Midwinter of the Spirit

1 It

THIS IS WHERE it walks…

Washing her hands, Merrily looked up and became very still, convinced in this grey, lingering moment that she was seeing the imprint.

What she saw, in the cracked and liver-spotted mirror, was a smudgy outline hovering beyond her left shoulder in the women’s lavatory with its stone walls and flagged floor. Through the bubble-glass in the door, a bleary ochre glow seeped from the oil lamp in the passageway where, for some reason, there was no electricity.

This was where it walked, Huw had explained in his soft, mat-flat Yorkshire voice – David Hockney on downers.

It.

Rumoured, apparently, to be the shade of a preacher named Griffith who heaped sermons like hot coals on hapless hill-farming folk towards the end of the nineteenth century. But also known as the Grey Monk because this was what it most resembled, and this was where it walked.

Where it walked.

Merrily focused on her own drained face in the mirror.

Was this where madness began?

‘Are they often caught short, then?’ the ex-Army chaplain, Charlie Headland, had asked a few minutes earlier, while Merrily was thinking: Why do they always walk? Why don’t they run like hell, in desperation, looking for a way out of this dismal routine?

The course tutor, Huw Owen, had blinked, a crumpled old hippy in a discoloured dog-collar.

‘No, I’m serious,’ Charlie insisted. ‘Do any of them still feel a need to pee, or do they leave all that behind?’

‘Charles…’ Huw being patient, not rising to it. ‘There hasn’t always been a lavatory at the end of that passage.’

Not smiling, either.

Huw would laugh, sometimes wildly, in the pub at night, but in the stone-walled lecture room he never lost his focus. It was about setting an example. Outside of all this, Huw said, you should always strive to live a full, free life but in ‘Deliverance’ remain watchful and analytical, and careful not to overreact to something as innocuous as an imprint.

This whole Grey Monk thing had arisen because of Huw needing an example of what he meant by ‘imprints’.

As distinct from ‘visitors’, who usually were parents or close friends appearing at your bedside or in a favourite chair on the night of their deaths, often a once-only apparition to say: Everything is OK. Or ‘volatiles’ – loose-cannon energy forms dislodging plates and table lamps, and commonly but some-times inaccurately called poltergeists.

When this place was a Nonconformist chapel, Huw had told them, the present women’s toilet had been some kind of vestry. Which was where Griffith the preacher – apparently helpless with lust for a married woman in Sennybridge – had been drinking hard into the night, was subsequently seen striding white and naked on the hill at dawn, and then had been found dead back here, his head cracked on a flagstone, the room stinking of brandy.

Sure – these things happened in lonely parishes. Merrily pulled down a paper towel and began to dry her hands, not hurrying – resisting the urge to whirl suddenly around and catch Griffith, crazed and naked, forming out of the dampness in the wall.

She would not be bloody-well scared. She would observe with detachment. Imprints were invariably harmless. They appeared, vanished, occasionally messed with the atmosphere, but they never accosted you. They were, in fact, unaware of you, having no feelings, no consciousness. Their actions rarely varied. They appeared like a wooden cuckoo from a clock, only silently. And, no, they did not appear to feel the need to pee.

If an imprint responded to you, then it was likely to be something else – a visitor or, worse, an insomniac – and you had to review your options.

‘And how, basically, do we know which is which?’ big, bald Charlie Headland had demanded then. Charlie was simple and belligerent – Onward, Christian Soldiers – and needed confrontation.

‘We have tests,’ Huw explained. ‘After a while, you might start feeling maybe you no longer have to apply them. You’ll feel you know what’s required – been here before, already done that. You’ll feel you’ve attained a sensitivity. Now you’ve got to watch that temptation, because—’

‘Meaning psychic powers, Huw?’ Clive Wells interrupted. Clive was old-money and High Church, and naturally suspicious of Huw with his ancient blue canvas jacket, his shaggy grey hair, his permanent stubble. ‘Psychic powers – that’s what you mean by sensitivity?’

‘No-oo.’ Huw stared down at the holes in his trainers. ‘It’s not necessarily the same thing. In fact I’m inclined to distrust people who go on about their powers. They start to rely on what they think of as their own ability, and they – and anybody else who relies on what they say – can be deceived. I was about to say I’ve found it dangerous to rely too heavily on your perceived sensitivity. That feeling of heightened awareness, that can be an illusion too. We still need, all the time, to stay close to an established procedure. We need that discipline, Clive; it’s one of the Church’s strengths.’

