The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Didn’t… Stewart make any kind of protest?’

  ‘Didn’t live long enough, thanks to his good friends, the gypos – those lithe and slippery gypo boys, dear, oh dear. But, yeah, he did make a last, meaningful gesture.’

  The path forked – Lol thought this was probably the point at which he’d lost his way the other night – and Stock went to the left and climbed over a stile.

  The kiln house was in front of them now. It was built of red brick and was smaller than it had looked by night, and now the full horror of the barn sandwich became apparent. The actual kiln tower, with just one window, was at the front, but most of the other windows seemed to be on the sides, permanently shadowed by industrial metal.

  Lol climbed over the stile and found Stock standing on the edge of the field, lighting his roll-up.

  ‘If you hadn’t guessed, Uncle Stewart’s final gesture was Gerard Stock. Stephie was Stewart’s’ –he coughed out smoke, – ‘favourite niece. Always close to her after her parents split. How’s she repay him? Marries Gerard Stock. Steph’s sweet eighteen, this guy’s twenny years older, smokes a lot of dope, gets both of them busted one time, dear oh dear. And, oh yeah, the clincher: one night Stephie falls downstairs and loses her baby and there’s some internal messiness so there aren’t gonna be any more babies. And this is all Gerard Stock’s fault, naturally. And Stephie, once beloved, gets sliced out of Stewart’s will. We thought.’

  They both looked up at the kiln house.

  ‘Now why,’ said Stock, ‘would the dear old turd-burglar let his beloved home fall into the hands of a man he couldn’t stand the fucking sight of? You’re right. He didn’t bequeath his house to Gerard Stock. He bequeathed Gerard Stock to Adam Lake.’

  Stock coughed, then laughed. The sun was sinking fast, and the side of the kiln house facing the nearest barn was already almost black in its shadow.

  ‘When Lake finds out who inherited, we get a letter from his agent, making an offer. We refuse. That’s when the second barn goes up.’ He nodded at the house. ‘There you go – power’s back on.’

  Lights had appeared in two of the windows in the shadowed wall. None of them seemed to be very big windows, Lol noticed, and the Stocks wouldn’t even be allowed to enlarge them because the kiln house would be on the historic-buildings list. Living there couldn’t be easy; it would look like deepest winter all year round.

  ‘You have to keep lights on all day?’

  ‘Some. Yeah, we live like moles, but it’s a liddle better than the trailer.’

  ‘What, even though—?’ Lol broke off. He couldn’t say it.

  Stock could. ‘Even though we have our dining table resting on the flagstones where the nice gypsy boys spread Uncle Stewart’s brains?’

  He burst out laughing again, but it was shallower this time and soon tailed off. The light that Lol remembered from the other night came on palely below the conical roof of the kiln.

  ‘Spooky.’ Stock’s cigarette lit up in his rosebud lips, like a spark from the setting sun. He stood with his legs apart, looking like some kind of psychotic troll. ‘It’s a spooky place. You believe in ghosts, Lol?’

  Lol thought of the naked woman in the naked hop-yard who, for one icy moment—

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I suppose I do.’

  ‘I don’t.’ Stock squeezed out his cigarette between finger and thumb and winced. ‘But something needs dealing with.’

  8

  Mercury Retrograde

  LATE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the vicarage seemed more still and vast than Merrily had ever known it. One woman, seven bedrooms. Even the kitchen was as quiet as a crypt.

  Wearing Jane’s old Radiohead T-shirt, she sat down at the table, took out the lumpy old penny from a hip pocket of her jeans, and stared at the blurred woman with the trident. Some broads had all the backbone.

  In the dawn-lit chancel, she’d blessed the coin on the altar – and then been unable to go through with the rest, spending the next half-hour on her knees, concluding that she was not a natural psychic and could never imagine herself approaching a state of grace.

  And then it had been time to go home and finish the last bits of Jane’s packing and help carry her bags out to the boot of Eirion’s stepmother’s silver BMW, where Eirion stowed it as carefully as if it was the kid’s trousseau and kept looking over his shoulder at Jane, as if to make sure she was still there, his guileless face breaking into the kind of smile that told you everything you didn’t really want to know.

