The Magus of Hay(14)

A movement next to her.

‘Dark night of the soul, Lol,’ she said. ‘I collect them, as you know.’

Had her thoughts been loud enough to wake him up, too? She reached for his hand.

Lol said, ‘You want to – as they say – talk about it?’

‘Thought you’d never ask.’

Lol had slipped across to the vicarage from his cottage in Church Street, just on twilight. Jane was spending the last weekend of her last school half-term at Eirion’s parents’ place near Abergavenny. Jane and Eirion had been down to Wiltshire to check out the Bronze Age dig where it looked like Jane would be starting her gap year in July, skivvying for archaeologists.

And in her absence… well, everybody in Ledwardine must surely know about Lol and the vicar by now. Just that not everybody approved, and some of them were the most constant members of an unsteady congregation. Which made her, on top of everything else, a hypocrite.

‘So Sylvia Merchant sends for me – that’s what happens, we get sent for – to confirm what she wants to be the truth. And if it goes against centuries of established theology, well, anything can be changed these days, if you don’t like it much. And if God doesn’t like it… well, we created him, we can uncreate him. Up yours, God.’

‘That dark, huh?’ Lol said. ‘Poor soul.’

‘I should be unfrocked.’

‘You are.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘So you went along with it.’

‘Mmm. Did the prayers.’

‘With the two of them?’

‘Don’t think I had a choice.’

Huw Owen’s First Law of Deliverance – or it might be the second – was never to leave a disturbed environment without administering a blessing. What he told his exorcism students after the story of the woman who seemed like a liar and then killed herself.

‘Actually, I didn’t.’ Merrily sat up in bed, naked before God. ‘I asked for release. For both of them. Can’t remember the actual words, but that was the essence of it.’

There was a mauve tint to the square panes of old glass. Later than she’d thought.

Lol said, ‘How did she take it?’

‘I don’t know. I kept my eyes closed.’

The implications were vast and terrifying. If you didn’t think it was delusion or brain chemicals. If you thought there was a possibility that you were more than a social service.

She leaned into him, slid back down into the bed.

‘Actually, I’m not sure she took it very well. She was a head teacher. Used to calling the shots. Maybe that’s why she liked having Alys Nott around. A secretary for all eternity. And, presumably, Alys liked that too.’

‘Doesn’t matter one way or the other, now, does it?’

‘I don’t know. Do I have responsibility to what remains of Alys?’

‘Hell, no. Definitely not. I don’t know much about theology, but I’m guessing she’s well out your sphere of influence now.’

‘Out of the mouths of babes and songwriters… bugger.’ She pushed back the duvet. ‘I need a wee. Do you want a cup of tea, or…?’

It was chilly, for May. She pulled her bathrobe from the back of the door. She was replaying what Sylvia Merchant had said.

Her eyes were without light. And I wasn’t sure she could see me.

Alys Nott held in some limbo. Trapped and blind.

‘You know that night? When I thought I saw something on the stairs to the attic?’

He’d been here that night, though long before they were an item. Downstairs on the sofa while she was upstairs, getting speared by the pure wild energy. He’d been the first to see her, afterwards.

‘You had seen something,’ Lol said. ‘Nightmares don’t have that effect.’

‘But, given the state I was in at the time, to what extent was that a subjective experience? I was looking for answers, and that’s how the answer came. Was that a case of the subconscious mind translating something into an image? I don’t know. I still don’t know how any of this works.’

‘You know more than most people.’

‘I’ve read a lot of books about paranormal phenomena, mysticism, occultism. I’ve studied case histories. I’ve observed other people’s spiritual crises, but I still don’t know how much I can accept. I could be self-deluded. I could be a charlatan.’

This was how you thought in the darkest hours.

‘Actually,’ Lol said, ‘there’s something I need to tell you…’

She turned, the robe half on. Because it was still before dawn, the devil’s time, she felt queasy with trepidation.





PART TWO