The Cure of Souls

Jane shrugged, keeping her lips clamped. She didn’t like talking about what Mum did, especially to someone like Layla Riddock.

‘So what would she say to this, your old lady?’

Jane managed a nervous grin but still said nothing. Her old lady would probably have snatched up the glass, scattered the letters and called on God and all His angels to cleanse this soiled place like now.

Kirsty said, ‘Who told you about this?’

‘Nobody,’ Jane said. ‘I was just—’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Layla leaned forward, those big, heavy breasts straining to come bouncing out of her blouse. ‘This is excellent. I think… I really do think that this is going to be a really good sitting.’

‘Yeah,’ said Kirsty, rebuked. ‘Right.’

Jane had never actually done this before. It belonged to the realm of sad gits, people with no real hold on life. It was a joke. Unhealthy, maybe, but still a joke.

She had to keep thinking like that, because she knew there was no way she was going to get out of here until it was over. OK, she could leap up and demand the key and they probably wouldn’t use violence to stop her. (Or would they?)

But that wouldn’t be awfully cool, would it?

Besides, it might be, you know… kind of interesting.

The air in the groundsman’s hut smelled of oil and sweat. The candlelight had found a little moisture in the cleft over Layla Riddock’s upper lip as it curled at last into a sort of smile.

‘Let’s go for it, then,’ Layla said.

It was terrifying.

And like… really addictive.

The glass made an eerie sound as it moved across the greasy surface of Steve’s bench. Like a coffin sliding through the curtains of a crematorium, reflected Jane, who had never been inside a crematorium, not even when her dad had died.

The first time—

‘Are you here?’ Layla had asked calmly.

—the glass shot directly to YES with the snap precision of a fast cue ball on a snooker table, and the sudden movement made both candle-flames go almost horizontal, like in the wind created when someone suddenly slams a door. Jane was so shocked she almost jerked her finger away.

‘Good,’ Layla said.

Jane let out a fast breath. She hadn’t expected that to happen. Nobody could be pushing; it just wasn’t possible.

‘Now, tell us your name,’ Layla instructed.

It, Jane thought.

There couldn’t be an it. Not on a summer afternoon in Slobbery Steve’s filthy shed in the precincts of the dreary once-modernist Moorfield High School, Herefordshire.

It was a scam, that was all. There had to be a trick to it, a method of setting up momentum without appearing to apply pressure – an interesting end-of-term conundrum for the anoraks in the new science block.

Jane looked into Layla’s face. Layla’s eyes were shut, but her wide mouth was set into a closed-lips smile that seemed to shimmer in the moist light, and Jane felt sure that Layla could see her through those lowered lids, as—

The glass glided, dragging Jane’s finger, then her hand across the oily bench-top towards the letter J.

OK, that was it. She was annoyed now. So, like, suppose she tried to manoeuvre it. Suppose she exerted a little deliberate pressure of her own next time. Suppose, with some really intense concentration, a blast of hyper-focused will power, she could make it spell out Jane…

Will power, yeah: thought-projection. She glanced up at Layla. Layla’s eyes still didn’t open.

All right. She located the letter A, halfway between Kirsty and the kid Amy, and she really, really concentrated on it, and when the glass began to move, she tried to—

The glass was dragged from under her forefinger, to slide unstoppably to the letter U.

Jane leaned back. She didn’t like this. She really didn’t like it.

She became aware that the girl opposite her, Amy of the fourth form, had begun panting. Her fair hair was pulled back tightly from her face and her skin seemed to be stretched taut. Now, Jane knew exactly who she was. She was the one who looked like one of those plaster mannequins in an old-fashioned school-outfitters: skirt always uncreased, blazer always buttoned, tie always straight, hair perfectly shoulder-length, perfectly brushed. Amy’s ultimate role model would be Candida Butler.

What was wrong with her? If this scared her so much, what was she doing here?

Because it was addictive? Because it worked?

Get me out of this.

The glass moved under Jane’s finger, slid back into the centre of the circle of letters and off again. The bloody thing seemed to know exactly where it was going, and she just let it happen now, watching the finger in motion, with the fore fingers of the other three – all of them apparently just resting on the thick base of the glass – and all the time trying to separate herself from this, pretending that finger was no longer connected to her nervous system.

Watching the glass spelling out one word, before it stopped in the dead centre of the circle.

J-U-S-T-I-N-E

Amy drew in a long, ratchety kind of breath.

Part One The Flavour in the Beer

The hop belongs to the same family as hemp and cannabis and is a relative of the nettle. A hardy, long-lived climbing perennial, its shoots can reach 20 feet in length but die back to ground level every winter. It has no tendrils and climbs clockwise round its support. Although it will grow in the poorest soils, only optimum conditions will produce the quality needed for today’s shrinking markets. As a result, hop-growing in Herefordshire is now concentrated in the sheltered valleys of the Frome and Lugg, where there are at least 18 inches of loamy soil.

A Pocketful of Hops (Bromyard and District Local History Society, 1988)

Church of England

Diocese of Hereford

Ministry of Deliverance

email: deliverance@spiritec.co.uk

Click

Home Page

Hauntings