He looked down at himself self-deprecatingly, and laughed.

  ‘Well, I suppose I must look like a Jez in this kit, mustn’t I?’

  Laughing herself, Angie began to like him.

  ‘Jez it is. Shall we go in?’

  Turning their backs upon the fenced-off vista of the yellowing allotments, they made their unhurried way towards the corner house, number eighteen. Both commented admiringly on how the slate roof rose into a modest turret over the bay windows, neither seeing fit to mention the colossal form of yet another beast that reached into the crystallised blue skies above it. This one, in addition to the sextuple eye-studded pinions, had a man’s head. Its receded hair and gormless look reminded the solicitor of her ex-husband, Derek, and she wondered briefly where he was right now, along with everybody else. Then Jez unlatched the wrought-iron gate and they proceeded up a short brick path to the front door, recessed beneath a porch that had ‘THE ARK’ embossed in neat black characters above it. Fishing in her bag, she handed him the keys to heaven’s kingdom, with Carstairs & Calderwood’s distinctive logo on the plastic fob, and two by two they entered.

  In the hallway, dust motes ventured glittering pirouettes through shafts of sunlight slanting from a window halfway up the stairs, and a grandfather clock measured eternity in thudding millimetres. Seeming at least not displeased by first impressions, the new owner paused to study a framed print that hung on the sedately papered left-side wall, above a fussy little table with a vase of artificial flowers. Viewed across the client’s well-tailored shoulder, Angie could make out the portrait of a somewhat bird-faced older woman dressed in a white robe and bonnet, seated with a hefty Bible open on her lap against a solemn umber background. Pursed lips almost smiling, but a carefully curated worry in the painted eyes. Here the prospective resident glanced back at Angie, nodding to the picture with a fond expression.

  ‘It’s Joanna Southcott, bless her cotton socks. I don’t expect she had it easy.’

  Forehead creasing, Angie made a clean breast of her ignorance.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know anything about her. Was she one of the four women who began the Panacea movement? I think I read that the leader was from Bedford. Is this her?’

  He shook his head. His eyes, she thought, had something of the look that she recalled from Sunday School, although greatly diluted. Warm and brown, they weren’t so much repositories of suffering and anguish as of some long-standing disappointment or frustration.

  ‘No. Joanna was a Devon lass, brought up in Gittisham. This was, what, middle of the eighteenth century, something like that? A footman tried it on when she was a domestic servant, and then, when she wasn’t having any, made out she was going mad. Gaslighted her, essentially. She joined John Wesley’s crew in Exeter, where they persuaded her she was a prophetess. Next thing you know, she’s telling everybody that she’s the Woman of the Apocalypse, the pregnant girl clothed in the sun, from Revelation. She flogged paper seals, twelve bob a throw, that guaranteed a place in heaven for twelve thousand dozen people. Everybody name-dropped her, from William Blake to Dickens.’

  Here the first-time homeowner returned his sympathetic gaze to Southcott’s portrait, scratching at the palm of one hand absent-mindedly as he wrapped up his anecdote.

  ‘When she was sixty-four – this would have been 1814 or thereabouts – Joanna made it known that she was up the duff with Shiloh, the messiah that gets talked about in Genesis. She had a due date sometime in October, but, well, obviously, nothing happened and she went into what her supporters called a trance, by which, presumably, they meant a coma. Anyway, she died on or around my birthday. Then, a century thereafter, pretty much exactly, you had Mabel Barltrop and her well-heeled single woman pen pals, cooking up the Panacea Society from Southcott’s teachings, there on the low slopes of World War One. I’m sure most people thought of Southcott and the Panaceans as delusional old trouts, but here we are.’

  He shrugged apologetically, and as if by some unspoken agreement, Angie opened the first door that led off from the hallway on the left as they came in. Together they went into the antimacassar still of the end-terrace property’s impeccably preserved front room.

