Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  She always felt more in control in the kitchen. It was a bit vast, but they’d had lots of cupboards put in, and installed a couple of squashy easychairs and some muted lighting. Recently, she’d converted the adjacent scullery into an office. She supposed this was her apartment.

  Which meant that, with just the two of them, huge areas of the vicarage remained unused. Stupid and wasteful. No wonder the Church was selling off so many of its old properties, and installing vicars in modest estate-houses.

  At least Merrily was no longer so intimidated by all those closed bedroom doors, which had played their own sinister role in the paranormal fluctuations that might – if she’d then heard of him – have sent her to consult Canon Dobbs. It had been quiet up there for several months now. A day or two ago she’d caught herself thinking she would almost welcome its return: a chance to study an imprint at close hand.

  But, then, probably not. Not now.

  It was ten fifteen. The Bishop had given her his private number, with instructions to call anytime, but she never had. This was probably too late.

  Don’t be a wimp.

  Merrily went through to the scullery, switched on the desk lamp. The answering machine had an unblinking red light; for once, nobody had called. On the desk sat the Apple Mac she’d bought secondhand. God knows what was being installed in the Deliverance Office. If she didn’t stop it now.

  She pulled down the cordless phone and stabbed out the number very quickly. It rang only twice before Mick Hunter came on. The late-night DJ voice.

  ‘Hi. Val and Mick are unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message after the tone. God bless.’

  Merrily hesitated for a second before she cut the line. She’d do this properly tomorrow: call his office and make an appointment. She was aware that when you came face to face with Mick Hunter, your doubts and reservations tended to be tidal-waved by his personality, but that wasn’t going to happen this time.

  She thought of calling Huw Owen at his stark stone rectory in the Brecon Beacons. But to say what?

  Realizing, then, that the only reason she would be calling Huw at this time of night was some tenuous hope that he’d changed his mind about the suitability of women priests for trench warfare.

  Unhappy with herself, she switched out the lights, and went up to bed, Ethel the black cat padding softly behind her.

  The bedside phone bleeped her awake.

  ‘Reverend Watkins?’

  ‘Yes.’ Merrily struggled to sit up.

  ‘Oh… I’m sorry to disturb you. It was your husband I wanted. Is he there?’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’ Merrily squinted at the luminous clock, clawing for the light switch over the bed, but not finding it.

  Nearly ten past two?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘Have I got the right number? I’m trying to contact the Reverend Watkins.’ Northern Irish accent.

  ‘Yeah, that’s me.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I… This is Sister Cullen at Hereford General.’

  ‘General? What… sorry?’

  ‘The General Hospital.’

  Jesus!

  Merrily scrambled out of bed into a wedge of moonlight sandwiched between the curtains. ‘Is somebody hurt? Has there been an accident?’

  Jane!

  She went cold. Jane had crept out again after Merrily had gone to bed? Jane and her friend in the car, clubbing in Hereford, too much to drink. Oh no, please…

  ‘It’s nothing like that,’ the sister said, almost impatient. ‘It was suggested we call you, that’s all. We have a problem. One of our patients is asking for a priest, and the hospital chaplain’s away for the night. We were given your number as somebody who should be the one to deal with this. There are some complications.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I’m ten miles away.’ Scrabbling on the floor for her cigarettes. ‘Who suggested…?’

  ‘We were given your number. I’m sorry, they never told me you were a woman.’

  ‘That make a difference?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything offensive. I don’t know what to do now.’

  ‘Look, give me half an hour, OK? I’ll get dressed. What are the complications you mentioned?’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s not the sort of thing we discuss over the phone.’

  Give me strength!

  ‘All right, the General, you said. It’ll take me about twenty, twenty-five minutes, Sister…’

  ‘Cullen. Ask for Watkins Ward.’

  ‘What?’

  It was starting to feel like a dream. The house had done this to her before.

  ‘The Alfred Watkins Ward,’ said Sister Cullen. ‘Don’t bother looking for your Bible. We’ve got one here.’

