The Cure of Souls (61 page)

Rebekah screaming inside as the fumes took her.

I watched her heaving and shivering and struggling for breath
…

Merrily broke off from the litany. The air felt dense and weighted. She suddenly felt desperately tired, and she was scared to close her eyes again in case she fell asleep on her feet.

‘Oh Christ,’ Simon murmured.

She looked across at him. He was aglow with sweat. He said, ‘You’ve brought someone with you, haven’t you?’ He had his eyes closed now, his fists clenched. ‘You’re carrying the weight of someone.’

Merrily began to pant.

‘Bleeding,’ Simon said. ‘She’s bleeding.’

Merrily whispered, ‘Jesus, redeemer of the world, have mercy on her.’

Her
. Rebekah, in her white blouse.

Her
. Layla Riddock in her black kimono.

‘Have mercy on them,’ Simon cried out.

Sweat dripped down Merrily’s cheeks.

‘Holy Spirit, comforter…’

‘Have mercy on them.’

‘Holy Trinity, one God…’

‘Have mercy on them.’

‘From all evil…’

‘Deliver her…’

It all came out in a rush now, and they were working together, a unit. ‘
From anger, hatred and malice… From all the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil… Good Lord, deliver them
.’

The cotton alb was fused to Merrily’s skin. If she had an aura, it felt like liquid, like oil. The air was very close. There seemed to be a different atmosphere here between the poles, a separate density of air. Between the wires, the sun was like a hole in the sky.

‘Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world.’

‘Have mercy on her,’ Simon said.

‘Yes,’ Merrily said.

She felt that Rebekah was very near, but resistant to the idea of being guided towards the Second Death. It came to her suddenly that Layla had somehow been sent as an intermediary. Allan Henry:
Layla, love, excuse me, but these ladies would like to know if you have much contact with the dead
.

She prayed for guidance, but she couldn’t see the blue or the gold, and her pectoral cross felt as heavy as an anvil.

The cross? Was the cross preventing—?

She touched it.
Please, God, what shall I do?
The cross felt cold. She longed to give herself away, as she had in church on the night of the coin, in true and total submission, so that her life-energy, her living spirit, might be used as a vessel of transformation for the tortured essence of Rebekah Smith: a sacrifice.

She turned to Simon, but he seemed a long way away. She closed her eyes, was aware of an intense pressure in her chest, as though she was about to have a heart attack.

She let the prayer book fall and used both hands to slip the chain and the cross up and over her head.

Simon had both arms around the pole with the wooden cross at the top, hugging it, like a sailor who’d roped himself to the mast in a storm. His body seemed to be in spasm. She was aware of a foetid fog between them.

She heard a cry from the end of the alley—

‘
Oh, Mother of God!
’

—which had become like a tunnel now, a tunnel through the middle of the day, and then there was a wrenching sensation from above, as though the crosspiece linking her pole with Simon’s pole was under sudden, severe stress.

Don’t look
.

But, of course, she had to.

Her body was held inert by damp dread, but her eyes followed the leaden, loaded creaking to the cross pole. From it, hanging like a lagged cistern between her and Simon St John, the corpse of Gerard Stock was turning slowly, tongue protruding,
white and furry, between the rosebud, spittled lips.

Merrily sobbed and sank slowly to her knees.

Flaunting him.

Failure
.

Too strong for them.

Too strong for
her
.

Stock swung from side to side like a swaddled pendulum.
Don’t really know what the fuck you’re doing. Waste of time, Merrily. Heard you were a political appointment
.

Merrily’s hands fumbled at the airline bag, closed on the flask of holy water.

‘Begone!’ she sobbed in pain and fear and ultimate despair. ‘Begone from this place, every evil haunting and phantasm. Be banished, every delusion and deceit of Satan. In the name of the living God, in the name of the Holy God, in the name of the God of all creation—’

How empty it sounded, how hollow. She was on her knees with the flask of holy water, and she couldn’t get the bloody top off.

She would have fallen forward then, into her own shadow, but there wasn’t one.

It must be noon.

He’d gone, of course he had. He was never there. Nothing dangled from the crosspiece. There was only Simon, with his face in his hands.

