by Phil Rickman
Only to the pub where the psychic fair had been held – there to meet with the gracious Angela. Jane felt like Macbeth going for his second session with the Weird Sisters. Like, face it, the first meeting had changed Jane’s life.
She hadn’t seen much of Rowenna over the past couple of days. Then, this morning, the lime-green Fiesta had slid into Ledwardine market square while she was waiting for the bus.
She’d immediately wondered whether to tell Rowenna what Dean Wall had said. If somebody was spreading that kind of filth about you, you had a right to know. But the minute she got in, Ro was like: ‘Guess who called me last night?’
Jane abandoned half her doughnut, pushed the plate away.
‘Don’t look so worried.’
Rowenna wore a new belted coat of soft white leather; Jane was wearing her school duffel coat. People must think she was like some hitchhiker this genteel lady had picked up.
‘Is she going to give us a reading?’
‘I don’t know,’ Rowenna said. ‘You scared of that?’
‘I was so pissed off when I got up, I forgot to do the sun thing.’
‘So what’s she going to do about that?’ Rowenna said quite irritably. ‘Give you detention? Lighten up, these people are not like…’ With a napkin over her finger, she dabbed a crumb from the edge of Jane’s mouth. ‘Listen, you know what your problem is? Your mother’s dreary Anglicanism is weighing down on you. So gloomy, kitten. You spend your whole life making sacrifices and practising self-denial in the hope of getting your reward in heaven. What kind of crappy deal is that?’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Going to waste her whole life on that shit – and they get paid peanuts, don’t they? I mean, that great old house and no money to make the most of it? What’s the point? She’s still attractive, your old lady. It’s understandable that it pisses you off.’
‘I can’t run her life.’
‘No? If it was me, I’d feel it was my responsibility to kind of rescue her, you know? She’s obviously got talent, psychicsensitivity, all that stuff, but she’s just pouring it down the drain.’
Jane laughed grimly. ‘Oh sure, I walk in one night and I’m, like: “Look, Mum, I can get you out of this life of misery. Why don’t you come along to my group one night and learn some cool spiritual exercises?” ’
‘You underrate yourself, Jane. You can be much more subtle than that,’ Rowenna said. There was something new about her tonight: an aggression – and a less-than-subtle change of attitude. Remember Listen to me. You cannot change other people. Only yourself. How many days ago did she say that?
‘Come on,’ Rowenna said, ‘let’s go.’
A bulb blew.
Merrily’s right hand slid under her top sweater to grip the pectoral cross. A bright anger flared inside her.
The lights were wall-mounted: low-powered, pearlized, pearshaped bulbs, two on each dusty bracket, the brackets about eight feet apart along the narrow passage. This was the one furthest away, so that now the passage – not very bright to begin with – was dimmed by new shadows and no longer had a visible end. Easy, in this lightless tunnel, to conjure a moving shadow.
Edna Rees chuckled. She was sitting in a pink wicker chair pulled out from a bathroom. Merrily was kneeling on the topmost of three carpeted steps leading up to the haunted east wing.
This was the third floor, and once was attics.
This was a stake-out.
Because you didn’t simply arrive and go straight into the spiel. Spend some time with it, Huw Owen said. Let it talk to you. No, of course they seldom actually talk. And yet they do.
Could she trust anything Huw Owen had told her?
They’d been here twenty minutes. Downstairs, Susan Thorpe would be glaring at her watch. Always take your time, Huw said. Never let any bugger rush you. Where some of these customers come from, there is no time. Don’t rush, don’t overreact, don’t go drowning it in holy water.
Merrily’s bag contained only one small bottle of holy water, for all the use that was. Her only other equipment was a Christian Deliverance Study Group booklet of suitable prayers, most of which she knew off by heart anyway.
She was just going through the motions, with no confidence that it would work.
It doesn’t always work – Huw’s truest phrase. It should be printed on the front of the Deliverance handbook.
It should be the title of the Deliverance handbook.
