A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Before I leave,’ Bain said, ‘I want to make it clear that no one else here was involved, no one conspired. No one else deserves to suffer.’

  And then he turned and gathered his robe and walked out without another word.

  There’d been a long period of quiet then, broken only by some weeping. Betty leaned against a wall, drained. Vivvie had her head in her hands. Even Max had nothing to say. His kids hovered in the doorway, the fiendish Hermes looking satisfyingly scared. The pregnant witch, whose name Robin couldn’t recall, had left the room with her partner. Robin only hoped she was OK. He was starting to feel sick and cold. The twig-fire hissed. A thick piece of altar candle rolled into a corner.

  Alexandra, who’d been sitting calmly, with the crown of lights on her knees to protect it, was the first to speak. ‘I think we should all leave Betty and Robin alone for a while.’

  And so Robin and Betty, covenless, had rediscovered one another. I take thee to my hand, my heart and my spirit at the setting of the sun and rising of the stars. Robin started to weep again and buried his face in her hair. Clinging together in their stupid robes, in the wreckage of the altar.

  They went hand in hand to the door, and looked out at Winnebagos, the barn and puddles. Robin watched the moon in the puddles, icing over. You could almost get sentimental about those puddles. But not quite.

  ‘We should get outa here tomorrow. Go check into a hotel someplace. Think things over. I love you.’

  Betty had her red ski jacket around her shoulders. ‘And I love you,’ she said. ‘But Robin, honey...’

  Betty fell silent. He hated when Betty became silent.

  ‘OK, what?’ he said.

  She held his hand to the centre of her breast, her emotional centre.

  ‘We can’t just leave it.’

  ‘Watch me,’ Robin said.

  But his spirit took a dive. She’d already explained how she’d spent the night at a Christian priest’s house. A woman priest, who was also the county exorcist or some such, and knew a lot of stuff. He had the idea it had all come about through Betty’s meeting with Juliet Pottinger. A part of him still didn’t want to know about any of this.

  He thought he could hear distant voices, beyond the trees. Like from a barbecue. Or maybe he just thought barbecue on account of the red glow in the sky. Perhaps a glimmering of Imbolc.

  ‘There’s a fire somewhere,’ Betty said. ‘Can’t you smell it? Didn’t you hear the sirens?’

  ‘I was maybe smashing things at the time. Coming on like the Reverend Penney.’

  ‘Let me tell you the truth about Penney,’ Betty said. ‘He had a bad time in Old Hindwell Church. I think he was basically a very good man, probably determined to make a success of his ministry. But I think there were some aspects of what he found here that he couldn’t handle. Began taking all kinds of drugs.’

  ‘Didn’t the Pottinger woman say, in her letter to the Major, she didn’t think he was doing drugs?’

  ‘She was wrong. He seems to have had a vision, or a hallucination... of a dragon... Satan... in the church. And he seems to have thought that by discontinuing active worship there, it would... make it go away.’

  Nothing very new there. ‘But?’ Robin said.

  ‘But I don’t think what he experienced was anything to do with the Old Religion or the rise of the new paganism. I think he became aware of the dualistic nature of religion as it already existed in this area; that there is a paganism here, but it’s all mixed in with Christianity. A kind of residual medieval Christianity – when magic was very much a part of the whole thing. When prayer was seen as a tool to get things done. It’s practical. It suits the area. Marginal land. Hand to mouth.’

  Robin thought of the witch box, the charm. Christian, but not entirely Christian. Those astrological symbols, and some of the words – using witchcraft against witchcraft.

  ‘There are five St Michael churches,’ Betty said. ‘A pentagram of churches, apparently to confine the dragon. But it’s an inverted pentagram, right?’

  ‘That... doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Betty said, ‘it was accepted that, at some time, they might need to invoke the dragon. It’s border mentality. I met a bloke called Gomer Parry. Radnorshire born and bred. He’ll tell you this place took a lot of hammering from both the English and the Welsh and survived, he reckons, by knowing when to sit on the fence and which side to come down on.’

