by Phil Rickman
She unwinds from a pew, shakes out her skirt. 'We gonna pray, Tom?'
'Too late,' Tom says glumly. Moira takes his hand; it's deathly cold, as if there's been no blood through it in hours.
Something's over. He's not resisting any more; just standing there without expression, swaying like a big, rubber toy. Moira is reminded of Donald the gypsy, the last time she saw him, on the steps of the Duchess's caravan, soon to be stripped and sold.
The candle flames jerk sideways as the church door is thrust open. A policeman stands in the opening with another man - incongruously, Steve Case, straggly grey hair around his ears from a dismembered ponytail.
The policeman nods towards Tom.
'This the dad?'
Case nods and steps inside the church. 'Tom ...'
Tom says, 'Fuck's sake, geddout.'
'Look, sir,' the policeman says, 'I think we're going to need ...'
There's a mass gasp from outside. A couple of seconds later, with a sound like a bomb in a crockery shop, the roof implodes.
Amazingly, when the dust starts to settle, the two altar candles are still alight.
'Stop!' A police-sounding shout. 'That's far enough. Nobody comes in.'
The policeman already inside, now crouching by a pew-end, says, 'Jesus' and puts a hand over his mouth.
Moira pulls hair and dust from her eyes. At first she sees only slates, dozens of them all over the pews and the stone floor, slates splintered into shards and arrows and needles.
And then she looks up.
'Holy shit,' she whispers.
Tom strolls to where the body hangs over a suspended crossbeam, so perfectly balanced it's actually swinging gently.
Tom stoops to peer into the face.
'Shit is right,' he says.
Most of the skin has been torn from one side of the face, slivers of slate projecting like stubble. The head is smashed and a grey ooze seeps into the eyes. The jaw is hanging off. Moira turns away as two or three discoloured teeth hit the stone floor with a ticking sound.
Over the noise of her own vomiting, she hears Tom say to the policeman, 'If he ain't got the blues by now ...' on his way out.
And then the policeman starts to vomit. He's seen Steve Case up against a wall pulling from his left eye a two-inch sliver of slate. And something hanging out on a membrane and glistening looks very much like the eye itself.
Tom and Moira are out on to the road in time to see the firefighters reach Vanessa with their ladders.
She seems to be waiting for them quite calmly.
Shelley stands at the bottom of the ladder.
Moira says, 'You knew, huh?'
'Nah,' Tom says. He looks embarrassed.
Epilogue
Simon, spent in soft flesh, moist with a mingling of sweat and musk and mysterious tears, whispered, 'I don't understand.'
The sky was a deep, deep red, hung with curling rags of mist.
Another whisper, close and warm and full of wonder. 'Have you never heard of magic?'
He remembered the black, wobbling thing looming unsteadily across the stone parapet.
This?
The not-so-distant flames dancing in eyes close to his. Simon felt angry, deceived. 'I don't f ... I don't understand.'
'Well, there's a bloody change. That's been the phrase on everybody's lips for days, except for yours. Oh, Simon understands. Simon understands everything.'
Simon closed his eyes. He didn't dare believe. About the rapture. That the rapture was no longer dark.
'You're not real.'
'I don't know which way to take that.'
Simon peered over the tower's edge. Far below, under the mist line, he could make out small patches of burning grass, like campfires. The fire had limped down from the hill, its wrath expended. It didn't quite reach the Abbey, but the warning was implicit.
He said, 'You're enjoying this, aren't you?'
'I'm flying,' Isabel said.
The dawn came again in a tight, bright line, like copper wire between two terminals.
Simon rose, shivering, and went to the guitar case, lying flat, just as it had been throughout the night.
He looked back at Isabel, also shivering now, inside Moira's black anorak in the south-eastern corner of the tower where they'd lain.
Lain.
He felt amazingly light-headed. He was trembling, but a grin was shuffling, half embarrassed, across his face. To stop his hands from shaking, he picked up the guitar case and carried it across to the woman.
