No candles? The candles had gone from the windows. Not just gone out, but gone: the trays, the Bibles, everything.
At first, it seemed an encouraging sign, and then Merrily thought, It isn’t. It isn’t at all. In the face of the invasion, the local people had withdrawn, disconnected; whatever happened tonight would not be their fault.
It was about five-fifty p.m. The post office and shop had closed, there were few lights in the cottages. Only the pub was conspicuously active; otherwise Old Hindwell, under dark forestry and the hump of Burfa Hill, had retracted into itself, leaving the streets to them from Off.
The multitude!
In the centre of the village, maybe three or four-hundred people had gathered in front of the former school. They had Christian placards and torches and lamps. They were not singing hymns. They seemed leaderless.
Gomer put the Land Rover at the side of the road, in front of the entrance to the pub’s yard, where it said ‘No Parking’. The car park was so full that none of the coaches would get out until several cars were removed. Two dark blue police vans lurked inside the school gates. Four TV crews hovered.
The minority of pagans here seemed to be the kind with green hair and eyebrow rings. Maybe twenty of them, in bunches — harmless probably. One group, squatting outside the pub, were chanting ‘Harken to the Witches’ Rune’, to the hollow thump of a hand drum.
‘Sad,’ Jane commented. She and Eirion were in the back of the Land Rover; Merrily sat next to Gomer in the front. ‘They’re just playing at it, just being annoying.’
‘You’ll be joining the Young Conservatives next, flower.’
‘But those so-called Christians really make me sick. They’re tossers, holier-than-thou gits.’
‘Phew,’ Merrily said. Through the wing mirror, she saw Sophie’s Saab pulling in behind them. Sophie didn’t get out.
Eirion said, ‘What do you want us to do, Mrs Watkins?’
‘Just stay with Gomer and Sophie. Perhaps you could get something to eat in the pub?’
Jane was dismayed. ‘That’s all the thanks we get? A mouldy cheese sandwich and a can of Coke?’
‘Don’t think I’m not immensely grateful for what you two and Sophie’ve uncovered. Just that I need to put it to Ellis by myself. If there are any witnesses, he won’t even talk to me.’
They’d talked intently for over an hour in the Land Rover, listened to a cassette recording of a phone call involving Sophie and some journalist in Tennessee, and then Merrily had watched as Betty, now armed with many things she hadn’t known about Ned Bain, had walked away into the last of the dusk, not looking back.
Merrily leaned against the Land Rover’s passenger door, and it opened with a savage rending sound.
‘How long will you be?’ Jane asked.
‘As long as it takes. He hasn’t even shown yet. An hour and a half maybe?’
‘And then we come looking for you?’
‘And then do whatever Gomer tells you.’
The crazy violence seemed to start as soon as Merrily’s feet touched the tarmac: lights flaring, a woman’s scream, a beer can thrown. A black cross reared out of a mesh of torch beams amid a tangle of angry voices.
‘… finished, you fuckers. Had your time. Christ was a wanker!’
‘… your level, isn’t it? The gutter! Get out of my-’
Sickening crunch of bone on flesh. Blood geysering up.
‘Oh dear God-’
‘So why don’t you just fuck off back to your churches, ’fore we have ’em all off you?’
‘Stand back!’
‘Reverend?’ A hand pulling Merrily back, as the police came through.
‘Marianne?’
She was pushed. ‘Stand back, please. Everybody, back!’
Headlights arriving. Then Collard Banks-Morgan with his medical bag. Next to him, a man in a dark suit. Not a white monk’s habit, but a dark suit.
A woman shrieked, ‘You’ll be damned for ever!’ and started to cry.
‘Listen, Reverend,’ Marianne said calmly. ‘I’m better now.’
‘Good.’
‘Things you oughta know.’ She pulled Merrily into the yard.
She followed when they took the man with the broken nose into the surgery. A woman too, spattered with his blood, wailing, Ellis’s arm around her. ‘He’s in good hands, sister. The best.’
In the waiting room, the lighting was harsh, the seats old and hard, the ceiling still school-hall high, with cream-painted metal girders. A woman receptionist smiled smugly through a hatch in the wall. ‘Come through,’ Dr Coll sang, voice like muzak. ‘Bring him through, that’s right.’
Doors slammed routinely. There were health posters all over the walls: posters to make you feel ill, paranoid, dependent. No surprise that Dr Coll had taken over the school, a local bastion of authority and wisdom.
‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Merrily said to Ellis.
