The Cure of Souls Read online

  The Cure of Souls

  PHIL RICKMAN was born in Lancashire and lives on the Welsh border. He is the author of the Merrily Watkins series, and The Bones of Avalon. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism and writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf for BBC Radio Wales.

  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

  OTHER BOOKS

  The Bones of Avalon

  PHIL

  RICKMAN

  The Cure of Souls

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Macmillan.

  This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2001.

  The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted 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 is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-0-85789-012-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-019-1

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  One: Special

  Two: Little Green Apples

  Three: Soiled Place

  Part One

  1. The Wires

  2. In the Old-fashioned Sense

  3. Stock

  4. The Reservoir

  5. Al and Sally

  6. Full of Dead People

  7. Stealing the Light

  8. Mercury Retrograde

  9. God and Music

  10. Bad Penny

  11. One Girl in Particular

  Part Two

  12. Everybody Lies

  13. Question of Diplomacy

  14. Thankless

  15. From Hell

  16. Mafia

  17. Comfort and Joy

  18. Lightform

  19. And then… Peace

  20. The Metaphysics

  21. The Brimstone Tray

  22. Barnchurch

  23. Poppies in the Snow

  Part Three

  24. Being Lost

  25. Soured

  26. Cats

  27. Scalding

  28. A Religious Man

  29. The Plagues of Frome

  30. Element of Surprise

  31. Little Taps

  32. The Big Lie

  33. Item

  34. The Cure of Souls

  35. Left to Hang

  36. Confluence

  37. Rebekah

  38. Physical Dependency

  39. Rich Girl With a Hobby

  40. Bleed Dry

  41. Another Round to the Devil

  42. Witch Trials

  Part Four

  43. Retribution

  44. Avoiding the Second Death

  45. Drukerimaskri

  46. Every Evil Haunting and Phantasm

  47. Ghost Eyes

  48. Love First

  One: Love Lightly?

  Two: Strung Up Closing Credits

  The Cure of Souls

  Prologue

  Church of England

  Diocese of Hereford

  Ministry of Deliverance

  email: [email protected]

  Click

  Home Page

  Hauntings

  Possession

  Cults

  Psychic Abuse

  Contacts

  Prayers

  If you’ve had a worrying experience of an unexplained or possibly paranormal nature, we may be able to help.

  Many people troubled or frightened by the unknown are often embarrassed to discuss their problem or are scared of being laughed at or disbelieved.

  The Deliverance Ministry is here to listen and advise – and we never make light of it.

  ONE

  Special

  IT WAS REALLY getting to Jane now, tormenting her nights, raiding her head as soon as she awoke in the mornings. The way things did when there was nobody – like, nobody – you could tell.

  I’m sixteen years old, and I’m…

  Feeling deeply isolated, she walked numbly out of the school, with its acrid anxiety-smell, and into the sun-splashed quadrangle, where Scott Eagles and Sigourney Jones were already into a full-blown, feely snog almost directly under the staffroom window.

  The big statement. This was Jones and Eagles telling the sad old gits in the staffroom that the English Language GCSE that they and Jane and a bunch of other kids had just completed, was, like all the other GCSEs – the focus of their school-life for the past four or five years – of truly minuscule significance in comparison with their incredible obsession with one another.

  Yes, having done their sleeping around, they were into something long-term and meaningful. Life-partners, possibly. An awesome thing.

  Jane, however, felt like part of some other species. Sixteen years old and…

  She closed her eyes on the superior, super-glued lovers. Walked away from the whole naff sixties edifice of concrete and washed-out brick sinking slowly into the pitted asphalt exercise yard, which the Head liked to call a quadrangle. She needed out of here, like now. And yet she kept wishing the term still had weeks to run.

  ‘So, how was it for you, Jane?’

  ‘Huh?’

  She spun round. The sun was a slap in the face. Candida Butler was shimmering alongside her, tall and cool, the words head girl material shining out of her sweatless forehead as they probably had since she was ten.

  ‘The exam, Jane.’ Candida wrinkled a sensible nose at the Jones-and-Eagles show. Her own boyfriend was at Cambridge, reading astrophysics. An older guy, natch. Candida – who was never going to be called Candy by anyone – was serene and focused, and knew it.

  ‘Pity the essay titles were all so crap,’ Jane said.

  ‘Did you think so?’ Candida looked mildly surprised. She’d have opted for the utterly safe and anodyne My Grandmother’s Attic. ‘Anyway, it’s another one over, that’s the main thing.’ She looked down at Jane with that soft, mature smile. ‘So what are you going to be doing with yourself this summer?’

