by Phil Rickman
And so went the eloquent but mindless eulogy to Mrs Willis. How popular she had been in the village. How she’d belonged to the WI, supported local charitable events, was caring towards the sick, always cheerful when you met her, had — quite remarkably — continued to work into her ninetieth year.
Ninety? She was as old as that?
Well, of course she would be.
And caring towards the sick? Surely, even if her true identity was not revealed, the man was going to mention the healing?
But the vicar’s high, fruity voice intoned not a word to suggest that Mrs Willis had been any more than an averagely dedicated parishioner. He expressed sympathy for her nieces, named, and for her employer, unnamed.
And suddenly Cindy saw the interior of the church as perhaps Bobby might have seen it: the rose-tinted wall hardening to a flinty grey and the members of the congregation rigid as stones. A conspiracy of silence.
The stained glass rattled with rain. In his phoney, bloated baritone, the vicar said, ‘And so, before we go into the churchyard for the interment … we will sing hymn number …’
A shuffling of hymn books. But Marcus Bacton was on his feet ahead of the rest of the congregation.
Oh no. ‘Marcus! ‘ Cindy hissed.
Marcus’s shoulders were shaking with rage, his hands gripped the prayer-book shelf until his knuckles blanched, and when he spoke it was in a voice rather louder and certainly more resonant than the vicar’s.
‘You hypocritical fuck! ‘
Black Knoll.
Jesus.
An avenue of stones no more than two or three feet high on either side. An open passageway, curving towards the caved-in chamber.
There was a fine, discreet English rain which very politely soaked you to the skin inside a couple of minutes. I could shelter, Grayle thought. I could shelter under the big stone.
And then she thought, Are you kidding?
Standing, dismayed, at the entrance to what had once been a covered passageway, the whole thing once concealed inside an earthmound, but now bleakly exposed, like the abandoned skeleton of a whale.
She wanted to cry.
This was it? She crossed an ocean for this? Like, she was supposed to believe the stark, ruined shell held some kind of key to the transformation of Ersula?
It was nothing. It had no grandeur at all. Maybe it was impressive at sunrise but now, on this damp, cooling October afternoon under low, spongy cloud, it was just… derelict… meaningless.
She strained to see the green and yellow in the grass, the pink in the soil and the little plants growing on the small stones of the passageway.
The Offa’s Dyke Path which more or less marks the boundary between England and Wales is close … I can sense a converging of separate energies.
Energies?
This place just sapped you.
Was that the path, that bare track behind the bushes? Was this the boundary? Between waking and dreaming, the known and the unknown, sanity and madness?
Scary fun, Grayle?
Was she missing something?
She tried to picture Ersula, in her sky-blue ski-jacket, making notes on a clipboard, lining up a picture with her Canon Sureshot — no sky on it, no flowers, no people; all Ersula’s pictures were for reference only — Oh, Grayle, what is the point of piling up pictures of people you see every day?
For when they’re not there, Ersula. When they’re not there any more.
A curtain of rain separated her from the big stones. She told herself, If I go through that fine curtain, she’ll be there. She’ll be waiting for me.
‘Aw come on! ‘ she howled aloud. ‘You’re fucking crazy!’
Crazy as Cindy the goddamned Celtic shaman. Crazy as Adrian Fraser-Hale with his cassette tapes of the number one Neolithic rap band. Like, what the hell are you doing here? You know where Ersula is? She’s back home with some guy, is where. You read stuff into her letters that was never there. You created a mystery because you’re still Holy Grayle and you’re never gonna change!
She sobbed. She looked at her watch. It was nearly three p.m. She would go back to the crappy hotel and she would call up her father and he would say, Sure she’s back in town, hell, your planes probably passed each other over the Atlantic. Hey, never mind, Grayle, at least it pushed you out of that cruddy little tabloid job.
She stared at the wet, grey stones and she sobbed again, and soon the air was full of sobs, heavy and soggy like the goddamned English clouds. She felt weak and walked through the curtain of rain to sit on one of the flat stones; she couldn’t get any wetter.
Which was when she realized they weren’t her sobs. That she wasn’t alone up here.
