for sure it was real, but all I got—’
‘Was my partner,’ said Robin.
‘Yes,’ said Flora, ‘and I knew from the way he wrote he’d never been in the UHC. You wouldn’t talk like that, if you had. “You really don’t like the UHC, do you?” You wouldn’t be that… casual. Then I thought it might be someone from Deirdre’s family, trying to goad me, and I felt… so guilty… so scared, I deleted my account.’
‘Who’s Deirdre?’ said Will.
‘Lin’s mother,’ said Robin.
For the first time, Will looked taken aback.
‘Flora,’ Robin said, ‘can I tell you what I think you saw?’
Slowly and carefully, Robin described the scene in the temple she believed had taken place during the Manifestation of the Drowned Prophet, in which Deirdre had been taken out of the pool, dead. When she’d finished speaking, Flora, whose breathing was shallow and whose face was very white, whispered,
‘How do you know that?’
‘I worked it out,’ said Robin. ‘I was there for one of the Manifestations. They nearly drowned me. But how did they explain what had happened? How did they get away with telling everyone Deirdre had left?’
‘When they took her out of the pool,’ said Flora haltingly, ‘it was still very dark. Dr Zhou bent over her and said, “She’s all right, she’s breathing.” Papa J told everyone to leave, the younger ones first. As we were filing out, Papa J was pretending to talk to Deirdre, acting as if they were having a conversation, as though her voice was very quiet but he could hear it.
‘But I knew she was dead,’ said Flora. ‘I was close to the stage. I saw her face when they pulled her out of the pool. There was foam on her lips. Her eyes were open. I knew. But you had to believe what Papa J and Mazu said. You had to. Next day, they gathered us together and said Deirdre had been expelled, and everyone just – they just accepted it. I heard people saying “Of course they had to expel her, if she’d displeased the prophet like that.”
‘I remember this boy called Kevin. It should have been his first Manifestation, but he was being punished, so he wasn’t allowed to attend. He asked a lot of questions about what Deirdre had done to be expelled, and I remember Becca – she was a teenager, one of Papa J’s spirit wives – hitting him round the head and telling him to shut up about Deirdre… Becca was the one who made me… who made me…’
‘What did Becca make you do?’ Robin asked.
When Flora shook her head, looking down into her lap, Robin said,
‘Becca made me do things, too. She also tried to get me into terrible trouble, hiding something stolen under my bed. I think she’s nearly as scary as the Waces, personally.’
Flora looked up at Robin for the first time.
‘Me too,’ she whispered.
‘What did she make you do? Something that might make you complicit in an awful situation? They did the same thing to me, sent me to look after a dying boy. I knew that if he died while I was with him, they’d blame me.’
‘That’s worse,’ said Flora faintly, and Robin was touched to see genuine sympathy for her on Flora’s face. ‘That’s worse than mine… they did do it to make me complicit, I’ve often thought that… Becca made me type letters from Deirdre, to her family. I had to make them up myself. I had to write that I’d left the farm but I wanted a new life, away from my husband and children… so obviously Deirdre was dead,’ said Flora in frustration, ‘but Becca looked me in the eye and told me she was alive, and she’d been expelled, even while she was making me write those letters!’
‘I think that’s a big part of what they do,’ said Robin. ‘They force you to agree black’s white and up’s down. It’s part of the way they control you.’
‘But that’s fraud, isn’t it?’ said Flora desperately. ‘They made me part of the cover-up!’
‘You were being coerced,’ said Robin. ‘I’m certain you’d get immunity, Flora.’
‘Is Becca still there?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin and Will together. The latter wore an odd, arrested expression now; he’d followed the story of the fake letters closely.
‘Has Becca ever increased?’ asked Flora.
‘No,’ said Will.
Now, for the first time, he volunteered information rather than demanding it.
‘Papa J doesn’t want to, because he thinks her bloodline’s tainted.’
‘That’s not why he won’t let her have a baby,’ said Flora quietly.
‘Why, then?’
‘He wants to keep her a virgin,’ said Flora. ‘That’s why Mazu doesn’t hate on her, like she does with all the other spirit wives.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Will, very surprised.
‘All the spirit wives know,’ said Flora. ‘I was one of them,’ she added.
‘Really?’ said Robin.
‘Yes,’ said Flora. ‘It started as the Loving Cure, and he liked it so much he made me a spirit wife. He likes… he likes it when you don’t like it.’
Robin’s thoughts flew immediately to Deirdre Doherty, the prim woman who’d wished to remain faithful to her husband, and whose last pregnancy, she believed, was the result of Wace’s rape.
