Friends of the Dusk

by Phil Rickman

  Welcome to Deliverance Tower.

  Almost the first words to Merrily from Sophie, the Bishop’s secretary, who had been waiting to open the door to the stone steps curving up to the gatehouse and the interior door, which the new bishop, Michael Hunter, had decreed should have a gothic D on it below a black cross.

  He’d also decided there should be a Hereford deliverance website and that Merrily should have meetings with the director of social services, various mental health charities and the police. Bishop Mick: nothing if not ambitious for the Church’s loony spooks.

  Of course, she’d got rid of the D as soon as it could be done without causing offence. Telling Sophie that deliverance should be low profile.

  And that was how she’d go out.

  This morning, she’d parked near the swimming pool again. She was wearing her best woollen coat and a black skirt. She’d come an hour early, wanting time and space to consider what she’d say to Craig Innes but then deciding not to consider it at all. What was the point? There were more important issues.

  Bliss had phoned last night to say that Hector Pryce was still angrily denying he’d put the pillow over his father’s face, insisting the old man had been dead already. Claiming he’d seen a Land Rover coming down the drive from Lyme Place when he’d arrived. Evidently not Huw’s old Defender, which hadn’t moved.

  Hector was protesting his innocence so hard, Bliss said, that he’d almost coughed to the other two killings. Only a matter of time, Bliss kept saying, sounding weary.

  Bliss. Funny thing, walking across the wet and empty Bishop’s Meadow not long after eight, Merrily had felt sure she’d seen him walking ahead of her, but then it seemed unlikely because he’d been hand in hand with a woman who was a little taller and bore a superficial resemblance to…

  She’d tried to close the gap between them but they’d gone.

  Couldn’t have been.

  She’d need to talk to Bliss later, to wind up her role in this on a note of suitable lunacy. Athena White was demanding that the body and head of Selwyn Kindley-Pryce should be separated. No spades necessary, simply a question of making sure they were donated separately for medical research. Different places, certain provisos. Presumably, only Hector could authorize that. Athena said he might not need to be leaned on too hard.

  The whole Cwmarrow situation, the legacy of the maleficus, the role of falling trees… it was never going to make total sense. But when did these things ever?

  As for the Land Rover leaving Lyme Place… Dennis Kellow had a Land Rover to which other members of his family had access. But then, no more common vehicle hereabouts.

  Don’t ask. You are not a detective. Within an hour you will no longer be a deliverance minister. You’ll no longer be officially obliged to try and explain the inexplicable, or guide people away from it or help them live with it.

  So here she was, coming around the benign, sandstone Cathedral under a sober sky, spotting Sophie under the gatehouse. She’d miss Sophie, most of all.

  Hold the image, make it into memory, file it next to Day One. Sophie hadn’t changed, except that she’d usually worn her white hair in a bun, back then, but this morning it was down and straggly, and that was not normal.

  Nor was the way she was standing with her winter cardigan displaying a patch of red the size of a poppy around the abdomen.

  God…

  Merrily began to run towards her and couldn’t run fast enough, could almost see herself running in slow motion, recalling all the misfits drawn to a Cathedral, the mentally disturbed, the coke-heads, once a man with a gun who said it was a cry for help.

  Merrily was running to Sophie, like she hadn’t run since she was a child running to her mother, so hard she couldn’t feel her legs moving, until she tripped and it was only Sophie who stopped her from falling.

  Sophie’s face was pale.

  ‘Merrily, what—?’

  ‘Are you—?’

  ‘Just came out for a breath of air, Merrily.’

  Merrily fighting for her own breath. Couple of weeks of vaping could hardly wipe out the effects of twenty years of cigs.

  ‘I… thought for a minute it was blood.’

  Sophie looked down at her cardigan.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘It is blood.’

  She opened the door to what had been Deliverance Tower.

  ‘You’d better come up.’

  The Bishop’s new chair – a chair of light grey leather – had its back to the window overlooking Broad Street. Not quite where her own chair used to be but close enough and well-spattered, like Sophie’s cardigan, with fresh blood.

  Huw Owen was standing next to it, wearing as close as he ever came to full kit: white dog collar, black shirt, with an old but proper suit. He had his head held back, a handful of sodden, reddening tissues around his nose.

  ‘Don’t think it’s broken, Sophie.’

  He straightened up, and blood ran around his mouth, into his beard and his dog collar. He saw Merrily and grinned, looking insane.

  ‘All right, lass?’

