Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘What are we worried about then?’

  ‘Did we say we were worried?’

  The bored, half-closed eyes, the sardonic tuck at the corner of the mouth. It was pure Sean – as when Merrily was trying to quiz him about some dubious client. You don’t see your daughter for a week, and in the interim she’s readmitted her father’s soiled spirit.

  Merrily tried again. ‘I, er… I missed you, flower.’

  ‘Really?’ Jane tilted her soft, pale face into a supportive hand, elbow on the table. ‘I’d have thought you had far too much to think about, poncing about in your robes and practising your Out, Demons, Out routine with the soul police.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what this is about – the soul police? You think I’m…’

  What? An anachronism? A joke? Though Jane was basically spiritual, she just didn’t believe the Church of England was. Bad enough to have your own mother walking around in a dogcollar, never mind the holy water and the black bag now. Was that it?

  That was probably too simple. Nothing about Jane was ever really simple.

  A man striding up the street towards All Saints glanced through the window, blinked, paused, strode on. Oh God, not him, not now. Merrily turned away from the window, stared across the table at Jane.

  The kid pushed back her tumbling hair. ‘OK, look…’

  Yes? Merrily leaned forward. A crack, an opening? Yes…

  Jane said, ‘I’m uncomfortable about what you’re doing, Merrily.’

  ‘I see.’

  Jesus. Merrily? A major development. Now we are sixteen, time to dump this Mum nonsense. We are two grown women, equals.

  This needed some thinking about.

  ‘I don’t think you do see,’ Jane said.

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘They’re dragging you in, aren’t they?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Church. It’s all political.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘All those fat, smug C-of-E gits, they’re worried about losing their power and their influence, so they’re appointing cool bishops: smooth, glossy people like Michael Hunter… Mick Hunter, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Bishops are still appointed by Downing Street.’

  ‘Yeah, well, exactly. Old mate of Tony Blair’s. I can just see them swapping chords for ancient Led Zeppelin riffs. Like, Mick’s superficially cool and different, but he’s really Establishment underneath.’

  ‘Phew,’ said Merrily theatrically. ‘Thank God, my daughter has finally become a revolutionary. I thought it was never going to happen.’

  Jane glared at her.

  ‘You really don’t understand, do you?’

  ‘Sure. You think I’m a glossy, superficial bimbo who’s—’

  ‘More like a trainee storm-trooper, actually.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look…’ Jane’s eyes flashed. ‘It seemed really interesting at first when you said you were going to do this Deliverance training. I’m thinking, yeah, this is what it’s all about: the Church actually investigating the supernatural nitty-gritty instead of just spouting all this Bible crap. And this course and everything, it all seemed really mysterious. So, like… Wednesday night, I go back to the vicarage to feed Ethel. I think maybe I should check the answering machine, see if there’s anything urgent. So I go into your office and I find… hang on…’

  From a pocket of her jeans, Jane dragged a compacted square of printed paper which she opened out on the tabletop.

  ‘And suddenly I saw what it was all really about.’

  Merrily pulled towards her a Deliverance Study Group pamphlet heralding a forthcoming seminar entitled:

  NEW AGE… OLD ENEMY.

  She’d forgotten about it. It had come in a package from the DSG the morning she left for the Brecon Beacons.

  ‘I haven’t read it, flower.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘But, sure, I can guess what it’s about.’

  She picked up the leaflet.

  Meditation-groups, sweat-lodges, healing-circles… it may all seem innocuous, but so-called New Age pursuits are often the marijuana which leads to the heroin of hard-core Satanism. Introducing the discussion, Canon Stephen Rigbey will examine the allure of alternative spirituality and suggest ways of discouraging harmful experimentation.

  Merrily said steadily, ‘You happen to notice the key word in this?’

  ‘Don’t try and talk all around it.’

  ‘It’s “discussion” – meaning debate.’

  ‘It’s bloody spiritual fascism,’ said Jane.

