slashes in the yellow, smoky air. 'Hey, it's you…'
Fay began to back away, coughing, in the opposite direction, up the nave until she could feel the heat from the petrol-soaked Bible on her back.
Warren produced a high-pitched trumpeting noise. 'This is Offa's Dyke Radio!'
He slashed the air again, twice.
'Voice of the Marches!' he said. 'Yeah!'
'That's right,' Fay said, cheerfully hysterical. 'Voice of the Marches. That's me.'
Warren stopped. Reflected a moment. 'We done a good job on your ole tape recorder, didn't we?'
Oh my…
'Yes,' she said weakly. 'Very impressive.'
His face went cold. Should have kept her mouth shut.
He opened the hand which held the Stanley knife, looked down at it, the hand and the knife's long, metal handle both splattered with criss-cross layers of blood, bright fresh blood on brown dried blood.
'Hand of Glory,' Warren said. And the fingers clenched again.
As he advanced on her, up the aisle, she saw – almost hypnotized – that his eyes were altering.
She'd never seen Warren Preece close-up before (only – Oh my God – his spidery shape scurrying across a field at sunset) and she was sure that she wasn't seeing him now.
Something in the eyes. The eyes were no longer vacant. Someone in residence.
'Aaah.' The heat at her back was acutely painful. She couldn't go any further: fire behind her, the knife coming at her. She went rigid, looked back towards the door, saw Jimmy Preece had slipped to the floor by the font.
'Black Michael,' she said, as the savage heat at her back became too much to bear and she was sure her clothing was about to catch fire. 'You're Black Michael.'
Warren Preece obviously took this as a huge compliment. He grinned lavishly, and the bloodstained Stanley knife trembled in his hand as he closed in.
'Say hello,' he said, 'to the Hand of Glory.' And lunged.
Fay threw herself sideways, landing hard on the stone. Crawled, coughing wretchedly, to the top of the altar step where the firelight was reflected in Jonathon Preece's closed coffin. A storm of shrivelled scraps of burning paper wafted from the Bible; she saw an orange core of fire eating through to the spine and the varnish bubbling on the wooden lectern as she rolled over, drew back her foot and stabbed out once sharply.
The lectern shook. It was made of carved oak, caked in layer upon layer of badly applied varnish, which dripped an blistered and popped. It moved when she hit it with her foot, but not enough, and she fell on her back beside the coffin, her face stinging from the heat and sparks, as Warren Preece sprang up the steps and the short, reddened blade of the Stanley knife came down at her, clasped in a fist gloved in smoke.
She curled up, and the bells clanged like wild, drunken laughter.
The bells, he thought, the bells of hell. Ringing to welcome old Alex.
He stood in the graveyard, looked up at the church tower and saw the window-slits outlined in light, glowing a feeble yellow at first and then intensifying to pure white as the clangour grew louder until it seemed the walls would crumble and there would only be these bright bells hanging in the night.
Welcome to hell.
No one more welcome in hell than a unfrocked priest except…
Oh Lord, yes. No one more welcome in hell.
The bells rang randomly, as one might expect, a mocking parody of the joyful Sunday peal.
The bells of hell hurt his ears as they were meant to do and would continue to do, he assumed, forever and ever.
He brushed against the Bible and it set light to the black vest he was wearing; little flames swarmed up his chest.
He seemed absolutely delighted. Looking proudly down at himself, dropping down a couple of steps, grinning hugely, as the petrol-soaked spine of the heavy old Bible collapsed into red-hot ash and the two halves toppled from the lectern.
Fay rammed both feet into the wooden stem.
Very slowly it began to fall towards him, and Warren didn't move.
He opened his arms wide, as the lectern fell like a tree, and he embraced it, hugging the blistering stem to his chest.
'Yeah!'
Roaring and blazing.
Fay didn't move, watched in hypnotized awe until she felt and smelt something burning, very, very close, and found a single charring page wrapped around her arm.
Book of David, she read, the page curling sepia, reminding her of the opening credits of some dreadful old American Civil War movie, and she found that her lungs were full of smoke.
CHAPTER XIII
His body jerked in the grass, a convulsion. The crashing bells he accepted as the death vibrations of a brain cleaved by a steel bolt.
'Mr Powys.'
Oh Christ, he thought at once, it wasn't me, it was Arnold; he wants me to see what he's done to Arnold before he puts one into me.
He'd flung himself at the dog, just as Fay had done in the field by the river when Jonathon Preece had been strolling nonchalantly across with his gun. But Powys had missed and Arnold had kept on running, towards Humble and his crossbow, leaving Powys sprawled helplessly, arms spread, waiting for the end. The way you did.
'Mr Powys.'
He rolled very slowly on to his back, pain prodding whatever was between his shoulder-blades, the place where Humble had hit him with the butt of the crossbow.
'It is you, isn't it? Joe?'
He focused on a face in the middle of a pale-coloured head scarf. He saw a woolly jumper. Below that some kind of kilt. Campbell tartan. Memory told him ridiculously.
'Mmmm…' Couldn't get the name out.
'It's Minnie Seagrove,' she said clearly. 'I want you to speak to me, please. Say something. I'm ever so confused tonight. I've been seeing Frank, and now it's bells. Bells everywhere.'
Powys came slowly to his feet. He didn't know about seeing Frank, but they couldn't both be hallucinating bells.
Mrs Seagrove gazed anxiously up at him, although she looked rather calmer than he felt. Behind her the Tump swelled like a tumour that grew by night. From out of the town can the wild pealing.
Powys was disoriented. He looked rapidly from side to side and then behind him. 'Where's…?'
'That's another thing, I'm afraid,' Minnie Seagrove said. 'I think I've killed the man with the… what do you call it?'
'What…?'
'Thank God. It's your voice. Here…' She pushed something into his hand – his lamp. 'I can't switch it on, it's got a funny switch on it.'
Powys switched it on, and the first thing it showed him on the ground was the crossbow. And then an outstretched, naked arm.
'Now just don't ask me how I got here,' Mrs Seagrove said 'because I don't know. It's been a very funny night, all told. But there you were, on the ground and this man with the thingy – crossbow – pointing it down at you – he had the lamp on – taking aim, like. I thought, Oh God, what can I do? And I came up behind him when the bells
