The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  ‘So Roland, he’s gettin’ real hysterical, starts pulling at the door handle, and Darrin’s goin’, “You get away from that door or I’ll give you a smacking.” So like Roland waits till Darrin turns round again and I can year him fiddling with the handle, and then Darrin whips round, sudden-like, and whangs him in the face, bang! Cops is behind us by then, look, blue lights going and that, and Roland’s sobbin’ away, and that’s when I decides I’m gonner go across the road and up this little turning, then the cops’ll be able to get us. And that… that’s how it was.’

  Silence, except for creaking chairs, small sounds of unrest. Then Alice started to weep. Routine parochial issue. Lol tugged his wet wellies onto his bare feet.

  Merrily said, ‘You didn’t tell the police about… any of this. Did you?’

  ‘How could I? But you see why Darrin en’t gonner want none of it out.’

  ‘Or your parents? You tell your parents anything?’

  ‘They know what Darrin’s like. Alice knows.’

  Another silence.

  Then a jagged wail.

  ‘Oh my God, that poor little child… his own brother…’ Like Alice’s voice was bleeding. ‘Oh my God, and then he died! He— My God, I never knew none of this.’

  ‘’Course you never knew,’ Dexter snapped. ‘Darrin en’t never gonner tell you, was he?’

  ‘Gets worse, gets worse all the time.’

  ‘You made me, Alice, I didn’t wanner—’

  ‘How’m I gonner tell my sisters?’

  ‘Can’t, can you?’ Dexter said flatly. ‘No way.’

  A chair creaking, someone standing up, footsteps going nowhere on the kitchen flags.

  Then Alice said, ‘We surely needs it now.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I can’t live with this. Knowing that child’s out there.’

  ‘He en’t out there, Alice, he’s f— He’s gone.’

  ‘We needs it now, more than ever — the Holy Spirit, the holy Eucharist.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Like a big white bird.’

  ‘This is an end to it!’

  ‘How do we organize it, vicar? How soon can we do it?’

  ‘Well, you know, that’s up to—’

  ‘No!’ Sound of a big fist smashing into the table; Lol leapt up. ‘I don’t wannit!’ Dexter roared. ‘I don’t wannit to happen, you understand me? Why you gotter—? You’re a fuckin’ ole meddler, Alice, nobody assed you to start all this shit. I only told you to fuckin’ stop you, for fuck’s sake!’

  Putting his right eye to the crack in the door, Lol saw a bulky guy with a petulant lower lip and a shaven head, standing in the middle of the kitchen. He looked marginally nearer to tears than to violence, but his fists were bunched, and he was breathing through his mouth. He unclenched a fist and started feeling in a pocket of his leather coat. Lol put a hand on the door, ready to wrench it open.

  Dexter brought his hand up to his mouth. There was a vacuum gasp.

  ‘You’re stressin’ me out. Leave it. Fuck it! All right?’

  Dexter walked out, banging the kitchen door hard enough to make pans rattle on shelves.

  ‘Alice,’ Merrily said, from out of Lol’s view. ‘Let him walk it off in the cold air.’

  Now she was hunched in the office chair, hands limp between her knees. She looked bloodless. Lol’s white high had evaporated. It was a powerful reminder, this episode, of how vulnerable the clergy were, feeling they had to be there, for everybody, whether it was wanted or not.

  Including the dead? Even the dead?

  ‘I don’t even know how bad he is, you see,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t know enough about asthma. What if he’s out there on the square and he can’t get his breath?’

  ‘Does Alice live far away?’

  ‘Three minutes’ walk.’

  ‘Not a problem, then.’

  ‘Let’s hope not.’ She stood up and came and sank down beside him on the rug. They sat there in front of the electric fire, with their backs to the wall, their shoulders not quite touching, and she told him about the death of the kid called Roland Hook and seventeen years of corrosive bitterness inside a family.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Lol said. ‘In a way I can understand Dexter’s problem with this. Is it normal, to have some kind of belated funeral service, in the hope that it’s going to make everything all right?’

  ‘Jeavons,’ Merrily said.

  ‘The loose canon.’

