Candlenight

'Bodily fluids?'

'Shit, Reverend. And the other stuff. Slime. Mucus. All over the sheets. Soaked-in, dried stiff. And splattered on the walls. Like those prisoners in Ireland did to their cells.'

'All right, Aled. It's clear this spirit is disturbed and angry and frustrated. The English think they have a right to know everything; lngley is dead and still knows nothing. His spirit is unsatisfied and so it wants, pathetically, to register a protest. But it's frightened, too — more frightened. perhaps, than when it died. It's a week, you say. since he left us?'

'A week ago tonight. Exactly.'

'Very well. I may need assistance. Perhaps you could fetch Mrs. Dafis. Or Buddug Morgan from the farm.'

'Yes indeed.' Aled said, clearly glad to have an excuse to go outside. He went downstairs very rapidly, but at the bottom he turned and shouted back. 'I swear to God, I locked the door! I put the key in the glass with the others. In the bar, see. I swear to God, nobody could get in.'

'Aled, I believe you.'

'So how can it be? He's dead, Rector. Dead and gone. I know there are things the dead can do, but this… How can it be?'

'Because,' said the Reverend Elias ap Siencyn, 'he cannot adjust. And he cannot contain his fear and his — I don't know, there is something else.'

With a single finger he pushed open the door.

'Also,' he said quietly, when Aled had gone, 'like others of his race, he is vermin. Vermin make a mess.'

The rector walked into the bedroom and looked around.

The sheets and the walls were spotless. Whatever Aled had seen was gone. But the stink remained. The stink was obnoxious, and carried a sense of fear and pain and suffering. As well as deep frustration, a helpless rage and a terrible confusion.

'Alien contaminant,' he muttered to himself, a fragment of an old verse, 'a foul disease now chokes the oakwood.'

He stood at the foot of the bed and spoke, with the clarity and resonance of the First words in a sermon.

'You expect my pity?'

He smiled coldly, putting down a scuffed attache case. Then he straightened up and looked at the bed, at a spot just above the pillow.

'You can't stay here,' he said. 'You are over. The air's too strong for you, the light's too bright.'

Chapter XVIII

When they drove at last into Aberystwyth, the coloured lights were on at the entrance to the pier. Green and yellow lights, rippling up and down in a sequence. It wasn't Coney Island, but it made Berry feel a little happier.

'Giles, I— You ever talk to anybody about the house? Anybody local?'

'How d'you mean?'

' — 'bout its history. Anything.'

'No, not really. We didn't like to go round asking questions. Nosey newcomers. Why?'

Berry took the first left after the pier and found a parking space in a side street, a block or two away from the hotel. He could see its sign and an illuminated advert for Welsh Bitter. He switched off the engine and lay back in his seat and let out a sharp breath.

'Look, what's up. Berry? You're behaving pretty bloody strangely tonight.'

'Giles, you're gonna think I'm crazy—'*

'I always have.'

'Listen,' Berry said. 'You remember old Winstone Thorpe—?'

'Oh no!' Giles snapped. 'We're not going into that again.'

Berry had come out the way he'd got in, landing this time less easily, on a gravel path, ripping a hole in his jeans and grazing a knee.

Giles had found him on the lawn. He must have looked like hell, but Giles didn't seem to notice.

'Berry, you cretin,' he'd said when Berry told him he hadn't been able to open either the front door or the back door. 'Why didn't you shout? There's a back door key in the bottom of an old vase in the scullery. I remember seeing the solicitor put it there when he was showing us round. You'll just have to get back in through the window.'

Berry was already shaking his head. Uh huh. No way. No time now. Gonna be dark soon. Anyway, had plenty time to look around. Let's go, OK…?

'Well, go on.' Giles snapped, 'Say it. Say what you've got to say.'

His lean, freckled face, lit up by the headlights of a passing car, looked aggressive, affronted and defiant, all at once.

A girl with luminous green hair and a man in a light silver jacket, as worn on the Starship Enterprise, walked past the car, laughing at each other, but probably not because of the jacket and the hair. They went into the hotel.

'C'mon. let's go in.' said Berry. 'Get a drink.'

The hotel bar was quite crowded, but they managed to find a table, one people had avoided because it was next to the men's room. Giles went to get the drinks and Berry leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, letting the voices wash over him, soporific, like surf. He could hear people speaking in English and in Welsh and even, he was sure, in Japanese. University town. Kind of a cosmopolitan town. He liked that. Made him feel secure. Like New York, except if you closed your eyes in a New York bar you'd open them half a minute later to find you'd lost your wallet or your watch or, where applicable, your virginity.

There was a crush of people around the bar; it took Giles a while to get served. Berry sat quietly, half- listening to the multilingual voices and half-hearing his own voice talking to him, saying all the real obvious things.

… you dreamt it, it was your imagination, you're making it up…

No way.

Something had been in there, something heavier than the desk, harder than the oak beams, blacker than the books.

'Here we are,' said Giles. He put down two beers. 'I know how you like to try local brews, so this is… dammit, I've forgotten the name, but it was in a bottle with a yellow label with a red dragon on it.'

Thanks, pal.' He hated local brews. 'I was just thinking, I could quite get to like this town. Good mix of people here, you know?'

'Yes.' said Giles. 'But what about Y Groes? What about my cottage?'

'Hell of a place,' said Berry. 'Hell of a place.'

So, OK. he thought, let's work this out rationally, bearing in mind that at the end of the day. this is not your problem. Tomorrow you drive out of here and you don't come back. Let Giles find out for himself. It is his problem.

So you didn't like the cottage. No, get it right, there was nothing so wrong with the cottage, it was the room you didn't like. You didn't like the furniture. You couldn't understand the books. You were inexplicably disturbed by a photograph which, in other circumstances, might have seemed faintly comic, bunch of old men in christening robes.

So how come you were squeezing out that window like some guy breaking jail. Grown man, smooth-talking wiseass reporter, scampering away like a puppy, oh, Jesus, this can't be happening, too bewildered to crank up the mental machinery to attempt to analyse it.

'Berry, are you going to come on like the rest of them. Like Winstone Thorpe— 'But you're an Englishman, old boy, you don't belong there.''