  Robin took some time to absorb this. He could smell those bonfire fumes on the air now. It was, in some ways, a sharp and exciting smell carrying the essence of paganism.

  He said, ‘You mean they’re... I don’t know this stuff, the Book of Revelation and all...’

  ‘Sitting on the fence while the war in heaven rages,’ Betty said. ‘Five little old churches in a depopulated area with a rock-bottom economy. No-man’s-land.’

  ‘No-god’s-land?’ Robin said, awed. ‘But, like... way back... way, way back... this place was something... the archaeology shows that.’

  ‘Maybe that accounts for its inner strength. I don’t know. We don’t know what we’re standing in front of. We don’t know the full nature of what lies the other side of that barn.’

  ‘Does Ellis?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Or Bain?’

  ‘Partly. Maybe.’

  ‘But Bain’s big thing was personal. That’s dark magic. Low magic.’

  ‘There are people round here who would understand it. It’s notorious for feuds lasting from generation to generation.’

  Robin said, ‘I wonder, how did Ned Bain get the box from the Major? He buy it? Or just push the old guy off of his ladder and steal it?’

  ‘I don’t think he’d push the Major off the ladder. But I don’t think he’d have been averse to posting his name on the Kali Three Web site.’

  ‘What is that, anyway?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ Betty said.

  ‘Don’t wanna dump on my idyll, huh? There’s no idyll, babes. No more idyll. Where’s that leave us?’

  ‘Leaves us with eleven disappointed witches,’ Betty said. ‘And a contaminated church.’

  Robin breathed in the distant smoke. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘I was expecting somebody. I thought she’d have come by now.’

  ‘The woman priest? The Christian priest?’

  ‘She’s also an exorcist.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Robin said, ‘but didn’t we pass this way before?’

  ‘It would’ve been very wrong to let Ellis do it. You were right about that. From the start.’

  ‘Don’t try and get me on your side.’

  ‘OK.’

  They looked out over the freezing puddles to the barn on the other side of which the Church of St Michael overhung the restless Hindwell Brook, probably the very same brook into which that guy’s son’s blood flowed from his hair, in the old Welsh poem Max had read out.

  ‘On account of you know you never need to,’ Robin said eventually. ‘You know that whatever shit comes down, I am on your side. Do what you think is best.’

  He felt like crying. He wished for subsidence, an earthquake. He wished the freaking church would fall into the freaking brook.

  Presently, Alexandra stood on the edge of one of the puddles, her long, grey hair loose, a thick woollen shawl wrapped around her.

  The emissary. The negotiator. The one they were most likely to talk to.

  ‘It has to be your decision,’ Alexandra told them.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Betty said.

  ‘Babes,’ Robin said gently, ‘it’s getting late. And the priest isn’t here. If she was ever gonna come at all.’

  ‘We don’t know what that place is really about.’ Betty looked out into the night, in the direction of the church. ‘We don’t know what rituals they were performing, what kind of magic they were trying to arouse or for what purpose. All those millennia ago.’

  ‘Bets,’ Robin said, pained, ‘the anc
ient powers locked into the land? The magic of the Old Ones? This is Blackmore shit.’

  She looked at him, puzzled. She was probably thinking of him standing watching the water rushing below the church and ranting about the cool energy, him and George with their dowsing rods working out how many old, old bodies were under there, where the energy lines converged. She didn’t understand – as Robin now did – that to do his paintings, to be what he was, a true creative artist, he just had to live the legend. That was all. That was as deep as it went.

  Alexandra said hesitantly, ‘May I make a suggestion?’

  ‘Please,’ said Robin.

  ‘We abandon all reconsecration plans. That’s been tainted now, anyway, because of Ned. And Ned’s gone, and we talked about that and we were all relieved, even George, because Ned’s... Ned’s a little bit dark.’

  ‘Fucker,’ Robin said.

  ‘So we forget all that. We forget the politics.’

  ‘Even Vivvie?’

  Alexandra glanced behind her. Robin saw the whole coven in the shadows.

  Vivvie came forward, looking like some rescued urchin. She stood beside Alexandra. ‘Whatever,’ she said.

