The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  ‘You’re fond of her, aren’t you?’ Bliss smiled. ‘Who wouldn’t be, eh?’

  Lol said, ‘You haven’t told me exactly what he did.’

  ‘How he killed her?’

  Lol looked at Bliss: pale skin, freckles, an unusually small nose.

  ‘What happened when you all went upstairs, Lol?’

  ‘Well, just…’

  Lol had a terrifying thought: the only cameras in the bedroom were the ones under the floorboards, pointing downwards, but suppose their microphones had picked up the voices from above, during Merrily’s blessing of the upstairs room? And during what happened afterwards, when Merrily had followed Stock downstairs. If there was anything on the tape, the quality would be terrible. But they could work on that. Someone like Prof Levin could clean up the thinnest of recordings.

  ‘… Just more or less what happened in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘With different words.’

  He could tell Bliss about Stephie’s implicit invitation. But it sounded too incredible, unless you knew about the Lady of the Bines incident. Which he’d also kept quiet about. Which he hadn’t even told Merrily about.

  Lol blanked it out. He was terrible at cover-ups. He would look furtive, he’d sweat.

  Bliss said, ‘Nothing happened up there you think might throw more light?’

  ‘Not… not that I can think of.’

  ‘You wanna see the tape, Lol?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Don’t blame yer. But… I think you’re gonna have to. I think we’re gonna have to take the both of you through it. I’m sorry.’ Bliss thought for a moment, then sighed. ‘Look, all right, I’ll be frank wid yer – he’s not saying a lot.’

  ‘Stock?’

  ‘In fact, the bugger’s not saying a thing. Won’t see a solicitor, won’t make a formal statement, just sits there like some bloody big Buddha.’

  ‘But he phoned you to confess…’

  ‘Oh aye. When we get there, he hands us the videos. Looking relieved, if anything. He won’t talk about it, though, won’t explain. That’s why you and Merrily are so important to us at the moment.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Don’t tell the Snow Queen I told you that.’

  ***

  Annie Howe said, ‘Have you heard of the case of Michael Taylor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She’s loving this, Merrily thought. A case on a plate.

  Me in the toaster.

  She was desperate for a cigarette, but she wouldn’t give Howe the satisfaction. She was also desperate for silence, somewhere to collapse and think and, if necessary, scream. Nothing made any sense. Nothing had made sense for days. She felt a welling hatred for Gerard Stock and a bitterness towards Simon St John who had known enough to shut the door in his face.

  ‘Happened near Barnsley, in Yorkshire.’ Howe was back behind her desk. ‘In the mid-seventies. I know most of the details because of the pseudo-Satanist person we found in the Wye last year. I called up some background on Satanism and related issues, and this case was the first to come up on the screen.’

  Merrily closed her eyes and inhaled on an imaginary cigarette. This was one of Huw’s cautionary favourites, which Howe would just love relating.

  ‘Michael Taylor was thirty-one, a good Christian, a family man – and a member, with his wife, of some local religious group. At some point, for reasons I’ve never found entirely understandable, he came to believe he’d been taken over by the Devil.’

  Howe had a set of files on her desk. She opened one and extracted a cellophane folder.

  ‘Two church ministers agreed that Taylor appeared to be possessed by evil, and they spent all night trying to exorcize him, claiming to have expelled – I think – forty demons – the statistical exactitude here obviously adding important credibility to what most people might consider an inexact science. However, Taylor left the priests early the following morning, went home—’

  ‘I know,’ Merrily screwed up her eyes in anguish. ‘I know what he did, there’s no need to—’

  ‘He went home and, with incredible savagery, attacked his wife with his bare hands.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘He tore at her skin, ripped out her tongue. And her eyes.’

  Merrily leaned her head back, stared at the ceiling.

  ‘Eventually, she choked to death on her own blood,’ Howe said.

  ‘And Taylor claimed, in his statement to police’ – Merrily’s voice was starved; she couldn’t look at Howe – ‘that he loved his wife very much but there was an evil inside her that had to be destroyed.’

