by Phil Rickman
‘First time you been alone yere, I reckon, vicar.’
‘It was ten-thirty,’ she said faintly. ‘I swear to God, ten-thirty at the latest.’
She remembered then how far the candles had burned down. It couldn’t be.
Six hours? Those few minutes had become… hours?
Her hands were trembling. The penny dropped out of one and fell onto the tombstone where she’d been sitting.
She recalled a blurred Britannia on the coin. Tails.
Gomer lit his ciggy. ‘Needs a bit of a holiday yourself, you ask me, vicar. Pack a case, bugger off somewhere nobody knows you, or what you do. Don’t say no prayers for nobody for a week, I wouldn’t.’
She bent to pick up the coin. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for dragging you out, Gomer. I really… Maybe I fell asleep or something.’
‘Sure t’be.’ Gomer Parry stood there nodding sagely, patient as a donkey.
She met his eyes. Both of them knew she didn’t believe she’d been asleep in the church, not for one minute of those six hours.
She invited Gomer back to the vicarage, but he wouldn’t come with her. ‘Strikes me you don’t need no chat, vicar,’ he said perceptively. ‘’Sides which, me and Nev got a pond to dig out, over at Almeley. Get an early start. Makes us look efficient, ennit?’
She walked back to the vicarage lucidly aware of every step, the warming of the air, the shapes of the cobbles on the square, the tension of the ancient black timbers holding Ledwardine together.
Back in the kitchen, she looked around the painted walls, as if walking into the room for the first time. Yes, she’d been away for a while, a night had passed. She put the kettle on and some food out for Ethel. The little black cat didn’t start to eat for quite a while, just sat on the kitchen flags and stared at her, olive-eyed, while she drank her tea.
‘I look different or something, puss?’
Ethel didn’t blink. Merrily went upstairs and had a shower hot enough to hurt. She was aching, but she wasn’t tired. She still felt light and unsteady, slightly drunk. But also strengthened, aware of a core of something flat and firm and quiet in her abdomen. Afterwards, she stood at the landing window, wrapped in a bath towel like someone out of a Badedas ad, and watched the morning sun shining like a new penny.
Lifted up or cracking up? State of grace or a state of crisis?
If she’d been seriously stressed-out last night, she could have understood what had happened: the collapse into the arms of God, the acceleration of time, the flooding of the senses.
Like being abducted by aliens.
She started to laugh and went to get dressed.
It wasn’t about stress. It was about the decision to toss a coin.
She put on the grey T-shirt and the dog collar and an off-white skirt. It was Monday, usually a quiet day in the parish. Meetings with the Bishop in Hereford were on Tuesdays.
With the decision to toss the coin she’d broken through something – probably her own resistance. She went quickly down the stairs and into the kitchen, its walls cross-hatched now with summer-morning light. The kitchen clock said nearly eight. Time still seemed to be moving faster than usual. She needed to ground herself. She needed another tombstone to sit on.
She went on into the scullery and sat behind the desk of scuffed and scratched mahogany. She didn’t plan to wait too long before she phoned the Shelbones. She’d ring just once, and if there was no answer she’d drive over there.
Knowing that this time she would get some straight answers.
She’d make the call at 8.45. She went back into the kitchen to make some breakfast, then decided she wasn’t hungry and cleaned the sink instead, scrubbing feverishly. She had energy to spare. Don’t question it. Don’t question anything about this.
Just after 8.35, as she was drying her hands, the phone summoned her back into the scullery.
‘Merrily,’ Sophie said quietly. ‘Can you come in, please – as early as possible.’
Not a question.
‘Problem?’
‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m afraid there is.’
Merrily lit her first cigarette of the new day.
It was the usual battle getting into Hereford, with the hundreds of drivers who just wanted to get through Hereford… and the inevitable roadworks. Not half a mile from the Belmont roundabout, southern gateway to the city, lorries were feeding pre-cast concrete into what used to be Green Belt and would, when completed, apparently be known as the Barnchurch Trading Estate.
