Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  Madness? At the very least, professional suicide. Church of England ministers did not behave like this. She would be making her entire career into this minor footnote in ecclesiastical history, right under the bit about the female priests who circle-danced around the Cathedral touching up dead bishops.

  And that was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You always thought it was a wasted life.

  No! Uncomfortable, Jane turned away from her mother. She didn’t know. She didn’t know any more. She began to feel helpless and desperate. They needed help and there was none.

  She looked up at the Cathedral, warm light making its windows look like the doors in an advent calendar. She was aware of the timeless apartness of the place, even though it was surrounded by city. She thought about its possible future as a tourist attraction, or a carpet warehouse, or something. A rush of confused emotions were creating a panic-bomb, just as a woman came towards them. She wore an expensive suede coat and a silk headscarf – Sophie Hill, the Bishop’s secretary and Mum’s secretary too. Sophie who, Mum explained, didn’t need a secretary’s job, but did need to be part of the Cathedral. Sophie was looking apprehensive.

  ‘Oh, hello, Jane,’ she began awkwardly.

  Which was like Goodbye, Jane. Mum said, ‘Why don’t you go in, flower, and find us a discreet pew with a good view – but not too near the front.’

  ‘Sure,’ Jane said meekly. She was wearing her new blue fleece coat and a skirt. Respectable. As she slipped away, the panicbomb began to tick.

  Walking quickly down towards the Cathedral porch, when she was sure they couldn’t see her, she diverted along the wall and back across the green, running from tree to tree, to the access path, and down into Church Street. Seeing this big, bald guy come out of John Barleycorn and – Thank you, thank you, God! – Lol Robinson behind him in the doorway.

  She started waving frantically at Lol as the bald guy vanished down the alley towards High Town.

  ‘Jane?’

  He looked seriously hyped up, nervous, but grateful to see her – all of those. With the overhead Christmas greens and reds strobing in his glasses, his hands making fists, and his mouth forming unspoken words – like he was full of stories that just had to be told.

  But as Jane said, ‘Oh, Lol, Mum is in such deep shit,’ and her tears defused the panic, reduced it to mere despair, he just listened. Listened to all the stuff about what Mum and this loopy Huw called ‘the Squatter’. And about the Boy Bishop, who was the weak point, like the fuse in an electric circuit.

  This was when Lol finally cut in. ‘How long? How long before the Boy Bishop gets…?’

  ‘Enthroned?’

  ‘Yeah. How long?’

  He was out in the street now, pulling the shop door closed behind him, shivering in his frayed sweat-shirt.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know where in the service it comes. In half an hour? Maybe only ten minutes.’

  She was asking him if he could get to this Dick Lyden first, and make him stop his son from going through with it, but Lol was just shaking his head, like she knew he would, and then he was pushing her away, up the street.

  ‘Go back, Jane. Stay with her.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m going to… going to do what I can.’

  ‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Lol, I want to come with you.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘You really know what’s going to happen, don’t you? At least, you have an idea?’

  ‘I don’t know anything, Jane. I just—’

  ‘Lol…’ She stumbled on the iced-up cobbles, clinging to his arm. ‘Dobbs stood up against it, Dobbs put himself in the way – and he wound up as this paralysed, dribbling…’

  ‘Dobbs was an old man in poor health.’ He held her steady. ‘Go back to her, Jane.’

  ‘He was also…’ Jane broke Lol’s grip and spun to face him. ‘He was also this really experienced exorcist. He knew all about this stuff; he’d been planning for ages. He knew exactly what he was facing, while Mum’s just—’

  ‘She wouldn’t thank you for saying she was just a woman.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, it’s more than that.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Lol, who can we call? We can’t raise Huw Owen. The Bishop’s a total tosser. All those guys in dog-collars in there are just like… administrators and wardens and bursars and accountants. All this dark energy gathering, and…’

  She flattened herself against a shop window as a bunch of young guys came past, hooting and sloshing lager at each other out of cans. They were lurching up the ancient medieval straight path to Hereford Cathedral – all huge and lit up like the Titanic – and none of them even seemed to notice it.

