The barn was like an intimate church. Lol could sense it around him, a rich and velvety warmth. He could see the long beeswax candles, creamy stems aglow, and imagine tendrils of soft scented smoke curling to the rafters.
He stood for a moment, giving in to the deceptive luxury of heat – experiencing the enchantment of the barn as, he felt sure, Moon would have known it. Then catching his breath when the total silence gave way to an ashy sigh – the collapse of crumbling logs in the hearth with a spasm of golden splinters, the small implosion bringing a glint from a single nail protruding from the wall over the fireplace. A nail where once hung a picture of a smiling man with his Land Rover.
Which brought Lol out of it, tensing him – because another black-framed photo hung there now: of a long-haired woman in a long dress.
The candle-holders were like dead saplings, two of them framing a high-backed black chair, thronelike. And, standing beside the chair – Lol nearly screamed – was a priest in full holy vestments.
Merrily was gesturing wildly for a verger, a cleaner, anybody with a mop and bucket – people staring at her from both sides of the aisle, as though she was some shrill, house-proud harpy.
What she was seeing was the defiled altar at St Cosmas, blistered with half-dried sacrificial blood – while this blood was close to the centre of the Cathedral, and it was still warm and it was human blood, bright and pure, and there was so damned much of it.
The choir sang on. The Boy Bishop and his entourage were now out of sight, out of earshot, paying homage to Cantilupe in all his fragments.
She should be there, too. She should be with them in the ruins of the tomb, where the barrier was down, where Thomas Dobbs had fallen. Yet – yes, all right, irrationally maybe – she also had to dispose of the blood… the most magical medium for the manifestation of… what? What? Anyway, she couldn’t be in both places, and there was no one else… absolutely nobody else.
Sophie was tending to the woman, the contents of her large handbag emptied out on the pew, the woman’s head tilted back – Sophie dabbing her nose and lips with a wet pad, the woman struggling to say how sorry she was, what a time for a nosebleed to happen.
‘She has them now and then,’ a bulky grey-haired man was explaining in a low, embarrassed voice to nobody in particular. ‘Not on this scale, I have to say. It’s nerves, I suppose. It’ll stop in a minute.’
Merrily said sharply, ‘Nerves?’
‘Oh,’ he mumbled, ‘mother of the Boy Bishop, all that. Stressful time all round.’
‘You’re Dick Lyden?’
‘Yes, I am. Look, can’t you leave the cleaning-up until after the service. Nobody’s going to step in it.’
‘That’s not what I’m worried about, Mr Lyden. This is his mother’s blood?’ She was talking to herself, searching for the significance of this.
‘I don’t want the boy to see the fuss.’ Dick Lyden pulled out a white handkerchief and began to mop his wife’s splashes from his shoes. ‘He’s temperamental, you see.’
Someone had given James Lyden one of the votive candles from near where the shrine had stood, and he waited there while they pushed back the partition screen.
‘Not how we’d like it to be,’ Jane heard this big minister with the bushy beard say. ‘Still, I’m sure St Thomas would understand.’
‘Absolutely,’ James Lyden said, like he couldn’t give a toss one way or the other.
There was no sign of Rowenna.
Pressed into the side of one of the pointed arches screening off the transept, no more than six yards away from them, Jane saw it all as the bearded minister held open the partition door to the sundered tomb.
Only the minister and the Boy Bishop went up to the stones – as though it was not just stone slabs in there, but Cantilupe’s mummified body. The two candle-bearing boys in white tunics waited either side of the door, like sentries. One of them, a stocky shock-haired guy, saw Jane and raised a friendly eyebrow. She’d never seen him before and pretended she hadn’t noticed.
The bearded minister stood before one of the side-panels with those mutilated figures of knights on it – their faces obliterated like someone had attacked them centuries ago with a hammer and a stone-chisel, and a lot of hatred.
The minister crossed his hands over his stomach, gazed down with closed eyes. He saw nothing.
