by Phil Rickman
‘What are you trying to do to me? I’m a Christian.’
‘As was Fortune herself, after her fashion. Merrily, how soon after the incident at the hospital did this unclean presence make itself apparent?’
‘I felt tired afterwards, but that was natural; I’d been up all night. But I don’t think I really became aware of it until I was called in to cleanse a desecrated church.’
‘Interesting. This was during your service?’
‘Well, I didn’t actually… It was before.’
‘When you entered the church?’
‘I…’ Merrily remembered standing outside the church talking to the policemen – with a stiffness and a clamminess in her vestments. Had she felt that in the car on the way there? Possibly.
‘Think back, Merrily. Who were you with when you first experienced something amiss?’
‘Policemen? I don’t know, can’t think. I’m mixed up and a bit anxious because I’m sitting here, a minister of the Church, unburdening myself to a practising occultist who, by force of willpower, has created a haunted house.’
‘Who would you normally go to for spiritual help?’
‘Huw, my course tutor, who was in the church with me when I exhibited what must have seemed to him like many of the symptoms of demonic possession.’
‘In which case, why the blue blazes—?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘All right.’ Athena White placed a hand on Merrily’s knee. It didn’t feel like a cloven hoof. ‘Go home, pull your bed into the centre of the room, and draw a pentacle…’
‘You have got to be joking!’
‘All right, a circle – in salt, or even chalk – around the bed. Perform whatever rite your religion allows, but supplement it, when you’re lying in bed, by visualizing rings of bright orange or golden light around you and above you, so that you are enclosed in an orb of light. Keep that in your mind constantly until you fall asleep. If you awake in the night, visualize it at once, intact. This should bring you unmolested to the morning.’
‘A circle?’
‘Don’t be afraid of it. There is but one God. Consider it heavenly light – angelic.’
Huw and Dobbs? Merrily frowned. She always knew it had to be something like this.
‘Secondly, take the robes – vestments – you were wearing in the church when you were spiritually assaulted and burn them. You could try to bless them or sprinkle them with holy water, but it’s really not worth it. Get rid of them.’
Merrily supposed this made sense.
‘But that is not enough, and you know it, Merrily. Until you trace it to its source and eradicate it, you’re always going to be a magnet for the obscene advances of this earthbound essence. This Denzil Joy. One can almost see him now, bloating your aura. You absolutely cannot afford to rest – indeed, you will not rest because of who you are – until you put him to rest.’
‘Yes, I was going to ring you,’ Dick Lyden said, agitated. ‘The boy’s back already, and he’s not terribly happy.’
‘He’s not happy…’ Lol dragged the phone over to the armchair.
Dick said, ‘Laurence, it was my understanding that Denny’s studio was a proper professional operation – not some Mickey Mouse outfit. You know what this is costing me, don’t you?’
Lol assured Dick that, while this was not the biggest studio around, it was one in which he personally would be delighted to record.
Dick said, ‘As long as it didn’t bloody well blow up, presumably.’
It didn’t blow up, Lol told him. Denny blew up, pressured beyond reasonable resistance by the song they were laying on him. When Denny had heard enough of it, wires became detached.
‘I’m not paying the man to be a bloody critic,’ Dick said. ‘I don’t like any damned song they do either, and I haven’t even heard them.’
Lol said, ‘Do you and Ruth talk about your work much, over the family supper, comparing notes, that kind of thing?’
‘What the hell has—?’
‘For instance, did you talk much about Moon in front of James?’
Dick’s voice dropped like it had been fast-faded. ‘What are you saying?’
Lol said, ‘James, as you may have gathered, isn’t satisfied with an EP – he wants an album. Denny and me, we were a bit underwhelmed by the quality of what we’d heard so far. We suggested the boys run through the rest of their material, so we’d know what we were looking at. Most of it wasn’t wonderful either.’
