by Phil Rickman
It was three weeks after this that Terry had that visit from Councillor Prosser, wondering why he hadn’t applied for a grant towards the upkeep of the old building.
Two weeks later, Terry trashed the church.
What had happened, Danny said, was that one night Terry came to the conclusion that God wanted him to go alone into St Michael’s, Old Hindwell, and open himself to revelation.
In fact, drop some acid.
Danny had obtained the LSD for Terry from Dr Coll. The price had gone up by then, acid being in demand, but Terry didn’t care. In fact, the idea of the priest taking a trip in his own parish church bothered Danny more than Terry.
‘For starters, he wouldn’t ’ave nobody with him. Dr Coll was back home at the time, but Terry wouldn’t ’ave him to supervise – nor me. Had to be just him an’ God, see. Terry reckoned nothin’ bad was gonner happen to him in the house of God. But me, I wouldn’t’ve gone in there alone at night in a million year, with or without drugs – creepy ole place like that.’
‘Bad trip?’
‘Had a bad one meself, few months later,’ Danny said. ‘Kept gettin’ flashbacks for bloody weeks. Scared the shit out o’ me. Anyway, the next time I seen Terry, the boy was a mess. Hadn’t shaved, din’t smell too good. Smelt of fear, you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know what ’appened to Terry Penney that night. I just sits in yere, hammering buggery out o’ the ole Les Paul and I remembers the good times.’
‘You must have asked him about it?’
‘Terry din’t wanner talk about it at all, vicar. Kept ’isself to ’isself. And then they finds bits o’ church floatin’ down the brook, and Terry’s gone. I used to wonder whether the boy seen the carvings on the wood screen come alive, or whether he seen... I dunno...’
‘The dragon?’ Merrily said.
‘He seen St Michael out in that field. Mabbe ’e seen the dragon in ’is own church?’
Merrily recalled the William Blake print in Nick Ellis’s war room. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun – relating to an image from Revelation about the dragon waiting for the woman to give birth so that it could devour the child. The dragon was said to have seven heads and ten horns. It was not a nice dragon, and Blake’s painting throbbed with a transcendent evil.
‘I don’t know how much of this Ellis knows,’ Merrily said, telling them as they sat around the kitchen table, ‘but it would account for a lot. If he believes Penney had a black vision of the dragon inside that church – Satan rising, or in his view paganism rising – and if we believe what he told me about being the subject of some kind of hate campaign, forecasting a return of the dragon...’
Poison-pen letters for months. And phone calls – cackling voices in the night. Recently had a jagged scratch removed from my car bonnet. Series of chevrons... like a dragon’s back.
‘... then, to him, Betty, you and Robin are the embodiment of something that already exists in those ruins on a metaphysical level.’
‘It’s not true, though,’ Betty said. ‘We didn’t know anything about Penney. We didn’t even know for certain that the church had been built on an ancient site until we’d bought it.’
‘How do you know that now?’
‘Well, after we learned about all the prehistoric archaeology in the area, it seemed like it was on the cards. Also – this probably won’t cut much ice with you – a friend of ours went round with a dowsing rod and pendulum.’
‘Jane, do we have an Ordnance Survey map handy?’
‘Brilliant!’ Jane leapt up.
Mr Penney came out with what was described to me as a lot of nonsensical gobbledegook relating to the layout of churches around Radnor Forest.
Betty said that Robin had tried to work out a pattern on the map, but they had been aware of only three St Michael churches at the time.
‘OK.’ Jane had returned with the map, spread it out on the table. ‘You’ll have to help me out here, Gomer. Where’s Cascob?’
Gomer found it after a bit of peering. He also found St Michael’s, Cefnllys, then Llanfihangel Rhydithon and Llanfihangel nant Melan. Jane encircled them – along with Old Hindwell (ruins of).
‘Five now.’ Jane drew a ring round the last one. ‘And they do go right around the Forest.’
Betty was silently contemplating the map. ‘It’s too big, this,’ she said at last. You wouldn’t have anything smaller scale?’