This figure was coming towards her off the stones, a figure in blue. ‘Ersula?’ she whispered, in spite of herself, although she knew it couldn’t be.
And yet she had to know. She tried to move forward but it was as if her sneakers were stuck in the red mud. ‘Ersula! ‘ she screamed into the rain.
And then — ohmygod — the girl was running towards her, in a skimpy cotton dress with blue flowers on it. The girl had braided hair and she was running hard, although the distance between Grayle and the stones was no more than a couple of yards, so it was as though the girl was running on a treadmill and the stones were some kind of back-projection.
Which was not possible, and Grayle was disbelieving and confused and then scared, more scared than she’d ever been in her whole life, and she started to hyperventilate.
A vivid distress vibrating in the grey air. The girl was a blur of threshing, graceless child-limbs. Running hard at Grayle.
Yet not reaching her. Never quite reaching her, but always coming on in a bumpy, flashing pattern, like those picture books you flipped through quickly with your thumb and the picture moved, only sometimes you flipped several pages at once and the image jerked. Rushing in tears through the rain. In the rain; the girl was part of the rain, like a rainbow, but only dowdy colours: the faded blue flowers on the dress, the dry, mousy brown of the plaited hair. And she was flinging out her arms to Grayle, blown towards her, light as the husk of a dead flower, her face in flux, forming and reforming, each time a little closer until Grayle could see her sagging, flaccid lips and her eyes, white and wet and dead.
‘Oh God,’ Grayle whispered. ‘Oh … God. ‘
XXVIII
Nobody said a word; that was the odd thing. No murmurings, no rustlings, no echoes from the rafters. The village was letting him have his say.
‘Nothing’s changed, has it?’ Marcus stormed. ‘Nothing’s bloody changed in nearly eighty years!’
Cindy sat and watched him explode like a series of firecrackers. Powerless to stop it, not sure he ought to try. Falconer watched too, a tiny smile plucking at a corner of his wide, professional mouth.
Leaning out of the pew, Marcus was, a wave of grey hair banging against his forehead, glasses misted, so he couldn’t, probably, even see the vicar. Who was just standing there, lips set into a typically ecclesiastical, turning-the-other-cheek pout. He knew what this was about; they all knew; they’d probably inherited the silence from their parents and grandparents.
‘Are you all bloody dumb?’ Marcus whirled on the congregation. ‘Is it really possible to sit on something for the best part of a frigging century? You really are a bunch of medieval bastards. She’d have had a better bloody deal growing up in the fucking East End!’
His voice bounced back at him off the stones. Nobody spoke, but Cindy saw compassion on the face of Amy Jenkins, an outsider who was clearly in the know. He’d persuade the truth out of her later.
‘I did say,’ the vicar said in the nearest he could manage to an undertone, ‘that you might be better advised burying her elsewhere.’
‘Oh yes, that’s a classic Anglican tactic,’ Marcus roared. ‘If in doubt, don’t get involved.’
The undertakers moved imperturbably into position around the coffin on its wooden bier.
‘You’re a very offe
nsive man,’ observed the vicar. ‘I can tolerate only so much of this in the House of God.’
‘Before what? ‘ Marcus lunged out of the pew as if he was about to grab the vicar by the surplice and bang his head on the side of his oak pulpit.
‘Marcus …’ Cindy murmured.
‘You just stay out of this, Lewis …’
‘Come on. Let’s get some air. You’re upsetting Mrs Willis.’
‘And that,’ said Marcus, ‘is the sort of bloody thing you would say.’
As they followed the coffin and the vicar out of the church, Cindy could almost hear a communal sigh of relief and a closing of frayed curtains over the St Mary’s Silence.
She was soaked, hair matted to her face, and when Bobby Maiden found her she was stumbling around the castle walls like someone coming down from a bad acid trip or maybe a mugging. Maybe even a rape.
‘God damn it,’ she said, ‘can’t anybody around here answer a simple question?’
‘Sorry,’ Maiden said. ‘You’re about a mile and a half out of St Mary’s.’
‘Am I anywhere near, uh, Cefn-y-bedd? I say that right?’
