Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘He said he’d find us in the churchyard.’ Lol looked towards the steeple, along a narrow, uphill street where everything was Sunday-silent. There was no wind, and the dusk was forming like coppery smoke around them.

And Moira said, ‘So you’re definitely up for the gig, right?’

They walked up some steps to the churchyard, their footsteps echoing from the buildings of brick and stone on either side.

‘So the offer’s still, er…’

‘Open, yeah.’ Moira, who persuaded things to happen, took his arm, hugging it to her. ‘What a difference a death makes, eh?’

Something like a pebble landed in Lol’s gut.

‘Directly under your feet,’ Sam Hall said, ‘are hundreds of dead people. Buried in their clothes – no shrouds, no coffins.’

Sam had found them at the edge of The Prospect, a plateau behind the church with a view of the river and, beyond it, twenty-five miles of darkening countryside rising to the slopes of the Black Mountains on the Welsh border.

He’d explained that there used to be a bishop’s palace up here, a second home for the bishops of Hereford who, for centuries, had been the biggest landowners hereabouts. Now The Prospect was mainly public space, a high garden sloping down to the sandstone walls and the Royal Hotel.

Moira had looked around, tossing an end of her wrap over a shoulder. ‘No sign of power lines.’

‘Oh, they’re around,’ Sam had said. ‘Come with me. I’d like to show you something.’ Turning away abruptly and setting off back along the path with a seasoned walker’s easy gait, a small knapsack hanging from his shoulder like just another crease in his plaid jacket. They went back into the churchyard under mature trees still heavy with dark foliage, where a straight path led from the church itself down towards the centre of the town.

Near the end of the path, opposite a shadowy street of houses and offices, was this stone cross on a hexagonal plinth with steps. Now Sam Hall had a foot on the lowest one.

‘This is the Plague Cross. In 1637 the Great Plague took out more than three hundred people, putting Ross into quarantine. All the trading with the outside world was done down by the bridge, and they washed the money in the river. Even the church services here were suspended. And the dead…’

Lol glanced at Moira, who was standing very still, the white streak in her black hair gleaming in the last of the light as she watched Sam climb to the third step and put a hand up to the stem of the cross.

‘The dead were buried in pits right here,’ Sam said. ‘At night. Buried, according to a local account, “in their wearing apparel”. The bodies were brought up here on carts, and dumped… while the minister stood here, right where I’m standing now, and gave the last blessings by torchlight. Can you imagine that?’

Moira said nothing. Lol thought she probably could – in full colour, with agonized suppurating faces and the stench of disease. Suddenly, in the stillness, he saw it all too, was aware of people in a state of exhaustion, beyond despair, beyond pity, beyond both fear of death and expectation of life. The images were so dense and complete that it felt as though Moira was sending them to him.

This is the same Great Plague that swept through London?’ he asked.

‘Only it came to Ross first. Prosperous-looking place, even then, but the streets were thick with filth and packs of rats. Most of the rich folk left town. But the minister stayed, to bless the sick and the dying.’ Sam turned to Moira. ‘You’d have heard of this man, maybe?’

‘Me?’

‘Name was the Reverend Price. At the height of the plague, the darkest hour, he had all the townsfolk that could make it to their feet join him in a procession – all walking with this desperate dignity through the town streets at five a.m. chanting a litany, a solemn appeal to the Lord for deliverance.’

A light came on in one of the houses across the street, making it seem darker in the churchyard.

‘And his faith was rewarded. When the sun rose that day, it was said, the plague went on the run.’ Sam Hall stepped down from the cross. ‘And you’re wondering why I’m showing you this, right? Well, see, a plague is how I think of it. The Great Plague of the Twenty-first Century. I have an engraving of this cross as the motif on my notepaper.’

‘This new plague is about power lines?’ Lol said.

‘The power towers are the enemy we can see.’ Sam stared up into the sepia sky. ‘If we could see all the TV and satellite signals, all the radio waves serving mobile phones, police communications, cab fleets, air networks, the sky would be this kind of poisonous black the whole day long. If we could smell them like exhaust fumes, we’d all choke to death. But it’s a whole lot more subtle than that. They zip unseen and unfelt through our atmosphere and through our bodies and our brains. They are the insidious wind that blows right through us all – through flesh and tissue, through bones.’

It sounded like a speech he’d made before. Sam was back on the path.

‘You’ll notice I came down off of the cross before I said all that. I’m no preacher, just a guy who seethes inside whenever ‘he sees some twelve-year-old kid in the street, calling up her pal on a piece of pink plastic that burns brains.’

‘Which is always gonnae be denied,’ Moira murmured.

‘Oh, sure. The bigger the investment, the stronger the denial. Like the electricity industry denied the report that came out of Bristol University a couple years ago linking overhead power lines to leukaemia, skin cancer, lung cancer – you name it.’

‘A plague on all humanity, huh?’

‘Sure. And we’re all of us guilty to some extent, even me. I won permission for a windmill to generate clean power for my place up on Howle Hill. I don’t have a phone, let alone a mobile. But if I want to get on the Web, I’ll still go down the hall, use one of Cody’s community computers. Act of plain hypocrisy, with the guy hell-bent on turning Underhowle into the hot spot to end all hot spots.’

‘Hot spots?’ Lol said.

‘ “Hot spot” is the term for a dangerous configuration of transmitters, pylons, what-have-you which renders an area… let’s say difficult to reside in. Cody’s computer plant came to the area on account of a development grant and a derelict site going for peanuts, and now they want to… but you know all this.’

‘I’m a stranger,’ Moira said. ‘I don’t know any of it.’

Sam Hall looked hard at her in the dimness. Moira folded her arms in her wrap.

‘We have a complex situation,’ Sam said. ‘The small industries which once built up Underhowle into a community with three, four pubs, a bunch of shops and its own school went to the wall long ago. By the mid-nineties, the shops had all gone out of business, the school was threatened with closure, and the village wasn’t pretty enough to attract the cottage-hunters from London – specially with these damn pylons like watchtowers around Belsen and Auschwitz.’

It was almost night now and growing cold. Somewhere at the back of his mind Lol could hear Prof Levin saying, The one thing you, of all people, do not need at this stage is to get in with crazies .

Biggest disease in Underhowle, when I came back from the States, was apathy,’ Sam Hall said. ‘I didn’t mind. I just wanted a place I could afford and where I’d be left alone to be a crank and a pain-in-the-ass idealist, sustain my fantasy that we could live without the goddam mains services run by fat cats who’d watch us die one by one, to stave off wasting-disease of the wallet.’

Lol wondered if Sam saw himself as the new Reverend Price, who’d chosen to live and fight in the plague hot spot.