by Phil Rickman
Separate lives. My God, Merrily thought, we’re starting to lead separate lives, meeting at mealtimes like hotel guests.
On Thursday night, the night before the installation service, she was awoken by a sound from above.
A single, tentative footstep. As though someone was testing the floor, to be sure the boards were firm between the joists. Like one of those ball-bearings in a gaming machine, the sound must have been rolling around her head for an inordinately long time.
Wake up. Come on. Don’t rise to this. Wake up now.
Because she wasn’t really awake at all, was she? Every time something like this happened, she dreamed she was waking up and she got out of bed ... and there were always more doors than there really were in that passage. Doors which should never be opened. Doors to the past. The image of Sean formed again behind her eyes. Sean turning from the window, eyes full of blood, hands feeling the air like the hands of someone newly blind. Merrily remembered shrinking back against the door, knowing that if his hands had found her, he wouldn’t let go and he would always be in that room. She couldn’t remember getting out of there, only awakening, in this bed, in her terror, to the morning.
Merrily opened one eye, with some difficulty. It had been a sticky, sucking sleep, like treacle. She pulled her head from the pillow, looking for the window. A strange, terracotta moon hung low and sultry between the trees. She sat up, blinking. Pushed her hands through her hair. It was damp with sweat. Her nightdress was pasted to her skin. There was a tightness around her chest.
Another footfall. And then another, closer. And then a flurry of them before two final, emphatic steps, like someone taking up a position directly over her bed.
And then silence. What the hell’s she doing up there?
‘No. I slept really well, thank you. Didn’t get up once.’ Wrapped in her yellow towelling robe, Jane spread sunflower marge on crispbread. ‘I don’t get up in the night unless I’m ill, you know that. What time was this?’
‘I don’t know.’ Merrily carried bread to the toaster; she didn’t want any toast, just a night’s sleep. ‘After midnight, before dawn.’
‘Oh, Mum, do you remember me ever getting up in the night?’
‘Well yes, as a matter of fact, the first night we spent here you got up to go to the loo.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Jane, I’m trying to be patient. You did.’
‘No, I said I wanted to go when I first got into the sleeping bag, and you said forget about it, it’ll go away and so I did and it did.’
‘You got up in the night, flower,’ Merrily said through her teeth. ‘You wanted me to go with you. You were tugging on my hand.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Jane threw down the butter knife. ‘Where do you get this crap from? You were dreaming, for God’s sake! All right. Look. I should’ve told you. I was throwing this wild party last night. Yeah, we had this all-night binge with masses of booze and hard drugs. I’d’ve invited you, but I knew you wanted a good night’s sleep before your initiation ceremony. Christ, Mother!’
‘So you’re saying you didn’t hear anything at all last night,’ Merrily said in a small voice, bent over the toaster, her back to Jane. There was a dull ache far behind her eyes.
Jane made a clicking noise, beyond exasperation. ‘I sleep, as you used to keep pointing out, the sleep of the innocent. Perhaps it was a ghost.’
Merrily dropped hot toast.
Jane grinned slyly. ‘Place is old enough. Yeah, bound to have ghosts. Maybe you should do an exorcism. We have the book, we have the candles, don’t know about the bell, would a bicycle bell do? Hey, did you have, like, mock-hauntings at college to practise your technique?’
‘We didn’t do exorcism. The only ghost that ever got a mention was the Holy Ghost.’
‘I can’t believe it. They didn’t teach you anything useful at that college, did they?’ Jane crunched her crispbread thoughtfully. ‘Er, do you think it’s him?’
‘What?’ Merrily shovelled her toast on to a plate and brought it to the table. She didn’t want to talk about this any more. One of them was going a little mad. What did it mean when half your night seemed to be spent in some ungodly no man’s land between reality and dreams? How could you be suffocated by a house this big?
‘Wil.’ Jane smiled wistfully.
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Hey, if I’d known I could’ve invited him to my party. There’s no decent totty in Ledwardine these days.’
