The Missing Ghost
part three, the rest of, out of four
Now the jolt was Father Dunstan’s. He climbed off his stool, then turned around, then climbed back on. He clasped the back of his head. “Why, then, is this little girl appearing to you? If, so far as we know, she’s been dormant for almost eighty years? Something about you or your circumstances must draw her out of the shadows. What is it, man? Think!”
Charmley was quiet for a long time after these questions, eyes locked onto the man opposite. Charmley didn’t seem to be thinking. He seemed to be waiting, even to be willing Father Dunstan on. But the priest said nothing, only listened to the silence with his eyes closed, rocking gently on his stool. Finally, Charmley dropped his eyes and shifted his haunches, as if the truth were hot underneath him, then carefully measured out a reply. “No. I can’t think of any reason why the revenant would appear to me in particular, now in particular.” Then he sat back, sad and disappointed.
“Really? None? You’re sure?” Now Father Dunstan too seemed to see this moment as the crux of the entire interview, for some different reason. He was insistent, incredulous. “Perhaps you have a daughter, yourself? Is the baby a daughter?”
“I have three children, not five. Including a six-year-old daughter, but she’s six years old, not eight, and she hasn’t got the plague, and neither have I.”
“Oh, it probably wouldn’t be anything as exact as the plague. Some strong but general alignment of physical circumstance, or of feeling. Grief. Loss. Your family in danger. A sense that you are alone with your daughter to face some threat, or that your daughter is losing you somehow.”
Charmley’d used up all his pauses and needed none now. “I don’t mean to be rude. I’m confused, also.”
The priest was certainly confused. He cocked his head hard to one side, as if a different angle might get at the truth more efficiently. “Perhaps it’s that you’re a father, and she is begging her father to return from the dead. Perhaps that’s all it is. But that seems such a thin cord to bind her to you. Surely fathers have lived in that house since, fathers of young girls. Perhaps they didn’t tell anyone what they had seen, and moved out quickly. There’s so much we don’t know, we can’t. How long have you lived in this house?”
“Since I was married, eight years ago.”
“And six months ago was the ghost’s first appearance? No hint of anything preternatural beforehand? Doesn’t have to be the girl herself, but footsteps crossing a room where no one is, papers or food rearranged from where you’d left them, that sort of thing?”
Charmley shook his head. “Nary a scratching in the night.”
Father Dunstan scratched his head in the daylight. All the surefootedness of his questions had deserted him. He’d landed an empty hook, and no mistake. Cast again. “You spoke to your local priest, I hope. What did he say, Father—Cecil, I believe?”
“He’d nothing to say. He ran out of questions very early. And referred me to a friend of his who specialises in deliverance of place.”
“And what did that produce?”
“The man came round holding a few sprigs of mint and a twig of baby oranges, and read some prayers out of a book. The girl showed up again a few nights later, as if he’d never visited, as if his visit was irrelevant. It had neither detained nor hurried her.”
Father Dunstan rubbed his face. “I’m not sure I can do better, honestly. Can’t think that we even have mint or oranges. I can try to pick a better prayer. I mightn’t even have a better book. And I’m so very far away. Charms and spells and prayers and such do better when physically applied, so to speak. You say them, aloud not in your head, in the very place. I think that’s right. That’s what they told me, anyway, in university, and what I’ve read since, in the books I could get hold of, and what I’ve seen, now and then, when I have prayed for someone.
“Ah, friend. You deserve better. She deserves better. Not that it is about deserving. Well. I’ll do what I can.”
He rose stiffly and went into the choir to retrieve a book, then came back, opened it, leafed slowly through several pages, his lips silently moving, then settled on one page and started to pray.
“Almighty God, in the name of Your Son the Lord Jesus Christ who purchased us for His eternal kingdom with the inestimable price of His incorruptible blood, complete Your purchase of the spirit of Margaret Saddler this day, this hour, this moment. Redeem her from whatever powers of darkness and whatever attachments to mortal things keep her from her eternal joy and rest.”
