The Green Man

‘You don’t suppose a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo could have the slightest effect, do you? On anything?’

‘I don’t know. I’d like to give it a trial. It would be a great favour to me if you’d just run through the service, Rector.’

I was fully prepared to go on and tell him in the plainest terms that no exorcism meant no invitation to the party, but he was ahead of me. No doubt the course of his career had trained him to recognize a quid pro quo as soon as he set eyes on one, or rather overtrained him, because he would never get any kind of quo from me. With the irritation which his face was so well constructed to express, he asked, ‘When?’

‘Now. I can drive you there in three minutes.’

‘Oh, honestly,’ he said, but without heat, and was busy in calculation for a moment. My bet is that he had spotted the annoyance-potential to Lord Cliff of going off with me on such an eccentric errand. ‘Oh, very well, but I think it’s shaking to find a person of your education falling prey to gross superstition like this.’ But he got off his stool nimbly enough.

‘You’d better put on your regalia for this do, I think.’

‘Oh, for …‘ Lord Cliff (on my reading) entered his thoughts again, and he cheered up a little. ‘Might as well do the thing properly while one’s about it, I suppose. Amuse yourself. Have some fruit. Back in a trice.’

There was a bunch of bananas on a table-top of an untrimmed chunk of slate, I ate a couple and told myself I was having lunch. But, in my experience, even a lunch as light as that needs washing down. I went to a likely- looking (also very nasty-looking) cupboard I had spotted on first entering the room. Apart from what might have been sticks of incense and what almost certainly were marijuana cigarettes, it contained gin, vermouth, Campari, white port, a variety of horrible drinks from the eastern Mediterranean, a siphon of soda and no glasses. I rejected the idea of mixing myself a dry Martini in a near-by ash-tray, and took a swig from the gin-bottle. Warm neat gin is nobody’s nectar, but I managed to get some down without coughing much. I chased it with soda-water, taking this perforce from the nozzle of the siphon, a different kind of feat, then swallowed a pill. As I did so, it crossed my mind that, if Underhill had been able to manufacture a hundred scarlet-and-green birds, he could certainly have manufactured one. It was true that he had produced something like my hypnagogic visions, which I had had for years, since long before moving into his house, but his version of these had been a passable copy, a counterfeit, whereas (I realized for the first time) the birds had been exact replicas of the original one I had seen in the bathroom—how like him to have tested a weapon before using it in earnest. Well, when I had had time to forget just how much the solitary bird had frightened me, there was going to be a case for going back on the bottle: the half-bottle, at least.

Time went by. There was a large book-case full of books across the room, but I left them quite alone, knowing how angry they would all make me. I had begun to contemplate pretty steadily another assault on the drinks cupboard when the Rev. Tom returned, in clerical rig-out and carrying a suit-case covered with what looked like white corduroy. He seemed in top form now, toned up by whatever had taken place while he was changing. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked me, twitching his eyebrows and shoulders. I agreed that we should.

At past three o’clock on a Sunday, the public dining-room was empty. We went in by way of the kitchen without being observed, and I at once locked the door to the hall. In quite a businesslike fashion, the rector put his suitcase on a serving-table, took out his vestments or whatever one calls them, plus some other odds and ends, accoutred himself with them and produced a book.

‘A bit of luck I happened to have this,’ he said. ‘It’s not the sort of thing one’s asked to produce every day.’

‘Good. You can start as soon as you’re ready.’

‘All right. I still think this is a lot of balls, but anyway. Oh no,’ he added after finding his place in the book.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘One’s meant to have holy water for this business.’

‘Haven’t you got any?’

‘What would I be doing with a whole lot of holy water? You don’t imagine I keep it round the place like gin, do you? Wait a minute—it tells one here how to make it. You have to … Look, you don’t want me to go through all that, surely to God. It’ll take—’

‘If it says holy water, you use holy water. Get on with it. What do you have to do?’

‘Oh, hell. Okay. I’ll need some water and some salt.’

I fetched a jugful from the kitchen and poured some salt on to a plate from a cellar on one of the dining- tables.

‘Evidently one has to sort of cleanse the stuff for some reason.’ He pointed his first two fingers at the salt and read, ‘I render thee immaculate, creature of Earth, by the living God, by the holy God,’—here he made the sign of the cross— ’that thou mayest be purified of all evil influences in the name of Adonai, who is the lord of angels and of men…’

I went to the window. It occurred to me to have another look for the crucifix, which I had vainly tried to find round about dawn, but I was sufficiently sure that, having fulfilled its purpose, it had been taken back by its giver. Instead, I waited. After a minute or two a very faint voice spoke to me, so faint that it could not have been heard more than a few feet away.

‘What are you about? Would you destroy me?’

Cautiously, my eyes on the rector, I nodded my head.

‘I’ll put you in the way to acquire great riches, you shall take any woman on earth to be your paramour, you shall have all the glory war affords, or peace too, so you but cease.’

I shook my head.

‘I exorcize all influence and seeds of evil,’ read the rector. ‘I lay upon them the spell of Christ’s holy Church that they may be bound fast with chains and cast into the outer darkness, until the day of their repentance and restoration, that they trouble not the servants of God …‘

When the tiny voice returned, there was fear as well as pleading in it. ‘I shall be nothing, for I am denied repentance for ever. I shall be a senseless clod to all eternity. Can one man do this to another? Would you play God, Mr Allington? But God at least would have mercy upon one who has offended Him.’

I shook my head again, wishing I could tell him just how wrong he was on that last point.

‘I’ll teach you peace of mind.’

Now there was an offer. I turned my back on the rector and stared out of the window, biting my lips furiously. I imagined myself not noticing myself for the rest of my life, losing myself, not vainly struggling to lose myself, in poetry and sculptore and my job and other people, not womanizing, not drinking. Then I thought of the Tyler girl and the Ditchfield girl and Amy and whoever might be next: deprived of the green man, Underhill would surely devise some other way of harming the young and helpless. It was convincing, it was my clear duty; but I have often wondered since whether what made up my mind for me was not the unacceptability of the offer as such, whether we are not all so firmly attached, in all senses, to what we are that any radical change, however unarguably for the better, is bound to seem a kind of self-destruction. I shook my head.

Across the room, the rector sprinkled water on the floor and continued, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, by the token of the life poured out in the broken body and blood of Jesus Christ, and by the seven gold candlesticks, and by one like unto the Son of Man, standing in the midst of the candlesticks, and under the sign and symbol of His holy, bloodstained and triumphant cross, I exorcize thee…’

At that point I heard, no less faintly than before but with complete distinctness, a single, drawn-out, diminishing scream of abandoned terror and despair. It did not quite die away, but was cut off abruptly. I shivered.

The rector looked up. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’

‘No. Please get it over.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course I’m all right,’ I said savagely. I had had enough of this query in the last few days. ‘How much more to go now?’

‘Oh, very well. There’s only another couple of sentences. Visit, O Lord, we beseech thee, this room, and drive from it all the snares of the enemy: let Thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace, and may Thy blessing