The Cure of Souls

Aren’t you?’

Merrily stared hopelessly at the close-mown lawn, at the well-weeded flowerbeds. Demonic evil was something you could sense, like a disgusting smell – sometimes precisely that. The only identifiable odour in this house had been floor-cleaner wafting from the kitchen. All she’d sensed in there were confusion, distress… and perhaps something else she couldn’t yet isolate. But it wasn’t evil.

In the end, all she had – the only universally accepted symptom of spiritual or diabolic possession – was the mother’s suggestion of a sudden, startling clairvoyance.

‘You said she knew things. Things she couldn’t have known.’

‘I’m sorry I said that, now.’ A nervous glance back at the house, as though a chair might come crashing through the window. ‘It’s nothing I can prove.’

‘What things?’

‘This isn’t the time, Mrs Watkins.’

‘What kind of… intrusion do you think might be affecting her?’

‘Isn’t that for you to find out? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to—’

‘Help me,’ Merrily said.

Amy’s mother stared over the low hedge, across the lane. ‘The spirit of a dead person.’

Merrily didn’t blink. ‘Specifically?’

There was a movement at the window of a room to the left of the door. The child stood there, not six feet away. She wore a white, sleeveless top. Her fair hair hung limply to her shoulders. She looked maybe twelve. She looked stiff and waxen. The room behind her was all featureless dark, like the background to a portrait. It’s so cold now. There’s a sense of cold. The cold you can feel in your bones.

Merrily tried to attract Amy’s gaze, but the kid was looking beyond her.

She turned. Nothing. Nothing had changed in the lane. There was nobody about; even the yellow sports car was pulling away.

It began to rain – big, warm, slow drops. When she looked back at the bungalow, the girl had vanished.

Hazel Shelbone walked back to the door. ‘My husband will be home presently. I don’t really want him to know you’ve been here. He’s under enough pressure.’

‘I’ll take advice,’ Merrily promised. ‘I’ll be back. I’ll leave you my number but I’ll call you tomorrow, anyway, if that’s all right.’

‘Just pray for her,’ Mrs Shelbone said limply. ‘I expect you can do that, at least.’

No thunder, yet, but the rain was hard and relentless, clanking on the bonnet of the old Volvo like nuts and bolts, turning the windscreen into bubblewrap. Both wipers needed new blades. After a few miles, Merrily was forced into the forecourt of a derelict petrol station where she sat and smoked a Silk Cut rapidly, filling up the car with smoke because she couldn’t open the window in this downpour.

Nothing was ever straightforward, nothing ever textbook.

In the car, behind the streaming windows, she prayed for Amy Shelbone. She prayed for communication to be reopened between Amy and her mother. She prayed for any psychic blockage or interference to be removed. She prayed for the healing of whatever kind of wound had been opened up, by the puncturing of what the kid now evidently believed to be the central lie of her upbringing.

She prayed, all too vaguely, for a whole bunch of whatevers.

With hindsight, if she couldn’t work with Amy, it ought to have been her mother. With extra-hindsight, she and Hazel Shelbone ought to have prayed together before they left the church. Except at that stage, Merrily hadn’t been convinced. She’d needed to see Amy.

And, having seen Amy, having heard her, she still wasn’t convinced.

She could perhaps have persuaded Mrs Shelbone to let her stay until Amy’s dad got home. Perhaps the three of them could have returned to the church this evening and, with Dennis Beckett’s permission, conducted a small Eucharist. Just in case.

In case what?

Six p.m., and she was back in the scullery/office, with the window open and the dregs of the rain dripping from the ivy on the wall. A Silk Cut smouldered in the ashtray. Jane was not yet back from Hereford.

Merrily felt like a cartoon person flattened in the road, watching a departing steamroller.

The phone was life support.

‘It’s the old dilemma,’ she said. ‘Don’t know whether I’m making too much of it, or not enough.’

‘When do we ever?’ said the Rev. Huw Owen. ‘You should know that by now.’

‘Did I tell you? Bernie wants me to set up a deliverance group.’

‘Never liked committees, focus-group crap. But in this case – traps everywhere, folk always looking for some poor bugger to blame when it all goes down the toilet. Do it, I would. Just don’t co-opt a social worker.’

She could picture him in his study in the Brecon Beacons, his legs stretched out, his ancient trainers wearing another hole in the rug. The old wolfhound, her Deliverance mentor, technical adviser to half the exorcists in Wales and the West Midlands.

‘Tell me that last bit again, lass. You asked the mother what she reckoned had got into the girl. And she said…’

‘The spirit of a dead person,’ Merrily said. ‘That was what she said.’

‘Anybody in particular?’

‘That’s what I asked her next, but she didn’t reply. Then she started to backtrack on what she’d said earlier about Amy telling them things she couldn’t possibly have known without—’

‘If they don’t cooperate, you’re buggered.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Basically, you want to know whether they need you or a child-psychiatrist.’

‘Mmm.’

Huw was silent for about a minute. She knew he was still there because she could hear his trainer tapping the fender. No matter how hot it was, he always kept a small fire going. Not that it could ever get over-hot in a rectory well above the snowline.

Outside a late sun was blearily pushing aside the blankets of cloud.

‘Got a favourite coin?’ Huw said at last.

Merrily’s heart sank.

‘Well?’ said Huw.

‘When you told us about this on the first course, I thought you were kidding. Then I read Martin Israel on exorcism, but I still think—’

‘Stop shaking your head, lass. I’ve done it a few times. It’s always worked – far as I could tell. It either tells you what you already knew or it tells you to think again. And once you start thinking again, you find some new angle you hadn’t noticed and that’s the way ahead.’

‘I wouldn’t have the bottle.’

‘Aye, you would. Take an owd coin and bless it and explain to God what you’re doing. I use this old half- crown. Not legal tender any more, therefore not filthy lucre. I keep it in the bottom of a candleholder on the altar.’

Merrily imagined some hapless parishioner wandering in and witnessing the Rev. Owen apparently settling some vexed spiritual issue on the toss of a coin. It could overturn your entire belief-structure.

‘Course, it’s nowt to do with the coin,’ Huw said.

‘Any more than the Tarot is to do with the cards.’

‘Don’t go fundamentalist on me, lass.’

Merrily laughed.

‘Look at Israel – a scientist, a distinguished pathologist. And they made him exorcist for the City of London. What d’you want? Oh aye, I know what you want. You want summat foolproof. You want a solution on a plate.’

‘A second opinion would do.’

‘If you don’t like the cold, come out of the mortuary.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

‘Any time,’ said Huw.