The Cure of Souls E-Book

Phil Rickman

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Merrily Watkins Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 749

Beschreibung

A school girl possessed by evil spirits and a savage murder; Merrily is once again drawn into the deadly tangle of deceit and mystery in rural Herefordshire... Lies, cover-ups, danger and the unexplainable. The pace is fast and plot twists await the reader around every corner. Even sceptics will shudder. - Publishers Weekly 'Black poles against the pale night . . . like a site laid out for a mass crucifixion.' A summer of oppressive heat in Herefordshire's hop-growing country, where the river flows as dark as beer. A converted kiln is the scene of a savage murder. When the local vicar refuses to deal with its aftermath, diocesan exorcist Merrily Watkins is sent out to a village with a past as twisted as the hop-bines which once enclosed it.

Leseprobe

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

PHILRICKMAN

THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

The Wine of AngelsMidwinter of the SpiritA Crown of LightsThe Cure of SoulsThe Lamp of the WickedThe Prayer of the Night ShepherdThe Smile of a GhostThe Remains of an AltarThe Fabric of SinTo Dream of the DeadThe Secrets of Pain

OTHER BOOKS

The Bones of Avalon

PHILRICKMAN

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: 978-0-85789-012-2eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-019-1

Printed in Great Britain.

CorvusAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26-27 Boswell StreetLondon 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 PageHauntingsPossessionCultsPsychic AbuseContactsPrayers

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.’

‘I don’t honestly know,’ she said. ‘Maybe we all are, to a varying degree. And maybe just doing this job gives you… insights. That is, God—’

‘All right,’ Bernie said. ‘Forget it. What else do we need?’

‘A tame shrink. Sure, we can make a good guess at who’s in genuine psychic torment and who’s clinically paranoid, but a guess isn’t good enough.’

‘And how on earth do we go about finding one of them?’ The Bishop shook his cider can, but found it empty. Merrily rose to fetch him another from the fridge, but Bernie shook his head and put a hand over his glass. ‘I mean, should we make a direct approach to the Health Authority, asking for nominations? And wouldn’t a proper psychiatrist require some kind of retainer? Doctors don’t like to do anything for nothing, in my experience, and the Archdeacon would be the first to query any kind of—’

‘I don’t know.’ Merrily sat down again. ‘There’s a whole lot I don’t know.’

‘We’re all feeling our way here,’ said Bernie, whose official elevation had been confirmed only at the end of May. ‘I mean, it’s all hit-and-miss, isn’t it? You get the wrong shrink, point him at some little old lady spouting the Lord’s Prayer backwards in a rich baritone, and he’ll still swear she’s a paranoid schizophrenic.’

‘Be hard to find one who won’t always say that. And he – or she – also needs to be a Christian because, if we ever get someone with a malignant squatter inside them, the psychiatrist is going to have to be there for the showdown.’

Bernie winced at the terminology. ‘I really can’t help you much there, I’m afraid. I don’t think I actually know any psychiatrists of any religious persuasion.’

‘Me neither,’ Merrily said. ‘But I know a man who does.’

He looked at her with the interest he usually displayed when she mentioned she knew a man. She didn’t elaborate. She was aching for a cigarette. Ethel, the black cat the vicarage had acquired from Lol Robinson, jumped onto her knee as if to prompt her, but Merrily kept quiet.

The Bishop got up and moved to the window. He was wearing his golfing clothes: pale green polo shirt over cream slacks and over what you didn’t like to call a beer gut. If this had been Mick Hunter, the ensemble would have been mauve and purple-black: episcopal chic. But Mick Hunter wouldn’t have played golf.

‘What you said a few moments ago’ – Bernie was looking out over the vicarage lawn, which Gomer Parry insisted on mowing twice a week – ‘about people living in a state of grace.’

The lawn ended at the old Powell orchard, which belonged now to the church. There were already tiny green apples on the trees, like individual grapes. Where was the year going to?

Merrily glanced at the clock. She was going to have to leave soon to pick up the kid after her English exam. No anxiety on that one, at least; English came naturally to Jane and it was the one GCSE that required no revision.

The Bishop coughed. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for a while.’

‘Mmm?’

‘You’re still young.’

‘Ish.’

