‘Come in, Buzz. I’m surprised you made it, what with the weather we’ve been having.’

I followed Mercy Higgs down her tiled hall-way. Dimly lit it was, but to my rain-beaten, wind-battered senses it felt like Nirvana. I could smell hot scones in her Aga cooker and already I was half-hallucinating the sensation of clotted cream and jam. A mug of black coffee at my elbow and the door to the range thrown open to allow us a glimpse of the coals.

In the kitchen, a big old rambling, wainscotted barn-sized snug that was made intimate with exposed wood and brightly polished brass work, I paused and blinked back the tears. They were tears of relief and tears of anguish. Relief that I’d made it to Mercy, anguish at the comparison between my circumstances now and when I’d last seen her. My one previous visit here had been in high summer, with the doors open for the heat and wisteria tapping at the window panes of an evening. I’d been here with Dave and Julie, the year before Matt died – the year before my life fell apart. Fell apart? No, that’s not quite right. Blew up in my face might be more appropriate. Then I had been a fair to middling successful businessman, almost a goddam entrepreneur. Now I was an outcast, a fugitive from human justice and inhuman malice. 

That’s the Wheel of Fortune for you 
when God has an axle to grind against you.

Self-pity? Yeah, I was feeling some of that. Bitterness, too. Impotence at my situation burned my gall. I had the burnt taste of outrage on my tongue night and day.

Mercy turned to look me up and down and there was unease in her face. But of course there would be. That’s why I was here. I was a bedfellow to unease; disquiet was my footstool and desperation was my teddy bear when I tucked myself into my cardboard box at night.

She was tall, her hair greying, but still long and flowing past her shoulders. A statuesque country-woman, with work-hardened hands and a brain like a solstice calculator. Her deep-set, wide-spaced eyes were troubled. The last time I’d seen her, in summer dress or light summer work-clothes, I’d described her as handsome. Tonight, she was dangerously desirable. A darkness coiled within her that was hotter than sex, deeper than lust. 

She swept a strand of hair from her brow and said, ‘I still can’t believe you’re here. Just like that.’

‘It isn’t just like that, Mercy.’

‘Half the police in the country looking for you and you just stroll in –’

‘I hardly strolled, Mercy.’ I began to take off my wet clothes. I was soaked to the skin and I was determined to get warm. 

‘But you got my message?’

‘I got a message.’ I kicked off my sodden white sports boots. ‘Otherwise I would never have come here. I’m a Jonah, Mercy. I don’t like bringing bad luck on my friends.’

I was down to shirt and jeans. Mercy saw what was coming and disappeared out another door, flinging over her shoulder, ‘I’ll get you some dry things to wear.’

I was naked by the time she got back. She dropped a pile of clothes on a chair and inspected her scones.

I shrugged on an old rugby shirt. ‘You’ve got guests tonight.’

She turned to look at me, her face half lit in chiaroscuro – one side blue-shadowed from the strip-lighting, the other side hot tones from a palette mixed in hell. 

‘Some regulars,’ she said at last. ‘Inigo Gerrish. He’s a solicitor who comes this way every so often to look after a client’s estate. Gareth Yates, the TV antiques person. You know him?’

I nodded. ‘I’ve met him once or twice through Dave.’

Outside a dog set up a barking, which was quickly joined with a score of other canines’ tongues. 

Mercy rose. ‘That’ll be Paul, my last guest. I’d better go and make sure he’s comfortable.’ She paused at the door. ‘The scones are for supper. Perhaps you’d care to join us in the parlour.’

‘D’you think that’s wise? What if Gareth Yates recognizes me?’

‘He wants to meet you. He’s the one who set up this whole meeting.’

I called after her, but already she had closed the door behind her and I could hear her greet her new guest. Rooting around in the clothes, I found an old pair of corduroys and tugged them on. 

***

While I waited for Mercy my mind went back to Dave Turner. Good ol’ short, pudgy, gourmet-cookin’, photo-developin’, antique-rustlin’ Dave. With his sandy hair and twinkling, faded-blue eyes and rusty moustache. God, I missed him. And Julie, his wife. And the life I once led. Dave had a real passion for wildlife programs. And heavy metal music. He looked like the last guy to be a closet head-banger. Oh, yeah, and he liked Tolkien. Every year, come Spring, he re-read Lord of the Rings. Religiously. He was born out of time and place. He should have been a Hobbit in Middle-Earth – he had all the right credentials.

But he was in custody. The medical wing of a high-security army camp. He was a decent guy, but he had been caught out. Or maybe he preferred prison to a life on the run. I know he didn’t have to be inside, but he had reconciled himself to it. If he really wanted to be free, he could be outside. But life on the run would have destroyed him. It’s like the use of gramarye – you are where you are meant to be. 

Occasionally I dreamed about him. Lucid dreams, which meant that we really met. Not in the flesh, but a meeting of minds – over the miles of distance that separated us, over the black gulfs of the wintry night. 

