December

by Phil Rickman

  An old man, he is. Too old for this. He feels his face suffused with blood but his actual head light as mist as he scrambles down into the cleft and slips, and his torch rolls out of his hand.

  And someone else picks it up.

  'Providence, eh?' A man says, in a friendly Northern voice.

  He stands in Eddie's path, astride the cleft, and kicks him in the face when he tries to get up.

  Simon's eyes jerk open.

  Mustn't sleep!

  How could he possibly have almost fallen asleep, with bare stone beneath his head? And the only softness his hair and the handkerchief around his cheek - not stupid enough to lie down with an open, bloodied face exposed.

  Simon prays.

  Oh God, protect me from sleep. Keep me cold. Protect me from impure thoughts. Protect me from evil.

  'Do you know what this is, Eddie?'

  Eddie tries to reply. 'Urrr' is the best he can manage.

  'Sacrificial rock,' Sile says. 'Goes back donkeys' years. Before the Abbey, oh aye, long before that. What they used to do is lie the sacrificial offering - animal, man or woman - in the bottom of the cleft, 'bout where we are now ... where the little lass is lying, to be more exact ... and then they'd cut its throat, and the blood'd run down the channel and drip off the edge

  Anybody at the bottom who caught it in a bowl, it'd be considered lucky, I presume. I don't know really. But guess where the blood lands now.'

  Sile laughs.

  'Church roof,' he says. 'Now that's what you call subjugation. Bit like pissing on them, only more so. Church warden, aren't you, Eddie?'

  'Urrr.'

  'Thought you were. You'll have seen the candles, then Anything can happen, in that church.'

  Eddie can't move. After introducing himself, Sile Cope has given Eddie what he calls 'a bit of a working over' to be sure he isn't overtaken by any latent pluck. This has involved stamping on Eddie's face until it feels like a punctured melon, and administering further sharp, disabling prods to his stomach and, with a leathery boot heel, to the area immediately below each of Eddie's knees. Sile and Eddie agree that Eddie's chances of rising unassisted are severely limited.

  'The Skirrid, of course,' Sile says, 'all this "holy mountain" shit. Bit of a myth. Mind you, depends what they mean by "holy". They tried. But where is it now, the famous Chapel of St Michael the Archangel?'

  Eddie retches. Bile bubbles from his lips and lies freezing on his chin. He's too old to withstand a beating.

  'Oops,' Sile says.

  Eddie is lying almost flat in the cleft. Looking out, he can see a couple of lights in the village, fuzzed by mist. His feet are pointed towards the opening, almost touching Vanessa's feet.

  She's lying the other way, still on her back, her head almost at the opening. If she could turn her head - which she probably can't - she would be able to look down on to the church roof a hundred feet below.

  Or she'd be able to do that if she had her glasses.

  A dark blotch above the bridge of her nose may account for the blood on the glasses. Eddie tried to speak to her before Sile beat him up; she didn't answer but tried - incredibly - to smile.

  He wonders how much she understands.

  Not too much, he hopes.

  'She'll not move,' Sile tells him. 'She's too cold and she can't see a foot in front of her without her glasses. Shame, really. Nice kid. What d'you say?'

  'Wharreryergon' do?'

  'Think about it,' Sile says.

  Eddie won't let himself think too hard about it. He reckons it's going to be Vanessa, poor little kid, and then him. You can be the lookout, Eddie, nothing ever happens to the lookout. He wonders what Sile is waiting for.

  Or perhaps the Seventh Cavalry will come charging out of the forestry, where no one goes from one month's end to another, even in the summer.

  Eddie wheezes. He thinks several of his ribs are broken. He closes his eyes.

  There's a couple of minutes of dead, frozen silence. And then a small voice, a voice that is, somehow, not quite right, as if the tongue is the wrong shape.

  'Oh, most faithful companion, appointed by God to be my guide and protector and who is ever at my side, what thanks can I offer you for your faithfulness and love ...?'

  Sile says, isn't that sweet? Isn't that just the sweetest thing you ever heard?'

  Eddie says, with a lot of effort, 'Bas ... ard.'

