Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Police, it is, see. Can’t say too much on the phone, but anything that’ll help bury that bastard, I’ll do it, they knows that.’

‘We’re working for the police ?’

‘Can’t say too much. Ten o’clock, boy?’

‘Early night for you, too, then,’ Moira said when he folded up the phone. ‘Hand me the torch, Laurence, I can see m’self back.’

‘You’ll need someone to run for help if you get attacked,’ Lol said.

Moira rolled her eyes, taking down her black cloak from one of the hooks inside the stable door. The cloak was well worn, he noticed, and its hem was frayed. She walked outside and waited for him. The night was dry now and the wind seemed to have pulled back into the west, leaving a thin breeze.

They followed the pool of torchlight along the track, between two old oaks, avoiding the puddles.

Moira said, ‘Jane’s mother, your… friend – how’d she come to be doing that job?’

‘You don’t believe in a calling?’

‘No, becoming a priest, I can understand that part. In other circumstances I might’ve gone that way, too, who can say? I was meaning the exorcism side of it. I don’t know how many women priests would be doing that job, but I’d guess not many.’

‘No. How it happened was, a year or two ago she was faced with something she couldn’t explain, a… well, a haunting. And the Church wasn’t helpful, and she made some comments at a particular conference about the lack of any kind of real advice for the clergy on the paranormal. And there was a guy there who was about to become the new bishop of Hereford, and he had this old-style exorcist he wanted to get rid of.’

‘He tossed her in there cold?’

‘There was a training course.’

‘Oh right, a training course . So that’s all right, then.’

He looked at Moira, her cloak billowing a little as if it was responding to her annoyance.

She said, ‘Were there no’ some… aspects of herself she needed to resolve, perhaps? Just that I’ve talked to a couple of exorcists over the years, and they both got into this particular ministry to try and understand certain experiences or abilities they’d discovered they possessed – precognition… clairvoyance… mediumship.’

‘Common ground there for you?’

‘Oh, aye, it’s all been pretty much normal with me since I was a wee girl. Hereditary – from ma mother.’ She stopped, pulling the cloak around her. ‘I suppose what always bothered me most was not that I was sensing stuff that just seemed to go flying past other people, but why ? Why me, y’ know? What was I supposed to do with it? Was there some wider purpose, or was it just there to give me a hard time – penance from another life or some shit like that? I just wondered if this was how it was with your friend – if she had personal stuff to come to terms with.’

Lol shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t claim to be psychic. She realizes she was brought in because she was a woman, youngish, personable… new image. That’s it, really. And she’s trying really hard to live up to it.’

‘Jesus.’ Moira ducked as more trees locked branches overhead. ‘These guys have some things to answer for, don’t they just? The administrators, the politicians, the power people with their meaningless degrees and their cheesy Tony Blair smiles, who think finding their sensitive side is learning how to change nappies and slice the fucking quiche. They never appoint people they believe can actually do anything, in case they do it too well. Just the ones they’re pretty sure they can control.’

‘He’s gone now, anyway.’ Lol stopped at an old footbridge over the narrow River Frome, which had seeped through the summer and now was racing with the rains of autumn. ‘You think that, as a normal person, with no obvious special… attributes, she maybe shouldn’t be doing what she’s doing?’

Moira leaned against the bridge’s damp wooden railing. ‘It bother you , what she does?’

‘Well, it’s not really my place—’

‘Oh, come on !’

‘It’s just that she was doing it before we—’

‘Does it scare you?’

‘Maybe not as much as it should.’ He pointed the Maglite vertically so that it made a white cone in the air. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Or maybe you’re more afraid of what’s in here’ – Moira pointed to the side of her head – ‘than what just might be out there.’ She levered herself away from the rail. ‘Well, more often than not, in my experience, Laurence, they are one and the same. Seems to me…’ She crossed the footbridge. ‘Ach, this is none of my—’

‘No, go on.’

A single light gleamed ahead of them. She’d taken his advice and left a light on in the granary, so that when they came out the other side of the trees they could see it in the middle distance.

‘It would be lovely,’ Moira said, ‘to think that the Holy Church confers protection. But I cannae help thinking that the awful mess that is modern Anglicanism is now becoming so far removed from the source that being an Anglican exorcist—’

‘Deliverance Consultant.’

‘Maybe it’s a wee bit like going into an unknown tropical jungle without your injections, carrying a road map of the Home Counties. Deliverance Consultant . Jesus, the weak-kneed bastards can’t even say what they mean.’

Lol stopped on the bridge. Beneath it, the swollen Frome foamed and spat; it wasn’t the river he thought he knew.

From the far bank, Moira said, ‘So I was lunching today with your not-invariably-amiable local clergyman, the Reverend Simon St John. A serious psychic, dogged all his life by premonitions, apparitions, all the bloody itions you can name. Still thinking of it as a kind of sickness, and the Church of England as his sanatorium. Guy who’ll run a mile from the unexplained.’

Lol joined her on the bank, uneasy. The torch beam showed the frayed hem of Moira’s cloak trailing in the mud; she didn’t seem concerned.

‘Simon and I were discussing your problem – the need to keep up appearances. In truth, we couldnae see you at the heart of village life – in your alien sweatshirt, handing round the vol- au-vents at the vicarage garden party, then stepping up on the podium with the Boswell guitar to perform a couple of angsty numbers for the parishioners. Simon said if it was him in Merrily’s shoes they could all go eat their lace curtains. But then, he’s a guy.’

The kind of guy, Lol reflected, who never worried about appearances and got away with it. Merrily tended not to get away with anything.

‘In the end, though, we couldnae come up with an easy answer, although Simon said it’d be a terrible shame if you didnae come through, the two of you. Not least, he said, because of what she’s doing… this lonely path, full of doubt and soul- searching and wondering whether you’re going clean out of your mind. She needs somebody around her who’s up to recognizing madness.’

‘Thanks.’

‘As for the wee girl…’

‘Jane?’

They came to the granary, the light from the window outlining the steps. ‘Some problem there, Laurence, my impression. Not a happy kid. I may be wrong; I don’t think so.’

Merrily limped into the vicarage, dragging the black sack after her – an ordinary Herefordshire Council medium-quality plastic bin liner. Under the security light over the church porch, she’d taken one look inside and then closed the top quickly, spinning the sack round and round.

She shut the front door and stood with her back to it, panting. She felt as if something was making circles of madness around her. She didn’t know whether to call the police tonight or…