by Phil Rickman
‘Maybe someone should’ve...’
‘Sorry, vicar?’
Rural stress came in many forms, most of them unrecorded, unrecognized by psychiatry.
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Merrily tightened Lol’s long scarf. ‘Are we nearly there?’
With the lights of Kington behind them, they’d followed the bypass into a harder, lightless landscape, ranks of snow-caked conifers forming on the hazy edges of the headlight beams.
‘What have they been shooting at, Gomer? Do you know?’
She’d been here many times, and she knew that when you turned the corner and cruised down into the Radnor Valley, the landscape and your spirits usually lightened. Only tonight they wouldn’t be turning the corner.
‘Likely shadows,’ Gomer said. ‘Shootin’ at shadows.’
At first, Jane had thought like, Wow, the enterprise, the bravado, the spectacle.
Realizing in seconds that nothing else the Chancerys might have done could have been more blatantly insane. And in that situation today they would have known it – between them, they would have seen, for heaven’s sake, a dozen crazy horror movies with the same simplistic message: don’t meddle. A pulp cliché now.
They’d been mature people, people of wealth and status, and they’d behaved like irresponsible kids.
But, of course, they were Victorians – at the decadent end, verging on the Edwardian. Jane had done her social history and, at this particular period, in the heat and smoke of technological revolution, superstition belonged to the more primitive corners of the Empire. The Chancerys would have felt some kind of immunity, by virtue of being Victorians.
Jane sat down on the edge of her bed, looking at the window, a blackboard dusted with chalk, and still seeing the ill-fitting dentures of Leonard Parsonage working their way around the word exshorshism. The beetle-like personal mike distorting it, too close to his mouth because of the way his tie bulged out of his pullover.
Jane shuddered. Sitting there in the dark, with three inches of snow on the window sill, she finally called home.
Not thinking too hard about what she was going to say. Fairly confident, now, that she could turn this around with Mum. Because it was a fact that if she hadn’t kept quiet, stuck around, picking up pertinent information here and there, ear to the ground... well, no outsider would know the full extent of it, and that—
‘Knight’s Frome— sorry, Ledwardine Vicarage.’
Jane stiffened for a moment, not expecting this.
‘Lol? Is that you?’
‘Jane!’
‘What are you doing there?’ Mum and Lol: a secret love-tryst. The things that went on when your back was turned.
‘Not enough,’ Lol said. He didn’t sound happy.
‘Are you snowed in?’
‘Kind of.’
‘You and Mum?’
‘I wish,’ Lol said.
As soon as Merrily walked into the living room at The Nant, her gaze connected with the eyes of Jesus whose face wore a bleak smile of acceptance, his halo dull with weariness. Kind of, Just get this over. The picture wasn’t as famous as The Light of the World, but it wasn’t any more guaranteed to engender hope.
The half-mile track hadn’t been blocked. Gomer had been able to drive up to the wall around the farmhouse, where Danny’s tractor was wedged.
She stood near the living-room doorway, spotting the dog next: a sheepdog, more black than white. The dog’s head was pointing upwards, between the knees of the man sitting on a wooden stool. The man was looking down at the floor. Behind him, a fire roared in the range, gilding perhaps everything in the room except the picture of Jesus.
Gomer prodded her gently into the room, and Danny Thomas stood up from somewhere.
‘Mrs Watkins... Good of you.’
Now she was here she didn’t know what to say, how to go about this. It was like the strangeness of the whole area was concentrated in this square, fire-lit room. And when Danny spoke, that was also surreal, initially.
‘I, er... I had this album once, see. In my folky days.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Fairport Convention,’ Danny said. His hair hung over his face like wet seaweed over a rock. ‘Babbacombe Lee. Period when Dave Swarbrick was writin’ the songs? Before your time, I ’spect.’
‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘I... I remember it.’
She stared at Danny, in his bottle-green farmer’s overalls. The dog began to whimper. A log shifted on the fire.
