A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Behold the Cross of the Lord! Behold the Cross and flee, thou obscene spirits of the night!’

  His voice dropped, became intense, sneering.

  ‘Most cunning serpent, you shall never again dare to deceive the human race and persecute the Holy Church. Cursed dragon, we give thee warning in the names of Jesus Christ and Michael, in the names of Jehovah, Adonai, Tetragrammaton...’

  Merrily stiffened. What?

  She leaned further out to watch Nick Ellis standing amongst all the women, brandishing his cross like a sword in the light, brandishing words which surely belonged originally to the Roman Church, to Jewish mysticism, to...

  The candles lowered again, to reveal a single woman crouching.

  More like cringing?

  Ellis laid the cross on the tall table and bent down to the woman.

  ‘Do you embrace God?’ His voice had softened.

  The woman looked up at him, like a pet dog.

  ‘You must embrace God,’ he explained, gently at first. ‘You must embrace God, embrace Him, embrace Him...’ His right arm was extended, palm raised, the loose sleeve of his robe falling back. ‘Embrace Him!’

  Shadows leaping. A short expulsion of breath – ‘Hoh!’ – and a sound of stumbling.

  Merrily saw he’d pushed the woman away; she lay half on her back, panting.

  ‘Say it!’ Ellis roared.

  ‘I... embrace Him.’

  ‘And do you renounce the evil elements of this world which corrupt those things God has created?’

  ‘Yes.’ She came awkwardly to her feet. She was wearing a white shift of some kind, possibly a nightdress. She must feel very cold.

  ‘Do you renounce all sick and sinful desires which draw you away from the love of God?’

  She began to cry again. Her London accent said this had to be Greg Starkey’s wife, Marianne, the sometime sufferer from clinical depression, not a nympho in the normal sense, but tempted by the dark glamour of the witch Robin Thorogood. Was that it? Was that really the extent of her possession?

  And, oh God, even if there was a whole lot more, this was not right, not by any stretch.

  ‘Say it!’

  Her head went back. She started to sniff.

  ‘Say, “I so renounce them”!’

  ‘I s... so... renounce them.’

  ‘And do you, therefore, wish with all your heart to expel the lewd and maleficent spirit coiling like a foul serpent within you?’

  Her head was thrown right back, as if she expected to be slapped, again and again.

  ‘I ask you once more...’ Softly. ‘Do you wish, with all your heart...?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Then lie down,’ Father Ellis said.

  What? Merrily moved away from the pillar. She could see now that Ellis was pointing at a hessian rug laid out on the boarded floor. Marianne drew an unsteady breath and went to stand on the rug. The watching women kept still. But she caught a movement from a darkened doorway, with a ‘Toilets’ sign over the top, and moved back behind her pillar.

  There was a man in that doorway, she’d swear it.

  Ellis said, ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  He turned to the table and took up another cross from a white cloth. Merrily saw it clearly. About nine inches long, probably gold-plated. He held it up to the candlelight, then lowered it again. One of the women leaned forward, handed him something.

  Involuntarily, Merrily moved closer. The woman held up her candle for Ellis. Merrily saw a yellow tube, then an inch of pale jelly was transferred to Ellis’s forefinger. She saw him smearing the jelly along the stem of the crucifix.

  What?

  Ellis nodded once. Marianne Starkey crumpled to her knees then went into an ungainly squat, holding the nightdress up around her thighs.

  ‘Be calm now,’ Ellis said. ‘Sit. Relax.’

  The woman sat still. Ellis raised his eyes from her. ‘O God of martyrs, God of confessors, we lay ourselves before Thee...’ He glanced at Marianne, whispered, ‘Lie back.’

  Merrily watched Marianne’s body subside onto the rough matting, her knees up, the nightdress slipping back. Ellis knelt in front of her.

  ‘I ask you again,’ he whispered. ‘Is it your heart’s wish that the unclean spirit might be expelled for ever?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you understand that a foul spirit of this nature may effectively be purged only through the portal of its entry?’

  ‘Yes...’ Marianne hesitated then let her head fall back over the edge of the mat and onto the boarded floor with a dull thump. She closed her eyes. ‘Yes.’

