A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Making a statement?’

  ‘Yeah. After centuries of holding ceremonies discreetly in the woods and behind curtains in suburban back rooms, we’re coming out.’

  They’d met in the decaying copse, Merrily walking from the old archaeological site, where Gomer had parked, Betty coming across the bridge from the farmhouse and joining the footpath.

  The sky had dulled, low clouds pocketing the sunken sun, and you could feel the dusk, carrying spores of frost. Betty looked cold. Merrily tightened her scarf.

  ‘Bain still wants to do it naked?’

  ‘Possibly. They’ll light a small fire inside a circle of stones in the open nave. Dance back to back with arms linked behind. Not as silly as it sounds. After a while you don’t feel it. You’re aglow.’

  Like singing in tongues, Merrily thought. A long, flat cloud lay over the church now, like a wide-brimmed hat. From the other side of the ruins, beyond the pines and the Sitka spruce, they could hear the sounds of a hymn: straggly singing, off-key. The Christians at the gate.

  ‘They’re going to keep that up all night long, aren’t they?’ Betty said.

  ‘You’ve heard nothing yet. There are scores more in the village now.’

  ‘Bad.’ Betty shivered. ‘Ned believes the spiritual tension will fuel the rite. He says we can appropriate their energy. That is way, way out of order.’ She shook herself. ‘I need to get them out of here, lock the gates and... try and save my marriage.’

  ‘Will you stay here... afterwards?’

  Betty shook her head. ‘We won’t survive this. We’ll lose everything we’ve got with that house, but I don’t care if we’re destitute. Only problem is, I’m going to feel guilty about anyone else living here. I wish we could sell it to a waste disposal firm or something.’

  ‘But we’re going to deal with that,’ Merrily said firmly.

  ‘No. It was very stupid of me to ask you.’ Betty looked at her, green eyes sorrowful, without hope. ‘I wasn’t thinking. This is part of a prehistoric ritual complex. We don’t know who or what those original inhabitants were, but they chose their sites well. They knew all the doorways. Can’t you feel the earth and the air fusing together as it gets dark? This is a place that knows itself – but we don’t know it. Can’t you hear it?’

  ‘Just the singing,’ Merrily admitted.

  ‘I can hear a constant low humming now. I know it’s in my head, but it’s this place that’s put it there. We don’t know what went on here, nobody does. There are no stones left standing, only the holes where they were... and that church. And whatever – metaphorically, if you like – is underneath that church. And whatever it is, it’s much older than Christianity.’

  ‘And much, much older than Wicca?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Sure. We were invented in the fifties and sixties by well-meaning people who knew there was no continuous tradition. Most of Wicca’s either made up or culled from Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune. It has no tradition. There. I’ve said it. Is that what you wanted?’

  The singing was already louder; more Christians had arrived.

  ‘There’s a tradition here,’ Merrily said, ‘of sorts. A strand of something that goes back at least to medieval times. Unfortunately, it seems to have been preserved by my lot.’

  ‘Yeah. You can certainly feel it in Cascob. Oh, and St Michael’s, Cefnllys. I meant to tell you – I looked this up – that when they eventually built a new church at Llandrindod the rector had the roof taken off Cefnllys Church to stop people worshipping there.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘It was in a book. I suddenly remembered it from when I was a kid in Llandrindod. So I looked it up. I mean, was he thinking like Penney? Did they both feel the breath of the dragon? Probably didn’t understand any of it, but something scared them badly. Now people like Ned Bain are coming along and saying: it’s OK, it’s fine, its cool... because we’re the dragon. Do you still want to go in there with your holy water?’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Any time after... I dunno, nine? If you don’t come, I’ll understand. Who’s that?’

  It was a vehicle, creaking over the footpath, where it had been widened by the archaeologists. Merrily ran to the edge of the copse. She could see Gomer’s ancient Land Rover parked the other side, with Gomer leaning on the bonnet, smoking a roll-up, watching the new vehicle trundling towards him. It was Sophie’s Saab.

  48

  Black Christianity

  NO CANDLES? THE candles had gone from the windows. Not just gone out, but gone: the trays, the Bibles, everything.

