The Fabric of Sin mw-9

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Perhaps not. Can’t just look around and leave. First rule of deliverance: never walk away from an alleged disturbance without leaving God’s card.’

  ‘In case of what?’ Jane said. ‘A ghostly coffin in the hall, and the body suddenly sits up, with the pennies dropping from its dead eyes?’

  ‘Wasn’t quite how I was thinking.’

  ‘You know what I think? I think you just don’t want to go into a possibly haunted house with someone you think might still be halfpagan.’

  ‘Things have changed. These days, I tend to credit the boss with being more broad-minded.’

  ‘So go on, then. Unlock it.’

  Jane’s eyes were dancing erratically. It could be that she didn’t actually want to go in. But she was Jane Watkins.

  ‘Yeah. All right.’

  Merrily put the key into a hole enlarged, probably, by generations of Gwilyns coming home from the pub in the dark. The key rattling around in there, failing to locate the tumblers. It took both hands and a lot of jiggling before the lock turned over and the door sprang loose and hung there sullenly, still needing a shoulder to shudder it open.

  ‘House that doesn’t want to be restored,’ Merrily said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She stepped inside ahead of Jane, inhaling damp and plaster dust disturbed by the vibration. Two grimy leaded windows were set into a sloping wall, and the restricted light — brown and flecked, like the sediment at the bottom of an old medicine bottle — was barely reaching the shadows that crowded the corners of what seemed quite a big room.

  Smelling wet earth, Merrily counted one, two three four … five doors, and the wall opposite jaggedly agape: a vast inglenook, the oak beam across it as rough and massive as the capstone of a cromlech. Primeval. Like the tree itself had fallen onto some waiting stones, been sawn off and the entire house built around it.

  ‘So this …’ Jane peering over Merrily’s shoulder ‘… this is where they laid the old girl out?’

  ‘Not here now, though, Jane. Sorry to disappoint.’

  The only furniture was in the hearth, a rusted iron fire-basket the size of a small sheep-pen. In search of better light, Merrily walked across what seemed like worn linoleum ground into the earth to a narrow door next to the inglenook. When she unlatched it, greyness slithered down a stone staircase, half-spiralling behind the fireplace.

  She didn’t go up. She was cold, rubbing her arms through the toothin sweatshirt, looking over her shoulder into an empty …

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘Down here. Couple of steps going down into … looks like the kitchen. Big hooks in the beams. Kind of a fatty smell.’

  ‘Just … tell me when you’re going somewhere, OK?’

  ‘In case of what?’ Jane came back up, pulling a door shut behind her. ‘What’s upstairs?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d feel better with a torch.’

  ‘If it was dangerous, they’d have warned you, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  The only warnings had come, in that faintly teasing way, from Mrs Morningwood, Merrily scenting a set-up.

  ‘Go on, then, Mum.’

  Jane was behind her on the steps, the wooden handrail was hanging loose from the wall. Merrily didn’t touch it.

  Upstairs, they found a landing with no windows, the only light fanning from one door left narrowly ajar. Merrily put out an arm to hold Jane back — could be floorboards missing — before stepping tentatively into a long and dismal bedroom smelling of dead things in decay. Bluish light from a single dormer, half-boarded. Wooden skeletons of two beds, at either end of the room.

  ‘Like in the story,’ Jane whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You”. In Parkins’s room at the … whatever the pub was called.’

  ‘The Globe Inn.’

  Jane turned sharply.

  ‘Bloody hell! That’s why you—’

  ‘It’s just a bit coincidental.’

  ‘In the circumstances, Mum, I’d say it’s seriously coincidental.’

  ‘It’s … noteworthy.’

  There was a paper sack up against one wall. Fuchsia’s lime-plaster? Was this the room where she’d … claimed to have seen something wriggling under the …

  The floor was bare boards. Felix had evidently taken his dust sheets away.

  ‘Mum, why didn’t you ask Mrs Morningwood about M. R. James?’

  ‘Because there’s a couple of other people I need to discuss it with first. And if you were to email the Ghosts and Scholars website we might learn a bit more from the experts.’