Charlie the chaplain nodded briskly, being all for discipline and procedure.

‘Make sure you put reason above intuition,’ Huw said. ‘Beware of inspiration.’

‘That include divine inspiration?’ Clive demanded.

Huw directed a bleak blue gaze at him. ‘How do you know when it’s divine?’

Clive stiffened. ‘Because I’m a priest. Because I have faith.’

‘Listen, beware of being too simplistic, man,’ said Huw coldly.

They’d all gone quiet at this. Dusk clogging the grimy, diamond-paned window behind Huw, melding with mountains and low cloud. Late October, long nights looming. Merrily wishing she was home in front of the vicarage fire.

‘I mean, don’t get me wrong…’ Huw was hunched up on a corner of his desk by the bare-stone inglenook. ‘All I’m saying is’ – he looked suddenly starved – ‘that we must strive to know the true God. Evil lies to you. Evil is plausible. Evil butters you up, tells you what you want to hear. We need to beware of what you might call disinformation.’

‘Hell’s bells.’ Charlie chuckled, trying to diffuse the atmosphere. ‘Times like this you begin to wonder if you haven’t walked into the wrong course. More like MI5 – imprints and visitors, weepers, breathers, hitchhikers, indeed.’

‘Important to keep them in their place, lad. If we overdramatize, if we wave our arms and rail against the Powers of Darkness and all this heavy-metal crap, if we inflate it… then we glorify it. We bloat what might simply be a nasty little virus.’

‘When all it requires is a mild antibiotic, I suppose,’ said Barry Ambrose, a worried-looking vicar from Wiltshire.

‘If you like. Take a break, shall we?’ Huw slid from the desk.

Cue for Merrily to stand up and announce that she was going to brave the ladies’ loo.

Deliverance?

It meant exorcism.

When, back in 1987, the Christian Exorcism Study Group had voted to change its name to the Christian Deliverance Study Group, it was presumably an attempt to desensationalize the job. ‘Deliverance’ sounded less medieval, less sinister. Less plain weird.

But it changed nothing. Your job was to protect people from the invasion of their lives by entities which even half the professed Christians in this country didn’t believe in. You had the option these days to consider them psychological forces, but after a couple of days here you tended not to. The journey each morning, just before first light, from the hotel in Brecon to this stark chapel in the wild and lonely uplands, was itself coming to represent the idea of entering another dimension.

Merrily would be glad to leave.

Yesterday, they’d been addressed by their second psychiatrist, on the problem of confusing demonic possession with forms of schizophrenia. They’d have to work closely with psychiatrists – part of the local support-mechanism they would each need to assemble.

Best to choose your shrink with care, Huw had said after the doctor had gone, because you’d almost certainly, at some time, need to consult him or her on a personal level.

And then, noticing Clive Wells failing to smother his scorn, he’d spent just over an hour relating case histories of ministers who had gone mad or become alcoholic or disappeared for long periods, or battered their wives or mutilated themselves. When a Deliverance priest in Middlesbrough was eventually taken into hospital, they’d found forty-seven crosses razored into his arms.

An extreme case, mind. Mostly the Deliverance ministry was consultative: local clergy with problems of a psychic nature on their patch would phone you for advice on how best to handle it. Only in severe or persistent cases were you obliged to go in personally. Also, genuine demonic possession was very rare. And although most of the work would involve hauntings, real ghosts – unquiet spirits or insomniacs – were also relatively infrequent. Ninety per cent were basic volatiles or imprints.

Like the monk.

Ah, yes… monks. What you needed to understand about these ubiquitous spectral clerics, Huw said, was that they were a very convenient shape. Robed and cowled and faceless, a monk lacked definition. In fact, anyone’s aura – the electromagnetic haze around a lifeform – might look vaguely like a monk’s cowl. So could an imprint, a residue. So that was why there were so many ghostly monks around, see?

‘Oh, just bugger… off!’ Merrily crumpled the paper towel, tossed it at the wall where the smudge had been and went over to investigate.

The smudge turned out to be not something in the air but in the wall itself: an imprint of an old doorway. The ghost of a doorway.

Three days of this and you were seeing them everywhere.

Merrily sighed, retrieved the towel, binned it. Picked up her cigarette from the edge of the washbasin. There you go… it was probably the combination of poor light and the smoke in the mirror which had made the outline appear to move.

It was rare, apparently, for Deliverance ministers or counsellors actually to experience the phenomena they were trying to divert. And anyway, as Huw had just pointed out, a perceived experience should not be trusted.

