A Crown of Lights

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Robin said. ‘I’m starting not to give a shit.’

  ‘You don’t mean that. You did a terrific job tonight.’

  ‘I most likely looked a complete asshole. I just wasn’t gonna cringe in front of that creep in his monk’s robes, was all. I was gonna look as white as he was.’

  And maybe less pretentious. He wasn’t gonna go out there swinging a gold pentacle. He’d wanted to handle the confrontation with simple human dignity. Because what he’d really hoped for was that Betty would be out there watching – that she’d gotten home OK, but had been unable to come through the gate on account of the march, so was out there watching her tactless, thoughtless, irresponsible husband handling a difficult situation with some kind of basic human dignity.

  And then fucking Hermes had blown it all away.

  If you were looking for omens, you sure had one there. What kind of headlines were they gonna get tomorrow? ‘Witches Hurl Shit at Man of God’. The perfect follow-through to Robin looking like a freaking cannibal that last time.

  ‘Robin...’ The motherly Alexandra smiled a tentatively radiant candlelight smile at him across the room.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Robin, there’s a small car just come into the yard.’

  ‘Huh...?’

  He shot to the window, the bath towel dropping to the flags. He shaded his eyes with his cupped hands, up against the glass, hardly daring to hope that he’d see...

  A little white Subaru Justy.

  Oh God. Oh God. Robin sagged over the big, wide window sill, staring down between his hands and working on his breathing until he no longer felt faint with relief.

  He straightened up. ‘Look, would you mind all staying here? I have to do some explaining.’

  The Black Lion was packed, the air in the bar full of damp and steam, coming off journalists, TV people, even a few of the Christian marchers – all wet through, starved, in need of a stiff whisky. Greg was run off his feet. No sign of Marianne yet.

  Gomer fetched Merrily a single malt and one for himself. There was nowhere to sit except in a tight corner by the window next to the main door. Whenever the door opened, they had to lean to one side, but at least they weren’t overheard as Merrily told Gomer the plain truth about Marianne’s exorcism.

  Gomer didn’t blink. He weighed it up, nodding slowly. He laid out a row of beer mats on the table – and, with them, Merrily’s dilemma.

  ‘Gotter be a problem for you, this, girl. Question of which side you’re on now, ennit?’

  ‘Yes.’ Merrily lit a cigarette. She’d taken off her wet coat, but still had the scarf wound round her neck. She was still seeing Robin Thorogood there on his own, vastly outnumbered, not wearing anything witchy, not countering Ellis’s talk of Satan and sacrilege with any pagan propaganda. It could have been an act, to appear ordinary in the face of all the cross-waving – and yet it was too ordinary to be feigned.

  ‘What you gonner do, then, vicar?’

  ‘Gomer, how could Judith Prosser and those other women sit there and watch it? Can they really believe in him to that extent?’

  Gomer took out a roll-up. ‘Like I said, it’s about stickin’ together, solid. Ellis’s helped the right people, ennit? Judy and Gareth with their boy. And who knows what else he done.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Vicar?’

  Merrily drank the rest of her whisky in a gulp.

  ‘Menna,’ she murmured. ‘Menna...’

  Robin turned on the bulkhead lamp. It was no longer raining, but the wind had gotten up. A metal door creaked rhythmically over in the barn; it sounded like a sailing boat on the sea making him wish he and Betty were alone together, far out on some distant ocean.

  Still naked to the waist, he stood on the doorstep and watched her park next to one of the Winnebagos. She stepped out of the car and into a puddle. The whole of the yard was puddles tonight.

  She didn’t seem to care how wet her feet got. Her hair was frizzed out by the rain, uncombed.

  Oh God, how he loved this woman. He tried to send this out to her. I take thee to my hand, my heart and my spirit at the setting of the sun and the rising of the stars...

  He saw her standing for a moment, entirely still, taking in the extra cars in the yard, the two Winnebagos.

  Then she saw him.

