Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

It was as if, Lol thought … as if this was how it was meant to be heard, to convey its meaning.

In which case, its meaning was: solitary .

The sky was clear and starry and smeared with a buttery northern light, and the whistling made slow, luminous coils and lonely whorls on the silence.

Twice it had stopped and then started up again from a different direction, the way tawny owls might answer one another across the vastness of the valley.

The oak tree was flat and featureless, like a massive spidery blot of Indian ink. Lol kept on walking towards it.

A joke. But who, in this situation, wouldn’t be unnerved? It would be eerie enough after dark outside your own front door on Ledwardine market square – one reason being that nobody did this any more. Nobody seemed to whistle. No window cleaners, no butchers’ boys with baskets. And nobody whistled this achingly sad, regretful…

As he approached the oak tree, the whistling seemed to develop a slow and rolling rhythm, like the breath-pattern induced, Lol caught himself imagining, by even, heavy pedalling on a gradual incline.

Only me …

He’d thought it was coming from under the tree, perhaps from the hollow that looked like a sacrificial pit. But when he reached the oak, the whistling was still some distance away, across to the right.

It stopped again. Lol crept up to the oak and lowered himself between two of its varicose roots, pushing himself back into the bole, spreading out his legs against the roots, gripping cakes of bark in his palms and staying very still, just another part of the tree, an offering of himself in return for shelter – shelter against madness – as it began again.

The moon was higher now, with an amber cast, and he saw, over to the right – the east? where the distant Eastnor obelisk was, anyway – he thought he saw a movement. He kept still, and the tune continued, fluidly, long beyond the point where his own version might have feebled out. Under the circumstances, with your own breath coming faster, all rational judgement in suspense, it was impossible not to imagine for one thought-dissolving moment…

This time, when it was over, Lol spent some seconds with his eyes closed, trying to breathe evenly, before lifting his hands and beginning – with as lazy and relaxed a rhythm as he could summon – to applaud.

Merrily took three or four long breaths before stepping into the kitchen.

Walking directly through to the hall, this time touching nothing. Activating the living-room light by brushing the metal switch with her sleeve.

Last time, she’d seen it only by the light washing in from the hall. Now, two big white wall brackets were flaring theatrically, scattering shadows, and it was so much worse: blood on the books, blood on the pictures, blood on the walls, blood on the writing table, gouts and drips and smears, and Winnie Sparke in silent freeze-frame.

Winnie wore one of her long filmy dresses which seemed now as if it was hanging together in threads of blood and tissue. Her arms spread out across the bookcase, with books pulled out, and the empty fireplace. Her buckled bare knees, touchingly girlish. A breast partly exposed, cut into like a flaccid fruit. Her face ripped in several places, top lip joined to her nose by strings of blood and mucus. Her throat slashed many times.

But the worst of it was never the gore. It was always the unseeingness of the eyes and the open mouth through which no breath passed.

The room was hot and clammy and stank and, worst of all, it was so waxily still. Merrily swallowed bile, and then something overtook her and she was just standing there raging.

‘You got him out … You brought him home. Keeping your secrets, playing your cards —Why couldn’t you just talk to me? Talk to anybody ?’

She froze. What if he’s still here? What if he’s upstairs? What if he’s halfway down the stairs and listening?

Not likely. Believe it. Seriously not likely. He was long gone. He’d gone lurching out with his whisky, draining the bottle and smashing it against the wall in his agony and self-hatred – please God, let it be self-hatred and repentance, let there be no more of this – and then he’d gone walking out on to the hill.

Why?

‘I mean why, for Christ’s sake, has he done this to you, Winnie? His saviour, his mentor, his—?’

There could be no halfway-rational explanation, not this time, not like the disposal of the drug dealer on the Beacon. This was frenzied. This was full on, the killer looking her in the eyes, as it was being done. This screamed insanity .

Merrily looked into Winnie Sparke’s last frozen cry. Could only see one eye through the blood and the hair. Winnie Sparke’s good hair. And the eye was a dead eye. It had been floating in blood and now the blood had congealed around it like a stiff collar.

‘Why couldn’t you talk about it? ’

Letting the sob empty itself out of her, as she did all there was left to do.

Pray.

Her job.

Take her and hold her and calm her. Take her from this place now. Take her into light .

Following this with the Lord’s Prayer, the oldest exorcism.

‘… Power and the glory, for ever and ever, amen .’

Quelling the dread, she opened her eyes.

And was able, for just a moment, to hold herself in and remain calm in the presence of a new shadow in the room.

Winnie Sparke hung there, no less dead. It was not Winnie Sparke who was breathing, who said, ‘Amen,’ softly from the doorway behind her.

54

Snaps Batons

‘Shouldn’t have done that,’ he said sternly. ‘You broke the vibration.’

Looming over Lol, nodding his head as though it was too heavy for him. He wore baggy grey sweatpants and a white singlet with dark stains and smudges on it.

‘Percussive noises…’ Clapping his hands clumsily; sometimes they missed. ‘… Break the connection. Gone.’

He moved in his bent, shuffling way over to a half-collapsed bale of straw, flopping down on it with his legs apart, his hands clasped between them, his body rocking slowly.

‘Take a pew, old cock.’

Lol found another damaged bale to sit on. There was a lamp on the floor between them, one of those battery-powered lanterns with a blue plastic shade, spraying a light like watered milk over the long shed that was either an open-fronted barn or a horse shelter.

Whatever, it was a walk of only a minute or so from the oak, and he’d come wading out of it soon after Lol had started clapping. Staggering behind his lantern, dazed survivor of some Iron Age tribal skirmish. Lol had recognized him at once from Merrily’s brief description and his accent and the way his words came blustering out as if his lungs were organ bellows.

‘Wasn’t working anyway, tell the truth. Ran out of puff. You need to do the whole jolly thing. All the way through until you become—’

He stopped, blinking slowly. Sliding back along his bale, bringing down a straw-storm from another, his mouth slack.

‘Really don’t know … wassa matter with me tonight.’

What was obviously the matter was coming sickly sweet and sour off his breath. Lol didn’t get too close. It was as well to remember this guy was only here because of a shortage of evidence.

His weighty, ragged moustache hung down either side of his mouth, more Mongol warlord than Victorian composer, his stomach overhanging his sweatpants, like a bag of sugar under his singlet.

‘I look all right to you ?’

‘I suppose,’ Lol said.

Aware of Tim Loste really looking at him now, trying to focus over the moist pink bags under his eyes.