The Triple Goddess (62 page)

One has recurrent erratic visions

Of the unwashed patriarch, beerily foul,

Still rolling in his pit in the den wherein

He fell from late-night poker with the lads,

Oath-muttering and acidulous, pirate-stubbled

Face, rancid in a greasy sheet, gaseous,

Muttering football scores and counting cash,

Scratching his arse and some persistent rash,

Ill-rested and -humoured, cigar-stenched,

Groping for the Radio Times,

And—heaven forbid it should be underdone—

Oven pre-set to bellow for his roast at one.

Perhaps that’s wrong. He swam some laps,

Or ran, and got the lunch on; called a chap

About some scheme or other, or took the yacht

Out on the lake, or the Bentley for a spin.

No again: he’s having a well-earned rest,

Or perhaps there’s a client staying, or a guest.

Whatever. Whichever. What is for sure is that

The lady hardly left him in the lurch

By taking time and the children off to church.

Chapter Five

Before the arrival of the DL introduced a further inhuman element into society, the village had a reputation in the outlying region for being haunted. The degree of spiritual infestation was said to be significant, even compared to the most outlandish locations of mountain and moor where ancient manor houses and castles are a phantom’s default des. res. in which to put on a good show of moping and moaning and walking through walls. Like the churches, this aspect had not featured in the estate agent’s blurb, so it came as a pleasant surprise to the devil lady when she read about it in some supplementary literature that came through from HQ as part of her relocation package, and that evening she made an entry in her diary to that effect.

Wide misunderstanding exists concerning devils, demons, ghosts and poltergeists, and the possession of mortal bodies by discarnate spirits. People who are dedicated to living in the moment, for the moment, are greatly disturbed that a looking-glass world might exist, one in which every human heart is open and every desire is known; one that some day they might themselves occupy. Although it might be thrilling to hear of such a place, most prefer to be spared witnessing a manifestation of what both lies on the Other Side and shares one’s bedroom at the same time. Going on ghost walks, and listening to chilling stories round the fireside are one thing; sightings are more than most care to experience.

Only ignorant persons assert that ghosts do not exist. Often they do so owing to their fear of the unknown and the hidden, the occult, and what they cannot possibly begin to understand. The professed belief is adhered to as tenaciously as a child’s faith in Father Christmas, and on as little a factual basis. A ghost can be seen or sensed by any suggestive or intuitive individual who has the dimension of perception described by Keats as “negative capability”. As the spiritual residue of a person, good or bad, whose ultimate fate has yet to be decided, it can be released into Judgement by any sympathetic person who is able to communicate with it. Artificial and pre-arranged methods of attracting and summoning entities from the spirit world, however, such as using Ouija and planchette boards, and by attending séances conducted by veiled gypsy female mediums exuding ectoplasm, can be lethal. By the process known as exsufflation, or exorcism, it is sometimes possible for a shade still hobbled by mortality to be released from its earthly shackles so that it might depart to the Light, should it be so lucky, or to whatever less desirable place or spiritual holding pen it may be consigned to while the indefinite process of evaluation is conducted that precedes a decision being made by the Powers-That-Be as to its eternal destination.

But even experts and qualified and experienced exorcists remain, by their own admission, neophytes in the science, and they know how risky it is to get too up close and personal with spirits and devils in the area of linkage, or slippage, between two mutually exclusive worlds; one of which they understand imperfectly and the other hardly at all.

Most often what creates the adumbration, or ghost, of an ex-being is the perplexity and confusion that it is thrown into following a death that the subject was unprepared for or not expecting. In the immediate post-mortem condition, a soul may not even be aware that it has shuffled off its mortal coil and is unable to return to the land of the living. Others, rather than being understanding and accepting, are confused, aimless, lost, traumatized, angry. They remain grooved into the long-playing record of time, still spinning on the turntable of life, unable to divest themselves of temporal associations, still to be held accountable for their lives. For others who comprehend the nature of their new condition, the inexorable draw of eternity, like the gravitational pull of the moon upon the seas and oceans, has yet to overcome their attachment to life, as pleasant or hard as it was, and they pretend still to be materially extant.

Murder is only the most dramatic proximate cause of a spirit remaining in the Heretofore rather than the Hereafter, impressed upon the atmosphere as if it has been melted or seared or branded into it like beef on a barbecue or an iron on the side of a steer, where it lingers as an agglomeration of afflicted and conflicted emotions. Like a photographer’s magnesium flash it dazzles the air with an energy so strong as to give it a temporary permanence, as it either refuses or finds itself unable to quit the present-and-familiar and the scene of its premature demise.

At the extreme end of the scale are the poltergeists: pockets of repression and psychosis that vent their spleens of frustration by childishly slamming doors and throwing tantrums and crockery and furniture about.

Possession is the most terrible affliction that may arise from the collision of the preternatural with the natural; for whenever concentrated evil is assimilated by or invades a soul it occupies it with cries of victory and ruinous consequences to the host. Whether they are prepared to admit it to themselves or not—and most are not, which is what makes the condition so dangerous or lethal—all humans, some more than others, are susceptible to being “possessed”, that is occupied or invaded and having its will taken over, by a devil or a demon who takes up residence within them and who is in most instances impossible to evict or subdue. Few people are prepared to accept the possibility that their own aberrant behaviour is the result of Possession…though Socrates believed that he was possessed by a demon, and made allowance for the unnatural impulses that it caused in him.