  ‘Not, I think it’s fair to say, the Church’s finest hour.’

  ‘Exorcism of a person is a complex and dangerous process,’ Merrily said. ‘But this… this case wasn’t anything like that.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘It wasn’t an exorcism. I made that completely clear to Mr Stock from the start. I even decided to hold off the customary Requiem Eucharist because it might look too much like Christian magic. It was prayer, that’s all – prayer as the first stage in dealing with a suspected spiritual presence, there being no reason to suspect any demonic infestation.’

  ‘Let’s go back to Taylor,’ Howe said. ‘Found not guilty by a jury for reasons of insanity. Caused quite a stir, didn’t it?’

  ‘What should be said about that verdict… although Michael Taylor had been, by all accounts, a friendly and popular man with no history of violence, nobody – not the judge, nor the jury, nor the media – seemed prepared even to consider that he might actually have been possessed by a metaphysical evil.’

  ‘He was considered insane.’ To Howe the difference between insanity and possession would be indiscernible. ‘His mental decline appears to have coincided with his taking up membership of a Christian group. His recourse to almost unimaginable violence immediately followed his so-called exorcism by two Christian ministers, isn’t that true?’

  Merrily could only nod, knowing now where this was going – a goods train with a toxic cargo inexorably picking up speed, and nothing she could do to stop it.

  Howe was still flipping through the file on her desk. ‘I’m trying to find what the local bishop said at the time.’

  ‘I can tell you more or less exactly what he said.’

  ‘Here we are… “Exorcism is a type of ministry which is increasingly practised in Christian churches. There is no order of service for this; it is administered as the situation demands. Clearly a form of ministry which must be exercised with the greatest possible care and responsibility.” ’

  ‘But this was not—’

  ‘Ms Watkins, the tape clearly shows the sacrament laid out on your impromptu altar, and the sprinkling, by you, of water, which I assume is what you regard as holy water.’

  ‘The sacrament wasn’t even used, it was—’

  Annie Howe wasn’t listening; she was back into the report, flipping pages.

  ‘Yes… the Taylor case was also commented on by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, who said, I quote: “We must get this business out of the mumbo-jumbo of magic. I do not see exorcism as something set off against and in opposition to medicine. Far from it. I think there are many cases where the more rash exorcists have bypassed the work of psychiatrists.” ’ Howe looked up. ‘Partly as a result, I believe, of the Taylor case, there was a re-examination by the Church of the usefulness of exorcism and how such disasters might be avoided in the future. As a result, the guidance now to exorcists is that they should always work with community psychiatric resources. Is that correct, Ms Watkins?’

  ‘Before an exorcism is carried out on an individual, it’s recommended that they should be seen by a psychiatrist, to make sure they aren’t, for instance, schizophrenic. Yes.’

  ‘And when an exorcism takes place, it’s advised that a qualified psychiatrist should be present. Is that correct?’

  Merrily sighed. ‘Yes.’

  Howe rearranged the papers in the report, applied
a paper clip and slipped them into the folder. She smiled pleasantly at Merrily.

  ‘So, is your idea of deploying community psychiatric resources – in carrying out a ritual that might loosely be described as “mumbo jumbo” at the behest of a notoriously unstable, possibly alcoholic, individual – to take along with you—’

  ‘That’s not what—’

  ‘—take along with you, as your expert medical consultant, a former psychiatric patient with a police record?’

  ‘You stay the fuck away from me!’ Stock screamed. ‘You do not come near me!’

  He was backing into shot. His shirt had come out of his trousers. The sweat patches under his arms were the size of hi-hat cymbals, Lol thought.

  And it was all so beautifully bright. This was what video did; it compensated for the conditions. Clear and clinical, then, even if the quality was not great; Bliss had said these were quickly made VHS copies of the two originals. The one they were looking at was wide-angle, evidently shot from a camera position just above the fridge. The constant picture included all of the table and an area of flagged floor about three feet around it.

