The Lamp of the Wicked

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Merrily, what do you suppose she means by that?’ Sophie fingered the phrase gift from God. ‘All right, it was unexpected, a fluke – but is she actually saying that he believed his ailing wife had been preserved by God just long enough to give birth to this…?’

  ‘Monster?’ Merrily shuddered.

  The farm was doing quite well in those days and the old man was able to employ a woman to look after the child in the daytime and stay over when he wasn’t well, but they never became substitute mothers, because they never stayed in the job long enough. It was a male household with a bit of help with the meals and the cleaning and childcare on top of that. My husband has told me how Roddy was always asking about his mother, what she looked like and so on, and one day Marilyn Monroe was on the telly and the old man laughed and said That’s what she looked like and although there must have been pictures of his mother around the house Roddy seemed to get fixated on this idea and he started collecting pictures of Marilyn Monroe to put up in his bedroom. When one of his brothers said something about it, Roddy said it was all right because she was dead. And then he’d find other pictures of women he liked the look of and if they were dead he’d say he’d have them for his mother and he’d put them up too and he seemed to find comfort in it so nobody thought anything of it.

  ‘You heard of anything like that before?’ Merrily asked. ‘Be interesting to talk to one of the nannies, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps the police already have.’ Sophie picked up the electric kettle to refill it. ‘Reinventing his mother: not some worthy but possibly rather dowdy middle-aged farmer’s wife in some fairly dour farmhouse, but in fact something world-shakingly beautiful, with glittery dresses and glossy lips.’

  ‘Making a goddess of her.’

  ‘A sex goddess,’ Sophie said quietly.

  ‘That came later,’ Merrily said. ‘Let’s do the child-psychology stuff first. A boy with no mother, an all-male household. He’s quite lonely at home; his brothers are grown men with work to do; his father’s well into middle age and strict in all kinds of ways. It’s an altogether rigid regime. So here’s a child desperately in need of a mother’s love, jealous of all the other kids he sees being taken to school by their mums.’

  ‘What you would call a projection, then?’ Sophie offered.

  ‘Or a simple invention? Some kids have imaginary friends, Roddy has an imaginary mum. But is he looking for maternal love or a situation where he feels, to some extent, in control – the way he doesn’t, normally, in that house? The dead don’t push him around. He doesn’t feel quite so small and insignificant with the dead.’

  ‘Quite touching, in a child.’ Sophie took the kettle into the adjacent washroom. ‘But it can only get unhealthy, can’t it, as he approaches the dread years of puberty and all his burgeoning urges become fixated upon… well, I think we can both see where this is going. It’s very hard to understand why they allowed it.’

  ‘Household of working men. If it kept him quiet at night…’

  Sophie’s voice came thinly from the washroom, over the rattle of water on metal. ‘Not if the rest is true.’

  Roddy was always seeing people who were not there, so he said. He didn’t seem to be afraid of them. At first it seemed like just his imagination, but when they heard him talking to them in his bedroom at night, the dead, well, this was a very stiff God-fearing house and talk of ghosts and spirits was thought of as sinful in the extreme! Roddy got into a lot of trouble with his father. Of course, in most homes today they would have him to a psychiatrist but there was still a stigma attached to that kind of thing then even though it doesn’t seem so very long ago to me.

  When he was older it seemed to stop. But Tony reckoned it was only that he stopped talking about it. They never said anything to the old man, knowing it would distress him, but it was definitely going on well into Roddy’s teens. Tony said you could still hear him talking and giggling in his room in the dead of night and you would swear, listening to it, that he was not alone in there. He said he and Geoff tried to laugh it off but there was something frightening about it too and they just tried to put it out of their minds and not hear it and get on with their lives. He said it was because they didn’t want to worry their father but I am not sure this was a good attitude to take, especially now obviously. I am also sure that Tony himself saw or heard more than he will talk about to me or anyone but there’s farmers for you. Head in the sand!

  ‘Was he psychic? Is that what we’re looking at, Sophie?’

