A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  The old man in the cellar at Grandma’s place in Sheffield... that had probably been the first. None of them had frightened her for quite a while, not until she’d learned from other kids that you were supposed to be afraid of ghosts. Until then, she’d been affected only by the particular emotions specific to each place where something similar happened: fear, hatred, greed and – the one emotion she hadn’t at first understood – lust.

  She steadied her breathing. Cascob Church squatted under low, grey cloud. It looked both cosy and creepy. To what extent had the present sensations been preconditioned by what she’d read in the leaflet?

  ... to exorcize a young woman...

  She walked on, towards the church.

  The stone and timbered building, like many this old, seemed to have grown out of the site organically. There were oak beams in its porch and under the pyramid-cap of the tower. It snuggled against an earthmound which was clearly not natural, possibly a Bronze Age tumulus. From the base of the mound grew an apple tree, spidery winter branches tangled against the cold light. There was a gate across the porch – more twine to untie.

  Betty stepped inside. There were recent posters on the wall and a framed card invited all who entered to say a prayer before they left. She would not be so crass as to offer a prayer to the goddess. When she put out a hand to the oak door, Cascob Church seemed to settle around her, not unfriendly, certainly ancient and comfortably mysterious.

  And locked.

  She wondered for a moment if this was a sign that she was not supposed to enter this place. But then, all churches were kept locked these days, even – perhaps especially – in locations this remote.

  She walked back across the churchyard and the narrow road to the farmhouse to enquire where she might borrow a key. The bloke there was accommodating and presented her with a highly suitable one, about six inches long. It made her right hand tingle with impressions, and she twice passed it quickly to her left hand and back again before reaching the porch.

  The lock turned easily. She went in and stood tensely, with the door open behind her.

  The church inside was dark and basic. Betty stood poised to banish anything invasive. But there was nothing. It was quiet. So far removed from the foetid turmoil swirling in the Old Hindwell ruins that she banished that from her thoughts, lest she somehow infest Cascob.

  The place was tiny and probably little changed since the fourteenth or fifteenth century. A farmers’ church, with a font for christenings but no room for gentry weddings.

  There was a wooden table with literature on it, including the sleeping dragon leaflet and a similar one about Cascob Church itself. A collection box had Betty fumbling for a fiver, an offering to appease the god of the Christians. She stood for a moment behind one of the back pews, not touching its dark wood, her head hanging down so as not to face the simple altar. It was not her altar, it faced the wrong direction, and she’d turned away from all this eight years ago.

  Betty closed her eyes. It had been her decision. She’d turned from the east to face the north: a witch’s altar was always to the north. There was no turning back... was there?

  When she reopened her eyes, she was facing the whitewashed north wall, where a document hung in a thin, black frame.

  Betty looked at it, breathed in sharply. The breathing came hard. The air around her seemed to have clotted. She stared at the symbols near the bottom of the frame.

  And saw, with an awful sense of déjà vu:

  She felt almost sick now, with trepidation. There was nothing coincidental about this.

  At the top of the document, under the funeral black of the frame, was something even more explicit.

  ABRACADABRA

  ABRACADABR

  ABRACADAB

  ABRACADA

  ABRACAD

  ABRACA

  ABRAC

  ABRA

  ABR

  AB

  A

  Betty spun away from the wall, snatched up one of the leaflets about the church and ran outside.

  Under the Zeppelin cloud, she opened the leaflet to a pen-and-ink drawing of the church and a smaller sketch of the Archangel Michael with wings outstretched and a sword held above his head.

  Under the drawing of the church, she read:

  ‘... the Abracadabra charm, dated from the seventeenth century, purported to have been used to exorcize a young woman. Heaven knows what she went through, but it sheds an interesting light on the state of faith in Radnorshire at the time.’

  Betty stilled herself with a few minutes of chakra breathing, then went back into the church and up to the document itself, again leaving the door open for light.

  What she’d read was a transcript of the original charm produced, it said in a tiny footnote, by an expert from the British Museum. The original was at the bottom: a scrap of paper with the ink faded to a light brown and now virtually indecipherable. There were no details about exactly how or when it had been found in the church.

