House of Small Shadows

THIRTY-NINE

The newspaper cuttings beneath the plastic coverings in the album were either yellowing or fragmenting. Grease from his fingers and crumbs from his desk had further tainted the paper whenever it was brought out for his delectation.

Leonard raised the metal shade of the desk lamp further from the album. With expertise in the preservation of old precious things he wondered at his carelessness in the matter of this newsprint, but also remembered that had the police investigations ever neared him, he may have been required to dispose of his interest in certain local matters.

Maybe the original stories from the newspapers had been archived somewhere. Or had been, what did Catherine call it, ‘digitized’? Or was it ‘digitalized’? He couldn’t remember, but it wasn’t entirely out of the question that he might replace his copies one day. Though inquiries might still carry a risk.

Leonard briefly looked to the drawn blinds. Outside the office the street had fallen silent. He had not heard a car for over twenty minutes.

Even though he could recite the best part of each article from memory, he bent to his reading. And started at the beginning of the album featuring the first of the ridiculous Pied Piper stories and the initial rumours of ‘the green van’. The stories began in 1959 and lasted until 1965.

Leonard wiped a tear from his face when he saw the photographs of Margaret Reid and Angela Prescott smiling back at him. The portraits were taken at the children’s home the two girls resided in, until their leaving of it in 1959 and 1962 respectively. A long time ago their pictures were displayed in every national newspaper.

Margaret had Spina Bifida, Myelomeningocele. Poor Angela was born blind. They’d both been abandoned young. The Magnis Burrow School of Special Education was the closest thing to an actual home they’d ever known. A place where they made the kind of friendships that lasted for ever. And the place in which they found the path to salvation.

No arrests were ever made after the disappearance of Margaret Reid. But two male care-home workers, who were lovers, were interviewed after the abduction of Angela Prescott, and later released. At the time of Angela’s disappearance the green vehicle was described as a tradesman’s Morris Minor van with no signage, then briefly the vehicle even became an ice-cream van in some news reports.

Leonard moved on and read the front-page story from a long extinct newspaper about the Magnis Burrow School of Special Education’s closure in 1965. Then he progressed through the album to find the news stories of Helen Teme, a Down Syndrome girl local to Ellyll Fields, who vanished from the reopened and refurbished Magnis Burrow School of Special Education in 1973.

In the Helen Teme pages, Leonard paused to treasure each photograph of the holiday snaps of the hapless Kenneth White, beloved of those distant Sunday tabloids. In each picture, strands of White’s comb-over rose in the breeze that came off the water of a choppy sea in Rhyl. The same three bleached pictures supplemented every story of the sex offender’s arrest for the suspected abduction and murder of little Helen Teme. There were pages about his release, rearrest, re-release, and subsequent suicide by asphyxiation in his white Austin Princess outside his council flat in 1975. Case closed.

Kenneth White had been a volunteer with disabled children, from whom he’d once taken his pick. And Ken was prolific with Down Syndrome girls, which led to him being investigated when Helen Teme disappeared. But Magnis Burrow was an institution that White had never worked at, nor had any contact with, and probably never laid eyes upon when he was active in Leominster during the sixties and early seventies. He had form.

One paper even tried to resurrect the Pied Piper story of the sixties around White. Leonard marvelled at the ignorance of the press. The Pied Piper led able-bodied children away and left the lame behind. But surely this story was the complete opposite.

The Magnis Burrow abduction cases weren’t consistently picked up by anyone but the American journalist, Irvine Levine, who wrote a series of stories for the News of the World, while working in England at the time Helen Teme’s abduction made headlines. Levine was a tenacious man and the first hack to champion the link between Helen Teme and the two earlier cases of missing children, the all but forgotten Margaret Reid and Angela Prescott. Three abductions from the same home across its two incarnations.

Leonard remembered that summer being one of great personal unrest. But it seemed the press at the time hadn’t much stamina for the story of a handicapped girl’s abduction. After making his brief link Levine became busy with a bestselling book about something else entirely. Case forgotten.

As with Margaret Reid and Angela Prescott, Helen Teme was never found. The school that all three girls had been taken from was closed for a second time in 1975.

When Alice Galloway was said to have been abducted from out of the disused Magnis Burrow School’s grounds in 1981, after climbing through a hole in the perimeter fence, the story made the nationals for a week, and the locals every day for three months. ALICE ISN’T IN WONDERLAND.

Plenty of people were interviewed by the police that time, though none were arrested. Leonard read of the hopes and then the dashing of these hopes with renewed relish. Alice Galloway’s parents campaigned for the police to do more in their search for the missing girl.

The next time the Magnis Burrow School made the headlines in Leonard’s clippings, but only at local level, came with the decision to demolish the derelict school buildings, in 1988, along with most of the surrounding residential area of social housing in Ellyll Fields.

