The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

Jane snorted. What was the point of that? She zipped up her fleece and got out of the car. She walked out into the middle of the clearing, the big lights shining down like this was a prison yard. A lone tree, a Scots pine, towered over the site, its steep trunk filigreed with moonlight.

  There was nobody in the Mazda. It was dead quiet, surreal.

  After a couple of seconds, Eirion stepped out, too, and Jane turned to wait for him. It was now that a shadow peeled off the base of the pine.

  Jane squeaked.

  The shadow spoke.

  ‘Little Jane Watkins. The vicar’s child. We are honoured.’

  Allan Henry leaned down to the Astra’s wound-down window. ‘My solicitor’s on his way. Not his usual office hours, but with all the money I pay the fat bastard, he’d’ve been reaching for his pinstripes even as we spoke.’

  He grinned, all those nice white crowns shining in the moonlight: teeth like stars. Basically unworried, Merrily concluded, up against it yet perversely energized; a stroll around the grounds with a cigarette and he was ready for anything. Been here before, and he’d be here again.

  ‘Where are the Shelbones now?’ she asked him.

  ‘Finally gone to the police, I imagine. I told them the bloody kid wasn’t here, never had been here. They weren’t convinced. My own fault: I’d antagonized them – maybe a mistake. Can’t believe they got you out again. Those people are frighteningly unbalanced. Look, how about you come down to the house and have that drink, Mrs Watkins. Is that your friend in there, the very proper Mrs Hill?’

  ‘It’s my other friend, the very self-effacing Mr Robinson.’

  ‘Boyfriend, eh? What a shame. When you’d gone yesterday, I had a little fantasy about you in your cassock.’

  ‘Thirty-nine buttons to undo, one by one,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s an old one. You haven’t seen a couple of teenagers around, boy and a girl?’

  ‘I told you: nobody here but me.’

  ‘But you’re a notorious liar, Allan.’

  ‘I swear on my Swiss bank account.’

  ‘OK.’ Merrily got out, Lol too, leaving the sidelights on, locking the car.

  ‘What’s he do, then?’ Allan Henry asked. ‘Archdeacon?’

  ‘He makes music. He writes songs.’

  ‘I think I feel one coming on now,’ Lol said.

  ‘Be careful, my friend,’ Allan Henry said, as if by instinct. ‘I don’t just threaten, I sue. I always sue. Go for everything. Bleed dry – it’s the only way.’

  Layla unlocked the metal gate with a steel key. She was wearing tight jeans and a black cotton top that finished three inches above her gold-ringed navel. Her tumbled hair was dyed black, with a long, streak of gold that seemed to have been spun from the moon. Jane could tell Eirion was unexpectedly impressed; he’d gone very quiet.

  ‘You don’t know about the Barnchurch, Jane?’ Layla’s voice was throaty, almost gravelly.

  It stood no more than twenty yards behind the gates. All the ground around it had been cleared, and a small mountain of sand had been dumped a few yards away. It was a regular red-brick building with a slate roof. There were brick steps up the outside, tough grass sprouting between them.

  It looked like, well, just a barn, and not a very old one – except that, where the gable end was half-lit by the security lamps, you could make out where a Gothic window had been bricked up, just the ridge now, like an old operation scar.

  ‘This Welsh miracle-worker used to preach here, way back,’ Layla said. ‘Sinners reborn, the sick taking up their beds and walking out, angelic visitations. Powerful stuff. In fact, the farmer here was so impressed he gave him this barn, and all the local people helped turn it into a church, and the miracles went on for a while and then… I dunno, the buzz died, or the preacher fucked off back to Wales, or the miracles stopped happening or something, and it became just a barn again and got forgotten about. But, hey, once a holy place – you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jane said, though it really wasn’t much more than a breath.

  ‘Imagine all that energy shut up with chickens and cows, sacks of feed, tractor parts. Throbbing away on its own for about a century. And then Allan buys the site and it wakes up again – so much energy focused on the old Barnchurch, so much money banked up, so many greasy palms, so much desire… that it’s become really charged again.’ Layla’s face was radiant. ‘You go in there, pow! Heavy shit, Jane. This place really makes it, where so many real churches are just old dust.’

