‘Oh, just bugger… off!’ Merrily crumpled the paper towel, tossed it at the wall where the smudge had been and went over to investigate.

The smudge turned out to be not something in the air but in the wall itself: an imprint of an old doorway. The ghost of a doorway.

Three days of this and you were seeing them everywhere.

Merrily sighed, retrieved the towel, binned it. Picked up her cigarette from the edge of the washbasin. There you go… it was probably the combination of poor light and the smoke in the mirror which had made the outline appear to move.

It was rare, apparently, for Deliverance ministers or counsellors actually to experience the phenomena they were trying to divert. And anyway, as Huw had just pointed out, a perceived experience should not be trusted.

Trust nothing, least of all your own senses.

Merrily took a last look at herself in the mirror: a small darkhaired person in a sloppy sweater. The only woman among nine ministers on this course.

Little dolly of a clergyperson… nice legs, dinky titties.

Dermot, her church organist, had said that the day he exposed to her his own organ. She shuddered. Dermot had worn a monkish robe that morning, and no underpants. So naturally she no longer trusted monks. Or, for that matter, priests like Charlie Headland who looked as if they wouldn’t mind spanking you. But she was inclined to trust the Reverend Huw Owen, faded and weary on the outside but tough and flexible as old leather. Something of the monk about Huw, also – the Celtic hermit-monk in his lonely cell.

She dropped her cigarette down the loo.

Oh well, back into the twilight zone.

The passage still had lockers and iron hooks on the wall, from when the chapel had been an Outward Bound centre owned by some Midland education authority. It had changed hands discreetly a couple of years ago, was now jointly owned by the Church of England and the Church in Wales, although it seemed few people, even inside the Church, knew it was currently used as a training centre for exorcists.