Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Amy Rae Durreson

A car turned into the drive behind us, and the other officer glanced that way, then kept staring. I said, “What are you implying?”

  The officer said mildly, “Were you Armstrong’s apprentice, or was it Forster?”

  “Fuck off,” I snapped, the last of my self-control breaking, “Niall Forster is the best man I’ve ever met. His daughter died. What the fuck is wrong with you that you think he could—”

  I’d taken a step forward, my fists clenching. Both men moved closer, faces hard.

  Behind us a car door opened, and a calm, cheery voice said, “There you are, Leon, old chap. What was Dad thinking to send you to such a godforsaken spot?”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  BOTH OFFICERS paused to gawp, and I couldn’t really blame them. There are few sights quite as disconcerting as a vicar in a Jag.

  In my case, I’d seen it before. The man striding towards me was my brother Peter—Felix’s only birth child.

  Peter wrapped me up in a warm hug, hissed in my ear, “Play along, you daft fool,” and turned his most genial smile on the police. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. How can my brother and I help you?”

  There was a very awkward moment of silence. We may be a secular country, but even the most atheist of police officers can be daunted by the prospect of telling a man in a dog collar that they’re on the verge of arresting his brother.

  “What are you doing here, Pete?” I asked him, grasping at straws, then belatedly realising he’d given me a cue, “Can the bishop really spare you?”

  “Even men of the cloth get holidays,” Peter replied, his arm still locked around my shoulder. “We’ve got a couple of weeks in Whitby, so it wasn’t all that far to drive. Dad said things were going pear-shaped up here.”

  “He’s prone to understatement,” I said, to mask the impulse to throw myself against Peter’s broad shoulder and weep. He and I had never been close. Kasia and Suleikha were my sisters, blood be damned, but Peter had already been away at uni by the time Felix had taken me in, and I’d never felt the same connection to him.

  But he was here, when I needed him most.

  “Don’t need to tell me,” Peter said with a warm chuckle and turned to the police with an inviting smile and a little roll of his eyes. “My dad didn’t even tell the family for three days after he found out about his KBE, and then he called it far too flattering.”

  “He deserved it,” I said fiercely.

  Peter patted me on the shoulder and confided to our audience, “If Dad hadn’t had Leon to rely on, he’d never have had the time to be active enough to earn a knighthood.”

  I hated the old boy network. I hated the old school tie system. I really hated people who used their titles as a bludgeon.

  But, dear God, it feels good when it’s being used to defend you.

  I could see them reconsidering. There’s a difference between a gay black special-needs teacher with a dodgy past and the son of a knight, even in our supposedly modern country. I could almost see the cogs turning as they reassessed me.

  Peter, who had all of Felix’s facility with a charming smile and about as many scruples as Machiavelli when it came to the greater good, unleashed his warmest smile at them all. “If you chaps don’t mind, I’d like to catch up with my brother. We’ll be staying in the area, of course, but let’s give the poor lad a bit of a break. Leon, go and grab your stuff. I’ve got reservations at a jolly nice-looking place up towards Hawick.”

  I gaped at him, but he squeezed his hand around my shoulder, and I bolted before anyone could object.

  It took me five minutes to stuff everything I’d brought with me into my bags and get back downstairs. I still wasn’t sure what was going on. Until Peter had strolled onto the scene, I’d been convinced I was on the verge of being arrested. I’d always vaguely realised Peter had not only inherited Felix’s gift for bonhomie, but had honed it into an offensive weapon. Still I didn’t realise the full extent of it until I got back out.

  By then Peter was cooing over pictures of one of the officers’ toddler and had charmed Fiona into bringing out a plate of chocolate biscuits.

  I offered a weak grin. Peter on a mission was a truly unholy meld of Hugh Grant and Kenneth Branagh, with a tinge of Rowan Williams to scare away the perpetually cynical.

  “Now,” said Peter with a happy sigh, “I must steal Leon away—don’t arrest me for it, boys. Fiona, you are the current light of my life, and I promise the foundation will continue to pay his board, but the poor lad needs to get away from things for a few days. Leon, you’ll like where we’re heading. Kasia—our sister, lads—says you told her the food was divine. Professional obligations prevent me from going so far, but I’m looking forward to sampling it.”

  I heaved my cases into the back of the Jag and slithered into the passenger side before anyone could stop me. Peter bid a cheerful farewell to his new friends in the force and slid in beside me, waving goodbye.

  But the moment we turned out of the gate, he put his foot down and we bombed down the lane as fast as his very fast car could take us.

  I snapped, “Be careful—too many people have died on this road!”

  “Yeah, Dad shared that too. Eventually.” He slowed down, though, at least until we were out on the main road, and then he opened up again. I took in a deep breath, pretending it was because of the speed, then another, shakier one.

  “Let it out, kiddo,” said Peter.

  “I don’t—” I gasped and bit my lip until I could compose myself. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Peter winced at the blasphemy but then said, perfectly seriously, “Like I said, I was in Whitby, which is a darn sight closer than the rest of the family. Mind you, I expect the aged parents will be here before long.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your lawyer mate rang Dad and suggested you might need some support. Dad rang me this morning.”

