Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

But as Jane said, ‘Oh, Lol, Mum is in such deep shit,’ and her tears defused the panic, reduced it to mere despair, he just listened. Listened to all the stuff about what Mum and this loopy Huw called ‘the Squatter’. And about the Boy Bishop, who was the weak point, like the fuse in an electric circuit.

This was when Lol finally cut in. ‘How long? How long before the Boy Bishop gets…?’

‘Enthroned?’

‘Yeah. How long?’

He was out in the street now, pulling the shop door closed behind him, shivering in his frayed sweat-shirt.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know where in the service it comes. In half an hour? Maybe only ten minutes.’

She was asking him if he could get to this Dick Lyden first, and make him stop his son from going through with it, but Lol was just shaking his head, like she knew he would, and then he was pushing her away, up the street.

‘Go back, Jane. Stay with her.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m going to… going to do what I can.’

‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Lol, I want to come with you.’

‘You can’t.’

‘You really know what’s going to happen, don’t you? At least, you have an idea?’

‘I don’t know anything, Jane. I just—’

‘Lol…’ She stumbled on the iced-up cobbles, clinging to his arm. ‘Dobbs stood up against it, Dobbs put himself in the way – and he wound up as this paralysed, dribbling…’

‘Dobbs was an old man in poor health.’ He held her steady. ‘Go back to her, Jane.’

‘He was also…’ Jane broke Lol’s grip and spun to face him. ‘He was also this really experienced exorcist. He knew all about this stuff; he’d been planning for ages. He knew exactly what he was facing, while Mum’s just—’

‘She wouldn’t thank you for saying she was just a woman.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, it’s more than that.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Lol, who can we call? We can’t raise Huw Owen. The Bishop’s a total tosser. All those guys in dog-collars in there are just like… administrators and wardens and bursars and accountants. All this dark energy gathering, and…’

She flattened herself against a shop window as a bunch of young guys came past, hooting and sloshing lager at each other out of cans. They were lurching up the ancient medieval straight path to Hereford Cathedral – all huge and lit up like the Titanic – and none of them even seemed to notice it.

‘Nobody really gives a shit, any more, do they?’ Jane said.

WHEN JANE REACHED the green again, Mum and Sophie were gone. Into the Cathedral, presumably. She looked behind her, hoping Lol would be there, that he’d changed his mind and would take her with him wherever he was going. But the night was hard and bright and empty; even the cackling lager crew had vanished.

She was alone now, with the frost-rimmed moon and the feeling of something happening, around and within the old rusty stones, that none of them could do a damned thing about.

She walked very slowly down to the Cathedral, hoping that something meaningful would come to her. But all she experienced was a stiffening of her face, as though the tears had frozen on her cheeks.

Should she pray?

And, if so, to whom? She reassured herself that all forms of spirituality were positive – while acknowledging that the Lady Moon looked a pitiless bitch tonight.

Jane went into the porch, and turned left through an ordinary wooden and glazed door into the body of the Cathedral. Always that small, barely audible gasp when you came out into the vaulted vastness of it. You were never sure whether it was you, or some vacuum effect carefully developed by the old gothic architects.

The organ was playing some kind of low-key religious canned music. Jane found herself on the end of a short queue of people. They were mostly middle-aged or elderly.

Which made Rowenna kind of stand out amongst them.

He remembered the last time he’d been up here at night, in the snow, with Moon beside him. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to come in .

What if he’d then refused to take no for an answer? What if he’d gone into the barn with her? What if he’d resisted the pushing of the darkness against him?

The pushing of the darkness? As he drove and fiddled vainly with the heater, he tried to re-experience that thin, frigid moment. There was a draught through a crack in the door, more chilling than blanketing cold outside. It felt like the slit between worlds.

He wished Denny was with him. Denny already had no love for the Purefoys – for taking advantage of Moon’s fantasies so as to unload their crappy, bodged barn conversion. Incomers! Stupid gits! He needed the heat of Denny’s honest rage. He needed this bloody heater to work – having run to the car without his jacket, because going back for it would have wasted crucial minutes.

Crucial minutes? Like he knew what he was going to do. Like only time might beat him: little four-eyed Lol, expsychiatric patient, shivering.

Ice under the wheels carried the Astra into the verge, the bumper clipping a fence post. Denny owned a four-wheel drive, had once done amateur rallying. But Denny wasn’t here, so Lol was alone – with a little knowledge, a sackful of conjecture, and the memory of the draught through a thinly opened door.

He came to the small parking area below the Iron Age camp, and killed his headlights. There were no other vehicles there, but what did he expect – black cars parked in a circle, customized number plates all reading 666?

You know what’s going to happen. Don’t you?

Lol got out of the Astra and followed the familiar path. Big, muscular trees crowded him. Between them, he could see a mat of city lights – but none around him, none up here. None here since damp, smoky firelight had plumed within the cluster of thatched huts where families huddled against the dark beating of the crow-goddess’s wings.

He’d never felt so cold.

Only the incense is missing , Merrily thought.

The warm colours of the soaring stone, the rolling contours of the Norman arches, the suspended corona – its daytime smiley, saw-tooth sparkle made numinous by the candles around it. And the jetting ring of red in the bottom of a giant black cast-iron stove near the main entrance.

Now a candlelight procession of choirboys singing plainsong, in Latin. One of the choirboys, the tallest of them, wore robes and a mitre, with a white-albed candle-bearer on either side.

There were about two hundred people in the congregation – not enormous, but substantial. They looked entirely ordinary, mostly over fifty, but an encouraging few in their twenties. Dress tending towards the conservative, but with few signs of the fuss and frothy hats such a service would once have produced.

Sophie sat next to Merrily, just the two of them on a rear central pew. Sophie’s gloved hands were tightly clenched on her lap. What she’d said outside, her face white and pitted as the moon, had been banished to the back of Merrily’s mind; not now, not now .

Her hands were underneath the cloak, clasped around the cross. She prayed it would never have to be revealed. She prayed that, in less than an hour’s time, she and Jane would be walking out of here, relieved and laughing, to the car, where the cross would be laid thankfully on the back seat.

But where the hell was Jane? Not in the nave. Not visibly in the nave – but there were a hundred places in here to sit or stand concealed. But why do that?

Merrily studied James Lyden. He was a good-looking boy, and he clearly knew it. Could she detect an insolence, a knowing smirk, as the choirboy voices swirled and ululated around him? Perhaps not, though. It was probably James’s idea of ‘pious’.