Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Possibly a church. And then there’s the inevitable passinground-the-chalice sequence.’

  ‘Black Mass?’

  ‘Someone drinks from the chalice, and there’s residue on the mouth suggestive of blood. But, as I say, the quality is appalling.’

  ‘You see, on the one hand,’ Merrily said, ‘the Black Mass is the best-known of all satanic rituals, and probably the easiest to carry out if you’re just idiots with a warped idea of fun. You just do everything in reverse – say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, et cetera. And you pervert everything – urinate in the chalice or… use blood instead of wine. Blood is the aspect which could, on the other hand, mean serious business. Blood represents the lifeforce, and it’s seen as the most potent of all magical substances. If you want to make something happen, you use real blood.’

  ‘Of course, we have no way of knowing whether this is. It looks too thin for ketchup, but it could be soy sauce or something.’

  ‘I’m not being much help. Am I?’

  ‘It’s more a question of what help you might be in the future,’ Howe said. ‘We’ve failed to identify a single person who’s been involved in any… any activity with Sayer. Or, indeed, with serious satanic activity of any kind. That’s not including the self-publicists, of course.’

  ‘When did you ever see a serious, heavy-duty, educated Satanist stripped off in the News of the World?’

  ‘You mean – as with organized crime – the big operators are the outwardly respectable types you’d never suspect?’

  ‘I suppose that’s a good parallel.’

  ‘It’s also largely a myth,’ said Howe. ‘The Mr Bigs of this world are very rare, and we do know who they are. But I’m still interested. Do you personally believe there are high-powered practitioners with big houses and executive posts?’

  ‘How would I know? I’m only a village vicar. But if Sayer was just a wanker, perhaps he was playing out of his league.’

  ‘You mean, if he was regarded by some serious and outwardly respectable practitioner as a potential embarrassment…’

  ‘Or he was getting too ambitious. Or he angered some rival… group. I’m told there’s a lot of jealousy and infighting and power-struggling among certain occult sects.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘It was discussed during a course I was sent on. Is this what you wanted to hear?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We were told that there are basically two classes of Satanist – what Huw, our tutor, calls the headbangers who are just in it for the experience or whatever psychic charge they can get; and the intellectuals. These are people who came out of Gnosticism and believe that knowledge is all, and so anything is valid if it leads to more knowledge.’

  ‘Including murder?’

  ‘Probably. Although they’d be as reluctant as the rest of us to break the law. Satanists, basically, are the people who hate Christianity. And they hate us because they see us as irrational. They despise us for our pomp and our smugness. All these great cathedrals costing millions of pounds a year to maintain, all the wasted psychic energy… to promote what they see as the idiot myth that you can get there by love.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling you also think it’s an idiot myth?’

  ‘Because I’m a police-person,’ Howe said. ‘Love is something we seldom encounter.’

  When Howe had left, Merrily phoned Mrs Straker back four times, and never got an answer. Her own phone rang three times; she didn’t pick it up, but pressed 1471 each time. The calls were from Sophie, Uncle Ted and Sophie respectively.

  She owed Sophie an explanation, but couldn’t face that now. And anyway, when Mick returned tomorrow, she’d have to talk to him – at length, no doubt. Before then, she wanted to have lost this… virus.

  In the afternoon, she filled a plastic bottle with tapwater and took it across to the church and into the chancel, where she stood it before the altar. In the choir stalls, she meditated for almost an hour. Blue and gold. Lamplit path.

  She went into the vestry and changed into the cassock and surplice she’d worn at St Cosmas and St Damien, since washed and replaced in the vestry wardrobe. She walked, head bowed, along the central aisle, back to the chancel, and stood before the altar.

  ‘Lord God Almighty, the Creator of Life, bless this water…’

  Back in the vicarage, she went up to her bedroom and sprinkled holy water in all four corners. Then across the threshold and at the window, top and bottom.

  She went down on her knees and prayed that the soul of our brother Denzil might be directed away from its suffering and its earthly obsessions and led into the Light.

  Filtered through fog, the fading light lay like a dustsheet on the bedroom.

