They’ve made her look so composed
, the husband had said.
After all her suffering and her confusion, I want everyone to see how together she looks
.
Together, yes. Like an expensive doll in a white padded gift-box. A classy ad for the embalmer’s art, but you couldn’t believe it had ever enclosed an animating spark.
This
was the problem: the underlining of the finality of death, the erasure of the spirit, a lasting image of the recently departed in eternal rigid repose. Where was the promise of freedom, the
energy of release
?
Standing in the ruins of the Master House porch, gripping the big, rust-brown key, Merrily was still unsure how she felt about public displays of mortality. But one thing was certain: a single, eerie experience as a child would hardly be enough to keep someone as world-hardened as Mrs Morningwood at bay for a half a century.
‘Weird about the dog,’ Jane said.
‘Maybe.’
‘You think she was winding you up? You could’ve just taken her up on the offer, walked him down here yourself.’
‘Wouldn’t have proved anything. Most dogs don’t like being suddenly taken away from their owners on the end of a lead. Perhaps she knew how he’d react.’
‘Honestly …’ Jane scowled. ‘You’re always so
suspicious
of people. Is that really good for a vicar? I mean, I liked her.’
‘
I
liked her, but I’m not sure how far I’d trust her. Everybody has an agenda, and she’d targeted us. There were things she wanted me to know.
That
’s suspicious.’
‘And you a Christian.’
‘Yes, it’s very sad.’
Down in the hollow, the air was already purpling with dusk, the birdsong withdrawing into the trees. Two sparrows flew out of the eaves. Merrily looked at the oak front door.
‘Makes you wonder why these Gwilyms wanted it back,’ Jane said. ‘It’s going to cost a fortune even to patch it up.’
‘I can understand that – if it’s the family home since way, way back. And if this guy Sycharth owns The Centurion, he’s certainly got the money.’
The house looked heavier close-up, less vulnerable, some of its lower stones like boulders. Jane picked up a stone tile fallen from the porch and propped it against the wall.
‘So these Gwilyms are obviously going to be seriously pissed off about the Newtons or the Grays or whoever cut this deal with Charles’s guys behind their backs.’
‘Having to sit there on the other side of the river and watch the old homestead getting immaculately renovated. Turned into somebody else’s business.’
‘Would there be
any
chance of them ever buying it back?’
‘Can’t be ruled out, flower. The Duchy’s a business, buying and selling property. If they can’t make it work, they might sell it on. And the project certainly hasn’t got off to the best of starts.’
Merrily was watching the top unrolling from a new can of worms. How influential
was
Sycharth Gwilym in Hereford property circles?
Had Felix Barlow ever worked for the Gwilyms? Had Felix somehow been got at? OK, that seemed unlikely but …
God
, who could you totally trust? Who could you
ever
trust?
‘So,’ Jane said. ‘We going in?’
She was standing, brown paw marks down her front, under the grey metal skull of a lamp over the front door. Fragments of glass embedded in its rim like splintered teeth. Merrily frowned.
‘Perhaps not. Can’t just look around and leave. First rule of deliverance: never walk away from an alleged disturbance without leaving God’s card.’
‘In case of what?’ Jane said. ‘A ghostly coffin in the hall, and the body suddenly sits up, with the pennies dropping from its dead eyes?’
‘Wasn’t
quite
how I was thinking.’
‘You know what
I
think? I think you just don’t want to go into a possibly haunted house with someone you think might still be halfpagan.’
‘Things have changed. These days, I tend to credit the boss with being more broad-minded.’
‘So go on, then. Unlock it.’
Jane’s eyes were dancing erratically. It could be that she didn’t actually want to go in. But she
was
Jane Watkins.
‘Yeah. All right.’
Merrily put the key into a hole enlarged, probably, by generations of Gwilyns coming home from the pub in the dark. The key rattling around in there, failing to locate the tumblers. It took both hands and a lot of jiggling before the lock turned over and the door sprang loose and hung there sullenly, still needing a shoulder to shudder it open.
‘House that doesn’t want to be restored,’ Merrily said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
She stepped inside ahead of Jane, inhaling damp and plaster dust disturbed by the vibration. Two grimy leaded windows were set into a sloping wall, and the restricted light – brown and flecked, like the sediment at the bottom of an old medicine bottle – was barely
reaching the shadows that crowded the corners of what seemed quite a big room.
