A Crown of Lights

cleverly, ‘I’m not your leader. Listen to your hearts and let the Holy Spirit move within you.’ And he had walked away, leaving bitter, apocalyptic stuff on the air amidst the hellfire fumes. He knew what they’d do. He just wasn’t going to be seen to instigate it.

Watching this, Gomer had nodded knowingly. ‘Truly a local man at last,’ he’d said – which Jane didn’t really understand.

Sophie appeared at her shoulder. ‘There’s one place we haven’t tried,’ Jane said.

‘The church, I suppose,’ Sophie said. ‘She had a loose arrangement with that young pagan woman, didn’t she? To do some sort of Deliverance work? You’re probably right. If you and Gomer want to go down there, Eirion and I will stay here, in case she shows up.’

Gomer nodded. He never liked to stand still for very long. ‘Thank you, Sophie,’ Jane said. ‘You’ve been —’

‘Shut up, Jane,’ Sophie said wearily. ‘Just go. And perhaps you could warn them over at the church’ – she nodded towards the assembly on the streets – ‘about that.’

Robin and Betty were holding one another in some kind of sweet desperation. Everything seemed lost: Robin’s work, the house, their friends, their religion, their future here. Everything smashed in an act of sacrilege so gross it was worthy of a Christian. The candle chopped in half, the scourge handle snapped, the pentacle sent skimming like a frisbee into the wall. The chalice of red wine draining into the rug.

Finally the one-time studio table hauled from its trestles, flung onto its side. Max’s wife Bella screaming, Vivvie raging, calling down the vengeance of the gods, or some shit like that. This was before Ned Bain had come and stood, unflinching, in front of Robin, who still held the sword. Robin had felt like decapitating the bastard, but Ned Bain had remained impressively cool. That quiet power, even Robin felt it.

‘Before I leave,’ Bain said, ‘I want to make it clear that no one else here was involved, no one conspired. No one else deserves to suffer.’

And then he turned and gathered his robe and walked out without another word.

There’d been a long period of quiet then, broken only by some weeping. Betty leaned against a wall, drained. Vivvie had her head in her hands. Even Max had nothing to say. His kids hovered in the doorway, the fiendish Hermes looking satisfyingly scared. The pregnant witch, whose name Robin couldn’t recall, had left the room with her partner. Robin only hoped she was OK. He was starting to feel sick and cold. The twig-fire hissed. A thick piece of altar candle rolled into a corner.

Alexandra, who’d been sitting calmly, with the crown of lights on her knees to protect it, was the first to speak. ‘I think we should all leave Betty and Robin alone for a while.’

And so Robin and Betty, covenless, had rediscovered one another. I take thee to my hand, my heart and my spirit at the setting of the sun and rising of the stars. Robin started to weep again and buried his face in her hair. Clinging together in their stupid robes, in the wreckage of the altar.

They went hand in hand to the door, and looked out at Winnebagos, the barn and puddles. Robin watched the moon in the puddles, icing over. You could almost get sentimental about those puddles. But not quite.

‘We should get outa here tomorrow. Go check into a hotel someplace. Think things over. I love you.’

Betty had her red ski jacket around her shoulders. ‘And I love you,’ she said. ‘But Robin, honey...’

Betty fell silent. He hated when Betty became silent.

‘OK, what?’ he said.

She held his hand to the centre of her breast, her emotional centre.

‘We can’t just leave it.’

‘Watch me,’ Robin said.

But his spirit took a dive. She’d already explained how she’d spent the night at a Christian priest’s house. A woman priest, who was also the county exorcist or some such, and knew a lot of stuff. He had the idea it had all come about through Betty’s meeting with Juliet Pottinger. A part of him still didn’t want to know about any of this.

He thought he could hear distant voices, beyond the trees. Like from a barbecue. Or maybe he just thought barbecue on account of the red glow in the sky. Perhaps a glimmering of Imbolc.

‘There’s a fire somewhere,’ Betty said. ‘Can’t you smell it? Didn’t you hear the sirens?’

‘I was maybe smashing things at the time. Coming on like the Reverend Penney.’

‘Let me tell you the truth about Penney,’ Betty said. ‘He had a bad time in Old Hindwell Church. I think he was basically a very good man, probably determined to make a success of his ministry. But I think there were some aspects of what he found here that he couldn’t handle. Began taking all kinds of drugs.’

‘Didn’t the Pottinger woman say, in her letter to the Major, she didn’t think he was doing drugs?’

‘She was wrong. He seems to have had a vision, or a hallucination... of a dragon... Satan... in the church. And he seems to have thought that by discontinuing active worship there, it would... make it go away.’

Nothing very new there. ‘But?’ Robin said.

‘But I don’t think what he experienced was anything to do with the Old Religion or the rise of the new paganism. I think he became aware of the dualistic nature of religion as it already existed in this area; that there is a paganism here, but it’s all mixed in with Christianity. A kind of residual medieval Christianity – when magic was very much a part of the whole thing. When prayer was seen as a tool to get things done. It’s practical. It suits the area. Marginal land. Hand to mouth.’

Robin thought of the witch box, the charm. Christian, but not entirely Christian. Those astrological symbols, and some of the words – using witchcraft against witchcraft.

‘There are five St Michael churches,’ Betty said. ‘A pentagram of churches, apparently to confine the dragon. But it’s an inverted pentagram, right?’

‘That... doesn’t sound good.’

‘Perhaps,’ Betty said, ‘it was accepted that, at some time, they might need to invoke the dragon. It’s border mentality. I met a bloke called Gomer Parry. Radnorshire born and bred. He’ll tell you this place took a lot of hammering from both the English and the Welsh and survived, he reckons, by knowing when to sit on the fence and which side to come down on.’

Robin took some time to absorb this. He could smell those bonfire fumes on the air now. It was, in some ways, a sharp and exciting smell carrying the essence of paganism.

He said, ‘You mean they’re... I don’t know this stuff, the Book of Revelation and all...’

‘Sitting on the fence while the war in heaven rages,’ Betty said. ‘Five little old churches in a depopulated area with a rock-bottom economy. No-man’s-land.’

‘No-god’s-land?’ Robin said, awed. ‘But, like... way back... way, way back... this place was something... the archaeology shows that.’

‘Maybe that accounts for its inner strength. I don’t know. We don’t know what we’re standing in front of. We don’t know the full nature of what lies the other side of that barn.’

‘Does Ellis?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Or Bain?’

‘Partly. Maybe.’

‘But Bain’s big thing was personal. That’s dark magic. Low magic.’

‘There are people round here who would understand it. It’s notorious for feuds lasting from generation to generation.’

Robin said, ‘I wonder, how did Ned Bain get the box from the Major? He buy it? Or just push the old guy off of his ladder and steal it?’

‘I don’t think he’d push the Major off the ladder. But I don’t think he’d have been averse to posting his name on the Kali Three Web site.’

‘What is that, anyway?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ Betty said.

‘Don’t wanna dump on my idyll, huh? There’s no idyll, babes. No more idyll. Where’s that leave us?’

‘Leaves us with eleven disappointed witches,’ Betty said. ‘And a contaminated church.’

Robin breathed in the distant smoke. ‘What do we do?’