‘Only a road map.’ Jane bounced up again. ‘I’ll get it.’
‘And some paper?’ Betty said.
Neither Cascob nor Cefnllys was marked on the road map, but she put circles on the approximate spots, and pushed the map and the paper and a pencil towards Betty.
Betty copied the pattern onto the paper. ‘It’s not perfect, but it’s there.’
‘It’s a five-pointed star,’ Merrily said. ‘A pentagram.’ She looked at Betty. ‘Can you explain?’
Betty swallowed. ‘Could I have another cigarette?’
Merrily lit it for her. Betty was now looking uncertain, perhaps worried.
‘If these churches were built to form not a circle but a five-pointed star, that would represent a defensive thing, OK? The pentagram’s a powerful protective symbol. It’s used in banishing rituals. Like if you’re faced with... an evil entity... and you draw a big pentagram in the air, it ought to go away. So the medieval Christians might have wanted to enclose Radnor Forest in a giant pentagram of St Michael churches for the purpose of containing the dragon. Or whatever the dragon represented for them.’
‘It’s hardly a perfect pentagram,’ Merrily pointed out. ‘It could be purely coincidental.’
But then, she thought, in Ellis’s ministry, nothing is coincidental.
‘There’s another connection here,’ Betty said, ‘with Cascob. The word “abracadabra” is used in a charm – an exorcism – which was found buried in the churchyard. The word “abracadabra” has become devalued because of all those stage conjurors using it, but it’s actually very, very old and very powerful, and it’s believed to represent the pentagram because it contains the letter “A” five times. And if you put the “A”s together...’ Betty pulled Jane’s pencil and paper across and drew:
‘Cool,’ Jane said.
‘Actually, it’s not,’ Betty said soberly. ‘The defensive, white magic pentagram has the point at the top. What you’ve just found on the map is an inverted pentagram.’ She put down the pencil and looked at Merrily. ‘I don’t think I need to explain what that means.’
‘No.’ Merrily pulled out a cigarette. ‘Probably not.’
Jane looked mystified. ‘You mean it’s like an aggressive thing?’
Betty said, ‘It tended to be used in black magic. See the horns? Even pagans accept that horns are not invariably a good sign. Look... I went to Cascob the other day. That exorcism’s displayed on the wall, in a frame. It dates back to about seventeen hundred, and was used to purge a woman called Elizabeth Loyd of evil spirits and alleged assaults of the Devil. I... got a bad feeling from it.’
‘In what way?’
Betty looked embarrassed.
‘You mean the exorcism itself?’
‘I don’t know. My first thought was that Elizabeth Loyd was just some poor epileptic or schizophrenic girl who somebody decided must be possessed. Then I... got the feeling that maybe she did have something... satanic... inside her. I don’t know. The wording was a mixture of Roman Catholic and pagan and cabbalistic references.’
‘Oh?’
‘A combination of religion and magic, therefore. I suppose what really scared me was that the words were so very similar to the ones used in a charm that was found in a box concealed in an old fireplace at our house. And that one was dated over a century later. Nothing had changed.’
Nothing had changed.
Nothing changes. Merrily tried to focus. There was something very important here.
‘You found this charm?’
‘No, it was del
ivered to us. The box was placed on our doorstep just after we moved in. It spooked us quite a bit, because it was a charm against witchcraft. It seemed to be saying, “We know what you are and we know how to deal with you.” There was a note with it, signed “The Local People”.’
‘Nasty,’ Jane murmured.
‘The wording of this exorcism,’ Merrily said, ‘do you remember how it went?’
‘It invoked God and the Trinity. It said it would deliver Elizabeth Loyd from all witchcraft and spirits and hardness of heart. It had Roman Catholic stuff, kind of Ave Maria, and it used these cabbalistic names of power – Tetragrammaton, the mighty name of God.’
‘Did it really?’
‘That means something?’
