Like me, you were also intrigued by the medieval dovecote with 666 dove holes. Do have any ideas why this might have been?
Anything you can tell me would be very gratefully received.
Perhaps we might be able to help with your own researches too, one day.
Yours sincerely,
Jane Watkins
Seemed OK. Didn’t give too much away.
Jane sent it.
Feeling a lot less excited than she had when she’d composed it. Since then, Mum had been back with Lol – Mum looking totally like death, this time – and then they’d both gone out to this place at Monkland. Mum apologetic, as usual – could Jane get herself something to eat? Jesus, what about her? Like, when was she going to eat? Mum was clearly losing weight. She looked like a small bird after a long winter.
Jane picked up Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, one of two books she’d brought down from her apartment. She put it down again. ‘Oh, Whistle’ was actually quite a bleak story, full of solitude. The guy didn’t die or anything, but the effects of what he’d seen would be hanging over him for the rest of his life.
She saw – the image still as vivid in her head as if it had been on the computer screen – Mum walking out of that derelict farmhouse into the early dusk. Walking with her shoulders stiffened and her spine kind of pulled in, like she knew there was something very close behind her. Her face like yellowing paper.
Never seen her quite like that before. Never. And it was unnerving because, in one way, she needed Mum to be basically sceptical – as resistant to the paranormal, despite her job, as Jane was to the strictures of the Church.
Mum as a buffer against her wildest ideas. Giving Jane the freedom to explore because there was always that framework of stability. Maybe she was really afraid of growing up into a world where a mature and intelligent woman was visibly and seismically shaken by the irrational, trying to conceal her fear from a kid … who was no longer a kid.
Jane turned, with a reluctance she recognised as unusual, to the second book on the desk. Ella Leather’s The Folklore of Herefordshire. In the index, under Garway, she’d found the line about nine witches and also a page reference for The watch after death.
On page 120, Mrs Leather listed the places where:
It was customary, until a few years ago, for the household to sit up all night when a death had occurred. They did not sit in the same room as the corpse, but elsewhere, the idea being that the spirit of the dead person was still in and about the house, and the people said, ‘it was for the last time, it was the last night’; so no one went to bed. But at Orcop and Garway, the watch is still kept, so Martha S— who lived on Garway Hill, assured me. ‘Only if it was somebody you cared about,’ she added, ‘not for strangers.’
So, as for bringing comparative strangers into the same room as the body … The Newtons had obviously bent the rules in their own best interests, picking up on what came next. Maybe they’d even read this very account, published for the first time in 1912.
… Usually, among the country folk, a light is kept burning in the room where a corpse lies every night until burial; a pewter plate of salt is placed on the body; according to Martha S—, the candle should be stuck in the middle of the salt, heaped up in the centre of the plate.
Seriously creepy. Jane shut the book. It was too quiet in here. Picking up the mobile, she got up and walked to the scullery window, looking out at darkness and a wall, pressing one on the keypad.
You have three new messages. To listen to your messages …
She hesitated, staring into the little square of light, before pressing one again.
First new message, received at thirteen forty-three today.
‘Jane, it’s … Oh, shit, you know who it is. For God’s sake, I’ve left about seventeen messages …’
Five actually.
‘… I know there’s nothing wrong with the phone, which means something wrong with YOU. I even tried ringing the landline, thinking I’d ask your mum – yeah, yeah, I know how much you’d hate that, but I’m a bit beyond caring. Only it’s always the bloody answering machine.
‘I mean, have I done something? Have I done something I didn’t know about? Has somebody told you I’ve done something? Just— You don’t even have to ring me back. Just leave a message. I’ll close down the phone for the rest of the night so you don’t risk speaking to me. Just leave a message, Jane. I mean, Christ, we’ve been, like, together for two years? That’s longer than a lot of marr— Oh … fuck it!’
Jane stared into the phone for a long time before switching it off.
The builder was dead, his girlfriend missing.
Most of this Lol had already put together out of fragments of chat heard from the open window of the truck, watching the shadowy scurryings around the screened-off caravan. Guessing what was coming when Merrily returned. Just not sure – as a failed psychotherapist and a derivative songwriter finding a little success a little too late – how best to handle it.
‘Maybe you need a good manager.’ She was rubbing her eyes wearily. ‘A tour-organizer. Whatever the word is.’
‘I really don’t think so.’
‘Or just a roadie to carry the spare guitar.’
‘You’re tired.’ Lol started the engine, flicked on the headlamps. ‘You haven’t eaten since lunch. Or, as it’s Sunday, knowing you, maybe even breakfast.’
‘It’s still Sunday?’ As they bumped into the lane Merrily loosened her seat belt, as if there was pressure in her chest. She hadn’t yet reached for a cigarette. ‘Couple of weeks ago … I lay awake counting up all the people who’ve suffered in some unnecessary way, or died – unnaturally – in spite of all my prayers and entreaties and …’
‘It’s supposed to be sheep, Merrily,’ Lol said gently. ‘I suppose counting corpses will eventually get you to sleep, but the dreams are going to be altogether less pastoral.’
‘She had the blessing, Lol. The full bit. Holy water. Oil.’
‘We could drive into Hereford now, and you could go round administering blessings at random to people in the street, but some of them would still get into a street fight, cause a road accident or something.’
‘So what’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?’
Lol was silent, pulling on to the main road, speeding up as Merrily stared out of the side window. On the way here, she’d told him about the ritual in the little, disused church, the girl suggesting something was coming – Merrily’s discussions with Huw Owen leading to her discovery of the fictional origins of that line.
This constant tension between her faith and an equally-necessary scepticism must drive her half-crazy at times. Like now. Her face was still turned away from him, watching the night.
‘You keep thinking, what if the Church is actually reaching the end of its useful life? And every day it gets harder to answer that persistent, nagging question: If there is a God, why does he allow so much suffering? Well, my children, the truth – the bottom-line, heartfelt truth – is, I’m buggered if I know.’
‘You’re thinking—’ Lol braked hard for a badger ambling across the road. ‘You’re thinking of that guy … Michael Taylor, that his name?’
The Yorkshireman who, back in the 1970s, told his local priest he was possessed by evil spirits and then, having been subjected to a night-long exorcism, went home and murdered his wife. In the most horrific way possible with bare hands.