  At first, it seemed an encouraging sign, and then Merrily thought, It isn’t. It isn’t at all. In the face of the invasion, the local people had withdrawn, disconnected; whatever happened tonight would not be their fault.

  It was about five-fifty p.m. The post office and shop had closed, there were few lights in the cottages. Only the pub was conspicuously active; otherwise Old Hindwell, under dark forestry and the hump of Burfa Hill, had retracted into itself, leaving the streets to them from Off.

  The multitude!

  In the centre of the village, maybe three or four-hundred people had gathered in front of the former school. They had Christian placards and torches and lamps. They were not singing hymns. They seemed leaderless.

  Gomer put the Land Rover at the side of the road, in front of the entrance to the pub’s yard, where it said ‘No Parking’. The car park was so full that none of the coaches would get out until several cars were removed. Two dark blue police vans lurked inside the school gates. Four TV crews hovered.

  The minority of pagans here seemed to be the kind with green hair and eyebrow rings. Maybe twenty of them, in bunches – harmless probably. One group, squatting outside the pub, were chanting ‘Harken to the Witches’ Rune’, to the hollow thump of a hand drum.

  ‘Sad,’ Jane commented. She and Eirion were in the back of the Land Rover; Merrily sat next to Gomer in the front. ‘They’re just playing at it, just being annoying.’

  ‘You’ll be joining the Young Conservatives next, flower.’

  ‘But those so-called Christians really make me sick. They’re tossers, holier-than-thou gits.’

  ‘Phew,’ Merrily said. Through the wing mirror, she saw Sophie’s Saab pulling in behind them. Sophie didn’t get out.

  Eirion said, ‘What do you want us to do, Mrs Watkins?’

  ‘Just stay with Gomer and Sophie. Perhaps you could get something to eat in the pub?’

  Jane was dismayed. ‘That’s all the thanks we get? A mouldy cheese sandwich and a can of Coke?’

  ‘Don’t think I’m not immensely grateful for what you two and Sophie’ve uncovered. Just that I need to put it to Ellis by myself. If there are any witnesses, he won’t even talk to me.’

  They’d talked intently for over an hour in the Land Rover, listened to a cassette recording of a phone call involving Sophie and some journalist in Tennessee, and then Merrily had watched as Betty, now armed with many things she hadn’t known about Ned Bain, had walked away into the last of the dusk, not looking back.

  Merrily leaned against the Land Rover’s passenger door, and it opened with a savage rending sound.

  ‘How long will you be?’ Jane asked.

  ‘As long as it takes. He hasn’t even shown yet. An hour and a half maybe?’

  ‘And then we come looking for you?’

  ‘And then do whatever Gomer tells you.’

  The crazy violence seemed to start as soon as Merrily’s feet touched the tarmac: lights flaring, a woman’s scream, a beer can thrown. A black cross reared out of a mesh of torch beams amid a tangle of angry voices.

  ‘... finished, you fuckers. Had your time. Christ was a wanker!’

  ‘... your level, isn’t it? The gutter! Get out of my—’

  Sickening crunch of bone on flesh. Blood geysering up.

  ‘Oh dear God—’

  ‘So why don’t you just fuck off back to your churches, ’fore we have ’em all off
you?’

  ‘Stand back!’

  ‘Reverend?’ A hand pulling Merrily back, as the police came through.

  ‘Marianne?’

  She was pushed. ‘Stand back, please. Everybody, back!’

  Headlights arriving. Then Collard Banks-Morgan with his medical bag. Next to him, a man in a dark suit. Not a white monk’s habit, but a dark suit.

  A woman shrieked, ‘You’ll be damned for ever!’ and started to cry.

  ‘Listen, Reverend,’ Marianne said calmly. ‘I’m better now.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Things you oughta know.’ She pulled Merrily into the yard.

  She followed when they took the man with the broken nose into the surgery. A woman too, spattered with his blood, wailing, Ellis’s arm around her. ‘He’s in good hands, sister. The best.’

