by Ashly Graham
Though they might be allowed to sit on certain do-nothing committees, in matters of domestic and public policy the men had no material say in anything: from the education of their children to the choice, furnishing and decoration of their homes, to the running of the village. Thus oppressed, the males developed saggy jowls, red faces and bulging waistlines, and spent a lot of time walking their disconsolate dogs up and down the Street, since both species were too unfit to climb the hill. They were shadowy adjuncts, powerless against a monopoly, an Amazonian cartel, and in consequence many were into their second and third marriages, a progression that entailed acceptance of even less authority than they had not enjoyed in the preceding union.
The comings and goings of members of these dysfunctional fractured families within such a close community could cause confusion. On Sundays, it was not uncommon for a lone male to be in church at the same time as one or more of his ex-wives, and it was part of the churchwardens’ duties to ensure that, although the women might be the best of friends, the man was seated towards the back near the door.
Amazingly, following the arrival of the DL, life for the men took a turn for the better; or so it seemed. The manager of the village pub, who had turned the place into a wine bar, was literally sent to Coventry in similar fashion as the vicar had been ejected from the Rectory, and the place restored to serving its historical purpose as a hostelry. The old tables and chairs were lugged out of the cellar, as well as the fixtures of the public and saloon bars, and reinstalled. The zinc counter, beer-taps and optics were refitted, and the stuffed animals and fish in glass cases and the horse-brasses were replaced on the walls.
There was not another pub for miles, and the men were greatly cheered, and rallied in support of the initiative. Nobody had been in favour of the wine bar, but the former manager was a bad-tempered rich pig and did not care because he was not interested in serving the community, only attracting outsiders with a fancy menu. Now they had a new and exciting extension to their circumscribed lives and limited range of activities. Eagerly they sought permission from their wives to become regular evening customers. The women conferred with each other and decided to approve such applications—they did not want to see their husbands at night any more than they did during the day (“I married you for better or for worse, but not for lunch.”), on condition that they did not come home pissed.
A transformed Hob turned out to be the perfect manager. Possessed of wits he had not been endowed with even in his heyday, as instructed he contracted with the finest brewery in the county, Fuddle’s of Woozeley, to supply the ale, and proudly recorded that every week the number of barrels delivered grew as the number of patrons and per capita consumption increased. This was a growth industry, there was no doubt about it, and the devil lady was delighted. A memo she received from the Corruptions Unit in Hell congratulated her on her play-book ploy; for as was commonly known and taught to Infernal inductees, a man will happily spend half his life in a cramped and smoky taproom, drinking pint after pint of bitter until it runs like a tide through his head and drowns his rational ability and sense of morality—at which point the devil on his shoulder invades his defenceless soul.
At the DL’s instruction the cost per glass of ale was nearly doubled, from threepence ha’penny to sixpence, a tanner, and the domestically disenfranchised customers bore it without a whimper. It was worth it and more. Now that their favourite amber nectar, Hogwash Bitter, was limitlessly available on tap they felt obliged to put away as much of it as possible. Supply was dependent on customer demand, after all, and like the village stream it must run for ever.
The men welcomed the inn like a concubine into their sorry lives. She was a unique female who never shrilled, dictated or remonstrated. In this “parish of rich women”, of W.H. Auden in his elegy In Memory of W.B. Yeats, she made them feel larger than life. Like the sailors in Tennyson’s Song of the Lotos-Eaters, “propt on beds of amaranth and moly”, the males could not stay away from the easy favours of their shared mistress; and when they were not at the pub she sang and beckoned to them like a Siren until they returned to fall gratefully into her drowning arms.
As the beer invaded their cells, rejuvenating and inspiring them, they developed late-blooming careers in their own minds as forces to be reckoned with. Scandal leaked from the scuttlebutt, and from other sources mysterious and impressive, as from their barstools the omniscient village seers and sages pronounced on matters of global importance to an audience that listened and nodded attentively and politely, as each awaited his individual turn to set the world to rights. Havened in complicity, the men held what passed for conversation day after day with the same other men, men who would no more arrange to meet for a cup of coffee or stop and chat with each other in the post office if they could help it than they would run naked down the Street on a bet. Now every night these very regular regulars exchanged bluff greetings. What a boon such comrades were!
The pub was a rocket that shot the men to the guiltless fringes of the universe, where there were no bills to be paid, no nagging wives and obstreperous bosses, and no feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt. As they escaped from the flat bosoms of their families with a wink on the pretext of walking the wheezing dog, and hastened into the gloaming, the pub shone and beamed like a floodlit palace, an illuminated pleasure-dome, a fiery beacon, a lighthouse. As soon as they entered it, they experienced the most wonderful sensations of welcome, release, and ease. Here, safely ensconced for the next two or three or four hours, every man was free to dream and imagine himself as lord of the manor or sheikh of the harem, whatever was his fantasy, floated his boat, or rang his bell...not the one that heralded chucking-out time. Here each man for the duration was a biblical Solomon: a Solomon stayed with flagons, not comforted with apples...unless the juice was expressed from those apples and fermented and poured as Old Scrumptious Cider...a Solomon who had the leisure to wax expansive upon all that was left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. “O friends; drink, yea, and drink abundantly…”!