‘Young,’ he said firmly. He had grandchildren Jane’s age. He turned back into the room. ‘And a very young widow.’

Merrily was about to remind him that if it hadn’t been for a particular fatal car-crash on the M5 she might have been a notso-young divorcee and therefore would never have made it into the priesthood. But she guessed they’d been into all that before.

Bernie said, ‘We all know that when Tommy Dobbs was exorcist here he felt it incumbent upon him to develop a rather rigid, monastic way of life. Frugal. Steeped himself in prayer.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I can understand that fully now – why he did that.’

‘However, he was an old man. You’re a—’

‘Whatever.’ She stood up.

‘Obviously, stepping into Dobbs’s shoes, you were bound to feel you were walking on eggshells.’

‘Well… that, and for other reasons, too.’ She had a vague idea what was coming and clapped her hands together briskly. ‘Look, Bernie, I’m afraid I’ve got to be off in a minute. Have to collect Jane from the school. GCSE-time? Once they finish an exam they can go home. I don’t really want her heading down the pub.’

He nodded, not really taking it in. ‘I… we’ve never minced words, you and I. Both accept that Hunter set you up to succeed Dobbs, to appear trendy… politically correct… all that tosh. And again, in my opinion, as I’ve told you on a number of occasions, in spite of all that it was probably one of Hunter’s better moves. Not least because people who wouldn’t dare go near that gruesome old bugger Dobbs will talk to you, as a human being. Young people, for instance. It’s very important that we should help the young people.’ He screwed up his face. ‘What I’m trying to say, Merrily… I don’t want you to be scared to be a human being.’

‘Huh?’

‘I mean, there must be times when you find yourself looking at young Jane – with all of it just beginning for her. Boyfriends, parties, you know what I mean. You must feel—’

‘They’re fairly human, too, in my experience.’ Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘Nuns.’

There was a moment of silence, then the Bishop sighed softly. ‘Well, you said it.’

‘I was trying to help you out.’

‘Bloody hell, Merrily!’ He brought his left fist down on the back of a dining chair.

Well, what was she supposed to say? She hadn’t exactly applied for the job down here on the coalface of Christianity: day-to-day confrontation with the intangible, the amorphous and the unproven, as experienced by the damaged, the vulnerable, the disturbed and the fraudulent.

Was the Bishop actually implying that she might find all this easier to cope with if she went out, got drunk, and got laid a time or two?

Probably not. He was probably just covering himself.

‘All I’m saying’ – Bernie thrust his left hand into his hip pocket, maybe to conceal the fact that he’d hurt it on the back of the chair – ‘is that Deliverance has started taking on a much higher profile than any of us imagined. I don’t want you cracking up on me, or tightening up – building some kind of impenetrable spiritual shell around yourself, the way Dobbs did.’

‘Oh, I doubt I’d have the personal strength for that, Bernie.’

‘Didn’t matter with Dobbs, because half the Hereford clergy didn’t even know what he actually did. He could go his own way. All his pressures were… inner ones.’

‘Yes.’

She noticed that a few of the little green apples had either fallen or been plucked from the orchard trees and now lay forlornly on new-mown grass that was already showing signs of sun-scorching. She wondered if there was some sinister piece of local folklore about premature windfalls.

‘Anyway,’ the Bishop said, ‘I’ll want you to email me that list by tomorrow night.’

‘I will, I will.’

‘And start helping yourself to a bit of ordinary life, Merrily. Before it gets eaten away.’

THREE

Soiled Place

IT WAS LIKE some illicit members’ club for which she’d accidentally given the secret sign. One foot over the threshold, and she was pulled in and Layla Riddock had closed the door behind them. Then she heard a lock turn and Layla was pulling the key out of the door, sliding it into her skirt pocket.

What?

The two candles on the workbench made shadows rise and turned the metal handles of the oldest lawnmower into twin cobra-heads. One of the flames was reflected, magnified and distorted, in the bevelled side of a glass. It looked like one of the water glasses from the dining hall, upturned in the centre of the bench-top.

‘Welcome,’ Layla Riddock said.

If Candida Butler looked mature, Layla looked somehow old, as in seasoned, as in tainted, as in kind of corrupt – or maybe you just thought that because of what you knew about her and all the guys she’d had. Like, actual guys, not boys.