Trust nothing, least of all your own senses.

Merrily took a last look at herself in the mirror: a small darkhaired person in a sloppy sweater. The only woman among nine ministers on this course.

Little dolly of a clergyperson… nice legs, dinky titties.

Dermot, her church organist, had said that the day he exposed to her his own organ. She shuddered. Dermot had worn a monkish robe that morning, and no underpants. So naturally she no longer trusted monks. Or, for that matter, priests like Charlie Headland who looked as if they wouldn’t mind spanking you. But she was inclined to trust the Reverend Huw Owen, faded and weary on the outside but tough and flexible as old leather. Something of the monk about Huw, also – the Celtic hermit-monk in his lonely cell.

She dropped her cigarette down the loo.

Oh well, back into the twilight zone.

The passage still had lockers and iron hooks on the wall, from when the chapel had been an Outward Bound centre owned by some Midland education authority. It had changed hands discreetly a couple of years ago, was now jointly owned by the Church of England and the Church in Wales, although it seemed few people, even inside the Church, knew it was currently used as a training centre for exorcists.

The door to the big stone room was open; she heard muted discussion from inside, a shrill, affected laugh. Charlie Headland was wedged against the jamb, crunching crisps. He shook the packet at Merrily.

‘Prawn mayonnaise flavour.’

Merrily helped herself to a crisp. Charlie looked down at her with affection.

‘You’ve got a lot of bottle, Mrs Watkins.’

‘What? Just for going for a wee in a haunted loo?’

Charlie chuckled. On occasion, he would fling an arm around Merrily and squeeze her. Twice he’d patted her bottom.

‘You wouldn’t be laughing,’ Merrily said, ‘if that thing was in the Gents’ instead.’

Charlie grimaced and nodded, munched meditatively for a while, then patted her arm lightly. ‘Got a little girl, I hear.’

‘Not any more. A woman, she tells me. She’s sixteen – just.’

‘Oh, blimey. Where’d you leave her? Suitably caged, one hopes.’

‘She’s staying with friends in the village. Not this village – back home.’

Charlie balled his crisp packet, tossed it in the air and caught it. ‘I reckon he made that up, you know.’

‘Who?’

‘Huw. That story about the hellfire preacher-man who died in the ladies’ bogs. It’s too pat.’

Merrily pulled the door to, cutting off the voices from the stone room. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Giving us all little tests, isn’t he? You particularly. You’re the only woman amongst us, so there’s one place you need to visit alone. If you’d suddenly started crossing your legs and holding it till you got back to the hotel, he’d know you were a little timid. Or if you came back rubbing your hands and saying you’d detected a cold patch, you’d be revealing how impressionable you were.’

‘Be difficult to spot a cold patch in this place.’

‘You’re not wrong,’ said Charlie. ‘Talk about Spartan. Not what most of them were expecting. Neither’s Huw. Awfully downmarket, isn’t he? Clive’s quite insulted – expected someone solemn and erudite like his old classics master at Eton.’

‘What about you?’

‘After fifteen years with the military? No problem at all for me. Funny chap, though, old Huw. Been through the mill, you can tell that. Wears the scar tissue like a badge.’ Charlie dug his hands into his jacket pockets. ‘I think Huw’s here to show us where we stand as of now.’

‘Which is?’

He nodded at the closed door. ‘Out in the cold – lunatic fringe. Half the clergy quite openly don’t believe in God as we know Him any more, and here we all are, spooking each other with talk of breathers and hitchhikers and insomniacs.’

Not for the first time since her arrival, Merrily shivered. ‘What exactly is a hitchhiker, Charlie?’

‘What’s it sound like to you?’

‘Something that wants a free ride?’

‘All the way to hell, presumably,’ said Charlie.

‘Mustn’t overdramatize,’ Merrily reminded him as the door opened and Huw stood there, unkempt, his dog-collar yellowing at the rim.

‘Putting the telly on now,’ Huw said hesitantly. ‘If that’s all right?’

Merrily said cheerfully, ‘I didn’t notice anything at all in the lavatory, Huw.’

Huw nodded.

There was a clear dent in the woman’s forehead. Also a halfknitted V-shaped scab over her left eye, the bruised one.

Merrily had seen several women in this condition before, although not recently. And not under these circumstances, obviously. Mostly in the hostel in Liverpool, when she was a curate.

‘This was what done it.’ The woman was holding out a green pottery ashtray. An old-fashioned pub ashtray like a dog bowl. ‘See? Chipped all down the side. Not from when it hit me, like. When it fell on the floor afterwards.’