  ‘It’s not just Jeavons. There’s a movement inside Healing and Deliverance which argues that some illness, particularly chronic illness, can be the result of something unresolved in the family’s past. Or the victim being in the grip of some aberrant ancestor.’

  ‘Your ancestors are haunting you and you don’t know it?’

  ‘It makes a certain kind of sense, but that’s the trouble, isn’t it? We’re finding hauntings where there are no actual phenomena… other than an illness, or an emotional crisis. We — the Church of England.’

  ‘So, by calming the spirit of this poor kid, who died in a state of terror, you can, in theory—’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Sorry, forgot the protocol. By organizing this Requiem for the dead kid, you can, in theory, open the way for God to cure not only Dexter’s asthma, but also to heal the rift in his wider family?’

  ‘Er… yeah.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Lol said, dismayed. ‘You go along with this, you could be spending every day of the rest of your life doing complicated Eucharistic services for people laying all their problems on their ancestors. Sure, let’s all blame the dead.’

  Merrily shrugged.

  ‘The Church of England authorizes this? And healing?’

  Merrily said, “When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to Him, and He drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick.”

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Matthew’s Gospel, linking healing and deliverance.’

  ‘You’re not Jesus Christ,’ Lol said. ‘Healing could make you ill.’

  ‘Do I look ill?’

  ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I’m fine. Really.’ She smiled at him. ‘I’m awfully glad you’re here.’

  Their shoulders touched. Lol took a long breath.

  She laid her head wearily on his shoulder. ‘I’m all mixed up. Rumours — just rumours — of healing, and I’m getting the size of congregation I always dreamed of. And it makes me sweat. A hint of miracle cures, and suddenly you’re on the way to becoming someone with a big voice and disciples.’

  ‘Scary.’

  Yes, it was. It was the very place he would hate for her to go, because of his parents, the born-again Pentecostalists, who used to attend Bible Belt-type healing services conducted by some crazy pastor who shook people till the sickness dropped out of them. But even the pastor, as far as Lol knew, hadn’t sought to heal the living through the dead.

  Merrily said, ‘I mean, I really, really want it to happen for people… for the sick. I just don’t want it to be me who’s seen as the significant channel. It’s too early. It’s somehow too early for the women’s ministry. Certainly too early for me. How selfish is that? How cowardly is that?’

  Lol felt the wetness on her cheeks and put an arm around her and held her, as chastely as he could bear. He tried to think of something he could say that didn’t sound soothing or patronizing or argumentative. On one level, he simply empathized. The idea of being a Major Artist still scared him, and the thought that he would soon be too old to scale the lowest available peak was almost comforting. But there was a big difference between a career and a calling, where you had to keep asking not what you or the audience needed, but how God wanted you to play it.

  It was a lousy, thankless job. Jane would sometimes tell Lol how much she hoped that her mum would one day see the light and, slamming the church door behind her, start running.

  Merrily said, ‘Lew Jeavons said this was a very interesting case,
and he’s distressingly right. More right than he could know. And it’s all valid, even on a psychological level. I mean, some priests believe that if, say, your great-grandfather was a Satanist or a heretic or even a Freemason a century ago, it could be affecting your health today. Well, yeah, sure… But this case — even if the Requiem is no more than symbolic, it still might help. I mean, look at what it’s brought out tonight.’

  ‘It’s certainly ruined any chance of Alice getting to sleep.’

  ‘Reach out, Jeavons said. Embrace.’ Merrily sighed.

  ‘I really wouldn’t like to think of you embracing Darrin Hook,’ Lol said.

  27

  Five Barrels

  Jane followed Ben down the red-carpeted stairs, aware of dragging her feet. Ben was silent the whole way. He wore a black fleece zipped all the way up and black jeans. He was like his own shadow.

  As they came into the lobby Jane saw the build-up of snow on the window ledges and thought, He can fire me, but he can’t send me home in this.

  The office behind the reception desk was used mainly by Natalie to monitor incomings and outgoings and to deal with wages for occasional cleaners and waitresses. It had originally been some kind of cloak and boot room. There were still a dozen coat hooks on walls that were cracked, white and windowless. The desk was ebony-coloured, with gold-leaf bits and had come from Ben and Amber’s London flat.