'If you don't tell me the truth,' he said carefully, 'I'm going to empty Aelwyn the Dreamer all over you.'
'Oh my God!' Isabel mock-cowered. 'All right. Tom. Tom, it was. Moira got Tom to carry me up. Over his shoulder, like a fireman. All those steps. All sixty-odd of them, poor dab. The cape was too big and cumbersome, so I borrowed Moira's coat.'
Isabel smiled, seemed about to say something flip and then went solemn. 'It was the only hope we had, Simon. Either of us. Tom wanted to stay with me, at least until we knew if you were … Anyway, I said, just leave me at the top and then get off down, quietly.'
He looked around the stone space. No wheelchair. Of course there wasn't. So how...?
'On my bum,' Isabel said. 'Very slowly. You were asleep. Moaning a lot. Disgusting.'
Simon said suddenly, 'Did you ...? Look, did you lick the blood from my face?'
'What?'
'Where the cut is. Did you lick it off?'
Isabel bit her Up. 'No. I didn't do that.'
Simon went cold. He felt pressure in the palms of his hands. Who licked the blood? Who had been drawn to the vapours of the blood?
'Isabel,' he said in a hell of a rush. 'I had this dream. Seems a long time ago now. In the dream, I had to choose between you and Richard Walden. I pushed you off the tower. This was a dream.'
'You didn't push me off last night,' Isabel said simply.
'No. I didn't, did I? Why?'
'Thanks very much.'
'No, I mean ... I mean, Christ, you were taking a hell of a risk because this is his place, and you knew that. At night, this is...'
The thoughts came frantically, elbowing each other out of the way. This isn't how it happens. This is wrong. Something's terribly wrong. Trickery. Deception. It's not over. Not over...
'Put that case down,' Isabel said, 'and come back and hold me.'
He sat down next to her. It was colder now, a hard December morning. She'd put most of her clothes back on. Still, as soon as he touched her, his jeans felt too tight again. It couldn't last. He kissed her. 'Don't start me off, Vicar,' Isabel said.
Simon held her, with desperation.
'I dragged myself across,' she said. 'On my bum. I leaned over you. Nearly passed out, you smelled so revolting. Like ...' Isabel wrinkled her nose '... Well, shit, if you really want to know. And bad breath. And ... body smells. All around you. All over you. It was like finding a dead body, and it's all decayed. I couldn't touch you. I didn't want to go near you. It was the most horrible moment of my life - that's saying something. I hated you.'
She stiffened slightly in his arms.
'Dragged myself to the edge of the tower and just leaned over, right over, desperate for some fresh air, and ...'
Simon tensed at the image, felt the heat of her on his cheek.
'... came over dizzy. I did want to jump off. Thought about flying. All there was left to do. Dragged myself to the very edge. I thought, everything I ever want turns to shit.'
He said nothing. For years he'd felt that was all there was inside him. Shit. Rottenness.
'... going to let myself go. Just, you know, overbalance. And then something made me look up and ... You ever tell this to anyone else, Simon ...'
'Go on.'
'I saw the Skirrid. I didn't think you could see it from here, I mean, it was dark last time ...'
'It was dark this time. And foggy.'
'... and it was white. All white. Like the Matterhorn or something. It was beaut
iful. Blazing white. For about ... half a second? A quarter of a second? I mean, gone ... but you went on seeing it. I can see it now. All white. And it reminded me.'
Isabel dug a hand into a pocket of Moira's anorak. 'Another dry cleaning bill.'
'What is it?'
'Soil. Still a few grains, see. Poor Meryl collected it in a binsack up on the Skirrid. She gave me a sackful to bring to the Abbey, but I felt stupid about it. The sack, that is. Wheeling myself in here with a sack. So what I did, I unscrewed part of the wheelchair frame and packed it with soil. Bloody thing went like an old lawnmower after that and ... oh, I crashed it eventually, that's not the ... Anyway, I unloaded as much of the soil as I could get into the coat pocket - that was another reason see, the cape didn't have pockets - and when the Skirrid lit up, I dragged myself back and spread the soil in a bit of a circle around you.'
