The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

The caller had a voice like a rich, organic mulch. ‘I’m phoning for Mrs Watkins. I do realize it’s late.’

‘She’s out.’ Lol sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Guess I’d be sorry, too, I was in her house and she wasn’t.’ The caller chuckled. ‘Well now, you must be the musician who would like to spend more time with the lovely Merrilee, but the situation, alas, forbids it. A concise name that rolls off the… Lon?’

‘Canon Jeavons?’ Lol said.

‘But you should call me Lew. We just two guys with short names. You think we shorten our names in the belief it gonna streamline our lives? Ah, wait… Lol. Not Lon, it’s Lol, correct? You know, I sometimes wonder, if I reverted to all three syllables of my own given name, whether perhaps it would slow me down enough that I didn’t give half-assed advice.’

Lol looked around Merrily’s bedroom. Its white walls were uneven, bolted together with twisted ribs of ancient oak. It had a pine wardrobe, no dressing table, no mirrors.

‘You mean like Reach out?’ he said. ‘Embrace?’

‘Good,’ Canon Jeavons said. ‘She talks to you. Yes, I guess that’s what I mean. On reflection, what I should’ve said was, Be reticent, go careful. That would be a slightly different approach, wouldn’t it?’

‘That would be exactly the opposite approach,’ Lol said.

In between the wardrobe and the window, the bedside light was reflected from polished wood, and he spotted his oldest Washburn guitar, the one he’d left here at the end of the summer when he was working on the final songs for the new album.

‘Lol,’ Canon Jeavons said, ‘you don’t have to tell me where she’s gone, but you could reassure me it’s nowhere in connection with a small boy who died in a car wreck.’

Lol saw that the Washburn was shining with new polish and had been stood reverently on a cushion. The cushion was pale blue, velvet. He was touched.

‘No, it isn’t anything to do with that,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ Jeavons said solemnly. ‘Can I ask — are you a religious man yourself, Lol? No forget that. Intrusive. Only, when I said on reflection, I mean that this phone call came out of prayer. Which, I concede, the secular might define as a conversation with the inner self in the hope of inspiration. In any event, I sit down and we going over it all between us. And the message comes to me: better to tell her to take advice before proceeding any further in this matter.’

‘She did take advice,’ Lol said. ‘She took advice from you.’

A pause.

‘Yes,’ Jeavons said heavily. ‘However—’

‘Let me get this right — God suggested you might call back. Because He wasn’t impressed with the advice you gave?’

‘Lol—’

‘She told you about the brother?’

‘The bad guy.’ Jeavons sighed. ‘Yes. The, ah, acts of violence carried out by the brother against the other half of the family, that did not bode well. Six years in New York, and I didn’t pick up on that. Must be getting old.’

‘As it happens,’ Lol said, ‘what we now know of him makes him seem even less of a teddy bear.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. It…’ Jeavons hesitated ‘… must be hard for you, Lol.’

‘It can get a bit perplexing.’

‘I like a man who understates. Come on, it blows your head off! For instance, where is she now, on this terrible night?’

Lol watched the light shimmer from the guitar, recalling the last song he’d composed on it and its key lines: The camera lies/she might vaporize.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hope she’s having a quiet one-to-one with a mild-mannered farmer who tried to take his own life. I hope she not standing in for twelve priests at the exorcism of a medieval devil and a hound of hell.’

A stony place, quilted with snow.

The path was here somewhere, but Jane couldn’t find it. She’d gone blundering after Ben into the white areas between the trees, looking for his tracks, until she wound up, panting, at the fork in the main drive. This was where one track sloped down to the Kington bypass, while the other, much narrower, crawled to the top of Stanner Rocks.

She’d been up there just once, when the weather was still OK. Great views. The track wasn’t too steep, and you could get a vehicle up when the ground was firm, but it went very close to the edge, where the old quarry had been, and you wouldn’t be happy doing it at night, not even in the best of conditions, not even with somebody like Gomer Parry at the wheel.

She saw the stems of the pines lighting up maybe fifty yards ahead of her, like organ pipes — Ben switching on a torch? Only it seemed to be in the wrong place. Too low. So easy to get disorientated in the white hell. She headed for the beam, anyway, and—

‘Aaah!’ A thin branch whipped her cheek, pulled the camera away, and she stumbled, and the camera fell into the snow.

Not too clever. She snatched up the Sony 150 and dusted it off. Moved on more slowly, holding it in both hands. Now she could neither see nor hear Ben or Beth Pollen, and the torch beam had vanished, and if it wasn’t for the snow and a lemon-wedge of moon she could be in trouble here.

Jane stopped, realizing in dismay that this actually wasn’t being very adult. Being adult was about standing back and rethinking your position in the light of changing circumstances. Like, circumstances were saying that Ben Foley didn’t want her here — basically, she guessed, because he didn’t want any of this preserved on video. Taking on Ben, getting into his face, was probably unwise. But once you were launched on the path of being awkward, it was a matter of basic pride that you didn’t turn away. It was like when you were a little kid, running faster and faster, giddy with it, knowing that the fall was inevitable.

Jane stubbed her toe on something very hard and stumbled and went down with her hands in the snow, throwing up a fine flurry like a cloud of frozen midges, as she pulled them out with a sucking sound.

Looking up she saw, in a moment of cold awe, the white-spattered face of Stanner Rocks, sheared off where the quarrying had been before the rocks were recognized as ancient and precious. The wall was glowering over her like a decaying cathedral, holes in its masonry pointed with snow. No flames up there now, no amber halo, only the milky mixture of snowlight and thin moonlight. And on the ground, that wet sucking sound.

Only the sucking was nothing to do with her.

The shock of this came at Jane like a sudden wild gust from nowhere, as she crouched, exposed, in the snow. It came at her along with something else — something close up, loping, something that came with a loose, heavy panting, with a pulsing of muscle and with a piercingly thin, raw, feral smell that ripped at your senses like barbed wire.

Jane tightened up, shrinking into a hedgehog ball. Somewhere far inside her — beneath the parka and the fleece, beneath the skin — there was a rolling orb of cold that felt no bigger than a pea and no smaller than a planet, coming to rest in her stomach and weighting her to the rock. And although she couldn’t seem to move, she could still scream, with no shame, like an animal.

And cower, biting down on a second scream — also, agonizingly, on her tongue — as the ground lit up around her.

‘For goodness’ sake!’ A gloved hand came out of the light. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Oh God.’ Jane was shaking, kept falling back down.

‘Are you hurt?’ Beth Pollen was bulked out by the sheepskin coat, throwing off some wholesome, matronly perfume, her voice mature and strong and unafraid.

‘Didn’t you hear it?’

‘I certainly heard you.’

‘Didn’t you feel it?’

‘I really don’t know how your mother puts up with you,’ Beth Pollen said crossly.