  10

  Denzil

  REVERSING THE CLANKING Volvo out of the vicarage drive, she saw Dobbs’s grim, stone face again, as though it was superimposed on the windscreen or the night itself. As if the old bastard had been in the car waiting for her. As if he was staying with her until she’d formally walked away from his job. As if—

  This has got to bloody stop!

  Merrily gripped the wheel, shaking it violently, but really shaking herself. She’d become oppressed by the dour image of Dobbs. When she’d had the chance to say a final No, thank you to Mick Hunter and to Deliverance, she was going to keep well away from the Cathedral precincts, because she – squeezing the wheel until her hands hurt – never… wanted… to… see… him… again.

  OK – steadying her breathing – this was no state in which to minister to a dying man.

  On the cobbles of the marketplace she thought she could see a glaze of frost. The wrought-iron mock-gaslamps had gone out, leaving only a small, wintry security light by the steps to the Black Swan.

  She drove slowly across the square, not wanting to wake anyone. She’d left a conspicuous note for Jane on the kitchen table in case she didn’t get home by morning; you never knew with hospital vigils.

  Virtually alone on the country roads, too tense to be tired, she found the kid’s all-time favourite album, the complex OK Computer, on the stereo and tried to concentrate on the words. But her perception of the songs, full of haunted darkness, only reminded her of Dobbs.

  She stopped the music. She would go over this thing once more.

  The truth was, after the shock of seeing Dobbs in the Cathedral, when she’d been all charged up and unstable, her mind inevitably had contrived this divinely scripted scene: he was there because she was.

  But what about the unknown woman Dobbs had been with?

  ‘What have I been doing wrong?’ the woman had cried. What was all that about?

  Well, it made no obvious sense, so forget it. The simple, rational explanation was that Merrily had walked, unexpected, into Dobbs’s scene. Perhaps he was just as shocked when who should suddenly emerge from the chantry but the notorious female pretender.

  All right. Stop it, there. Stop looking for a way out. You made your decision, you stick to it.

  The General Hospital was an eighteenth-century brick building with the usual unsightly additions. Messy at the front but, like the Bishop’s Palace, with a beautiful situation on the Wye, a few hundred yards downstream from the Cathedral. No parking problems at pushing three a.m.; Merrily left the Volvo near a public garden where a path led down to the suspension footbridge over the river, all dark down there now.

  Been here many times to visit parishioners, of course, but never at this hour. And never to the Alfred Watkins Ward, named presumably after the Herefordian pioneer photographer, brewer, magistrate and discoverer of ley-lines. No relation of hers, as far as she knew, but then she didn’t know the Herefordshire side of the family very well.

  ‘Bottom of the corridor,’ a passing paramedic advised. ‘Turn left and immediately left again, through the plastic doors, up the stairs, left at the top and through the double doors.’

  These old buildings were wonderful, Merrily thought, for almost everything except hospitals. A plaque o
n the wall near the main entrance discreetly declared that this used to be a lunatic asylum and, as you walked the unevenly lit, twisting passages, you could imagine the first ever patients wandering here, groping vaguely for their senses, the air dense with disease and desperation.

  Despite the directions received, she lost herself in the dim labyrinth, and it was over five minutes before she found a sign to Alfred Watkins Ward. At its entrance, two nurses were talking quietly but with a lot of gesturing. When they saw Merrily, they separated.

  She smiled. ‘Sister Cullen?’

  ‘On the ward,’ the younger nurse said. ‘Who shall I say?’

  ‘Merrily Watkins.’

  The younger nurse pushed through the double doors into the gloom of the ward itself. Merrily unzipped her waxed jacket, feeling better now she was here. The presence of the dying used to scare her, but recently she’d become more comfortable with them, even slightly in awe – aware of this composure they often developed very close to the end, a calm anticipation of the big voyage – assisted passage. And she would sometimes come away with a tentative glow. Over her past three years as a cleric, several nurses had told her shyly that they’d actually seen spirits leaving bodies, like a light within a mist.

  ‘Oh hell!’ The older nurse spotted the dog-collar, took a step back in dismay. ‘You’re the priest?’

