Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘She should stay there another night,’ Sophie said stiffly. ‘Concussion’s unpredictable.’

‘I think, on the whole, I can probably do without her discharging herself and stalking the streets of Worcester at midnight.’

‘I should have thought that she’d be sufficiently penitent not to dare to—’

‘Sophie’ – Merrily cradled her face in cupped hands, looked up sorrowfully – ‘this is Jane we’re talking about.’

‘If she were my daughter...’

‘Don’t give yourself nightmares.’ Merrily dropped her hands, trying not to cry from exhaustion, anxiety, confusion and a terror which seemed to be lodged deep inside her, which every so often would pulse, hot-wiring her entire nervous system.

‘Delayed shock, Merrily.’

‘If you tell me I need trauma counselling, I’ll put this computer through the window.’

Sophie brought over a chair, sat down opposite Merrily.

‘Tell me then.’

The sun had put itself away again. Sophie added two sugars into Merrily’s tea and switched on the answering machine.

Sophie? Sophie in her incredibly expensive Alpine sweater. Sophie who served the cathedral and all it represented. Yeah, why not?

‘When you really contemplate the nature of this job,’ Merrily said, ‘you can start to think you’re more than half mad. When the line between reality and whatever else there is... is no longer distinct. When it’s no longer even a line .’

And when you swerve around a crashed lorry in the fog, and there’s a figure staggering in the road that you just know you’re going to hit, and in the last second, while you’re throwing yourself around the wheel, you see her face.

‘I’m starting actually to understand the Church’s conservatism on the supernatural. Shut the door and bar it. Block the gap at the bottom with a thick mat. Let no chink of unnatural light seep in, because a chink’s as good as a... whatever you call a big blast of light that renders you blind.’

‘As in Paul on the road to Damascus?’ Sophie said.

‘Not exactly. Paul was... sure.’

‘You are tired.’

‘I mean, I’m sure... I’m just not quite sure what I’m sure of . It’s only by being dull and conservative that the Church remains relatively intact. Bricks and mortar and Songs of Praise . Leave the weird stuff to Deliverance. It’s a dirty job, and they’ve never been totally convinced someone has to do it.’

‘I did watch the Livenight programme,’ Sophie said. ‘I didn’t really see how else you could have handled it. Without coming over as a... crank.’

‘Or a bigot. Both of which are probably better than a drowning wimp.’ Merrily drank her tea, both hands around the cup, like someone pulled out of the sea and wrapped in a blanket. ‘You spend an interminable hour making a fool of yourself on TV, you walk out thinking all religion’s a joke. You’re unhappy and ashamed and cynical all at the same time. You get in your car, you drive maybe not quite as carefully as you ought to, given the ubiquitous fog warnings and the fact that your husband just happened to have died horrifically on this same stretch of motorway. You drive into a fog bank. You become aware of two dull specks of red that you think must be a hundred yards away and which turn out to be this bloody great crashed lorry dead in your path. You spin the wheel in panic. You become aware of a figure dragging another figure across the road in front of you. The second figure stares full into your headlights, and you see... you see the face of your daughter who you know for a fact is at home in bed fifty-odd miles away. Your daughter’s face... blank, white, expressionless. Like the face of a corpse.’

Sophie shuddered. ‘It must have been... I can’t imagine what that must have been like.’

‘Like... Nemesis,’ Merrily said. ‘You know what I was thinking about in the few minutes before? I was thinking about this woman who believes she’s seeing her sister’s ghost. I was just deciding she really didn’t have a psychiatric problem— Oh no! ’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I told her I’d go with her to her sister’s funeral. It’s this afternoon. It’s in about two hours. Or less.’

‘Oh, Merrily, nobody could possibly expect—’

‘I’ve got to.’

‘You’ve had no sleep .’

‘Oh, I’ve had... had an hour on the sofa. Fed the cat, grabbed a slice of toast, rung Worcester Infirmary twice to make sure Jane’s not... worse. No, look, I’ve got to go, because...’ Because if I don’t and something awful happens ... ‘Because it’s something I can’t just leave in the air.’

‘Then you must lie down for a while first. I’ll find somewhere in the palace. Look at you – you’re trembling. Are you saying this pile-up actually happened in the same area where your husband was killed?’

‘Well, that was on the other side, the northbound lanes. He was... I suppose he was on my mind, when...’

When she’d walked into that studio? Was Sean stalking her then? Was he already deep-harboured in her head when she’d entered the TV building? Having driven along the same stretch of the M5, under the very same bridge against which his car had balled on impact and bounced in its final firedance, while he and Karen were torn and roasted.

Couldn’t tell Sophie any of that. Couldn’t tell her about the eloquent pagan, Ned Bain, sitting there with his lazy, knowing Sean-like eyes, and even his legs crossed à la Sean.

Just stay with the main event.

‘And, you think... what you think is that this can’t be happening. And if it can’t be happening then it’s a hallucination. And you know you’re not hallucinating. Therefore – click, click – it has to be a paranormal experience, just like all the paranormal experiences other people have told you about and you’ve nodded sagely and given your balanced opinion.’

‘But only you would think that. Only someone in your—’

‘Only someone in my weird, cranky job.’

‘But you didn’t hit her,’ Sophie said intensely. ‘Did you? You did not hit Jane.’

‘No. There was no impact. I didn’t hit anyone. But still a complete nightmare – I mean dreamlike. You haven’t physically driven into your daughter, therefore it must be a premonition: a vision of killing your own child .’

‘But it wasn’t, was it?’

‘I could see Sean in her face... that little bump in the nose, the twist of the lips. I could see Sean in her, like I’d never seen him there before.’

‘Juxtaposition of ideas,’ Sophie said, ‘or something.’

‘I swerved, violently. Stopped the car and got out, terrified out of my mind. Only to discover...’ Sophie reached across the desk, squeezed Merrily’s cold right hand. ‘... that this really was Jane. The actual Jane, being pulled away by a terrified Eirion after being very nearly killed when this speeding low-loader smashed into the back of his car. She was pale and expressionless not because she was dead, but because she was semi-concussed. This is the mind-blowing perversity of it, that there is an absolutely cold, earthly, rational explanation ... for everything. For every aspect of it. Why do I find that even more frightening? The most horrifying moment in my life, and there is, in the end, a simple, rational explanation.’

‘You’re afraid that you’ve stopped looking for simple rational explanations? Is that what you mean?’

‘Maybe.’

‘How many people were killed?’ Sophie asked. ‘In the end.’

‘Three. And one critical in hospital. I think about four slightly hurt, including Jane. There were about six cars involved, and a couple of lorries. Seemed like the parameds and the fire brigade were on the scene before I was out of my car. There was one poor woman...’