Wylding Hall

Chapter 6

Will

Well, Nance fancied herself a witch in those days. Her and half the girls in London. She’s the only one I knew made a career of it, though.

Tom

I’m still angry about that. I blame her for some of what happened. Putting ideas in their heads, especially Julian. That’s why I wanted them down there, for god’s sake — to avoid outside influences.

And I think what she does now is shameful — taking money from ignorant people, people who want to believe in — well, whatever the hell it is they want to believe in. Like Harry Houdini getting duped by all those spiritualists because he was so desperate to get a message from his dead mother. I’m glad she’s in Florida or wherever it is she lives now. I wouldn’t trust myself if I ran into her in the street.

Jon

No one put any ideas in our heads. Not mine anyway. Certainly not Nancy. I know that Tom holds it against her that she came down that weekend, but really, what did that have to do with anything that happened later?

Truth is, there was something in the air back then. There really was. Things just felt different in those days, and not just at Wylding Hall, but everywhere. You could sense it, like a smell, or a certain way the light came down through the trees. Everything looked golden. Everything felt golden. Like anything could happen.

Wylding Hall intensified all that. It was like a lens: you focus the light through it, ordinary sunlight, but the lens intensifies it, makes it strong enough to start a fire.

We had a game we’d play sometimes at Wylding Hall, after we’d have a good day and night of rehearsing and smoked a few spliffs — Julian got very good hash from a bloke in Notting Hill. We’d all hold our hands and shut our eyes. Then, without speaking, we’d drop our hands, and one at a time we’d open our eyes. All without talking. We thought that maybe, just maybe, if we did it at the right moment, in the right place, with the right people, we’d open your eyes and we’d be somewhere else.

I don’t know where. Just someplace we’d never been. Some impossible place. It never worked. Not with me, anyway. I was never that stoned. Sometimes I wish I had been.

Will

I think what it was, Julian and Nance were the canaries in the coal mine for that place. They were sensitives — not sensitive, though they were that, but sensitives: people who can sense things that other people don’t. Psychics, I guess you’d call them, though that’s probably not the right term, either. Julian was certainly very conscious of any kind of emotional distress or tension between all of us in the band, especially once we were at Wylding Hall.

There was a sort of balance we tried to maintain, consciously or not, and I respect Tom for doing what he did, arranging for us to have that place to ourselves for three months. In retrospect, it wasn’t a good thing. It was a disaster.

But we weren’t to know that. And I don’t think anyone can be blamed, certainly not Nance. She does have a gift, whatever you choose to call it. She was very strong, much stronger than Julian. So if the two of them were the canaries in the coal mine, she was perhaps the one who felt it first, but she got out quickly — she was only there that one weekend.

Julian withstood it much longer. People forget that the colliers didn’t just bring the canaries into the mines to warn them against the poisonous gases. They took them down because they sang so beautifully, even in the dark.

Lesley

She had a seizure of some kind. I was looking right at her when it happened. Silas Thomas had picked her up hitchhiking and given her a ride. The boys all ran to see what he’d brought for us, and I was rushing over to Nancy. We’d met a couple of times and hit it off, and I was craving female companionship. A fortnight in the woods with only lads takes it out of you.

Really, I was just looking forward to having a laugh, the two of us gossiping and catching up on what was going on back in London. She tumbled out of the truck, looked around smiling — it was a gorgeous day; that whole summer I don’t think it rained once. She just stood there, staring into the air and smiling, the way you do when you first arrive from the city and breathe in country air, kind of blissed out.

Then she let out this blood-curdling scream. Truly blood-curdling — it was like she was being murdered right there in front of us.

I just about jumped out of my skin and took off running, that’s how scared I was. But Nancy only stood there, screaming with her eyes wide open.

She looked like she was asleep. Have you ever seen someone who’s having a night terror? Not a nightmare — a night terror is when you think you’re awake. Your eyes are open and you see things that aren’t there. Will has them sometimes, ever since that summer.

Nancy looked like that. But she wasn’t asleep. It was middle of the afternoon and she was as wide awake as I am now. I ran over and grabbed her and brought her inside, sat her down in the hall. Will got her something to drink. I held her hands and kept talking to her, the way you do a spooked horse.

Her hands were freezing — so cold that when I touched her, it hurt. Burned, the way that cold iron burns. You know stories about kids putting each other to licking a flagpole in winter? This is how I imagined that would feel — not that I was licking her.

And it really did burn me. Right there, those white marks — that’s where I touched her. It blistered, hurt like hell for a few days. When it finally healed, I was left with that scar.

Still, we quickly got over Nancy’s fit. Will took her up to bed and shagged her and that put her to rights. You couldn’t sneeze in that place without everyone knowing it.