‘I see.’ The man’s voice was calm and gentle and unsurprised. Not Huw – too deep, too posh. ‘So it came flying—’

‘I should’ve saved the other pieces, shouldn’t I? I didn’t think.’

‘That’s quite all right, Mrs… bleep… We’re not the police. Now, the ashtray was where?’

‘On the sideboard. Always kept on the sideboard.’

You could see the sideboard behind her. Looked like early sixties. Teak, with big gilt knobs on the drawers. On the oncewhite wall above it was a half-scrubbed stain. As though she’d started to wipe it off and then thought: What’s the bloody point?

‘So you actually saw it rising up?’

‘Yeah, I… It come… It just come through the air, straight at me. Like whizzing, you know?’

This was a very unhappy woman. Early thirties and losing it all fast. Eyes downcast, except once when she’d glanced up in desperation – You’ve got to believe me! – and Merrily could see a corona of blood around the pupil of the damaged eye.

‘Couldn’t you get out of the way? Couldn’t you duck?’

‘No, I never…’ The woman backing off, as though the thing was flying straight at her again. ‘Like, it was too quick. I couldn’t move. I mean, you don’t expect… you can’t believe what’s happening, can you?’

‘Did you experience anything else?’

‘What?’

‘Was there any kind of change in the atmosphere of this room? The temperature, was it warmer… or colder?’

‘It’s always cold in here. Can’t afford the gas, can I?’ Her eyes filling up.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Tell me, where was your husband when this was happening?’

‘What?’

‘Your husband, did he see anything?’

‘Nah, he… he wasn’t here, was he?’ Plucking at the sleeve of her purple blouse.

Merrily wrote down husband on her pad.

‘He was out,’ the woman said.

‘Has he had any experiences himself? In this house?’

‘He ain’t seen nothing. Nothing come flying at him. I reckon he’s heard, like, banging noises and stuff, though.’

‘Stuff?’

‘You better ask him.’

‘Have you discussed it much between yourselves?’

Minimal shake of the head.

‘Why not?’

‘I dunno, do I?’ A flicker of exasperation, then her body went slack again. ‘What you supposed to say about it? It’s the kids, innit? I don’t want nothing to happen to the ki—’

The woman’s face froze, one eye closed.

‘All right.’ Huw walked back to his desk pocketing the remote control, turning to face the students. ‘We’ll hold it there. Any thoughts?’

Merrily found she’d underlined husband twice.

They looked at one another, nobody wanting to speak first. Someone yawned: Nick Cowan, the former social worker from Coventry.

Huw said, ‘Nick, not impressed?’

Nick Cowan slid down in his canvas-backed chair. ‘Council house, is this, Huw? I don’t think you told us.’

‘Would that make a difference?’

‘It’s an old trick, that’s all. It’s a cliché. They want rehousing.’

‘So she’s faking it, is she?’

‘Well, obviously I can’t… I mean you asked for initial impressions, and that’s mine, based on twenty-five years’ experience and about a thousand reports from local authorities after that rubbishy film came out… Amityville whatever. It’s an old scam, but they keep on trying it because they know you can’t prove it one way or the other. And if you don’t rehouse them they’ll go to the press, and then the house’ll get a reputation, and so…’

Nick felt for his dog-collar, as if to make sure it was still there. He was the only one of the group who wore his to these sessions every day. He seemed grateful for the dog-collar: it represented some kind of immunity. Perhaps he thought he no longer had to justify his opinions, submit reports, get his decisions rubberstamped and ratified by the elected representatives; just the one big boss now.

‘All right, then.’ Huw went to sit on his desk, next to the TV, and leaned forward, hands clasped. ‘Merrily?’

He was bound to ask her, the only female in the group. On the TV screen the woman with one closed eye looked blurred and stupid.

‘Well,’ Merrily said, ‘she isn’t faking that injury, is she?’

‘How do you think she got the injury, Merrily?’

‘Do we get to see the husband?’

‘You think he beat her up?’

‘I’d like to know what he has to say.’

Huw said nothing, looked down at his clasped hands.

‘And see what kind of guy he is.’

Huw still didn’t look at her. There was quiet in the stone room.

There’d been a lot of that. Quite often the course had the feeling of a retreat: prayer and contemplation. Merrily was starting to see the point: it was about being receptive. While you had to be pragmatic, these weren’t decisions which in the end you could make alone.

Beyond the diamond panes, the horn of the moon rose over a foothill of Pen-y-fan.

