The House of Susan Lulham (Kindle Single)

by Phil Rickman

  The House of Susan Lulham

  The full story

  A Merrily Watkins novella

  PHIL RICKMAN

  Copyright © 2014, Phil Rickman

  FOREWORD

  The angular, modernist house was an unexpected bargain for Zoe and Jonathan Mahonie - newcomers to the city of Hereford and apparently unaware that the house’s pristine, white interior walls had been coated with the lifeblood of a previous owner.

  How is Merrily Watkins, diocesan exorcist for Hereford, to know if Zoe Mahonie is lying or deluded when she claims that the wrathful Susan Lulham is still in residence?

  Then comes another bloody death.

  Who is the real killer?

  The House of Susan Lulham first appeared as a short story in the Oxfam anthology Oxcrimes, in May 2014, when some readers suggested there was more to be told. They were not wrong. Here’s the whole story, exploring the hornet’s nest of exorcism in a secular age. More than five times as long, this novella continues the story to its eerie conclusion.

  Part One

  While unquiet spirits do not themselves

  produce poltergeist phenomena, it may

  well be that they can act on living

  persons to cause them to produce

  psycho-kinetic effects. …

  DELIVERANCE

  an essential resource for anyone seeking

  effectively to understand and help people

  who believe themselves to be psychically

  disturbed.

  (SPCK 1996. Ed. Michael Perry)

  Imaginary Ballroom

  ‘I don’t like old,’ Zoe Mahonie said. ‘Get creeped-out in churches. Sorry, but I do. Old places, you know what I mean? It’s why we came here.’

  ‘This city?’

  ‘This house,’ Zoe said.

  It wasn’t old, not in a way Zoe would see, and yet it was. Screened by the shaggy suburban conifers of Aylestone Hill, it was like an offcut from an arts centre from the 1960s: precast concrete, split-level, a jutting conservatory. Some architect’s strident statement, once alone, now with a small executive housing estate wrapped around it. Like a gag, Merrily thought, as Zoe leaned into a puffy arm of the white leather sofa.

  ‘Couldn’t believe it was so cheap, look.’

  She was china-doll pretty, probably mid-thirties, not fat, just overweight. She wore a shiny, lime-green top and had short, dark hair with highlights, and an emerald nose-stud.

  ‘Jonno,’ she said, ‘he had this surveyor guy give it a going-over, and he couldn’t find nothing wrong, so…’

  ‘The vendors didn’t say anything?’

  ‘Ah well…’ Zoe tossing out a bitter smirk. ‘Turns out they was in property, you know what I mean? Obviously picked it up dirt-cheap when nobody else wanted it, cos of what happened. And when we come to view, they’re both here, him and his girlfriend, so naturally we was thinking they lived here. Bastards.’

  ‘Who told you, in the end?’

  ‘Oh… Anita - neighbour. We been here a month by then. She thought we knew. As if.’ Zoe sat back. ‘Can you fix it?’

  She had one arm bared as if for an injection. Through the low, horizontal window, with its frame of reddish wood, the October morning, under waxen cloud, was as white and ungiving as the room, where the only detail was in the white bookcase - half-filled with books on education, politics, psychology and, at the end, Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Hitchens’ God is Not Good and The Hole in the Sky by Matthew Stooke.

  Between the conifers, across the city, Merrily could see the cathedral tower, a fat warning finger. She wanted time to think. On her first deliverance course, they’d been shown a DVD of a woman claiming there were bad things happening in her house. The priest, sceptical, suspecting domestic abuse - the husband - had left, wanting time to think. The woman had been found later with an empty pill bottle and a radio tuned to easy-listening.

  ‘Who told you about me, Zoe, you mind me asking?’

  ‘Just a friend.’ Reluctantly. ‘She posted your number on Facebook.’

  ‘I see.’ Dear God. ‘Erm… could you tell me about the mirror again?’

  * * *

  It was over by the door, vertical, in a chrome frame and bright with reflections of white walls, white squashy sofa, light grey carpet, white, cordless phone on a small table near the sofa. And Merrily, in the unzipped black hoody over the well-worn cashmere sweater. No dog-collar, just the smallest pectoral cross. She thought her face looked pale and blurred.