  The sun’s reflection lasered out of the plate-glass doors of the new science block. Danny Gittoes and Dean Wall, who probably still couldn’t get the letters ‘GCSE’ in the right order, came out of the toilets grinning and ripping off their school ties in preparation for another bid to get served in the Royal Oak, where the teachers drank. Went without saying that they wouldn’t be coming back in the autumn.

  Jane wished it was already
winter. She wished she could spend the next seven weeks holed up in her own attic apartment, under the Mondrian walls, with a pile of comfort reading.

  I am sixteen, and I’m an old maid.

  ‘I’m going on holiday for a couple of weeks,’ she said miserably. ‘With my boyfriend. At his family’s holiday home.’

  From the edge of the quad, where it met the secondary playing fields, you could see across miles of open countryside to the Black Mountains on the horizon.

  On the other side of the mountains was Wales, another country.

  Eirion’s country.

  On the edge of Wales, probably nearly a hundred miles away, was the Pembrokeshire coast, where Eirion’s family had their five-bedroom holiday ‘cottage’. Where you could go surfing and walk the famous coastal path and lose your virginity. That kind of thing.

  ‘Some people have all the luck,’ said Candida. ‘We’re kind of constrained this year, because Robert’s got a holiday job at his cousin’s software plant near Cheltenham.’

  ‘Beats strangling poor bloody chickens at Sun Valley.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Candida’s wealthy farming family probably had major shares in Sun Valley. ‘Welsh, isn’t he, your guy?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ Jane blushed. Then, furious with herself, she went over the top again. ‘I mean, he doesn’t shag any old sheep.’

  Candida’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you all right, Jane?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jane sighed. ‘Fine.’

  Candida patted Jane’s shoulder. ‘See you next term, then. On the A level treadmill.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Jane watched Candida stride confidently across the quad towards the car park, where her mother would be waiting for her in the second-best Range Rover. Jane’s own mum – ancient, clanking Volvo – would be a while yet. She’d had an early funeral to conduct: Alfred Rokes, who’d gone out at a hundred and two, having still been blacksmithing at ninety, so nothing too sorrowful there. And then – a little grief here, maybe – the Bishop was expected to call in.

  With a good hour to kill, Jane could have strolled round the back for a cigarette. If she’d been into tobacco. But when your mum smoked like a chimney, what was the point?

  Jane’s nails dug into her palms.

  An old maid who didn’t even smoke. What kind of life was this?

  OK, the problem. The problem was that Eirion was giving every impression of wanting to move them up to the Scott Eagles–Sigourney Jones relationship level.

  Jane watched Jones and Eagles heading hand in hand for the students’ car park. Scott had passed his test on his seventeenth birthday; he’d been driving Land Rovers since his feet could reach the pedals, which had probably been around the age of nine, because he was a tall guy, maybe fully grown now. Adult. Experienced.

  Also, Eirion, himself – sexy enough, in his stocky, amiable way – had obviously been putting it about for years. Well, you know, I was in this band, he would say. Oh, Eirion had been around, no question.

  And he could have had Jane, too, by now. She would have had sex with him, no arguments. In the back of the car or somewhere, anywhere; she just wanted the bloody thing cleared away, like dirty dishes – everybody said the first time was crap anyway, this messy chore to be undergone before you could start enjoying it.

  But Eirion would gently detach her clammy little hand from his belt. I want this to be proper, he’d mumble. Do you know what I’m saying?

  Proper? Like, what did proper have to do with it?

  I don’t want this to be… ordinary, you know? Run-of-the-mill. Me and you, we’re… And then he’d go all embarrassed, looking out of the car window at the moon. Jesus.

  Ordinary? Listen, ‘ordinary’ would have been just fine by Jane, who had no illusions, didn’t expect rockets and Catherine wheels. ‘Ordinary’ would’ve been an enormous relief.

  She found herself stomping across the playing field between the tennis courts, panting with anguish under the merciless sun. A torrid sun, guaranteed to turn the Pembrokeshire coast into Palm Beach. Did Eirion’s fat-cat family have their own beach? Did they all sprawl around naked and uninhibited? Like, just because they were Welsh didn’t mean they were all buttoned-up and chapel-whipped, necessarily. Probably the reverse: she and the Young Master would be assigned a double room and presented with a gross of condoms.

  Shit. She shouldn’t be feeling like this, because back in the exam room she’d probably done OK. You always sensed it. She’d get her ten GCSEs and then come back in September and do some A levels.

  Come back as an adult, with a lover.

  She swallowed.

