Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  It hurt all the more because he knew that was wrong. She couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking of his dream of the mist-furled Moon in Capuchin Lane, holding the broken heads of the ancestors as she’d held the crow. A dream… like the dreams she’d had of her father. Moon had joined not the ancestors but the grey ranks of the sleepless. When the curtains closed over the coffin, there were tears in Lol’s eyes because he could not love her – had not even been able to help her. It was a disaster.

  And it was not over.

  Outside, in the foggy car park, Dick Lyden said to Lol, ‘Never seen you in a suit before, old chap,’ then he patted Denny sympathetically on the arm. Denny looked like he wanted to smash Dick’s face in. Lol found the slender, sweet-faced Anna Purefoy at his side.

  ‘I feel so guilty, Mr Robinson. We should have positively discouraged her. We should have seen the psychiatric problems.’

  ‘They aren’t always easy to spot,’ Lol said.

  ‘I taught at a further-education college for a year. I’ve seen it all in young women: manic depression, drug-induced psychosis. I should have seen her as she really was. But we were so delighted by her absorption in the farm that we couldn’t resist offering her the barn. We thought she was perfect for it.’

  ‘You couldn’t hope to understand an obsession on that scale,’ Lol said. He realized it was going to be worse for the Purefoys than for anyone else here, maybe even for Denny. They would have to live with that barn. ‘What will you do with it now?’

  ‘I suspect it will be impossible to find a permanent tenant. We’d have to tell people, wouldn’t we? Perhaps we could revert to our original plan of holiday accommodation. I don’t know, it’s too early.’

  ‘Well, good luck,’ Lol said. He wondered if Merrily might be persuaded to go up there and bless the barn or something. He watched the Purefoys walk away to their Land Rover Discovery. Denny’s wife, Maggie, was chatting to an elderly couple, while Denny stood by with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels. A lone crow, of all birds, flew over his head and landed on the roof of the crematorium, and stayed there as though it was waiting for Moon’s spirit to emerge in the smoke, to accompany it back to Dinedor Hill.

  But nobody could see the smoke in this fog – and the way to Dinedor would be obscured. He imagined Moon alone in that car park, after everyone had gone. Moon cold in the tatters of her medieval dress – bewildered because there was nobody left. Nobody left to understand what had happened to her.

  The Astra was parked about fifteen yards away. As he approached, Jane’s face appeared in the blotched windscreen, looking very young and starved. He tried to smile at her; she looked so vulnerable. It was cold in the car as he started the engine.

  She said, ‘Lol, that woman you were talking to…’

  ‘Mrs Purefoy?’

  ‘The blonde woman.’

  ‘That was Moon’s neighbour and landlady, Anna Purefoy.’

  He drove slowly out of the car park on dipped headlights.

  Jane said, ‘You mean Angela.’

  ‘I thought it was Anna. I could be wrong.’

  ‘Moon’s neighbour?’

  ‘On Dinedor Hill. They own the farm where she died.’

  After a while, as the car crept back into the hidden city, Jane said, ‘Help me, Lol. Things have got like horribly screwed up.’

  42

  The Invisible Church

  THE GOLDEN SANTAS drove their reindeer across a thick sea of mist in Broad Street. The lanterns glowed red like fog warnings. In the dense grey middle-distance, the Christmas trees twinkling above the shop fronts were like the lights of a different city.

  And Merrily, alone in the gatehouse office, with the Cathedral on one side and the Bishop’s Palace on the other, felt calmer now because Lol had called her before she left. Because Jane was with Lol in the flat above John Barleycorn, not three minutes’ walk away, and maybe Lol would now find out how far it went, this liaison with the wan and wispy Rowenna, serial seducer of priests.

  Scrabbling about under Sophie’s desk, she found an old two-bar electric fire with a concave chrome reflector, plugged it in and watched the bars slowly warm up, with tiny tapping sounds, until they matched the vermilion of the lanterns outside.

  Merrily stood by the fire, warming her calves and watching the lights. They were all part of Christmas, but anyone who didn’t know about Christmas would not see them as linked.