  But there was no inglenook fireplace where a box might be placed.

  Hands clenched in the pockets of her ski jacket, Betty read the transcript. The two charms might be a century or more apart, but the similarities were obvious.

  In the name of the Father, Son and of the Holy Ghost Amen X X X and in the name of the lord Jesus Christ I will delive Elizabeth Loyd from all witchcraft and from all Evil Spirites and from all evil men or women or wizardes or hardness of heart Amen X X X

  It went on with a mixture of Roman Catholic Latin – pater noster, ave Maria – and cabbalistic words of power like ‘Tetragrammaton’, the name of God. At the bottom were two rows of planetary symbols. The sun, the moon and Venus were obvious. The one that looked like a ‘4’ was Jupiter.

  Wizards... spirits... hardness of heart. All too similar. Another solid link, apart from St Michael, between the two churches.

  There was more obsessive repetition:

  I will trust in the Lord Jesus Christ my Redeemer and Saviour from all evil spirites and from all other assaltes of the Devil and that he will delive Elizabeth Loyd from all witchcraft and from all evil spirites by the same apower as he did cause the blind to see, the lame to walke and that thou findest with unclean spirites to be in thire one mindes amen X X X as weeth Jehovah Amen. The witches compassed her abought but in the name of the lord i will destroy them Amen X X X X X X X

  It was signed by Jah Jah Jah.

  Poor Elizabeth Loyd. A ‘young woman’. How old?

  Twenty? Seventeen? Was she really possessed by evil? Or was she schizophrenic? Or, more likely, simply epileptic?

  Heaven knows what she went through, but it sheds an interesting light on the state of faith in Radnorshire at the time.

  Had it been carried out here, in the church? If so, Betty wasn’t picking up anything. What kind of minister had mixed this bizarre and volatile cocktail of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, paganism, cabbalism and astrology?

  Or was it the local wise man, the conjuror?

  Or were they one and the same?

  Betty was glad the charm lay behind glass, that she wouldn’t have to force herself to touch it, where it had been held by the exorcist, didn’t even like to look too hard at the original manuscript, was glad that the ink had faded to the colour of soft sand.

  She walked back outside into the churchyard and was drawn back – felt she had no choice – to that spot amongst the graves where she’d previously felt the weight of something. She wondered what had happened if, after the exorcism, the epilepsy or whatever persisted? There was something deeply distasteful about the whole business – and there had probably been villagers at the turn of the eighteenth century who also found it disturbing. But they’d have to keep quiet. Especially if the exorcism was performed by the minister.

  She was gazing out towards the Forest – yellowed fields, a wedge of conifers – when the pain came.

  It was so sudden and so violent that she sank to her knees in the long, wet grass, both hands at her groin.
There was an instant of shocking cold inside her, and then it was over and she was crawling away, sobbing, to the shelter of a nearby gravestone.

  She stayed there for several minutes, her breathing rapid and her heart rate up. She pushed her hair back out of her eyes and found that it was soaked with sweat.

  When she was able to stand again, she was terrified there might be physical damage.

  She stumbled back to the church wall and, trembling, wrote a huge banishing pentagram, clockwise on the air.

  And then followed it with the sign of the cross.

  20

  Blessed Beneath the Wings of Angels

  BEEN A WHILE since he was here last, but it might as well have been yesterday. Nothing changed, see. A new bungalow here, a fancy conservatory there. A few new faces that started out bright and shiny and open... and gradually closed in, grew cloudy-eyed and worried.

  Like this boy in the pub. Londoner, sounded like. Gomer had seen it before. They came with their catering certificates and visions of taking over the village inn and turning it into a swish restaurant with fiddly little meals and vintage wine, fifty quid a time. Year or so later, it was back to the ole steak pie and oven chips and a pint of lager – three diners a night if they was lucky, at a fiver apiece.

  Gomer sucked the top off his pint of Guinness. Ole Hindwell, he thought, where city dreams comes to die.