  ‘I’ll do that tonight. But if … like, if M. R. James admits something strange happened to him in Garway, maybe he actually stayed in the Globe Inn? That would surely—’

  ‘He always stayed with some people not too far away. Let’s not speculate, huh?’

  ‘Whatever.’ Jane looked around. ‘Are you going to leave the calling card or what?’

  ‘Can’t decide what to do. It’s just an empty house. In my limited experience, they need … people.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Don’t ask me what they are. However, I think — Huw Owen thinks — we might need to ask a few people round, interested parties. Although getting a Gwilym and a Gray into the same room might be problematical.’

  ‘Why would you need to?’

  ‘That seem a bit like meddling to you?’

  Feuds were a pastoral issue, and she wasn’t the parish priest. Maybe she needed to talk to Teddy Murray again, even though he was only a stand-in.

  They checked out three other bedrooms of varying sizes, unfurnished. A bathroom with a cracked, discoloured bath and no water from the taps. A separate toilet that stank. Everywhere tainted by dereliction, in dire need of Felix Barlow.

  But Fuchsia?

  If Felix was right, something had brought Fuchsia back here yesterday. Fuchsia, who wanted to be blessed in the old-fashioned way. Watch over her, in the name of all the angels and saints in heaven. Keep guard over her soul day and night.

  Fuchsia, newly blessed, had returned to a place she’d judged to be full of death. Nothing here was suggesting why.

  Jane headed for the top of the half-spiral stairs, and Merrily followed her down, unsatisfied, mildly annoyed. The stone steps were worn smooth at the edges, slippery, some shored up underneath with bricks. Pointless doing a room-to-room prayer cycle; she didn’t know enough of the history to have any kind of focus, and all she could feel in the air was the criss-crossing of private agendas. It was an unwelcoming old house, soured by neglect, and that was probably the extent of it.

  Back in the big room, the light seemed stronger, but that would be just her eyes adjusting. She looked around, walked around the ingrained lino and then stepped inside the inglenook. Ducking, although there was no need to, under the vast beam.

  The inglenook was almost a small chamber in itself. A separate place. In the sooty dimness, she found the remains of what must have been a bread oven, empty, and a matted tangle of grey bones, all that was left of a bird, behind the fire-basket. She looked up the chimney: glimmerings of light, but something blocking it — nests maybe.

  ‘Nothing much here, Jane.’

  ‘Sorry, Mum?’

  Jane’s voice coming from the other side of the room.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily said, ‘I thought you—’

  The sentence guillotined by the thought that if it hadn’t been Jane who was with her in the inglenook …

  ‘… Sort of passage, leading to a back door,’ Jane called out. ‘Kind of a washroom?’

  Standing very still and fully upright, her back flat to the rear wall, Merrily let in a long, thin river of breath.

  ‘… An old sink.’ Jane’s voice further away. ‘Cupboards …’

  ‘Jane, get—’

  Merrily’s throat spasm-blocked, her headache back, like spikes, like a crown of thorns, twisting in. The iron fire-ba
sket gaped up at her like an open gin-trap while she scrabbled in the pockets of her mind for prayer. Christ be … Be, for God’s sake, calm. Pushing back a sudden amazing panic, vile as a migraine, she closed her eyes, but it was like when you made yourself dizzy as child, and she felt sick, feeling the crumbling house turning slowly around her, grinding on the axis of its origins.

  ‘Christ be wi—’

  ‘… with …’

  Only half-hearing the words — St Patrick’s Breastplate, the old armour — but her lips were cold and flaccid and wouldn’t shape them. There was a solid, substantial resistance, a flat, hard-edged no, and a rubbery numbness in her hands when she tried to clasp them together. And although the prayer was sounding in her head, it was distant, someone else’s whispers, and she tried to turn up the volume, envisioning bright brass bells clanging in a high tower, but the sound was harsh and industrial.

  Christ behind me, Christ before me …

  A muted crackling down there: bird bones crunching under her shoes. When she opened her eyes in revulsion, there was a face in the high corner of the inglenook and it had stubby horns and a worm squirming from its blackened mouth, and Merrily recoiled.

