Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘You’re not local?’ Mr Sandford said.

‘No, not very.’ Lol began to prod tentatively at the pea-gravel around the bottom of the tank.

‘In which case, you wouldn’t know this is Silicon Valley in the making.’

‘You’ve got a factory?’

‘Not me personally. Chris Cody’s the genius. Saved the whole village from a slow death. Seventeen new jobs this year, if you include part-time employment for cleaners and so on. That’s big-time here. And it’s just the start.’

What, software manuf—?’ Lol recoiled as his spade found something in the gravel. Black. Could be a shoe. He looked up at Gomer.

‘The lot.’ Sandford hadn’t noticed it. ‘We make computers. Right now, the big thing’s computers for kids.’

It was a pipe, just a thick, black pipe.

‘I thought…’ Lol collected some breath, unsure if this was relief because, of all the bits you might uncover first, a shoe would probably be the least distressing. ‘I thought kids could use anything. Eight-year-old hackers getting into the White House and… all that.’

‘Nah, little kids, this is. Simple computers for four-year-olds, three-year-olds, two or younger. With games they can understand. By the time they get to school they’re computer-literate and most of ’em can read and write. Puts ’em a couple of years ahead of other kids. Fantastic. Might look run-down and primitive round here, but this place is the future, and that’s why—’

‘All right.’ Gomer jumped down from the digger, tossing his ciggy into the mud. ‘I’ll come in there now, boy.’

‘You sure, Gomer?’ Lol was already out of the pit, a shiver up his back.

‘But you do not expect this,’ Mr Sandford said, watching the Efflapure, as if they were excavating Hell itself in his half-acre garden.

‘Careful now.’ Jenny Box pulled back the rug in her oak-panelled hall, revealing the hatch in the crooked wooden floor.

‘Chapel House…’ Merrily said. ‘You mean… ?’

‘Even the estate agents didn’t try to make anything of it,’ Mrs Box said. ‘They thought ’twas just a little cellar – a “wine cellar” they called it – which they thought would sound more appealing to the kind of people they were expecting to buy the house.’ She pulled back a bolt and slipped slender fingers under a black cast-iron ring. ‘This hatch is Victorian, I’m guessing, and they’d have made a feature of it, but for most of last century it’d have been nothing but a storage space.’

The hatch came up easily. Jenny Box laid it down flat. She depressed a switch in the oak panelling. Stone steps were softly lit from below.

‘After you, Reverend,’ Mrs Box said.

Merrily put a toe on the first step. She was still wary of enclosed and windowless spaces after a harrowing night last Candlemas, in a private mausoleum in Radnorshire. Maybe she always would be.

‘There used to be a rail,’ Mrs Box said, ‘but it’d fallen off and I didn’t replace it. ’Twas always my feeling that, going down there, a certain sense of danger would be not inappropriate. Sometimes, if I’m feeling a little daring, I’ll go down in the dark and light a candle.’

‘You should be a bit careful,’ Merrily said. ‘What if you fell and got trapped?’

‘Tssk,’ Jenny Box said scornfully.

Merrily went down the steps, which curved. She was wondering: some kind of priest’s hole? Was the house old enough for that? As she came to the bottom step, she glanced back over her shoulder, trepidation lightly brushing her, as if the hatch might come crashing down, the bolt thrown, sealing her underground with… what?

There was an absurd moment of relief when she saw Jenny Box following her. She went forward, ducking – not something she had to do very often, even in the oldest cottages, but here the curved ceiling was, at its highest, only an inch or so above her head.

Mrs Box laughed lightly. ‘Kneeling room only, for most people today. I guess people were all a lot shorter when this was built.’

A round lantern, with an electric bulb, hung close to the wall, and Merrily saw she was in a short, narrow passage, its walls recently replastered and painted white. A smell. Incense? She didn’t move. She felt cold down here, despite still wearing her coat – the short woollen one, newish; she hadn’t wanted to look too poor this morning.

She wants me to know… is that possible?

‘Go on.’ Jenny Box was behind her, not quite touching her. ‘Go through.’

The passage opened out into a small white room lit by a second lantern and given focus by a low wooden altar. The atmosphere was suddenly so pervasive that, if she hadn’t been so unsettled, it might have brought Merrily instinctively to her knees.

‘I didn’t know this even existed.’

She’d been expecting something contrived, something fabricated, something faintly naff. But there were places where you could be brought in blindfold and you’d still be instantly aware of the energy of prayer.

The altar was of dark oak, its top a good four inches thick. It had on it a small golden cloth, a heavy gilt cross on a stand and two thick yellow candles in trays. Before it, a gold-coloured rug lay on the flagged floor and the ceiling was painted gold, like a chantry. There was an oak settle against the back wall. An incense-burner hung from what looked like a meat-hook in a corner and behind the altar was a tall picture involving a misty white figure with a down-pointing arm extending to form what could be a sword.

From a small alcove in the stone wall to their left, Jenny Box took down a box of cook’s matches, and moved to the altar.

‘When I contacted the previous owners… well, no, not them because they were only here two minutes, but the daughter of the people who’d owned Chapel House for about a half-century before that, she said they always knew there was something “funny” about this cellar, and in fact local people used to say it was haunted. The daughter said her parents just used it as storage space, for junk. They didn’t know its history – nobody seems to, but I don’t think that matters.’

‘No.’

‘I mean, I could tell straight off that there was something . I had it cleaned out completely, did most of it myself. Scrubbed for hours at the floor – the first time I’d scrubbed a floor in many, many years. It seemed like… an important thing to do. Like washing the feet of…’ She broke off and smiled almost bashfully. ‘It had obviously even been used as a coal cellar at one time. The walls were pretty filthy. So I started to scrub away at them, too. And that was when the cross appeared.’

Merrily looked around.

‘Oh, it’s not there now.’ Jenny Box struck a match. ‘It disappeared again, I’m afraid. There I was, scrubbing at the wall one day, and the plaster came off, and it left the exact, perfect shape of a cross, but when I came back the next morning all the rest of the plaster had fallen off. It wasn’t for anyone else, you see.’ Her faced tilted; she sought out Merrily’s eyes. ‘It was to show me ,’ she said. ‘You know?’

Merrily said nothing. This was no place for scepticism. Although it was still cold, there seemed to be no intrusive air down here, and when Mrs Box lit the candles their flames rose elegantly and brought the painting behind the altar to flickering life. She saw a stormy sky over a church steeple and, parting the thunderclouds, the figure of white smoke with what was now clearly a naked sword.

‘It’s not exact,’ Jenny Box said. ‘A friend of mine did it in London. She’s a fashion designer, so I suppose the whole thing’s a bit glib and glossy, but she did her best with what I outlined to her.’