‘Oh God,’ Merrily whispered. ‘John Babbacombe Lee, the man they couldn’t—’
Danny Thomas looked at her helplessly, his eyes wide with anguish. Danny had been crying. ‘Hang,’ he said. ‘The man they couldn’t hang.’ He pointed at the man on the stool in front of the fire. ‘And that... that’s Jeremy Berrows, the man couldn’t hang hisself. Stupid little bastard.’
32
Party Game
‘BUT HE’S ALL right?’ Jane was sounding lost, disconnected, groping for certainties. ‘He won’t die?’
‘Not if he stays away from rope,’ Lol said.
Hanged. A weighty word, full of ancient resonance and with only one definition: execution.
‘Lol... why? Why would he?’
Jeremy Berrows. A harmless, benign little guy, Merrily had said, when she’d called to tell him it could be a long night. There were things, she’d said, that didn’t add up. Things that even Gomer couldn’t put together.
‘Was it like a cry-for-help thing, or what?’
‘I... wouldn’t think it’s what you do when you’re hoping someone’s going to discover you in time,’ Lol said. ‘Meanwhile, keep this to yourself, OK?’
The lemon-yellow sleep light on the front of the computer was swelling and fading, swelling and fading. Here in the vicar’s study, where madness collected like dust. Flaky fantasies in the phone lines, images of the irrational only clicks away.
‘Why’s Mum gone to The Nant? Why did Gomer want her to go? I need to talk to her.’
‘If you do, it might be wisest to assume that she knows too much already for you to get away with... concealing anything.’
‘Like what?’
‘The White Company?’
‘Oh my God, who’s been talking? She knows about the documentary?’
Lol said nothing.
‘Lol, look, all it was – I swear it – Ben and this guy Antony are shooting a TV thing about Conan Doyle and spiritualism, and Antony gave me a video camera. He wanted me to shoot stuff, when he wasn’t there. So, like, I wasn’t going to blow it, just because there were spiritualists involved. I mean, was I?’
‘No, you wouldn’t do that.’
‘Only a lot of it was total bullshit. I was very naive. I was stitched up. I’m an extremely gullible person, and I wish I’d never come here, all right?’
‘I’d like to make some time to cry for you,’ Lol said, ‘but could you tell me about the Stanner Project first?’
She was quiet for so long, he was beginning to think they’d lost the signal.
‘Oh God, you really do know everything,’ Jane said.
Merrily followed Danny Thomas back into the kitchen, shut the door.
‘What about a doctor?’
Danny dropped a scornful hiss. ‘What’s a doctor gonner do for his condition?’
He went and half-sat on the edge of the kitchen table, hair matted on his face. When she’d put on the electric light, he’d switched it off again, as if there was something here that had to be contained in near-darkness to stop it spreading. A tongue of flame wavered on the wick of a small hurricane lamp on the draining board. This was the lamp that had been on a ledge in the barn when Danny had crashed in. When he’d seen something that he said was like out of a black acid-flashback.
‘Thought I was too late. All the beasts in there moaning.’
And Jeremy Berrows in the meagre lamplight, stoically dangling.
Danny roaring in agony and rage.
Jeremy, seeing Danny in the e
ntrance there, had started twitching and jerking, half-spinning on the rope, staring in terror at Danny out of his bulging eyes. Trying, for fuck’s sake, to finish it.
‘Sorry,’ Danny said, meaning his language. Merrily waved it away, and Danny said he must’ve gone temporarily insane hisself at that point, fumbling out his clasp-knife, clawing his way to the top of the scaffold of bales, slashing like a mad bastard at the oily rope.
Lucky that Jeremy was old-fashioned about rope: none of your nylon for this boy.
‘Stretched under his weight, see. So his feet’s reaching the topmost bales, and he don’t even know it. Only wondering why it’s takin’ so long.’
‘Has he said anything?’
Danny shook his head. He’d caught Jeremy as he fell, laying him out on the hay, the boy making this cawing noise like a stricken crow, wearing the mark of the rope like a red collar, bruises coming up under it. Long minutes passing before Jeremy would let Danny help him up and into the house.
