Friends of the Dusk

by Phil Rickman

  He was maybe thirty-seven, flecks of grey in his tightly trimmed beard, a quiet smile.

  ‘However,’ he said, ‘here we all are, trying to survive in an increasingly complex world where faith and spirituality are no longer perceived by many Western people as positive influences. Nadya, no—’ Fending off the hard stare. ‘We need to say it. This kind of situation would have been fully accepted by my grandparents, and don’t think I’m dismissing it. It’s just that in my professional situation I have to be wary of being linked with any—’

  ‘Primitive superstition,’ Nadya said.

  A lot of cream leather between them now.

  Merrily said, ‘Your friend in Worcester…’

  ‘We hoped,’ Adam Malik said, ‘that the imam would relieve us of any need to speculate about the nature of the disturbance. We didn’t think there’d be demarcation lines. He’ll be happy to talk to you if you want that, but he understands if you don’t want it. He says it’s a matter of practicality, not politics, if that makes sense to you.’

  ‘Actually, it does.’

  ‘Well, there we are, then. We’re in your hands.’ He glanced at his wife. ‘All of us.’

  ‘All of you,’ Merrily said. ‘Erm… I was about to ask about your daughter.’

  ‘Upstairs,’ Nadya said quickly. ‘Doing her homework. She usually does her weekend homework on Sunday afternoons.’

  ‘Does she know about any of this? Does she know about her grandad’s experience?’

  ‘Reverend Watkins, she’s a child. She—’

  ‘I did look into this,’ Adam Malik said. ‘And talked at length to a neurologist of my acquaintance. It’s not unknown for hallucinations to be linked with strokes. Seeing things that aren’t there, hearing voices when no one is speaking. There are even accounts of people seeing what they’ve described as demonic figures. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes not. It can be very frightening. Sometimes this is an effect of the prescribed drugs.’

  ‘But that’s… after a stroke,’ Merrily said. ‘Surely.’

  ‘Well… yes. I’ve discovered no recorded evidence of anything similar occurring pre-stroke. Pre-stroke symptoms tend to be physical. Headaches, impaired vision. Not, however, impaired in that way.’

  ‘And…’ Merrily looked at Casey. ‘If Casey heard the clocks…’

  Casey said nothing. Merrily saw the accusatory look that Nadya tossed like a dart at her mother, like it was Casey who’d brought the Anglican Church into the house.

  ‘Has Aisha ever mentioned seeing or hearing anything? Feeling anything?’

  ‘We’re not sure,’ Casey said. ‘However, we’re aware that a child – particularly an adolescent child, because I’ve read about this – may in some ways be more vulnerable.’

  ‘And sometimes,’ Merrily said, ‘can be seen as the focus for it. Which does need some consideration. Hormones can be linked to all kinds of anomalous—’

  ‘No!’ Nadya’s hand came down on the arm of the sofa. ‘I’m not having that. Aisha is happy here. She’s settled in at the school, has friends – real friends, Facebook friends. She’s a normal girl. She loves the countryside, goes off for long walks. Likes to read, and… and long may that last.’

  ‘And, in between all this…’ Merrily hesitated. ‘… is she following the Islamic faith?’

  ‘She’s free to follow whatever faith she wants to,’ Adam Malik said. ‘Or no faith at all. There’s no pressure here. My wife came to Islam some years after we married, with no demands from me, and I want no demands made on my daughter.’

  ‘Although I have to say,’ Nadya said, ‘when it happened, it gave my life a direction and a structure I would never have imagined achievable, and I’d like that for her, too. As the Church was always meaningless to me, irrelevant to my needs, I could never have imagined that faith could absorb one’s life at every level. This is the energy of faith. Becoming part of something moving forward.’

  Nobody reacted. Nadya gazed into space, wearing a little, knowing smile. Merrily saw Dennis Kellow’s big fists tighten. Adam Malik was looking steadily across the big room.

  ‘And what about you?’ Merrily asked him.

