Night After Night
NIGHT
AFTER
NIGHT
Also by Phil Rickman
THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES
The Wine of Angels
Midwinter of the Spirit
A Crown of Lights
The Cure of Souls
The Lamp of the Wicked
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd
The Smile of a Ghost
The Remains of an Altar
The Fabric of Sin
To Dream of the Dead
The Secrets of Pain
The Magus of Hay
THE JOHN DEE PAPERS
The Bones of Avalon
The Heresy of Dr Dee
OTHER TITLES
Candlenight
Curfew
The Man in the Moss
December
The Chalice
Night After Night
The Cold Calling
Mean Spirit
Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2014 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2014
The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 0 85789 869 2
E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 871 5
Printed in Great Britain.
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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Contents
PART ONE: At the fading of day
PART SEVEN: What you remember from the night
PART ONE
At the fading of day
It is important to be aware that every ghost story… depends on the honesty of those telling it, the accuracy of their memory and the reliability of their interpretation of the circumstances.
Ian Wilson
In Search of Ghosts
(1995)
A fine late afternoon in
January and…
…
A HAUNTED HOUSE
?
He wonders what this means, as he moves from dark room to even darker room, in the dust of discarded centuries. What
is
a haunted house?
Not an easy question. A case, there is, for saying that all houses are haunted and that this is rarely harmful. Everyone’s home holds the residue of sickness, physical and mental. Every house stores memories of pain and pleasure. Few walls have not absorbed howls of anger, purrs of passion – and not all of it normal.
But sickness is rarely infectious after five hundred years or more. Not all memories are active.
And how many of us are normal? He plucks a strand of cobweb from his tweed skirt.
Certainly not him.
The closing hour of a lovely day for the time of year. Outside, the walls of the house are still sun-baked. This is the beauty of Cotswold stone, it seems to store the sun, so that villages look from a distance like uncovered beehives.
A lovely day, a lovely old house – from the outside, at least – and a lovely woman.
She stands beside him on the steps. She’s wearing a heavy cloak of dark blue wool, ankle-length. The kind of cloak that women must have worn here when the house was young and held fewer memories, active or otherwise. From a distance, in certain lights, you might think she herself was a ghost.
‘Knap Hall was derelict for decades at a time,’ she says. ‘Eventually – and we’re talking in the 1970s, I think – it was divided up into rented apartments before it became a pub again. With a
restaurant, this time. A gastropub – in the newer part, not here. Too costly to convert the older rooms, too many restrictions. So the rooms at this end, which are sixteenth century or earlier, have been mainly left alone. Which is good. For us, anyway.’
‘How did they get the people out?’ he wonders.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Presumably some of the flats were still tenanted when it was sold for a gastropub.’
She shakes her head, doesn’t know. Perhaps they didn’t have to try too hard, he thinks. Perhaps people couldn’t wait to get out.
‘And what happened with the pub?’
Trinity shrugs.
‘Lot of pubs just close overnight these days, don’t they? And it was a bit isolated. And the smoking ban, of course.’ She smiles her helpless smile. ‘Actually, I don’t really know.’
He nods. He’s more interested in her mention a few minutes ago, of the house once being a home for maladjusted boys. A lot of anger there, you imagine, and torrenting sexuality.
‘It needs to be cared for,’ she says. ‘Don’t you think?’
He stares out across gardens that became fields again and are now being retamed.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’m quite sure there are a number of things here that need some care.’
He turns, looks beyond the house, to what rises above it, crowned by a stand of Scots pine.
‘What’s that hill called? Is
that
the Knap?’
A wooden kissing gate lets them into a footway, partly stepped, leading steeply up behind the house, overlooking a walled garden, its bottom wall tight to the hill. In one corner, there’s a small stone building with a cross at the apex of its roof.
‘Domestic chapel?’
‘Used to be. The pub used it as a storeroom. Harry’s bought some old pews from one of those reclamation places and we’re having them installed. Do you think that’s a good idea?’