Phil Rickman: The Cure of Souls

Sodden with weariness, she put away the flask, picked up her airline bag.

Simon didn’t move. Merrily heard a crumbly rustling that her tired mind dispiritingly translated into brittle hop-cones fragmenting on mummified bines.

‘Almighty God,’ Simon said numbly, gazing beyond her. ‘Please don’t do this.’

THE FIRST SOUND Merrily was aware of was the vibrating of the wires overhead.

It wasn’t much; if there’d been a breeze, it would have sounded natural. If these had been electric wires, it would have seemed normal. It was a thin sound, with an almost human frailty, a keening, that somehow didn’t belong to summer. The rustling overlaid it, as if all the wires were entwined with dried bines. This other sound belonged to winter. It sang of mourning, loss, lamentation.

The sounds came not from their alley, but the one adjacent to it and, as Merrily went to stand at its entrance, she noticed that it seemed oriented directly on the tower of the kiln, the poles bending at almost the same angle as the point of its cowl.

Merrily stood there with sweat drying on her face, edging past the fear stage to the part where she knew she was dreaming but it didn’t matter.

She waited. She would not move. She fought to regulate her breathing.

For here was the Lady of the Bines, approaching down the abandoned hop-corridor, drifting from frame to frame, and the sky was white and blinding, and the Lady moved like a shiver.

Simon St John came up behind Merrily.

‘What am I seeing, Simon?’

He didn’t reply. She could hear his rapid breathing.

‘Whose projection now?’ she said, surprised that she could speak at all. ‘Whose projection is this?’

She blinked several times, but it was still there: this slender white woman, pale and naked and garlanded with shrivelled hops.

Merrily put on her cross. Christ be with me, Christ within me …

The bine, thick with yellowed cones, was pulled up between the legs, over the glistening stomach and between the breasts. Wound around and around the neck, covering the lower face, petals gummed to the sweat on the cheeks.

Christ behind me, Christ before me …

The head was bent, as though she was watching her feet, wondering where they were taking her. She was not weaving, as Lol had described his apparition, but almost slithering through the parched grass and the weeds. And she couldn’t be real or else why was she affecting the wires?

When she was maybe ten yards away, the head came up.

Merrily went rigid.

The Lady swayed. Her eyes were fully open but hardened, like a painted doll’s, under a thickly smeared lacquer of abstraction. They were a corpse’s eyes, a ghost’s eyes. The end of the bine was stuffed into her mouth, brittle cones crushed between her teeth, and those petals pasted to her cheeks – grotesque, like one of the foliate faces you found on church walls.

She put out her arms, not to Merrily but to Simon, but he stepped away.

‘Stay back. For Christ’s sake, don’t touch her. Keep a space.’

The woman’s hands clawed at the air, as though there was something between them that she could seize. Her breath was irregular and came in convulsions, her body arching, parched petals dropping from her lips like flakes of dead skin.

‘Don’t go within a foot of her,’ Simon rasped.

‘It’s all right,’ Merrily said softly.

And she reached for the clawing hands, and waited for the cold electricity to come coursing up her arms all the way to her heart.

NOON: THE DEAD moment in time. 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 still. Everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead .

But these people clustered in the base of the bowl under the midday sun, they were not the dead.

The severely beautiful elderly woman, weeping, and the sharp-faced, white-haired man with an arm around her and the plump woman in a wheelchair and the leather-faced, crewcut man demanding an ambulance – surely somebody had a bloody mobile phone. And Lol, standing apart from the others, looking thoughtful.

And the pale, naked woman under the hop-frame, lying with the padded airline bag under her head. Not even she was dead.

Keep her here? Would that contain it? For how long? How long?

Merrily looked up at the sun.

Simon St John understood. ‘Get back. Please. Just a couple of yards, please.’ Simon was OK, he was in the clear – the woman was not dead, had not been dead when she walked under the wires. Simon was all right with this. Wasn’t he?

‘Yes,’ the woman agreed irritably, ‘Just keep back. I’m all right. I’ll be all right .’ She coughed, her head thrown back over the airline bag, a bubble of saliva and a half-masticated hop-petal in a corner of her slack mouth. ‘I’ll be with you in… just give me… give me a moment… give me a bloody minute .’

Merrily looked up at Simon. He nodded towards the woman. The hop-bine was still curled around her legs, yellowed petals crumbled into her pubic hair.

Simon said, ‘You know her?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Merrily knelt down, was immediately enclosed in a dense aura of sweat and hops. ‘Annie, listen to me – were you in the kiln? Were you in the kiln, just now?’

‘Cordon it off!’ The eyes were still blurred. ‘We… need the fire service. There’s probably—’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said.

‘Gases. An escape of gases.’

‘Or sulphur.’

‘I don’t… I got out of there, but I must have lost… Put somebody on the door. Don’t let anybody go back in there. It may be… I think I lost consciousness, just for a moment. You—’ She seemed to register Merrily for the first time. ‘What the hell are you —?’

‘I’m going back to the village,’ Charlie said. ‘We need an ambulance.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Annie Howe tried to sit up. ‘That’s—’

‘Who’s he?’ Simon demanded. The woman in the wheel-chair had made it from the path, breathing hard from her struggle across the baked ground. Simon was holding her hand.

‘Her father,’ Merrily told him. ‘Charlie, she’s right. Forget the ambulance. But—’ She met his eyes, his copper’s eyes now, hard as nuts. ‘There’s something else we need to do, and we need to do it now. I’m not kidding, Charlie, we’ve got a problem here, you must be able to see that.’

‘And possibly a solution,’ Simon St John said.

‘Dad?’ Annie Howe struggling to sit up. ‘What the hell are you —?’

‘Stay where you are, girl,’ Charlie said softly. ‘Everything’s all right.’ He looked down at Merrily. ‘She been attacked?’

‘Not in the way you think, no. In the way I think – do you know what I’m saying?’

‘I don’t know, Merrily, her clothes…’

Lol was there. ‘I think it’s pretty obvious she took them off herself, Charlie. The things we saw strewn across…?’

‘I’ll fetch them,’ Sally Boswell said.

Merrily came to her feet. ‘Charlie, I swear to God. I swear to you that this is not some scam. She was in the kiln just now – on her own. The wrong place at the wrong time. Charlie, it all comes down to that place.’

‘I was simply’ – Annie shook her ash-blonde head in irritation – ‘taking a final look round before we handed the keys back to…’ She looked vague for a moment. ‘Before we handed over the keys to S–Stock’s solicitors. Is there some water? If I can just have some water…’