by Phil Rickman
‘Because of the brook, no one’s been buried there in centuries.’ She came back with two brown cups and saucers on a tray.
‘Thank you, uh, Judith. Hey, I met the vicar. He came round.’
‘Mr Ellis is a good rector.’
‘But not local,’ Robin said.
‘You don’t get local ministers anywhere any more, do you? But he brings people in. Very popular, he is. Quite an attraction.’
‘You like to see new people coming in?’
She laughed: a good-looking woman, in her weathered way. ‘Depends what people they are, isn’t it? Nobody objects to churchgoers. And the collections support the village hall. They’re always very generous.’
‘Just Nick doesn’t seem your regular kind of minister,’ Robin said.
‘He suits our needs,’ said Mrs Prosser. ‘Father Ellis’s style of worship might not be what we’ve been used to in this area, but a breath of something new is no bad thing, we’re always told. Jog us out of our routine, isn’t it?’
‘I guess.’ He tasted the coffee. It was strong and surprisingly good. Judith Prosser put the tray on a small table and came to sit on the sofa opposite. She was turning out to be unexpectedly intelligent, not so insular as he’d figured. He felt ashamed of his smug preconceptions about rural people, local people. So he went for it.
‘From what I hear, this area seems to attract kind of off-the-wall clergy. This guy, uh... Penney?’
‘My,’ she said, ‘you have picked up a lot of gossip in a short time.’
‘Not everybody finds themselves buying a church. You feel you oughta find out the history.’
‘Or the lurid bits, at least.’
‘Uh... I guess.’ He gave her his charming, sheepish smile.
‘Terry Penney.’ Judith sipped her coffee. ‘What’s to say? Quiet sort of man. Scholarly, you know? Had his study floor-to-ceiling with books. Not an unfriendly person, mind, not reclusive particularly. Not at first.’
‘He didn’t live at the farmhouse – our house?’
‘Oh, no, that was always a farm. No, the rectory was just out of the village, on the Walton road. Mr Weal has it now – the solicitor.’
Robin recalled the name from someplace. Juliet Pottinger’s letter?
‘So...’ He put down his coffee on a coaster resting on the high chair arm. ‘The, uh, lurid bit?’
‘Restrain yourself, Mr Thorogood, I’m getting there.’
Robin grinned; she was OK. He guessed the Christ is the Light sticker was just the politically correct thing to do in Old Hindwell.
‘Well, it was my husband, see, who had the first inkling of something amiss – through the county council. Every year Old Hindwell Church would apply for a grant from the Welsh Church Acts Committee, or whatever they called it then, which allotted money to old buildings, for preservation. Although the church was in the Hereford diocese it’s actually in Wales, as you know. However, this particular year, there was no request for money.’
She turned on a wry smile. She was – he hadn’t expected this – enjoying telling this story.
‘The Reverend Penney had been yere... oh, must have been nearly eighteen months by then. Thought he must have forgotten, we did, so Councillor Prosser goes to see him. And Mr Penney, bold as you please, says, oh no, he hasn’t forgotten at all. He doesn’t want a grant. He doesn’t think the church should be preserved!’
Robin widened his eyes.
‘The church is wrong, says Mr Penney. It’s in the wrong place. It should never have been built where it is. The water’s not healthy. The fabric’s rotten. Parking’s difficult. Oh, a whole host of excuses. He says he’s written to the diocese and whoever else, suggesting that they dispense with St Michael’s at the earliest possible opportunity.’
Robin was fazed. ‘He called for them to get rid of his own church? Just like that?’
‘Just like that. No one could believe it.’
‘Wow.’ Robin was thinking furiously. Had Penney realized this was a powerful pagan site? Was it that simple? Had he made some kind of discovery? He tried to hide his excitement. ‘Was he mad?’
‘Perhaps he’d always been a little mad,’ said Mrs Prosser. ‘But we just never saw it until it was too late.’
‘So, like... what did he do?’
Judith Prosser put down her coffee. ‘No one likes to talk about it. But, as the owner now, I suppose you have a right to be told.’
