by Phil Rickman
‘Look, whatever it is, you really don’t have to tell me. You know how I hate to feel compromised.’
‘Yeh, well, on past experience,’ Bliss said, ‘I prefer to have you compromised.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And it’s been a crap day.’
‘So you want to ruin someone else’s?’
‘His eyes were gone,’ Bliss said.
Merrily swallowed some smoke, coughed. An empty stock lorry came rattling over the bridge, headlights full on, yellow smears on Bliss’s blotched windscreen.
‘Ayling’s eyes had been gouged out and pebbles placed in the sockets. Bits of gravel, it looked like.’
‘Gravel?’
No…
‘Which turned out, on examination last night, to include fragments of quartz.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Almost certainly originating in the so-called Dinedor Serpent. Somebody’d carefully jammed bits of the serpent into Clem Ayling’s eye sockets.’
Merrily squeezed out the cigarette, burned her thumb.
‘Being a cynical, case-hardened detective, I never let on, but I’ll admit it spooked even me at first.’
‘As it was… meant to?’
‘Yeh. Me or somebody. Torchlight, see. Councillor Ayling’s severed head, with the eyes lit up like little bulbs on a Christmas tree. Not something you easily forget, Merrily, to be honest.’
22
Watery Lane
IT SHOULDN’T BOTHER her, of course. With less than ten per cent of the population of Ledwardine ever showing up at a service, there had to be scores of atheists in this village.
On the other hand, the others simply didn’t show up. Said the occasional good morning to the vicar, ignored the church. Entirely inoffensive, your atheists, as a rule. Didn’t make a thing out of it. Except for fundamentalists like the celebrated geneticist Richard Dawkins, who had opened his book The God Delusion by hailing the bravery and the splendour of atheism. And Mathew Stooke, who’d taken it a little further. Who, according to his website, was demanding — how seriously wasn’t made clear — an official bank holiday, some kind of Atheism Pride Day. People parading with blank banners, singing ‘Glad to be Godless’?
Merrily lit a cigarette, studying Stooke’s face on his website, like there was the smallest chance of him being the first to blink.
Not an edifying image. Black hair, black beard — touch of the Charles Manson, even — but better than imagining the heavy head of big, smiley Clem Ayling with eyes of shining quartz.
No matter how much he’d changed, she thought she’d recognise Stooke’s eyes. Quiet eyes that were looking past you towards a finite horizon. No visible rage.
For ten years, Mathew Elliot Stooke was a Religious Affairs correspondent for the Guardian and then the Independent newspapers. He travelled all over the world, meeting and interviewing religious leaders — archbishops, cardinals, ayatollahs, the Dalai Lama, and various powerful evangelists in the US. And then, one day, I had what the religious would call a religious experience.
Most people lose their faith as a result of personal tragedy — for example, the failure of prayer to alleviate the suffering of a loved one. In my case, I simply awoke, as if from a ridiculous dream and realised in a single moment of revelation — a word much inflated by the Christian church — that it was all a despicable fabrication.
Immediately, a great weight dropped away from me and for a few moments I had never felt as free or as happy in my life.
This, of course, was before the anger set in.
Not even a physicist or a geneticist. Just a journalist.
The Independent had kept him on as Religious Affairs correspondent after he’d come out as an atheist. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Merrily sat in the computer-lit scullery, remembering, from her childhood, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Catholic against Protestant, religion synonymous with hatred and violent death.
Around the same time, John Lennon had been imagining wistfully that there was no heaven. Easy if you tried, and she had tried but never found it that easy. Nothing colder than an empty sky: clean, pure, bleak, pointless.
Like the scores of Islamic suicide bombers who’d given their lives to promote the cause of secularism in the West. Blow yourself up with a few dozen innocent infidels and there’s a queue of virgins waiting for you in paradise.
World Cup tickets for all martyrs.
Insane.
All religion, therefore, was insane.
