by Phil Rickman
By the time the call had come through from Danny, Barry was changed into his running kit, had his old Freelander waiting outside the Swan, leaving Marion in charge.
‘Tell me again,’ he said to Danny.
‘We come out onto the Credenhill road, and we done mabbe two hundred yards and Mostyn suddenly stops, and we gotter pass him, see? So we turns round and creeps back on sidelights, and he’s found this ole van in the bushes side of the road. And then he gets back in and he’s off along the lane like a bullet then, up this track.’
No compromises on this track. It was steep and unmade. Without a four-by-four you’d be in trouble. Halfway up, that sign, black on white.
THE COMPOUND TRAINING CENTRE
TRESPASSERS UNWELCOME
The moonlight was so bright on it this time that Lol made out a small amendment, half scrubbed-out. It actually said:
TRESPASSERS UNWELCOME.’
‘Trespassers here seem to have had their uses,’ Lol said.
He’d also told Barry on the way here about the smashed CCTV camera and the cut wire. How the police had thought it was him. Barry had said he was a stupid bleeder for even getting out of his truck.
‘Gomer,’ he hissed now. ‘Stay in the trees.’
‘Looks like an ole JCB down there, boy, back o’ the big shed.’
‘Yeah, well, leave it alone for now. In the absence of poultry, the best thing is probably to get the hell out.’
‘He’s got a bloody cockfight somewhere,’ Gomer said. ‘Sure to. We was told.’
‘We’d hear something, would we not? And frankly I can’t see Byron permitting it. He don’t do entertainment, on any level.’
‘Might not start till later, boy. This en’t bingo. And he’s in yere. Mostyn.’
‘He works here. Bleedin’ hell, you never give up, do you, Gomer?’
But it was clear they were going in.
Lol wondered if it would feel any different entering the compound by what passed for an actual entrance. Going in mob-handed, unblooded. He checked his mobile to see if there was anything from Jane and found a short text from Merrily.
This is getting weird.
please don’t
go anywhere
***
It was on the way home, anyway.
Almost.
Still wearing the atheist’s coat, Merrily stood close to the grave of Jane Winder, whose potted history was spotlit by the moon.
AND DIED AT BRINSOP COURT,
IN THIS PARISH, OCTOBER 16, 1843.
IN THE 43 YEAR OF HER AGE.
Poor Jane. A stranger. From Off. No age at all. By night, the stone was a monolith in front of the trees on the dark pond – which was labelled moat on the map – and all the mysterious humps in the moon-scratched fields below Credenhill. And you held on to it to steady yourself against what seemed like an irreversible madness.
Brinsop Church was locked for the night, of course. Merrily had thought about calling the local team minister, Dick Willis, but she wouldn’t have got away this time without an explanation.
She stood there, an arm around Jane Winder’s cold shoulder, and took in the long view to the right, where it was as though the whole wide area overshadowed by Credenhill had been stripped back by the full moon. Nothing but a skim of soil and rock and clay over what remained of the Romans. The men that have been reappear. A poet’s imaginative exercise, probably nothing more than that. Nothing about a brutalized religion reinvoked from the soil. But the poem had been there, in the book left out by Syd.
A rabbit hopped across the graveyard and sat by the church porch, sniffing the night.
No Bible, no Bergen, no cross, Merrily slipped away out of the churchyard and over the stile to the field where the Dragon’s Well lay in sodden grass, its round stone like a small cider wheel. A modern metal drain cover was embedded in the stone.
Ewes and big lambs were watching her from the hedge. Round eyes like lamps. Could be innocence, could be cynicism. If you were looking for an adversary, it could be the dragon but was more likely, in this place, to be George.
Merrily lit a cigarette.
‘Advice, Syd?’
In her darkest moments she thought that, if exorcism hadn’t found her, she might not have stuck this job. How feeble was that, if the only way you could convince yourself that you were more than just another badly paid professional carer was by re-enacting medieval rituals and seeing what happened? The psychic son et lumière and the bangs and whistles that real mystics discounted as foreplay.