  A dark green carpet covered varnished floorboards, almost to the parlour’s edges, bearing a symmetrical design of fronds and curlicues that Angie thought resembled a disquieting hybrid between humming tops and jellyfish. The freshly laundered nets and velour curtains were tied back to either side, framing a view of the allotments opposite, which didn’t look quite as scorched and neglected as she’d thought them at first glance. Beyond the waist-high fencing, she could make out bud-bedizened saplings and a bush that dripped with portly blackberries, although the bull-headed enormity still standing on the east horizon tended to draw most of her attention. Jez was trying out a massive horsehair sofa and examining the glass-doored china cabinet, where the glazed faces of Edwardian women stared out from commemorative plates. She was directing his attention to the decorative mouldings up above the picture rail when she glimpsed motion from the corner of her eye, and turned once more to look out of the window.

  Outside, something terrible was scuttling along Albany Road.

  Recoiling, her protesting senses tried to frame what she was seeing as machinery, as some kind of construction vehicle, ingeniously articulated, moving without wheels, but … no. No, that wasn’t it at all. It was alive. It was an insect, a huge locust bigger than a bus that picked its way in the direction of the river, the precise typewriter movement of its sickeningly thick legs turning Angie’s stomach. On the meaty hind limbs were erectile hairs like radio antennae, bristling and grotesque. The weight and textures of its lamp-black body – glistening gristle, lacquered chitin – had a terrible immediacy that dispelled her last feeble attempts to read the creature as a CGI effect, the way she’d handled the glass stratosphere with its unnerving weather front of beasts and candlesticks. This was, incontrovertibly, a giant bug as real and physical as the allotment gate it stalked past, or the blue composting bin that stood beyond. And then she realised, with a lurch, that even this dreadful analysis was just a self-protective screen, an effort to prevent herself from understanding what was really there. It wasn’t a giant bug – or at least, not entirely. It was much, much worse than that.

  At the monstrosity’s rear end, curling up from the rustling black lacework of its folded wings, was the fatal and beckoning finger of a scorpion’s tail, plump and segmented, terminating in a shellacked talon with a viscous bead of poison drooling from its tip. However, more disturbing yet were the additions to the locust’s front extremity, which Angie had not taken in before this moment of lucidity: raised up before it like a begging dog were two crustacean pincers, and between these, sprouting from the insect’s thorax, was a human head. Its inky hair hung in lank curtains, drawn back to reveal the sallow features as the horror craned its neck to right and left, scanning the empty street ahead for obstacles or prey. The jaw was dislocated or deformed, accommodating as it was a radiator grill of outsized teeth, the blood-caked sabres of a hungry jungle predator. It rolled its angry, unforgiving eyes, mad with the hideous truth of what it was. Angie became aware that she was hyperventilating.

  As she watched the awful thing creeping away downhill to the embankment, she noted that Jez now stood beside her, watching with her. He’d recovered the e-cigarette from his top pocket and drew on it thoughtfully, turning his gaze to the transfixed solicitor with what seemed genuine concern.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve not given any thought to how all this must look to normal people, have I? Here’s you, weathering what must be a demanding brief with such professionalism that it hasn’t once occurred to me: you must be terrified. Please don’t be. None of this is what it looks like.’

  Angie let him lead her to the ancient tan settee, where he sat on the other end and waited for her to stop shaking, the vape stick now back in his breast pocket.

  ‘L-Look, I know this is none of my business and I don’t want to step over any lines, but if this isn’t what it looks like, then what is it? Are you telling me that wasn’t an enormous locust with a man’s head and a scorpion’s tail crawling along Albany Road just now?’

  The Panacea Trust’s sole beneficiary stared at the coelenterate flourishes of the deep emerald carpeting. He shifted on the couch’s creaking leather and appeared almost embarrassed.

  ‘No. I mean, yes, that was a giant locust. It was real. This is all real, but … well, you shouldn’t feel intimidated by it, all the things with lion’s heads and what have you. They’re just symbols manifested in a certain order, like the letters in a word or sentence. It’s a sort of language.’

  Angie was beginning to feel rather small and sorry for herself, which made her cross.

  ‘Well, if it is, it’s language that’s impenetrable and designed to frighten everybody.’

