by Phil Rickman
She hit the keys.
By half past ten, she’d more or less nailed it. The print on the screen was starting to swim. The e-cig had run out of fluid. Ethel was under the desk, between her ankles, dropping hints about food. Huw had not rung and she needed sleep. She went to feed Ethel in the kitchen, then rang Huw’s machine – by this time of night, it was nearly always the machine. She left a message suggesting they talk tomorrow night, saying she was tired, probably couldn’t think straight.
‘Time is it, lass?’ Huw said.
‘Oh.’ Hadn’t heard him pick up, as usual. Perhaps he always picked up. ‘Coming up to eleven.’
‘Didn’t realize it were that late. I should’ve called. It were just I thought I’d phone Jenny Roberts.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Just came into my head to ring Jenny Roberts. Always meant to ring her, see if she were all right. See if I could help. But time passes and you neglect things.’
‘Jenny Roberts?’
‘Oh aye, I didn’t call her that. No need for anonymity now. Ann Evans, did I call her that? Happen I wouldn’t’ve rung her at all if Innes showing up in Hereford hadn’t brought it all to mind again. Why couldn’t the bugger’ve shown up sooner?’
‘What?’
‘Discontinued line. I rang the local rector – different one now. Told me Jenny Roberts were dead. Died two months ago. Found in the Usk at Newport. When the tide went out. Tidal river, the Usk. Happen thought she’d be washed out to sea, never found.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Her body were in the mud, near the city centre. Couldn’t’ve been more public. Didn’t make much in the local papers and nobody told me. But then, no reason why they should.’
28
Smashed faces
USUALLY, THE BRILLIANCE that flashed up in the night was just worthless dream-residue. Bliss knew that, but it still wouldn’t let him get back to sleep. Annie was breathing evenly, like all was right with the world, when he slid out of bed. Picking up his phone from the bedside rug, creeping off with it to the bathroom.
Sometime in the early hours this was. He hadn’t bothered to check. He sat on the bog’s closed lid in his briefs and his slippers and brought up on the phone the picture from Greenaway’s lappie. The skull grinned raggedly out of his hand. All skulls grinned. They got the joke about death.
Which never seemed all that far away in the hours before dawn, when time was like a closed telescope. Only moments, in the great schemes of things, since the skull had had flesh and skin and eyes. Before they were smashed in.
Like Tristram Greenaway’s. Beautiful kids, people fawn over them, Karen said.
Somebody had ripped into Greenaway’s meal-ticket face with the claw end of a hammer, or similar. Could have been the result of an escalating row over a job, maybe with some X-factor to heat it up. But the damage still suggested malice or envy or rage or bitterness. Somebody whose boyfriend he’d pinched. Or someone who thought – unlike Greenaway himself – that his looks had got him too much too soon. No more, Tris. Sorry, pal, you’re going out looking like a butcher’s slab.
‘Warrabout you then, son?’ Bliss murmured to the gappy, ruined grin. ‘They have claw-hammers in your day?’
This was the face he’d been seeing when he awoke – the dream-residue – with the brilliant idea that he should show it to Billy Grace. Email him the picture. Just out of interest, Billy, knowing how you like something a bit different. What happened to this feller?
Two smashed faces eight hundred or so years apart.
someone we all hoped to meet one day has turned up
‘You? Why would anyone want to meet you, Steve?’
Bliss had taken to calling him Steve. Steve Skull.
‘Cos you’re deviant, pal. They had you down as a vampire. They buried you with a stone in your gob to stop you chewing your shroud.’
Shrouds must’ve been different in those days, more like body bags. Bliss stood up, went over to the window with its view across the darkened estate to grey fields, middle-distant hills. No visible lights.
Not such a brilliant idea at all, really. He went back to the lavvie, sat down with the phone and looked up Billy Grace’s email address. Wrote Billy a brief note, saying he’d give him a bell later, if that was all right. Attached the picture and sent it. Nothing lost, except some sleep.
He was about to switch off the phone when a little red thingy signalled a new email, timed 23.35.