‘But that wasn’t you, Syd. You didn’t want any of it. Came out of the army, looked back in horror.’
Leaps I can’t make, he’d said to her, smoking in his church. Aspects I can’t face.
‘Any more,’ Merrily said. ‘ “Can’t face any more” – that was what you meant.’ She sat down on the wellhead, watched the smoke rising from her fingers towards the moon.
‘The Bible in the Bergen, Syd. This is what I think. A reminder of which side you were on now. Well, sure. But going up Credenhill with that on your back, it’s like Christ carrying his cross. A constant reminder, every step you take – the tug of the pack, the weight of the book, brass-bound, bulky, uncomfortable. Every step you take up that hill, you feel it. Who you are, what you’re about. The weight of responsibility.’
She felt Syd moving up Credenhill, like Thomas Traherne in the blazing stained glass. Bump, bump of the Bible on the spine. Total consciousness.
Why, if he wanted to confront the shadow of Mithras, had he gone up Credenhill rather than come here? Perhaps he didn’t know. Hadn’t worked it out.
Whatever, something had found him. Death had found him.
Idiopathic Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.
Merrily stood up, folded her arms, looked down at them, swaying a little, then looking up at the moon in its halo of pagan complacency. She felt profoundly empty inside, like a sucked-out seashell. The night before Good Friday, the night of the Last Supper. Always tainted with the sour odour of failure and betrayal.
Bending to pick up her bag from the well-cover, she thought for a moment that it wasn’t there, that the well water was exposed and the full moon, a perfect pale disc, was reflected in it.
Merrily straightened up, gazed down for some time and then nodded, remembering. She slipped a hand down one of the back pockets of her jeans and found splinters. Crumbs of faith.
Always a rational explanation.
Slowly, she bent and retrieved the moon.
77
Migraine Lights
THE PIECE OFconcrete fell short. Inevitably. Even desperation hadn’t produced the necessary strength.
Jane watched it landing on the edge of the bench, rolling into the gulley at the same time as the torch rolled off and died, and the only light was from the Roman lamp on the altar, the air thick and fetid with hot animal fat. One small lamp had done that.
But Jane was bone-achingly cold, looking down at Cornel lying in the gulley with his knees drawn up, foetal.
Kenny Mostyn was standing slightly away from Cornel, quite calm with his arms by his side. But loosened up, springy, watching as Cornel began to roll away, and his hand came out and even Jane could tell what he was trying to reach and knew he wouldn’t make it.
Kenny’s knee rose up and his foot cracked down on the clawed hand, and Cornel screamed hideously, rolling helplessly onto his back as Kenny kicked something away.
‘We don’t need this, do we, mate? We’re men.’
‘I was just—’
‘What?’ Squatting down. ‘Tell your Uncle Kenny.’
‘Just trying to scare you, that’s all. That’s all it was.’
‘Course it was,’ Kenny said softly.
Cornel was sobbing. Jane hated anybody sobbing. A sob was not something you could fake, and she could feel his fear.
‘Kenny, listen, it really was just a joke. Like one of your tests, one of your exercises, where you’re thinking you’re gonna die, and at the
last second…?’
‘Sure.’ Kenny crouched down next to Cornel. ‘You’re all right, mate. I understand.’
Jane saw Kenny’s face for the first time – actually, not for the first time; she realized she’d seen him several times in Hereford, maybe among the Saturday scrum in High Town or sitting outside one of the pubs where they had tables. Short, round-faced guy with a moustache and the hint of a beard which made a dark circle around his mouth.
He was looking up towards the gloss-painted metal ceiling but saying nothing, no expression on the face, and his eyes were white, like a blind man’s eyes. He seemed to be stroking Cornel’s hair, calming him down, then abruptly he turned his head away, looking up. Not at her, perhaps at the smears of movement which she could see as though through old, speckled glass.
