The mountains hunched around the chapel, in its hollow, like some dark sisterhood over a cauldron. You had to go to the end of the drive before you could make out the meagre lights of the village.
It was awesomely lonely up here, but it was home to Huw, who sniffed appreciatively at Merrily’s smoke, relaxing into his accent.
‘I were born a bastard in a little bwddyn t’other side of that brow. Gone now, but you can find the foundations in the grass if you have a bit of a kick around.’
‘I wondered about that: a Yorkshireman called Huw Owen. You’re actually Welsh, then?’
‘Me mam were waitressing up in Sheffield by the time I turned two, so I’ve no memories of it. She never wanted to come back; just me, forty-odd years on. Back to the land of my father, whoever the bugger was. Got five big, rugged parishes to run now, two of them strong Welsh-speaking. I’m learning, slowly – getting there.’
‘Can’t be easy.’
Huw waved a dismissive arm. ‘Listen, it’s a holiday, luv. Learning Welsh concentrates the mind. Cold, though, in’t it?’
‘Certainly colder than Hereford.’ Merrily pulled her cheap waxed coat together. ‘For all it’s only forty-odd miles away.’
‘Settled in there now, are you?’
‘More or less.’
They followed a stony track in the last of the light. Walkers were advised to stick to the paths, even in the daytime, or they might get lost and wind up dying of hypothermia – or gunshot wounds. The regular soldiers from Brecon and the shadowy SAS from Hereford did most of their training up here in the Beacons.
No camouflaged soldiers around this evening, though. No helicopters, no flares. Even the buzzards had gone to roost. But to Merrily the silence was swollen. After they’d tramped a couple of hundred yards she said, ‘Can we get this over with?’
Huw laughed.
‘I’m not daft, Huw.’
‘No, you’re not that.’
He stopped. From the top of the rise, they could see the white eyes of headlights on the main road crossing the Beacons.
‘All right.’ Huw sat down on the bottom tier of what appeared to be a half-demolished cairn. ‘I’ll be frank. Have to say I were a bit surprised when I heard he’d offered the job to a young lass.’
Merrily stayed on her feet. ‘Not that young.’
‘You look frighteningly young to me. You must look like a little child after Canon T.H.B. Dobbs.’ Huw pronounced the name in deliberate block capitals.
‘Mr Dobbs,’ Merrily said, ‘yes. You know him, then?’
‘Not well. Nobody knows the old bugger well.’
‘I’ve never actually met him – with him being in and out of hospital for over a year.’
‘There’s a treat to look forward to,’ Huw said.
‘I’ve heard he’s a… traditionalist.’
‘Oh aye, he’s that, all right. No bad thing, mind.’
‘I can understand that.’ Merrily finally sat down next to him.
‘Aye,’ Huw said. ‘But does your new bishop?’
It was coming, the point of their expedition. The pale moon was limp above a black flank of Pen-y-fan.
‘Bit of a new broom, Michael Henry Hunter,’ Huw said, as a rabbit crossed the track, ‘so I’m told. Bit of a trendy. Bit flash.’
‘So he appoints a female diocesan exorcist,’ Merrily said, ‘because that’s a cool, new-broom thing to do.’
‘You said it.’
‘Only, he hasn’t appointed me. Not yet. Canon Dobbs is still officially in harness. I haven’t been appointed to anything.’
‘Oh, really?’ Huw tossed a pebble into the darkness.
‘So are you going to tell him?’
‘Tell him?’
‘That he shouldn’t.’
‘Not my job to tell a bishop what he can and can’t do.’
‘I suppose you want me to tell him: that I can’t take it on.’
‘Aye.’ Huw gazed down at the road. ‘I’d be happy with that.’
Shit, Merrily thought.
She’d met the Bishop just once before he’d become the Bishop. It was, fatefully, at a conference at her old college in Birmingham, to review the progress of women priests in the Midlands. He was young, not much older than Merrily, and she’d assumed he was chatting her up.
This was after her unplanned, controversial speech to the assembly, on the subject of women and ghosts.
