by Phil Rickman
‘Stay at this end, then?’
‘I think so.’
Merrily looked up at the sky through an irregular network of wires. ‘How long to noon?’ She’d come out without her watch.
Simon looked at his, then took it off. ‘Fifty-one minutes.’
He laid the watch on the parched grass near the base of a pole. Stood there in his dog collar and his ruined jeans, with his fair hair looking almost white and as dead as the grass, and his hands on his hips.
‘Over to you,’ he said. ‘Drukerimaskri.’
46
Every Evil Haunting and Phantasm
CHARLIE HOWE CLEARLY knew the TV cameraman – grey-haired bloke crouching near the sign saying knight’s frome, getting the church into shot. The old Jaguar pulled in next to him and Charlie leaned out of the window, bawling out, ‘Jim!’
Lol brought the Astra up behind the Jag, as the cameraman turned in irritation, then saw who it was and grinned, lowering his camera. ‘Knew they’d never be able to manage without you, Charlie. Come to take over the inquiry, is it?’
Charlie poked a finger out of the window. ‘Now don’t you go saying that to Anne, boy.’
Jim said he wasn’t that brave, and they laughed, and then Charlie said, ‘Talking of whom, you seen that girl at all?’
Lol spotted a slender woman walking through the churchyard, about two hundred yards away. He thought it was Sally Boswell, with someone else, a child it looked like from where he was.
He got out of the car as the cameraman said, ‘Nobody here yet, Charlie, only me, shooting wallpaper till the reporter shows. What you doing with yourself now?’
‘Creating the new Hereford, most of the time,’ Charlie told him. ‘So Anne’s due when?’
‘Two o’clock, outside the pub. That’s what I was told.’
Lol ran past them, towards the churchyard.
Sally wore a faded yellow dress and a straw sunhat, and it wasn’t a child with her but Isabel St John in her wheelchair. Isabel looked defiant. Her crimson top began just above her nipples.
‘Laurence.’ Sally pulled off her hat; her misty hair was pushed back over her ears and her skin was pale as moth wings. She tucked the hat under an arm, drew a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. ‘Hay fever. Isn’t it ridiculous? Haven’t suffered in years.’
Lol thought she’d been crying.
Isabel glanced back, almost disparagingly, at the church. ‘Been trying to do our bit, isn’t it?’
‘Supportive prayer,’ Sally said. ‘Though I’m afraid I don’t particularly feel any closer to the Deity in there.’
Isabel raised her eyes. ‘Should’ve said. Out here’s all right.’ A Red Admiral butterfly landed on an arm of her wheelchair and stayed there, as though it had been sprayed with lacquer.
‘Where’s Al?’ Lol said. The air seemed hushed and heavy, not only around the church but over the whole valley. He wasn’t aware of any birds singing. He could see Charlie Howe walking towards them, but couldn’t hear his steps.
‘Al?’ said Sally. ‘Don’t you know?’
‘Al’s with Simon,’ Isabel said. ‘And your lady. Chasing the gorgeous, pouting Rebekah. Dredging her up from the slime.’ Her voice had gone harsh with distress. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘Now? Today?’
‘For noon.’
‘They’re doing it now?’
Sally put a hand on his arm. Her fingers felt like lace. ‘Don’t interfere, Laurence. It does have to be done, I’m afraid. Al and I quarrelled over it. I didn’t want…’ She half turned away. ‘He believes he has no choice. He believes he’s responsible for her. That’s all there is to it.’
‘What about Merrily? Who’s she res—’
‘You want to concentrate more on your music, Lol,’ Isabel said. ‘Form a new band. Employ Simon, get him out of this crappy job.’ The butterfly still hadn’t moved. Isabel looked as if she wanted to swat it. ‘Nobody needs this in their lives. We can deal with it, if we have to, when we’re dead.’
‘Where are they?’ Lol said.
‘Leave it,’ Sally told him. ‘Whatever has to happen will happen.’
