by Phil Rickman
‘But now something’s slipping away?’ Betty said.
‘Like everyplace. Greedy bankers, idiots in government, the Internet collapsing high streets. Then the King’s health breaks down and he doesn’t get to spend as much time here. The castle goes on the market, and now it’s in the hands of a trust which may or may not pull it together. And the ideas that took the town on to a new level are just… running down.’
‘So it needs… us?’
Oh God. Robin was viewing his possible encounter with the King as a sign of converging destinies.
‘Needs people with commitment to more than their own bank accounts. Needs reconnecting to its energy-source.’
This was Robin, seeing everything in mystical terms. Betty thought it would have been so much easier if they’d come here a few years ago, before they’d bought a farmhouse with a ruined church on it and Robin’s body had been smashed by falling masonry.
‘We should go back,’ Robin said. ‘Gotta be some other place for rent.’
‘Let’s wait awhile, see what happens.’
‘That’s what you had from the tarot?’
Betty said nothing. Although the tarot was just points of reference, a way of seeing what, deep down, you already knew, it still scared Robin.
‘Could be like old times,’ he said. ‘Like the first apartment.’
The first apartment was when he’d followed her home to the UK after they’d met at a Wiccan international moot in Salem, Mass. Robin attending as an exhibitor of artwork for pulp fantasy novels, Betty as… well, as a witch. A sublime witch, Robin used to say, with hair like a cornfield in the warm days before the harvest, telling her how he’d felt his whole being drawn into a vortex of obsessive love… and something more, something epic and mythological that he could evoke in gouache and coloured inks but would never understand.
The way Betty saw it, him following her home to England, embracing paganism, had been like going to live in his own artwork. Which was fine, until the lucrative Lord Madoc series had suddenly been terminated and the other cover-artwork it had brought in began to tail off in the wake of a betrayal that made you realize that no religion run by human beings should ever be trusted.
‘Of course, we were young, then,’ Betty said.
‘We’re still young.’
‘What’s left of us.’
‘OK,’ Robin said angrily, ‘we’ll stay here. You can aspire to three days a week on the checkout and I can sit on my sorry ass trying to paint over the sound of lawnmowers and… and life grinds on.’
It was a matter of supreme irony to Robin that he now had an actual sorry ass.
‘OK, we’ll go tomorrow,’ Betty said.
The entry to Back Fold was facing them next morning as they came out of the parking lot, but they ignored it, heading up an adjacent short track that led around the castle and accessed stone steps leading down through its grounds to the marketplace.
At the bottom of the castle hill, there were unattended open-air bookshelves full of cheap books they relied on visitors’ honesty to pay for. Used to be books all over the castle itself, Robin told Betty – at least the parts you were allowed into without a hard hat. And down in the town even the shops that weren’t bookstores – the antique shops, the jeweller’s – all sold a few books as well.
Books had become the town’s circulation system. Carrying the energy, the mojo.
‘You take out books,’ Robin said, ‘you’re weakening the system. You’re inviting, like, entropy. So whatever they do to this castle, books need to be part of it. Crucial.’
Betty looked up at the castle. They were under the heavy medieval tower, with massive oak doors in the portcullis opening. Doors so huge and damaged they could even be original. A shudder took Betty by surprise; a voice from the square stopped her thinking about it.
‘Mr and Mrs Thorogood.’
A very dry, very Home Counties voice. Betty turned slowly.
‘Mr Oliver.’
‘So you’re back.’ He was in an Edwardian-length jacket, a suede hat with a turned down brim. ‘Still looking for a shop? I confess I didn’t think you were particularly serious about acquiring a lease on mine.’
‘I tend not to do things for laughs.’ Robin leaned on his stick. ‘Any more.’
‘Then I apologize. As you can imagine, there are passing tourists who just get it into their heads that they’d like to be booksellers.’
‘Time wasters,’ Betty said bluntly. ‘We’re not.’
