Milly Gill half rose and then sat down again and looked at Willie and then at Mungo Macbeth.
'I'm sorry, Mr Macbeth. Sorry to've given you such awful news. But…' Spreading her hands: what else can I do?
Telling him to get the hell out in other words.
Macbeth stood up but made no move toward the door. 'I don't think so,' he said.
The hollow knocking came again, a little faster this time, a little closer to the tempo of Wagstaff's restless fingers.
'Why d'you do that?' Macbeth said, in no mood for tact. 'With your fingers.'
Willie looked non-plussed, like nobody ever asked him that before.
'He has a problem with his nerves,' Milly Gill said hastily. 'If you don't mind, Mr Macbeth, there's a gentleman come to see us.'
So they know who it is. Knocking comes at the door, latish, and they know what it's about before they open up.
'Sure,' Macbeth said. 'Thanks for your time.' Maybe he should go. Cancel his room at the inn, drive out of here, head back north. Maybe organise a flight home. And call on the Duchess? Could he ever face the Duchess again?
He nodded at Willie Wagstaff, followed Milly Gill to the door.
'Good luck,' he said, not sure why he said that.
And then something told him to turn around, and he found Willie on his feet, a whole series of expressions chasing each other across the little guy's face like videotape on fast-forward.
'Look.' Willie was clasping both hands between his legs like a man who badly needed to use the John. 'It's not nerves. It's…'
'Hey.' The big woman pulled back her hand from the door catch. 'A few minutes ago you were telling me to shut up.'
'I know, lass, but happen we've kept quiet too bloody long. This… Moira. Dead. Finished me, that has. Too many accidents. Going right back to that lad who fell off top of the brewery. Too much bad luck. And when I hear Jack's name… Hang on a minute, lad. Milly, let Ernie Dawber in.'
Milly said, 'If it's Jack – which I…' She swallowed. 'If it is, we've got to sort it out for ourselves.'
'Oh, aye. Like we've sorted everything else out. Let him in.' This Ernie Dawber was a short, stout, dignified-looking elderly guy in a long raincoat and a hat. He didn't look pleased at being kept wailing in the rain. He looked even less pleased to see Macbeth.
'This bloke's a friend of Moira's,' Willie Wagstaff explained.
'Mungo Macbeth.'
Old guy's handshake was firm. Eyes pretty damn shrewd. 'My condolences,' he said. 'I'm sorry.'
'Mr Dawber,' Willie said, 'I'll not mess about. This lad – Mungo – reckons Moira…' He took a breath. 'He reckons there's a connection with Jack. With… John Peveril Stanage.'
Willie's voice was so thick with loathing that Macbeth had to step back.
'Not possible,' Ernie Dawber said. 'I know what you're saving, but it's not possible.'
'No?' said Willie.
'He was banished, Willie. In the fullest sense. Forty-odd years ago. In all that time he's never once tried to come back. And if your ma was here now she'd go mad at you for even saying his name.
'Aye. But she's not. She's dead.' Willie's voice hardened. 'Suddenly. Under very questionable circumstances.'
Ernie Dawber shook his head. 'You're clutching at straws.'
Milly Gill said, 'Leave it, Willie. We've problems enough. Jack couldn't set foot in this village…'
'While Ma was alive!' Willie shouted.
'He's a rich man now, Willie, he's got everything he needs. And like Mr Dawber says, he's never once tried to get back in. Why should he?'
'Aye,' said Willie. 'Why should anybody want owt to do wi' Bridelow? Why's Bridelow suddenly important? Why's it on everybody's lips when things here've never been so depressed? Why? – Mr Dawber'll tell you, he's got the same disease.'
'Willie, stop it off!'
Willie brought a hand down on the gateleg table with a crack. 'Bogman fever! That little bastard's contagious. Look at Matt, he got too close for his own sanity. How close did you get, Mr Dawber, that you want to die for it as well? Did you ever think it'd got at your mind… staid, cautious old Ernie Dawber, man of letters?' He turned away. 'Ernie Dawber, human sacrifice. Don't make me laugh!'
