The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  Go on: try and think of something more rational than that.

  The banality of evil. Small-time, squalid, local evil, as huge and coldly bloated as the night sky.

  ‘Where’s the torch, boy?’

  ‘Left it in the churchyard. Couldn’t manage the torch and Alice.’

  ‘You knob. Whereabouts you keep your candles? Where’s the matches?’

  ‘Don’t know if there are any.’

  ‘Naw, that little bitch smokes like a chimney. Where are they?’

  Lol didn’t live here. He didn’t know where the candles were, or the matches.

  ‘Get a doctor, Dexter.’

  Lol saw a slice of grey, possibly one of the kitchen windows. He saw a tiny green glow in the air: smoke alarm, reverted to the battery when the power went off.

  Dexter said, ‘Her’s goin’ back, boy. Her’s goin’ back in that graveyard.’

  Oh, no. No going back now.

  ‘You can’t put us both in the graveyard, Dexter.’

  ‘Landfill site for you, boy. They’ll find Alice — natural causes, no problem. They’ll never find you. You’re missin’. I got a mate in landfill. No problem. Back o’ the truck. Easy-peasy. Got no choice, look.’

  ‘Because you killed Darrin?’

  Silence. Lol didn’t move.

  ‘I never,’ Dexter said.

  ‘Yeah, I know, it was a van, right? Like it was a lorry killed Roland.’

  Alice whimpered. There was a movement like a great claw descending, then another — Dexter shifting handfuls of air to find him. He could smell Dexter now, a blend of beer, sweat and petrol. Lol moved behind the table.

  ‘What did Roland do to you? Come on, what? Tell Alice — you owe it to Alice.’

  ‘Little fuck.’ Dexter moving slowly around the table towards him, the squeak of his leather jacket.

  ‘He was gonna tell someone about the cars?’ Lol moving round the table on the other side. ‘All the cars you were nicking, you and Darrin?’

  ‘I never nicked no cars.’

  ‘No, OK, Darrin nicked them, because you wanted to drive them. Darrin was older, but he was smaller and weedier.’ Lol sliding between the table and sink. ‘Darrin did everything his big cousin told him because he was shit-scared.’

  Thinking: magnetic knife rack on this wall, row of kitchen knives in ascending sizes, butter knife to bread knife to carving knife. Edging round the end of the table. Thinking, how could he use a knife, for heaven’s sake?

  ‘Bit of luck, Dexter, that crash at Allensmore… or what?’

  Then Dexter went: ‘Fuuuuuu…!’ Jarring sound of wood scraping stone, jolting pain in both Lol’s thighs as the table was slammed into him, jamming him into the sink.

  ‘Who needs luck?’ Dexter said.

  A wrenching now — the table dragged aside, and where in God’s name was asthma when you needed it?

  Lol felt the breeze of Dexter’s massive fist sailing past his head. He swayed — the wrong direction, and the next blind jab was into his left cheek, a knuckle stabbing up into his eye, dislodging his glasses. He slammed his fist into where he thought Dexter’s gut was, hit leather, a metal zip.

  Crap at this.

  A fleshy hand around his chin, tossing his head back into the wall with a crack and a wild, white shooting pain. His glasses gone, the black air bursting. Torn from the wall, slammed down into the flags, kicked in the chest, in the stomach, the pain explosive, Lol retched. Curling into a ball, rolling and squirming until he came up against a leg of the table, his gut spasming. Christ, it didn’t take long, did it?

  ‘Best thing, look’ — Dexter’s boot coming in again — ‘is if ‘you just lie still and think of fucking the vicar, or whatever you want. ’Cause I en’t gonner stop, look. I en’t got no choice, you knows that, and I en’t got no time, with Alice to take back to her grave. So you just fuckin’ lie there quiet and peaceful. And you takes it till it’s over, all right, Mister Lol?’

  ‘Uhhh.’ Boot ripping across his face. Lol lay still — pain, fear, indignity, hopelessness coalescing in the air. He could hear Alice’s hollow breathing. Then a singing in the air — Dexter’s boot going for his head again, missing. He tried to haul himself across the floor, sensed the foot drawn back for the big one, pushed his head back into the flags, licked stone.