Three nights ago I had broken into an empty house for the night, holed up in a box room and dreamed about him. Dave reproached me that at last I had become a real criminal. I had finally become what the authorities said. I called him a wimp. That he knew he should be free and out, looking for Julie, for she had disappeared off the face of the earth. I think that’s what burned me up most of all about Dave. That he could take his separation from Julie so calmly, so passively. They had had a good marriage. They had been real good friends to each other. Supportive and honest. And he made no effort to learn of her whereabouts. Okay, so he was suffering, but he was swallowing all this shit and not doing something about it.

He told me that Mercy had visited him. That she needed help. He didn’t know what her problem was, but he was sure that I could help. I growled at him that he never just called round any more for a good ol’ conversation. He smiled. ‘Sorry, Buzz. We’ve changed. Don’t you always tell me that these things only happen when they’re supposed to happen. If I popped over to see you every night, you’d only start nagging me about Julie.’

‘Can I get you anything, Dave?’

‘No, thanks, Buzz. I’m in solitary again. Someone cut their wrists in the cell next door and blamed it on me. He’s probably right, too. I didn’t like the way he glared at me.’

‘You going to read Lord of the Rings again this year?’

‘I don’t know, Buzz. How many times can you knock on a door, trying to get in, and pick yourself up to live with the disappointment?’

‘I don’t know, Dave. How ever many times it takes, I guess.’

‘I guess, too, Buzz. ’Bye.’

‘Good bye, Dave. Do I really nag about Julie?’

No reply. Only the dark, the cold and aching emptiness. And then the memory of Mercy and the fact that she needed to see me.

***

Now that I’d met Mercy again, I was less inclined to come stomping into her life. That sexual darkness I sensed in her had been more than just a metaphor. Mercy had brought me here to betray me. Maybe not willingly, maybe not consciously, but at some time in the very near future Mercy was going to throw me to the wolves.

But the fact that I was here was part of the play. Earlier I’d called myself a Jonah. Not strictly true. The original Jonah hadn’t been a bad-luck guy – just a guy who had tried to escape his destiny. His prophetic message had told him to go to Nineveh and prophesy against the king. Like any sensible adult, he could think of better career directions than spitting in the face of authority – especially the kind of authority with a human rights violations record as long as your intestines.

But that’s not how it worked out for Jonah. His Destiny was too strong – call it karma, dharma or Jehovah – when you pick up the card and are told to go to jail, go straight to jail, etc, then jail is where you go.

I could have slipped out of Mercy’s house while she talked to her latest guest. Sure it was a real stinker of a storm, but what’s a little raw elements against a brush with Chaos and Old Night? I could have just upped and walked away, but I had a Destiny too. Like Jonah, it had me by the scruff of the neck and my face was pressed tight against the glass door of the future.

As I arranged my damp clothes over chairs close to the heat, I decided it was time to beard the lion in its den.

Opening the door to the innards of the old house, I heard the distant murmur of voices. Although it was too far away to hear the words, I followed Mercy’s tones and then the deeper, TV-authoritative voices of guests. 

As I entered the room I was aware of a change in temperature – the room was cool, the kind of cool that needs to be dispelled by having a fire lit in the hearth for a few days. There was a fire in the grate, surrounded by an Art Deco marble fireplace, but most of the heat it gave off seemed to be sucked straight up the flue and out into the wild night outside.

Mercy’s house is a late Regency villa in Kent, but the decor in this room was modernist and minimalist. The walls and ceiling were painted white, with a modest plaster frieze lining the top of each wall and running along the edge of a beam that cut across the ceiling. A potted fig tree eight feet tall lent the room none of nature’s spontaneity. The carpet was a dull parchment color, the blocky, low-backed suite in gray suede gave the impression of standing stones that had been water-eroded into the merest remnants of their former stature. The severity of the room was enhanced by the lack of drapery. Stainless steel Venetian blinds were closed against the night outside and our dim reflections swam sluggishly over the rigid ripples of their surfaces.

Then Mercy and her guests discovered my presence.

Mercy rose and captured my arm, leading me to one of the ottomans beside a square-shouldered Art Deco wooden obelisk. 

As I settled myself, Mercy told her three guests, ‘You have heard the name, but this is the man at last. Buzz Lee.’

Gareth Yates I recognized immediately. He shook my hand and murmured a Home Counties-accented greeting. In his late forties, he carried his gray-haired good looks and boyish charm as a passport to TV-land. His enthusiasm kept him young. I was surprised to find him in an open-neck white shirt and Armani jeans and suede loafers. His TV image was always bespoke casualness and school-tie impromptu. He had made his career serving good TV for the oiks while still retaining critical and establishment credibility. I’d liked him the last time I’d met him; tonight, however, his persona seemed stretched tight over the skeletal infra-structure of his greed.

The second guest was Inigo Gerrish. He had the face of an Irish ascetic monk. Again in his late forties, his gray hair was cropped short to reveal the tonsure decreed by his male pattern baldness. His hand, when I shook it, contained power. If he had been the seventh son of a seventh son he could well have been a healer. He too was casually dressed – in a gray-flannel tracksuit and blue Nike runners.

Paul Lusher was the youngest. In his early twenties, he was raw and awkward. His hair was uncut and uncombed; he wore a plaid shirt and jeans with white sports boots with protruding tongues. Despite his air of nervousness, he had one dandyish item on his person: a leather bracelet on his wrist with beads and feathers plaited into braids.