‘I’m sure you would, Mrs Watkins,’ he said briskly, ‘but I don’t have the time or the interest to talk to you. You’re a vain and stupid woman.’ Under his suit he wore a black shirt, no tie, no clerical collar.
‘What happened to your messiah kit?’
‘Libby, tell Dr Coll I’ll talk to him later,’ Ellis said to the receptionist.
Merrily said, ‘There’s going to be trouble out there.’ She waited as Ellis dabbed with a tissue at a small blood speck on his sleeve. ‘Are you going to stop them marching to the church?’
‘Who am I,’ he said, ‘to stop anyone?’
‘You started it. You lit the blue touchpaper.’
‘The media started it. As you say, it’s already out of hand. It’d be highly irresponsible of me to inflame it further. Now, if you don’t mind…’
‘You could stop them. You could stop it now. It isn’t worth it for a crumbling old building with a bad reputation.’
‘I’d lock the door after us if I were you, Libby,’ Ellis said to the receptionist.
‘I’ll do that, Father.’
Ellis held open the main door for Merrily, looking over her head. ‘After you.’ She didn’t move. ‘Don’t make me ask the police to come in,’ Ellis said.
‘Could you clear up a few points for me, Nick?’
‘Goodnight.’
She had no confidence for this, still couldn’t quite believe it.
‘ “I am a brother to dragons”,’ Merrily said.
‘Go away.’ He didn’t look at her, opened the door wider.
‘Book of Job.’
‘I do know the Book of Job.’
The sounds of the street outside came in, carried on cold air, sounds alien to Old Hindwell — shouts, jeers, a man’s unstable voice, on high, ‘May God have mercy on you!’
‘I think your real name is Simon Wesson,’ Merrily said. ‘You went out to the States with your mother and sister in the mid-seventies, after the death of your stepfather. Over there, your mother married an evangelist called Marshall McAllman. You later became his personal assistant. He made a lot of money before he was exposed and disgraced and your mother divorced him — very lucratively, I believe.’
She couldn’t look at him while she was saying all this, terrified that it was going to be wrong, that Jane and Eirion had found the wrong person, that the journalist whose voice Sophie had so efficiently recorded was talking about someone with no connection at all to Nicholas Ellis.
‘McAllman concentrated on little backwoods communities. His technique was to do thorough research before he brought his show to town. He’d employ investigators. And although he would appear aloof when he first arrived…’
None of your good-old-boy stuff from Marshall, the journalist had told Sophie on the tape. Marshall was cool, Marshall was laid-back, Marshall would target a town that was hungry and he’d spread a table and he’d check into a hotel and sit back and wait for them to come sniffing and drooling…
‘… his remoteness only added to his mystique. They came to him — the local dignitaries, the civic leaders, the business people — and he passed on, almost reluctantly, what the Holy Spirit had communicated to him about them and their lives and their past and their future… and he convinced them that they and their town were riddled with all kinds of demons.’
Merrily focused on a wall poster about the symptoms of meningitis. She spoke in a low voice, could see Libby the receptionist straining to hear while pretending to rearrange leaflets behind the window of her hutch.
‘Time and time again, the local people would pull Marshall into the bosom of the community, everyone begging him to take away their demons, and their children’s demons… especially the daughters, those wayward kids. A little internal ministry… well, it beats abortion. He was a prophet and a local hero in different localities. He only went to selected places, little, introverted, no-hope places with poor communications — the places that were gagging for it.’
The print on the meningitis poster began to blur. She turned at last to look up at Ellis, his nose lifted in disdain, but she could see his hand whitening around the doorknob.
‘He taught you a lot, Nick, about the psychology of rural communities. And about manipulation. Plus, he gave you the inner strength and the brass neck to come back to this country and finally take on your hated, still-vengeful stepbrother.’
She stood in the doorway and waited.
Ellis closed the door again.
In the Black Lion, Jane saw Gomer was talking at the bar to a fat man of about thirty in a thick plaid shirt that came down halfway to his knees. At their table by the door, Sophie gathered her expensive and elegant camel coat over her knees to protect them from the draught.
‘I’d take you two back to Hereford with me, if I thought you’d stay put in the office.’
‘No chance.’ Jane ripped open a bag of crisps, stretched out her legs.
‘Nothing’s going to happen here, Jane,’ Sophie said. ‘The whole thing comes down to two obsessive men settling a childhood grudge.’
‘But what a grudge, Sophie. Serious, serious hatred fermenting for over a quarter of a century. A fundamentalist bigot and a warlock steeped in old magic. A white witch and a black Christian.’
‘Jane!’