And where was she really? How far had she come since the four a.m. horror? Since the fleeing of her bedroom, the vomiting in the kitchen sink, the stove-hugging, the burning of lights till dawn and the Oh Christ, why hast thou forsaken me?
There was then the Putting On A Brave Face Until The Bus Takes Jane Away interlude. She’d had the time – hours – to wash and dress carefully, apply make-up. To stand back from the mirror and recoil at the sight of age and fear pushing through like a disease.
Then the staring-at-the-phone phase. The agitated For God’s Sake Ring, Huw moments. He keeps calling you. He wants to explain. So you should call him back. It doesn’t matter that he and Dobbs conspired against you. It doesn’t matter what he did. You need him. You need him to take it away. You need to call him now and say, Huw, I am possessed. I am possessed by the spirit of Denzil Joy.
Yet it was not like that. She might look rough in the mirror, but her dull, tired eyes were not the sleazed-over eyes of Denzil Joy. She didn’t feel his greasy desires. She didn’t know him.
Was not possessed by him.
Haunted, though – certainly that. Useless to paper it over with psychology; she was haunted by him. He followed her, had become her spirit-stalker. Because she’d failed, that night in the General, to redirect his malignant energy, its residue had clung to her. She’d walked out of the hospital with Denzil Joy crawling and skulking behind her like some foul familiar. He was hers now. No one else had caught his disease.
And she’d been unaware of it until – once again insufficiently prepared – she had been collecting herself for the assault on the crow-killer of St Cosmas. Collecting her energy. Then into the cocktail had seeped his essence.
Was that what happened? Had yesterday’s holy-water exercise been a failure because it had been directed only at the bedroom – making the room safe – rather than herself?
Because she was the magnet, right? She’d invited him – sitting by his bedside, holding his kippered hands. The female exorcist attracting the incubus, just as the priest-in-charge had invoked the lust of the organist who’d flashed at her from a tombstone.
Today, she’d concentrated on cleansing herself. Leaving the answering machine unplugged, she’d set out on a tour of churches, a pilgrimage on the perimeter of Hereford. A full day of prayer and meditation.
Finally, parking in a back street near the Cathedral School, and slipping discreetly into the Cathedral, sitting quietly at the back for over an hour while tourists and canons she didn’t know flitted through.
She had not called Huw, or Sophie. Had resisted the impulse to enter Church Street and find Lol. She had left the answering machine unplugged. At four p.m., she’d returned to the vicarage and fed the cat and made a meal for Jane and herself. Then one more visit to the church before the drive – leaving plenty of time – to the Glades.
It was not about proving herself as an exorcist any more. That was over. This was about saving her ministry.
And her sanity?
Leave sanity out of this. Sanity is relative.
Edna Rees looked along the passage, without apparent apprehension, to where the bulb had just blown. ‘Surely that’s not the first time it’s happened to you, my dear?’
Merrily said nothing.
Edna shifted comfortably in her wicker chair. ‘Regular occurrence, it was, in Gwynne Street. Wherever he lived, it happened. So I learned.’
‘Bulbs blowing?’
‘Might’ve put me off if I’d known before I took the job, see. But you get used to it.’
Merr
ily glanced along the line of bulbs. The loss of one seemed to make all the others less bright, as though they were losing heart. There was probably a simple scientific explanation; she should ask Chris Thorpe.
‘One week we lost five,’ Edna said. ‘I said, you want to charge them for all these bulbs, Canon. Well, expensive they are these days, bulbs. We tried those economy things – cost the earth, take an age to come on, but they’re supposed to last ten years. Not in that house, they didn’t.’
‘What else happened?’
‘Some nights…’ Edna pulled her skirt down over her knees, ‘… you just couldn’t heat that place to save your life, even with all the radiators turned up, the living-room fire banked all day. Wasn’t even that cold outside sometimes, see. And yet, come the night, just when you’d think it’d be getting nicely warmed up…’
Cold spots?
