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  The Cure of Souls

  ( Merrily Watkins - 4 )

  Phil Rickman

  Another mystery for exorcist Reverend Merrily Watkins. Dark shadows have gathered around a converted hopkiln where the last owner was brutally murdered, while a women claims her daughter is possessed by an evil spirit. Merrily untwines the history of a village and the legacy of Roman gypsies.

  The Cure of Souls

  (The fourth book in the Merrily Watkins series)

  A novel by Phil Rickman

  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 drawled 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?’

  But, OK, she knew what he meant. Nick Ellis had been a rampant evangelical who preached in a village hall plastered with CHRIST IS THE LIGHT posters and used the Holy Spirit like an oxyacetylene torch. Merrily Watkins was the crank who prayed for the release of earthbound spirits, currently setting up the first Hereford Deliverance Website to offer basic, on line guidance to the psychically challenged. They hadn’t liked each other, she and Ellis, but to a good half of the clergy they were out there on the same ledge.

  And one of them was mad, and the other was a woman.

  Bernie Dunmore was quite right, of course: she’d been putting it off too long.

  She saw that he was blatantly inspecting her from head to feet – which wasn’t far – as if looking for signs of depreciation.

  ‘So you want to build a team, then, Bishop?’

  ‘If Deliverance has its back to the wall, better it should be more than one back,’ Bernie said sagely.

  Well, fine. Most dioceses had one now: a Deliverance cluster, a posse of sympathetic priests as back-up for the exorcist. It was about spreading the load, fielding the flack, having people there to watch your back.

  ‘OK, let’s do it.’ She came to sit down opposite him at the pine refectory table, where bars of yellow sunlight tiger-striped her bare arms. ‘The problem is… who do we recruit?’

  Bernie sank more cider. Merrily tried to think what his appearance suggested if not Bishop. You could almost think he’d been appointed simply because he looked so much like one – unlike his predecessor, Mick Hunter, who might have been a rising presenter from Newsnight. Previously, Bernie had been suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, the number two who rarely made it to the palace. But his formal acceptance by Downing Street as Bishop of Hereford had been a relief all round: a safe option.

  ‘Anyone in particular you want to sound out, Merrily?’

  Of course, she’d already been thinking about this a lot.
But the members of the local clergy she most liked and trusted tended to be the ones who wouldn’t touch Deliverance with coal-tongs and asbestos gloves. And the ones who actively sought involvement in what they imagined to be a hand-to-hand battle with Satan… well, Nick Ellis had wanted the job for himself; that told you all you needed to know.

  ‘There must be any number of people out there better equipped spiritually than me.’ Fighting off the urge to dig for a cigarette, she poured herself some spring water. ‘I mean, so many people who seem to be living in what, seen from my miserable level, looks awfully like a state of grace.’

  She glanced at him, worried he might think she was fishing for praise and reassurance. But there truly wasn’t a day that went by without her feeling she wasn’t up to this job, wondering if she wasn’t any better than the mystical dabblers she was obliged to keep warning off.

  ‘Then make me a list of these saintly buggers.’ Bernie Dunmore would never have considered himself one of them either, but then saintliness had never been a prerequisite for bishops. ‘Fax it across to the Palace or give it to Sophie. I’ll make the approaches, if you like. Suppose we start with… what would you suggest… two?’

  ‘Two clerics?’

  ‘That’s enough to begin with. Don’t want Deliverance looking like a faction. And, ah, would they… pardon my ignorance, but would these two need to be, ah…?’

  ‘What?’ Merrily blinked.

  ‘You know.’

  ‘You mean psychic?’

  He looked pained. ‘What’s that other word?’

  ‘Sensitive?’

  ‘Yes. Well… would they?’

  ‘That’s a good question.’ She sipped some water.

  ‘I mean, I never liked to ask, Merrily, but would you say that you yourself…?’

  ‘Well, er…’

  ‘This is not a witch-hunt, Merrily.’