Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  They’d laid her out on one of the effigies.

  She tried to lift her head from that stone face. But she couldn’t, felt too heavy, as if all the stones of St Thomas’s tomb were piled on top of her. Then the candlelight went away, as they pushed her further down against the stone surface. She felt stone lips directly under hers.

  ‘Never go off on your own with an exposed flame,’ Rowenna said. ‘It’s bad news, kitten. Night-night then.’

  A stunning pain on the back of her head and neck.

  Time passed. No more voices.

  Only smoke.

  Smoke in her throat. Her head was full of smoke – and words. And Mum whispering…

  Let me not run from the love that You offer

  But hold me safe from the forces of evil.

  But Mum was not here. It was just a mantra in her head.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ George Curtiss grunted from the pulpit, as the lights came back on.

  There was laughter now in the nave – half nervous, half relieved – as George’s words were picked up by the suddenly resensitized microphone.

  ‘Well, ah… we don’t know what caused this, but it was most unfortunate, very ill timed. However, at least, ah… at least it demonstrates to our Boy Bishop that the life of a clergyman is not without incident.’

  The Boy Bishop stood, head bowed, beneath the edge of the corona, in front of the central altar itself. Mick Hunter stood behind him, one hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  ‘We’d like to thank you all for being so patient. I realize some of you do need to get home…’

  Merrily stood in the aisle, near the back of the nave, looking around for Jane, and very worried now. This is all that matters, isn’t it? This is all there is.

  Something was wrong. Something else was wrong. The power seemed to be restored, but there was something missing. A dullness lingered – a number of bulbs failing to re-function, perhaps. The round spotlights in the lofty, vaulted ceiling appeared isolated, like soulless security lamps around an industrial compound.

  ‘It’s been suggested,’ George said, ‘that we now carry on with the ceremony, with the prayers and the Boy Bishop’s sermon, but omit the final hymn. So, ah… thank you.’

  And no warmth either. The warm lustre had gone from the stones; they had a grey tinge like mould, their myriad colours no longer separated.

  George Curtiss stepped down.

  An air of dereliction, abandonment, deadness – as though something had entered under the cover of darkness, and something else had been taken away.

  Dear God, don’t say that.

  Under her cloak, the cross drooped from Merrily’s fingers, as the choir began – a little uncertainly, it sounded – with a reprise of the plainsong which had opened the proceedings.

  Sophie had appeared at her side. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Sophie, have you seen Jane?’

  ‘I’m sorry, no. Merrily, what did Michael say to you?’

  ‘Basically he sacked me.’

  ‘But he can’t just—’

  ‘He can.’

  She looked for the puddle of blood left by Mrs Lyden’s nosebleed. It was hardly visible, carried off on many shoes into the darkness outside.

  ‘Don’t give in, Merrily.’ Sophie said. ‘You mustn’t give in.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  Mick had melted away into the shadows. James Lyden, Bishop of Hereford, was alone, sitting on his backless chair, notes in hand, waiting for the choir to finish.

  ‘I don’t like that boy,’ Sophie said.

  The choristers ended their plainsong with a raggedness and a disharmony so slight that it was all the more unsettling. The sound of scared choirboys? By contrast, James Lyden’s voice was almost shockingly clear and precise and confident: a natural orator.

  ‘A short while ago, when I took my vows, the Lord Bishop asked me if I would be faithful and keep the promises made for me at my baptism.’

  ‘You must stop him,’ Sophie murmured.

  ‘I can’t. Suppose it… Suppose there’s nothing.’

  ‘Of course,’ James said, ‘I don’t remember my baptism. It was a long time ago and it was in London, where I was born. I had no choice then, and the promises were made for me because I could not speak for myself.’

  Sophie gripped her arm. ‘Please.’

  ‘But now I can.’ James looked up. Even from here, you could see how bright his eyes were. Drug-bright? ‘Now I can speak for myself.’

  ‘Don’t let him. Stop him, Merrily – or I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘All right.’ Merrily brought out the cross. It didn’t matter now what anyone thought of her. Or how the Bishop might react, because he already had. The worst that could happen…

  No, the best – the best that could happen!