This passage had five doors, all closed. Closed doors were threatening. Doors ajar with darkness within were terrifying. Merrily guessed she just didn’t like doors. Otherwise, there was no sense of disturbance, no cold spots – and certainly nothing like the acrid, soul-shrivelling stench which had gathered around…
Stop!
She turned briskly to Edna. ‘Are you saying that he… brought his work home?’
Edna looked at Merrily from under her bottle-green velvet hat. Her eyes were brown and shrewd, over cheeks that were small explosions of split veins.
‘My dear, his work followed him home.’
She froze. ‘He told you that?’
‘He never talked about his work,’ Edna said. ‘Not to me; not to anyone, far as I know. But when he came back sometimes, it was like Jack Frost himself walking in.’
‘What did he do about that?’
‘Not for me to know, Mrs Watkins.’
‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘obviously not. I… saw you with him the other week, in the Cathedral.’
‘Yes,’ Edna said calmly, ‘I thought it was you.’
‘He was telling you to go away. He said there was something he couldn’t… couldn’t discuss there.’
‘Sharp ears you have.’
‘Is it none of my business?’
‘You must think it is.’
‘Why “here”? Why did he want to get you out of the Cathedral?’
‘For the same reason he wanted me out of his house, Mrs Watkins.’
‘Which is?’
‘Why are you asking me these questions?’
‘Because I can’t ask him. Because he’s lying in hospital apparently incapable of speech. Or at least he doesn’t speak to the female nurses.’
Edna smiled.
‘Any more than he’d speak to me before his stroke. He froze me out, too, on the grounds that I wasn’t fit to do his job. His sole communication with me was a cryptic note saying that Jesus Christ was the first exorcist. There. I’ve told you everything, Edna.’
It was what she wanted.
‘Merrily… Can I call you Merrily?’
‘Please do.’
‘Merrily, this began… I don’t know exactly when it began, but it did have a beginning.’
‘Yes.’
‘I started to hear him praying, very loud and… anguished. I would hear him through the walls: sometimes in what sounded like Latin – the words meant nothing to me. He would shout them into the night. And then, backwards and forwards from the Cathedral he’d go at all hours, in all weathers. I would hear his footsteps in the street at two, three in the morning. Going to the Cathedral, coming from there – sometimes rushing, he was, like a man possessed. I don’t mean that in the…’
‘I know.’
‘And this was when he began cutting himself off: from men too, but especially from women. Would not even see his own sister. He would put her off – I was made to put her off – when she wanted to visit. He would not even speak to her on the telephone. Or to his granddaughters – he has two granddaughters. One of them brought her new baby to show him. He saw her coming down the street and made me tell her he was away. It made no sense to me. He’d been married for forty years.’
‘Does it make sense now?’
‘I have been reading,’ Edna said, ‘about St Thomas of Hereford.’
‘Thomas Cantilupe?’
‘He would not have women near him, either.’
She fell silent.
‘But that was then,’ Merrily said. ‘That was the Middle Ages. Cantilupe was a Roman Catholic bishop. They weren’t allowed to have…’
‘I know that, but where did the Canon go when he went into the Cathedral? Where did he have his stroke?’
‘Cantilupe’s tomb.’
‘I can’t tell you any more,’ Edna said. ‘You had better do what you came for.’
In fact, the routine for this kind of situation usually involved blessing the entire house, room by room, starting at the main entrance, the blessing thus extended to all who passed in and out. But Susan Thorpe was hardly going to permit that.
If you couldn’t tie down a haunting to a specific incident in the history of the house, then you at least should ask: What’s causing it to happen now? Is it connected to the present function of the house, the kind of people living here? Old people feeling unwanted, neglected, passed-over? Confused, their senses fuddled…? Yet Susan Thorpe wouldn’t accommodate that kind of client. Any signs of dementia, they have to go. We aren’t a nursing home.
You could spend days investigating this, and then discover it was a simple optical illusion. Merrily moved a little closer to the dead bulb’s bracket.
