God in heaven, I don't know where I am…
Calm down. It wasn't a candle, candle, andle, ndle…
Sharp, probing pain now, deep in his chest, like a slender knife going in…
… and his eyes came open, to show him there
He shut out the image in frozen panic. It was only a symbol, a motif summoned by his subconscious, an hallucination, a manifestation of the corruption in his system — a sick body's attempt to bring down the mind to its own level of decay.
Dying people, he thought in silent hysteria, conjured up choirs of angels, all that nonsense. Chemicals. And his own chemicals now, flooding about uncontrollably, mixing the toxic cocktails, how ironic they should throw off such an image. The corpse candle. Harbinger of death. Flickering from the periphery of his scholarly probings into a society still obsessed with its own mythology.
He could make this candle go away. He could send it back to his subconscious. He was furious now. He would not submit to this invasion. And he would not die. Damned if he would.
Damned if he…
Ingley squeezed his eyes shut, trying to squeeze rationality into his thoughts… and found himself walking up the aisle of the church, footsteps on stone,
Turn back, turn back, turn back…!
Can't… Can't go on… Must go back…
Drawn steadily down the aisle towards the steep window leaking livid light into the nave.
He struggled frantically to open his eyes, didn't care now what arcane symbol they would show him, so long as it could pull him out of this place of old, forgotten, stinking evil. He felt himself rolling about in the bed, sweating cold fluid, screaming inside. But his eyelids, fastened down like heavy blinds, would not move. He remembered as a boy being shut by older boys inside a wall cupboard where there was barely room to breathe and heaving at the door in helpless panic, his first experience of claustrophobia, the stifling terror.
Please. Let me go. I'm sorry, oh God, I'm sorry.
It was cold in the church. The altar cloth was white, with a mulberry splash, like an old bloodstain, where it caught light through the long windows. The altar was where you turned left, three paces to…
No…!'
Three paces.
The air thickened and vibrated with a frigid energy.
No. Please… Can't… Jesus Christ, let me out! tock
A long black shadow arose in his path. He screamed. Screamed to get out of the church. Screamed for his eyes to open. But it was as if, while his mind was elsewhere, both lids had been very precisely stitched up.
… but the stone eyelids of the knight sprang open, and his eyes were of cold amethyst light. His hands unclasped from prayer, chipped knuckles, white bone beneath the stone, seeking one's throat. His stone mouth splintered into a grin.
Thomas Ingley threw all that remained of his strength into the fight to re-enter his bedroom at the inn, like pushing and pushing at a seized-up manhole cover to escape from the fetid cellar, the strain tearing at his poor exhausted heart, stretching and popping like rotted rubber.
The stone hands locked around his windpipe. His eyeballs bulged.
And his eyes opened.
Lids flicking up with a butterfly motion. Effortless.
The room was quiet and the air was still. He could see the wardrobe in the corner by the door. The moon through the uncurtained window. The luminous green hands of the travel alarm clock, although he couldn't make out how they were arranged.
Inside his chest he felt nothing at all. The bed was silent now, no creaks. He expected to find the bedclothes in knots, but the sheets were still stiffly tucked in around him. Hospital corners. He lay calmly motionless and listened to his breathing, steady now. Nor could he feel his heart pounding any more.
So peaceful.
The relief was so great that he didn't try to move, just let his head sink into the pillow and his gaze drift up to the ceiling, where the little light hung in a frosty miasma about six inches above his left temple. He went on watching the light, fully resigned now, as it turned from blue to pink… to blood red.
He tried to scream then, his face twisting, but it came out as a parched rattle.
Chapter IV
This was the thing about Wales. Some places seemed cursed — filthy weather, soil you could hardly grow dandelions in — and some places, like this village, had it all. The change, when you came out of the forestry, the other side of the Nearly Mountains, was dramatic and yet subtle too… the landscape greener, the weather milder, the whole atmosphere all-round mellower.
It embraced you, he thought, like a good woman,
The better to appreciate it, Dai Death, the undertaker in Pontmeurig, stopped his hearse in the middle of the road, where it left the forestry, and looked down on the village in its little cwm. Sunday afternoon. No hurry. It had looked like rain in Pontmeurig- but the sky over Y Groes was as deep a blue as you could ever expect to see in Wales.
The cottages were a clutch of eggs in a nest; the church a benevolent old bird.
A clutch of eggs, yes. Nice metaphor. Dai liked to write a bit of poetry and aspired to the crown of the Glanmeurig Eisteddfod. Sitting at the wheel of his hearse, window wound down and the sunlight warm on his bald head, he lit a cigarette, feeling happy because he liked doing business in Y Groes and it wasn't often he got the chance — not because nobody died here, but because they had little use for undertakers. He wondered, not for the first time, how anyone could look out at such a place from his deathbed and hold on to any hopes of going to a greater paradise,
By all accounts, though, today's customer had been in no position to dwell upon the relative merits of a hypothetical heaven and the village of Y Groes. He'd gone in the night when, Dai supposed, Y Groes looked much the same as any other village.
An engine grumbled at him from behind. In his wing mirror he saw a tractor that couldn't get past, it being a narrow road and the farmer not wanting to sound his horn because he could see a coffin in the back of Dai's hearse — how was he to know it was empty?
'All right, man. I'm off.'
Dai tossed his cigarette out of the window, raised an apologetic hand and put the hearse in gear. Normally he might have let out the clutch sharpish like, and shot off in a spurt — bouncing the pale utility coffin into the air, giving the bugger on the tractor one hell of a shock. But he didn't like to do that now.
Not here.
For Dai's greatest aspiration, even closer to his heart than the thought of wearing the plastic crown at the Glanmeurig Eisteddfod, was to get himself a cottage in this village and retire one day to paradise.
He was on his own today, his brother Harri still in Bronglais Hospital with his back. So he had to ask the landlord to give him a hand with the customer.
'Police sent you. is it?' said Aled Gruffydd.
Dai nodded. 'Said could they have him stored until they find his relatives down in England.' He lifted up the tailgate of the hearse and pulled out the lightweight fibreglass coffin with one hand. 'Well, see. I don't mind jobs like this, even on a Sunday. Sooner or later some bugger pays the bill.' He smiled slyly. 'English prices, isn't it?'
The bedroom was almost directly over the bar. It had a very low ceiling and wasn't really big enough for