  Merrily caught herself thinking he was the sort of guy Jane ought to meet in about ten years’ time, when she’d… been around?

  God, it was always so hard. Sometimes you wished they could have some kind of life-experience cell implanted in their brains as soon as they hit puberty.

  Jane was being practical, methodical, counting off on her fingers all the things she needed to take – and avoiding Eirion’s eyes, Merrily noticed. Eirion she thought she could understand; Jane was more complex. Jane, she suspected, would always be complex.

  Last night, the power hadn’t gone off. They hadn’t managed a proper talk, but what was she supposed to have said, anyway: Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do? At about three and a half years older than Jane, she’d been pregnant.

  ‘You will be OK, won’t you, Mum?’ The kid wore a high-necked lemon-and-white striped top and white jeans. She’d looked about nine.

  ‘Yes, flower, I’ll avoid junk food, I won’t drink to excess, I’ll observe speed limits and I’ll try to be home before midnight.’ The kid was still looking too serious; her mood clearly did not match Eirion’s. ‘And, erm… I expect you’ll ring occasionally from Pembrokeshire?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Got enough money?’

  ‘I won’t flash the plastic unless things get really tight, if that’s—’

  ‘Whatever,’ Merrily said. ‘Do you want to take the mobile?’

  They still only had one between them.

  ‘Your need’s far greater than mine. Besides, it’s supposed to be a holiday.’ Jane picked up Ethel, the black cat, and nuzzled her. ‘A whole month. She won’t remember me.’

  ‘Of course she will.’

  ‘Anyway, I can borrow Irene’s phone.’

  ‘Ring any time. Any time at all.’

  ‘It’s all in.’ Eirion had closed the boot and stood with his back to the car, his baseball cap hanging from both hands at waist level, obviously trying to control his smile, contain a youthful glee that might be viewed as uncool.

  ‘Off you go, then, flower.’ Merrily accepted Ethel, popping her down on the lawn, where she lifted a paw and began to lick it, unconcerned. Cats.

  Hugging them at the gate, Eirion had felt reassuringly stocky and trustworthy. Jane’s face had felt hot.

  Now, Merrily laid the coin on the table, her eyes suddenly filling up, a hollow feeling in her chest.

  She was thirty-seven years old.

  She wondered sometimes if the kid’s dead father, the faithless Sean, could ever see them. She tried to remember if Sean had ever been remotely like Eirion, but the only image she could conjure up was the range of emotions – dismay, anger, resignation and a final apologetic tenderness – warping his twenty-year-old face on the night she’d told him that something that would turn out to be Jane had been detected.

  She walked aimlessly into the echoey hall, looked at herself in the mirror, a good two inches shorter than Jane now. On her, the one-size, once-venerated, Radiohead T-shirt looked as baggy as a surplice.

  She thought about taking the coin to the church again. But it wasn’t long after five p.m., and there’d probably still be the odd tourist about. Or worse, a local. The vicar tossing a coin at the altar? It’d be all round the village before closing time at the Black Swan.

  On impulse, she went out to the Volvo.

  Unfinished business: a surprise visit to the Shelbones in the cool of a Saturday evening. Just happening to be passing.

  In the churchyard at Dilw
yn, the yews threw big shadows across three women leaving the porch. None of them was Hazel Shelbone, and when Merrily reached the bungalow, there was no car in the drive and the garage doors were open – no vehicle inside.

  Family outing?

  But as Merrily drove slowly past, she caught a flicker of movement at the end of a path running alongside the garage.

  She drove on for about two hundred yards, past the last house in the lane, and parked the Volvo next to a metal field-gate. With no animals in the field, she figured it was safe to leave the car there for a while. She got out and walked back to the Shelbones’ bungalow, where she pressed the bell and waited.

  No answer. OK. Round the back.

  The flagged path dividing the bungalow and the concrete garage ended at a small black wrought-iron gate. As Merrily went quietly through it she heard a handle turning, like a door opening at the rear of the house. Around the corner of the bungalow, she came face to face with Amy Shelbone, emerging from a glassed-in back porch.

