Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Did she know about Merrily?’

  ‘Pretty soon she did. See, one of her most… attractive qualities is she likes talking about you. She listens, she asks questions, she laughs at the things you say. She’s sympathetic when you’ve got problems at home. You are the most interesting person in the world when you’re with Rowenna.’

  ‘You tell her everything.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jane said gloomily. ‘You tell her everything.’

  ‘How soon before the psychic things, the New Age stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just happened. You’re talking all through the lunch hour, then you discover she’s got her own car, so she gives you a lift home. But, yeah, when I found out she was interested in like otherwordly pursuits, that was the clincher. Soul-mates! It’s just like so brilliant when you find somebody you can talk to about that stuff, and they’re not going: Yeah, yeah, but where do you go on Saturday nights? It just never occurs to you to be suspicious, you’re so delighted. And when she says, Hey, there’s this psychic fair at Leominster, you don’t go, Oh, I’d better ask my mum, do you?’

  ‘What happened at the psychic fair?’

  ‘We met Angela.’

  ‘Mrs Purefoy?’

  ‘If you say so. Although, when I look back, was she really doing the psychic fair? How do we know she read anybody else’s cards? See, it was Rowenna who first mentioned the fair. It was Rowenna who, when we’d been there a while and it was getting cold and boring, suggested we consult a clairvoyant in the nice warm pub. It was Rowenna who said she’d had a call from Angela wanting to see us again. I will struggle for a long time against things I don’t want to believe, Lol, but when the cracks start to appear…’

  ‘What was Angela like?’

  ‘Really, really impressive – not what you were expecting. Very smooth, very poised, very articulate and kind of upperclass. Like, you felt she had your best interests at heart at all times. And, of course, you believed every damn word she said.’

  Lol smiled.

  ‘She said I had extraordinary abilities.’

  ‘Which, instinctively, you knew.’

  Jane scowled.

  ‘I suppose she recommended you should develop them.’

  ‘She put me in touch with a group called the Pod.’

  ‘Meeting over the healthfood caff in Bridge Street.’

  ‘It was you then. I thought you hadn’t spotted me.’

  ‘If you’d been your usual friendly little self,’ Lol said, ‘I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it. So what happens at the Pod?’

  ‘It’s good actually. It’s just about building up your awareness of like other realms.’

  ‘Nothing heavily ritualistic?’

  ‘Not at all. In fact – here we go – Rowenna’s already suggesting it’s kind of low-grade stuff. God, it’s so transparent when you start seeing it from another angle.’

  ‘It’s not really. It seems quite sophisticated to me. They introduce you into a group full of nice, amiable women who mother you along, don’t scare you off…’

  ‘So the Pod are part of this?’

  ‘I don’t know. They seem fairly harmless. Somebody apparently suggested you’d be an asset. That’s what I was told.’

  ‘Because of Mum? What is all this?’

  ‘It’s just about women clerics, I think,’ Lol said. ‘They’re still new and sexy, and it’s the biggest and most disruptive thing to happen in the Church for centuries. Angela’s involved with the Pod, right?’

  ‘I don’t actually think so. She’s never’s been to a meeting in the short time I’ve been going.’

  ‘She mention your mum?’

  ‘She said Rowenna’d told her. She said she was annoyed about that because she thought it was ethically wrong – some bullshit like that – to know things about people you were doing readings for. And, yeah, she’s like, “Oh, I can’t tell you anything tonight after all, I’ve probably got it all wrong” – until I’m begging her. And then all this stuff that I have to tease out of her and Ro, about needing to lead Mum into the light. And they’re dropping what now seem like really broad hints that if I don’t, some disastrous situation will develop. They just want to like… corrupt her, don’t they?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Lol said. ‘And Merrily’s right: they’re getting at her through you. Whatever you might think, you’re the most important thing in her life. That must be obvious to them – you being the only child of a single parent.’

  ‘Who’s them?’

