Friends of the Dusk (51 page)

The light of the body is in the eye. Therefore when thine eye is single thy whole body is full of light.

She smiled. She hoped to God that the sense of high calm was not an illusion.

When it was over, Huw produced a thin paperback book from his canvas shoulder bag.

‘I don’t know whether to give you this or not, lass.’

‘What is it?’

It looked old, decades old. You couldn’t tell whether its cover was yellow or just yellowed.

‘First published 1972 when it were all the rage and the Church decided we should go for it. With rules. But you can see from the title what it were still called, back then.’

‘Pre-deliverance,’ Merrily said.

‘Seen it before?’

‘Actually, I may have.’

‘The deliverance handbook’s over three times as thick, good in its way, but essentially it walks all round major exorcism.’

‘Which is what’s needed here.’

‘A major? Oh aye.’

‘You sure you don’t want—?’

‘
No.
I’ve faced Kindley-Pryce – it – before. It knows my name, Huw.’

‘That might not be…’

‘Come in with me, though?’

‘Oh aye. Try and keep me out. It’s not a one-priest job, this.’

‘He’s an old man. An old, demented man.’

‘No. You don’t say that. You don’t
think
that. It’s something inside an old man’s body and his corroded mind. And it were invited in. Don’t forget that. This is not oppression, this is invitation.
Invitation
.’

‘Right.’

She took off the hoodie, positioned the pectoral cross on her cotton top.

‘After you,’ Huw said. ‘You know the way.’

Lol stayed behind in the chapel, with Athena.

Walking slowly down the passageway, muted lighting, the night in the glass walls on either side, she read from the booklet.

The difference between an exorcism and a blessing was the resistance.

The fight.

Too generalized?

Evil. Just a word.

Not
just a word.

‘Damn,’ Merrily said, carrying on walking, the airline bag over her right shoulder. ‘I forgot to phone Bishop Craig to check if this was all right with him.’

‘Do not laugh,’ Huw said. ‘Don’t you
dare
laugh.’ She didn’t laugh.

The last time.

The last Deliverance.

The Old Stables. Three doors, only one with a number on it and a white speaker grille.

Man or woman?

Kee, kee, kee
…
.

They stopped. The door was ajar. Merrily glanced at Huw, who lifted a hand, and not in benediction. Presently, Hector Pryce came out, looking at them with no surprise. Donna must have called him, told him who’d arrived. He’d had plenty of time to get here from Hereford while they were in the chapel.

‘Dead,’ Hector said.

As if to illustrate his point, he held a human skull, yellow and brown and coming apart in his hands around a crooked grin.
He’s getting it out of there
, Merrily thought, as Hector kicked the door fully open behind him.

‘See? Old man’s gone. Somebody seen him off, look.’

An overhead light had turned the whole room into a Victorian engraving of a classical funeral, the great Cwmarrow bed an ornate tomb, Selwyn Kindley-Pryce its rigid effigy. There was an acrid stench of funeral. Death and earth.

‘I just found him,’ Hector said. ‘Thought he was having his nap before tea.’

A buff-coloured pillow, creased, lay beside the head of the corpse. But the eeriest thing was Hector’s face: flushed with relief, excitement and a delight only half suppressed. Was he glad he’d done it… glad that someone else had done it…
fooling himself
that someone else had done it?

‘Gone, eh?’ Huw said.

She could see his grey eyes wondering
where.

68

The door

S
HE WAS THERE
again, under the gatehouse arch, just as she’d been on that very first day.

Welcome to Deliverance Tower.

Almost the first words to Merrily from Sophie, the Bishop’s secretary, who had been waiting to open the door to the stone steps curving up to the gatehouse and the interior door, which the new bishop, Michael Hunter, had decreed should have a gothic
D
on it below a black cross.

He’d also decided there should be a Hereford deliverance website and that Merrily should have meetings with the director of social services, various mental health charities and the police. Bishop Mick: nothing if not ambitious for the Church’s loony spooks.

Of course, she’d got rid of the D as soon as it could be done without causing offence. Telling Sophie that deliverance should be low profile.

