Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Oh.’ This sometimes happened. A graveyard was crowded underground; there was slippage. It would happen tonight. ‘How far down is the other coffin?’

Gomer said. ‘That’s the point, ennit? This one don’t have no coffin.’

‘Put it out of your head, all right?’ Moira picked up the Boswell guitar by its neck and handed it to Lol. ‘I told the girl you’d talk to her afterwards. She’ll find you. Now let’s get this stuff on stage.’

Mephisto Jones had said he’d been out all day helping a friend to do some fencing on his farm. Then he’d called in for a beer on his way home. He said he was feeling good at the moment; on nights like this, feeling stronger, he wondered if it wasn’t time to come back to England, give it another try. Yeah, he remembered Prof, of course he remembered Prof.

Lol had made himself sit down and ask some questions about the symptoms of electrical hypersensitivity, telling Mephisto about Roddy Lodge’s death on the pylon. At one point, Prof had looked in, his bald head shining with sweat, shaking both fists.

He’d be well out of it , Mephisto had said. Wouldn’t know who he was any more .

He said he was Satan ,’Lol had recalled.

Makes sense , Mephisto had said. I used to think I was the walking dead, but you know what they said about Satan…

Now Lol and Moira carried the guitars down the passage, under muted lights, and out onto the stage, where black curtains concealed the auditorium. Sounds of mass movement out there. This wasn’t a big theatre, but it still felt like standing on a cliff- top overhanging a vast city.

They put the guitars on stands: the curved-backed Boswell, the Washburn and Moira’s thin-backed Martin. There were voice microphones and guitar mikes at waist level.

‘Check the tuning,’ Moira instructed, and Lol went through the motions while she fingered a couple of chords on the Martin, provoking a whoop from beyond the curtain. She put the guitar down, placed both hands on his shoulders, gripping hard, and hissed, ‘She’s no gonnae go away. She’ll find you. But you have to do this first, OK?’

A young guy in a black sweater appeared. ‘Whenever you’re ready.’

‘Thanks.’ Moira nodded. Rustling, chatter, laughter from behind the curtains. An audience. Hundreds of people anticipating an experience. ‘Will your wee priest have made it?’

He shook his head. ‘She’s been delayed.’

I lied when I said I wasn’t involved… Lynsey and Piers and Roddy and the whole bit . What were the implications here? What could he do about it tonight? Moira would play for maybe forty-five minutes, then he’d shamble on, do his forgettable best, shuffle off. An hour lost, maybe more.

On the other hand, if he were to shuffle off now…? It wasn’t as if he’d be letting Moira down – probably the reverse; appearing with sub-standard support didn’t help anyone’s reputation. And he certainly wouldn’t be letting the audience down. But how easy would it be to find Cola French and then get out of the theatre?

They came to the black curtains at the back of the stage. The main curtains had opened now, and he could see the audience in the steep theatre, could see that it was almost full, that all the boxes set into the walls on either side seemed to have been taken.

The house lights went down. The chat sank as sweetly as the ambient noise being lowered in the mix of a live recording. The mike stands and the guitars stood in pools of golden light, and you could almost hear the steel strings vibrating in the air.

Silence like a gasp. Four hundred people out there. Anticipation.

Then Moira said, ‘OK, off you go.’

He spun in shock, and she stepped behind him to cut off his retreat, and the curtains either side of her were execution black.

‘I thought, with you needing to get away, you could go on first after all,’ Moira said.

Lol’s lungs made like a vacuum pump.

Moira pushed him hard. ‘Just get the fuck out there, eh, Robinson?’

GOMER HAD LEFT an earthen step inside the grave, and he went down onto it, but he held the hurricane lamp away so that Merrily couldn’t see.

‘En’t terrible attractive, vicar,’ Gomer admitted.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ She stood on the slippery rim of the grave and leaned over, the wind pulling at the hood of her alb and rattling the laurel bushes. The church crouched above them with its stubby bell-tower, and the lights from inside were dull and unhelpful.

The smell was mainly of freshly turned earth and clay, but it was still the smell of mortality. Her foot dislodged a cob of soil, and she stumbled.

‘Careful, vicar.’

‘I’m OK. Go on… let’s have a look.’

She drew a breath. Gomer flattened himself against the side of the grave and lifted the lamp so that it lit up the interior of the grave like an intimate cellar.

‘Deep,’ Gomer said. ‘Cold earth – preserves ’em better, see.’

Merrily looked down into an absence of eyes. Decay was a corrosive face pack. In its nest of clay-caked hair, the face was like a child’s crude cardboard mask, the emptiness of it all emphasized by the mouth, the way the jaw had fallen open on one side into a last crooked plea.

And all of it made heartbreaking by the rags of what looked like a red sweatshirt and an uncovered hand with its dull glimmer of rings. She had to be fully six feet down. Some gravediggers today didn’t go that deep. She could have ended up with a coffin on top and never have been found.

Merrily stepped back, making the sign of the cross.

‘There was this.’ Gomer climbed out. He held up the lamp and opened out his other hand. ‘Cleaned him up a bit, vicar, so’s you can see.’

She saw an angel.

An angel on a chain.

‘If he was still round the neck, see, I’d’ve left him on, but he was lying on top, he was. Loose. Like somebody’d put him in after the body.’

The angel was no more than an inch and a half long, with wings spread and hands crossed over its lower abdomen, which protruded as though it was pregnant. In fact, there was something curved there, like a small locket or a cameo.

‘Any idea what he is, vicar?’

She felt a sadness as sharp as pain. ‘Think I just might.’

‘Valuable?’

‘It was to someone,’ Merrily said.

Lol felt like he was dying, his recent past laid out before him in a mosaic of faces.

He stood there, frozen, gazing into purgatory, a warm-col- oured vault with boxes set into the sides like the balconies of apartment blocks or the doors in an advent calendar.

The house lights had come up again, because somebody thought he wasn’t ready – some technical problem, maybe – and now he could see the individual faces in the mosaic.

He saw, in one of the boxes, Al and Sally Boswell – Al in his Romany waistcoat and his diklo, Sally in that long white dress with the embroidery around the bosom, the dress that was so much a part of her personal history. The two of them sitting in their box, gypsy aristocracy, as if this was a ceremonial occasion for them. Al, who’d given Lol the Boswell guitar, had come to Hereford to see it abused.

The Boswell guitar was behind Lol, on its stand. He had the Washburn hanging from his shoulder; it felt unresponsive, like a shovel.

He saw Alison Kinnersley, this woman who’d originally gone with him to Ledwardine and then left him for the squire, James Bull-Davies, and his farm and his horses. Bad for you , Lucy Devenish had told him sternly. Wrong type of woman entirely .

James was there, too, in a tie. A male-menopausal stooge , said Lucy Devenish, who’s known only two kinds of women – garrison-town whores and county-set heifers .