  ‘Smeared all over, look.’ Zoe shuddered. ‘Hadn’t barely woken up, and Jonno’s away, like I said.’

  ‘So what exactly did you think—?’

  ‘Christ!’ Zoe sprang away from the sofa’s bloated arm. ‘Susan Lulham lived here. Susan Lulham. You know what I mean?’

  Only the lurid basics. Sophie, at the cathedral, was putting together some detailed background.

  ‘And it was definitely lipstick.’

  ‘It… yeah.’

  ‘And you scrubbed it away. All of it.’

  Zoe said nothing. A smartphone lay on the sofa, switched on to a display of coloured planets. If she’d taken pictures of the mirror with that, would they have shown only a reflection of the room?

  ‘Erm… was it your lipstick, Zoe?’

  Ready for the sharp look, and it came, small features crowding.

  ‘Didn’t expect you’d be going at it like the police or something.’

  Merrily smiled. The police had victims and offenders and sometimes a result. A police inquiry wasn’t a dance with invisible partners in a dark and possibly imaginary ballroom.

  ‘When…’ She wanted a cigarette, but it was unlikely anybody had smoked in here since the new carpet had gone down. ‘When you found out about Susan Lulham, what did your husband say?’

  ‘Said we finally had a reason why it was so cheap. He’s laughing. Nothing to worry about, kind of thing. Nothing, you know…’

  ‘Structural?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But maybe… laughing because he didn’t believe anything that had happened here in the past could have any lingering effect? Except in the imagination.’

  There was a wedding picture on the bookcase. Jonno had thinning hair and a close beard. Zoe looked young and lovely.

  ‘Look, we was going through a bad patch before we come here. It was like a new start, you know what I mean? In a fantastic new house we couldn’t’ve afforded. No way is that bitch driving me out.’

  ‘So you haven’t told him,’ Merrily said. ‘About any of it.’

  ‘He’s busy all the time - head of department. Meetings, parent nights…’

  ‘Half-term, isn’t it?’

  ‘He does courses. He’s on a course. In Bristol.’

  Zoe folded her arms. Behind her was the TV screen, big as they came. The one she’d said had come on at 3.00 am, throwing out jagged music from a slasher movie on some all-night horror channel. The way lights came on in various rooms. On their own, came on, went off, came on again. She’d go upstairs and the bedroom light would be on, and she’d turn it off and it would be back on again when she went to bed, as if there was somebody already in there.

  Then there was the night she’d awoken to a sound like laughing, throaty laughing, which Jonno said was the pipes.

  ‘Anyway,’ Zoe said, ‘I’d like it done before he comes back.’

  ‘And that’s…?’

  ‘Weekend.’

  Zoe moved to the window. The flower bed outside was full of evergreen ground-cover. Below it was the terrace where she’d said the woman had been standing as the sun was going down. Short leather jacket, red leggings. Solid as you like, unt
il she wasn’t there.

  She. Her name had once been a lazy flourish of red, across a Hereford salon window. And, according to Zoe, across the mirror in lipstick the colour of fresh blood.

  Suze.

  2. Cutting

  ‘Seems she hated her given name,’ Sophie Hill said in the cathedral gatehouse office that afternoon. ‘Too neat and prissy, too old fashioned. If you called her Susan she’d just scowl and ignore you.’

  Merrily nodded. Jane had once had her hair done at Suze’s salon, now a charity shop. Well overpriced, in Merrily’s view, but Jane had been sixteen, and Suze was as near as you could find to Hereford cool. Suze had been going with this guy from EastEnders who she’d met when he’d presented her with a hairdressing award. Suze had broken up his marriage. Jane had been well impressed, but if she now knew that one of the teachers at her school had bought Suze’s house she hadn’t mentioned it.

  ‘Press cuttings.’

  Sophie placing a laminate folder on the desk in front of Merrily, who looked up, curious.

  ‘Where did you get these?’