  ‘Mum?’

  Jane’s footsteps sounded on the ingrained lino. But she mustn’t …

  ‘Mum, look, I don’t want to worry you or anything, but it’s getting dark, and you’ve got your meditation in just over an hour? And I think we’ve both had enough of this place.’

  Merrily wouldn’t move. Or try to speak because, if Jane knew where she was, Jane would join her.

  18

  Listen

  What Lol liked best about the gigging was the coming home. Home to the mosaic of coloured-lit windows in the black and white houses, the fake gas lamps ambering the cobbles, sometimes the scent of applewood smoke.

  He parked the Animal under the lamp on the edge of the square, well back from the cars and SUVs of the Sunday-evening diners in the Black Swan.

  The truck had been Gomer’s idea, watching Lol loading two guitars and an amp awkwardly into the Astra, together with all the one-man-band gadgets which contrived the drumming and the toots and whirrs and storm noises that audiences loved for the apparent chaos of it all.

  Gomer had remembered that his sidekick Danny Thomas knew a reliable bloke who was selling his Mitsubishi L200. Animal, it said on the side. Gomer seemed to find this funny. He and Danny had converted the truck, building a watertight compartment into the box to accommodate the gear, fitting a metal roll-top cover you could lock, and Gomer had taken Lol’s old Astra to recondition for himself: Waste not, want not, Lol, boy.

  Lol climbed down, walked round the Animal in the late twilight and pushed back the roll-top under the lights, uncovering the case of the lovely Boswell guitar, handmade by Al Boswell, the Romani, in the Frome Valley, two harmonicas, shining like ingots in a black velvet tray, and the plastic thing that could make your voice sound like an oboe. Audiences everywhere — Hello Hartlepool, Good Evening, Godalming — seemed to warm to the homespun, the cobbled-together. They actually wanted to like you.

  Taken him a long time to realize that. Nick Drake never had. Nick who, for God’s sake, was so much better, all he’d felt was a paralysing isolation which had sometimes left him playing with his back half-turned away from the crowd.

  Lol opened the case that held the Boswell. Paranoia, he knew, but he was always worried that the vibration of the truck might have damaged it. Many different kinds of wood had gone into its mandolin soundbox. It wasn’t the kind of guitar you took out on the road, but he felt it was his talisman — receiving it from Al Boswell when his life was turning round, the songs coming through and Merrily, miraculously warm in his bed.

  The guitar seemed fine. But, across the street, over the corner of the square, the vicarage had no lights.

  Not how it should be. Before Merrily left the house to do the evening meditation, she’d always put on the globular lamp over the door. Always. Symbolic. Place of sanctuary. For Lol more than anybody. He pulled back the roll-top, locked it quickly, ran across the square to the vicarage gate. No visible lights in the house. No Volvo in the drive. Garage doors shut and bolted.

  Lol felt the inner freeze of dislocation. She wasn’t there, and she hadn’t told him. He felt, for cold moments, like a stranger here again. Without Merrily, he would be a stranger, snatching moments of warmth only from his hard-earned applause, a furnace door opening and closing.

  Stupid. Not as if they were married.

  Maybe she’d left him a message on the answering machine? He ran back across the square to the terraced cottage in Church Street, unlocked his front door.

  A haze of street light on the desk under the front window. Silence. No bleeps. Lol looked out into the street, up and down at the windows of Ledwardine, the mosaic of coloured squares now as unwelcoming as the ash in the hearth.

  There would be a simple explanation. He was becoming neurotic, over-possessive.

  Not as if they were married.

  Yet, so often, with the nature of what she did, when he’d felt a wrongness there had been … something wrong.

  He went back out to the square, to where he could see the body of the church through the lych-gate, the bunched shadows of people drifting through to an evening service with no hymns, psalms, lessons or sermon.

  A vaporous glow from the church-door lantern. About to walk down, glancing back at the vicarage, he saw a blur of white, someone emerging from the gate, crossing the cobbles towards Church Street.

  Lol made tea, and Jane seized her mug with both hands, carrying it through to the parlour with the burnt-orange ceiling, where Lol switched on the parchment-shaded desk lamp, leaving the curtains open, his initial relief burning away.

