December

by Phil Rickman

  'You nearly gave me a heart attack. How long have you been in here?' Beginning to be angry with Vanessa; you could get more sense out of the sheep on the hills.

  Anger, however, would get her nowhere. With a sigh, Meryl took off her navy-blue dressing-gown, put it around the girl's shoulders.

  'Let me help you. Please.'

  Vanessa carried on looking out of the window. She'd said so little to Meryl all the time she'd been here. Had eaten just enough food, with no great, relish - not much of a compliment to Meryl's flair for whipping up mouth-watering sundaes.

  She had said a small thank-you for the new clothes and left most of them on in the shop ... while clinging determinedly to her school blazer, which she insisted on wearing whenever she went out, especially yesterday afternoon, shivering on the slopes of the Skirrid.

  And yet she seemed content to be here. As if she was waiting for something to happen.

  Why do you have to wear your dirty blazer? Why not your new quilted jacket?

  So my guardian angel mil know me, Vanessa had replied scornfully, like a good Catholic.

  Meryl said now, 'I'm going to phone Shelley. Just to put her mind at rest. She must be terribly worried about you.'

  The changeling turned round fast enough at that. 'No!'

  'Why not? You tell me why not, or I'm going to phone her right now!'

  What else could she do? Yesterday, within sight of the summit of the Skirrid, she'd knelt in the grass, holding Vanessa's hand, and prayed for guidance, the first time she'd done such a thing since childhood. She'd felt there was guidance to be had here, but no clear direction was signposted. She interpreted this as an indication that she should do nothing for the present. Stay where she was, learn patience.

  She'd turned round to find Vanessa white-faced and shaking, her gaze fixed on the smaller of the two humps, almost below them now. Meryl had felt flecks of light snow on her face, but could see nothing.

  Meryl said sharply, 'Do you hear me, miss?'

  Vanessa shrugged, looked back out of the window, stiffened and instantly became animated. She turned, picked up the phone and, smiling, held it out towards Meryl.

  'Why, thank you,' Meryl said, surprised.

  But while she was reaching out for the receiver, Vanessa suddenly snatched it back, jumped down from the desk and dodged past Meryl out of the room, still clutching the receiver, dragging the phone to the floor and the wire from the wall.

  Meryl shrieked and pursued the phone as it bumped along the carpet but, by the time she'd gathered it up, Vanessa was out of the front door and rushing across the road into the path of an electric wheelchair containing a young woman who looked as if she would be only too pleased to run the child down.

  As Moira turned the spiral, wooden sandals clip-clopping on the stone steps, there was another sharp scream of rage and pain, and she stopped, afraid, for the scream had an animal quality.

  A howling.

  In the Abbey, it was unwise ever to relax.

  In the Abbey, God help you, it was not necessarily in your best interests to heed a scream.

  It was freezing on the uneven stone stairs. She'd stopped alongside a slit window with old glass in it, opaque with grime. Knowing that even if she could see out, there would only be mist upon mist. As Simon had said last night, vapours gathered here, always had, always would.

  She moved on, went up seven more steps, bare toes numb with cold, poking out of the open sandals.

  Until, at last, she stood at the very summit of the spiral, outside the recess concealing Simon's bedroom door, above her a rough beamed ceiling. Above that, presumably, the tower's conical roof.

  She looked down at herself. Bart Simpson wore an evil grin. In this situation, Bart Simpson would not be scared. Bart Simpson was the devil incarnate.

  What we gonna do, Bart?

  'Piss off, kid, what would you know.'

  Just to hear her own voice.

  And then, 'Nooooooo.'' A hideous, twisted yelp.

  'Simon!'

  'Don't come in! Whoever you are, for God's sake go away!'

  'Simon, it's me. Moira.'

  'Go away! Leave me alone!'

  She heard his cough, and it turned into a dreadful gasping retch. Simon puking his guts up. As if poisoned. She was thinking about Prof and the medieval red wine in the twelfth-century baluster jar which materialised in the night on the floor by the bed.

  She moved into the door recess, stood very still with her ear to the door - wooden, white-painted, peeling, rotting at the bottom with the damp. Moira breathed in and out twice to calm herself. Some hope.