  The girl jumped back in alarm, her face red and ruched-up, thin, bare arms down by her sides, stiff as dead twigs, fists clenched tight.

  ‘Sorry, Amy. I rang the bell, but—’

  Amy was blinking, breathing hard. She had on a sleeveless yellow dress. Her thin, fair hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore white gymshoes, not trainers.

  ‘They’re not here.’

  Merrily turned and closed the metal gate behind her, as if the girl might bolt like a feral kitten. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps—’ Moving slowly to the edge of the path, taking a step on to the lawn.

  ‘No!’ The kid backed away towards a small greenhouse in which the sun’s reflection hung like a lamp. ‘No! You just keep away from me!’

  Recognition at last, then.

  ‘It’s OK, I’ll stay here.’ Merrily looked down at her T-shirt. ‘It’s my day off. See – no cross, no dog collar.’

  ‘Go away.’

  Merrily shook her head. ‘Not this time.’

  ‘You’re trespassing! It’s disgraceful. I’ll call the police.’

  ‘OK.’

  Amy backed against the greenhouse, then sprang away from it and started to cry, her shoulders shaking – a gawky, stick-limbed adolescent in a large, plain, rectangular garden.

  ‘I only want to talk,’ Merrily said. ‘Or, better still, listen.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘What would be the point? I’d just have to keep coming back.’

  ‘People like you make me sick,’ Amy said.

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ Amy cawed.

  ‘I was sick in church once. It’s no big deal.’

  Amy looked down at her white shoes in silence.

  ‘And sometimes I’ve felt God’s let me down,’ Merrily said. ‘You think he’s watching you suffer and not lifting a finger. You think maybe God’s not… not a very nice person. And then sometimes you wake up in the night and you think there’s nobody out there at all. That everybody’s been lying to you – even your own parents. And that’s the loneliest thing.’

  Amy didn’t look at her. She walked to the middle of the half-shadowed lawn. The garden, severely bushless and flowerless, backed on to open fields that looked more interesting. Amy stopped and mumbled at her shoes, ‘They did lie.’

  ‘Your mum and dad?’

  ‘They’re not—’

  ‘Yes, they are. They wanted you. Not just any baby… you. That’s a pretty special kind of mum and dad.’

  Amy didn’t reply. She was intertwining her fingers in front of her, kneading them, and seemed determined to keep at least six yards between herself and Merrily. With feral cats, you put down food and kept moving the bowl closer to the house. It might take weeks, months before you could touch them.

  ‘Where are they – your mum and dad?’

  Amy produced a handkerchief from a pocket of her frock. A real handkerchief, white and folded. She shook it out, revealing an embroidered A in one corner, and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  ‘Shopping,’ she said dully, crumpling the hanky. ‘They go shopping every second Saturday. In Hereford. She can’t drive.’

  ‘How long have they been gone?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ Amy hacked a heel sulkily into the grass. Then she said, ‘They went off about nine. They always go off at nine. They’ll be back soon, I expect.’

  ‘And you stayed home.’

  ‘There was no point.’

  It wasn’t clear what she meant. At first, she hadn’t seemed much like the teacher’s-pet type of girl described by either her mother or – more significantly – Jane. Yet there was something that kept pulling her back from the edge of open rebellion, making her answer Merrily’s questions in spite of herself.

  ‘Could we go in the house, do you think?’

  ‘No!’

  Merrily nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘I don’t have to talk to you.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. Nobody has to talk to anybody. But you often feel glad afterwards that you did.’

  Amy shook her head.

  ‘You used to talk to God, didn’t you?’ Merrily said. ‘I bet you used to talk to God quite a lot.’

  The girl’s intertwined fingers tightened as if they’d suddenly been set in cement.

  ‘But you don’t do that any more. Because you think God betrayed you. Do you want to tell me how he did that, Amy? How you were betrayed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you told your mum and dad?’

  Amy nodded.