After intros and general conversation which mainly concerned the state of the weather, and how bad the driving conditions were, Mercy returned from her kitchen with scones, clotted cream, home-made jam and home-made ginger snaps.

Gareth Yates, resident talking head, lived up to his reputation and regaled us with celebrity gossip and showbiz flummery. It sounded pretty fake and forced, so I stayed quiet, waiting for the real reason for our meeting.

I studied the art on the wall. An early Hockney that I knew wasn’t a reproduction; several low-relief panels of sandstone that I remembered from my last visit – I guessed they were Hittite or Hurrian: they depicted donkey-headed figures performing round dances. On top of the fireplace was a strange Art Deco style confection. While I tuned in and out of the conversazione I tried to figure it out. 

It was made from a black porcelain, with a sphinx-like figure at the top, its features picked out in gold leaf. Beneath the sphinx was a spoked wheel about the size of a dinner plate. Attached to the circumference of the wheel were four figures, portrayed in ancient Egyptian style. One figure was a baboon; another an ibis-headed man; the third was a crocodile and the fourth was the dwarfish god known as Bes – a sort of Quasimodo to the Egyptian pantheon.

‘I see you have instinctively come to the point of our meeting tonight, Mr Lee.’

It was Gareth Yates, interrupting himself.

‘It is rather striking,’ murmured Inigo Gerrish, a slight Irish burr coming through in his excitement.

‘Striking. So, what is it?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Mercy.

‘It’s – superficially, at any rate – the Wheel of Fortune,’ supplied Inigio Gerrish. He rose and donned a pair of round, wire-framed glasses. Crossing over to the mantelpiece he took a spill from the companion set and held it to the flames for a moment. Once he had a light, he brought it up to the artifact on the mantelpiece. With the flames licking around each figure, he lit an oil-soaked wick hidden in the gaping jaws of each creature. As the wicks caught, the porcelain began to jangle musically as the heat made it expand. As the last wick was lit, the wheel began to turn. Majestically, slowly, unbelievably. But it turned. 

Each creature on the rim of the wheel kept its relative position as the wheel turned. With each turn the gold-leaf highlights on the spokes and rim began to glow. They pictured stick figures – a representation of humanity caught in the gyring of the cosmic wheel. As the figures glowed with flame, they began to resemble some curiously familiar cursive script.

It was a script I had never seen before, but as the wheel revolved it was as if I was tantalizingly close to recognizing it. The sensation of having a name on the tip of your tongue. You know it, but you can’t just call it to mind.

While I was fascinated by this phenomenon, I was aware that there was something else active in the fabric of the wheel. Somehow the action of the mechanism produced a centripetal force that I could sense. I hate names for occult forces such as mana or gramarye, vril or chi. Giving a name to an occult force fools the namer into thinking it’s something that can be turned on and off like a faucet. 

Whatever it was the wheel affected, I could sense it was not benign. For want of a better analogy it was something like a sponge that absorbed humanity’s integral spirit. Why did it do such a thing? Who knows? I generally avoid asking questions like that of the sick fucks who dream up such gizmos.

The mechanism wasn’t actually up to sucking my soul out, but that was because it had just been put into action. It would take a few weeks, maybe even a few months but it would get there in the end. I try not to think in metaphysics – to me someone without a soul is someone without humanity. There’s something to be said for Joe Bloggs, Tommy Atkins, John Doe and all the other dead-beats that wind up being the common man. If he’s a common man, then he’s got a communal soul.

I’ve said before that my youth was misspent reading Kipling, but now a line of his came to me from If:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same.

That’s what the Wheel of Fortune meant. Sure you can work your butt off till you’re blue in the ass but all that makes you is a baboon. It’s not what you do but why you do it that decides whether you do it for the sake of your soul. Oh, yeah, and I forgot that great line: What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?

‘Where did you get it from?’ I asked my question carefully and slowly. My ‘bad feeling’ chakra had just kicked in and was giving me a headache the size of a fist between my eyes.

‘I found it,’ said Paul Lusher.

Of course! I should have guessed. He was the poor loser with the Pearl of Great Worth, and when he had brought this cosmic toy to the attention of the world of men, he had opened a real can of worms. Yates and Gerrish would have leaped at the chance to be in on a discovery like this. Mercy – I couldn’t quite figure her part in this yet. But – like the flaming script on the turning wheel – I knew it was coagulating on the tip of my tongue. Right now I didn’t care whether it would taste sweet or bitter.

‘You found it? Where? In an old antiques shoppe, and when you went back the place was nowhere to be had.’

Lusher looked confused at my irony. But it still didn’t stop him from trotting out his story:

***

‘I was on a camping trip in Scotland last August – my girlfriend and me. Pony-trekking and camping. We had an argument and ended up with me stamping off into the night and leaving her on her own. It was an awful night – it wasn’t a downpour, but there was low cloud and a drizzle that’s nearly worse than driving rain. I was looking for a road so that I could hitch a lift. I saw lights in the distance and that supposed were the headlights of cars. As I got nearer, I came across the – the Lamp.’

‘Out in the middle of nowhere?’

‘Not the middle of nowhere,’ supplied Inigo Gerrish. ‘In a piece of ancient forest, original druid’s wood that once stretched from Scotland to the Alps before the ice caps melted and drowned the land bridge that linked these islands to the Continent. We Celts are not insular by choice.’

