Candlenight

Alun sat up, put the Range Rover into reverse and looked constantly over his shoulder until they were back on the road and the headlights no longer lit a recumbent, erotic sculpture in marble, two figures coitally entwined, utterly still, frozen together for ever.

'It's a nightmare, Guto,' Alun said. 'It has got to be a nightmare.'

Yes. Of course. Sure. A nightmare. A dream from which you had to free yourself. The difference was that, in a dream, when that thought came to you, the realisation that you were in fact dreaming would wake you up at once.

This was the difference.

He tried to speak, to scream at the circle of black, malevolent trees under the white moon. He tried to scream out, you are not here, you are someplace else, this is a church for Chrissake…

These lines only came to him as vague things, nothing so solid as words.

Sice, the mist said, blown from the bellows. The mist had risen to cover the altar, but it may have been a mist inside his own head because this was how it was in dreams. siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!

'Sais,' Giles Freeman hissed, a red spectre staggering out of the mist in a torn and soaking suit, with a bulging black eye. 'Means English. Often used in a derogatory way, like the Scots say Sassenach. Satisfied now?'

A string somewhere was pulled. A big door opened and closed. Thunk. Breath came back to Berry Morelli, air blasting down a wind-tunnel.

'DIM SAIS!' he cried out. stumbling out into the nave, arms waving, 'DYDWY DDIM YN SAIS, YOU BASTARDS!'

'We never said you was, man,' Dai Death said calmly. 'Come on out now.'

Bethan, waiting by the lych gate, saw Dai Williams and Idwal Pugh leaving the church with Berry Morelli, him gesturing at them, as if arguing. He was all right. He was not dying by the tomb, leaking dark blood over the stone flags.

Bethan's relief was stifled by the realisation that nothing had changed. The air still was fetid, the moonstreaked sky bulging over Y Groes like the skin of a rotting plum.

She did not go to him but slipped back through the lych gate and hurried a little way along the road until she saw a track winding between the silhouettes of two giant sycamores.

Chapter LXXI

Around the timber framed porch for several yards in all directions, the snow was as pink as birthday-cake icing and this had nothing to do with the strawberry sky.

When they dragged his body out, Charlie Firth seemed to have a hole in him the size of a grapefruit. As if he'd been punched by a fist in a boxing glove and the glove and gone through him.

Bill and Ray dragged him out on the off chance that he was still alive.

He wasn't.

The mistake he'd made had been to laugh when Aled had emerged from the back room holding out the double-barrelled twelve bore shotgun and hoarsely ordering them all to leave his inn. Charlie had made some reference to Old Winstone's mother and a shotgun and that she, being English, at least had the nerve to use it.

Ray Wheeler remembered Aled's hollowed-out face in the wan ambience of the candle, by then not much more than a wick floating in an ashtray full of liquid wax. He thought he remembered a glaze of tears in the licensee's eyes as he poked the gun barrel under Charlie Firth's ribcage.

Ray certainly remembered Aled reloading the twelve-bore from a box of cartridges on the bartop, Sykes shakily saying something along the lines of, 'Now look, old boy, no need for this, surely?' The banalities people came out with when something utterly appalling had occurred.

Blood and obscene bits of tissue had been slurping out of Charlie all the way to the door and Bill was relieved to leave him in the snow. He and Ray, liberally spattered with pieces of their colleague, backed away from the body, looking for some cover in case the mad landlord should come charging out after them.

They hid in the car park at the side of the inn, behind the Daihatsu. 'So where's everybody gone?' Ray said. 'It's like bloody High Noon. What the fuck's wrong with this place?'

Bill Sykes ran in a crouch — how he thought that would make him less of a target for a man with a twelve- bore, Ray couldn't fathom — across the road to the only cottage with some sort of light burning inside. He heard Bill hammering at the cottage door hard enough to take all the skin off his knuckles and then enunciating in his polite and formal Old Telegraph way, 'Hello, excuse me, but would it be possible to use your phone?'

There was no response at all from within, where a single small, yellow light never wavered. Not even an invitation to go away.

'I need to telephone the police,' Bill said loudly into the woodwork.

To nil response.

'Well, could you perhaps telephone the police? Tell them to come at once. Please. Just dial nine nine nine. Think you could do that?'

The cottage was silent. The air was still. The burgeoning sky seemed to have sucked warm blood out of the snow.

'Oh, bollocks to this,' Ray yelled. 'Let's get the fuck out of here.'

In thirty years of journalism, in Africa, South America, he'd never known a place, an atmosphere, quite so unearthly. He climbed into the Daihatsu, fumbled around and almost wept with relief when he discovered the key in the ignition. Obviously nobody worried about teenage joyriders on the loose in a place as remote as this.

Bill climbed in the other side. 'Ever driven one of these things, old boy?'

'No,' Ray said, through his teeth. 'But I reckon this is one of those occasions when I could master the controls of a bloody Jumbo Jet if need be.' He leaned forward to turn the key in the ignition, feeling distaste as a patch of Charlie's blood on his shirt was pulled against his chest.

Bill said. 'What about Shirley and young whatsisname?'

'I reckon they've gone,' said Ray, with more confidence than he felt. 'The Range Rover's gone, hasn't it? The Plaid bunch.'

'True. Well, off you go then, Ray. Probably the only way we'll get to alert the constabulary.'

'I don't know what the hell kind of story we're going to do on all this, do you?'

'Least of my worries, old boy. Least of my worries.'

After a hiccupy start, they got over the bridge and on to the road that look them out of Y Groes. There was only one and, at first, the going was easy enough. It was not snowing and the stuff on the road was impacted, no problem for the four-wheel drive.

They came soon to a signpost. Pontmeurig one way, Aberystwyth the other. 'Doesn't say how far Aberystwyth is, Ray. I think we should stick to what we know.'

'Yeah, OK.' Ray steered the Daihatsu, headlights full on, into the hills. Where it soon became quite clear that Y Groes had got off incredibly lightly as far as the weather was concerned.

As the road rose up, they could see the church tower behind them under a sky so rosy it seemed like some sort of ominous false dawn. But before midnight?

Above and around them, however, the night was darker than Welsh slate, and then the snow began to come at them like a fusillade of golf-balls, through which they first saw the figure at the side of the road.

'Reckon this poor bugger's broken down?' Ray slowed the Daihatsu. 'Or got his motor jammed in a drift?'

Bill Sykes was wary. 'Nobody we, er, know, is it? Better be a bit careful here, Ray.'

'Bill, it looks like an old woman.'

The figure lifted a slick to stop them. They made out a long skirt and a ragged shawl tossed in the snowstorm.

Ray opened his window, got a faceful of blizzard. 'Yeah, OK, luv. Can you make it over here, I don't want to