‘OK.’

Huw stepped down. His face was deeply, tightly lined, as though the lines had been burned in with hot wire, but his body was still supple and he moved with a wary grace, like an urban tomcat.

‘We’ll take another break.’ He switched off the TV, ejected the tape. ‘I’d like you to work out between you how you yourselves would proceed with this case. Who you’d involve. How much you’d keep confidential. Whether you’d move quickly, or give the situation a chance to resolve itself. Main question, is she lying? Is she deluded? Merrily, you look like you could do with another ciggy. Come for a walk.’

2 Fluctuation

THE MOUNTAINS HUNCHED around the chapel, in its hollow, like some dark sisterhood over a cauldron. You had to go to the end of the drive before you could make out the meagre lights of the village.

It was awesomely lonely up here, but it was home to Huw, who sniffed appreciatively at Merrily’s smoke, relaxing into his accent.

‘I were born a bastard in a little bwddyn t’other side of that brow. Gone now, but you can find the foundations in the grass if you have a bit of a kick around.’

‘I wondered about that: a Yorkshireman called Huw Owen. You’re actually Welsh, then?’

‘Me mam were waitressing up in Sheffield by the time I turned two, so I’ve no memories of it. She never wanted to come back; just me, forty-odd years on. Back to the land of my father, whoever the bugger was. Got five big, rugged parishes to run now, two of them strong Welsh-speaking. I’m learning, slowly – getting there.’

‘Can’t be easy.’

Huw waved a dismissive arm. ‘Listen, it’s a holiday, luv. Learning Welsh concentrates the mind. Cold, though, in’t it?’

‘Certainly colder than Hereford.’ Merrily pulled her cheap waxed coat together. ‘For all it’s only forty-odd miles away.’

‘Settled in there now, are you?’

‘More or less.’

They followed a stony track in the last of the light. Walkers were advised to stick to the paths, even in the daytime, or they might get lost and wind up dying of hypothermia – or gunshot wounds. The regular soldiers from Brecon and the shadowy SAS from Hereford did most of their training up here in the Beacons.

No camouflaged soldiers around this evening, though. No helicopters, no flares. Even the buzzards had gone to roost. But to Merrily the silence was swollen. After they’d tramped a couple of hundred yards she said, ‘Can we get this over with?’

Huw laughed.

‘I’m not daft, Huw.’

‘No, you’re not that.’

He stopped. From the top of the rise, they could see the white eyes of headlights on the main road crossing the Beacons.

‘All right.’ Huw sat down on the bottom tier of what appeared to be a half-demolished cairn. ‘I’ll be frank. Have to say I were a bit surprised when I heard he’d offered the job to a young lass.’

Merrily stayed on her feet. ‘Not that young.’

‘You look frighteningly young to me. You must look like a little child after Canon T.H.B. Dobbs.’ Huw pronounced the name in deliberate block capitals.

‘Mr Dobbs,’ Merrily said, ‘yes. You know him, then?’

‘Not well. Nobody knows the old bugger well.’

‘I’ve never actually met him – with him being in and out of hospital for over a year.’

‘There’s a treat to look forward to,’ Huw said.

‘I’ve heard he’s a… traditionalist.’

‘Oh aye, he’s that, all right. No bad thing, mind.’

‘I can understand that.’ Merrily finally sat down next to him.

‘Aye,’ Huw said. ‘But does your new bishop?’

It was coming, the point of their expedition. The pale moon was limp above a black flank of Pen-y-fan.

‘Bit of a new broom, Michael Henry Hunter,’ Huw said, as a rabbit crossed the track, ‘so I’m told. Bit of a trendy. Bit flash.’

‘So he appoints a female diocesan exorcist,’ Merrily said, ‘because that’s a cool, new-broom thing to do.’

‘You said it.’

‘Only, he hasn’t appointed me. Not yet. Canon Dobbs is still officially in harness. I haven’t been appointed to anything.’

‘Oh, really?’ Huw tossed a pebble into the darkness.

‘So are you going to tell him?’

‘Tell him?’

‘That he shouldn’t.’

‘Not my job to tell a bishop what he can and can’t do.’

‘I suppose you want me to tell him: that I can’t take it on.’

‘Aye.’ Huw gazed down at the road. ‘I’d be happy with that.’

Shit, Merrily thought.

She’d met the Bishop just once before he’d become the Bishop. It was, fatefully, at a conference at her old college in Birmingham, to review the progress of women priests in the Midlands. He was young, not much older than Merrily, and she’d assumed he was chatting her up.