  'Simon, listen to me. Are you ... ?'

  Bloated, strangled noises, the creaking of the bed. She rattled the handle. 'No!' he screeched. 'Jesus Christ, you bitch, will you go away!'

  'I will not!'

  'Pleeeeeeeease!'

  She backed off and shouted for help, a desperate cry down a well. But a spiral stairway was not a well, there were only five steps to the next corkscrew twist and two thick, ancient ceilings between her and anything else human.

  And then Simon, stifling a scream, produced such an agonised, pitiful squeal, like a kitten, that Moira leapt back up and threw herself at the door.

  'It's locked!' he wailed. 'You can't.'

  But it wasn't, of course. When she twisted the handle, the door almost creaked off its rusting hinges and Moira fell forwards into the room, landing on her knees at the foot of the bed. The curtains drawn across the window recess.

  Simon lay half-sprawled across it, on his back, naked, one leg straight on the bed, the other buckled on the floor, both hands over his genitals.

  'Moira ... please ... go ... You ... don't want to see this.'

  His face puckered in misery, pain and shame under a hard film of sweat. Simon St John, classically trained, the laid-back one.

  'Arrogance.' The word thrust through teeth so tightly gritted they seemed likely to splinter.

  'Huh?' She moved hesitantly to the bed, prised a hand from his groin and held it tightly. 'Nobody's gonna hurt you, Simon.'

  'You'd think a fucking vicar would know ... uhhhh ... the futility of arrogance.'

  'You did what you thought was best,' Moira whispered. 'You made a stand.' He's gonna die, she thought in horror. He's gonna die here in this filthy attic.

  She saw that his shoulders and upper back were on the bed, his lower back and his ass held in space by the other leg bent crablike on the floor.

  'Oh, dear God, Simon, love, you better turn over on your stomach.'

  'I can't move. Whichever way I ... move it's ... bloody … ag-'

  'Hold on.' She knelt down, pushed her hands under the middle of his back, through the rivers of sweat. This was like one of those awful funny stories that firemen told, unless it ended in death and then it maybe wasn't quite so funny.

  When she tipped him over, his serrated shriek made her reel back into the wall.

  He lay spread-eagled on the bed, weeping, impaled.

  'Jesus God,' Moira said. 'What is it?'

  'You know what ... Christ, it hurts when I breathe. I can't breathe.'

  'Simon, we have to get a doctor. Do you understand?'

  'No! Pull ... pull the bastard out. Can you do that? Can you bring yourself... uhhhh.' His hands clawed, nails piercing the mattress.

  'I don't... I don't know how deep it goes, Simon.'

  'Feels like it's half-way to my ... throat. Oh Jes ... listen, a doctor would tell the cops, and we'd all be out of here so fast, questions, questions, questions.'

  'That's such a bad thing, to get out?'

  'Don't be f... foolish ... We've got to finish it.'

  'Sure. And what if this finishes you first?

  Oh God, calm yourself, hen. Have to think about this. There could be internal bleeding.

  'What's it made of?'

  'If it's like the others it's a ... a kind of tallow. Fat. Lard.'

  It looked hard as bone. Dark brown, near-black. Thick and knob
bly, like an old, rustic walking-suck, and God knows how long.

  How could something penetrate your mind so deep it could make you do this to yourself?

  She climbed up on to the bed, balanced there on the mattress in her Bart Simpson night wear, a foot either side of him. She thought, I can't. I just can't. I'm bound to be sick or something.

  'Please.'

  She touched the end of the candle, protruding about three inches. It felt just so disgusting.

  'How did you, I mean, get it in?'

  Simon squirmed.

  'Listen to me. Just listen. I've never ... seen an object appear. I don't think anybody has. Matthew Manning, Uri Geller, all these people it's happened to, they've never ... uhhhh ... seen it. It ... must've started while I was asleep. What I'm saying ...'

  She looked at the repellent brown smears on her fingertips.

  'It grew ... formed ... inside?'

  Simon grunted, tried to nod.

  What are we dealing with here?

  And, oh God, ma poor mammy ...

  And she felt so angry. As angry as Simon had been in the studio, 'correcting history'.

