by Phil Rickman
‘Merrily needs a bit of quiet,’ Huw said.
‘Yes, I shall leave you alone and go out to contemplate the moonlight on the snow.’
‘Aye, give us quarter of an hour, there’s a good lad.’
‘I know his type,’ Huw said as the latch dropped into place behind Kimball. ‘Gets to the age when the bishops are looking younger. How are you, lass?’
She hugged Huw. It was the first time they’d been together since the Deliverance course. He wore what looked like an airforce greatcoat and a yellow bobble-hat.
‘You all right for this, Merrily?’
‘Sure.’ She looked around, sniffed the air, could only smell disinfectant.
‘Who cleared it up?’ Huw asked.
‘I did. Couldn’t ask anybody else, could I? Buried the… remains… just over the wall. Little ceremony.’
‘Hands and knees wi’ a scrubbing brush, eh? What you got in mind for tonight?’
‘We’re looking at minor exorcism.’
‘Never go over the top.’
‘A cleansing. Holy water.’
‘Go right round it, I would. Take one of them coppers with you. Never had a copper at one of mine. Right, make a start? You want to pray together first?’
‘That would be good.’
They sat side by side on the pew nearest the pulpit. ‘I’ll keep it simple,’ Huw said, ‘then we’ll have a bit of quiet. Lord, be with us in this tainted place tonight. Help this lass, Merrily, to repossess it, in Your name, from whatever dark shadows may still hang around it. Protect her this night, amen.’
‘Amen,’ Merrily added.
And, during the ensuing period of quiet, she felt nothing – at first.
When she closed her eyes, she saw neither the blue nor the gold, nor the lamplit path. She saw nothing but a swirling grey untinged by the lamps and the candles.
She was not comfortable on the strange, sloping pew. Found she was squirming a bit, her cassock feeling clammy again. She was actually sweating; she felt damp down her spine. Come on, calm down. She undid the cloak, let it slip from her shoulders. Opened her eyes, but lowered the lids, letting them relax. Shifted position again, and was aware of Huw’s brief sideways glance.
Lamplight flushed the sandstone faces of the knight and his lady, raised only inches above the floor to her left. They were believed, she now knew, to be John and Agnes de la Bere. The de la Beres were lords of the manor for much of the Middle Ages. John wore armour and carried a shield; his wife was gowned and wimpled, slim and girlishly pretty. Another knight, probably John’s father, Robert, lay in the sub-chancel in front with his wife Margaret. Some effigies were terrifying, but these were courtly and benign and truthful. John de la Bere was stocky, had narrow eyes and a big nose.
In other words, she felt OK about them. And about the church. So why was she so uneasy?
She closed her eyes again, pressed her hands formally together, like the hands of John and Agnes de la Bere, and murmured St Patrick’s Breastplate in her mind. She smelled the pine disinfectant she’d borrowed from the farm, and ignored the slow-burning itch which occurred in the palm of her left hand and then the right, as though transmitted from one to the other.
Huw was watching her openly now. She was absolutely desperate for a smoke. She shifted again. The itch in her hands was worse; she couldn’t ignore it, had to concentrate hard to stop herself pulling her hands apart and rubbing her palms on the edge of the pew.
When she could bear it no longer and yearned for relief, she was at last given some help.
Scritch-scratch.
The tiny bird-claw, the curling nail on a yellow finger. The smell of disinfectant had grown sweet and rancid, and was pulled into her nostrils like thin string and down into her throat.
Cat faeces and gangrene.
A rough cough came up like vomit. Merrily began to cough and cough and couldn’t stop. She folded up on the pew, arms flailing, eyes streaming. She felt Huw’s arms around her, heard him praying frantically under his breath, clutching her to him, and still she couldn’t stop coughing and slid down his legs to the stone floor, and he pulled away from her and she heard him scrabbling about.
‘Drink,’ he said urgently. Then a hard ring of glass pushing at her lips, chinking on her teeth.
She gripped it and sucked and Huw held it there.