  ‘My suggestion,’ Alexandra said, ‘is that we simply enact the Imbolc rite.’

  ‘Who’d be the high priest?’ Robin said.

  ‘It should be you.’

  Robin knew this was a major concession, with George and Max out there. Although he’d been through second-degree initiation, he’d never led a coven.

  ‘And when we come to the Great Rite,’ Alexandra said, ‘we’ll leave so that you can complete it.’

  For Robin, the cold February night began to acquire luminosity.

  Alexandra smiled. ‘You’ve both had a bad time. We want this night to be yours.’

  Robin tingled. He did not dare look at Betty.

  55

  Grey, Lightless

  ONLY A DEAD body.

  Whatever else remained was not here; it was probably earth-bound in that back room, where a medieval exorcism replayed itself again and again, until the spirit was flailing and crackling and beating at the glass. The grey and lightless thing that J.W. Weal brought home from Hereford County Hospital.

  ‘Look at her...’ said Merrily, in whom guilt constantly dwelt, like an old schoolmistress. ‘That’s what you all did. That’s what you left behind. Take a proper look at her face. Go on.’

  But Judith Prosser looked only at Merrily. And there was no guilt. Practical Judith in her tight blue jeans, the sleeves of her shirt pushed up to the elbows, her black coat in a heap on the floor. Practical Judith Prosser, ready to act, thinking what to do next, how to make her move. A smart woman, a hard woman, a survivor.

  But Merrily, perhaps taking on the guilt that Judith would never feel, pushed harder.

  ‘Maybe that’s why J.W. invited you to the interment – you and Gareth and the good Dr Coll. Did Dr Coll, by the way, prescribe Valium to keep Menna afloat, keep her quiet when she threatened to be an embarrassment? Was there medication for Marianne, too? I thought Marianne seemed awfully compliant during her cleansing.’

  ‘You have it all worked out, Mrs Watkins,’ Judith said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Merrily said. ‘I finally think I do. It stinks worse than this embalming stuff.’

  ‘And what will you do with it all? Will you go to the police and make accusations against Dr Collard Banks-Morgan and Mr Weal, the solicitor, and Mrs Councillor Prosser?’

  ‘It would help,’ Merrily conceded, ‘if Barbara Buckingham’s body was in here.’

  ‘So why don’t you come back here with a pickaxe? Or with your good friend Gomer Parry and one of his road-breakers?’

  It wasn’t going to be there, was it? There was no one under Menna. Yet Merrily was sure now that Barbara Buckingham was dead.

  ‘Did Barbara find out about the exorcism?’

  Judith slowly shook her head, smiling her pasted-on smile, back on top of the situation, giving nothing away.

  ‘Still,’ Merrily said, ‘Menna’s here. For any time you want to look at her and remember the old days before she turned into a woman and became less malleable. And J.W.’s left you with a key. So you can come in any time and watch what you once had... see what you did. Watch it slowly decaying before your—’

  Merrily sank to her knees.

  She’d been expecting, if anything, a shriek of outrage and clawing hands. She hadn’t seen this coming. Judith Prosser didn’t seem to be close enough. Now Merrily was on her knees, with the flash memory of a fist out of nowhere, hard as a kitchen pestle. On a cheekbone.

  She had never been hit like this before. It was shattering, like a car crash. She cried out in shock and agony.

  Judith Prosser bent with a hand out as if to help her, and then hit her again with the heel of it, full in the eye. Merrily even saw it, as if in slow motion, but still couldn’t move. It drove her back into the wall, her head connecting with the concrete, her left eye closing.

  ‘You can tell the police about that, too, Mrs Watkins.’ Judith was panting with satisfaction. ‘And see who they believe – a hysterical little pretend-priest from Off, or Mrs Councillor Prosser. Ah...’

  One hand over her weeping eye, Merrily saw through the other one that the door had swung open. And the doorway was filled. Really filled.

  ‘Good evening, Jeffery,’ Judith said.

  ‘You have me, Judith, as a witness that she hit you first.’ Weal’s voice was colourless and flat as card. ‘But only if you make no further mess of her than that, or it would not be a reasonable defence.’