Lusher looked gratefully to Gerrish for helping him out. It sounded more impressive coming from this wily solicitor.

Lusher continued: ‘There was a body beside the Lamp. I didn’t see it at first. It wore a robe that camouflaged it against the bracken. Not even a body, more like a skeleton. Except the bones were all in pieces.’

He was floundering again; this time Mercy helped him out: ‘Show him the photographs, Paul.’

‘I was just about to,’ he said, and pulled out an envelope from the breast pocket of his shirt. He handed me the first photograph. I could make out the outlines of a collapsed, very decomposed body lying in bracken. Shadows and over-exposed parts in the photograph suggested Lusher had taken it while the ‘Lamp’ was still glowing. They added amateurish verisimilitude. Pictures this bad could only be authentic. 

He handed me another photograph: a close up of the skull. It was as if some necrophiliac artist had taken a jigsaw to it and turned it into a three-dimensional puzzle. 

‘I take it that you kept these bones?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Lusher bobbed his head enthusiastically. ‘I gathered every piece up later and bagged it. I know it sounds creepy, but I didn’t want to report this to the police. I was sure that they would – I don’t know how this sounds – but I was certain they would spoil it. This was my discovery, my enigma. I felt I had been given the puzzle. I was the only one who could put it together.’

I stared at him. ‘Just you?’

He bobbed his head in discomfort under my gaze. ‘Just me.’

‘And your friends, of course,’ I added.

Bob of head again – I promised myself that the next time he bobbed, I would hold his head underwater.

‘Of course,’ he bobbed.

I gritted my teeth. ‘So you gathered up the bones. And brought the Lamp back to civilization with you.’

Lusher looked hesitant. ‘Not quite.’ He glanced at the photos in his hands. ‘I had to wait for the Lamp to go out.’

‘Why?’

‘I knew it had to go out sooner or later. It was too hot to touch. If I was going to take it with me I had to wait until it went out.’

‘How long did you wait?’

‘About four hours. I sat down beside it and fell asleep. I didn’t mean to. When I woke it was dawn. The Lamp was cool enough to touch so I hid it along with the bones and marked my trail out of there. I hitched a lift home and the next weekend borrowed a friend’s car and went up. It was still there – ’

While Lusher continued with his story, filling in too much inconsequential detail, my mind ferreted out the problem of the Wheel of Fortune. I had pre-visioned it tonight when I’d remarked on it to Mercy in the kitchen; and now Gerrish was adamant that it was indeed the Wheel of Fortune. 

I wasn’t convinced. When Gerrish referred to the Wheel of Fortune, what he was really meant was the Tarot card of that name. The Golden Dawn produced their own Tarot and their version was primarily based on Egyptian imagery, which is okay by me if you like that sort of thing. (Off-hand I didn’t know of any Scottish connections of the Golden Dawn except for Aleister Crowley and Macgregor Mathers – there are probably a few others, but hey, I’m no occult historian.)

But the real Wheel of Fortune is not the Tarot image. The original Wheel of Fortune was turned by the personification Fortuna. Usually blindfolded and sometimes naked. The four figures about the wheel are usually men, not mythological characters. The top figure is usually a king – sometimes with asses’ ears, to tie him up with King Midas – and his motto is Regno: I rule. The wheel turns anti-clockwise and the descending figure is a man – sometimes with a tail – whose motto is Regnavi: I ruled. At the bottom of the wheel is an old man with a white beard, crawling on his hands and knees. Sometimes he has asses’ ears too. His motto is Sum sino regno: I am without rulership. The final figure on the wheel, the guy going up in the world, asses’ ears and all, has a motto of Regnabo: I shall rule. This is a medieval figure that has evolved through the centuries into various forms, rather like Chinese whispers. The figures change; folk tacked on imagery they were comfortable with, but the message remained: the wheel turns and you go round with it.

I was getting more uncomfortable imagery than this: there were five of us here tonight. As in the allegorical figure, there was one woman. Mercy was our Fortuna, turning the events, blind-folded maybe; maybe yes, maybe no.

So who was Regno: I rule? Gareth Yates, man of the world? After that it got muddy. Was I going down, down on my knees, or going up? Going up appealed mostly. I was more resigned to Sum sino regno: I am without rulership. I was bottom of the pecking order. Paul Lusher, despite his youth, was the man falling: he had stewardship of the device but handed it over to others, thus he was Regnavi: I ruled. Gerrish, I suspected, had deeper plans than Yates: Yates could see embellishments to his current standing by taking the arts and antiques world by storm in producing a provenance for the device. A six-part series on BBC2, with the final episode turning out to be a demonstration of the powers of the Wheel. It would make Chariots of the Gods? and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail look like the Hitler diaries. So, if Yates was going for the populist vote, what was Gerrish up to?

Lucky me. I was going to find out.

I tuned back into Lusher’s story. By now he had finagled a medical student friend to analyze the bone samples. The friend came back with the story that the bones didn’t match up with anything on their DNA register. Surprise, surprise. More than that, the bones had not been cut up after death. These bones were the way nature intended them to be. Which begs the question, what sort of creature has a skeleton made out of bones the size of gaming dice?