‘Almighty God,’ he said, ‘let us this night remember Your servant, Thomas, guardian of this cathedral church, defender of the weak, healer of the sick, friend to the poor, who well understood the action of Our Lord when His disciples asked of Him: which is the greatest in the Kingdom of God and He shewed to them a child and set him in the midst of them.’
Jane saw James Lyden’s full lips twist into a sour and superior sneer.
The minister said, ‘Father, we ask that the humility demonstrated by Thomas Cantilupe throughout his time as bishop here might be shared this night and always by your servant James.’
‘No chance,’ Jane breathed grimly, and the shock-haired boy must have seen the expression on her face, because he grinned.
‘It is to our shame,’ the minister went on, ‘that Thomas’s shrine, this cathedral’s most sacred jewel, should be in pieces, but we know that James will return here when it is once again whole.’
Wouldn’t put money on it. This time Jane looked down at her shoes, and kept her mouth shut.
Which was more than James did when he put down his candle on a mason’s bench, and bent reverently to kiss the stone. Jane reckoned he must have spent some while dredging up this disgusting, venomous wedge of thick saliva.
When his face came up smiling, she felt sick. She also felt something strange and piercingly frightening: an unmistakable awareness, in her stomach, of the nearness of evil. She gasped, because it weakened her, her legs felt numb, and she wanted to be away from here, but was not sure she could move. She felt herself sinking into the stone of the arch. She felt soiled and corrupted, not so much by what she’d seen but by what she realized it meant, and she groped for the words she’d intoned with all the sincerity of a budgie – while Mum held her hands – before the altar at Ledwardine.
Christ be with us, Christ within us.
And then the electric lights went out.
‘Look, darling,’ he said, ‘it’s Mr Robinson. You remember Mr Robinson.’
Tim Purefoy held a large glass of red wine close to the tablecloth white of his surplice.
Anna wore a simple black shift, quite low-cut. She was a beautiful woman; she threw off a sensual charge like a miasma. Like an aura, Lol supposed.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I thought, one day, there would be somebody. I really didn’t think it would be you.’
‘The brother, perhaps.’ Tim lowered himself, with a grateful sigh, into the chair. ‘All rage and bombast, amounting, in the end, to very little – like most of them.’
‘Or the exorcist,’ Anna said, ‘Jane’s mother. I did so want to meet her before we moved on.’
‘But not this little chap here. No, indeed. Hidden depths, do you think?’ A bar of pewtery moonlight cut through the high window, reaching almost to the top of Tim Purefoy’s pale curls. He held up a dark bottle without a label. ‘Glass of wine, old son?’
‘No thanks,’ Lol said tightly. ‘I… seem to be interrupting something.’ Everything he said seemed to emerge slowly, the way words sometimes did in dreams, as though the breath which carried them had to tunnel its way through the atmosphere.
‘Not at all.’ Tim Purefoy took a long, unhurried sip of wine. ‘It’s finished now. It’s done. We’re glad to have the company, aren’t we, darling?’
‘Done?’
‘Ah, now, Mr Robinson…’ Tim put down his glass then used both hands to pull the white surplice over his head, letting it fall in a heap to the flags. ‘You must have some idea of what we’re about, or you wouldn’t be here.’
Anna Purefoy brought Lol a chair and stood in front of him until he sat down – like he was going to be executed, sacrificed. Anna looked young and fit and energized, as if she’d just had sex. She must, he thought, be about sixty, however. ‘Sure you won’t have a glass of wine?’
Before you die?
‘Communion wine?’ Lol said.
Tim Purefoy laughed. ‘With a tincture of bat’s blood.’
‘It’s our own plum wine, silly.’ Anna took the bottle from her husband and held it out to Lol. ‘See? You really shouldn’t believe everything you read about people like us.’
Lol remembered her patting floury hands on her apron. One can buy a marvellous loaf at any one of a half-dozen places in town, but one somehow feels obliged, living in a house this old.
He was almost disarmed by the ordinariness of it, the civility, the domesticity: candles like these, in holders like these, available in all good branches of Habitat. He blinked and forced himself to remember Katherine Moon congealing in her bath of blood – glancing across towards the bathroom door, holding the image of the dead, grinning Moon pickled like red cabbage. In that room over there, beyond those stairs. Behind that door.