Smelling wet earth, Merrily counted one, two three four … five doors, and the wall opposite jaggedly agape: a vast inglenook, the oak beam across it as rough and massive as the capstone of a cromlech. Primeval. Like the tree itself had fallen onto some waiting stones, been sawn off and the entire house built around it.
‘So this …’ Jane peering over Merrily’s shoulder ‘… this is where they laid the old girl out?’
‘Not here now, though, Jane. Sorry to disappoint.’
The only furniture was in the hearth, a rusted iron fire-basket the size of a small sheep-pen. In search of better light, Merrily walked across what seemed like worn linoleum ground into the earth to a narrow door next to the inglenook. When she unlatched it, greyness slithered down a stone staircase, half-spiralling behind the fireplace.
She didn’t go up. She was cold, rubbing her arms through the toothin sweatshirt, looking over her shoulder into an empty …
‘
Jane?
’
‘Down here. Couple of steps going down into … looks like the kitchen. Big hooks in the beams. Kind of a fatty smell.’
‘Just … tell me when you’re going somewhere, OK?’
‘In case of what?’ Jane came back up, pulling a door shut behind her. ‘What’s upstairs?’
‘I don’t know. I’d feel better with a torch.’
‘If it was dangerous, they’d have warned you, wouldn’t they?’
‘I suppose.’
The only warnings had come, in that faintly teasing way, from Mrs Morningwood, Merrily scenting a set-up.
‘Go on, then, Mum.’
Jane was behind her on the steps, the wooden handrail was hanging loose from the wall. Merrily didn’t touch it.
Upstairs, they found a landing with no windows, the only light fanning from one door left narrowly ajar. Merrily put out an arm to hold Jane back – could be floorboards missing – before stepping tentatively into a long and dismal bedroom smelling of dead things in decay.
Bluish light from a single dormer, half-boarded. Wooden skeletons of two beds, at either end of the room.
‘Like in the story,’ Jane whispered.
‘What?’
‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You”. In Parkins’s room at the … whatever the pub was called.’
‘The Globe Inn.’
Jane turned sharply.
‘Bloody hell!
That
’s why you—’
‘It’s just a bit coincidental.’
‘In the circumstances, Mum, I’d say it’s
seriously
coincidental.’
‘It’s … noteworthy.’
There was a paper sack up against one wall. Fuchsia’s lime-plaster? Was this the room where she’d …
claimed
to have seen something wriggling under the …
The floor was bare boards. Felix had evidently taken his dust sheets away.
‘Mum, why didn’t you ask Mrs Morningwood about M. R. James?’
‘Because there’s a couple of other people I need to discuss it with first. And if you were to email the
Ghosts and Scholars
website we might learn a bit more from the experts.’
‘I’ll do that tonight. But if … like, if M. R. James admits something strange happened to him in Garway, maybe he actually stayed in the Globe Inn? That would surely—’
‘He always stayed with some people not too far away. Let’s not speculate, huh?’
‘Whatever.’ Jane looked around. ‘Are you going to leave the calling card or what?’
‘Can’t decide what to do. It’s just an empty house. In my limited experience, they need … people.’
‘
They?
’
‘Don’t ask me what
they
are. However, I think – Huw Owen thinks – we might need to ask a few people round, interested parties. Although getting a Gwilym and a Gray into the same room might be problematical.’
‘Why would you need to?’
‘That seem a bit like meddling to you?’
Feuds were a pastoral issue, and she wasn’t the parish priest. Maybe she needed to talk to Teddy Murray again, even though he was only a stand-in.
They checked out three other bedrooms of varying sizes, unfurnished. A bathroom with a cracked, discoloured bath and no water from the taps. A separate toilet that stank. Everywhere tainted by dereliction, in dire need of Felix Barlow.
But Fuchsia?
If Felix was right, something had brought Fuchsia back here yesterday. Fuchsia, who wanted to be blessed in the old-fashioned way.
Watch over her, in the name of all the angels and saints in heaven. Keep guard over her soul day and night
.
Fuchsia, newly blessed, had returned to a place she’d judged to be
full of death
. Nothing here was suggesting why.