  Ellis began to pray, a long, rolling mumble, slowly becoming intelligible.

  ‘Let the impious tempter fly far hence! Let thy servant be defended by the sign...’ Ellis rose and put the cross swiftly on Marianne’s forehead. ‘... of Thy Name.’ He placed the cross against her breast. ‘Do Thou guard her inmost soul...’

  Merrily thought, He won’t. He can’t. It isn’t possible, not with all these women here.

  Ellis reared over Marianne. ‘Do Thou rule...’ Then he bent suddenly. ‘... her inmost parts.’

  Marianne gave a low and throaty cry, then Ellis sprang up, kissing the cross, tossing it to the table, and it was over. And women were hugging Marianne.

  And Merrily was frozen in horror and could no longer see a man in the doorway.

  31

  Jewel

  THE CONVERGING LANES were filling up with vehicles – like last Saturday. When Ellis and the women – but not Marianne – came down the steps, they were joined by more people. By the time they all reached the road there were about thirty of them, with Ellis seeming to float in their midst, glowingly messianic in his white monk’s habit.

  The sick bastard.

  Merrily turned away, found her hands were clenched together. Shame. Fury. When she could stand to look again, she saw that someone was bearing a white wooden crucifix aloft, in front of Ellis. At the apex of the village hall roof, the neon cross became a beacon in the rain. Like it was all a crusade.

  She didn’t recognize anyone in Ellis’s group, but why should she? She guessed they were not locals anyway. A couple of the men wore suits but most others were casually but warmly dressed, like members of a serious hiking club. Nobody was speaking. Shouldn’t they be singing some charismatic anthem, swaying, clapping?

  Killing the shakes, Merrily walked erratically along the lane to the corner where a bunch of reporters stood under umbrellas and Gomer was waiting for her in the rain, an unlit ciggy drooping from his mouth.

  ‘Vicar... you all right, girl?’ Following her behind a Range Rover parked under some fir trees, he regarded her gravely. ‘You looks a bit pale.’

  ‘Don’t fuss, Gomer.’ Merrily dropped a cigarette in the process of trying to light it.

  Gomer straightened his glasses.

  ‘Sorry.’ She touched his arm. ‘It’s me. I’m furious with me, that’s all.’

  ‘Happened in there, vicar?’

  ‘Exorcism – of sorts. I ought to have stopped it. I just’ – she thumped her thigh with a fist – ‘stood there... let it happen.’

  ‘Hexorcism?’ Gomer said, bewildered. ‘This’d be Greg’s missus?’

  ‘Must’ve been.’

  ‘The bugger hexorcized Greg’s missus for fancyin’ a feller?’

  ‘For embracing the dark,’ Merrily said, with unsuppressible venom. ‘For letting herself become possessed by most unholy and blasphemous lust.’

  ‘Load of ole wallop. You gonner tell Greg?’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Boy oughter know,’ said Gomer, ‘whatever it was.’ He nodded towards a man getting into the Range Rover. ‘Dr Coll,’ he observed.

  The cameramen were backing away down the street ahead of Ellis and his entourage. Dr Coll drove away in his Range Rover, leaving Merrily and Gomer exposed.

  ‘I can’t believe I let it happen,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it was happening. I can’t tell Gr
eg. You saw the state he was in. He’d go after Ellis with a baseball bat. That... bastard.’

  Ellis walked without looking to either side. When a couple of the reporters tried to get a word with him, his anoraked minders pressed closer around him – the holy man. Merrily and Gomer walked well behind, Merrily turning things over and over.

  Internal ministry, it had been called when the phenomenon had first been noted in the North of England. Mostly it was for supposed incidents of satanic child abuse – a number of allegations, but not much proven. It was a charismatic extreme, an evangelical madness: the warped and primitive conviction that demonic forces entered through bodily orifices and could only be expelled the same way.

  It had all happened too quickly, clinically, like a doctor taking a cervical smear. The fact that it was also degrading, humiliating – and, as it happened, amounted to sexual assault – would not be an issue for someone who had convinced himself of it being a legitimate weapon in the war against Satan. Someone invoking the power of the Archangel Michael against a manufactured dragon.

