At 8 a.m., the Sunday sky hung low and glistened like the underside of a huge aircraft.
It didn't menace Joel Beard, God's warrior, skimming across the causeway, hands warm in his gauntlets, deep and holy thoughts protected inside his helmet, his leathers unzipped to expose the cross.
Nourished by little more than three hours' sleep at Chris and Chantal's place in Sheffield, he felt… well, reborn. Talked and prayed and cried and agonized until 2 a.m. Old chums, Chris and Chantal. Born Again brethren, still with the Church of the Angels of the New Advent. Still strong in their faith.
'I sometimes wish I'd never left.' Joel reaching out for reassurance.
'Why? It was your great mission, Joel – we all knew that, it's terrific – to carry our commitment, all our certainty, into the straight Church.'
'But it's just so… lonely, Chantal. I didn't realise how… or how corrupt. That there were places where the Church allowed the evil to remain – real evil – for a quiet life. A quiet life – is that what it's come to? I mean, tonight, going back to the church, after this fiasco with the grave, it was there for anyone to see. The ghastly light from the clock that isn't really a clock, and all the sneering gargoyles and the place over the door where this revolting Sheelagh na gig thing used to be… And you realise… it's everywhere. How many country churches have these pagan carvings, the Green Man, all kinds of devil-figures? Demons. Twisted demon faces, everywhere, grinning at you – it's our Church!'
Yes… yes… yes… the pieces of so-called character clinging to old churches like barnacles to a wreck, the very aspects of ancient churches that tourists found so picturesque… 'Oh, yes, I've always been fond of old churches.' As if this was some sanctified form of tourism, when really they were soaking up the satanic.
'What it means is that the Church has been sheltering this filth, pressed to its own bosom, for centuries. What everyone finds so appealing about these old parish churches are the things that should not be there. Am I the only one to see this?'
They'd brought him food and coffee. Made up a bed for him in the sitting room. Sat up half the night with him. Prayed with him in his agony.
'I've had visions. Dreams. I've been tested. All the time I'm there I'm tested. It tries to twist me. How can I handle this? I'm only one man.'
'No. You're not only one man, Joel. We're here. We're in this together. Tens of thousands of us. Listen, you were our emissary. You've seen and you've come back. We hear you, Joel. We hear you!'
Yes.
He slowed for the cobbles, bumping up the street towards the church, its stonework black with age and evil.
'Say the word, Joel. Just say the word. We're with you.'
'I'm tired. I've only been there a couple of days, and I'm exhausted.'
'You'll sleep tonight, Joel. We'll cover you with our prayers. You'll sleep well.'
And he had. Even if it was only for a few hours. He'd awoken refreshed and ready for his first morning worship at St Bride's, no prepared sermon in his pocket, no script, no text. He would stride into that pagan place and cleanse it with the strength of his faith. His sermon would be unrehearsed; it would almost be like… speaking in tongues. Cathy said, 'You look really awful.',
'Thanks.'
'I've been trying to understand it,' Cathy said.
'Don't. It won't do you any good.'
Cathy pushed the fingers of both hands through her hair, 'I mean, they broke in here, in this really obvious, unsubtle way and they didn't take the telly or the video, or even your guitar… just this comb. Does it look valuable?'
Moira broke the end off a piece of toast and tried to eat it. 'Looks like one of those metal combs you buy for grooming dogs, only not so expensive and kind of corroded. Like a lot of stuff over a thousand years old, it looks like junk.'
'Look,' Cathy said reasonably, is it not possible it just sort of slipped out when you were bringing your stuff in? Should I search the garden?'
Moira shook her head, gave up on the toast.
'Should we call the police?'
'No… No, this is… Only guy I ever took the thing out for was… Matt Castle, and I never wanted to. Look, I'm sorry. Your father's had a coronary, you've got this Joel Beard moving into your house and I'm rambling on about a damn comb. What time are you leaving?'
'This afternoon – sooner if I can.' Cathy said she'd wait for the cleaner, to tell her to put Joel Beard in the room Moira had slept in and to get Alf Beckett to fix the pantry window. Then she'd pack a couple of suitcases for her father and drop them off at The Poplars, this home for clapped-out clergy. And then think about going back to Oxford.
'What are you studying at Oxford?'
'This and that,' Cathy said. 'Where will you go? Home?'
Moira didn't answer. Where was home anyway? Glasgow? The folk circuit? She felt motiveless. The white-tiled rectory kitchen looked scuffed but sterile, like a derelict operating theatre. Getting to her feet was an effort. The view from the window, of graves, was depressing. The sky was like a crumpled undersheet, slightly soiled.
