Midwinter of the Spirit

‘Oh.’

‘Not very long at all.’

‘No.’ Jane stood up, hands in the hip pockets of her jeans. ‘Why don’t you try calling Huw Owen again?’

‘He isn’t going to be there, flower. If he is, it would take him well over an hour to get here.’

‘Try Lol again. Maybe he can put the arm on James Lyden’s dad.’

‘The psychotherapist?’

‘Maybe he can.’

‘All right.’ Merrily punched out Lol’s number; the phone was picked up on the second ring.

‘John Barleycorn.’ A strange voice.

‘Oh, is Lol there?’

‘No, he’s not. This is Dennis Moon in the shop. Sorry, it’s the same line. I’m not usually here on a Sunday, but Lol’s not around anyway. Can I give him a message if he shows before I leave?’

‘Could you ask him to call Merrily, please?’

‘Sure, I’ll leave him a note.’

‘Face it,’ Merrily said, hanging up. ‘This guy is not going to pull his boy out of the ceremony – thus forcing them to abort it.’

‘I suppose not. Actually, it does seem quite scary. What if something did happen and we could have prevented it? But, on the other hand, what could happen?’

‘Well, it won’t be anything like thunder and lightning and the tower cracking in half.’ She saw Jane stiffen. ‘Flower?’

‘Why did you say that?’

‘What?’

‘About the tower cracking in half.’

‘It was the first stupid thing I thought of.’

‘That’s the tarot card Angela turned up for me: the Tower struck by lightning. It’s just… Sorry, your imagination sometimes goes berserk, doesn’t it?’

‘Look.’ Merrily stood up and put an arm around her. ‘Thunder is not forecast, anyway. You don’t get thunder at this time of the year, in this kind of weather. That tower’s been here for many centuries. The tarot card is purely symbolic. And even if something like that did happen…’

‘It did in 1786.’

‘What did?’

‘We did this in school. They had a west tower then, and it didn’t have proper foundations and the place was neglected, and on Easter Monday 1786 the whole lot collapsed.’

Merrily moved away, looked down at the desk, gathering her thoughts. ‘Look, even if it was likely, it’s still not the worst disaster that could happen.’

‘You mean the collapse of spirituality,’ Jane said soberly.

‘Whatever you say about the Church, flower, there’s no moral force to replace it.’

‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘So suppose all the people jumping off the Tower Struck By Lightning are the ones, like, abandoning Christianity as the whole edifice collapses. Suppose the final disintegration of the Church as we know it was to start here?’

Merrily said, ‘Would you care?’

48 Blood

THE CROW.

As the crow flies: a straight line.

Dinedor Hill… All Saints Church… Hereford Cathedral… and two further churches, ending in…

‘What’s this place, Robinson? Can’t make it out.’

‘Stretford.’ For a moment it stopped his breath. ‘This… is the church of St Cosmas and St Damien.’

‘Oh, Robinson,’ Athena White said. ‘Oh, yes.’

Once the old ladies had begun to gather in the lounge, she’d beckoned Lol away and up the stairs. In Athena’s eyrie, with the Afghan rugs and all the cupboards, the OS map of Hereford had been opened out on the bedspread, and the line from Dinedor drawn in.

Athena’s glasses were white light. ‘It was in the Hereford Times, wasn’t it? Was that last week, I can’t remember? The crow… the crow. Why does one never see what is under one’s nose?’

‘They happened the same night. The crow sacrifice, and Moon’s death… and a minister called Dobbs had a stroke in the Cathedral.’

‘Yes!’

It all came out then, in strands of theory and conjecture which eventually hung together as a kind of certainty.

Tim Purefoy had said: That’s one of Alfred Watkins’s leylines. An invisible, mystical cable joining sacred sites. Prehistoric path of power. They’re energy lines, you know. And spirit paths. So we’re told. Probably all nonsense, but at sunset you can feel you own the city.

Now, Athena White said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s there or not, Robinson. It’s what the magician perceives is there. The magician uses visualization, driven by willpower, to create an alternative reality.’

Moon had said: The line goes through four ancient places of worship, ending at a very old church out in the country. But it starts here, and this is the highest point. So all these churches, including the Cathedral, remain in its shadow. This hill is the mother of the city. The camp here was the earliest proper settlement, long before there was a town down there.

‘When the first Christian churches were built, Rome ordered them to be placed on sites of earlier worship, places already venerated, so as to appropriate their influence. But you see, Robinson, the pre-Christian element never really went away, because of the continued dominance of Dinedor Hill. So, if your aim was to destabilize the Cathedral and all it symbolizes, you might well decide to cause a vibration in what lies beneath.’

And Lol had said to Merrily – ironically in the cafe in the All Saints Church, on the actual line from St Cosmas to Dinedor Hill: In Celtic folk tales, crows and ravens figured as birds of illomen or… as a form taken by anti-Christian forces.

‘At one end of the line,’ Athena said, ‘a crow is sacrificed. At the other – at the highest point – is your crow maiden.’

Lol said, ‘Sacrificed?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘They killed her?’

‘Or helped her to take her own life? Probably, yes. I’m sorry, Robinson, I don’t know if this is what you wanted to hear.’

‘It’s just… are you sure about this?’ She’s an old woman, he thought. She lives in a fantasy world. ‘You have to be sure.’

‘And yet,’ she said, ‘these two deaths are so different. Calm down, Robinson, I won’t let you make a fool of yourself. You see, as Crowley once pointed out, a sacrifice was once seen as a merciful and glorious death, allowing the astral body to go directly to its God. This essentially means a quick death, a throat cut… the way the crow presumably died. But your friend’s blood was let out through the wrists. Not quick at all – a slow release…’

‘ “Crow maiden, you’re fadin’ away…” ’

‘What did you say?’

‘Just a line from a song.’

Athena White’s clasped hands were shaking with concentration. ‘Robinson, have we discussed the power of