  … was that she’d make a complete fool of herself and never be able to show her face in Hereford again. Or in Ledwardine either.

  Untying the cloak at her neck, she began to walk up the aisle towards James Lyden.

  As James noticed her, his lips twisted in a kind of excitement. She kept on walking. The backs of her legs felt weak. Just keep going. Stay in motion or freeze for ever.

  Members of the remaining congregation were now turning to look at her. There were whispers and mutterings. She kept staring only at James Lyden.

  Who stood up, in all his majesty.

  Whose voice was raised and hardened.

  Who said, ‘But, as we have all seen tonight, there is one who speaks more… eloquently… than I. And his name… his name is…’

  ‘No!’

  Merrily let the cloak fall from her shoulders, brought up the wooden cross, and walked straight towards the Boy Bishop, her gaze focused on those fixed, shining, infested eyes below the mitre.

  52

  A Small Brilliance

  LOL WAS SEEING himself with Moon down below the ramparts of Dinedor Camp. They were burying the crow, one of his hands still sticky with blood and slime… for him, the first stain on the idyll. He saw Moon turning away, her shoulders trembling – something reawoken in her.

  ‘Did you ever watch her charm a crow?’ Anna Purefoy asked. ‘It might be in a tree as much as fifty, a hundred yards away, and she would cup her hands and make a cawing noise in the back of her throat. And the crow would leave its tree, like a speck of black dust, and come to her. I don’t think she quite knew what she was doing – or was even aware that she was going to do it until it began to happen.’

  It fell dead at my feet. Out of the sky. Isn’t that incredible?

  ‘It was simply something she could always do,’ Tim added. ‘Further proof that she was very special.’

  Lol glanced at the red-stained photograph of Moon over the fireplace. Not one he’d seen before; they must have taken it themselves. Athena White had told him how they would use photographs, memorabilia of a dead person as an aid to visualization.

  He turned back to the Purefoys. ‘Why don’t you both sit down.’ He didn’t trust them. He imagined Anna Purefoy suddenly striking like a cobra.

  ‘As you wish.’ She slipped into one of the cane chairs. Tim hesitated and then lowered himself into the high-backed wooden throne.

  ‘After she was dead,’ Lol said, ‘you left out that cutting from the Hereford Times, like a suicide note. She’d probably never even seen it, had she?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Tim yawned. ‘That’s a trivial detail.’

  Lol made himself sit in the other cane chair, keeping about ten feet between himself and them.

  ‘How did you kill her?’

  ‘Oh, really!’ Anna leaned forward in the firelight, a dark shadow suddenly spearing between her breasts.

  ‘Darling—’

  ‘No, I won’t have this, Tim. Murder is a crime. We did not kill Katherine. We showed her the path she was destined to find, and she took it – according to the values of the Celtic ethos. We talked for hours and hours with Katherine. She could never relate to this era – this
commercial, secular world, this erratic world, this panicking period in history. She knew she didn’t want to be here, and she was looking for a way back.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Lol said, although he realized it wasn’t.

  ‘And anyway,’ Anna said, ‘to the Iron Age Celt, death is merely a short, shadowy passage, to be entered boldly in the utter and total certainty of an afterlife. A Celtic human sacrifice was often a willing sacrifice. Katherine always knew she wouldn’t enjoy a long life – I showed her that in the cards, though she didn’t need me to – and therefore she was able to give what remained of it a purpose.’

  ‘We helped her return to the bosom of her tradition,’ Tim said comfortably.

  ‘It was very beautiful,’ Anna said softly. ‘There was snow all around, but the bathroom was warm. We helped her put candles around the bath. She was naked and warm and smiling.’

  ‘No!’ Lol said.

  But he saw again Moon’s thin arms gleaming pale gold, lit by the four tall church candles, one at each corner of the white bathtub. Her teeth were bared. Her hands – something black and knobbled across Moon’s open hands.

  ‘But you didn’t give her an afterlife, did you?’