  'Not really, Eddie. Just part of a tradition. An old, old tradition that's there for the joining. We don't all wear robes and goat's head masks. We don't even talk about Satan any more. Who the fuck's Satan, eh? You've got to believe in yourself, that's what it's about. I found meself here fifty years ago. At the Abbey. On the night me cousin died. Fell through the roof reslating the barn. I asked for it to happen after the old girl said she was going to leave us the farm. Just asked. Didn't have to disembowel a white cockerel. Went and asked.'

  Eddie's mind churns with a memory of Isabel after the Women's Institute Cheese and Wine Evening.

  ... just after the war ... two boys, cousins from Leeds or Sheffield ... evacuated ... Mrs Price, husband died leaving her with the farm to manage and no sons.

  'Went to the Abbey and just asked for it to happen,' Sile says. 'Downhill all the way after that.'

  ... do know the other came to inherit the farm and owns it still ... Copeley ... Copestake...?

  Eddie doesn't want to know any more. More to the point, he doesn't want Vanessa to know. Doesn't want the child to die knowing that there are people this bad in the world.

  'Wharrayou waiting for?' he almost screams.

  Sile's shadow shifts on the rock. Eddie still hasn't seen his face. He imagines it as slablike, featureless, except for the eyes, swirling like oil in a burner.

  'It's a two-way street, mind you,' Sile says. 'You've got to do your bit. And you've got to get it right.'

  'Wharrayou wait...?'

  'Don't get impatient!' Sile kicks him playfully in the throat.

  Eddie retches and retches.

  Sile explains, 'I'm waiting for your lad, Simon. He's a trier. He's gone up the north-west tower with a bag of old bones to try and work some magic of his own.'

  Eddie can't get his breath.

  'But he's got a weak spot,' Sile says. 'A soft spot. For a thing called Richard Walden. Here ...'

  Hands snatch Eddie up by the lapels. Breath comes in an agonising gulp, like swallowing a plum.

  'Don't die yet, Eddie. I'll have nobody to talk to. I was getting right bored with our little retarded friend.'

  He lets Eddie's head fall, with a sickening crack, to the stone. 'Aye, an example to us all in his day, was Richard. And tonight's the night when Simon opens himself to Richard - or maybe Richard opens himself to Simon. And when it happens, there'll be such a mighty surge of energy between the Abbey and the Skirrid that you'll feel it yourself, Eddie, even you. Especially here. Satisfied?'

  Sile stands up.

  Vanessa says, in a small voice, 'Leave me not then. I entreat you, but still comfort me in adversity and obtain for me the great gift of final perseverance and the grace to die in the friendship of my creator and so enter into life everlasting.'

  'Sorry kid,' Sile says. 'No can do.'

  Eddie hears a click and then the sound of friction, a knife on rock. An array of small sparks twinkles in the stodgy air.

  'Amen,' Vanessa says.

  Eddie could break his heart.

  And sleep takes Simon St John.

  For a long time, he thinks he's still awake.

  He thinks the sky has acquired a blush of mauve in the east, harbinger of dawn. He thinks the air has grown warmer. His face begins to sweat, and he reaches up and drags away the handkerchief exposing the deep slit Sile has laid in his cheek and causing the blood to flow again.

  The opening of the cut opens his mind to mysterious images carried on silken wisps of night.

  The first, however, is the least pleasant.

  It is a picture - a faded, sepia photo o
r a gloomy Victorian Gothic painting - of himself all scrunched up in his pathetic, single bed, a brass-bound tome at each corner. His muscles are twisted and his throat constricted; he can't take in air, except in thin, straining breaths, and it hurts when he tries to move.

  Simon lies on his back, weighed down; he can't turn over. He can't get out of this on his own. He reaches out with both hands in a mute plea; his hands pierce the fusty vapours, smelling of mould and mothballs

  and emerge into an atmosphere soft with musky scents. .

  He begins to breathe in deep, fulfilling draughts of air like rough ale.

  And into his reverie, the knocking comes again.

  you ready, pal?

  Yes. Now it is time, he thinks, to open the guitar case, to release the spirits like birds.