He went on for some minutes. The prayer was a powerfully conventional prayer, written by a hundred women and men from lessons learned over centuries of observant, intelligent deliverance. It was now a key worn smooth enough to fit any relevant lock, a breastplate painstakingly forged and polished in the greatest spiritual armoury of the Empire. “With the wind, water, and light of Your Holy Ghost, cleanse the house but most especially the bedroom in which Viridian and Elena Charmley sleep. Make it pure and safe enough for Your vessels to indwell without threat or shame.” The prayer systematically examined all aspects of a haunting, stopping up the smallest of chinks. “Seal away the powers that hold Margaret Saddler; permit them not to redound upon this man, his wife, his children, or myself who intercedes for them.”
Then, there was struggle over there. The priest had lifted his head from the book and closed his eyes, working to bring new words out. He wasn’t breaking convention as though God was telling him something that he needed to tell Charmley. He was speaking as though he was seeing something dimly, through a glass, and talking to God urgently about it. If the other prayer was a breastplate already forged for people like him, this was him hacking dull ore slowly out of the rock, with his head.
“Almighty God, find the link that holds this revenant to this man. Find the link that I have failed to find. This link, of sympathy, of grief, of a common experience of suffering. Raise it to this man’s knowledge if he needs to know, but whether or not he ever understands, You have always understood, and, where You understand, heal, in my place and on their behalf, the open wounds in both these spirits bound together in this pain.”
Charmley had suddenly cried too much to brush the tears away with his fingertips. He had to use his whole hands.
Father Dunstan wobbled off his stool, came over, pulled Charmley to his feet, and hugged him. His robe scratched and stank of sharp sweat. So did his bristly hair against Charmley’s face, because the crown of his head came only to Charmley’s nose. Another sweltering day, although the stone church was mercifully cool in the sun. Father Dunstan seemed unprotected by the coolness. He pushed Charmley to arm’s length but kept his right hand on Charmley’s shoulder, then looked him squarely in the eyes.
“Please, please, let me know how you get on. I won’t know unless you tell me. I’m worried. And the first thing you must do, the very first, is to return to this deliverance fellow, he of the mint and oranges, and tell him to make you a very nice drink.” Both men snorted with laughter, the recent intensity of feeling finding unexpected release. “No, of course I mean tell him that his first prayers didn’t take and that you need further help. You can tell him you’ve come to me. He is very welcome to consult with me if he likes—I will answer a letter quickly—but I’m far from certain I’ve offered any insight or done any good, so that offer may or may not prove useful.”
“Yes. Yes, I . . . yes.” Then, as Father Dunstan started to turn away, “Wait! I’m here for only a day and must return to my life in the city. I’m staying at the inn. Would you consider having lunch with me there? At my expense, of course. I want—to talk with you further,” he finished lamely. Both men knew what he meant. He did not want to come away so soon from the man who had prayed that prayer. He did not want the bond to snap off, shred apart.
“Ah, no, friend.” Father Dunstan’s answer was quick and firm, though he smiled in regretful kindness. “I go home at lunch, to my family and the duties of my parish, to God’s deeper and more intimate calls on my life.”
One last try. “Perhaps a drink, then? Later in the day, in some gap between your duties?”
For the first time in their conversation, pain shaded the priest’s face, up from underneath. His own shadow, not a shadow falling on him from outside or someone else. “Least of all a drink. Drink has a power over me, friend, for which I have found no deliverance. Even when Christ’s blood is on my tongue, my own hot blood mocks me. That is the time I hate myself the most.” He shivered.
A middle-aged woman bustled out of the sacristy. “Dunstan, the boys are home from school; are you ready? Oh, who’s this visitor?” She squinted, rather like her husband. “I don’t think I know you.”
“Julia, dear, this is Viridian Charmley, visiting me for prayer. All the way from Mkewangu, poor man.”
“Oh, poor man, indeed! May the Lord ease the burden of your travels, strengthen your feet and your back.” She came over to shake his hand. Her eyes were crossed, her grip calloused, her breath strong. Her husband looked upon her with dumbfounded bliss and awe, as if she were some saintly visitation. She cuffed his shoulder affectionately. Hand in hand, they left together through the sacristy, into some shared life Charmley could not even glimpse from afar.