By 9:30, James Lyden and his band had been ejected from the cellar studio in Breinton Lane. Lol got out of there, too, before Denny’s rage could do some damage. By the time the band had been packed into their Transit in the driveway, he was making his excuses – there was someone he needed to call.
Which was true.
‘You can do it from here, man.’ Denny’s bald head was shining with angry sweat.
‘I can’t.’ Lol was backing away out of the drive, pulling on his army-surplus jacket. No way he wanted to discuss this with Denny until he had some background.
‘You…’ Denny was stabbing at the fog. ‘You know more than you’re letting on. Where’s this come from? What’s this crow shit?’
‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘And you can tell that fucking Lyden he’s finished!’ Denny bawled after him down Breinton Lane.
The Transit van had reversed, and was alongside Lol now, James’s Welsh friend, Eirion, at the wheel. It stopped.
‘Mr Robinson,’ Eirion shouted, ‘for heaven’s sake, what have we done?’ He sounded shocked and frightened.
‘Get your cocking head back in here, Lewis,’ Lol heard James say lazily. ‘The old man will sort it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Eirion said, as the van pulled away. Lol wondered what his chances were of talking to Dick before James did.
‘How old are you, Merrily?’
‘Thirty-six.’
She sat at the bottom of the bed, feeling a little unconnected, slightly not-quite-here. She felt guilty because that was not unpleasant. Maybe the whisky…
Or not?
‘When I was your age, I knew nothing,’ Miss White said. ‘Indeed, I knew very little even when I retired from the Civil Service. You would have been only a child then. I, however, was very high-powered in those days, or so I thought. In reality I knew nothing. It was only when I left London that I began to study in earnest.’
She unlocked one of the cupboards, threw open its double doors.
Merrily thought: Oh… my… God…
Books. Hundreds of books – many stored horizontally on the shelves, so as to stuff more in. Madame Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, Israel Regardie, Dion Fortune: recent paperbacks wedged against yellowing tomes on meditation, astrology, the Qabalah. If the other cupboards were similarly stocked, there must be several thousand books in this attic.
A lifetime’s collection of esoteric reading. A witch’s cave of forbidden literature. You wouldn’t have prised Jane out of here this side of breakfast time.
‘They know I have books in my cupboards,’ Miss White said, ‘but I rather imagine they consider me a subscriber to the lists of Messrs Mills and Boon.’
Merrily thought how wary she herself used to be of Jane’s guru: the late folklorist, Lucy Devenish. God only knew what this old girl got up to when the lights were out.
One thing puzzled her.
‘Miss White, I can’t… What are you doing in a place like this?’
‘Ah, yes… why not the bijou black and white cottage? Why not the roses round the door and the Persian cat in the window?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Because then, my little clergyperson, one would be obliged to prune the roses and feed the cat, to shop for food and employ workmen to preserve the ancient timbers. How much more space there is here… inner space, I mean. As well as beautiful hills to walk in, should one be overtaken by the need to commune with nature.’
‘But how can you…? I don’t know how to put this.’
‘Be surrounded by twittering biddies, patronized by the dreadful Thorpe? That is simply the outer life. The Thorpes suspect I have enough money to buy the whole place, so they don’t pressure me. All right, when one gets very, very annoyed with them, one can be… mischievous…’
‘I bet.’
‘… while at the same time’ – Miss White smiled almost seraphically – ‘giving one’s fellow inmates a welcome, nostalgic frisson once in a while.’
His name drifted serenely in the air between them.
‘Sholto,’ Merrily said eventually.
‘A-ha.’
‘How did you do it?’
Miss White selected from the bookshelves what turned out to be a stiff-backed folder, and took out a yellowing photograph pasted on card.
‘This is him?’
He wore a pinstriped suit with wide lapels. His hair was dark and kinked, his moustache trimmed to a shadow.
‘I bought him in a print shop in Hay,’ said Miss White. ‘I liked his little twist of a smile. No idea who he is or where he came from – there’s no name on the photo. I thought he rather looked like a Sholto.’
Merrily said, ‘I’m not going to ask you how you did this.’
‘Good, because I should refuse to tell you. You could find out easily enough, if you studied. It’s a very well established technique.’
‘He isn’t a ghost at all.’
‘He’s a projection. Do you know what I mean by that?’
Merrily said, ‘Can I think about it?’
Projection?
Psychic projection, psychological projection – a grey area. Come on, Huw, what are we dealing with here?