  When, in fact, he was the monster.

  Got to stop him.

  But if she spoke out there would be a dozen respectable women ready to say she was a liar with a chip on her shoulder; about a dozen women who had watched the ritual in silence. Then, afterwards, tears and hugs and ‘Praise God!’

  ‘Gomer... those women over there, who are they?’

  Gomer identified Mrs Eleri Cobbold, the village sub-post-mistress, Mrs Smith whose cottage they’d passed, Linda Llewellyn who managed a riding stables towards Presteigne. The others he didn’t know. Mostly from Off, he reckoned.

  Marianne wasn’t among them.

  ‘No back way out of the hall, is there?’

  ‘Yes, but not without comin’ down them steps, vicar, less you wants to squeeze through a fence and lose yourself in the forestry.’

  So she was still up there. That made sense; they’d hardly want to bring her out looking like a road casualty, not with TV crews around.

  Ellis had reached the car park of the Black Lion. He was evidently about to hold a press conference.

  ‘Gomer, could you kind of hang around and listen to what he says? I need to go back in there.’

  All eyes were fixed on Ellis as Merrily walked inconspicuously back through the rain towards the steps.

  Nobody on the door this time. Inside the hall, all the blinds were now raised, the chairs were spread out and a plain wooden lectern stood in the centre of the room. This time, one corner looked very much like another and only a vague smell of wax indicated that anything more contentious than an ad hoc meeting of the community council had taken place.

  No, there was something else: the atmosphere you often caught in a church after a packed service – tiny shivers in the air like dust motes waiting to settle.

  A black coat slung over one of the chairs suggested someone was still around, if only a cleaner. Presently, Merrily became aware of voices from beyond the door with the ‘Toilets’ sign above it – where that solitary man had stood. She crossed the hall, not caring about the sound of her shoes on the polished floorboards.

  The door opened into an ante-room leading to separate women’s and men’s lavatories. It contained a sink and one of the chairs from the main room – Marianne sitting in it. A woman was bending over her with a moistened paper towel, patting her brow. Marianne didn’t react when the door swung shut behind Merrily, but the other woman looked up at once, clear blue eyes unblinking.

  ‘We can manage, thank you.’

  The voice echoed off the tiles: cold white tiles, floor to ceiling, reminding Merrily of the stark bathroom at Ledwardine vicarage.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s much better, thank you. Had problems at home, haven’t you, my love?’

  The woman wore jeans and a black and orange rugby shirt. She had a lean, wind-roughened face, bleakly handsome. A face which had long since become insensitive to slaps from the weather and the world. A face last seen lit by the lanterns in Menna’s mausoleum.

  The woman dabbed at Marianne’s cheek, screwed up the paper towel and looked again at Merrily, in annoyance. ‘You want the lavatory, is it?’

  ‘No. I’d just like a word with Marianne – when you’ve finished.’ Merrily unwound her scarf. ‘Merrily Watkins. Hereford Diocese.’

  ‘Oh? Come to spy on Father Ellis, is it? We’re not stupid. We know what the diocese thinks of him.’

  Marianne looked glassy-eyed. She didn’t care one way or the other.

  ‘And anyway,’ the woman said, ‘Mrs Starkey hasn’t been through anything she didn’t personally request. Father Ellis doesn’t do a soft ministry.’

  ‘Obviously not.’

  ‘Practical man who gets results. She’ll be fine, if people will let her alone. If you want to talk to anybody, you can talk to me. Judith Prosser, my name. Councillor Prosser’s wife. Come outside.’

  She gave Marianne’s shoulder a squeeze then went and held open the door for Merrily, ushering her out and down the central aisle of the hall, past Ellis’s lectern. She picked up the black quilted coat from a chair back, and they went out through the main doors.

  The rain had stopped. At the top of the steps, Judith Prosser didn’t turn to look at Merrily; she leaned on the metal railings and gazed over to the village centre, where Ellis and his entourage were assembling for the media.

  ‘And was it the diocese sent you to Menna’s funeral, too, Reverend Watkins?’