'I don't know what to do,' Moira said, and the words tasted like chewed-out gum. 'When something dreadful's going down and you don't know what it is or how you connect…'
'Why do you have to connect? You just came to a friend's funeral. You can go home.'
'Can I?'
'Just take it easy, that's all. You can't drive all the way to Scotland without sleep, you'll have an accident. Why don't you book in somewhere for a night?'
'I look that bad?'
'You look like somebody walked off with your soul,' Cathy said with this shockingly accurate perception. Holy Communion, by tradition, was at 9, but by 9.15 nobody had arrived.
Joel went to pick up a stray twig in the aisle, a piece of the Autumn Cross the cleaners had missed. He took it outside, through the churchyard, and dropped it on the cobbles outside the lych-gate. Depositing it safely on secular ground.
On his return he glanced above the doorway, where the Sheelagh na gig had hung, half afraid the thing would have left some murky impression of itself on the stonework beneath, but there was only dust. He'd sent the vile plaque to be locked away in the school cellars until such time as a museum might be persuaded to take it.
He waited, in full vestments, in the vestry doorway, looking over the backs of empty pews towards the altar. Yesterday evening he'd had Beckett bring the wine up from the cellar room and then had the room locked, and he'd taken the key and hurled it away Across the Moss.
The church clock gave a single chime for 9.30. When nobody came to Holy Communion. It didn't really surprise him. How could anyone here kneel at the altar, accepting the blood and body of Christ – knowing what they knew? Knowing that stipends and student grants added up to bugger-all, she tried to give Cathy some money for the two nights' accommodation.
Cathy laughed. 'After you were burgled?'
Moira didn't think she looked too convinced, about the comb. Understandably, perhaps.
They were standing by the front gate of the Rectory. She felt weak and washed out and cold without her cloak. The raw air hurt her cheeks and made her eyes water.
Cathy said, 'You look like you're coming down with something. Hope it's not this Taiwanese flu.'
Moira looked down the hill towards The Man I'th Moss.
Either side of the cobbled street, the cottages looked rough and random, like rocks left by a landslide. She said goodbye to Cathy, kissed her on the check. Cathy's cheek felt hot and flushed, Moira's lips felt cracked, like a hag's. She was remembering the day the Duchess had given her the comb. How she'd stood before her wardrobe mirror and the old comb had stroked fluidly through her short hair, like an oar from a boat sailing with the tide, and the hair had seemed suddenly so lustrous and longing to be liberated, and that was when it began, the five-year war with her gran, who thought children should be seen and not heard and not even seen without their hair was neatly trimmed.
'… if that's what you were thinking,' Cathy was saying in a low voice.
'Huh?'
'I said…' raising her voice,'… it wasn't Dic.'
'What wasn't?'
'Whoever broke in. You've been indicating it was a personal thing. I mean, how many people would know about that comb anyway?'
'I didn't say anything.'
'You didn't have to. You thought it was Dic. Well, he wouldn't do a thing like that and anyway he… he's away teaching.'
'Where's he teach?'
'I'm not telling you,' Cathy said. Her pale eyes were glassy with tears. 'Please, Moira, it wasn't him. It wasn't.'
Moira thought, What's happening to her? What's happening to me? When she picked up her fancy, lightweight suitcase and her guitar case they both felt like they were full of bricks, and her hair felt lank and heavy, suffocating, like an iron mask, as she made her way over the cobbles to the church car park. In the room directly over the Post Office, Milly Gill brought Willie Wagstaff tea in bed.
'Shouldn't've bothered,' Willie grumbled.
Milly said, 'I'm your mother now.'
'Don't say that.'
Balancing her own cup and saucer in one hand – the Mothers were supposed to be good at balancing things – she got gracefully back into bed with him. She was wearing an ankle-length floral nightdress tied over the breasts with an enormous pink bow. She looked like a giant cuddly rabbit, Willie thought, never more grateful for her than he had been this past night.
'I'm everybody's mother now,' Milly said miserably. 'Who else is there? Old Sarah?'
'Shit,' said Willie, 'I don't want it to be you.'
Milly shrugged her big shoulders and still kept the cup balanced on the saucer, 'I've lived opposite Ma for twenty years. I've studied her ways, best I can. I've been… well… almost a daughter-in-law.'
'I was always led to believe,' Willie said, 'that Ma was supposed to announce her successor. "There's one as'll come after me." And it weren't you, luv, I'm sure of that.'
'No,' said Milly. 'But Ma thought she'd be around for another ten years yet. I know that for a fact. Ma thought she'd see in the Millennium.'
'Who can say owt like that? Who the hell knows how long they've got?'
'Ma knew.'
'Aye. But she were bloody wrong, though, weren't she?'
Milly squeezed her lips tight.