  She thought about that devil-worshipper pulled from the river not half a mile from here… the strings of crow-intestine on a disused altar… the inflicted curse of Denzil Joy… the old exorcist lying silent, half-paralysed – or faking it – in a hospital bed inside a chalked circle. And, inevitably, she thought of Rowenna.

  Linked? All of them? Some of them? None of them?

  After a while she spotted the untidy man – in bobble-hat, ragged scarf, RAF greatcoat – shambling out of the fog, with his exorcist’s black bag, and wondered how many answers he could offer her.

  Jane had decided to clean up Lol’s flat: ruthlessly scrubbing shelves, splattering sink-cleaner about, invading the complexity of cobwebs behind the radiators.

  A purge, Lol thought.

  Just as they were hitting the city centre, she’d asked if they could go somewhere: the village of Credenhill, where the poet Traherne had been vicar in the seventeenth century. Where the SAS had, until recently, been based. And where, just entering dusk, he and Jane had found the perfectly respectable but undeniably small Army house where Rowenna’s family lived. Until the last possible moment, Jane had been vainly searching for some rambling, split-level villa behind trees.

  She’d stood for a long time at the roadside, looking across at the fog-fuzzed lights of the little house with the Christmas tree in its front window. ‘Why would she lie? Why would she think it mattered to me if she lived in a mansion or bloody tent? Why does she lie about everything?’

  On the way back, Lol considered what Merrily had said on the phone about Rowenna’s sexual history. It had made him look quickly – but very hard – at the girl over Jane’s shoulder in Slater’s. Rowenna was pale, appeared rather fragile – fragile like glass.

  Once they were back in his flat, he’d told Jane about the events in Salisbury.

  Jane had listened, blank-faced, silent. Then she stood up. ‘This flat’s in a disgusting state.’

  Lol sat with Anne Ross’s Pagan Celtic Britain open on his knees, and let Jane scrub violently away at the kitchen floor and her own illusions. In the book, he read that crow-goddesses invariably forecast death and disaster.

  At last, Jane came back from the kitchen, red-faced with exertion and inner turmoil.

  Lol put the book down.

  ‘I’m not going to be able to live with any of this,’ Jane announced.

  ‘But you still shafted me.’

  Merrily was feeling her fury reignite – reflected in the red glow of the tinking electric fire, the sparky glimmerings from the Santas over Broad Street.

  Trust in God, but never trust a bloody priest.

  ‘You claimed you hardly knew him.’

  Huw had taken off his scarf, but left his woolly hat on. They were sitting at opposite ends of Sophie’s long desk under the window. Huw was just a silhouette with a bobble on top. You had to imagine his faded canvas jacket, his shaggy wolfhound hair.

  ‘I don’t know Dobbs,’ Huw said, ‘and I never tried to shaft you.’

  She shook her head and lit a cigarette, staring out of the window. It was after six now and the traffic was thinning out. A granny and grandad kind of couple were walking a child down Broad Street towards All Saints, the child between them hopping and swinging from their hands under the decorations.

  ‘I’m trying to explain,’ Huw said. ‘I want to give you a proper picture, as far as I can see it. They didn’t want me to tell you, but there’s no way round that now, so balls to them.’

  ‘Who didn’t?’

  ‘The canons, the Dean’s Chapter – well, not offici
ally. None of this is official.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘Two fellers came to see me. No,’ raising a shadowy hand, ‘don’t ask. But they’re honourable blokes.’

  ‘As Mark Antony once said.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Huw thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Merrily, there is no conspiracy. These lads are scared. They didn’t know what Dobbs was at, but it put the wind up them. Give us one of them cigs, would you?’

  She slid the packet across the desk to him. ‘Didn’t know you did.’

  ‘You know bugger all about me – nor me about you, when we cut to the stuffing. Ta, lass.’ Huw shook the packet, extracted a cigarette with his teeth. ‘The Devil, what’s he like these days?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Devil, lass.’