But there were no guys in here today, not even Steve the beer-gutted groundsman.

‘Take a seat, then.’ Layla pulled out some kind of oil drum, tapped on the top of it with her nails.

The other girls said nothing.

Only the chunky Kirsty Ryan, Layla’s mate, turned her spiky red head towards Jane. Kirsty was sitting on the mower’s grassbox turned on its side. The other girl, on a stool, kept on looking down at the bench-top where pieces of cardboard the size of playing cards were arranged in a circle, the candles standing outside of it, in what looked like tobacco tins.

‘Well, go on,’ Layla said.

Jane sat down on the oil drum, next to Kirsty Ryan, because… well, because when Layla told you to do something, you somehow just did it. Layla was tall and good-looking in this kind of pouting, sexual way, and she somehow had this forceful thing about her, an aura of grim authority. Her father had been a gypsy – she liked to tell people that, liked hinting she had a long tradition of secret powers behind her. The gypsy must have moved on pretty quick, though, because Layla’s mother was long-married to Allan Henry, the well-known builder and property developer – ALLAN HENRY HOMES – and they lived in this huge, crass, ranch-style bungalow, with a swimming pool and a snooker room, out near Canon Pyon. Riddock was presumably her mother’s family name… or the gypsy’s.

‘It’s Jane, right?’ Layla sat down on a stool at the head of the bench, behind the candle tins. ‘Kirsty you know, I assume. And that’s Amy. Fourth year.’ She pushed the candles further apart, so that they were arranged either side of her and she looked like some sombre, smouldering idol in an Indian temple.

The card in front of Jane said NO. The letters were printed on white paper stuck to the card. Now she had an idea what this was.

Kirsty Ryan turned to her. ‘You got the ten quid on you?’

Jane said nothing.

‘She can bring it in tomorrow,’ Layla said crisply, then looked at Jane without smiling. ‘Cheap at the price, love, you’ll find out.’

Kirsty smirked.

Jane thought she saw Amy stiffen. The kid was slight and fair-haired and was the only one in here wearing her school blazer, despite the heat. She was sitting directly opposite Jane. In front of her was the card that said YES.

Kirsty said to Jane, ‘You come with a special question? Got a problem you want sorted?’

Jane shook her head.

‘Lying little cow,’ Kirsty said.

Jane said nothing. She had to get out of here, but it would be seriously unwise to let any of them know that.

‘Told you there’d be another one along, didn’t I?’ Layla folded her arms in satisfaction.

‘There was this other kid,’ Kirsty explained, ‘but she got shit-scared and backed out, and we were worried they wouldn’t like it. There should be four.’

They? Jane cleared her throat. ‘Why?’

‘’Cause we started out with four. So, like… your mother’s a vicar, yeah?’

‘So?’

‘Oh, not just a vicar,’ Layla said, ‘is she, love?’

Jane shrugged, keeping her lips clamped. She didn’t like talking about what Mum did, especially to someone like Layla Riddock.

‘So what would she say to this, your old lady?’

Jane managed a nervous grin but still said nothing. Her old lady would probably have snatched up the glass, scattered the letters and called on God and all His angels to cleanse this soiled place like now.

Kirsty said, ‘Who told you about this?’

‘Nobody,’ Jane said. ‘I was just—’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Layla leaned forward, those big, heavy breasts straining to come bouncing out of her blouse. ‘This is excellent. I think… I really do think that this is going to be a really good sitting.’

‘Yeah,’ said Kirsty, rebuked. ‘Right.’

Jane had never actually done this before. It belonged to the realm of sad gits, people with no real hold on life. It was a joke. Unhealthy, maybe, but still a joke.

She had to keep thinking like that, because she knew there was no way she was going to get out of here until it was over. OK, she could leap up and demand the key and they probably wouldn’t use violence to stop her. (Or would they?)

But that wouldn’t be awfully cool, would it?

Besides, it might be, you know… kind of interesting.

The air in the groundsman’s hut smelled of oil and sweat. The candlelight had found a little moisture in the cleft over Layla Riddock’s upper lip as it curled at last into a sort of smile.

‘Let’s go for it, then,’ Layla said.

It was terrifying.