  So Eirion, at seventeen, was experienced and mature, had done the rounds, and had met Jane – who was sexually backward to what, in this day and age, was a frightening extent – and she had become like ‘special’ to him, maybe because when they’d first met she’d been physically hurt by someone she’d thought was a friend, and he’d felt protective and stuff… and that was OK, that was acceptable.

  And ‘special’?… yeah, OK, that was flattering.

  Or would have been flattering if she was ready to be ‘special’, which might have been the case if there’d been others – or least one other – before Eirion. But the first guy you actually did it with, at the age of sixteen, really should not be ‘special’, should he? Not long-term special, not Jones-and-Eagles special. Not the very first guy.

  Why the hell had she said she’d go there?

  Jane began to blink back tears, seriously unravelled, not knowing what she wanted – except not to be a virgin. Not to be a virgin now. Not to have to take this useless lump of excess baggage with her to the Holiday Cottage.

  In fact, if there’d been some not-over-acned sixth-former wandering towards her right now, she’d probably have been tempted to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse, just to get IT out of the way.

  Sure.

  She was alone on the playing field. Somewhere in the distance she could hear howls of laughter – Wall and Gittoes on the loose, ready to crash the Royal Oak, pick a fight with a teacher. Their last week at school, the week they’d been dreaming of for five long years. They were adults now, too. Official. Even Wall and Gittoes were adults!

  Panic seized Jane and she stood there, feeling exposed, the sun directly above her like a hot, baleful eye.

  She was a child. Still a child.

  Ahead of her was the groundsman’s concrete shed, a square bunker standing out on its own. The groundsman was called Steve and he was about thirty and had big lips, like a horse, and this huge beer gut. He was a useful guy to know, however, because of this concrete shed: a safe house where card schools could meet, cigs and dope could be smoked, and Es and stuff exchanged. Steve would also deal the stuff himself, it was rumoured, but not with everybody; he was very careful and very selective.

  Lower-sixth-formers Kirsty Ryan and Layla Riddock were less selective. They laughed openly at Steve but sometimes went into his shed with him after school. And what did slobbery Steve give them in return? Nobody knew, but it was rumoured that he could get actual cocaine for anyone who offered that kind of payment.

  School life. Sex and drugs and—

  Jane saw that the blinds were down over the window in the shed.

  There was absolutely no reason why a groundsman’s hut should have blinds at all, but every window in the school was fitted with the same type, black and rubbery, so that educational videos could be shown at any time or the Net consulted.

  There was no TV in here, obviously, no computer. The lowered blinds could only mean one thing: with the English Language GCSE not half an hour over, slobbery Steve was in there doing business.

  You couldn’t get away from it, could you? Jane shook her head wearily and was about to turn back across the field when the wooden door of the shed swung open.

  She stiffened. The sun-flooded playing fields stretched away on three sides: everywhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  ‘Well, come on,’ a voice drawle
d from inside. ‘Don’t hang around.’

  Jane didn’t move. She imagined pills spread across Steve’s workbench – or maybe some really desperate sixth-former. Jane felt cocooned in heat and a sense of unreality.

  She blinked.

  Layla Riddock, large and ripe, stood there in the doorway of Steve’s hut – in her microskirt, blouse open to the top of her bra. Like a hooker in the entrance to an alleyway.

  ‘Well, well,’ Layla said. ‘The vicar’s kid. We are honoured.’

  TWO

  Little Green Apples

  SAFETY IN NUMBERS…spread the load… a problem shared. The Bishop was heavy with clichés this morning, although what he was saying made sense when you accepted that the Church of England looked upon the supernatural like the Ministry of Defence regarded UFOs. Visitations? The blinding light on the road to Damascus? The softly glowing white figure in the grotto? God forbid.

  The blinding sunlight over Ledwardine Vicarage was diffused by the thin venetian slats at the kitchen window. Bernie Dunmore’s friar’s tonsure was a fluffy halo. He topped up his glass with Scrumpy Jack from the can, beamed plumply at Merrily.

  ‘They look at you, they see a symptom of escalating hysteria. They see the Church being dragged towards the threshold of a new medievalism simply to stay in business. Oh no.’ Bernie shuddered. ‘If the Third Millennium does witness the collapse of the Anglican Church, we’d rather go down quietly, with our passive dignity intact, leaving you out there waving your crosses at the sky and waiting for the angels.’

  ‘That’s not me, is it, Bernie?’ Below the dog collar, Merrily wore a dark grey cotton T-shirt and black jeans. Her hair was damp from the swift but crucial shower she’d managed to squeeze in between Alf Rokes’s funeral and the arrival of the Bishop. ‘They’re saying that? Even after Ellis?’