second time I’ve even heard of them, and both times I’ve had a case taken out of my hands and my arse smacked like I’m a kid trying to raid the sweet jar. Tell me what I’m up against.’
I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. Truth to tell, that wasn’t an easy one to answer.
When it comes to the whole faith thing, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. Growing up in Liverpool in the 70s, I came to the same conclusion that L. Ron Hubbard did in Nebraska fifty years earlier: that anyone can make a religion out of ingredients they probably already have lying around the house. You just take equal parts bullshit, xenophobia and moral outrage, mix well and leave to curdle.
But on one level at least, religion works. Any religion, almost, although I’d probably have to draw the line at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s as though the human soul is an iron filing, and religions are magnetic fields that get all our north and south poles lined up along the same axis. As a consequence, and please don’t ask me why, power flows.
A jobbing exorcist sees it every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. The crucifix, the shield of David, the star and crescent, the Hindu swastika and the Gnostic sun-cross all work as specifics against the undead, as long as they’ve been handled - or better yet, blessed - by somebody who actually believes in them. When Juliet first rose from Hell and tried to love me to death in my own bedroom over at Pen’s, my brother Matthew, who’s a priest, brought me through the worst of the after-effects with prayer and holy water. And the most commonly practised exorcism ritual is still the one the Benedictine monks wrote down in the Abbey of Metten in 1415. It starts with ‘ Crux sancta sit mihi lux ’ and becomes really hummable with ‘ Vade retro, Satana ’.
So in some ways, being both an exorcist and an atheist, I’m like a tightrope walker who knows the knots will hold but kind of resents it. And when I come up against religious zealots of any persuasion, I lose the cheerful, easygoing disposition that I’m widely known for and become a surly, intemperate bastard. I mean, everyone has to choose their own poison, obviously - I’m all for freedom of choice. But if you say ‘Praise the Lord’, I’ll be the one who answers ‘Pass the ammunition’.
The Anathemata Curialis, therefore, pushes all my buttons so hard they leave permanent indentations in my spine.
“They’re a holy order,’ I told Coldwood. ‘They were founded and given their charter by Pope Paul III. The same gent who bankrolled Ignatius Loyola when he set up the Jesuits - you know, “Give me a child until he’s seven, and I’ll give you a brainwashed drone that thinks its name is Harvey Maria.” And he was doing all this in between trying to steal the wheels off the Reformation bandwagon, so he was a busy little bee. Quotable quote: “Of course there’s a God. Martin Luther just had a stroke, didn’t he?”’
I was trying to be concise and factual, but the truth was that venting all this stuff made me feel marginally better. And it was pretty fresh in my memory because I had to look it up the first time Father Gwillam waved his wedding tackle in my face.
‘Pope Paul seemed to feel that the Inquisition had gone soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime,’ I went on. ‘The Anathemata’s scarily open mission statement was to deal with anything that the Church had declared anathema - abomination - and by deal with I mean stop dead. Then a much later pope excommunicated the whole outfit, right down to the factory cat, but not before he’d voted it enough funds to keep it going to the crack of doom. Pretty neat trick, that - adding plausible deniability to the list of Christian virtues.’
Coldwood grunted. ‘If they were closed down,’ he said, ‘what are they doing working my case?’
I shook my head. ‘I never said they were closed down, Gary. The Anathemata still
I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. Truth to tell, that wasn’t an easy one to answer.
When it comes to the whole faith thing, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. Growing up in Liverpool in the 70s, I came to the same conclusion that L. Ron Hubbard did in Nebraska fifty years earlier: that anyone can make a religion out of ingredients they probably already have lying around the house. You just take equal parts bullshit, xenophobia and moral outrage, mix well and leave to curdle.
But on one level at least, religion works. Any religion, almost, although I’d probably have to draw the line at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s as though the human soul is an iron filing, and religions are magnetic fields that get all our north and south poles lined up along the same axis. As a consequence, and please don’t ask me why, power flows.
A jobbing exorcist sees it every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. The crucifix, the shield of David, the star and crescent, the Hindu swastika and the Gnostic sun-cross all work as specifics against the undead, as long as they’ve been handled - or better yet, blessed - by somebody who actually believes in them. When Juliet first rose from Hell and tried to love me to death in my own bedroom over at Pen’s, my brother Matthew, who’s a priest, brought me through the worst of the after-effects with prayer and holy water. And the most commonly practised exorcism ritual is still the one the Benedictine monks wrote down in the Abbey of Metten in 1415. It starts with ‘ Crux sancta sit mihi lux ’ and becomes really hummable with ‘ Vade retro, Satana ’.
So in some ways, being both an exorcist and an atheist, I’m like a tightrope walker who knows the knots will hold but kind of resents it. And when I come up against religious zealots of any persuasion, I lose the cheerful, easygoing disposition that I’m widely known for and become a surly, intemperate bastard. I mean, everyone has to choose their own poison, obviously - I’m all for freedom of choice. But if you say ‘Praise the Lord’, I’ll be the one who answers ‘Pass the ammunition’.
The Anathemata Curialis, therefore, pushes all my buttons so hard they leave permanent indentations in my spine.
“They’re a holy order,’ I told Coldwood. ‘They were founded and given their charter by Pope Paul III. The same gent who bankrolled Ignatius Loyola when he set up the Jesuits - you know, “Give me a child until he’s seven, and I’ll give you a brainwashed drone that thinks its name is Harvey Maria.” And he was doing all this in between trying to steal the wheels off the Reformation bandwagon, so he was a busy little bee. Quotable quote: “Of course there’s a God. Martin Luther just had a stroke, didn’t he?”’
I was trying to be concise and factual, but the truth was that venting all this stuff made me feel marginally better. And it was pretty fresh in my memory because I had to look it up the first time Father Gwillam waved his wedding tackle in my face.
‘Pope Paul seemed to feel that the Inquisition had gone soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime,’ I went on. ‘The Anathemata’s scarily open mission statement was to deal with anything that the Church had declared anathema - abomination - and by deal with I mean stop dead. Then a much later pope excommunicated the whole outfit, right down to the factory cat, but not before he’d voted it enough funds to keep it going to the crack of doom. Pretty neat trick, that - adding plausible deniability to the list of Christian virtues.’
Coldwood grunted. ‘If they were closed down,’ he said, ‘what are they doing working my case?’
I shook my head. ‘I never said they were closed down, Gary. The Anathemata still
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