‘He is. If you, like, subvert Christianity, if you use it aggressively to try and hurt or crush people of a different religion… or if you go around exorcizing demons out of people who haven’t actually got demons in them, just to get power over them — like this guy McAllman — then you’re using Christianity for evil, so that’s got to be black Christianity.’
‘I wouldn’t exactly call Bain a white witch, either,’ Eirion murmured.
Sophie said, ‘Jane, your grasp of theology-’
But Gomer was back with them, thoughtfully rolling and unrolling his cap. ‘That’s Nev,’ he said, watching the man in the plaid shirt go out. ‘My nephew, Nev, see. Er, some’ing’s come up, ennit? Mrs Hill, if there’s a chance you could stay with these kids till the vicar gets back…’
‘Uh-huh.’ Jane shook her head. ‘Mum said to stick with Gomer.’
Gomer sighed. He opened the pub door, peered out. Jane got up and leaned over his shoulder. There were still a lot of people out there and more police — about seven of them. Also, the guy in the plaid shirt standing by a truck. In the back of the truck was a yellow thing partly under a canvas cover.
‘What’s that?’ Jane demanded.
‘Mini-JCB.’
‘Like for digging?’
‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer admitted gruffly.
Ellis took her into the second surgery: a plain room with a big, dark desk, Victorian-looking. Authority. A big chair and a small chair. Ellis sat in the big chair; Merrily didn’t sit down. She was thinking rapidly back over the history of her faith, the unsavoury aspects.
In the Middle Ages, Christianity was still magic: charms and blessings indistinguishable. The Reformation was supposed to have wiped that out but, in seventeenth-century Britain, religious healers and exorcists were still putting on public displays, just like modern Bible Belt evangelists. And when it was finally over in most of Britain, here in Radnorshire — inside the inverted pentagram of churches dedicated to the warrior archangel — it continued. In a place with a strong tradition of pagan magic, the people transferred their allegiances to the priests… the more perspicacious of whom took on the role of the conjuror, the cunning man.
Few more cunning than Nicholas Ellis, formerly Simon Wesson. His face was unlined, bland, insolent — looking up at her but really looking down.
‘Where’s your mother now, Nick?’
‘Dead. Drowned in her swimming pool in Orlando, four years ago. An accident.’
‘Your sister?’
‘Still out there. Married with kids.’
‘You came back to Britain because of what happened over Marshall McAllman and this Tennessee newspaper?’
‘I’ve told you I won’t discuss that.’ He brought a hand down hard on the desk. He was sweating. ‘And if you say a word about any of this outside these walls, I shall instruct my solicitor to obtain an immediate injunction to restrain you and make preparations to take you to court for libel. Do you understand?’
‘This is Mr Weal, is it?’
‘Never underestimate him.’
‘I wouldn’t. He’ll do anything for you, won’t he? After what you did for him. And for his wife — before she died.’
Ellis kept his lips tight, his face uplifted to the lights and shining.
‘You must have investigated this parish pretty thoroughly before you applied for it. Or were you looking specifically for a parish that suited your kind of ministry? Or was it just luck?’
‘Or the will of God?’
‘From what I gather, your mother was into a particularly mystical form of High Church-’
He turned his chair away with a wrench. ‘No. No. No! I will not.’
‘Perhaps she found the connections. Perhaps she was a particular influence on McAllman’s ministry.’ Merrily stood with her back to the door. ‘Any point in asking you if you did actually help to cover up a less-than-hot-blooded murder?’
His eyes burned.
‘All that matters is Ned Bain thinks you did,’ Merrily said.
‘Edward is a despicable nonentity.’
‘Not in pagan circles he isn’t. I mean, I suppose it’s easy to say that’s why he became a pagan. It’s rough, natural, wild… very much a reaction against your mother’s suffocating churchiness.’
He rose up. ‘Blasphemer!’
Merrily lost it, bounced from the door. ‘Do you know what real blasphemy is, Nick? It’s a man with a nine-inch cross.’
‘I will not-’
‘Do you sterilize it first?’
‘May God have mercy on you!’
‘Only, I was there when you exorcized Marianne Starkey. Who…’ Merrily prayed swiftly for forgiveness. ‘Who’s now prepared to make a detailed statement.’
A lie. But she had him. He stared at her.
‘We’ve prepared a press release, Nick. Unless she hears from me by seven o’clock, my secretary’s been instructed to fax it to the Press Association in London.’
Ellis folded his arms.
Merrily looked at her watch. ‘I make it you’ve got just under an hour.’
