Midwinter of the Spirit

and sweated.

She’d been here before: a panic-attack at her own installation service at Ledwardine Church. And hallucinations…

But what kind of sick, warped mind conjures up the filth of Denzil Joy?

Dear God.

Franny Bliss and his colleague had watched her hobble to the car, perhaps waiting to see her safely back to the church of St Cosmas and St Damien, but she hadn’t returned. Out of here, lass.

It was all over. Finished.

Jane brought her hot chocolate.

‘There’s a drop of brandy in it.’

‘You’ll have me at the Betty Ford Clinic, flower.’

Jane smiled wanly.

‘Where did you go tonight?’

‘Just… you know… to see a couple of friends.’

‘They could come here sometime. Lots of room.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Maybe sometime.’

Merrily sank back into the sweat-damp pillow and slithered into a feverish sleep. At times she heard bleeps and voices – which might have been on the answering machine or in her hot, fogged head – like satanic static.

Just before midnight, the bedside phone bleeped.

‘Huw?’ she said feverishly.

‘You were asleep, Merrily?’

‘Yes. Hello, Eileen.’

‘Your man’s back,’ Cullen said, ‘with his candles and his bottles.’

‘Oh.’

‘I said I’d call you.’

She clawed for consciousness. ‘It’s not… visiting time, is it?’

‘Jesus, you must have been sound asleep. Being as Mr Dobbs is in a side ward, any time is visiting time, within reason. This is not exactly within my idea of reason, but the visitor’s a very plausible feller. Whatever the hell kind of weirdness he’s getting up to in there, I have to say I quite took to him.’

‘You… talked to him?’

‘He was very apologetic. Said he’d have come earlier but he had some urgent business to see to… Are you still there, Merrily?’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Oh… late fifties. Longish, straggly grey hair. He had a bobble-hat and he was in this auld blue airman’s coat. Talked like… who’s that feller? Alan Bennett? But a real auld hippy, you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s still in there, doing his stuff around Mr Dobbs with his candles. Probably be gone by the time you get here. I could try to keep him talking, if you like…’

‘No,’ Merrily said bleakly, ‘it’s all right now, Eileen. I don’t think I want to see him.’

29 Fog

AT FIRST IT felt like the start of a cold: that filthy, metallic tainting of the back of the throat. And then she was fully awake – knowing what it was, panting in terror.

He’s here!

Rolling out of bed, breath coming in sobs, rolling over and scrambling on to her knees, she began to mutter the Breastplate, groping on the carpet for her pectoral cross.

‘… by invocation of the same

‘The Three in One and One in Three.

‘Of whom all nature hath creation.

‘Eternal Father, Spirit, Word…’

And she fell back against the bottom of the bed, gulping air.

Gone? Perhaps.

After a while she sat up, before reaching instinctively for the cigarettes and lighter, pulling herself to her feet, into the old woollen dressing-gown and out of the cold, uncosy bedroom.

She ached. The light from the landing window was the colour of damp concrete. The garden below looked like her head felt: choked with fog. She stood swaying at the top of the stairs, dizzy, thought she would fall, and hugged the newel post on the landing, the cigarette dangling from her mouth. Repeatedly scraping her thumb against the Zippo, but the light wouldn’t come. Sweating and shaking with panic and betrayal.

‘Mum?’

What?

‘Mum!’

The kid stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking frightened.

Merrily heard a single letter dropping through the box. The postman.

Normality.

She began to cough. No such thing.

Because there was no light, as such, penetrating Capuchin Lane, Lol overslept and awoke to the leaden grind of a harmonium from the shop below, a deep and doomy female voice.

Nico. Mournful, sinister old Nico songs from the seventies. Unshaven, Lol made it down to the shop, past Moon’s lonely mountain-bike, and found Viv, the new manager: a sloppyhippy granny, old friend of Denny’s.

‘Do you like Nico, Lol?’

‘Sometimes,’ Lol said.

‘I love her,’ Viv said. ‘I know she’s not to everybody’s taste. But it’s Moon’s funeral on Friday: a mourning time.’

‘That’s three days away.’ He didn’t know whether Moon had ever even liked Nico; it was not unlikely.

‘I thought I’d play it for an hour every morning, to show that we’re in mourning,’ Viv promised. ‘There’s a letter for you, from London.’

Lol opened it over his toast in the corner cafe. Ironically it promised money – money, as usual, for nothing. The revered Norma Waterson wanted to use one of his songs on her next solo album. It was ‘The Baker’s Lament’, the one about the death of traditional village life.

He was depressed. By James Lyden’s rules, he should have been dead now for at least ten years. On the other hand, unless folk singers were exempt, Norma Waterson should have been dead for over twenty-five. He stared through the cafe window into the fog. There was nothing in the day ahead for him. It had come to this.

Whereas Moon, so excited by her research, so driven… had just simply ended it.

He could not believe that what she’d discovered had led her to the conclusion that the only way of repairing the broken link with her ancestors was by joining them.

He’d heard nothing more from Merrily.

Lol finished his toast, walked back to the shop. A customer was coming out, and Lol heard that endless dirge again through the open door. It sounded – because Nico was also dead – like an accusation from beyond the grave, a bony finger pointing.

Sophie was saying into the phone, ‘Have they double-checked? Yes, of course, I’m sorry. But it seems so…’

Merrily pulled off her coat, tossed it over the back of her chair, slumped down into it. She was going to miss Sophie, and even the office with D on the door – almost a second home now, with none of the complications of the first.