'Stop it!' Milly Gill advanced on Willie like she was figuring to pull him apart. 'How dare you, little man? There's things we never can laugh at. Maybe something's turned your mind.'
'Jesus.' Macbeth stepped between them. 'Bogman fever? Human sacrifice? What kinda shit is this? Guy in the bar said everybody was on edge tonight, I figured he was making small talk. Back off, huh?'
Removing his hat, Ernie Dawber stepped further into the room, leaving the door ajar behind him. No visible ease-up in the rain. 'Could I ask you, Mr…'
'Macbeth. Like the evil Scottish King, had all his buddies iced.'
'That's as maybe,' Ernie Dawber said. 'But could I ask you, sir, what precisely is your interest here?'
'I got nothing to hide.' Macbeth let his arms fall to his sides. 'I fell in love with a woman.'
The noise from outside was like Niagara.
'And now she's dead,' Macbeth said. 'Some bastard's keeping secrets about that, maybe it's time for me to research a few ancestral vices, yeah?'
He shifted uncomfortably. Starting to sound like some steep-jawed asshole out of one of his own TV shows.
'Perhaps,' said Ernie Dawber, 'we should all calm down and discuss this. And for what it's worth – history being my subject – despite the Bard's best efforts to convince us otherwise, Macbeth was actually quite a stable monarch.'
'Ernie…' Macbeth pulled out a chair. 'I wasn't so pissed about this whole thing, I could maybe get to like you.' He sat. 'Now. Somebody gonna tell me about John Peveril Stanage?'
Only Milly Gill still looked defiant. She folded her arms, pushed the door shut with her ass.
'Oh, hell, tell him, Willie,' Ernie Dawber said. It had been novelty value, and now it was wearing off.
Chris wasn't stupid; he wasn't blind, being born-again to God didn't blind you to common sense.
Most of them were young. They sought, Chris conceded, a vibrancy and an excitement in religion which the Church had failed to give them. They found it at outdoor rallies, in marquees and packed rooms that were more like dancehalls. And now they were back where, for many of them, it had begun first time around in the stone clad starkness of an old-fashioned church. To defend it, Joel had told them. Against evil. But an evil they could not see, nor comprehend.
And Chris, an elder of the Church of the Angels of the New Advent, was asking himself: is this man, this figure of almost prophet-like glamour, this embodiment of the biblically angelic, is this man entirely sane?
'Joel.' Chris shambled over to the lectern, a lean, bearded man in a lumberjack shirt. 'Er, how many hours has it been exactly?'
'Are you counting, Chris?'
'No, but… I know the heat's on in here, but it's still pretty cold. Bit of an ordeal for some of these kids.'
'You're saying their faith isn't strong enough?'
Like the PE teacher he used to be, Chris thought. Loftily disdainful of youngsters shivering on a wintry playing field.
'Of course not,' Chris said. 'But don't you think… don't you think this church is clean now?'
'This thing is deep-seated, Chris.' Joel clutched at the lectern for strength, the muscles tautening in his face. 'You think you can eradicate centuries of evil in a few hours?'
He looked down at the wooden pedestal lectern, as if seeing it for the first time, and then sprang back. 'Look! Look at this!'
The lectern was supporting a black-bound Bible, open across spread wings of carved oak.
'It's an eagle,' Chris said. 'Lots of them are eagles.'
'This is not an eagle.' Joel's hands retracted as if the lectern were coated with acid. 'Look.'
Chris didn't understand.
'An owl is a pagan bird,' Joel intoned calmly, like a bomb-disposal expert identifying a device. 'Step away from it. Go down and open the door.' He closed his eyes, breathed a brief, intense prayer for protection, gently detached the Bible, carried it to a choir stall.
And then hefted the lectern in both arms, as though uprooting a young tree.
'Door!'Joel gasped.
Feeling less than certain about this, Chris preceded him down the aisle. Hesitantly, he held open the church door and then the porch door until Joel had staggered out and, with an animal grunt, hurled the lectern far into the rainy tumult of the night.
They heard it crash against a tombstone.
