Midwinter of the Spirit (37 page)

‘This is my mother, Edna Rees. This is Mrs Merrily Watkins, Mother. She’s Dobbs’s successor.’

The former housekeeper to the Canon had raw red farmer’s cheeks and wore her hat indoors; how many women did that these days? She put down her cup, and studied Merrily at length, unembarrassed.

‘You seem very young, Mrs Watkins.’

‘I’m not sure which way to take that, Mrs Rees.’

‘Oh, I think you are, my dear.’ Mrs Rees’s accent was far more local than her daughter’s – Hereford-Welsh. ‘I think you are.’

Merrily smiled.
How do I get to talk to her in private?

Susan Thorpe frowned. ‘I don’t know how long this operation normally takes you, Merrily. But our venerable guest of honour is usually in bed by ten.’

‘So there’s going to be nobody on that floor until then?’

‘Nobody living,’ said Mrs Rees blandly.

Chris Thorpe glanced at Merrily’s shoulder-bag. ‘You have some equipment?’

‘We don’t have to be near any power points, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Chris, why don’t you go and do something else?’ Susan said through her teeth.

‘It’s my house. I’ve a right to be informed.’

‘But I don’t feel you really believe it’s going to achieve anything,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s just that normally we like to do this in the presence of people who are a bit sympathetic – a scattering of actual Christians. I mean,
are
there any practising Christians around? What about the woman who saw… him? Helen?’

‘Supervising the party,’ Susan said. ‘Making sure it doesn’t get too rowdy. Anyway, she doesn’t want to be involved. Christians? No shortage of
them
but they’re the ones we’re trying not to alarm. You’re on your own, I’m afraid, Merrily. Can I offer you a fortifying cigarette?’

‘Thanks. Afterwards, I think. If you could just point me at the spot.’

‘Don’t fret.’ Mrs Rees put down her cup and saucer. ‘I’ll go with you.’

Excellent
.

‘Did you ever go with Canon Dobbs, Mrs Rees?’

‘Oh no.’ Mrs Rees stood up, shaking cake crumbs from her pleated skirt. ‘Wasn’t
woman’s
work, was it?’

Jane and Rowenna ordered coffee and doughnuts at the Little Chef between Hereford and Leominster. Jane nervously stirred an extra sugar into hers. ‘I didn’t even tell her I was going out tonight. It’s come to this: separate lives.’

Rowenna was unsympathetic. ‘You’re a woman now. You live by your own rules.’

‘Yeah, well…’ Jane looked through the window at the car park and a petrol-station forecourt. She kind of liked Little Chefs because they sold maps and stuff as well, giving you a feeling of being on a
journey
. They weren’t travelling far this time, however.

Only to the pub where the psychic fair had been held – there to meet with the gracious Angela. Jane felt like Macbeth going for his second session with the Weird Sisters. Like, face it, the first meeting had changed Jane’s life.

She hadn’t seen much of Rowenna over the past couple of days. Then, this morning, the lime-green Fiesta had slid into Ledwardine market square while she was waiting for the bus.

She’d immediately wondered whether to tell Rowenna what Dean Wall had said. If somebody was spreading that kind of filth about you, you had a right to know. But the minute she got in, Ro was like: ‘Guess who called
me
last night?’

Jane abandoned half her doughnut, pushed the plate away.

‘Don’t look so worried.’

Rowenna wore a new belted coat of soft white leather; Jane was wearing her school duffel coat. People must think she was like some hitchhiker this genteel lady had picked up.

‘Is she going to give us a reading?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rowenna said. ‘You scared of that?’

‘I was so pissed off when I got up, I forgot to do the sun thing.’

‘So what’s she going to do about that?’ Rowenna said quite irritably. ‘Give you detention? Lighten up, these people are not like…’ With a napkin over her finger, she dabbed a crumb from the edge of Jane’s mouth. ‘Listen, you know what your problem is? Your mother’s dreary Anglicanism is weighing down on you. So
gloomy
, kitten. You spend your whole life making sacrifices and practising self-denial in the hope of getting your reward in heaven. What kind of crappy deal is that?’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Going to waste her whole life on that shit – and they get paid peanuts, don’t they? I mean, that great old house and no money to make the most of it? What’s the point? She’s still attractive, your old lady. It’s understandable that it pisses you off.’