‘I looked you up on the Internet,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘I didn’t realize you designed book covers.’
‘Just did the paintings for them,’ Robin said.
This was before publishers discovered Photoshop and no longer wanted to pay artists. He didn’t talk much about that.
‘Your designs for the Waugh reissues,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘Coincidentally, we sold one a few weeks ago. Alec, not Evelyn.’
Betty smiled, recalling how, when Robin had first been offered these Waugh covers, he’d asked her if Alec and Evelyn were husband and wife.
Mr Oliver said. ‘We… began by specializing in literary first editions but, sadly, there are not as many collectors as there used to be. Nor, indeed, as many bestselling literary writers.’
Betty saw Robin’s mouth opening, probably to say something like, fuck literary, just go with the flow, and shot him a warning glance. Robin shut his mouth, went loose.
‘Look,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘I don’t know how much time you have, but… ah… there may be a basis for discussion.’
All right, it wasn’t in totally great condition. There was some damp in the walls, and damp wasn’t good for books. Caused foxing – was that the term for the brown marks on the edges of pages? But damp could be dealt with… eventually.
Betty said. ‘If we decided to go ahead, how long would it take to draw up a lease?’
Mr Oliver’s hands opened out.
‘Drawn up already, Mrs Thorogood. Just a question of your agreeing to the terms.’
Interesting. When did that happen – before or since he’d checked them out on the Net? Robin was trying to catch Betty’s eye, but she kept looking at Mr Oliver, choosing the best time to hit him with Kapoor’s suggestions about rent and repairs. She pointed to the stairs.
‘Perhaps one more look at the living accommodation before we go away and think about it?’
Upstairs, it looked… OK. The rooms were not huge and the windows were small, but it was clean and the taps worked. The whole building had evidently been a barn at one time, and the upstairs was the loft. Must have been converted to living accommodation quite some while ago; there was a small fireplace, probably early twentieth century, another upstairs, now sealed off. Pity, it was cold up here.
Too cold? She went still, slowed her breathing. Robin must have seen her arms drop to her sides; he raised an eyebrow.
Betty shook herself.
‘So has this ever actually been living accommodation for you, Mr Oliver?’
Mr Oliver said he and his wife had a house on the outskirts of the town. Clearly it had provided living accommodation for someone in the not-too-distant past – note the replaced wiring, the extra power points, the TV aerial socket.
‘It’s a bit… compact, isn’t it?’ Betty said. ‘We’d have to put some of our furniture in store. Or sell it.’
‘I will admit,’ Mr Oliver said, ‘that I never thought of anyone actually living here. Wouldn’t deny that life could be a trifle cramped.’
‘For a while, anyway,’ Robin said. ‘Until we make enough money to turn upstairs into more book rooms. You ever think of that?’
‘As I say, Mr Thorogood, our original plan to pursue what you might call a literary purity proved to be incompatible with the times. And the business tended to consume too much of our time.’
‘It’ll come back,’ Robin said unconvincingly. ‘Quality always prevails.’
‘One hopes. I could have sold the shop last month as a… body-piercing establis
hment.’
Mr Oliver smiled grimly, letting them out. In the alley, an old lady turned round.
‘You smelled him yet?’
She was in one of those ankle-length stockman’s coats, unwaxed and worn back to the webbing. Mr Oliver sighed.
‘Good morning, Mrs Villiers.’
It was the tweed cap she had on that ID’d her – the little old lady he’d seen last time they were here, walking up the alley whistling, making him feel good. She jerked a thumb at Mr Oliver.
‘Reckons he don’t smell nothin’.’
‘Like what?’ Robin said.
But she just walked away, looking back over her shoulder, leaving them with a cracked grin with black gaps.
‘One of the charms of Hay,’ Mr Oliver said drily, ‘is the number of characters one finds here.’
Mrs Villiers stopped.
‘Dickhead,’ she said.
Robin smiled happily. You wouldn’t get that on the street in Bath or Cheltenham.