  Sophie sat down opposite Merrily, with her back to the window and the lights of Broad Street, reached for a pencil and her shorthand pad. ‘What do you know that would reinforce that theory?’

  ‘Not much. Told me he’d been to see the vicar and scared him. After talking to Jerome Banks myself, I’d say the scaring bit was wishful thinking, but Banks did admit Roddy had been to see him – claiming his bungalow was haunted. The usual poltergeist effects were mentioned, but that was probably Banks being dismissive. So either Roddy was genuinely experiencing something or he wanted to give people the impression he was. And this is in a new bungalow, don’t forget. No history apart from his own.’

  Sophie lifted an eyebrow. ‘He brought Marilyn and the others with him?’

  When Tony and I were married we lived in a bungalow in the village so that he could carry on running the farm with Geoff. Roddy was about fifteen then and I never saw that much of him. He didn’t want anything to do with the farm except driving the tractor, so he had a few other jobs including training as a mechanic at a garage in Ross but he didn’t stick that of course, he never stuck at anything for long. The old man said he was sure Roddy was going to make something of himself one day although none of us could see it. Then Geoff went to Australia with his family and the old man died soon after. Tony got the farm and there was money for Geoff and Roddy with the proviso he spent it on setting himself up in a decent business which Tony was to approve and oversee in the early stages. Quite a few local farms etc said they would offer him work if he got himself a digger and a bulldozer and the parish council said he could dig graves, so that was how it started, although we never imagined it was going to take off like it did. I think that was because of getting into septic tanks. He never looked back, especially after he got that contract as representative for Efflapure. How he managed that we’ll never know.

  I think Tony was also relieved when he started going out with girls. Or rather Melanie Pullman who was his first real girlfriend, they were going out together for quite some time, over a year, but then they broke up and then she disappeared and he started going out with that Lynsey.

  ‘Now that’s interesting, don’t you think, Sophie?’

  ‘The fact that both he and the Pullman girl were having odd experiences?’

  ‘I wonder why they split up.’

  ‘People do, Merrily – especially a first relationship. Men have one sexual liaison, and it gives them confidence to go out looking for something new.’

  Merrily recalled Sam Hall in the community centre. Boy seems to have gone through what you might call a delayed adolescence – as if he’d discovered sex for the first time in his thirties. No woman was safe.

  ‘So, how do we follow him into the next stage? Which is killing living women.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s somewhere I want to follow him,’ Sophie said. ‘And I’m not sure you need to either. I’ll just make the tea.’

  Merrily marked one more paragraph.

  I should also say it came as no surprise to either of us, the way he died. He was always one for the pylons, according to Tony. He had long legs and was always good at climbing. When he was about ten he had a good hiding off his father for going up the one in the field behind the farm, almost right to the top. He wasn’t afraid. He never seemed to be afraid of anything, Tony said, so it came as no surprise at all how he went.

  Was that part of his world of the dead? Climbing to another level of – what? But that whole area was an electric
valley. Always part of his world. Who knew what connections he might have made?

  Merrily read the last sheet again.

  ***

  I have never had any kind of experience in this house so I must assume that when Roddy went from here it all stopped. Well, it stopped here anyway, and that was all that mattered to Tony, I am afraid to say. Head in the sand until it’s too late! Isn’t it always the case? I’m telling you all this, Mrs Watkins, and I haven’t told anybody else and I hope that as a Church minister you will respect this. None of us could possibly have known, could we, what was going on inside him. We couldn’t. Tony says that if we could just get him buried and do our duty by his father then we can try and settle down but I don’t know. I think Tony is getting very depressed about it and I think sometimes that it would be the best thing for everyone if we were to sell up and move from here. But we can’t do that yet because who would want to buy a farm where a mass murderer was raised?

  Sophie came back with the teapot and went to the window. ‘Fog’s clearing.’

  ‘Glad you think so,’ Merrily said.

  30

  Light and Sparks

  BEFORE JANE WAS even across the square, she knew precisely how she was going to play it: deceit against deceit. Lies, illusion… front.