‘While we get to wait on the shore.’ Isabel put on a pair of very dark sunglasses. ‘Keep the bloody home fires burning.’
The butterfly finally took off, fluttered to a nearby grave. Lol said, ‘Why do they need Merrily? Why couldn’t they have done this in the first place? I can’t believe Simon was scared.’
‘What do you know, Lol?’ Isabel said with venom. ‘What do you know of what he’s been through over the years? You think it isn’t a terrible bloody burden for a priest to be psychic?’
‘I’m sure it is. But if he thinks Merrily can come in and shoulder it—’
‘Nobody can shoulder it. He has to face it on his own.’
‘Then why do they need Merrily? Is it because Rebekah will only come to a woman?’
‘Stop it,’ Sally said. ‘Both of them are Christians. Neither of them is part of the tradition. If anything happens to anyone…’ She opened her bag, took out a parchment-coloured, egg-shaped label and handed it to Lol. ‘I found this when I came back.’
He recognized it at once. It was what you saw when you peered down the soundhole of a well-loved guitar, with the sacred name ‘Boswell’ printed quite small.
Sally said, ‘It’s the price you pay. For preserving the balance. What you borrow must be repaid, if not in itself then… in kind. Sometimes with interest.’
Below the name was an inner oval in which the serial number of each instrument would be stamped. In this space was hand-printed:
My love
Don’t burn
the vardo
The hop-frames were constructed from now-faded creosoted poles, ten to fifteen feet high and leaning inwards. The cross-pieces of some were fixed below the top, forming two actual crosses, joined. Merrily took this as significant, and she and Simon each stood under a cross, close to the entrance of the alley.
Al Boswell sat at the far end, seventy or eighty yards away. His head was bowed.
Dead bines hung limp from several frames.
With the airline bag at her feet, Merrily laid the Lord’s Prayer on the still, already humid air.
When she’d finished, there was a strange silence in the yard that seemed close to absolute. No birds was what it meant, she decided – there seemed to be nothing here for them to feed on. The hop-yard and adjacent fields were almost in a bowl of earth, the landscape curving up to wooded hills, only the highest ridge of the Malverns visible.
And only one building, the one with the witch’s-hat tower. Should I say it came out of the kiln on the smoke of Rebekah’s cremation? Was it scattered with her ashes?
What came out? What was at the core of this? As Simon had pointed out, there was no agreed ritual for this situation.
Merrily glanced up the alley towards Al Boswell. His hands were raised now, in supplication, and he seemed to be chanting, though she couldn’t hear anything – was Al’s consciousness down there in the Lower World, home of the ancestors and the dead, bargaining with his father, the chovihano, for the soul of Rebekah? What was he offering? What did he expect to pay? She felt scared for him because he came from a culture which was, in essence, unbending.
She also felt an agitation and a tension emanating like cold steam from Simon St John. She banished it, closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on her breathing without changing its rhythm.
In her hands she held a slim prayer book. Into her mind came the image of Rebekah in her sleeveless white blouse. No earrings – the girl wouldn’t have wanted to look like a gypsy for the picture editor at Tit Bits. Poor kid. Poor Rebekah: brazen hussy of 1963, blinded by her own sexuality. As if she’d like to seize the whole world in her teeth.
Eating the world… and suddenly choking. Merrily sensed how dense and dark the flesh-smelling smoke from the kiln would have been, made noxious by all the psychic bacteria that fed on the detritus of violent death. Rem
nants here, too, of Conrad Lake, his greed, his ultimately murderous cruelty.
This was about separating Rebekah’s soul from all of that and guiding it to the light.
Merrily opened her eyes, consulted the book and said quietly, ‘Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers, and do not condemn us for our sins… Lord have mercy.’
‘Lord have mercy,’ Simon echoed from across the alley.
‘Christ have mercy.’
‘Christ have mercy.’
She visualized Rebekah Smith in the kiln, doubled up, the beautiful features blotched and reddened and distended by coughing and retching and wheezing.
‘Heavenly father.’
‘Have mercy on her!’