‘I don’t know. OK, something else... Cascob. Apparently, Penney approached the then vicar or rector of Cascob and suggested he get his church decommissioned. He talked about the St Michael churches around Radnor Forest. The vicar reminded him of a folk tale implying that if one of those churches were destroyed it would allow the dragon to escape.’
‘Right.’
‘Penney said it was... quite the reverse.’
‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘like the reverse pentagram. I don’t get it.’
‘Nor me.’ Merrily stared at the irregular star of churches. ‘Whether the churches were intended to be a circle and just happened to fall into this rather vague star shape... or whether it’s all complete coincidence. And, when you think about it, if you turn the map upside down, it’s not inverted any more, is it?’
‘Wrong!’ Jane cried. ‘Because pagans always work to the north, right, Betty? Their altars are north-facing. The two prongs, the horns, are pointing north.’
Merrily nodded, with reluctance. ‘Yeah, OK. I think it’s at least fair to say that Penney became convinced this was bad news. If his LSD experience – and, in those days, the feeling was that this wasn’t just another drug – if his experience convinced him that the unfortunate layout of the churches invited the old serpent to slither in... then that would explain why he was so determined to destroy the pattern by taking out one of the churches.’
‘I wonder how much of this Ellis knows?’ Betty said.
Possibly quite a lot, Merrily thought. She was considering the distinctly medieval aspects of Ellis’s unnecessary exorcism of Marianne Starkey.
She dreamed, through most of that night it seemed, in colour.
Deep velvet purples and wild, slashing yellows. Abstract images, and then the church at Old Hindwell, vibrating blue against a pink evening sky. White-clad Ellis and his followers walking like pilgrims through the woods with their Bibles and bottles of holy water to exorcize the pagan place by night. Betty, in a robe of pale mauve.
Jesus Christ screaming on the cross.
Fire sizzling. Yellow fire in the kindling. The robe shrivelled and blackened. Betty’s golden hair alight.
At the foot of the cross, Marianne Starkey in a torn white nightdress, blood-flecked.
Out of a dream full of savage heat, Merrily awoke into the cold. The sizzling became the metallic rattle of night hail on the bedroom window. Merrily wrapped herself in the too-thin duvet and prayed for the blue and the gold, but they wouldn’t come.
41
The Kindling in the Forest
IT WAS DAWN.
Max led Robin out, through his own house, through the mingled aromas of incense and marijuana, out through the kitchen, past the Rayburn on which sat the remains of a pot of fragrant stew tended last night by Alexandra, past sleeping people in sleeping bags.
Robin, as if sleepwalking, his mind disconnected.
He followed Max across the cold yard, in between the oily pools, past the barn, five cars as well as the Winnebagos parked in front of it now, including the Subaru Justy. There was an intermittent sleet.
‘I thought it was meant to be cold and sharp and fine.’
‘Give it time,’ said Max.
In fact, the sky was not so dark: there was a curdled-milk moon under thin cloud and a pale, muddy glow in the east. It was February, and the blackest night of Celtic winter was supposed to be over.
The fuck it was over. Robin stared, for the first time with resentment, at the church: big and bare. The tower was lamp black. The sky in the north and west was burnt umber.
Robin had spent the night in his studio, but had hardly slept. He hadn’t shaved for two days. He didn’t want to be here any more, not without Betty. Without Betty there could be no light.
A short while ago, he’d been aroused from a miserable doze by a tapping on the door, and there was big, beardy, flutey-voiced Max, and he said, ‘Oh, Robin, I’m sorry to disturb you so early, but we have to discuss tonight.’
‘Max, how many ways can I say this? If there was no tonight, I would not be awfully gutted.’
Max was nodding solemnly, the asshole. ‘I understand. I do understand, Robin. I would give anything to have Betty back, but if she has a problem with all this, it’s perhaps as well she stays away, and she probably knows that.’
‘Oh, that’s what you think, is it?’
Betty had to be someplace close. She couldn’t have gone far, unless she’d called for a cab. And then where? Back to Shrewsbury? Back to her parents in Yorkshire, who’d barely spoken to her since she gave up her career for the Craft? Maybe she was staying with the widow Wilshire.