To be fair, it wasn’t badly played, and the harmonies were as neatly dovetailed as you might expect from newly retired cathedral choirboys. It was the material – derived from the work of second-division bands which were already derivative of other second-division bands twenty years earlier – that didn’t make it. Denny had, in reality, told Lol – behind the protection of thick glass – that they would make a recording of such pristine quality that the deficiencies in the area of compositional talent would stand out like neon.
‘Well, James’s mate Eirion isn’t entirely insensitive.’
‘Really?’ Dick said. ‘His old man runs Welsh Water.’
‘Eirion can tell Denny isn’t impressed, so after about three routine power-chord numbers he gets the band into a huddle, and then he and James sit down with acoustic guitars and they go into this quiet little ballad which James introduces as “The Crow Maiden”. Perfect crystal harmonies – you could hear every word.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘I tend to remember lyrics – remembered the last verse, anyway, so I wrote it down.’ Lol began to unfold a John Barleycorn paper bag. ‘It’s really subtle, as you can imagine – still you’ll probably get the drift. You ready?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake—’
Lol held up the paper bag, and recited:
‘Found your refuge in the past
‘You hid beneath its shade
‘And when you knew it couldn’t last
‘You took your life with an ancient blade.
‘CROW MAIDEN
‘CROW MAIDEN
‘YOU’RE FADIN’
‘AWAY…’
‘Would you like that again?’
You could hear Dick’s hand squeezing the phone.
‘The little shit,’ Dick said.
37
Faeces and Gangrene
FRIDAY MORNING, SIX a.m. A cold morning moon through new glass. And a smell of putty in the vestry at Ledwardine, where Merrily stood before the wardrobe, frozen with indecision.
She had the Zippo. The Zippo would do it.
What are you waiting for?
She hadn’t slept well, but she had slept until five, with – all right, yes – the bed in the middle of the room inside a circle of salt. All of which she’d swept into a dustpan before she left the vicarage, in case she didn’t return before first light and Jane came looking for her, popped her head around the bedroom door and – God forbid!
She was half ashamed, half embarrassed – and had, as soon as she arose, knelt before the window and apologized to God, if He had been offended by the circle and the salt. But she was, in the end, helplessly grateful. For the first time in days, she had not awakened feeling ill, congested, soiled, or worse.
Grateful to whom, though? She’d prayed for a peaceful night, prayed for the soul of Denzil Joy. But it was, to her disquiet, the orange-gold orb of Athena White which had coloured her dreams.
Was she balancing at the top of the slippery slope into New Age madness? Into Jane country? And if she burned the cassock and surplice?
Last night, in her state of compliance at the Glades, half hypnotized by the extraordinary Miss White, this had seemed entirely logical. This morning, she’d been dwelling on it with increasing horror – a bonfire of these vestments was wholly sacrilegious, the most explicit symbolic rejection of her vows.
She’d prayed hard over this one, kneeling under the window, summoning the blue and the gold. Oh Jesus, give me a sign that this is acceptable in Your eyes.
Please God, don’t take it the wrong way. Infantile? God listened to your heart.
You will not rest – until you put him to rest.
Oh, Miss White, so plausible. This career civil servant – very high-powered – who had committed herself to an old folks’ home to develop her inner life. Damned woman, Susan Thorpe had said afterwards, I could have sworn she was downstairs with the others. But you did manage to complete your exorcism? No problem, Merrily had assured her. Miss White was a surprisingly devout believer. One God. Angelic light.
A dabbler? A minister of God was following the advice of a mad dabbler all the way to New Age hell?
Now Merrily stood in the vestry, with no lights on and her torch switched off – after Sunday night’s break-in, Ted probably had vigilantes watching out for signs of intruders. She felt like a thief: the taking and destruction of priest’s vestments… wilful damage… and worse.
Burn them.
Where? On the drawing-room fire? In the garden, like a funeral pyre of her faith?
It was well meant. She had no bad feelings at all about Athena White as a human being. And the advice was… well meant.