The last part of the album dealt with the human remains found by labourers after earthworks were conducted to level the Magnis Burrow School to build a dual carriageway in 1989. Briefly, the smiling faces of Margaret Reid, Angela Prescott, Helen Teme and Alice Galloway reappeared for a week, as did the Pied Piper name once given to the child snatcher who had never been caught. But this time, the green van, and ice-cream van, weren’t mentioned.

Once the human remains were found to be those of children intered over a century before the disappearances of Margaret Reid and Angela Prescott, the story died. With certainty, it was decided by archaeologists and the police, the discovered remains were those of infants laid in unmarked graves by the orphanage staff on the same site. No one dug any deeper.

Leonard found the sensation of reading all of the articles together, now they were much improved and enhanced by time, akin to being drunk after a funeral.

Finally he removed the pictures he always saved for last. On top of this prized collection was the only photograph he possessed of himself as a boy, a picture that was now faded to a brown smear. But he didn’t need to see much to remember himself in the picture as a thin pale lad in an old wheelchair; his withered legs slack, small black boots at rest upon the footplate. It was taken outside a little stone house in Magbar Wood, the place of his birth.

He remembered other pictures being taken of him at that age too, on a grass lawn so sweet and bright with sunlight that he was sure he had been in heaven when he first saw the garden, up at the great house of the Last Martyr. But those other pictures of him were kept in a place no one would ever see, unless invited.

The last four pictures in his portfolio featured another child. Three of these pictures were in colour. A pale sun-bleached picture of a little freckled girl in school uniform, whose pretty green eyes were telescoped behind the cumbersome spectacles she was once made to wear.

There was a picture of her as a baby, too, sat in her little pram covered in Union Jack flags on the blessed ground. A third picture featured her wearing a pink pinafore dress. She was looking at the camera, smiling. In her hand she held an ice-lolly shaped like a coloured rocket.

The final photograph of the girl in this part of the collection was in black and white, when she was much younger. And it featured the young mother of the girl in a room so dark and small and dismal, it could have been a room for another poor woman giving birth at home, a hundred years before. The woman held her new baby against her chest for those few precious minutes before the little girl was taken away.

Leonard shuddered from the emotion that came into his heart like an electric current. And he wept silently for a while, then wiped at his face. ‘You were given away.’

He blinked back tears. ‘You were despised because you were gifted. But you were not forgotten by those who cherished you.’ Leonard kissed the photograph of the little girl holding the ice lolly. ‘Time to come home, Kitten.’

Leonard turned in his chair and spoke out loud to the window, and the world beyond it, as if in accusation. His voice was broken by emotion, but carried by anger. ‘One must never forget the enchantment and the terror of childhood. For some it will always be acute. Their path is much closer to ours. What you discard, we will cherish.’

Leonard placed the pictures back inside the album. He closed his eyes and gathered himself, then shut the album and looked across to the open safe.

From the top drawer of his desk he removed a pair of white cotton gloves and slipped his thin fingers inside them. Then removed a blank cassette tape from the drawer. He pushed his wheelchair back from his desk to the wall and applied the brakes. Then placed his hands upon the armrests of the wheelchair and stood up. Stretched his back and raised his white hands to the ceiling. His stiff knees cracked.

Unsteady on his feet, he walked across to the little stereo system he kept in the office to listen to the weather reports after Catherine had left the office. She’d once tried to play a CD on it but found the CD player to be broken. She didn’t have any tapes.

Leonard opened the cassette deck and fitted the unmarked cassette inside the door. Closed the lid. A tremor passed along his index finger. He pressed PLAY.

From out of the static and wear on the tape the great voice of the Last Martyr, Mason, rose to begin the recitation.

Keep one kitten, destroy the rest…

Leonard half closed his eyes for a moment to savour the sound of the Martyr’s voice before moving to the corner of the large rug between the two desks. On his hands and knees he rolled the rug back to the far wall, until the faded white circle of the Ring o’ Roses was completely uncovered.

Drowning is the preferred method… up by the hind legs, a quick blow to the back of the head…

Upon the bare wooden floorboards he slipped off his shoes. Unbuckled his trousers, let them drop. Removed his pullover, tie, shirt, socks, and underwear. Folded his clothes and placed them upon his desk.

Once he was naked, he carefully removed his hairpiece. Against his scalp the adhesive tape issued a ripping sensation, but caused him no discomfort. He placed the mop of grey hair upon his clothes. Then removed his eyebrows with two sharp tugs and returned to the circle.