Merrily found herself winding up the car window in response to a sudden sensation of the air itself being polluted by human greed, like poison gas.
Don’t let’s get carried away, vicar…
The traffic started to move again, and this time she made it all the way to Greyfriars Bridge without a hold-up.
Hereford Cathedral sat at the bottom of Broad Street, snug rather than soaring. Behind it, the medieval Bishop’s Palace was concealed by an eighteenth-century and Victorian façade that made it look like a red-brick secondary school with Regency and Romanesque pretensions.
This was Administration; it brought you down to earth.
The morning had dulled rapidly and a fine rain was falling as Merrily parked the old Volvo next to the Bishop’s firewood pile close to the stone and timbered gatehouse, the quaintest corner of the complex. The view under its arch was back into Broad Street; you went through a door in the side of the arch and up some narrow stone steps and came out at the Deliverance office, with the Bishop’s secretary’s room next door, from where Merrily could hear people talking – two male voices. She didn’t know what this was about, hadn’t liked to ask on the phone because it had been clear that Sophie was not alone.
Now Sophie appeared in her doorway. She wore a silky, dark green sleeveless dress and pearls. Always pearls. And also, this morning, a matching pale smile. She slipped out of the room, to let Merrily go in.
‘Ah,’ said the Bishop.
The other man, elderly with grey and white hair, didn’t say anything, and Merrily didn’t recognize him at first.
‘We’ll have tea later, Sophie,’ Bernie Dunmore called out, and then lowered his voice. ‘We shall probably need it. Come in, Merrily, take a seat. You know Dennis, don’t you?’
Oh God, it was, too. Since she’d last seen him, Canon Beckett had shed some weight and his beard. He looked crumpled and unhappy.
‘Dennis?’ Merrily went to sit in Sophie’s chair by the window, overlooking the Cathedral green and the traffic on Broad Street.
‘I, ah… imagine you can guess was this is about,’ the Bishop said. He sat across the desk in the swivel chair he used for dictating letters to Sophie, his episcopal purple shirt stretched uncomfortably tight over his stomach. The Bishop was looking generally uneasy. Canon Beckett just looked gloomy, sitting on a straight chair a few feet away, with his back to the wall.
‘Dennis’s presence offers a clue,’ Merrily said.
‘Merrily, did you go to see this girl Amy Shelbone on Saturday evening, when her parents were out?’
‘Well, I…’ Merrily glanced across at Dennis, who was inspecting his hands. ‘I went over with the intention of talking to her parents, actually. They were – as you say – out. But I met Amy in the garden. I tried to talk to her about – obviously you know what about, Bishop. I mean, Dennis has presumably filled you in on the background?’
‘The child behaved in a disturbed fashion during the Eucharist, as well as exhibiting symptoms of what appeared to be clairvoyance, plus personality changes… enough to convince her parents she was being, ah, visited by an outside influence. You, however, seem unconvinced.’
Merrily nodded. ‘She did seem to have turned away from God, but it seemed to me more like disillusion. Or, if there was an influence, then it was an earthly influence.’
‘You didn’t offer the parents any suggestions as to how she might have become susceptible to whatever was influencing her?’
‘I won
dered about a teacher, or a boyfriend.’
‘Boyfriend?’
‘But her mother insisted she didn’t have a boyfriend.’
‘Quite immature for her age,’ Canon Beckett mumbled.
‘The girl went to church with her parents yesterday,’ said the Bishop. ‘Did you know that?’
Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘No.’
‘Not to Holy Communion this time. To the morning service.’
‘She was all right, then?’
‘Dennis…?’ The Bishop swivelled his chair towards the Canon.
‘She was fine, as far as I could see,’ Dennis said. ‘I kept a close eye on her, obviously. She was a little quiet, sang the hymns somewhat half-heartedly. It seems she and her parents had had a long talk the previous night. After… Mrs Watkins’s visit.’