  Ben sat behind the desk in a leather swivel chair and nodded at the typist’s chair opposite. A strip light made his thin face white and taut. Jane sat, too. Headmaster’s-study situation.

  ‘Look, Ben, all I meant—’

  He waved her into silence. Above his head was a framed print of one of the etchings from the Strand Magazine. It was almost entirely black, except for a white spurt of flame from a pistol. Beneath the drawing, it said: Holmes had emptied five barrels of his revolver into the creature’s flank.

  Ben said, ‘This business of strange forces, curses, hauntings, the mystical powers of the Border, the retentive power of ancient rocks… It’s absolute rubbish, isn’t it?’ He leaned back, his hands clasped on his chest, swivelling a little. ‘Jane, I’m a drama man, always will be, and that’s about using real people and real places to create an illusion.’

  Jane nodded.

  ‘When you’re putting a TV production together,’ Ben said, ‘you have this great tangle of egos — actors, writers, money men. You have time limits, locations, weather conditions. And you have to contain the lot inside a budget that never seems adequate to the task. And then, when it’s all over, you’re competing for just ninety minutes of someone’s attention. Which is fine; it obliges me to’ — Ben unclasped his hands and brought them slowly together in the air — ‘condense.’

  ‘Make it… controllable?’

  Ben smiled.

  ‘But what are you — I’m sorry — what are you talking about exactly? The documentary or…?’

  ‘The whole thing. The big picture. Stanner, the enterprise. This place appealed to me as soon as I saw it because it’s pure artifice, built to look like a Gothic manor house, on a lavish scale. A production. And then, thanks to Conan Doyle, it became Baskerville Hall, another creation.’

  Jane thought about this. ‘But if The Hound of the Baskervilles was based on an actual legend — a real legend — then there is a kind of reality here, surely.’

  ‘A real legend?’ Ben looked pained. ‘How real is a legend? What’s the so-called Hound of Hergest now but a half-forgotten local folk tale? Who’s even heard about that outside this immediate area? Whereas the Hound of the Baskervilles — the creation, the artifice — is world-famous, immortal… a hugely powerful image. That’s the power I’m harnessing — I mean, stuff the Hound of Hergest. Its part was over as soon as Doyle’s book was written.’

  Typical. Jane’s mouth tightened.

  ‘What?’ Ben said. ‘Come on, spit it out.’

  ‘Well, it’s… you know it’s been seen.’

  ‘What has?’

  ‘The Hound. Or something. Something that’s killing sheep. The shooters… that’s what they were after.’

  Ben nodded slowly.

  Jane blinked at him. ‘You knew that?’

  ‘About Dacre and his pathetic bounty? Of course I knew. Known about it for a while. And naturally, I love the idea of something out there. And I love the idea of people believing in it, and I want to hear their stories. As long as the bastard stays out there… something unknown.’

  Ben laughed. Over his head, Sherlock Holmes pumped round after round into the flank of the poor hound, its head and muzzle outlined in white lines of phosphorus.

  ‘Only Dacre — who I’ve never met, by the way, and have no particular wish to — rather shot himself in the foot. When he heard I was making inquiries about sightings of the Hound, he instructed his tenants, his employees at the farm and the hunt kennels — anybody, in fact, he felt he had authority over — to keep shtum.’ Ben smiled, tongue prodding at the inside of a cheek. ‘Fortunately, in this day and age the feudal flame burns rather lower than it used to.’

  ‘You actually knew the shooters were working for him?’

  ‘Well, not at first. I’d heard rumours of what they were after, but I only started putting it together after you and I and Antony encountered them in the lane at Hergest Court. Ended up meeting a very interesting old guy in Kington — no friend of Dacre’s and more than willing to talk to me about a number of things, as it happens. Yes, of course I knew who they were working for.’

  ‘So when you found that guy Nathan…’

  ‘When I lost it completely, you mean, Jane? When I risked facing a murder charge?’