I was getting bad vibes from this little ménage à cinq, so I came right out with:

‘Where do I fit in? I was under the impression I was charging to the rescue. Mercy’s knight in tarnished armour. I thought this was a family deal. Tonight feels like the directors of a firm discussing plans for expansion.’

Mercy answered: ‘We need your expertise, Buzz. We know of your real circumstances. You’re on the run from the authorities not because you are a criminal but because you have a story to tell them that would be incomprehensible to them. If you told them your story, they would lock you up.’

‘How do you know about my “real circumstances”?’

‘Through mutual friends,’ supplied Gareth Yates, plummily.

‘Okay, so what is the deal here?’

‘We are offering you a chance to prove the veracity of your circumstances. You feel at the moment that you can’t tell the police the true sequence of events that sent you on the run. Mainly because it involves the occult, and outré systems of belief. If you can prove before disinterested onlookers that occult forces exist – ’ He made a grandiose gesture towards the mantelpiece. ‘E.g. the Lamp, then, you can prove your innocence and be re-instated into society.’

I’d never heard anybody use the phrase ‘e.g.’ in conversation before. Mulling over that textual nuance gave him the idea that I took his proposition seriously. He rose and gestured to the assembled company, ‘Why not retire for the night? Let our friend Buzz sleep on the matter.’

The others dutifully rose, Mercy only lingering long enough to tidy away the food dishes. I offered to wipe if she washed, but she laughed and said that she was leaving them for her staff who would do them in the morning.

***

Mercy showed me to my room. It lived up to its country farmhouse ambiance with a sloping ceiling under the eaves and Laura Ashley prints on curtains and bedspread. It seemed like heaven. Except that us Bodhisattvas reject heaven, in order to help more plain folks on the way.

I lay on top of the covers, fully clothed and settled myself for a wait. As I’ve said before, gramarye is something that is best used by the unconscious mind. Real magic works at the edge of human mentation – Dave’s phrase, but apt. Like the Tao – the Tao that can be described is not the real Tao. The gramarye that can be rustled up for a stage show or a parlor trick – sure, it can work the desired effect, but there are effects that reach out beyond the immediate. It’s like the Sufi mystics and the Arabian systems of magic. 

To the Arabs, Sihr is magic; but real magic, the stuff that lingers on for centuries and transforms tribes into nations is linked to barakah or power, spiritual influence. According to their traditions, Hárut and Márut were angels who gave mankind the secret of magic. They have a whole bunch of words for ’em: karámát or wonders; according to the Sufis, if you follow in their path, you practically fall over these occult powers. From istridraaj, or the activities of magicians, O Lord deliver me. They had other names, such as kahána or sorcery, which involved the use of talismans, a debased form gramarye, but probably still lethal in the hands of a magical operator. Maskh was their word for the art of transforming men into animals…

Well, well, well.

The ancient Persians believed in the fabulous Huma bird that never alighted on earth. It traveled to initiates and passed secrets from one salik, or seeker, to another. And I think my Huma bird had just whispered something. Maskh. What’s in a homophone? Sounds almost like the English word mask. And speaking of masks – I thought of caterpillars. Julie was a crossword and dictionary freak. She was never far from her newspaper and its concomitant dictionary. I remember her telling me once that a larva – the name for a caterpillar or the immature form of an insect – was derived from the Latin word for a mask. 

Grief, I hate it when my brain goes into hyper-drive just when I really want to relax and get some shut eye. And it’s always a bad sign when I start analyzing language, because that’s where gramarye works – that no-person’s-land between the real world and our perceptual model. The edge of mentation, the beachhead in our mind where reality filters through.

I was having one of my insights. I knew why the bones were dice-shaped. The dead figure was a shape-changer. The skeleton was held together by ligaments that interwove the framework. Under the action of various stimuli – let’s call a full moon a libidinous albedo – the body released hormones that warped the ligaments and re-structured the bone. Pain? Like you wouldn’t believe. We are talking major natural pain-killers here. To survive a lycanthropic change of that magnitude you would need to be tripped out on enough neuro-hormones to achieve escape velocity.

This altered things. 

No pun. 

Earlier I’d fingered Inigo Gerrish as the dangerous bastard. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Paul Lusher fell asleep beside that damned preternatural device while it still functioned. What did that make him?

I sat up rigid. It probably made him a murderer. He’d mentioned a girlfriend. One mention. She’d never come up again. 

I rose and found the door unlocked. Padding into the corridor, I heard the wind outside. The storm was building.

Downstairs, I found the telephone. I rang directory inquiries for the telephone number of a Scottish newspaper. It was one o’clock in the morning. If this old newshound was out, then my best bet was to steal a car and get out of here. If he was in the office and he confirmed my suspicions, then my best bet was to steal and car and light out of here – only faster.

The ringing tone stopped and I heard a soft Scottish burr. I asked for Hugh Purdey and was told to hold the line. Hugh and I had met several times. At first as adversaries, but then we won each other round. The last time we’d met, I had given him a head-start on a sizable scoop, so I was sure he’d feel mellow.

‘Who is it?’ His voice, crisp, direct and no-nonsense came over the line. 