'Makes you wonder,' Willie said bitterly, 'if it's not a load of old garbage, all of it, the whole caboodle. Makes you bloody wonder.'
'I'll not have that from you, Little Man,' Milly chided, 'even if you are in grief. That's part of the problem. That sort of talk's like decay.'
'Realism, more like,' Willie said, his fingers waking up, stretching themselves, then batting the side of his teacup in a soft chinking rhythm.
'Drink your tea. You're upset. We all are. I just wish I could get some insight about the Man.'
'Aye,' Willie said. 'And where's bloody Matt? Don't bear thinking about, this lot. Makes me think I'll happen have Ma cremated.'
'You never will!' Milly sat up so suddenly she actually spilled some tea.
'Nowt as goes in yon churchyard ever bloody stays down,' Willie protested. 'Aye, all right. I mean, no, I'll not have her cremated, settle down. Will you talk to Moira?'
'I don't know,' Milly said. 'Wasn't there talk of her getting into bad magic some while back?'
'Aye, and she got out again,' Willie said. 'You met her last night. How did she seem to you?'
'All right, I suppose,' Milly said grudgingly. 'But you can't tell. I should be able to tell, I know, but… Oh, Willie…'
Her shoulders started to shake and she collapsed against him.
'I'm out of mc depth. Why did she have to die like that? Why did she leave us?'
'Because she had no choice,' said Willie, almost managing to get his arm all the way around her. 'It's no good us keep getting worked up about it. What's done is done.'
But his fingers didn't accept it; they set up a wild, uncontrollable rhythm on Milly's arm, just below the shoulder. Ma was killed… Ma was killed… Ma was…
'Stop it!' Milly sobbed, 'I know. I bloody know! But what can we do?'
'Talk to Moira,' Willie said.
The church clock chimed, for 10 a.m.
'Be late for church,' Willie said.
'Not going,' Milly said. 'Means nowt to me now, that place. He's destroyed it. In one day.'
'Aye,' Willie said. 'And the well.'
'You what?
'Him or somebody. I never told you, did I? I forgot – what with Ma and everything. Me and Moira went up there looking for Ma, and the well had been wrecked. Statue smashed, right bloody mess.'
Milly rolled away from him, mashing her face into her pillow in anguish.
'I'm sorry, lass,' Willie said, 'I just forgot.' Sunday morning and the whole village was unaccountably silent. Moira walked to the church car park and loaded everything into the BMW.
It was coming up to 10.45, which probably explained the silence. This would be the time of the Sunday morning worship.
She walked across to the public notice board next to the lych-gate.
SUNDAY: HOLY COMMUNION 9.0. MORNING SERVICE 10.30 UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTIFIED
Life will go on. Unless otherwise notified.
She no longer felt observed. She wasn't worth it any more: a thin, bewildered Scottish woman coming up to middle age and her hair turning white.
Everything was unreal. The clouds were like stone. Her head felt as if it was set in concrete. She needed to get away, to sleep and think and sleep.
And then, maybe, to find Dic, track the little shit down, deal with this thing.
She'd see Willie and then leave. She didn't feel like talking to him – or to anybody. But Willie was the other link; there were things Willie could tell her.
And he was a churchgoer, or always used to be. She was probably going to have to wait until they all came out.
She slipped through the lych-gate. It began to rain, quite powerfully. The gargoyles glared down at her. She moved quietly into the church porch, but there was no feeling of sanctuary here now. The sense of walking into the womb had gone with the Sheelagh na gig. It was merely shelter now, from the rain and nothing else.
Moira stopped, hearing a voice, a preacher's lilt, from the body of the church.
'… Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moves us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness, and that we should not dissemble nor cloak them before the face of Almighty God…'
It was cold in the porch, colder than outside. She hugged herself.
And there was something wrong with that voice.
… Wherefore I pray and beseech you, as many as are here present, to accompany me with a pure heart and humble voice, unto the throne of the heavenly grace, saying after me…'
The door to the church was closed. She would wait for a hymn and then go in.
'Almighty and most merciful father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep…
'We have offended against thy holy laws…
… and there is no health in us..
Cathy had been right. She was coming down with something, a cold, flu. Wasn't just shock. She was shivering again.
Should go back to the car, turn up the heater.
And then it came to her, what was wrong.
There should be responses. All these lines the minister was intoning were supposed to be repeated by the congregation. He was leaving the spaces.
'To the glory of thy holy name… '
But nobody was filling them. Not one person in this congregation was participating.
'Amen.'
Nobody repeated amen. He might have been talking to himself.
Holy Jesus.
'We shall sing… Hymn number six hundred and three. "Round The Sacred City Gather."'
She waited for the organ or the harmonium or whatever.