  'Simon,' she said, 'I want you to grab a big wedge of the pillowcase in your teeth and bite down on it hard as you can. Do it. OK.'

  She wiped her sweating hands on Bart Simpson. It didn't wipe away his evil grin.

  Moira said, 'I'm not gonna dress this up, Simon. It is gonna hurt like every kind of hell, and if there's a lot of blood I don't care what questions we have to answer, you're away to hospital, right.'

  'Yes,' he said and took the pillow in his mouth.

  XII

  Darker Underneath

  Meryl thought Simon St John must be terribly paranoid or something because, as far as she was concerned, Eddie Edwards was a delightful little man.

  'I shouldn't really, see,' he said, fingers poised over Meryl's fruitcake. 'But it looks so good and I've had no breakfast. And, anyway, if our calculations are anything to go by, tonight looks like the first night of the end of the bloody world.'

  'Eddie ...' The woman in the wheelchair, Isabel, gave him a menacing glare. She looked to Meryl as if she could be quite an awkward customer, but there was only so much trouble someone could cause, surely, from a wheelchair.

  'No need to crush my shins again,' said Eddie. 'I take your point, but this lady might be able to help us.'

  Meryl watched Vanessa carrying over a fluffy pouffe thing to perch on next to Isabel's chair in the vicarage living-room. The girl kept looking at the woman in the wheelchair, big-eyed, even allowing for the glasses.

  Why was Vanessa so drawn to this woman? What had the child felt, catching sight of the wheelchair from the study window? What connection had she made to make her go berserk like that? Meryl would have given anything to know, because there was no doubt, from Isabel's impatience when Vanessa had run out in front of her chair, that the two had never met before.

  'Why we have to be so secretive about it,' Eddie said, dipping his fruitcake into his tea, 'I really cannot imagine. Not at this stage of the game.'

  'It isn't a game, Eddie,' Isabel reminded him.

  'Figure of speech, girl. I know this is no game, by God I do.'

  Isabel had clearly been anxious at first to get away from the handicapped kid clinging to the chair. But then Eddie had come along the street. Eddie who expressed instant curiosity about the strange woman and the little girl at the vicarage and what

  their connection was with Simon.

  Eddie who, on learning Vanessa was the child born out of the holocaust in the hills in 1980, had been only too happy to accept Meryl's offer of tea at the vicarage and to exchange information.

  But suspicious Isabel was still resistant. 'We shouldn't go shouting it about, we could get ...'

  'In trouble? That's not like you, girl. Who's going to cause trouble for us? Is Abbot Richard Walden going to sue if we brand him a child-molester, a Satanist, a murderer?'

  'No, but some of what I discovered last night at the W.I. is not so far in the past.' Isabel swung her chair abruptly around to point at Meryl. 'And I don't understand. This is not Tom Storey's wife, so what's she doing with his kid?'

  It was not yet nine a.m.

  'If you have the time,' Meryl said, 'I'll tell you the whole story.'

  There was some blood. It came out in a sickening, greasy trickle, with the candle, which proved to be almost a foot long and lumpily irregular in shape. Moira tore off a length of bedsheet. wrapped the sticky cylinder in it, took it out of the room and laid it, with a final shiver of revulsion, at the top of the stairs.

  It troubled her in another way, this candle. Its wick seemed to be of a vegetable nature - possibly a rush or a reed. And although the candle was many times longer than the ones she remembered, the colour and the rudimentary moulding were horribly similar.

  This had to be settled.

  On his bed, Simon was sobbing with relief. Simon was breaking his heart into the pillow. When, grimacing with pain, he rolled over, there was blood and water and shit and mucus where he'd lain.

  'I still think we should get a doctor,' Moira said. 'You could have internal haemorrhaging, anything.'

  'There are all kinds of little capillaries and blood vessels and things in the anus. Looks worse than it is, I'm sure.' Simon rolled over on his back, pulling the eiderdown up to his stomach.

  'Certainly feels worse.'

  'Oh, yeah? How can you be sure you're no' seriously damaged up there?'

  'Because if it was as bad as it feels I'd be bloody dead, and if Dave doesn't recoil when he sees me, I'll assume there's nothing imminent in that direction. Oh ... God!' Simon beat a fist on the bed. 'I wouldn't turn the other cheek on that bastard Walden, if I ever …'

  'Simon, this is a spirit. An essence. A vapour. This is the Abbey.'

