by Phil Rickman
‘What happened then?’
‘They took me up the hall. Father Ellis was there.’
‘Did they tell you why you were going to the hall?’
‘What?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Father Ellis...?’
‘He was dressed all in white, as usual. He was like a saint, and I felt so comforted. I felt I was in the right hands, the hands of a living saint. And we sits down and Father Ellis explains about the demon what Robin had put inside of me.’
‘Those were his words?’
‘Once he’d given me the demon, he didn’t wanna know me no more, he just pushed me away.’
‘Robin?’
‘Pushed me away, and I fell down in the street. The demon did that. That was the demon. After the pub closed, Greg and me, we had this terrible ding-dong. I’m insulting him, I’m like belittling him, you know what I mean? I’m screaming, “Go on, do it to me, you got any bottle.” Poor Greg. Turns him off like a light, you talk dirty. But that wasn’t me. I know now that wasn’t me. That was the demon.’
‘Is that what Father Ellis said?’
‘He said he could take it away, but it wouldn’t be easy, and it was not to be gone into lightly and I would have to understand that I would be giving myself to the Holy Spirit. He said it was a foul entity, the demon, and it was gonna have to come out... like a rotten tooth.’
Merrily said. ‘You mean... out of your mouth?’
Marianne’s eyes narrowed, lines appeared either side of her mouth. She looked accusingly at Merrily. ‘Judy said you come to spy on Father Ellis.’
‘I was sent to support him,’ Merrily said. ‘From the bishop, remember? The bishop thought he needed some help.’
Marianne looked confused. ‘That Judy, she took you outside, din’t she? I was glad when she did that.’
‘We hadn’t met before. I think she was a bit suspicious of me.’
‘She took you outside,’ Marianne said. ‘I was very glad.’
‘We had a good chat,’ Merrily assured her. ‘We worked things out. Marianne, do you remember what Father Ellis did... to exorcize the demon of lust?’
Marianne blinked, affronted. ‘He said the Church has strict rules about the exorcizing of demons. They don’t just do it. You could wind up exorcizing someone who was mentally ill, couldn’t you?’
‘Er... yes. Yes, you could.’
Ellis told her this? Merrily’s heart sank a little. This was established Deliverance procedure. You didn’t even contemplate exorcism until all the other possibilities, usually psychiatric, had been eliminated.
‘Don’t get me wrong, love, he could’ve done what he liked without a word, the way I was feeling, long as he took it away. But he explained it was a disease. I needed checking over by a doctor, and what he was doing should be medically supervised.’
‘He said that?’
‘Dr Banks-Morgan was there for the whole thing,’ Marianne said. ‘That’s the kind of man Father Ellis is.’
The male figure in the doorway.
She sat in her car for a while.
Then she rang Hereford Police, asked for Mumford. He was out, so she rang Eileen Cullen at home, hoping she wasn’t asleep. A man answered; Merrily realized she knew nothing about Cullen’s domestic situation. When she came on the line, she sounded softer, a bathrobe voice.
‘Before you say a word, Merrily, there is one incident I will never talk about again, not to you, not to anyone.’
‘Angina,’ Merrily said.
‘Ask away,’ Cullen said.
‘The pills you take for angina. Tri-something?’
‘Trinitrin. You feel it coming on, you stick one under your tongue.’
‘Becomes automatic?’
‘Long-term sufferers, they practically do it in their sleep.’
‘Take a hypothetical case. Person on Trinitrin for angina becomes converted to herbal remedies. Says I’m going to stop filling myself up with these nasty drugs. Then she feels an attack coming on, so what does she do?’
‘Reaches for the Trinitrin. Says I’ll stop fillin’ meself up with these awful drugs tomorrow.’
‘All right.’ No time for the subtle approach. ‘Hypothetically, if, in circumstances like this, a doctor saw an opportunity to do away with a patient in a way which might throw blame on someone else, say for instance the herbalist... how would he go about it?’