  'Be right with you, Dave,' he mumbles.

  He doesn't even need to get up. The guitar case comes to him. He sees its black bottle/coffin shape shouldering through the pink mist, waddling across the white, shining stone to where he lies.

  The guitar case bows, like a penguin.

  The click, clack of the fastenings.

  A shadow over the purpling sky. It opens.

  It's never really occurred to Simon before how similar a traditional guitar case is, in silhouette, to a black-cowled monk.

  Simon laughs in delight. It's been a long, long time.

  Warm breath on his face. Simon's back arches and luxuriates on the stone damp with his sweat.

  A tongue laps at the thickening blood on his check. It occurs to Simon he must be naked.

  Desire rolls over him like coils of smoke. His arms reach out and he clasps the black thing and pulls it on top of him, his loins arching upwards.

  Prof Levin is the first to see the glow in the sky.

  He doesn't know this country, it could be anywhere.

  'Time is it?'

  'Ten past two,' says one of the coppers. There are at least twenty of them here now, headed by a uniformed chief inspector, a veteran, it's been said, of hunts for missing children across the countryside.

  Shelley watches them, she and Tom almost holding each other up. Since hearing about Weasel, Tom has said very little.

  'Can't be dawn then,' Prof says. 'Tom, here, take a look at this.'

  One of the policemen says, 'That's a bloody fire, mate,

  'That's a forest fire, that is, and if we can see it as clear as this in these conditions, it's going some. Gerry, better get on to the brigade.'

  Prof says, 'A forest fire? In December?'

  'Well if it's not a forest fire, I'm buggered if I know what it is.'

  Moira clutches a policeman's arm. 'Where? Where do you reckon?'

  'No more than a couple of miles, love.'

  'Tom,' Moira shouts. 'Shelley. My car. Come on.'

  She feels sick to her stomach; she's seen it before. Once.

  Tom and Shelley don't move, grey-faced and terminally weary, like two people in a bus queue who can't understand that the service has been discontinued.

  'I'm not leaving you,' Moira says.

  She's got the engine going, full choke, before Tom and Shelley reach the car. If the gate's closed she's going to smash through it.

  'What's happening?' Shelley says, sounding vaguely glad that something is.

  'I don't know.' Once through the gates, Moira switches the headlights off. 'Just keep your eyes on that fire.'

  In her head, the awful aroma of flaking flesh, the crumbling silhouette. Debs, Debsie, Debs ...

  Tom is in the passenger seat, Shelley in the back. She wants them where she can see them. Doesn't want them going with anyone else - two other cars are already following her. A fire in the hills, in December, too much of a coincidence.

  'Whatever happens,' Moira instructs them, 'you must stay together.'

  'I don't know what you mean,' Shelley says. 'Moira ...'

  The glow in the sky is orange and white; to Moira, on first sight, the gases seemed, just for a moment, to form the shape a giant harp.

  Tom says gruffly, 'Keep me away from the fire.'

  In December?

  Not even on a balmy August evening, it's being said, have so many people left their homes and crowded into the single street of Ystrad Ddu. Overcoats over pyjamas. People pointing, children squealing. Behind it all, a coarse roaring, like a giant blow-heater.

  The Dragon has thrown open its doors again; the police clearly don't care. Cars clog the street; nobody gets out the other side. Moira stops the old BMW in the middle of the road and stands, bewildered, in the V of the open driver's door.

  Lights in every house, curtains thrown back, people hanging out of windows. Water drips from roofs and guttering; the accumulation of humanity has raised the temperature - or, most likely, it's the heat from above.

  A woman is to be seen roaming the crowds with a dog on a lead shouting, 'Eddie? Has anybody seen Eddie?'

  Confusingly, the scene recalls for Moira images from the fax Davey sent about the chaos in Liverpool when the power failed last December.

  But there's power here. A terrible, savage, relentless energy.

  Above the village, a hissing wall of flame, the forest alight from end to end.

  Voices floating in the mingled mist and smoke.

  '... about evacuation? If it...'

  'No way. 'Won't spread down yere. Nothing to catch light on the rock, see. Go straight down the hill, it will, and the river'll keep it on ...'