  He came out of the doorway, walked towards her. She still didn’t move. If it was cold out here, he wasn’t feeling it yet.

  ‘Bets, I...’

  He stopped a couple of yards from his wife. The back of his neck felt on fire.

  ‘Bets, I couldn’t stop them. It was either them or... or all kinds of people we didn’t know. It had all gotten out. You just couldn’t imagine... It was all over the Internet. We were getting hate faxes and also faxes from people who were right behind us – like, religious polarization, you know, over the whole nation? Or so... so it seemed.’

  Betty spoke at last, in this real flat voice.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Well, there... there’s George and Vivvie, and... and Alexandra. And Stuart and Mona Osman, who we met at some... at some sabbat, someplace. And Max and Bella... Uh, Max is kind of an all-knowing asshole, but they’re OK where it matters. I guess. And some other people. Bets, I’m sorry. If you’d only called...’

  There was no expression at all on her face; this was what scared him. Why didn’t she just lose her temper, call him a stupid dickhead, get this over?

  ‘See, we always said there was gonna be a sabbat at Imbolc. Didn’t we say that? That we were gonna bring the church alive with lights? A big bonfire to welcome the spring? So like... maybe this was destined to come about. Maybe there was nothing we could do to get in the way of it. Like it’s meant to be – only with more significance than we could ever have imagined.’

  Why did this all sound so hollow? Why was she taking a step back, away from him?

  There was a splish in a puddle. Her car keys? She’d dropped the car keys. Robin rushed forward, plunged his hand and half his arm into the puddle, scrabbling about in the black, freezing water, babbling on still.

  ‘Look... Ellis was here, with his born-again buddies. Chances are they’re gonna be back tomorrow – only more of them. There was like this real heavy sense of menace. You and me, we couldn’t’ve handled that on our own, believe me.’

  He hated himself for this blatant lie, but what could he say? He pulled out the dripping keys, hung on to them.

  Betty said, ‘Give me the keys, Robin.’

  ‘Why? No!’

  ‘I can’t stay here tonight.’

  ‘Please... you don’t know... Bets, it’s gotten bigger than us two. OK, that’s a cliché, but it’s true. What’s happening here’s gonna be—’

  ‘Symbolic,’ a voice said from behind him. He turned and saw Vivvie on the step. Vivvie had come out to help him. Vivvie alone.

  The worst thing that could’ve happened.

  ‘Symbolic of the whole struggle to free this country from two millennia of religious corruption and spiritual stagnation. He’s right, Betty. We have to play our part. We have to reconsecrate the church and it has to be tomorrow night. It’s why we’re here.’

  Betty started to shake her head, and the light from the bulkhead caught one side of her face and Robin saw the dark smudges, saw she’d been crying hard.

  ‘Bets!’ He almost screamed. ‘Look, I know things haven’t been right. I know you never connected with this place. Honey, please... once this is over we’ll sell up, yeah? I mean, like, Jeez, from what I’ve been hearing there’s gotta be about a hundred pagans ready to take it off our hands. But this... Imbolc... this is something we have to go through – together, yeah? Please let it be together.’

  ‘Give me those keys.’

  ‘I will not let you leave!’

  ‘You will not stop me,’ Betty said. ‘And she certainly won’t.’

  She turned away, walked across the yard toward the track.

  Robin r
an after her, managed four paces before the cold, suddenly intense, bit into his chest and his breathing seemed to seize up. But that was nothing to the pain right dead centre of his heart chakra.

  His eyes flooded up.

  ‘Don’t follow me,’ Betty said. ‘I mean it, don’t take one more pace.’

  36

  The Atheist

  ‘YOU’RE BACK HOME?’ Eileen Cullen’s relief was apparent, even over hospital corridor echo and clattering trays.

  Merrily switched on the engine, turned the heater up all the way and shook a cigarette into her lap. ‘I’m in my car on a pub car park in Old Hindwell, and wet and cold.’

