by Phil Rickman
'Oh well. Just the time for a holiday. December. Come and have a drink with me, Eddie.'
'Well, I would, see, only I've got to meet someone, isn't it?'
'Oh yes?' Into Eddie's face Gwyn Arthur blows enough smoke to evacuate a wasp's nest. 'Anyone I know?'
'Just a quick one then,' Eddie says miserably.
Oh God, oh God, not far now.
The trees either side of the road are now embracing overhead, the mesh of shadow-branches infilled by nightmist, making the road into a tunnel, but one with no light at the end.
There was a moon that night, in 1973. She's sure there was a moon. Some sort of light, anyway. Or maybe it was just her, incandescent, in love.
If there's a moon tonight, she can't see it; the further she trundles down this road the worse the mist comes down. And the likelier it seems that the batteries will give out.
You can go back. You can still go back. To the fire and the telly and the chair lift to bed.
Big deal.
At least she'll be there before Meryl, who's relying on Eddie to take her. Rather him than me. See how he liked the saga of Lady Bluefoot and the fuzzy brown apparition with an extra hole in his face and the awful vision of slaughter around the dinner table.
Isabel sighs. Suddenly everybody's a visionary.
Except for me. Well, only the once. The night of flying.
Pinned down like a victim of the Blitz under tons of masonry. Pinned down all night, next to a poor boy whose eager, young loins have pumped their last.
Pinned down and feverish, but soothed by the body's natural morphine and some strange and ancient magic in the night.
The flying.
She didn't say a word about this to Meryl. In all these years, Simon St John has been the only person she's felt able to trust with her memories of ecstatic night-flight, escape from a broken body, freedom ... sensations so cruelly crushed with the coming of the dawn and the police and the fire brigade and ambulance, the dawning of days, months, years of numb misery and doctors shaking their stupid heads.
Only Simon understands - even if he's done his best to discourage it - her need to make just one meaningful return to the place where ecstasy and horror collided. To go back for what she left behind?
Isabel stops the chair for a moment in the lane. Last chance to turn back.
She has her deepest and most terrible wish. She's returning to the Abbey, alone, in December of a seventh year.
I mean, talk about crazy. Talk about bloody fanciful, mystical bullshit, talk about ...
talk about flying.
Isabel presses the green button, goes on.
He's on his own. Really on his own this time.
The hills are the same, more woodland maybe and harder, more bristly, Less scenic, less picturesque - what a strange, senseless word; Dave's suddenly mystified by the idea that a hard, frozen winter landscape could ever be considered pleasing to the eye.
The windblown snow is there, the same harsh, grey spattering. And the track's the same, although you stay off it to avoid making footprints. And your feet, by God, are as cold as ever you remember.
But he isn't surprised to find Aelwyn is not the same and has a new voice.
Aelwyn Mark One was gentle and breathy, like the wimpy singers in all those acoustic bands of the early 70s. Sounding like a martyr before he was even over the wall of Abergavenny Castle ... and running ... crouching.
The new Aelwyn's singing isn't sweet, his notes soar only with pain. His song is free-form; it comes without rhyme or obvious meter. It struggles against the structure imposed by the tune. The song of the new Aelwyn makes no concessions.
The new Aelwyn is a man with dreams but no illusions. The new Aelwyn is a hard bastard in a hard land. And I'm staying with him. I'm staying with him this time. Until the end.
'Let's try it again.' Prof's voice in the cans, sounding a bit dismayed.
'Left, he has. Twenty minutes ago.'
'Left?'
'Gone to the pub. Always goes to the pub on a Thursday, he does,' Eddie's wife tells Meryl. 'Who shall I say?'
'It's all right. I'll call him again.'
Meryl puts the phone down.
He's gone. He's gone alone. The old devil has lied to them. He's keeping it for himself. Doesn't want his style cramped by a handicapped child and a mad woman.
'And are you?' Meryl rushes out of the study to confront herself in a mirror in the hall. 'Are you mad?'
'Are you mad?'