  He saw those sharp little teeth bared in excitement, Moon panting in the sprinkling light: energized, euphoric, slashing, gouging. And then lying back at peace, relieved to feel her lifeblood jetting from opened veins.

  The tragedy and the horror of it made him pant with emotion. The Purefoys had done this, as surely as if they’d waylaid her like a ripper in a country lane. But it was actually worse than that…

  Hands sweating on the edge of the chair seat, he flung at them what Athena White had explained to him.

  ‘If a sacrifice is swift, the spirit is believed to progress immediately to a… better place. But if the death is protracted, the magician has time to bind the spirit to his will, so that it remains earthbound and subject to the commands of—’

  ‘Oh, really’ – Tim half rose – ‘what nonsense…’

  ‘It might well be,’ Lol said, ‘but you don’t think it is. You think you still have her… and through her an access to her ancestors and to the whole pre-Christian, pagan Celtic tradition.’

  He sprang up. He was sure Moon’s image there on the wall was shining not with the candlelight, nor the moonlight, but with a sad grey light of its own.

  ‘You just prey on inadequates and sick people like Moon, and attract little psychos like Rowenna and other people desperate for an identity and—’

  ‘People like you,’ Anna said gently.

  ‘No.’ He backed away, as she arose.

  ‘Katherine told us about you, Laurence. She said you would often make her feel better because you were so insecure yourself, and had a history of mental instability.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  Tim laughed. Anna held out her hands to Lol. Her face, in the mellow light, was beautiful and looked so exquisitely kind.

  ‘It wasn’t such a long time ago. And it doesn’t go away, does it, Laurence? It’s part of you. You have no certainty of anything, and you’re drawn to people who do have.’

  He stared into the explicit kindness of her, searching for the acid he knew had to be there, because this was the black siren, the woman who had moulded Moon into her own fatal fantasy and would have taken Jane too – to use as well.

  Anna smiled with compassion, and he knew that if he let her touch him his resistance would be burned away.

  She said softly, ‘Laurence, think about this. What sent you to Katherine? Why did you come here tonight?’

  Lol closed his eyes for just a moment. At once he saw a small, slim dark woman in black, with eyes that had to laugh at the nonsense of it all. He blinked furiously to send her away; this was no place for—

  ‘Ah.’ Anna was shaking her head, half amused – an infants’ school headmistress with a silly child who would never learn. ‘Why are you… why are you so obsessed with the little woman priest?’

  ‘You can only…’ His mind rebelled. Up against the far wall, facing this smiling Anna and the candles in the barn bay, he refused to be shocked, refused to believe she’d pulled the image of Merrily from his head. ‘You can only think in terms of obsession, can’t you? Love doesn’t mean a thing.’

  There were suddenly two bright orbs in the air.

  ‘Love,’ Tim Purefoy said, ‘is the pretty lie we use to justify and glorify our lust. And the feeble term used in Christian theology to dignify weakness and sentiment.’

  Both Purefoys were gazing with placid candour at Lol, as the bright orbs exploded, and Lol’s ears were filled with roaring and the night went white.

  * * *

  A shadow fell across Merrily as she walked towards the altar with the cross in her hands.

  The old priest stood next to her in the aisle. He wore a black cassock, stained, plucked and holed. He looked very ill, pale beyond pale. She had no idea how he came to be here – only why. His eyes looked directly into hers. His eyes were like crystals in an eroded cliff–face. They carried no apology. There was a bubble of spit in a corner of his mouth.

  He held out a hand ridged and gnarled as a shrivelled parsnip.

  Jesus Christ was the first exorcist – letters on a white page.

  And Huw Owen on a mountainside in Wales. I don’t want stuff letting in. A lot of bad energy’s crowding the portals. I want to keep all the doors locked and the chains up.

  Merrily nodded.

  She put the cross into Thomas Dobbs’s hand and stepped aside, with her back to a pew-end.

  Jesus Christ was the first exorcist.

  The Boy Bishop stood up, letting his notes flutter to the tiles. He held his crozier at arm’s length, like a spear. His two candlebearers had melted away, but Mick Hunter still stood a few paces behind him. Merrily saw a series of expressions blurring James’s face. She thought of Francis Bacon’s popes.

