The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Mum, I don’t think she even believes in God.’

  ‘She believes in love. That’s got to be nearly as embarrassing.’

  ‘What was the other thing?’

  ‘We can talk about that later,’ Merrily said. ‘Can I borrow your room to prepare?’

  ‘You do not know what you’re taking on.’ Jane’s face was creased up with tiredness and concern. ‘You don’t know how far back this goes.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘All the time you go on at me about putting myself at risk, and you’re putting yourself in the path of something... unknowable—’

  ‘Jane—’

  ‘Because you don’t want to look uncaring and wimpish. The reason you’re not waking up the Bishop is you know what he’d say.’

  ‘Give me a break, OK?’ Merrily tried to pull the kid closer, but Jane dragged her hand away.

  What could you say? She was probably right.

  ‘Is that, erm, Frank?’ Jane packed herself into a corner near the porch, with the mobile.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m still half asleep.’

  ‘Look, it’s... it’s Jane. From Stanner? We met at the murder-mystery weekend? I brought the chocolate?’

  ‘I see. This is your revenge for being dragged out of bed to find a body.’

  ‘Sorry? Oh... right. Yeah. No. Listen, I’m really sorry to wake you, but this is pretty urgent. I’ll be dead straight and upfront about this. My mother’s the diocesan exorcist for Hereford, and she’s been asked to do something tonight to deal with the... presence... of Hattie Chancery. And I’ve seen the tape that Ben recorded with old Leonard, and you were there. And all I want to know is what Leonard said after Ben finished recording.’

  ‘What makes you think he said anything?’ Frank Sampson’s voice acquiring focus.

  ‘Just a feeling. And the way Ben’s behaving.’

  ‘So ask Ben.’

  ‘Well, he’s... he’s been a bit funny lately. Honestly, Frank, I wouldn’t bother you in a million years if I didn’t think this was like crucial, you know?’

  ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘Of course I’m not. I just—’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what you’re asking.’

  ‘Well, I’m not either. If I just... If I just tell what I’m worried about – I mean without going into the ins and outs of exorcism. If Hattie Chancery was in some way haunting this place...’

  He chuckled. ‘I think something is, don’t you? Nobody’s had any luck there.’

  ‘Well, right. But if she was a presence there, what would be the significance of that? And how would it tie in with the really old stuff – Black Vaughan and everything – and the exorcism Leonard was talking about? What happened at that exorcism?’

  ‘But was it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was it an exorcism?’

  ‘It was supposed to be a restaging of the exorcism of Black Vaughan, wasn’t it?’

  ‘But they had a medium, didn’t they? Erasmus Cookson. Why would they need a medium at an exorcism? Perhaps they didn’t want to exorcize Black Vaughan at all, but to communicate with him. Or someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jane, I don’t feel too happy about discussing this on the phone. I think you need to talk to... do you know Mrs Pollen?’

  46

  The Living Dark Heart

  IN THE KITCHEN, Lol was standing over Alice, blinking, focusing hard on anything that seemed paler than black, and Dexter’s voice was curling out of the hall.

  ‘What you gonner do now, Mister Lol?’

  Alice’s breathing was much louder in here, like an old steam train might have sounded in a station.

  ‘Give us a song, is it?’

  ‘How about you go and find the doctor, Dexter?’

  ‘I don’t think so, boy.’

  ‘I’d better call 999, then.’

  ‘You don’t listen, do you, Mister Lol?’

  Dexter’s voice had a glasspaper rasp. Lol was sure that Alice could hear all this. He laid a hand on her shoulder. It was supposed to be reassuring. It was trembling.

  ‘Look,’ Lol said. ‘It’s like this: she’s had a stroke and she’s wet through and suffering from exposure. If we piss about for too long, she’s going to die.’

  He gently squeezed her shoulder, trying to convey that he was only trying to scare Dexter, and moved away from her, easing off his wellingtons, flexing his toes on the flags, putting his hands out to feel for the familiar and finding the edge of the refectory table.

  ‘How quick?’ Dexter said.

  Lol stopped.

  ‘How quick you reckon she gonner die?’

  ‘I said she’d die if we didn’t get a doctor.’

  ‘Half an hour?’

  ‘Kent Asprey, that’s his name, isn’t it? The local GP?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Lol went quiet. Of course, Alice had tried to tell him. Alice had told him. She hadn’t wandered into the churchyard in search of solace and then collapsed; she’d had the stroke at home, and Dexter had come back from the chip shop and found her comatose and had dragged on her coat and outdoor shoes and carried her along the orchard path into the churchyard and left her to die there of exposure. Confident that nobody would go there until well after daybreak, by which time she would be long gone, frozen to the stones.

  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 bot
h 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.’