  ‘Not seen you around before,’ the London boy said.

  ‘That’s on account you en’t been around yourself more’n a week or two,’ Gomer told him.

  ‘Two years, actually. Two years in March.’ The boy had dandruffy hair, receding a bit, greying a bit. You could tell those two years had felt to him like half a lifetime. He’d be about forty years old; time to start getting anxious.

  ‘Bought the place off Ronnie Pugh, is it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Ar.’ Gomer nodded, spying the creeping damp, already blackening walls they must have rewhitewashed when they moved in. ‘Tryin’ to get rid for six year or more, ole Ronnie.’

  ‘So it appears,’ the boy said, regrets showing through like blisters.

  As well they might. Never fashionable, the Forest. No real old money, see. Radnorshire always was a poor county: six times as many sheep as people, and you could count off the mansions on one hand. Not much new money, neither: the real rich folk – film stars, pop stars, stockbrokers, retired drug dealers and the like – went to the Cotswolds, and the medium-rich bought theirselves some rambling black and white over in Herefordshire.

  While Radnorshire – no swish shops, no public schools, no general hospital, no towns with much over 3,000 people – collected the pioneer-types. Trading in the semi in Croydon or Solihull for two scrubby acres, a dozen sheep and a crumbly old farmhouse with rotting timbers, loose slates and stone-lice.

  And the pensioners. Radnorshire got them too, by the thousand. Couples like Minnie and Frank, buying up the old farm cottages and the cheap bungalows. And then one of them dies and the other’s stuck, all alone in the middle of nowhere, on account of Radnorshire property prices don’t rise much year to year, and the poor buggers can’t afford to move away.

  ‘Not going up the funeral?’ the boy said. Though the car park was full, there was only himself and Gomer in the Black Lion. Mourners for Menna Weal had parked up outside, stopped in for one drink, and trailed off to the village hall. Funny old setup, doing church services at the village hall. But that was Radnorshire – lose your church and you makes do.

  Gomer shook his head. ‘Well, I never knowed her that well, see.’ Truth was, with Min only days in the ground, he couldn’t face it, could he? Good to help the little vicar, but he realized the vicar was only giving him something to do to take his mind off his own loss; she wouldn’t want him attending no funeral.

  ‘Nor me,’ the boy said. ‘Mrs Weal never came in here. Her husband comes in occasionally.’

  ‘Picks up his business in the pub, what I yeard. Folks from Off. Friendly local lawyer, sort o’ thing.’ Gomer had heard this from a few people. He didn’t say much, Big Weal, played his cards close, but he put himself about in all the right places.

  The boy came over bashful. ‘He picked us up, actually. He was in here when we were looking over the place. Knew the agent, wound up doing the conveyancing.’ He laughed, a bit uncomfortably. ‘Bloke’s so big you don’t feel you dare refuse, know what I mean?’

  ‘Likely it was the same with poor Mrs Weal,’ Gomer said.

  He’d gathered a fair bit of background about Menna from Danny Thomas, the rock-and-roll farmer at Kinnerton who, it turned out, was a distant cousin. Danny had fancied her himself at one time, but Merv Thomas kept her out of the way of men. Selfish bastard, old Merv, especially after his wife passed on; he had to have another woman around doing the things women had been put on God’s earth to do.

  Frail, pale little person, Menna, it seemed. All right for washing and cleaning, but too frail for farming, definitely too frail for Merv Thomas’s farm. Sons was what Merv had needed, but never got. So now the Thomas farm had gone to folk from Off, the deal sorted by J.W. Weal who then married the profits. What a bloody waste, Danny Thomas had said, guitar on his knee in the barn, crunching Gomer’s eardrums with something called ‘Smoke on the Water’.

  ‘Like I said, he never brought her in here.’ The boy leaned over his bar, confidentially. ‘You never saw her round the village neither. We used to wonder if she had agoraphobia or somefing, but I never liked to ask.’

  ‘Ar.’ Wise attitude. Nobody liked a new landlord nosing into the affairs of local people. ‘Her never had no friends yere, then?’