And that was how she’d go out.

This morning, she’d parked near the swimming pool again. She was wearing her best woollen coat and a black skirt. She’d come an hour early, wanting time and space to consider what she’d say to Craig Innes but then deciding not to consider it at all. What was the point? There were more important issues.

Bliss had phoned last night to say that Hector Pryce was still angrily denying he’d put the pillow over his father’s face, insisting the old man had been dead already. Claiming he’d seen a Land Rover coming down the drive from Lyme Place
when he’d arrived. Evidently not Huw’s old Defender, which hadn’t moved.

Hector was protesting his innocence so hard, Bliss said, that he’d almost coughed to the other two killings. Only a matter of time, Bliss kept saying, sounding weary.

Bliss. Funny thing, walking across the wet and empty Bishop’s Meadow not long after eight, Merrily had felt sure she’d seen him walking ahead of her, but then it seemed unlikely because he’d been hand in hand with a woman who was a little taller and bore a superficial resemblance to…

She’d tried to close the gap between them but they’d gone.

Couldn’t have been.

She’d need to talk to Bliss later, to wind up her role in this on a note of suitable lunacy. Athena White was demanding that the body and head of Selwyn Kindley-Pryce should be separated. No spades necessary, simply a question of making sure they were donated separately for medical research. Different places, certain provisos. Presumably, only Hector could authorize that. Athena said he might not need to be leaned on too hard.

The whole Cwmarrow situation, the legacy of the
maleficus
, the role of falling trees… it was never going to make total sense. But when did these things ever?

As for the Land Rover leaving Lyme Place… Dennis Kellow had a Land Rover to which other members of his family had access. But then, no more common vehicle hereabouts.

Don’t ask. You are not a detective. Within an hour you will no longer be a deliverance minister. You’ll no longer be officially obliged to try and explain the inexplicable, or guide people away from it or help them live with it.

So here she was, coming around the benign, sandstone Cathedral under a sober sky, spotting Sophie under the gatehouse. She’d miss Sophie, most of all.

Hold the image, make it into memory, file it next to Day One. Sophie hadn’t changed, except that she’d usually worn her
white hair in a bun, back then, but this morning it was down and straggly, and that was not normal.

Nor was the way she was standing with her winter cardigan displaying a patch of red the size of a poppy around the abdomen.

God…

Merrily began to run towards her and couldn’t run fast enough, could almost see herself running in slow motion, recalling all the misfits drawn to a Cathedral, the mentally disturbed, the coke-heads, once a man with a gun who said it was a cry for help.

Merrily was running to Sophie, like she hadn’t run since she was a child running to her mother, so hard she couldn’t feel her legs moving, until she tripped and it was only Sophie who stopped her from falling.

Sophie’s face was pale.

‘Merrily, what—?’

‘Are you—?’

‘Just came out for a breath of air, Merrily.’

Merrily fighting for her own breath. Couple of weeks of vaping could hardly wipe out the effects of twenty years of cigs.

‘I… thought for a minute it was blood.’

Sophie looked down at her cardigan.

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘It
is
blood.’

She opened the door to what had been Deliverance Tower.

‘You’d better come up.’

The Bishop’s new chair – a chair of light grey leather – had its back to the window overlooking Broad Street. Not quite where her own chair used to be but close enough and well-spattered, like Sophie’s cardigan, with fresh blood.

Huw Owen was standing next to it, wearing as close as he ever came to full kit: white dog collar, black shirt, with an old but proper suit. He had his head held back, a handful of sodden, reddening tissues around his nose.

‘Don’t
think
it’s broken, Sophie.’

He straightened up, and blood ran around his mouth, into his beard and his dog collar. He saw Merrily and grinned, looking insane.

‘All right, lass?’

‘Huw— Jesus
Christ
—’

‘Bit of a nosebleed. Dry up in a bit.’

‘Where’s the Bishop?’