‘Jesus, Merrily, what is this?’
‘It’s, er... a question. Just a question.’
‘Well here’s your answer – a hundred ways. Could casually swap her Trinitrins for blanks, for starters. Who’s gonna know? It’s easy for a doctor. Always has been.’
Robin had been gazing from his studio window when he saw her walking, like some grounded angel, across the yard, and he’d gone running wildly through the farmhouse, like some big, stupid kid, knocking a bowl of cornflakes out of the hands of a mousy, pregnant witch from Gloucester, called Alice.
Now he held Betty’s hand, and he was breathing evenly for the first time in many hours. They shared this big cushion they used to have in their previous apartment. Only now it was on the floor of the parlour, the room with the inglenook which was now the house temple.
They’d been left alone in here, just Robin and Betty and the altar and the crown of lights.
The kindly, mature witch, Alexandra, Betty’s one-time tutor, had made it. Alexandra was a twig-weaver, or whatever you call it, and this was a tight wreath of hedgerow strands, like a crown of thorns without the thorns. Across the top of the wreath was shaped a kind of skullcap made out of one of those foil trays you got around your supermarket quiche. The candles which ringed its perimeter were the kind you had on birthday cakes, though not coloured.
‘A Blue Peter job,’ Betty had said with a wistful smile, referring to some TV show she used to watch as a kid, where you were taught how to make useful artefacts from household debris. Foil trays apparently featured big.
‘I love you,’ Robin said. ‘I want you to wear it tonight.’
Outside on a calm night, with all the candles lit around the head of a beautiful woman, the crown of lights looked awesome.
‘It’s the mother wears the lights,’ Betty said.
‘This is special.’
‘What would Ned say?’
‘He’ll be cool.’
Everything was cool, coming together, happening just like he’d known it would. He hadn’t asked where she’d spent last night. That didn’t matter. She sometimes needed time to think things out. He recalled how one moonlit night she’d gone out walking from Shrewsbury into the countryside, hadn’t returned until dawn, had covered maybe twenty miles and hadn’t noticed the time go by. He’d been frantic, but she was her own person. She was his priestess. He would trust her for ever, through life after life after life.
‘Ned’s even gonna fix things with Kirk Blackmore, I tell you about that?’
‘Yes,’ Betty said, ‘I’m sure he will.’
‘Bets, things are really turning around. It’s Imbolc. I can feel the light coming through.’
‘Yes,’ Betty said.
Down the hill, into the forestry land, until she came to the point where there were farm buildings either side of the road and a Land Rover with a ‘Christ is the Light’ sticker. Oh, he had his uses, did Jesus Christ: the very name served as a disinfectant.
Merrily turned in to a rutted track between two stone and timbered barns, and there was the farmhouse, grey brown, black windows. No garden, just a yard of dirt and brown gravel, where she parked the Volvo. There was a glazed front porch, its door hanging ajar. She saw the interior door swing open before she was even into the porch, and Judith Prosser standing there, cool and rangy in her orange rugby shirt.
‘You’re late, Mrs Watkins. Had you down for an early riser, I did.’
The banter was wrapped around Judith’s need always to be ahead of the situation. This visit must, on no account, be seen as a surprise.
‘Late night, Mrs Pr
osser.’
‘I’ve coffee on.’
‘That would be good... Erm, I felt there were things left in the air from last night.’
‘No bad thing, sometimes,’ Judith replied swiftly. ‘Left in the air, they have a chance to blow away.’
‘But sometimes they stick around and the air goes sour, and that’s not a good thing in my experience.’
‘Oh, your experience.’ Holding open the door for Merrily. ‘Profound today, is it, Mrs Watkins?’
‘You have a problem with profound?’ Merrily blinked. It was dark inside and the hulking furniture made it darker.
‘Life’s too short to tolerate problems.’
‘Life’s too short for cover-ups, Mrs Prosser,’ Merrily said.