  ‘Oh, I’m very happy to be here, Mrs Watkins. I’m a convert…’ He smiled. ‘… to the countryside. A convert to the countryside, yes.’ He seemed pleased with that. ‘And I understand what absorbs Dennis about this old house. It’s a unique place, a worthy project…’

  ‘You see, I’m looking for a way in.’ Merrily moved to the edge of the window seat, leaning into the room. ‘Some way of addressing this in which you’re all willing to play a part.’

  So many complications, here. So much unsaid. No wonder the girl went for long walks.

  And – the worst of it – none of them helped. They let her talk about the various options: the full blessing, the Requiem Eucharist for the restless dead, the exorcism of place for an indefinite but aggressive presence. She didn’t feel that any of these was right. She didn’t know enough. She had an acute sense of specific things she did not know.

  At one time – in Canon Dobbs’s day, not so very long ago – an exorcism of any kind would demand not merely acquiescence but the active belief of all participants. Attendance at a church service would be required, before and after. And people would go along with that.

  At one time. She threw a wordless prayer out into the churchy room, felt it fluttering feebly like a tissue.

  ‘Can we just…? Before we make a decision, can we lay this out? If I say anything anybody disagrees with, just tell me. OK? Let’s start with what’s been described as a perceptible hostility here. Something Dennis felt. A presence in the Castle Room.’

  She looked at Dennis, giving him a chance to deny it, take it all back.

  He said nothing.

  ‘And then the stroke.’

  Nadya opened her mouth, then shut it again. Casey’s arms stiffened against a shudder. Dennis drew a long, unhappy breath that seemed, to Merrily, to be echoed and amplified by the wind outside.

  ‘And I’m getting a bit uncomfortable,’ she said, ‘about the reluctance to involve Aisha. Who, if she’s anything like my daughter at her age – which is not so long ago – will know exactly what we’re talking about.’

  Know exactly?

  Was that not the problem? Did any of them even know enough to frame a theory?

  She’d never felt more uncertain. Scared of doing something, scared of doing nothing.

  32

  Foetal

  BELOW JANE, THE brown water was wind-whipped through a little, steep-sided gorge before piling noisily under the wooden footbridge.

  Noisy like a watermill. Maybe there’d been a mill here at one time. It made sense. Standing on a grassy mound, Jane half-closed her eyes, drew a long breath and held it. She might not have a tiny fraction of the great Francis Pryor’s feel for a landscape, but she could at least fantasize.

  Go.

  Letting the breath out, very slowly, she projected a water-wheel into the scene. The wheel was rough and wooden, a cluster of buildings forming alongside it.

  Fragments of autumn dusted her face. She felt the slope of the mound under her boots. She could hear in her head the creak and clank and cistern-hiss of the wooden wheel behind her as she turned her head to look back up the hill to the trees concealing the old farmhouse, Cwmarrow Court.

  Do you trust this place?

  Amongst the thorn hedges and the brambles between the brook and the Court, she carried on building. Mental Lego.

  OK. Hundreds of people must have trusted Cwmarrow in the past – a small, fertile valley with water, what was not to rely on?

  So why had they all left, leaving just two medieval buildings facing each other across the brook? Two buildings united by the sharing of stone. Through daylight fading ahead of schedule, Jane looked up at the crumbled ochre walls of the plundered Cwmarrow Castle and the trees below it, mountain ash and silver birch, getting swung across the castle hill by the stiffening wind. Between them, th
e brook was growling: Don’t come over, don’t come over. The sky behind the ruins was solid, like a board. A barrier. The only movement was the water, like it couldn’t race through here fast enough.

  Why had Cwmarrow been allowed to die?

  Godforsaken.

  Good point. Where was God in this place?

  Jane came down from the mound and stood beside it, looking all around the valley. If there was a medieval village, there had to have been a place of worship.

  Slitting her eyes again, she saw mud where there was grass, conjured a track, a village street winding up from the mill, maybe a ditch down one side oozing animal and human sludge. Small houses of wattle and daub – walls of stiff dung. Strong smells here, but not all of them bad; there would have been orchards, a cider press, fermenting fruit, pleasantly intoxicating on a warm day.

  And somewhere a blacksmith would be hammering. There was always a blacksmith, the glow of the forge, a red eye in the gloom. The sound of the hammer which Mum said she’d been told that Selwyn Kindley-Pryce had heard from his bed in the early morning.