This was after her unplanned, controversial speech to the assembly, on the subject of women and ghosts.

‘Shot my mouth off,’ she told Huw, sitting now on the other side of the smashed cairn. ‘I’d had a… all right, a psychic experience. One lasting several weeks. Not the kind I could avoid, because it was right there in the vicarage. Possibly a former incumbent, possibly just… a volatile. Plenty of sensations, sounds, possibly hallucinatory – I only ever actually saw it once. Anyway, it was just screwing me up. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and Jane saying: “Didn’t they teach you anything at theological college, Mum?” And I’m thinking, yeah, the kid’s right. Here we are, licensed priests, and the one thing they haven’t taught us is how to handle the supernatural. I didn’t know about Mr Dobbs then. I didn’t even know that every diocese needed to have one, or what exactly they did. I just wanted to know how many other women felt like me – or if I was being naive.’

‘Touched a nerve?’

‘Probably. It certainly didn’t lead to a discussion, and nobody asked me anything about it afterwards. Except for Michael Hunter. He came over later in the restaurant, bought me lunch. I thought, he was just… Anyway, that was how it happened. Obviously, I’d no idea then that he was going to be my new bishop.’

‘But he remembered you. Once he’d got his feet under the table and realized, as a radical sort of lad, that he could already have a bit of a problem on his hands: namely Canon T.H.B. Dobbs, his reactionary old diocesan exorcist. Not “Deliverance minister”. Decidedly not.’

‘I’m afraid “Deliverance consultant” is the Bishop’s term.’

‘Aye.’ She felt his smile. ‘You know why Dobbs doesn’t like the word Deliverance? Because the first two syllables are an anagram of devil. That’s what they say. Must’ve been relieved, Mick Hunter, when the old bugger got his little cardiac prod towards retirement.’

‘But he hasn’t gone yet, and I’m only here because the Bishop wants me to get some idea of how—’

‘No, luv.’ Huw looked up sharply. ‘This isn’t a course for people who just want to learn the basics of metaphysical trench warfare, as Hunter well knows. He wants you, badly.’

It’s a sensitive job. It’s very political. It throws up a few hot potatoes like the satanic child-abuse panic – God, what was all that about, really? Well, I don’t want any of this bell-book-andcandle, incense-burning, medieval rubbish. I want somebody bright and smart and on their toes. But also sympathetic and flexible and non-dogmatic and upfront. Does that describe you, Merrily?

Mick Hunter in his study overlooking the River Wye. Thirtynine years old and lean and fit, pulsing with energy and ambition. The heavy brown hair shading unruly blue eyes.

‘So,’ Huw Owen said now, mock-pathetic, slumped under the rising moon. ‘Would you come over all feminist on me if I begged you not to do it?’

Merrily said nothing. She’d been expecting this, but that didn’t mean she knew how to handle it. Quite a shock being offered the job, obviously. She’d still known very little about Deliverance ministry. But did the Bishop himself know much more? Huw appeared to think not.

‘I do like women, you know,’ he said ruefully. ‘I’ve been very fond of women in me time.’

‘You want to protect us, right?’

‘I want to protect everybody. I’ll be sixty next time but one, and I’m starting to feel a sense of responsibility. I don’t want stuff letting in. A lot of bad energy’s crowding the portals. I want to keep all the doors locked and the chains up.’

‘Suddenly the big, strong, male chain’s acquired all these weak links?’

‘I’ve always been a supporter of women priests.’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘Just that it should’ve all been done years ago, that’s the trouble. Give the women time to build up a weight of tradition, some ballast, before the Millennial surge.’

‘And how long does it take to build up a weight of tradition? How long, in your estimation, before we’ll be ready to take on the weepers and the volatiles and the hitchhikers?’

‘Couple of centuries.’

‘Terrific.’

‘Look…’ Silver-rimmed night clouds were moving behind Huw. ‘You’re not a fundamentalist, not a charismatic or a happy-clappy. You’ve no visible axe to grind and I can see why he was drawn to you. You’re in many ways almost exactly the kind of person we need in the trenches.’

‘And I would keep a very low profile.’

‘With Mick Hunter wearing the pointy hat?’ Huw hacked off a laugh. ‘He’ll have you right on the front page of the Hereford Times brandishing a big cross. All right – joke. But you’ll inevitably draw attention. You’re very pretty, am I allowed to say that? And they’ll be right on to you, if they aren’t already. Little rat-eyes in the dark.’

