Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘Oh shit,’ Jane whispered.

It was sudden – like a grey woollen blanket flung over your head.

‘Oh, dear God,’ Jane said.

It was like they’d entered some weird fairground. Red lights in the air. Also white lights, at skewed angles, intersecting across all three carriageways.

She heard Eirion breathe in sharply as he hit the brakes and spun the wheel. Spun into a carnival of lights. Lights all over the place. False lights in the night of filth . Grabbed by her seatbelt, Jane heard screams, dipping and rising like the screams of women on a roller coaster.

The engine stalled. The car slid and juddered.

And stopped? Had they stopped?

Under the fuzzed and shivering lights, there was a moment of massive stillness in which Jane registered that Eirion had managed to bring the car to a halt without hitting anything. She breathed out in shattered relief. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

‘It’s a pile-up,’ Eirion said. ‘I don’t know what to do. Should we get out?’

‘We might be able to help someone.’

‘Yeah.’

There was fog and there was also steam or something. And the silhouettes of figures moving. Even inside the car, there was a smell of petrol. Jane scrubbed at the windscreen, saw metal scrunched, twisted, stretched and pulled like intestine. The fog swirled like poison gas, alive with shouting and wailing and the waxy, solidified beams of headlights.

Jane screamed suddenly and thudded back into the passenger seat. Eirion frenziedly unbuckled his seatbelt, leaned across her. ‘Jane?’

‘I saw an arm. In the road. An arm sticking out. With a hand and fingers all splayed out and white. Just an arm, it was just—’

Brakes shrieked behind them.

Behind.

You never thought about behind. Jane actually turned in time to see it, the monster with many eyes, before it reared and snarled and crushed them.

GARETH PROSSER WAS loading hay or silage or whatever the hell they called it in these parts onto a trailer for his sheep out on the hills. He was panting out small balloons of white breath. He didn’t even look up when Robin strolled over, just muttered once into the trailer.

‘’Ow’re you?’

Robin deduced that his neighbour was enquiring after his health.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, although he still felt like shit after the Blackmore put-down. ‘Nice morning. Specially after all that fog last night.’

‘Not bad.’

Gareth Prosser straightened up. He wore a dark green nylon coverall and an old discoloured cap. Behind him, you could hardly distinguish the grey farmhouse from the barns and tin-roofed shacks. There was a cold mist snaking amongst a clump of conifers on the hillside, but the sun had risen out of it. The sun looked somehow forlorn and out of place, like an orange beachball in the roadway. It was around eight-fifteen a.m.

‘Wonder if you can give me some advice,’ Robin said.

Gareth Prosser looked at him. Well, not in fact at him, but at a point just a couple degrees to his left, which was disconcerting – made you think there was someone behind you with an axe.

‘Firewood,’ Robin said. ‘We need some dry wood for the stove, and I figured you would know a reputable dealer.’

Gareth Prosser thought this over. He was a shortish, thickset guy in his fifties and now well overweight. His face was jowly, the colour and texture of cement.

Eventually, he said, ‘Mansel Smith’s your man.’

‘Ah.’ Robin was unsure how to proceed, on account of, if his recollection was accurate, the dealer who had sold them the notorious trailerload of damp and resinous pine also answered to the name of Mansel Smith.

‘You get your own wood from, uh, Mansel?’

Prosser slammed up the tailgate on the trailer.

‘We burns anthracite,’ he said.

‘Right.’ If Mansel Smith was the only wood dealer around, Robin could believe that. And yet somehow he thought that if Gareth Prosser did ever require a cord of firewood from Mansel it would not be pine and it would not be wet.

‘Well, thanks for your advice.’

‘No problem,’ Prosser said.

Right now, if this situation was the other way about, Robin figured he himself would be asking his neighbour in for a coffee, but Prosser just stood there, up against his trailer, like one of those monuments where the figure kind of dissolves into uncarved rock. No particular hostility; chances were this guy didn’t know or didn’t care that Robin was pagan.

Well, this was all fine by Robin, who stayed put, stayed cool. If there was one thing he’d learned from the Craft it was the ability to become still, part of the landscape like an oak tree. Prosser stayed put because maybe he was part of the landscape, and Robin figured they could both have stood there alongside that trailerload of winter fodder until one of them felt hunger pains or he – unlikely to be Prosser – burst out laughing.

But after about five seconds, the farmer looked up when a woman’s voice called out, ‘Gareth! Who was that?’

Prosser didn’t reply, and she came round the side of one of the sheds onto the half-frozen rutted track.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Hi there,’ Robin said.

The woman was a little younger than Gareth, maybe fifty, and a good deal better preserved. She wore tight jeans and boots and a canvas bomber jacket. She had a strong, lean face and clear blue eyes and short hair with, possibly, highlights.

‘Good morning,’ the woman said distinctly. ‘I’m Councillor Prosser’s wife.’

‘Hi. Robin Thorogood. From, uh, next door.’

‘Judith Prosser.’

They shook hands. She had a firm grip. She even looked directly into his eyes.

‘I’ve got some coffee on,’ she said.

‘That would be wonderful.’

‘I’ll be in now,’ Gareth said.

Robin had learned, from Betty, that when they said ‘now’ they meant ‘in a short while’. So he smiled and nodded at Gareth Prosser and gratefully followed Judith up the track toward the farmhouse complex. In the middle distance, their two teenage sons were wheeling their dirt bikes out to the hill. There was a sound like a chainsaw starting up and one of the boys splattered off.

‘Be an international next year, our Richard,’ Judith Prosser said proudly. ‘Had his first bike when he was four. All Wales Schoolboy Scrambling champion at eleven. Perfect country for it, see.’

‘Doesn’t it mess up the fields?’

‘Messes up the footpaths a bit.’ Mrs Prosser smiled ruefully. ‘We gets complaints from some of the rambling groups from Off. But not from the local people.’

Robin nodded.

‘Councillor Prosser’s boys, see,’ Mrs Prosser said, like it was perfectly reasonable that being a councillor should automatically exclude you from certain stifling social impositions. Robin didn’t detect any irony, but maybe it was there.

‘I see,’ he said.

‘This is Juliet Pottinger.’ An efficient and authoritative Scottish voice. ‘I’m afraid I am away this weekend, but you may wish to leave a message after the tone. If you are a burglar uninterested in thousands of books which are essentially old rather than antiquarian, then I can tell you that you are almost certainly wasting your time.’

Betty thought she sounded like a woman who would at least give you a straight answer – if not until Monday.

Bugger. She cleared away the breakfast things, ran some water for washing-up. Whatever Robin learned about the Reverend Penney from the Prossers, she didn’t trust him not to put some pagan-friendly spin on it, and it was important to her now to find out the truth. What had Penney done to cause ‘weeping and wailing’ in the village? Why had the local people hushed it up? Did the priest, Ellis, know the full story and did this explain why he was so determined to subject the site to some kind of exorcism? She’d never settle here until she knew.