Merrily came to her feet.

‘Mine,’ Simon croaked.

‘What?’

‘My projection.’ His face was grey-sheened. ‘Projection of defeat.’

Merrily leaned against the pole, nothing to say. There was no fog, no Stock, and the air in the alley was the same air that lay heavy on the whole of the Frome Valley. She swallowed; it hurt.

When did it ever go right? When did it ever work? Through the overhead wires, the midday sun was splashing its brash, soulless light over the whole of the sky.

Go out losing. What better way? Nothing to look back on, no foundation for thoughts of what might have been.

Sodden with weariness, she put away the flask, picked up her airline bag.

Simon didn’t move. Merrily heard a crumbly rustling that her tired mind dispiritingly translated into brittle hop-cones fragmenting on mummified bines.

‘Almighty God,’ Simon said numbly, gazing beyond her. ‘Please don’t do this.’

T
HE FIRST SOUND
Merrily was aware of was the vibrating of the wires overhead.

It wasn’t much; if there’d been a breeze, it would have sounded natural. If these had been electric wires, it would have seemed normal. It was a thin sound, with an almost human frailty, a keening, that somehow didn’t belong to summer. The rustling overlaid it, as if all the wires were entwined with dried bines. This other sound belonged to winter. It sang of mourning, loss, lamentation.

The sounds came not from their alley, but the one adjacent to it and, as Merrily went to stand at its entrance, she noticed that it seemed oriented directly on the tower of the kiln, the poles bending at almost the same angle as the point of its cowl.

Merrily stood there with sweat drying on her face, edging past the fear stage to the part where she knew she was dreaming but it didn’t matter.

She waited. She would not move. She fought to regulate her breathing.

For here was the Lady of the Bines, approaching down the abandoned hop-corridor, drifting from frame to frame, and the sky was white and blinding, and the Lady moved like a shiver.

Simon St John came up behind Merrily.

‘What am I seeing, Simon?’

He didn’t reply. She could hear his rapid breathing.

‘Whose projection now?’ she said, surprised that she could speak at all. ‘Whose projection is this?’

She blinked several times, but it was still there: this slender white woman, pale and naked and garlanded with shrivelled hops.

Merrily put on her cross.
Christ be with me, Christ within me
…

The bine, thick with yellowed cones, was pulled up between the legs, over the glistening stomach and between the breasts. Wound around and around the neck, covering the lower face, petals gummed to the sweat on the cheeks.

Christ behind me, Christ before me
…

The head was bent, as though she was watching her feet, wondering where they were taking her. She was not weaving, as Lol had described
his
apparition, but almost slithering through the parched grass and the weeds. And she couldn’t be real or else why was she affecting the wires?

When she was maybe ten yards away, the head came up.

Merrily went rigid.

The Lady swayed. Her eyes were fully open but hardened, like a painted doll’s, under a thickly smeared lacquer of abstraction. They were a corpse’s eyes, a ghost’s eyes. The end of the bine was stuffed into her mouth, brittle cones crushed between her teeth, and those petals pasted to her cheeks – grotesque, like one of the foliate faces you found on church walls.

She put out her arms, not to Merrily but to Simon, but he stepped away.

‘Stay back. For Christ’s sake, don’t touch her. Keep a space.’

The woman’s hands clawed at the air, as though there was something between them that she could seize. Her breath was irregular and came in convulsions, her body arching, parched petals dropping from her lips like flakes of dead skin.

‘Don’t go within a foot of her,’ Simon rasped.

‘It’s all right,’ Merrily said softly.

And she reached for the clawing hands, and waited for the cold electricity to come coursing up her arms all the way to her heart.

N
OON: THE DEAD
moment in time. All the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything still. Everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead
.

But these people clustered in the base of the bowl under the midday sun, they were not the dead.

The severely beautiful elderly woman, weeping, and the sharp-faced, white-haired man with an arm around her and the plump woman in a wheelchair and the leather-faced, crewcut man demanding an ambulance – surely
somebody
had a bloody mobile phone. And Lol, standing apart from the others, looking thoughtful.

And the pale, naked woman under the hop-frame, lying with the padded airline bag under her head. Not even
she
was dead.