‘That’s the University of the Earth place?’
‘Uh huh.’ She snatched off her baseball cap and shook her hair like a dog. It was blond and it came down in a wet heap.
‘I don’t know,’ Maiden said. ‘I’ve never been.’
‘Terrific.’
‘You’re on a course there?’
‘Visiting. I took a walk over …’ She shuddered and it turned into a shiver that looked like it wasn’t going to stop. ‘See, I must’ve come down the wrong way. I saw the rooftop, figured this must be Cefn-y-bedd. And then … is this some kind of castle?’
‘Some kind.’
‘Weird.’
‘You need a drink.’
‘I do,’ she said gratefully. ‘Jesus, do I need a drink.’
‘Well, that’s it, isn’t it? I’m finished. And I’m not sorry. Couldn’t give a flying fart.’
Mrs Willis had been buried in virtual silence, Marcus tossing in his clod of earth and turning away, avoiding eyes, almost running out of the churchyard. Cindy had caught up with him in the lane, under a dripping horse chestnut.
‘Like to buy a serious, parapsychological quarterly, Lewis? Christ, you can have the bastard. Change it to Shamanic Times. Have the fucking castle, too. I’ll get a council flat. They still have council flats or did Thatcher flog them all to slum landlords?’
‘This isn’t helping anyone, Marcus.’
‘Why should I want to help anyone? Mrs Willis helped people, and where did that get her? Perhaps you were right. Perhaps she was murdered. Perhaps the village murdered her with three-quarters of a century of indifference.’
‘Aren’t you coming back to the pub?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You’ve paid for the funeral tea. That gives you the right to watch them all eating it and feeling uncomfortable. I think they owe you an explanation.’
‘Then you don’t know the people of St Mary’s.’
‘And I think you owe me one.’
Marcus stopped. ‘What?’
‘Why did you keep it to yourself?’
‘What?’
‘About Annie Davies.’
‘I don’t know anything about Annie Davies.’
‘Did she tell you to keep it quiet?’
‘She didn’t tell me anything. We never discussed it. Piss off. Go and find your serial killer. I’m tired.’
‘OK. If you must know,’ Grayle said, ‘it’s not that kind of shivering.’
Maybe finding the guy easy to talk to because he looked kind of like she felt. Beat-up. Exhausted. That eyepatch. And with this air of apprehension — it was maybe an illusion, maybe she needed to feel there were other people around like this, after Roger and Adrian and the mad Cindy, who were all so sure of everything, but she felt the guy didn’t trust anybody any more.
He opened up the woodstove and tried to position a couple of logs. Not looking at her as she talked.
‘Like … things … things you see. Jesus, this doesn’t happen in my part of New York. We say it does. We love to think it does. We have a million psychics and people claiming they talk to the spirits, see the future, read stuff in the Tarot, purify your aura …’
Hearing her own voice going higher and higher, as if she’d taken a hit from a helium balloon.
‘Have another drop of Marcus’s whisky. I’ll make some tea in a minute. Go on, Miss …’
‘Underhill. G … Grayle.’ Feeling her shoulders shaking, like an apartment block about to collapse, under the sweatshirt he’d left out in the bathroom for her.
‘You weren’t attacked or anything, were you?’
‘I, uh …’ Grayle took a big swallow of whisky and coughed, tears and stuff smeared all over her face. ‘I just had to get outa there.’
‘This is Cefn-y-bedd?’
‘What? Oh hell, no, this is … this was … Black Knoll? The prehistoric … whatever you wanna call it.’
‘What were you doing there?’ His eyes going a mite watchful.
‘That place is … I mean, seriously …’ Grayle shuddered a breath down, like the dregs of a glass of milk gurgling through a straw. ‘… haunted. Right?’
Haunted. Just saying the word … it was a whole different word now.
‘Are you saying you saw something? At Black Knoll?’
‘Would you think I was real crazy? Would you think, like, here’s this insane American tourist, she’s only been here like a couple hours and she’s already going around seeing-’
Another word. Another key player from the Holy Grayle thesaurus. Ghost. Phantom. Apparition. Spook. Revenant…
‘What was it you saw?’