  Eirion said, ‘Where is Amy?’

  Layla turned to appraise him. ‘Boyfriend?’ She walked right up to Eirion, gazed arrogantly into his eyes from about three inches away, her breasts almost touching his chest. Eirion blinked. Jane tensed.

  ‘Hey, this boy’s had nooky tonight!’ Layla spun away from him. ‘Was that with you, Jane?’

  Jane said nothing.

  ‘Where’s Amy?’ Eirion said stolidly.

  ‘You want to keep this boy, Jane? You’d like to stay together? I can actually fix that, if you like. I can show you kitan-epen. I fixed it for Eagles and Sigourney, did you know?’

  ‘Ms Riddock,’ Eirion said, ‘is Amy Shelbone with you?’

  ‘She’s probably in there.’

  ‘In the barn?’

  ‘She’s got a key. She’s very trustworthy. She’s got a key to the main gate and a key to the Barnchurch itself. She comes on the bus. Isn’t that sweet?’

  Jane stared. ‘She’s been here? All the time?’

  ‘Just for a couple of nights, approaching the full moon. Making things ready for Justine. You remember Justine, Jane?’

  ‘Her… mother. Murdered.’

  ‘Oh, you know all that. Who’ve you been talking to? Kirsty?’

  Jane said nothing.

  ‘There was a full moon the night Amy’s daddy slaughtered Amy’s mummy, did you know that? The moon’s great for that stuff. It moves the tides, and we’re nearly all water – but you’d know all that.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You want to go in and see? Talk to little Amy?’

  Jane looked back at the wire-mesh fence and the BMW. Actually, she didn’t. She wanted to go home.

  ‘After you,’ Eirion said to Layla.

  ‘Tell me something.’ Layla put the flat of a hand on Eirion’s chest and spread her big, fleshy fingers. ‘Do you get asthma at all?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer, let her hand fall and walked away towards the brick steps, big hips swaying, the sliver of gold breaking up and reforming as she tossed back her hair.

  Eirion swallowed. Jane looked at him questioningly.

  ‘Haven’t had an attack in years,’ Eirion said uncomfortably ‘Jane…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think it would be a good thing to annoy her, do you?’

  They didn’t make it to the house, only as far as the vardo in its little clearing, to one side of the drive.

  Allan Henry noticed Merrily looking at it.

  ‘She’s not in there, vicar. Believe me.’

  ‘Can I see, anyway? Would you mind?’

  ‘The holy of holies?’

  ‘Please.’ What she needed was to get him talking about Layla. Now, while he was hyped-up, aggressive, his back to the wall. Outside the gates, he’d picked up what looked like the plastic cover of a car’s tail lamp and thrown it far into the bushes, without comment.

  Allan Henry tutted. ‘Can’t believe how amenable I’m being to everyone tonight.’ There were two wooden steps up to the vardo. The door was locked, but he had a key. ‘She doesn’t know I had this cut. Thing is, I don’t like there to be places I can’t go. ’Specially not on my own property.’

  He went in first. There was electricity: a flicked switch turned on a couple of erstwhile Victorian brass oil-lamps, one on a dresser, one on a wall bracket.

  ‘Gosh,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s a complete little world.’

  It was beautifully kept but not like a museum. Although everything – from the
decorated and lacquered panels on the dresser to the vaulted ribs in the bowed ceiling – was polished or at least shiny, there was a used feel about the place: a pan on the cast-iron stove, a mortar and pestle on the dresser with powder scattered around it, a silk scarf spread on a small camping table, with a pack of Marseilles tarot cards at its centre.

  And books: over a hundred on shelves, floor to ceiling, either side of a red-and-black-curtained window. Merrily checked out a few of the titles: a couple of dozen on gypsy lore but mainly general occultism. One was laid horizontally on top of a row: A Manual of Sexual Magic.

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Coming up to eighteen,’ Allan Henry said. ‘That means she’s been a grown woman for five, six years.’

  ‘Erm – in what context are we talking here?’

  ‘Gypsy girls mature earlier. By Layla’s age, most of them are married, with two kids. By my age, there’d be a bunch of grandchildren. Like you say, a different world.’