Mathew Stooke continued in his job with the Independent for another year. During this time, viewing the world of religion through new and penetrating eyes, he wrote the remarkable series of articles which would become the basis of the international bestseller The Hole in the Sky.
Merrily cross-reffed to Stooke’s Amazon listing, found The Hole in the Sky ranking number 34 in the Hot One Hundred. Which, since it had been around for more than a year, was disturbingly impressive. Whatever it was costing to rent Cole Barn would be small change, these days, for Mr Winterson.
‘A man who embraces glorious, guiltless blasphemy like an expensive whore.’
New York Times.
Yeah, right. She scrolled into the Amazon reader reviews.
This book came out of rage and it made me angry too. Stooke is a diamond. I salute him.
… The guy beats Dawkins hollow because he seems to have started out as a believer and he knows what that’s like. The sense of betrayal comes across so much more powerfully than the smart-arsed science-boy stuff you get from Dawkins. It’s time for the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury and a few imams to get scared. Stooke is the goods.
I got this book for Christmas, which I thought at first was a bad joke. By the time I was halfway through the book I realised it was Christmas that was the joke.
Merrily watched the cigarette browning in the ashtray. So what did you get for Christmas, Merrily? Apart from Britain’s premier evangelical atheist as a parishioner.
She picked up the cigarette and tamped it out in the ashtray. She had a parish to work, the open desk diary reminding her to drop in this afternoon on Sarah Clee, who provided summer flowers for the church from her garden in Blackberry Lane, and should be back home after a hip replacement.
Real life. She spooned out some lunch for Ethel, scrambled herself an egg and carried it, with a slice of toast, back to the computer. On the desktop was an icon marked Sacred.
Cole Hill Preservation Society. The membership database. Jane had all the names on her laptop but, for safety’s sake, she’d copied the file onto the scullery computer.
All the names of all the decent citizens concerned about their heritage. All the gentle pacifist pagans. And maybe one or two loonies. No worries about her mum prying, because of the new trust between them now.
Merrily’s hand hovered over the mouse. The paperback copy of The Hole in the Sky lay at the edge of the desk like a time bomb.
Bliss stopped the car on a forecourt in front of some shops on the edge of the Rotherwas Industrial Estate, got out his mobile and checked in with the incident room.
‘Hold on a moment, Francis.’ And then — a knowing, calculated insult — Iain Brent, PhD, didn’t even bother to cover the phone. ‘Don’t need Bliss for anything, do you, ma’am?’
Bliss didn’t hear a reply.
‘No, Francis,’ Brent said. ‘Unless you have anything for us?’
Twat.
Bliss spent a couple of minutes staring through the dirty windscreen at the dirty sky, trying to lose the tightness in his chest.
On the way out, after his dismissal by Howe, Kevin Snape had called him back.
‘Nice one, Francis. The Dinedor connection — staring us all in the face, but nobody else spotted it.’
‘Deductive flair, Kev. Sadly out of fashion nowadays.’
‘No, come on, what put you on to it?’
Just a hunch, Bliss had said. And contacts. Like he was going to tell them the truth — that all he’d done, because he k
new bugger-all about local councillors, was Google Clement Ayling, Hereford and then watch two full pages of links to the Dinedor Serpent come bouncing up at him. And then Google the Serpent.
Bliss started the car, looking for Watery Lane which apparently gave access to the new road site. His mobile went off. He pulled in again. ‘Yeh.’
‘Inspector Bliss? It’s Steve Furneaux, Planning Department, Herefordshire Council. You wanted to talk to me, I think, about Hereforward. And then my secretary said you’d rung an hour or so ago — she wasn’t sure whether it was to cancel or postpone.’
Bliss thought about it quickly. Yeh, he’d done that. He’d called to cancel. Just like he’d been ordered to by his superior officer — daughter of the ex-copper, bent, who was also a member of Hereforward. Not of immediate importance, is it? Annie had said.
Right, then.
‘No worries, Steve,’ Bliss said. ‘All it was… small problem about me getting to your office before lunchtime. Where is it you actually go for lunch?’