'Filthy conditions.' Joel stumbled back into the church slapping at his surplice, a strange, fixed look on his face. 'Is this natural, all this rain? Is it natural, Chris?'
'It's only rain, Joel.'
'You're not seeing this, Chris, are you? You're not seeing it at all.'
All heads were turned towards him as he walked back up the aisle. Chris sensed an element of uncertainty among their devotion. Perhaps Joel was slightly aware of it too, for he raised his eyes to the altar. 'Oh Lord, give them a sign. Give them proof!'
He stood where the lectern had been, his coronet of curls looking dull, as if tarnished by the rain. Chris found himself praying silently for deliverance from what was becoming a nightmare.
'It was…' Joel spread his big hands helplessly the width of the aisle… evil. Don't you see? It wasn't an eagle, it was an owl. A symbol of what they would call "ancient wisdom". It was a satanic artefact. Can't you understand? It had to be removed.'
'Praise God,' someone called out, but only once and rather feebly. A man in a white T-shirt drifted up to Joel as if to congratulate him, shake him by the hand. When Joel opened his arms to embrace his brother, he felt a blast of cold air against his chest.
Puzzled, he looked down and saw that his pectoral cross was missing. Must have become hooked around the lectern, and he'd thrown it out of the door as well. He felt angry with himself. Now he had to visualize the cross. But he saw his brother Angel's open arms and he smiled.
His brother was smiling back. His brother's eyes were brown and swirling like beer-dregs in a glass.
'Thank you,' Joel said. 'Thank you for your support. Thank you for your faith.'
Couldn't recall the name. But he knew the face, although he d seen it only once before.
'Joel,' Chris said, 'you OK?'
Seen the face by lamplight and edged with lace in a violated coffin.
Joel's eyes bulged. He felt his jaw tightening, his lips shrinking back over his teeth, his throat expanding under pressure of a scream.
But he didn't scream. He would not scream. Instead, he stretched out his arms and grasped his terror to his bosom.
'Joel!' A voice behind him, Chris? But so far away, too far away, a dimension away from death's cold capsule in which Joel embraced a column of writhing darkness comprised of a thousand wriggling, frigid worms.
'Begone.' But it came out breathless, thin and whingeing, from between his clenched teeth.
He tried to project the missing pectoral cross in front of him, a cross of white fire.
Gasping, 'In the name… name of God.' As the cold worms began to glide inside his vestments and to feed upon him, to devour his faith. 'In God's name… begone!'
'Joel, stop it.' Hands either side of him, clutching at his arms.
The cross of fire had become a cross of ice.
Joel roared like a bull.
They were pinioning his arms while the cold worms sucked at his soul. His own brothers in God offering him as sustenance for the voracious dead.
'Aaaaargh.'
A boiling strength erupted in his chest. In the centre of the silence, the black bag was brought to the woman.
From the bag, a thick, dark stole uncoiling. A slender vein of silver or white.
Winding it around her hands like flax and holding it up and showing it to the corpse, twisting it in the candlelight.
Hair. Human hair, two feet of it, three, bound together, with a strip of grey-white hair rippling through it.
The woman's hands moving inside the tent of hair with a certain rhythmical fluidity, as the pipes moaned, an aching lament. The watchers mumbling and, out of this, a single voice rising, a pale ribbon of a voice singing out, 'I conjure thee.'
And winding back into the mumbling with the winding of the hair.
'He's coming.
He's coming and he's strong.' Up against the vestry wall, four of the men around him so he couldn't break away, he wailed in despair, 'Whose side are you on?'
Blood in the aisle. One man sitting up on the flags, head in his hands, semi-concussed.
Chris pressing a tissue to a burst lip. 'Joel, it's all gone wrong. You're seriously scaring people. Some of the women want to leave, get out of here.'
'They can't. They can't go out there now. Not safe, do you not see?'
'Joel, I'm sorry, they're saying it's probably safer out there than it is here with… with you.'
'Lock and bar the doors. Go on. Do it now. LOCK AND BAR THE DOORS!'
'Joel, please, they're saying you… All that screaming and wrestling with…'
'With evil! The infested dead!'