  '... far's the Abbey, maybe.'

  '... fireball. Honest to God. Ball of lightning. Freak thing, got to be.'

  '... No, I didn't see it, but the wife's mother said it come rolling down off the Skirrid, so bright you couldn't look at it, see. Had to turn away.'

  'How come she seen it, then, you had to turn away?'

  'Fuck knows. Eyes in the back of her head, the wife's mother.'

  A man in a Barbour jacket detaches himself from a knot of spectators, walks into the road and peers into Moira's BMW through a side window almost opaque with condensation. Shelley opens the car door. She can barely find the energy to shake her head in answer to the question swimming in Martin's eyes,

  She gets out. 'How were the police?'

  'Put it this way, if it wasn't for our friend Jones, I think I'd be spending the night in a cell.' Martin doesn't sound as if he cares one way or the other. 'When they learned that Meryl and I were ... linked, it became quite difficult.'

  'How did they learn?'

  'I told them.'

  'As you would.'

  'Don't make me out to be honest, Shelley. If I'd been totally honest, none of this would have ...'

  'Yes it would.' Shelley presses his arm. 'Nothing could stop it.'

  Above the village, the fire rushes through the forest as if powered by giant bellows.

  'Tom?'

  Moira gets back into the car with Tom. He is staring straight ahead through the windscreen. He shows no interest in what's happening outside, might as well be stuck in a traffic jam on the M4.

  'Anything?'

  Tom looks down, rubs his eyes.

  'Nuffink. Can't get ... wevver it's the smoke or what. I don't like fire. I told you, keep me away from the fire, so you brung me here.'

  'Let's try something. Come on.'

  'Ain't moving. Don't like fire.'

  'Tom, I know you don't like fire. Where we're going you won't see the fire.'

  Moira takes his hand, leads him out of the car, along the street, past a couple of men at the roadside with pints of beer from the Dragon - festival time in Ystrad Ddu.

  Tom doesn't once raise his gaze from the tarmac.

  'Where we going?'

  'To church.'

  'Why?'

  'Find some peace and quiet. Away from the fire. OK?'

  Sometimes you have to treat Tom like a large kid. She leads him through the churchyard to the stone shed that passes for a church in this village. The door is unlocked.

  Because the church is half under the rock, the lig
ht through the plain Gothic windows is only faintly blushed. They can't hear the roar from above which made the street sound like it was under a motorway.

  'This place OK, do you think?'

  Tom sniffs. 'See some action. I reckon it's OK.'

  Moira digs a box of matches from the pocket of her long skirt and approaches the two long, white candles on the altar.

  'These OK?'

  Tom nods. She lights both candles. Shadows rear. Tom sits on a wooden chair, head bowed, hands in his lap.

  Moira waits.

  The candle flames don't waver. Serene spears sending wisps of smoke towards the ceiling, which complete the illusion of a sacred shed - a minimum of crossbeams and then the roof slates, edged now with rosy light.

  No wonder it's cold. Moira hugs herself, wishing she'd borrowed Isabel's woollen cape or something.

  'Dad,' Tom says.

  'Dad? Whose dad?'

  come on then, Dad.

  Keeps calling him 'dad' in that sarky voice.

  'Get off my arm. Who are you?' Eddie splutters.

  don't ask so many fuckin' questions.

  'Not from round here, are you?'

  that's true.

  'Your friend's not saying much.'

  he's new.

  'In the fire brigade? Are you the fire brigade? What's going on?'

  A hush has enfolded the street.

  Nobody wants to breathe.

  'Oh ... my ... Christ.' A lone, female voice.

  The great clefted rock of Ystrad Ddu gleams like the metal apron in front of an open furnace.

  Two figures on the very edge.

  A buxom woman with blonde hair in a bell-shape rushes out into the middle of the road.

  'Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo'

  And then a third figure. Some people will swear later that they saw a third figure in the half-second before the blue lights and fire sirens.

  Tom stands up slowly, carefully straightens the flat cushion on the wooden chair. His eyes have clouded. He beckons Moira to the altar.