And it was insidiously irresistible last night, after Jane had gone to bed, and Merrily had been standing at the sink, filling her hot water bottle and contemplating the night ahead… smelling his smell, feeling his fingers – scritch-scratch… hearing the ratchet wrench as his body snapped upright in its deathbed, the tubes expelled, pip-pop!
And now remembering how Ethel the cat – who, until this week, had habitually slept at the bottom of Merrily’s bed – had once again padded discreetly and faithlessly up the stairs after Jane.
It was then that she’d reached into the cupboard for the drum of kitchen salt. Taking it with her into the scullery-office, where she’d followed the mad woman’s next instruction – Trace it to its source – and called the Alfred Watkins Ward to ask Eileen Cullen for the address of the widow Joy.
And Eileen, puzzled, asking her, ‘Is there a problem there, Merrily, you think? Would it not be a case of blessed relief for the poor woman?’
‘Sometimes it doesn’t work like that,’ Merrily had said. ‘She may even be feeling guilt that she wasn’t there at the end.’
‘That was my fault, so help me, for not telling the poor cow until it was over. All right, Merrily, whatever your secret agenda is, you made a good case. You know your way to Bobblestock district?’
She’d find it. As soon as Jane was off the premises, she would go and find Mrs Joy. She would take the whole Deliverance kit, and fresh vestments in the car boot.
But not these vestments.
She opened the wardrobe and pulled them down. They’d been washed, of course, since the night at St Cosmas. She hung the cassock and surplice over the arm that held the torch, still not switched on. She opened both doors wide and felt around to make sure she’d taken the correct garments.
Which was when she found the man’s suit.
What?
She pushed the torch inside the wardrobe and switched it on. The suit was on a hanger, pushed to the end of the rail so that it was not visible if you opened only one door.
Merrily pushed her head inside to examine the suit. It was dark green, with a thin stripe of light brown, made of some heavyweight material, and well worn. She touched it. It felt damp.
Or moist, more like.
Merrily screamed. She now had her sign.
She stood, retching, in the moon-washed vestry.
The thin smell the suit gave off had reminded a doctor at the General Hospital of cat faeces and gangrene.
It was around eight, cloudy but fog-free, when Lol spotted the boy in Cathedral School uniform lurking below in Church Street. He went down, and the boy came over: a stocky darkhaired boy with an unexpectedly bashful smile. It was Eirion Lewis, son of the boss of Welsh Water.
‘Hoped you might be about, Mr Robinson. I just… didn’t really feel like going to school until I knew where we stood, you know?’
‘Come on up,’ Lol said.
Once inside, Eirion went straight to the guitar. ‘Wow, is that a Washburn? Could I?’
Lol handed Eirion the Washburn and the boy sat down with it, picking out the opening riff to ‘The Crow Maiden’.
‘I have to play bass in the band because James is rather better on this than me.’
‘Like McCartney,’ Lol recalled.
‘Really?’
‘He was the worst guitarist in the band, so he wound up on bass.’
‘Brilliant bass-player, actually. I… You know, I didn’t mean what I said about how he should have been shot. You feel you’ve got to keep up with James’s cynicism sometimes. Like, he’s younger than me, you know?’
‘Right,’ Lol said.
‘I… Mr Robinson, I really don’t have much time. I just sort of…’ Eirion hung his head over the guitar. ‘I don’t know what we did, but we did something, didn’t we? I mean, this is really important to me, this recording. I don’t want to blow it. You know?’
‘Well, it was that song,’ Lol said.
‘This song? “The Crow Maiden”?’
‘Which of you actually wrote it?’
‘We both did. I do the tunes, James does the words. Like, he gives me a poem or something and I work a tune around it – or the other way about. You know?’
‘It’s a bit more, er, resonant than the other stuff, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘James tell you where he got the idea?’
‘I assumed he made it up – or pinched it from some ancient Fairport Convention album or something. Actually, you know, what can I say? I mean… James is a shit, isn’t he?’
