Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘It’s just an old pub sign, Jane, that’s all.’

‘Mum, it was like a giant tarot card. The Sun? And the Moon? This place had two pubs called The Sun and The Moon? That says nothing to you?’

‘I’m … reserving my opinion.’

‘I think I was probably guided to turn up this road.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘As above, so below,’ Jane said.

The holy well was at the bottom of the churchyard. Like most holy wells, it was disappointing. A trickle under the wall. Ribbons on a nearby bush, which could be down to either visiting pagans or local kids.

Jane crouched down, unzipping her white hoodie, holding cupped hands underneath the water. Merrily was reminded uncomfortably of the author Winnie Sparke, who had hung around the wells in Malvern, and what had happened to her.

‘Jane, you know how much I really hate doing the mother-hen bit, but that water …’

Jane looked into her cupped hands but didn’t drink the water. She smiled and dabbed some on her cheeks. Beyond the body of the church, the vertically-slit-eyed tower gazed down with what Merrily took to be a kind of benign cynicism.

‘If we go back to the church, we can see the outline of the original circular nave. Templar trade mark. Designed in honour of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem?’

‘On the other hand …’ Jane stood up and walked off to the edge of the churchyard ‘… if we go along here, we should be able to see the dovecote designed to commemorate the Beast 666.’

‘It’s on private land. We’d need to ask for permission.’

‘Not just to see it.’

Jane – why else was she here? – was already walking across a marshy-looking field towards the fringe of a farm with barns, storage tanks, a galvanized shed and some kind of stone silo. Merrily, wrong shoes, as usual – bugger – stepping uncertainly across a boggy bit, following a shallow stream, while slowly realizing that the stone silo on the edge of the farmyard clutter was probably what they were looking for.

She stopped and confronted it: a squat round tower, like a sawn-off, roofless hop-kiln. The fading sun balanced on its rim, Jane shading her eyes.

‘Doesn’t look very evil from here,’ Merrily said.

‘Why should it be evil?’ Jane turning in annoyance. ‘That’s just Christian propaganda. Anyway, recent translations of the Book of Rev from the ancient Greek suggest it might actually be six one six.’

‘Not being much of a Greek scholar, I may have to continue to be wary of 666.’

‘Whatever,’ Jane said, ‘it does suggest a kind of partly submerged mystical awareness, doesn’t it?’

‘It does?’

‘Sacred architecture.’

‘It’s a dovecote.’

‘Everything is significant. Another pointer to this whole hill being a store of arcane knowledge. I can’t believe Coops and his guys haven’t checked this place out. I need to ask him.’

‘Jane, I think—’

Merrily shut up. Some mothers with daughters, it was pregnancy, abortion, drugs. If the worst you had to worry about was your kid creating a fantasy landscape …

And Coops, of course. Maybe she ought to find out more about Coops.

‘Fantastic energy here, Mum.’ Jane began whirling around with her arms spread wide, eight years old again. ‘Can’t you feel it?’

‘Not to speak of, no.’

The sun had tucked itself under the rim of the tubular dovecote, the ground dropping into shadow, and Merrily was aware of a damp pattering, as Jane said, ‘You just don’t want to admit—’

And then was staggering back, something long and grey and damp surging between them.

‘God—’

Merrily lurching towards Jane through the wet grass, a woman’s voice crying out behind her.

‘ Roscoe! ’

When Jane sat down in the grass, it was on top of her, pinning her down, all over her face.

Tail waving, thank God. A woman with shoulder-length white-blonde hair threw down a short leather dog-lead.

‘You bastard , Roscoe!’

The dog shifted from Jane, looked back at the woman, seeming bemused.

‘Obviously thought she was offering to play with him,’ the woman said. ‘Is it racist nowadays to say the Irish wolfhound’s the stupidest bloody creature on four legs? You all right, darling?’

‘I … sure.’

Jane had struggled upright, holding Roscoe’s hairy head against a hip to prove that she wasn’t afraid of him. If there hadn’t been energy in the air before, there was now.

‘Teach you to stand there in a place like this,’ the woman said, ‘calling out the Number of the bloody Beast.’

THE WOMAN PICKED up the dog-lead. She wore an ancient Barbour, flayed almost white in places, full of holes and flakily at odds with her rose-pink silk scarf. Her face was long and thin-lipped, and older than the Barbour, but by how much was anybody’s guess.

‘If we’re on your land,’ Merrily said, ‘I apologize.’

Frowning at Jane, who was brushing herself down, smudged brown paw marks down the front of the white hoodie.

‘It isn’t my land, don’t worry.’ The woman patted her knee and Roscoe ambled over, and she attached his lead as a mobile phone beeped inside the Barbour. ‘Not that ownership of most of the land around here isn’t open to some kind of dispute. Excuse me a moment.’

Reining in the wolfhound, she dug out the mobile, pushed back her straight white hair and held the phone to an ear without turning or moving away.

‘Mr Hinton, good afternoon … No, not yet, I’m afraid. As you may not have noticed, it’s Sunday … Yes, indeed, I’m expecting the delivery in the next week and as soon as it gets here I shall bring it round … Yes, I guarantee you’ll love it. Guarantee it … Money back, yes, absolutely. We’ll talk again, Mr Hinton.’

The woman clicked off the phone, dropped it into a coat pocket.

‘Farmers. They think everybody works on Sundays. The columbarium, yes, why does it have 666 chambers? Not often spoken of locally. As you see by its situation, we tend not to advertise our antiquities.’

‘Why not?’ Jane asked. ‘It’s supposed to be unique.’

‘No idea.’ The woman smiled, exposing a dark and raunchy slit between upper front teeth, setting light to deep-set but vivid blue-green eyes. ‘But then I was merely born here. We tend, nowadays, to rely on outsiders – usually Americans – to explain all our mysteries. Where’ve you come from?’

Merrily told her Ledwardine, in the north of the county. Aware of time moving on, the need to take a brief look at the Master House before they left.

‘You’re no use at all then.’ The woman patted her pockets. ‘Haven’t got a fag on you, by any chance? Slim chance nowadays, I know.’

‘Actually, I have.’ Merrily reached down to her shoulder bag. ‘Only Silk Cut, I’m afraid.’

‘That would be perfect, m’ dear. Left my buggers on the mantelpiece, and I’m absolutely gasping. Thank you.’

She mouthed a cigarette and Merrily lit it for her and she swallowed a lungful of smoke, head tilted back to exhale it into the sky in the direction of the devil’s dovecote.

‘Lit up in the pub the other night in joyful contravention of the law. Chap looking at me as if I’d pissed on his shoes. Bloody government. How dare they?’

Merrily looked at Jane. Jane was wide-eyed and trying not to laugh.

‘Ledwardine, eh?’ The woman lowering her eyes to Merrily’s Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt. ‘And you evidently know the little digger chap with specs that you or I might use to track the canals on Mars.’