To Dream of the Dead

yucky.’

‘If there’s enough hot water.’

When she’d gone up, Merrily drew the curtains, and then — superstitiously — drew them back.

‘How is she, Eirion? Really?’

‘We, er… we went to Coleman’s Meadow. I persuaded her it was the thing to do.’

‘Good.’

‘Good and… not so good. We met Neil Cooper — the archaeologist from the council? Not a happy man.’

Eirion didn’t look too happy either. Since she’d seen him last, he seemed to have grown up, lost the puppy fat, turned the big corner. She listened to his story about Bill Blore’s private memos to the Council — the authority he’d publicly slagged off. It didn’t actually strike her as all that curious.

‘Maybe it’s part of his contract for the excavation. The Council don’t trust Blore, and they got into a potentially difficult situation with the Dinedor Serpent, so everything he finds, every step he takes, he has to report back.’

‘And he’d’ve agreed to that?’

‘What choice would he have? And anyway, in my experience, the high-profile maverick image is usually a facade. You often find that so-called rebels, when you meet them, tend to be disappointingly orthodox.’

Merrily was thinking of Mathew Stooke. Eirion sighed.

‘The older I get, Mrs Watkins, the more disillusioned I become. By the time I’m thirty, the world’s going to look like a grey waste-land full of zombies who believe in nothing. In fact, I can see it already. All these teenage suicides, is that any wonder?’

‘Hey, come on, Eirion, this is how Jane talks when she’s down. I rely on you to lift her out of it.’

‘Sorry.’

Eirion pushed back his chair, went over to the window. It was like looking into an aquarium with no lights.

‘It doesn’t end,’ he said. ‘She’s become obsessed now with finding whatever Blore’s discovered. What it’s done to Cooper, that’s made her angry, but also… hopeful, you know? That there’s still some mystery to be uncovered there? And she thinks if she can let it out before Blore does it might somehow clear her name, turn it all around. She… doesn’t give up.’

‘You noticed.’

‘Dragging me all round the boundaries of the site and halfway up Cole Hill, trying to make out the alignment through the rain, trying to see something new. It was… seemed a bit pointless. Sad.’

‘You know what we need to do?’ Merrily said, as the phone started ringing in the scullery. ‘Somehow we need to persuade Blore either to ditch the interview with Jane or record it again, rather more kindly.’

‘How do you propose to do that?’

‘Haven’t the faintest idea, Eirion.’

Huw’s Yorkshire voice, flat and scuffed as an old rag rug, sometimes reassuring, not always.

‘Never seemed like much to me, Stooke. Doesn’t claim to be a boffin, doesn’t refer constantly to Darwinian theory. Doesn’t seem to specialise in owt.’

‘Except derision,’ Merrily said. ‘He specialises in scorn.’

‘A man of the age,’ Huw said.

There was a pause. Merrily thought she could hear the ubiquitous rain bombarding Huw’s gaunt rectory in the Brecon Beacons, the crackle of his log fire.

‘So Stooke’s missus wants you to get this West woman off their backs.’

‘Essentially, yes.’

‘You told them she’s not a member of your church.’

‘But she is. She comes every week. But she goes to the other place twice a week.’

‘A serial worshipper.’

‘She’s quite clever about it. Never really mentions the Church of the Lord of the Light in Ledwardine. No posters in the post office. A devout Anglican of the old school. My church is her church.’

‘But she slags you off. She walked out of your service.’

‘She would see that as defending the village’s religious tradition against a dangerous subversive influence.’

‘Kind of support she got?’

‘Not a lot. Some people think she’s a joke, some feel sorry for her because she’s a lone voice. And, of course, her opposition to the raising of the heathen stones makes her a gift to Lyndon Pierce and the pro-expansion lobby.’

Impregnable, in a way, when you thought about it. Exactly the way she looked behind the big metal cross and the reinforced glass in the post office.

‘All right,’ Huw said. ‘I’m looking at this website, as we speak. Thelordofthelight.com. You think this is Ellis again, from the States?’

‘I honestly don’t know, Huw. It carries his mark. It’s not unintelligent, and it’s plausible enough. And it would explain Shirley’s attitude. Ellis has very good reason to hate me.’

‘It has been predicted that, close to the Endtime, Satan will incarnate’, Huw quoted. ‘He will have neither horns nor tail.’

‘That’s cows in the clear, then.’

Huw laughed.

‘You read the rest, though,’ Merrily said, ‘what it’s almost saying is that Satan is the secular society. The moral void.’

‘A persuasive argument in many ways. Where do you stand?’

‘Personally, I don’t have that much of a problem with unbelievers, unless they try to bully other people into unbelief. But then, I have the same problem with people who try to bully people into belief. Like Ellis.’

‘Can’t bully an atheist into faith any more.’

‘But you can make their lives unpleasant. The Stookes are getting what I suppose you’d call ominous mail and anonymous letters, arguably from the same source, basically reminding them of the various names of their… satanic master.’

‘If Stooke looks different and they’re living under a false name,’ Huw said, ‘how did Shirley find out about them?’

‘She’s the postmistress. They haven’t completely changed their identity — he won’t do that. So his real name still appears on official documents… and on cheques. Silly mistake by Leonora. They were late paying an electricity bill because they were contesting it, and in the end she took the final demand to pay it at the post office… paid with a cheque, with, of course, the name Stooke on it. Not realising at the time what kind of woman was handling the transaction.’

‘Shirley must’ve seen that as a little gift from God.’

‘Oh yes. Leonora remembers her looking up with this awful still smile she has — pious going on sinister. Thank you, she says, handing over the receipt, Mrs Stooke.’

‘So how did it go from there?’

‘Quite subtly, for Shirley. Or maybe she was being restrained. Say she told someone at the Lord of the Light, and they passed the information up the line to Ellis or whoever — if not Ellis there has to be somebody like him — and the word comes back to play it quietly. Not to out him, because then he becomes public property… a target for fundamentalists everywhere.’

‘Aye, and they wouldn’t have him to themselves any more. Their private demon for the Endgame. Think they’re the chosen ones.’

‘Hard to credit the mentality.’

‘It’s all too bloody easy. These folk are fantasists of the first order. Owt unexpected happens, it’s the hand of God. That’s all they’ve done so far, is it, threatening letters?’

‘Well… seems Shirley quite often takes an evening stroll from the orchard to Coleman’s Meadow. Taking a