‘All right. Let it go. And talking of parties, will you be coming to mine?’
‘The initiation? That’s what you call a party, is it?’
‘I know, very sad. But the Cassidys are laying on a buffet afterwards in the church itself. Should be over by about half-nine or ten. But perhaps you could slip away, get changed and drift over to Colette’s thing, up in the restaurant?’
Jane met her eyes. The kid could always recognize a deal.
‘What makes you think I want to go to Colette’s party?’
‘Don’t you?’
Jane shrugged. ‘What time would I have to be home?’
Merrily shrugged.
‘Really?’
‘I trust you to be careful. And to remember that you’re not sixteen yet.’
‘So don’t get shagged is what you mean.’
Merrily held the kid’s brazen gaze. ‘Something like that.’
‘Well. Like I said ‘ – Jane smiled ruefully, looking suddenly and disturbingly older – ‘there’s no worthwhile totty around here these days, is there?’
When Jane had left for school, Merrily sat for a while, staring at the cold, uneaten toast, and then she dragged the phone over to the table.
An admission of defeat, but what could she do? Jane, as usual, had touched a nerve. Merrily tapped out the college number from memory.
‘Is it possible to speak to Dr Campbell?’
The switchboard said David Campbell was on the phone; Merrily said she’d wait. David was the only one of her old tutors she figured would be any help. He was a liberal, but he’d also been High Church in his time, an incense-burner.
We didn’t do exorcism. The only ghost that ever got a mention was the Holy Ghost.
She felt more than a little stupid about this. Once, in Liverpool, one of her prozzies had asked Merrily what she could do about her flat, which was haunted. The flat had been supplied by the woman’s pimp, who owned the building; Merrily had interpreted this as a cry for help, found her a room in a shelter, but she’d gone back to the flat and the pimp after a week, never made contact again.
‘Putting you through,’ the switchboard said.
‘Merrily Watkins! How are you, love?’
‘Hello, David.’
‘Installation day, right?’
‘Tonight. How did you know?’
‘Word gets around. You won’t mind if I don’t come, I hate bloody parishes, as you know.’
‘I remember. David, are you alone?’
‘One always hopes not.’
He meant God. Merrily pondered the get-out option: asking him about some aspect of installation-night protocol. But she let the silence hang too long.
‘What’s the problem, love?’ David said quietly.
‘OK. I think ... Oh, Jesus, it sounds so—’ Her head thumping away.
‘Go on.’
‘All right. I think my vicarage is haunted, and I don’t know how to handle that.’
David said, ‘I see.’ She imagined him in his office, his metal-stemmed pipe sticking out of the pen-pot on the desk.
‘I’m glad you see,’ she said, ‘because I don’t. According to my Uncle Ted, churchwarden and oracle, the last incumbent had no problems in that department. And that was over about thirty-five years.’
‘What makes you think it’s haunted?’
Was she imagining a shift in his voice, a reserve setting in?
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘usual stuff. Or what I understand is usual. Footsteps in the night. S
eeing things that ... that can’t be there. It isn’t imagination, although the experiences do seem to be interwoven with dreams. What I mean ... some of it happens in actual dreams – sometimes I think I’m awake when I’m really dreaming and maybe the other way around, too. And I ... Look, I know what you’re thinking, and I have been overworking a bit and things have been very fraught, what with living out of a pub and then moving into an old house that’s far too big and ... What?’
‘Hold on. Steady.’
‘I’m perfectly steady. I mean, this morning, my daughter’s saying to me, didn’t they teach you how to do an exorcism in college, and I have to say no, we didn’t even touch on it. Why didn’t we touch on it, David?’
‘How is Jane?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘She’d be ... what? Fourteen?’
‘Fifteen. What are you saying? That most poltergeist activity is caused by adolescent children? That it’s Jane who’s doing it?’
‘I’m not qualified to say anything.’
‘But why?’ Merrily demanded. ‘Why didn’t we go into this stuff? We’re supposed to be at the cutting edge, aren’t we? We’re supposed to be dealing with the supernatural on a day-to-day basis, and yet we never talked about ghosts.’