  She was sure she’d gone too far. It wasn’t her place to critique the client, and especially not this one. Anxiously, she waited for his brow to cloud in thunderous rebuke, and was surprised when all he did was beam and look delighted with her.

  ‘Yes! That’s it right there! As a solicitor, you know the kind of language that I mean.’

  She thought this over for a while before she spoke.

  ‘You mean contractual language?’

  He could not have been more pleased. He clapped both hands against his thighs enthusiastically. The gesture seemed old-fashioned, practically Dickensian; the sort of move a public schoolboy from the 1940s might pick up in imitation of their Latin teacher.

  ‘You’re bang on. Contractual language. That’s exactly what it is, deliberately intimidating and unfathomable. The man-headed locusts and bull-headed men, the slaughtered lamb with seven eyes and seven horns – these are all clauses and subclauses and disclaimers in a legal document. And yes, I know, we’ve got to bring all this archaic nonsense up to date and make it more accessible. Some of this terminology, the images and symbols that it’s drafted in, are pre-Sumerian. That’s not the way to run a modern business. I kept telling everybody, but …’

  He trailed off, peering glumly at the morning glories on the ornamental fireplace surround. Out in the hallway, the grandfather clock continued its dull listing of the seconds, underscoring the dejected pause. Angie considered what he’d said, determined to keep this professional and not to relapse into paralysing awe. The bit about the seven-eyed dead lamb had startled her, simply because she hadn’t witnessed that particular celestial vision yet, and didn’t much like having to imagine it. Similarly, she had an uncomfortable suspicion that by ‘business’ he meant ‘universe’, the implications of which made the soles of her feet cringe and tingle, like when she saw someone in a film balanced precariously on a high window ledge. It was a thought you could fall into, and your fall would never stop. He was still staring at the floral tiles around the hearth. She felt she ought to say something.

  ‘This contract … it’s been in place for some time, then, and is just now coming into force? So, what are its conditions? What does it relate to? If this is all confidential stuff that you don’t want to talk about, that’s fine. Just say, and I’ll shut up.’

  He offered her a weak smile in response, and Angie saw the tiredness in his eyes.

  ‘No. To be honest, it’s nice having somebody to moan to. I don’t get to unload very often. What this contract is about, it’s all the fiddling details of the handover. Our legal people have been quibbling about the wording for, what, fifty years or more? “That needs a comma. That needs a huge wine press spurting blood. That needs a human-headed locust.” All right, fifty-something years, it’s longer for you than it is for us, but still. That’s more than half a century we’ve been in business limbo without proper management, and that’s not counting nearly two millennia of inactivity before that. It makes us look stagnant as a company, doesn’t it? That’s not the message that we should be putting out.’

  Angie was having trouble keeping up.

  ‘Sorry, but I’m still not getting this handover that you mentioned. What is it that’s being handed over, and to whom?’

  He looked taken aback, as if he’d thought that fact too obvious to warrant mention.

  ‘Well, the company. The business. With the former chief executive passed on, the whole lot comes to me. You’ve no idea how long I’ve waited for this, feeling like an idler with no proper job, but now it’s here … I don’t know. It’s a big responsibility, but I expect I’ll manage.’

  ‘So, the former chief executive …?’

  ‘My dad.’

  After some several moments without blinking, she processed what he was telling her and was surprised to feel a desolated lurch, right at her very core. She’d always thought she was an atheist.

  ‘He’s dead?’

  The client sighed and nodded, scratching at his palm distractedly. She understood that this was all still raw, still recent, something he was dealing with, that fifty-odd years might be just a week or two where he was from. Staring down at his trainers planted on the writhing emerald carpet, he continued in a quizzical and distant tone, as though he spoke more to himself than Angie.

  ‘Funnily enough, it happened only a few months before they ran that headline in Time magazine. I mean, I see now it was just coincidence, a fluke of the statistics, but it put the wind up everybody just the same. Of course, my dad, he’d been on his last legs for centuries, just getting worse and worse, but you know what it’s like. Somehow you think they’ll always be there.’