  ‘Oh, Jane, listen—’

  ‘You listen, for once. The New Age is about… it’s about millions of people saying: I want to know more… I want an inner life… I want to commune with nature and the cosmos and things, find out about what we’re really doing here and who’s running the show, and like what part I can play in the Great Scheme of Things. Right?’

  ‘Pretty much like Christianity, in fact.’ Merrily lit a cigarette.

  ‘No, that’s bollocks.’ Jane shook her head furiously. ‘The Church is like: Oh, you don’t have to know anything; you just come along every Sunday and sing some crappy Victorian hymns and stuff and you’ll go to heaven.’

  ‘Jane, we’ve had this argument before. You just want to reduce it to—’

  ‘And anybody steps out of line, it’s: Oh, you’re evil, you’re a heretic, you’re an occultist and we’re gonna like burn you or something! Which was how you got the old witch-hunts, because the Church has always been on this kind of paternalistic power trip and doesn’t want people to search for the truth. Like it used to be science and Darwinism and stuff they were worried about, now it’s the New Age because that’s like real practical spirituality. And it’s come at a time when the Church is really feeble and pathetic, and the bishops and everybody are shit scared of it all going down the pan, so now we get this big Deliverance initiative, which is really just about… about suppression.’ Jane sat back in her chair with a bump.

  ‘Wow,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re gonna say something patronizing. Don’t.’ Jane snatched back the leaflet and folded it up again. Evidence obviously. ‘I bet you were mega-flattered when Mick offered you the job, weren’t you? I bet it never entered your head that they want people like you because you’re quite young and attractive and everything, and like—’

  ‘It did, actually.’

  ‘Like you’re not going to come over as some crucifix-waving loony, what?’

  ‘It did occur to me.’ Merrily cupped both hands around her cigarette; she wasn’t sure if they allowed smoking in here. ‘Of course it did. It’s still occurring to me. Not your let’s-stamp-out-the-New-Age stuff, because I can’t quite believe that. But, yeah, I think he does want me for reasons other than that I’m obviously interested in… phenomena, whatever. Which is one reason I haven’t yet said yes to the job.’

  Jane blinked once and they sat and stared at one another. Merrily thought about all the other questions that were occurring to her. And what Huw Owen had said to them all as they gathered outside the chapel in the last minutes of the course.

  Maybe you should analyse your motives. Are you doing this out of a desire to help people cope with psychic distress? Or is it in a spirit of, shall we say, personal enquiry? Think how much deeper your faith would be if you had evidence of life after death. How much stronger your commitment to the calling if you had proof of the existence of supernatural evil. If that’s the way you’re thinking, you need to consider very carefully after you leave here. And then, for Christ’s sake, forget this. Do something else.

  Merrily dragged raggedly on her cigarette.

  ‘You really want it, though, don’t you?’ Jane said. ‘You really, really want it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Merrily lied.

  Jane smiled.

  ‘I have a lot of thinking to do,’
Merrily said.

  ‘You going to tell Mick you’re in two minds?’

  ‘I think I shall be avoiding the Bishop for a while.’

  ‘Ha.’ Jane was looking over her mother’s left shoulder.

  Merrily said wearily, ‘He just came in, didn’t he?’

  ‘I think I’ll leave you to it. I’ll go and have a mooch around Waterstone’s and Andy’s. See you back at the car at six?’

  The waitress arrived with the tea.

  ‘The Bishop can have mine if he likes,’ Jane said.

  4

  Moon

  IT WAS WHAT happened with the crow, after the rain on Dinedor Hill. This was when Lol Robinson actually began to be spooked by Moon.

  As distinct from sorry for Moon. Puzzled by Moon. Fascinated by Moon.

  And attracted to her, of course. But anything down that road was not an option. It was not supposed to be that kind of relationship.

  Most people having their possessions carried into a new home would need to supervise the operation, make sure nothing got broken. Moon had shrugged, left them to get on with it, and melted away into the rain and her beloved hill.