And like… really addictive.

The glass made an eerie sound as it moved across the greasy surface of Steve’s bench. Like a coffin sliding through the curtains of a crematorium, reflected Jane, who had never been inside a crematorium, not even when her dad had died.

The first time—

‘Are you here?’ Layla had asked calmly.

—the glass shot directly to YES with the snap precision of a fast cue ball on a snooker table, and the sudden movement made both candle-flames go almost horizontal, like in the wind created when someone suddenly slams a door. Jane was so shocked she almost jerked her finger away.

‘Good,’ Layla said.

Jane let out a fast breath. She hadn’t expected that to happen. Nobody could be pushing; it just wasn’t possible.

‘Now, tell us your name,’ Layla instructed.

It, Jane thought.

There couldn’t be an it. Not on a summer afternoon in Slobbery Steve’s filthy shed in the precincts of the dreary once-modernist Moorfield High School, Herefordshire.

It was a scam, that was all. There had to be a trick to it, a method of setting up momentum without appearing to apply pressure – an interesting end-of-term conundrum for the anoraks in the new science block.

Jane looked into Layla’s face. Layla’s eyes were shut, but her wide mouth was set into a closed-lips smile that seemed to shimmer in the moist light, and Jane felt sure that Layla could see her through those lowered lids, as—

The glass glided, dragging Jane’s finger, then her hand across the oily bench-top towards the letter J.

OK, that was it. She was annoyed now. So, like, suppose she tried to manoeuvre it. Suppose she exerted a little deliberate pressure of her own next time. Suppose, with some really intense concentration, a blast of hyper-focused will power, she could make it spell out Jane…

Will power, yeah: thought-projection. She glanced up at Layla. Layla’s eyes still didn’t open.

All right. She located the letter A, halfway between Kirsty and the kid Amy, and she really, really concentrated on it, and when the glass began to move, she tried to—

The glass was dragged from under her forefinger, to slide unstoppably to the letter U.

Jane leaned back. She didn’t like this. She really didn’t like it.

She became aware that the girl opposite her, Amy of the fourth form, had begun panting. Her fair hair was pulled back tightly from her face and her skin seemed to be stretched taut. Now, Jane knew exactly who she was. She was the one who looked like one of those plaster mannequins in an old-fashioned school-outfitters: skirt always uncreased, blazer always buttoned, tie always straight, hair perfectly shoulder-length, perfectly brushed. Amy’s ultimate role model would be Candida Butler.

What was wrong with her? If this scared her so much, what was she doing here?

Because it was addictive? Because it worked?

Get me out of this.

The glass moved under Jane’s finger, slid back into the centre of the circle of letters and off again. The bloody thing seemed to know exactly where it was going, and she just let it happen now, watching the finger in motion, with the fore fingers of the other three – all of them apparently just resting on the thick base of the glass – and all the time trying to separate herself from this, pretending that finger was no longer connected to her nervous system.

Watching the glass spelling out one word, before it stopped in the dead centre of the circle.

J-U-S-T-I-N-E

Amy drew in a long, ratchety kind of breath.

Part One

The Flavour in the Beer

The hop belongs to the same family as hemp and cannabis and is a relative of the nettle. A hardy, long-lived climbing perennial, its shoots can reach 20 feet in length but die back to ground level every winter. It has no tendrils and climbs clockwise round its support. Although it will grow in the poorest soils, only optimum conditions will produce the quality needed for today’s shrinking markets. As a result, hop-growing in Herefordshire is now concentrated in the sheltered valleys of the Frome and Lugg, where there are at least 18 inches of loamy soil.

A Pocketful of Hops (Bromyard and District Local History Society, 1988)

Church of England

Diocese of Hereford

Ministry of Deliverance

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Psychic Abuse

Psychic abilities, real or pretended, are often used to gain power and influence over groups and individuals. It is very easy to become intimidated by a person who claims to have access to super-normal forces, even though we may suspect these ‘powers’ amount to nothing more than a strong or dominant personality.

This kind of situation usually calls for some personal spiritual defence, beginning with prayer and then perhaps extending, if necessary, to support from a priest.

1

The Wires

IN THE WARM, milky night, Lol was leaning against a five-barred gate, listening for the River Frome. It couldn’t be more than six yards away, but you’d never know; this was the nature of the Frome.

