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.
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Ministry of Deliverance
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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.’