In the glass she sees not the old smouldering allure in the mysterious, dark-eyed one who looks beyond the horizon, but plain, perplexed apprehension in the unpainted eyes of an ordinary middle-aged woman.
And she longs to be back with Martin, for whom the only unknown forces are market forces. With whom she can safely be a believer in Other Spheres, a confidante of ghosts, and it doesn't matter, because she's the only one, an exotic eccentric in a world of businessmen and socialites.
Out here, on the very edge of reality, you can entertain the silliest romantic fantasy and find someone desperate enough to believe you. And in no time at all you find yourself determined to make it happen.
Like taking a consignment of holy earth from the Skirrid to sanctify the Abbey.
And Meryl thinks, yes, possibly I am mad. Possibly I parted company with reality the minute that child appeared at the door with her strange, magnified eyes.
Or, more possibly, the night I slept with Tom Storey. The night I persuaded him, because it seemed so exciting, to return to confront his 'destiny'.
What have I done?
I haven't even tried to ring Shelley. I could be accused of kidnapping. Because I wanted it to be a mystery, I've never tried too hard to find out how Vanessa came to be here.
What have I turned into?
Slightly hysterically, Meryl hurtles back into the living-room, manufacturing a warm smile, to find Vanessa looking into the fire. Vanessa has a sorrowful fascination with fire.
'Vanessa.' Meryl kneels down on the carpet next to her. 'I want to talk to you.' The fire is burning low and red. 'Vanessa, who brought you here?'
'Weasel,' Vanessa says at once, turning to look at Meryl, 'in his van.'
'And where's the van now?'
'In the shed.'
'Where's the shed?'
'At the farm.'
'I see. Which farm is this?'
Vanessa looks blank,
'Is it near here?'
Vanessa just looks at Meryl, her mouth half-open.
'Where's Weasel then?'
'In the van.'
'But you said the van was at the farm.'
'Yes.'
'Vanessa ...' Meryl hesitates. 'Why didn't you stay with Weasel?'
Vanessa thinks about this. 'He wouldn't talk to me '
'Had you fallen out? Had an argument?'
Vanessa shakes her head.
'Then why wouldn't he talk to you?'
Vanessa looks mixed up. 'I think he was poorly.'
'Ill?'
Vanessa blinks hard behind her glasses.
'Vanessa, was Weasel ill?'
Oh no. There's a sick man somewhere in a van, been lying there for days. Or even ...
'Vanessa, is Weasel ... is he ...?'
Vanessa stands up. Her convent school blazer is hanging, freshly-pressed now, from a coat hanger behind the door.
Vanessa reaches up for it, takes it off the hanger, puts it on and methodically buttons it up.
'Can we go and find Daddy, now?'
She doesn't even remember the road any more. She's never been down it at night. Nobody from the village goes down this road at night, except for Dai Salmon, the poacher. And never in December, even him.
She wishes she weren't so alone. Perhaps Vanessa. Who already feels - because of the Abbey - like Isabel's little sister.
The little miracle child, born like a phoenix from the flames.
Flames.
Shortly before they parted tonight, Isabel felt herself d
rawn towards Vanessa's magnified eyes and experienced the momentary illusion of gazing into the intense, gassy core of a furious fire.
Which, all right, was probably only a reflection in her specs of the fire in the vicarage hearth. She can only have imagined the rest, see, the muffled roaring.
debs, debsie, debs ...
And the heat on a winter's night, the terrible sensuality of it. like the fl ...
No! Why're you doing this to yourself, you daft bitch? Turn back while you can. Jesus Christ, you don't think for one minute you're going to wheel yourself in there and twenty-one years will drop away, and you and the gay vicar will fly away together?
She stops the chair. She feels so heartbroken and angry with herself she actually turns it around.
To find that the view to the rear is exactly the same as the view to the front: damp, filthy freezing mist and the imprints of hostile winter trees.
Oh Simon, what have we become? What has this place done to us?
There aren't many aspects of me, Isabel concludes in despair that I don't hate and despise.