‘Shot my mouth off,’ she told Huw, sitting now on the other side of the smashed cairn. ‘I’d had a… all right, a psychic experience. One lasting several weeks. Not the kind I could avoid, because it was right there in the vicarage. Possibly a former incumbent, possibly just… a volatile. Plenty of sensations, sounds, possibly hallucinatory – I only ever actually saw it once. Anyway, it was just screwing me up. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and Jane saying: “Didn’t they teach you anything at theological college, Mum?” And I’m thinking, yeah, the kid’s right. Here we are, licensed priests, and the one thing they haven’t taught us is how to handle the supernatural. I didn’t know about Mr Dobbs then. I didn’t even know that every diocese needed to have one, or what exactly they did. I just wanted to know how many other women felt like me – or if I was being naive.’
‘Touched a nerve?’
‘Probably. It certainly didn’t lead to a discussion, and nobody asked me anything about it afterwards. Except for Michael Hunter. He came over later in the restaurant, bought me lunch. I thought, he was just… Anyway, that was how it happened. Obviously, I’d no idea then that he was going to be my new bishop.’
‘But he remembered you. Once he’d got his feet under the table and realized, as a radical sort of lad, that he could already have a bit of a problem on his hands: namely Canon T.H.B. Dobbs, his reactionary old diocesan exorcist. Not “Deliverance minister”. Decidedly not.’
‘I’m afraid “Deliverance consultant” is the Bishop’s term.’
‘Aye.’ She felt his smile. ‘You know why Dobbs doesn’t like the word Deliverance? Because the first two syllables are an anagram of devil. That’s what they say. Must’ve been relieved, Mick Hunter, when the old bugger got his little cardiac prod towards retirement.’
‘But he hasn’t gone yet, and I’m only here because the Bishop wants me to get some idea of how-’
‘No, luv.’ Huw looked up sharply. ‘This isn’t a course for people who just want to learn the basics of metaphysical trench warfare, as Hunter well knows. He wants you, badly.’
It’s a sensitive job. It’s very political. It throws up a few hot potatoes like the satanic child-abuse panic – God, what was all that about, really? Well, I don’t want any of this bell-book-andcandle, incense-burning, medieval rubbish. I want somebody bright and smart and on their toes. But also sympathetic and flexible and non-dogmatic and upfront. Does that describe you, Merrily?
Mick Hunter in his study overlooking the River Wye. Thirtynine years old and lean and fit, pulsing with energy and ambition. The heavy brown hair shading unruly blue eyes.
‘So,’ Huw Owen said now, mock-pathetic, slumped under the rising moon. ‘Would you come over all feminist on me if I begged you not to do it?’
Merrily said nothing. She’d been expecting this, but that didn’t mean she knew how to handle it. Quite a shock being offered the job, obviously. She’d still known very little about Deliverance ministry. But did the Bishop himself know much more? Huw appeared to think not.
‘I do like women, you know,’ he said ruefully. ‘I’ve been very fond of women in me time.’
‘You want to protect us, right?’
‘I want to protect everybody. I’ll be sixty next time but one, and I’m starting to feel a sense of responsibility. I don’t want stuff letting in. A lot of bad energy’s crowding the portals. I want to keep all the doors locked and the chains up.’
‘Suddenly the big, strong, male chain’s acquired all these weak links?’
‘I’ve always been a supporter of women priests.’
‘Sounds like it.’
‘Just that it should’ve all been done years ago, that’s the trouble. Give the women time to build up a weight of tradition, some ballast, before the Millennial surge.’
‘And how long does it take to build up a weight of tradition? How long, in your estimation, before we’ll be ready to take on the weepers and the volatiles and the hitchhikers?’
‘Couple of centuries.’
‘Terrific.’
‘Look…’ Silver-rimmed night clouds were moving behind Huw. ‘You’re not a fundamentalist, not a charismatic or a happy-clappy. You’ve no visible axe to grind and I can see why he was drawn to you. You’re in many ways almost exactly the kind of person we need in the trenches.’
‘And I would keep a very low profile.’
‘With Mick Hunter wearing the pointy hat?’ Huw hacked off a laugh. ‘He’ll have you right on the front page of the Hereford Times brandishing a big cross. All right – joke. But you’ll inevitably draw attention. You’re very pretty, am I allowed to say that? And they’ll be right on to you, if they aren’t already. Little rat-eyes in the dark.’
Merrily instantly thought about Dermot Child, the organist in the monk’s robe. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do, Merrily.’
‘Satanists?’
‘Among other species of pond life.’
‘Isn’t all that a bit simplistic?’
‘Let’s pretend you never said that.’