‘True,’ David said. ‘We never once discussed the area of parapsychology, and perhaps we should have, if only to examine the demarcation lines.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘All right ...’ She envisaged him shifting in his old captain’s chair, leaning an elbow on the cushion over an arm, establishing a position. ‘Let me say, first of all, that I accept entirely that certain unexplained events occur. All the time.’
‘So you’re not saying I’m nuts.’
‘Certainly not. There’s far too much evidence. What I am saying, however – and I say it as a question to which I don’t really have an answer – is, do these phenomena really fit inside our field of operation?’
‘Good or evil, they’re spiritual matters.’
‘But are they? Are we not simply talking about, say, forms of energy, which are, as yet, unknown to science? Yes, certainly, this sphere of activity was absolutely central to the work of the medieval Church. Much of what priests were up to in those days would constitute what we now dismiss as magic; illusion. They’d find it expedient to produce the odd miracle out of their back pockets to maintain their ... what you might call their street cred. What we know to be perfectly natural electrical phenomena would, then, have been seen as the work of either God or Satan. Yes, I do believe in haunted houses.’
‘But you think – let me get this right – you think there’s a scientific explanation that has nothing to do with religion and therefore nothing to do with us. So all the official diocesan exorcists are just remnants of the Middle Ages.’
‘Dangerous ground, here, Merrily. Yes, some clergy feel drawn to that kind of work. But even they are increasingly seeing what they do as a form of psychology. The Church is guarded about ghosts and demons and alleged appearances of the Mother of God as damp stains in kitchen walls, and rightly so in my view. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something happening.’
Dangerous ground indeed, Merrily thought. How far was he from saying that one day science would explain God, and then they’d all be redundant?
‘So you think I should see a scientist. Or a shrink.’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Or take Jane to one?’
David Campbell sighed. ‘You’re a sensible person, Merrily. That’s why you’re in a responsible position.’
‘Even though I’m a woman.’
‘It’s still sensitive,’ David said. Now there was an unmistakable coldness in his voice.
‘You’re saying I should keep my mouth shut,’ Merrily said. ‘Or I’ll have the diocesan chauvinists twittering to the bishop – told you what happens when you let hysterical women take over. That sort of thing.’
‘I think you should give it a few more weeks. It isn’t ... harmful in any way, is it?’
She thought of Sean peering and groping through the mist of blood. The dream-Sean. That definitely was a dream. Wasn’t it? The phone felt slippery in her hand.
‘And I wouldn’t have thought,’ David said, ‘that after all the emotional traumas you’ve come through, you would find these minor paranormal fluctuations at all frightening.’
‘No.’ She paused to bring her voice down. ‘Oh no.’
‘You say you don’t know how to handle it, as if there’s a secret technique we didn’t bother to tell you about. There isn’t, I’m afraid. Sorry, love, but you have to search your own faith, your own belief system. Look, call me again in a week or two, if it’s still worrying you.’
But he was telling her not to. He was telling her that, as far as the Church was concerned, she was on her own.
21
Tears
SHE HAULED HER headache off to the church. Was it because she didn’t like being alone in the vicarage? Because the even older church, with its tombs and the fractured skulls grinning up at you from stone flags, was actually homelier?
Frightened? Frightened of a paranormal fluctuation? Frightened for her daughter’s emotional condition, her own mental state? The Priest-in-Charge? God’s handmaiden? Good God, no. Perish the thought.
Her head felt like a foundry; she’d never ring David Campbell or anyone else at that bloody college again.
She gripped the cold ring-handle of the door into the porch. Pausing there, as she tended to these days. If Dermot Child was slowly undressing her for the benefit of the bellringers she didn’t want to be a captive audience. She opened the church door just a crack. Through it echoed a torn and stricken howl.
‘... you!’
She stopped, head pulsing.