‘Oh?’ Lol tilted his head. ‘Why?’
‘He just is, isn’t he? He kind of tells lies a lot. Enjoys getting up people’s noses. Does kind of antisocial things for the hell of it. Well, lately, anyway. God, this is stupid of me; you’re his dad’s mate, aren’t you? You used to kind of work with him, right?’
‘Oh, well, that’s over now,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing you say will get back to James’s old man, OK. “The Crow Maiden”, it’s about Denny’s sister.’
‘Sorry?’
‘She committed suicide last weekend. She cut her wrists with an ancient blade.’
Eirion’s fingers fell from the frets.
‘Mmm,’ Lol said, ‘I can see you didn’t know that.’
At the front door, Jane sniffed. ‘What’s burning out there?’
‘I can’t smell anything, flower. It’s probably from the orchard. Gomer’s been clearing some undergrowth.’
‘Right.’ Jane inspected her mum in the first bright daylight of the week. ‘You’re looking better.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Pressure off now?’
‘Maybe. You’re going to miss the school bus.’
Jane said casually, ‘You know, if things have loosened up a bit, Mum, you really ought to take the opportunity to think about your long-term future.’
‘It’s not a problem, flower. I’ll be going to heaven.’
‘God,’ said Jane, ‘you Christians are so simplistic. ’Bye.’
‘Work hard, flower.’
When the kid was out of sight, Merrily went around the side of the house to check out the garden incinerator. The vestments were ashes. She made the sign of the cross over them.
Then she burned the suit.
Merrily called directory enquiries for the Reverend Barry Ambrose in Devizes, Wiltshire. She rang his number.
‘I’m sorry, he’s just popped round to the church,’ a woman said pleasantly. ‘He’ll be back for his breakfast any minute. I’m Stella, his long-suffering wife. Can I get him to call you?’
‘If you could. Tell him I really won’t keep him a minute.’
‘That’s no problem. He’s talked a lot about you, Merrily, since you were on that course together. He thinks you’re awfully plucky.’
‘Well, that’s… a common illusion
. Has Barry done much in the way of Deliverance so far?’
‘Only bits and bobs, you know. He’s still quite nervous about it, to be honest. And you?’
‘Still feeling my way,’ Merrily said.
Waiting for Barry Ambrose to call back, she went to the bookcase in the hall where they kept the local stuff. She plucked out one she’d bought in the Cathedral shop: St Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in His Honour. She hadn’t yet had time to open it.
I have been reading, Edna Rees had said, about St Thomas of Hereford.
In the book, several historians explored aspects of the saint’s life and the effect he’d had on Hereford – enormous apparently. Merrily began to read about Cantilupe’s final months, in 1282, after his dispute with the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham.
This seemed to be a bureaucratic argument about one going over the other’s head, further fired up by a clash of temperament. It had ended with Cantilupe being excommunicated and travelling to Italy to appeal personally to the Pope. On the way back, exhausted, he’d collapsed and died – at dusk on 25 August – while still in Italy. As was the custom (Really? Christ!) the body was boiled to remove the flesh from the bones. The flesh was buried at the monastery church of San Severo, the heart and bones were brought back to England by Cantilupe’s steward, John de Clare. The heart was then kept at Ashridge, in Buckinghamshire, at a college of canons, while the bones came back to Hereford.
Where they began to attract pilgrims – thousands of them. When news of the miracles spread – cures of the crippled and the blind – it became the most important shrine in the West of England. And it made this comparatively remote cathedral very wealthy.
Although several of the bones seemed to have been removed as relics before this, it was not until the shrine was destroyed in the Reformation, on the orders of Henry VIII, that they were dispersed. The book recorded, without further comment, a story that during the journey from Italy the ‘persecuted bones’ had bled.
Barry Ambrose called back. She liked Barry: he was inoffensive, hamsterish, an old-fashioned vicar.
‘Hey, Merrily… you heard about Clive Wells?’