We don’t fully understand this, but if we assume, to put it simply, that an imprint exists on a sensory wavelength or plane parallel to our own, then it follows that some people are capable of tuning into that wavelength, sometimes allowing the imprint to be transmitted in a way that renders it visible to others. They may be able, consciously or unconsciously, to lend it the energy it needs to manifest. They may even create their own imprint, projecting it like a hologram. If you come across one of these, you’re unlikely to be able to get rid of it through prayer or ritual alone. You’ve got to stop the person from doing it.
Merrily imagined, in the part of the passage where the bulb had blown, turning it into a black tunnel, a man in a doublebreasted suit bringing a match to his cigarette, exhaling the smoke towards her – smoke which rose in a V, a grey, sardonic smile – before shrivelling up into his own vapour like a silently bursting balloon.
‘You’re thinking, is this devilry – aren’t you?’ The light through Miss White’s glasses was intense and focused, like when as a kid you used the sun through a magnifying glass to burn a hole in a newspaper.
‘I suppose I am.’
‘Would you settle for naughty?’
‘I’d love to, but I don’t think I’d be allowed to. You see, the problem – as I see it – is that you’ve created an energy form separate from yourself, but possessing a few atoms of your transferred… intelligence?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘How far is that from it acquiring a level of existence of its own? A primitive level, perhaps, but then other – possibly negative – energies might be attracted to it. And then you could have trouble that’s not so easy to control: a volatile – a poltergeist. Or worse.’
‘Yes.’ Athena White sat down next to Merrily. ‘I follow your argument. It’s unlikely, though, especially if I’m here.’
‘But… I’m sorry, Athena, but you’re not always going to be here, are you?’
‘He’ll die when I die.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Oh, you are a pain, Mrs Clergyperson. All right, I’ll consider it. But it’ll be a frightful wrench – for all of us.’
‘I’m sure he’ll live on in all your memories.’
‘I’ve said I’ll consider it,’ Athena snapped. ‘Now tell me about Denzil Joy.’
There was a rapping on the door, and Susan Thorpe said, ‘Miss White, is there a woman in there with you?’
‘I’m here, Susan,’ Merrily said. ‘Miss White’s been helping me.’
‘I hope she can keep her mouth shut.’
Miss White said loftily, ‘You may, for once, count on it, Thorpe. Now leave us.’
‘You know I can’t drag the party out much longer.’
‘Well, tell your husband to take his clothes off.’
‘Oh!’ said Susan Thorpe. They heard her footsteps recede.
‘That makes me feel quite queasy,’ Merrily said.
‘Wait till you’re as old as they are.’ Mrs White stood up. ‘Merrily, I’m very disturbed by this. I think he’s feeding off you.’
‘Don’t.’
‘If one doesn’t face these things, one can’t take remedial action. I suspect you haven’t been yourself for some days. Tired? Depleted? Prone to emotional outbursts?’
‘Well, yes, since you ask. And also flu-like symptoms: vaguely sore throat, blocked nose, temperature. I put it down to stress.’
‘Losing the will to fight it?’
‘Half the time I just want to run away. I mean… Well, to be quite honest, this was going to be my last job as Deliverance consultant… diocesan exorcist.’
‘You were giving it up?’ An eyebrow rose above the spectacles. ‘While, under different circumstances, that is a decision one might wish to applaud-’
‘I felt I couldn’t cope. I felt under attack from all kinds of different directions.’
‘As you may well be. This could be precisely what’s happening. How many people know of your appalling experience with this man?’
‘I don’t know. The nurses involved… my daughter, Jane… my Deliverance course tutor. And Canon Dobbs, of course.’
‘As he appeared to have arranged it for you? The sheer ignorance of the clergy dumbfounds me. Who else?’
‘There’s no one else I’ve told, I don’t think. It’s not something I enjoy talking about. What’s the significance of that, anyway? If I mishandled the job in the hospital, and I’ve let him in, that’s not their fault.’
‘Admittedly, the idea of an unhappy spirit desperately clinging at the moment of death to a living person is not unknown, particularly in a sexually charged situation. But I think you must also consider the possibility of psychic attack by person or persons unknown. Which is far far more common than most people would imagine. Merely thinking ill of someone is its most basic form, but we may be looking at something more complex in this instance. If I were to lend you my copy of Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence…’
‘What are you trying to do to me? I’m a Christian.’
‘As was Fortune herself, after her fashion. Merrily, how soon after the incident at the hospital did this unclean presence make itself apparent?’
‘I felt tired afterwards, but that was natural; I’d been up all night. But I don’t think I really became aware of it until I was called in to cleanse a desecrated church.’
‘Interesting. This was during your service?’
‘Well, I didn’t actually… It was before.’
‘When you entered the church?’
‘I…’ Merrily remembered standing outside the church talking to the policemen – with a stiffness and a clamminess in her vestments. Had she felt that in the car on the way there? Possibly.
