Look at Matt, he got too close for his own sanity. How close did you get, Mr Dawber, that you want to die for it as well? Did you ever think it'd got at your mind… staid, cautious old Ernie Dawber, man of letters?' He turned away. 'Ernie Dawber, human sacrifice. Don't make me laugh!'
'Stop it!' Milly Gill advanced on Willie like she was figuring to pull him apart. 'How dare you, little man? There's things we never can laugh at. Maybe something's turned your mind.'
'Jesus.' Macbeth stepped between them. 'Bogman fever? Human sacrifice? What kinda shit is this? Guy in the bar said everybody was on edge tonight, I figured he was making small talk. Back off, huh?'
Removing his hat, Ernie Dawber stepped further into the room, leaving the door ajar behind him. No visible ease-up in the rain. 'Could I ask you, Mr…'
'Macbeth. Like the evil Scottish King, had all his buddies iced.'
'That's as maybe,' Ernie Dawber said. 'But could I ask you, sir, what precisely is your interest here?'
'I got nothing to hide.' Macbeth let his arms fall to his sides. 'I fell in love with a woman.'
The noise from outside was like Niagara.
'And now she's dead,' Macbeth said. 'Some bastard's keeping secrets about that, maybe it's time for me to research a few ancestral vices, yeah?'
He shifted uncomfortably. Starting to sound like some steep-jawed asshole out of one of his own TV shows.
'Perhaps,' said Ernie Dawber, 'we should all calm down and discuss this. And for what it's worth – history being my subject – despite the Bard's best efforts to convince us otherwise, Macbeth was actually quite a stable monarch.'
'Ernie…' Macbeth pulled out a chair. 'I wasn't so pissed about this whole thing, I could maybe get to like you.' He sat. 'Now. Somebody gonna tell me about John Peveril Stanage?'
Only Milly Gill still looked defiant. She folded her arms, pushed the door shut with her ass.
'Oh, hell, tell him, Willie,' Ernie Dawber said. It had been novelty value, and now it was wearing off.
Chris wasn't stupid; he wasn't blind, being born-again to God didn't blind you to common sense.
Most of them were young. They sought, Chris conceded, a vibrancy and an excitement in religion which the Church had failed to give them. They found it at outdoor rallies, in marquees and packed rooms that were more like dancehalls. And now they were back where, for many of them, it had begun first time around in the stone clad starkness of an old-fashioned church. To defend it, Joel had told them. Against evil. But an evil they could not see, nor comprehend.
And Chris, an elder of the Church of the Angels of the New Advent, was asking himself: is this man, this figure of almost prophet-like glamour, this embodiment of the biblically angelic, is this man entirely sane?
'Joel.' Chris shambled over to the lectern, a lean, bearded man in a lumberjack shirt. 'Er, how many hours has it been exactly?'
'Are you counting, Chris?'
'No, but… I know the heat's on in here, but it's still pretty cold. Bit of an ordeal for some of these kids.'
'You're saying their faith isn't strong enough?'
Like the PE teacher he used to be, Chris thought. Loftily disdainful of youngsters shivering on a wintry playing field.
'Of course not,' Chris said. 'But don't you think… don't you think this church is clean now?'
'This thing is deep-seated, Chris.' Joel clutched at the lectern for strength, the muscles tautening in his face. 'You think you can eradicate centuries of evil in a few hours?'
He looked down at the wooden pedestal lectern, as if seeing it for the first time, and then sprang back. 'Look! Look at this!'
The lectern was supporting a black-bound Bible, open across spread wings of carved oak.
'It's an eagle,' Chris said. 'Lots of them are eagles.'
'This is not an eagle.' Joel's hands retracted as if the lectern were coated with acid. 'Look.'
Chris didn't understand.
'An owl is a pagan bird,' Joel intoned calmly, like a bomb-disposal expert identifying a device. 'Step away from it. Go down and open the door.' He closed his eyes, breathed a brief, intense prayer for protection, gently detached the Bible, carried it to a choir stall.
And then hefted the lectern in both arms, as though uprooting a young tree.
'Door!'Joel gasped.
Feeling less than certain about this, Chris preceded him down the aisle. Hesitantly, he held open the church door and then the porch door until Joel had staggered out and, with an animal grunt, hurled the lectern far into the rainy tumult of the night.
They heard it crash against a tombstone.
'Filthy conditions.' Joel stumbled back into the church slapping at his surplice, a strange, fixed look on his face. 'Is this natural, all this rain? Is it natural, Chris?'
'It's only rain, Joel.'
'You're not seeing this, Chris, are you? You're not seeing it at all.'
All heads were turned towards him as he walked back up the aisle. Chris sensed an element of uncertainty among their devotion. Perhaps Joel was slightly aware of it too, for he raised his eyes to the altar. 'Oh Lord, give them a sign. Give them proof!'
He stood where the lectern had been, his coronet of curls looking dull, as if tarnished by the rain. Chris found himself praying silently for deliverance from what was becoming a nightmare.
'It was…' Joel spread his big hands helplessly the width of the aisle… evil. Don't you see? It wasn't an eagle, it was an owl. A symbol of what they would call 'ancient wisdom'. It was a satanic artefact. Can't you understand? It had to be removed.'
'Praise God,' someone called out, but only once and rather feebly. A man in a white T-shirt drifted up to Joel as if to congratulate him, shake him by the hand. When Joel opened his arms to embrace his brother, he felt a blast of cold air against his chest.
Puzzled, he looked down and saw that his pectoral cross was missing. Must have become hooked around the lectern, and he'd thrown it out of the door as well. He felt angry with himself. Now he had to visualize the cross. But he saw his brother Angel's open arms and he smiled.
His brother was smiling back. His brother's eyes were brown and swirling like beer-dregs in a glass.
'Thank you,' Joel said. 'Thank you for your support. Thank you for your faith.'
Couldn't recall the name. But he knew the face, although he d seen it only once before.
'Joel,' Chris said, 'you OK?'
Seen the face by lamplight and edged with lace in a violated coffin.
Joel's eyes bulged. He felt his jaw tightening, his lips shrinking back over his teeth, his throat expanding under pressure of a scream.
But he didn't scream. He would not scream. Instead, he stretched out his arms and grasped his terror to his bosom.
'Joel!' A voice behind him, Chris? But so far away, too far away, a dimension away from death's cold capsule in which Joel embraced a column of writhing darkness comprised of a thousand wriggling, frigid worms.
'Begone.' But it came out breathless, thin and whingeing, from between his clenched teeth.
He tried to project the missing pectoral cross in front of him, a cross of white fire.
Gasping, 'In the name… name of God.' As the cold worms began to glide inside his vestments and to feed upon him, to devour his faith. 'In God's name… begone!'
'Joel, stop it.' Hands either side of him, clutching at his arms.
The cross of fire had become a cross of ice.
Joel roared like a bull.
They were pinioning his arms while the cold worms sucked at his soul. His own brothers in God offering him as sustenance for the voracious dead.
'Aaaaargh.'
A boiling strength erupted in his chest. In the centre of the silence, the black bag was brought to the woman.
From the bag, a thick, dark stole uncoiling. A slender vein of silver or white.