‘I don’t know what your son-in-law expected, but—’
‘Stuffed-shirt, he is,’ Edna said. ‘I hope I die, I do, before I have to go into a place owned by people like them. Pretend-carers, they are.’ Out of her daughter’s earshot, Edna’s accent had strengthened. ‘Poor old souls. Grit my teeth, I will, and stay here until I can find a little flat, then you won’t see me for dust.’
‘Good for you,’ Merrily said.
It was quiet. No wind in the rafters. They stood in silence for a couple of minutes and then Merrily called on God, who Himself never slept, to bless these bedrooms and watch over all who rested in them.
35
Sholto
HER HANDS TOGETHER, head bowed.
Even the piano was inaudible up here, and in the silence her words sounded hollow and banal.
‘… and ask You to bless and protect the stairs and the landings and the corridors along which the residents and the workers here must pass to reach these rooms.’
She was visualizing the old ladies gathered around the piano two floors below, so as to draw them into the prayer.
‘We pray, in the name of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, that no spirit or shade or image from the past will disturb the people dwelling here. We pray that these images or spirits will return to their ordained place and there rest in peace.’
This covered both imprints and insomniacs, although she didn’t really think it could be an insomniac. There’d surely be some sign, in that case, some pervading atmosphere of unrest.
‘Amen,’ Edna said.
Merrily held her breath. It had been known, Huw Owen had said, for the spirit itself to appear momentarily, usually at the closing of the ritual, before fading – in theory for ever – from the atmosphere.
Mind, it’s also been known to appear with a mocking smile on its face and then – this is frightening – appearing again and again, bang-bang-bang, in different corners of the room…
Although it was hard not to flick a glance over her shoulder, Merrily kept on looking calmly in front of her under half-lowered eyelids, her body turned towards the darkness at the end of the passage. From which drifted a musty smell of dust and camphor which may not have been there before.
She waited, raising her eyes to the sloping ceiling with its blocked-in beams, and the filigree pouches of old cobwebs over the single curtained window. She straightened her shoulders, feeling the pull of the pectoral cross.
&nbs
p; It was darker – well seemed darker. As though there’d been a thirty per cent decrease in the wattage of the bulbs. Possibly something was happening, something absorbing the energy – something which had begun as she ended her first prayer. A mild resistance was swelling now.
Merrily began to sweat, trying not to tense against the ballooning atmosphere. She wondered if Edna was aware of it, or if she herself was the only focus, her lone ritual beckoning it. When she spoke again, her voice sounded high and erratic.
‘If there is a… an unquiet spirit… we pray that you may be freed from whatever anxiety or obsession binds you to this place. We pray that you may rise above all earthly ties and go, in peace, to Christ.’
That sounded feeble. It lacked something. It was too bloody reasonable.
Belt and braces, said the awful Chris Thorpe, stooped like a crane and sneering.
Yes, OK, there was something. Now that she was sure of that, there should perhaps be a Eucharist performed for the blessing of the house. It could be conducted by the local vicar, held under some pretext where all the residents could be invited. Those who were churchgoers would accept it without too many questions.
The atmosphere bulged. She felt a sudden urgent need to empty her bladder.
‘May the saints of God pray for you and the angels of God guard and protect you…’
Either the air had tightened or she was feeling faint. Resist it. She fumbled at the mohair sweater to expose the cross. As she pulled at the sweater, her palms began to—
‘Mrs Watkins.’
Merrily let go of the sweater; her eyes snapped open. Edna Rees was pointing to where, at the top of the three shallow steps, a figure stood.
‘Please, there’s really no need for this,’ it said.
Angela turned over six cards in sequence and then quickly swept the whole layout into a pile.
But not before Jane had seen the cards and recognized three of them: Death… The Devil… The Tower struck by lightning.
‘I can’t do this,’ Angela said. ‘I’m afraid it’s Rowenna’s fault.’
It was the same pub where the psychic fair had been held, but this time they were upstairs in a kind of boxroom. Pretty drab: just the card table and two chairs. Rowenna had to perch on a chest of drawers, her head inches from a dangling lightbulb with no shade.