  ‘Huw— Jesus Christ—’

  ‘Bit of a nosebleed. Dry up in a bit.’

  ‘Where’s the Bishop?’

  ‘The Bishop left,’ Sophie said. ‘When I saw you coming, from the window, I thought I’d better go down and see if he was still here, but he… must’ve gone through to the palace. He… fell on the steps. Fell against the door.’

  Merrily looked at Huw. He was still grinning through the blood on his teeth.

  ‘And you fell into the same door, did you?’

  ‘Could say that, aye.’

  ‘To be more accurate,’ Sophie said, ‘the Bishop walked into what would become a heated discussion.’

  Huw sniffed.

  ‘Involving a number of topics… related to his past ministry. You know the kind of thing.’

  ‘Jenny Roberts?’

  ‘Aye, Jenny Roberts were one of them, obviously. His abominable treatment of you another.’ He dragged another handful of tissues from the box on Sophie’s desk. ‘Way I see it, Merrily, we can be too subtle about these things. Could’ve delivered a sermon, but what bloody use would that’ve been?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s a bishop, but a bishop’s a man. Wi’ a man’s pride. You can wind a man up to breaking point. Well, I can. When I’m in the mood. And if I know what kind of man I’m dealing with. Like a man wi’ a history of playing contact sport? You keep prodding him, waiting for the moment when he breaks, when he loses it. When he lashes out without quite realizing what he’s doing. Bam.’

  ‘He hit you? The Bishop actually hit you?’

  ‘Now, see, what’s important, lass, in these situations, is making sure the other feller’s fist is the first to land. And because you’re expecting it – happen you’ve actually prayed for it - you know exactly how you’re going to react when it comes. You say another quick prayer – well, more of an apology in my case. I’m not a very physical man, as you know. I’m a man of peace and a bit of a wimp, but after what I said to Innes, I would’ve hit me.’

  He sat in the bloodied chair. His laughter suddenly seemed very emotional.

  ‘When Huw arrived,’ Sophie said, ‘the Bishop suggested I might have some more shopping to attend to. I was halfway down the stairs when I realized I must have forgotten my shopping list.’

  Huw laughed, snorted more blood, put his head back again.

  ‘I came off worse, I’ll not deny that. He’s a good bit younger than me, and I were crap at rugby. But I were ready, see? This is the crucial point. Just had to get that one punch in, and then he could do what he liked to me after that.’

  Sophie pointed to the iPhone on her desk.

  ‘It was a quite disgraceful episode. If I was the Bishop I’d be taking it further. On which basis, I felt I should obtain photographs which could be used as evidence to support any charges the Bishop might choose to bring against Mr Owen.’

  Huw screwed up the used handful o
f bloody tissues and tossed them into the waste bin.

  ‘He hit me first. No way round that. Well, I’m an ugly bugger at best of times. And at least I don’t have to appear in the Cathedral in the full purple kit, wi’ a matching eye. Thing about falling into a door, is nobody ever believes it.’

  He picked up Sophie’s iPhone and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Some bugger’s nicked Sophie’s phone. Can’t trust anybody these days, though happen they’ll send it back. But what if Innes doesn’t see sense and them pictures wind up on the Net? Press’ll be down on it like a dog at dinner time.’

  Huw put a hand on Merrily’s shoulder.

  ‘Come in on Monday, same as usual, I would. See what happens. Or what doesn’t.’ He walked lightly to the door. ‘Ta-ra, lass.’

  THE END

  Delivered by 'Friends of grizedale'

  Notes and closing credits

  IT DIDN’T SURPRISE me a lot when I discovered that the first convincing British account of something predatory and undead should have originated on the Hereford/Wales border. After years of saying I was NEVER going near a vampire, I had either to keep pretending I hadn’t read it or consider how it might echo (credibly).

  Should you wish to check it out, Walter Map’s account of Sir William, Bishop Foliot and the summoner is retold in several books, from The Secret History of Vampires by Claude Lecouteux to the whimsical Herefordshire Folklore by David Phelps (The History Press 2009) which (like Kindley-Pryce’s version) suggests that the beheaded corpse might have been buried close to Hereford Cathedral. The short, chilling version by Edwin Sidney Hartland remains where Jane found it, in the introduction to Ella Mary Leather’s The Folklore of Herefordshire.

  The village of Cwmarrow might be harder to find but virtually all its significant features can be found in the Golden Valley, in an area between Vowchurch and Dorstone.

  Thanks to Mairead Reidy, who divined and dispatched all the right books.