  There really wasn’t very much stuff to move in. Moon didn’t even have a proper bed. When the removal men had gone, Lol went up to the Iron Age ramparts to find her.

  He walked up through the woods, not a steep slope because the barn was quite close to the flattened summit where the ancient camp had been, the Iron Age village of circular thatched huts. Nothing remained of it except dips and hollows, guarded now by huge old trees, and by the earthen ramparts at the highest point.

  And this was where he found Moon, where the enormous trees parted to reveal the city of Hereford laid out at your feet like an offering.

  Lol was aware that some people called the hill a holy hill, though he wasn’t sure why. He should ask Moon. The ancient mysteries of Dinedor swam in her soul.

  She was standing with her back to him, next to a huge beech tree which still wore most of its leaves. Her hair hung almost to the waist of the long medieval sort of dress she wore under a woollen shawl.

  Making Lol think of drawings of fairies by Arthur Rackham and the centrefolds of those quasi-mystical albums from the early seventies – the ones which had first inspired him to write songs. The kind of songs which were already going out of fashion when Lol’s band, Hazey Jane, won their first recording contract.

  Moon would still have been at primary school then. She seemed to have skipped a whole generation, if not two. Hippy nouvelle. Down in the city, she sometimes looked pale and nervy, distanced from everything. Up here she was connected.

  Dick Lyden, the psychotherapist, had noticed this and given his professional blessing to Moon’s plan, despite the fears of her brother Denny, who was jittery as hell about it. ‘She can’t do this. You got to stop her. SHE CANNOT LIVE THERE! OUT OF THE FUCKING QUESTION!’

  But she was a grown woman. What were they supposed to do, short of getting her committed to a psychiatric hospital? Lol, who’d been through that particular horror himself, was now of the opinion that it should never happen to anyone who was not dangerously insane.

  When he first saw Moon on the ramparts, even though her face was turned away, he thought she’d never seemed more serene.

  She glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Yes.’ She turned back to the view over the city. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it? Look. Look at the Cathedral and All Saints. Isn’t that amazing?’

  From here, even though they were actually several hundred yards apart, the church steeple and the Cathedral tower overlapped. The sky around them was a strange, burned-out orange.

  Moon said, ‘Many of the ley-lines through other towns, you can’t see them any more because of new high-rise buildings, but of course there aren’t any of those in Hereford. The skyline remains substantially the same.’

  Lol realized he’d seen an old photograph of this view, taken in the 1920s by Alfred Watkins, the Hereford gentleman who’d first noticed that prehistoric stones and mounds and the medieval churches on their sites often seemed to occur on imaginary straight lines running across the landscape. Most archaeologists thought this was a rubbish theory, but Katherine Moon was not like most archaeologists. ‘It’s at least spiritually valid,’ she’d said once. He wasn’t sure what she meant.

  ‘Moon,’ he said now, ‘why do some people call it a holy hill?’

  She didn’t have to think about it. ‘The line goes through four ancient places of worship, OK? Ending at a very old church in the country. But it starts here, and this is the highest point. So all these churches, including the Cathedral, remain in its shadow.’

  ‘In the poetic sense.’

  ‘In the spiritual sense. This hill is the mother of the city. The camp here was the earliest proper settlement, long before there was a town down there. Over a thousand Celtic people lived up here.’ She paused. ‘My ancestors.’

  There was a touching tremor of pride in her voice.

  ‘So it’s kind of…’ Lol hesitated, ‘… holy in the pagan sense.’

  ‘It’s just holy.’ Moon still had her back to him. ‘This was before the time of Christ. Over a thousand people keeping sheep and storing grain, doing their spinning and weaving and dyeing. It would’ve been idyllic – for a time.’

  ‘What happened to them? The Dinedor People.’

  ‘Some of them never went away. And the spirit remains.’

  Moon gazed down over the spread of the city towards the distant Black Mountains and Welsh border. Slowly she turned towards him.

  ‘And some… some of us have returned.’

  He saw tears shining in her eyes.

  And then he saw the black thing clasped to her stomach.

