Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Are you something to do with the little shop?’ Anna asked, a scarlet parka now setting off her yellow scarf. ‘That place where Katherine works?’

  ‘Me? Not exactly, I’m just a… friend of hers. And of Denny.’

  ‘Must be a busy man, her brother,’ Tim said. ‘Never seems to have time to visit her here.’

  Lol tried knocking one more time, harder in case she was still asleep.

  ‘OK if I go round the back and bang on one of the windows?’

  ‘My dear chap, whatever you want.’

  Lol pushed through bushes at one corner. Behind the barn there was, under snow, what must be a small square of lawn up against a low bank. It looked quite pretty – like a cake with pink icing.

  Also, like some exotic confection, its design became more complex as he stared. Pink – but pale brown in places where the thaw had already eroded the snow. Strawberry ice-cream in the middle, sorbet round the edges, up against the back wall made of rubble-stone.

  All it needed was a cherry in the middle, Lol thought in the wild surrealism of the moment. The red woollen beret Merrily used to wear, that would do. If you threw her beret into the centre of this lawn, it would lodge lusciously in the soft, wet, pink snow like a cherry.

  There was a jagged hole in the snow under the nozzle of a pipe poking out of the wall about eighteen inches above the ground.

  They’d bodged the plumbing, he thought. That was the overflow from the bath, and it should empty down into a drain.

  Oh God!

  Lol stood there remembering how completely Moon had changed once they’d reached the door of the barn. Her voice becoming sharp like the night, her eyes glittering like ice under the moon, as she pulled out her keys. She had been talking about Dick Lyden again, and what a clown he was. While separating a long black key and unlocking the door in the glass bay.

  Maybe not such a clown, Lol had thought at the time. Confidence had seemed to click into place the minute Moon arrived back here – the strength of the old settlement around her, the child of the Hill. In Dick’s terms of reference, a fantasy structure: The way we create our destiny. The way we form fate.

  He’d moved to follow her into the barn, but she’d turned in the doorway, somehow stiffening.

  She’d said, No.

  Moon?

  I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to come in.

  He’d stepped back.

  Thank you, Moon had said. Once she had opened the door, the darkness inside seemed to suck her in and thrust him away.

  Now, when Lol walked back round to the front of the barn, he was shaking.

  ‘No luck, old chap?’

  ‘I think we’re going to need those keys, Mr Purefoy,’ Lol said.

  24

  Last Long Prayer

  THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH of St Cosmas and St Damien was almost part of a farmyard situated on the edge of a hamlet among windy-looking fields in the north of the county. Not that far from main roads but Merrily, who thought she knew this county fairly well, had been unaware of it.

  The church was tiny, the size of a small barn, with a little timbered bell-turret at one end.

  St Cosmas and St Damien?

  ‘Fourth-century Mediterranean saints,’ said Major Weston, ‘connected with physicians and surgeons, for some reason. Local doctors hold the occasional service here. Otherwise it’s disused. Absolute bloody tragedy.’

  ‘One of all too many these days, Major.’ Powdered snow blew at Merrily’s legs.

  ‘Call me Nigel,’ suggested Major Weston, whose belligerence had dropped away the moment he saw her. He was about sixty, had a moist and petulant lower lip, and a costly camel coat.

  Merrily followed him around the raised churchyard, pine trees rearing grimly on its edge.

  ‘I think it was the Bishop of Lincoln,’ the Major said, ‘who warned that disused churches were now increasingly falling prey to Satanism. The message seems to be that if your people don’t want them, the Devil’s only too happy to take them on.’

  ‘It’s not that we don’t want them.’

  ‘I know, I know, but you don’t, do you? Otherwise my Fund wouldn’t exist. We maintain nearly three hundred churches at present, and the figure’s going up at an alarming rate. Now, when you think what a comparatively tiny population England had when these lovely old buildings were erected…’

  ‘Yeah,’ Merrily said, ‘tell me about it.’

  They stopped outside the porch. She saw that the single long gothic window in the wall beside it had an iron bar up the middle. On one side lay the farm, and some houses on the other – a stone’s throw away.