Karen Dowell.
Got them. Neogoth.
I’ll feed it into the machine first
thing tomorrow, but thought I’d
tell you first.
All closer than you’d think.
It was, too. Bliss smiled. A new direction for tomorrow. Real old-style cop, Karen, in spite of being not yet thirty-five. Didn’t turn off when she went home.
Or maybe it was just that she was between boyfriends.
… still fancies you, doesn’t she? Annie had never said anything like that before.
He crept back into the bedroom, stood listening to her steady breathing. Could be she’d taken a sleeping pill; she’d admitted once that she used to take them occasionally, without explaining what used to keep her awake.
Charlie?
She hadn’t known what Charlie was when she’d joined the force. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Not your own dad, a good man whose race through the ranks in the days before fast-track had been nothing at all to do with his weekly night out at the Masonic hall. A good man who’d be unlikely to boast to his daughter about covering up for a wealthy killer.
Bliss felt the damp and the cold of the night he’d faced-up Charlie in front of Charlie’s house and come off worst.
Go home, boy. Go back to Liverpool or wherever it was you crawled from… You got no friends…
Charlie had friends. Charlie always had the right friends.
Bliss stood in the dark, dog-tired and wide awake, wondering where Annie kept her sleeping pills.
29
Rambling in the night
PLEASE. WHISPERING. GET this over.
Cold. Merrily aware of wearing what she wore in bed, the long T-shirt, only even longer and white as a shroud. She felt very small, and the piercing smell of church polish was a thin wire in her nose.
Unknown churches at night, unlit, were seldom welcoming, even to a priest. She most certainly didn’t want to be here. She stood behind the back pews, keeping the doors in view. The polish smell gave way to the mould of old vestments.
Smells in dreams – did that happen?
This is a lucid dream, a voice murmured.
Jane used to talk about lucid dreams, how she’d tried to induce them but it never worked. In a lucid dream, you knew you were dreaming and you could direct the outcome.
Your duty to stay, Jane whispered. See this through.
But it was not Jane’s voice. Why had she thought that?
Let this be over, let this be over, let this be…
A hiss came back in reply, a thin wind from the cavern of shadow that was the chancel behind its knotty rood screen. She felt the hiss on her face, personal and contemptuous. Wanted so much to be out of here. But dreams of this kind always demanded commitment. You were part of a cycle.
There was a moment of silence then a hideous grinding, the thock of something dislodging, springing free and then – oh God, oh, God, oh God – directly in front of her, huge as the prow of a wooden ship on a stormy sea at night, the great Victorian pulpit rose out of the well of the nave.
Filling her with the level of primeval horror that, once you’d grown up, you rarely felt outside of dreams. Tried to back away, but couldn’t feel her feet, could only stare at a mauvish mist above the pulpit, watching it gradually taking the form of a man. He had no face, but his hands were in hard focus, arthritically twisted, knuckles swollen, gripping the pulpit’s rim. She knew what would happen next and, as soon as she knew it, it began, one gnarled hand unlocking from the pulpit, rising in a ratche
ty way, like in an early film, frame by frame, a forefinger extending to point steadily at the centre of her—
She awoke with the scream trapped in her throat.
In the half-lit kitchen, where the clock said five-fifteen, she sat in her tatty dressing gown and drank tea, Ethel watching from her fleecy bed near the wood-stove with its faint pinky ashes. The windows were black.
She was thinking of Huw Owen, and how much this was going to damage him.
Always meant to ring her, see if she were all right… But time passes and you neglect things.
Women and suicide. You only learned about Huw’s personal history when circumstances compelled him to tell you. Like his relationship with a woman called Julia. A late flowering. They might have married had she not taken her own life. Not because of anything Huw had done or failed to do, but that didn’t make it any better. He hadn’t seen it coming. That, to someone like Huw, was neglect.
When the kitchen door opened she twisted round, and Jane stood there, hazy with the hall light behind her, like a dream figure in her blue towelling robe. She was carrying her iPad and the old-fashioned wooden clipboard she still used to make notes on.
