by Phil Rickman
‘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 rocking 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.
Madness? At the very least, professional suicide. Church of England ministers did not behave like this. She would be making her entire career into this minor footnote in ecclesiastical history, right under the bit about the female priests who circle-danced around the Cathedral touching up dead bishops.
And that was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You always thought it was a wasted life.
No! Uncomfortable, Jane turned away from her mother. She didn’t know. She didn’t know any more. She began to feel helpless and desperate. They needed help and there was none.
She looked up at the Cathedral, warm light making its windows look like the doors in an advent calendar. She was aware of the timeless apartness of the place, even though it was surrounded by city. She thought about its possible future as a tourist attraction, or a carpet warehouse, or something. A rush of confused emotions were creating a panic-bomb, just as a woman came towards them. She wore an expensive suede coat and a silk headscarf – Sophie Hill, the Bishop’s secretary and Mum’s secretary too. Sophie who, Mum explained, didn’t need a secretary’s job, but did need to be part of the Cathedral. Sophie was looking apprehensive.
‘Oh, hello, Jane,’ she began awkwardly.
Which was like Goodbye, Jane. Mum said, ‘Why don’t you go in, flower, and find us a discreet pew with a good view – but not too near the front.’
‘Sure,’ Jane said meekly. She was wearing her new blue fleece coat and a skirt. Respectable. As she slipped away, the panicbomb began to tick.
Walking quickly down towards the Cathedral porch, when she was sure they couldn’t see her, she diverted along the wall and back across the green, running from tree to tree, to the access path, and down into Church Street. Seeing this big, bald guy come out of John Barleycorn and – Thank you, thank you, God! – Lol Robinson behind him in the doorway.
She started waving frantically at Lol as the bald guy vanished down the alley towards High Town.
‘Jane?’
He looked seriously hyped up, nervous, but grateful to see her – all of those. With the overhead Christmas greens and reds strobing in his glasses, his hands making fists, and his mouth forming unspoken words – like he was full of stories that just had to be told.
But as Jane said, ‘Oh, Lol, Mum is in such deep shit,’ and her tears defused the panic, reduced it to mere despair, he just listened. Listened to all the stuff about what Mum and this loopy Huw called ‘the Squatter’. And about the Boy Bishop, who was the weak point, like the fuse in an electric circuit.
This was when Lol finally cut in. ‘How long? How long before the Boy Bishop gets…?’
‘Enthroned?’
‘Yeah. How long?’
He was out in the street now, pulling the shop door closed behind him, shivering in his frayed sweat-shirt.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know where in the service it comes. In half an hour? Maybe only ten minutes.’
She was asking him if he could get to this Dick Lyden first, and make him stop his son from going through with it, but Lol was just shaking his head, like she knew he would, and then he was pushing her away, up the street.
‘Go back, Jane. Stay with her.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m going to… going to do what I can.’
‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Lol, I want to come with you.’
‘You can’t.’
‘You really know what’s going to happen, don’t you? At least, you have an idea?’
‘I don’t know anything, Jane. I just—’
‘Lol…’ She stumbled on the iced-up cobbles, clinging to his arm. ‘Dobbs stood up against it, Dobbs put himself in the way – and he wound up as this paralysed, dribbling…’
‘Dobbs was an old man in poor health.’ He held her steady. ‘Go back to her, Jane.’
‘He was also…’ Jane broke Lol’s grip and spun to face him. ‘He was also this really experienced exorcist. He knew all about this stuff; he’d been planning for ages. He knew exactly what he was facing, while Mum’s just—’
‘She wouldn’t thank you for saying she was just a woman.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, it’s more than that.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Lol, who can we call? We can’t raise Huw Owen. The Bishop’s a total tosser. All those guys in dog-collars in there are just like… administrators and wardens and bursars and accountants. All this dark energy gathering, and…’
She flattened herself against a shop window as a bunch of young guys came past, hooting and sloshing lager at each other out of cans. They were lurching up the ancient medieval straight path to Hereford Cathedral – all huge and lit up like the Titanic – and none of them even seemed to notice it.
‘Nobody really gives a shit, any more, do they?’ Jane said.
49
Costume Drama
WHEN JANE REACHED the green again, Mum and Sophie were gone. Into the Cathedral, presumably. She looked behind her, hoping Lol would be there, that he’d changed his mind and would take her with him wherever he was going. But the night was hard and bright and empty; even the cackling lager crew had vanished.