Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  Midwinter of the Spirit

  ( Merrily Watkins - 2 )

  Phil Rickman

  The post of "Diocesan Exorcist" in the Church of England has changed to the preferred term "Delivery Ministry". It sounds less sinister, more caring, so why not a job for a woman? When offered the post the Rev. Merrily Watkins cannot easily refuse, having suffered uncanny experiences of her own.

  Midwinter of the Spirit

  (The second book in the Merrily Watkins series)

  A novel by Phil Rickman

  PART ONE

  IMPRINT

  1

  It

  THIS IS WHERE it walks…

  Washing her hands, Merrily looked up and became very still, convinced in this grey, lingering moment that she was seeing the imprint.

  What she saw, in the cracked and liver-spotted mirror, was a smudgy outline hovering beyond her left shoulder in the women’s lavatory with its stone walls and flagged floor. Through the bubble-glass in the door, a bleary ochre glow seeped from the oil lamp in the passageway where, for some reason, there was no electricity.

  This was where it walked, Huw had explained in his soft, mat-flat Yorkshire voice – David Hockney on downers.

  It.

  Rumoured, apparently, to be the shade of a preacher named Griffith who heaped sermons like hot coals on hapless hill-farming folk towards the end of the nineteenth century. But also known as the Grey Monk because this was what it most resembled, and this was where it walked.

  Where it walked.

  Merrily focused on her own drained face in the mirror.

  Was this where madness began?

  ‘Are they often caught short, then?’ the ex-Army chaplain, Charlie Headland, had asked a few minutes earlier, while Merrily was thinking: Why do they always walk? Why don’t they run like hell, in desperation, looking for a way out of this dismal routine?

  The course tutor, Huw Owen, had blinked, a crumpled old hippy in a discoloured dog-collar.

  ‘No, I’m serious,’ Charlie insisted. ‘Do any of them still feel a need to pee, or do they leave all that behind?’

  ‘Charles…’ Huw being patient, not rising to it. ‘There hasn’t always been a lavatory at the end of that passage.’

  Not smiling, either.

  Huw would laugh, sometimes wildly, in the pub at night, but in the stone-walled lecture room he never lost his focus. It was about setting an example. Outside of all this, Huw said, you should always strive to live a full, free life but in ‘Deliverance’ remain watchful and analytical, and careful not to overreact to something as innocuous as an imprint.

  This whole Grey Monk thing had arisen because of Huw needing an example of what he meant by ‘imprints’.

  As distinct from ‘visitors’, who usually were parents or close friends appearing at your bedside or in a favourite chair on the night of their deaths, often a once-only apparition to say: Everything is OK. Or ‘volatiles’ – loose-cannon energy forms dislodging plates and table lamps, and commonly but some-times inaccurately called poltergeists.

  When this place was a Nonconformist chapel, Huw had told them, the present women’s toilet had been some kind of vestry. Which was where Griffith the preacher – apparently helpless with lust for a married woman in Sennybridge – had been drinking hard into the night, was subsequently seen striding white and naked on the hill at dawn, and then had been found dead back here, his head cracked on a flagstone, the room stinking of brandy.

  Sure – these things happened in lonely parishes. Merrily pulled down a paper towel and began to dry her hands, not hurrying – resisting the urge to whirl suddenly around and catch Griffith, crazed and naked, forming out of the dampness in the wall.

  She would not be bloody-well scared. She would observe with detachment. Imprints were invariably harmless. They appeared, vanished, occasionally messed with the atmosphere, but they never accosted you. They were, in fact, unaware of you, having no feelings, no consciousness. Their actions rarely varied. They appeared like a wooden cuckoo from a clock, only silently. And, no, they did not appear to feel the need to pee.

  If an imprint responded to you, then it was likely to be something else – a visitor or, worse, an insomniac – and you had to review your options.

  ‘And how, basically, do we know which is which?’ big, bald Charlie Headland had demanded then. Charlie was simple and belligerent – Onward, Christian Soldiers – and needed confrontation.

