentifiable matter, mostly dry, which she covered with black paint. Kept her eyes closed and cried at the same time as she lashed the wall with the brush.

  With an unwelcome frequency they had also begun to leave things behind. To introduce inevitability to a daunting reacquaintance. Yesterday, before she wrote a long email to her son in Toronto, writing as if it were the last communication she would ever make, she found a little blackened shoe on the kitchen floor. Small enough for a child. Hard as wood, stitched like a buckskin moccasin, and old. So very old. Dropped from a foot she dare not even consider. A puff of soot had fallen from it when she scooped it up with a pizza menu to drop in the trash.

  And here we are, girl.

  Bump bump bump bump. Frantic now in at least one room upstairs. Probably her bedroom. The woman recalled a party above the thin ceiling of a motel room she’d once rented in LA, a long time ago, on the run even then. Those muffled thumps of feet and sudden shrieks and bursts of laughter from strangers that served no greater purpose than a reminder of her disengagement from life, while keeping her awake. But up there, in this house, her final refuge, wasn’t any kind of party she wanted to attend.

  They were in her room for sure. Because the determined bumps, swaddled by bedclothes, had become crashes as something on he r bed started to cast about. A bedside table was swept of its contents.

  The woman pulled her dry tongue from the roof of her mouth to swallow the lump in her throat. She knuckled a fist against the wall until the dizziness passed. Then turned around and closed the front door. Shut herself inside. With them.

  Another of her uninvited visitors attempted to raise itself from the floor of the kitchen. She could hear it behind the closed door at the end of the hall. A disturbance she’d heard in the last two apartments she’d rented right before she fled them in the middle of the night. Sounds that brought to her mind the image of a wildebeest calf she had once seen on television, with a leg broken by the jaws of a crocodile, jerky in its attempt to pull itself away from the water.

  When she wondered if they would come for her on all fours or upright, she raised the pistol and went and stood at the foot of the stairs. Supported her lead hand with the other like she’d learned on the gun range, but with the barrel pointed up. Ready.

  The woman stilled her min
d and let her final thoughts find a memory of her boy, on the night she carried him through the cold desert, pressed into her chest. So long ago, but she remembered his snuffles, his warmth, a little hand clasped in her raven hair like it was yesterday. Went all the way down to her waist in those days and covered her baby like a waterfall. That boy always knew who his mama was too. Didn’t matter what they did to make it not so, make no mistake, he always knew. And she got her boy out.

  She smiled through her tears. Sucked her breath inside. ‘Come on you bitch!’ she screamed at the thing that moved into partial visibility, in a murky articulation of painful movements, onto the top step.

  Darkness folded about the stairs; they brought it with them from the lightless place between here and somewhere else. And within its protective veil, the intruder obeyed her request and came down to her, on all fours, the face upturned.

  Before it covered the short distance between them, the woman shoved the cold barrel of the handgun inside her own mouth. When it felt like it was somewhere behind her eyes, she squeezed the trigger.

  THE PROCESS

  ‘An epic story of inhuman savagery’

  Irvine Levine, Last Days

  ONE

  BLOOMSBURY, LONDON. 30 MAY 2011

  ‘Have you ever heard of Sister Katherine and The Temple of the Last Days?’

  The smile vanished from Maximillian Solomon’s eyes when he asked the question; a sign of self-seriousness, or a sudden scrutiny of Kyle’s fitness for disclosure; something Kyle noticed about mind, body and spirit types who spoke about their interests with strangers. Ufologists and mediums were the same.

  But even though Solomon’s eyes hardened, the small tanned face of the CEO of Revelation Productions retained its default setting of being vaguely amused. With Kyle. Or maybe with everyone in the world except himself. The permanent half-smile was either convivial or mocking. It was hard to tell which with these people: the successful, the owners of things, the commissioners and controllers he’d dealt with as a film-maker.

  ‘Yes,’ Kyle said, and then his mind snatched at what he did know about Sister Katherine and The Temple of the Last Days. Fragments resembling instamatic polaroid photos: sun-bleached flashes of a scruffy, bearded man in handcuffs, walking from a police car and into a municipal building; aerial footage of what might have been a ranch or a farm in . . . California? Snippets of imagery from something about the cult he’d seen on telly a long time ago. A documentary, or was it news footage?

  He wasn’t sure of the source of the impressions, but they were glimpses of things that suggested a notoriety that had evolved into the noir and the cultish. He knew that much; the group was perceived these days as dangerous and cool. A US Indie band called itself Sister Katherine in the eighties; some industrial band called itself The Temple of the Last Days in the next decade. And of course, he’d recognize the iconic portrait of Sister Katherine anywhere without knowing much about her life; it had been Andy Warholed on to T-shirts in Camden Market, alongside images of Jim Jones and Charles Manson, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. A plump, heavily made-up face, its expression beatific, haloed by a purple nun’s habit as her eyes searched the heavens. Mother Mary meets Revlon. An evil female cult leader reduced to sick joke gimmickry, lurid nostalgia, and bespoke infamy for disaffected youth. A woman who was killed by . . . or did she commit suicide with her followers in America? He couldn’t remember, but he knew the Temple had murdered people. Or was it each other? A film star? No, that was Manson’s family. Same era because the Temple was a hippy death cult in the sixties. Or was it the seventies?

  ‘The cult,’ he said and tried not to look clueless. Too late, his eyes had gone vague and he’d frowned with confusion throughout his hazy recall.

