Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘Come on.’

Denzil Joy’s terrible breathing was through the mouth: liquid, strangulated, the sound of an old-fashioned hot-water geyser filling up. In the side ward, with the door closed, it seemed all around them, underscored by that hum you couldn’t seem to escape in hospital wards, and the throaty chortle of the overhead heating pipes.

The green oxygen tubes were clipped together behind his head, which was supported by three pillows. There were scabs of mucus where the tubes fitted into his nostrils.

‘You want me to do anything?’ Tessa asked.

‘Just grab a chair from somewhere.’

‘I’d rather stand. Is that OK?’

‘However you feel comfortable.’

Merrily sat in the vinyl-covered chair on which the wretched Mrs Joy was said to have stood. Its seat was sunken in the middle.

OK. She pushed up a sleeve of her black jumper, reached over in the half-light and took Denzil’s hand, instantly screwing up her eyes because it was undeniably vile, like picking up a cold turd.

Stop it!

Sliding her hand away from his fingers with their long yellow nails, and up to his bony wrist, holding it gently, calming her breathing.

‘Denzil…’ She cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know if you can hear me. My name’s Merrily. I’m… er, the Vicar of Ledwardine. I’m just doing the rounds – as we vicars do.’

If he was even half awake, he wouldn’t be aware of what time it was, how unlikely it was that a vicar would be doing the rounds. At all costs she mustn’t alarm him.

‘I wanted to say a few prayers with you, if that’s OK.’

His breathing didn’t alter. His eyes remained three-quarters closed. He seemed unaware of her. She looked down at his thin, furtive face, the spittle bubbling around his mouth. And she pleaded with God to send her some pity. Nobody should die an object of fear and hatred and revulsion.

‘He’s very, very weak,’ Tessa murmured in her ear. ‘I don’t know how he’s holding on.’

Merrily nodded. ‘Almighty God, our Heavenly Father,’ she said softly. ‘We know, all of us, that we’ve done bad things and neglected to do good things we might’ve done.’

She felt Denzil’s wrist turn under her hand: other than the breathing, the first sign of life. The wrist turned so that the palm was upwards, the position of supplication, as though he was responding, holding out his hand for forgiveness.

‘For the sake of Jesus Christ, our Lord, Your Son, we beg You to forgive us, close the book on the past. Calm our souls.’

She squeezed the hand encouragingly. Outside, Nurse Sandra Protheroe passed the door without looking in.

‘We know Your nature is to have mercy, to forgive. We beg You to free Denzil from whatever bonds are binding his spirit.’

One of Denzil’s fingernails began to move slowly against her palm, like the claw of an injured bird. It felt, actually, quite unpleasant. Suggestive. She wished she’d never spoken to Sandra Protheroe.

Tessa was standing beside the door with her hands behind her back. She managed a rather wounded smile.

‘We ask You this,’ Merrily said, ‘in the name of our saviour Jesus Christ.’ She felt slightly sick and closed her eyes.

At once, the light scratching of Denzil’s nail on her palm picked up momentum, acquired a rhythm. A small highpitched wheeze was detectable under his rasping, snuffling breath, and the sweet sour stench was back – suddenly and rapidly unravelling from him like a soiled string, seeming to spiral through the thin, stale air directly into Merrily’s nose and coil there.

Cat faeces and gangrene .

Oh God! She felt clammy and nauseous but also starved, like she had flu coming on.

I’ll tell you what that is, Reverend. It’s the smell of evil .

It’s not evil. It’s sickness. It’s disgusting, but it’s not evil.

Still, she tightened her lips against it, fighting the compulsion to snatch her hand away. She must not , she must let it lie there, mustn’t react. It’s my job, it’s my job, it’s what I do, it’s—

She could almost hear it now. Scritch-scratch – the tiniest movement of a curling nail on the end of a yellow finger. Suspecting that in the mind of Denzil Joy this was not a mere finger.

He can enter you without moving an inch, that man .

Slide away, squirm away, get out of here.

Scritch-scratch , as though he was teasing away layers of skin in the centre of her palm to get his finger under the flesh. But that was imagination. His strength, his lifeforce, was so depleted this was the most he could manage: scritch-scratch . Poor guy – reach out to the humanity in him. Poor guy, poor guy, poor guy, poor guy …

She was aware of him taking in a long, long shuddering breath. Tessa moving towards the bed.

The breath was not released. There was an awesome cliffedge of silence. The scratching stopped.

‘This is it,’ Tessa said quietly. So much composure in the kid. ‘He’s Cheyne-Stoking, no question this time.’

In the breathless silence, Merrily would swear she could feel the heat of him, slithering from his mind to her mind, while his finger lay still in her hand like a small cigar.

It seemed much darker and colder in here now – as though, in its hunger for life-energy, the shrivelled body in the bed was absorbing all the electricity, all the light, all the heat in the room.

‘In fact I think he’s gone,’ Tessa said.

Darkness. Cold. Stillness. And the sinuous, putrid smell. Gently, Merrily attempted to slip her hand out of his.

And then it seized her.

Grip like a monkey-wrench .

Like a train from a tunnel, his breath came out and in the same moment his fingers pushed up between hers and tightened; a low, sniggering laugh seemed to singe the air between them.

And Merrily felt something slide between her legs.

Knowing in a second that she’d felt no such thing, that it was all imagination, conditioning. But it was too late: the cold wriggled fiercely into her groin, jetted into her stomach like an iced enema. She’d already torn her hand away, throwing herself back with so much force that she slipped from the chair to the shiny grey floor and slid back against the second bed, hearing herself squealing,

‘ I bind unto myself the Name ,

‘ The strong Name of the Trin— ’

And, hearing Tessa screaming shrilly, she cried out helplessly.

‘Begone!’

Not knowing who or what she meant.

There was a wrenching, snapping sound; she saw the green tubes writhing in the air like electric snakes, torn from Denzil’s nostrils as suddenly, in a single, violent ratchet movement, he sat up in his bed.

Tessa shrieking, ‘Noooooooooooo!’ and falling back against the door, stumbling out when it was flung open by Eileen Cullen – who just stood there with Denzil Joy’s upright, stiffened, shadowed shape between her and Merrily.

SHE DISCOVERED SHE was in the corridor outside. And that she was half sobbing and half laughing, but it wasn’t real laughing. On the other side of a film of tears, a small flame was approaching.

‘It’s not allowed, is it?’ Was that her voice, that mad cackle?

‘The hell it isn’t,’ said Cullen, lighting Merrily’s cigarette and then one for herself.

They sat on the bench outside the ward. It was no longer quiet in there.

‘We told them Tessa had seen a mouse, but patients, especially old fellers – it’s like spooking the horses in a stable, you know? We’ll give them half an hour to get themselves back to sleep before we get somebody up here to take him out.’