  ‘I don’t know. The idea of all these evil Devil-worshippers targeting priests, it just sounds so… and yet…’

  ‘We have to do something, Lol. I’m just like so boiling up inside. It’s like I’ve been raped, you know? We…’ Jane sprang up. ‘Hey! Let’s go and see Angela! Now we know who she is, let’s just turn up on her doorstep and, like, demand answers.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve got to think about this.’

  Jane frowned. ‘This is about Moon again, isn’t it?’

  43

  Deep Penetration

  HUW LIFTED HIS black bag up on to the desk, switched on the lamp, and took out a fat paperback.

  Merrily recognized it at once. The Folklore of Herefordshire (1912) by Ella Mary Leather had been, for several months, Jane’s bible, introduced to her by the late Lucy Devenish, village shopkeeper, writer of fairytales for children and a major source of the kid’s problematic interest in all things New Age. It was a formidable collection of customs and legends, gathered from arcane volumes and the county’s longest memories.

  Huw opened it.

  SECTION IV

  SUPERNATURAL PHENOMENA

  (1) WRAITHS

  Visitors, it would have said now, in Huw-speak.

  Mrs Leather revealed that all over Herefordshire it was accepted – at least in 1912 – that the wraith of a person might be seen by relatives or close friends shortly before or just after death. The departing spirit was bidding farewell to the persons or places most dear to it; this was stated as a matter of fact. It seemed amazing that it had taken less than a century for believers in ghosts to be exiled into crank country.

  Huw turned the page and pushed the book directly under the desk lamp for Merrily to read. He said nothing.

  (3) DEMONS AND FAMILIAR SPIRITS

  A Demon in the Cathedral

  A very strange story of the appearance of a demon in the Cathedral is told by Bartholomew de Cotton. The event is supposed to have happened in AD 1290.

  An unheard of and almost impossible marvel occurred in the Cathedral Church of the Hereford Canons. There a demon in the robes of a canon sat in a stall after matins had been sung. A canon came up to him and asked his reason for sitting there, thinking the demon was a brother canon. The latter refused to answer and said nothing. The canon was terrified, but believing the demon to be an evil spirit, put his trust in the Lord, and bade him in the name of Christ and St Thomas de Cantilupe not to stir from that place. For a short time he bravely awaited speech. Receiving no answer, he at last went for help and beat the demon and put him in fetters; he now lies in the prison of the aforesaid St Thomas de Cantilupe.

  She looked up. ‘Who was Bartholomew de Cotton?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Where’s the prison of St Thomas?’

  ‘Don’t know. Bishops did have their own prisons, I believe.’

  ‘So what does it all mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Huw. ‘It could be an allegorical tale to put the knife in for one of the clerics. Could simply be some penniless vagrant got into the Cathedral and nicked a few vestments to keep himself warm, and it got blown up out of all proportion.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or it could be the first recorded appearance of the squatter.’

  Merrily became aware of a thin, high-pitched whine nearby. Possibly the bulb in the desk lamp, a fil
ament dying.

  She realized fully now why Huw used all these bloody silly words: visitor, hitchhiker, insomniac. It was because the alternatives were too biblical, too portentous.

  And too ludicrous?

  ‘So a squatter,’ Merrily said, ‘is your term for a localized demon – an evil spirit in residence.’

  ‘If I were trying to be scientific I’d cobble summat together like potentially malevolent, semi-sentient forcefield. Or I might’ve called it a sleeper, but that doesn’t sound noxious enough. You know what a sleeper is, in espionage?’

  ‘It’s a kind of deep-penetration agent, isn’t it? Planted in another country years in advance, to be awoken whenever.’

  Deep-penetration, Huw liked that. Made it sound, he said, like dampness. And it was very like that – in so deep, it was almost part of the fabric. It could be lying there for centuries and only the very sensitive would be aware of it.

  ‘Like an imprint,’ Merrily suggested.

  ‘With added evil. Evil gathers around a holy place, like we said. The unholiest ground, they used to say, is sometimes just over the churchyard wall. But if it gets inside, you’ll have a hell of a job rooting it out. It’s got all those centuries of accumulated devotional energy to feed on, and it’ll cause havoc.’