The spirits of those who are recently departed, disembodied and disoriented, those who cannot or refuse to believe that they were dead, they too are looking to inhabit any living being whose habits are reassuringly familiar and similar to their own, and whose defences are down, which is what renders them susceptible to occupation. Because death does nothing to abate the cravings and addictions of the flesh, these selfish spirits are driven to invest the bodies of others in order to experience them vicariously. They may have other reasons for doing so: they reciprocally mourn their loved ones and family and do not wish to leave them; or they have unfinished business to attend to. Places of sickness and disease, such as hospitals, are full of anxious spirits looking to graft themselves into the bodies of those who are destined to recover and be discharged. Any ill or injured patient who is not marked for death is, during the period of recuperation or rehabilitation, ripe for takeover.

And, as the devil lady knew from her earliest training, drug users, drunks and barflies are also easy marks because they actively seek to diminish or suspend their voluntary and involuntary faculties in order to release themselves for a time into a fantasy world of their own creation—which is what made the reinstatement of the village pub such a no-brainer.

But as much as the devil lady knew about all of these things, and one Hell of a lot more besides, her business lay in the land of the living not the dead; and, as an official emissary from Hell and designated evangelist of depravation, her duty was to engage with earthly subjects with the end of whip up the tidal waters of humanity, like a one-woman lunarly magnetic influence, into a tsunami of hurt and regret. Or, to use a railway metaphor, to invite them onto a one-way bullet train that bypassed Limbo as easily as its carriages sliced through Victorian railway halts en route to the grand terminus of Hell and the Southern Line Underground Station.

It was with malice aforethought, therefore, that, several days following her encounter with the Local Yokel, the DL ventured out again down the Street on her horse, the still chastened Elagabalus. As before she was dressed to the sixes, all three of them, and felt very confident of her ability to command the respect and attention of anyone she may encounter.

It being market day, the villagers had set up their vegetable and fruit and cake stalls in a public field, and although there were plenty of people wandering about and chatting in low tones about not much, they were buying very little except the odd pot of jam that they would probably end up giving as a Christmas present to the person who had made it, receiving one of their own in return. So when the devil lady stood up wobbling in the stirrups by the open gate and raised her voice, she had an instant audience.

‘Oyez, oyez. This is to inform ye all that I have appointed a new vicar, the Reverend Fletcher Abraham Dark, who will commence his duties forthwith. End of statement. Ye may disperse.’

This Father Fletcher had answered her advertisement in
The Church Times
by sending in a résumé stained with cheap claret. Although she had met him but once, and though he was the only candidate she had chosen from her shortlist for viva voce examination at the Old Rectory, she had decided instantly that he was the perfect man for the job of her priestly appointee and collaborator. Fletcher Abraham Dark had immediately impressed the devil lady so much with his eagerness to serve without knowing anything about either her or the job, and the amorality that he exuded from every pore, that she told her man to send regrets to the other clergy who had submitted their details, even though a number of them had been defrocked, or “laicized”, by having their licences withdrawn, thanking them for their interest and assuring them that their names would be kept on file.

That Dark, although he still had Permission to Officiate, had either not applied for or had been unable to obtain—she did not care to know which—the necessary Safe to Receive Commendation from his bishop, she regarded as being in his favour.

The choice of this individual, the DL hoped, would score her a number of black points in Hell. If all went as well, or badly depending on one’s point of view, she might be interviewed by the publicity department at HQ for an article in the monthly magazine,
Hell’s Bell
. Hot diggety damn!, she thought, she might even win Devil of the Year for demonstrating model strategy in the field. This warranted another favourable entry in the devil lady’s diary, in large red (the stationer’s office at HQ dispensed only Waterman red fountain pen ink) capital letters and a number of exclamation marks and asterisks.

When Fletcher Abraham Dark accepted on the spot the devil lady’s offer to move him out of his dead-end job as a curate in Whitechapel and modestly increase his stipend, he fancied that he was finally getting somewhere in the priestly profession that he had chosen years ago after he was dismissed from the Polytechnic where he was not taking a course in English Literature. Having answered a higher calling by attending and not much else Cuddesdon, the Oxfordshire location of the theological college where Anglican priests are trained, he had worked as an exhaust fitter at the Morris Car Company, Cowley, before being employed as assistant chaplain in Her Majesty’s Prison Service at Bullingdon, near Bicester, where he succeeded in converting a lot of prisoners who had got religion since their arrival to atheism.

In sum, though he was no longer young, Fletcher Abraham Dark struck the devil lady as being a
reductio ad absurdum
of his class who exuded a certain puppy-dog enthusiasm. He seemed to fancy that promotion and a successful Church career still awaited him as a reward for his dedication to whatever it was that he was dedicated to...it being obvious to the DL that this was something he was agnostic about. And as for Dark, where he thought he was ascending to as he heaved his corpulent frame onto the second rung of the employment ladder he had no idea, nor did he have a head for heights, and he had once broken an ankle falling off a rotten ladder; but movement of any kind was preferable to stagnation, and he had marinated in failure for a long time.

Thinking to mingle for a moment with the parishioners, the devil lady dismounted with difficulty owing to her new jodhpurs being several sizes too small in the seat. When the material parted at the seam, a quantity of pink frilly undergarment blossomed through the split. Standing at an awkward angle to disguise her misfortune, she walked the horse from stall to stall and examined a marrow before clambering back into the saddle. As everyone watched and sniggered at her underwear one individual commented, to murmurs of assent, that it would be worthy of a prize at the county fair for the biggest carnation.