  Max seemed pleased with his ignorance. It would enable him to expound. ‘An organization that began right here in London, in 1967.’

  ‘London?’

  ‘Yes. In this city. Few are aware of that. But Sister Katherine was British. Her real name was Hermione Tirrill. She was born in Kent. Came from the remnants of a wealthy family. Her mother even had a title. She was a Baroness, and made sure little Katherine knew she was better than everyone. As did the boarding schools where she was educated until she was fourteen, when her father left his bankrupt family. And little Kathy and her mother were forced into the ignominy of poverty. She came down hard from a pile in the country to a council flat in Margate. Had to slum it in a second-hand school uniform. Down there with the rest of them. Must have been devastating for her, this plump little overachiever with funny teeth, while she watched her former peers become debutantes.’

  Kyle shrugged. ‘I don’t know much—’

  ‘She was a runaway at fifteen and never spoke to her mother again. There was some time in borstal for theft and assault, then prison in her twenties. She was arrested for solicitation, and then again for running a brothel. Embezzlement, forgery too. A petty criminal. We can read what we choose into this. But what we do know from the few that have ever gone on record about her formative years, is that Katherine never liked a level playing field. That’s for sure. But she liked power. And status. Wanted back what had been taken from her.’

  Kyle intuited a taint of bitterness in Max, but something else too: a grudging respect.

  ‘But the Temple’s origins are fascinating. It grew out of a cocktail of Scientology and apocalyptic millennial ideas, a mimicry of Christian sainthood, occult magic, Buddhism, a belief in reincarnation . . . and various other things.’ Max seemed to detach himself from Kyle then, and from the conversation and even the room, like an old man reminiscing fondly. ‘It could have been so beautiful. Simple psych-therapy techniques, blended with medieval ideas of asceticism and piety. A life free of ego. These were the original values. All cloaked in mysticism for an aesthetic appeal.’

  Breaking his reverie and now self-conscious about his digression, Max killed the half-smile. ‘A well-intentioned concept quickly usurped by a female sociopath and criminal elements. In London it was known as The Last Gathering. It became The Temple of the Last Days in France, during a schism in 1969. At a farm in Normandy where they nearly starved to death. The remnants migrated to America, under the same management. Where they self-destructed in Arizona. 1975. That you will surely be familiar with?’

  Kyle swallowed. ‘I’m not that familiar with it.’ He cleared his throat too aggressively. ‘With them.’

  ‘So I see.’ Max said with a condescending inflection on the last two words.

  Momentarily, Kyle felt dizzy with embarrassment, as if he were being asked a question at school that he had no answer for. An illogical reaction, because why would he know anything about them? Had he pretended to? They were hardly important. And Max Solomon had invited him by email to the production offices in Bloomsbury, for a meeting about a ‘prospective collaboration’ without stating anything specific about the proposal. He felt his face go hot. ‘No disrespect intended, but why would I be?’

  ‘From what I have enjoyed about your work, Kyle, I’d say you might want to be.’ Max smiled. And commenced issuing the impression that he would ever be the unruffled and idly comfortable man, his success innate, entitled to prosperity and that all should know it. Signs recognizable to Kyle. And he instinctively disliked those who exhibited them. A class unto themselves; the money man, the film executive from the upper corporate tier, the self-important producer. Loved being close to the creative flame, stressed their own ‘creativity’ at every opportunity, and by doing so devalued the very word to house dust. But their aspiration to take ownership of another’s work, he’d learned the hard way, was always reinforced by an underhand cleverness that you underestimated at your peril in this racket. They were the reason he had reduced himself to self-financed film-making, and a personal debt so colossal just thinking about it made it hard to breathe.

  Earlier, he’d been collected from an impressive reception so brightly lit he’d spent the entire wait squinting. When shown into the CEO’s office and
Max had risen to greet him, his movements so light and graceful, the tiny man had reminded Kyle, uncomfortably and unkindly, of a small clever monkey with quick glittering eyes. A primate rising to its hind legs, dressed in Paul Smith.

  The man was also tanned the colour of a sweet potato and his entire scalp was covered in a semi-transparent pelt of hair implants. He never understood why balding men paid so dearly for a procedure that only gave them thinning hair. The one time he’d been to Cannes, and the two visits he’d made to LA to talk to film agents, he’d found alien worlds full of men just like Max Solomon.

  When the email arrived the night before to request the meeting, Kyle had broken an anxious evening of reading job ads online and immediately checked out the Revelation Productions website. Instantly, his heart and its vain hope that the meeting might lead to an opportunity to work again, and that he would earn enough money to stave off his impending insolvency, cooled with dismay. His disappointment grew incrementally the more he saw of the website, until it was total.

  Revelation had published a book called The Message, which had sold ‘Fifty Million Copies!’ A strapline that filled most of the company’s homepage. He’d seen the book around. It had changed the life of many female celebrities as well as being one of those books that every other woman had been reading on the London Underground for one summer. How long ago that summer was escaped him, but he’d never seen the book being read in public since.

  As well as The Message, the company produced a massive backlist of books, DVDs, CDs and merchandise that had a contemporary, life-affirming, self-help USP attached. The company claimed their products were ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘definitive’ and ‘revelatory’. But the brand struck Kyle as being very Californian, a bit vulgar, and dated lo-tech, magic-bullet-chicanery, while also fortifying his aversion to bad science blended with spiritual horseshit. But it had come to this; with the exception of porn, he’d dropped to the bottom of the film industry.