blue and mottled. And he thought,
And then the moment passed, and nothing was clear any more.
Chapter LXVIII
Berry walked into the nave, footsteps on stone.
Outside, it had been unseasonally, ridiculously, warm.
Inside the church it was winter again. When he switched off the torch, the light was ice-blue from through the Gothic windows on either side and livid through the long window at the top of the nave, beyond the altar.
He was glad Bethan was not with him, but that didn't make him feel any better about being here.
He walked up the aisle towards the altar.
The churches of his several childhoods, in different States, had mostly been newish buildings masquerading as places as old as this. His dad had been a lapsed Catholic, his mom a Presbyterian. And so religion, to him, had been something pointless that people argued about.
Here, tonight — shining the torch on his watch he discovered it was not yet nine o'clock — he was aware for maybe the first time of the awful power of something venerated. Like the Welsh Language in Judge Rhys's study, only there was ritual worship involved here, and many centuries of it.
Whatever it was reverberated off the stones in the walls, was filtered through the mortuary light from the windows, lay rich and musky on the air.
And it didn't want him here.
Fuck you, he wanted to say, to make a stand, be defiant. But his full range of flip obscenities would seem pathetically peevish and infantile, and about as effectual as throwing stones at a tank.
'Help me,' he said, to his surprise, and the walls immediately laughed off the words.
He switched on the torch with a thunderous clack-ack-ack, and the monstrous shadows leapt out, rearing up then settling back just on the periphery of the beam so he would know they were there, and waiting.
He drew breath and the rich air seemed to enter his lungs in staccato bursts, like something that was planning to come out as a sob. It was thick, sour-milk air, like in the judge's study, only here it had a great auditorium to waft around in and ferment.
Berry found the tomb. There was only one. It was in a small chapel to the left of the altar. A chapel of its own.
It was three feet high and five or six feet long, as long as the stone figure of the knight laid out on top, hands together, praying.
The knight wore armour and its face was worn, the expression on it blurred by the years. But the essence of this remained, and it had nothing reassuring to say. Berry thought the face might at one time have had a beard, but he could not tell if the beard was cleft.
He didn't like to look too hard at it, felt it was looking back.
There was kind of a plaque thing on the side of the tomb, with lettering. But this was in Latin and maybe Welsh too, and he couldn't make it out.
Meredydd, the guy's name, it had said in Ingley's book.
Owain Glyndwr, I presume, was what he'd figured he'd say on approaching the tomb. Let the stiff inside know it was dealing with a wisecracking, smart-assed American who was in no mood for any spooky tricks, OK?
Only the words wouldn't come out.
He thought that if anything spooky happened in this place, there would be little question of how he'd react. He would piss himself, throw up, something of that order.
The years had not blurred a very ancient, sneering cruelty in the face of this knight that belied the supplication of his hands.
Berry didn't like him one bit and he had a sensation, like a cold vibration in the air over the knight's eyes, that the feeling was mutual.
He put out a finger, touched the effigy's eyes, one, then the other. The way the centuries had worn the stone you couldn't be sure whether the eyes were closed or wide open. Berry felt exposed, observed, and was unable to rid himself of the notion that somebody was standing behind him in the cold chapel, perhaps the knight himself, a great sword raised in both hands over his head.
He tried to clear his mind of all such thoughts and made himself go through the motions of checking out the structure of the tomb, as Ingley must have done.
Before he died.
For Chrissake…
The body of the tomb was constructed out of stone blocks, each about ten inches by six, three rows of them supporting the top slab and the effigy.
He laid the torch down on the knight's stone-armoured breast, up against the praying hands with their chipped knuckles.
Then he turned his back on the tomb, fitted his fingers under the edge of the slab, closed his eyes, counted down from three… and heaved.
To his secret horror, the slab moved just enough to show him that with the equipment and perhaps a little help he could get inside.
The thought chilled his stomach.
OK. Calm down.
He knew he had to go fetch the stuff from the car, and whatever was in there he had to let out. And let some air into this place.
An act of desecration.
Sure. No problem.
Berry emerged from the chapel of the tomb holding the rubber flashlight confidently in front of him. The flashlight immediately went out.
He froze.
And the sour milk air clotted around him and clogged his head. He felt dizzy and sat down on some pew on the edge of the nave, and then found he could not move. His thoughts congealed; his senses seemed to be setting like concrete.
Then, after a while — could have been hours, minutes or only seconds — there were ribbons of light.
And the light came now not from the windows on either side or the long window behind the altar, but from above. It descended in a cold white ray, making dust-motes scintillate in the air, and he had the idea it must be the moon and the pillars and buttresses of stone were like trees on either side and the air was pungent now with brackish scents and the residue of woodsmoke.
As the walls of the nave closed in, he looked up into the light sky and on the boundary of his vision a black figure eased out of the mist.
Chapter LXIX
Bethan parked the Sprite in the shadow of the lych gate and sat there for a minute or two, making her mind up.
Then she got out, slammed the door — you had to slam it or it would not stay shut — and walked back down
