by Phil Rickman
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.
&nb
sp; 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 God.’
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.
Sophie was tending to the woman, the contents of her large handbag emptied out on the pew, the woman’s head tilted back – Sophie dabbing her nose and lips with a wet pad, the woman struggling to say how sorry she was, what a time for a nosebleed to happen.
‘She has them now and then,’ a bulky grey-haired man was explaining in a low, embarrassed voice to nobody in particular. ‘Not on this scale, I have to say. It’s nerves, I suppose. It’ll stop in a minute.’
Merrily said sharply, ‘Nerves?’
‘Oh,’ he mumbled, ‘mother of the Boy Bishop, all that. Stressful time all round.’
‘You’re Dick Lyden?’
‘Yes, I am. Look, can’t you leave the cleaning-up until after the service. Nobody’s going to step in it.’
‘That’s not what I’m worried about, Mr Lyden. This is his mother’s blood?’ She was talking to herself, searching for the significance of this.
‘I don’t want the boy to see the fuss.’ Dick Lyden pulled out a white handkerchief and began to mop his wife’s splashes from his shoes. ‘He’s temperamental, you see.’
* * *
Someone had given James Lyden one of the votive candles from near where the shrine had stood, and he waited there while they pushed back the partition screen.
‘Not how we’d like it to be,’ Jane heard this big minister with the bushy beard say. ‘Still, I’m sure St Thomas would understand.’
‘Absolutely,’ James Lyden said, like he couldn’t give a toss one way or the other.
There was no sign of Rowenna.
Pressed into the side of one of the pointed arches screening off the transept, no more than six yards away from them, Jane saw it all as the bearded minister held open the partition door to the sundered tomb.
Only the minister and the Boy Bishop went up to the stones – as though it was not just stone slabs in there, but Cantilupe’s mummified body. The two candle-bearing boys in white tunics waited either side of the door, like sentries. One of them, a stocky shock-haired guy, saw Jane and raised a friendly eyebrow. She’d never seen him before and pretended she hadn’t noticed.
The bearded minister stood before one of the side-panels with those mutilated figures of knights on it – their faces obliterated like someone had attacked them centuries ago with a hammer and a stone-chisel, and a lot of hatred.
The minister crossed his hands over his stomach, gazed down with closed eyes. He saw nothing.
‘Almighty God,’ he said, ‘let us this night remember Your servant, Thomas, guardian of this cathedral church, defender of the weak, healer of the sick, friend to the poor, who well understood the action of Our Lord when His disciples asked of Him: which is the greatest in the Kingdom of God and He shewed to them a child and set him in the midst of them.’
Jane saw James Lyden’s full lips twist into a sour and superior sneer.
The minister said, ‘Father, we ask that the humility demonstrated by Thomas Cantilupe throughout his time as bishop here might
be shared this night and always by your servant James.’
‘No chance,’ Jane breathed grimly, and the shock-haired boy must have seen the expression on her face, because he grinned.
‘It is to our shame,’ the minister went on, ‘that Thomas’s shrine, this cathedral’s most sacred jewel, should be in pieces, but we know that James will return here when it is once again whole.’
Wouldn’t put money on it. This time Jane looked down at her shoes, and kept her mouth shut.
Which was more than James did when he put down his candle on a mason’s bench, and bent reverently to kiss the stone. Jane reckoned he must have spent some while dredging up this disgusting, venomous wedge of thick saliva.
When his face came up smiling, she felt sick. She also felt something strange and piercingly frightening: an unmistakable awareness, in her stomach, of the nearness of evil. She gasped, because it weakened her, her legs felt numb, and she wanted to be away from here, but was not sure she could move. She felt herself sinking into the stone of the arch. She felt soiled and corrupted, not so much by what she’d seen but by what she realized it meant, and she groped for the words she’d intoned with all the sincerity of a budgie – while Mum held her hands – before the altar at Ledwardine.
Christ be with us, Christ within us.
And then the electric lights went out.
‘Look, darling,’ he said, ‘it’s Mr Robinson. You remember Mr Robinson.’
Tim Purefoy held a large glass of red wine close to the tablecloth white of his surplice.
Anna wore a simple black shift, quite low-cut. She was a beautiful woman; she threw off a sensual charge like a miasma. Like an aura, Lol supposed.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I thought, one day, there would be somebody. I really didn’t think it would be you.’
‘The brother, perhaps.’ Tim lowered himself, with a grateful sigh, into the chair. ‘All rage and bombast, amounting, in the end, to very little – like most of them.’