Judith turned to face her. They were standing in a square hall dominated by a huge, over-ornate chair with a nameplate on the back. It looked like the seat of a council chairman or a presiding magistrate. Judith leaned an elbow on one of its carved shoulders.
‘As I said last night, it would be stupid for you to react to silly rumours.’
‘Here’s the situation,’ Merrily said. ‘I was there, I saw the whole thing: the cross, the petroleum jelly. Also Dr Coll standing in the doorway – and didn’t that explain why a bunch of local matrons were able to sit there and watch Ellis violate a woman with a metal cross? Because there was a doctor present. This, of course, makes everything all right, above board, entirely respectable, clinically proven.’
Judith Prosser flicked a speck of dust or ash from the point of the chairman’s chair.
‘I’m not sure how far from being a police matter this is,’ Merrily continued, ‘but we’re very close to finding out.’
45
Stupid Wires
JANE TYPED IN the word ‘charismatic’. The usual, mainly irrelevant list appeared. She grabbed the mouse, dithered over ‘Charismatic Q and A’.
‘Try it,’ Eirion suggested. ‘Might lead somewhere better.’ On the screen: ‘The Charismatic Movement: what in the name of God is it all about?’
‘Click,’ Eirion said.
The Charismatic Movement (from the Greek charismata, meaning ‘spiritual gifts’) developed in the 1950s and ’60s from the Pentecostal movement, crossing over the denominations, embracing the sphere of angelology and the gifts of healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues and power-prayer. It reached a new peak worldwide in the 1990s...
There was a list of options. Jane clicked on ‘Yes, I want to talk to God.’
They needed all the help they could get.
Sophie had said she shouldn’t be allowing this, before shutting them in the Deliverance office with the computer.
And she wanted copies of anything they found.
Jane had said, ‘This is awfully good of you... Mrs Hill.’
Collecting a contemptuous frown and, ‘Jane, you are not among the people with whose patronage I can cope. Try “evangelism”.’
On the way here, Jane had told Eirion virtually everything she’d learned so far – about Terry Penney, about pentagrams... The poor little Chapel boy had seemed unnerved, regaining his cool only when he saw the computer. Smiling his famous smile at Sophie, who wore a checked woollen skirt with a grey twinset and pearls – Sophie, who might one day be the last person in the entire universe still wearing a twinset and pearls.
Jane clicked again, losing enthusiasm for talking to God. When it was working fast and well, the Internet could give you the illusion of being God – you could imagine Him operating like this, constructing human situations with a click of the mouse, running programs, consigning icons to the dumpbin.
‘Evangelism’, though, had been a bummer. There were background articles on St John the Evangelist. There were four Web sites about some kind of computer software with that name. There were no obvious links into crank preachers in the American South who might have known Nick Ellis; and ‘Charismatics’ proved little better.
‘I could try “Bible Belt”,’ Eirion offered.
‘You’d probably get suppliers of religious fashion accessories,’ Jane said gloomily.
‘ “Cults”?’
‘No chance. People never think of themselves as being in a cult. “Just off to the cult, don’t wait up” – doesn’t happen.’
‘What we need is a Christian search engine.’
‘What we need is divine intervention.’ Jane walked over to the window which overlooked the forecourt of the Bishop’s Palace. No good searching for it out there.
‘OK,’ Eirion said. ‘What are we really asking for?’
‘Some big, rattling skeleton in Ellis’s vestment closet. Something that maybe caused him to leave America, come back here in a hurry. When you think about it, most Brits who go over to the States tend to stay there, making piles of money. So it’s reasonable to think Ellis came back because something happened to make him kind of persona non grata. Like he was the leader of a mass suicide cult who contrived not to go down with the rest.’
‘We’d have heard about it.’
‘We’re stuffed.’ Jane angrily keyed in ‘loony fundamentalist bastards’, and the Web found, for some no doubt entirely logical reason, a bunch of science fiction and fantasy writers including David Wingrove, David Gemmell and Kirk Blackmore.
