A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Unless you know what you’re doing, maybe yes. And they don’t, they can’t know what they’re doing. How can they, Jane?’

  ‘It never occurred to you that by working on yourself for, like, years and years and studying and meditating, you can achieve wisdom and enlightenment?’

  ‘But most of those people haven’t, have they? It’s just, “Oh, let’s light a fire and take all our clothes off...” ’

  ‘That is a totally simplistic News of the World viewpoint.’ Jane’s head was suddenly full of a dark and fuzzy resentment. ‘You haven’t the faintest idea...’

  ‘At least I’m not naive about it.’

  ‘So I’m naive?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  There was a moment of true, sickening enlightenment. ‘You’ve been talking to her, haven’t you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My esteemed parent, the Reverend Watkins. She didn’t just speak to your stepmother on the phone, she spoke to you as well, didn’t she?’

  ‘No. Well only at the hospital. I mean you were there some of the time.’

  ‘That’s why there’s been no big row. Why she hasn’t asked me what the hell I was doing on the M5 at midnight. Why she’s so laid-back about it.’

  ‘Look, Jane, I’m not saying Gwennan didn’t also fill her in on some of the details, but I’ve never even—’

  ‘I’ve been really, really stupid, haven’t I? It really must have destroyed some of my brain cells. While I’m sleeping it off, you’re all having a good chat. You told her how I’d rigged the whole trip, making you think she knew all about us going. Then she’s like, “Oh, you have to understand Jane found it hard coming to terms with me being a priest, has to go her own way.” This cosy vicar-to-cathedral-school-choirboy tête-à-tête. Gosh, what are we going to do about that girl?’

  ‘Jane, that is totally—’

  ‘And you’re like, “Oh, I’m trying to understand her too, Mrs Watkins. If you think I’m just one of those reprehensible youths who only want to get inside her pants, let me assure you—” ’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Jane—’

  ‘That is just so demeaning.’

  ‘It would be if it—’

  ‘You are fucking well dead in the water, Irene.’

  ‘J—’

  26

  Demonstration of Faith

  MERRILY PULLED THE old Volvo up against the hedge.

  ‘I’m sure that wasn’t there on Saturday.’

  A cross standing in a garden.

  ‘Mabbe not,’ Gomer said.

  It wasn’t any big deal, no more than the kind of rustic pole available from garden centres everywhere, with a section of another pole nailed on as a horizontal. It had been sunk into a flowerbed behind a picket fence in the garden of a neat, roadside bungalow about half a mile out of Walton, on the road leading to Old Hindwell. There were three other bungalows but this was the only one with a cross. Although it was no more than five feet high, there was a white light behind it, leaking through a rip in the clouds, and the fact that it was out of context made you suddenly and breathlessly aware of what a powerful symbol this was.

  The bungalow looked empty, no smoke from the chimney. Merrily drove on. ‘You know who lives there?’

  ‘Retired folk from Off, I reckon.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Retired incomers were always useful for topping up your congregation. If the affable local minister turned up to welcome them, just when they were wondering if they were going to be happy here among strangers, they would feel obliged to return the favour, even if it was only for the next few Sundays. But if the friendly minister was the Reverend Nicholas Ellis, drifting away after a month or so could be more complicated.

  This was what Bernie Dunmore had been afraid of. She’d received a briefing on the phone from Sophie before they left.

  Apparently there was something of a record turn-out at the village hall yesterday. The bishop understands that a number of people were out delivering printed circulars last night, and bulletins were posted on Christian websites, warning of pagan infestation. Today there’s to be what’s been described as ‘a Demonstration of Faith’, which the bishop finds more than a little ominous.

  ‘I wonder what he said to them in his sermon. You know any regular churchgoers in the village, Gomer?’

  ‘We’ll find somebody for you, vicar, no problem.’

  The bishop’s in conference all day...

  Unsurprisingly.

  ... but what he wants you to do initially, Merrily, is to offer advice and support to the Reverend Mr Ellis. By which I understand him to mean restraint.

  What was she supposed to do exactly? Put him under clerical arrest?