We had a party that night: stayed up till two or three A.M., singing and dancing. Nancy was a wonderful dancer. Saint Dominic’s Preview had just come out, and she’d brought it down. “Jackie Wilson Said”: we played that over and over again. It was a big deal when a new record came out; you’d buy it then find one of your mates who had a stereo and everyone would come over to listen to it together for the first time.

We had several record players at Wylding Hall — Julian had one, and Jon and I think Ashton. They were expensive, as were albums. Jon had brought his turntable to the rehearsal room, and that’s where we’d play whatever we were listening to, so everyone could hear it.

That night it was Van Morrison. Sexy music, everyone was feeling very friendly. Hormones running at high tide. Nothing like adding a new face to the mix to spice things up. That’s where the rumors of orgies came from, that one night. God knows who started them, I know I never said anything. It must have been Nancy when she went back to London. No, my lips remain sealed.

Nancy

There was no orgy. It was all very innocent. We ended up on the floor, that’s all, stoned and lying on our backs with our hands touching. This game they played in the dark. It was the shank of the night, and we closed our eyes and just lay there, breathing.

After a while, someone began to sing. It was the most haunting song. No words, just a melody.

I could never recall it afterward, but it was something I never forgot. It’s true. I can hear it sometimes, still — it’s there in my head and I can’t get it out. I thought it was Julian. But he said no, he wasn’t singing. But he heard it, too.

Jon

It was definitely a male voice — a boy’s. Someone whose voice hadn’t yet broken. Julian had a reedy voice, but this was a true boy’s soprano. It made the hair on my neck stand up. I couldn’t make out the words.

Ashton

We were all fucking stoned out of our minds, that’s all. We’d been playing and singing earlier, and then Jon put on that damned Van Morrison album and left it so it just played over and over and over again. Everyone finally just zonked out on the floor; at some point, the stereo got turned off and we fell asleep. Someone dreamed they heard singing. I think Lesley was singing in her sleep. It happens. Anyway, there was no one else there, no … ghost, or whatever they say.

Yeah, I heard something. Like, I said, it was Lesley. Didn’t sound like her but it was. Definitely a woman’s voice.

Definitely not Nancy. She couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

Lesley

It wasn’t me, because I wasn’t asleep, and I heard it too. I thought it was Will — gorgeous tenor, almost a counter tenor, a bit of a quaver in it. A very eerie melody. Like “the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance.” Will collected old tunes like that, and I suppose that’s why I assumed it was him. He refuses to talk about it.

Julian heard it. I asked him the next morning, Had he heard the singing? We had stumbled off to bed together, but we didn’t have sex. He didn’t say anything. He pretended not to hear me. That was when it ended between the two of us, not that it had ever really started.

The thing that disturbed me about that night in the rehearsal room — it wasn’t the singing. We all heard that, even if some won’t talk about it. It was afterward. We were all still lying on the floor in the big room. People were asleep. I know Ashton was asleep, because he snores, and Will was, too.

Julian was beside me. He wasn’t sleeping, but he wanted me to think he was asleep. I touched his hand, ran my fingers along his arm: nothing.

I felt horrible. If he’d rejected me outright or if we’d had a fight, I could understand that. But he was just freezing me out. And I was utterly obsessed with him — crazy, the way you are when you’re seventeen. I thought I would die, I was so in love with him. But it was like loving a book, or a beautiful song: something you could never really touch.

He was on the floor beside me, and Nancy was next to him. All of a sudden I felt this insane jealousy, just on fire — he wanted to be with her! That’s why he wasn’t responding to me.

So I laid there and held my breath, to hear if they were whispering to each other, or if they were touching. I imagined her hand on him, and I couldn’t see and it was driving me crazy.

I couldn’t hear a thing. It was pitch dark, a few weeks past midsummer, so it was still bright till almost ten at night, and the sun rose very early. But that night, it seemed as though it stayed dark hours longer than it should have. I just lay there, creepy little me, listening to their breathing and to hear if Nancy was having him off.

I didn’t hear a peep. Until finally Julian whispered, “I saw it, too.”

I thought he was talking to me, but he was so quiet I thought maybe he was talking to himself. Talking in his sleep.

But then I heard Nancy move very, very slightly — she must have turned her head towards his — and I heard her whisper, “I know.”

That was all. I kept holding my breath in case they went on, but there was nothing else. I never asked Julian about it. Like I said, the next day, whatever was between us was over.

I was heartbroken, but I didn’t show it — didn’t want anyone to think it mattered. We all had mayfly relationships in those days. Girls did, anyway. You’d be with someone for a one-night stand and it was like you were engaged to be married, you’d be so excited.

But it was over. I didn’t know much back then, but I knew that whatever had happened between Julian and me was done. I have no idea what they were talking about, him and Nancy. I have no idea what they saw.