  Despite the fog, the square was collecting its nightly quota of upmarket 4X4s: well-off couples coming in to dine – on a Monday night, for heaven’s sake – at the Black Swan and the restaurant that used to be Cassidy’s Country Kitchen. The Monday diners were mostly the youthfully retired with up to half a century to kill before death. The Swan, mistily lit up, had become more like a bistro than a village pub and pretty soon Ledwardine would be more like a theme park than a village, with its shops full of repro, its resident celebs – and, of course, its state-of-the-art, postmodern, designer vicar with the sexy sideline in soul-retrieval. Poor as a church mouse, but you wouldn’t kick her out of your vestry, haw, haw.

  Unfair. Bitch. Jane straightened her back and siphoned in a slow breath. You had to channel your anger or it would all come back at you; she’d learned that much, at least, from her New Age years.

  The lights of the Swan dimmed behind her in what remained of the fog, as the pub’s façade sobered up into a couple of timber-framed terraced houses. Then there was an alleyway with a wrought-iron lantern over it, which looked pretty old but probably wasn’t. It was unlit. On the other side of it – narrow and bent, with one gable leaning outwards like a man in a pointed hat inspecting his shoes – was Chapel House.

  The house was the real thing. As for its owner… Hello, I’m Jenny Driscoll and this afternoon I’ll be looking at ways you can turn your living room into a true sanctuary… a place where you can really be yourself… and yet also be taken out of yourself. What do I mean? Let’s go inside and find out…

  Yeah, right, let’s do that.

  Three steps led from the pavement up to the front door. Jane stood at the bottom, clutching the cold handrail. It was quite dark here, away from the fake gaslamps on the square. There was a glow in one of the downstairs windows but the bottom of the window was too far above the road for her to tell where the light was coming from or if there was anyone in that room.

  Cold feet, now, of course. Something like this was always ‘the obvious thing to do’ until it actually came to it. Like, would she even be here if Eirion had left his phone switched on, if he’d answered it? If it hadn’t been over.

  Well, probably not. But that was not what had happened and this, in the event, was where the obvious path had led. Probably, it was meant. A confrontation waiting to happen.

  Jane paused, with a hand on the knocker. All right. Stop. Consider. This was her last chance to backtrack home and think this through properly, for it might not, in fact, be such a good idea. And if it failed, and the Driscoll woman hung the whole thing on Mum, it could get seriously dicey – believe it.

  Clear footsteps behind the door, then. Oh God, she’d been seen from inside. So much for the element of surprise. Jane swallowed fog, coughed. Mrs Box, look, I hope you don’t mind me just arriving like this, but I’d really like to talk to you about angels. We might be able to help each other.

  Aw, she could wing this. As it were. She unzipped her fleece halfway, thinking of Jenny Driscoll at seventeen: Terrible clothes, terrible music. And this element of sadomasochism. Thank you, Irene. Goodnight.

  Oh, shit, run!

  Too late. None of the tugging and creaking you got at home; the door opened like it was greased. But not to reveal Jenny Box. A man stood there.

  There was a hum in the studio, and Prof Levin was trying to track it down, lying underneath the mixing board, scrabbling about. Concerned about all the electricity under there, Lol offered to switch off at the master.

  Prof’s howl came out boxy. ‘You crazy? How would I find it then? Why don’t you take a walk, Laurence? I can’t concentrate.’

  Lol said thoughtfully, ‘Prof, you’ve spent whole decades in this kind of atmosphere. Has it… you know, affected you at all?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘All the electricity.’

  Prof’s bald head came up, glowing with sweat. ‘It’s an electric world. What’s your problem?’

  ‘Just, is there too much of it? Are we killing ourselves?’

  ‘Nah,’ Prof said scornfully. ‘Our bodies adjust. One day we’ll become electric beings. Just light and sparks.’ He crawled out from under the mixing board. ‘This is about the mad guy wanted you to do his song, right? Moira told me. The guy who now wants urgently to meet the Reverend to discuss who-knows-what.’