Simon's eyes widened.
'And then I imagined the light ... a circle of light around us.'
'Who told you to do that?'
She's a witch, he thought. Maybe all women are witches.
Isabel looked away. 'Sounds daft now.'
'I am out my depth,' Gwyn Arthur admitted. His pipe had gone out. There were too many people around.
Vanessa was on the vicarage sofa, between her father and his wife. She was wearing a nightie, a grey blanket around her shoulders. She looked about nine.
All right, fireball hit the hillside, igniting the woods. Fine so far.
Silas Copesake seeming oblivious of this? Well, yes, we are dealing here with a demented person, schizophrenic maybe. No problem with that.
But no way was Eddie Edward's official testimony going to contain references to a loose shadow around Copesake, like a dressing-gown (or a monk's robe), or to a hulking thing which appeared at first like a column of brown smoke rising from the smouldering woods, and began to glow only when it smiled.
Smiled twice. With two mouths.
Oh no. No indeed. None of that.
And what about the flames roaring up behind them and this little girl, Vanessa, calmly reciting a prayer to her guardian angel while Copesake was sharpening his sacrificial Swiss Army penknife to release her blood?
He needed the blood, see. The monk needed the blood.
Oh no. None of that.
And nothing about the column of brown smoke interceding, bending over her, the little girl lifted up as if on a cushion of murky, swirling air.
A moment of violence. Frenzied. Like a street-fight, Gwyn, just like that...
Before Copesake was over the edge.
All this time, Eddie lying there in the cradle of rock. Pretty badly beaten, couldn't get up, certain the flames would have him. And thinking, irrationally, about the glasses.
When the fireball, or whatever it was, hit the hillside, he'd struggled to a sitting position and taken the opportunity to give Vanessa her glasses, which he'd found earlier.
But they were the wrong glasses, see. They didn't fit. Too big. She gave them back, Gwyn. And then afterwards, when Copesake is over the edge, I'm being helped away by these two men. And one says - funny Northern accent - 'Hey, Dad, you found me glasses.' Just like that. And he takes them off me and puts them on. 'Blind as a fuckin' bat without me glasses.'
Gwyn Arthur Jones, detective superintendent, leading the inquiry into the death of Silas Copesake, blues singer, company director and probable murderer. Did he fall or was he pushed? And who the hell really cared?
Gwyn cared. And the reason he cared was that he was going to have to compile reports for at least four inquests: Silas Copesake, Eric Beasley, the woman, Meryl, and the musician, David Reilly.
The way things were going, these reports were going to read like plots rejected as too far-fetched by the Brothers Grimm. Even the weather and atmospheric conditions made no sense: freak thunderbolts and ball-lightning, hints of seismic activity.
They say the Skirrid was cleft at the very moment of...
Oh, God, don't even suggest it.
'Not going to talk to me, is she?' Gwyn said to Tom Storey.
'Give her a day or so, mate,' Tom Storey said. 'Good night's sleep. Works wonders, dunnit?'
Gwyn pocketed his pipe and stood up. His best witness, a Down's Syndrome child. And yet, why did he think that when he'd gone, she'd be able to tell her dad precisely what had occurred?
He wandered into the vicarage garden. The air stank. Didn't they say fire was a purifying force? Didn't smell like it, but who could say?
Only Eddie Edwards, worst luck.
The other witness.
Eddie was at the hospital now, having his ribs strapped up. Gwyn hoped someone would have the sense to do the same to his mouth. Certainly, before Eddie made any formal statement, Gwyn was going to have to have a discreet word - indeed, make a few discreet threats. One way or another, Eddie's natural sense of drama would need to be severely curbed.
Gwyn's brain was still congested with the irrational discharge from the old chap when he'd stumbled into the churchyard. Well, all right, could have been a couple of villagers. Gwyn had instructed his foot-soldiers to try and find them.
And they take an arm each, these two chaps, and they haul me out of the trench - me feeling like the pensioner who doesn't want to cross the road. What about the little girl? Who's going to bring her down? But they insist - dragging me away, they are. And now they've gone ...
