Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

Meaning the candles, she guessed.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mr Ellis...’

‘They told me you’d be dropping in.’ He shrugged. ‘I accept that.’

‘I feel a bit awkward...’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you must do. Do you want to come in?’

She followed him through a shoebox hall which smelled of curry, into a small, square living room which had been turned into an office. There was a steel-framed desk, two matching chairs. A computer displayed red and green standby lights on a separate desk, and there was a portable TV set on a stand with a video recorder underneath.

‘The war room,’ Nicholas Ellis said with no smile.

His accent sounded far more transatlantic than it had during Menna’s funeral service. He wore a light grey clerical shirt, with pectoral cross, and creased grey chinos. His long hair was loosely tied back with a black ribbon. His face was windreddened but without lines, like a mannequin in an old-fashioned tailor’s shop.

He waved her vaguely to one of the metal chairs.

‘Not much time, I’m afraid. I’ll help you all I can, but I really don’t have much time today, as you can imagine. Events kind of caught up on me.’

When he sat down behind his desk, Merrily became aware of the aluminium-framed picture on the wall behind him, over the boarded-up fireplace. It was William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun . Sexually charged, awesomely repulsive. Ellis noticed her looking at it.

‘Revoltingly explicit, isn’t it – shining with evil? I live with it so that when they look in my window they will know I’m not afraid.’

They? The war room?

Merrily sat down, kept her coat on.

‘So...’ he said, as if he was trying hard to summon some interest. ‘You are the, uh... I’m sorry, I did write it down.’

‘Diocesan Deliverance Consultant.’

It had never sounded more ludicrous.

‘And the suffragan Bishop of Ludlow has sent you to support me. Well, here I am’ – he opened his arms – ‘a humble vessel for the Holy Spirit. Have you ever truly experienced the Holy Spirit, Merrily?’

‘In my way.’

‘No, in other words,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t happen in your way, it happens in His way.’

‘Damn,’ Merrily said, prickling. ‘You’re right.’

He looked at her with half a smile on his wide lips. ‘Diocesan... Deliverance... Consultant. I guess you’re like one of those young female MPs... what did they call them... Blair’s Babes? I suppose it was only a matter of time before we had them in the Church.’

‘Like woodworm.’

He didn’t reply. He’d lost the half-smile.

‘Meaning I look vaguely presentable,’ Merrily said, ‘even though I must know bugger all.’

‘And you feel you must throw in the odd swear word to show that the clergy doesn’t have to be stuffy and pious any more.’

‘Gosh,’ Merrily said, ‘it doesn’t take you long to get the measure of a person, does it?’

Ellis smiled at last. ‘My, we really aren’t getting along, are we? You aren’t going to want to “support” me at all, are you? Well, other priests tend not to, as I’m a fundamentalist. That’s what the Anglican Church calls someone who truly believes in the living God.’ He leaned back. ‘I’m sorry. Let’s start again. How do you propose to support me?’

‘How would you like to be supported?’

‘By being left alone, I guess.’

‘That’s what I guessed you’d say.’

‘Aren’t you clever?’

He was looking not at her, but through her, as though she was, for him, without substance – or at least insufficiently textured to engage his attention. It made her annoyed, but then it was designed to.

She pressed on, ‘Um... you said “war room”.’

‘Yes.’

‘And, obviously, quite a few people here seem to agree with you on that.’

‘Yes.’

‘And it all looks quite dramatic and everything.’

‘You make it sound like a facade. It’s an initial demonstration of faith in the Lord. It will spread. You’ll see twice as many candles on your way out.’

‘Isn’t it a bit... premature to call this a war zone? One story in a newspaper? Two amateur witches in a redundant church? Unless...’

He gave her just a little more attention. ‘Unless?’

‘Unless this goes back rather further than this morning’s Daily Mail .’

‘It goes back well over two thousand years, Merrily. “The satyr shall cry to his fellow. Yea, there shall the night hag alight, and find for herself a resting place.’

‘Isaiah.’ Merrily remembered the taunts of the industrial chaplain, the Rev. Gemmell, in the Livenight studio, inviting her to stand up and denounce Ned Bain as an agent of Satan in front of seven million viewers. ‘Meaning that, whether they accept it or not, all followers of pagan gods are actually making a bed for the Devil.’

‘In this case,’ Ellis said, ‘to reflect the imagery of the Radnor Forest, a nest for the dragon.’

‘Because the former church here is dedicated to St Michael?’ Merrily glanced up at the Blake print, in which the obscene and dominant dragon, viewed from behind, was curly-horned and not really red but the colour of an earthworm. It was hard not to believe that William Blake himself must have seen one.

‘One of five churches positioned around Radnor Forest and charged with the energy of heaven’s most potent weapon. Cefnllys, Cascob, Llanfihangel nant Melan, Llanfihangel Rhydithon, Old Hindwell.’

‘The Forest is supposed to be a nest for the dragon? Is that a legend?’

‘No legend is simply a legend,’ Ellis said. ‘We have the evidence of the five churches dedicated to the warrior angel. If one should fall, it creates a doorway for Satan. You see merely two misguided idiots, I see the beginnings of a disease which, unless eradicated at source, will spread until all Christendom is a mass of suppurating sores. This is what the Devil wants. Will you deny that?’

‘Hold on... You say there’s a legend that if one of the churches falls, et cetera... Yet you’re not interested in preserving churches, are you? I mean, as I recall, when the Sea of Light group was inaugurated, someone said that the only way faith could be regenerated was to sell off all the churches as museums and use the money to pay more priests to go out among the people.’

‘Correct. And in the village here, a resurgence of faith has already restored a community centre which had become derelict, a home for rats. Look at it now. Eventually, the church will move out, put up its illuminated cross somewhere else. But in the meantime, God has chosen Old Hindwell for a serious purpose. I can see you still don’t understand.’

‘Trying.’

‘You see a ruined church, I see a battleground. Look...’

He stood up and strode to the computer, touched the mouse and brought up his menu, clicked on the mailbox icon. His in-box told him he had two unread e-mails. One was: From: warlock. Subject: war in heaven . He clicked. The message read, ‘I am a brother to dragons and a companion to owls.’

‘Book of Job,’ Merrily said.

Ellis reduced and deleted it. ‘There’s one every day.’

‘Since when?’

‘They like to use that Internet provider, Demon. Today’s is a comparatively mild offering.’

‘You reported this to the police?’

‘The police? This is beyond the police.’

‘They can trace these people through the server.’

‘It’ll only turn out to be some fourteen-year-old who received his instructions anonymously in a spirit message from cyberspace, and the police are gonna laugh. I would hardly expect them to understand that there’s a chain of delegation here, leading back, eventually, to hell. That, of course’ – he nodded at the computer – ‘is Satan’s latest toy. I keep one here, for the same reason I have that repulsive picture on the wall.’