  ‘But if you accept that this was an evil spirit, how could this canon beat it and put it in fetters? That argues for your first suggestion – that the canon caught some vagrant who’d stolen the vestments.’

  ‘Or the entire story’s metaphorical. It suggests he was able to bind this evil by ritual and the power of the Lord, and also…’

  ‘St Thomas Cantilupe.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Huw, ‘there we have the link – the key to it all.’

  The whining in the bulb was making her nervous. It was like a thin wire resonating in her brain.

  ‘Thomas Cantilupe.’ Huw leaned back, and his chair creaked. ‘Tommy Canty – now there were a hard bastard.’

  The Norman baronial background, the years in government, the initial ambition to be a soldier. ‘And you could still think of him as one,’ Huw said. So he already had the self-discipline and, on becoming a bishop of the Church, had taught himself humility – and chastity.

  ‘He went to Paris once and stayed wi’ a feller, and the feller’s wife – a foxy lady – contrives to get into bed wi’ Tommy. Tommy rolls out t’other side, pretends he’s still asleep. Next morning she asks him how he slept and he tells her he’d have had a better night if he hadn’t been tempted by the Devil.’

  Merrily thought of Mick Hunter under the aumbry light. And then she thought of herself and Lol: how close she’d come, in her near despair, to slipping into Lol’s bed.

  ‘Tommy Canty,’ said Huw. ‘No sleaze. No risks. Warrior for the Lord. What would your lad Hunter have made of him?’

  Both fast-track, Merrily thought. Cantilupe had come straight in as bishop. No weddings and funerals for him, presumably. But, yes, in spite of that they’d probably have hated each other’s guts.

  ‘But think what Cantilupe did for this town,’ Huw said. ‘Most of the religious establishments along the border were well into debt during that period. After St Thomas’s day, Hereford Cathedral never looked back. They were adding bits on to the building, all over the place. Pulling power of the shrine meant thousands of pilgrims, hundreds of accredited miracles, cripples brought in droves.

  ‘If you were too sick to get to Hereford, you were measured on a length of string and they brought that instead. I don’t know how it worked, but it did. You believe in miracles, Merrily, don’t you? I bet Hunter doesn’t.’

  ‘Who can say? Look, the demon story – how long had Cantilupe been dead by then?’

  ‘About eight years. And the shrine’s power was near its peak. How could that demon get in? Was it brought in by one of the pilgrims? Was it already there and something activated it?’

  ‘Like a sleeper?’

  ‘Aye, exactly. But, thank God, the unnamed medieval canon, and the power of Christ channelled through the Cantilupe shrine… they contained it. Imprisoned is the word. Not killed or executed, but imprisoned.’

  Merrily experienced one of those moments when you wonder if you’re really awake. Mrs Straker, the aunt, had said Rowenna Napier lived in what she would call a fantasy world. But what would she call this? Where was it leading?

  ‘Tommy Canty’ – Huw liked saying that, maybe a Northerner’s need for familiarity, as if he and the seven-centuries-dead St Thomas wouldn’t be able to work together unless they were old mates – ‘guardian and benefactor of Hereford. Must have been a mightily good man, or there’d be no miracles. Now his bones have all gone, but he’s there in spirit. His tomb’s still there’ – Huw suddenly leaned towards her, blocking out the lamplight – ‘except when it’s not…’

  ‘Oh.’ She felt a tiny piece of cold in her solar plexus.

  ‘Know what I mean?’

  ‘Except when it’s in pieces,’ she said.

  And the image cut in of Dobbs lying amid the stones, arms flung wide, eyes open, breathing loud, snuffling stroke-breaths.

  ‘I want to show you something else.’ Huw bent over the bag, his yellowing dog-collar sunk into the crew-neck of his grey pullover. He brought out a sheaf of A4 photocopies and put them in front of Merrily. She glanced at the top sheet.

  HEREFORD CATHEDRAL: SHRINE OF ST THOMAS

  CANTILUPE

  Conservation and Repair: the History

  ‘You know what happened when he died?’