‘You’re gonna think I’m crazy.’
‘I’m not. Honest.’
‘OK.’ Grayle pushed her hands through her still-damp hair. ‘A girl. A young girl. In a blue dress? With flowers on it? Like billowed out, kind of Alice in Wonderland? She had also … she had like, pigtails. And she was, you know, majorly upset. Like she was as scared of me as I … Or scared of something. A frightened ghost, Jesus, how can you have a frightened ghost?’
Grayle gulped down the rest of the Scotch.
‘This is crazy. They can’t harm you. In my column — I had this column — I was always quoting people who say, Oh they can’t harm you. Like all aliens are good aliens out of Close Encounters, never Independence Day. I mean, how the fuck do they know? You’re supposed to stand there, and like, Hey, this thing can’t harm me, maybe it needs my help? Are there people who could do that? I don’t believe it. I listen to all these assholes talk about communion with the spirit world, and now I know the truth, and the truth is it never happened to them. Never … happened. To them. Or else they’d know it is not nice, not good. We shouldn’t have to see them. It is truly terrifying, even when you think you understand. It is …’
This could send you terminally crazy. Was this how it started for Ersula? Any wonder she got the hell out?
‘Oh boy.’ Grayle started to shiver again, held on to the fat dog with uneven eyes. ‘Oh Jesus.’
No more than two dozen villagers had arrived at the Tup for the tea and sandwiches paid for by Marcus. Amy Jenkins let them get on with it and joined Cindy at his table in the deepest corner.
‘It’s a can of worms, love,’ she said. ‘Fair play, if it was happening today, I don’t think there’d be a problem. But the church doesn’t have that hold any more, see.’
‘A good thing,’ Cindy said. ‘But also a bad thing. So, let me get this right, the Church said, well, visions of the Virgin Mary, that’s a Catholic thing, so we don’t want to know.’.
‘Got to remember there was a big chapel influence, too.’
‘All hellfire and damnation. And at vision at a pagan place. Devil’s work?’
‘Well, it destroyed her family, isn’t it? That was the thing. Annie’s dad, Tommy Davies, he was
never much of a churchgoer, apparently. Real old farmer, the kind you don’t get much nowadays, knew everything about the weather and the … you know … the land.’
‘Moods of the land?’
‘That sort of thing. Black Knoll was a forbidden place because of the bodies of hanged criminals they used to put there. Be people then could still remember it. But Tommy Davies, he wasn’t afraid. He’d say they put up these stones to help the old-time farmers. So he’d take Annie up the Knoll on the quiet and that’s why she was never afraid. Wouldn’t have got any other village girls going up there before sunrise.’
‘Does Marcus know about this?’
Amy snorted. ‘Nobody’d tell Marcus. Fair play to him, but he’d write it all down for his magazine, and nobody wanted that.’
Cindy bit into a cream cheese and celery vol-au-vent. ‘What do you mean, it destroyed her family?’
‘Because Annie’s mam, Edna, she was all for the Church. Headmistress of the school, ran the Women’s Institute, the Parish Council. Tells Annie she’d better forget this nonsense and pray for forgiveness, and when she won’t drop it, out comes the strap. Have the social services on to her now, see, but then …’
‘Didn’t her dad do anything to stop it?’
‘Edna was the dominant one. A Cadwallader. So it was a long time, see, before Tommy Davies did what he did.’
Cindy noticed they were getting some attention, now. A big woman in a hat giving Amy daggers.
‘Don’t you go looking at me like that, Ruthie Walters,’ Amy said. ‘Or I’ll tell him how much Owen and Ron took Falconer for, for that land.’
‘Careless talk…’ said the big woman.
‘The bloody war’s over,’ Amy snapped. ‘You don’t like it, tell your Edgar to get hisself a slate at the Crown.’
Ruthie Walters scowled. Amy said, ‘Owen and Ron Jenkins are That Bastard’s cousins who used to own Black Knoll. Till they found out how badly Falconer wanted it. That’s the sort of dealing goes on in this village. Like a dog with two dicks, Owen is. Where was I?’