‘The Bishop left,’ Sophie said. ‘When I saw you coming, from the window, I thought I’d better go down and see if he was still here, but he… must’ve gone through to the palace. He… fell on the steps. Fell against the door.’

Merrily looked at Huw. He was still grinning through the blood on his teeth.

‘And you fell into the same door, did you?’

‘Could say that, aye.’

‘To be more accurate,’ Sophie said, ‘the Bishop walked into what would become a heated discussion.’

Huw sniffed.

‘Involving a number of topics… related to his past ministry. You know the kind of thing.’

‘Jenny Roberts?’

‘Aye, Jenny Roberts were one of them, obviously. His abominable treatment of you another.’ He dragged another handful of tissues from the box on Sophie’s desk. ‘Way I see it, Merrily, we can be too subtle about these things. Could’ve delivered a sermon, but what bloody use would that’ve been?’

‘What?’

‘He’s a bishop, but a bishop’s a man. Wi’ a man’s pride. You can wind a man up to breaking point. Well,
I
can. When I’m in the mood. And if I know what kind of man I’m dealing with. Like a man wi’ a history of playing contact sport? You keep prodding him, waiting for the moment when he breaks, when he loses it. When he lashes out without quite realizing what he’s doing.
Bam.
’

‘He hit you? The Bishop actually hit you?’

‘Now, see, what’s important, lass, in these situations, is making sure the other feller’s fist is the
first to land
. And because you’re expecting it – happen you’ve actually
prayed
for it - you know exactly how you’re going to react when it comes. You say another quick prayer – well, more of an apology in my case. I’m not a very physical man, as you know. I’m a man of peace and a bit of a wimp, but after what I said to Innes,
I
would’ve hit me.’

He sat in the bloodied chair. His laughter suddenly seemed very emotional.

‘When Huw arrived,’ Sophie said, ‘the Bishop suggested I might have some more shopping to attend to. I was halfway down the stairs when I realized I must have forgotten my shopping list.’

Huw laughed, snorted more blood, put his head back again.

‘I came off worse, I’ll not deny that. He’s a good bit younger than me, and I were crap at rugby. But I were ready, see? This is the crucial point. Just had to get that one punch in, and then he could do what he liked to me after that.’

Sophie pointed to the iPhone on her desk.

‘It was a quite disgraceful episode. If I was the Bishop I’d be taking it further. On which basis, I felt I should obtain photographs which could be used as evidence to support any charges the Bishop might choose to bring against Mr Owen.’

Huw screwed up the used handful of bloody tissues and tossed them into the waste bin.

‘He hit me first. No way round that. Well, I’m an ugly bugger at best of times. And at least I don’t have to appear in the Cathedral in the full purple kit,
wi’ a matching eye
. Thing about falling into a door, is nobody ever believes it.’

He picked up Sophie’s iPhone and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

‘Some bugger’s nicked Sophie’s phone. Can’t trust anybody these days, though happen they’ll send it back. But what if Innes doesn’t see sense and them pictures wind up on the Net? Press’ll be down on it like a dog at dinner time.’

Huw put a hand on Merrily’s shoulder.

‘Come in on Monday, same as usual, I would. See what happens. Or what doesn’t.’ He walked lightly to the door. ‘Ta-ra, lass.’

THE END

Delivered by 'Friends of grizedale'

Notes and closing credits

I
T DIDN
’
T SURPRISE
me a lot when I discovered that the first convincing British account of something predatory and undead should have originated on the Hereford/Wales border. After years of saying I was NEVER going near a vampire, I had either to keep pretending I hadn’t read it or consider how it might echo (credibly).

Should you wish to check it out, Walter Map’s account of Sir William, Bishop Foliot and the summoner is retold in several books, from
The Secret History of Vampires
by Claude Lecouteux to the whimsical
Herefordshire Folklore
by David Phelps (The History Press 2009) which (like Kindley-Pryce’s version) suggests that the beheaded corpse might have been buried close to Hereford Cathedral. The short, chilling version by Edwin Sidney Hartland remains where Jane found it, in the introduction to Ella Mary Leather’s
The Folklore of Herefordshire.