‘Think back, Merrily. Who were you with when you first experienced something amiss?’
‘Policemen? I don’t know, can’t think. I’m mixed up and a bit anxious because I’m sitting here, a minister of the Church, unburdening myself to a practising occultist who, by force of willpower, has created a haunted house.’
‘Who would you normally go to for spiritual help?’
‘Huw, my course tutor, who was in the church with me when I exhibited what must have seemed to him like many of the symptoms of demonic possession.’
‘In which case, why the blue blazes-?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘All right.’ Athena White placed a hand on Merrily’s knee. It didn’t feel like a cloven hoof. ‘Go home, pull your bed into the centre of the room, and draw a pentacle…’
‘You have got to be joking!’
‘All right, a circle – in salt, or even chalk – around the bed. Perform whatever rite your religion allows, but supplement it, when you’re lying in bed, by visualizing rings of bright orange or golden light around you and above you, so that you are enclosed in an orb of light. Keep that in your mind constantly until you fall asleep. If you awake in the night, visualize it at once, intact. This should bring you unmolested to the morning.’
‘A circle?’
‘Don’t be afraid of it. There is but one God. Consider it heavenly light – angelic.’
Huw and Dobbs? Merrily frowned. She always knew it had to be something like this.
‘Secondly, take the robes – vestments – you were wearing in the church when you were spiritually assaulted and burn them. You could try to bless them or sprinkle them with holy water, but it’s really not worth it. Get rid of them.’
Merrily supposed this made sense.
‘But that is not enough, and you know it, Merrily. Until you trace it to its source and eradicate it, you’re always going to be a magnet for the obscene advances of this earthbound essence. This Denzil Joy. One can almost see him now, bloating your aura. You absolutely cannot afford to rest – indeed, you will not rest because of who you are – until you put him to rest.’
‘Yes, I was going to ring you,’ Dick Lyden said, agitated. ‘The boy’s back already, and he’s not terribly happy.’
‘ He’s not happy…’ Lol dragged the phone over to the armchair.
Dick said, ‘Laurence, it was my understanding that Denny’s studio was a proper professional operation – not some Mickey Mouse outfit. You know what this is costing me, don’t you?’
Lol assured Dick that, while this was not the biggest studio around, it was one in which he personally would be delighted to record.
Dick said, ‘As long as it didn’t bloody well blow up, presumably.’
It didn’t blow up, Lol told him. Denny blew up, pressured beyond reasonable resistance by the song they were laying on him. When Denny had heard enough of it, wires became detached.
‘I’m not paying the man to be a bloody critic,’ Dick said. ‘I don’t like any damned song they do either, and I haven’t even heard them.’
Lol said, ‘Do you and Ruth talk about your work much, over the family supper, comparing notes, that kind of thing?’
‘What the hell has-?’
‘For instance, did you talk much about Moon in front of James?’
Dick’s voice dropped like it had been fast-faded. ‘What are you saying?’
Lol said, ‘James, as you may have gathered, isn’t satisfied with an EP – he wants an album. Denny and me, we were a bit underwhelmed by the quality of what we’d heard so far. We suggested the boys run through the rest of their material, so we’d know what we were looking at. Most of it wasn’t wonderful either.’
To be fair, it wasn’t badly played, and the harmonies were as neatly dovetailed as you might expect from newly retired cathedral choirboys. It was the material – derived from the work of second-division bands which were already derivative of other second-division bands twenty years earlier – that didn’t make it. Denny had, in reality, told Lol – behind the protection of thick glass – that they would make a recording of such pristine quality that the deficiencies in the area of compositional talent would stand out like neon.
‘Well, James’s mate Eirion isn’t entirely insensitive.’
‘Really?’ Dick said. ‘His old man runs Welsh Water.’
‘Eirion can tell Denny isn’t impressed, so after about three routine power-chord numbers he gets the band into a huddle, and then he and James sit down with acoustic guitars and they go into this quiet little ballad which James introduces as “The Crow Maiden”. Perfect crystal harmonies – you could hear every word.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘I tend to remember lyrics – remembered the last verse, anyway, so I wrote it down.’ Lol began to unfold a John Barleycorn paper bag. ‘It’s really subtle, as you can imagine – still you’ll probably get the drift. You ready?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake-’
Lol held up the paper bag, and recited:
‘Found your refuge in the past
‘You hid beneath its shade
‘And when you knew it couldn’t last
‘You took your life with an ancient blade.
‘CROW MAIDEN
‘CROW MAIDEN
‘YOU’RE FADIN’
‘AWAY…’
‘Would you like that again?’
You could hear Dick’s hand squeezing the phone.
‘The little shit,’ Dick said.