One of the few good things about living here was that the post usually arrived before nine; in some rural areas you couldn’t count on getting it before lunchtime.
Today’s was a catalogue from a mail order supplier of garden ornaments – how quickly these people caught up with you – and a letter addressed to ‘Mrs’ Thoroughgood with a Hereford postmark.
That ‘Mrs’ told her what this was going to be.
She sat down at the table with the letter in front of her. Usual cheap white envelope. They’d received two when they were living in Shrewsbury. They said things like: We Know About Your Dirty Nude Ceremonies Worshipping Heathen Gods. The Lord Will Punish You.
How had they found out? Who’d told them? Had Robin been indiscreet?
Betty felt gutted. The sick irony of this was that she hadn’t practised as a witch since they moved here and, the way she was feeling now, never would again – at least, not in any organized way.
She contemplated tossing the letter in the stove unopened. But if she did that it would dwell in her, would be twice as destructive.
With contempt, Betty slit the envelope.
She read the note three times. Usual capitals, usual poor spelling.
But otherwise not quite what she’d expected.
YOU HAD BETTER TELL THAT LONG HAIRED LOUT THAT IF HE WANTS TO GO HELPING HIMSELF TO THE FAVOURS OF THE BIGGEST HORE IN THE VILLAGE HE OUGHT TO BE MORE DISCREAT ABOUT IT.
17
Revelations
IT WAS INCREDIBLE! So wonderfully bizarre that, walking back to St Michael’s Farm, Robin forgot all about agonizing over that asshole Blackmore who thought bestsellerdom had conferred upon him an art critic’s instincts.
On the footbridge over the Hindwell Brook, he stopped a moment, evoking the incredible scene on that October morning back in the sixties when the brook was in flood. Had anyone photographed it? Could there be pictures still around?
Naw, anyone who’d pulled out a camera would probably have been compelled by some local by-law to hand over the film to Councillor Prosser – whichever Prosser happened to be the councillor at the time.
Judith Prosser had let him out the front way, through a dark-beamed hallway with some nice oak panelling. Up against the panelling there had been an outsize chair with a leather seat and a brass plate on the back. The chairman’s chair, Judith had explained when he asked about it, from the Old Hindwell Community Council, disbanded some years ago under local government reorganization. And, yes, Gareth had been its chairman – twice.
Robin wondered if Judith Prosser called her husband by his title. Maybe got a little bedtime buzz out of it: Oh, oh... give it to me harder, Councillor...
He grinned at the winter sun. He felt a whole lot lighter. Holy shit, he’d actually spoken, in a meaningful way, to a Local Person! It was a seminal thing.
Indeed, when he looked across at the church on its promontory he even had the feeling that the Imbolc sabbat could go back on the schedule. He could see it now – using his visualization skills to cancel the brightness, and paint the sky dark, he could see lights awakening in the church, its ruins coming alive. He conjured the sound of Celtic drums and a tin whistle. Son et lumière. He saw, in the foreground, Betty’s graceful silhouette – Betty in her pale cloak and a headdress woven from twigs. And, in the headdress, a ring of tiny flames, a sacred circle of candle-spears, a crown of lights.
He came in through the back door of St Michael’s farmhouse so much happier than when he’d gone out of it. Returning with the breeze behind him.
‘Siddown, babe
,’ he told her. ‘You should hear this.’
‘Should I?’ She was already sitting down.
Robin halted on the stone flags. His mood fell, like a cooling meteor, to earth.
Her voice was flat as nan bread. At gone ten in the morning she was still in her robe. She looked pale and swollen-eyed, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of the hot water she sometimes drank early in the day.
‘You OK?’
Her hair also looked flat, like tired barn-straw. She’d been sleeping when he’d slipped out of bed around seven. He’d first made some coffee and toast for himself, not keeping especially quiet, and left a note for her on the table before he went over to the Prosser farm. He was half suspecting then that it was going to be one of those days, the kind he’d hoped there wouldn’t be any more of after they moved to the country. In fact, since they’d moved here those days had accumulated one after the other, sure as sunrise. It was now reaching the point where it seemed they could never, simultaneously, be in a good mood. Like the sun would only shine on one of them at any one time.
