Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘OK if I go round the back and bang on one of the windows?’

‘My dear chap, whatever you want.’

Lol pushed through bushes at one corner. Behind the barn there was, under snow, what must be a small square of lawn up against a low bank. It looked quite pretty – like a cake with pink icing.

Also, like some exotic confection, its design became more complex as he stared. Pink – but pale brown in places where the thaw had already eroded the snow. Strawberry ice-cream in the middle, sorbet round the edges, up against the back wall made of rubble-stone.

All it needed was a cherry in the middle, Lol thought in the wild surrealism of the moment. The red woollen beret Merrily used to wear, that would do. If you threw her beret into the centre of this lawn, it would lodge lusciously in the soft, wet, pink snow like a cherry.

There was a jagged hole in the snow under the nozzle of a pipe poking out of the wall about eighteen inches above the ground.

They’d bodged the plumbing, he thought. That was the overflow from the bath, and it should empty down into a drain.

Oh God!

Lol stood there remembering how completely Moon had changed once they’d reached the door of the barn. Her voice becoming sharp like the night, her eyes glittering like ice under the moon, as she pulled out her keys. She had been talking about Dick Lyden again, and what a clown he was. While separating a long black key and unlocking the door in the glass bay.

Maybe not such a clown, Lol had thought at the time. Confidence had seemed to click into place the minute Moon arrived back here – the strength of the old settlement around her, the child of the Hill. In Dick’s terms of reference, a fantasy structure: The way we create our destiny. The way we form fate .

He’d moved to follow her into the barn, but she’d turned in the doorway, somehow stiffening.

She’d said, No .

Moon?

I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to come in .

He’d stepped back.

Thank you , Moon had said. Once she had opened the door, the darkness inside seemed to suck her in and thrust him away.

Now, when Lol walked back round to the front of the barn, he was shaking.

‘No luck, old chap?’

‘I think we’re going to need those keys, Mr Purefoy,’ Lol said.

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH of St Cosmas and St Damien was almost part of a farmyard situated on the edge of a hamlet among windy-looking fields in the north of the county. Not that far from main roads but Merrily, who thought she knew this county fairly well, had been unaware of it.

The church was tiny, the size of a small barn, with a little timbered bell-turret at one end.

St Cosmas and St Damien?

‘Fourth-century Mediterranean saints,’ said Major Weston, ‘connected with physicians and surgeons, for some reason. Local doctors hold the occasional service here. Otherwise it’s disused. Absolute bloody tragedy.’

‘One of all too many these days, Major.’ Powdered snow blew at Merrily’s legs.

‘Call me Nigel,’ suggested Major Weston, whose belligerence had dropped away the moment he saw her. He was about sixty, had a moist and petulant lower lip, and a costly camel coat.

Merrily followed him around the raised churchyard, pine trees rearing grimly on its edge.

‘I think it was the Bishop of Lincoln,’ the Major said, ‘who warned that disused churches were now increasingly falling prey to Satanism. The message seems to be that if your people don’t want them, the Devil’s only too happy to take them on.’

‘It’s not that we don’t want them.’

‘I know, I know, but you don’t, do you? Otherwise my Fund wouldn’t exist. We maintain nearly three hundred churches at present, and the figure’s going up at an alarming rate. Now, when you think what a comparatively tiny population England had when these lovely old buildings were erected…’

‘Yeah,’ Merrily said, ‘tell me about it.’

They stopped outside the porch. She saw that the single long gothic window in the wall beside it had an iron bar up the middle. On one side lay the farm, and some houses on the other – a stone’s throw away.

‘If I was a Satanist, Major, I really don’t think I’d feel too safe performing a black mass here. You wouldn’t be able to chant very loudly, would you, before somebody came in with a torch and a shotgun?’

‘That’s what the police said. Must’ve been lunatics – but then that’s what they are, aren’t they? Not normal, these people. Beggars belief.’

‘I’ve never met one. I’d rather like to.’

He peered at her. ‘Would you, by God?’

‘Just to try and find out why .’

‘What they’ve done in here may just change your mind. Ready to go in?’

‘Sure.’

‘Not squeamish are you?’

‘Let’s hope not.’ She followed him into the porch, and he lifted the latch. ‘There’s no lock!’

‘There should be – and there will be. A new one’s in the course of being made, I believe. Perhaps these scum knew that.’

‘Meanwhile, the church is left without a lock?’

‘You can’t just put any old lock on a building dating back to the twelfth century. In you go, m’dear.’

Holding the door for her, letting her go in first. A gentleman, ha.

It was dim and intimate, no immediate echo. None of that sense of Higher Authority you had in most cathedrals, and big churches like her own at Ledwardine.

It was in fact fascinating, the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien. Quartered by an arcade of stone and a wooden screen with a pulpit in the middle. Two short naves and what seemed to be two chancels with two altars, although she could only see one from where she was standing – a plain wooden table without a cloth.

Against the far wall, and close to the floor, the stone effigies of a knight in armour and his lady shared that last long prayer.

Merrily didn’t move. She was reminded of nowhere so much as the little stone Celtic cell where she’d had the vision of the blue and the gold and the lamplit path. Only the smell was different.

She knew the smells of old churches, and they didn’t usually include urine.

Before Tim Purefoy was even back with his keys, a big vehicle was roaring up to the barn bay, sloshing through the wet snow. The dull gold, bull-barred Mitsubishi, spattered from wheels to windscreen with snow-slicks and mud, skidded to within a couple of feet of the glass wall.

Denny Moon slammed out, looking once – hard – at the barn, as though angry it was still there; not burned out, derelict, toppled into rubble. He wore an old leather jacket and a black baseball cap. Wraparound dark glasses, like he feared snowblindness. He took in the encircling trees and the overgrown Leylandii hedge, sucking air through his teeth.

‘Fucking place!’

Lol walked nervously towards the car. ‘Mr Purefoy’s gone for his keys.’

‘Fuck that. I’ll kick the door down.’ Denny gave him a black stare. ‘Lol, what is it? What is it you know, man?’

‘We just need to get in.’

‘Look at you! Something’s scared you. What is it?’

Tim Purefoy appeared, holding up a long key on an extended wire ring holding also two smaller ones.

At the same time his wife came round from the back of the barn. She looked stricken. ‘Call… call the police,’ she stammered. ‘Better call the police.’

Denny gasped and snatched the keys.

The big room was brightened by snowlight from the highest window, exposed trusses the colour of bone.

‘Kathy!’ Denny bawled. ‘ Kathy! ’

The smell of candlewax. Blobs of it on the floor.