‘I can’t run her life.’

‘No? If it was me, I’d feel it was my responsibility to kind of rescue her, you know? She’s obviously got talent, psychicsensitivity, all that stuff, but she’s just pouring it down the drain.’

Jane laughed grimly. ‘Oh sure, I walk in one night and I’m, like: “Look, Mum, I can get you out of this life of misery. Why don’t you come along to my group one night and learn some cool spiritual exercises?” ’

‘You underrate yourself, Jane. You can be much more subtle than that,’ Rowenna said. There was something new about her tonight: an aggression – and a less-than-subtle change of attitude. Remember
Listen to me. You cannot change other people. Only yourself
. How many days ago did she say
that
?

‘Come on,’ Rowenna said, ‘let’s go.’

A bulb blew.

Merrily’s right hand slid under her top sweater to grip the pectoral cross. A bright anger flared inside her.

The lights were wall-mounted: low-powered, pearlized, pearshaped bulbs, two on each dusty bracket, the brackets about eight feet apart along the narrow passage. This was the one furthest away, so that now the passage – not very bright to begin with – was dimmed by new shadows and no longer had a visible end. Easy, in this lightless tunnel, to conjure a moving shadow.

Edna Rees chuckled. She was sitting in a pink wicker chair pulled out from a bathroom. Merrily was kneeling on the topmost of three carpeted steps leading up to the haunted east wing.

This was the third floor, and once was attics.

This was a stake-out.

Because you didn’t simply arrive and go straight into the spiel.
Spend some time with it
, Huw Owen said.
Let it talk to you. No, of course they seldom actually
talk.
And yet they do
.

Could she trust anything Huw Owen had told her?

They’d been here twenty minutes. Downstairs, Susan Thorpe would be glaring at her watch.
Always take your time
, Huw said.
Never let any bugger rush you. Where some of these customers come from, there
is
no time. Don’t rush, don’t overreact, don’t go drowning it in holy water
.

Merrily’s bag contained only one small bottle of holy water, for all the use that was. Her only other equipment was a Christian Deliverance Study Group booklet of suitable prayers, most of which she knew off by heart anyway.

She was just going through the motions, with no confidence that it would work.

It doesn’t always work
– Huw’s truest phrase. It should be printed on the front of the Deliverance handbook.

It should be the
title
of the Deliverance handbook.

And where was she really? How far had she come since the four a.m. horror? Since the fleeing of her bedroom, the vomiting in the kitchen sink, the stove-hugging, the burning of lights till dawn and the
Oh Christ, why hast thou forsaken me
?

There was then the Putting On A Brave Face Until The Bus Takes Jane Away interlude. She’d had the time – hours – to wash and dress carefully, apply make-up. To stand back from the mirror and recoil at the sight of age and fear pushing through like a disease.

Then the staring-at-the-phone phase. The agitated For God’s Sake Ring, Huw moments.
He keeps calling you. He wants to explain. So you should call him back. It doesn’t matter that he and Dobbs conspired against you. It doesn’t matter what he did. You need him. You need him to take it away. You need to call him now and say, Huw, I am possessed. I am possessed by the spirit of Denzil Joy
.

Yet it was not like that. She might look rough in the mirror, but her dull, tired eyes were not the sleazed-over eyes of Denzil Joy. She didn’t feel his greasy desires. She didn’t
know
him.

Was not possessed by him.

Haunted, though – certainly that. Useless to paper it over with psychology; she was haunted by him. He followed her, had become her spirit-stalker. Because she’d failed, that night in the General, to redirect his malignant energy, its residue had clung to her. She’d walked out of the hospital with Denzil Joy crawling and skulking behind her like some foul familiar. He was hers now. No one else had caught his disease.

And she’d been unaware of it until – once again insufficiently prepared – she had been collecting herself for the assault on the crow-killer of St Cosmas. Collecting her energy. Then into the cocktail had seeped his essence.

Was that what happened? Had yesterday’s holy-water exercise been a failure because it had been directed only at the bedroom – making the
room
safe – rather than herself?

Because she was the magnet, right? She’d
invited
him – sitting by his bedside, holding his kippered hands. The female exorcist attracting the incubus, just as the priest-in-charge had invoked the lust of the organist who’d flashed at her from a tombstone.

