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shoulder, leaving them with a cracked grin with black gaps.
    ‘One of the charms of Hay,’ Mr Oliver said drily, ‘is the number of characters one finds here.’
    Mrs Villiers stopped.
    ‘Dickhead,’ she said.
    Robin smiled happily. You wouldn’t get that on the street in Bath or Cheltenham.
    As they walked away, Betty said something about them accepting there’d have to be sacrifices. Robin stared at her in the alley, knowing that making sacrifices wouldn’t mean like coming down from Michelob to Budweiser. Nor would it involve a white cockerel, a knife and a full moon. Usually, something less bloody than one and more painful than both.
    ‘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. Whenpaganism, 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
    H AVING 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.