  ‘We have tests,’ Huw explained. ‘After a while, you might start feeling maybe you no longer have to apply them. You’ll feel you know what’s required – been here before, already done that. You’ll feel you’ve attained a sensitivity. Now you’ve got to watch that temptation, because—’

  ‘Meaning psychic powers, Huw?’ Clive Wells interrupted. Clive was old-money and High Church, and naturally suspicious of Huw with his ancient blue canvas jacket, his shaggy grey hair, his permanent stubble. ‘Psychic powers – that’s what you mean by sensitivity?’

  ‘No-oo.’ Huw stared down at the holes in his trainers. ‘It’s not necessarily the same thing. In fact I’m inclined to distrust people who go on about their powers. They start to rely on what they think of as their own ability, and they – and anybody else who relies on what they say – can be deceived. I was about to say I’ve found it dangerous to rely too heavily on your perceived sensitivity. That feeling of heightened awareness, that can be an illusion too. We still need, all the time, to stay close to an established procedure. We need that discipline, Clive; it’s one of the Church’s strengths.’

  Charlie the chaplain nodded briskly, being all for discipline and procedure.

  ‘Make sure you put reason above intuition,’ Huw said. ‘Beware of inspiration.’

  ‘That include divine inspiration?’ Clive demanded.

  Huw directed a bleak blue gaze at him. ‘How do you know when it’s divine?’

  Clive stiffened. ‘Because I’m a priest. Because I have faith.’

  ‘Listen, beware of being too simplistic, man,’ said Huw coldly.

  They’d all gone quiet at this. Dusk clogging the grimy, diamond-paned window behind Huw, melding with mountains and low cloud. Late October, long nights looming. Merrily wishing she was home in front of the vicarage fire.

  ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong…’ Huw was hunched up on a corner of his desk by the bare-stone inglenook. ‘All I’m saying is’ – he looked suddenly starved – ‘that we must strive to know the true God. Evil lies to you. Evil is plausible. Evil butters you up, tells you what you want to hear. We need to beware of what you might call disinformation.’

  ‘Hell’s bells.’ Charlie chuckled, trying to diffuse the atmosphere. ‘Times like this you begin to wonder if you haven’t walked into the wrong course. More like MI5 – imprints and visitors, weepers, breathers, hitchhikers, indeed.’

  ‘Important to keep them in their place, lad. If we overdramatize, if we wave our arms and rail against the Powers of Darkness and all this heavy-metal crap, if we inflate it… then we glorify it. We bloat what might simply be a nasty little virus.’

  ‘When all it requires is a mild antibiotic, I suppose,’ said Barry Ambrose, a worried-looking vicar from Wiltshire.

  ‘If you like. Take a break, shall we?’ Huw slid from the desk.

  Cue for Merrily to stand up and announce that she was going to brave the ladies’ loo.

  Deliverance?

  It meant exorcism.

  When, back in 1987, the Christian Exorcism Study Group had voted to change its name to the Christian Deliverance Study Group, it was presumably an attempt to desensationalize the job. ‘Deliverance’ sounded less medieval, less sinister. Less plain weird.

  But it changed
nothing. Your job was to protect people from the invasion of their lives by entities which even half the professed Christians in this country didn’t believe in. You had the option these days to consider them psychological forces, but after a couple of days here you tended not to. The journey each morning, just before first light, from the hotel in Brecon to this stark chapel in the wild and lonely uplands, was itself coming to represent the idea of entering another dimension.

  Merrily would be glad to leave.

  Yesterday, they’d been addressed by their second psychiatrist, on the problem of confusing demonic possession with forms of schizophrenia. They’d have to work closely with psychiatrists – part of the local support-mechanism they would each need to assemble.

  Best to choose your shrink with care, Huw had said after the doctor had gone, because you’d almost certainly, at some time, need to consult him or her on a personal level.