*
These women who attend church religiously,
Alone or with their children, smartly dressed,
To whom the Sunday Host flies eagerly
And rests upon devout, transparent lips...
One has recurrent erratic visions
Of the unwashed patriarch, beerily foul,
Still rolling in his pit in the den wherein
He fell from late-night poker with the lads,
Oath-muttering and acidulous, pirate-stubbled
Face, rancid in a greasy sheet, gaseous,
Muttering football scores and counting cash,
Scratching his arse and some persistent rash,
Ill-rested and -humoured, cigar-stenched,
Groping for the Radio Times,
And—heaven forbid it should be underdone—
Oven pre-set to bellow for his roast at one.
Perhaps that’s wrong. He swam some laps,
Or ran, and got the lunch on; called a chap
About some scheme or other, or took the yacht
Out on the lake, or the Bentley for a spin.
No again: he’s having a well-earned rest,
Or perhaps there’s a client staying, or a guest.
Whatever. Whichever. What is for sure is that
The lady hardly left him in the lurch
By taking time and the children off to church.
Chapter Five
Before the arrival of the DL introduced a further inhuman element into society, the village had a reputation in the outlying region for being haunted. The degree of spiritual infestation was said to be significant, even compared to the most outlandish locations of mountain and moor where ancient manor houses and castles are a phantom’s default des. res. in which to put on a good show of moping and moaning and walking through walls. Like the churches, this aspect had not featured in the estate agent’s blurb, so it came as a pleasant surprise to the devil lady when she read about it in some suppl
ementary literature that came through from HQ as part of her relocation package, and that evening she made an entry in her diary to that effect.
Wide misunderstanding exists concerning devils, demons, ghosts and poltergeists, and the possession of mortal bodies by discarnate spirits. People who are dedicated to living in the moment, for the moment, are greatly disturbed that a looking-glass world might exist, one in which every human heart is open and every desire is known; one that some day they might themselves occupy. Although it might be thrilling to hear of such a place, most prefer to be spared witnessing a manifestation of what both lies on the Other Side and shares one’s bedroom at the same time. Going on ghost walks, and listening to chilling stories round the fireside are one thing; sightings are more than most care to experience.
Only ignorant persons assert that ghosts do not exist. Often they do so owing to their fear of the unknown and the hidden, the occult, and what they cannot possibly begin to understand. The professed belief is adhered to as tenaciously as a child’s faith in Father Christmas, and on as little a factual basis. A ghost can be seen or sensed by any suggestive or intuitive individual who has the dimension of perception described by Keats as “negative capability”. As the spiritual residue of a person, good or bad, whose ultimate fate has yet to be decided, it can be released into Judgement by any sympathetic person who is able to communicate with it. Artificial and pre-arranged methods of attracting and summoning entities from the spirit world, however, such as using Ouija and planchette boards, and by attending séances conducted by veiled gypsy female mediums exuding ectoplasm, can be lethal. By the process known as exsufflation, or exorcism, it is sometimes possible for a shade still hobbled by mortality to be released from its earthly shackles so that it might depart to the Light, should it be so lucky, or to whatever less desirable place or spiritual holding pen it may be consigned to while the indefinite process of evaluation is conducted that precedes a decision being made by the Powers-That-Be as to its eternal destination.
But even experts and qualified and experienced exorcists remain, by their own admission, neophytes in the science, and they know how risky it is to get too up close and personal with spirits and devils in the area of linkage, or slippage, between two mutually exclusive worlds; one of which they understand imperfectly and the other hardly at all.
Most often what creates the adumbration, or ghost, of an ex-being is the perplexity and confusion that it is thrown into following a death that the subject was unprepared for or not expecting. In the immediate post-mortem condition, a soul may not even be aware that it has shuffled off its mortal coil and is unable to return to the land of the living. Others, rather than being understanding and accepting, are confused, aimless, lost, traumatized, angry. They remain grooved into the long-playing record of time, still spinning on the turntable of life, unable to divest themselves of temporal associations, still to be held accountable for their lives. For others who comprehend the nature of their new condition, the inexorable draw of eternity, like the gravitational pull of the moon upon the seas and oceans, has yet to overcome their attachment to life, as pleasant or hard as it was, and they pretend still to be materially extant.