  On the table were Stewart Ash’s book on hop-growing, and a wine stain.

  Frannie Bliss froze the tape.

  ‘I think, boss, that this bit gives the lie to the theory that this whole thing was like some big theatrical production… that he even had an idea how it was gonna end. Whatever she’s doing now, you can tell he’s not expecting it.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ DCI Howe said. ‘We can’t even see Stephanie at this point. We don’t know that she’s doing anything. She might not even be there. This could be part of his act.’

  ‘He’d have to be bloody good.’ Bliss started up the tape again.

  Stock was shaking. He just stood there trembling, almost full-face to the camera. His beard was shiny with sweat and spittle.

  The fridge noise was rumbling out of the TV speaker. Lol thought of rocks before an avalanche. He thought of Stock in the seconds before he’d spouted a gutful of sour beer over Adam Lake. He prayed that both Stock and his wife would be out of shot when the killing happened.

  ‘If I didn’t know the circumstances, I’d say he was shit-scared,’ Bliss said. ‘What would he be scared of, Merrily? What could she be doing that would put the fear of God into him?’

  ‘I couldn’t give an opinion on that.’ Merrily’s voice was all dried out.

  ‘We’re looking for ideas, that’s all,’ Bliss said. ‘Doesn’t have to be a thesis.’

  Merrily had been placed near the covered window, DCI Howe standing next to her chair like the angel of death. They’d brought Lol into the room, but only just, seating him near the door, between Frannie Bliss and the other detective, Mumford; he couldn’t even exchange glances with Merrily.

  ‘Not saying much, is she, young Stephanie?’ Bliss said. ‘She still taking the piss? Is she taunting him, you reckon? What’s she doing, Lol? What d’you reckon?’

  Lol said nothing. Why should Bliss think he would know? Had he given something away, with a reaction, an expression? Had Merrily told them that Lol and Stephanie had been alone together, upstairs, not long before the killing?

  ‘Bearing in mind that her body was unclothed,’ Bliss said, ‘when we found her.’

  ‘I don’t…’ Lol was thinking of Stock that first night in the pub. Derek, the landlord, must certainly have overheard when Stock had said, My wife leaves scratches a foot long down my back.

  ‘Stock implied that his wife was highly sexed,’ Lol said. ‘He talked about it in the pub a few nights ago.’

  ‘Boasting?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘He’s not looking too turned-on now, is he?’

  There was a movement on the screen – Stock reaching up to the wall.

  ‘Recognize that thing, Ms Watkins?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a hop-cutter’s hook. It was part of Stewart Ash’s collection of hop-farmers’ implements. Stock said—’

  Breaking off because Stock had walked out of shot again. Carrying the hook. Lol had seen enough. Both Howe and Bliss had gone quiet and were watching the screen. There was nothing to see there now but stone flags, a curving brick wall and a table with a book on it. The fridge was going whump, whump… whump – irregular, as though its metal heart was about to fail.

  After about a minute, there arose, from somewhere in the house, perhaps everywhere in the house, this cavernous, animal bellow, mingling with its own echo and the sound of the fridge.

  Rage and terror, Lol thought, numbed.

  Then only the sound of the fridge.

  ‘What were you about to say, Ms Watkins?’ Howe asked mildly, as if the TV was merely screening some corny old melodrama they’d all seen many times before. ‘What did Stock say?’

  ‘He told me he’d sharpened it himself.’ Merrily’s voice was flat. ‘He said that, because of what had happened to Uncle Stewart, he’d become afraid of someone breaking in at night, and so he… he wanted to be ready.’

  On the TV screen: flags, table, book. The only sound was the fridge.

  Frannie Bliss said delicately, ‘I wouldn’t think there’s any particular need for Merrily to watch any more, would you, boss?’

  Lol heard Merrily saying, ‘He said it might seem ridiculous, but he just didn’t trust the countryside.’