Crossing the wooden bridge, he’d looked down and seen nothing. That was OK. It was a small and secretive river that, in places, didn’t flow so much as seep, dark as beer, obscured by ground-hugging bushes and banks of willowherb. Already Lol felt a deep affinity with the Frome; he just didn’t want to step into it in the dark, that was all.

‘River?’ Prof Levin had said vaguely this morning. ‘That’s a river? I thought it was some kind of sodding drainage ditch.’

Which had only made Lol more drawn to it. Later, he’d sat down in the sun with his old Washburn guitar and started to assemble a wistful song.

Did you ever think you’d reach the sea,

Aspiring to an estuary.

But – hey – who could take that seriously…?

Yeah, who? Like, wasn’t he supposed to have turned his back on all this for good?

Now here was Prof Levin, forever on at him to give it another go. And Prof didn’t give up easily, so Lol had gone wandering out into this milky night feeling guilty and confused, nerves quivering, jagged pieces of his past sticking out of him like shards of glass from a smashed mirror.

Seeking the unassuming tranquillity of the night-time river, nothing more than that. The modern countryside, Prof Levin had insisted this morning, was one big sham.

‘Close to nature? Balls! This is heavy industrial, Laurence. Guys in baseball caps driving machinery you could build motorways with – six-speaker stereo in the cab, blasting jungle. These lanes ain’t wide enough for the bastards any more.’

Grabbing hold of the bottom of Lol’s T-shirt, Prof had towed him to the window, overlooking someone else’s long meadow sloping to the bank of the River Frome.

‘Week or two, they’ll be out there haymaking… techno-hay-making. Come September they start on the hops over there – and that’s all mechanized. Take a look at the size of those tractors, tell me this ain’t heavy industry. They don’t even stop at night! Got lamps on them like frigging great searchlights – doing shift work now! Who ever hears the cock crow any more? This, Laurence… this is the new rural. And here’s me padding out the frigging walls to double-thickness on account of I don’t want to disturb them.’

Prof Levin grinning ruefully through his white nail-brush beard: a shaven-headed, wiry man of over sixty years old – precisely how far over nobody would know until he was dead and not necessarily even then. When Lol had first known him, Prof had been the world’s most reliable recording engineer, always in work, and then, after forty years in the business, he’d emerged as a revered producer, an icon, an oracle.

And now a bucolic oracle. Disdainful of belated acclaim, Prof had quit the mainstream industry. He would produce only material that was worth producing, and only when he was in the mood. He would create for himself a bijou studio, a private centre of excellence in some deeply unfashionable corner of the sticks. Knight’s Frome? Yeah, that sounded about right. Who the hell had ever heard of Knight’s Frome?

Who indeed? Down south, there was at least one other River Frome, only much bigger. The Frome Valley here in east Herefordshire had just the one small market town and a string of villages and hamlets – Bishop’s Frome, Canon Frome, Halmond’s Frome and little Knight’s Frome, all sunk into rich, red loam and surrounded by orchards and vineyards and hop-yards under the Malverns, Middle England’s answer to mountains.

Not that Prof appeared to care about any of this; that it was obscure was enough. In fact, the real reason he was here, rather than the west of Ireland or somewhere, was that an old friend, a one-time professional bass-player and cellist, was currently vicar of Knight’s Frome. It was this unquestionably honest guy who had identified for Prof a suitable property: a cottage with a stable block and pigsties but no land for either horses or pigs, therefore on sale at an unusually reasonable price. And Prof had shrugged: Whatever. He had no basic desire to communicate with the landscape – or with people, for that matter, except through headphones.

Unless, of course, he needed help. Arriving out here, marooned among crates of equipment, Prof had put out an SOS to every muso and sparks he knew within a fifty-mile radius – only to find that most of them had moved on, some to the next life.

In the end, it was only Simon, the vicar, and Lol Robinson, formerly songwriter and second guitar with the long-defunct band Hazey Jane, now on holiday from his college course in psychotherapy. Not that Lol was any good with wiring, but that wasn’t important; it was mainly about making the tea and listening to Prof grouch and taking the blame for malfunctions. This afternoon they’d installed the final wall-panels, and tested the new acoustics by recording – in the absence of anything more challenging – some of Lol’s more recent numbers.