  ‘Nobody really gives a shit, any more, do they?’ Jane said.

  49

  Costume Drama

  WHEN JANE REACHED the green again, Mum and Sophie were gone. Into the Cathedral, presumably. She looked behind her, hoping Lol would be there, that he’d changed his mind and would take her with him wherever he was going. But the night was hard and bright and empty; even the cackling lager crew had vanished.

  She was alone now, with the frost-rimmed moon and the feeling of something happening, around and within the old rusty stones, that none of them could do a damned thing about.

  She walked very slowly down to the Cathedral, hoping that something meaningful would come to her. But all she experienced was a stiffening of her face, as though the tears had frozen on her cheeks.

  Should she pray?

  And, if so, to whom? She reassured herself that all forms of spirituality were positive – while acknowledging that the Lady Moon looked a pitiless bitch tonight.

  Jane went into the porch, and turned left through an ordinary wooden and glazed door into the body of the Cathedral. Always that small, barely audible gasp when you came out into the vaulted vastness of it. You were never sure whether it was you, or some vacuum effect carefully developed by the old gothic architects.

  The organ was playing some kind of low-key religious canned music. Jane found herself on the end of a short queue of people. They were mostly middle-aged or elderly.

  Which made Rowenna kind of stand out amongst them.

  He remembered the last time he’d been up here at night, in the snow, with Moon beside him. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to come in.

  What if he’d then refused to take no for an answer? What if he’d gone into the barn with her? What if he’d resisted the pushing of the darkness against him?

  The pushing of the darkness? As he drove and fiddled vainly with the heater, he tried to re-experience that thin, frigid moment. There was a draught through a crack in the door, more chilling than blanketing cold outside. It felt like the slit between worlds.

  He wished Denny was with him. Denny already had no love for the Purefoys – for taking advantage of Moon’s fantasies so as to unload their crappy, bodged barn conversion. Incomers! Stupid gits! He needed the heat of Denny’s honest rage. He needed this bloody heater to work – having run to the car without his jacket, because going back for it would have wasted crucial minutes.

  Crucial minutes? Like he knew what he was going to do. Like only time might beat him: little four-eyed Lol, expsychiatric patient, shivering.

  Ice under the wheels carried the Astra into the verge, the bumper clipping a fence post. Denny owned a four-wheel drive, had once done amateur rallying. But Denny wasn’t here, so Lol was alone – with a little knowledge, a sackful of conjecture, and the memory of the draught through a thinly opened door.

  He came to the small parking area below the Iron Age camp, and killed his headlights. There were no other vehicles there, but what did he expect – black cars parked in a circle, customized number plates all reading 666?

  You know what’s going to happen. Don’t you?

  Lol got out of the Astra and followed the familiar path. Big, muscular trees crowded him. Between them, he could see a mat
of city lights – but none around him, none up here. None here since damp, smoky firelight had plumed within the cluster of thatched huts where families huddled against the dark beating of the crow-goddess’s wings.

  He’d never felt so cold.

  Only the incense is missing, Merrily thought.

  The warm colours of the soaring stone, the rolling contours of the Norman arches, the suspended corona – its daytime smiley, saw-tooth sparkle made numinous by the candles around it. And the jetting ring of red in the bottom of a giant black cast-iron stove near the main entrance.

  Now a candlelight procession of choirboys singing plainsong, in Latin. One of the choirboys, the tallest of them, wore robes and a mitre, with a white-albed candle-bearer on either side.

  There were about two hundred people in the congregation – not enormous, but substantial. They looked entirely ordinary, mostly over fifty, but an encouraging few in their twenties. Dress tending towards the conservative, but with few signs of the fuss and frothy hats such a service would once have produced.

  Sophie sat next to Merrily, just the two of them on a rear central pew. Sophie’s gloved hands were tightly clenched on her lap. What she’d said outside, her face white and pitted as the moon, had been banished to the back of Merrily’s mind; not now, not now.