  ‘Mrs Prosser, Councillor Prosser’s wife, she used to go there once or twice a week, apparently.’

  Judy Prosser. This figured. Judy Prosser was born and raised the other side of the quarry, no more than half a mile from Merv Thomas’s farm. She’d have known the Thomas girls, likely Barbara better than Menna, being nearer her age. Judy Prosser would know the score. Smart girl that one; not much got past her, whereas most everything got past that dull bugger Gareth.

  Well, Gomer had always got on well enough with Judy, in the days before Gareth bought his own digger. Likely he’d hang around here, see if she came in the pub after the funeral.

  ‘My missus went across there once,’ the boy continued.

  ‘To visit Menna?’

  ‘They’d be about the same age, near enough, and she reckoned maybe they could be friends. But she got short shrift. Never got further’n the doorstep.’

  ‘This is the ole rectory?’

  ‘Blooming great big place for just the two of them. Never seemed to have guests to stay or anyfing, even in the summer. Never went on holidays either.’

  ‘Solicitor, see,’ Gomer said. ‘Gotter have ’isself a big house. Status in the community. Plus, his ole man likely got a good deal on it when they ditched the church. You drinking...?’

  ‘Greg. Fanks very much,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll have a half. So you were from round here, originally, Mr—’

  ‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire,’ Gomer said. ‘Radnor Valley born an’ bred. Used to run a bunch o’ diggers and bulldozers. We done drainage, soakaways, put roads in, all over the valley. My nephew, Nev, he does it now, see.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, I know. He was filling in after the archaeological digs, yeah? Used to come in for a sandwich and a pint at lunchtime?’

  ‘Sure t’be.’

  ‘They were digging all over the place. We all got excited when it came out they’d found an old temple. We fought it was gonna be like Stonehenge and we’d get thousands of tourists. But all it was – it was just a few holes in the ground where there’d been like wooden posts what rotted away centuries ago. Noffing to see, apart from all the stone axe-heads and stuff they dug up. Terrible disappointment.’

  ‘Ar. Typical Radnorshire tourist attraction, that is.’ Gomer took out his tin to roll a ciggie. ‘Sounds good till you sees it.’

  Crossing the Welsh
border, you came, unexpectedly, out of darkness into light, Merrily thought, raising herself up in the passenger seat of Sophie’s Saab. The last English town, Kington, with its narrow streets and dark surrounding hills, had been more like a Welsh country town. The hills beyond were densely conifered until the trees thinned to reveal a rotting cathedral of fissured rocks.

  And then, suddenly, the Radnor Valley opened up and the whole landscape was washed clean under a sandy sky, and Merrily sank back again, just wanting to go on being driven through the winter countryside, not having to make any decisions... not having to answer difficult questions with a boom-mic hanging over her like a club.

  Sophie took a left, and the car began to burrow under high banks and high, naked hedges. As the lanes narrowed, Old Hindwell began to be signposted, but by now they might just as well have followed any vehicle on that road; every car and Land Rover seemed to contain people dressed in black.

  ‘One forgets,’ Sophie mused, ‘that rural funerals are such social events.’

  The lanes seemed to have brought them in a loop, back into conifer country. The official Old Hindwell sign was small and muddied. Just beyond it, set back into a clearing, sat a well-built, stone Victorian house with a small, conical turret at one end. In most of its windows, curtains were drawn; the others probably didn’t have curtains.

  ‘The old rectory, do you think?’ Sophie said.

  ‘Weal’s house? You could be right. There’s obviously nobody about. If it is the rectory, we ought to be able to see the old church nearby.’

  She peered among the trees, an uneasy mixture of leafless, twisted oaks and dark, thrusting firs.

  ‘I suppose it must have occurred to you,’ Sophie said, ‘that the old church here might have been the one referred to by that woman on your TV programme.’

  ‘The pagan church, mmm?’ The road took them through a farm layout – windowless buildings on either side. ‘But let’s not worry about that until someone asks us to.’