Jane headed for the top of the half-spiral stairs, and Merrily followed her down, unsatisfied, mildly annoyed. The stone steps were worn smooth at the edges, slippery, some shored up underneath with bricks. Pointless doing a room-to-room prayer cycle; she didn’t know enough of the history to have any kind of focus, and all she could feel in the air was the criss-crossing of private agendas. It was an unwelcoming old house, soured by neglect, and that was probably the extent of it.
Back in the big room, the light seemed stronger, but that would be just her eyes adjusting. She looked around, walked around the ingrained lino and then stepped inside the inglenook. Ducking, although there was no need to, under the vast beam.
The inglenook was almost a small chamber in itself. A separate place. In the sooty dimness, she found the remains of what must have been a bread oven, empty, and a matted tangle of grey bones, all that was left of a bird, behind the fire-basket. She looked up the chimney: glimmerings of light, but something blocking it – nests maybe.
‘Nothing much here, Jane.’
‘Sorry, Mum?’
Jane’s voice coming from the other side of the room.
‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily said, ‘I thought you—’
The sentence guillotined by the thought that if it hadn’t been Jane who was with her in the inglenook …
‘… Sort of passage, leading to a back door,’ Jane called out. ‘Kind of a washroom?’
Standing very still and fully upright, her back flat to the rear wall, Merrily let in a long, thin river of breath.
‘… An old sink.’ Jane’s voice further away. ‘Cupboards …’
‘Jane, get—’
Merrily’s throat spasm-blocked, her headache back, like spikes, like a crown of thorns, twisting in. The iron fire-basket gaped up at her like an open gin-trap while she scrabbled in the pockets of her mind for prayer.
Christ be
… Be, for God’s sake, calm. Pushing back a sudden amazing panic, vile as a migraine, she closed her eyes, but it was like when you made yourself dizzy as child, and she felt sick, feeling the crumbling house turning slowly around her, grinding on the axis of its origins.
‘
Christ be wi
—’
‘
… with
…’
Only half-hearing the words –
St Patrick’s Breastplate
, the old armour – but her lips were cold and flaccid and wouldn’t shape them. There was a solid, substantial resistance, a flat, hard-edged
no
, and a rubbery numbness in her hands when she tried to clasp them together. And although the prayer was sounding in her head, it was distant, someone else’s whispers, and she tried to turn up the volume, envisioning bright brass bells clanging in a high tower, but the sound was harsh and industrial.
Christ behind me, Christ before me
…
A muted crackling down there: bird bones crunching under her shoes. When she opened her eyes in revulsion, there was a face in the high corner of the inglenook and it had stubby horns and a worm squirming from its blackened mouth, and Merrily recoiled.
‘
Mum?
’
Jane’s footsteps sounded on the ingrained lino. But she mustn’t …
‘Mum, look, I don’t want to worry you or anything, but it’s getting dark, and you’ve got your meditation in just over an hour? And I think we’ve both had enough of this place.’
Merrily wouldn’t move. Or try to speak because, if Jane knew where she was, Jane would join her.
W
HAT
L
OL
L
IKED
best about the gigging was the coming home. Home to the mosaic of coloured-lit windows in the black and white houses, the fake gas lamps ambering the cobbles, sometimes the scent of applewood smoke.
He parked the Animal under the lamp on the edge of the square, well back from the cars and SUVs of the Sunday-evening diners in the Black Swan.
The truck had been Gomer’s idea, watching Lol loading two guitars and an amp awkwardly into the Astra, together with all the one-man-band gadgets which contrived the drumming and the toots and whirrs and storm noises that audiences loved for the apparent chaos of it all.
Gomer had remembered that his sidekick Danny Thomas knew a reliable bloke who was selling his Mitsubishi L200.
Animal
, it said on the side. Gomer seemed to find this funny. He and Danny had converted the truck, building a watertight compartment into the box to accommodate the gear, fitting a metal roll-top cover you could lock, and Gomer had taken Lol’s old Astra to recondition for himself:
Waste not, want not, Lol, boy
.
Lol climbed down, walked round the Animal in the late twilight and pushed back the roll-top under the lights, uncovering the case of the lovely Boswell guitar, handmade by Al Boswell, the Romani, in the Frome Valley, two harmonicas, shining like ingots in a black velvet tray, and the plastic thing that could make your voice sound like an oboe. Audiences everywhere –
Hello Hartlepool, Good Evening, Godalming
– seemed to warm to the homespun, the cobbled-together. They actually wanted to like you.