Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

The airline bag was open at her feet. She brought from it one flask and placed it on the table.

‘This was once a hop-crib,’ Lol observed. ‘See the crosspieces? There’d be like a big canvas hammock thing hanging here.’

‘Gosh,’ Merrily said, ‘you know your way around hops, then.’

‘There’s a museum down the road. They’ve got several cribs.’ Lol sensed that Merrily was less sure about all this now, after meeting Mrs Stock. He wondered if he should tell her about the Lady of the Bines.

He looked around the circular wall of old bricks, some of them actually blackened by the furnace. It was like being in a big chimney and nearly as dark. Apart from the stove and a tall, juddering fridge everything in here seemed to be still hop-related. Even the shelves on which crockery was piled looked old and stained.

‘OK,’ Merrily said quietly. She looked around the kitchen, then took down one of the coffee cups, put it in the centre of the table. She bent and took a small canister out of the airline bag, stepped back, closed her eyes.

Lol moved away, looking down at his trainers. He couldn’t quite believe he was doing this. He felt privileged to be here, but that didn’t make him feel any closer to her. She was The Reverend Watkins.

Merrily said softly, ‘We come to bless this place and pray that the presence of God may be known and felt in it. We pray that all which is evil and unclean may be driven from it. As a sign of the pouring forth and cleansing of God’s Holy Spirit, which we desire for this place, we use this water. Water has been ordained by Christ for use in the sacrament of Baptism…’

She poured water from the flask into the coffee cup, whispered to Lol, ‘We’re guarding against anything else that might be around.’

He nodded. The fridge rattled.

‘Lord God Almighty, the Creator of life, bless this water. As we use it in faith, forgive us our sins, support us in sickness and protect us from the power of evil.’

Merrily made the sign of the cross, opened her eyes and picked up the small canister. She took off the lid: salt. She blessed the salt, sprinkled some on the water. ‘Water for purification,’ she explained softly to Lol. ‘Salt representing the element of earth. A formidable combination. In any religion.’

Merrily stepped back from the table. ‘You up for this, Lol?’

Lol nodded.

‘Think calm.’

‘Sure.’

Merrily put her right hand briefly over his. Her fingers were cooler than Stephie Stock’s. The light, at close to noon, glanced off her pectoral cross. Lol thought, unhappily, of vampires.

‘I think we can bring them in now,’ Merrily said.

IT WAS PARTICULARLY during a Requiem Eucharist that images of the departed had been known to appear, sometimes standing next to the priest. They would usually look solid and entirely natural, an extra member of a select congregation.

Sometimes, as the rite was concluding, they would smile.

Gratitude . The received wisdom was that the hovering essence, presented with an overview and offered assistance, would usually recognize the pointlessness and the tedium of haunting. Nine out of ten cases , Huw Owen had told his students, they’re not going to resist you. They’ll not fight. Most times you’ll get a welcome like an AA van at a breakdown on the M4 .

And so sometimes they appeared. Smiling.

Actually, this had never happened to Merrily – either that or she wasn’t sufficiently sensitive to have noticed. Always nervous enough, anyway, before it began. Who was she to go dancing on the great boundary wall?

Never, never, never show nerves , Huw Owen would warn his students. All the same, don’t let them think it’s a bloody tea party .

A balancing act, then, these dealings with the dead.

Initially, Merrily had prepared for a Requiem for Stewart Ash. The dining table, the converted hop-crib, was to be her altar. On it, she’d set out wine in a small chalice she kept in the airline bag and communion wafers in a Tupperware container.

And then – woman priest’s privilege? – she’d changed her mind.

Question of sledgehammer and nuts , Huw had said more than once. You don’t even get out the nutcrackers if you can squeeze it open between finger and thumb .

So she ended up telling the Stocks she didn’t think there were enough people here for a valid requiem – not enough committed Christians (she didn’t actually say that). She’d explained to them that she proposed, in this first instance, to offer a prayer commending the soul of Stewart Ash to God, and maybe a prayer of penitence for his killer, followed by a blessing of each room, a sprinkling of holy water.

A Eucharist for Stewart would be the next step if all this proved ineffective.

Gerard Stock had nodded: whatever the priest thought best.

Stewart’s book on hop-growing still lay on the table. Merrily was unsure about this. Perhaps it should have been taken away; it represented his work, part of his attachment to the earth which it was now necessary to break. His other known attachment had been to young men; how strong was that now? The pull of earthly obsession: weakened, but not necessarily severed by death.

In the otherwise-silence of the kiln, the growling refrigerator was an unstable presence; its noises varied and fluctuating, as if it were trying to tell her something.

‘Our Father…’

It remained the most powerful prayer of all, an exorcism in itself. This was how they all should begin.

How you took it from there… well, there was always an element of playing it by ear, by sensation, by perception – always remembering that, in the end, it wasn’t you doing this; you were only the monkey, you didn’t have any powers. You could only respond to signals.

In the kiln-house kitchen, the sun shone through as best it could; the fridge still shivered. The timing seemed about right: nearly noon, the time of no shadows. Nothing sinister.

Merrily offered the prayer conversationally, with only a little extra stress on the crucial line ‘… and deliver us from evil.’

Us .

Four of them in a semicircle in this half-lit brick funnel. Gerard Stock with shoulders back, eyes closed, lips invisible in the beard. But she knew now that those moist, rosebud lips were clamped tight on Gerard’s hidden agenda – oh, there was one, something raging inside him, like the fire in a brick furnace. Merrily was sensing anger and frustration made unbearable by fear. Even Fred Potter, the journalist, had picked up on that. But fear of what, exactly?

‘For ever and ever. Amen.’

‘Amen.’ An echo from Gerard Stock and Lol.

‘Sorry.’ Stephanie giggled. ‘Amen.’

Convent girl, huh?

There was – and face it, it could be relevant – almost certainly a problem in Stock’s marriage, no concealing that. Stephanie’s eyes were wide open, the twist of a smile on her lips – not taking this seriously and not caring who knew. There were perhaps twenty years between her and Gerard. Maybe he’d been slim and successful when they’d met – glamorous parties, cool contacts. Now he was looking florid and finished – career-wise, anyway.

Stephanie was standing between the two men, but closer to Lol than to Stock, their shoulders sometimes even touching, and Stephanie’s was bare, her strap slipping, and Merrily felt a stirring of—

Whatever the emotion was, she squashed it. She was the priest here.

All right: the metaphysics.

Had the transition of Stewart Ash simply been too sudden? Merrily caught a cold, shocking image of the spirit flung out, flailing and struggling, as the skull went crack, crack, crack, crack on the flags, an implosion of shattered bone and dying brain cells. Huw Owen again: Most hauntings are imprints, caused by the atmospheric shock of sudden death. Your imprint is no great problem – a tape loop, a magic-lantern show. It’s with the insomniacs and the sleepwalkers you need a bit of one-to-one .