  Jane felt uncomfortable on the school bus home. Increasingly so, as more and more students got off. The buses had arrived early at the school, on account of the fog which was getting worse; classes had been wound up twenty minutes ahead of time.

  The bus was moving very slowly, in low gear. It must be like driving through frogspawn. Jane just hoped to God that Mum was feeling better – was not going to be really ill.

  Ledwardine was near the end of the line. Dean Wall, legendary greaseball, knew that, so there was no need at all for him to dump his fat ass on the seat next to Jane. He was on his own tonight, his mate Danny Gittoes off sick, supposedly.

  ‘Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss your stop in all this fog. Seein’ as how you en’t much used to buses these days.’

  Very funny! Jane gathered her bag protectively on to her lap. ‘Don’t worry about me. I have a natural homing instinct.’

  The bus was crawling now. She had no idea where the hell they were.

  ‘Only tryin’ t’be helpful, Watkins.’ Dean Wall shoved his fat thigh against hers, leaned back and stretched. The fat bastard clearly wasn’t going to move. ‘Goin’ out tonight?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Off with some bloke tonight, then, is she?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  Wall’s big fat lips shambled into a loose smile.

  ‘Look, just sod off, OK?’ Jane said.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry, Watkins – you’ll still get yours. Er’s likely bisexual.’

  ‘Will you piss off?’

  ‘You don’t know nothin’, do you? You’re dead naive, you are.’

  Jane gazed out of the window at dense nothing. ‘Stop trying to wind me up.’

  ‘I’m tryin’ to put you right, Jane. You wanner talk to Gittoes, you do. ’Cept he en’t capable of speech right now – still recoverin’, like. His ma’s thinkin’ of gettin’ him plastic surgery to take the smile off his face.’

  ‘I don’t want to know!’

  ‘I bet you do.’ Dean Wall leaned a little closer and Jane shrank against the streaming window. Dean lowered his voice. ‘’Er give Danny a blow job, back o’ the woodwork building.’

  She spun and stared at him.

  ‘Listen, I en’t kiddin’, Jane.’ He threw up his hands like she was about to hit him. ‘Gittoes was pretty bloody gobsmacked himself, as it were.’

  ‘You totally disgusting slimeball.’

  ‘’Er needed a favour, see.’

  ‘I want you to sit somewhere else, all right?’ Jane said. ‘I’m going to count to five. If you haven’t gone by then, I’ll start screaming. Then I’ll tell the driver you put your hand up my skirt.’

  ‘Mrs Straker?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Merrily Watkins again. I’ve tried several times to call back, but I suppose you had to go out.’

  ‘Who’d you say you were?’

  ‘Merrily – it’s Jane’s mum. She’s Rowenna’s friend. We spoke earlier.’

  ‘I think you’ve got the wrong number, dear.’

  ‘We spoke about an hour and a half ago. You said there was something I should know about Rowenna.’

  You won’t
find it funny. I’ll guarantee that.

  ‘You must be thinking of somebody else,’ Mrs Straker said. ‘I’ve never spoken to you before in my life.’

  She couldn’t talk, Merrily decided. Someone had come into the house who shouldn’t hear this. Or someone she was afraid of.

  ‘Is there somebody with you? Has Rowenna come back? Is Jane with her? Could you just answer yes or no?’

  ‘Listen,’ Mrs Straker hissed, ‘I don’t know who you are, but if you pester me again I’ll call the police. That clear enough for you, dear? Now get off the fucking line.’

  She lay awake that night for over an hour, a whole carillon of alarm bells ringing.

  It was the first evening this week that she and Jane had eaten together. Afterwards, they made a log fire in the drawing room and watched TV, all very mellow and companionable. Later they put out the lamps and moved out of the draughts and close to the fire, sipped their tea and talked. And then she got around to telling Jane about Katherine Moon.

  ‘Dead?’

  So she hadn’t known. It was hard to tell how Jane really felt about this; she seemed to have assumed Moon and Lol had been, at some stage, an item. When Merrily came to Moon’s use of the Iron Age knife – this kind of stuff never seemed to upset Jane particularly, as long as no animals were involved – the kid nodded solemnly.