  An indrawn breath, then a jarring crunch just above his ear, and Dexter grunting. He’d kicked the table leg, sounded like. Lol heard him backing off, boots scraping on the flags, and Lol rolled away, scrambling to his feet, bringing on pulses of pain, like being knifed all over. Fear overcoming agony. Thinking fast. Thinking Dexter would expect him to go for the main door into the hall.

  So going the other way. Flattening himself into the far wall, looking hard into nothing. Across the room, the hall door slammed, Dexter cutting off the main exit.

  Silence, now, except for Alice and the Aga, and Lol had the sense of Dexter moving very quietly around the room, eyes unseeing, hands poised. Figured if he could get into the scullery he could open the window, slide out into the strip of garden bordering the orchard, into the fresh, cold air and the kiss of snowflakes.

  Dexter stumbled and hissed. Lol’s fingers found the scullery door.

  Shut. No! The sound of him bending the handle down would bring Dexter back here faster than he could open the door, and then it would all be over very quickly because he didn’t think he could even stand upright.

  Worst thing of all, even without his glasses, he could see Dexter’s shape now, blundering towards the Aga like a prowling troll, outlined in the greenish sheen of the smoke alarm light, a little glow around it, and he knew that the alarm bulb, the size of the smallest pea in the tin, would soon be as good as lighting the whole room, and Dexter would have him again. Last time.

  ‘En’t nowhere to go, boy.’ As if Dexter had seen his thoughts, neon-lit in the blackness.

  Lol edged, very slowly, one foot at a time, along the wall to the second door. This one opened into the passage leading to the rear door of the vicarage and the back stairs. The rear door was always locked and the key kept… where? Couldn’t remember. Jane had a key, because this had once been her private front door, the way up to her apartment, until using it got to be too much of a drag.

  The second door was not quite shut and Lol rested his shoulder against it, knowing that it nearly always creaked. He could get through all right, but the noise would tell Dexter where he’d gone. If he could get upstairs, into Merrily’s bedroom with its phone… if Dexter would just make some kind of covering noise…

  ‘When I gets you… gonner make it all hurt real bad… I promise.’

  It was enough.

  Lol leaned back against the door to the back stairs and, with a creak even he barely heard, he was through. He went directly for the narrow stairs. No point in even trying for the back door. Tripping over the first step and going down on his hands, and then up the stairs that way, his hands finding the next steps, his bruised stomach screaming at him to stop.

  He collapsed on the top step and just… just breathed, taking in real air, letting it come out in a rush, lying on his back. Hands out on either side, feeling the rough plaster covering the old wattle and daub.

  When he tried to get up, he nearly passed out with the pain. Started to slide back down the stairs.

  ‘Come on, boy.’

  Sod it.

  Lol said wearily, ‘You’re stuffed, you know that? They’ll find your DNA all over her.’

  ‘But mainly yours, boy. And you’ll have gone. You’ll have buggered off. They en’t gonner find you.’

  Lol looked back down the steep and malformed back staircase in search of light. This was the throat down which you dropped into the belly of the house. He saw a vague smear of grey, perhaps the small window alongside the back door. He sensed that the door at the end of the passage at the bottom of the stairs was still open to the kitchen.

  And Dexter, somewhere very close.

  He tried to stand up. A
foot skidded off the edge of a stair and he shuffled down three of them.

  ‘That’s it, boy. Alice is dyin’ to see you.’

  Alice.

  We needs it now, more than ever — the Holy Spirit, the Holy Eucharist.

  Clear challenge there to the remorseless evil represented in Dexter Harris. They were going to drag him into a public place so that the born-again Darrin could publicly denounce him before God. Something in Dexter had sent him out in search of an answer to that.

  ‘Why the churchyard, Dexter?’ Lol croaked. ‘Why did you take the trouble to bring Alice all the way to the church? Could’ve left her in the orchard, might have been days before she was found. Why the churchyard?’

  Ritual behaviour. Dexter wouldn’t understand why he’d done it.

  ‘Why’d you take Darrin back to the scene of the crash?’