  Clink clink.

  This morning, while Mum was in church, doing the Sunday shift, she’d wandered over to the village bookshop in search of Selwyn Kindley-Pryce and Caroline Goddard. Crucial country proverb: use it or lose it.

  The shop called – you had to laugh – Ledwardine Livres, was run by the slightly severe Londoner, Amanda Rubens, and her partner, the plump, goblinesque Gus Staines. Gus was there alone this Sunday morning. It was the slow season between the tourists and the Christmas shoppers, and Jane was the only customer. She’d been nervous. Oh God.

  Gus wore a thick green woollen dress and a chunky necklace not much smaller than a mayoral chain. Jane had told her the guy whose books she was interested in was probably before her time, and Gus had laughed.

  ‘Virginia Woolf? H.G. Wells?’ And then, when Jane had tossed her the name: ‘Oh dear. Poor Mr Pryce.’

  ‘You did know him?’

  ‘Well, not here, obviously. Before I went to London, I used to work part time at what was then the finest bookshop in Hereford. The one that used to be in Church Street? No more beautiful location, just below the Cathedral. Gone now, Jane. History. Like most of the best shops in town.’

  Gus was smiling, which didn’t mean she was happy. Gus always smiled in the face of life.

  Jane said, ‘You sold Kindley-Pryce’s books there?’

  ‘We stocked them. Didn’t sell many. The Cunning was over twenty-five pounds, which was big money back then, especially here. You learn that there are prices beyond which people in Hereford will not go.’

  ‘And it was a bit dry, I suppose, The Cunning.’

  ‘Yes, but then he produced something which we all thought would be of more general interest. It was called Borderlight, much shorter and more colourful. An interpretive retelling of legends and stories from the medieval chroniclers. Privately published – I doubt any commercial publisher would have touched it. Still overpriced, but quite exquisite, with lovely, parchment-like paper and pen and ink illustrations by his friend, Caroline Goddard.’

  ‘She was an artist, too?’

  ‘She wrote and illustrated children’s books. I have a copy at home… somewhere. I can bring it in for you to look at. Borrow it if you like.’

  ‘That would be fantastic.’

  Gus beamed, a happy gnome even though nothing had been sold.

  ‘They wrote some children’s books together, for a national publisher, Jane. Under the name… ah…’

  ‘Foxy Rowlestone.’

  ‘Yes. We only learned that Foxy Rowlestone was two local people when it was too late. Maybe we should have guessed with Rowlestone being a village at the end of the Golden Valley. Terribly annoying because the books had sold well even with no local connection. Would have been wonderful to get the two of them into the shop to sign copies. Did you read them, Jane?’

  ‘No. I was a snobbish kid who thought books like that were naff. I was reading, erm, Tolstoy. Why was Foxy’s identity hidden?’

  ‘Because they didn’t want the attention, apparently. Didn’t want their readers – teenagers – coming to look for them. And finding their home, which they were using as a setting for the books – the castle on the hill, the village huddled under it and the forest all around where vampires lurked.’

  ‘Cwmarrow was the setting for the books?’

  ‘It was never named. They didn’t even say which part of the country it was in – people thought Cornwall or somewhere.’

  ‘Blimey, Gus, think of the lost tourism.’

  ‘So you haven’t any in stock.’

  ‘We’ve never had any, Jane. By the time we opened here, the series was over, almost before it had started. And the Twilight books were out by then, from America, totally cornering the young-adult vampire market.’

  ‘But if Foxy Rowlestone had carried on…’

  ‘Well, possibly. Who can really say? But they didn’t carry on, and it’s easy to see why. Ironically, a few years earlier, Mr Pryce agreed to come into the Hereford shop and do a signing, for the self-published book, Borderlight.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Ten years or more. Seems such a very long time ago now. A different era. Mr Pryce was…’ Gus looked strangely glum. ‘… charming. Kindly – like his name. Suntanned, wrinkled face like a walnut. He wore a sort of safari jacket. Made me think of one of those Victorian academics who went out to Egypt and places like that to excavate old tombs. There were some people who came in who knew him well. You know, “How are you, Selwyn? You’re looking jolly fit…” And within a few years…’

  The memory had seemed to throw a shadow over Gus. She put the smile back on and began to gather some local guidebooks into a stack.