Merrily fell back against the pew, holy water dribbling down her chin, the lamps and candles blurring into a blaze. Huw brought her gently to her feet and put her cloak around her shoulders.
‘Out of here, lass,’ he said mildly. ‘Don’t come back, eh?’
28
Crone with a Toad
LOL SAW THAT Dick Lyden had become aware of deep waters and was now backing into the paddling area. Dick poured Glenmorangie for Lol and himself. He still looked shaken: not terribly upset exactly, more like unnerved. Almost certainly this was the first time a client of his had taken her own life.
An unexpected minefield then, psychotherapy.
Dick sat down behind his desk lamp, some art-deco thing with a cold blue shade. It created distance.
‘And the police, Lol… the police are saying what?’
‘Keeping the lid on it. No crime, no guilty parties. Probably doing their best to disregard the bizarre bits.’
Dick had finally got through on the phone, demanding Lol should come round at once. Needing to know, for his peace of mind and his professional security, everything that had happened and how it might rebound on him.
This was no longer jolly old Dick revelling in his newfound status as analyst, delightedly knitting strands of experience together into some stupid woolly jumper.
Lol said, ‘As I understand it, they don’t particularly want to know if it’s the same sword, basically.’
‘That’s quite understandable. A suicide is not a murder. This… this wrist-cutting is still not uncommon, I gather, in an age of subtler methods. Not a difficult way to go. More distressing, perhaps, for whoever finds the body. And the weapon? An important symbol for Moon, no doubt, under the regrettable circumstances, but irrelevant as far as the police are concerned. But what the hell was Denny doing sitting on this information? Would I have supported her plan to move into that place if I’d known her father had done it in that actual same… When’s the inquest?’
Meaning: Will I be called? What am I going to say?
‘Going to be opened tomorrow, but that’s just so Denny can give formal identification of the body and they can release her for burial. It’ll then be adjourned for weeks – maybe months – while they put the medical evidence together.’
‘They haven’t been to see me yet.’
‘Maybe you don’t matter, Dick,’ Lol said coldly.
He’d hate to think that Dick was counting on the inquest being economical with the facts, so there’d be more unpublicized material available for his own psychological paper on Moon’s case. He’d really hate to think that.
But the inquest was going to get it all wrong, wasn’t it?
Just that Lol couldn’t see through to the truth either.
‘Look… ahm…’ Dick leaned back, well behind his blue lamp. ‘Lol, I don’t want you to blame yourself for this. You tried to get close to her and it didn’t work out. Perhaps that was a mistake, but we’ll never know. We must accept we’ll never know, and… and… and let it go.’
A subtle restructuring of history here: like it had been Lol’s sole decision to try to get close to Moon, with Dick’s tentative, guarded approval.
‘Well,’ Dick stood up, ‘thanks for coming over. Ahm… this won’t affect the boy’s recording, will it? Denny… well, obviously something creative to occupy his mind.’
Tuneless Little Twats with Fender Strats.
‘I’m sure it’s exactly what he needs,’ said Lol.
‘Good man,’ Dick said. ‘The boy, you see… the boy’s been very difficult and uncommunicative, and when he does communicate, it’s with an unpleasant teenage sneer. Goes out eve
ry night now, pushing it as far as he can get. When he’s not with his band, he’s with some girl. Some girl’s got her hooks into him, so I would rather he was with the band in Denny’s studio. At least until after Sunday.’
‘Why Sunday?’
‘His enthronement as Boy Bishop in the Cathedral, during evensong. By the actual Bishop, and before a packed Cathedral. Just let’s get that over with.’
‘You still think he might back out, right?’
‘Not if the little shit knows what’s good for him,’ Dick said through his teeth. Then he laughed at his own venom. ‘Look, Lol, Moon was ill – more ill than any of us knew. Delusional. Shouldn’t have been on her own there. We’re all to blame for that – Denny, you, ah… me, and the Health Service. All I’m saying… the police are right. Let’s not overcomplicate things, or see things that might not be there. That’s how myths are created.’