This had continued into the night when, at some point, Prof had stopped cursing and wrenching out leads and replacing mikes… and sat back for a while behind the exposed skeleton of his mixing board, just listening to the music.

And then had stood up and stomped across the studio floor, positioning himself menacingly in the doorway of the booth where Lol sat with the old Washburn on his knees.

‘Laurence! You little bastard, stop right there.’

Lol looking up timidly.

‘Listen to me.’ Prof glowered. ‘How long, for fuck’s sake, have you been sitting on this stuff?’

It was past eleven now, but the night was still awash with pale light, forming long lakes in the northern sky. To the south, a plane tracked across the starscape like a slow pulse on a monitor.

In the middle distance was a round tower, like some story-book castle, except that the tip of its conical hat was oddly skewed. There was a window-glow visible in the tower, unsteady like lantern light. Lol was stilled by the unreality of the moment, half feeling that if he were to climb over the farm gate and walk towards that tower, the entire edifice would begin to dissolve magically into the grey-black woodland behind.

It was, he concluded, one of those nights for nothing being entirely real.

From the shadowed field beyond the gate, he heard the slow, seismic night-breathing of cattle, so loud and full and resonant that it might have been the respiration system of the whole valley. The air was dense with pollen and sweet with warm manure, and Lol experienced a long moment of calm and the nearness of something that was vast and enfolding and brought him close to weeping.

At which point he cut the fantasy. The fairy-tale castle hardened into a not-so-ancient hop kiln. There were dozens of them around the valley, most of them converted into homes.

Sad. Not some rich, mystical experience, just another bogstandard memory of the womb.

… Because therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the new millennium. And we’re the priests.

Lol gripped the top rail of the gate until his hands hurt. Prof was exaggerating, of course. His material wasn’t that strong.

Anyway, Lol was too long out of it. The most he’d done in years had been occasional demos, for the purpose of flogging a few songs to better-known artists – makeweight stuff for albums, nothing special. It was an income-trickle but it wasn’t a career, it wasn’t a life, and he thought he’d accepted the reality of that a long time ago.

Back in January, he’d enrolled on this course for trainee psychotherapists, the only one he could find still with any available places, up in Wolverhampton. It made a surreal kind of sense to Lol, though he didn’t share the irony of it with any of the other students, certainly not with the tutors.

Without actually saying therapy, shmerapy, Prof had managed to convey a scepticism well over the threshold of contempt.

‘I can’t believe you waste your time on this! You want to take money for persuading the gullible to remember how they were abused by their daddies, then they go home and slash their wrists? It’s like I say to Simon: you’re just being a vicar for you, not for them. Who gets married any more? Who wants to hear a sermon, sip lemonade at the vicarage fête? If you want to reach people, cure people, calm people, and you have it in you to give them beautiful music, from the heart… then, Jesus, this is the real therapy, the real spirituality. Forget this counselling bullshit! Who’re you really gonna change?’

Of course, Prof knew all about Lol’s history on the other side of psychiatry, brought about by early exposure to the music business – the blurred fairground ride ending in half-lit caverns with drifting, white-coated ghosts and gliding trolleys, syringes, pills.

Medication: the stripped-down NHS was a sick system, drug-dependent. It made sense to Lol that he should be using his own experience to help keep other vulnerable people out of the system. Otherwise, the medication years were just a damp, rotten hole in his life.

Prof knew all about this, just didn’t accept the logic.

‘Listen to me, boy, I have strong contacts these days… people who trust me, who tend to act on what I say, and I’m telling you, you gotta take these songs into the market place.’

‘Well, sure,’ Lol said obligingly. ‘Anybody who wants one—’

‘No! They’ll want you! Listen to me. I can get you a good tour—’

Lol had been backing away into the booth at this point, the guitar held in front of him like a riot shield, Prof pursuing him, hands spread wide.

‘Laurence, you’re older now, you know the score, you know all the traps. I’m telling you honestly: you don’t do this now, you’ll be a very embittered old man one day. Jesus, what am I saying, one day? How long you been out of it now – ten years, fifteen? That’s three whole generations in this business! How much time you really got left? How long now before the looks start to fade, before the winsome little-boy-lost turns into some sad, wrinkled—? Listen to me!’

