Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Tim yawned. ‘That’s a trivial detail.’

Lol made himself sit in the other cane chair, keeping about ten feet between himself and them.

‘How did you kill her?’

‘Oh, really!’ Anna leaned forward in the firelight, a dark shadow suddenly spearing between her breasts.

‘Darling—’

‘No, I won’t have this, Tim. Murder is a crime. We did not kill Katherine. We showed her the path she was destined to find, and she took it – according to the values of the Celtic ethos. We talked for hours and hours with Katherine. She could never relate to this era – this commercial, secular world, this erratic world, this panicking period in history. She knew she didn’t want to be here, and she was looking for a way back .’

‘Bollocks,’ Lol said, although he realized it wasn’t.

‘And anyway,’ Anna said, ‘to the Iron Age Celt, death is merely a short, shadowy passage, to be entered boldly in the utter and total certainty of an afterlife. A Celtic human sacrifice was often a willing sacrifice. Katherine always knew she wouldn’t enjoy a long life – I showed her that in the cards, though she didn’t need me to – and therefore she was able to give what remained of it a purpose.’

‘We helped her return to the bosom of her tradition,’ Tim said comfortably.

‘It was very beautiful,’ Anna said softly. ‘There was snow all around, but the bathroom was warm. We helped her put candles around the bath. She was naked and warm and smiling.’

‘No!’ Lol said.

But he saw again Moon’s thin arms gleaming pale gold, lit by the four tall church candles, one at each corner of the white bathtub. Her teeth were bared. Her hands – something black and knobbled across Moon’s open hands.

‘But you didn’t give her an afterlife, did you?’

He saw those sharp little teeth bared in excitement, Moon panting in the sprinkling light: energized, euphoric, slashing, gouging. And then lying back at peace, relieved to feel her lifeblood jetting from opened veins.

The tragedy and the horror of it made him pant with emotion. The Purefoys had done this, as surely as if they’d waylaid her like a ripper in a country lane. But it was actually worse than that…

Hands sweating on the edge of the chair seat, he flung at them what Athena White had explained to him.

‘If a sacrifice is swift, the spirit is believed to progress immediately to a… better place. But if the death is protracted, the magician has time to bind the spirit to his will, so that it remains earthbound and subject to the commands of—’

‘Oh, really’ – Tim half rose – ‘what nonsense…’

‘It might well be,’ Lol said, ‘but you don’t think it is. You think you still have her… and through her an access to her ancestors and to the whole pre-Christian, pagan Celtic tradition.’

He sprang up. He was sure Moon’s image there on the wall was shining not with the candlelight, nor the moonlight, but with a sad grey light of its own.

‘You just prey on inadequates and sick people like Moon, and attract little psychos like Rowenna and other people desperate for an identity and—’

‘People like you,’ Anna said gently.

‘No.’ He backed away, as she arose.

‘Katherine told us about you, Laurence. She said you would often make her feel better because you were so insecure yourself, and had a history of mental instability.’

‘That was a long time ago.’

Tim laughed. Anna held out her hands to Lol. Her face, in the mellow light, was beautiful and looked so exquisitely kind.

‘It wasn’t such a long time ago. And it doesn’t go away, does it, Laurence? It’s part of you. You have no certainty of anything, and you’re drawn to people who do have.’

He stared into the explicit kindness of her, searching for the acid he knew had to be there, because this was the black siren, the woman who had moulded Moon into her own fatal fantasy and would have taken Jane too – to use as well.

Anna smiled with compassion, and he knew that if he let her touch him his resistance would be burned away.

She said softly, ‘Laurence, think about this. What sent you to Katherine? Why did you come here tonight?’

Lol closed his eyes for just a moment. At once he saw a small, slim dark woman in black, with eyes that had to laugh at the nonsense of it all. He blinked furiously to send her away; this was no place for—

‘Ah.’ Anna was shaking her head, half amused – an infants’ school headmistress with a silly child who would never learn. ‘Why are you… why are you so obsessed with the little woman priest?’

‘You can only…’ His mind rebelled. Up against the far wall, facing this smiling Anna and the candles in the barn bay, he refused to be shocked, refused to believe she’d pulled the image of Merrily from his head. ‘You can only think in terms of obsession, can’t you? Love doesn’t mean a thing.’

There were suddenly two bright orbs in the air.

‘Love,’ Tim Purefoy said, ‘is the pretty lie we use to justify and glorify our lust. And the feeble term used in Christian theology to dignify weakness and sentiment.’

Both Purefoys were gazing with placid candour at Lol, as the bright orbs exploded, and Lol’s ears were filled with roaring and the night went white.

A shadow fell across Merrily as she walked towards the altar with the cross in her hands.

The old priest stood next to her in the aisle. He wore a black cassock, stained, plucked and holed. He looked very ill, pale beyond pale. She had no idea how he came to be here – only why. His eyes looked directly into hers. His eyes were like crystals in an eroded cliff–face. They carried no apology. There was a bubble of spit in a corner of his mouth.

He held out a hand ridged and gnarled as a shrivelled parsnip.

Jesus Christ was the first exorcist – letters on a white page.

And Huw Owen on a mountainside in Wales. I don’t want stuff letting in. A lot of bad energy’s crowding the portals. I want to keep all the doors locked and the chains up .

Merrily nodded.

She put the cross into Thomas Dobbs’s hand and stepped aside, with her back to a pew-end.

Jesus Christ was the first exorcist .

The Boy Bishop stood up, letting his notes flutter to the tiles. He held his crozier at arm’s length, like a spear. His two candlebearers had melted away, but Mick Hunter still stood a few paces behind him. Merrily saw a series of expressions blurring James’s face. She thought of Francis Bacon’s popes.

She thought that James’s face was not now his own.

The Cathedral had filled with a huge and hungry hush.

Thomas Dobbs stopped about ten feet short of the boy – under the jagged halo of the corona. When he spoke, his voice was slurred and growly, dense with phlegm and bile, and the words tumbled out of him, unstoppable, like a rockslide.

‘IN THE NAME OF… OF THE LIVING GOD, I CALL… I CALL YOU OUT !

‘IN… NAME OF… GOD OF ALL CREATION…

‘… NAME OF HIS SON JES… JESUS CHRIST… I CALL YOU OUT …

‘I CALL YOU OUT AND…

‘ BANISH YOU .’

Merrily watched his pocked monument of a face, only one side of it working. She could almost feel the strength leaving his body, the despair at the heart of his struggle against his own weakness.

The Boy Bishop let his crozier fall, and ran down the aisle. Merrily saw Dick Lyden squeezing out of his pew, striding after his son. Where the boy had stood, she saw the slightly unclear figure of a slim woman in a long dress, with hair down to her waist, like dark folded wings, and then – as though Merrily had blinked – the woman was no longer there. She saw Dobbs clench his teeth so hard she felt they were going to split and fragment, and she saw his arm winching stiffly upward like a girder, pointing.