  Clerical consultants were the Revs Jason Bray, Peter Brooks, Liz Jump, Sue Richardson and the late, seriously lamented Kevin Wilkinson. Also thanks to the Rev. Nicholas Lowton, who runs things up by the Black Mountains, for his enlightening parish magazine article ‘On being a Rural Dean’, which includes the key sentence, The first the new Rural Dean knows about it is when he receives a letter from the Bishop inviting him to be Rural Dean and thanking him for agreeing to take the role on.

  In attempting to tune into her surroundings, Jane must have been recalling Francis Pryor’s monumental work The Making of the British Landscapes (Allen Lane 2010).

  Way back, Jeanine McMullen gave me a copy of Katharine Briggs’s classic A Dictionary of Fairies (Penguin, 1976) which discusses the fairy stroke, as does Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality (Viking, 1994). Another informative volume was The Vengeful Djinn by Rosemary Ellen Guiley and Philip J. Imbrogno (Llewellyn 2011). Thanks again to Dion Fortune who never fails to come up with something. And Robert A. Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body (Souvenir Press, 1972) is probably the most convincing account of astral projection ever published. I’m sure my late grandma, May, would have agreed.

  Thanks also to…

  Tony Hazzard, writer of many classic songs, on how TV commercials can change your life… or not.

  Mobeena Khan (no relation to Raji) who answered lots of questions about non-fundamentalist Muslim life.

  The archaeologist Jodie Lewis on the excavation of human bodies, buried deviantly and otherwise.

  The Rev. Strachan McQuade (channelled) on… let’s not go there.

  Philippa May and Paul Rogers at the Hereford Times.

  Dr Jamie Monaghan, on the diagnosis of dementia.

  Dai Pritchard on building technicalities.

  Tooki Proctor on Antipodean linguistical pitfalls.

  Tracy Thursfield, for magical guidance.

  Caitlin Warrior for Internet esoterica.

  On the publishing side,

  Sara O’Keeffe, Louise Cullen, Liz Hatherell and…

  My wife and most ruthless editor, Carol, for spotting all the structural flaws, and then pointing the way forward… which was not, as usual, the direction in which I was heading.

  Also by Phil Rickman

  THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

  The Wine of Angels

  Midwinter of the Spirit

  A Crown of Lights

  The Cure of Souls

  The Lamp of the Wicked

  The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

  The Smile of a Ghost

  The Remains of an Altar

  The Fabric of Sin

  To Dream of the Dead

  The Secrets of Pain

  The Magus of Hay

  THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

  The Bones of Avalon

  The Heresy of Dr Dee

  OTHER TITLES

  Candlenight

  Curfew

  The Man in the Moss

  December

  The Chalice

  Night After Night

  The Cold Calling

  Mean Spirit

  OTHER TITLES

  The House of Susan Lulham

  Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2015 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2015

  The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 24601 694 9

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 24601 696 3

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Frienda of Grizedale

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Part One

  1 Touch the darkness

  2 A date with Hurricane Lorna

  3 Hallowe’en. Normal, irrational anxieties

  4 Win-win

  5 … or treat

  6 Nightlife

  7 Not one of ours

  8 Lawful and justified

  9 Overpowering

  10 Trashy world

  11 Purple haze

  12 Cutting edge

  13 Big voice

  14 Bridgework

  15 A sense of betrayal

  16 Claw

  17 Get over it

  Part Two

  18 A war

  19 Hicksville

  20 Work in progress

  21 Bad guy

  22 Believe it happened

  23 Seedbed

  24 Appropriate adult

  25 Agony

  26 Good-looking kid situation

  27 Cunning

  28 Smashed faces

  29 Rambling in the night

  Part Three

  30 Dark Net stuff

  31 Unsaid

  32 Foetal

  33 Homework

  34 Full broadcast quality

  35 Cold case

  36 More

  37 Coffin wood

  Part Four

  38 FOTD

  39 The Summoner

  40 Going out normal

  41 The Hereford Issue

  42 Swallow the pill

  43 Get rid

  44 Walks by night

  45 Cou
rting the goddess

  46 Bloodline

  47 At peace

  48 Kingsize

  49 Before he was mad

  50 What can haunt you

  51 Just the one

  52 The song with the big cigar

  53 Only the start

  Part Five

  54 A peg

  55 Grim visitor

  56 Blame

  57 A fence

  58 Timeless beauty

  59 Pulse

  60 What to believe

  61 The cloaked