The Visitor

By Christopher Chase Walker

Satan, in the form of a bewildered and naked Old Man, arrives in Brighton one dark and snowy December morning. That night a gull kills itself trying to get at Lucy Cuthman, a charity worker in her early 30s, through her bedroom window. A thick fog descends over the city - and lingers. The Old Man is twice attacked on the streets, before finding the squat where Geoffrey Cantor, our cultured and Byron-quoting narrator, lives. The Old Man discovers he has a mesmeric singing voice, and starts to busk around Brighton. He attracts the attention of Lucy, who is so diabolically enchanted that she can only see him as a beautiful young boy in need of help. In this guise, the Old Man visits her at work one evening - and promptly disappears. Hopelessly beguiled, Lucy searches everywhere for him. Meanwhile, mysterious bundles of money start turning up at her charity...

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Nov 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785355363

Christopher Chase Walker

Christopher Walker was born in Maryland and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Since graduating from the College of Wooster, he has lived in Chicago, London and, currently, in Brighton. His first novel, Now You Know, was published in 2012.

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First published by Cosmic Egg Books, 2016

Cosmic Egg Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

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For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

Text copyright: Christopher Chase Walker 2015

ISBN: 978 1 78535 535 6

978 1 78535 536 3 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943149

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Christopher Chase Walker as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY, UK

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To Mary

If chance with nymphlike step fair virgin pass,

What pleasing seemed, for her now pleases more,

She most, and in her looks sums all delight:

Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold

This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve

Thus early, thus alone; her sweet heavenly form

Angelic, but more soft and feminine,

Her graceful innocence, her every air

Of gesture or least action, overawed

His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved

His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought.

That space the Evil One abstracted stood

From his own evil, and for the time remained

Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,

Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge.

But the hot hell that always in him burns,

Though in mid Heaven, soon ended his delight,

And tortures him now more the more he sees

Of pleasure not for him ordained: then soon

Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts

Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites

– John Milton, Paradise Lost

He is my household’s guardian soul

He judges, he presides, inspires

All matters in his royal realm…

The fire of his opal eyes,

Clear beacons glowing, living jewels

Taking my measure, steadily

– Baudelaire, The Cat

The flat is warm and its windows fogged. It smells of cigarettes, hash, roasting turkey, and clementines. Four stuffed chairs and a two-seat sofa crowd the sitting room. They are draped with throws and fattened out with cushions. Framed and unframed pictures cover the walls – charcoals, oils, gouaches, lithographs, sketches of whom I presume to be family and friends, and souvenir postcards of everyone from Longhi and Moser to Grimshaw. The room was once two rooms but was knocked through, and last night was cleared of the bicycle, laundry, post, and recycling that are ordinarily here. All of the books and vinyl records have been tidied away. Near the French doors to the yard at the back is a table laid for a meal, and crowded by seven mismatched chairs. Everything here is like that: clothes, furniture, cutlery, crockery, records and books are dog-eared, dusty or rusty or scuffed. But it is cosy – made cosier still by the dark, red-painted walls, the coal fire in the grate, fairy lights, and the six foot bough of long-needled pine affixed to the ceiling where a wall once separated the rooms. Homemade paper snowflakes and chocolate coins dangle from the bough. They tantalise me. Everything here might be old and worn, but it’s new to me. I only arrived three days ago and already it’s Christmas, so it’s been a lot to take in.

Of course I sniffed around. The flat is Belinda Bell’s. Belinda is slender and small, with hazel eyes and a strong jaw. Her flat is shaped like a squared lowercase letter ‘d’, lying flat on its back. The bedroom and box room, from where Belinda runs her eBay shop, are adjacent to each other upstairs, on the first floor, as is the bathroom, an extension at the back of the house that forms the stem of the letter ‘d’. The kitchen is directly below the bathroom. It is narrow and has an acorn-brown lino floor, a brown-spattered, old gas cooker below a window looking onto the little yard in the back and cabinets you could hide inside. When the half-size refrigerator clicks on it vibrates in e-flat and the magnets on its face describe patterns as erratic as butterfly paths. Belinda has been in the kitchen since sunrise. Chopping and boiling and stuffing and seasoning and basting. Just before guests began to arrive at three she raced upstairs to change for dinner. She is wearing a green, velvet, ankle-length dress with seven buttons on each sleeve, and a high, lace-crested collar. Her hair is swooped up in an onion-shaped pompadour that shows off a grey streak at the front. The grey streak is the first thing you notice (she is only thirty-eight), otherwise her hair is the hue of a dirty copper coin. It’s getting on my wick that she’s introducing me as Jarvis instead of Geoffrey Cantor (always the full four syllables, thank you very much) as I’ve been called all of my life. Next person who comes to the door and I’m gone. I don’t want to be here when everyone twigs that Lucy isn’t coming, when they realise she’s disappeared.

Lucy… oh, Lucy. You were built for the stage, for the opera, a Wagnerian soprano, with your big hips and chest, your tragic eyes, wide face, wide mouth and big arms – arms that seemed to pull at the air. We never met. But I know about you through The Glaring. I know where you lived and that you ran The Bitch and that you cycled everywhere, even in the rain, and fed the neighbourhood cats who came to your rooftop window. I know that you never asked for help but always offered it. I know you were a virgin, and I know the day you met Him. Belinda was there too. But to her He was just some old man.

It was late afternoon, the 1st of December. Belinda was rolling a cigarette in front of the Dorset. You were trudging up North Street with six shopping bags, rather resembling a powerlifter in the early stages of the clean and jerk. In one bag was a pair of ankle boots from Oxfam and three pairs of woollen knee socks. In another was your horde from the Saturday Market: a pewter letter opener (Secessionist, you thought), a rosewood box probably once used for pens or pins but now good for catnip or weed, a metre of Victorian lace and thirty-six un-inflated balloons. In the three cloth bags were your groceries, a bottle of disinfectant, kitchen roll, and a large scouring sponge. The air was icy. Christmas lights, hung earlier that week, twinkled and blinked. It was one of those wintry afternoons that feels like it belongs to an old photograph or film. The sky was dark; the snow was white. It didn’t feel like Brighton but somewhere belonging to the cold, somewhere borne up from the past. A city like Budapest or Prague, with its understorey of secret police and vanished faces. You smiled at how your breath fell before rising and disappearing against the cold, hard darkness of the sky. Then, catching sight of the gulls circling in the high distance, you crunched hurriedly across the street in little Geisha steps. You would have kept going but you spotted a five-pound note, damp and partially obscured by the snow in front of the Dorset. You picked it up.

‘Your round then,’ Belinda said, simultaneously lighting her roll-up and, reaching behind her, whacking on