  Jane squirmed. She looked away from Ben’s taunting eyes, inevitably up at the etching. And then it was like Holmes’s pistol had gone off in her head in a spurt of light. Something began, shockingly, to make sense.

  Ben looked up as Natalie’s head came round the door.

  ‘Ben, Alistair Hardy’s just arrived, with that guy Matthew. I’ve shown them up to the Chancery room. I have to take Clancy to a neighbour’s for the night, OK? The drive’s totally blocked at The Nant — I’ll be back later.’

  ‘Nat — do be careful. We need you enormously this weekend.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I’ll try not to get stuck,’ Natalie said, and Ben raised a hand.

  For a moment, as the door closed on Natalie, the instability of the Border seemed to vibrate through the room, making everything glow, but with a cheap and garish light. Jane took a breath and came right out with it.

  ‘The truth is that the very last thing you wanted was for those guys to come out of the pines with a dead puma. That would’ve blown it, right?’

  ‘Blown it?’

  ‘The mystique.’ Jane gripped the sides of her chair. ‘A whole century’s worth. Like, you don’t believe the story of the spectral hound, but you don’t want it disproved either. You didn’t want those guys coming up with anything real that they’d shot. Certainly not anywhere near Stanner. Like… Oh, we’ve shot the Hound. And it gets in all the papers. You really didn’t want that.’

  ‘Would’ve been a touch prosaic,’ Ben agreed.

  ‘And that was really… that was why?’

  She heard him shouting at the shooters on the last night of the murder weekend. I warned you, not on my land! This time you’re fucking dog meat!

  You thought you knew about people. She’d had this nice, safe image of Ben: clever, charming, theatrical, faintly camp.

  Ben shrugged. Jane almost cringed from him.

  The snow was piled like mashed potato out by the entrance of Danny’s place, and Danny had his tractor out, with the snow-plough attachment and the spotlights. If he got it cleared now and he was up again by five tomorrow, likely he could keep on top of it.

  He climbed down and stood by the gate, looking out. The Queens of the Stone Age were giving it some welly from the stereo back in the cab, singing, as it happened, about the sky falling. If this went on, there’d b
e some contract work for him and Gomer, from the county highways, sure to be. Plant hire, like Gomer kept saying, never slept.

  Normally he’d be excited: snow was a challenge, folk needed help. But tonight he felt weary. Biggest problem was the lane outside — passable now, with four-wheel drive, but tomorrow was another day. Danny was knackered now, and the snow was oppressive.

  Back at the house, he saw a tongue of yellow light — the back door opening — and Greta shouted, ‘Is it clear?’

  ‘Clear as I can get it without two tons of grit.’ Danny left the music on and trudged back up the path.

  ‘Only Jeremy rang, see. Wanted to know if we could take the child tonight on account his track’s blocked solid.’

  Danny kept on walking till he reached the back door. ‘Gimme that again, Gret.’

  ‘The child. Clancy? That woman— Her mother… is gonner bring her down from the hotel. Drop her off yere.’

  ‘Wants us to have her?’

  ‘I said I’d make up the spare bed.’

  Danny stood just short of the step, trying to figure it. This Natalie and the kiddie, here they were at a great big hotel full of empty bedrooms… and they wanted the spare bed in the box-room where he kept all his albums. But even that wasn’t the most unlikely aspect of it.

  ‘Nothing strike you as funny, Gret?’ Danny breathed in stinging air through his teeth. ‘Jeremy’s track? When is Jeremy’s track ever blocked?’

  ‘You gonner come in or not, ’fore we loses every bit of heat in the house?’ Greta backed away from the cold, arms folded.

  Danny stepped inside. ‘If anybody knowed the big snow was on the way… When I was up The Nant earlier on, he’d got a trailerload of grit all ready. Had his ewes down last night, all tucked up. And now you tell me—’

  Danny’s brain froze.

  ‘Well, what you want me to say?’ Greta demanded. ‘I accuse him of lying, say we en’t having the girl—? What’s wrong?’

  ‘He don’t want the kiddie there. Why don’t he want the kiddie there?’

  Her stared at him, not getting it.