‘To do what?’ He leaned back, expressionless.
‘Put on your white messiah gear,’ Merrily said. ‘Get out there and tell them it’s all over. Tell them to go home. Or lead them all up to the village hall and keep them there.’
Ellis spread his hands. ‘They’ll be there, anyway. The police wanted them off the streets. I believe the Prossers have taken them to the hall.’
‘Keep them there then. Tell them you don’t want to risk their immortal souls by having them stepping onto the contaminated ground of St Michael’s.’
He shrugged. ‘OK, sure.’ He leaned back, two fingers along the side of his head, curious. ‘But I don’t understand. Why do you care?’
She didn’t follow him. She stayed on the edge of the schoolyard, near the police vans, and saw lights eventually come on in what she reckoned was Ellis’s house. Dr Coll came out of the surgery, but didn’t so much as glance at her. Perhaps Judith hadn’t told him. At the same time, two policemen went in, presumably to obtain statements from the injured man and his wife. Merrily resisted an impulse to yell at Dr Coll, ‘Why did you kill Mrs Wilshire?’ in the hope that some copper might hear.
The village was comparatively quiet again. The lights were still few and bleary. Or maybe it was her eyes. Was there more she could have done? If there was, she couldn’t think what it might be. She was tired. She prayed that Ellis would see sense.
A few minutes later, she saw him coming down from the council estate, a Hollywood ghost in his white monk’s habit. He walked past the school and didn’t turn his head towards her. Leaving twenty or thirty yards between them, she followed him to the hall. A cameraman spotted him and ran ahead of him and crouched in the road, recording his weary, stately progress to his place of worship. A journalist, puffing out white steam, ran back to the pub to alert the others. Merrily prayed that they were all going to be very disappointed. Like the Christians.
‘With respect, Father, what was the point of us coming at all?’
One man on his feet in the crowded hall. It was the biker with the black dragon.
Ellis brought his hands together. ‘You came here because you were moved by the Holy Spirit. We must all obey those impulses which we recognize as a response to the will of God.’
‘But,’ the man persisted, ‘what does God want us to do?’
Ellis let the question hang a while, then he said softly, ‘You all saw what happened earlier to our brother. I can tell you that two men have been charged with assault causing actual bodily harm. That will be the least of their punishment. But, in allowing that to happen, God was telling us that a public demonstration is no longer the answer. The answer is prayer.’
‘Praise God,’ someone cried, but it was half-hearted. They wanted…
Blood? Merrily sat at the back, demoralized even in victory.
‘There will be no more… violence.’ Ellis emphasized it with open hands. There was desultory applause. ‘But our task is still far from over.’
He told them they must pray for the intervention of St Michael to keep his church out of the hands of Satan, out of the red claws of the dragon. And if they prayed, if their faith in God was strong enough, the Devil would fail tonight. The Lord would yet intervene.
A frisson went through the hall; there were tentative moans.
‘God’ — Ellis’s arms were suddenly extended, ramrod stiff — ‘arises!’
A man arose from the floor, his own arms raised, a mirror image of the priest. Others followed, with a squeaking and scraping of chairs.
Hundreds of arms reaching for the ceiling.
A woman began to gabble, ‘God, God, God, God, God!’ orgasmically.
Soon, Merrily found she was the only one seated and was obliged to scramble to her feet. She looked up and saw that Ellis — who must surely know that this was as good as over, that there would be no more generating paranoia, no more wholesale exorcism, no more internal ministry — was aglow again, his eyes like foglamps, and they were focused, through the wintry forest of stiffened arms… focused on her.
‘God arises!’ Ellis snarled.
Merrily left the hall. He was showing her that even in defeat his power was undiminished. That the Holy Spirit was with him.
‘A remarkable man, Mrs Watkins,’ said Judith Prosser.
She was standing in the porch, in her long black quilted coat.
‘Yes,’ Merrily admitted.
Judith gently closed the doors on the assembly. She contemplated Merrily with a wryly tilted smile. ‘I take it,’ she said lightly, ‘that you’ve made your decision.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your “exorcism in reverse”,’ Judith said. ‘The laying to rest of the poor moth in the jar.’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘Jeffery will have left now, for his lodge. But perhaps this was not such a good idea.’
Inside the hall, a hymn was beginning. It would end in tongues. Ellis and his followers were, for the time being, contained. Jane, too, by Gomer and Sophie. Merrily had a couple of hours yet before she was due at St Michael’s. She walked out into the cold and looked down on the meagre glimmer of the village. She shivered inside Jane’s duffel coat.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and do it.’