Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

Stupid question.

No time for stupid questions.

As Lol got out of the car, the front door at the end of the terrace opened and a man in a light blue suit came out.

Lol stayed close to the Astra. The man didn’t look behind him, or towards Lol, as he walked out of the entrance. Could this actually be the right guy – wide shoulders, stiff white hair? Stop him now? Accost him before he got into his car?

But the man didn’t go to a car. He walked briskly along the pavement. When a woman passed him, he said warmly, ‘How are you , my dear?’ Glanced up into the sky. ‘Make the most of it, it’s due to break today, I hear.’ Rich, rolling local accent.

Lol followed him to where the road widened and you could see a junction with fields beyond. But before that there was a big Safeway supermarket, a commercial palace with a tower, set well back behind its car park. The man almost skipped down the steps towards the supermarket. Lol waited until he’d reached the bottom and was strolling across the car park towards the entrance, before following.

He watched the white-haired man go through the automatic door. Hesitated. Was he supposed to challenge this guy across the fruit counter, maybe block his trolley in one of the aisles?

Lol went through the door, through the porch, past Postman Pat and his black and white cat in their van, and on into the store. He looked from side to side: a dozen or so customers, none of them a man in a blue suit – maybe he’d gone to the Gents’. Lol moved further into the store, uncertain. He felt conspicuous, so he picked up a shopping basket from a stack. He felt hollow. He was hollow. He couldn’t do this.

The voice was very close to his left ear.

‘Looking for me, brother?’

A clock made out of a breadboard with a six-pointed star on it put the time at ten-fifteen a.m.

‘Why noon?’ Merrily asked bluntly.

Simon St John exchanged a glance with Al.

Al was sitting straight-backed on his stool, determinedly defiant, with his hands in the side pockets of his waistcoat. Simon St John, however, looked as wrecked as his jeans.

‘When we travelled,’ Al said, ‘we camped at night, but we always stopped the wagons at noon: the time of no shadows. Do you understand? Noon is the dead moment in time. When the day belongs to the dead – all the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything is still, everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead.’

‘He means that noon is the time of the mulo ,’ Simon said. ‘The only time you’ll see one by daylight.’

‘No.’ Al tossed a guitar bridge from one hand to the other. ‘In most cases, you won’t see it at all.’

Merrily shrank from the melodrama. The time of no shadows . And yet…

‘You do know, don’t you, that we did the Deliverance in the kiln around midday? Stock wanted me to do it at night. I said, let’s do it now, in the full light of a summer morning. Let’s not make it sinister . You did know that?’

‘And was this when the sulphur came to you?’

‘At midday, yes. Or very close.’

Al glanced at the photograph. ‘She could have had you. You were lucky.’

‘Or protected.’

‘And were you protected in the hop-yard last night?’

Merrily felt herself blush. ‘It happened too quickly.’

‘Lucky,’ Al said.

‘What is she?’ Merrily asked. ‘I need to know. You use these terms – muli . Very sinister. But what are we really talking about?’

Simon St John came over to sit down. He had a glass of water. All three of them were drinking water. No alcohol, no caffeine, not today.

‘Not quite a ghost,’ Simon said. ‘Not possession either, in the classic sense. You could say it’s a question of borrowing the aura.’

‘Very much a Romany thing,’ Al pointed out. ‘Live lightly and borrow.’

‘But the mulo doesn’t necessarily give back,’ Simon said. He kept rubbing his black-shirted arms as though they were cold.

‘This is true,’ Al accepted.

Simon said, ‘When Shakespeare talked about shuffling off the mortal coil, he was probably close to it. Death appears to be a staggered process – when the body dies, the spirit exists for a while in the aura, the astral body, the corporeal energy field. Its normal procedure, at this stage, is to look for the exit sign and get the hell out.’

‘But if the cycle’s incomplete,’ Al said, ‘if there’s a need for justice, for balance, for satisfaction …’

Merrily thought about it. ‘This is about what’s sometimes called the Second Death isn’t it?’

‘This is about avoiding the Second Death.’ Simon leaned forward. ‘I don’t think it’s common, not in our society. I don’t imagine it’s a common occurrence in the Romany culture either. I think it’s something they’ve tended to blow up out of proportion over the centuries – I bloody hope it is.’

‘It’s an unpleasant state to be in,’ Al said, ‘because the mulo is said to require life-energy to maintain its existence. Hence the term “living dead”. There are tales of a mulo or muli sucking the blood of the living, but’ – he waved a long hand dismissively – ‘it’s all energy. Sexual, mostly. The victim may be the former life-partner – you get tales of people having sex with their dead husbands or wives – or the person held responsible for the sudden death of the subject before their time.’

‘In the stories, they talk of a solid physical presence,’ Simon said. ‘But we prefer dreams, or sexual fantasies.’

‘You’re selling it as psychology?’ Merrily asked, doubtful.

‘It’s all psychology,’ Simon said. ‘That doesn’t make it any less real. It doesn’t make it any less frightening.’ His face was gaunt; it was one of those soft, pale faces which could alternate in seconds between looking youthful and prematurely aged. ‘The thought of Rebekah – or what she may have become – leaves me cold with—I’m sorry.’

Al stood up and walked over to the photograph. ‘It seems to me that our task is to separate the spirit of Rebekah from what’s formed around it. The evil that grows like fungus around hatred and rage. You follow, drukerimaskri ?’

‘And lead it to God. To the light.’

‘And the evil,’ Simon said sourly. ‘Where does that go?’

‘ My responsibility.’ Al walked to the door. ‘You two probably have Christian things to work out. I’m going to the place. I’m going to talk to my father. Come when you’re ready, you won’t disturb me.’

‘Al…?’ Merrily touched his sleeve.

‘It’ll work out, drukerimaskri .’ He looked again at the picture of the young woman amateurishly pouting at the sun. ‘She’s ripe. She’s swollen. We can’t delay.’

He walked out without looking back.

Councillor Howe said, ‘Small piece of advice, brother Robinson, in case you’re ever called upon to tail anybody again. Nobody comes shopping at a supermarket and parks half a mile away. Just a small point.’

‘Thanks.’ Lol took the two cups of tea off the tray, along with Charlie Howe’s doughnut. This time in the morning, fewer than a quarter of the tables in the supermarket coffee shop were taken. They were sitting at a window table, just up from the creche.

‘I take it this en’t council business, then.’ Charlie Howe’s brown, leathery face was not remotely wary. He bit into his doughnut. Dark, liquid jam spurted. Charlie licked his fingers. ‘And you’re not a newspaperman after my memoirs?’