… While the sulphur rolls burned blue and the few remaining hop-cones yellowed on their loft.
‘Jesus, redeemer of the world…’
‘Have mercy on her.’
Rebekah screaming inside as the fumes took her.
I watched her heaving and shivering and struggling for breath…
Merrily broke off from the litany. The air felt dense and weighted. She suddenly felt desperately tired, and she was scared to close her eyes again in case she fell asleep on her feet.
‘Oh Christ,’ Simon murmured.
She looked across at him. He was aglow with sweat. He said, ‘You’ve brought someone with you, haven’t you?’ He had his eyes closed now, his fists clenched. ‘You’re carrying the weight of someone.’
Merrily began to pant.
‘Bleeding,’ Simon said. ‘She’s bleeding.’
Merrily whispered, ‘Jesus, redeemer of the world, have mercy on her.’
Her. Rebekah, in her white blouse.
Her. Layla Riddock in her black kimono.
‘Have mercy on them,’ Simon cried out.
Sweat dripped down Merrily’s cheeks.
‘Holy Spirit, comforter…’
‘Have mercy on them.’
‘Holy Trinity, one God…’
‘Have mercy on them.’
‘From all evil…’
‘Deliver her…’
It all came out in a rush now, and they were working together, a unit. ‘From anger, hatred and malice… From all the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil… Good Lord, deliver them.’
The cotton alb was fused to Merrily’s skin. If she had an aura, it felt like liquid, like oil. The air was very close. There seemed to be a different atmosphere here between the poles, a separate density of air. Between the wires, the sun was like a hole in the sky.
‘Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world.’
‘Have mercy on her,’ Simon said.
‘Yes,’ Merrily said.
She felt that Rebekah was very near, but resistant to the idea of being guided towards the Second Death. It came to her suddenly that Layla had somehow been sent as an intermediary. Allan Henry: Layla, love, excuse me, but these ladies would like to know if you have much contact with the dead.
She prayed for guidance, but she couldn’t see the blue or the gold, and her pectoral cross felt as heavy as an anvil.
The cross? Was the cross preventing—?
She touched it. Please, God, what shall I do? The cross felt cold. She longed to give herself away, as she had in church on the night of the coin, in true and total submission, so that her life-energy, her living spirit, might be used as a vessel of transformation for the tortured essence of Rebekah Smith: a sacrifice.
She turned to Simon, but he seemed a long way away. She closed her eyes, was aware of an intense pressure in her chest, as though she was about to have a heart attack.
She let the prayer book fall and used both hands to slip the chain and the cross up and over her head.
Simon had both arms around the pole with the wooden cross at the top, hugging it, like a sailor who’d roped himself to the mast in a storm. His body seemed to be in spasm. She was aware of a foetid fog between them.
She heard a cry from the end of the alley—
‘Oh, Mother of God!’
—which had become like a tunnel now, a tunnel through the middle of the day, and then there was a wrenching sensation from above, as though the crosspiece linking her pole with Simon’s pole was under sudden, severe stress.
Don’t look.
But, of course, she had to.
Her body was held inert by damp dread, but her eyes followed the leaden, loaded creaking to the cross pole. From it, hanging like a lagged cistern between her and Simon St John, the corpse of Gerard Stock was turning slowly, tongue protruding, white and furry, between the rosebud, spittled lips.
Merrily sobbed and sank slowly to her knees.
Flaunting him.
Failure.
Too strong for them.
Too strong for her.
Stock swung from side to side like a swaddled pendulum. Don’t really know what the fuck you’re doing. Waste of time, Merrily. Heard you were a political appointment.
Merrily’s hands fumbled at the airline bag, closed on the flask of holy water.
‘Begone!’ she sobbed in pain and fear and ultimate despair. ‘Begone from this place, every evil haunting and phantasm. Be banished, every delusion and deceit of Satan. In the name of the living God, in the name of the Holy God, in the name of the God of all creation—’
How empty it sounded, how hollow. She was on her knees with the flask of holy water, and she couldn’t get the bloody top off.
