The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

stop it spreading. A tongue of flame wavered on the wick of a small hurricane lamp on the draining board. This was the lamp that had been on a ledge in the barn when Danny had crashed in. When he’d seen something that he said was like out of a black acid-flashback.

‘Thought I was too late. All the beasts in there moaning.’

And Jeremy Berrows in the meagre lamplight, stoically dangling.

Danny roaring in agony and rage.

Jeremy, seeing Danny in the entrance there, had started twitching and jerking, half-spinning on the rope, staring in terror at Danny out of his bulging eyes. Trying, for fuck’s sake, to finish it.

‘Sorry,’ Danny said, meaning his language. Merrily waved it away, and Danny said he must’ve gone temporarily insane hisself at that point, fumbling out his clasp-knife, clawing his way to the top of the scaffold of bales, slashing like a mad bastard at the oily rope.

Lucky that Jeremy was old-fashioned about rope: none of your nylon for this boy.

‘Stretched under his weight, see. So his feet’s reaching the topmost bales, and he don’t even know it. Only wondering why it’s takin’ so long.’

‘Has he said anything?’

Danny shook his head. He’d caught Jeremy as he fell, laying him out on the hay, the boy making this cawing noise like a stricken crow, wearing the mark of the rope like a red collar, bruises coming up under it. Long minutes passing before Jeremy would let Danny help him up and into the house.

‘Can he even speak?’

‘Can’t hardly move his head.’ Danny was intertwining his hands, like he was washing them slowly under a tap. ‘I can’t do n’more for him, vicar.’ He looked hard at her. ‘Can I?’

‘Is there a medicine chest? First-aid box?’

‘En’t that kind o’ first aid he needs.’

‘Would help if he was able to talk, though. Has someone gone for Natalie?’

‘We don’t know where she is. En’t at Stanner.’ Danny stood up. ‘Ah, damn. My idea we gets you yere, now I don’t know what to tell you. I still don’t know what brought him to this. Things about this boy we en’t never fathomed.’

‘Gomer thought maybe he’d just found out about’ — she glanced at the door, brought her voice down — ‘about Natalie? In the van?’

‘Couldn’t tell him, see, vicar. Had the perfect opportunity, couldn’t do it. Can’t hardly ask him now, can I?’ Danny hung his head, a slow smile shuffling into his beard. ‘You could, though, mabbe.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And then ask him who she is.’

‘Natalie?’

‘Ask him who she is, really,’ Danny said. ‘This is what we wanner know, see.’

Sounding as if there was something here that he half-suspected but didn’t dare approach.

‘It’s hard to believe how crazy they were, the Chancerys,’ Jane said to Lol. ‘You know about Thomas Vaughan. Black Vaughan?’

‘A bit.’

‘According to the legend, he was terrorizing Kington. After his death. The full poltergeist thing. The whole economy of the town under threat because people didn’t want to go there.’

‘This was when?’

‘Fifteenth, sixteenth century? If it happened at all. Folklore seems to work to its own calendar, doesn’t it? So they call in the Church. You know about that? Twelve priests confine the spirit in a snuff-box. Which might’ve been a metaphor — a way of explaining it to humble countryfolk who knew sod-all about states of consciousness but had a vague idea of what a snuff-box looked like.’

‘Did it work?’

‘To an extent. No more actual violence, just vague manifestations, like the Hound. Like warnings that it was only dormant. Maybe… hang on a mo, I’m just putting the phone down.’

Lol heard Jane moving about. There was the sound of a door opening and then closing before she was back at her mobile.

‘Thought there might’ve been somebody around. This place is suddenly full of totally unbalanced people.’

‘Where are you?’ The Jane he knew would relish being around totally unbalanced people.

‘In my room. If the door had a lock I’d lock it. Jeremy… I don’t believe it.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m just not sure who I can trust. Lol, if you talk to Mum, tell her we… would appreciate some help. But tell her to ring me first, not just show up.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Amber. And me. Everybody else seems to have a finger in the pie.’

Lol guessed he was about to hear things that Jane would never have passed on if she hadn’t been shafted over the video.

‘This is what Ben finally got from old Leonard. Walter Chancery got hold of the Vaughan story. Or rather, his wife did — Bella — who was well into this new fad for spirit-contact. See, what strikes me about all this is that it was probably the first time in recorded history when people weren’t terrified by the supernatural. Like the birth of New Age.’

‘Convinced the mystery of death was being unveiled to them.’

‘Totally. So when Bella hears the tale of Black Vaughan, she’s like, OK, let’s look at all this in the light of — wooh! — modern science! Meaning spiritualism. There’d been some sightings locally, mainly the dog — but when was that dog not seen around? So Bella Chancery’s like, Hey, let’s do something for the community. Lady Bountiful. These crass incomers, money coming out of their ears, but what they wanted was status — like in Society and also locally. They wanted to be lord and lady of the manor, that was how Leonard put it. They had a celebrated medium there by the name of Erasmus Cookson, who Bella shipped up from London. And because they were into spectacle and stuff, they all dressed up. They used the kitchen, because it had stone walls and it looked like you were inside a castle. The kitchen’s quite big, and they arranged it like the great hall of a castle, with candles everywhere.’

‘Why would they dress up?’

‘For the exorcism. They recreated the exorcism of Black Vaughan. If you look in Mrs Leather you’ll see there’s quite a lot to go on. The dialogue between Vaughan and the priests? Total pantomime, but that wouldn’t worry them.’

‘Where did they get twelve priests?’

‘Well, they didn’t, obviously. Just got friends in — house guests, people down from London, and dressed them up like monks or something. And servants to make up the numbers. And this Erasmus Cookson, who was like some kind of showbiz spiritualist and who may have been a charlatan, for all I know.’

‘And Arthur Conan Doyle?’

‘And Conan Doyle. Absolutely. Doyle was in the area with relatives, right? In fact, one theory is that it was nothing to do with helping the community, they just — this is the kind of people they were — staged the whole thing for the benefit of this big celeb.’

‘And what happened?’

‘And they even had an actual snuff-box? You imagine that? They were probably going to tie a brick to it and toss it in the sodding pond.’

‘Hang on, Jane.’ Lol awoke the computer, brought up Matthew’s last message.

We believe that his initial baptism — a ‘baptism of fire’ — occurred at Stanner Hall… little more than a party game for his amusement… turned into something profoundly disturbing

‘So what happened that disturbed Conan Doyle enough to send him into complete denial and turn the Hound into a detective story with a weak ending?’