  ‘Which sounds like as good an excuse as any.’ Merrily looked at Lol, who was still standing out on the steps. Lol’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘However, this is not really any of your business.’ Allan Henry picked up the tarot pack and then dropped it quickly, as if it was hot. ‘No blood relationship between me and Layla. Don’t even have the same surname. I’ve never been a father to her. She never wanted a father. But, like I say, not your business, Reverend.’

  ‘No, it’s between you and Layla and… Mrs Henry.’

  ‘Mrs Henry’s well taken care of.’

  ‘I bet.’

  He grinned. She saw he was still wearing the wheel medallion, representing wealth.

  ‘Where’s Layla now?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. She’s a free spirit.’

  ‘Just I had a feeling you always liked to know where everything was. Where you could put your finger on it.’

  Allan Henry turned and glanced at Lol. ‘Before we go any further – some things I don’t talk about in front of a third party. Legal safeguard.’ The lines either side of his nose were parallel, like a ladder without rungs.

  Lol looked at Merrily. ‘Go for a walk, shall I?’ Merrily nodded.

  ‘Don’t go anywhere you shouldn’t, my friend,’ Henry said over his shoulder. ‘The boy in the bungalow’s nervy tonight.’

  There was a Victorian sofa opposite the cast-iron stove. Merrily sat at one end of it, with her hands on her lap. Henry was at the other, an arm flung over the backrest.

  ‘Costly, this little vehicle?’ she said.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Beats a Wendy house. But she’s worth it, is she? Layla?’

  ‘You’re not wired, I suppose?’

  ‘I’m certainly not going to invite you to check.’

  ‘Sometimes she’s solid gold,’ he said. ‘Sometimes she’s plutonium. We had a big bust-up after you left. She drove out of here during—when my back was turned, but I don’t want to talk about that.’

  ‘She gives you Romany talismans to wear, and decorates your house accordingly.’

  ‘Where’s the harm?’

  ‘Does it have any effect?’

  ‘On a personal level.’ He smiled. ‘You bet.’

  Merrily glanced up the bookshelf. A Manual of Sexual Magic.

  ‘How long have you and she been…?’

  ‘Longer than I’m ever going to admit to the likes of you, my dear. Like I say, they mature early, and not only physically. I have no guilt about this. She made the running, in the early stages. She knew what she was doing. And I’m a businessman, not a teacher, not a politician. I’m not obliged to set an example to anyone.’

  ‘But she’s still at school.’

  ‘And will be until she gets her four A levels. It’s a changing world, Reverend. That’s all right by me. You only have one life, live it on the outside track.’ He jabbed a finger at the window. ‘He famous, that guy?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Too old to make it now. Nobody in that business sees first-time action the wrong side of thirty. What would you want with a loser?’

  ‘He’s not a loser. He just doesn’t make much money. Maybe you’re the loser.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘Just my warped Christian way of looking at things.’

  He shook his head irritably. ‘What do you want, anyway? Not to help the Shelbones. Nobody wants to help the Shelbones.’

  ‘And that would make me your enemy, wouldn’t it?’

  A fist clenched. ‘Where do you get that from? The man’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of a fucking breeze-block. His colleagues don’t like him, the council doesn’t like him. He wants to turn Hereford into a museum – how many jobs are there in a museum? Do you have any idea how much money’s riding on Barnchurch, how many people go down if it crashes?’

  ‘It’s not going to crash because of one barn. It’ll just have to be modified.’

  ‘Modified?’ His face quite visibly darkened. ‘A full-conceptualized multi-million-pound project that everybody wants has to be modified because of one man’s whim? Let me tell you, an out-of-town location, it’s got to be big to work – we need the whole fucking space, we don’t need a prime plot right on the entrance clogged up with a useless pile of old bricks we aren’t even allowed to adapt. If this works – when this works – it opens up the whole Hereford Bypass corridor… and that’s mega. Let me tell you—’

  ‘—that it makes sense, in anybody’s language, to destroy one awkward cranky little family rather than spend a lot more money?’

  Go for everything. Bleed dry. It’s the only way.

  ‘That’s a naive oversimplification,’ he said.

