by Phil Rickman
‘Would I be right in thinking there aren’t a whole bunch of boys queuing up for this privilege?’
‘Probably. It’s a parent thing – also a choir thing. The Boy Bishop is almost invariably a leading chorister, or a recently retired chorister, and he has several attendants from the same stable.’
‘So, what you’re saying is, Hunter symbolically gives up his throne to this guy.’
‘No, it isn’t symbolic. He actually does it. And then the boy and his entourage proceed around the chancel and into the North Transept, where he’s introduced to St Thomas Cantilupe at the shrine.’
‘Or, in this case, the hole where the shrine used to be.’
‘Yes, I understand this will the first time since the institution of the ceremony in the Middle Ages that there’s been no tomb.’
‘Heavy, right?’
Merrily said, ‘So you’re following my thinking.’
‘Maybe.’ Jane pushed her hair behind her ears.
Merrily said, ‘If – and this is the crux of it – you wanted to isolate the period when Hereford Cathedral was most vulnerable to… shall we call it spiritual disturbance, you might choose the period of the dawning of a millennium… when the tomb of its guardian saint lies shattered… and when the Lord Bishop of Hereford…’
She broke off, searching for the switch of the Anglepoise lamp. The red light of the answering machine shone like a drop of blood.
‘Is a mere boy,’ Jane supplied.
‘That’s the final piece of Huw’s jigsaw. Is that a load of superstitious crap or what? You can now be cynical.’
‘Thanks.’
‘So?’ Merrily’s hand found the lamp switch and clicked. The light found Jane propping up her chin with a fist.
‘How long do we have before the ceremony starts?’
‘It takes place during Evensong – which was held in the late afternoon until Mick took over. Mick thinks Evensong should be just that – at seven-thirty. Just over three hours from now.’
‘Oh.’
‘Not very long at all.’
‘No.’ Jane stood up, hands in the hip pockets of her jeans. ‘Why don’t you try calling Huw Owen again?’
‘He isn’t going to be there, flower. If he is, it would take him well over an hour to get here.’
‘Try Lol again. Maybe he can put the arm on James Lyden’s dad.’
‘The psychotherapist?’
‘Maybe he can.’
‘All right.’ Merrily punched out Lol’s number; the phone was picked up on the second ring.
‘John Barleycorn.’ A strange voice.
‘Oh, is Lol there?’
‘No, he’s not. This is Dennis Moon in the shop. Sorry, it’s the same line. I’m not usually here on a Sunday, but Lol’s not around anyway. Can I give him a message if he shows before I leave?’
‘Could you ask him to call Merrily, please?’
‘Sure, I’ll leave him a note.’
‘Face it,’ Merrily said, hanging up. ‘This guy is not going to pull his boy out of the ceremony – thus forcing them to abort it.’
‘I suppose not. Actually, it does seem quite scary. What if something did happen and we could have prevented it? But, on the other hand, what could happen?’
‘Well, it won’t be anything like thunder and lightning and the tower cracking in half.’ She saw Jane stiffen. ‘Flower?’
‘Why did you say that?’
‘What?’
‘About the tower cracking in half.’
‘It was the first stupid thing I thought of.’
‘That’s the tarot card Angela turned up for me: the Tower struck by lightning. It’s just… Sorry, your imagination sometimes goes berserk, doesn’t it?’
‘Look.’ Merrily stood up and put an arm around her. ‘Thunder is not forecast, anyway. You don’t get thunder at this time of the year, in this kind of weather. That tower’s been here for many centuries. The tarot card is purely symbolic. And even if something like that did happen…’
‘It did in 1786.’
‘What did?’
‘We did this in school. They had a west tower then, and it didn’t have proper foundations and the place was neglected, and on Easter Monday 1786 the whole lot collapsed.’
Merrily moved away, looked down at the desk, gathering her thoughts. ‘Look, even if it was likely, it’s still not the worst disaster that could happen.’
‘You mean the collapse of spirituality,’ Jane said soberly.
‘Whatever you say about the Church, flower, there’s no moral force to replace it.’
‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘So suppose all the people jumping off the Tower Struck By Lightning are the ones, like, abandoning Christianity as the whole edifice collapses. Suppose the final disintegration of the Church as we know it was to start here?’
Merrily said, ‘Would you care?’
48
Blood
THE CROW.
As the crow flies: a straight line.
Dinedor Hill… All Saints Church… Hereford Cathedral… and two further churches, ending in…
‘What’s this place, Robinson? Can’t make it out.’
‘Stretford.’ For a moment it stopped his breath. ‘This… is the church of St Cosmas and St Damien.’
‘Oh, Robinson,’ Athena White said. ‘Oh, yes.’
Once the old ladies had begun to gather in the lounge, she’d beckoned Lol away and up the stairs. In Athena’s eyrie, with the Afghan rugs and all the cupboards, the OS map of Hereford had been opened out on the bedspread, and the line from Dinedor drawn in.
Athena’s glasses were white light. ‘It was in the Hereford Times, wasn’t it? Was that last week, I can’t remember? The crow… the crow. Why does one never see what is under one’s nose?’
‘They happened the same night. The crow sacrifice, and Moon’s death… and a minister called Dobbs had a stroke in the Cathedral.’
‘Yes!’
It all came out then, in strands of theory and conjecture which eventually hung together as a kind of certainty.
Tim Purefoy had said: That’s one of Alfred Watkins’s leylines. An invisible, mystical cable joining sacred sites. Prehistoric path of power. They’re energy lines, you know. And spirit paths. So we’re told. Probably all nonsense, but at sunset you can feel you own the city.
Now, Athena White said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s there or not, Robinson. It’s what the magician perceives is there. The magician uses visualization, driven by willpower, to create an alternative reality.’
Moon had said: The line goes through four ancient places of worship, ending at a very old church out in the country. But it starts here, and this is the highest point. So all these churches, including the Cathedral, remain in its shadow. This hill is the mother of the city. The camp here was the earliest proper settlement, long before there was a town down there.
‘When the first Christian churches were built, Rome ordered them to be placed on sites of earlier worship, places already venerated, so as to appropriate their influence. But you see, Robinson, the pre-Christian element never really went away, because of the continued dominance of Dinedor Hill. So, if your aim was to destabilize the Cathedral and all it symbolizes, you might well decide to cause a vibration in what lies beneath.’
And Lol had said to Merrily – ironically in the café in the All Saints Church, on the actual line from St Cosmas to Dinedor Hill: In Celtic folk tales, crows and ravens figured as birds of illomen or… as a form taken by anti-Christian forces.
‘At one end of the line,’ Athena said, ‘a crow is sacrificed. At the other – at the highest point – is your crow maiden.’
Lol said, ‘Sacrificed?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘They killed her?’
‘Or helped her to take her own life? Probably, yes. I’m sorry, Robinson, I don’t know if this is what you wanted to hear.’
‘It’s just… are you sure about this?’ She’s an old woman, he thought. She
lives in a fantasy world. ‘You have to be sure.’
‘And yet,’ she said, ‘these two deaths are so different. Calm down, Robinson, I won’t let you make a fool of yourself. You see, as Crowley once pointed out, a sacrifice was once seen as a merciful and glorious death, allowing the astral body to go directly to its God. This essentially means a quick death, a throat cut… the way the crow presumably died. But your friend’s blood was let out through the wrists. Not quick at all – a slow release…’
‘ “Crow maiden, you’re fadin’ away…” ’
‘What did you say?’
‘Just a line from a song.’
Athena White’s clasped hands were shaking with concentration. ‘Robinson, have we discussed the power of blood?’
On the way back from the Glades, Lol kept glancing at the passenger seat – because of a dark, disturbing sensation of Moon sitting beside him.
I’d like to sleep now.
‘I know,’ he said once. ‘I know you can’t sleep. But I just don’t know what to do about it.’
At the lectern in Ledwardine Church, with the altar behind them, candles lit, Merrily took both Jane’s hands in hers, and looked steadily into the kid’s dark eyes.