‘Oh, various pubs. And Gilbies bar.’
‘Gilbies would be fine,’ Bliss said. ‘Shall we say half-one?’
When he turned along Watery Lane it was rising to its name, the ditch on the left overflowing, half the road swamped.
Bliss drove through regardless.
Over seven thousand people worldwide had signed Jane’s online petition, calling for the preservation of Coleman’s Meadow as sacred space. Merrily hadn’t realised there were so many. Easy to underestimate the Web’s ability to draw together threads of dissent.
from Dr Padraig Neal, Co. Wexford.
The warmest of greetings, Jane, from Ireland.
I most fervently applaud your courageous stand against the barbarian bureaucrats and would respectfully draw your attention to our own battle royal. As you may have read elsewhere, Ireland’s most venerated ancient site, Tara, seat of the pagan High Kings, is threatened by the construction of the M3 motorway, powered by Euro-grant millions.
Tara represents, in the words of the poet Seamus Heaney, ‘an ideal of the spirit’. But the secular state is without ideals. Heedless of tradition, it will thrust a spear into our spiritual heart and fill the hole with money.
Several like this. She kept on scrolling down, looking for a specific reference to the Dinedor Serpent. Although there seemed to be a direct parallel here, if on a far smaller scale, to what was happening at the hill of Tara, the various Irish protesters didn’t seem to have been aware of the Serpent.
A hard copy of Jane’s petition had already gone to Herefordshire Council, although Merrily guessed that some of the messages accompanying the names and addresses of supporters had been edited out first.
These are gentle people. Well-meaning, Jane had said.
From Helios, Chichester:
This is to confirm that my Order has now placed a suspended curse upon The Herefordshire Council. If a single modern brick should ever be laid upon Coleman’s Meadow, it will come into effect and you will — be assured — have local by-elections within the year.
Bright blessings to you, Jane!
Merrily found several like this, also, some of them far more local and even more weird.
One, from a man in Malvern, said:
Dear Jane Watkins,
I thought I should write to you as I have visited Coleman’s Meadow on a number of occasions in the past few months and wondered if anyone else had had similar experiences to me.
I should point out that I am an experienced pendulum dowser and also, I suppose, a sensitive, in that when I visit neolithic sites I can usually sense something of their origins and the purposes for which they were created.
The essence of it is, at Coleman’s Meadow I believe you have a very active site-guardian.
(I presume you know what I mean by this term. In the unlikely eventuality that you do not, I append a list of relevant websites — I trust, Miss Watkins, that I do not insult you.)
Most site guardians are, as Shakespeare has it, ‘all sound and fury signifying nothing’.
Not so at Coleman’s Meadow. I rather think that anyone working on or near this site who is not well-intentioned will have cause to regret it.
Please post this message on your website so that this information is available to anyone who may wish to comment or even to use it, in the defence of this site against negative intentions.
Yours sincerely.
Charles Miller
Inst. of Chartered Surveyors
Member, British Society of Dowsers.
Merrily closed the database, switched off the computer. Sometimes logging on to the Net was like turning over an old log in the woods, a whole unexpected ecosystem under there.
Gentle people. Well-meaning.
Yes. Most of them.
23
The Hill, the River and the Moon
‘It’s not gone,’ the archaeologist said. ‘Just gone back underground, it has. Like a big earthworm.’
His name was Harri Tomlin, from the South Wales Valleys, now based in Worcester with the team in charge of the Dinedor/Rotherwas excavation. Young guy. Blond curls fringing his orange hard hat. Bliss had been given one too, before he’d been allowed on the site. Health and Safety. At least it kept the rain out.
‘When I say worm,’ Harri said, ‘that’s not much more than conjecture at this stage. Worm, dragon, serpent… we have nothing to measure it against, see, that’s the problem. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere.’