  ‘Boss…’ Bliss said plaintively, ‘do you really think this is…?’

  Annie Howe didn’t reply.

  Lol was still hearing But he just didn’t trust the countryside, repeated like a loop in his head, when Gerard Stock walked casually back into the kitchen.

  He wasn’t carrying the hop-cutter’s hook any more. The picture quality was crisp and suddenly very pleasant, the midday sun throwing a bright path from the middle window across the flags, creating a golden alley. Into it, Gerard Stock – the stains on his white shirt as startling as poppies in the snow – put down Stephanie’s head.

  Part Three

  If a terrible crime has been committed in the area – especially if justice has not been properly carried out – the disturbances will be potentially very unpleasant. The entity is inflamed by a combination of fear and anger for the injustice it feels has been committed against it. If a person believes that they have been especially wrongfully treated, they may be inspired to curse the individual who they blame or else the locality in which the wrongful action has taken place.

  Martin Israel: Exorcism – The Removal of Evil Influences

  Church of England

  Diocese of Hereford

  Ministry of Deliverance

  email: deliverance@spiritec.co.uk

  Click

  Home Page

  Hauntings

  Possession

  Cults

  Psychic Abuse

  Contacts

  Prayers

  Possession

  For a number of reasons, possession is the most misleading and dangerous term in the Deliverance dictionary.

  The first thing to remember is that satanic or demonic possession is extremely rare, and offers of practical help or exorcism should be treated initially with caution, as misguided treatment could make the situation worse.

  If you think that you are in spiritual danger or someone close to you has become the victim of demonic or spiritual interference, it may help to read the following pages before deciding which kind of assistance might have the most immediate benefit.

  24

  Being Lost

  TRAFFIC HAD FADED, the shops and the city library were all well closed. Broad Street was cooling into torpid evening and the trees were draping long shadows over the Cathedral green.

  Inside the gatehouse, Merrily sipped tea the colour of engine oil, not tasting it. Furrows of concern on Sophie’s forehead were dislodging strands of her fine white hair.

  ‘I mean, what was the woman trying to do to you?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Merrily watched a man aiming a camera up at the gatehouse. Just the one camera,
not very big – a tourist, then. It would be the real thing soon enough, the pack unleashed. ‘She probably did the right thing in the circumstances. Until we saw the video, I don’t think I quite believed it. Thought maybe I was being set up – or that he’d told them he’d killed her, but he hadn’t… not really. She was probably right to show us.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone in with you,’ Lol said. They’d both had to make full statements, which had taken another hour and a half. ‘It isn’t as if I was any use in there.’

  The three of them were hunched close to the window, as if putting on lights might draw the eyes of the world. Siege mentality already.

  Sophie looked at Lol. ‘Mr Robinson, were you posing as a qualified psychotherapist when you went into the kiln with Merrily?’

  Merrily smiled wanly. ‘He’s not good at posing. Even if he was qualified, you’d never get him to admit it.’

  ‘Quite,’ Sophie said. ‘So there’s no real argument, is there? A – neither of you was suggesting that Mr Robinson was there to fulfil the psychiatric or psychological function. B – this was a minor exorcism-of-place, for which a psychiatrist would hardly, in normal circumstances, be considered essential anyway.’

  ‘That’s not how it’s going to read, though, is it?’ Lol said.

  ‘The fact remains,’ Sophie told him severely, ‘that, for reasons of her own – resentment, religious antipathy, whatever else – Detective Chief Inspector Howe is fabricating a spurious scenario.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Merrily almost howled. ‘A man’s murdered his wife. Would that still have happened if I hadn’t gone there and done what I did? Possibly. But possibly not. And possibly not is enough to hang me. But more than that—’

  ‘Just don’t hang yourself first,’ Lol said. ‘You know really that you didn’t have a choice.’

  ‘—more than that, I’ve got to live with the killing of a young woman. And the inference – the increasingly strong inference – that it… it doesn’t work. Or when I do it, it doesn’t work.’