  ‘You’re still out there? Oh hey, one of the porters saw you on the box tonight, said he fancied the hell out of you. Listen, you’ve heard about Buckingham? The car in the reservoir?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean she’s dead, Eileen.’

  ‘It’s scary, Merrily. Civilized woman like that, if she wanted to do away with herself, why not a bottle of Scotch and a handful of pills?’

  ‘I still can’t believe she has.’

  ‘Aye, well, sometimes you...’ Cullen hesitated. ‘Sometimes there’s things you just don’t want to believe, no matter what. What are the alternatives, after all? It’s suicide, face it. And don’t you go feeling guilty. There’s nothing you could’ve done.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘Because, Reverend, that’s the official motto of the National Health Service. Listen, will you be in town tomorrow?’

  ‘Probably not tomorrow.’

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Are we not talking now?’

  ‘What I want to talk about, you don’t on the phone. Well you don’t at all if you’ve got any sense. I could come and see you... at your home.’

  ‘Eileen?’ Jane was right; Cullen, hard as a hospital potato, had never sounded less assured.

  ‘Truth is... I’ve not been frank with you, Merrily – or with meself, come to that. There’s things I ought to’ve said.’ She dropped her voice to just above a whisper. ‘About the night Menna Weal died. And I can’t talk here, I’m on the public phone.’

  ‘You’ve got an office, haven’t you?’

  ‘It’s open house in there, so it is. Anyway, I won’t talk in this place, and I don’t get off now until the morning. You’ve got my home number, so call me when you can.’

  ‘Eileen, don’t... do not hang up. Let’s just talk about Menna, OK? The stroke could have been brought on by stress, right? Severe emotional stress?’

  ‘Hypertension due to emotional trauma. Distended arteries, then a clot gets shunted into the brain. What kind of trauma you thinking about?’

  ‘Exorcism,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Oh, terrific,’ Cullen said drably.

  ‘The expulsion of an evil entity. Intended expulsion.’

  ‘I know what it is, I was raised a Catholic. But, excuse me, Reverend, would not someone in your job be seeing it everywhere you bloody look?’

  ‘Just... bear with me, OK? You get some ministers – of an evangelical or charismatic persuasion – who believe that demonic forces... and angelic forces, come to that... are all around us in all kinds of guises. Like there are probably a few in California who’d offer to exorcize me in order to expel the demon nicotine.’

  ‘You mean eejits.’

  ‘So here’s poor Menna – withdrawn, maladjusted maybe, communication problems. OK, I won’t go into details, but there’s good reason to think she was abused by her dad.’

  ‘Is that a fact,’ said Cullen, who’d heard it all many times before.

  ‘Probably over a long period. But not necessarily when she was a kid.’

  ‘So you could be talking about more of an unnatural relationship.’

  ‘If she was as naive and immature as I’ve been told, I think we’re still talking about abuse.’

  Merrily lit another cigarette and gathered her thoughts, staring out along the village street. From here, she could count candles in nine separate windows. The street lighting was so meagre and widely spaced that some of the candles seemed disproportionately bright through the rain-blobbed windscreen and unintentionally jolly, like Christmas lights.

  She just wanted to air this stuff, to another woman.

  ‘I don’t want to speculate too much about the state of the Weal marriage... but it seems likely the obsessive love there was fairly one-sided. And Weal must have realized that – that the father was still very much in the background, even though dead.’

  ‘You mean Weal’s thinking he might be having a happier time altogether if he can remove whatever emotional block’s been left behind in Menna by her having a sex beast for a father.’

  ‘I doubt the concept of happiness means much to him, but yeah... And he wouldn’t have her seeing a psychiatrist or a therapist because that’s not the kind of thing you’re seen to do in Old Hindwell. So, after a lot of agonizing and soul-searching, perhaps, he goes to the priest.’

  ‘Who you say’s not your regular kind of priest, yeah?’

