Night After Night Read online

  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

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Contents

  PART ONE: At the fading of day

  A fine late afternoon in January and…

  PART TWO: Before nightfall

  Another January

  1. House

  2. Fairyland

  3. Lights out, fires dying

  4. A soul on eBay

  5. Its own darkness

  February

  6. Something touched me

  7. Feral

  8. Shock of the cold

  March

  9. Until morning

  10. Hunter-Gatherer

  11. The significance of holes

  12. All the reasons to be afraid

  13. Holy Trinity

  14. Watershed

  15. Burned

  16. Toast

  PART THREE: Getting dark

  Late September

  17. Woohoo Hall

  18. Still there

  19. Little sister

  20. Closed lips

  21. Flawed people

  22. Guantanamo

  23. The bed

  24. Two camps

  25. Spent energy

  26. Big word

  27. Responsibility

  28. Exorcizing Trinity

  PART FOUR: Night…

  Late October

  29. Resentment

  30. Skid beach

  31. It lives here

  Friday

  32. Fouler seed

  33. Domestic chores

  34. A form of containment

  35. Women and ghosts

  36. Walk but they can’t sue

  37. The eighth person

  38. Fragrant

  39. Death canal

  PART FIVE: … after…

  40. Iscariot

  41. Electric pig

  42. Losers

  43. The rusty fender

  44. KP

  45. Dirty linen

  46. Guilty

  47. Shrine

  48. Dirty lantern

  49. Hurt

  50. Surfeit of detail

  51. Not to be understood

  PART SIX: … night

  52. Betrayed?

  53. No wall

  54. Fruitcake thing

  55. Old and twisty lane

  56. The haunted

  57. Close to the land

  58. Say goodbye

  59. Last fruitcake

  60. Script over it

  61. Pure, bright water

  62. The runes don’t work

  63. Borrowing a ghost

  64. Bits of you

  65. White sadness

  66. Landmark

  67. Pig roast

  68. Presenter

  PART SEVEN: What you remember from the night

  69. Victims reunited

  70. Parameters

  71. In the old and proper sense

  NOTES AND CREDITS

  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 cour
se.’ 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?’

  ‘And perhaps you should have it blessed. A local priest will probably do it. Perhaps you could find out when it was consecrated. Not as old as the house, I would imagine, from the stonework.’

  ‘Can’t you do it?’

  He smiles.

  ‘Not exactly my tradition, lovely.’

  When they’re approaching the summit of the hill, he turns to take in the vast view, the setting sun spreading a deep watercolour wash over pastel fields and smoky woodland.

  ‘What’s that village over to the left?’

  ‘That’s Winchcombe,’ she says. ‘I never know whether it’s a village or a town.’

  ‘Ah, yes, so it is.’ He knows it well enough, drove close to its perimeter to get here today. ‘A large village these days with the heart of a town.’

  A town in the old sense, a sturdy, working town, untypical of the modern Cotswolds. It has a strange history of growing tobacco.

  ‘All very old round here,’ she says. ‘And nothing barbarically new to spoil it. Not for miles and miles.’

  ‘Only the barbarically old. If barbaric is the word.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Belas Knap. If this little hill isn’t known as the Knap, it probably suggests the name of the house links with the Neolithic longbarrow.’

  ‘I suppose. It’s somewhere over there.’ She points vaguely at a wood behind the hill. ‘Only been once. A longer walk than I imagined. It’s just like an odd little hill. As if it’s erupted from the corner of the field. Or it’s landed from somewhere. Doesn’t look five thousand years old with all that new stonework.’

  ‘Probably a matter of health and safety.’

  ‘There used to be dead people in there. I think they took away dozens of skeletons. I’m quite glad you can’t see it from here.’

  ‘I should take a look.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get there before dark. It’s quite steep and treacherous. The ground.’

  Fingers moving inside her cloak, holding it closed at the front.

  ‘Perhaps not, then,’ he says. ‘Perhaps when I return.’

  ‘I hope you’re going to.’

  ‘You know me, lovely. Be with you, I will, at the merest beckoning of a finger. Now we’re in touch again. Now I know where you are.’

  She smiles. A hand emerges from the cloak and she squeezes his arm affectionately as he raises it to point to something two or three miles away which lies like a chunky copper bangle in an open jewel case of green baize.

  ‘Sudeley Castle?’

  ‘Yessss.’ Her hair’s thrown back, and he sees her face is shiny with… pride? For someone else’s luxuriously appointed castle? ‘You know it, Cindy?’