Jane shook her head and the glass brightened and then fragmented and then coalesced and broke apart and coalesced again, like migraine lights, and there were human forms, wet naked men, glowing greasily like in some rugby team’s communal bath, a fatty stew of nudging, squirming, white-eyed men around her, touching her skin, and she like shrank into herself in disgust, all her senses full of the steam and the stink of sweat and the disconnected cries from a long way down in her mind, and then one man stepped out of it and became Kenny Mostyn.
He was holding up a short blade which he briefly inspected before nonchalantly folding it and putting it away in an almost military fashion, not once looking down.
But Jane did.
She saw Cornel move. Cornel was lying bent like a burst pipe, and it was as if he was laughing. Shaking with laughter. Just another scary exercise, a test for a hard man. What happens is anything you want.
His body jerked once, in spasm, that big chin jutting out like a shelf of rock over a waterfall. Jane felt the pressure of a scream in her throat, but no sound came out. She just stood there, watching from the gallery, watching all the blood belching out of the hole in Cornel’s long neck, filling up the gulley.
Kenny Mostyn was sitting down now, on the concrete bench opposite, wiping his forehead with the back of a hand. Blank-faced as the blood ran past his boots, spreading almost the width of the gulley but never quite reaching the other face on which Cornel’s glassy eyes were focused.
A face without a head or a body. A straight nose, a petulant twist to the mouth and a hat like a caterpillar.
The face sculpted into the shard of concrete that Jane had grabbed from the rubble after Cornel had attacked the altar-piece with his lump hammer. She thought a smile formed for a moment on the face in the concrete, as her scream passed into echo and all she could hear was the thin, wet sound of Cornel dying.
78
The Wafer and the Moon
THE SCREAM HAD been muffled, choked off, but it was still reaching for Lol like an imploring hand and, for just a moment, he’d thought it was Jane.
It sent him to the Nissen hut. The padlock had been broken, but the big doors were firm. A wall of wood, new oak that would break your shoulder. He turned in desperation to Danny who was alongside him, hands exploring the panels.
‘Bolted, it is, from inside.’
‘What do we do?’
‘All right,’ Barry whispered. ‘Options. We could bang on the door, shout “police, open up now”.’
‘But that’d warn ’em,’ Danny Thomas said. ‘We wanner do that?’
‘It would, yeah.’
‘And when they seen us… if there’s a whole bunch of ’em in there…’
‘True.’ Barry turned to Gomer, pointed across the compound to the biggest shed. ‘That old JCB… you reckon…?’
‘Oh aye.’ Twin moons floating in Gomer’s bottle glasses. ‘Sure to. Less he’s broke.’
‘You can hot-wire it?’
‘Don’t need no hot-wire.’ Gomer had dragged out a jangle of keys on a ring. ‘Digger that age, one size fits all.’
‘Try it. Go with him Danny, eh? If it don’t look promising, get out before you make too much noise and we’ll try something else.’
Barry moved away from the doors and Lol followed him to the original hole in the barbed wire, its ends springing free like brambles. Barry ran an uncertain hand across his jaw.
‘Bit too much like the old days, Laurence. But this is not the old days, it’s not warfare, it’s not terrorism… and I’m not your gaffer. Bearing in mind there could be very serious repercussions, you don’t have to do what I say, none of you.’
Lol threw up his hands. ‘You want me to make decisions? The songwriter? Barry, I don’t give a shit about repercussions. There’s something here makes my blood go cold.’
‘All right. Let’s quickly go over the situation one last time. What’s the worst we know happens that might be happening in there?’
‘They kill a bull.’
‘With?’
‘A knife. In theory.’
‘How many people involved in that?’
‘No idea.’
He looked back at the Nissen hut. Underground, Athena had said, to simulate a cave. Certainly no windows. It was a possibility.
‘If this was Regiment business,’ Barry said, ‘we’d have smoke bombs, masks and automatic bleedin’ hardware from Heckler and Koch.’
‘And one of us might even know what to do with it.’
There was a metallic clang from the JCB, then silence. Barry gazed across the compound, light as a dull day down there.
‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘Look at us, Laurence. Even you’d be too old to qualify for selection.’
From behind the big shed, they heard the slow clatter of an old, cold engine being coaxed back into active service.
‘And as for him…’
The moon lay in the palm of Merrily’s hand, its symbolism fully apparent.
The night before Good Friday was the night of the Last Supper.
This is my body.
Merrily looked down at the tiny full moon. Two of them, in fact, both consecrated. Must’ve fallen off the communion plate last Sunday morning and she’d found them when she’d come in at night for the meditation, slipped them into her back pocket and forgotten about them. One – still intact, she guessed because it had lodged near a seam – must have fallen out of her pocket when she’d sat down on the stone over the well. The other was already in pieces.
She looked towards the church porch, directly across from the well, and recalled the sorrowful shadow over the door on the inside, the weary, defeated Jesus, drained and desiccated, in the act of dying. Fading into the wall and into history. And soon, the way things were going, out of history and into myth and legend sooner than anyone would have imagined, least of all Mother Julian, who in some way had experienced the reality. An anchoress, a solitary, not part of a religious community. They spent their lives in prayer and contemplation, in a particular place which was felt to be blessed by their presence there, the way the atmosphere of an area could be darkened by the shadows of violence.
Merrily held up the intact communion wafer until it covered the moon, so that it looked like the fan of white-gold rays were spraying from the wafer.
Like, when a place gets into disaster mode, expecting the worst all the time, the worst just seems to go on happening. Unless you step in with an act of sacrifice.
Jane. Who’d been known to venerate the moon as Mother Goddess – how seriously Merrily was still unsure, but it was a very different concept from Julian’s Mother God. Who, in an odd way, was more like Syd Spicer’s God, the SAS commander in the field, on first-name terms with his team. Your best mate, none of that sir crap, no salutes. In the same way, back in the days when God was seen as a touchy tyrant with a pile of plagues and thunderbolts at his elbow, Julian had sensed only a source of infinite kindness and patience and politeness, without which, she’d insisted, it would be impossible for this flawed world to exist.
Merrily closed her fingers on the wafer. It felt warm. She had the surreal thought that here, in a place whose sanctity pre-dated both Christianity and Mithraism,
there could be some act of fusion between the wafer and the moon.
It was cold now, her trainers crunching on frost as she went back over the stile and across the field to the car, where she took off Annie’s coat and laid it on the back seat. She stashed Syd’s books, Lol’s map and the compass from the glove compartment in her bag, checked her manicure case for nail scissors and went back to the churchyard, and now it was very cold.
In the swivelling seat of the old JCB, Gomer lit up a ciggy and then was still, looking across at Barry like an old toy dog with glass eyes.
Barry took a breath, held it for several seconds. They listened. There was no sound from inside the hut.
‘Remember the steps,’ Lol said.
‘And afterwards, Gomer, leave your lights on full-beam, but don’t get out. Danny, see he don’t get out.’ Barry moved back. ‘OK, off you go.’
Lol clocked Danny’s worried eyes over the beard, gave him a tight nod and slammed the cab door as the big shovel wobbled, the cig came spinning out of the window, the engine noise changed into a minor-key growl.
‘Back off till it’s done,’ Barry told him. ‘There’ll be flying splinters.’
But the hinges were weaker than the doors. The shovel, nearly as wide as the doors, just punched them off the side walls, and they collapsed into the void.
Job done.
Lol crouching, an arm thrown across his face, turned for guidance to Barry, but Barry had already gone. Lol saw him flattened against the wall at the entrance to the Nissen hut as the JCB roared and trembled massively in the entrance, like some wounded charging animal.
Barry made a backwards turning motion with his fingers, and Gomer switched off the engine but left the lights on. Danny had his window down, leaning out, yelling,
‘Body…’
Barry said, ‘Dead or alive?’
‘Dunno, blood everywhere.’
Barry shouted into the hut.
‘Out now, please. Everybody. Slowly.’