  ‘They boiled his body, separated the bones from the flesh. And the heart—’

  ‘Good, you know all that. All right, when the bones first arrived in Hereford, they were put under a stone slab in the Lady Chapel. You know about this, too?’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘That was temporary. A tomb was built in the North Transept and the bits were transferred there in the presence of King Edward I – in, I think, 1287. The miracles started almost immediately, and petitions were made for Tommy to be canonized, but that didn’t happen until 1320. That’s when he got a really fancy new shrine in the Lady Chapel – which, of course, was smashed up during the Reformation a couple of centuries later, when the rest of the bones were divided and taken away.’

  ‘So the present one is… which?’

  ‘It appears to be the original tomb, which seems to have been left alone. According to this document, one of the first pilgrims wrote that he’d had a vision of the saint, which came out of the “image of brass” on top of the tomb. We know there was brass on this one, because the indent’s still visible. Now, look at this.’

  Huw extracted a copy of a booklet with much smaller print, and brought out his reading glasses.

  ‘This is the 1930 account of the history of the tomb, and it records what happened the last time it was taken apart for renovation, which was in the nineteenth century. Quotes a fellar called Havergal, an archaeologist or antiquarian who, in his Monumental Inscriptions, of 1881, writes… can you read this?’

  Merrily lifted the document to the light. A paragraph was encircled in pencil.

  This tomb was opened some 40 years ago. I have an account written by one who was present, which it would not be prudent to publish.

  Huw’s features twisted into a kind of grim beam. ‘You like that?’

  ‘What does “not prudent” mean?’

  ‘You tell me. I’d say the person who wrote that account was scared shitless.’

  ‘By what they found?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘But the bones had all gone, right?’

  ‘People aren’t frightened by bones anyroad, are they? Least, they wouldn’t be in them days.’

  ‘You’re presuming some… psychic experience?’

  ‘The squatter,’ Huw said. ‘Suppose it was an apparition of the squatter in all his unholy glory.’

  ‘Oh, please…’ Merrily shuddered. ‘And anyway, nothing happened when they opened it this time, did it?’r />
  ‘No. And why didn’t it?’

  ‘How can I possibly…? Oh, Huw… Dobbs!’

  And backwards and forwards from the Cathedral he’d go, at all hours, in all weathers, said Edna Rees. I’d 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.

  ‘Dobbs exorcized this thing?’

  Huw shrugged. ‘Contained it, he reckons – like that canon in the thirteenth century – with the help of St Thomas Cantilupe in whose footsteps our Thomas had so assiduously followed. Until he was struck down.’

  Memories of that night snowballed her. Sophie Hill: He’s just rambling. To someone. Himself? I don’t know. Rambling on and on. Neither of us understands. It’s all rather frightening… George Curtiss: My Latin isn’t what it used to be. My impression is he’s talking to, ah… to Thomas Cantilupe.

  And the atmosphere in the Cathedral of overhead wires or power cables slashed through, live and sizzling.

  ‘Dobbs modelling himself on his hero, Tommy Canty,’ Huw said. ‘Keeping his own counsel, thrusting away all temptation… keeping all women out of his life? Making sense now, is it, lass?’

  The whining from the lamp was unbearable now, like the sound of tension itself. She was afraid of an awful pop, an explosion. Although she knew that rarely happened, she felt it would tonight.

  ‘He fired his housekeeper of many years, did you know that? She didn’t know what she’d done wrong.’

  ‘Strong measures, Merrily, measuring up to Tommy Canty. Very strict about ladies – not only sexually. He kept all women at more than arm’s length, with the exception of the Holy Mother. See, what you have, I reckon, is Dobbs inviting the mighty spirit of Cantilupe to come into him. Happen he thought they could deal with it together.’

  ‘That’s what he told you?’

  ‘In not so many words. Not so many words is all he can manage.’

  ‘You’re saying that when it emerged that the Hereford Cathedral Perpetual Trust had finally managed to put enough money together to renovate the tomb, Dobbs was immediately put on his guard, suspecting something had happened when the tomb was last opened.’