He’d thought she would at least’ve phoned. He’d had the phone and the answering machine in his studio all night, but all he heard were good wishes from supporters he didn’t know, threats from enemies he didn’t know, offers from media people – even one call from some private TV production company suggesting the Thorogoods might like to discuss the possibility of a docusoap series about the day-to-day lives of witches. What did these guys think their average day was like, for Chrissakes – they had breakfast in their ceremonial robes, went down to the shops hand in hand, skyclad, then sang ‘The Witches’ Rune’ together in the tub before having tantric sex in front of an open fire?
Max was bleating on, ‘... would have been a problem with numbers but, as usually happens when something is meant, it’s been solved.’
‘Solved?’ Robin said vaguely.
‘I want you to come and meet someone.’
A Tilley lamp stood on one of the old tombstones in what had been the chancel, about where the Christian altar was originally located. Presumably the Reverend Penney had hurled the altar in the creek with the rest of the stuff – or had he baulked at that?
When Max and Robin walked into the nave, George Webster was saying to someone, ‘Yeah, I see your point. The problem is, this whole building, being Christian, is oriented on the east. We can either go with that or we can just pretend the building isn’t here at all and work with the site geophysically. You know what I mean?’
‘So which do you think, George?’ A man’s voice, smooth. ‘You’re the geomancer.’
‘I think there’s got to be a compromise somewhere.’
‘No,’ the man said firmly. ‘Oh no, no compromise. We either use their altar and change the current, or we build our own to the north and work, as you say, with the site.’
‘Ah... Ned.’ Max sounded like a hesitant owl. ‘I’ve brought Robin Thorogood.’
Ned Bain, pagan publisher, king-witch in all but title, came out into the lamplight. Robin had never seen him before. His face looked white in the gaseous Tilley light, but it was strong and lean and kind of genial. His hair was tight and curly. He had on a dark suit with a dark shirt underneath, kind of priesty – like church priesty.
‘Hi.’ He gripped Robin’s arm.
‘Hello.’
‘I do like your name. It evokes Robin Goodfellow, the hobgoblin. Is it your given name?’
‘Sure.’
‘Someone’s prescience? And I very much like your work.’
‘Well, uh... thanks.’ Despite the temperature, Robin’s arm felt warm all the way to the shoulder, even after Bain let it go.
‘This place i
nspires you?’
‘I guess.’
‘It should do. It’s an important site. It’s an axis.’ Bain’s voice was one peg down from smooth and refined, maybe a tad camp, but not enough to deter the ladies, Robin guessed. He felt faintly uncomfortable about the heat in his arm.
‘Listen, Robin, I’m grateful for what you’re doing. I know this has got to be a strain. I mean physically, psychically, domestically.’
‘Uh... yeah, domestically, sure.’
‘But I can’t tell you how important it is, mate.’ Bain was standing on the tombstone next to the lamp, casual, on someone’s grave. His eyes found Robin’s. Couldn’t see those eyes but they’d found him and they held him. ‘This is our religion. We are the religion of the British Isles. All these church sites are our sites.’
‘Right. Uh, I’ve been kind of out of it... You just drive over here or were you here last night?’
‘No, I was in a hotel last night. I think you were already crowded enough, weren’t you? I drove over this morning. I wanted to watch the sun rise here. And to see the place in the dark. I’m sorry, I should’ve asked your permission.’
‘Uh, no, that’s...’
Max said, ‘The point is, we have to get this right. Old Hindwell’s a crucial test case, and if we’re seen to back down before this man Ellis, it’ll set the Craft back years... decades, even.’
Robin glanced at George. George was looking up over the walls of the nave towards the moon. Robin guessed George had told Ned Bain all about Betty walking out and Robin coming to pieces. He’d been set up for a pep talk. Trouble was, it was working. Bain had magnetism, even in the dark – maybe especially in the dark. Also he had a certain instant gravitas: when Max talked, you thought bullshit; but if Ned laid something on you, you were inclined to accept its importance.
