Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

And it did go pear-shaped sometimes, no denying that. An inexact science, deliverance. Well, not a science at all, obviously …

‘Everybody lives in fear nowadays,’ Huw said. ‘Way things are going, deliverance itself could be C of E history in a year or two.’

‘And what would you do, Huw, if we all got the elbow?’

‘I’d retire, lass. Take the pension, rent a little shack at the rough end of Sennybridge, with a back yard and a bog, and carry on with the job. No bureaucracy, no politics, no farcical PC synods. Just me and the naked cross.’

‘Talking of which … Canon Dobbs.’

‘Old bugger’s dead.’

‘Sophie’s given me a collection of news cuttings he kept about the Prince of Wales and the Church and other connections. Why would Dobbs keep a royal scrapbook?’

‘Traditionalist of the first order, Dobbs. Happen he ’d started to notice the lad spreading his favours. I wouldn’t worry about it. Concentrate on covering your own arse.’

‘And your specific advice, as my spiritual director, would be …?’

‘Keep all your cards on the table, face up.’

Merrily shook out a Silk Cut.

‘Explain?’

‘Stage one: find the former owners of this hovel and see what kind of recent history it’s got. Forget the White Lady and the Phantom Stagecoach. The home movies you can do without.’

Home movies : Huw’s latest euphemism for place-memories and trapped events that repeated themselves.

‘And then … if it’s just what the girl claims she saw and there’s nowt blindingly obvious from the last few years, Stage Two would be to set up a low-key house-blessing for a specific date. Being careful, mind, to invite the local incumbent.’

‘There isn’t one. A retired guy’s holding the fort.’

‘He’ll do. Also, you want at least one member of the family – the folks who flogged the place off to the Duchy, plus, if possible, someone from the family as owned it before. For many generations, you said?’

‘So I’m told.’

‘That would help, then. And finally – this is important – you must formally request the presence of an official of the Duchy of Cornwall. The higher up the better.’

‘Wow.’ Merrily sat back, lit her cigarette. ‘Smart.’

‘That way, you’ve acquitted yourself in full view, and they’re all involved – all implicated.’

‘Flawless.’

It wouldn’t be, of course. It was never that easy.

‘And what do you do after that?’ Huw said.

‘I don’t know. What do I do after that, boss?’

‘You bugger off out of it just as fast as your cute little legs will carry you.’

‘What about the woman? Fuchsia. Aftercare?’

‘Oh, aye.’

There was a lengthy, meditative silence. She imagined him staring down at his peeling slippers, their rubber soles smoking on the edge of the hearth.

‘You do need to separate it,’ he said eventually. ‘If there’s nowt particularly to support it at the house, you most likely are looking at a different problem. You said she was orphaned?’

‘Abandoned. She’s certainly had personal problems. Maybe the house brought something to a head?’

‘Possible. How was the blessing?’

‘Curious. There wasn’t the normal sense of relief afterwards. In fact, she looked up, as if something might have followed us into the church. Said something like, is something coming? Something like that. And laughed. I mean, it’s always a problem, isn’t it? You can never be quite sure when somebody’s winding you up.’

‘Happen include her in your prayers when you do the cleansing. Something moving around under the carpet, was that what you said?’

‘Dust sheets. I suppose a shrink would be talking about demons in her past that she’s covered up. Perhaps she just has a Gothic imagination: the wriggling under the sheets, the face of crumpled linen. She’s also obviously read a fair amount about healing and deliverance, because she knew exactly what she—’

‘Hang on … Gimme that again, lass.’

‘What?’

‘Crumpled linen. A face of crumpled linen?’

‘That’s the image Fuchsia claims she saw when she turned around from the wall she was plastering. Poetic, in its macabre way. Although this would’ve been crumpled plastic.’

‘Aye. Very literary,’ Huw said. ‘But, then, not surprising, really. It’s a quote.’

‘What?’

‘M. R. James. Author of classic ghost stories in the 1900s?’

‘Yeah, I know who M. R. James is.’

‘I can even tell you which story it comes from. “Whistle”.’

‘What are you—?’

‘“Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is the one about the university professor haunted by a malevolent entity which … I’d get hold of a copy if I were you, without too much delay.’

‘You’re saying …’

There’d been a book of James’s stories amongst Fuchsia’s collection in the caravan. Orange-coloured spine on the shelf by the wood stove. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary .

‘All right, lass?’

‘Let me get this totally right. You’re telling me it’s an actual phrase taken from one of M. R. James’s ghost stories?’

Merrily dropped her cigarette in the ashtray and flopped forward, both hands around the old black phone.

Oh, bugger .

‘ Bit of a coincidence, eh? If you have any problems finding the story, give us a call and I’ll scan a few pages and email them across.’

‘Yes. Thank you, Huw.’

Shit .

Merrily tipped the phone very gently into its rest. Gazing at her reflection in the dark mirror of the scullery window and into a too-familiar void.

THIS JOB …

People learned what you did, and envisaged desecrated graves, chalices of blood, night-long spiritual struggles with an indelibly black metaphysical evil, his satanic majesty, The Beast 666.

Their disappointment, almost invariably, was palpable.

So you’ve never really had to rescue anyone from actual demonic possession?

To which you’d shrug and smile awkwardly and admit that, rather than the coils of the Old Serpent, it mostly came down to the spirals of the subconscious mind.

This was the void – the thought that there might, in the end, be nothing there that psychology would not be equipped to explain. That people like Siân Callaghan-Clarke might just be right about the relevance of what you were doing.

The dark night of no-soul. What, in the end, you feared most, and a dampener on the spirit, as Merrily drove down into the Unknown Border, using a route she’d never travelled before: sunken lanes below the bare, abraded hillsides, wind-whipped, twisted trees.

Still England. It had to be; there, below the road, was the River Monnow, which was the border, failing to be crossed by a smashed and collapsing footbridge, fenced off, with a sign that said: Danger .

But if this wasn’t Wales, neither was it truly Herefordshire, not with names like Bagwllydiart on the signposts. Rural Wales – almost all of it, now – was designated tourist country, while Herefordshire’s own tourist country was Ledwardine and its neighbouring black and white villages in the north of the county and the lushness of the Wye Valley in the south.

The Unknown Border was only about an hour from Ledwardine and, sooner or later, it would be joining the New Cotswolds.

Not for a while, though.

And it certainly had never been, nor ever would be, East Anglia.

Jane had them all, natch. The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1862-1936) .

Sitting up in bed last night, under the blackened oak beams, with her dressing gown around her shoulders and the tawny owls fluting in the churchyard, Merrily had read ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, first published in 1904.