As they walked away, Betty said something about them accepting there’d have to be sacrifices. Robin stared at her in the alley, knowing that making sacrifices wouldn’t mean like coming down from Michelob to Budweiser. Nor would it involve a white cockerel, a knife and a full moon. Usually, something less bloody than one and more painful than both.
‘We’d need more stock,’ he said. ‘I figure our stuff will fill about half the shelf space. Not much more than what’s left of his. We need to check out some car-boot sales.’
They’d discussed this. Charity stores and boot sales were always full of books that might roughly qualify as pagan-oriented. They had just over two-thousand pounds saved to spend on more stock. Not be too many signed first editions there, but New Age pulp would fill a few holes.
‘Bets,’ Robin said at last, ‘were you… getting something? Upstairs?’
One thing you needed to know about Betty, she never claimed to be psychic any more. She just had feelings about places. It wasn’t a sixth sense, no such thing as a sixth sense. It was just about paying attention to the other five, getting them working in concert. Which most people rarely did, if ever.
That was her story, anyhow.
‘I just think,’ she said, ‘that we might have some work to do. To make it ours.’
‘Ours? Rather than…?’
‘Rather than… someone else’s. I don’t know. Forget it.’
Hardly the first time this had happened. These things, Betty would say, they want to play with you, and it’s very rare that anything good comes out of it, so you don’t get drawn into the game.
This was when they’d broken with Wicca and begun to avoid anything with any kind of organisation or hierarchy. When paganism, for Betty, had become no more than a viewpoint. If you started seeing it as a stepping-off point, she’d say, you’d just step into a situation with people who wanted a piece of you. Or into a mental-health crisis.
But right now he wanted to know. He wanted her to feel as good about this place as he did.
‘Whose?’ Robin said. ‘Ours rather than whose?’
‘Dunno.’ She was looking steadily ahead of her, but not seeing what he saw: the brick, the stone, the patched stucco. The solemnity of her expression indicative of some interior process beyond explanation. ‘Anyway. Doesn’t scare me any more.’
Something else she’d say: never let it scare you. That’s what it wants.
‘Whatever it is, we take it on.’ Betty came out of it, shrugged. ‘We fix it.’
6
Formless conceit
HAVING PRAYED SHE wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night, Merrily woke up in the middle of the night.
Encased in cooling sweat, still hearing the metal-framed typist’s chair creaking gently in a corner of the bedroom.
Not this one, of course. No chairs in this bedroom. She’d moved last month to a far smaller one in the north-eastern corner of the vicarage where the leaded window would catch the first light as the dawn chorus opened up.
Still a couple of hours to go before the blackbirds began. The panes in the window were blue-black. The softly stated certainties of Ms Sylvia Merchant, head teacher, retired, retained control of the dark.
Because I would expect someone in your position to have had considerable experience of the earthbound dead.
Actually, no. It came down to one experience, in this house. On the third staircase leading to the attic which Jane had claimed for her apartment.
She hung on to it, an anchor now. It had begun with the sense of an unending misery which, for an instant, had been given vaguely human form before becoming a minimal thing of pure, wild energy.
That was it. Lasting seconds. Maybe not even one – who knew how long an instant was? Events were expanded by the mind according to their significance. This one had persuaded her, months later, to say yes to an extra role in the diocese, a job which handed you the keys to a repository of collected shadows.
The dictionary said:
Exorcist: one who exorcizes or pretends to remove evil spirits by ritual means.
Or something like that, suggesting that you could still qualify as an exorcist even if you only pretended to do it. Even if you thought it was bollocks.
And the Church… Merely by introducing the replacement term, Deliverance, the Church had been backing away, softening it, erasing the shamanistic overtones, making it sound more like a social service, a token nod towards the boundaries of belief… and leaving a handy escape route, because who, in all seriousness, could, in this day and age, accept that people and premises could be psychically disinfected through a priest’s petition to that increasingly formless conceit known as God?