‘Mazu sometimes joined in,’ said Flora, in a near whisper. ‘She’d… sometimes, she’d help hold me down, or… sometimes he likes to watch her do stuff to you…’
‘Oh God,’ said Robin. ‘Flora… I’m so sorry.’
Will now looked both scared and disturbed. Twice, he opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, then blurted out,
‘How d’you explain the things the prophet does at Chapman Farm, if she’s not real, though?’
‘Like, what kind of things?’ said Flora.
‘The Manifestations.’
‘You mean, like, in the pool and in the woods?’
‘I know they use little girls, dressed up like her, in the woods, I’m not stupid,’ said Will. ‘But that doesn’t mean they don’t become her, when they’re doing it.’
‘What do you mean by that, Will?’ asked Prudence.
‘Well, it’s like transubstantiation, isn’t it?’ said Will. He might have been back on the vegetable patch again, lecturing Robin on church doctrine. ‘The wafer they give you in communion isn’t really the body of Christ, but it is. Same thing. And that dummy thing they make rise up out of the baptismal pool, it’s just symbolic. It’s not her, but it is her.’
‘Is that one of the Higher-Level Truths?’ Robin asked. ‘That the little girls dressed up like Daiyu, and the dummy without eyes, are Daiyu?’
‘Don’t call her Daiyu,’ said Will angrily. ‘It’s disrespectful. And no,’ he added, ‘I worked that stuff out for myself.’
He seemed to feel he needed to justify himself, because he said forcefully,
‘Look, I know a lot of it’s bullshit. I saw the hypocrisy, how Papa J gets to do stuff nobody else is allowed to – he can marry, and he gets to keep his kids and his grandkids because his bloodline’s special, and everyone else has got to make the Living Sacrifice, and the alcohol in the farmhouse, and the smarming around celebrities even though that’s all supposed to be bullshit – I know Papa J’s not a messiah, and that they do really bad things at that farm, but you can’t say they haven’t got something right, because you’ve seen it,’ he said to Flora, ‘and you have too!’ he added to Robin. ‘The spirit world’s real!’
There was a short silence, broken by Prudence.
‘Why d’you think nobody in the church ever admits they dress up little girls at night, and use a dummy to rise up out of the baptismal pool, Will? Because a lot of people believe they’re literally seeing something supernatural, don’t they?’
‘Some of them might,’ said Will defensively, ‘but not all of them. Anyway, the Drowned Prophet does come back for real. She materialises out of thin air!’
‘But if the other things are a trick…’ suggested Flora.
‘That doesn’t follow. Yeah, OK, sometimes they’re just showing us representations of the prophet, but other times, she genuinely comes… it’s like, in churches, having a model of Jesus on the wall. Nobody’s pretending it’s literally him. But when the Drowned Prophet appears as a spirit, and moves around and everything – there’s no other explanation for it. There’s no projector, and she’s not a puppet – it’s her, it’s really her.’
‘Are you talking about when she manifests like a ghost, in the basement room?’ asked Robin.
‘Not just in the basement,’ said Will. ‘She does it in the temple, too.’
‘Is the audience always sitting in the dark when that happens?’ asked Robin. ‘And do they sometimes make you clear the room before she appears? They made us leave the basement for a while before we saw her manifest. Is the audience always in front of her when she manifests, not sitting round the stage?’
‘Yeah, it was always like that,’ said Flora, when Will didn’t answer. ‘Why?’
‘Because I might be able to explain how they do it,’ said Robin. ‘A man I work with suggested it could be an old illusion called Pepper’s ghost. I looked it up. You need a glass screen, which is at an angle to the audience, and a hidden side room. Then a figure in the side room is slightly illuminated, and the lights on stage go down, and the audience sees the reflection of the supposed ghost in the glass, and it’s transparent and looks as though it’s onstage.’
Silence followed these words. Then, startling everyone in the room, Flora said loudly,
‘Oh my God.’
The other three looked at her. Flora was gazing through her hair at Robin in what appeared to be awe.
‘That’s it. That’s how they do it. Oh. My. God.’
Flora began to laugh.
‘I can’t believe it!’ she said breathlessly. ‘I’ve never been able to work that one out, it’s always been the one that made me doubt… a reflection on glass – that’s it, that makes total sense! They only ever did it where there was a side room. And if we were in temple, we all had to sit face-on to the stage.’
‘I think,’ said Robin, ‘the temple at Chapman Farm was designed like a theatre. That upper balcony where members never sit, those recesses… I think it’s been constructed to enable large-scale illusions.’