Gwyn remembered Eddie sitting on the churchyard wall, looking around as though he might see the two men. And what did they look like, these two?
I ... don't know. Didn't get a good look at them, see. One was doing all the talking. Merseyside, his accent, I think. Sure I know the voice ... from somewhere. And the other ... all I remember about him was he was wearing a white scarf...
At just after eight, there were footsteps on the spiral staircase and Moira arrived on the roof. She was alone.
A couple of hours ago, Prof Levin had stepped between the patches of smouldering grass and shouted up to see if they were OK. Simon had shouted back and waved. He thought he'd seen Prof grin through his white beard.
Now Moira said, 'You two get to go down in style. They're calling in one of the builders' guys to work that platform crane thing they were using to reroof the other tower.'
'I could carry her down the stairs,' Simon said.
'And break your back!' said Isabel. She laughed lightly. 'I won't be walking down either. But that's the way of things, isn't it? First you learn to fly, and then you think about learning to walk.'
'Where exactly are you paralysed from?' Moira asked curiously. 'If I'm not being intrusive.'
'Perhaps not quite as high up as I imagined,' Isabel said with a self-conscious little smile.
Moira looked at Simon. Expressionless. Kind of.
'But then,' Isabel said, 'they do say it's all in the head, isn't it?'
'And the heart,' Moira said. 'Don't forget the heart.'
Moira told them everything she knew, a lot of what she guessed and a few things she just hoped. She told them about Meryl which distressed Isabel. She told them about Stephen Case, who was in hospital and would probably lose an eye. And Eddie, whose ribs were strapped up.
Simon said. 'How is he, you know ... otherwise?'
'Pretty shaken up, I'm told. Nobody's been able to explain what happened Just as well, huh?'
She told them about Vanessa, who was safe. And Sile, who was dead.
'I looked in Vanessa's eyes,' Isabel said. 'Last night, this was, the last time I saw her. I felt I could see flames.' She shook her head. 'Very, very strange.'
Simon thought about Isabel's circle of sacred soil and what had happened inside it. A little outpost of the holy mountain at the heart of the blackness. A tiny circle of love and redemption from which the evil had been banished.
And so had accumulated around Sile Copesake, like a cloud of flies around a turd.
And had they gone down together, Sile and Richard?
'You're going to have to get me out of her
e, Isabel,' Simon said. 'I've probably seen too much to be a vicar.'
People were clustering at the foot of the tower, an engine started up.
'They're bringing the crane,' Moira said. 'Let's do it, huh?'
Simon stood up. 'The guitar case?'
'We don't have much time.'
Moira picked up the Martin case and laid it at the edge of the tower. 'You got a prayer for an occasion like this, Si?'
'I'm not even a priest any more,' Simon said. 'I broke my vow of celibacy.'
Moira grinned. She snapped open the chromium hasps.
'In the movies, this is where a weird gust of wind comes out of nowhere and we see all this humble muck take off like a comet.'
She flung back the lid.
Nothing happened.
Moira and Simon started to laugh. Isabel looked at them and shook her head in pity.
'Come on, Aelwyn, you old bastard.' Simon could hear a kind of hydraulic grinding as the guys down below positioned the platform-crane. 'You can do better than this.'
'Maybe he's shy,' Moira said. 'Anyhow, a Martin guitar needs its case. I'm gonna dump this stuff out and leave it up here, OK?'
She turned the case upside down, emptied out the mess of soil and bone and ancient wood-dust. 'Good luck, Aelwyn,' she said. Her voice softened. 'Davey.'
There was a clink.
Amid the human and vegetable debris lay something dull and metallic.
Simon picked it up.
It looked like a very old, mainly toothless dog comb. The early coppery sun shone through the gaps in the metal.
Simon and Isabel watched, more than a little perplexed, as Moira fell to her knees in the ancient dust and began to weep.
Overhead, many miles from the sea, a seagull keened.