A string of headlights floated down the valley a long way away. She thought of Jane back home in Ledwardine and felt isolated, cut off. How many of the other priests on the course would agree with Huw? All of them, probably. A night-breeze razored down from crags she could no longer see.
‘Listen,’ Huw said, ‘the ordination of women is indisputably the most titillating development in the Church since the Reformation. They’ll follow you home, they’ll breathe into your phone at night, break into your vestry and tamper with your gear. Crouch in the back pews and masturbate through your sermons.’
‘Yes.’
‘But that’s the tip of the iceberg.’
‘Rather than just a phase?’
‘Jesus,’ Huw said, ‘you know what I heard a woman say the other week? “We can handle it,” she said. “It’s no more hassle than nurses get, and women teachers.” A priest, this was, totally failing to take account of the… the overwhelming glamour the priesthood itself confers. It’s now a fact that ordained women are the prime target for every psychotic grinder of the dark satanic mills that ever sacrificed a chicken. And there are a lot of those buggers about.’
‘I’ve read the figures.’
‘Exaggerated – two million in Britain alone, that sort of level. I don’t think so. I’d guess no more than a thousand hard-liners and another five or six thousand misfit hangers-on. But, by God, that’s enough, in’t it? It’s a modern religion, see, masquerading as something ancient. I’ve not said much about it down there yet.’ Jerking a thumb towards the chapel. ‘I like to save it for the end of the course, on account of some priests find it harder to take seriously than spooks.’
A blur of white: an early barn owl sailing over on cue.
Merrily said, ‘What do you mean by a modern religion?’
‘Well, not in principle, though it got a hell of a boost in the eighties. All that worship of money and sex and wordly success – Lucifer as patron saint of greedy, self-serving bastards, the Lord of this World. Goes back to some of the old Gnostic teachings: God’s in His Heaven, while the other feller runs things down here.’
‘You can’t imagine people actually believing that.’
‘Why not? If you want to get on in the world, you have to join the winning team. That’s not evil, it’s pragmatic. It’s being levelheaded, recognizing the set-up. A jungle, every man for himself, that’s the manifesto. That’s the spin. Got this amazing charge in the eighties. Took off faster than mobile phones.’
‘Which was when you-?’
He lifted a hand. ‘I only talk about me when I’m drunk, and I don’t like to get drunk any more.’
She stood up and walked, with determination, around to his side of the stones. ‘Why are you here, really, Huw? I mean out here in the sticks. Are you in hiding?’
‘Eh?’
‘I just don’t go for all that Land of my Fathers bullshit. Something happened to you in Sheffield and you felt you couldn’t-’
‘Cut it any more?’
‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’
She was sorry. She wished she could see his eyes, but his face was in deep shadow.
‘Aye, well, it wasn’t Sheffield,’ Huw said.
‘You don’t have to-’
‘I won’t. I’m just saying it wasn’t Sheffield. I just… Look, don’t try and turn this round, Merrily. You should consider your situation. You’re on your own, your daughter won’t be around much longer-’
‘And I can’t possibly hold myself together without a man.’
Huw stood up, the rising moon blooming on his left shoulder. ‘This is not just wankers in the back pews, you know.’
She looked at him. ‘I’ve encountered evil.’
‘Face to face? Hearing it call your name? And your mother’s name, and your daughter’s name? Feeling it all over you like some viscous, stinking-’
He turned away, shaking his head, shambled back on to the track towards the chapel.
‘Look, those blokes down there – solid, stoical, middle-aged priests: I can tell you four of them won’t go through with it. Out of the rest, there’ll be one broken marriage and a nervous breakdown. Are you listening, Merrily?’
‘Yes!’
She stumbled after him, and he shouted back over his shoulder, ‘Woman exorcist? Female guardian of the portals? You might as well just paint a great big bullseye between your tits.’
When they got back, the chapel was in near-darkness, only an unsteady line of light under the door of the stone room.
Inside, the oil lamp which normally hung in the passage now stood on Huw’s desk, next to the TV.
‘Power’s gone,’ someone said. They were all standing around in the lamplight looking guilty like small boys. There was a smell of burning.
‘Ah, Huw, ah…’ The Rev. Charles Headland flicked at the letter-box mouth of the VCR. ‘Some of us wanted to have another look at that lady. Couldn’t make up our minds. Dodgy items, poltergeists.’