  Dexter: one small greasy cog in the huge and complex machinery of evil.

  ‘Poor Darrin,’ Lol said. ‘He could’ve had everything. The repentant sinner takes all. Including the chip shop.’

  The voice roared up, like out of a wind-tunnel. ‘That cunt? Pretend you changed your ways, sorry for what you done? That’s how you gets out of jail quicker. He never found no fuckin’ religion, he—’

  ‘I think he did, Dexter. But if he was dead, who’d know one way or the other?’

  ‘Come on, boy.’

  ‘You can’t get out for the snow, anyway.’

  ‘I can get out.’ Dexter was back on his high, everything going his way, couldn’t lose. ‘Hey, guess what I found — nice set o’ knives on the wall. You gonner come and have a look? How about I gives Alice a little prod, see if her’s gone yet.’

  … Real nasty, look. Stuck his knife in the back of my hand once. Had an airgun, shot a robin in the garden…

  ‘No, I’m coming down.’

  ‘Good boy.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Dexter,’ Lol said, ‘where are you from? You’re a walking curse. You’re the living dark heart of your own family. You’re a big, walking disease.’

  Lol took the crooked, swollen steps steadily, a hand on each wall and his aching head way above everything — the attic, the snow-covered stone tiles — up in the teeming night sky. The last time it was like this, he was on stage in The Courtyard in Hereford, finding out that people still wanted to hear his songs after all these years. He was glad he’d done that.

  By the time he was close to the bottom of the stairs, he could hear Dexter in the kitchen doorway, panting. It was rage, of course. Dexter had a limited emotional range. It was an encouraging sound, but it wasn’t…

  ‘Hey,’ Lol said, ‘that wouldn’t be a touch of the old asthma coming on, would it? Can you manage to find your inhaler in this light, or will you have to suck your own—?’

  He reached the bottom before he was expecting it and stumbled and twisted, and the agony from somewhere in his abdomen brought him to his knees.

  ‘You… what are you, Dexter?’ Lol whispered. ‘What are you?’

  He climbed back onto the third step and sat down, remembering the white high of just a few hours ago. Sitting barefooted on the rug in the scullery, in the orange glow of the electric fire, thinking about the woman in the kitchen with the lights turned down low. Warm love.

  He closed his eyes, heard Dexter coming at him, all meat and malevolence, in the total night, and saw Lucy Devenish alongside him, with her poncho spread like bat wings.

  You have to learn to open up, Lucy said. Let the world flow into you again.

  47

  Losers

  On the first landing, Merrily encountered a portly grey-haired man in a well-cut three-piece suit, very neat and compact and self-assured. The kind of man who sauntered. He was leaning on the banisters, gazing down the curve of the stairs, and turned as she came up.

  ‘Mrs Watkins.’

  ‘Have we met?’

  He pointed at the pectoral cross. ‘Can’t be too many of those around here tonight.’

  ‘Another eleven and we’d be ready to take on Black Vaughan.’

  He laughed. ‘Alistair Hardy.’

  ‘I guessed. My daughter’s just been telling me how you were in communication with an old friend of ours.’

  He tilted his head.

  ‘In a poncho?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said.

  ‘Personally, I didn’t think it was Lucy’s style, but there you go.’

  ‘You’re sceptical about the spirit world?’

  ‘Hell, no, I’m just sceptical about spiritualists.’ She came to lean on the banisters next to him. The lighting down there was too dim; the walls cried out for huge portraits in ornate gold frames. ‘Sorry, I’m not usually this rude. I think it must be past my bedtime.’

  ‘Mine, too,’ Hardy said. ‘They even went to the trouble of fitting out a magnificent chamber for me. The one where Mrs Davies shot herself.’

  ‘Whose idea was that?’

  ‘I wish I knew. Have you been in there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you something, Mrs Watkins. I’m not a timid man, as you can imagine, but I have to tell you I could no more sleep in that room than on a bed of nails.’

  She looked at him: fleshy, well fed, comparatively unlined. It was disturbing how untroubled some of these people appeared — coasting through life, the greatest fear of all having been removed.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I never think of spiritualists acknowledging the idea of evil. It’s always seemed a bit…’

  ‘Tame?’