  ‘Sure. The later Celtic period, coming up to the Dark Ages, that was like this really screwed-up time.’

  ‘It was?’ Merrily curling her legs on to the sofa.

  ‘Bad magic. The Druids were getting into blood sacrifices and stuff. If your family was rooted in all that, you’re quite likely to get reverberations. Plus, who knows what else happened on the site of that barn? I mean way back. It could be really poisoned, giving off all kinds of mind-warping vibrations. If you don’t know how to handle these things, it could go badly wrong for you.’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ Merrily had said mildly. ‘Where did you learn all that, flower?’

  ‘Everybody knows that,’ Jane said inscrutably. She was sitting on a big cushion at the edge of the hearth. ‘So this Moon was bonkers all along?’

  ‘She had a history of psychiatric problems.’

  Which led to a long and fairly sensible discussion about Lol and the kind of unsuitable women into whose ambience he seemed to have been drawn, beginning with his born-again Christian mother, then the problem over a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, when he himself was about nineteen but no more mature than the girl, and then some older woman who was into drugs, and later Alison Kinnersley who’d first drawn him to Herefordshire for entirely her own ends.

  ‘How’s he taken it?’ Jane set her mug down on the hearth and prodded at a log with the poker.

  ‘He thinks he should have known the way things were going, which is what people always say after a suicide. But in this case people were trying to help her. It’s very odd. It doesn’t add up.’

  ‘So, like, Lol… was he in love with her?’

  ‘I really don’t think so, flower.’

  And at this point the phone had rung and she’d waited and dialled 1471, finding it had been Lol himself. She called him back from the scullery-office, still answering monosyllabically, because Jane was sometimes a stealthy mover. So she never did learn how he’d discovered the kid had become involved with something called the Pod, which met above a café in Hereford. It could be worse, however, Lol said: women only, nothing sexual. Self-development through meditation and spiritual exercises. Progressing – possibly – to journeys out of the body.

  Oh, was that all?

  When she went back to the drawing room, Jane had put on the stereo and it was playing one of the warmest, breathiest, Nick Drake-iest songs on the second and final Hazey Jane album. The one which went, Waking in the misty dawn and finding you there.

  Merrily lay on the sofa and listened to the music, her thoughts tumbling like water on to rocks.

  During the remainder of the evening, the phone rang twice. Merrily said the machine would get it, although she knew it was still unplugged.

  The last caller, she’d discovered from the bedside phone, was Huw Owen. She fell asleep trying to make sense of him and Dobbs.

  She lay there, half awake for quite a while, dimly aware of both palms itching, before the jagged cold ripped up her, from vagina to throat, and then she was throwing herself out of bed and rolling away into a corner, where the carpet was still damp from holy water, and she curled up dripping with sweat and terror and saw from the neon-red digits of the illuminated clock that the time was four a.m., the hour of his death in Hereford General.

  Across the room, with a waft of cat’s faeces and gangrene, a shadow sat up in her bed.

  34

  A Party

  THE BULKHEAD LIGHT came on and the back door was tugged open.

  Somewhere deep in the stone and panelled heart of the Glades a piano was being plonked, a dozen cracked sopranos clawing for the notes of what might have been a hymn.

  ‘Ah.’ Susan Thorpe stepped out in her Aran sweater, heathery skirt, riding boots. ‘Splendid. We were beginning to think you weren’t going to venture out.’

  No ‘How good of you to turn out on a night like this’. Mrs Thorpe appeared to think Deliverance was the kind of local service you paid for in your council tax.

  The singing voices shrilled and then shrank under a great clumping chord.

  ‘I can never say no to a party,’ Merrily said.

  She shed her fake-Barbour in the hall. Underneath, she wore a shaggy black mohair jumper over another jumper, her largest pectoral cross snuggling between the two layers. Susan Thorpe looked relieved that she wasn’t in a surplice. But her husband Chris obviously thought she ought to be.

  ‘This is a proper exorcism, isn’t it?’ He was extremely tall, with a shelf of bushy eyebrow and a premature stoop.

  His wife glared. ‘They aren’t all bloody deaf in there, you know.’