‘Right,’ Lol said. A small fury ignited inside him.
‘Good man.’ Dick clapped him on the shoulder.
It was thawing at last. Clouds crowded the moon as Lol crossed the main road towards the refashioned ruins of the city wall.
This CD would be his last work for Dick Lyden. He hadn’t been to his psychology night-class for over a fortnight.
The city wall glistened in the moonlight.
So the version of Moon’s death which the inquest would establish would be untrue. The verdict – unless the post-mortem threw up something unexpected – would be a straightforward Suicide While the Balance of Mind was Disturbed. And no blindingly obvious warnings from the coroner afterwards; there was nothing anyone else would learn from this.
And when you left her at the door on Saturday evening, how would you describe Miss Moon’s state of mind?
Kind of… intense. She was researching a book. About her family. I had the impression she couldn’t wait to get back to it.
It was true. When he’d left her, there was no indication at all that she might—
If you were the police, Denny had said, would you want a hint of anything paranormal?
Why had Denny said that? It was the first time he’d ever mentioned the paranormal in connection with Moon, or indeed any connection at all. But how well did he really know Denny? Only well enough to know now that Denny had been putting up a front to conceal unvoiced fears. Perhaps if he’d told Denny, rather than Dick, about the crow and about Moon seeing her father…
Oh, hell!
Lol stood on the medieval bridge, gazing over the parapet into the Wye, numbed by a quiet panic. He didn’t know what to do, which street to go down. Directionless. Working with Dick, while it hadn’t felt exactly right, at least had been a new rope to hold on to.
Very soon he would reach the main road again, having walked in a complete circle. He felt like some aimless vagrant – or worse, closer to the truth, a mental patient returned to the care of the community. He turned abruptly, moved back up Bridge Street, past the off-licence and Peter Bell’s Typewriter Shop, the snow on the pavement reduced to slivers of slush.
Two young women walked out of a darkened doorway about five yards ahead of him and he saw, by an all-night-lighted shopfront, that one of them was Jane Watkins. Perhaps she noticed him; she turned sharply away and hurried on, slightly ahead of her companion.
The doorway belonged to Pod’s, a healthfood café. He’d been in there just once: it was dark and primitive and woody, with secondhand tables and rickety chairs – people who opened healthfood restaurants were into recycling and no frills. On the whitewashed walls, in thin black frames, he remembered, were reproductions of drawings by Mervyn Peake: twisted figures, spindly figures, bulbous figures, in gloomy landscapes. Lol recalled eating a soya-sausage roll under one showing a crone with a toad. He hadn’t stayed long.
When she got in, she put out some food for Ethel and went up to the bathroom, which was still like a 1950s public lavatory, with black and white tiles and a shower the size of an iron streetlamp. She sat on the lavatory, head in hands, her stomach churning. She heard Jane’s key turn in the door, but it was quite a while before Merrily could go down.
‘You’re ill,’ Jane said. Looking up from the omelette mix in the pan. The sight of the yellow slop made Merrily want to throw up.
She shivered damply inside her dressing-gown. ‘I’m sorry, flower, I can’t eat… anything. I’m really sorry.’
‘I’d better stay off school tomorrow and look after you,’ Jane said promptly, ‘if you’re no better by then.’
‘No, thank you… I mean, certainly not.’
‘How long have you been in?’
‘Not long.’ Merrily leaned against the Aga rail next to her daughter.
‘How did it go?’
‘All right, I think.’
‘Did you feel ill then?’
‘Yes. In fact, I… couldn’t do it. But Huw was there. Huw did it.’
Jane sniffed, her eyes narrowing. ‘You’ve been drinking.’
‘Hey, what is this? I called into a pub for something to settle my stomach.’
Everybody trying not to stare at the cloaked figure with the bottom of her cassock showing: the first female whisky-priest in the diocese.
‘Hmm,’ Jane said, ‘why don’t you go to bed? I’ll bring you a drink up.’
‘Thanks, flower.’ She thought she might be about to cry.
Again.