  I was still confused. The relationship between me and Peter was the flimsiest of technicalities. He was the last person I’d expect to come running to my rescue. “But—”

  “You’re my brother, Leon. Did you really think I’d leave you in this kind of mess by yourself?”

  I stared at him as the rolling moors flashed past us.

  After a moment, Peter said slowly, “Oh.”

  I felt awful. “I’m sorry… I just never…. I was never even sure if you liked me.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I like you. You’re my brother. I’d drop everything and run, whatever I thought of you.” We blasted along another half a mile or so before he added, “But I do like you, for the record, even if you are Dad’s favourite.”

  I opened my mouth to deny that, then stopped myself. I managed to say, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re also the one I’m most worried will float away again. The girls have roots now, but you’ve just got the school, and I’m not sure that’s enough.”

  “It’s got deeper roots than any of us.”

  He shrugged. “Even so. People make for better homes than institutions.”

  I thought of Niall and swallowed hard. “Yeah. I’m starting to get that.” Even to my own ears, my voice sounded rough and jerky.

  Peter, focused on the road, said, “I’ve got a few bits from Dad and Kasia, but why don’t you tell me what’s been going on here.”

  I let out a laugh that was half a sob. “You wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

  He said tranquilly, “Try me. Belief is a job requirement in my line of work.”

  I considered that for a while before saying, “Pull over. I don’t want to tell this story while you’re breaking the speed limit.”

  Peter snorted his opinion of that but pulled into a gateway at the next passing point. There wasn’t a building in sight, but a round sheepfold stood a few hundred metres above us. I led the way up there, and we both settled against the wall. Peter took a slow, deep breath and said appreciatively, “Clean air. It’s lovely up here. Bleak, but still beautiful.”

  “You
don’t know the half of it,” I told him but breathed in too, filling my lungs and letting the wind whip some of my troubles from my shoulders.

  “Try me.”

  I told him everything, in little fits and bursts, and every time I ran dry, he asked the right questions to coax the next parts of the story out of me. A few times the words caught in my throat, and he offered me a handkerchief and a broad shoulder. He was a good listener, calm and steady, but asking enough careful questions that I knew he was taking it all in. I’d been told he’d been very popular with his parishioners but had put that down, a little meanly, to the fact that he was young and not hard on the eyes. Now I wondered how much I’d underestimated him. He’d always been part of a different world from mine—conservative, religious, ambitious, and adult long before me.

  When I was done, he nodded slowly and said, “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed, looking at the moor rather than him, speaking the words to the wind.

  “We’re here for you. Now, let me have a think.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  He considered it for a moment. “I will, once I’ve thought it through.”

  I laughed a little too loud and settled more comfortably on the wall. The wind was fierce, but the sun was out again, and thin streamers of clouds went sliding across the sky. It felt like we were a million miles from anywhere, and I had to keep glancing at Peter to convince myself he was here in a place so different from his usual city and cathedral haunts.

  He was a solid, sturdy man, gone a little meaty in the last few years. His fair hair was starting to thin at the top, and I could see how it would go as wispy as Felix’s in a few years. He had all his father’s energy but matched with some of Valerie’s redoubtable self-discipline. I’d always thought he had missed his century—in the medieval church he would have risen far, meeting all his rivals with such pleasant regard that they wouldn’t have been able to pin any enmity on him even as he left them in his wake.

  Now I remembered his role in the diocese wasn’t all that different from mine in the school—he was responsible for a vast range of jobs, all essential to the bishop—but the ones he talked about the most over Christmas dinner were all about community support with the homeless, young carers, the old and lonely and housebound. I’d always been a little cynical about it all, but he was Felix’s son, after all.

  And my brother, though I’d never really thought of him that way.

  I thought of Martyn Armstrong and little Frank. Would Peter be devastated if I vanished from all of their lives? The thought was disconcerting. He and I had virtually nothing in common. And yet, looking at his worried, contemplative face, I thought he would be.

  Perhaps I had more family than even I had realised.

  “You could imagine Macbeth and Banquo meeting the witches on a road like that,” Peter said, looking down at the narrow moor road twisting its way north. “By the pricking of my thumbs…”

  “…something wicked this way comes,” I finished. He understood, at least in part. “You can feel it in the air, y’know. Evil.”

  Peter shuddered. “I know the chap who runs the diocese’s deliverance ministry.”

  I was puzzled. “Deliverance? Oh. He’s an exorcist.”

  Peter winced slightly. “Please, we’re Church of England. But, yes, I suppose so. We call it deliverance.”

  “I didn’t realise it was still an actual job.” Could the answer have been so simple? Could the redcap simply have been sent back to hell by the right priest?

  “It’s a more pastoral job these days. Jeff works with a doctor and a psychologist, and he makes a lot of referrals to local mental health services. He says in thirty years he’s seen a lot of deeply troubled people, but he’s never seen anything he believed to be a spirit of any sort. Evil isn’t made from nothing. It has its roots in past deeds. And he thinks, and I agree, that the devil acts through the pain we inflict upon one another rather than by direct intervention in the world.”

