The Cure of Souls

and pulsed as if a melody was trying to escape.

Lol turned, walked back the way he’d come, putting a hand up to his glasses, pushing them tight onto the bridge of his nose; losing your specs was not something you did in a wood at night. When he took his hand away, he saw the trees and bushes had fallen away and there was now a clear space up ahead. A small yellow light appeared, not too bright, a little unsteady, with a black cone above it: a witch’s hat. The kiln tower again.

When the sky was clear of branches, a trailing scarf of brightness told him which direction was north… and then it was suddenly split by something black and rigid that made him reel back, startled. He slipped and stumbled, went down on one knee before it – waiting for the thing to move, bend down, snatch him up, hit him.

Nothing moved. Even the humming had stopped. Lol scrambled warily to his feet.

It was only a pole, half as thick as a telegraph pole, but not tall enough to carry telegraph wires or electricity cables – although it did support wires of some kind. To avoid it, he took a couple of steps to the right. No trees or bushes stood in the way and the ground was level.

A second black pole appeared, rearing hard against the northern sky, and this one had a short crosspiece like – his first thought – a gibbet. From it hung something limp and shrivelled, the skeletal spine of a dead garland; when he passed between the two poles, his bare elbow brushed against the remains with a dry, papery crackle.

Now he could see the extent of it: dozens of black poles against the pale night, in lines to either side of him across the barren ground, most of them with crosspieces, some connected by dark wires overhead. It was like a site laid out for a mass crucifixion. Between the wires, he could still see the yellow kiln-house light, perhaps two hundred yards away. And the nearness of the kiln told him what this was… or should have been.

It was high summer and these poles should be loaded with foliage, the ripening bines high on the wires, rippling with soft green hop-cones. But this whole scene was in black and white and grey, and there was an awning of silence: no owls, no scurryings in the undergrowth. No undergrowth, in fact.

The silence, Lol thought, was like a studio silence: soft, dry, flat and localized. The air seemed cooler now, and he could feel goosebumps prickling on his bare arms as he ventured tentatively into a hop-yard where no hops grew, along an alley of winter-bleak, naked hop-poles, a place as desolate as the stripped-back bed of someone recently dead. He felt a little scared now. There was no contented cattle-breath around this place – it felt less like a memory of the womb than a premonition of the grave.

No reason to stay. Lol started to turn away. Afterwards, he couldn’t remember whether these thoughts of death had occurred in the moment before the humming began again, or whether it was the combination of the sound and the stark setting that conveyed the sense of mourning, loss, lamentation. The bleak keening seemed to be around and above him, as if it was travelling along those black wires, as if they were vibrating with some kind of plangent sorrow.

And then, as he turned, there was another noise – a crispy swishing, like dried leaves in a tentative breeze, like the noise when he’d touched the remains of the dead hop-bine, only continuous – and a pale smear blurred the periphery of his vision like petroleum jelly spread on a camera lens.

Lol saw her.

It was like she was swimming through the night towards him, from the far end of the corridor of crosses.

No sense of unreality here, that was the worst of it. It was not dreamlike, not hallucinatory.

She stopped between the poles, legs apart, leaning back, one moment all shadows, and then shining under the northern sky: a thin, white woman garlanded with pale foliage. Rustling and crackling like something dead and dusty, moved by the wind.

But there was no wind.

Lol backed into a pole, felt it juddering against his spine and the back of his head, as he gasped and twisted away, semistunned and reeling, into a parallel hop-corridor, the poles rushing past him like black railings seen from a train.

Between them, he saw the woman moving. A long, dried-out, bobbled bine was wound around her like a boa, around her neck, under her arms, over her shoulders, pulled up between her legs – the cones crackling and crumbling on her skin, throwing off a spray of flakes, an ashy aura of dead vegetation.

As she drew level with him, he could see, under the winding bine, black droplets beading her breasts, streaks down her forearms, as though the bine was thorned.

She turned to Lol and the bine fell away as she extended her hands towards him.

Lol very nearly took them in his own.

Very nearly.

2 In the Old-fashioned Sense

IT WAS LIKE she’d told the Bishop: anything iffy, out came the coal-tongs and the asbestos gloves, and it made you wonder whatever happened to that old job description: The cure of souls.

‘I’d just said “The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life,” and that was when the girl went slightly crazy,’ Canon Dennis Beckett explained on the phone.

To be fair, he had good reason to feel this wasn’t really his problem. He was retired now, and lived on the other side of the county. He only came across to Dilwyn to take the Sunday services for two weeks a year, when Jeff Kimball, his godson, was away on holiday. Which was a diversion for Dennis, too, and a nice place to drive out to: this neat black and white haven with its village green.

But at the end of it, the thing was, other than on a superficial, hand-shaking level, he didn’t really know these people, did he? And in this case there was a young girl involved – always dicey. Also, for extra tension, a touch of drama, it had happened during Holy Communion.

‘We’ve all had situations of people becoming ill, of course,’ Dennis said, ‘even dying in their pews on two occasions that I can recall. But… well, it’s usually elderly people, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm.’ Since coming to Ledwardine less than two years ago, Merrily had seen a stroke, a blackout, an epileptic fit and a birth. ‘Not invariably.’

She wasn’t yet seeing this as a deliverance issue. She’d met Canon Beckett two or three times at local clergy gatherings, remembered him as grey-bearded, vague, affable. She wondered why, if this incident had occurred last Sunday, it had taken him five clear days to decide he should tell her about it.

It was the first morning of Jane’s school holidays. Friday the thirteenth, as it happened.

‘It was embarrassing rather than anything else, at the time,’ Dennis said. ‘The mother appeared to be affected the most – essentially such a good family, you see, in the old-fashioned sense; a family, in fact, to whom the term God-fearing might once have applied. And I’m afraid you can’t say that of very many of them nowadays, can you?’

‘No.’ Merrily tucked the phone under her chin, leaning forward through a sunbeam to pull over her sermon pad and a felt pen. ‘I suppose not. So, what did happen, exactly?’

‘She dashed – that’s the only word for it – dashed the chalice from my hands. And then she was sick.’

‘She actually—?’

‘Threw up. Copiously. Tossed her cookies, as my grandson would say. In the chancel. On everything. On me.’

‘Oh.’

‘Rather a mess. And the smell soured everything. Hard to continue afterwards.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Everyone was extremely understanding and trying not to react. Someone said, Oh dear, very quietly, and then they all discreetly moved out of the way. The mother was absolutely white with the shame of it, poor woman. She’s one of Jeffrey’s regulars – cleans the church, arranges the flowers. There she was, dragging the child away down the aisle, followed by the father, and I was starting to go after them when