  But if Merrily felt a seeping trepidation about this exercise, it clearly wasn’t shared by Gomer, who was hunched eagerly forward in the passenger seat, chewing on an unlit ciggy, his white hair on end like a mat of antennae. Describing him to someone once, Jane had said: ‘You need to start by imagining Bart Simpson as an old man.’

  The lane dipped, darkening, into a channel between lines of forestry. The old rectory appeared on the left, in its clearing. Merrily kept her eyes on the narrowing road. How would she have reacted if she’d turned then and seen a pale movement in a window? She gripped the wheel, forestalling a shudder.

  ‘Not a soul, vicar,’ Gomer observed ambivalently.

  ‘Right.’ Her voice was huskier than she would have liked. The towering conifers were oppressive. ‘This must be the only part of Britain where you plunge into the trees when you leave the Forest.’

  ‘Ar, we all growed up never thinkin’ a forest had much to do with trees.’

  Merrily slowed at the mud-flecked Old Hindwell sign. A grey poster with white lettering had been attached to its stem.

  ‘Christ is the Light!’

  That hadn’t been there on Saturday either. She accelerated for the hill up to the village. Halfway up, to the right, the tower of the old church suddenly filled a gap in the horizon of pines. It was like a grey figure standing there.

  The manifestation of a truly insidious evil in our midst.

  A seriously inflammatory thing to say – Ellis playing it for all it was worth.

  She’d read the Daily Mail story twice. Robin Thorogood sounded typical of the type of pagan recruited for Livenight. Primarily political, and an anarchist – what they used to call in Liverpool a tear-arse – but not necessarily insidiously evil. She wondered what his wife was like; no picture of her in the paper.

  Sophie had said, The bishop would like you to point out to whoever it might concern that, while this might have previously been a church, it is also now this couple’s private property, and they do not appear to be breaking any laws – which the Reverend Ellis and his followers might well be doing if any of them sets foot inside it.

  Merrily slowed to a crawl at the side road to the church and farm. This was where you might have expected to find a lychgate. There was a small parking area, and then an ordinary, barred farm gate. She saw that, while St Michael’s Church had never been exactly in a central position, trees and bushes had been allowed to grow around what was presumably the churchyard, hedging it off from the village. Somewhere in there, also, was the brook providing another natural barrier.

  They moved on up the hill. ‘I wouldn’t mind taking a look at that place without drawing attention. Would that be possible, Gomer?’

  ‘Sure t’be. There’s a bit of an ole footpath following the brook from the other side. They opened him up a bit for the harchaeologists last summer, so we oughter be able to park a good way in.’

  ‘You know everything, don’t you?’

  ‘Ah, well, reason I knows this, vicar, is my nephew, Nev, he got brought in to shovel a few tons o’ soil and clay back when the harchaeologists was finished. I give Nev a bell last night. Good money, he reckoned, but a lot o’ waitin’ around. Bugger me, vicar, look at that...’

  Merrily braked. There was a cottage on the right, almost on the road
. It had small windows, lace-curtained, but in one of the downstairs ones the curtains had been pushed back and a candle was alight. Although the forestry was thinning, it was dark enough here for the flame to be visible from quite a distance. Power cut?

  Not exactly. The candle was fixed on a pewter tray, which itself sat on a thick, black book, almost certainly a Bible. Christ is the Light.

  ‘Annie Smith lives there,’ Gomer said. ‘She’s a widow. Percy Smith, he had a little timber business, died ten year ago. Their boy, Mansel, he took it over but he en’t doin’ too well. Deals mostly in firewood now, for wood-burners and such.’

  Merrily stopped the car just past the cottage. ‘She overtly religious, this Annie Smith?’

  ‘Never made a thing of it, if she is. But local people sticks together on things, see. Gareth Prosser goes along with the rector, say, then the rest of ’em en’t gonner go the other way. It’s a border thing: when the Welsh was fightin’ the English, the border folk’d be on the fence till they figured out which side was gonner be first to knock the ole fence down, see. And that was the side they’d jump down on. But they’d all jump together, see.’