  In the waiting room, the lighting was harsh, the seats old and hard, the ceiling still school-hall high, with cream-painted metal girders. A woman receptionist smiled smugly through a hatch in the wall. ‘Come through,’ Dr Coll sang, voice like muzak. ‘Bring him through, that’s right.’

  Doors slammed routinely. There were health posters all over the walls: posters to make you feel ill, paranoid, dependent. No surprise that Dr Coll had taken over the school, a local bastion of authority and wisdom.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Merrily said to Ellis.

  ‘I’m sure you would, Mrs Watkins,’ he said briskly, ‘but I don’t have the time or the interest to talk to you. You’re a vain and stupid woman.’ Under his suit he wore a black shirt, no tie, no clerical collar.

  ‘What happened to your messiah kit?’

  ‘Libby, tell Dr Coll I’ll talk to him later,’ Ellis said to the receptionist.

  Merrily said, ‘There’s going to be trouble out there.’ She waited as Ellis dabbed with a tissue at a small blood speck on his sleeve. ‘Are you going to stop them marching to the church?’

  ‘Who am I,’ he said, ‘to stop anyone?’

  ‘You started it. You lit the blue touchpaper.’

  ‘The media started it. As you say, it’s already out of hand. It’d be highly irresponsible of me to inflame it further. Now, if you don’t mind...’

  ‘You could stop them. You could stop it now. It isn’t worth it for a crumbling old building with a bad reputation.’

  ‘I’d lock the door after us if I were you, Libby,’ Ellis said to the receptionist.

  ‘I’ll do that, Father.’

  Ellis held open the main door for Merrily, looking over her head. ‘After you.’ She didn’t move. ‘Don’t make me ask the police to come in,’ Ellis said.

  ‘Could you clear up a few points for me, Nick?’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  She had no confidence for this, still couldn’t quite believe it.

  ‘ “I am a brother to dragons”,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Go away.’ He didn’t look at her, opened the door wider.

  ‘Book of Job.’

  ‘I do know the Book of Job.’

  The sounds of the street outside came in, carried on cold air, sounds alien to Old Hindwell – shouts, jeers, a man’s unstable voice, on high, ‘May God have mercy on you!’

  ‘I think your real name is Simon Wesson,’ Merrily said. ‘You went out to the States with your mother and sister in the mid-seventies, after the death of your stepfather. Over there, your mother married an evangelist called Marshall McAllman. You later became his personal assistant. He made a lot of money before he was exposed and disgraced and your mother divorced him – very lucratively, I believe.’

  She couldn’t look at him while she was saying all this, terrified that it was going to be wrong, that Jane and Eirion had found the wrong person, that the journalist whose voice Sophie had so efficiently recorded was talking about someone with no connection at all to Nicholas Ellis.

  ‘McAllman concentrated on little backwoods communities. His technique was to do thorough research before he brought his show to town. He’d employ investigators. And although he would appear aloof when he first arrived...’

  None of your good-old-boy stuff from Marshall, the journalist had told Sophie on the tape. Marshall was cool, Marshall was laid-back, Marshall would target a town that was hungry and he’d spread a table and he’d check into a hotel and sit back and wait for them to come sniffing and drooling...

  ‘... his remoteness only added to his mystique. They came to him – the local dignitaries, the civic leaders, the business people – and he passed on, almost reluctantly, what the Holy Spirit had communicated to him about them and their lives and their past and their future... and he convinced them that they and their town were riddled with all kinds of demons.’

  Merrily focused on a wall poster about the symptoms of meningitis. She spoke in a low voice, could see Libby the receptionist straining to hear while pretending to rearrange leaflets behind the window of her hutch.

  ‘Time and time again, the local people would pull Marshall into the bosom of the community, everyone begging him to take away their demons, and their children’s demons... especially the daughters, those wayward kids. A little internal ministry... well, it beats abortion. He was a prophet and a local hero in different localities. He only went to selected places, little, introverted, no-hope places with poor communications – the places that were gagging for it.’

  The print on the meningitis poster began to blur. She turned at last to look up at Ellis, his nose lifted in disdain, but she could see his hand whitening around the doorknob.