  ‘At three a.m.,’ Merrily said, ‘you don’t get an archbishop.’

  ‘Oh, look…’ The nurse was plump, mid-fifties, agitated. ‘This isn’t right. Eileen Cullen shouldn’t have done this. She’s an atheist, fair enough, but she should’ve had more sense. Isn’t there a male priest you know?’

  Merrily stared in disbelief at the woman’s face, pale and blotched under the hanging lights. And fearful too.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry, Miss… Reverend. It’s just that what we don’t need is another woman. Look, would you mind waiting there while I go and talk to Sister Cullen?’

  ‘Fine,’ Merrily said tightly. ‘Don’t worry about me. I don’t have to go to work until Sunday.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sure.’ Merrily sat down on a leather-covered bench, pulled out her cigarettes.

  ‘And I’m afraid you can’t smoke in here.’

  Sister Cullen was about Merrily’s age, but tall, short-haired, sombre-faced. More like a priest than I’ll ever look.

  Behind her, the ward diminished into darkness like a Victorian railway tunnel.

  ‘I may have misled you on the phone,’ Cullen said. ‘I was confused.’

  ‘You’re confused.’ Merrily stood up. ‘Forgive me, but sometimes, especially at three in the morning and without a cigarette, even the clergy can get a trifle pissed off, you know?’

  ‘Keep your voice down, please.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I would just like to know what this is about.’

  ‘All right.’ Cullen gestured at the bench and they both sat down. ‘It’s Mr Denzil Joy… that’s the patient. Mr Joy’s dying. He’s unlikely to see the morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘With respect, Mrs Watkins, you’ll be the only one.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘This is a difficult situation.’

  ‘He’s asked for a priest, hasn’t he?’

  ‘No, that… that’s where I misled you. He hasn’t.’

  She jerked a thumb at the double doors. Behind the glass, Merrily saw the other two nurses peering out. They looked like they wanted to escape, or at least stand as close as possible to the lights outside.

  ‘They did,’ Sister Cullen said. ‘They asked me to call a priest.’

  Following Cullen through the darkened ward, she was reminded of those war-drawings by Henry Moore of people sleeping in air-raid shelters, swaddled and anonymous. The soundtrack of restive breathing, ruptured snores, shifting bodies was inflated by muted hissings and rumblings in the building’s own decaying metabolism. And also, Merrily felt, by slivers of tension in the sour sickness-smelling air.

  ‘He’s in a side ward here,’ Cullen whispered. ‘We’ve always had him in a side ward.’

  ‘What’s his… his condition?’

  ‘Chronic emphysema: lungs full of fluid. Been coming on for years – he’s been in four times. This time he knows he’s not going out.’

  ‘And he isn’t… ready. Right?’

  Cullen breathed scornfully down her nose. ‘Earlier tonight he sent for his wife.’

  Merrily looked for some significance in this. ‘She’s not here with him now?’

  ‘No, we sent her home. Jesus!’

  A metal-shaded lamp burned bleakly on a table at the entrance to the side ward, across which an extra plastic-covered screen had been erected.

  ‘There’s an evil in this man.’ Sister Cullen began sliding the screen away. ‘Brace yourself.’

  Merrily said, ‘I don’t understand. What do you…?’

  And then she did understand. It was Deliverance business.

  Huw Owen had stressed: Compose, prepare, protect yourself – ALWAYS.

  Directing them to the prayer known as St Patrick’s Breastplate, very old, very British, part of our legacy from the Celtic Church, Huw had said, and Merrily had seen the strength of the hermit in him, the hermit-priest in the cave on the island.

  Christ be with me, Christ within me,

  Christ behind me, Christ before me,

  Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

  Christ to comfort and restore me,

  Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

  Christ in quiet, Christ in danger…

  Binding yourself with light Huw had said; this was what it was about. A sealing of the portals, old Christian magic, Huw had said. Use it.

  But she hadn’t even thought of that. She’d made no preparations at all, simply dashed out of the house like a junior doctor on call. Because that was all it was – a routine ministering to the dying, a stand-in job, no one else available. Nobody had mentioned…

  We were given your number as somebody who should be the one to deal with this. There are some complications.