  ‘If I was a Satanist, Major, I really don’t think I’d feel too safe performing a black mass here. You wouldn’t be able to chant very loudly, would you, before somebody came in with a torch and a shotgun?’

  ‘That’s what the police said. Must’ve been lunatics – but then that’s what they are, aren’t they? Not normal, these people. Beggars belief.’

  ‘I’ve never met one. I’d rather like to.’

  He peered at her. ‘Would you, by God?’

  ‘Just to try and find out why.’

  ‘What they’ve done in here may just change your mind. Ready to go in?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Not squeamish are you?’

  ‘Let’s hope not.’ She followed him into the porch, and he lifted the latch. ‘There’s no lock!’

  ‘There should be – and there will be. A new one’s in the course of being made, I believe. Perhaps these scum knew that.’

  ‘Meanwhile, the church is left without a lock?’

  ‘You can’t just put any old lock on a building dating back to the twelfth century. In you go, m’dear.’

  Holding the door for her, letting her go in first. A gentleman, ha.

  It was dim and intimate, no immediate echo. None of that sense of Higher Authority you had in most cathedrals, and big churches like her own at Ledwardine.

  It was in fact fascinating, the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien. Quartered by an arcade of stone and a wooden screen with a pulpit in the middle. Two short naves and what seemed to be two chancels with two altars, although she could only see one from where she was standing – a plain wooden table without a cloth.

  Against the far wall, and close to the floor, the stone effigies of a knight in armour and his lady shared that last long prayer.

  Merrily didn’t move. She was reminded of nowhere so much as the little stone Celtic cell where she’d had the vision of the blue and the gold and the lamplit path. Only the smell was different.

  She knew the smells of old churches, and they didn’t usually include urine.

  Before Tim Purefoy was even back with his keys, a big vehicle was roaring up to the barn bay, sloshing through the wet snow. The dull gold, bull-barred Mitsubishi, spattered from wheels to windscreen with snow-slicks and mud, skidded to within a couple of feet of the glass wall.

  Denny Moon slammed out, looking once – hard – at the barn, as though angry it was still there; not burned out, derelict, toppled into rubble. He wore an old leather jacket and a black baseball cap. Wraparound dark glasses, like he feared snowblindness. He took in the encircling trees and the overgrown Leylandii hedge, sucking air through his teeth.

  ‘Fucking place!’

  Lol walked nervously towards the car. ‘Mr Purefoy’s gone for his keys.’

  ‘Fuck that. I’ll kick the door down.’ Denny gave him a black stare. ‘Lol, what is it? What is it you know, man?’

  ‘We just need to get in.’

  ‘Look at you! Something’s scared you. What is it?’

  Tim Purefoy appeared, holding up a long key on an extended wire ring holding also two smaller ones.

  At the same time his wife came round from the back of the barn. She looked stricken. ‘Call… call the police,’ she stammered. ‘Better call the police.’

  Denny gasped and snatched the keys.

  The big room was brightened by snowligh
t from the highest window, exposed trusses the colour of bone.

  ‘Kathy!’ Denny bawled. ‘Kathy!’

  The smell of candlewax. Blobs of it on the floor.

  Denny’s head swivelled. ‘She sleep up there?’ He made for the stairs to the loft. He hadn’t seen the lawn, so he wouldn’t know that what they really needed was the bathroom. ‘Kathy!’

  Two doors behind the stairs: one ajar, through which Lol could see kitchen worktops and the edge of a cooker; the other door shut.

  Lol opened it and went in.

  Into the square, white, bitter-smelling, metal-smelling bathroom, quietly closing the door and snipping the catch, sealing himself in with her. Like he should have done on Saturday night – resisting the hostile thrust of the barn – when she’d said, I don’t want you to come in.

  His back against the door, he saw first, on the wall over the bath like an icon, the photograph of a smiling man standing before a Land Rover.

  On the rim of the bath were pebble-smooth shards of black pottery, arranged in a line.