Is this a psychic malaise? Could this be solved?
‘Bets?’ He was burning to bring her comfort, but he didn’t know how. There were always going to be areas of her he could not reach; he accepted this. He also accepted that in some ways he was no more than her attendant. This was not necessarily sad, was it?
‘I’m sorry. Time of the moon.’ She gave him the palest smile he could recall. ‘Tell me what you learned at the farm.’
She was evidently not going to talk about whatever it was. He sat down opposite her and, in a voice from which the oil of narrative enthusiasm had now been well drained, told her what he’d learned about the Reverend Penney.
It was obviously his change of mood, but now he saw beyond the bizarre; he saw the sadness of it all.
‘It’s like early in the morning, still only half light and a mist down by the water, so not everyone sees it. Just the Prossers, that’s the two brothers who lived here, and their older brother – Gareth’s father – and his wife. And Gareth himself, who’d have been in his twenties back then. And this Mrs Pottinger, she was there soon enough, in her role as the eyes and ears of Old Hindwell for the Brecon and Radnor Express. Because she’d seen a... what do you call that thing they kneel on to pray?’
‘Hassock,’ Betty said. ‘I think.’
‘Yeah. Pottinger was out for an early walk with the dog and she’d seen a hassock floating down the brook. Maybe her first thought was that this was the vandals she talked about in her letter to Major Wilshire. Seems she wanted to call the cops, but she ran into the Prossers, and the Prossers stopped her. They knew it was an inside job.’
‘Yes,’ Betty said, like she knew it would have to be.
‘Well, the brook was already high, with all the rain, and close to bursting its banks, and that’s what they think’s happened at first. It’s overflowed into the field by the barn and it’s halfway up the promontory where the church is. It’s like there’s a dam – like a tree or something fell into the brook – but as the day gets lighter they can see the full extent of what’s going down here.’
While he told her, he was seeing it so clearly, hearing the voices over the rushing and roaring of the water. Shrieks of shock from the women, Pottinger’s dog barking in excitement. Judith Prosser hadn’t been there, of course; it would be another fifteen years before she and Gareth were married, but she must have heard the story many times since.
‘Everything!’ Robin said. ‘Everything that wasn’t part of the fabric or nailed down. All the pews, the lectern, a big tapestry from the wall, the choir stalls... all floating down the Hindwell Brook. Until the first stuff reaches the bend and gets snagged on some branches and it all starts to pile up.’
He could see the great dam, one of the pews on end, wood groaning and splintering like the wreck of a sailing ship on the rocks, the water rising all around. He wanted so much to paint it, like Turner would have painted it, all mist and spray.
Betty said, ‘The altar?’
‘Oh yeah, that too. He’d stripped off the cloth and dragged it out through the doors and out to the end of the promontory, like he’d done with all the pews, and just... just tipped it into the water.’
Visualizing the great spout of water as the altar crashed into the brook.
‘He was apparently a big guy. Played rugby. Very strong. His most impressive feat was to rip out the stone font. He must’ve rolled it out the double doors. They found it sticking out of the water, like a big rock.’
Betty glanced bleakly across at him, then picked up her glass and drank the rest of the warm water like it was a double Scotch.
‘And where was he? Where was Penney?’
‘Gone. They never saw him again. The Prossers and some other guys they could trust salvaged what they could. Took about four of them to get the font out – they waited nearly a week till the water level dropped down, and draped tarpaulin and stuff over it meantime. Couple of weeks later, the diocese gets a cheque for several thousand. Whole damn thing was hushed up.’
‘They never found out why he did it?’
‘Just he’d grown to hate the church, was all. There was no further explanation. He’d cleaned it out. Musta taken him hours, working at it through the night, by the oil lamps – no electricity in there. Trashing his own church like a maniac. When they went inside, it was all bare. Just the Bible from off of the lectern. The Bible lying there in the middle of the nave. Lying open.’