‘... you, Liza Howells ... the night you came to me with your bruises, your torn lip, mouth smashed and teeth gone ... that night your husband beat you for your dalliance with Joseph Pritchard ...’
Her first thought was that this was something to do with the pageant the Women’s Institute was organizing for the festival, a parade of Ledwardine society through the ages.
‘OK.’ Footsteps. ‘Leave it there a minute.’
But this voice she’d heard before. Martin Creighton, the theatre director.
‘So, OK, if we had this Liza sitting somewhere in the middle, and she’s wearing ... what?’
‘A fairly simple black dress.’ Mira Wickham, the designer. ‘Nothing obvious until she’s on her feet. It’s important that the members of the audience sitting all around her don’t realize she isn’t one of them until she starts to react.’
Merrily walked in, stood by the Norman font.
‘In fact, you know, I think what would be really good,’ Mira said, ‘is if Liza and one or two of the others have been chatting to people – in character – before the lights go down. A merging of present-day villagers with their ancestors. So that it seems to several people that they know Liza and the others as individuals. And this communicates itself. We get a blur. A timeslip.’
‘Spooky,’ Creighton said. ‘But that only works if you have real locals in the audience every night.’
‘So we offer free seats to regular churchgoers. Let the vicar sort that out.’
‘You might find it just a bit more complicated than that,’ Merrily said, and there was silence.
Stefan Alder spotted her from the pulpit. ‘Oh ... Hi!’ He bounded down, loped along the aisle, grabbed her hand. ‘You’re ... Merrily Watkins, right?’
‘Mr Alder.’
Creighton and Wickham came to stand either side of him. They looked uncomfortable.
‘Look,’ Creighton said. ‘I hope you don’t think we’re being presumptuous. Obviously, we’ve got to plan as if the thing is going to happen here, but if you say no ...’ He wiped the air, both hands flat. ‘That’s it. We’ll understand.’
‘And where would you go then?’
‘Oh.’ Stefan Alder flicked back h
is ash-blond fringe. ‘I’m sure the bishop would fix Richard up with something. Although, personally, if we couldn’t do it here I’d be inclined to knock it on the head. You see—’
Creighton was glaring at him.
‘—no, really, Martin, I want to be up-front about this whole thing. It was my idea after all. I ... Look, are you doing anything absolutely vital, Merrily? I mean, can we talk about this? The two of us?’
Really succulent totty, Jane had described him once, being provocative. Maybe this was what she saw when she thought of Wil Williams. It was understandable. In a cream-coloured sweat-top and light blue jeans, he looked as fresh and innocent as Richard Coffey seemed seasoned and corrupt. He looked like the singer with one of those boy bands Jane claimed she’d grown out of.
Down past the last of the graves, where the church bordered the orchard on one side and the vicarage garden on the other, there was an apple tree in the hedge.
‘It could have been this one,’ Stefan said. ‘Well, I mean, obviously not this particular tree, but its ancestor. I was talking to your Mr Parry, and he said this particular spot could well have been orchard in Wil’s time. You notice how all the graves at this end are relatively modern, showing where they had to extend the churchyard.’
It was true. There was even a grave of black marble, put in before the conservationists got them banned.
‘Couldn’t be this particular tree, though, could it?’ Merrily said. ‘According to the legend, no actual apples would ever grow over the place where he lay.’
Whereas the tree in the hedge was heavily talcumed with blossom.
‘They would say that, though, wouldn’t they? All these stories are supposed to have an eerie postscript.’ Stefan plucked off a sprig. ‘I remember the first time I came here I’d read an account of it and I’d thought, you know, Poor sod. There was no emotional involvement at that stage, not until I actually came here. I just thought what a bloody shame. I mean, even if he was a witch ... damaging an apple crop? Really!’
‘Perhaps, if it had gone to court, it would’ve been thrown out. That was happening, increasingly. It’s my understanding that, by 1670, people were getting a bit wise to all these witchcraft accusations. You had a neighbour you couldn’t get on with, you’d just accuse him of making your prize bull impotent or something.’