‘You all right about this?’
‘Sure.’
Merrily had locked the church doors – the first time she’d ever locked herself in. A church was not a private place; it should always offer sanctuary.
Merrily gripped the kid’s hands more firmly.
‘Christ be with us,’ she said, ‘Christ within us.’
‘Christ behind us,’ Jane read from the card placed in the open Bible on the lectern. ‘Christ before us…’
‘Hello, Laurence,’ Denny said tiredly.
The shop was all in boxes around his knees. Despite the possible implications for his own domestic future, Lol had forgotten about Denny’s decision to shut John Barleycorn for ever. The walls were just empty shelves now, even the balalaika packed away. The ochre wall-lamps, which had lit Moon so exquisitely, did her brother Denny no favours. His face was grey as he wiped his brow with the sleeve of his bomber jacket.
‘I haven’t been totally frank with you, Lol. Another reason for all this is that I’m going to need all the money I can get’ – he looked away – ‘to pay Maggie off.’
Lol remembered the distance between them at Moon’s cremation. ‘You and Maggie…?’
‘Aw, been coming a while. I won’t explain now. Kathy’s death could have saved it. At least, that’s what she thought – Maggie. But the very fact she thought that…’ Denny smashed a fist into a tall carboard box. ‘That made it unfucking-tenable.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lol said awkwardly, the urge welling up in him to tell Denny what he believed had really happened to Moon. But could Denny, in his present state, absorb this arcane insanity? ‘What about the kids?’ he said instead.
‘She’ll have them.’ Denny taped up the flaps of a box full of CDs. ‘I’m hardly gonner fight that.’ He looked across at the door to the stairs. ‘Do something for me, Laurence. The bike.’
‘Moon’s bike?’
‘Take it away, would you? It’s oppressive. I dream about it.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I dream. I have these fucking dreams. It starts with the bike and then it turns into this, like, cart with the same big wheels… like some old war chariot. I want to get into it, and I know if I do, it’s gonner take me up there again. No fucking way.’
‘To the hill.’
‘No way, man. So, would you do that? Would you get rid of the bike? Somebody’s gonner buy or lease this place, see, and then they’ll make me take the bike out. I’m not touching it – it’s like that fucking sword, you know? Take it away. Flog it, dump it… somewhere I don’t know where it is.’
‘All right. I’ll do that tomorrow.’
‘Thanks. Oh yeah, a woman rang for you. Mary?’
‘Merrily?’
‘Probably. She said could you call her. Look, Lol… I tried to use you to compensate for my brotherly inadequacies. I regret that now – along with all the rest.’
‘There wasn’t a lot you could do, Den. In the end, Moon’s fate was in other hands.’
‘No.’ Denny’s eyes narrowed. ‘I don’t buy this shit, Lol. I’m not buying any more than that she was sick. I’m not having anything else unloaded on me. I won’t go down that road.’
Lol nodded. So he himself would have to go down that road alone.
‘Hello, this is Ledwardine Vicarage. Merrily and Jane aren’t around at the moment, but if you’d like—’
Lol put down the phone and went to sit down for a while in Ethel’s chair, once-insignificant details crowding his mind.
Like the sword. The sword she’d just happened to find in a pit where it looked as though the Purefoys had been digging a pond. The sword sticking up for her to find – like it was meant. They’d put it there, hadn’t they?
Perhaps they’d found it where Denny had buried it, or perhaps it wasn’t the same sword at all – Denny’s own memory refashioning it to fit the circumstances.
At the funeral, Anna Purefoy had said: We were so delighted by her absorption in the farm that we couldn’t resist offering her the barn. We thought she was perfect.
Moon was perfect for them because – according to the tenets of Anna Purefoy’s occultism – Moon’s obsession was a passage to the heart of the hill’s pagan past. By stimulating a resurgence of the once-dominant pagan energy, they were attempting to induce a spiritual reversion. Using the Celtic tradition of vengeful crow-goddess and blood ritual to link that holy hill with the pre-medieval Church at the terminus of the ley-line alignment. Thus feeding something old and corrupt inside the Christian Cathedral.