Those blokes down there – solid, stoical, middle-aged priests. I can tell you four of them won’t go through with it. Out of the rest, there’ll be one broken marriage and a nervous breakdown.
This was Huw Owen, in charge of C. of E. and Church-in- Wales Deliverance courses, now her self-appointed spiritual adviser. Whether you chose to dismiss it as pure delusion or the product of some brain-chemical cocktail, it was, Huw said, still capable of rotting the fabric of everyday life.
A movement next to her.
‘Dark night of the soul, Lol,’ she said. ‘I collect them, as you know.’
Had her thoughts been loud enough to wake him up, too? She reached for his hand.
Lol said, ‘You want to – as they say – talk about it?’
‘Thought you’d never ask.’
Lol had slipped across to the vicarage from his cottage in Church Street, just on twilight. Jane was spending the last weekend of her last school half-term at Eirion’s parents’ place near Abergavenny. Jane and Eirion had been down to Wiltshire to check out the Bronze Age dig where it looked like Jane would be starting her gap year in July, skivvying for archaeologists.
And in her absence… well, everybody in Ledwardine must surely know about Lol and the vicar by now. Just that not everybody approved, and some of them were the most constant members of an unsteady congregation. Which made her, on top of everything else, a hypocrite.
‘So Sylvia Merchant sends for me – that’s what happens, we get sent for – to confirm what she wants to be the truth. And if it goes against centuries of established theology, well, anything can be changed these days, if you don’t like it much. And if God doesn’t like it… well, we created him, we can uncreate him. Up yours, God.’
‘That dark, huh?’ Lol said. ‘Poor soul.’
‘I should be unfrocked.’
‘You are.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘So you went along with it.’
‘Mmm. Did the prayers.’
‘With the two of them?’
‘Don’t think I had a choice.’
Huw Owen’s First Law of Deliverance – or it might be the second – was never to leave a disturbed environment without administering a blessing. What he told his exorcism students after the story of the woman who seemed like a liar and then killed herself.
<
br /> ‘Actually, I didn’t.’ Merrily sat up in bed, naked before God. ‘I asked for release. For both of them. Can’t remember the actual words, but that was the essence of it.’
There was a mauve tint to the square panes of old glass. Later than she’d thought.
Lol said, ‘How did she take it?’
‘I don’t know. I kept my eyes closed.’
The implications were vast and terrifying. If you didn’t think it was delusion or brain chemicals. If you thought there was a possibility that you were more than a social service.
She leaned into him, slid back down into the bed.
‘Actually, I’m not sure she took it very well. She was a head teacher. Used to calling the shots. Maybe that’s why she liked having Alys Nott around. A secretary for all eternity. And, presumably, Alys liked that too.’
‘Doesn’t matter one way or the other, now, does it?’
‘I don’t know. Do I have responsibility to what remains of Alys?’
‘Hell, no. Definitely not. I don’t know much about theology, but I’m guessing she’s well out your sphere of influence now.’
‘Out of the mouths of babes and songwriters… bugger.’ She pushed back the duvet. ‘I need a wee. Do you want a cup of tea, or…?’
It was chilly, for May. She pulled her bathrobe from the back of the door. She was replaying what Sylvia Merchant had said.
Her eyes were without light. And I wasn’t sure she could see me.
Alys Nott held in some limbo. Trapped and blind.
‘You know that night? When I thought I saw something on the stairs to the attic?’
He’d been here that night, though long before they were an item. Downstairs on the sofa while she was upstairs, getting speared by the pure wild energy. He’d been the first to see her, afterwards.
‘You had seen something,’ Lol said. ‘Nightmares don’t have that effect.’
‘But, given the state I was in at the time, to what extent was that a subjective experience? I was looking for answers, and that’s how the answer came. Was that a case of the subconscious mind translating something into an image? I don’t know. I still don’t know how any of this works.’