  … it had simply never occurred to her that the hospital had been given her name as a trained Deliverance minister. It never occurred to her that this was what she now was. Who had directed them? The Bishop’s office? The Bishop himself?

  I’ve been set up, she thought, angry – and afraid that, whatever needed to be done, she wouldn’t be up to it.

  There were two iron beds in the side ward, one empty; in the other, Mr Denzil Joy.

  His eyes were slits, unmoving under a sweat-sheened and sallow forehead. His hair was black, an unnatural black for a man in his sixties. A dying man dyeing, she thought absurdly.

  Two pale green tubes came down his nostrils and looped away over his cheeks, like a cartoon smile.

  ‘Oxygen,’ Cullen explained in a whisper.

  ‘Is he asleep?’

  ‘In and out of it.’

  ‘Can he speak?’

  Trying to understand what she was doing here, looking hard at him, wondering what she was missing.

  Like little horns or something? What do you expect to see?

  ‘With difficulty,’ Cullen said.

  ‘Should I sit with him a while?’

  ‘Fetch you a Bible, shall I?’

  ‘Let’s… let’s just leave that a moment.’ Knowing how ominous a black, leathered Bible could appear to the patient at such times, wishing she’d brought her blue and white paperback version. And still unclear about what they wanted from her here.

  There was a vinyl-covered chair next to the bed, and she sat down. Denzil Joy wore a white surgical smock thing; one of his arms was out in view, fingers curved over the coverlet. She put her own hand over it, and almost recoiled. It was warm and damp, slimy somehow, reptilian. A small, nervous smile tweaked at Cullen’s lips.

  In the moment Merrily touched Denzil Joy, it seemed a certain scent arose. The kind of odour you could almost s
ee curling through the air, so that it entered your nostrils as if directed there. At first sweet and faintly oily.

  Then Merrily gasped and took in a sickening mouthful and, to her shame, had to get up and leave the room, a hand over her mouth.

  The other hand, not the one which had touched Denzil Joy.

  One of the patients on the ward was calling out, ‘Nurse!’ as loudly as a farmer summoning a sheepdog over a six-acre field.

  At the door Merrily gulped in the stale hospital air as if it was ozone.

  ‘Dr Taylor found a good description for it.’ Eileen Cullen was standing beside the metal lamp, smiling grimly. ‘Although he never quite got the full benefit of it, being a man. He said it was like a mixture of gangrene and cat faeces. That seems pretty close, though I wouldn’t know for sure. Never kept cats myself. Excuse me a minute.’

  She padded down the ward towards the man calling out, one hand raised, forefinger of the other to her lips. As soon as she’d gone, the plump middle-aged nurse appeared from the shadows, put her mouth up to Merrily’s ear.

  ‘I’ll tell you what that is, Reverend. It’s the smell of evil.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He can turn it on. Don’t look at me like that. Maybe it’s automatic, when his blood temperature rises. It comes to the same thing. Did you feel him enter you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can’t talk here.’ She took Merrily’s arm, pulled her away and into a small room lit by a strip light, with sinks and bags of waste. She shut the door. The disinfectant smell here, in comparison with that in the side ward, was like honeysuckle on a summer evening.

  ‘I’m a strong woman,’ the nurse said, ‘thirty years in the job. Everything nasty a person can throw off, I’ve seen it and smelled it and touched it.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘No, you can’t, my girl.’ The nurse pushed up a sleeve. ‘You have no idea. Look at that, now.’ Livid bruising around the wrist, like she’d been handcuffed.

  ‘What happened was: Mr Joy, he asked for a bottle – to urinate in, you know? And then he called me back and he said he was having… trouble getting it in. Well, some of them, they say that as a matter of course, and you have a laugh and you go away and come back brandishing the biggest pair of forceps you can find. But Denzil Joy was a very sick man and he seemed distressed, so I did try to help.’ She pulled down her sleeve again. ‘You see where that got me.’