She took up a hot-water bottle, dumped her cassock and surplice in the wash-bin, lay between the sheets and sweated.
She’d been here before: a panic-attack at her own installation service at Ledwardine Church. And hallucinations…
But what kind of sick, warped mind conjures up the filth of Denzil Joy?
Dear God.
Franny Bliss and his colleague had watched her hobble to the car, perhaps waiting to see her safely back to the church of St Cosmas and St Damien, but she hadn’t returned. Out of here, lass.
It was all over. Finished.
Jane brought her hot chocolate.
‘There’s a drop of brandy in it.’
‘You’ll have me at the Betty Ford Clinic, flower.’
Jane smiled wanly.
‘Where did you go tonight?’
‘Just… you know… to see a couple of friends.’
‘They could come here sometime. Lots of room.’
‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Maybe sometime.’
Merrily sank back into the sweat-damp pillow and slithered into a feverish sleep. At times she heard bleeps and voices – which might have been on the answering machine or in her hot, fogged head – like satanic static.
Just before midnight, the bedside phone bleeped.
‘Huw?’ she said feverishly.
‘You were asleep, Merrily?’
‘Yes. Hello, Eileen.’
‘Your man’s back,’ Cullen said, ‘with his candles and his bottles.’
‘Oh.’
‘I said I’d call you.’
She clawed for consciousness. ‘It’s not… visiting time, is it?’
‘Jesus, you must have been sound asleep. Being as Mr Dobbs is in a side ward, any time is visiting time, within reason. This is not exactly within my idea of reason, but the visitor’s a very plausible feller. Whatever the hell kind of weirdness he’s getting up to in there, I have to say I quite took to him.’
‘You… talked to him?’
‘He was very apologetic. Said he’d have come earlier but he had some urgent business to see to… Are you still there, Merrily?’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Oh… late fifties. Longish, straggly grey hair. He had a bobble-hat and he was in this auld blue airman’s coat. Talked like… who’s that feller? Alan Bennett? But a real auld hippy, you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s still in there, doing his stuff around Mr Dobbs with his candles. Probably be gone by the time you get here. I could try to keep him talking, if you like…’
‘No,’ Merrily said bleakly, ‘it’s all right now
, Eileen. I don’t think I want to see him.’
29
Fog
AT FIRST IT felt like the start of a cold: that filthy, metallic tainting of the back of the throat. And then she was fully awake – knowing what it was, panting in terror.
He’s here!
Rolling out of bed, breath coming in sobs, rolling over and scrambling on to her knees, she began to mutter the Breastplate, groping on the carpet for her pectoral cross.
‘… by invocation of the same
‘The Three in One and One in Three.
‘Of whom all nature hath creation.
‘Eternal Father, Spirit, Word…’
And she fell back against the bottom of the bed, gulping air.
Gone? Perhaps.
After a while she sat up, before reaching instinctively for the cigarettes and lighter, pulling herself to her feet, into the old woollen dressing-gown and out of the cold, uncosy bedroom.
She ached. The light from the landing window was the colour of damp concrete. The garden below looked like her head felt: choked with fog. She stood swaying at the top of the stairs, dizzy, thought she would fall, and hugged the newel post on the landing, the cigarette dangling from her mouth. Repeatedly scraping her thumb against the Zippo, but the light wouldn’t come. Sweating and shaking with panic and betrayal.
‘Mum?’
What?
‘Mum!’
The kid stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking frightened.
Merrily heard a single letter dropping through the box. The postman.
Normality.
She began to cough. No such thing.
Because there was no light, as such, penetrating Capuchin Lane, Lol overslept and awoke to the leaden grind of a harmonium from the shop below, a deep and doomy female voice.
Nico. Mournful, sinister old Nico songs from the seventies. Unshaven, Lol made it down to the shop, past Moon’s lonely mountain-bike, and found Viv, the new manager: a sloppyhippy granny, old friend of Denny’s.
‘Do you like Nico, Lol?’
‘Sometimes,’ Lol said.