'Strewth,' Prof mutters, adjusting Dave's voice level as the meter hits the red again. He doesn't know what the hell to make of this.
Not exactly what he expected after the way they were when they got back from the canteen: good mates, optimistic, ready to hit this thing head-on. Confident, at last, of what it was about.
Whatever's happening to Dave, he can tell Simon wasn't expecting it either. Simon was making a valiant attempt to follow it, contribute the odd fiddle-lick, but he's given up. Not as if there's even a tempo, as such, any more.
If Simon was in charge of last night's session, this is Dave's moment. But it's not the same, no message here of the triumph of art over evil. Simon's a classically trained, string-quartet man; Dave's a self-taught guitarist who can't even sing a tune unless he's imitating somebody else.
God only knows who he's imitating here.
And Prof has no choice any more; he has to go with it.
This is the fourth take, each one more extreme than the last. Five minutes into Take Three you'd swear the bugger was singing in a foreign language. This was just before Prof stopped recording and went out on the studio floor to try and talk some sense.
'Look, Dave, come on, I'm gonna have problems mixing this. I'm all for avant garde, long as I understand it.'
Dave just grinning sheepishly, like even he doesn't know what it's about, and Simon saying, 'Let it go, eh. Prof. If it turns out to be a solo, where's the problem?'
OK, so this is a man of many voices; this is a guy who can give you a Simon that might fool Garfunkel. He could be faking it.
And as this strange, rough Aelwyn treks bitterly through the snow, some bastard's turned the heating off, for authenticity.
Thanks.
Gwyn is buying.
Eddie, resigned to losing half an hour, says, 'I thought you fellows weren't supposed …'
'… To drink on duty. Everybody says that.' On the wonky, scuffed table Gwyn Arthur Jones deposits a whisky and dry ginger for Eddie and a half of Welsh for himself. 'Uniform men, that is. And lower ranks.'
Gwyn Arthur drinks cautiously. 'Besides,' he says. 'I'm not on duty.'
'You mean anything I say will not be taken down?'
'It's what you don't say, Eddie, that will get you hanged.'
There are only half a dozen people in the bar tonight. Gwyn Arthur briefly eyes a scratched plastic container of cold meat pies and then seems to lose interest.
'That candle,' he says. 'Case closed.'
'Oh?' Eddie waits.
'Lack of evidence.'
'You mean the forensic boys couldn't turn up anything else?'
'No.' Gwyn Arthur finishes his beer, puts his glass down and stares sourly into the dregs, 'I mean we've lost the fucking candle.'
Only his desire not to prolong this session prevents a smile from creasing Eddie's features.
'Forensic have no valid explanation for the disappearance. We've suggested they fingerprint their own bell jars, or whatever such specimens are preserved in.'
'Somebody's taken it?'
'Let's just say it's gone. As if it had never existed. The lab assistant says she'll go to court to swear everything was locked up and still locked up the following morning, et cetera, et cetera. So. Don't suppose you've any others? No, don't tell me, I don't want to go through this again.'
'Go through what again?'
'Whatever it is you're going through, my friend.' Gwyn Arthur slowly raises his eyes. 'Like a cat on hot bricks, you are.'
'Nonsense,' Eddie says, squirming a little. What's the time now? Oh hell...
'If there's anything that inflames my curiosity beyond normal tolerance levels,' Gwyn says, 'it's the sight of a respectable citizen with something on his mind he desperately wants to unload but knows he daren't.'
'D ... daren't?'
'Let me get you another drink,' Gwyn says, 'I can't recall seeing a man so obviously in need of something to calm his nerves ...'
Gwyn Arthur stands, moves behind Eddie's chair and plants a firm and rather menacing hand on his shoulder.
'... and to lubricate his conscience, prior to unburdening himself at great length.'
The path is already slick with frost and every blade of grass is white and hoary. It seems so much colder than usual, for early December.
Or maybe it's just here, in this forgotten valley.
'Aren't you cold, in just that blazer?'
Meryl has tried in vain to persuade Vanessa to wear something warmer. How will her guardian angel recognise her anyway in the foggy dark? she asks the child, ludicrously.