  ‘Not quite right, but… yeah. You never seem to accept the possibility of… risk.’

  Hardy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Hmm.’ He smiled and nodded and walked away.

  In the centre of the great island unit, there was this small earthenware crucible in which incense was burning.

  Fat candles sat in glass bowls placed at the cardinal points on the worktop and all the electric lights in the kitchen had been switched off, so that the ambience of the room was one of, like, shivery motion.

  Jane thought of the fire on the rocks, how elemental that had looked, how basic it had turned out to be. Antony Largo had two cameras set up on tripods, both bigger and more technical-looking than the Sony 150 he’d given her.

  And which he now gave her again.

  ‘You’re joking,’ Jane said.

  ‘Look, don’t give me a hard time, huh, hen?’ Just the two of them down here. Largo cocked his head, peering into her face. ‘I never had you down as a prima donna.’

  ‘You never had me—?’

  ‘Look — a crucial set piece like this, I’d usually have three experienced people at the very least. Tonight, well, obviously Ben’s gonna be in the movie — unless we get ourselves a spectral manifestation, he’s gonna be the star, so he’s no help. Therefore, I’m gonna leave this wee implement with you. It’s fully charged. You can choose to shoot stuff or not, but there’ll only be the two of us. Maybe you’ll see things I miss — I can’t be in two places at once.’

  Jane felt her hands closing around the Sony like they were betraying all her finer principles. She turned away as the first footsteps sounded on the stone stairs.

  ‘Not yet!’ Antony strode out, hands aloft. ‘I’ll tell you when.’

  Jane held her watch to a candle. It was nearly four a.m. Antony waved her away into the shadows and moved over to the farthest tripod, bending over the camera.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘in five.’

  When they came in, even Jane could tell that most of them were rigidly self-conscious, didn’t know where to look. You might have expected some small element of anticipation, but they were kind of shuffling like some ragbag band of medieval lepers in search only of relief.

  Beth Pollen first, her white hair pulled back and secured with one of those leather things with a stick through it. Beth Pollen, who lost her husband and fell among spiritualists, but who had been a good friend to Natalie. Then Ben in his Edwardian jacket over a white shirt — not as dan
gerous as he’d seemed only hours ago, just badly wasted, the old sense of suave long gone. Amber… well, Amber was as normal, her gaze wandering to the big French stove, making sure that nobody had glued candles to her big steel hotplate. Matthew Hawksley was looking crumpled, his white jacket well creased. Alistair Hardy was in his conman’s business suit, with his hands behind his back, looking like he’d come to value the place.

  Losers, Jane thought, as they took their places on high wooden stools around the island unit, their faces shimmering in the candlelight. Hardy was at the top of the table. Missing was Natalie Craven, over whom a pile of circumstantial evidence towered like Stanner Rocks.

  Nobody spoke. It looked like the set-up for virtually every phoney seance scene that Jane had seen on television, but maybe this was what Largo wanted. This wasn’t a serious documentary, this was cheap, naff reality TV, coming from the same kind of factory as all that airport crap and the bollocks set in hairdressing salons.

  True to his word, though, Antony didn’t make them all go out and come in again more realistically. He wasn’t invisible, but he was moving around unobtrusively enough, with another little hand-held Sony. Jane was aware of the tiny red light glowing on the second tripod camera. Long shots from two angles, then, with meaningful close-ups by Antony Largo.

  He slid back to the tripod at the top of the room, refocused. Then he lifted a finger and brought it down, pointing at Ben.

  Ben cleared his throat. ‘Well… good morning. And I think it’s a morning when none of us will be… altogether sorry to see daylight.’

  Murmurs and smiles, Jane thinking, Buggered if I’m shooting any of this.

  ‘Because of the weather, there are fewer of us than anticipated, but I think the essential people are here — most of them. To be honest, I think we’ve all been… shattered by what’s happened tonight. And as we really don’t know how it’s going to turn out…’ Ben looked directly into Antony’s camera. ‘I’m sorry, Antony, I really don’t know how safe I am. I don’t know how much of this is going to be sub judice, do I?’