‘I can’t… I can’t tour.’ Face it: he couldn’t even play all that well any more.

‘Right, let’s see, now.’ Prof went on like he hadn’t heard. ‘It would have to be as support, the first time. But supporting somebody tasteful – don’t worry about that, it can be arranged. REM, Radiohead… all these guys admit to being influenced by your work. You’re a cult… OK, a minor cult. But a cult is still a cult…’

‘Prof?’ Lol was resting the guitar on his trainers, his fingers among its machine-heads. ‘Be honest – you don’t even know that’s true, do you?’

‘The hell does that matter? Laurence, I apologize in advance if this sounds immodest, but if I’m the one spreading it around, everyone is going to believe it, therefore it becomes the truth.’

‘I can’t tour.’ Lol stood with his back against the partition wall again, his breathing becoming harder at the very thought of on the road.

‘You can tour! You need to tour… this will kick-start your confidence. You’re just using this therapy shit as some kind of buffer against the real world. You’re institutionalized and you don’t even know it. It’s like… like so many schoolteachers are really just kids who were afraid to leave school. Believe me, Laurence.’

And part of Lol did believe him, because Kenneth ‘Prof’ Levin had been down in the half-lit caverns, too – in his case alcoholism, the destruction of a good marriage.

Lol recalled the buzz he’d felt when he’d had the message to call Prof, a couple of weeks ago – around the same time he was concluding that knowing the difference between cognitive therapy and humanistic therapy didn’t make either of them any more effective. In fact, the day after his senior tutor had told him, not with irony but with something approaching pride: Therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the third millennium. And we’re the priests – the voice slick with self-belief, after a few glasses in the wine bar down the road from the college. Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness. This senior tutor, this high priest, was younger than Lol, maybe thirty-four.

‘All right!’ Prof Levin had finally backed off. ‘Enough. We’ll talk about this again. For starters, we just do the album.’

‘Album?’

Prof had spread his arms magnanimously. With his own studio set up, he was at last able to make these decisions without consulting anyone in a suit.

And Lol had thanked him for the offer – very profusely, obviously, because having Prof Levin produce an album for you was kind of like having Spielberg take on your screenplay – but then pointed out, reasonably enough, that he had only four songs: not quite half an album.

Prof had smiled beatifically through his white, nail-brush beard.

‘You have the whole summer, my son. This summer… is yours.’

And he had shambled smugly away to his room in the adjacent cottage, leaving Lol to switch everything off before climbing to his own camp bed in one of the old haylofts.

Like he was really going to sleep after this?

Instead, he’d stumbled out, bemused, into the warm night, to commune with the Frome. But the river was already asleep and that was how he ended up following the track running down a line of poplars and out the other side, close to where the hopkilns stood. The sky was now obscured by a tangle of trees, and he was aware of a high, piercing hum that somehow translated itself into Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness.

Not exactly the wisest analogy to hang on Lol who, in his late teens, had seen his parents find religion, watched them being swept away on waves of foaming fundamentalist madness, causing them to reject the Godless kid playing the devil’s music – the kid who would always remember coming home one weekend to find that those two small mantelpiece photos of himself as a toddler had been replaced by framed postcards of Jesus. Which was probably how it had started – the alienation.

And then – in just this last year – a surprise development. Lol’s fear and resentment of the Church had been fatally compromised by encounters with a priest called Merrily Watkins who lived and worked, as it happened, less than twenty miles from here… but if this was another reason for coming back to Herefordshire he wasn’t going to admit it, least of all to himself. Their last meeting had followed events so dark that maybe she wouldn’t want to be reminded.

He felt a sharp pain below his knee and stopped, feeling suddenly out of breath. He realized he’d been running, like he sometimes did to try and overtake a dilemma, to put an impending decision behind him. He must have veered from the path and now he was in the middle of an unknown wood and there were brambles tangled around his legs.

Wrong turning, somehow. It was easy enough to do, even in the daytime, even in countryside you thought you knew. In the middle of this unknown, unmanaged wood, snagged with hawthorn, he heard his T-shirt rip, and he stood there, shaking his head.

