Friends of the Dusk (52 page)

The village of Cwmarrow might be harder to find but virtually all its significant features can be found in the Golden Valley, in an area between Vowchurch and Dorstone.

Thanks to Mairead Reidy, who divined and dispatched all the right books.

Clerical consultants were the Revs Jason Bray, Peter Brooks, Liz Jump, Sue Richardson and the late, seriously lamented Kevin Wilkinson. Also thanks to the Rev. Nicholas Lowton, who runs things up by the Black Mountains, for his enlightening parish magazine article ‘On being a Rural Dean’, which includes the key sentence,
The first the new Rural Dean knows about it is when he receives a letter from the Bishop inviting him to be Rural Dean and thanking him for agreeing to take the role on.

In attempting to tune into her surroundings, Jane must have been recalling Francis Pryor’s monumental work
The Making of the British Landscapes
(Allen Lane 2010).

Way back, Jeanine McMullen gave me a copy of Katharine Briggs’s classic
A Dictionary of Fairies
(Penguin, 1976) which discusses the fairy stroke, as does Patrick Harpur’s
Daimonic Reality
(Viking, 1994). Another informative volume was
The Vengeful Djinn
by Rosemary Ellen Guiley and Philip J. Imbrogno (Llewellyn 2011). Thanks again to Dion Fortune who never fails to come up with something. And Robert A. Monroe’s
Journeys Out of the Body
(Souvenir Press, 1972) is probably the most convincing account of astral projection ever published. I’m sure my late grandma, May, would have agreed.

Thanks also to…

Tony Hazzard, writer of many classic songs, on how TV commercials can change your life… or not.

Mobeena Khan (no relation to Raji) who answered lots of questions about non-fundamentalist Muslim life.

The archaeologist Jodie Lewis on the excavation of human bodies, buried deviantly and otherwise.

The Rev. Strachan McQuade (channelled) on… let’s not go there.

Philippa May and Paul Rogers at the
Hereford Times
.

Dr Jamie Monaghan, on the diagnosis of dementia.

Dai Pritchard on building technicalities.

Tooki Proctor on Antipodean linguistical pitfalls.

Tracy Thursfield, for magical guidance.

Caitlin Warrior for Internet esoterica.

On the publishing side,

Sara O’Keeffe, Louise Cullen, Liz Hatherell and…

My wife and most ruthless editor, Carol, for spotting all the structural flaws, and then pointing the way forward… which was not, as usual, the direction in which I was heading.

Also by Phil Rickman

THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

The Wine of Angels

Midwinter of the Spirit

A Crown of Lights

The Cure of Souls

The Lamp of the Wicked

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

The Smile of a Ghost

The Remains of an Altar

The Fabric of Sin

To Dream of the Dead

The Secrets of Pain

The Magus of Hay

THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

The Bones of Avalon

The Heresy of Dr Dee

OTHER TITLES

Candlenight

Curfew

The Man in the Moss

December

The Chalice

Night After Night

The Cold Calling

Mean Spirit

OTHER TITLES

The House of Susan Lulham

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2015 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2015

The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 24601 694 9

E-book ISBN: 978 1 24601 696 3

Printed in Great Britain.

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