Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘Irene...?’

‘It was the smell, I suppose.’ He shuddered. ‘I just put my hand down this kind of fissure and this whole wall of stuff came down and like... Oh God.’ He turned away, pushing slimy fingers through his hair.

Gomer came back for the spade.

‘Is it?’ Jane was shocked at the weakness of her own voice.

‘’Ang about,’ Gomer said non-committally.

Sophie said, her voice dry and clipped, ‘ Is it, Mr Parry?’

‘Well... likely.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, give me that torch!’ Sophie snatched the rubber-covered lamp from a caterpillar of the mini-JCB and stalked off into the murk.

Gomer followed her with the spade, called back over his shoulder, ‘Better stay there, girl. En’t nothin’ you can do.’

‘I kind of think there is, actually,’ Jane said sadly. She slithered after him towards the bank. Eirion plunged into the mud, grabbed her.

‘No...’

‘Irene, I’m the only one of us who’s actually seen her.’

‘Jane, believe me... that is not going to help you.’

‘What?’

Even over the clatter of three engines, she heard Sophie’s moan. Ahead of her, the newly unearthed soil and clay was shining almost white in the intersecting beams, and had that multihued, stretched look, like when you bent a Mars bar in half. Sophie came back, slapping dirt from her hands.

‘Go back. Now!’

‘Sophie...?’

‘It’s a woman.’

‘Could it be Barb—?’

‘Cashmere and tweed,’ Sophie said. ‘She’s wearing cashmere and tweed.’

‘What does she look like? I’ve seen her, you see. When she first came up to Mum at the funeral...’

‘Come on, Jane.’

‘I’m not a little kid, you know. Let me just—’

‘Jane.’ Eirion took her hand in his mud-encrusted paw. ‘We don’t know what she looks like.’

Sophie said coldly, ‘Someone seems to have hacked her face to pieces before they buried her.’

Sophie’s camel coat was ruined.

ALONE IN THE yard, Robin looked back at the farmhouse, lit by the underfed porchlight, and it was like he was finally waking up.

Here were the once-white walls, stained and crumbling to reveal rubble underneath. There were the four front windows, small and sunken, like squinting eyes.

Then it just, like, hit him in the gut: What a dump! What was he doing here, stranded in this squalid hovel, with a coughing stove and a pile of wet wood, and his wife coming and going like some kind of elemental spirit, and his portfolios coming back marked ‘Piece of shit’, this whole godforsaken place rejecting him?

All day he’d felt a madness around him, wild fluctuations of mood, chasms of disaster opening up at his feet, like the potholes in the yard... and then the sun suddenly breaking out again, the puddles streaked with rainbows.

I still think Kirk could be persuaded to listen to reason.

The elegant and cultured Ned Bain could change it all about, even though Bain was doing this not for Robin, whom he didn’t really need, but for Betty, whom he apparently did. Whom everyone did.

Even witches talked in hushed tones about Betty. There were all kinds of people in Wicca, and the ones you needed to be most wary of tended to be the men – guys who’d read about group sex and ritual flagellation, guys who’d heard you could learn to magic your dick into staying hard all night long. Every coven attracted a few of these, and they never stuck it long, and they were the trash end of the Craft. And at the other end were women like Betty, about whom even witches talked in hushed tones. I was very much looking forward to meeting her, Ned Bain had said. Word gets around.

And yet, since Betty had returned home, she and Bain seemed hardly to have spoken, as though neither wanted the other to read their private agenda. Because there sure as hell were private agendas here, even stupid and decidedly unpsychic Robin could sense that. Maybe – like high priest and high priestess – Bain and Betty were communicating without words. Robin’s fists tightened. He couldn’t bear the thought of that.

The night was as cold as you could get without inches of snow on the ground, but it was bright, with a last-quarter moon and a scattering of stars. So what, in the names of all the gods, were they waiting for?

The church itself was primed for its reversion to the Old Religion. A hundred fat candles were in place, plus garden torches and sconces and fireworks for when it was all over. There was a purposeful silence around the place, unbroken even by crazy Vivvie and fluty-voiced Max. Even the god-damned Christians had cooled their hymn-singing.

Robin had had to get out of the house; he couldn’t stand the tension, had kept getting up and walking around, irritating the witches who were sitting in the parlour, hanging out, waiting, their robes – in view of the extreme cold, they were at least starting this one robed – stowed in bags at their feet, and the crown of lights ready in the centre of the room. But whose house was this anyway? He’d wanted Betty to come outside with him, confide in him. She was a great priestess but she was still his wife, for heaven’s sake.

But Betty had avoided his eyes.

Was there something she didn’t want him to know? Something secretly confided to her by Bain? He who would later join with her in the Great Rite – simulated. Simulated, right? Robin’s nails dug into his palms. Bain was a handsome and, he guessed, very sexual guy.

Usually – invariably, in fact – the hours before any sabbat were lit with this gorgeous anticipation. Tonight was the sabbat. An event likely to be more resonant, in Robin’s view, than the collapse of the Berlin Wall, than the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese. This should be the finest night of his life. So how come, as he walked back toward the house, all he felt was a sick apprehension?

The pub car park, the point where the village streets come together, is full of nothing much. Coppers and reporters, yes – but where were all the funny Christians, then?

Gomer leaves the truck on the double-yellows outside the school, and that boy Eirion brings the Land Rover in behind him. Eirion’s going along with Mrs Hill to tell the coppers what they’ve dug up. Better coming from somebody cultured, see, so the cops move faster. Besides which, Gomer and young Jane need to find the vicar in a hurry, on account of there’s somebody out there has done for Barbara Thomas, then took what Gomer judges to be a log-splitter to her face, before her was planted in Prosser’s ground.

One of the telly cameramen is pointing his lens at the mini-JCB. A bored-looking woman reporter asks, ‘What have you been digging?’

‘Sprouts,’ Gomer tells her. He’s spotted a light in the old school that’s now become Dr Coll’s surgery. ‘Why don’t we give this a try, girl?’ he asks Jane. ‘Vicar was in yere earlier, we knows that.’

They walk into the yard. Don’t seem two minutes since this old place was a working school. Don’t seem two minutes since Gomer had friends went to this school. That’s life, too bloody short. Too short for bloody old wallop and bullshit.

So, who should they meet but Dr Coll himself in the doorway, coming out. Gomer stands his ground, and Dr Coll’s got to take a step back into the building. Has to be a reason, going way back, that Gomer don’t care for doctors, but he bloody don’t, and that’s the only mercy about the way Minnie went: no long years of being at the mercy of no bloody doctors.

‘Look, I’m afraid surgery’s long over.’

‘It bloody en’t, pal.’ Gomer lets the youngster in, and then slams the door behind them all.