  ‘Let’s get this clear,’ Merrily said. ‘It isn’t going to be an exorcism at all. An exorcism is an extreme measure only normally used for the removal of an evil presence.’

  ‘How d’you know it isn’t that?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is yet, Mr Thorpe.’ Yet – that was optimistic. ‘If it does turn out to be, er, malevolent, we shall have to think again.’

  Believe me, if you had real malevolence here, you would know…

  ‘Always believed in belt and braces, myself,’ Chris Thorpe said gruffly. ‘Go in hard. If you’ve got rats, you put down poison, block all the holes.’

  Merrily smiled demurely up at him. ‘How fortunate we all are that you’re not an exorcist.’

  ‘Let it go, Chris.’ Susan Thorpe pushed him into the passage leading to the private sitting room, held open the door for Merrily. ‘The truth is, my husband’s a sceptic. He teaches physics.’

  ‘Oh, where?’

  ‘Moorfield High,’ Susan said quickly. Oh dear, a mere state school. The Thorpes were no more than late-thirties, yet had the style and attitudes of people at least a generation older. You couldn’t imagine this was entirely down to living with old people. More a cultivated image over which they’d lost all control.

  The sitting room was gloomily lit by a standard lamp with an underpowered bulb, but it was much tidier tonight – possibly the work of the plump woman who sat placidly sipping tea. On her knees was a plate with a knife on it, and cake crumbs.

  ‘This is my mother, Edna Rees. This is Mrs Merrily Watkins, Mother. She’s Dobbs’s successor.’

  The former housekeeper to the Canon had raw red farmer’s cheeks and wore her hat indoors; how many women did that these days? She put down her cup, and studied Merrily at length, unembarrassed.

  ‘You seem very young, Mrs Watkins.’

  ‘I’m not sure which way to take that, Mrs Rees.’

  ‘Oh, I think you are, my dear.’ Mrs Rees’s accent was far more local than her daughter’s – Hereford-Welsh. ‘I think you are.’

&
nbsp; Merrily smiled. How do I get to talk to her in private?

  Susan Thorpe frowned. ‘I don’t know how long this operation normally takes you, Merrily. But our venerable guest of honour is usually in bed by ten.’

  ‘So there’s going to be nobody on that floor until then?’

  ‘Nobody living,’ said Mrs Rees blandly.

  Chris Thorpe glanced at Merrily’s shoulder-bag. ‘You have some equipment?’

  ‘We don’t have to be near any power points, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Chris, why don’t you go and do something else?’ Susan said through her teeth.

  ‘It’s my house. I’ve a right to be informed.’

  ‘But I don’t feel you really believe it’s going to achieve anything,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s just that normally we like to do this in the presence of people who are a bit sympathetic – a scattering of actual Christians. I mean, are there any practising Christians around? What about the woman who saw… him? Helen?’

  ‘Supervising the party,’ Susan said. ‘Making sure it doesn’t get too rowdy. Anyway, she doesn’t want to be involved. Christians? No shortage of them but they’re the ones we’re trying not to alarm. You’re on your own, I’m afraid, Merrily. Can I offer you a fortifying cigarette?’

  ‘Thanks. Afterwards, I think. If you could just point me at the spot.’

  ‘Don’t fret.’ Mrs Rees put down her cup and saucer. ‘I’ll go with you.’

  Excellent.

  ‘Did you ever go with Canon Dobbs, Mrs Rees?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Mrs Rees stood up, shaking cake crumbs from her pleated skirt. ‘Wasn’t woman’s work, was it?’

  Jane and Rowenna ordered coffee and doughnuts at the Little Chef between Hereford and Leominster. Jane nervously stirred an extra sugar into hers. ‘I didn’t even tell her I was going out tonight. It’s come to this: separate lives.’

  Rowenna was unsympathetic. ‘You’re a woman now. You live by your own rules.’

  ‘Yeah, well…’ Jane looked through the window at the car park and a petrol-station forecourt. She kind of liked Little Chefs because they sold maps and stuff as well, giving you a feeling of being on a journey. They weren’t travelling far this time, however.