  Merrily said, ‘Forked tail, cloven hooves, little horns – deceptively cuddly. And we invented him to discredit the pagan horned god Cernunnos. This is what Jane tells me, over and over.’

  ‘Canny lass.’ Huw extended his cigarette towards her Zippo, and in its flare she saw his grainy bootleather features flop into a smile. ‘Like her mam.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  And then the smile vanished. ‘So…’ He drew heavily. ‘What do you believe?’

  ‘I do accept the existence of a dark force for evil,’ Merrily said steadily.

  Huw nodded. ‘Good enough.’

  When he had first arrived, she’d told him about the projection of the fouled phantom of Denzil Joy: how they’d done it, how well it had worked. She’d told him about the burning of the vestments, and the eucharist she planned for Denzil and Denzil’s mute, abused wife. She was telling him because she needed him to know she was clean, able to deal with things.

  Huw started now to talk about evil in its blackest, most abstract form. Evil, the substance. How it was always said that the deepest evil was often to be found in closest proximity to the greatest good. How Satanists would despoil churches for the pure intoxication of it, the dark high it gave them.

  ‘And does that explain St Cosmas?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve not told Dobbs about that. He smelled it on me, mind, that night. Knew I’d just done an exorcism. Happen that’s what got him talking.’

  ‘Ah,’ Merrily sat up, ‘so Dobbs has talked to you.’

  ‘Only in bits, till last night. The other times he were weighing me up, getting the measure of me. See, what he’s done is he’s shut himself down, boarded himself up, put himself into a vacuum. Working out whether he was going to snuff it or be fit enough to go back. I figured it was my job to give him the space he needed. To see he wasn’t pestered – you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘You sealed him into a kind of magic circle.’

  ‘Protective circle: the invisible church. Magic is where you use your willpower to bring about changes in the natural pattern, to rearrange molecules. We ask God to do it, if He thinks it’s the right thing – which is subtly different, as you know.’

  ‘Protecting him from what? The Devil? What, Huw?’

  ‘I wanted to bring you in on it, Merrily, honest to God I did. I hated going behind your back. But the Dean’s lads are saying no way, no way. It’s the last thing Dobbs’d want. They don’t like the Bishop and you’re the Bishop’s pussycat.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘You know that’s not what I think, so stuff the Dean. Let’s talk about this; I really don’t know how much time we’ve got. I’ve not come across it before in any credible situation.’

  ‘What?’

  A shadow had dropped over the room, like a cloth over a birdcage. Merrily saw that a line of golden Santas had gone out over Broad Street.

  ‘We think there’s a squatter in the Cathedral,’ Huw said.

  * * *

  So, like, how could she go back to that school on Monday and be in the same room with the lying slag? The same building? How?

  Lol said, without much conviction, that maybe it was best not to leap to too many conclusions.

  ‘Yeah?’ Jane collapsed on to the rug. ‘Like which particular conclusions is it best to avoid, Lol? Should I maybe like hang fire on the possibility that Rowenna wants to be my best friend for reasons not entirely unconnected with my mother?’

  ‘No, that’s valid.’

  ‘Is she real, Lol? Is she psychotic? Is there a word for women who need to shag priests?’

  ‘Janey, if we were merely talking about a psychological condition, it would make it all so much simpler. She hasn’t been anywhere near Merrily, has she?’

  ‘Just the once.’

  ‘All right,’ Lol said, ‘let’s go back to when you first knew her. This must be before your mum became an exorcist. When did she make the first approach?’

  ‘She didn’t. It was me. This was when she first started at the school, right? Before her, the last new girl there was me, and I know what it’s like when you come in from out of the area and they’re all kind of suspicious of you. I went over to talk to her, and we just got on. That’s it.’

  ‘Did she know about Merrily?’

  ‘Pretty soon she did. See, one of her most… attractive qualities is she likes talking about you. She listens, she asks questions, she laughs at the things you say. She’s sympathetic when you’ve got problems at home. You are the most interesting person in the world when you’re with Rowenna.’