  And then, noticing Clive Wells failing to smother his scorn, he’d spent just over an hour relating case histories of ministers who had gone mad or become alcoholic or disappeared for long periods, or battered their wives or mutilated themselves. When a Deliverance priest in Middlesbrough was eventually taken into hospital, they’d found forty-seven crosses razored into his arms.

  An extreme case, mind. Mostly the Deliverance ministry was consultative: local clergy with problems of a psychic nature on their patch would phone you for advice on how best to handle it. Only in severe or persistent cases were you obliged to go in personally. Also, genuine demonic possession was very rare. And although most of the work would involve hauntings, real ghosts – unquiet spirits or insomniacs – were also relatively infrequent. Ninety per cent were basic volatiles or imprints.

  Like the monk.

  Ah, yes… monks. What you needed to understand about these ubiquitous spectral clerics, Huw said, was that they were a very convenient shape. Robed and cowled and faceless, a monk lacked definition. In fact, anyone’s aura – the electromagnetic haze around a lifeform – might look vaguely like a monk’s cowl. So could an imprint, a residue. So that was why there were so many ghostly monks around, see?

  ‘Oh, just bugger… off!’ Merrily crumpled the paper towel, tossed it at the wall where the smudge had been and went over to investigate.

  The smudge turned out to be not something in the air but in the wall itself: an imprint of an old doorway. The ghost of a doorway.

  Three days of this and you were seeing them everywhere.

  Merrily sighed, retrieved the towel, binned it. Picked up her cigarette from the edge of the washbasin. There you go… it was probably the combination of poor light and the smoke in the mirror which had made the outline appear to move.

  It was rare, apparently, for Deliverance ministers or counsellors actually to experience the phenomena they were trying to divert. And anyway, as Huw had just pointed out, a perceived experience should not be trusted.

  Trust nothing, least of all your own senses.

  Merrily took a last look at herself in the mirror: a small darkhaired person in a sloppy sweater. The only woman among nine ministers on this course.

  Little dolly of a clergyperson… nice legs, dinky titties.

  Dermot, her church organist, had said that the day he exposed to her his own organ. She shuddered. Dermot had worn a monkish robe that morning, and no underpants. So naturally she no longer trusted monks. Or, for that matter, priests like Charlie Headland who looked as if they wouldn’t mind spanking you. But she was inclined to trust the Reverend Huw Owen, faded and weary on the outside but tough and flexible as old leather. Something of the monk about Huw, also – the Celtic hermit-monk in his lonely cell.

  She dropped her cigarette down the loo.

  Oh well, back into the twilight zone.

  The passage still had lockers and iron hooks on the wall, from when the chapel had been an Outward Bound centre owned by some Midland education authority. It had changed hands discreetly a couple of years ago, was now jointly owned by the Church of England and the Church in Wales, although it seemed few people, even inside the Church, knew it was currently used as a training centre for exorcists.

  The door to the big stone room was open; she heard muted discussion from inside, a shrill, affected laugh. Charlie Headland was wedged against the jamb, crunching crisps. He shook the packet at Merrily.

  ‘Prawn mayonnaise flavour.’

  Merrily helped herself to a crisp. Charlie looked down at her with affection.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of bottle, Mrs Watkins.’

  ‘What? Just for going for a wee in a haunted loo?’

  Charlie chuckled. On occasion, he would fling an arm around Merrily and squeeze her. Twice he’d patted her bottom.

  ‘You wouldn’t be laughing,’ Merrily said, ‘if that thing was in the Gents’ instead.’

  Charlie grimaced and nodded, munched meditatively for a while, then patted her arm lightly. ‘Got a little girl, I hear.’

  ‘Not any more. A woman, she tells me. She’s sixteen – just.’

  ‘Oh, blimey. Where’d you leave her? Suitably caged, one hopes.’

  ‘She’s staying with friends in the village. Not this village – back home.’

  Charlie balled his crisp packet, tossed it in the air and caught it. ‘I reckon he made that up, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Huw. That story about the hellfire preacher-man who died in the ladies’ bogs. It’s too pat.’