Belief was all, Athena White had said. It didn’t matter how real any of this was, so long as they believed it. They hadn’t even had to bend Moon to their will. She was already halfway there. But had they actually killed her? Had they used the Celtic sword as a sacrificial blade to cut her wrists? Because, if they hadn’t done anything physical, it was an unprovable crime, bizarrely akin to euthanasia. Perhaps not even a crime at all.
He called Merrily again.
‘Hello, this is Led—’
He put the phone down, then lifted it again and redialled, waiting for the message to end. ‘Merrily,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ve got to tell somebody. It’s about Moon and… and your desecration thing at the little church…’
He talked steadily about crows and sacrifice. After three minutes, the bleeps told him his time was up. He waited for a minute, then called back, waited again for the message to finish. This time he talked about projections. He knew why he was doing this: he had to hear himself saying it, to decide if he could believe it.
Moon’s father: not a ghost but a projection, a transferred image. Transmitting a projection – Athena looking rather coy at this point – was not terribly difficult. Especially if the Purefoys had a photograph to work with. Photographs and memories, half-truth and circumstance – and the power of the ancestors, usurped.
‘By some combination of projection, hypnosis, psychic-suggestion – maybe you have better words for this – they may have steered her to suicide.’
When the bleeps started again, he didn’t call back. He took up his habitual stance at the window, looking down into Christmas-lit Church Street/Capuchin Lane. Moon’s agitated shade was misting the periphery of his vision – Moon with her medieval dress and her rescue-me hair.
What did you do with information like this? What could you do but take it to the police, or try to get it raised at the inquest?
But the man to do this was Denny, the brother. At some stage, Denny – who wanted none of it – would have to be told. Lol went downstairs.
In the shop below, Denny was sitting, his back to Lol, on the last filled box. John Barleycorn was no more.
‘Destroying something can be a very cleansing thing.’ Denny had his hands loosely linked and he was rock
ing slowly on the box, his earring swaying like a pendulum: tick… tick… tick.
‘You, er… you want to go for a drink?’
‘Nah, not tonight, Laurence.’
‘Only, you were right,’ Lol said, ‘about needing to talk.’
‘Couldn’t face it now, mate.’ Denny stared out of the window. ‘Anyway, you wouldn’t wanner be with me tonight.’ He heaved himself down from the box and grinned. ‘I’ll be off. You look a bit shagged-out, Laurence. Get some sleep. It’ll all seem much clearer in the morning.’
‘It will?’
‘Maybe.’ Denny looked around the skeleton shop. ‘Good night, mate.’ He turned in the doorway. ‘Thanks.’
There was a full moon. They hadn’t seen it coming because of the fog, but tonight was a flawless, icy night and the moon hung over Broad Street – and the Christmas Santas couldn’t compete, Jane thought.
Hail to Thee, Lady Moon,
Whose light reflects our most secret hopes.
Her only secret hope tonight was for Mum to come through this with everything intact: her reputation, her mind…
Hail to Thee from the Abodes of Darkness.
There won’t be any darkness, Jane thought, willing it and willing it. There won’t.
They stood together on the green, watching people file into the Cathedral. The usual Evensong congregation, plus whatever audience the Boy Bishop ceremony pulled in with its pre-Christmas pageantry and extra choral element.
Mum had come in her long, black cloak – the winter-funeral cloak – wearing it partly because you couldn’t turn up for a ceremony at the Cathedral in a ratty old waxed jacket. And partly because it was so much better for concealing—
Oh, please, no…
—the foot-long, gilt-painted, wooden cross she’d taken from Ledwardine Church, prising it out of the rood-screen with a screwdriver, then immersing its prongs in holy water.
The whole bit! The complete, crazy Van Helsing ensemble. And Merrily had no plan. If the worst happened, if there was some indication of what she called infiltration, she was just going to, like, walk out, holding the cross high and shouting the magic words from the Deliverance handbook.