Lost again. Story of his life.

Knight’s Frome was a scattered hamlet with no real centre, so it wasn’t as if he could look around for a cluster of lights. Or even listen for the river. All he could hear was the humming: a plaintive sound that rose and fell and pulsed as if a melody was trying to escape.

Lol turned, walked back the way he’d come, putting a hand up to his glasses, pushing them tight onto the bridge of his nose; losing your specs was not something you did in a wood at night. When he took his hand away, he saw the trees and bushes had fallen away and there was now a clear space up ahead. A small yellow light appeared, not too bright, a little unsteady, with a black cone above it: a witch’s hat. The kiln tower again.

When the sky was clear of branches, a trailing scarf of brightness told him which direction was north… and then it was suddenly split by something black and rigid that made him reel back, startled. He slipped and stumbled, went down on one knee before it – waiting for the thing to move, bend down, snatch him up, hit him.

Nothing moved. Even the humming had stopped. Lol scrambled warily to his feet.

It was only a pole, half as thick as a telegraph pole, but not tall enough to carry telegraph wires or electricity cables – although it did support wires of some kind. To avoid it, he took a couple of steps to the right. No trees or bushes stood in the way and the ground was level.

A second black pole appeared, rearing hard against the northern sky, and this one had a short crosspiece like – his first thought – a gibbet. From it hung something limp and shrivelled, the skeletal spine of a dead garland; when he passed between the two poles, his bare elbow brushed against the remains with a dry, papery crackle.

Now he could see the extent of it: dozens of black poles against the pale night, in lines to either side of him across the barren ground, most of them with crosspieces, some connected by dark wires overhead. It was like a site laid out for a mass crucifixion. Between the wires, he could still see the yellow kiln-house light, perhaps two hundred yards away. And the nearness of the kiln told him what this was… or should have been.

It was high summer and these poles should be loaded with foliage, the ripening bines high on the wires, rippling with soft green hop-cones. But this whole scene was in black and white and grey, and there was an awning of silence: no owls, no scurryings in the undergrowth. No undergrowth, in fact.

The silence, Lol thought, was like a studio silence: soft, dry, flat and localized. The air seemed cooler now, and he could feel goosebumps prickling on his bare arms as he ventured tentatively into a hop-yard where no hops grew, along an alley of winter-bleak, naked hop-poles, a place as desolate as the stripped-back bed of someone recently dead. He felt a little scared now. There was no contented cattle-breath around this place – it felt less like a memory of the womb than a premonition of the grave.

No reason to stay. Lol started to turn away. Afterwards, he couldn’t remember whether these thoughts of death had occurred in the moment before the humming began again, or whether it was the combination of the sound and the stark setting that conveyed the sense of mourning, loss, lamentation. The bleak keening seemed to be around and above him, as if it was travelling along those black wires, as if they were vibrating with some kind of plangent sorrow.

And then, as he turned, there was another noise – a crispy swishing, like dried leaves in a tentative breeze, like the noise when he’d touched the remains of the dead hop-bine, only continuous – and a pale smear blurred the periphery of his vision like petroleum jelly spread on a camera lens.

Lol saw her.

It was like she was swimming through the night towards him, from the far end of the corridor of crosses.

No sense of unreality here, that was the worst of it. It was not dreamlike, not hallucinatory.

She stopped between the poles, legs apart, leaning back, one moment all shadows, and then shining under the northern sky: a thin, white woman garlanded with pale foliage. Rustling and crackling like something dead and dusty, moved by the wind.

But there was no wind.

Lol backed into a pole, felt it juddering against his spine and the back of his head, as he gasped and twisted away, semistunned and reeling, into a parallel hop-corridor, the poles rushing past him like black railings seen from a train.

Between them, he saw the woman moving. A long, dried-out, bobbled bine was wound around her like a boa, around her neck, under her arms, over her shoulders, pulled up between her legs – the cones crackling and crumbling on her skin, throwing off a spray of flakes, an ashy aura of dead vegetation.

As she drew level with him, he could see, under the winding bine, black droplets beading her breasts, streaks down her forearms, as though the bine was thorned.

She turned to Lol and the bine fell away as she extended her hands towards him.

Lol very nearly took them in his own.

Very nearly.