  ‘You mean she’s ill?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jane’s eyes glassy and anxious. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Jane—’

  ‘We were in a hurry, Lol. We got back late. I said I’d get on the computer, try and get some background.’

  ‘On what? She is in the church?’

  ‘Yeah. She dashed straight across. Left me to put the car away and feed Ethel and stuff.’

  ‘So what’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Lol, I just … I don’t know, all right? Maybe it’s been coming on for a while. OK, it’s been a heavy year, all the death, all the things she couldn’t prevent. All the stuff that came to nothing. I don’t know.’

  ‘OK.’ Lol sat down in the chair facing Jane on the sofa, a chill on the room. ‘Tell me. In sequence.’

  And she tried to, but most of it he couldn’t really take in. The number of the beast and the pubs with the cosmic names, the spooky woman with the dog. And the farmhouse.

  ‘When we came out, honest to God, Lol, she was white as … as a surplice. Like, trying to be normal — kind of, let’s not worry Jane. Which only made it worse because it was so obvious. Like I’m going to be worried? Me? The pagan?’

  ‘Worried about what?’

  ‘And then we go into this field, and I get the full blessing bit. The spiritual body-armour, at sundown on the edge of a field? Like, huh?’

  ‘She ever done that before?’

  ‘No. But then I don’t usually go with her on these jobs, do I? She said it was routine. Quite normal. Yeah, right.’

  ‘And she’s gone ahead with the meditation?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Jane nodded. ‘I mean … maybe that’ll help?’

  Lol got her to tell him again — about the pubs and the dovecote and M. R. James.

  ‘After you came out of the house, what exactly did she say?’

  ‘She looked at her watch, and she’s like, “Oh my God, we’re not going to make it back in time.” But you could tell that wasn’t what was really bothering her, and if we were late why was she wasting time with all this blessing crap? Like, I’m an idiot? And all the way back she was like talking about other things — trivial things, in this brisk, practical way. Like she was trying to screen something out. Li
ke she’d seen something in there, or realized something she didn’t want to face up to.’

  ‘And when you got back, was she still …?’

  ‘Upset, yeah. That was obvious.’ Jane drank some tea. ‘She looked totally out of it, like someone who’d been in a car crash. But when we were actually looking around the place, she was fairly dismissive, a bit annoyed, like she’d been set up. She hates that, people treating her like she’s some dim … vicar.’

  Jane finished her tea, still looking starved and unhappy and maybe even resentful that some dim vicar might have picked up on an aspect of otherness that she’d missed out on.

  ‘Lol …’ Catching him looking at her. ‘I think I’ve changed quite a bit the past year. I’d like to think I could help her. But she’s still wary, you know?’

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ Lol said.

  Lol padded past the font, unseen. Not difficult at the Sunday-evening meditation, when the front pews were arranged in a circle, and the only light was candlelight, vast shadows ghosting the sandstone walls.

  About two dozen people had come — about normal. When the rumours of healing had been circulating, there would have been as many as a hundred, but it had calmed down now.

  ‘… Idea that prayer’s as much about listening … means we have to think about what we mean by listening.’

  No priestly trappings, no ceremonial. No smoke, no mirrors, no applause, no stamping for encores.

  Merrily’s gig.

  She was sitting on the edge of the circle in her black jeans and sweatshirt, hair tied back. Never a pulpit person.

  ‘Because, when you think about it, we hardly ever really do it.’

  Lol sank down a couple of rows back, in deep shadow, his eyes closing momentarily in relief. Feeling her voice: low, soft, conversational, unassuming, intimate. Half-guiltily fancying the hell out of her.

  ‘If we’re holding a conversation with somebody, even if we think we’re taking in what they’re saying to us, what we’re actually doing is filtering it … putting it through this sieve of our own needs, desires, fears. Thinking of what we want them to be saying, and also of what we’re afraid they might really be saying. We’re processing the words, analysing, alert for any subtext. Our minds are taking an active role, in other words. We’re not listening. Does that make sense?’