  ‘I know a little of its history.’ He’s done some reading. ‘And its ghosts, of course.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Is there more than one?’

  Back inside the house, she shows him a leaflet for Sudeley, displaying an aerial view of the castle with its velvety gardens. Walk in the footsteps of Kings and Queens, it says on the front.

  There’s a cut-out figure over the castle: a tall, slender woman, from a painting, her waist forming the point of a V, in a sumptuous red dress. She has delicate, composed features and her multi-ringed fingers are spread over her abdomen. Red stones in the rings, the necklace and the choker.

  He rather likes her. She has, for the period, an unusually kind, intelligent face. The sixth wife of Henry VIII, herself four times married. One of the survivors.

  Trinity, of course, played her in the British feature film The King’s Evening. Not a very good film, he recalls, and Katherine Parr does not appear until the last quarter; there’s much more about the flighty Catherine Howard – wife five, beheaded for adultery. Adultery is always more cinematic. As is beheading, of course.

  ‘You felt close to Katherine Parr?’

  ‘More than any woman I ever played.’

  ‘And that’s why you wanted to live here?’

  ‘She’s the only Queen of England to be buried at a private house, rather than some cathedral. Did you know that?’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’ Through the old, sour-milk panes of a mullioned window, he watches a hill beyond Sudeley Castle catching fire in the last rays of the sun. ‘Didn’t survive Henry for long, mind, poor dab.’

  Falling rapidly into the arms of Thomas Seymour, brother of Jane, wife three, and then…

  ‘What complicated times those must have been, Trinity.’

  ‘And so close,’ she says. ‘When you’re here.’

  She’s standing near enough for him to sense the tremor under the cloak. It’s cold in here, colder than outside, though there are signs of a recent fire in the vast ingle. The room, unfurnished except for a window seat with a cushion, has uneven oak panelling on two walls and another is a dense wooden screen. The room’s been cleaned out and stripped back quite recently. She insists everything will be finished in time for the summer, but the smog of dark history is not so easily dispelled.

  Outside there are ladders and scaffolding. It’s Saturday tomorrow but the renovation work will apparently be continuing. No expense spared to make the place habitable… and more, much more.

  She’s told him she didn’t want a house someone else had restored. She wanted somewhere neglected, unwanted, misused. Well, he supposes a gastropub qualifies as misuse. Nothing left of that now. He suspects it had all gone before the builders and carpenters moved in. Starting their operations here, at the core of the house, and working outwards, drawing in the newer sections, opening up the stairs, rediscovering bedrooms – of which there might be as many as twenty. Like most houses with land, it’s been added to over the years, and not always sympathetically.

  ‘Trinity, was this house – when it was much smaller – connected with Sudeley? One of the castle farms, perhaps?’

  ‘I certainly feel it was,’ she says protectively. And then opens her arms. ‘I can’t wait. Can’t wait to fill it with people. Harry isn’t sure it’s going to work, but… I just think it will.’ Her arms drop. ‘Cindy, love, you’ve been awfully quiet. Is there something you’re not telling me?’

  He doesn’t react quickly enough and knows she’s seen his expression. Feels terrible, he does, knowing how much this place means to her. But there are better houses than this, if you have the money, which surely they do.

  But they’ve bought it now, see, that’s the problem. No going back. Seems she tried to find him months ago, when he’d changed his mobile phone number, and his email address to something confusing. Eventually, she employed an inquiry agent to track him to West Wales.

  He only wishes he felt more worthy of her faith in his instincts.

  ‘I won’t lie to you, lovely,’ he says. ‘I suspect that it’s had its moments, this house.’

  And he thinks she feels that, too, but doesn’t want to tell him something,
in the hope that she’s wrong.

  ‘Is that so unusual, a place this old?’

  He forces a shrug.

  ‘Just me, it is, probably.’

  They’ve known one another for quite some years now, since the night she was the star guest on the BBC’s National Lottery Live, which he was presenting at the time. The night she activated the big-money balls in the machine. Before her marriage, this was. They had dinner afterwards and began a period of exchanging confidences, when he learned about her yearning for the English countryside and a gentler, more gracious way of life, while at the same time recognizing the irony in her situation: that to attain her pastoral dreamworld she must struggle on for a while through the brash and frenzied carnival of popular culture.

  And then she married Harry Ansell.

  ‘You’re not staying here alone?’

  ‘No, no. I’m going back to Cheltenham. I wouldn’t mind staying here, we have one bedroom more or less finished, but I promised Harry I wouldn’t. He’s in America till the middle of next week.’