Candlenight

He turned away, tramped off down the hill back towards the Range Rover. When he turned around, the man had gone, but there was a kind of heat below his left shoulder where the hand briefly had touched him.

He almost bumped into Alun, who had come over the rise, his mobile phone in his gloved hand. 'Who were you talking to?'

'Some bloke,' Guto said.

'I got through,' said Alun. 'Gwyn Arthur Jones is sending to Carmarthen for the police helicopter. They say we should go back to Y Groes and wait.'

'OK.' Guto got in the front of the Land-Rover with Alun, not wanting to look at what lay on the rear seat.

Alun reversed the Range Rover for almost half a mile until they came to a sign indicating a lay-by and he was able to make a three-point turn and they went back towards Y Groes, as Guto always knew they would.

'God, I feel sick,' Miranda said in his ear, inducing icy palpitations down his spine. 'What time is it?'

Snow swirled around the Fiat Panda, tucked into the side of the inn. 'What have I become?' Dai Death said. 'Tell me that.'

'What have you always been, man? A covetous bugger.' Idwal Pugh sat in the driver's seat, where he'd been for the past hour, trying to get the car radio to work. 'Pontmeurig was not good enough. No, you had to find your paradise. Look at it. You call this paradise?'

'I didn't believe it. And then I did.' Anguished. Dai pummelled his knees.

'I told you,' Idwal said. 'I warned you not to go in there.'

'And then — was as if I was seeing everything through different eyes. I just dropped the bloody stone on his arm. I did that! Me! How is it I could do that? How?'

'You tell me.'

'Seems like a dream to me now. Maybe it was a dream. Come back with me, Idwal.'

'I will not.'

'See, I go back there afterwards—'

'You told me.'

' — when the snow has started and the fever has gone from my head. And I go back into the church, see —'

'Yes, yes. But where have they taken him?'

' — Bloody tomb open, bloody statue thing in pieces, shattered.'

'But what was in it, Dai? Did you look?'

'Oh, Jesus.' Dai wailed. 'Don't go asking me that.'

'A question you have for me. is it, little bitch?'

'I don't want to know,' Bethan said, and knew immediately this was the wrong thing to say.

Buddug smiled horribly.

As a wind blew out of nowhere, she forced Bethan down the river bank to the edge of the water. Bethan looked up. Even without her glasses she could see the church tower had lost its grip on the moon, which seemed to be swimming away on a churning sea of cloud.

'Look, Buddug! Look at the sky!'

'It will pass,' Buddug said. The wind had seized her ragged hair, making it writhe like serpents. She was the Gwrach y rhibyn. The death hag. She pulled Bethan into the shelter of the bridge. 'I will tell you how it was,' she hissed into Bethan's face, with a gush of vile breath.

'No!'

'We all came to see. A beautiful summer night, it was, the sun going down. And you in your white summer dress. Like a bride.'

'And my husband already dying.' Bethan tried to turn her head away and Buddug seized her cheeks between thumb and forefinger.

'Indeed, perhaps that was the very night he began to die,' Buddug said, the muscular fingers of her other hand caressing the bruised skin on Bethan's neck with dreadful tenderness.

'No…' Bethan closed her eyes, felt and smelled Buddug's warm, putrid breath, began to cough.

'You closed them that night, too…' Bethan jerked both eyes open, looking into Buddug's yellow teeth, the black gaps between them, the breath pumped through those gaps like poison gas.

'You did not care,' Buddug said dreamily. 'You were in thrall to the night and the sweet smells and the old magic. And as you lay with your legs spread…' A heavy gust of wind came through the bridge, with a surge of snow.

'Gwrach! Bethan screamed through the wind. 'Gwrach! Gwrach! Gwrach!'

Buddug had both her butcher's hands around Bethan's throat now, holding her at arm's length and looking from side to side, down at the river then up at the church and the heaving sky, with the sudden realisation that something fundamental had altered. 'What have you done, bitch? What have you done to the night?'

'Gwrach!'

'You are… cachu.' Buddug's eyes burning red like coals.

Bethan felt a thumb going up into her larynx, its nail probing like a knife. She felt the skin parting, her throat constricting, tongue out, eyes popping.

'And when I can see in your eyes that your time is upon you,' Buddug told her, 'I shall tell to you the name of the father of your child.'

Bethan felt herself rising above the horror of the night and the hag's slaughterhouse hands and graveyard breath. Rising into the Wales of her childhood, low tide at Ynyslas, a fire of driftwood on her birthday, the view from Constitution Hill at sunset over the last ice lolly of the day. She heard lines of poetry: Gwenallt, Dic Jones the bard and finally, sonorously, in English, the haunted cleric, R. S. Thomas: to live in Wales is to be conscious

At dusk of the spilled blood

That went to the making of the wild sky

Between the snowflakes, she felt the hot splashes of blood on her face, opening her eyes at the deafening blast, Buddug's hands still around her throat but no grip in them any more.

And Buddug, no head to speak of most of it in fragments down the front of Bethan's torn once-white raincoat.

Part Ten NOS DA

Chapter LXXV

The other side of midnight people began to emerge from their homes in coats and scarves, carrying lamps and torches, all very muted, hardly saying a word to each other. Like survivors of some bombing raid, Mair Huws, from the Post Office, and Eirlys Hywels silently helped Bethan take off what remained of the raincoat and wrapped her in an old tapestry cape, leaving the bloody mac draped over the bridge, dripping into the river.

Aled was crouching alone just inside the alley between the inn and the sub-station where the wind could not reach him. By the light of his torch, propped up against a brick, he was slipping another cartridge into his shotgun.

'What are you looking at?' He stood up and pointed the twelve-bore vaguely around him. In fact, nobody was looking at him except Berry Morelli, smoking a cigarette, one sleeve of his flying jacket flapping empty.

'Well, Aled. What can I say? You blew her head off. Dump the gun now?'

Aled shook his head. 'To the rectory I have to go.'