  ‘He taught you a lot, Nick, about the psychology of rural communities. And about manipulation. Plus, he gave you the inner strength and the brass neck to come back to this country and finally take on your hated, still-vengeful stepbrother.’

  She stood in the doorway and waited.

  Ellis closed the door again.

  In the Black Lion, Jane saw Gomer was talking at the bar to a fat man of about thirty in a thick plaid shirt that came down halfway to his knees. At their table by the door, Sophie gathered her expensive and elegant camel coat over her knees to protect them from the draught.

  ‘I’d take you two back to Hereford with me, if I thought you’d stay put in the office.’

  ‘No chance.’ Jane ripped open a bag of crisps, stretched out her legs.

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen here, Jane,’ Sophie said. ‘The whole thing comes down to two obsessive men settling a childhood grudge.’

  ‘But what a grudge, Sophie. Serious, serious hatred fermenting for over a quarter of a century. A fundamentalist bigot and a warlock steeped in old magic. A white witch and a black Christian.’

  ‘Jane!’

  ‘He is. If you, like, subvert Christianity, if you use it aggressively to try and hurt or crush people of a different religion... or if you go around exorcizing demons out of people who haven’t actually got demons in them, just to get power over them – like this guy McAllman – then you’re using Christianity for evil, so that’s got to be black Christianity.’

  ‘I wouldn’t exactly call Bain a white witch, either,’ Eirion murmured.

  Sophie said, ‘Jane, your grasp of theology—’

  But Gomer was back with them, thoughtfully rolling and unrolling his cap. ‘That’s Nev,’ he said, watching the man in the plaid shirt go out. ‘My nephew, Nev, see. Er, some’ing’s come up, ennit? Mrs Hill, if there’s a chance you could stay with these kids till the vicar gets back...’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Jane shook her head. ‘Mum said to stick with Gomer.’

  Gomer sighed. He opened the pub door, peered out. Jane got up and leaned over his shoulder. There were still a lot of people out there and more police – about seven of them. Also, the guy in the plaid shirt standing by a truck. In the back of the truck was a yellow thing partly under a canvas cover.

  ‘What’s that?’ Jane demanded.

  ‘Mini-JCB.’

  ‘Like for digging?’

  ‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer admitted gruffly.

  Ell
is took her into the second surgery: a plain room with a big, dark desk, Victorian-looking. Authority. A big chair and a small chair. Ellis sat in the big chair; Merrily didn’t sit down. She was thinking rapidly back over the history of her faith, the unsavoury aspects.

  In the Middle Ages, Christianity was still magic: charms and blessings indistinguishable. The Reformation was supposed to have wiped that out but, in seventeenth-century Britain, religious healers and exorcists were still putting on public displays, just like modern Bible Belt evangelists. And when it was finally over in most of Britain, here in Radnorshire – inside the inverted pentagram of churches dedicated to the warrior archangel – it continued. In a place with a strong tradition of pagan magic, the people transferred their allegiances to the priests... the more perspicacious of whom took on the role of the conjuror, the cunning man.

  Few more cunning than Nicholas Ellis, formerly Simon Wesson. His face was unlined, bland, insolent – looking up at her but really looking down.

  ‘Where’s your mother now, Nick?’

  ‘Dead. Drowned in her swimming pool in Orlando, four years ago. An accident.’

  ‘Your sister?’

  ‘Still out there. Married with kids.’

  ‘You came back to Britain because of what happened over Marshall McAllman and this Tennessee newspaper?’

  ‘I’ve told you I won’t discuss that.’ He brought a hand down hard on the desk. He was sweating. ‘And if you say a word about any of this outside these walls, I shall instruct my solicitor to obtain an immediate injunction to restrain you and make preparations to take you to court for libel. Do you understand?’

  ‘This is Mr Weal, is it?’

  ‘Never underestimate him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t. He’ll do anything for you, won’t he? After what you did for him. And for his wife – before she died.’

  Ellis kept his lips tight, his face uplifted to the lights and shining.

  ‘You must have investigated this parish pretty thoroughly before you applied for it. Or were you looking specifically for a parish that suited your kind of ministry? Or was it just luck?’