  ‘You tell her everything.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jane said gloomily. ‘You tell her everything.’

  ‘How soon before the psychic things, the New Age stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just happened. You’re talking all through the lunch hour, then you discover she’s got her own car, so she gives you a lift home. But, yeah, when I found out she was interested in like otherwordly pursuits, that was the clincher. Soul-mates! It’s just like so brilliant when you find somebody you can talk to about that stuff, and they’re not going: Yeah, yeah, but where do you go on Saturday nights? It just never occurs to you to be suspicious, you’re so delighted. And when she says, Hey, there’s this psychic fair at Leominster, you don’t go, Oh, I’d better ask my mum, do you?’

  ‘What happened at the psychic fair?’

  ‘We met Angela.’

  ‘Mrs Purefoy?’

  ‘If you say so. Although, when I look back, was she really doing the psychic fair? How do we know she read anybody else’s cards? See, it was Rowenna who first mentioned the fair. It was Rowenna who, when we’d been there a while and it was getting cold and boring, suggested we consult a clairvoyant in the nice warm pub. It was Rowenna who said she’d had a call from Angela wanting to see us again. I will struggle for a long time against things I don’t want to believe, Lol, but when the cracks start to appear…’

  ‘What was Angela like?’

  ‘Really, really impressive – not what you were expecting. Very smooth, very poised, very articulate and kind of upperclass. Like, you felt she had your best interests at heart at all times. And, of course, you believed every damn word she said.’

  Lol smiled.

  ‘She said I had extraordinary abilities.’

  ‘Which, instinctively, you knew.’

  Jane scowled.

  ‘I suppose she recommended you should develop them.’

  ‘She put me in touch with a group called the Pod.’

  ‘Meeting over the healthfood caff in Bridge Street.’

  ‘It was you then. I thought you hadn’t spotted me.’

  ‘If you’d been your usual friendly little self,’ Lol said, ‘I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it. So what happens at the Pod?’

  ‘It’s good actually. It’s just about building up your awareness of like other realms.’

  ‘Nothing heavily ritualistic?’

  ‘Not at all. In fact – here we go – Rowenna’s already suggesting it’s kind of low-grade stuff. God, it’s so transparent when you start seeing it from another angle.’

  ‘It’s not really. It seems quite sophisticated to me. They
introduce you into a group full of nice, amiable women who mother you along, don’t scare you off…’

  ‘So the Pod are part of this?’

  ‘I don’t know. They seem fairly harmless. Somebody apparently suggested you’d be an asset. That’s what I was told.’

  ‘Because of Mum? What is all this?’

  ‘It’s just about women clerics, I think,’ Lol said. ‘They’re still new and sexy, and it’s the biggest and most disruptive thing to happen in the Church for centuries. Angela’s involved with the Pod, right?’

  ‘I don’t actually think so. She’s never’s been to a meeting in the short time I’ve been going.’

  ‘She mention your mum?’

  ‘She said Rowenna’d told her. She said she was annoyed about that because she thought it was ethically wrong – some bullshit like that – to know things about people you were doing readings for. And, yeah, she’s like, “Oh, I can’t tell you anything tonight after all, I’ve probably got it all wrong” – until I’m begging her. And then all this stuff that I have to tease out of her and Ro, about needing to lead Mum into the light. And they’re dropping what now seem like really broad hints that if I don’t, some disastrous situation will develop. They just want to like… corrupt her, don’t they?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Lol said. ‘And Merrily’s right: they’re getting at her through you. Whatever you might think, you’re the most important thing in her life. That must be obvious to them – you being the only child of a single parent.’

  ‘Who’s them?’

  ‘I don’t know. The idea of all these evil Devil-worshippers targeting priests, it just sounds so… and yet…’

  ‘We have to do something, Lol. I’m just like so boiling up inside. It’s like I’ve been raped, you know? We…’ Jane sprang up. ‘Hey! Let’s go and see Angela! Now we know who she is, let’s just turn up on her doorstep and, like, demand answers.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve got to think about this.’