Relax a dried skin to reintroduce suppleness. Bathe with warm water, ammonia, sulphonated neatsfoot oil. Place the specimen in a moist box for one night, then scrape the skin… wash the skin…

In nothing more than the illumination from his desk lamp, Leonard moved his arms through the air and studied his scars. Stroked the furrows where great rents had been made in his flanks. Caressed the long ventral incision down to his hairless pelvis and shivered, rolled his eyes up. Gently pressing the thin, pale flesh of his abdomen, he closed his eyes to delight at the parcel of sawdust packed inside the cavity.

Once salted, fresh skins of large mammals can be washed with Ivory soap, rinsed three times, then degreased with petroleum…

Such was his excitement a little warm urine trickled down his inner thigh from the pink hole in his smooth groin.

Plug their openings with cotton, apply corn starch and wash the blood away…

The man some people called Leonard sucked in his breath. His legs trembled. Those parts of his hairless arms that were still capable of sensation were blessed with shivery bumps that had nothing to do with being naked.

He took his mind from the recording for a moment and focussed his eyes on the safe. It was too easy to go to the ground and give in to the golden rushing of things through himself.

Clean a skull with soap and water mixed with ammonia and sodium sulphate…

From the cavity in the wall he withdrew the wooden chest bequeathed to his care by the Last Martyr. He tried not to remember the time of his succession in detail because it still caused him great pain. A time so grey in his mind when his master could no longer bear the burden of the Great Art and what his troupe demanded of him. Mason, the man who had found him as a boy and shown him miracles. The man who had appointed him successor and servant of the great tradition.

Leonard carried the box across to Catherine’s desk, the altar she had sat behind for twelve months, bathed in his adoration. Leonard opened the chest.

The wax mould of the face should be applied to the mannequin at this stage… boomed the voice of the Last Martyr. And such was Leonard’s ecstasy at this point, he heard no more from the recording.

As Leonard raised the small golden effigy of a hand from its velvet compartment inside the wooden chest, tears burned his eyes and blurred his vision.

The blessed Hand of Henry Strader, the first of the known Martyrs; the hard polished fingers of the relic were relaxed above the palm as if the hand were acknowledging a crowd from atop a raised arm.

Leonard’s own gloved hands shook around the smooth, gleaming container, and his fingers became as insubstantial as feathers. He wept.

‘Saintly mentor,’ he said through his sobs, ‘extend thy reach through this vessel.’

He wanted to shriek out his prayer, but kept his voice down in case the accountant next door was working late, or someone should pass in the street outside. ‘Open this pathway to sublime knowledge that we may carry the true cross.’

Leonard sniffed and blinked away his hot tears.

So little was salvaged after the routing of Henry Strader’s broken remains by beggars, in that filthy street on the morning of 6 June 1649. The power of the revelation, that never dimmed with time, struck him hard: he actually held, in his own humble hands, one of the few surviving parts of the first of the known Martyrs. One of the actual fingers no less, returned to Strader’s birthplace after his murder. The very idea never failed to paralyse Leonard with astonishment.

‘Grant that such heavenly treasures will bless your keeper’s pilgrimage.’ Leonard kissed the side of the golden hand. ‘And that other wretches will be saved as I was saved.’

From the wrist portion of the reliquary of the Hand of Strader, Leonard unscrewed the golden cap and gently removed a small parcel from the hollow canister.

Carefully, he unfolded a fragment of protective material. The fabric was stiff and brown; a glorious shred from the shirt of the king who lost his head. From within the wrappings, Leonard removed the wizened third finger from Strader’s right hand. The relic was as black as liquorice and almost weightless.

When he cupped the finger in his palm his entire body convulsed, and he longed to slot something sharp beneath his meagre flesh.

Before he fainted from the touching and the blessing, he slipped the soiled linen upon the girl’s altar and placed the finger of the Martyr upon the cloth.

Leonard regained his breath and wiped the sweat off his forehead and nose with the back of one gloved hand. Gently, holding the aged chin of the leather face with his fingers, he then raised the Mandylion of The Smooth Field from the wooden chest. And with the Mandylion came the perfume of stale incense and old sweat.

Long curls of raven hair fell from the relic and tickled his knees. He could barely stand upright at the sight of the mottled ivory of Henry Strader’s skull fragment stitched within the discoloured fabric of the scalp. So glorious was the sensation of holding the head of the Martyr he became terrified he might urinate again.

Holding his breath, the lean tendons in his legs quivering like catgut strings, he placed the Mandylion of the Smooth Field upon his old hairless head. When the skull fragment rested upon his flesh, he collapsed to his hands and knees and began to whisper from behind the blank mask of leather, pressed so close and hot to his face.

‘Live through me, Lord. So that I may do thy bidding. Let thy will be resurrection. As thou did raise them, we too are saved.’