Meryl has pulled on a thick, padded coat over her blouse and slacks and is still cold. She waves the vicarage torch in front of them and the beam bounces off a barrier of fog. In the village it was mist; out here it's fog.
'Is this the right path? Do you know?'
For the first couple of hundred yards she was carrying over her shoulder one of the black plastic sacks of Skirrid soil but she's abandoned it now. It's just too heavy and cumbersome.
To leave the holy earth on the footpaths would have seemed such a pointed rejection of the legend that she took a couple of gloved handfuls of earth and filled the side-pockets of her coat before hiding the sack behind a tree.
Damn Eddie Edwards. Was there ever a man who could keep his word?
The child scurries ahead. Her only concession to the cold has been to put on the woollen gloves she allowed Meryl to buy for her in Abergavenny.
'Come back, Vanessa! Stay close to me. We could lose each other so easily in this fog.'
Vanessa glances back over her shoulder. Her enormous glasses look like saucers in the torchlight. She turns away and hurries on. Seems to know where she's going, which is more than Meryl does.
The conditions don't worry her greatly; she's a country girl, she's been out in worse. And alone. And in the dark.
However, in her imagination, from the first she heard of it, the Abbey has existed in a kind of endless summer, in a night dense not with mist but with soft, scented spiritual promise.
The very word ... Although 'cathedral' has a soaring splendour, 'Abbey' is the most serene and beautiful word for spiritual budding. And although everything she's heard lately is suggestive of the brooding, the sinister and the soiled, she finds it hard to regard it in this way.
Meryl pats her pockets. What's a dry-cleaning bill against a great spiritual gesture?
She's examined the Ordnance Survey map and discovered the Skirrid lies almost due east of the Abbey. In the inside pocket of her coat is a compass.
She understands from books on Simon's shelves that a great archway stands at the extreme eastern end of the ruins. What she plans to do is build a little mound of holy earth directly under the arch so that when the morning sun rises over the Skirrid and penetrates the mist, its rays will find the mound and the holy light will find its way to the Abbey's sick, Satanic heart.
Before they leave, she and Vanessa will hold hands and bring down the blessings of the Spirits and the great archangel whose chapel once crowned the holy mountain.
The simplicity of the intention warms her briefly. She decides to explain it to Vanessa, who's still hurrying on ahead.
'Vanessa ... Vanessa!'
She never responds. She always goes her own way. A wilful child. Or disobedient, depending on how you evaluate your children.
It's all right, though; she can hear the patter of the feet in her sensible, brown school shoes.
All around her in the freezing fog, clammy as frogspawn, are hunched shapes of frosted sheep. Sheep will sleep anywhere, in any conditions, their winter wool heavy with hoar.
It can't be very far; Eddie (damn him) said this was a shortcut. He said you would suddenly be there, surrounded by stones.
'Vanessa. Come on, now.'
The child's footsteps are softer, not so clumpy. Maybe the path's grassed over.
Meryl can actually see Vanessa's shoes - although not the rest of her - as they trip along in the glistening mist, such small, light graceful feet.
And they've stopped. The sound has softened into nothing.
Vanessa, are you all right, my love?' Perhaps she's fallen.
Vanessa doesn't reply, but something tells Meryl to switch on her torch.
Which she does, without a thought.
Click.
And in the mist, the small shoes are glowing.
Glowing the most beautiful pastel shade of blue.
Oh!'
Meryl's breathing is stilled. In this drab landscape, carelessly straddled by the coarse, promiscuous mist, something extraordinary is happening.
When it happens, it's never when or how you expect it.
There's a swish and rustle of silk and a light laugh which makes Meryl want to join in.
And then, like the opening of a flower, the raw country smells give way to a heady floral fragrance as if the mist itself is becoming refined and scented.
A few yards in front of Meryl, the blue shoes glow as softly as a child's nightlight.
Meryl's lips part and her gloved hands clasp her cheeks.
Oh, my lady.'
IV