Merrily instantly thought about Dermot Child, the organist in the monk’s robe. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do, Merrily.’

‘Satanists?’

‘Among other species of pond life.’

‘Isn’t all that a bit simplistic?’

‘Let’s pretend you never said that.’

A string of headlights floated down the valley a long way away. She thought of Jane back home in Ledwardine and felt isolated, cut off. How many of the other priests on the course would agree with Huw? All of them, probably. A night-breeze razored down from crags she could no longer see.

‘Listen,’ Huw said, ‘the ordination of women is indisputably the most titillating development in the Church since the Reformation. They’ll follow you home, they’ll breathe into your phone at night, break into your vestry and tamper with your gear. Crouch in the back pews and masturbate through your sermons.’

‘Yes.’

‘But that’s the tip of the iceberg.’

‘Rather than just a phase?’

‘Jesus,’ Huw said, ‘you know what I heard a woman say the other week? “We can handle it,” she said. “It’s no more hassle than nurses get, and women teachers.” A priest, this was, totally failing to take account of the… the overwhelming glamour the priesthood itself confers. It’s now a fact that ordained women are the prime target for every psychotic grinder of the dark satanic mills that ever sacrificed a chicken. And there are a lot of those buggers about.’

‘I’ve read the figures.’

‘Exaggerated – two million in Britain alone, that sort of level. I don’t think so. I’d guess no more than a thousand hard-liners and another five or six thousand misfit hangers-on. But, by God, that’s enough, in’t it? It’s a modern religion, see, masquerading as something ancient. I’ve not said much about it down there yet.’ Jerking a thumb towards the chapel. ‘I like to save it for the end of the course, on account of some priests find it harder to take seriously than spooks.’

A blur of white: an early barn owl sailing over on cue.

Merrily said, ‘What do you mean by a modern religion?’

‘Well, not in principle, though it got a hell of a boost in the eighties. All that worship of money and sex and wordly success – Lucifer as patron saint of greedy, self-serving bastards, the Lord of this World. Goes back to some of the old Gnostic teachings: God’s in His Heaven, while the other feller runs things down here.’

‘You can’t imagine people actually believing that.’

‘Why not? If you want to get on in the world, you have to join the winning team. That’s not evil, it’s pragmatic. It’s being levelheaded, recognizing the set-up. A jungle, every man for himself, that’s the manifesto. That’s the spin. Got this amazing charge in the eighties. Took off faster than mobile phones.’

‘Which was when you—?’

He lifted a hand. ‘I only talk about me when I’m drunk, and I don’t like to get drunk any more.’

She stood up and walked, with determination, around to his side of the stones. ‘Why are you here, really, Huw? I mean out here in the sticks. Are you in hiding?’

‘Eh?’

‘I just don’t go for all that Land of my Fathers bullshit. Something happened to you in Sheffield and you felt you couldn’t—’

‘Cut it any more?’

‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’

She was sorry. She wished she could see his eyes, but his face was in deep shadow.

‘Aye, well, it wasn’t Sheffield,’ Huw said.

‘You don’t have to—’

‘I won’t. I’m just saying it wasn’t Sheffield. I just… Look, don’t try and turn this round, Merrily. You should consider your situation. You’re on your own, your daughter won’t be around much longer—’

‘And I can’t possibly hold myself together without a man.’

Huw stood up, the rising moon blooming on his left shoulder. ‘This is not just wankers in the back pews, you know.’

She looked at him. ‘I’ve encountered evil.’

‘Face to face? Hearing it call your name? And your mother’s name, and your daughter’s name? Feeling it all over you like some viscous, stinking—’

He turned away, shaking his head, shambled back on to the track towards the chapel.

‘Look, those blokes down there – solid, stoical, middle-aged priests: I can tell you four of them won’t go through with it. Out of the rest, there’ll be one broken marriage and a nervous breakdown. Are you listening, Merrily?’

‘Yes!’

She stumbled after him, and he shouted back over his shoulder, ‘Woman exorcist? Female guardian of the portals? You might as well just paint a great big bullseye between your tits.’

When they got back, the chapel was in near-darkness, only an unsteady line of light under the door of the stone room.

Inside, the oil lamp which normally hung in the passage now stood on Huw’s desk, next to the TV.

‘Power’s gone,’ someone said. They were all standing around in the lamplight looking guilty like small boys. There was a smell of burning.