‘We’re just not asking the right questions.’
‘Kirk Blackmore... where did I hear that?’
Sophie came in then, with a piece of paper, a name written on it. ‘Try this.’
‘Ah,’ Jane said, as Blackmore came up on the screen. ‘This was the guy whose covers Robin Thorogood was going to design, but they pulled the plug.’
Eirion was staring up at Sophie, bewildered.
‘I used the telephone.’ Sophie inclined her neck, swan-like. ‘It’s rather old-tech, it involves the less-exact medium of human speech, but it does tend to be more effective when dealing with the clergy.’
‘ “Marshall McAllman”,’ Eirion read.
‘Before the Reverend Nicholas Ellis came to New Radnor and then Old Hindwell, he was a curate for just over a year at a parish outside Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I’ve talked to his former vicar, the Reverend Alan Patterson, who only found out after the Reverend Mr Ellis had been with him for several months that he’d previously been a personal assistant to the Reverend Mr McAllman – which did not entirely please him.’
‘Let’s put it in, Jane.’ Eirion keyed in the name, while the computer was still showing:
KIRK BLACKMORE ORACLE.
The reclusive Celtic scribe returns with a
remarkable new Lord Madoc novel which...
‘Found,’ Eirion said, after a few seconds. ‘ “The Mobile Ministry of Marshall McAllman”.’
He clicked. Kirk Blackmore vanished.
‘There you are.’ Sophie peered. ‘ “Angelweb Factfile. The journeys of Reverend Marshall McAllman were directed by the Will of God and took him from Oklahoma...” ’
‘ “... to South Carolina”,’ Eirion read from the screen, ‘ “via Arkansas and Tennessee, dispensing a low-key but extremely potent evangelism effectively tailored to the needs of small towns and simple folk. He developed a loyal following after several witnessed instances of prophecy, divine inspiration and angelic” blah blah blah... “Reverend McAllman retired in 1998, a disillusioned man, after surviving a campaign by an unscrupulous journalist on a Tennessee newspaper, the Goshawk Talon. Although there remains considerable debate about Reverend McAllman’s ministry, his name is still revered in” blah, blah—’
‘There you have it, then,’ Sophie interrupted. ‘Your next port of call must surely be the, ah, Goshawk Talon.’
‘Does that mean it’s in a place called Goshawk?’ Jane wondered.
‘Doesn’t matter, let’s just put it in,’ Eirion said.
‘ “Found”. Some stuff on birds of prey. And... “The Goshawk Talon and Marshall McAllman”... OK.’ Eirion clicked, waited. ‘Oh.’
The file you are seeking is unavailable.
Jane�
��s face fell. ‘What do we do now?’
‘A technical brick wall.’ Sophie sighed. ‘Hard to imagine how we survived for so long without all this.’ Then she did something most un-Sophie-like – stamped her foot. ‘Phone them, child! They presumably have telephones in Goshawk, Tennessee. If this publication still exists, it shouldn’t take long to find the number. If it doesn’t, we shall have to think of something else. Get on to international directory enquiries.’
‘I don’t know how.’
Sophie sighed in mild contempt. ‘Leave it to me.’ She stalked out.
‘Wow,’ Jane said. ‘The turbo twinset.’
Eirion smiled his Eirion smile. It did things to her, but this was not the time. There never seemed to be a time. The sudden urgency manifested by Sophie made Jane quite tense. What if someone was ringing home with information far more important than anything they could hope to find on the Net, and she wasn’t there to relay it. Paranoid, she rang the vicarage answering machine. One message for Mum to call Uncle Ted. Sod that.
‘We seem to be drifting a long way from Kali Three,’ Eirion said. He started to key it in.
‘No, don’t.’ Jane leapt up and stood at the window, staring down at the woodpile below. There was a sense of being very close to something, but it was too indistinct, ghostly. She felt that invoking Kali Three would somehow bring bad luck. She turned back to the room.
‘We have to go there.’