  Merrily pulled the door to, cutting off the voices from the stone room. ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Giving us all little tests, isn’t he? You particularly. You’re the only woman amongst us, so there’s one place you need to visit alone. If you’d suddenly started crossing your legs and holding it till you got back to the hotel, he’d know you were a little timid. Or if you came back rubbing your hands and saying you’d detected a cold patch, you’d be revealing how impressionable you were.’

  ‘Be difficult to spot a cold patch in this place.’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ said Charlie. ‘Talk about Spartan. Not what most of them were expecting. Neither’s Huw. Awfully downmarket, isn’t he? Clive’s quite insulted – expected someone solemn and erudite like his old classics master at Eton.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘After fifteen years with the military? No problem at all for me. Funny chap, though, old Huw. Been through the mill, you can tell that. Wears the scar tissue like a badge.’ Charlie dug his hands into his jacket pockets. ‘I think Huw’s here to show us where we stand as of now.’

  ‘Which is?’

  He nodded at the closed door. ‘Out in the cold – lunatic fringe. Half the clergy quite openly don’t believe in God as we know Him any more, and here we all are, spooking each other with talk of breathers and hitchhikers and insomniacs.’

  Not for the first time since her arrival, Merrily shivered. ‘What exactly is a hitchhiker, Charlie?’

  ‘What’s it sound like to you?’

  ‘Something that wants a free ride?’

  ‘All the way to hell, presumably,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Mustn’t overdramatize,’ Merrily reminded him as the door opened and Huw stood there, unkempt, his dog-collar yellowing at the rim.

  ‘Putting the telly on now,’ Huw said hesitantly. ‘If that’s all right?’

  Merrily said cheerfully, ‘I didn’t notice anything at all in the lavatory, Huw.’

  Huw nodded.

  There was a clear dent in the woman’s forehead. Also a halfknitted V-shaped scab over her left eye, the bruised one.

  Merrily had seen several women in this condition before, although not recently. And not under these circumstances, obviously. Mostly in the hostel in Liverpool, when she was a curate.

  ‘This was what done it.’ The woman was holding out a green pottery ashtray. An old-fashioned pub ashtray like a dog bowl. ‘See? Chipped all down the side. Not from when it hit me, like. When it fell on the floor afterwards.’

  ‘I see.’ T
he man’s voice was calm and gentle and unsurprised. Not Huw – too deep, too posh. ‘So it came flying—’

  ‘I should’ve saved the other pieces, shouldn’t I? I didn’t think.’

  ‘That’s quite all right, Mrs… bleep… We’re not the police. Now, the ashtray was where?’

  ‘On the sideboard. Always kept on the sideboard.’

  You could see the sideboard behind her. Looked like early sixties. Teak, with big gilt knobs on the drawers. On the oncewhite wall above it was a half-scrubbed stain. As though she’d started to wipe it off and then thought: What’s the bloody point?

  ‘So you actually saw it rising up?’

  ‘Yeah, I… It come… It just come through the air, straight at me. Like whizzing, you know?’

  This was a very unhappy woman. Early thirties and losing it all fast. Eyes downcast, except once when she’d glanced up in desperation – You’ve got to believe me! – and Merrily could see a corona of blood around the pupil of the damaged eye.

  ‘Couldn’t you get out of the way? Couldn’t you duck?’

  ‘No, I never…’ The woman backing off, as though the thing was flying straight at her again. ‘Like, it was too quick. I couldn’t move. I mean, you don’t expect… you can’t believe what’s happening, can you?’

  ‘Did you experience anything else?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was there any kind of change in the atmosphere of this room? The temperature, was it warmer… or colder?’

  ‘It’s always cold in here. Can’t afford the gas, can I?’ Her eyes filling up.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Tell me, where was your husband when this was happening?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your husband, did he see anything?’

  ‘Nah, he… he wasn’t here, was he?’ Plucking at the sleeve of her purple blouse.

  Merrily wrote down husband on her pad.

  ‘He was out,’ the woman said.

  ‘Has he had any experiences himself? In this house?’