Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

Jane felt her eyes filling up as the car bumped around a bit. She thought at first he’d just gone over the kerb in the fog, but it was deliberate. He was fully in control. The car stopped, and he switched off the engine. Jane looked out and saw wet grass.

‘Where are we?’ Turning to him, wanting for a moment just to see his old smile in the dimness and then fall into his arms and everything would be all right.

For a while, anyway.

So where does it begin, this clinical depression? At what stage do they prescribe the pills? She pulled her bag onto her lap, folding her hands on top of it: self-contained, untouchable. Inside, along with the books, was her Walkman with the Nick Drake compilation CD – Nick Drake, who died of an overdose of antidepressants. It could all be really funny. Except it wasn’t.

Eirion scrubbed at the windscreen with his hand. ‘You can’t even see it.’

‘What?’

‘The steeple at Ledwardine. We’re on Cole Hill.’

‘What are we doing here?’

‘I don’t know, really.’ He sank back in his seat. ‘This is where she saw it, isn’t it? Where Jenny Driscoll saw the angel. Or didn’t… as you decided.’

‘So?’ She stared at him. If she was getting an inkling of what this was all about, she wasn’t inclined to allow the idea to develop.

‘Doesn’t matter, anyway.’ He stopped rubbing. ‘It’s too foggy.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I think you do.’ He swallowed. ‘It’s like I said before – a few months ago this whole thing would’ve been just so exciting to you that we’d’ve been up here every night on some kind of angel hunt.’

‘No, we wouldn’t. That would be stupid.’

‘Yeah,’ Eirion said. ‘It probably would be, now. But the thing is… it would also have been fun. I would’ve liked it. Flask of hot soup and the… you know, the need to keep warm.’

‘Oh, right,’ Jane said, laying on the scorn. ‘This is about sex .’

‘ No! ’ Almost a scream. ‘That’s not what—’

‘Think about it very carefully,’ Jane said sadly. ‘Underneath it all, it would be about sex.’

Eirion drew in a tight breath. ‘So we’re into Freud now, is it?’ Stirrings of anger bringing out the Welshness in his voice.

‘I really wouldn’t know about that,’ Jane said. ‘I think I’m probably just coming to my senses.’

He exploded then. ‘This is your senses ? It seems to me that you’re losing your fucking senses. All… all six of them.’

Jane said, without thinking much about it, ‘Can you take me home?’ The windscreen was opaque with fog and condensation; it was already going cold inside the car.

‘Is this it?’ Eirion said. ‘Is this it for us?’ Talking in this dramatized way to provoke from her an outraged denial.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe like the angel will float down and spread this healing radiance all around us and we’ll feel really cool.’

It was hard to see his face in what light was left, but she could feel the extreme shock coming off him. It was like being in one of those cold patches that Mum was supposed to look for in haunted houses. And though she’d caused it, Jane felt detached from it – and that wasn’t right, was it? That was kind of… cruel.

‘Listen,’ Eirion said urgently. ‘We all get like this sometimes. You read about executive stress and mid-life crisis, but I think those people’ve just forgotten what it was like when they were in their teens and there were like whole big areas of their lives they couldn’t control.’

‘What?’

‘They don’t remember how bad it could be sometimes. When you can’t cont—’

‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ She looked at him with pity. ‘I’ve realized that nobody ’s in control. Nobody and nothing. All this information going round and round the world on the Internet and stuff, and it’s all bullshit and everybody’s got a Website that tells you nothing you want to know, and all the politicians are like… And Mum… Mum knows these guys know sod-all really and are never going to get us anywhere, and the hospitals and everything are always going to be totally crap, but she can live with it, because she’s managed to con herself into thinking that way above all this ridiculous mess there’s this all-knowing, benevolent thing .’

‘Oh Jane—’

And meanwhile she and Lol are coming apart before it ever came together. And he’ll shag the Cairns woman, if he hasn’t already, because at least she’s there for him. At least she’s there . And Mum will just spend the rest of her life humouring fruitcakes like Jenny Driscoll. And poor old Gomer will start sitting in front of daytime telly – day after mindless day of soaps and Kilroy – not even seeing it after a bit, and falling asleep, until one blessed day he doesn’t wake up.’

Silence.

‘It’s a phase,’ Eirion said feebly at last. ‘It’ll pass, Jane.’

She jerked in her seat. ‘ I don’t want it to pass, you cretin! This is reality! ’

She started to cry, and wound down the window to let the fog come in like a damp facecloth.

‘I’ll take you home, then,’ Eirion said emptily.

Merrily had come home via Hereford, calling in at Tesco to pick up a sandwich and then at the hospital to see a couple of parishioners in the geriatric ward – Miss Tyler and Mrs Mackay, once neighbours in the village and now they didn’t even recognize one another on the ward. But they recognized Merrily, or seemed to, and Mrs Mackay wanted her to pray with her and, at the end of it, Merrily added her own silent prayer that something could be done about geriatric wards. Even the word itself had become demeaning and contemptuous, and when you said it aloud it made a sound like a creaking wheelchair.

Back home, she found a parcel – a brown Jiffy bag – in the porch and dumped it on the hall table when she heard the phone ringing. She exchanged grimaces with the lamp-bearing Christ and went through to the scullery to answer it.

‘You sound a bit down, lass.’

‘Oh. Hello, Huw.’

‘You find that stuff about the girl?’

‘Yeah. I was trying to think if it could be relevant, in any way, to her disappearance.’

‘Depends if it were still going on.’

‘Getting abducted by aliens becomes a regular thing?’

‘ Sometimes the experience is repeated. Sometimes it even seems to be site-specific.’

‘You mean the house is haunted, rather than the individual? That rather argues against aliens, doesn’t it? More like geological conditions – fault lines, underground springs. Any atmospheric conditions that might promote hallucinations. Nothing to do with rehabilitation of the displaced dead. No requirement for social services of the soul.’ Merrily sat down, still wearing her coat. ‘Huw, I’ve got to bury Roddy Lodge.’

‘So I heard.’

‘ Did you?’ Amazing how much gossip drifted up the Brecon Beacons. ‘And would you have any advice on that? For instance, there’s a body of local opinion doesn’t want him in the churchyard.’

‘That bother you?’

‘I feel OK about it. He’s entitled to a Christian burial. However, bearing in mind that I’ve never buried a murderer before…’

‘Aye.’ A pause for consideration. ‘Complications are possible. A lot of psychic fallout drifting round a murder. As for several murders…’

‘Not proved. He’s still an innocent man in the eyes of the law.’

‘And that can make it even more complex. Unfinished business, lass.’

‘This is what you rang about, isn’t it?’

Huw was silent for quite a while. Long enough for Merrily to tuck the phone under her chin while she shed her coat.