The Bishop swivelled back to face Merrily across the desk. ‘The child admitted to her parents that she’d been caught up in certain activities involving other pupils from her school. One girl in particular.’
‘Activities?’ Merrily tilted her head.
‘You don’t know about this?’
‘Am I supposed to?’ Was she being naive?
‘Spiritualism,’ the Bishop said. ‘The ouija board. Making contact with… the spirits.’
‘Amy?’
‘Seems unlikely to you?’
‘It would have, at first. She really didn’t seem the sort. Far too prissy. But then—’
‘Prissy?’
‘Inhibited, strait-laced, unimaginative, if you like. But then, on Saturday night, she said – fairly contemptuously – that she didn’t see any point in trying to talk to God, but if she did want to talk she could talk to someone called Justine.’
‘Her mother,’ Dennis Beckett said.
‘What?’
‘Her real mother. She was adopted by these people. Her real mother was called Justine.’
Merrily closed her eyes, bit her lower lip.
‘The apparent opportunity to talk to one’s dead mother,’ said the Bishop, ‘would, I suppose, be sufficient bait to lure even a prissy child into spiritually dangerous terrain.’
Merrily had come down with a bump that was almost audible to her. ‘I’ve been stupid.’ She felt herself sag in Sophie’s chair.
‘Have you?’ the Bishop said.
‘I should have made the connection.’
‘Why?’ asked the Bishop, a lilt in his voice.
‘Why?’
She felt like crying. Driving into Hereford, she’d still felt high, swollen with… what? Faith? Certainty? Arrogance? She’d cast aside her scepticism, opened her heart, broken through – six hours passing like minutes.
Tails. The coin kept coming up tails. She’d been given her answer.
And it wasn’t the answer. It wasn’t any kind of answer. The inspiring and apparently mystical circumstances had obscured the fact that little had been revealed to her. It might even have been misleading.
‘Where did this happen? These ouija board sessions?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘You don’t have to rub it in, Bernie. I don’t know. The kid wouldn’t talk to me.’
The rain was coming harder, rivulets on the window blurring Broad Street into an Impressionist painting. She felt a pricking of tears and looked down into her lap.
‘I really don’t think you do know, do you?’ The Bishop’s voice had softened. She shook her head. ‘Or the identity of the girl who led Amy into these spiritualist games?’
She looked up into his fat, kindly face. His eyes were full of pity.
The room tilted.
‘What are you saying, Bishop?’ She turned on Dennis Beckett. ‘What are you saying?’
Bernie Dunmore shuffled uncomfortably. ‘Your daughter Jane goes to the same school, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes, she—’ It was as if her mouth were full of cardboard. ‘No!’
‘After the service, Merrily, Mr and Mrs Shelbone invited Dennis back to their house, where Amy admitted to Dennis that she’d been lured into what had become quite a craze at Moorfield High School for attempting to make contact with the dead. She said—You’d better relay the rest of it, Dennis, I don’t want to get anything wrong.’
Dennis Beckett cleared his throat. He didn’t look directly at Merrily.
‘Amy told her parents, in my presence, that a Jane Watkins had approached her one day in the playground and told her that a group of them had been receiving messages from a certain… spirit… who kept asking for a girl called Amy. Amy gave this – this Jane short shrift, until the girl told her the woman had identified herself as Amy’s mother, from whom Amy had been parted as an infant. Amy, of course, had always known that she was adopted.’
‘And she was then persuaded to attend one of these, ah, sessions, was she?’ said the Bishop.
‘Which, it seems, proved somewhat convincing – and immensely traumatic, apparently. The child claims she was able to communicate with the spirit of her mother – who gave her some very frightening information. Mr and Mrs Shelbone, however, declined to tell me what this information was.’ Dennis leaned back, as if exhausted, his head against the wall. ‘For which, to be quite honest, I was grateful. Suffice to say that Amy asked the Shelbones certain questions about her birth-mother and then proceeded to give them information about things which they did know but had never revealed to the child. Beginning with the significant disclosure of the mother’s name.’
