Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls
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- Название:The Cure of Souls
- Автор:
- Издательство:Corvus
- Жанр:
- Год:2001
- ISBN:978-0-85789-019-1
- Рейтинг книги:4 / 5. Голосов: 1
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Her lips unmoving. The words forming in her heart.
Her heart chakra , Jane would insist: the body’s main emotional conduit.
Without irritation, she sent Jane away again and put Amy at the periphery of her consciousness, at the entrance to her candlelit sanctuary. She knelt for some more minutes, losing all sense of herself, opening her heart to…
She’d long ago given up trying to visualize God. There was no He or She. This was a Presence higher than gender, race or religion, transcending identity. All she would ever hope to do was follow the lamplit path into a place within and yet beyond her own heart and stay there and wait, patient and passive and without forced piety.
When – if – the time came, she would ask if Amy might join them in the sanctuary.
Amy and…
Justine?
Three questions hovered, three possibilities: Is the problem psychological, or demonic, or connected with the unquiet spirit of a dead person?
Merrily let the questions rise like vapour, and prayed calmly for an answer. More minutes passed; she was only dimly aware of where she was and yet there was a fluid feeling of focus and, at the same time, a separation… a sublime sense of the diminution of herself… the aching purity and beauty of submission to something ineffably higher.
At one stage – although, somehow, she didn’t remember any of this until it was over – she’d felt an intrusion, a discomfort. And for a long moment there was no candlelight and the chancel was as dark – darker – than the rest of the church and bitterly cold and heavy with hurt, incomprehension, bitterness and finally an all-encompassing sorrow.
She didn’t move, the moment was gone and so, it seemed, was Amy Shelbone. And Merrily’s cheeks were wet with tears, and she was aware of a fourth question:
What shall I do?
Please, what shall I do?
She tossed the heavy old coin and it fell with an emphatic thump to the carpet in the chancel. She had to bring one of the candlesticks from the altar to see which side up it was. But it didn’t matter, she knew anyway. This was only proof, only confirmation.
She held the candle close to the coin. The candle was so much shorter now, the candlestick bubbled with hot wax.
Tails.
Nothing demonic .
She tossed again.
Tails.
No possession by an unquiet spirit .
She nodded, held the coin tightly in her right hand, snuffed out the candles, bowed her head to the altar and walked down the aisle and out of the church.
In the porch, it was chilly. The goosebumps came up on her arms.
In the churchyard, it was raining finely out of a grey sky that was light though moonless. Clouds rose like steam above the orchard beyond the graves. It had been a warm, summer evening when she went in, and now—
Now a figure appeared from around the side of the porch, carrying an axe.
11
One Girl in Particular
THE DEW ON the tombstone was soaking through the cotton alb to her thighs. She had her arms wrapped around herself, one hand still clutching her coin, and she was shivering.
Disoriented, she looked up, following the steeple to the starless sky, puzzled because it was so bright up there, yet she couldn’t see a moon.
‘Oughter get home, vicar,’ Gomer Parry said. ‘Don’t bugger about n’more.’
He was leaning on his spade. It was an ordinary garden spade, not an axe, but could be nearly as deadly, she imagined, in the hands of the wiry little warrior in the flat cap and the bomber jacket. So glad it was Gomer, Merrily tried to smile, but her lips took a while to respond. She felt insubstantial, weightless as a butterfly, and just as transient. She gripped the rounded rim of the tombstone, needing gravity.
‘Wanner get some hot tea down you, girl.’ Gomer’s fingers were rolling a ciggy on the T-handle of the spade.
Now in semi-retirement from his long-time business of digging field drains and cesspits, Gomer saw to the graveyard, where his Minnie lay, and kept the church orchard pruned and tidy. Also, without making much of a thing out of it, he reckoned it was part of his function to look out for the vicar. This vicar, anyway. Been through some situations together, she and Gomer. But still she couldn’t tell him why she’d been in the church tonight or what had happened in there.
The colour of the sky alarmed her. It was streaked with orange cream, laying a strange glare on Gomer’s bottle glasses. Merrily pushed her fingers through her hair. It felt matted with dried sweat.
‘Time… time is it, Gomer?’
‘Time?’ He looked up at the sky behind the steeple. ‘All but five now, sure t’be.’
‘Five in the morning ?’
Her knees felt numb. Strips of… of sun were alight between layers of cloud like Venetian blinds over the hills.
Gomer struck a match on a headstone. ‘That Mrs Griffiths, it was, phoned me. Her don’t sleep much n’more since her ol’ man snuffed it. Reckoned there was some bugger in the church, ennit? Bit of a glow up the east window, see. Vicar? What’s wrong? ’
‘It can’t be.’ Merrily was shaking her head, frenziedly. Her face felt stiff. ‘It can’t be. I’ve only been—Gomer, I…’ She clutched his arm. ‘I went in there… maybe an hour ago. An hour and a half at the most. It was about ten o’clock… ten-thirty.’
And then the earth turned .
The molten copper of the dawn sent terrifying pulses into Merrily’s head.
Gomer patted her hand.
‘Young Jane… Her’s gone away, then?’
‘Huh?’
‘First time you been alone yere, I reckon, vicar.’
‘It was ten-thirty,’ she said faintly. ‘I swear to God, ten-thirty at the latest.’
She remembered then how far the candles had burned down. It couldn’t be .
Six hours? Those few minutes had become… hours?
Her hands were trembling. The penny dropped out of one and fell onto the tombstone where she’d been sitting.
She recalled a blurred Britannia on the coin. Tails .
Gomer lit his ciggy. ‘Needs a bit of a holiday yourself, you ask me, vicar. Pack a case, bugger off somewhere nobody knows you, or what you do. Don’t say no prayers for nobody for a week, I wouldn’t.’
She bent to pick up the coin. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for dragging you out, Gomer. I really… Maybe I fell asleep or something.’
‘Sure t’be.’ Gomer Parry stood there nodding sagely, patient as a donkey.
She met his eyes. Both of them knew she didn’t believe she’d been asleep in the church, not for one minute of those six hours.
She invited Gomer back to the vicarage, but he wouldn’t come with her. ‘Strikes me you don’t need no chat, vicar,’ he said perceptively. ‘’Sides which, me and Nev got a pond to dig out, over at Almeley. Get an early start. Makes us look efficient, ennit?’
She walked back to the vicarage lucidly aware of every step, the warming of the air, the shapes of the cobbles on the square, the tension of the ancient black timbers holding Ledwardine together.
Back in the kitchen, she looked around the painted walls, as if walking into the room for the first time. Yes, she’d been away for a while, a night had passed. She put the kettle on and some food out for Ethel. The little black cat didn’t start to eat for quite a while, just sat on the kitchen flags and stared at her, olive-eyed, while she drank her tea.
‘I look different or something, puss?’
Ethel didn’t blink. Merrily went upstairs and had a shower hot enough to hurt. She was aching, but she wasn’t tired. She still felt light and unsteady, slightly drunk. But also strengthened, aware of a core of something flat and firm and quiet in her abdomen. Afterwards, she stood at the landing window, wrapped in a bath towel like someone out of a Badedas ad, and watched the morning sun shining like a new penny.
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