Candlenight

Phil Rickman Candlenight

Part One PORTENTS

Chapter I

Laughter trickled after him out of the inn.

Ingley's mouth tightened and he would have turned back, but this was no time to lose his temper. In a hurry now. Knew what it was he was looking for. Could almost hear it summoning him, as if the bells were clanging in the tower.

Besides, he doubted the laughter was intended to be offensive. They were not hostile in the village — yes, all right, they insisted on speaking Welsh in public all the time, as if none of them understood anything else. But he could handle that. As long as they didn't get in his way.

'Torch,' he'd demanded. 'Flashlight. Do you have one I could borrow?'

'Well…' Aled Gruffydd, the landlord, had pondered the question as he pulled a pint of beer, slow and precise as doctor drawing a blood sample.

The big man, Morgan somebody, or somebody Morgan, had said, very deadpan, 'No flashlights here. Professor. Blindfold we could find our way around this place.'

'… and pissed,' a man called out by the dartboard. Blindfold and pissed.'

Aled Gruffydd laid the pint reverently on a slop-mat and then produced from behind the bar a big black flashlight, 'But we keep this,' he said, 'for the tourists. Rubber, Bounces, see.'

Morgan laughed into his beer, a hollow sound.

'Thanks,' Ingley said, ignoring him. 'I… my notes, And a couple of books. Left them in the church. Probably there in the morning, but I need to know.' He smiled faintly. 'If they aren't, I'm in trouble.'

The landlord passed the rubber torch across the bar to him. 'One thing. Doctor Ingley. Batteries might be running down a bit, so don't go using it until you need to. There's a good bit of moon for you, see.'

'Quite. You'll have it back. Half an hour or so, yes?'

'Mind the steps now,' Gruffydd said.

There was a short alleyway formed by the side of the inn where he'd taken a room and the ivy-covered concrete wall of an electricity sub-station. From where it ended at some stone steps Thomas Ingley could hear the river hissing gently, could smell a heady blend of beer and honeysuckle.

This pathway had not been built with Ingley in mind. The alley had been almost too narrow for his portly body, now the steps seemed too steep for his short legs. On all his previous visits to the church he'd gone by car to the main entrance. Hadn't known about the steps until somebody had pointed them out to him that morning. The steps clambered crookedly from the village to the church on its hillock, an ancient man-made mound rising suddenly behind the inn.

As the landlord had said, there was a moon — three parts full, but it was trapped behind the rearing church tower (medieval perpendicular, twice repaired in the nineteenth century) and there were no lights in the back of the inn to guide him up the steps. So he switched on the torch and found the beam quite steady.

Ingley had lied about leaving notes in the church. Kept everything — because you couldn't trust anybody these days — under the loose floorboard beneath his bed. He wondered what the hell he would have done if one of the regulars had offered to help him. Can't go up there on your own in the dark, Professor — break your neck, isn't it? He'd have been forced to stroll around the place, pretending to search for his documents, the tomb tantalisingly visible all the while, then have to wait for the morning to examine it. Too long to wait.

He never put anything off any more. If one had a line to pursue, strand to unravel, one should go on regardless of ritual mealtimes, social restraints, the clock by which man artificially regulated — and therefore reduced — his life.

And depressingly, with Ingley's condition, one never knew quite how much time one had left anyway.

He set off up the jagged steps.

A bat flittered across the torchbeam like an insect. Bats, like rats, were always so much smaller than one imagined.

Ingley paused halfway up the steps. Had to get his breath. Ought to rest periodically — doctor's warning. He scowled. Stood a moment in the scented silence. Did the sense of smell compensate for restricted vision in the dark? Or were the perfumes themselves simply more potent after sunset?

A sudden burst of clinking and distant clatter, then a strong voice in the night. A voice nurtured, no doubt, by the male choir and the directing of sheepdogs on windy hills.

'Professor! Dr. Ingley! Where are you. man?'

Morgan. Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. Snapping off the torch, he held himself very still on the steps. Or as still as one could manage when one was underexercised. overweight and panting.

'Prof, are you all right?'

Of course I am. Go away. Go away. Go away. Thomas Ingley stayed silent and clenched his little teeth.

Another voice, speaking rapidly in Welsh, and then Morgan said 'O'r gorau' OK, then — must mean that, surely. And the heavy front door of the inn closed with a thunk that sounded final.

Ingley waited a while, just to be sure, and then made his way slowly to the top of the steps. Emerging onto the plateau of the churchyard, he stopped to steady his breathing. The sky was a curious moonwashed indigo behind the rearing black tower and the squat pyramid of its spire. A dramatic and unusual site in this part of Wales, where most people worshipped in plain, stark, Victorian chapels — rigid monuments to nineteenth century Puritanism. Even the atmosphere here was of an older, less forbidding Wales. All around him was warmth and softness and musty fragrance; wild flowers grew in profusion among the graves, stones leaning this way and that, centuries deep.

Not afraid of graves. Graves he liked.

'Dyma fedd Ebenezer Watkins,' the torch lit up, letters etched into eternity. '1858–1909.'

Fairly recent interee. Ingley put out the light again, saving it for someone laid to rest here well over four centuries before Ebenezer Watkins. Excited by the thought, he made straight for the door at the base of the tower, straying from the narrow path by mistake and stumbling over a crooked, sunken headstone on the edge of the grass. Could fall here, smash one's skull on the edge of some outlying grave and all for nothing, all one's research. 'Don't be stupid,' he said aloud, but quietly. He often gave himself instructions. 'Put the bloody light back on.'

Followed the torchbeam to the door, which he knew would be unlocked. 'A hospice, sanctuary I suppose you would say, in medieval times,' Elias ap Siencyn had told him. 'And today, is there not an even greater need for sanctuary?' Impressive man, ap Siencyn, strong character and strong face, contoured like the bark of an old tree. Too often these days one went to consult a minister about the history of his church to be met by a person in a soft dog collar and jeans who knew nothing of the place, claiming Today's Church was about people, not architecture.

At the merest touch the ancient door swung inwards (arched moulded doorway, eighteenth century) and the churchy atmosphere came out to him in a great hollow yawn. He was at once in the nave, eight or nine centuries or more enfolding him, cloak of ages, wonderful.

All the same, was it not taking tradition too far to have no electricity in the church, no lights, no heating?

Inside, all he could see were steep Gothic windows, translucent panes, no stained glass, only shades of mauve stained by the night sky. He knew the way now and, putting out the torch, moved briskly down the central aisle, footsteps on stone, tock, tock, tock.