Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

And only one building, the one with the witch’s-hat tower. Should I say it came out of the kiln on the smoke of Rebekah’s cremation? Was it scattered with her ashes?

What came out? What was at the core of this? As Simon had pointed out, there was no agreed ritual for this situation.

Merrily glanced up the alley towards Al Boswell. His hands were raised now, in supplication, and he seemed to be chanting, though she couldn’t hear anything – was Al’s consciousness down there in the Lower World, home of the ancestors and the dead, bargaining with his father, the chovihano , for the soul of Rebekah? What was he offering? What did he expect to pay? She felt scared for him because he came from a culture which was, in essence, unbending.

She also felt an agitation and a tension emanating like cold steam from Simon St John. She banished it, closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on her breathing without changing its rhythm.

In her hands she held a slim prayer book. Into her mind came the image of Rebekah in her sleeveless white blouse. No earrings – the girl wouldn’t have wanted to look like a gypsy for the picture editor at Tit Bits . Poor kid. Poor Rebekah: brazen hussy of 1963, blinded by her own sexuality. As if she’d like to seize the whole world in her teeth .

Eating the world… and suddenly choking. Merrily sensed how dense and dark the flesh-smelling smoke from the kiln would have been, made noxious by all the psychic bacteria that fed on the detritus of violent death. Remnants here, too, of Conrad Lake, his greed, his ultimately murderous cruelty.

This was about separating Rebekah’s soul from all of that and guiding it to the light.

Merrily opened her eyes, consulted the book and said quietly, ‘Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers, and do not condemn us for our sins… Lord have mercy.’

‘ Lord have mercy ,’ Simon echoed from across the alley.

‘Christ have mercy.’

‘ Christ have mercy .’

She visualized Rebekah Smith in the kiln, doubled up, the beautiful features blotched and reddened and distended by coughing and retching and wheezing.

‘Heavenly father.’

‘ Have mercy on her! ’

… While the sulphur rolls burned blue and the few remaining hop-cones yellowed on their loft.

‘Jesus, redeemer of the world…’

‘ Have mercy on her .’

Rebekah screaming inside as the fumes took her.

I watched her heaving and shivering and struggling for breath …

Merrily broke off from the litany. The air felt dense and weighted. She suddenly felt desperately tired, and she was scared to close her eyes again in case she fell asleep on her feet.

‘Oh Christ,’ Simon murmured.

She looked across at him. He was aglow with sweat. He said, ‘You’ve brought someone with you, haven’t you?’ He had his eyes closed now, his fists clenched. ‘You’re carrying the weight of someone.’

Merrily began to pant.

‘Bleeding,’ Simon said. ‘She’s bleeding.’

Merrily whispered, ‘Jesus, redeemer of the world, have mercy on her.’

Her . Rebekah, in her white blouse.

Her . Layla Riddock in her black kimono.

‘Have mercy on them,’ Simon cried out.

Sweat dripped down Merrily’s cheeks.

‘Holy Spirit, comforter…’

‘Have mercy on them.’

‘Holy Trinity, one God…’

‘Have mercy on them.’

‘From all evil…’

‘Deliver her…’

It all came out in a rush now, and they were working together, a unit. ‘ From anger, hatred and malice… From all the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil… Good Lord, deliver them .’

The cotton alb was fused to Merrily’s skin. If she had an aura, it felt like liquid, like oil. The air was very close. There seemed to be a different atmosphere here between the poles, a separate density of air. Between the wires, the sun was like a hole in the sky.

‘Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world.’

‘Have mercy on her,’ Simon said.

‘Yes,’ Merrily said.

She felt that Rebekah was very near, but resistant to the idea of being guided towards the Second Death. It came to her suddenly that Layla had somehow been sent as an intermediary. Allan Henry: Layla, love, excuse me, but these ladies would like to know if you have much contact with the dead .

She prayed for guidance, but she couldn’t see the blue or the gold, and her pectoral cross felt as heavy as an anvil.

The cross? Was the cross preventing—?

She touched it. Please, God, what shall I do? The cross felt cold. She longed to give herself away, as she had in church on the night of the coin, in true and total submission, so that her life-energy, her living spirit, might be used as a vessel of transformation for the tortured essence of Rebekah Smith: a sacrifice.

She turned to Simon, but he seemed a long way away. She closed her eyes, was aware of an intense pressure in her chest, as though she was about to have a heart attack.

She let the prayer book fall and used both hands to slip the chain and the cross up and over her head.

Simon had both arms around the pole with the wooden cross at the top, hugging it, like a sailor who’d roped himself to the mast in a storm. His body seemed to be in spasm. She was aware of a foetid fog between them.

She heard a cry from the end of the alley—

‘ Oh, Mother of God! ’

—which had become like a tunnel now, a tunnel through the middle of the day, and then there was a wrenching sensation from above, as though the crosspiece linking her pole with Simon’s pole was under sudden, severe stress.

Don’t look .

But, of course, she had to.

Her body was held inert by damp dread, but her eyes followed the leaden, loaded creaking to the cross pole. From it, hanging like a lagged cistern between her and Simon St John, the corpse of Gerard Stock was turning slowly, tongue protruding, white and furry, between the rosebud, spittled lips.

Merrily sobbed and sank slowly to her knees.

Flaunting him.

Failure .

Too strong for them.

Too strong for her .

Stock swung from side to side like a swaddled pendulum. Don’t really know what the fuck you’re doing. Waste of time, Merrily. Heard you were a political appointment .

Merrily’s hands fumbled at the airline bag, closed on the flask of holy water.

‘Begone!’ she sobbed in pain and fear and ultimate despair. ‘Begone from this place, every evil haunting and phantasm. Be banished, every delusion and deceit of Satan. In the name of the living God, in the name of the Holy God, in the name of the God of all creation—’

How empty it sounded, how hollow. She was on her knees with the flask of holy water, and she couldn’t get the bloody top off.

She would have fallen forward then, into her own shadow, but there wasn’t one.

It must be noon.

He’d gone, of course he had. He was never there. Nothing dangled from the crosspiece. There was only Simon, with his face in his hands.

Merrily came to her feet.

‘Mine,’ Simon croaked.

‘What?’

‘My projection.’ His face was grey-sheened. ‘Projection of defeat.’

Merrily leaned against the pole, nothing to say. There was no fog, no Stock, and the air in the alley was the same air that lay heavy on the whole of the Frome Valley. She swallowed; it hurt.

When did it ever go right? When did it ever work? Through the overhead wires, the midday sun was splashing its brash, soulless light over the whole of the sky.

Go out losing. What better way? Nothing to look back on, no foundation for thoughts of what might have been.