  While diligently maintaining the deliverance database, Sophie trusted nothing you couldn’t keep in a fireproof filing cabinet. She plugged in the kettle by the sink.

  ‘I’ll make some tea. Susan’s mother’s a secretary at one of the solicitors’ offices across the road. We were at school together.’

  ‘You never told me that.’

  ‘Why would I?’ Sophie took down mugs, chained reading-glasses clinking against her pearls. ‘You don’t gossip, Merrily, when you work for…’

  Her lips tightened. Not the deliverance ministry. Not the Bishop, to whom she was lay-secretary. Sophie worked for the sandstone bookend to Hereford’s old city centre. The cathedral. God, for Sophie, was a sun-soaked tower overlooking the most celebrated river in southern Britain.

  ‘Grace - Susan’s mother - keeps the cuttings in a file in her office. Well, you wouldn’t want them at home.’

  ‘No.’

  From the folder, Merrily shook photocopies of newspaper stories and a glossy county magazine which fell open at a double-page photo-spread.

  ‘Bloody hell, Sophie.’

  ‘Ah.’ The glasses were back on Sophie’s nose as she peered over Merrily’s shoulder. ‘She did men as well. Specialising, for a time, in artistically-shaven heads.’

  In the picture, Susan Lulham held up a cut-throat razor, photoflash in the open blade. Behind it, Suze’s strong-boned face was blurred by lavish laughter below a wing of indigo hair. Underneath the magazine, Merrily found a photocopy, blackly over-inked, of a front page of the Hereford Times.

  CITY STUNNED BY

  ‘BLOODBATH’ DEATH

  OF TOP STYLIST

  ‘Susan’s death, I’m afraid,’ Sophie said, ‘was like her private life. Entirely lacking in normal human restraint.’

  ‘You met her?’

  ‘Not since she was small. Long before she was excluded from school.’

  Merrily looked up.

  ‘Passing ecstasy tablets around in an exam room,’ Sophie said. ‘Don’t smile, Merrily, a child was hospitalised.’

  A blade of sunlight lit Sophie’s white hair, struck a spark from the kettle.

  ‘Never went back to school after that. When she showed an interest in hairdressing, her parents paid for a short college course, then she worked for a salon in Gloucester, which, to their probable surprise, she took to quite rapidly. If not quite in the way they imagined. Finally, they set her up in business here. Four salons, eventually, from Ludlow to Ledbury.’

  ‘Must’ve done well to buy that house. I mean I don’t like it, but…’

  Sophie frowned.

  ‘Spectacularly unruly parties there.’ She picked up the folder. ‘Thought there was an inquest report, but it’s not here. I remember most of it, anyway, except the actor’s name. He’d apparently announced his intention of going back to his wife and children. Susan was furious. Two of her younger employees took her for a night out in Hereford to take her… out of herself.’

  ‘As they say.’

  ‘Put her in a taxi in the early hours. Arriving home, she phoned her estranged partner, starting what seems to have been something fairly volcanic - loud enough to awaken neighbours. Summer night, windows open. Nobody… well, hardly the first time they’d been disturbed by Susan’s antics, and the kind of people living there are not the sort to make public protests. So nobody went out. Nobody heard her announcing to the former boyfriend that she’d begun cutting herself.’

  Merrily glanced at the magazine picture, with the razor. Sophie nodded.

  ‘Yes. Or one very like it. Drunken frenzy. Presumably Mrs Mahonie told you the details.’

  Merrily shook her head.

  ‘As we were in the room where it took place, I didn’t encourage her.’

  ‘Starting to cut herself in various places while still on the phone. First the skin and then… every visible vein. All the time telling the former boyfriend what she was doing. He told the coroner he’d… well, that he’d heard it all before, I suppose. Didn’t believe her, hung up and she… didn’t stop. Perhaps convinced he’d leap into his car and come to her rescue. At three am. It was three am.’

  Merrily winced, looked down at Suze’s laughing face, wide lips pulled back over deep and meaty gums. A strong, demanding presence, palpable energy, a face to fuel fantasies. She pushed the paper away. Sometimes you felt you were pulling disparate elements together to invest a crazy situation with a crazy logic. A disturbed woman, very drunk, cuts every visible vein with a razor, bleeds to death, horribly and copiously, in her living room. What better basis for a haunting?