‘Sorry, flower, did I wake you?’
‘Wasn’t really asleep. Heard you coming down and you didn’t come back up, so…’
‘I did look in to say goodnight. Didn’t I?’
‘Doesn’t matter if you didn’t. You’ve obviously got a lot on your mind.’ Jane opened up the wood-stove and threw in some brittle twigs from the basket. ‘We’re not going back upstairs, are we?’
‘Only to get dressed, in my case. Holy Communion in under three hours.’
The twigs flared in the stove. Jane stood with her back to it.
‘Just I wanted to catch you before you left. That village, Cwmarrow. It seems to have died in about the thirteenth century. Or before.’
‘Died?’
‘Most of it’s in The Buildings of Herefordshire. It seems to have been quite a big village in the Middle Ages. Like Ledwardine was a town back then. Cwmarrow was never that big, but it was a definite community. And then it was abandoned. Could’ve been plague, that’s the speculation.’
‘Let me get you some tea.’ Merrily stood up. ‘What about the castle?’
Jane said the castle had been active, until about the fourteenth century, when some castles started to become domesticated, turned into homes rather than fortresses. Not this one. It was a fortress that turned into a ruin.
‘The Court was probably a farm from the beginning, providing meat and stuff for the castle and then the village, when it was there. It grew up again, to an extent, but it never really came back.’
‘And why was that? Any idea?’ Merrily brought the teapot to the table, with a mug for Jane. ‘Is it a bit early for toast?’
‘I don’t feel hungry.’
‘Nor me.’
‘There’s really not much about it at all,’ Jane said, ‘even on the Net. Quite a few medieval villages have just disappeared. It’s surprising how quickly walls collapse and stone foundations get overgrown. Be interesting to have an excavation at Cwmarrow. Geofizz, ground radar. You could probably map out the whole village. I’d like to look.’
‘Sure. Why not.’
Be good to have Jane there, it really would. She was so grateful to Jane for coming down, lighting up the stove, leading her out of the ambience of that clinging paranoid dream.
‘The Golden Valley’s still largely unknown,’ Jane said. ‘Unvisited. A few miles west and it’d be in the Brecon Beacons National Park. Tell tourists somewhere’s a national park and they’re all over it.’
‘In the shadow of the National Park. There’s a film – Shadowlands. About C.S. Lewis – Narnia?’
Jane nodded.
‘The film was about his last holiday with his sick wife – in the Golden Valley. Too sad for me, flower.’
‘The whole area has a little-known history of connections with writers on the surreal and the bizarre. Guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland?’
‘Lewis Carroll.’
‘His brother was the vicar of Vowchurch, so the chances are he came here. Probably picking up some of his ideas. I wouldn’t know. Didn’t really get on with that book. And there was M.R. James, of course, at Kilpeck and Abbey Dore and… Garway.’
‘And there was Selwyn Kindley-Pryce.’
‘Also sad,’ Jane said. ‘Well, at the end. It was happy at first. He was in his element.’
Jane talked about an academic, but also a poet and a romantic. Moderate distinction at Oxford and then professorships at American universities. Well received books, an accumulation of money, and then Pryce returned to England in late middle-age to realize a dream.
Dreams. What attention, if any, were you, as an exorcist, supposed to pay to dreams? The crack of unholy light under the door. When did you put a foot in the door?
Not a problem that need concern a rural dean.
Merrily expelled a cloud of pale vapour and the e-cig glowed green.
‘You’re sticking with it then?’ Jane said.
‘What?’
‘The e-cig. I mean, really, don’t feel obliged. I hate the thought of coming over as, you know, holier than… even holier than thou.’
‘You?’
‘Pious. You always hated that word. I always remember that, from when we first came here. You were like, I never want to be pious.’
‘It was embarrassing,’ Merrily said. ‘Determined to be a new vicar.’
The flames leapt behind the stove glass and sent a warm flush to Jane’s face.