  He was carrying what looked like a kind of garden implement. He came in and gently closed the door of the mausoleum behind him. He was wearing a charcoal grey three-piece suit and a white shirt, and a black tie to show he was still in mourning. His face was pouchy, red veins prominent in his grey cheeks.

  He propped the garden implement against the door. Merrily saw that it was a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun.

  ‘Thought it was the hippies, see.’ He nodded at the twelve-bore. ‘Some satanist hippies are parked up in the clearing by the Fedw Dingle. Father Ellis phoned to warn me. They break in anywhere.’

  ‘Isn’t loaded, is it, Jeffery?’ Judith said.

  ‘It’s always loaded. There are foxes about. And feral cats. I hate cats, as you know.’

  ‘Not going to the Masonic?’

  ‘I was going, Judith, till I saw all those troublemakers in the village. Can’t leave your house unguarded, all this going on, can you?’

  Talking politely, like neighbours over the wall, people who knew each other but not that well.

  They must have known one another for most of their lives.

  Merrily didn’t try to move. Judith looked down at her.

  ‘Recognize this one, do you, Jeffery? Came to see me this morning. Asking all kinds of questions about Father Ellis. And about you, and Menna. When she left, I saw that the keys... You know where I keep your keys, on the hook beside the door? Stupid of me, I know, but I trust people, see, and we’ve never had anything stolen before. But when she left I seen the keys were gone.’

  Weal stood over Merrily. ‘Called the police?’

  ‘Well, next thing, there she is coming down the lane tonight. I thought, I’ll follow her, I will, and sure enough, up the drive she goes, lets herself in and when I came in here, she’d already done that.’ They both looked at the open tomb. ‘Disgusting little bitch. I shouldn’t have touched her but, as you say, she went for me. Like a cat.’

  I hate cats, as you know. How instinctive she was.

  Merrily was able to open her swelling eye, just a little. She looked up at Weal. It was like standing under some weathered civic monument. She didn’t think there was any point at all in telling him that Judith had lured her here, picking up, with psychopathic acumen, Merrily’s guilt, her sense of responsibility for Barbara Buckingham.

  ‘Why did you do this? Why do you keep coming here? Why do you keep wanting to see
my wife?’

  J.W. Weal gazing down at her sorrowfully, giving Merrily the first real indication that there was something wrong with him. His speech was slow, his voice was dry.

  ‘The truth of it is,’ Judith said, ‘that she seems to have a vendetta against Father Ellis.’

  ‘Father Ellis is... a good man,’ Weal said calmly.

  No, it wasn’t calmness so much as depletion. Something missing – almost as if he was drugged, not fully here. As if part of him existed on some intermediate plane, at grey-and-lightless level. Lying there in a cocoon of pain, detached, Merrily felt her senses heightened, her objectivity sharpened.

  ‘Supposed to be the exorcist for the Hereford Diocese, she is,’ Judith told Weal. ‘Doesn’t like him working in her back yard – a priest whose feet she is not fit to wash. What good would a woman like this be at what he does?’

  Merrily tried to stand. Judith immediately pushed her down again and she slid into the corner by the door. Judith was wearing her leather gloves again, perhaps to cover up any slight abrasions or bruising from the punches. Merrily’s face felt numb and twisted. She wondered if her cheekbone was broken. She wondered where this would end. The way these two were talking to each other, it was like a bad play.

  ‘Gave me some nonsense story,’ Judith Prosser said. ‘About Barbara Buckingham being murdered and buried in there.’ Another nod to the open tomb.

  Why, in God’s name, didn’t one of them close it?

  ‘Buckingham?’ Weal said vaguely. What was wrong with him?

  ‘Barbara Thomas.’

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘She thinks Barbara was murdered.’ A gleeful, almost girlish lilt now. ‘Thinks you did it, Jeffery.’

  Merrily didn’t look at him. She could almost hear his mind trying to make sense of it.

  ‘Because... Barbara Thomas... came to see me, is it?’ His voice thin and stretched, as though he was trying to remember something. ‘Because she... accused me?’