Today, she’d concentrated on cleansing herself. Leaving the answering machine unplugged, she’d set out on a tour of churches, a pilgrimage on the perimeter of Hereford. A full day of prayer and meditation.

Finally, parking in a back street near the Cathedral School, and slipping discreetly into the Cathedral, sitting quietly at the back for over an hour while tourists and canons she didn’t know flitted through.

She had not called Huw, or Sophie. Had resisted the impulse to enter Church Street and find Lol. She had left the answering machine unplugged. At four p.m., she’d returned to the vicarage and fed the cat and made a meal for Jane and herself. Then one more visit to the church before the drive – leaving plenty of time – to the Glades.

It was not about proving herself as an exorcist any more. That was over. This was about saving her ministry.

And her sanity?

Leave sanity out of this. Sanity is relative
.

Edna Rees looked along the passage, without apparent apprehension, to where the bulb had just blown. ‘Surely that’s not the first time it’s happened to you, my dear?’

Merrily said nothing.

Edna shifted comfortably in her wicker chair. ‘Regular occurrence, it was, in Gwynne Street. Wherever he lived, it happened. So I learned.’

‘Bulbs blowing?’

‘Might’ve put me off if I’d known before I took the job, see. But you get used to it.’

Merrily glanced along the line of bulbs. The loss of one seemed to make all the others less bright, as though they were losing heart. There was probably a simple scientific explanation; she should ask Chris Thorpe.

‘One week we lost five,’ Edna said. ‘I said, you want to charge them for all these bulbs, Canon. Well, expensive they are these days, bulbs. We tried those economy things – cost the earth, take an age to come on, but they’re supposed to last ten years. Not in that house, they didn’t.’

‘What else happened?’

‘Some nights…’ Edna pulled her skirt down over her knees, ‘… you just couldn’t heat that place to save your life, even with all the radiators turned up, the living-room fire banked all day. Wasn’t even
that
cold outside sometimes, see. And yet, come the night, just when you’d think it’d be getting nicely warmed up…’

Cold spots?

This passage had five doors, all closed. Closed doors were threatening. Doors ajar with darkness within were terrifying. Merrily guessed she just didn’t like doors. Otherwise, there was no sense of disturbance, no cold spots – and certainly nothing like the acrid, soul-shrivelling stench which had gathered around…

Stop!

She turned briskly to Edna. ‘Are you saying that he… brought his work home?’

Edna looked at Merrily from under her bottle-green velvet hat. Her eyes were brown and shrewd, over cheeks that were small explosions of split veins.

‘My dear, his work
followed
him home.’

She froze. ‘He told you that?’

‘He never talked about his work,’ Edna said. ‘Not to me; not to anyone, far as I know. But when he came back sometimes, it was like Jack Frost himself walking in.’

‘What did he do about that?’

‘Not for me to know, Mrs Watkins.’

‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘obviously not. I… saw you with him the other week, in the Cathedral.’

‘Yes,’ Edna said calmly, ‘I thought it was you.’

‘He was telling you to go away. He said there was something he couldn’t… couldn’t discuss there.’

‘Sharp ears you have.’

‘Is it none of my business?’

‘You must think it is.’

‘Why “here”? Why did he want to get you out of the Cathedral?’

‘For the same reason he wanted me out of his house, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Which is?’

‘Why are you asking me these questions?’

‘Because I can’t ask him. Because he’s lying in hospital apparently incapable of speech. Or at least he doesn’t speak to the female nurses.’

Edna smiled.

‘Any more than he’d speak to me before his stroke. He froze me out, too, on the grounds that I wasn’t fit to do his job. His sole communication with me was a cryptic note saying that Jesus Christ was the first exorcist. There. I’ve told you everything, Edna.’

It was what she wanted.

‘Merrily… Can I call you Merrily?’

‘Please do.’

‘Merrily, this began… I don’t know exactly
when
it began, but it did have a beginning.’

‘Yes.’

‘I started to hear him praying, very loud and… anguished. I would hear him through the walls: sometimes in what sounded like Latin – the words meant nothing to me. He would shout them into the night. And then, backwards and forwards from the Cathedral he’d go at all hours, in all weathers. I would hear his footsteps in the street at two, three in the morning. Going to the Cathedral, coming
from
there – sometimes rushing, he was, like a man possessed. I don’t mean that in the…’