‘It was mainly me,’ said Barry Ambrose, the worried vicar from Wiltshire. ‘I half-believed her, but I think I’d have wanted to go back and talk to her again.’
‘Yes.’ Huw closed the door of the room. ‘That was what they did. It was a rector in Northampton. He felt bad about them recording the first interview on tape for the likes of us, and just giving her a token prayer, so he went back to talk to her in private.’
Merrily felt a tension in the room.
‘Sorry, Huw.’ Charlie held up his hands, something ribboning and rustling there, and glistening in the lamplight. ‘Don’t know what happened here.’
Holding up the video cassette. About four yards of tape had become unravelled.
‘Screen went blank. Ejected the tape, and the damn thing was on fire. Had to rip it out and stamp on it. Extraordinary thing. Wasn’t your only copy, was it?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Huw accepted the remains of the video. ‘Coming to the end of its shelf-life anyway, that particular case-history.’
‘Need a new player, too, I’d guess.’
Merrily leaned in and saw that the lips of the machine were scorched and warped. She’d never known this happen to a VCR before.
‘That’s the fourth one in two years,’ Huw said. ‘It’s a right difficult place, this.’
‘Jesus.’ Merrily’s legs felt weak; she clutched at a chair. ‘You’re not saying…?’
‘No, luv. I don’t say anything, me.’
Silence in the stone room. One of those moments when spiderwebs of cracks appeared in the walls of reality, and Merrily thought: Do I really want to be doing this? Should anyone be doing it?
Huw looked over the lamplit assembly of bemused vicars and rectors and priests-in-charge. God’s elite commando unit, Merrily thought, and wanted to give in to hysterical laughter, except one or two of them might then think she was possessed.
‘So, lads,’ Huw said, ‘which of you would like to practise his cleansing routine?’
Charlie Headland’s mouth tightened. Merrily guessed he was wondering if Huw had rigged this. And she even wondered that, too. Tests – little tests. Lies. Disinformation.
‘And should we bless and cleanse the entire premises? Or perhaps each other?’
Merrily thought, horrified: It’s getting completely out of hand. How quickly we all rush to the edge.
‘This is insane,’ Nick Cowan, the ex-social worker, said. ‘It’s nonsense. There was obviously some sort of electrical fluctuation. A power surge, that’s all.’
Huw beamed at him. ‘Good thought, Nicholas. You do get problems like that in the mountains. That’s a very good thought. There you are…’ He spread his hands. ‘Lesson for us all. Always consider the rational nuts-and-bolts explanation before you get carried away. Why don’t you go and check the fuse-box, Charles? In the cupboard over the front door. There’s a torch in there.’
When Charlie had gone, Merrily sat down. She felt tired and heavy. To break the uncomfortable silence, she said, ‘Was that a genuine case – the woman on the video?’
‘Ah,’ said Huw. In the wavery light, he looked much younger. Merrily could imagine him in some rock band in the sixties.
‘You said they went back to talk to her again.’
‘Well.’ He began to wrap the unravelled videotape in a coil around his hands until it was binding them together. ‘Our man in Northampton knocks on the door and gets no answer, but he can hear a radio playing loudly inside the house, and the door’s unlocked, so he goes in and calls out, like you do. And the radio just goes on playing, and our man’s beginning to get a funny feeling.’
‘Oh, dear God, no,’ said Clive Wells. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘Afraid so, Clive.’ Huw held out his hands, pressed together as though in prayer but bound tight, somehow blasphemously, with black videotape. ‘There she is on the settee with a bottle of whisky, nearly empty, and a bottle of pills, very empty, and Radio Two playing comforting sixties hits.’
Merrily closed her eyes. Huw wouldn’t be lying about this. He wouldn’t be that cruel.
‘And we still don’t know if she was genuine or not,’ Huw said sadly. ‘The bottom line is that our man in Northampton should not have left before administering a proper blessing to leave her in a state of calm, feeling protected. Psychological benefits, if nothing else. The worst that could’ve happened then was he’d have looked a pillock if it came out she’d made the story up. But, then, looking like a pillock’s part of the clergyperson’s job, in’t it, Merrily? Get used to it, don’t we?’
Merrily was still staring into the scorched and grinning maw of the VCR when the lights came on again.
‘First law of Deliverance,’ Huw said. ‘Always carry plenty of fuse wire.’