  'It's a battle,' Simon said. 'There's personal malevolence here. Last night - this morning - I told him he was finished. You remember? I said: You're fucked, Richard. Not me, old boy, he's saying. Not me, exactly. Richard Walden, Satan, the Abbey, I don't care what you call it, it's personal. It's something set in motion years ago.'

  Moira thought he should have some rest. She also thought this was as good a time as any to raise the question which worried her the most: whose side had Simon been on?

  'The candle,' she said. 'I was hardly going to examine it thoroughly, but that thing looked dreadfully familiar. Mmmm?'

  'Yes,' he said wearily. 'I thought it might.'

  'I'm thinking back to a circle of thirteen of them.'

  'Yes.'

  'I'm thinking about how you were so cool, assuring Tom it was probably a practical joke.'

  'I was very cool in those days. Cool and self-assured. And fascinated by something that was dark and mysterious and ... and somehow powerfully religious, too.'

  'How long's it been going on? How long you been able to do it? Can you lift your legs?" She was easing the soiled sheet from underneath him.

  'Thanks. I can't remember a time when it didn't go on. Strange little objects used to appear in my cot, they tell me. But nothing remotely as spectacular as ...' He turned on his side, face creased in discomfort '... Richard's little gifts. I didn't ... you see, I didn't think it was evil at first. You don't, when there's ... love.'

  'Love?'

  'OK, eroticism. There's no more ... powerfully corrupting combination than ... religion and sex. I was hooked. From the beginning. When Goff first set us up for this, I read everything I could find on the Abbey, and I discovered Richard, the pederast monk who rediscovered his soul. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've never been into choirboys, in any sense.'

  'Well, that's one wee mercy.'

  'But Walden was very, very powerful and so very, very glamorous. He'd had a holy vision, a direct link with God, and now ... now he had a direct link with me. I suppose that made me the conduit.'

  'We were all conduits in different ways.'

  'And the candles were a really dramatic demonstration
of it, of what we had. Him and me. I mean, even after what happened that night, it took me a long time to work it out. And then there was the matter of getting free of it ... on every level. First, there was Max Goff to pay off.'

  'Oh, Simon ...' His face was dirty with dried sweat and stained with pain, like a casualty of some old war. 'You never liked Goff. Even physically, he didn't have ...'

  'What he did have was the tapes. Which Russell gave him. After we burned blanks with a few first-takes stuck on the front, in case we checked. He refused to destroy them, but I ... persuaded him to bury them, as it were. I believed ... I was given to believe ... that those tapes would have been ... used ... if I hadn't had ... been helped. That is ... what convinced me ... Goff crying out. Oh Richard! when ...'

  He rolled over, weeping into the already saturated pillow. 'I was used. I let myself be used. I enjoyed being used. I'm just shit, Moira.'

  'That's the pain talking.'

  'Don't fucking patr— Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm never going to be able to repay you for this.' He tried to sit up and his eyes filled with agonised tears. He fell back. 'What you did for me ... I can't repay that, ever. And all I do is rant at you.'

  'Simon,' Moira said, 'if something shoved twelve inches of stiff candle up me, I'd be ranting from now till Hogmanay and then I'd get drunk and rant some more.'

  He grinned momentarily. 'I must smell bloody awful. I've just got to get myself down to the bathroom, but I don't think I can even make it to the bloody basin.'

  'Patience, Vicar. I'll fill a bowl of water, see what I can do.'

  'You've done enough for me, Moira. Far too much. No wonder Dave ... I'm sorry. Not my business.'

  'After everything you just told me? Dave ... He's a nice guy, always was. As guilt-ridden as any of us. But Dave and me? I don't think so any more. Could've been, once. Or maybe not, I can't say. I feel so sorry for the guy. And I feel sorry for Tom, you ... even myself, just a wee bit. But that's no' the same thing.'

  Simon stared at the blackened beams in the ceiling. 'I've been virtually celibate since that time with Goff. Going into the church ... that was a fairly obvious step. That I should study theology. I was a good vicar, you know?'