Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Cobbold whispered.

This was ridiculous.

‘Thank you.’ Betty also bought a bottle of milk and a pot of local honey. She took her purse from her shoulder bag. She didn’t smile. ‘And if I could have a carton of bat’s blood as well, please.’

This, and the presence in the shop of the doctor, seemed to release something.

‘Take your paper and don’t come in here again, please,’ Mrs Cobbold said shrilly.

The doctor raised a ginger eyebrow.

Betty started to shake her head. ‘I really can’t believe this.’

‘And’ – Mrs Cobbold looked at her at last – ‘you can tell that husband of yours that if he wants to conduct affairs with married women, we don’t want to have to watch it on the street at night. You tell him that.’

Betty’s mouth fell open as Mrs Cobbold stared defiantly at her. The doctor smiled and held open the door for her.

Robin paced the freaking kitchen.

She wouldn’t let him fetch the paper. She didn’t trust him not to overreact if there were any comments... to behave, in fact, like a man who’d been cold-shouldered by his wife, told his artwork was a piece of shit and then stitched up by the media.

She’d been awesomely and unapproachably silent most of yesterday, like she was half out of the world, sealing herself off from the awful implications of the whole nation – worse still, the whole village – knowing where they were coming from. Implications? Like what implications? A lynch mob? The stake? Their house torched? Was this the twenty-first century or, like, 1650?

Later in the day he’d actually found her sunk into a book on the seventeenth-century witch-hunts. The chapter was headed ‘Suckling Demons’; it was about women accused of having sex with the Devil. But she wouldn’t talk about it. He just wanted to snatch away the book and feed it to the stove.

She’d hardly moved from the kitchen for the rest of the morning, drinking strong herbal tea and smoking – Robin counted – eleven cigarettes. And still he hadn’t told her the truly awful news, about Blackmore, because things were bad enough. He’d just spent the entire day trying to persuade her just to talk to him, which was like trying to lure a wounded vixen from her lair.

Was she blaming him for the truth leaking out – like he’d been down the pub handing out invitations to their next sabbat. And the journalists... well, how was he supposed to have handled them? Invite the bastards in to watch them perform the Great Rite on the hearthrug?

Some chance.

If he’d had the brains he was born with, she’d told him, her voice now inflected with hard Yorkshire – this was while they were still speaking – he’d’ve kept very quiet, not answered the door. There was no car there, so they could quite easily have been away from home.

What? This had made him actually start pulling at his hair. Like, how the fuck was he supposed to know it was the god-damned media at the door? Might have been insurance salesmen, the Jehovah’s freaking Witnesses. How could he have known?

No reply. No reply either when he’d twice called George Webster and Vivvie, up in Manchester, to see if they knew anything about this damn TV show. He’d left two messages on their answering machine.

And then yesterday, after a lunch of tomato soup and stale rolls, Betty had said she needed time to think and went outside to walk alone, leaving Robin eking out the very last of the sodden pine wood. Maybe she went to the church to try and communicate with the Reverend freaking Penney. Robin wasn’t interested any more. When she came back, she started moving furniture around and drinking yet more herbal tea.

Maybe there was something on her mind he didn’t know about. Dare he ask? What was the damn use?

It was like she was waiting for something even worse to happen.

This was all down to Ellis. No question there. It was Ellis sicked the press on them.

Goddamn Christian bastard.

She came in from the post office and laid a newspaper on the kitchen table. She didn’t even look at Robin. ‘I’m going to change,’ she said and went out. He heard her going upstairs.

The room felt cold. The colours had faded.

This was bad, wasn’t it? It was going to be worse than he could have imagined, although he accepted that he maybe hadn’t endeared himself to the Mail hacks by going for their camera like that.

He looked at the paper. At least it wasn’t on the front. Nervously, he turned over the first page.

Holy shit ...

Just the whole of page three, was all.

Down the right-hand side was a long picture of St Michael’s Church, in silhouette against a sunset sky, the tower starkly framed by winter trees. It was a good picture, black and white. The headline above it, however, was just crazy: ‘Witches possess parish church. “Nightmare evil in our midst,” warns rector’.

‘Evil?’ Robin shouted. ‘They really listened to that crazy motherfucker?’

But it was the big picture, in colour, that made him cringe the most.

It was a grainy close-up of a snarling man, eyes burning under long, shaggy black hair. On his sweat-shiny cheeks were streaks of paint, diluted – if you wanted the truth – by bitter tears, but who was ever gonna think that? This was blue paint. It had obviously come off the cloth he’d used to wipe his eyes. In the picture, it looked like freaking woad. The guy looked like he would cut out your heart before raping your wife and slaughtering your children. Aligned with the picture, the story read:

This is the face of the new ‘priest’ at an ancient village church.

Robin Thorogood is a professional artist. He and his wife, Betty, are also practising witches. Now the couple have become the owners of a medieval parish church – while the local rector has to hold his services in the village hall.

‘This is my worst nightmare come true,’ says the Rev. Nicholas Ellis. ‘It is the manifestation of a truly insidious evil in our midst.’

Now the acting Bishop of Hereford, the Rt Rev. Bernard Dunmore, is to look into the bizarre situation. ‘It concerns me very deeply,’ he said last night.

It is more than thirty years since the church, at Old Hindwell, Powys, was decommissioned by the Church of England. For most of that time, it stood undisturbed on the land of farming brothers John and Ifan Prosser. When the last brother, John, died two years ago it passed out of the family and was bought by the Thorogoods just before Christmas.

Robin Thorogood, who is American-born, says he and his wife represent ‘the fastest-growing religion in the country’.

He claims that many of Britain’s old churches were built on former pagan ritual sites – one of which, he says, he and his wife have now repossessed.

However, when invited to explain their plans for the church, Mr Thorogood became abusive and attacked Daily Mail photographer Stuart Joyce, screaming, ‘I’ll turn you into a f—ing toad.’

Now villagers say they are terrified that the couple will desecrate the ruined church by conducting pagan rites there. They say they have already seen strange lights in the ruins late at night.

The Thorogoods’ nearest neighbour, local councillor Gareth Prosser, a farmer and nephew of the former owners, said, ‘This has always been a God-fearing community and we will not tolerate this kind of sacrilege.

‘These people sneaked in, pretending to be just an ordinary young couple.

‘Although this is a community of old-established families, newcomers have always been welcome here as long as they respect our way of life.