  ‘Border logic.’

  ‘Don’t matter they hates each other’s guts the rest o’ the time, they jumps together. All about survival, vicar.’

  ‘And does Gareth Prosser go along with the rector?’

  ‘They d’say he’s got one o’ them Christ stickers in the back of his Land Rover.’

  ‘What does that mean, then?’

  ‘Means he’s got a sticker,’ Gomer said.

  Before they reached the village centre, they’d passed five homes with candles burning in their windows, and two of them with Bibles stood on end, gilt crosses facing outwards. A fat church candle gleamed greasily in the window of the post office. Merrily, usually at home with Bibles and candles, found this uncanny. We don’t do this kind of thing any more.

  ‘It’s medieval, Gomer. One couple. One pagan couple – OK, young, confrontational, but still just one couple. Then it’s like there’s a contagious disease about, and you put a candle in the window if it’s safe to go inside. Is this village... I mean, is it normally... normal?’

  ‘Just a village like any other yereabouts.’ He pondered a moment. ‘No, that en’t right. Ole Hindwell was always a bit set apart. Not part o’ the Valley, not quite in the Forest. Seen better times – used to ’ave a little school an’ a blacksmith. Same as there used t’be a church, ennit? But villages around yere, they grows and wanes. I never seen it as not normal.’

  A big, white-haired man was walking up the hill, carrying something on his shoulder.

  ‘They d’say he does a bit o’ healin’,’ Gomer said.

  ‘Ellis? Laying on of hands at the end of the services?’

  At the Big Bible Fest in Warwickshire, the spiritual energy generated by power prayer and singing in tongues would often be channelled into healing, members of the congregations stepping up with various ailments and chronic conditions and often claiming remarkable relief afterwards. It was this aspect Merrily had most wanted to believe in, but she suspected that, when the euphoria faded, the pain would usually return and she hated to hear people who failed to make it out of their wheelchairs being told that their faith was not strong enough.

  ‘They reckons he does a bit o’ house-to-house. And it en’t just normal sickness either.’

  ‘Know any specific cases?’ A snatch of conversation came back to her from Minnie’s funeral tea at Ledwardine village hall. Boy gets picked up by the police, with a pocketful o’ these bloody ecstersee. Up in court... Dennis says, ‘That’s it, boy, you stay under my roof you can change your bloody ways. We’re gonner go an’ see the bloody rector...’

  When the big man stepped into the middle of the road and swung round, the item on his shoulder was revealed to be a large grey video camera. He took a step back, to take in the empty, sloping street, where the only movement was the flickering of the candles. He stood with his legs apart, recording the silent scene – looking like the sheriff in a western in the seconds before doors flew open and figures appeared, shooting.

  No doors opened. Clouds hung low and heavy; there was little light left in the sky; the weather was co-operating with the candles. The cameraman shot the scene at leisure.

  ‘TV news,’ Merrily said. ‘There’ll be a reporter around somewhere, too. I’m supposed to make myself known to them.’

  Gomer nodded towards the cameraman. ‘Least that tells you why there’s no bugger about. Nobody yere’s gonner wanner explain on telly about them candles.’

  Even if they could, Merrily thought.

  ‘What you wanner do, vicar?’

  ‘It’s not what I want to do,’ Merrily said, ‘but I do have to talk to the Reverend Nick Ellis. He lives on the estate. Would that be...?’

  Past the pub, about a hundred yards out of the village centre, were eight semi-detached houses on the same side of the road.

  ‘That’s the estate.’ Gomer pointed, as they approached.

  Merrily parked in front of the first house. Though these were once council houses, fancy gates, double glazing and new front doors showed that most of them had been purchased.

  They all had candles in the windows.

  Only one house, fairly central, kept its maroon, standard-issue front door and flaking metal gates. It was the only one still looking like a council house. Except for the cross on the door: wood, painted gold, and nailed on.

  There was a large jeep crowding the brief drive. A sticker over a nameplate on the gate announced that Christ was the Light. In the single downstairs window, two beeswax candles burned, in trays, on Bibles.