‘Can he even speak?’
‘Can’t hardly move his head.’ Danny was intertwining his hands, like he was washing them slowly under a tap. ‘I can’t do n’more for him, vicar.’ He looked hard at her. ‘Can I?’
‘Is there a medicine chest? First-aid box?’
‘En’t that kind o’ first aid he needs.’
‘Would help if he was able to talk, though. Has someone gone for Natalie?’
‘We don’t know where she is. En’t at Stanner.’ Danny stood up. ‘Ah, damn. My idea we gets you yere, now I don’t know what to tell you. I still don’t know what brought him to this. Things about this boy we en’t never fathomed.’
‘Gomer thought maybe he’d just found out about’ – she glanced at the door, brought her voice down – ‘about Natalie? In the van?’
‘Couldn’t tell him, see, vicar. Had the perfect opportunity, couldn’t do it. Can’t hardly ask him now, can I?’ Danny hung his head, a slow smile shuffling into his beard. ‘You could, though, mabbe.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And then ask him who she is.’
‘Natalie?’
‘Ask him who she is, really,’ Danny said. ‘This is what we wanner know, see.’
Sounding as if there was something here that he half-suspected but didn’t dare approach.
‘It’s hard to believe how crazy they were, the Chancerys,’ Jane said to Lol. ‘You know about Thomas Vaughan. Black Vaughan?’
‘A bit.’
‘According to the legend, he was terrorizing Kington. After his death. The full poltergeist thing. The whole economy of the town under threat because people didn’t want to go there.’
‘This was when?’
‘Fifteenth, sixteenth century? If it happened at all. Folklore seems to work to its own calendar, doesn’t it? So they call in the Church. You know about that? Twelve priests confine the spirit in a snuff-box. Which might’ve been a metaphor – a way of explaining it to humble countryfolk who knew sod-all about states of consciousness but had a vague idea of what a snuff-box looked like.’
‘Did it work?’
‘To an extent. No more actual violence, just vague manifestations, like the Hound. Like warnings that it was only dormant. Maybe... hang on a mo, I’m just putting the phone down.’
Lol heard Jane moving about. There was the sound of a door opening and then closing before she was back at her mobile.
‘Thought there might’ve been somebody around. This place is suddenly full of totally unbalanced people.’
‘Where are you?’ The Jane he knew would relish being around totally unbalanced people.
‘In my room. If the door had a lock I’d lock it. Jeremy... I don’t believe it.’
‘You OK?’
‘Yeah, I’m just not sure who I can trust. Lol, if you talk to Mum, tell her we... would appreciate some help. But tell her to ring me first, not just show up.’
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘Amber. And me. Everybody else seems to have a finger in the pie.’
Lol guessed he was about to hear things that Jane would never have passed on if she hadn’t been shafted over the video.
‘This is what Ben finally got from old Leonard. Walter Chancery got hold of the Vaughan story. Or rather, his wife did – Bella – who was well into this new fad for spirit-contact. See, what strikes me about all this is that it was probably the first time in recorded history when people weren’t terrified by the supernatural. Like the birth of New Age.’
‘Convinced the mystery of death was being unveiled to them.’
‘Totally. So when Bella hears the tale of Black Vaughan, she’s like, OK, let’s look at all this in the light of – wooh! – modern science! Meaning spiritualism. There’d been some sightings locally, mainly the dog – but when was that dog not seen around? So Bella Chancery’s like, Hey, let’s do something for the community. Lady Bountiful. These crass incomers, money coming out of their ears, but what they wanted was status – like in Society and also locally. They wanted to be lord and lady of the manor, that was how Leonard put it. They had a celebrated medium there by the name of Erasmus Cookson, who Bella shipped up from London. And because they were into spectacle and stuff, they all dressed up. They used the kitchen, because it had stone walls and it looked like you were inside a castle. The kitchen’s quite big, and they arranged it like the great hall of a castle, with candles everywhere.’
‘Why would they dress up?’