I told him, and his second’s pause was probably for turning on his tape recorder. Non-committal, he said, ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’m looking for a story of an unsolved murder – possibly with ritual connections, took place in a wood in Scotland, sometime last August, a young woman – ’

‘You mean the Tuecher Wood Body?’

‘I don’t know. Tell me about it.’

‘Hold on, Buzz, while I get the file.’ I heard the receiver being muffled and then he was back on the line: ‘Where are you ringin’ from, Buzz?’

‘Hugh, I’m surprised a man of the world would ask me.’

‘I’m just killin’ time, Buzz, till the report comes to me. Are you keepin’ all right?’

We talked for a few minutes. He had never met any of the others, but he knew my story well enough to know that I would always be on the run. Finally, Hugh gave me the facts:

‘Janice Connor, aged nineteen, student from Leicester. Found murdered. Signs of sexual activity and depravity – lots of hints of stuff they aren’t releasing so that when they do get the bugger they can hang him good and proper.’

‘Is there anything in your files about a boyfriend?’

‘Police cleared him. Paul Lusker in one report and Lusher in another story.’

‘That’s him, Hugh. What’s the biz on him?’

‘It’s not mentioned here, but I remember talkin’ to somebody from the Coroner’s office. He was prime suspect until they tagged the semen on the body. After that they were lookin’ for somebody else.’

Shape-changing at a cellular level? 

‘Does it tie in with bodies from around the country?’

‘If it does the Polis are keepin’ their lips buttoned. And nae whispers concernin’ visitin’ detectives who have brought their wee notebooks up for a confab.’

 ‘Thanks, Hugh. You’ve been a great help.’

‘So, what’s the story, Buzz?’

‘Are you taping this?’

‘Does the Pope shite in the woods?’

‘That’s good enough for me.’ I gave him the edited highlights of Lusher’s tale and made sure that he knew who was involved. He didn’t like Gareth Yates’ TV show, so he would enjoy pulling the plug on the bastard’s career. And they say British TV is the best in the world. Hah!

‘Do you want your name kept out of this?’

‘Don’t be ingenuous, Hugh, it doesn’t suit you. It’s gonna be worth another coupla thou of circulation if you tie this into the continuing Buzz Lee saga – the new heir to Aleister Crowley, the latest designer serial killer. You were just joshin’ me, weren’t you?’

‘Sorry, Buzz, I don’t know what came over me there.’

‘So long, Hugh. You know how to contact me.’

‘I do?’

‘Yeah, you just whistle. You know – ’

‘Aye, Buzz, I ken how to whistle.’

***

I put the phone down and felt very alone. Pondering my options, I gathered up the telephone line and wadded it into a ball. The line connecting the phone to the wall grew taut. A surge of anger made me tense up and the line popped out of the wall. I dropped the ball of flex and watched it re-arrange under gravity. It was like watching some invertebrate creature making a bed.

A blast of wind shook the house and made the china on the mantelpiece tinkle. That old pathetic fallacy – the elements mirror the turmoil of the psyche. My problem was I had wandered out of the B-movie of my life into a high-budget, special effects extravaganza. 

I opened the Venetian blinds and watched the crazy mime artistry of the trees in the high wind. Not waving, but drowning. Lightning flashed in the distance and I felt the tremor through my subtle anatomy. The mechanism stirred on the mantelpiece. That old pathetic fallacy again. The device responded to the thunder. Who was I to deny it?

I opened the French windows to the elements. Rather, I turned the key and the wind burst in, scattering cushions and causing the blinds to crash like cymbals in their mountings. The fireguard over the embers of the fire rattled. The embers glowed red, baleful, as air rushed up the chimney. 

Lightning forked through the trees. I counted silently and then the thunder spoke. Only a mile away. And approaching.

I set the Wheel of Fortune on the hearth. Using the spills, I lit the wicks in the porcelain creatures. Sometimes the wind blew out the flame, but soon the Wheel was spinning in response to the ancient enchantment of fire. I carried the Wheel outside, walking backwards to shield it from the wind, but I needn’t have bothered. The flames grew stronger as I stepped out into a sheet of driving rain borne under a blast of wind. It was as if the goddam thing was meant to be lit outside; indoors you got only half the effect. Now I knew what Lusher had said about waiting for the thing to cool down before he could touch it. The flames licked around my fingers, singeing the hair on the back of my hands and causing my clothes to smolder.

The Wheel of Fortune is a fitting Tarot card for a shape-shifter. It’s all about change, the inconstance of image. We keep changing all the time, yet we are the same person; the continuity inherent in living through time. Slippery logic. Grab it and it coils around your wrist and bites you in the back of the hand.

Lightning back-lit the naked trees about the house. I was glad this wasn’t the Tarot card of the Lightning-Struck Tower. 

I set the Wheel down on the lawn and stepped back. The flames from the wicks still curled about my fingers, like visible static discharges. I clapped my hands to shake them off. They vanished, bursting like bubbles. The Wheel was spinning faster now, the spokes still individually visible. Thunder broke overhead and bounced off the house behind me. The wind drove into my face, so strong I had to put my face down to catch a breath. With the wind in my face I felt I was riding the Wheel.