  She thought that James’s face was not now his own.

  The Cathedral had filled with a huge and hungry hush.

  Thomas Dobbs stopped about ten feet short of the boy – under the jagged halo of the corona. When he spoke, his voice was slurred and growly, dense with phlegm and bile, and the words tumbled out of him, unstoppable, like a rockslide.

  ‘IN THE NAME OF… OF THE LIVING GOD, I CALL… I CALL YOU OUT!

  ‘IN… NAME OF… GOD OF ALL CREATION…

  ‘… NAME OF HIS SON JES… JESUS CHRIST… I CALL YOU OUT…

  ‘I CALL YOU OUT AND…

  ‘BANISH YOU.’

  Merrily watched his pocked monument of a face, only one side of it working. She could almost feel the strength leaving his body, the despair at the heart of his struggle against his own weakness.

  The Boy Bishop let his crozier fall, and ran down the aisle. Merrily saw Dick Lyden squeezing out of his pew, striding after his son. Where the boy had stood, she saw the slightly unclear figure of a slim woman in a long dress, with hair down to her waist, like dark folded wings, and then – as though Merrily had blinked – the woman was no longer there. She saw Dobbs clench his teeth so hard she felt they were going to split and fragment, and she saw his arm winching stiffly upward like a girder, pointing.

  ‘DEVIL… UNCLEAN SPIR… IT!’

  No more than a harsh rasp this time, and then he turned away, stumbling, and he and Merrily came face to face.

  He put up a hand to her.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. She had no tradition.

  Slowly, she bowed her head.

  Felt the heat of his hand a second before his fingers touched her cheek.

  Merrily looked up then, and saw in his old, knowing eyes, a small brilliance, before he died.

  53

  Silly Woman

  LOL GAZED INTO Anna Purefoy’s pale eyes. There was no obvious expression in them: no fear, no alarm. Only perhaps the beginning of surprise, or was he imagining that?

  There was dust in her fine, fair hair.r />
  No blood at all – Anna’s neck was simply broken. It wasn’t obvious exactly what had done that, but it wasn’t important, was it? Not important now.

  He didn’t touch her. He just stood up. Strangely, although part of the loft had come down, six of the ten candles were still alight. No shadows, other than his own, appeared to be moving.

  He couldn’t look for very long at Tim Purefoy, who was, mostly, still in his chair, the chair itself crushed into the stairs. The black bull-bars had torn Tim almost in half. One of his legs was…

  God! Lol turned away, towards the car. The smell from Tim’s body was hot and foul, and there was still running blood and what might be intestine over the windscreen of the Mitsubishi Intercooler Super-Turbo-whatever the hell it was called.

  And something else, half across the roof, which he thought was Moon’s futon fallen from the toppled loft. Making it impossible to see inside the vehicle. The steaming silence, though, was ominous.

  Also, the old oak pillar. Nothing but old oak or steel would have stopped the bull-barred Mitsubishi. It had torn down the glazed bay like cellophane, exploded the urbane Tim Purefoy like a rotten melon. But the pillar had held.

  He couldn’t make himself go past Tim; he didn’t want to know the details. Instead he squeezed around the back, stepping over the smashed pieces of the chair he’d been sitting in a few minutes ago. If he hadn’t finally lost it… if Anna Purefoy hadn’t pursued him, gleefully taunting him with her knowledge of his obsession for ‘the little woman priest’… he would have been the first to be hit.

  When he reached the other side of the car, he found the driver’s window wound down. Right down – as if that was how it had been when the Mitsubishi rammed the glass-covered bay. As though the driver had needed to hear the impact – and the screams.

  But there had been no screams audible above the engine’s roar and the sounds of destruction. All too fast, too explosively unexpected.

  Denny smiled out at him. ‘Bodged job, eh? I always said it was a… bodged job. They never meant to… turn it into holiday ’commodation. Never planned to renovate it, till… till Kathy showed up. Dead, are they?’