  Lol had driven up to Ledbury to collect supplies from Tesco and got back to find Merrily had left a message with Prof: she’d tried to see Sam Hall but he wasn’t there. She’d call Lol here again, early this evening. She hadn’t. He’d called: answering machine. Then Gomer had called, asking if he was free tomorrow.

  Prof stood up and laid his electrical screwdriver on the board. ‘You ever know Mephisto Jones?’

  ‘Mephisto Jones, the session guitarist?’

  ‘No, Mephisto Jones, the road sweeper, Mephisto Jones, the systems analyst. Jesus.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to have been around for a while.’

  Plays acoustic now. That’s all he plays. Acoustic.’

  ‘Well,’ Lol said, ‘if he’s happy…’

  ‘Happy? He’s fucking wrecked! Case, I suspect, of what your man’s talking about. Mephisto takes his headaches to the doctor, is referred to a neurologist. The neurologist invites him to have a brain scan. Mephisto says, “What, you wanna kill me now?” Brain scan – that’s how much they know about it, these neurologists. A brain scan involves the use of a massive electromagnetic field.’

  ‘Mephisto Jones was damaged by electricity? I always thought it was the drink.’

  ‘Drink would’ve been easier. And when I say that… No, this came out of nowhere, out of the ether. Headaches, weakness, pain in the joints, fingers swollen. Started with he couldn’t work in the studio, so he’d go home, lie on the sofa with a bottle of Jameson’s and the TV on. And feel even worse. It was a while before he put it all together that this was the TV, not the drink. By then, he couldn’t even listen to a Walkman. Mobile phones… goes without saying. He told me he felt so ill some nights, he couldn’t stay in the house, so he used to go and sit in the car – in the cold, because if he switched on the engine to power the heater…’

  ‘He became allergic to electricity?’

  Prof tilted his hands. ‘Some people it just happens to. Like anything else, some people are more sensitive to it than others. Most doctors still don’t even accept it as a valid condition. Most doctors are arseholes: give you a choice of nerve tablets… red ones or blue ones. In the end, Mephisto found this international support group for electro-allergics or whatever the hell it is they’re called.’

  ‘So where is he now?’

  ‘Somewhere in Ireland, with no power to speak of and a bunch of acoustic guita
rs. Living on old royalties and looking fearfully out the window in case someone should decide to drag his valley into the last century. They’d have a lot to talk about, Mephisto Jones and your madman. If Mephisto’s in a mood to ‘answer the phone.’ Prof picked up his screwdriver. ‘Not a mobile, needless to say. Now will you leave me to my wires?’

  ‘That’s very interesting. Thank you, Prof.’

  But Prof had already vanished, like a badger into its set. Lol went through to the kitchen and out through the stable door, trying to think what use a priest might be in this kind of situation.

  Tendrils of fog were still ghosting the trees along the banks of the hidden River Frome, but the rooftops were clear. It was cold out here, colder than he’d expected. Presently, his own song came drifting out, as Prof tested the system. These Burt Bacharach kind of chords he couldn’t put names to, sounding better with distance.

  Remember this one? The day is dwindling Down in Badger’s Wood, collecting kindling Smudgy eyes, moonrise… Golden.

  Warm images. The toes curling by the electric fire.

  The rather loathsome curling sensation in Moira’s gut. This bothered him. He’d heard too many shivery stories about Moira’s premonitions.

  In fact, Lol shivered and was about to go back into the kitchen, out of the cold, when headlights lit the bushes along the track from the road.

  The car came very slowly, mud sucking at its tyres, as the song went into its second short verse. At the end of it, streaked with cello, the chord change registered as bitter and paranoid in the dense air.

  The camera lies She might vaporize…

  The headlights splashed Lol’s eyes. The car stopped, the lights went down. He heard the driver’s door opening, feet on gravel, and then the door closing very lightly and carefully to make the most minimal of clinks. A visitor sensitive to studio hours.