  Her hands were underneath the cloak, clasped around the cross. She prayed it would never have to be revealed. She prayed that, in less than an hour’s time, she and Jane would be walking out of here, relieved and laughing, to the car, where the cross would be laid thankfully on the back seat.

  But where the hell was Jane? Not in the nave. Not visibly in the nave – but there were a hundred places in here to sit or stand concealed. But why do that?

  Merrily studied James Lyden. He was a good-looking boy, and he clearly knew it. Could she detect an insolence, a knowing smirk, as the choirboy voices swirled and ululated around him? Perhaps not, though. It was probably James’s idea of ‘pious’.

  And then there were two…

  Here was Mick Hunter on a low wooden seat under the rim of the corona. It was not the first time she’d seen Mick in his episcopal splendour. He wore it well, like some matinée idol playing Becket. We’re all of us actors, Merrily. The Church is a faded but still fabulous costume drama. She noticed the medieval touches, the fishtail chasuble, the primatial cross instead of the crozier; Mick was not going to be upstaged by a schoolboy. Sad, Jane would comment, wherever she was.

  As the plainsong ended, the Boy Bishop turned his back on the congregation and knelt to face Mick Hunter on his throne.

  Merrily’s fingers tightened on the stem of the cross.

  Jane had hidden in the little chantry chapel, where the stone was ridged like a seashell. She crouched where she supposed monks had once knelt to pray – though not ordinary monks; it was far too ornate. The medieval chant washed and rippled around her, so calming.

  She must not be calm.

  Rowenna stood not ten feet away, leaning against a pillar. Rowenna wearing a soft leather jacket, short black skirt, and black tights.

  How would she react if Rowenna was to walk in here now?

  Go for her like a cat? Go for her eyes with all ten nails?

  Uh-huh, better to keep quiet and watch and listen. Whatever was going to happen here, Rowenna would be central to it. She wasn’t just here to watch her boyfriend – who would not be her boyfriend at all if he hadn’t been the chosen as Boy Bishop.

  And Jane suddenly remembered yesterday’s lunch in Slater’s, and Rowenna saying, Listen, I have to go. Go on, ask me where. You’re gonna like this… the Cathedral. Then Jane expressing surprise because she’d understood they were going shopping, and Rowenna going, I just forgot what day it was. I have to meet my cousin – breaking off at this point because Lol had appeared. But it was obvious now: Rowenna would have gone with James to his dress rehearsal, so she’d know exactly…

  The evil, duplicitous, carnivorous slag! Jane didn’t think she’d ever hated anyone like she hated Rowenna right now.

  But it was wrong to hate like this in a cathedral. It had to be wrong. She emptied her mind as the Bishop’s lovely deep, velvet voice was relayed to the congregation through the speaker system. What Mum had once called his late-night DJ voice – so, like, really sincere.

  ‘James, you have been chosen to serve in the office of Boy Bishop in this cathedral church. Will you be faithful and keep the promises made for you at your baptism?’

  In the silence, Jane heard a small bleep quite close. It was such an un-cathedral noise that she flattened herself against the stones, and edged up to the opening and peeped out just once.

  The Boy Bishop said, in a kind of dismissive drawl, ‘I will, the Lord be my helper.’

  Jane saw Rowenna slipping a mobile phone into a pocket of her leather jacket.

  Mick Hunter said, ‘The blessing of God Almighty – Father, Son and Holy Ghost – be upon you. Amen.’

  Silence – as Jane held her breath.

  The choir began to sing.

  She relaxed. It was done. James Lyden was Boy Bishop of Hereford.

  And nothing had happened.

  Had it?

  Amid the cold trees, below the cold moon, was a panel of light.

  Lol stopped on the ice-glossed earthen steps. He thought at first it must be the farmhouse, and that he was seeing it from a different angle, seeing behind the wall of Leylandii.

  But it was the barn.

  The glazed-over bay was one big lantern.

  Lol moved down the frozen steps and saw, behind the plateglass wall, tall candles burning aloft on eight or ten holders of spindly wrought-iron.