  Merrily had heard that Ellis was living in a council house because, when he’d given up his churches, he’d also given up his rectory. The Church paid the rent on this modest new manse. A small price to pay per head of congregation, and it wouldn’t do Ellis’s image any harm at all, and he would know that.

  She felt a pulse of fury. From singing in tongues to erecting a wall of silence, this man had turned a whole community, dozens maybe hundreds of people, against a couple who hadn’t yet been here long enough for anyone really to know them. The Thorogoods would need to be very hard-faced to survive it.

  27

  Spirit of Salem

  ‘THIS IS NO COINCIDENCE,’ George said on the phone. ‘This is fate. We all know what tomorrow is.’

  ‘Probably the last day of my freaking marriage.’

  ‘You have to go with it, Robin. We can turn this round. We can make it a triumph.’

  Robin wanted to scream that he couldn’t give a shit about Imbolc; he just wanted things to come right again with his wife, some work to bring in some money, his religious beliefs no longer to be national news. He just wanted to become a boring, obscure person.

  In the background, the old fax machine huffed and whizzed. He watched the paper emerge.

  Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live

  Poison faxes? Creepy Bible quotes? Someone had unleashed the Christian propaganda machine. The spirit of Salem living on.

  ‘It’s all our fault, man,’ George said.

  ‘Not your fault. Vivvie’s fault.’

  ‘I share the blame. I was there too. I also now share the responsibility for getting you and Betty through this.’

  ‘We could maybe get through this, George, if people would just leave us the fuck alone.’

  He wasn’t so sure about that, though, the way Betty was behaving.

  By nine a.m. the answering machine had taken calls from BBC Wales, Radio Hereford and Worcester, HTV, Central News, BBC Midlands and 5 Live. And from some flat-voiced kid who said he was a pagan too and would like to pledge his support and his magic.

  Already they were starting to come to the front door. By eleven a.m., there’d been four people knocking. He hadn’t answered. Instead he’d closed the curtains and sat in the dimness, hugging the Rayburn. He’d listened to the answering machine, intercepting jus
t this one call from George.

  The whole damn story was truly out; it had been on all the radio stations and breakfast TV. Was also out on the World Wide Web, with e-mails of support – according to George – coming from Native Americans in Canada and pagans as far away as India. George claimed that already this confrontation was being seen as a rallying flashpoint for ethnic worshippers of all persuasions. Strength and courage were being transmitted to them from all over the world.

  ‘We don’t want it,’ Robin told George. ‘We came here for a quiet life. Pretty soon I’m gonna take the phone off the hook and unplug the fax.’

  ‘In that case,’ George said, ‘surely it’s better that the people you know—’

  ‘You mean people you know. Listen, George, just hold off, can you do that? I would need to talk to Betty.’

  ‘When’s she going to be back?’

  ‘I don’t know when she’s gonna be back. She’s mad at me. She thinks I screwed up with the Mail guys. I think I screwed up with the Mail guys. I’m mad at me.’

  ‘You need support, man. And there’s a lot of Craft brothers and Craft sisters who want to give you some. I tell you, there’s an unbelievable amount of strong feeling about this. It’ll be very much a question of stopping people coming out there.’

  ‘Well you fucking better stop them.’

  ‘Plus, the opposition, of course,’ George said. ‘We don’t know how many they are or where they’re coming from.’

  Robin peered round the edge of the curtain at the puddles in the farmyard and along the side of the barn. It looked bleak, it looked desolate. In spite of all the courage and strength being beamed at them, it looked lonely as hell. Sure he felt vulnerable; how could he not?

  When he sighed, it came out rough, with a tremor underneath it.

  ‘How many were you thinking?’

  ‘Well, we need a coven,’ George had said. ‘I’ll find eleven good people which, with you and Betty makes... the right number. We could be there by nightfall. Don’t worry about accommodation, we’ll have at least two camper vans. We’ll bring food and wine and everything we need to deck out the church for Imbolc. Be the greatest Imbolc ever, Robin. We’ll set the place alight.’