‘Ah, Huw, ah…’ The Rev. Charles Headland flicked at the letter-box mouth of the VCR. ‘Some of us wanted to have another look at that lady. Couldn’t make up our minds. Dodgy items, poltergeists.’

‘It was mainly me,’ said Barry Ambrose, the worried vicar from Wiltshire. ‘I half-believed her, but I think I’d have wanted to go back and talk to her again.’

‘Yes.’ Huw closed the door of the room. ‘That was what they did. It was a rector in Northampton. He felt bad about them recording the first interview on tape for the likes of us, and just giving her a token prayer, so he went back to talk to her in private.’

Merrily felt a tension in the room.

‘Sorry, Huw.’ Charlie held up his hands, something ribboning and rustling there, and glistening in the lamplight. ‘Don’t know what happened here.’

Holding up the video cassette. About four yards of tape had become unravelled.

‘Screen went blank. Ejected the tape, and the damn thing was on fire. Had to rip it out and stamp on it. Extraordinary thing. Wasn’t your only copy, was it?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Huw accepted the remains of the video. ‘Coming to the end of its shelf-life anyway, that particular case-history.’

‘Need a new player, too, I’d guess.’

Merrily leaned in and saw that the lips of the machine were scorched and warped. She’d never known this happen to a VCR before.

‘That’s the fourth one in two years,’ Huw said. ‘It’s a right difficult place, this.’

‘Jesus.’ Merrily’s legs felt weak; she clutched at a chair. ‘You’re not saying…?’

‘No, luv. I don’t say anything, me.’

Silence in the stone room. One of those moments when spiderwebs of cracks appeared in the walls of reality, and Merrily thought: Do I really want to be doing this? Should anyone be doing it?

Huw looked over the lamplit assembly of bemused vicars and rectors and priests-in-charge. God’s elite commando unit, Merrily thought, and wanted to give in to hysterical laughter, except one or two of them might then think she was possessed.

‘So, lads,’ Huw said, ‘which of you would like to practise his cleansing routine?’

Charlie Headland’s mouth tightened. Merrily guessed he was wondering if Huw had rigged this. And she even wondered that, too. Tests – little tests. Lies. Disinformation.

‘And should we bless and cleanse the entire premises? Or perhaps each other?’

Merrily thought, horrified: It’s getting completely out of hand. How quickly we all rush to the edge.

‘This is insane,’ Nick Cowan, the ex-social worker, said. ‘It’s nonsense. There was obviously some sort of electrical fluctuation. A power surge, that’s all.’

Huw beamed at him. ‘Good thought, Nicholas. You do get problems like that in the mountains. That’s a very good thought. There you are…’ He spread his hands. ‘Lesson for us all. Always consider the rational nuts-and-bolts explanation before you get carried away. Why don’t you go and check the fuse-box, Charles? In the cupboard over the front door. There’s a torch in there.’

When Charlie had gone, Merrily sat down. She felt tired and heavy. To break the uncomfortable silence, she said, ‘Was that a genuine case – the woman on the video?’

‘Ah,’ said Huw. In the wavery light, he looked much younger. Merrily could imagine him in some rock band in the sixties.

‘You said they went back to talk to her again.’

‘Well.’ He began to wrap the unravelled videotape in a coil around his hands until it was binding them together. ‘Our man in Northampton knocks on the door and gets no answer, but he can hear a radio playing loudly inside the house, and the door’s unlocked, so he goes in and calls out, like you do. And the radio just goes on playing, and our man’s beginning to get a funny feeling.’

‘Oh, dear God, no,’ said Clive Wells. ‘Don’t say that.’

‘Afraid so, Clive.’ Huw held out his hands, pressed together as though in prayer but bound tight, somehow blasphemously, with black videotape. ‘There she is on the settee with a bottle of whisky, nearly empty, and a bottle of pills, very empty, and Radio Two playing comforting sixties hits.’

Merrily closed her eyes. Huw wouldn’t be lying about this. He wouldn’t be that cruel.

‘And we still don’t know if she was genuine or not,’ Huw said sadly. ‘The bottom line is that our man in Northampton should not have left before administering a proper blessing to leave her in a state of calm, feeling protected. Psychological benefits, if nothing else. The worst that could’ve happened then was he’d have looked a pillock if it came out she’d made the story up. But, then, looking like a pillock’s part of the clergyperson’s job, in’t it, Merrily? Get used to it, don’t we?’

Merrily was still staring into the scorched and grinning maw of the VCR when the lights came on again.

‘First law of Deliverance,’ Huw said. ‘Always carry plenty of fuse wire.’