Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Danny Gittoes looked up slowly and blinked. ‘I’m drinking. And it’s cold out there.’

Jane took a chance. She’d gone to sleep thinking about this and she’d woken up thinking about it. If she was wrong, well… she just didn’t bloody deserve to be wrong.

‘Must have been cold in the church, too,’ she said.

‘What are you on about, Watkins?’ Gittoes had this narrow face, dopey eyes.

Dean Wall rose and tucked his belly into his belt. ‘If the lady wants to go outside, let’s do it.’

‘Siddown, Wall,’ Jane snarled, indicated Gittoes. ‘Just… that .’

‘Got no secrets from Dean,’ Gittoes said.

‘I believe you.’ Jane put on her grimmest smile. ‘Rowenna and I, we don’t have secrets either. For Christmas, I’m buying her a whole case of extra-strength mouthwash.’

‘Fetch me a map,’ demanded Athena White. ‘There’s a stack of them in the hall. Fetch me an OS map of Hereford. I want to locate this Dinedor Hill.’

Miss White seemed much happier now she knew precisely what this was about. And what he was about. The process of knowing him – and where he’d been and what made him afraid – had taken all of ten minutes. It would take Dick Lyden maybe four full sessions to get this far.

Lol was impressed – also disturbed. He sensed she could be, well, malevolent, when she wanted to. There was something dangerously alien about Athena White: unmoving, sunk into her many cushions, but her mind was darting; picking up the urgency of this.

Telling her about Katherine Moon had been the right thing to do.

He brought her the map. ‘Spread it out on the floor,’ she commanded. ‘Move that perfectly awful table, there. Oh, dear, it’s what one misses most stuck out here. The seclusion, the study time, yes, but there are things going on that one misses. OK, Dinedor Hill. Why Dinedor Hill? Put your finger on it, Robinson. Can’t make out the damned map, but I can at least see your finger. Now give me your other hand.’

He found himself kneeling on the map, with the forefinger of one hand on Dinedor Hill, while she held his other hand, both of her small hands over his. They were frail and bony and very warm.

‘Look at it, Robinson, look at the hill… no, not on the map, you fool. Picture it in your mind. Feel yourself there. Feel the wind blow, feel the damp, the cold. Think about Moon being there. She’s coming towards you, isn’t she? Now, tell me what you’re seeing.’

‘I’m seeing the crow,’ he said at once. ‘Her hand inside the crow. We’re standing right at the end of the ramparts, with the city below us and the church spire aligned with the Cathedral tower.’

‘Good.’

In the moments of quiet, he could hear crockery clinking several rooms away. Footsteps clumped outside the door, the handle creaked and Athena White let out a piercing squeak. ‘Get away from that door! Go away!’

And the footsteps went away.

Miss White said, ‘She killed that crow, you know.’

‘I wondered about that.’

‘I think she would have brought the crow down and killed it.’

Brought it down how?

Crow Maiden , he thought. And the crows would come, Denny had said. Crows’d come right up to her .

Lol opened his eyes. Through the window, the Radnor hills were firming up as the mist receded; you could see the underside of the sun in the southern sky.

‘You see, it doesn’t really work unless the blood is still warm,’ Athena White explained.

Jane and Danny Gittoes stood in the alley alongside of the Ox. There were men’s toilets here, the foul-smelling kind, and she was starting to get pictures of Danny Gittoes and Rowenna.

‘Jane, I’m sorry, all right. I’m sorry about your mother’s church, but I didn’t take nothing, did I? And it was her idea, all of it.’

‘Yeah, tell that to the police. “I did it for a blowjob, officer.” Real mitigating-circumstances situation, that is. The magistrates will really like you for that, Gittoes.’

‘I’ll pay for it, all right? I’ll pay for the window.’

‘Tell me about the suit.’

‘What about it?’

‘What did she say about the suit?’

‘She said it was a joke – on you and your ma. I didn’t twig it. She had the suit in the back of her car, in one of them plastic suit-bags like you get from the cleaners, and I had to keep it inside the bag till I’d got it in the wardrobe – then take it out of the bag.’

‘Did she go in with you?’

‘She waited outside with the torch. She shone the torch in and she told me where to put the suit, and to make sure it was out of sight. Look, Watkins, this is between you and her, right? This en’t nothing—’

‘You’re going down for it, Gittoes.’

‘Nobody goes down for breaking a window.’

‘It gets in the paper, though, and then everybody knows how pitiful you are. Everybody sees this redhaired stunner, and then they look at you. It does kind of test the imagination, doesn’t it, Danny? It’ll like follow you around for years – Beauty and the Sad Git.’

‘What about her ?’

‘You really think she cares what anybody thinks? Hey – wow, I forgot.’ Jane stepped away from him and began to smile. ‘Isn’t your stepfather up for a vacancy on the parish council?’

‘Fuck you, Watkins.’

‘Not even in your dreams.’

‘What do you want? What you want me to do?’

‘Tell me what happened when she first approached you. Was she on her own?’

‘Course she was on her own.’

‘I bet you thought she actually fancied you, didn’t you?’

Gittoes blushed.

‘Don’t worry, she’s good at that,’ Jane said. ‘Come on, don’t stand there like a bloody half-peeled prawn. Talk to me.’

‘I dunno what you want !’

‘What do you know about her?’

‘She’s your friend!’

‘Cooperate,’ Jane hissed, ‘or the first thing that happens – like tonight – is word gets to reach your stepfather.’

‘ Please … what you wanner know? You wanner know where she goes when you en’t with her? You wanner know who her real boyfriend is? Cause I followed her – all right? – on the motorbike. Yeah, I thought I was in with a chance – how sad is that? I followed her around. I can give you stuff to, like, even the score… if you’ll leave me alone.’

‘Keep talking, hairball,’ Jane said.

For quite a long time, Miss White continued, she did not really understand what a Satanist was. For a start, nobody would ever admit to being one. You had this absurd American self-publicist, La Vey, with his Church of Satan, following a poor variation of Crowley’s Do What Thou Wilt philosophy. But that was a misnomer: there wasn’t that quality of pure, naked hate which Satanism implied.

Black magic? Ah, not quite the same thing. Black magic was simply the use of magic to do harm. And, yes, Miss White had been tempted, too – was often tempted. Aware, of course, of the easy slope from mischief to malignity, but she had done worse things without the need for magic – hadn’t everyone?

Miss White had practised ritual magic for a number of years before the robes and the swords and the chalices had begun to seem rather unnecessary and faintly absurd. It was during this period that she first encountered Anna Purefoy, or Anna Bateman as she was then.

‘We were both civil servants at the time. Anna worked at the Defence Ministry – secretary to an under-secretary, quite a highly paid post for a girl her age. She never hid her interest in the occult – neither did I. There are a surprising number of senior civil servants practising the dark arts – by which, of course, I do not mean Satanism. To the vast, vast majority of ritual magicians, the idea of worshipping a vulgar creature with horns and halitosis is absolute anathema.’