  ‘And what did they—?’ Merrily broke off, because Amy was looking directly at her now. Her plain, pale face was wedge-shaped and her cheeks seemed concave. She did not look well. Anorexics looked like this.

  ‘I don’t need to talk to God.’ Sneering out the word. ‘God doesn’t tell you anything. God’s a waste of time. If I want to talk, I can talk… I can talk to her.’

  Her voice was suddenly soft and reverent. For a moment, Merrily thought of the Virgin Mary.

  ‘Her?’

  Over Amy’s shoulder, the lamp of the sun glowed in the greenhouse.

  ‘Justine,’ Amy whispered.

  ‘Justine?’

  In the softening heat of early evening, Amy’s lips parted and she shivered. This shiver was particularly shocking because it seemed to ripple very slowly through her. Because it seemed almost a sexual reaction.

  Merrily went still. ‘Who’s Justine, Amy?’

  Amy’s body tightened up. ‘No!’

  ‘Amy?’

  ‘Get out!’ Amy screamed. ‘Just get out, you horrible, lying thing! It’s nothing to do with you!’

  As if she’d been planning this for some minutes, she suddenly hurled herself across the lawn, passing within a couple of feet of Merrily, and into the glazed porch, slamming the door, shooting a bolt and glaring in defiance from the other side of the glass, poor kid.

  Three times that evening, Merrily tried to call Hazel Shelbone. Twice it was engaged, the third time there was no answer.

  When she’d got home, there’d been a message from Jane on the answering machine. Merrily replayed it twice, trying to detect the subtext.

  ‘Well, we got here. All of us. The whole family. It’s quite a big place, an old whitewashed farmhouse about half a mile from the sea, near an old quarry, but you can see the sea from it, of course. So it’s… yeah… cool. And the whole family’s here. Everybody. So… Well, I’ll call you. Look after Ethel and, like… your little self. Night, night, Mum.’

  Hmm. The whole family, huh?

  The shadows of apple trees meshed across the vicarage garden. In the scullery, Merrily switched on the computer, rewrote her notes for tomorrow’s sermon and printed them out. It was to be the first one in – well, quite a long time – that she’d given around the familiar theme of Suffer little children to come unto me. A complex issue: how should we bring kids to Christ? Or was it better, in the long term, to let them find their own way?

 
; Merrily deleted a reference to Jane’s maxim: Any kind of spirituality has to be better than none at all. Dangerous ground.

  We never pressed the Church on her, David and I, Hazel Shelbone had said. Never forced religion on any of our children.

  Bet you did, really, Merrily thought, gazing out at the deepening blue, whether you intended to or not.

  She recalled Hazel saying, in answer to her question about what might have got into Amy, The spirit of a dead person, in a voice that was firm and intense and quite convinced.

  Now she had a question for Hazel: who is Justine?

  She reached out for the telephone and, as often happened, it rang under her hand.

  He said his name was Fred Potter. It was a middle-aged kind of name, somehow, but he sounded as if he was in his early twenties, max.

  He said he worked for the Three Counties News Service, a freelance agency based in Worcester, supplying news stories to national papers. He said he was sorry to trouble her, but he understood she was the county exorcist.

  ‘More or less,’ Merrily admitted.

  ‘Just that we put a story round earlier,’ Fred said, ‘but a couple of the Sundays have come back, asking for a quote from you or the Bishop, and the Bishop seems to be unavailable.’

  ‘Let’s see… Saturday night? Probably out clubbing.’

  ‘What? Oh.’ He laughed. ‘Listen, Mrs Watkins, if I lay this thing out for you very briefly, perhaps you could see if you have any comments. I’ve got to be really quick, because the editions go to bed pretty early on a Saturday.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Right. This chap’s convinced his house is badly… haunted. He and his wife are losing a lot of sleep over this. It’s an old hop-kiln, a man was murdered there. Now they say they’re getting these, you know, phenomena.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Fred, ‘it always amazes me when you people say “I see” and “Sure”, like it’s everyday stuff.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Wow,’ Fred said. ‘Brrrr.’

  ‘Is this person living in the diocese?’