  Angie felt that she should pat his shoulder, but she left it too long and decided not to.

  ‘So, the immortality …?’

  Jez snorted.

  ‘Well, there’s clearly no such thing. How do you know that you’re immortal, unless you get to the end of time and haven’t died? You’re probably just very long-lived, aren’t you? Naturally, Dad being Dad, he’s going to assume that he’s immortal, even when he’s haemorrhaging stars and coughing up black matter. That last thousand years, no kidding, he could barely get up from the throne. We told him he should see somebody, get it looked at, but he’d take no notice. He was one of those; thought he knew everything. And now he’s gone, and I’m in charge of … well, all this.’

  He gazed disconsolately into some internal void for a few moments, then seemed to recover his composure, offering Angie a pained smile that bordered on a grimace.

  ‘Ah, well. That’s enough of that. Shall we get on with showing me around the house?’

  Next off the hallway to the left, the living/dining room was bigger than the parlour, though perhaps it got less direct light. There was a polished hardwood table you could see your face in, and a complement of straight-backed chairs that Angie thought might have been Regency, with a repeated fleur-de-lis motif in their upholstery. The white-gold carpet looked like a steamrollered ghost.

  A near-sarcophagus-sized sideboard stood against the north wall, china knick-knacks crowded at its ends in order to accommodate the worn and corner-blunted packing case that rested in the centre. Roughly three feet wide and two feet high by one foot deep, its blemished boards seemed held together by the doubled lengths of twine in which the box was bound. A luggage label, creased and jaundiced, was affixed up top with something written on it in a trembling hand, too small for Angie to make out. The almost black of a Box Brownie photograph, the box’s shabby presence dominated what was otherwise a tidy and impeccably presented space. Her client gently ran his hand across the object’s battered surfaces, twanging its taut strings playfully.

  ‘So this is it, then. This is the society’s panacea against crime and banditry, along with sadness and perplexity. Not much to look at close up, is it?’

  Angie grudgingly allowed that Bedford had most likely seen the last of crime and banditry, and that despite the disappearance of its population, she was not particularly sad – perhaps because her doctor had prescribed anti-depressants at around this time last year – but she was certainly perplexed.

  ‘What is it?’ She recalled that Revelation said something about a book with seven seals, but didn’t think a box tied up with string was mentioned anywhere. Jez grinned, nodding towards the hall.

  ‘This is her box, Joanna Southcott’s. When she died, she left it sealed up with instructions saying it was only to be opened by two dozen bishops, at a time of gravest national emergency. What Mabel Barltrop, Rachael Fox, Kate Firth and Helen Exeter were doing from the twenties onwards was petitioning the government to convene four-and-twenty bishops, so that they could open Southcott’s treasure chest. I’m not entirely sure the Church of England even had twenty-four bishops by that point, but Mabel and the others weren’t much bothered by the technicalities.’

  Here the incoming tenant lifted the container in both hands to test its weight before putting it down again. Though cumbersome, it clearly wasn’t heavy. Angie asked the obvious question.

  ‘And does anybody know what’s in it?’

  Turning from the sombre package and towards the room’s west-facing window, the solicitor’s last ever client raised his eyebrows speculatively and pressed his lips into a doubtful pout.

  ‘Depends who you believe. According to the Panaceans, it’s Joanna Southcott’s prophecies of the apocalypse in 2004 – and, OK, sixteen years out, but across the centuries, that’s still not bad. What muddied up the waters, though, in 1927 this so-called psychic investigator, Harry Price, he claimed he’d found the box and had it opened. Said that it was empty except for some unimportant papers, a horse pistol and a lottery ticket. Naturally, the Panacea Society claimed that the box Price opened was a fake or a mistake. They had the real thing here in Bedford, they insisted, and would carry on petitioning to have its mysteries revealed. You’ve got to hand it to them, haven’t you, for sticking to their guns? I mean, this was a group made up almost exclusively of well-off single women, living in an England that was near enough The Handmaid’s Tale.’