The Magus of Hay(13)

‘We’d need more stock,’ he said. ‘I figure our stuff will fill about half the shelf space. Not much more than what’s left of his. We need to check out some car-boot sales.’

They’d discussed this. Charity stores and boot sales were always full of books that might roughly qualify as pagan-oriented. They had just over two-thousand pounds saved to spend on more stock. Not be too many signed first editions there, but New Age pulp would fill a few holes.

‘Bets,’ Robin said at last, ‘were you… getting something? Upstairs?’

One thing you needed to know about Betty, she never claimed to be psychic any more. She just had feelings about places. It wasn’t a sixth sense, no such thing as a sixth sense. It was just about paying attention to the other five, getting them working in concert. Which most people rarely did, if ever.

That was her story, anyhow.

‘I just think,’ she said, ‘that we might have some work to do. To make it ours.’

‘Ours? Rather than…?’

‘Rather than… someone else’s. I don’t know. Forget it.’

Hardly the first time this had happened. These things, Betty would say, they want to play with you, and it’s very rare that anything good comes out of it, so you don’t get drawn into the game.

This was when they’d broken with Wicca and begun to avoid anything with any kind of organisation or hierarchy. When paganism, for Betty, had become no more than a viewpoint. If you started seeing it as a stepping-off point, she’d say, you’d just step into a situation with people who wanted a piece of you. Or into a mental-health crisis.

But right now he wanted to know. He wanted her to feel as good about this place as he did.

‘Whose?’ Robin said. ‘Ours rather than whose?’

‘Dunno.’ She was looking steadily ahead of her, but not seeing what he saw: the brick, the stone, the patched stucco. The solemnity of her expression indicative of some interior process beyond explanation. ‘Anyway. Doesn’t scare me any more.’

Something else she’d say: never let it scare you. That’s what it wants.

‘Whatever it is, we take it on.’ Betty came out of it, shrugged. ‘We fix it.’





6

Formless conceit


HAVING PRAYED SHE wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night, Merrily woke up in the middle of the night.

Encased in cooling sweat, still hearing the metal-framed typist’s chair creaking gently in a corner of the bedroom.

Not this one, of course. No chairs in this bedroom. She’d moved last month to a far smaller one in the north-eastern corner of the vicarage where the leaded window would catch the first light as the dawn chorus opened up.

Still a couple of hours to go before the blackbirds began. The panes in the window were blue-black. The softly stated certainties of Ms Sylvia Merchant, head teacher, retired, retained control of the dark.

Because I would expect someone in your position to have had considerable experience of the earthbound dead.

Actually, no. It came down to one experience, in this house. On the third staircase leading to the attic which Jane had claimed for her apartment.

She hung on to it, an anchor now. It had begun with the sense of an unending misery which, for an instant, had been given vaguely human form before becoming a minimal thing of pure, wild energy.

That was it. Lasting seconds. Maybe not even one – who knew how long an instant was? Events were expanded by the mind according to their significance. This one had persuaded her, months later, to say yes to an extra role in the diocese, a job which handed you the keys to a repository of collected shadows.

The dictionary said:

Exorcist: one who exorcizes or pretends to remove evil spirits by ritual means.

Or something like that, suggesting that you could still qualify as an exorcist even if you only pretended to do it. Even if you thought it was bollocks.

And the Church… Merely by introducing the replacement term, Deliverance, the Church had been backing away, softening it, erasing the shamanistic overtones, making it sound more like a social service, a token nod towards the boundaries of belief… and leaving a handy escape route, because who, in all seriousness, could, in this day and age, accept that people and premises could be psychically disinfected through a priest’s petition to that increasingly formless conceit known as God?

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

This was Huw Owen, in charge of C. of E. and Church-in- Wales Deliverance courses, now her self-appointed spiritual adviser. Whether you chose to dismiss it as pure delusion or the product of some brain-chemical cocktail, it was, Huw said, still capable of rotting the fabric of everyday life.