Visualization, Athena White had said. Willpower.
‘Thank you.’ Lol accepted the stoppered wine bottle from Anna. He held it up for a moment before grasping it by the neck and smashing it into the stone fireplace. He felt the sting of glass-shards as the fire hissed in rage. Rivers of wine and blood ran down his wrist. And down over the hanging photograph of Moon.
‘Now, tell me what you did to her,’ Lol whispered.
The choir faded into trails of unconducted melody.
‘Please remain in your seats.’ The Bishop’s voice, crisply from the speakers. ‘We appear to have a power failure, but we’re doing all we-’ And then the PA system cut out.
Merrily spotted Mick in his mitre, by candlelight amid jumping shadows, before the candles began to go out, one by one, the air laden with the odour of cooling wax, until there was only the oval of light on the corona, like a Catherine wheel over the central altar – the last holy outpost.
She pulled the cross from under her cloak, standing close to the pool of blood on the tiles, though she couldn’t see it now. A baby began to cry.
She looked across the aisle and the pews, towards the main door, to where the big black stove should have been jetting red, and saw nothing. The stove was out, too. The Cathedral gone dark – gone cold.
‘ Jesus,’ – Merrily feeling the fear like a ball of lead in her solar plexus – ‘ may all that is You flow into me.’
‘James?’ the bearded minister called out. ‘Are you there?’
Jane stepped out from the archway and heard the swish of heavy robes as the Boy Bishop brushed past her in the dark. The candles held by the two attendants, the sentries, were also out. Only one small flame glowed – the two-inch votive candle given to James Lyden, now lying on the mason’s bench. Jane ran and snatched it up, hid the flame behind her hand, and moved out into the transept, listening for the swish of the robes.
Lyden was going somewhere, being taken somewhere, escorted.
She heard him again – his voice this time. ‘ Yeah, OK.’ She followed quietly, though maybe not quietly enough, wishing she had her trainers on instead of her stupid best shoes.
She could see him now – a black, mitred silhouette against the wan light from the huge diamond-paned gothic windows in the nave.
Moonlight. Shadows of people, unmoving. Jane heard anxious whispers and a baby’s cry mingling into a vast soup of echoes. Where was Mum? Where was Mum with the cross? Why wasn’t she rushing for the pulpit, because, Christ, if there was a time for an exorcism, a time for the soul police to make like an armed response unit, this was it.
She could no longer see the mitred silhouette. Where had he gone, the sneering bastard who’d spat on the saint’s tomb, and brought darkness? Although, of course, she knew it hadn’t really happened like that. Somebody had hit a big fusebox somewhere. It was all coincidence, theatrics.
Jane stumbled, stepped into space, groping for stone, nearly dropping her stub of a candle. Hearing quick footsteps receding ahead of her.
Steps. Stone steps going down.
The crypt? The Boy Bishop was going into the crypt.
Jane had never been down there, although it was open to visitors. Mum had seen it. Mum said it was no big deal. No, there weren’t stacks of old coffins, nothing like that. Tombs at one end, effigies, but not as many as you might expect. It was just a bare stone cellar really, and not as big as you’d imagine.
Jane stayed where she was at the top of the steps.
Afraid, actually.
Admit it: afraid of being down there with Rowenna’s creepy boyfriend in his medieval robes, afraid of what slimeball stuff she might see him doing. The guy was a shit. Just like Danny Gittoes had broken into Ledwardine Church for Rowenna, James Lyden had spat on the tomb of the saint for her. Another sex-slave to Rowenna, who in turn was a friend of Angela. How long had Rowenna known Angela?
Aware of this long slime-trail of evil unravelling before her, Jane edged down two steps, listening hard.
Nothing.
She raised the stub of votive candle in its little metal holder. Perhaps she held the light of St Thomas, the guardian.
Could she believe that?
What did it matter? Jane shrugged helplessly to herself and went down into the crypt.