Keep her here? Would that contain it? For how long? How long?

Merrily looked up at the sun.

Simon St John understood. ‘Get back. Please. Just a couple of yards, please.’ Simon was OK, he was in the clear – the woman was not dead, had not been dead when she walked under the wires. Simon was all right with this. Wasn’t he?

‘Yes,’ the woman agreed irritably, ‘Just keep back. I’m all right. I’ll
be all right
.’ She coughed, her head thrown back over
the airline bag, a bubble of saliva and a half-masticated hop-petal in a corner of her slack mouth. ‘I’ll be with you in… just give me… give me a moment… give me a bloody
minute
.’

Merrily looked up at Simon. He nodded towards the woman. The hop-bine was still curled around her legs, yellowed petals crumbled into her pubic hair.

Simon said, ‘You know her?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Merrily knelt down, was immediately enclosed in a dense aura of sweat and hops. ‘Annie, listen to me – were you in the kiln? Were you in the kiln, just now?’

‘Cordon it off!’ The eyes were still blurred. ‘We… need the fire service. There’s probably—’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said.

‘Gases. An escape of gases.’

‘Or sulphur.’

‘I don’t… I got out of there, but I must have lost… Put somebody on the door. Don’t let anybody go back in there. It may be… I think I lost consciousness, just for a moment. You—’ She seemed to register Merrily for the first time. ‘What the hell are
you
—?’

‘I’m going back to the village,’ Charlie said. ‘We need an ambulance.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Annie Howe tried to sit up. ‘That’s—’

‘Who’s he?’ Simon demanded. The woman in the wheel-chair had made it from the path, breathing hard from her struggle across the baked ground. Simon was holding her hand.

‘Her father,’ Merrily told him. ‘Charlie, she’s right. Forget the ambulance. But—’ She met his eyes, his copper’s eyes now, hard as nuts. ‘There’s something else we need to do, and we need to do it now. I’m not kidding, Charlie, we’ve got a problem here, you must be able to see that.’

‘And possibly a solution,’ Simon St John said.

‘Dad?’ Annie Howe struggling to sit up. ‘What the hell are
you
—?’

‘Stay where you are, girl,’ Charlie said softly. ‘Everything’s all
right.’ He looked down at Merrily. ‘She been attacked?’

‘Not in the way you think, no. In the way
I
think – do you know what I’m saying?’

‘I don’t know, Merrily, her clothes…’

Lol was there. ‘I think it’s pretty obvious she took them off herself, Charlie. The things we saw strewn across…?’

‘I’ll fetch them,’ Sally Boswell said.

Merrily came to her feet. ‘Charlie, I swear to God. I swear to you that this is not some scam. She was in the kiln just now – on her own. The wrong place at the wrong time. Charlie, it all comes down to that place.’

‘I was simply’ – Annie shook her ash-blonde head in irritation – ‘taking a final look round before we handed the keys back to…’ She looked vague for a moment. ‘Before we handed over the keys to S–Stock’s solicitors. Is there some water? If I can just have some water…’

Merrily said, ‘Charlie, I don’t have time to explain. You have got to—Please trust me.’

‘Look,’ Annie Howe said, ‘where’s the fucking car?’ She finally sat up. ‘Get these people—’

‘Stay where you are, Anne.’ Charlie’s jaw was working from side to side. ‘You’re naked, girl.’

‘
What
are you—?’ Annie Howe rose up suddenly, and Charlie Howe stepped to one side so that Annie was in the full sun.

There was a moment of silence, and then she started to scream, her head tossed back, eyes squeezed shut against the blast of light. Her spine arched in a spasm, her white breasts thrust towards the sun, her mouth opening into a big, hungry smile, as if—

In the instant that the screaming turned to laughter, Merrily was down by Annie’s side, both hands on her burning forehead. The eyes opened once, a flaring of panic and outrage under the sweat-soaked white-blonde hair.

It wasn’t all sweat, though. The top must finally have come off the flask inside, because the airline bag, where Annie’s head had lain, was soaked now with holy water.

Rebekah
, Merrily said calmly, somewhere deep inside herself.
Listen to me
.