Murder is only the most dramatic proximate cause of a spirit remaining in the Heretofore rather than the Hereafter, impressed upon the atmosphere as if it has been melted or seared or branded into it like beef on a barbecue or an iron on the side of a steer, where it lingers as an agglomeration of afflicted and conflicted emotions. Like a photographer’s magnesium flash it dazzles the air with an energy so strong as to give it a temporary permanence, as it either refuses or finds itself unable to quit the present-and-familiar and the scene of its premature demise.
At the extreme end of the scale are the poltergeists: pockets of repression and psychosis that vent their spleens of frustration by childishly slamming doors and throwing tantrums and crockery and furniture about.
Possession is the most terrible affliction that may arise from the collision of the preternatural with the natural; for whenever concentrated evil is assimilated by or invades a soul it occupies it with cries of victory and ruinous consequences to the host. Whether they are prepared to admit it to themselves or not—and most are not, which is what makes the condition so dangerous or lethal—all humans, some more than others, are susceptible to being “possessed”, that is occupied or invaded and having its will taken over, by a devil or a demon who takes up residence within them and who is in most instances impossible to evict or subdue. Few people are prepared to accept the possibility that their own aberrant behaviour is the result of Possession…though Socrates believed that he was possessed by a demon, and made allowance for the unnatural impulses that it caused in him.
The spirits of those who are recently departed, disembodied and disoriented, those who cannot or refuse to believe that they were dead, they too are looking to inhabit any living being whose habits are reassuringly familiar and similar to their own, and whose defences are down, which is what renders them susceptible to occupation. Because death does nothing to abate the cravings and addictions of the flesh, these selfish spirits are driven to invest the bodies of others in order to experience them vicariously. They may have other reasons for doing so: they reciprocally mourn their loved ones and family and do not wish to leave them; or they have unfinished business to attend to. Places of sickness and disease, such as hospitals, are full of anxious spirits looking to graft themselves into the bodies of those who are destined to recover and be discharged. Any ill or injured patient who is not marked for death is, during the period of recuperation or rehabilitation, ripe for takeover.
And, as the devil lady knew from her earliest training, drug users, drunks and barflies are also easy marks because they actively seek to diminish or suspend their voluntary and involuntary faculties in order to release themselves for a time into a fantasy world of their own creation—which is what made the reinstatement of the village pub such a no-brainer.
But as much as the devil lady knew about all of these things, and one Hell of a lot more besides, her business lay in the land of the living not the dead; and, as an official emissary from Hell and designated evangelist of depravation, her duty was to engage with earthly subjects with the end of whip up the tidal waters of humanity, like a one-woman lunarly magnetic influence, into a tsunami of hurt and regret. Or, to use a railway metaphor, to invite them onto a one-way bullet train that bypassed Limbo as easily as its carriages sliced through Victorian railway halts en route to the grand terminus of Hell and the Southern Line Underground Station.
It was with malice aforethought, therefore, that, several days following her encounter with the Local Yokel, the DL ventured out again down the Street on her horse, the still chastened Elagabalus. As before she was dressed to the sixes, all three of them, and felt very confident of her ability to command the respect and attention of anyone she may encounter.
It being market day, the villagers had set up their vegetable and fruit and cake stalls in a public field, and although there were plenty of people wandering about and chatting in low tones about not much, they were buying very little except the odd pot of jam that they would probably end up giving as a Christmas present to the person who had made it, receiving one of their own in return. So when the devil lady stood up wobbling in the stirrups by the open gate and raised her voice, she had an instant audience.
‘Oyez, oyez. This is to inform ye all that I have appointed a new vicar, the Reverend Fletcher Abraham Dark, who will commence his duties forthwith. End of statement. Ye may disperse.’
This Father Fletcher had answered her advertisement in The Church Times by sending in a résumé stained with cheap claret. Although she had met him but once, and though he was the only candidate she had chosen from her shortlist for viva voce examination at the Old Rectory, she had decided instantly that he was the perfect man for the job of her priestly appointee and collaborator. Fletcher Abraham Dark had immediately impressed the devil lady so much with his eagerne
ss to serve without knowing anything about either her or the job, and the amorality that he exuded from every pore, that she told her man to send regrets to the other clergy who had submitted their details, even though a number of them had been defrocked, or “laicized”, by having their licences withdrawn, thanking them for their interest and assuring them that their names would be kept on file.
That Dark, although he still had Permission to Officiate, had either not applied for or had been unable to obtain—she did not care to know which—the necessary Safe to Receive Commendation from his bishop, she regarded as being in his favour.
The choice of this individual, the DL hoped, would score her a number of black points in Hell. If all went as well, or badly depending on one’s point of view, she might be interviewed by the publicity department at HQ for an article in the monthly magazine, Hell’s Bell. Hot diggety damn!, she thought, she might even win Devil of the Year for demonstrating model strategy in the field. This warranted another favourable entry in the devil lady’s diary, in large red (the stationer’s office at HQ dispensed only Waterman red fountain pen ink) capital letters and a number of exclamation marks and asterisks.