  ‘Mmm. At the funeral, Ellis disclosed that Weal and Menna were baptized together, not long before she died. I think that means she was exorcized. Historically, baptism’s always been linked with exorcism. In the medieval Church, it was more or less believed that until it was baptized, a baby was the property of the Devil and if it died before baptism it would be consigned to the fires of hell.’

  ‘No offence to you, personally,’ Cullen said, ‘but how I hate the Church.’

  ‘So, suppose Weal believed that having Menna rebaptized into the faith would free her from the influence of her father... from the effects of her childhood. And suppose the ceremony – conducted in the privacy of their home – involved... well, something considerably more stressful than a sprinkling of holy water. And I mean more stressful.’

  ‘Then, sure, you could be into stroke country.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘And...’ Cullen hesitated, ‘as you’ve mentioned baptism, the anointing of the forehead with water, if we cast our minds back to a certain wee side ward...’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I always thought any anointing of a corpse was down to the priest.’

  ‘Me, too.’

  Long silence.

  ‘Possession is nine points of the law,’ Merrily said. ‘That was what Barbara Buckingham said.’

  ‘Possession?’ Cullen said.

  ‘Possession of the dead by the living, was how she put it, ostensibly meaning the private tomb. But I think there were other things she wasn’t prepared to put into words, maybe even to herself.’

  ‘Ah, Merrily...’

  ‘Pretty much like you, really. Why don’t you just tell me the rest?’

  Cullen said, ‘This is a pressure job, you know? You get overtired, so you do.’

  ‘And imagine things.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like things you don’t believe in.’

  ‘Did something happen when you went down to the morgue?’

  Cullen sighed. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘He went along with you – which is not usual.’

  ‘Not only that, he sent the porters away. He asked could he spend some time with her, say his goodbyes.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A clear hour. To cut a long story short, they sent for me, in the end, to exercise my fabled diplomacy on the man. When I get down there, I’m delighted to see he’s finally leaving. Has on his hat and coat, a big dark solicitor’s overcoat, like he’s on his way to court. I didn’t approach him, but I thought it was as well to follow him, to make quite sure he left the premises. So I did that. I followed him.’

  Cullen broke off. There was the sound of someone calling from a distance, then Cullen said, ‘Two minutes, Josie, all right?’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said, ‘don’t stop now.’

  ‘Ach, normal way of things you wouldn’t get this out of me with
thumbscrews. All right. Weal goes out by one of the back doors near the consultants’ car park. You can get across the yard there to the temporary visitors’ car park. It’s the quickest way, if you don’t mind there being no lights. Which I wish to God there had’ve been, then I could’ve said it was a reflection.’

  Merrily revved the engine to blow more heat into the Volvo.

  ‘I could still say it was,’ Cullen said defiantly. ‘I can say any damn thing I want to, as I’m an atheist. I do not believe in God, I do not believe in angels or demons.’

  ‘And you don’t believe what you saw. A lot of people say that. That’s OK.’

  ‘Feel free to be patronizing, Reverend. I’ve woken up about seven times in the night since then. Gets into me fockin’ dreams, the way you get a virus in your computer. And everything freezes on you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh, you know everything, so you do!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m standing in the doorway, just the other side of the big plastic doors, and I’m watching him walk across to the visitors’ car park, which is all but empty now. Nobody about but him and this... Jesus.’

  Merrily’s eyes turned this way and that, determinedly counting nine candles in nine windows, banishing all wildly flickering thoughts of the old rectory garden, while Cullen kept her waiting.

  Until, at last, over the sound of footsteps in the hospital corridor and a woman squealing, she whispered, ‘Just a hovering thing, you know? Like a light. Not a bright light... more kind of greyish, half there and half not. That’s as best as I can tell you. You could see it and then you couldn’t. But you knew... you bloody knew. I went very cold, Merrily. Very cold, you know?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘And him... Oh, he knew it was there, all right. I swear to God he knew it was there. Twice, he looked back over his shoulder. I... Aw, hell, I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. It made me go cold, you know?’

  ‘I do know,’ Merrily said.