'… with yourself, Joel! Oh, my God, this is awful. Somebody wipe his mouth.'
'Where is he?'
Joel flailed, but they held him.
'Where is he? The spirit. Was he expelled? Tell me.'
'Let's go back to the Rectory, shall we? Have a cup of coffee? Come back later. When we've all, you know, calmed down.'
'What's happened to your face?'
'You hit me, Joel.'
'No.'
'Yes! You were like a man poss… We couldn't hold you. Please, Joel. You've been under a lot of stress.'
'… fighting it… fighting for our souls. Stinking of the grave.., filthy womancunt… let me…'
'Come on. You're scaring people. Let's get some air. Please.'
'Matt Castle. Spirit of Matt Castle. Soiled. Soiled spirit.'
'Joel, Matt Castle's dead…'
'And was here!'
'Look, Declan's hurt. I think he hit his head. He needs a doctor. Please.'
'Illusion. Temptation. They want you to open the doors and let them in. If you don't do it of your own free will, they'll get inside you, fill you up with worms, make you think things that aren't true. Let me go, I command you to let me go.'
'Let him go.'
'Chris?'
'Just let him go. We can't hold him all night.'
'Matt Castle. Its face was Matt Castle's. But I looked into its eyes and its eyes were the eyes of Satan.'
'Yes. Yes, but it's gone now, Joel. I swear to you it's gone. You… you defeated it. You were more powerful. You… you threw it to the ground and it… sort of disintegrated.'
'Ah.'
'Yes, we saw it. We did. Didn't we, Richard? So, Joel, come back to the Rectory, OK? You need a coffee. And a lie down. After your exertions. After your… Oh God, help me…'
'… was it wearing?'
'… your struggle.'
'What was it wearing?
'I… Well, it wasn't… I mean, too clear. Not from where we were standing. A… a shroud, was it? And glowing. Sort of glowing?'
Joel felt his face explode. 'Liars!'
His chest swelled, arms thrashed. One man was thrown across the vestry like a doll, spinning dizzily around until the stone wall slapped into his nose; they heard him squeak and a quick crack of bone, and then Joel's white surplice was blotting up bullets of blood.
'Come on! Let's get out now. Don't go near him.'
'What about Martin?'
'Pick him up, come on. Oh, my God. It's all right. It's all right. Somebody stop them screaming.' Joel heard scrambling and scuffling, stifled shouts and squawks and screams, bolts being thrown, the soulless slashing of the rain and a shrilling from inside of him, something squealing to be free.
At first he wouldn't move, paralysed with dread. Then he began to laugh. It was only the mobile phone at the leather belt around his cassock.
He pulled it out and inspected it. A deep fissure ran from the earpiece to the push-buttons. He had difficulty dragging out the aerial because its housing was bent. The phone went on bleeping at him.
He tried to push the 'send' button, but it wouldn't go in. Joel became irrationally enraged with the phone and began to beat it against the wall. Went on beating it when the bleeps stopped and a tinny little faraway voice was calling out, 'Mr Beard.'
Would have continued until it smashed to pieces in his hand, had he not recognised the voice.
'Mr Beard, can you hear me?'
'Yes.'
'Are you all right, Mr Beard?'
'They've all gone.'
'Who?'
'The Angels.' He giggled. The Angels have flown.'
'As angels are apt to do. You won't run away from this, will you?'
'Never!'
'Mr Beard, I told you once – do you remember? – about the Devil's light. How no one could cross the Moss at night except for those for whom the Devil lit the way.'
'Yes. I remember. Isn't it time you told me who you were?'
'I'll do better than that, Mr Beard. I'll meet you '
'When? Where?'
'Tonight. Stay in the church. Be alone.'
'No choice, have I? And yet I know…'
'You could always run away from it.' Teasing.
'I'll never do that. I'm not afraid, you know. I… tonight I've embraced evil and I know… I know that I am never totally alone.'
'Well said, m'boy. Together we'll put out the Devil's light.'
'Thank you,' Joel said. 'Nobody else believes in me. Thank you. Thank you for everything.'
He started to weep with the joy of the sure knowledge that he was not alone.