  ‘No sign,’ he heard Denny shout from upstairs, sounding relieved, almost optimistic, because he hadn’t found her dead in her futon.

  Lol saw the crusted brown tidemark on the porcelain around the overflow grille, like sloppy dinner deposits around a baby’s mouth. Presumably a tap had been left running and the overflow had gulped it all down and regurgitated it on to the snowy lawn, stopping only when the primitive water tank ran dry.

  ‘Lol?’ Denny’s feet descending the stairs. ‘Where’d he go?’

  It was dreamlike. Lol thought at first – from the position of her, the stillness of the tableau – of Ophelia in that sad, famous Pre-Raphaelite painting.

  The thin pine door bulged against him as Denny tried to open it, and then battered it with his fists, making it vibrate against Lol’s back until Lol almost tripped and fell forward towards the bath. And he cried out, ‘Oh God!’ seeing it now as it was: graceless, peaceless, sorrowless – nothing like Ophelia.

  Who wouldn’t have been naked or grinning like Moon was grinning, congealing in her stagnant pool of rich, scummy, pinky-brown, cold water. With eyes open, like frosted glass, and lips retracted over stiff, ridged gums and sharp white teeth.

  Beautiful Moon, so defiantly disgusting now with her cunning, secret, bloodless grin and her blood-pickled fingers below her breasts – on the waterline, on the bloodline. And the wrists ripped open: not nice neat slits – the skin was torn and ruched.

  ‘Lol!’ Denny screamed, and the pressure on Lol’s back eased, telling him Denny was about to hurl himself against the door.

  She’d been here a long time, you could tell. This hadn’t happened this morning or even last night; this had to be Saturday night, maybe only hours after he’d brought her home and meekly taken no for an answer… almost gratefully, because he’d already had the sense of something dark and soiled. He should have said: Moon, there are things we have to talk about. He should have said this long ago – after the crow. He should have gone long ago to Merrily Watkins.

  Swallowing his nausea, he went closer and bent over the bath. On the bottom, between Moon’s legs, lay the eroded filelike blade, ragged and blackened and scabby and old, very old.

  He remembered those slender but unexpectedly hardened hands fouled by crow’s blood, and turned away, and opened the door to Denny.

  I’d like to sleep now, Lol.

  25

  Sad Tosser

  SOPHIE SAID, ‘Was it very horrible?’

  ‘It was, actually.’

  ‘It’s so utterly distressing.’ Sophie’s face creased into shadows. ‘I once read a book by a reformed Satanist who said that when they break into a church and do appalling acts, it has an almost intoxicating effect. Afterwards they feel a terrible elation. Almost… sexual.’

  ‘Well,’ Merrily said, ‘by the very nature of what they are, they’re not going to walk out feeling disgusted and nauseous, are they?’

  Sophie shuddered.

  When she’d gone, Merrily rang Huw Owen.

  No reply, no answering machine.

  She thought about calling Lol to rearrange that chance encounter with his troubled friend, Moon, but then Sophie came through again.

  ‘Merrily, it’s Chief Inspector Howe on the line.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Ms Watkins?’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Ms Watkins, I, er… I’d like to consult you – as an expert.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Howe said.

  ‘Heavens.’ What seemed likely was that the Superintendent, after a lunch with the Bishop, had strongly suggested Annie Howe consult Merrily over something, anything. Howe would be disinclined, as acting DCI, to make waves.

  ‘Ms Watkins?’

  ‘Sorry, just swallowing one of the pills I’ve been prescribed for moments of overexcitement.’

  Howe sighed. ‘Perhaps we could meet. I gather you’ve been cleaning up after devil-worshippers.’

  ‘Blanket term, Annie. I’m not convinced.’

  ‘Good. That’s what I wanted to discuss with you.’

  ‘One o’clock? Pub?’

  ‘No, I’ll come to your office,’ Annie Howe said, keeping it official, hanging up.

  Sophie came back again. ‘The Reverend Owen now. Take it on my phone if you like. I have to powder my nose.’

  It seemed that Sophie didn’t feel she was ready to hear about this incident in detail.

