Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Dinedor Hill… All Saints Church… Hereford Cathedral… and two further churches, ending in…

‘What’s this place, Robinson? Can’t make it out.’

‘Stretford.’ For a moment it stopped his breath. ‘This… is the church of St Cosmas and St Damien.’

‘Oh, Robinson,’ Athena White said. ‘Oh, yes.’

Once the old ladies had begun to gather in the lounge, she’d beckoned Lol away and up the stairs. In Athena’s eyrie, with the Afghan rugs and all the cupboards, the OS map of Hereford had been opened out on the bedspread, and the line from Dinedor drawn in.

Athena’s glasses were white light. ‘It was in the Hereford Times , wasn’t it? Was that last week, I can’t remember? The crow… the crow . Why does one never see what is under one’s nose?’

‘They happened the same night. The crow sacrifice, and Moon’s death… and a minister called Dobbs had a stroke in the Cathedral.’

‘Yes!’

It all came out then, in strands of theory and conjecture which eventually hung together as a kind of certainty.

Tim Purefoy had said: That’s one of Alfred Watkins’s leylines. An invisible, mystical cable joining sacred sites. Prehistoric path of power. They’re energy lines, you know. And spirit paths. So we’re told. Probably all nonsense, but at sunset you can feel you own the city .

Now, Athena White said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s there or not, Robinson. It’s what the magician perceives is there. The magician uses visualization, driven by willpower, to create an alternative reality.’

Moon had said: The line goes through four ancient places of worship, ending at a very old church out in the country. But it starts here, and this is the highest point. So all these churches, including the Cathedral, remain in its shadow. This hill is the mother of the city. The camp here was the earliest proper settlement, long before there was a town down there .

‘When the first Christian churches were built, Rome ordered them to be placed on sites of earlier worship, places already venerated, so as to appropriate their influence. But you see, Robinson, the pre-Christian element never really went away, because of the continued dominance of Dinedor Hill. So, if your aim was to destabilize the Cathedral and all it symbolizes, you might well decide to cause a vibration in what lies beneath .’

And Lol had said to Merrily – ironically in the café in the All Saints Church, on the actual line from St Cosmas to Dinedor Hill: In Celtic folk tales, crows and ravens figured as birds of illomen or… as a form taken by anti-Christian forces .

‘At one end of the line,’ Athena said, ‘a crow is sacrificed. At the other – at the highest point – is your crow maiden.’

Lol said, ‘Sacrificed?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘They killed her?’

‘Or helped her to take her own life? Probably, yes. I’m sorry, Robinson, I don’t know if this is what you wanted to hear.’

‘It’s just… are you sure about this?’ She’s an old woman , he thought. She lives in a fantasy world . ‘You have to be sure.’

‘And yet,’ she said, ‘these two deaths are so different. Calm down, Robinson, I won’t let you make a fool of yourself. You see, as Crowley once pointed out, a sacrifice was once seen as a merciful and glorious death, allowing the astral body to go directly to its God. This essentially means a quick death, a throat cut… the way the crow presumably died. But your friend’s blood was let out through the wrists. Not quick at all – a slow release…’

‘ “Crow maiden, you’re fadin’ away…” ’

‘What did you say?’

‘Just a line from a song.’

Athena White’s clasped hands were shaking with concentration. ‘Robinson, have we discussed the power of blood?’

On the way back from the Glades, Lol kept glancing at the passenger seat – because of a dark, disturbing sensation of Moon sitting beside him.

I’d like to sleep now .

‘I know,’ he said once. ‘I know you can’t sleep. But I just don’t know what to do about it.’

At the lectern in Ledwardine Church, with the altar behind them, candles lit, Merrily took both Jane’s hands in hers, and looked steadily into the kid’s dark eyes.

‘You all right about this?’

‘Sure.’

Merrily had locked the church doors – the first time she’d ever locked herself in. A church was not a private place; it should always offer sanctuary.

Merrily gripped the kid’s hands more firmly.

‘Christ be with us,’ she said, ‘Christ within us.’

‘Christ behind us,’ Jane read from the card placed in the open Bible on the lectern. ‘Christ before us…’

‘Hello, Laurence,’ Denny said tiredly.

The shop was all in boxes around his knees. Despite the possible implications for his own domestic future, Lol had forgotten about Denny’s decision to shut John Barleycorn for ever. The walls were just empty shelves now, even the balalaika packed away. The ochre wall-lamps, which had lit Moon so exquisitely, did her brother Denny no favours. His face was grey as he wiped his brow with the sleeve of his bomber jacket.

‘I haven’t been totally frank with you, Lol. Another reason for all this is that I’m going to need all the money I can get’ – he looked away – ‘to pay Maggie off.’

Lol remembered the distance between them at Moon’s cremation. ‘You and Maggie…?’

‘Aw, been coming a while. I won’t explain now. Kathy’s death could have saved it. At least, that’s what she thought – Maggie. But the very fact she thought that…’ Denny smashed a fist into a tall carboard box. ‘That made it unfucking-tenable.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Lol said awkwardly, the urge welling up in him to tell Denny what he believed had really happened to Moon. But could Denny, in his present state, absorb this arcane insanity? ‘What about the kids?’ he said instead.

‘She’ll have them.’ Denny taped up the flaps of a box full of CDs. ‘I’m hardly gonner fight that .’ He looked across at the door to the stairs. ‘Do something for me, Laurence. The bike.’

‘Moon’s bike?’

‘Take it away, would you? It’s oppressive. I dream about it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I dream . I have these fucking dreams. It starts with the bike and then it turns into this, like, cart with the same big wheels… like some old war chariot. I want to get into it, and I know if I do, it’s gonner take me up there again. No fucking way.’

‘To the hill.’

‘No way, man. So, would you do that? Would you get rid of the bike? Somebody’s gonner buy or lease this place, see, and then they’ll make me take the bike out. I’m not touching it – it’s like that fucking sword, you know? Take it away. Flog it, dump it… somewhere I don’t know where it is.’

‘All right. I’ll do that tomorrow.’

‘Thanks. Oh yeah, a woman rang for you. Mary?’

‘Merrily?’

‘Probably. She said could you call her. Look, Lol… I tried to use you to compensate for my brotherly inadequacies. I regret that now – along with all the rest.’

‘There wasn’t a lot you could do, Den. In the end, Moon’s fate was in other hands.’

‘No.’ Denny’s eyes narrowed. ‘I don’t buy this shit, Lol. I’m not buying any more than that she was sick. I’m not having anything else unloaded on me. I won’t go down that road.’

Lol nodded. So he himself would have to go down that road alone.

‘ Hello, this is Ledwardine Vicarage. Merrily and Jane aren’t around at the moment, but if you’d like —’

Lol put down the phone and went to sit down for a while in Ethel’s chair, once-insignificant details crowding his mind.