  The relief I’d felt at being believed guttered out. “Is that what you think? That my past finally caught up with me and broke my brain?”

  He snorted. “No. If it had, you’d have my support, of course, but you’re as rational as the next man, Leon. Too rational for your own good, sometimes.”

  It was my turn to make the same noise. “So what are you saying?”

  “He also says—my friend—that he never answers a call without taking with him the possibility that this time he will come face-to-face with something beyond rational explanation. ‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.’ Even though he has never come face-to-face with evil spirits, he is ready. Just like neither you nor I have ever seen someone have a heart attack, but we’ve both had our first-aid training and know how to do CPR if we must.”

  “Just because we haven’t seen it, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take precautions against it?” I considered that. I hadn’t woken up this morning expecting to debate spirituality with my brother while sitting on a mossy wall with the scent of sheep and damp heather blowing around us. “That sounds like a very exhausting world to live in.”

  “Which is why some of us take on the responsibility of being trained first aiders and some of us keep watch for the devil. We’ve all got a role to play in this world.”

  “You should talk to Jeannie,” I said. “That’s what she and Martyn devoted their lives to—keeping watch.”

  “She sounds like a remarkable woman. I’d like to meet her.”

  “Even though she helped bring that evil into the world?”

  Peter gave me a wry smile. “We’ve already grappled with the nature of evil. If we get onto repentance as well, we’ll never make it to the hotel in time for dinner.”

  For some reason, that struck me as funny, and I dissolved into laughter. Peter said indignantly, “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Damn right I am,” I said and was both startled and gratified when he promptly put me in a headlock. I tried to wriggle out of his hold, still laughing too shrilly to stop, and we wrestled amicably for a few minutes, as if we were a pair of teenagers rather than a perfectly respectable archdeacon and a deputy head teacher.

  Back in the car, I wiped the last wet traces of my hysterical laughter from my eyes and sat back, breathing in as Peter negotiated the high curves of the road much faster than I would have dared. I felt better—able to breathe more freely. Watching the heather and the hills move past us, always revealing new purple shadows in the distance but somehow never quite bringing us to civilisation, a thought struck me. “Can you perform an exorcism?”

  “Not without the proper paperwork,” Peter said, grimacing.

  “Shut up,” I said involuntarily.

  “There are procedures.”

  “Risk assessment forms? Expenses claims?”

  “You think you’re joking,” he grumbled. He added, voice steady, “Do you think it might come back?”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “YES,” I said. “The only other kid who ever escaped it was me. It lay low for a few months, but usually it’s at least five years between attacks. The next victim after me was six months later. And it doesn’t matter if it’s six months or seven years. We need to stop it for good.”

  “Didn’t Armstrong and his friends try that?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to ask them.” We were approaching the outskirts of Hawick. “We could drive up there now and ask her.”

  “Or we could wait until morning,” Peter said firmly. “I’m a growing boy, Leon. I need my dinner.”

  “You’re forty-three.”

  “You’re never too old to grow, Leon. Outwards if not upwards.”

  I laughed despite myself. “Fine. We’ll go demon hunting tomorrow.”

  We’d hit rush-hour traffic in town and sat for several minutes on the bridge over the tumbling waters of what I thought must be the River Teviot. I wat
ched the water and was taken aback when Peter suddenly let out a guffaw and said, “Two brothers, hunting demons in what I do say is a very nice car.”

  “You have never watched that show in your life,” I said, my own lips twitching.

  “Mindless blasphemous twaddle,” he said cheerfully. “Naomi has all the box sets.”

  I suddenly liked my sister-in-law a lot better. Naomi was a terrifyingly elegant family lawyer who had never shown the faintest hint of either humour or imagination. I said lightly, “I should hang out with Naomi more at parties. She’s obviously more fun than you.”

  “You should. You and Kasia are so tight she’s a little shy to interrupt.”

  Now I felt bad. “She shouldn’t be, really.”

  He cast me an amused glance; then the traffic started to move again.

  WE WERE in the same hotel Niall had taken me to for his birthday dinner, and I narrowed my eyes at Peter as we climbed the grand staircase. “Are you and Kasia talking about me behind my back?”

  “Actually, the three of us have a WhatsApp group,” Peter admitted.

  “And I wasn’t invited?” A little of that increased sense of family faded.

  “We were worried you’d invite Felix, and we mostly use it to moan about him.”

  “Oh.” I pondered that as we turned along a long corridor. I hadn’t quite taken in the full grandeur of the hotel when we had eaten outside, but it was a vast rambling Victorian mansion. Unlocking my door, I stared. “Bloody hell. This is grand.”

  Peter followed me in and skirted the four-poster to look out at the view. “It was surprisingly cheap. Probably haunted.”

  “Whatever. That’s hardly a novelty.” I wandered over to join him. “Nice view.”

  “I should have brought Naomi,” he said wistfully. “Be a shame to pull the girls away from Whitby, though. They’re loving it there. Olivia’s having a Gothic phase, and Amelia’s currently mad about watercolours.”

  “And you decided not to bring them to see my haunted manor house in the Borders?”