They were standing on a bulldozed mound of clay. Caterpillar tracks below it had filled up with cloudy water. A bunch of trees had been sawn down, their trunks lying around like dead soldiers on a battlefield. Behind the site was the sprawl of the Rotherwas Industrial Estate and the civic waste tip — on the edge of that, unexpectedly, the Rotherwas Chapel, medieval and Tudor, an historical gem.
Mass of contradictions, this part of town. Directly ahead was Dinedor Hill, wooded and misted, towards which the Serpent apparently coiled.
‘So let me get this right,’ Bliss said wearily to Harri Tomlin. ‘You’re saying it definitely wasn’t an ancient road.’
‘We very quickly ruled out an actual road, Mr Bliss, because it doesn’t have any substructure, see. It’s also built on undulating ground, rather than having the ground flattened as you’d do for a road. So it has this kind of flow.’
He’d talked about fire-cracked stones, sourced nearby. The Bronze Age guys would heat up big stones, then drop them into cold water which would break them up into the kind of small pieces they could use.
‘And it contains a lot of quartz?’ Bliss said.
‘Fair amount.’
‘And it was exposed for a while after you found it.’
‘For too long. Even after a few weeks, there was some erosion. We were actually glad to get it covered over again.’
‘Weeks,’ Bliss said. ‘So in that time anybody could’ve nipped up here, under the fence, and pinched a handful.’
‘Or a bucketful. That’s what worried us. Sightseers often like to go home with a souvenir.’
‘So people were actually nicking stones?’
‘It’s ten metres wide. How could we tell? Why do you want to know if some were missing, Mr Bliss? If you don’t mind me asking.’
‘How long is it?’ Bliss said.
‘How long’s a piece of string? We cleared sixty metres, but that might be just a small segment. May go all the way up the hill, to the Iron Age camp on the top, behind those trees. The Serpent is pre- Iron Age, obviously, but then there could’ve been something interesting up there before the camp.’
‘I’m not really getting an image, Harri.’
Bliss was cold and his hands were going numb and whatever the Serpent had been they’d reburied it, so the council could put their road across it. Just another construction site now.
‘Ever seen the Uffington White Horse in Berkshire, Mr Bliss?’
Bliss shook his head. Didn’t recall ever being in Berkshire. He did
remember a white horse in Wiltshire, in the context of a miserable camping holiday with Kirsty before they were married. Kirsty whingeing the whole week.
‘May have seen one on the Wiltshire Downs. Chalk?’
‘That’ll do. Now, forget the chalk and instead of a horse think of a snake. Or, if you like, think of a river. Think of the Wye. Could our structure have been designed to replicate the actual course of the Wye, winding from the top of the hill to the banks of the river itself?’
‘That far?’
‘It’s not very far. The river’s down there, behind those industrial buildings. This is about the hill, the river and the moon.’
Harri told him the theory about this sinuous spectral form winding its moonlit way to the top of the hill.
‘Prehistoric son et lumière?’ Bliss said.
‘The sound would be chanting. A sacred hill, see. A lot of hills were sacred. And the river. Water was always very significant, and the Wye’s a magnificent river so it would be venerated above all others in the west. Therefore, if we imagine…’
Harri walked to the top of the mound and started weaving his arms about, the way blokes used to air-sketch a voluptuous woman.
‘… If we imagine something mystically — and very visibly — connecting the hugely powerful River Wye with the highest hill in these parts. Something suggestive of a coming-together, a confluence, of these great power symbols, the hill, the river and the moon.’
‘Now about to be trashed by a new road slicing through the middle, courtesy of the Hereford Council,’ Bliss said. ‘Would that be a fair assessment?’
‘Hey…’ Harri Tomlin put up his hands. ‘Wasn’t me done him, guv.’
‘So much for a quick result. Where do you lads go from here, Harri?’
‘Probably try to extend the excavation in the direction of the river, see how far the Serpent goes. Which means digging on private land, so may take a while to organise.’
‘And when you say these places are sacred, what’s the significance of that, in terms of what they were doing here back then?’