  ‘And that’s an admission,’ Merrily said.

  Total darkness at first.

  ‘Amy?’ Layla called out. ‘Are you there, love?’

  Then, gradually, a lozenge of light appeared high up in the furthest wall – the old ventilation slit.

  They’d come in from the door at the top of the steps, into the loft where there must once have been pews, Jane figured.

  ‘Amy!’

  There was a big echo. It was a cathedral of a place, but it didn’t smell like a cathedral. Instead, there was a crude blend of old hay and manure and engine oil and something sourish.

  ‘Evidently not here,’ Layla said. ‘Come on, we’ll go down. You’d better follow me. No electricity, I’m afraid.’

  Eirion held Jane’s hand. He squeezed it encouragingly. But this was all going so totally, totally wrong. Layla Riddock was supposed to be furious and devastated at being exposed as some kind of spiritual abuser – not playing the affable tourist guide.

  Jane remembered, with a wince, her own excruciating cockiness earlier on. Now I can take the slag, no problem. The truth was, she was feeling exactly the way she’d felt that day in Steve’s shed, when she was just a mixed-up little virgin and Layla was a mature woman, seventeen going on thirty-eight – someone who didn’t guess or fantasize, someone who knew.

  Rites of passage? What a load of bollocks. It didn’t make any bloody difference at all, did it? Jane didn’t even have as much going for her as little bloody Sioned and little bloody Lowri – at least they had a culture around them. Like Layla, in fact – a Romany gypsy, with all the powers that seemed to confer. One hand on Eirion’s chest and she’d identified him as an asthmatic, something even Jane, his girlfriend, his lover, didn’t know. Where did that skill come from? Jane remembered reading somewhere that gypsies didn’t tell each other’s fortunes, because that was something they could all do – no big deal.

  No big deal. Wow. If you weren’t part of an ethnic minority you were like nowhere these days.

  ‘The steps are quite steep,’ Layla called, ‘so you’ll need to go down one by one. There used to be stairs when this was a church, but they rotted away years ago.’

  ‘I’ll go first, wait at the bottom for you,’ Eirion said.

  Jane could hardly see her way to th
e steps, which were wooden, with gaps in between, not much more than a wide ladder. At the bottom, there were stone flags.

  She could see Layla’s dark form moving on confidently down what maybe was once an aisle.

  ‘You say your dad – Allan – owns this place?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s going to flatten it in a couple of months. We’re just getting some use out of it first. We needed a church. We needed to match that energy, you follow?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Where were we supposed to go, Steve’s shed?’

  ‘I don’t understand, Layla.’

  Layla was squatting by a wall. Far above her was the ventilation slit, the only light source. It was a cold light, and Layla’s silhouette was blue-grey.

  ‘They go through an identity crisis, Jane, adopted kids – especially when they’ve got adoptive parents like hers. Weird old fucks. But you saw them at our place, obviously.’

  ‘Er… yeah.’

  A match was struck, yellow-white light flared, like the light in Steve’s shed: a fat candle.

  ‘I’m helping her to find herself, Jane. Very rewarding, for both of us.’

  Another match, another fat candle. Two fat candles – on an altar.

  ‘Here she was, little angel in a house full of religious prints, Bible at the bedside, church twice on Sunday. Is that normal?’

  Jane thought about Mum: no, not normal.

  She could make out the altar now. It was obviously not the original one; it was supported on two rough pillars of old bricks, but the top was quite a big, thick piece of wood, varnished and shiny. As well as the candles, it had a chalice on it, a real churchy kind of chalice, perhaps even silver. Layla was loaded, Layla could get hold of these things, no problem.

  ‘And it wasn’t Amy, was it?’ Layla said. ‘Not the real Amy, whose parents got pissed and shot up. What this is all about is letting the real Amy come through. This is what her mother wants – I mean her real mother.’

  As Layla stood up, Jane screamed and clutched at Eirion. A grey-white figure was standing behind the altar.

  41

  Another Round to the Devil

  LOL HAD WALKED twice up and down the drive, once exchanging a wave with the nervous gardener through the front window of his bungalow, when a police car nosed in, no siren, no fuss.