  A beacon! You would see it from afar, like a fire in the sky laying a flickering path towards the Cathedral tower.

  It shocked him into stillness, as if the same candles had been burning on Katherine Moon’s coffin. Behind their sombre shimmering, he was sure shadows were moving. All was quiet: not an owl, not a breath of wind. A bitter, still, rock-hard night.

  He was scared.

  Calm down, Robinson, Athena White said from somewhere. He ran from the steps to the rubble-stone barn wall and edged towards the lit-up bay. Rough reflections of the candlelight were sketched on to the ridged surface of a long frozen puddle, the remains of the pond-excavation where Moon had said she’d found the Celtic sword.

  When he reached the front door, he realized it was lying open. He backed away, recalling the darkness pushing against him – the slit between worlds.

  Tonight, however, the door was open, and – perhaps not only because he was so cold – the barn seemed to beckon him inside.

  Merrily murmured to Sophie, ‘What happens now?’

  A hush as the Boy Bishop and his two candle-bearing attendants faced the high altar. Choristers were ranked either side, poised for an instant on a single shared breath.

  As Mick Hunter walked away, smiling, the choir sailed into song, and the Boy Bishop approached the altar.

  ‘Later,’ Sophie whispered, ‘the boy will lead us in prayer, and then he gives a short sermon. He’ll say how important the choir’s been to him, and that sort of thing. But first there’ll be a kind of circular tour, taking in the North Transept.’

  ‘The shrine?’

  ‘I don’t know quite how they’re going to cope with that this time – perhaps they won’t. What are you doing, Merrily?’

  ‘I’m going to watch.’ She edged out of the pew, holding the cross with one hand, gathering her cloak with the other.

  ‘Are you cold, Merrily?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Me too. I wonder if there’s something wrong with the heating.’

  The candle-led procession was leaving the chancel, drifting left to the North Transept. Merrily paused at the pew’s end. She felt slightly out of breath, as if the air had become thinner. She looked at Sophie. ‘Are you really cold, as well?’

  Behind her, there was a muffled slap on the tiles.

  Sophie rose. ‘Oh, my Go
d.’

  Merrily turned and saw a large woman in a grey suit, half into the aisle, her fingers over her face, with blood bubbling between them and puddling on the tiles around her skittering feet.

  50

  Abode of Darkness

  THE BARN WAS like an intimate church. Lol could sense it around him, a rich and velvety warmth. He could see the long beeswax candles, creamy stems aglow, and imagine tendrils of soft scented smoke curling to the rafters.

  He stood for a moment, giving in to the deceptive luxury of heat – experiencing the enchantment of the barn as, he felt sure, Moon would have known it. Then catching his breath when the total silence gave way to an ashy sigh – the collapse of crumbling logs in the hearth with a spasm of golden splinters, the small implosion bringing a glint from a single nail protruding from the wall over the fireplace. A nail where once hung a picture of a smiling man with his Land Rover.

  Which brought Lol out of it, tensing him – because another black-framed photo hung there now: of a long-haired woman in a long dress.

  The candle-holders were like dead saplings, two of them framing a high-backed black chair, thronelike. And, standing beside the chair – Lol nearly screamed – was a priest in full holy vestments.

  Merrily was gesturing wildly for a verger, a cleaner, anybody with a mop and bucket – people staring at her from both sides of the aisle, as though she was some shrill, house-proud harpy.

  What she was seeing was the defiled altar at St Cosmas, blistered with half-dried sacrificial blood – while this blood was close to the centre of the Cathedral, and it was still warm and it was human blood, bright and pure, and there was so damned much of it.

  The choir sang on. The Boy Bishop and his entourage were now out of sight, out of earshot, paying homage to Cantilupe in all his fragments.

  She should be there, too. She should be with them in the ruins of the tomb, where the barrier was down, where Thomas Dobbs had fallen. Yet – yes, all right, irrationally maybe – she also had to dispose of the blood… the most magical medium for the manifestation of… what? What? Anyway, she couldn’t be in both places, and there was no one else… absolutely nobody else.