Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘When he went away, where did he go? Does Mr Long know?’

‘There’s no happy ending here, Merrily. Mr Long says he was told some years later that Terry Penney died in a hostel for the homeless in Edinburgh or Glasgow, he isn’t sure which. The poor man had been a heroin addict for some time. I think I shall go home now, Merrily.’

Robin spotted some lights, but they were the wrong lights.

He saw them through the naked trees, through the bald hedgerow further along from the barn. They were not headlights.

George came to stand alongside him at the window.

‘What do you want to do, Robin? Shall we all go out and have a few words with them – in a civilized fashion?’

Vivvie dumped her glass of red wine and came over, excited. ‘Is it them?’ She had on a long red velvet dress, kind of Tudor-looking, and she wore those seahorse earrings that Robin hated. The bitch was ready to appear on TV again. ‘What I suggest is we—’

‘What I suggest,’ Robin said loudly, ‘is we don’t do a god-damn thing. This is still my house... mine and... Betty’s.’

The whole room had gone quiet, except for the damp twigs crackling in the hearth.

‘ I’m gonna go talk to them,’ Robin said.

George smiled, shaking his head. ‘You’re not the man for this, Robin. You tend to speak before you’ve thought it out, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I do mind, George. I mind like hell ...’

‘And you’re tired,’ Alexandra said kindly. ‘You’re tired and you’re upset.’

‘Yeah, well, damn freaking right I’m upset. I’ve been accused by that bastard of being a manifestation of insidious evil. How upset would you feel?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

Robin backed up against the window, gripping the ledge behind him with both hands. ‘So, I’m gonna go out there on my own.’

‘That’s really not wise,’ Vivvie said, appealing to the coven at large.

Max cleared his throat. ‘What I would suggest—’

‘Don’t you...’ Robin threw himself into the room. ‘Don’t any of you tell me what’s wise. And you...’ He levelled a shaking finger at Vivvie. ‘If it hadn’t been for you and your goddamn big mouth—’

‘Robin...’ George took his arm, Robin shook him off.

Vivvie said, ‘Robin, I’ll thank you not to use the expression God -damned...’

‘Shut the fuck up! ’

Robin saw that it had begun to rain again. He saw the lights curling into rivulets on the window.

He took off his sweater.

The gate to St Michael’s Farm was shut.

Through the bare trees you could see lights in the house, you could see the black hulk of what seemed to be a barn. But you could not see the church. The itinerant congregation formed a semicircle around Nicholas Ellis at the gate. The two men with garden torches stood either side of the gate.

A white wooden cross was raised – five or six feet long, like the one in the bungalow garden on the road from Walton.

Merrily felt an isolated plop of rain. Umbrellas went up: bright, striped golf umbrellas. A cameraman went down on one knee on a patch of grass, as if he’d found God, but it was only to find a low angle, to make Ellis look more like an Old Testament prophet.

Disgracefully, Ellis responded to it. A kind of shiver seemed to go through him, like invisible lightning, and his wide lips went back in a taut grimace.

‘My friends, can you feel the evil ? Can you feel the evil here in this place?’ And then he was crying to the night sky. ‘Oh Lord God, we pray for your help in eradicating this disease. You who sent Your most glorious warrior, Michael, to contain the dragon, the Adversary, the Old Enemy. Oh Lord, now that this infernal evil has once again returned, we pray that You will help us drive out these worshippers of the sun and the moon and the horned gods of darkness. Oh Lord, help us , we pray, help us !’

And the chant was taken up. ‘Help us! Help us, Lord! ’ Faces were turned up to the rain.

Merrily winced.

Ellis cried, ‘... You who send Your blessed rain to wash away sin, let it penetrate and cleanse this bitter earth, this soured soil. Oh Lord, wash this place clean of Satan’s stain!’

His voice rode the slanting rain, his hair pasted to his forehead, the hissing torchlight reflected in his eyes. Until I attended one of Father Ellis’s services I did not truly believe in God as a supernatural being .

Now Ellis was spinning round in the mud, his white robe aswirl, and putting his weight against the gate and bellowing, ‘Come out! Come out, you snivelling servants of the Adversary. Come out and face the sorrow and the wrath of the one true God.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Nick...’

Ellis sprang back.

The weary, American voice came from the other side of the gate. The TV camera lights found a slightly built young guy with long, shaggy hair. He wore a plain T-shirt as white as Ellis’s robe, but a good deal less suited to the time of year. He was just standing there, arms by his side, getting soaked. When he spoke, the tremor in his voice indicated not so much that he was afraid but that he was freezing.

‘Nick, we don’t need this shit, OK? We never touched your lousy church. There’s no dragon here, no Satan. So just... just, like, go back and tell your God we won’t hold you or your crazy stuff against him.’

The man with the cross stood alongside Ellis, like a sentinel. One of the garden torches fizzed, flared and went out. There was a gasp from the crowd, as though the flame had been a casualty of demonic breath. To charismatics, everything was a sign. Merrily moved in close to the gate. She needed to hear this.

Ellis put on a grim smile for the cameras. ‘Let us in, then, Robin. Open the gate of your own free will and let us – and Almighty God – be readmitted to the church of St Michael.’

He waited, his white habit aglow. ‘Praise God!’ a man’s voice cried.

Robin Thorogood didn’t move. ‘I don’t think so, Nick.’

He was watching Ellis through the driving rain – and fighting just to keep his eyes open. To Merrily, he looked bewildered, as if he was struggling to comprehend the motivation of this man who was now his enemy on a level he’d never before experienced. He finally hugged himself, bare-armed, his T-shirt soaked, grey and wrinkled, into his chest. Then, defiantly, he let his arms fall back to his sides, still staring at Nick Ellis, who was now addressing him sorrowfully and reasonably in a low voice which the TV people might not pick up through the splashing of the rain.

‘Robin, you know that we cannot allow this to go on. Whether you understand it or not – and I believe you fully understand it – if you and your kind proceed to worship your profane, heathen deities in a temple once consecrated in His holy name, you commit an act of gross sacrilege. You thereby commend this church into the arms of Satan himself. And you curse the community into which you and your wife were innocently welcomed.’

‘No.’ Robin Thorogood shook his sodden hair. ‘That is bullshit.’

‘Robin, if you don’t recognize it, I can’t help you.’

The big cross was shaking in the air. One of the men screamed out, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!’

Merrily tensed, expecting an invasion – when something struck Ellis in the chest.

JANE AGONIZED FOR a while, cuddling Ethel the cat, and then rang Eirion at what she always pictured as a grim, greystone mansion beyond Abergavenny. The line was engaged.

She went back to the sitting room, still holding the cat, and replayed the tape she had recorded of the Old Hindwell story on the TV news.