  Above Old Hindwell, a hopeless sun was trying vainly to burn a hole in the clouds. Mist still filigreed the firs on Burfa Hill but the tower of the old church was clear to the north.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d recognized me,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Well, of course I recognized you.’

  This was the intelligent woman who Gomer seemed to admire. Who did her husband’s thinking for him. Who could sit and watch another woman physically invaded in the name of God.

  ‘For what it’s worth, that was nothing at all to do with the diocese,’ Merrily told her. ‘I’d arranged to meet Barbara Buckingham at her sister’s funeral. You remember Barbara?’

  Judith Prosser’s head turned slowly until her eyes locked on Merrily’s.

  ‘Had you now?’

  ‘She was referred to me by a nurse at Hereford Hospital, after her sister died there. I do... counselling work, in certain areas.’

  ‘Didn’t come to the funeral, though, did she?’

  ‘She’s disappeared,’ Merrily said. ‘She spent some days here and now she’s disappeared. The police are worried about her safety.’

  ‘Oh, her safety? An eyebrow arched under Judith’s stiff, short hair. ‘And what are we to assume they mean by that?’

  ‘We both know what they mean, Mrs Prosser.’

  The sun had given up the struggle, was no more than a pale grey circle embossed on the cloud.

  ‘Poor Barbara,’ Judith said.

  Merrily did some thinking. While she hadn’t come up here to discuss Barbara and Menna, as soon as the conversation had been diverted away from Ellis himself, Judith Prosser had become instantly more forthcoming.

  ‘Barbara told me you used to write to her.’

  ‘For many years. We were best friends for a time, as girls.’

  ‘So you know why she left home.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I know it wasn’t a hydatid cyst.’

  ‘Ha. Good informants you must have. What else did they tell you?’

  ‘That you were looking out for Menna, and keeping Barbara informed. Menna was a source of... disquiet... for Barbara. Especially after their mother died.’

  ‘Ah.’ Judith Prosser nodded. ‘So that’s it.’ She leaned back with her elbows against the railings. ‘Well, let me assure you right now, Mrs... is it Mrs? Let me assure you emphatically that Mervyn Thomas never touched Menna. I know that, because I warned him myself what would happen to him if he ever did.’

  ‘But you’d ha
ve been just a kid... or not much more.’

  ‘This was not when Menna was a child. Good heavens, Merv was never a child-molester. He’d wait till they filled out. Ha! No, there was never anything for Barbara to worry about there. Nothing. She could go on living her rich, soft, English life without a qualm.’

  ‘Hasn’t she been to see you in the past week or so?’

  Judith sniffed. ‘I heard she was around, pestering people – including you, it seems. Evidently she couldn’t face me.’

  ‘Wasn’t it you who told her about Menna’s stroke?’

  ‘I sent her a short note. Somebody had to.’

  ‘But not her husband.’

  Mrs Prosser smiled and nodded. ‘Let me also tell you, Mrs Watkins, that Jeffery Weal was the best thing that could have happened to Menna. If you knew her – which Barbara, lest we forget, never really did – Menna was a wispy, flimsy little thing. Insubstantial, see, like a ghost. She—Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Merrily swallowed. ‘I’m fine. Why was Mr Weal so good for her?’

  ‘If you knew her, you would know she would always need someone to direct her life. And while he was not the most demonstrative of men, he adored her. Kept her like a jewel.’

  In a padded box, Merrily thought, in a private vault.

  ‘Anyway,’ Judith said, ‘I do hope the Diocese of Hereford is not going to interfere with Father Ellis. He suits this area very well. He meets our needs.’

  ‘Really? How many other people has he exorcized?’

  Judith Prosser sighed in exasperation. ‘As far as local people are concerned, he’s giving back the church the authority it used to have. Time was when we had a village policeman and troublesome youngsters would get a clip around the ear. Now they have to go up before people like my husband, Councillor Prosser, and receive some paltry sentence – a conditional discharge, or a period of community service if they’re very bad. Time was when sinners would be dealt with by the Church, isn’t it? They weren’t so ready to reoffend then.’

  ‘The way Father Ellis deals with them?’

  Judith smiled thinly. ‘The way God deals with them, he would say, isn’t it? Excuse me, I must go back and minister to Mrs Starkey.’