  ‘Hard to get rid of the taste, in’t it, lass?’

  ‘Hard to lose the smell.’

  ‘Number twos as well?’

  ‘Not that I could detect, but I didn’t go prying into too many dark corners.’

  ‘Aye, well, your problem here,’ Huw said, ‘is deciding whether this is the real thing or just kids who think it’d be fun to play at being Satanists for an hour or so.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t get away with just playing at it.’

  ‘In my experience you don’t, but let’s not worry about poor little dabblers at this stage. Tell me again about the bird.’

  ‘Well, it was… had been a crow or a raven. Is there much difference? I don’t know. It had been cut open, and its entrails spread over the altar. There are kind of twin chancels in this church, but this was the real altar, on the right.’

  ‘Two chancels?’

  ‘Side by side. Very unusual. Quite a special little place.’

  ‘Let me have a think.’

  Merrily looked down from Sophie’s window at white roofs on cars and people hurrying. Hereford people were essentially country folk, and country folk had no great love for snow. Certainly not November snow. Never a good sign; winter was supposed to settle in slowly. What if this went on until March or April?

  ‘Two chancels,’ Huw said. ‘They might see this as representing a dualism: left and right, darkness and light.’

  ‘Actually, there was some blood on the other table, too, as if the sacrificed crow had been brought from one side to the other.’

  ‘How do you know it was sacrificed?’

  ‘I don’t. It would be nice – nicer – to think it was already dead, and they just wanted to make a mess. Huw, the way you’re talking suggests you think this was the real thing.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘If it was the real thing, what would be the motive? What would they be after?’

  ‘Kicks… a buzz… power. Or – biggest addiction of the lot – the pursuit of knowledge. Nowt you won’t do to feed your craving. Ordinary mortals – expendable like cattle. Kindness and mercy – waste of energy. Love’s a drain, faith’s for feeble minds. Can you understand that? To know is all. Can you get a handle on that?’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m a Christian.’ Working towards it, anyway. Made it to the pious bitch stage.

  ‘Mind, a crow splattered over a country church, that still has the touch of low-grade headbangers. What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘M
ajor Weston was asking for reconsecration. I said that wasn’t necessary, as a consecration’s for all time.’

  ‘Correct. What you proposing instead?’

  ‘A lesser exorcism, do you think?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I was thinking early evening, if we could get some people together then. I wouldn’t like to think of the place getting snowed in before we could do it.’

  ‘You want me to come over?’

  ‘I couldn’t ask you to do that.’

  ‘Give me directions,’ Huw said. ‘I’ll be there at five.’

  ‘I can’t keep leaning on you.’

  ‘I like it,’ Huw said. ‘Keeps me off the drink.’

  Merrily smiled. She saw Annie Howe, in her white belted mac, walking rapidly out of King Street carrying a briefcase. ‘I… suppose you’ve heard about Dobbs.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Any thoughts on that?’

  ‘Poor bugger?’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Huw said.

  Sophie pulled up an extra chair for Howe and left them in her office. The Acting DCI kept her mac on. She hated informality.

  ‘My knowledge of police demarcation’s fairly negligible,’ Merrily said, ‘but aren’t you a bit senior to be investigating the minor desecration of a country church?’

  ‘I’m not sure I am.’ Annie Howe brought a tabloid newspaper from her case and placed it before Merrily, on Sophie’s desk. ‘You’ve seen this, I imagine.’

  A copy of last night’s Evening News. The anchor story:

  WYE DEATH: MAN NAMED.

  ‘Oh, this is the guy…’ Merrily had scarcely given it another thought. All memories of that night were still dominated by Denzil Joy. She scanned the text.

  … identified as 32-year-old Paul Sayer, from Chepstow. Mr Sayer had not been reported missing for over a week because his family understood he was on holiday abroad. Acting Det. Chief Inspector Annie Howe, who is leading the investigation, said, ‘We are very anxious to talk to anyone who may have seen Mr Sayer since November 19. We believe he may have arrived in Hereford by bus or train and…