She would have fallen forward then, into her own shadow, but there wasn’t one.
It must be noon.
He’d gone, of course he had. He was never there. Nothing dangled from the crosspiece. There was only Simon, with his face in his hands.
Merrily came to her feet.
‘Mine,’ Simon croaked.
‘What?’
‘My projection.’ His face was grey-sheened. ‘Projection of defeat.’
Merrily leaned against the pole, nothing to say. There was no fog, no Stock, and the air in the alley was the same air that lay heavy on the whole of the Frome Valley. She swallowed; it hurt.
When did it ever go right? When did it ever work? Through the overhead wires, the midday sun was splashing its brash, soulless light over the whole of the sky.
Go out losing. What better way? Nothing to look back on, no foundation for thoughts of what might have been.
Sodden with weariness, she put away the flask, picked up her airline bag.
Simon didn’t move. Merrily heard a crumbly rustling that her tired mind dispiritingly translated into brittle hop-cones fragmenting on mummified bines.
‘Almighty God,’ Simon said numbly, gazing beyond her. ‘Please don’t do this.’
47
Ghost Eyes
THE FIRST SOUND Merrily was aware of was the vibrating of the wires overhead.
It wasn’t much; if there’d been a breeze, it would have sounded natural. If these had been electric wires, it would have seemed normal. It was a thin sound, with an almost human frailty, a keening, that somehow didn’t belong to summer. The rustling overlaid it, as if all the wires were entwined with dried bines. This other sound belonged to winter. It sang of mourning, loss, lamentation.
The sounds came not from their alley, but the one adjacent to it and, as Merrily went to stand at its entrance, she noticed that it seemed oriented directly on the tower of the kiln, the poles bending at almost the same angle as the point of its cowl.
Merrily stood there with sweat drying on her face, edging past the fear stage to the part where she knew she was dreaming but it didn’t matter.
She waited. She would not move. She fought to regulate her breathing.
For here was the Lady of the Bines, approaching down the abandoned hop-corridor, drifting from frame to frame, and the sky was white and blinding, and the Lady moved like a shiver.
Simon St John came up behind Merrily.
‘What am I seeing, Simon?’
He didn’t reply. She could h
ear his rapid breathing.
‘Whose projection now?’ she said, surprised that she could speak at all. ‘Whose projection is this?’
She blinked several times, but it was still there: this slender white woman, pale and naked and garlanded with shrivelled hops.
Merrily put on her cross. Christ be with me, Christ within me…
The bine, thick with yellowed cones, was pulled up between the legs, over the glistening stomach and between the breasts. Wound around and around the neck, covering the lower face, petals gummed to the sweat on the cheeks.
Christ behind me, Christ before me…
The head was bent, as though she was watching her feet, wondering where they were taking her. She was not weaving, as Lol had described his apparition, but almost slithering through the parched grass and the weeds. And she couldn’t be real or else why was she affecting the wires?
When she was maybe ten yards away, the head came up.
Merrily went rigid.
The Lady swayed. Her eyes were fully open but hardened, like a painted doll’s, under a thickly smeared lacquer of abstraction. They were a corpse’s eyes, a ghost’s eyes. The end of the bine was stuffed into her mouth, brittle cones crushed between her teeth, and those petals pasted to her cheeks – grotesque, like one of the foliate faces you found on church walls.
She put out her arms, not to Merrily but to Simon, but he stepped away.
‘Stay back. For Christ’s sake, don’t touch her. Keep a space.’
The woman’s hands clawed at the air, as though there was something between them that she could seize. Her breath was irregular and came in convulsions, her body arching, parched petals dropping from her lips like flakes of dead skin.
‘Don’t go within a foot of her,’ Simon rasped.
‘It’s all right,’ Merrily said softly.
And she reached for the clawing hands, and waited for the cold electricity to come coursing up her arms all the way to her heart.
48
Love First
NOON: THE DEAD moment in time. All the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything still. Everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead.
