Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘Ellis? Laying on of hands at the end of the services?’

At the Big Bible Fest in Warwickshire, the spiritual energy generated by power prayer and singing in tongues would often be channelled into healing, members of the congregations stepping up with various ailments and chronic conditions and often claiming remarkable relief afterwards. It was this aspect Merrily had most wanted to believe in, but she suspected that, when the euphoria faded, the pain would usually return and she hated to hear people who failed to make it out of their wheelchairs being told that their faith was not strong enough.

‘They reckons he does a bit o’ house-to-house. And it en’t just normal sickness either.’

‘Know any specific cases?’ A snatch of conversation came back to her from Minnie’s funeral tea at Ledwardine village hall. Boy gets picked up by the police, with a pocketful o’ these bloody ecstersee. Up in court... Dennis says, ‘That’s it, boy, you stay under my roof you can change your bloody ways. We’re gonner go an’ see the bloody rector...’

When the big man stepped into the middle of the road and swung round, the item on his shoulder was revealed to be a large grey video camera. He took a step back, to take in the empty, sloping street, where the only movement was the flickering of the candles. He stood with his legs apart, recording the silent scene – looking like the sheriff in a western in the seconds before doors flew open and figures appeared, shooting.

No doors opened. Clouds hung low and heavy; there was little light left in the sky; the weather was co-operating with the candles. The cameraman shot the scene at leisure.

‘TV news,’ Merrily said. ‘There’ll be a reporter around somewhere, too. I’m supposed to make myself known to them.’

Gomer nodded towards the cameraman. ‘Least that tells you why there’s no bugger about. Nobody yere’s gonner wanner explain on telly about them candles.’

Even if they could, Merrily thought.

‘What you wanner do, vicar?’

‘It’s not what I want to do,’ Merrily said, ‘but I do have to talk to the Reverend Nick Ellis. He lives on the estate. Would that be...?’

Past the pub, about a hundred yards out of the village centre, were eight semi-detached houses on the same side of the road.

‘That’s the estate.’ Gomer pointed, as they approached.

Merrily parked in front of the first house. Though these were once council houses, fancy gates, double glazing and new front doors showed that most of them had been purchased.

They all had candles in the windows.

Only one house, fairly central, kept its maroon, standard-issue front door and flaking metal gates. It was the only one still looking like a council house. Except for the cross on the door: wood, painted gold, and nailed on.

There was a large jeep crowding the brief drive. A sticker over a nameplate on the gate announced that Christ was the Light. In the single downstairs window, two beeswax candles burned, in trays, on Bibles.

Merrily had heard that Ellis was living in a council house because, when he’d given up his churches, he’d also given up his rectory. The Church paid the rent on this modest new manse. A small price to pay per head of congregation, and it wouldn’t do Ellis’s image any harm at all, and he would know that.

She felt a pulse of fury. From singing in tongues to erecting a wall of silence, this man had turned a whole community, dozens maybe hundreds of people, against a couple who hadn’t yet been here long enough for anyone really to know them. The Thorogoods would need to be very hard-faced to survive it.

‘THIS IS NO COINCIDENCE,’ George said on the phone. ‘This is fate. We all know what tomorrow is.’

‘Probably the last day of my freaking marriage.’

‘You have to go with it, Robin. We can turn this round. We can make it a triumph.’

Robin wanted to scream that he couldn’t give a shit about Imbolc; he just wanted things to come right again with his wife, some work to bring in some money, his religious beliefs no longer to be national news. He just wanted to become a boring, obscure person.

In the background, the old fax machine huffed and whizzed. He watched the paper emerge.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live

Poison faxes? Creepy Bible quotes? Someone had unleashed the Christian propaganda machine. The spirit of Salem living on.

‘It’s all our fault, man,’ George said.

‘Not your fault. Vivvie’s fault.’

‘I share the blame. I was there too. I also now share the responsibility for getting you and Betty through this.’

‘We could maybe get through this, George, if people would just leave us the fuck alone.’

He wasn’t so sure about that, though, the way Betty was behaving.

By nine a.m. the answering machine had taken calls from BBC Wales, Radio Hereford and Worcester, HTV, Central News, BBC Midlands and 5 Live. And from some flat-voiced kid who said he was a pagan too and would like to pledge his support and his magic.

Already they were starting to come to the front door. By eleven a.m., there’d been four people knocking. He hadn’t answered. Instead he’d closed the curtains and sat in the dimness, hugging the Rayburn. He’d listened to the answering machine, intercepting just this one call from George.

The whole damn story was truly out; it had been on all the radio stations and breakfast TV. Was also out on the World Wide Web, with e-mails of support – according to George – coming from Native Americans in Canada and pagans as far away as India. George claimed that already this confrontation was being seen as a rallying flashpoint for ethnic worshippers of all persuasions. Strength and courage were being transmitted to them from all over the world.

‘We don’t want it,’ Robin told George. ‘We came here for a quiet life. Pretty soon I’m gonna take the phone off the hook and unplug the fax.’

‘In that case,’ George said, ‘surely it’s better that the people you know—’

‘You mean people you know. Listen, George, just hold off, can you do that? I would need to talk to Betty.’

‘When’s she going to be back?’

‘I don’t know when she’s gonna be back. She’s mad at me. She thinks I screwed up with the Mail guys. I think I screwed up with the Mail guys. I’m mad at me.’

‘You need support, man. And there’s a lot of Craft brothers and Craft sisters who want to give you some. I tell you, there’s an unbelievable amount of strong feeling about this. It’ll be very much a question of stopping people coming out there.’

‘Well you fucking better stop them.’

‘Plus, the opposition, of course,’ George said. ‘We don’t know how many they are or where they’re coming from.’

Robin peered round the edge of the curtain at the puddles in the farmyard and along the side of the barn. It looked bleak, it looked desolate. In spite of all the courage and strength being beamed at them, it looked lonely as hell. Sure he felt vulnerable; how could he not?

When he sighed, it came out rough, with a tremor underneath it.

‘How many were you thinking?’

‘Well, we need a coven,’ George had said. ‘I’ll find eleven good people which, with you and Betty makes... the right number. We could be there by nightfall. Don’t worry about accommodation, we’ll have at least two camper vans. We’ll bring food and wine and everything we need to deck out the church for Imbolc. Be the greatest Imbolc ever, Robin. We’ll set the place alight.’

‘I dunno. I dunno what to do.’ For George this was cool, this was exciting. If you’d put it to Robin, even just a few days ago, he’d have said yeah, wow, great. It was what he’d envisaged from the start: the repaganized church becoming a centre of the old religion at the heart of a prehistoric ritual landscape. The idyll .