  She shut the magazine. Sophie poured water into the pot, steam rising around her.

  ‘Her mother told me that one neighbour claimed to have heard her laughing. I suppose saying laughter, rather than cries of pain might have been an excuse for not going over to find out what was happening.’

  ‘Zoe didn’t mention that. As such.’

  like laughing… throaty laughing. Jonno said that was the pipes…

  ‘As a teenager, if she didn’t get her own way over something, she’d take a… blade of some kind to an arm or a thigh. Even her mother thought she was long over that, though when she went out, it seems she would take a knife with her. With a retractable blade - Stanley knife, or similar. And then the cut-throat razor - tool of the trade. In her bag. Protection? I don’t know.’

  ‘In Hereford?’

  Sophie shrugged.

  ‘Who knows what kind of people she was mixing with. Certainly none of them came to her funeral.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘Crematorium. Very small, very swift. The eulogy brief and dishonest. What else could they do under the circumstances? The cathedral and a horse-drawn hearse?’

  ‘Husband’s an atheist,’ Merrily said. ‘Zoe’s, that is. Presumably with all the layers of disbelief that go with that. An educated man, and she….’

  ‘Not a teacher?’

  ‘Part-time dinner lady at his last school.’ Merrily sighed. ‘What I should be doing now is finding previous tenants. The guy who bought the house was smart enough to use it as rental accommodation for a couple of years, let the history fade.’

  ‘The former tenants could be anywhere, now. And so you find them and they say it was a perfectly peaceful home, what then? How did you leave it? What did you do?’

  3. The night job

  There was a terrace or a patio, grey and white concrete flags, and then a steep slope down to the road, made easier to maintain by a formal rockery with tufty, ground-hugging evergreen bushes, steps down the middle.

  Where the woman had been standing. Short, red leather jacket, red leggings. Solid as you or me.

  See, that was convincing. People who saw them usually described something solid, quite normal-looking. With people who invented them, it was hazy, see-through.

  Merrily had stood on what might be the spot. From the steps, you had
a good overview of the estate: very small and exclusive, not much more than this cul-de-sac, all the houses detached, guarded by mature trees.

  Place memory, imprint?

  Not when you put it together with all the rest. This might be what Huw Owen, her spiritual director, would call an insomniac.

  Unquiet spirit. The restless essence of someone who’d died here, and not peacefully in bed. For the re-homing of which there was an established sequence of responses aimed at gently but decisively breaking earthly ties and obsessions. Even discounting the actor from EastEnders, there’d have to be a stack of those with Susan Lulham. In theory, a case for the full Requiem. A calming, the replacement of anger, bitterness and resentment with love and sympathy and pity. But a Requiem usually required a congregation of more than one, especially if the one was Zoe Mahonie.

  Love and sympathy and pity?

  No way is that bitch driving me out of my house.

  Perhaps some way to go with Zoe. Who should’ve been down here, part of this, but who had consented to observe from the doorway while she did what you usually did on a first visit when you were unsure: the basic blessing. Zoe had stood, po-faced, nursing her mobile phone, maybe ready to call the police if this got out of hand.

  You’re not gonna make a big show of this, are you?

  I’ll be as discreet as possible.

  This being a discreet upmarket estate with well-foliaged space between homes. No obvious curiosity, but who knew? Merrily bending her head, setting extraneous thoughts adrift, lowering her eyelids, letting a familiar breath-pattern develop, thankful when it happened.

  Birdsong from the tall trees behind the house, the crunching of stop-start traffic from the main road cresting Aylestone Hill. A scent of wet grass cuttings, an image of herself as if from above: small woman in black with a tiny cross round her neck, a mini New Testament in one hand and the airline bag on the step by her feet. Jane kept saying she should get a better bag, with a solid frame. A proper exorcist bag, meaningfully black, like on the old film-posters. A holdall styled for what Jane, smirking, used to call the Night Job.