Light came on behind me and projected my shadow over the Wheel. A window had been thrown open upstairs. Mercy leaned out, the pale face of Lusher behind her. Different strokes. What’s it like doing it with a shape-changer? Shades of the Cat-People when human control broke down under orgasm. Talk about your regular Three in a Bed Romp trash-paper headlines.

‘Mercy Higgs, come on down,’ I called out. ‘Or is that the wrong game show? Been on the run, lost all track of trivia. You get right down to basics. That catchphrase was from The Price is Right. Don’t know if they have a catchphrase for the Wheel of Fortune. I suppose it’ll be something like – spin that wheel!’

Lusher pushed past Mercy and glared down, his eyes fixed on the Wheel. His eyes gleamed in that otherworldly fire. Where did he stand in the scheme of things? Did he still belong in genus Homo? Would Linnaeus require a new scientific classification? Linnaeus used dentition to classify his mammals. Linnaeus was into teeth in a big way. I was betting Paul Lusher would be too. You wanna be a shape-changer, who’s gonna pick a wimpy model with aardvark teeth suitable only for chomping termites? You’re gonna want to do some slashing and ripping. You’ll be packing canines long as your arm; incisors like hunting knives. We are talking penis envy here. Nothing like enamel to give a terminal hard-on. Terminal for the other guy, that is.

Lusher leaned so far out of the window I thought he was going to topple out. Then he brought his leg up to steady himself and I knew I’d misjudged him. His leg wasn’t human. For a moment he looked as if he was wearing a pair of hairy jeans with cowboy boots. Except that his feet were hooves. Not cleft hooves, but more like a horse’s hoof. I’d misjudged him about the teeth angle. But not about the penis-envy. 

The original Centaurs of Greek mythology were half-men half-horse, more like Satyrs and Panisci, being bipedal. 

Lusher dropped from the second-story window and crunched on the gravel path. Lightning arced overhead, almost immediately followed with the thunder that broke over us, like cosmic surf. 

The spokes of the Wheel were a blazing light. I looked away with a purple afterimage in my vision, like a throbbing mandala.

‘Okay, Lusher. This is where you get what’s coming to you. The cops are on their way. I rang a newspaper and found out more about your girlfriend.’

Lusher threw his head back and laughed. It was disconcertingly insane. ‘The cops?’ he said, at last. ‘What can you tell them? They know it wasn’t me who killed Janice. I have an alibi, plus their forensics has cleared me. They’re looking for who I once was – and he doesn’t exist any more.’

‘Where’s it all going to end, Lusher? You’re a freak, and if the alienation doesn’t turn your head, the loneliness will. You’ve no future.’

‘There is no future,’ growled Lusher. He gestured to the Wheel. ‘There never was. It’s always just more of the same. Dying and begetting.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with dying and begetting. The only thing out of joint is if somebody else decides for you. Did you have to kill the girl, Paul? Or were you just high on horseflesh at the time?’ 

Lusher stepped closer. I backed away, circling about the Wheel. Rain hissed on the humming spokes. Heat radiated, despite the strong wind.

‘You’re right about no future, Lusher. No future for you, that is.’ I pointed to the Wheel. ‘That’s your future, rushing to meet you. Time’s wingéd chariot. You changed the first time the Wheel turned. You’re gonna change each time the Wheel turns. It’s like a ragged cardigan near a lathe. You’ve just had your frayed soul snagged into the machinery of guilt and you are being tugged deeper and deeper. Sure, you’ve got a big dick out of it for now, and you think you’re one up on the rest of us. But the Wheel’s “still in spin, and there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’”.’ 

Lusher laughed incredulously. ‘You are quoting Bob Dylan at me? At me? You are so full of shit, Lee, you American bigmouth. That’s all you have. Just a big gob and I’m goin’ to shut it.’

He lunged for me. I dodged. Stumbled, went down on the gravel, tucked myself into my momentum and tried to keep out of his way. A hoof struck dangerously close to my head. I slammed into the wall of the house. There was no place to dodge.

Lusher towered over me, his fists clenched, silhouetted against the lambent Wheel. He was breathing deeply, but not from exertion. His whole body flexed, every muscle outstanding, every sinew rigid. The term ithyphallic sprang into my mind. This guy was a total dick.

I struggled to regain my balance. The Wheel was glowing white hot, as bright as magnesium. 

Lusher took in breaths like a bellows. It was like listening to a horse snort. He was hyper-ventilating madly as his body produced the endorphins to combat the pain. Pain like that could drive a guy insane. How could human behavioral responses survive under the withering heat of such animality?

Then I heard the bones begin to creak within his body. He let rip with a bellow as he clutched at his head. His neck arched and writhed under the torment. Was it bliss or agony he underwent? Part of his mind said pain, but his body said pleasure and showed it.

I came to my feet in a low crouch. I had no intention of drawing his attention while he was undergoing this metamorphosis. Keeping low, I hunkered away from the wall and made for the cars. It was time to withdraw. The authorities would be here soon if the storm didn’t give them different priorities and they could deal with Trigger in their own inimitable style – maybe they could place him on a witness re-location program in the Kentucky Derby.

Then a door opened and threw a slab of light in my path. Mercy blocked it for a moment, her shadow long and stick-like, cast into the darkness. The light winked on the shotgun in her hands.