‘All those bitter rows. Horrible. I can hardly bear to think about all that now. I just… so totally hated you being a vicar. Dad dead, and you… I was a little shit.’
‘A little shit and a pious bitch,’ Merrily said. ‘Those were the days.’
Remembering when they were sharing a room at the Black Swan, before they moved in here, and she was murmuring her morning prayers at the window, Jane going. Do you really have to do that in here?
She looked up, and Jane’s eyes were glassy with tears.
‘It’s weird, Mum. I don’t want… change any more. Suddenly, I’m frightened of it. I bought those e-cigs for you and Gomer because I wanted you to, you know, live forever? Like, I realize I’m going to have to leave here at some stage, but I always want to think I can come back and it’ll be just like it was.’
Merrily blinked.
‘God’s sake, Jane, tell me about Kindley-Pryce.’
Jane was pouring herself more tea.
She’d started with Wikipedia.
‘A lot of pretty dry stuff there. Like his books. He called himself an anthropologist, which I guess is not as boring as it sounds. But that’s, like, the story of his life. The first part of it was boring, but when he came back from America he was a different man.’
‘When was this?’
‘Nineteen nineties? His wife had died – his second wife, older than him. His first marriage in England ended in divorce. One son. The second wife was from a wealthy Californian family and she’d financed his studies. He collected quite a lot when she went, and he seemed to have decided to make a new start and came back to England and bought Cwmarrow Court… which was falling down, is that right?’
‘Close to derelict.’
‘Described in Wikipedia as Pryce’s folly. He’d just, like, fallen in love with it, and most of his money went on making it fit to live in. When the cash began to run out, he started holding events there. Music and lectures. Kind of upmarket – string quartet stuff. And also traditional folk-singers and fiddlers and all that. And they’d play and he’d tell his stories. There was an article about him in the Guardian, which had a quote about him that said…’ Jane consulted the printouts and notes in her clipboard. ‘Kindley-Pryce claims his discovery of oral traditions has liberated him from the straitjacket of academia. “It’s brought me alive,” he says. “Even in my advancing years.”’
‘Sounds like a
bucolic idyll.’
‘This is him.’
Jane opened up the iPad, brought up a photograph of a man with a face like a brown egg. Either shaven-headed or completely bald. Eyes heavy-lidded as if they were looking down at his own minuscule smile.
‘So he had this new girlfriend,’ Jane said. ‘Caroline Goddard, children’s writer, and they created Foxy Rowlestone. I haven’t downloaded any of the books yet. I thought I’d see if the bookshop had any.’
‘You never know. I’ll give you some money.’
‘They did OK, those books. A cult following, according to Wiki. But there were only a couple before Pryce and Goddard split. I found some pictures of her. Much younger than him. And then she goes and leaves him, and things are like downhill all the way.’
‘Dementia?’
‘Horrible,’ Jane said.
‘Mmm. With the demented, they say that the oldest memories are the last to die. But how can anyone really know? No cure. They don’t come back to talk about it.’
Jane said, ‘You think his mind, like, vanished into… not so much his own past as the place’s past?’
Merrily shook her head, non-committal.
‘Can a storyteller’s mind disappear into a world of his own imagination?
‘Creepy, Mum.’
‘Yes.’
Jane pulled a smile together.
‘And while we’re talking creepy… the other thing you asked me to look up. Strokes?’
‘Oh, yeah. I forgot.’
‘You won’t now,’ Jane said. ‘Not ever. Stay there.’
She went upstairs, came down with a very old paperback, flopped open on its much-split spine.
‘This is just in case you think I’m making it up.’
Pushing the book in front of Merrily. The print was tiny. In this light, she could make out about every third word.
‘I keep putting it off, flower. The sin of vanity.’
‘New reading glasses?’
‘I’ll pick up a pair at a chemist’s tomorrow. Today. Can’t afford—’ She bit off the rest about not being able to afford a proper session with an optician and pushed the book back to Jane. ‘Would you mind reading it out? Feel free to paraphrase.’
