Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Edna Rees chuckled. She was sitting in a pink wicker chair pulled out from a bathroom. Merrily was kneeling on the topmost of three carpeted steps leading up to the haunted east wing.

This was the third floor, and once was attics.

This was a stake-out.

Because you didn’t simply arrive and go straight into the spiel. Spend some time with it , Huw Owen said. Let it talk to you. No, of course they seldom actually talk. And yet they do .

Could she trust anything Huw Owen had told her?

They’d been here twenty minutes. Downstairs, Susan Thorpe would be glaring at her watch. Always take your time , Huw said. Never let any bugger rush you. Where some of these customers come from, there is no time. Don’t rush, don’t overreact, don’t go drowning it in holy water .

Merrily’s bag contained only one small bottle of holy water, for all the use that was. Her only other equipment was a Christian Deliverance Study Group booklet of suitable prayers, most of which she knew off by heart anyway.

She was just going through the motions, with no confidence that it would work.

It doesn’t always work – Huw’s truest phrase. It should be printed on the front of the Deliverance handbook.

It should be the title of the Deliverance handbook.

And where was she really? How far had she come since the four a.m. horror? Since the fleeing of her bedroom, the vomiting in the kitchen sink, the stove-hugging, the burning of lights till dawn and the Oh Christ, why hast thou forsaken me ?

There was then the Putting On A Brave Face Until The Bus Takes Jane Away interlude. She’d had the time – hours – to wash and dress carefully, apply make-up. To stand back from the mirror and recoil at the sight of age and fear pushing through like a disease.

Then the staring-at-the-phone phase. The agitated For God’s Sake Ring, Huw moments. He keeps calling you. He wants to explain. So you should call him back. It doesn’t matter that he and Dobbs conspired against you. It doesn’t matter what he did. You need him. You need him to take it away. You need to call him now and say, Huw, I am possessed. I am possessed by the spirit of Denzil Joy .

Yet it was not like that. She might look rough in the mirror, but her dull, tired eyes were not the sleazed-over eyes of Denzil Joy. She didn’t feel his greasy desires. She didn’t know him.

Was not possessed by him.

Haunted, though – certainly that. Useless to paper it over with psychology; she was haunted by him. He followed her, had become her spirit-stalker. Because she’d failed, that night in the General, to redirect his malignant energy, its residue had clung to her. She’d walked out of the hospital with Denzil Joy crawling and skulking behind her like some foul familiar. He was hers now. No one else had caught his disease.

And she’d been unaware of it until – once again insufficiently prepared – she had been collecting herself for the assault on the crow-killer of St Cosmas. Collecting her energy. Then into the cocktail had seeped his essence.

Was that what happened? Had yesterday’s holy-water exercise been a failure because it had been directed only at the bedroom – making the room safe – rather than herself?

Because she was the magnet, right? She’d invited him – sitting by his bedside, holding his kippered hands. The female exorcist attracting the incubus, just as the priest-in-charge had invoked the lust of the organist who’d flashed at her from a tombstone.

Today, she’d concentrated on cleansing herself. Leaving the answering machine unplugged, she’d set out on a tour of churches, a pilgrimage on the perimeter of Hereford. A full day of prayer and meditation.

Finally, parking in a back street near the Cathedral School, and slipping discreetly into the Cathedral, sitting quietly at the back for over an hour while tourists and canons she didn’t know flitted through.

She had not called Huw, or Sophie. Had resisted the impulse to enter Church Street and find Lol. She had left the answering machine unplugged. At four p.m., she’d returned to the vicarage and fed the cat and made a meal for Jane and herself. Then one more visit to the church before the drive – leaving plenty of time – to the Glades.

It was not about proving herself as an exorcist any more. That was over. This was about saving her ministry.

And her sanity?

Leave sanity out of this. Sanity is relative .

Edna Rees looked along the passage, without apparent apprehension, to where the bulb had just blown. ‘Surely that’s not the first time it’s happened to you, my dear?’

Merrily said nothing.

Edna shifted comfortably in her wicker chair. ‘Regular occurrence, it was, in Gwynne Street. Wherever he lived, it happened. So I learned.’

‘Bulbs blowing?’

‘Might’ve put me off if I’d known before I took the job, see. But you get used to it.’

Merrily glanced along the line of bulbs. The loss of one seemed to make all the others less bright, as though they were losing heart. There was probably a simple scientific explanation; she should ask Chris Thorpe.

‘One week we lost five,’ Edna said. ‘I said, you want to charge them for all these bulbs, Canon. Well, expensive they are these days, bulbs. We tried those economy things – cost the earth, take an age to come on, but they’re supposed to last ten years. Not in that house, they didn’t.’

‘What else happened?’

‘Some nights…’ Edna pulled her skirt down over her knees, ‘… you just couldn’t heat that place to save your life, even with all the radiators turned up, the living-room fire banked all day. Wasn’t even that cold outside sometimes, see. And yet, come the night, just when you’d think it’d be getting nicely warmed up…’

Cold spots?

This passage had five doors, all closed. Closed doors were threatening. Doors ajar with darkness within were terrifying. Merrily guessed she just didn’t like doors. Otherwise, there was no sense of disturbance, no cold spots – and certainly nothing like the acrid, soul-shrivelling stench which had gathered around…

Stop!

She turned briskly to Edna. ‘Are you saying that he… brought his work home?’

Edna looked at Merrily from under her bottle-green velvet hat. Her eyes were brown and shrewd, over cheeks that were small explosions of split veins.

‘My dear, his work followed him home.’

She froze. ‘He told you that?’

‘He never talked about his work,’ Edna said. ‘Not to me; not to anyone, far as I know. But when he came back sometimes, it was like Jack Frost himself walking in.’

‘What did he do about that?’

‘Not for me to know, Mrs Watkins.’

‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘obviously not. I… saw you with him the other week, in the Cathedral.’

‘Yes,’ Edna said calmly, ‘I thought it was you.’

‘He was telling you to go away. He said there was something he couldn’t… couldn’t discuss there.’

‘Sharp ears you have.’

‘Is it none of my business?’

‘You must think it is.’

‘Why “here”? Why did he want to get you out of the Cathedral?’

‘For the same reason he wanted me out of his house, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Which is?’

‘Why are you asking me these questions?’

‘Because I can’t ask him. Because he’s lying in hospital apparently incapable of speech. Or at least he doesn’t speak to the female nurses.’

Edna smiled.

‘Any more than he’d speak to me before his stroke. He froze me out, too, on the grounds that I wasn’t fit to do his job. His sole communication with me was a cryptic note saying that Jesus Christ was the first exorcist. There. I’ve told you everything, Edna.’