The wind whipped at her hair, driving it into a nest of writhing serpents as she glared at me.

‘What possessed us,’ she gasped, ‘to bring you here in the first place?’

‘You didn’t bring me, Mercy. I was meant to come. All the Centaurs are dead because their time has gone. Maybe their time’ll come in another era, or maybe they’ve had their shot at existence and they’re relegated to the stable of archetypes in the collective unconscious. Who knows? Come to that, who cares? Except you and your animal friend. 

‘Was it really that good, Mercy? Could it drive the blood and the murder out? Could it purge the guilt? The inadequacy of the human condition?’

‘Fuck you!’ she snarled and raised the shotgun.

I’d been edging closer to her. It was easy to take her thunder stick away.

‘No thanks, I’m already spoken for.’

Then I heard hooves on gravel. I turned and saw Lusher. His head had been ground between the pestle of necessity and the mortar of possibilities. Long, narrow and equine, his face turned one red-rimmed eye at me. He champed his long narrow teeth and whickered as if for a bridle.

Mercy stood frozen, caught in an ecstasy of fear. Finally, her lips bared her teeth, and she whispered:

‘Paul?’

Then thunder and lightning broke overhead and suddenly I knew I’d been looking at this situation from far too Classical a standpoint. He wasn’t a Centaur, he was a phouka. The Highland legends; Robbie Burns; Sir Walter Scott. From goblins and ghosties and lang-nebbity beasties, and things that go bump in the night – good Lord, deliver us.

Horses have a pretty long neb or nose. They’re just so damn beautiful you never notice the phrase ‘horse-faced’ usually means an ugly physog. The phouka had come for Mercy and she was ready to ride it to Hell or Faëry and back.

Lusher made some sort of low, whinnying sound. Mercy stepped closer. I had a loaded shotgun in my hands and I could have saved her. Saved her for what? So she could spit in my face and tell me to go to hell?

Lusher held out misshapen hands, and Mercy stepped into his embrace, nuzzling his neck, one hand on his muzzle to feel the hot breath there.

I couldn’t help Lusher or Mercy, but I could stop a certain infernal machine from destroying other lives. I fired the shotgun from the hip. The Wheel exploded into shards of blazing porcelain.

Lusher stepped back, snorting like a stallion.

I held up my hands, dropping the single-barrel shotgun. ‘Hey, I’m outta here. You two deserve each other.’

I turned to go and found that Yates and Gerrish had been wakened by the hubbub. They were blinking owlishly, dressed in snazzy, matching Paisley pattern silk pajamas.

I frowned for a moment, putting two and two together. ‘I hope you’re very happy. How come with everybody else doing the coupling, I’m the one who feels he’s been screwed?’

Envoi

I left them to it. There were four cars in Mercy’s driveway and none of them belonged to me. I smashed in the sidelight of the blue Ford Sierra, found that the steering lock wasn’t on and hot-wired her.

The so-called storm of the century was on its way to ravage south-east England and northern France. It wasn’t long before I abandoned the Sierra to a fallen tree. I got out and trudged on, fighting the winds that gusted up to 110 mph. In Orpington, someone directed me to a church hall, where people were sheltering from the storm. I slept there and skipped out before the police became too interested. I was afraid of Hugh’s story breaking, but it never saw the light of day. 

That hurricane destroyed six of the oaks of Sevenoaks, Kent. Was it significant that the Wheel of Fortune was there in the vicinity and, after its destruction, the storm grew much worse? I don’t know. A few days later, I contacted Hugh Purdey again and asked him for the low-down on his reaction to my story. 

‘There is no such person as Mercy Higgs,’ he told me. ‘All that cock-and-bull story you spun me. It was a load of shite. Thon address was right enough, but the only people living there are Gerrish and Yates, and let me tell you that they did not take too kindly to having the Polis on their necks in the middle of the Big Wind. Seems they had some trouble wi’ a mad horse that they had to put down. But next time you ring me, you’d bloody better have the right goods and no more fairy-tales!’ The phone was slammed down.

Yates has since come out as a celebrity gay and gone over to Channel 4 as the producer of a gay interests program. Janice Connor’s death is still on police files. 

So that’s how it ended. Faëry glamour changed human memory and perception. Not for the first time in my experience. The phouka came out of the deep waters of its Abyss and stole away its human prey, Mercy Higgs.

Where are Paul Lusher and Mercy Higgs now? Don’t know. But you can be certain that somewhere there’s a Wheel of Fortune turning, and it’s turning for them.

[T. James Johnston has been writing since the 1980s, numerous short stories published in small press publications, both sides of the Atlantic; over 100 poems published, and a poetry volume from local press, Lapwing, highly regarded by Guardian newspaper; produced a short film, short-listed in the Hennessy Film Festival; written several plays, four of which received multi-venue productions in Belfast, North of Ireland, and in Antwerp, Belgium; song-lyrics with multiple music collaborators, many of which have been produced on albums. Currently creator/producer/writer children’s puppet show for television, which is currently being platformed on UK-based Children’s Media Conference. Part of a music collective entitled, J’MOK. Part of the AOK Curator YouTube channel. The song list is available here: J’mok – Glad – Full video]