That sound they always made, like they were drawing breath for the first chord.
There was silence. Only that hollow gasping ambience these places had. And then the singing began.
'Round the sacred city gather
Egypt, Edam, Babylon.
All the warring hosts of error.
Sworn against her, move as one.'
A strong and strident tenor. One voice.
This guy was singing on his own.
And that was very seriously eerie. Moira began to feel scared.
'Get thee, watchman, to thy rampart,
Gird thee, warrior, with thy sword… '
Trembling, she pushed gently at the swing-door, opening it just an inch, just enough to peer in… and let out the voice, louder.
'Watch to prayer lest while ye slumber.
Stealthy foemen enter in…'
She almost screamed. Let go of the door, letting it swing back into place with an audible thunk that seemed to echo from the rafters.
I'm away. I'm out of here.
As she ran out of the porch, into the bleakly battering rain, she could still see him, fully robed, statuesque but crazy-eyed, arms filing out, balanced there on the steps before the altar place, singing to all those empty pews. All those completely empty pews. She walked back along the cobbles, to where she could see down the street as far as The Man I'th Moss.
Not a soul.
But the silence was more sorrowful than sinister, hung down like her confidence, somewhere around the soles of her shoes.
She looked along the blank windows of the cottages. The only sign of presence was some chimney smoking cheerlessly.
Maybe all this had something to do with the sudden death of Ma Wagstaff. A big death.
And the stealing of the Sheelagh, the removal of the candles, the toppling of the Autumn Cross. Like they didn't feel welcome in the church any more, these bewildered people who no longer knew where they stood in relation to their God or their Goddess.
She turned into the alley which led to Willie's house and she hammered on his door, her body flattened against it. Come on, Willie, come on.
Deserted. She tried, a little nervously, a couple of raps on the front door of the curtained cottage at the top of the street where Ma Wagstaff had lived and died. Finally, she found an old envelope in the car and wrote a careful note, walking back down the hill to push it into Willie's letter-box.
Willie, I suppose we need to talk sometime about what we're going to do about Mao's music on the bog body. I don't suppose you feel any more like it than me at the moment, so I'll get in touch in a few weeks' time. I have to go home now…
Home. Where the hell was home?
Home is where the heart is, and I haven't got a heart, I haven't got a soul.
I have been burgled.
She stood in the street and looked from window to window, up and down, in search of life, and did not find it. But then, what the hell business was it of hers if the people of Bridelow wanted to lie low and boycott St Bride's and its unsympathetic new minister?
And turning on her heel, summoning energy from God knew where, she walked crisply, with determination, clop, clop, bloody clop on the cobbles, back up to the lych-gate and the car.
Almost falling into the arms of the Angel bloody Gabriel in white as he strode through the gate, his desperate solo service abandoned.
'I'm sorry,' he snapped. And then, with his hands still on her shoulders to separate their bodies, he began to stare at her.
Seeing what she figured must be this sad, sluttish face, no make-up, hair awry, maybe a low and useless anger burning fitfully in the eyes.
His hands dropped away from her. His fists clenched. He began to tremble. He said, 'Who are you?' Golden curls tight to his head, Van Helsing-size cross looming out at her as his white linen chest swelled.
'Who are you?'
'Doesn't matter,' Moira said tonelessly. 'I'm leaving now.'
He blocked her path to the car, legs apart, this real big bastard in full Sunday vestments, humiliated in the sight of his God. Profile like Michelangelo's 'David' or something, a good head taller than she was and bellowing out, 'In the name of God… WHO ARE YOU, WOMAN?'
'Look, would you please get outa my way,' she said tiredly.
Like she didn't have enough problems of her own.
'It's Sunday morning.' He was snarling now, through gritted teeth, rage choking him. 'And my church is empty. There is no congregation. No sidesmen. No organist.'
'Maybe it's just your sermons are crap,' Moira said. 'Look…'
He said, in a kind of wonder, backing off, his surplice billowing like a sail, 'You're taunting me'
'Please…'
'I know who you are.' He was screaming it at the village, 'I know what you are!'
'Yeah, I'm sure you do, but would you please just get the hell out of my way?'
And knew, as she was saying it, that she shouldn't have used the word hell.
His face glowed red, bulging with blood.
She saw it corning but she didn't move. She took it from his massive open hand across the side of her face, from forehead to lower jaw. It would have hurt her less if she'd fallen, but she wouldn't do that. She stayed on her feet and she stared into his incandescent eyes.
Abruptly he spun away and strode back through the gate; she heard his footsteps crunching the gravel and then, hitting the path. Finally she heard the church door crashing into place with an echo that didn't seem to fade but went on smashing from one side of her skull to the other as she moved unsteadily to her car.