  ‘Time to put these away. Holidays over, Christmas books coming in soon.’

  ‘Can you still buy the Kindley-Pryce books?’

  ‘Possibly second-hand, but be prepared for some steep prices. I doubt the print runs were very extensive.’

  ‘Only, Mum thought he might be still alive.’

  ‘Then God knows what he’s like now. I believe they got him into a home out beyond Leominster. One of these awfully expensive places with private nursing. I believe his son made the arrangements, to get him out of that big house.’

  ‘What about his partner… Caroline?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Left him. Not terribly supportive of her, was it?’

  ‘She left him because he was losing his mind?’

  ‘Well, she was much younger. What do you do? Spend your best years caring for an old man who can barely remember who you are?’

  Jane hadn’t known what to say.

  ‘Yes.’ Gus had become suddenly very solemn, quite fierce. ‘Yes, you do. You should. For better, for worse. In sickness and in health. That includes mental health, or maybe I’m old-fashioned.’

  ‘But they weren’t married or anything.’

  ‘They were a couple. Marriage is wonderful, but it’s essentially a recognition of an existing commitment.’

  Jane nodding, finding a tentative smile. Now or never.

  ‘Erm… I haven’t really seen you since you and Amanda…’

  ‘It was lovely,’ Gus said. Augusta Rubens-Staines, as she was now. ‘Your mother was kind enough to bless us in church afterwards. Couldn’t ask for more.’

  ‘No. Erm, congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you, Jane.’

  ‘Right… well…’

  Oh God, this was impossible. Jane had become breathless, turning away, glancing out of the window, across the square.

  ‘Is there something else I can do for you, Jane?’

  Cold feet. Her feet had actually felt cold, as Gus smiled her whitest, most accommodating smile. Really nice woman.

  No thank you,’ Jane said. ‘I just… That’s fine. I’ll look forward to seeing the book.’

  She was swaying, transferring her weight from her
left foot to the right and back again, Pressure, pressure, pressure. Horribly aware, in the stiflingly strange intimacy of the Cwmarrow valley, of the person she’d been just a couple of years ago. The stupid, arrogant, self-important, self-righteous little bitch. Echoes of the bitter rows with Mum, all the stuff she’d put Eirion through. The certainty. How could you be so sure of yourself?

  Gap year. Super. Everybody should have one. Sam had said that. In Pembrokeshire, when Eirion had left. Super chance to find out who you are, Jane.

  Super was one of Sam’s words. Sam, the real archaeologist, who’d seen the potential in Jane, telling her to read the books of Francis Pryor. Sam who had later said, More things, Horatio.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ Jane snarling into the wind. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I am. Nothing’s certain. Just get off my back.’

  Through tears in free-flow, Jane started to laugh, stamping away through the greasy grass, following the track her mind had made, the village street with the peasant homes and the blacksmith’s forge, the hammer banging in her chest. Let it all go. Stop thinking. Stop thinking.

  Another track had opened up in a corner of her mind’s eye, this one ribboning up into the shallow hills that neighboured Cwmarrow Court to the south, mostly bristling with forestry, the kind that got planted on land nobody cared too much about, the kind of coniferous forestry that didn’t exist in Britain in the Middle Ages. Anything could be under there.

  Zipping up her parka to stop it snagging on the rampant blackthorn, Jane made her way up towards the near-black conifers. There was movement in the eastern sky, small clouds like gunboats on darkening water. At some point, it would rain, hard. The ground was steep and already slippery; the boots she wore were wrong for this.

  She stopped halfway up the hill. Turning to look back across the valley, she found she was viewing Cwmarrow Castle from a very different angle, the tower side-on so you could see that most of its back was missing. Like a movie-set tower, just a façade, the truth about the castle exposed: defenceless from behind, impotent, relegated to the role of ornament. The castle wouldn’t like that; you could almost feel its bitterness, its resentment. He don’t like that, see, the local people would say. He en’t happy, he—