Betty waited a long time before she asked him.
‘Open at?’
Robin smiled, shaking his head.
‘The Book of Revelations, wouldn’t you guess? About Michael and his angels taking on the Devil and his angels? The great dragon getting cast out into the earth? All of this underlined in ink.’
‘I see.’ Betty stood up.
‘Shows us where Ellis is coming from, doesn’t it? He’s clearly heard about Penney and the dragon fixation that gets him so screwed up he trashes his own church. Well, OK, maybe the poor guy experiences some pre-Christian energy on that site which is so awesome it shakes his Christian faith, scares the shit outa him. To Penney it’s devilish. It blows his mind... he wrecks the joint.’
‘Thereby becoming a vehicle for this energy, I suppose,’ Betty said wearily.
‘Holy shit!’ A big light came on in Robin’s head. ‘Hey, that’s so cool! The priest is unwittingly helping the church to cast off Christianity – to revert.’
Betty took her glass to the sink, not looking at him, like she didn’t want to hear what was coming next. But, hell, he had to say it. It was staring them right in the face.
‘Bets... it’s down to us, now, isn’t it? To, like, finish the job. It puts us hard against Ellis, but... like, is this fate, or what?’
He was tingling with excitement. This was their clear future.
At the sink, Betty put down the glass, turned both taps on full. She was staring into the water running out of the taps. ‘I doubt this is as simple as you imagine.’
‘Or maybe it just is. Maybe it’s also fate that the local people weren’t so attached to the church the way it was that they wanted to fight to save it.’
‘It was in a poor state, anyway. It was going to cost a fortune in repairs. That’s what the Pottinger woman said.’
‘And maybe Ellis was right about something coming to the surface. Bad news for him... but not for us, babes.’
‘Oh, don’t be so bloody simplistic! Just for a moment stop trying to make everything fit into your dream scenario.’
‘Well, sure... OK.’ He felt hurt. ‘I mean let’s talk this thing through.’
‘I have to go out. I have to go and see Mrs Wilshire.’
‘Again? What the fuck is this?’
‘It’s not your problem.’
‘Oh really?’ Hell, this needed saying, this was long overdue. ‘Well what is my problem is why you always have to find excuses to get out of here. Like going in the
car. Why don’t you ever even go into the village? The place we live next to? Why don’t you get to know the people here? People like Judith Prosser next door. OK, Gareth might be a dumb bastard, but she’s OK, not what I imagined. Maybe we were wrong to start condemning the local people as total redneck bigots, purely on your flawed fucking childhood memories.’
Betty didn’t flare up. She just stared hard at him for a couple of seconds, and he stared back.
And then she said, ‘I never said that. I’m sure there are some decent, liberal, perceptive, outward-looking people down there.’ She went to the table, picked up a piece of white notepaper, pushed it at him. ‘Like, for instance, the person who sent that.’
18
Cold, Earthly, Rational...
THE GOTHIC LETTER D was still on the office door, but hanging loose now, at an angle. D for Deliverance – Bishop Hunter’s idea.
As had been the Reverend Watkins becoming Deliverance Consultant.
She stood on the stone stairs, in front of the closed door, and decided, after all, to go back home. Her head ached. What the hell was she doing here? As she turned to creep back down the stairs, the office door opened.
‘I thought it was!’
Merrily stopped, and slowly and sheepishly turned around again.
‘I thought it was your car.’ Sophie was expensively casual in a blue and white Alpine sweater. ‘What on earth are you doing here? Nobody would have expected you to come in today.’
She’d spoken briefly to Sophie on the phone, asking her to put the bishop in the picture.
‘Merrily, you look—’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Starved.’ Sophie stood aside for her.
Merrily slung Jane’s duffel coat on the back of her chair, and slumped into it. ‘If I hadn’t come in today, I might never have come in again.’
Sophie frowned and began making tea. Through the gatehouse window, above Broad Street, the late morning sun flickered unstably in and out between hard clouds. The air outside had felt as though it was full of razor blades. The weather forecast had said there might be snow showers tonight – which was better than fog.