‘For the exorcism. They recreated the exorcism of Black Vaughan. If you look in Mrs Leather you’ll see there’s quite a lot to go on. The dialogue between Vaughan and the priests? Total pantomime, but that wouldn’t worry them.’
‘Where did they get twelve priests?’
‘Well, they didn’t, obviously. Just got friends in – house guests, people down from London, and dressed them up like monks or something. And servants to make up the numbers. And this Erasmus Cookson, who was like some kind of showbiz spiritualist and who may have been a charlatan, for all I know.’
‘And Arthur Conan Doyle?’
‘And Conan Doyle. Absolutely. Doyle was in the area with relatives, right? In fact, one theory is that it was nothing to do with helping the community, they just – this is the kind of people they were – staged the whole thing for the benefit of this big celeb.’
‘And what happened?’
‘And they even had an actual snuff-box? You imagine that? They were probably going to tie a brick to it and toss it in the sodding pond.’
‘Hang on, Jane.’ Lol awoke the computer, brought up Matthew’s last message.
We believe that his initial baptism – a ‘baptism of fire’ – occurred at Stanner Hall... little more than a party game for his amusement... turned into something profoundly disturbing
‘So what happened that disturbed Conan Doyle enough to send him into complete denial and turn the Hound into a detective story with a weak ending?’
‘This is what Ben’s asking. He videoed Leonard talking about it, and Leonard’s telling Ben what I’ve just told you, and Ben’s like, “What happened?” in his calm interviewer’s voice, like he really couldn’t give a toss. And Leonard’s sitting there with this thin little smile on his lips, and Ben’s going, “Leonard, what happened?” You can feel him just longing to walk into shot and shake the old guy – I wanted to. And Leonard’s just shaking his head sadly. “Stupid stories, Mr Foley, to frighten the children, I’m not going to pass on stupid stories.” And that’s where the video ends, with this shot of Leonard sitting there shaking his head, with a bit of dribble at the corner of his mouth.’
‘So after Ben showed you the video—’
‘He didn’t. He doesn’t know I’ve seen it. Amber gave it me to watch.’
‘So you don’t know if he found out any more after he’d stopped recording – if this guy told him the rest, off the record.’
‘No.’
‘You’re not going to do anything, are you?’ Lol said. Because Jane, slighted, was an unexp
loded device.
‘Look, if they’re planning to recreate the recreation of the exorcism of Black Vaughan – yeah, I know, where do you get twelve priests in a snowstorm? – but whatever they have in mind, it’s got to be spiritually offensive, hasn’t it? So I’ve said I’d go along with Amber, who thinks it’s time to talk to Mum.’
‘You want her to raid the joint in the name of the Church?’
‘She could talk to people. She’s the Diocesan Exorcist, that must count for... Lol...’ He could almost feel the heat of her breath in his ear, as if she was cupping her hands around the receiver. ‘You don’t think they want that?’
He saw where she was going. ‘Jane, let’s not—’
‘According to Amber, Ben’s original idea was that Mum would be part of the documentary – like formally protesting on behalf of the Church? But suppose what he really wanted was that she should be involved as an exorcist. If you were doing it now – putting Vaughan to bed – who else would you use? Lol, they—’
‘Jane—’
Jane’s voice was hoarse. ‘Suppose they want her to take on Vaughan?’
‘That’s crap.’
‘It’s so not crap, Lol. It’s the sort of thing Foley would think of as soon as he found out what my mother was.’
‘Jane.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t do anything. Think of all the times you’ve been wrong and the damage it’s caused.’
‘Only maybe this time I’m not wrong,’ Jane said.
Pocketing her phone, holding the videotape inside her fleece, she went out onto the upper landing and down the stairs that came out near the fire doors concealing the passage that led to Hattie Chancery’s room.
She imagined Alistair Hardy lying in Hattie’s bed, in the dark. Silverskin eyes watching him from a corner of the room. And then, as he was close to sleep, a hissing, and something cold writhing all over him: whoop, whoop.
Jane smirked. He’d probably enjoy it.