  Katherine Moon…

  Dick Lyden, the therapist, had briefed Lol as best he could about three months ago.

  Twenty-six. Bright girl, quite a good degree in archaeology, but an unfortunate history of instability. Runs in the family, evidently. Her brother Denny, he’s the sanest of them; might look like a New Age traveller, but Denny’s a businessman, has his head screwed on.

  After university, Dick said, Katherine had spent a couple of years freelancing on various archaeological digs across Britain. This was how she became obsessed with dead Celtic civilizations. Began wearing primitive clothing and strange jewellery, smoking too much dope, tripping out on magic-mushroom tea. When she arrived back in Hereford, the Katherine bit had gone; she was just Moon, and more than a little weird.

  The reason she’d come back to Hereford was the lure of the big Cathedral Close dig. Also, perhaps, the impending death of her mother – as if Moon had sensed this coming. Her mother had died after several years in and out of expensive psychiatric residential homes – one of the reasons Denny had kept working so hard. Now it looked like he had another one to provide for.

  But Denny’s wife, Maggie, had decreed that Katherine wasn’t living with them, no way – this stemming from the Christmas before last, when Moon had come to stay and Maggie had found her stash under the baby’s cot. What a dramatic Christmas that had been. Now it was: Let her take her inheritance, smoke it, snort it, inject it into her arm… Just keep the mad bitch well out of our lives.

  No wonder Maggie was paranoid. Denny’s mother seemed to have picked up psychiatric problems simply by marrying into the Moon family, like their instability was infectious.

  Meanwhile, Katherine had flipped again. Bought some speed from a dealer in Hereford, disappeared into pubs and clubs for three days, and been pulled in by the police after nicking two skirts from Next. Denny had taken her to Dick Lyden, as part of the deal for a conditional discharge by Hereford magistrates.

  He’d refurbished the flat over one of his shops for her, suggesting she ran the store for a while. Knowing this wasn’t entirely satisfactory – right in the city centre, too convenient for pubs and clubs and dealers, it was not really where he’d w
anted her. But where did he want her? Well, somewhere safe. Somewhere he wouldn’t have to visit her too often and risk domestic strife.

  But certainly not Dinedor Hill. Not in a million years. As for fucking Dyn Farm…

  We got to stop her, man! Denny with his head in his hands, beating it on the shop counter when he heard about the barn. She can’t DO this!

  But Moon had the money from her mother’s bequest. She’d already signed the lease with the latest people to own the farmhouse and its Grade Two listed outbuildings.

  Think about it this way, Denny, Dick Lyden had suggested. The hill might have terrible memories for you, but she was just a child at the time. She has no memories of it at all. To Moon it’s simply the birthright of which she was robbed. So going back to the hill – to part of the actual family farm – could be a healing thing. Who knows? Might even be the making of her. If I were you, Denny, and I couldn’t disguise my feelings, I’d keep my distance. Now she’s done it, it would not be good for her to be exposed to any negativity.

  And then Dick had said, Tell you what, why don’t we get Lol here to keep an eye on her? Most inoffensive chap I know, this. Patting Lol on the arm. No threat, you see? She mustn’t feel pressured in any way – that’s the important thing.

  So Lol Robinson, ex rock-star (almost), sometime songwriter, former mental patient, had become Moon’s minder. Possibly because no one else really wanted to take that responsibility.

  But that was OK. Lol needed some responsibility. It was fine.

  Until this.

  The rain had begun again. It misted Lol’s glasses and made a glossy slick of Moon’s waist-length hair, falling black and limp down her back.

  As black and limp as the dead crow she held.

  She was leaning back against the tree now, her right hand cupped under the bird.

  ‘Moon?’ Lol took a step backwards, stumbled to his knees in the mud, looking up at her. She was beautiful. Her big eyes were penetrating, like an owl’s.

  ‘Look,’ she said.

  There was a spreading patch of blood, already the size of a dinner plate, on her dress from the stomach to the groin.