‘Justine,’ Merrily whispered. ‘Oh God.’
‘They were so shocked to hear her saying these things that Amy could tell at once, from their reactions, that she must be in possession of the truth. All of which was quite enough to reduce both the girl and the parents to a state of absolute dread.’
The spirit of a dead person.
The Bishop said, ‘Did she tell them then, Dennis, about the ouija board sessions? Because—’
‘No, she didn’t. This initial exchange took place immediately following Amy’s… upset, during the Eucharist. When they got home, there was an attempt at a family discussion, which ended rather abruptly when Amy realized that her adoptive parents had concealed this – whatever it was – disturbing information from her. She became resentful and spiteful. She told them she was in contact with her real mother, but she didn’t explain how this had come about. She was, I would guess, behaving in a rather sly way: playing her parents off against her natural mother.’
‘Pretty unnatural mother, if you ask me,’ Bernie Dunmore spluttered. ‘So this, presumably, is what led to the adoptive mother’s request for an exorcism.’
‘Hazel Shelbone didn’t tell me about any of this,’ Merrily said tonelessly. ‘And as for Jane’s—’
‘It was only after Mrs Watkins’s latest visit that Amy explained, somewhat reluctantly, about the ouija board,’ Dennis Beckett said. ‘Which I would imagine carries less kudos than direct personal contact with one’s late mother.’
‘Do we know when the mother died?’ Bernie asked.
‘No.’
‘Not in childbirth, then.’
‘I don’t know, I’m sorry.’
‘Are they still asking for this exorcism?’
‘I was able to pray with the child,’ Dennis said.
Merrily felt the Bishop’s glare this time. More than you were able to do.
‘I think it was sufficient,’ Dennis said. ‘But I’m prepared to go back.’
‘Look…’ Merrily fumbled for words. ‘I… I accept that I probably mishandled this from the beginning. And maybe I shouldn’t even have attempted to talk to Amy when her parents weren’t there. But I can’t accept that Jane’s in any way involved in this.’
‘Merrily,’ the Bishop said, quite gently, ‘I think I’m correct in saying that it wouldn’t be the first time Jane’s exhibited curiosity about things that—’
‘She would not do this.’
There was silence, the two men looking anywhere but at Merrily. The door was open; Sophie, presumably i
n the Deliverance office next door, would have heard everything.
‘She’s my daughter,’ Merrily said. ‘I would know.’
Bernie Dunmore pulled out a tissue, blotted something on his beach ball of a forehead. ‘You’d better tell us the rest, Dennis.’
‘Amy…’ Dennis Beckett half turned to face the Bishop. ‘I’m afraid that Amy maintains that Mrs Watkins was fully… fully aware of her daughter’s involvement.’
Merrily shut her eyes, shaking her head.
‘And when Mrs Watkins came to see Amy on Saturday evening – when her parents were out – she warned the child very forcibly—’
‘What?’ When her eyes reopened, Dennis Beckett was finally staring directly at her, perhaps to show how much he wasn’t enjoying this.
‘—that she’d better keep quiet about Jane Watkins—’
Merrily sprang up. ‘That’s a complete and total—’
‘—if she knew what was good for her,’ Dennis said.
‘It’s a lie,’ Merrily said.
Bernie Dunmore breathed heavily down his nose. ‘Sit down, Merrily,’ he said. ‘Please.’
Part Two
When I am involved in the work of deliverance I admit my own ignorance…
Martin Israel, Exorcism – The Removal of Evil Influences
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Diocese of Hereford
Ministry of Deliverance
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Hauntings
Haunting or spiritual infestation of property is a complex problem which constitutes most of the work of the Deliverance Service. It falls into a number of clear categories and each case needs careful investigation before a particular course of action is undertaken.
The following pages will attempt to explain the difference between the most common types of haunting: poltergeist activity, ‘imprints’ and ‘the unquiet dead’ and why each demands different treatment.