A Crown of Lights

‘Them finding the prehistoric site?’ Betty sat up, pushing her golden hair behind her ears.

‘It was coming out like a rash, was how he put it,’ Robin said. ‘Like the disease under the surface – the disease which you only identify when the rash starts coming out?’

‘What’s he talking about?’

‘Man with an agenda, Bets.’ Robin detected a half-inch of beer in one of the Michelob bottles and drained it, laid down the bottle with a thump. ‘If there’s anything I can recognize straight off, it’s another guy with an agenda.’

‘Robin, you don’t have an agenda, you just have woolly dreams.’

‘You wanna hear this, or not?’

‘Sorry,’ Betty said, frayed. ‘Go on.’

Robin told her that when Ellis had first come here, before the Church let him go his own way, he looked after four small parishes, on both sides of the border. New Radnor was the biggest. All the parishes possessed churches, except one of these was in ruins.

‘But don’t take this the wrong way. Remember this is a guy doesn’t go for churches. He’s into clapboard shacks. Now, Old Hindwell is a village with no church any more, not even a Baptist chapel. But one thing it does have is a clapboard fucking shack. Well, not exactly clapboard – more like concrete and steel. The parish hall in fact.’

‘Is there one?’

‘Up some steps, top of the village. Built, not too well, in the early sixties. Close to derelict, when Ellis arrived. He hacks through the brambles one day and a big light comes down on him, like that guy on the road to Damascus, and he’s like, “This is it. This is my church!” You recall that film Witness, where the Amish community build this huge barn in, like, one day?’

‘Everybody mucking in. Brilliant.’

‘Yeah, well, what happens here is Christians converge from miles around to help Nick Ellis realize his vision. Money comes pouring in. Carpenters, plumbers, sundry artisans giving their work for free. No time at all, the parish hall’s good as new... better than new. And there’s a nice big cross sticking out the roof, with a light inside the porch. And every Sunday the place is packed with more people than all the other local churches put together.’

Robin paused.

Betty opened out her hands. ‘What do you want me to say? Triumph of the spirit? You think I should knock that?’

‘Wait,’ Robin told her. ‘How come all this goes down in a place with so little religious feeling they abandoned the original goddamn church?’

‘Evangelism, Robin. It spreads like a grass fire when it gets going. He’s a new kind of priest with all that American... whatever. If it can happen there, it can happen here – and obviously has. Which shows how right we were to keep a low profile, because those born-again people, to put it mildly, are not tolerant towards paganism.’

Robin shook his head. ‘Ellis denies responsibility for the upsurge. Figures it was waiting to happen – to deal with something that went wrong. Something of which Old Hindwell church is symptomatic.’

Betty waited.

‘So we’re both moving in closer to the church, and I’m finding him a little irritating by now, so I start to point out these wonderful ancient yew trees – how the building itself might be medieval but I’m told that the yews in a circle and the general positioning of the church indicate that it occupies a pre-Christian site. I’m talking in a “this doesn’t mean much to me but it’s interesting, isn’t it?” kind of voice.’

‘Robin,’ Betty said, ‘you don’t possess that voice.’

Ellis was staring at him. ‘Who told you that, Robin?’

Robin floundered. ‘Oh... the real estate agent, I guess.’

Furious with himself that, instead of speaking up for the oldest religion of these islands, he was scuttling away like some shamed vampire at dawn, allowing this humourless bastard to go on assuming without question that his own 2,000-year-old cult had established a right to the moral high ground. So how did they achieve that, Nick? By waging countless so-called holy wars against other faiths? By fighting amongst themselves with bombs and midnight kneecappings, blowing guys away in front of their kids?

‘All right,’ Ellis had then said, ‘let me tell you the truth about this church, Robin. This church was dedicated to St Michael. How much do you know about him?’

Robin could only think of Marks and freaking Spencer, but was wise enough to say nothing.

‘The Revelation of St John the Divine, Chapter Twelve. “And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought Michael and his angels.” ’

Robin had looked down at his boots.

‘ “And the great dragon was cast out... that old serpent called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world. He was cast out... into the earth.” ’

‘Uh, right,’ Robin said, ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

‘Interestingly, around the perimeter of Radnor Forest are several other churches dedicated to St Michael.’

‘Not too much imagination in those days, I guess.’

Ellis had now taken off his beret. His face was shining with rain.

‘The Archangel Michael is the most formidable warrior in God’s army. Therefore a number of churches dedicated to him would represent a very powerful barrier against evil.’

‘What evil would this be precisely, Nick?’ Robin was becoming majorly exasperated by Ellis’s habit of not answering questions – like your questions are sure to be stupid and inexact, so he was answering the ones you ought to have asked. It also bugged Robin when people talked so loosely about ‘evil’ – a coverall for fanatics.

Ellis said, ‘I visit the local schools. Children still talk of a dragon in Radnor Forest. It’s part of the folklore of the area. There’s even a line of hills a few miles from here they call the Dragon’s Back.’

Robin shrugged. ‘Local place names. That so uncommon, Nick?’

‘Not awfully. Satanic evil is ubiquitous.’

‘Yeah, but is a dragon necessarily evil?’ Robin was thinking of the fantasy novels of Kirk Blackmore, where dragons were fearsome forces for positive change.

Ellis gave him a cold look. ‘It would seem to me, Robin, that a dragon legend and a circle of churches dedicated to St Michael is incontrovertible evidence of something requiring perpetual restraint.’

‘I’m not getting this.’

‘A circle of churches.’ Ellis spread his hands. ‘A holy wall to contain the dragon. But the dragon will always want to escape. Periodically, the dragon rears... and snaps... and is forced back again and again and keeps coming back...’ Ellis clawing the air, a harsh light in his eyes, ‘until something yields.’

Now he was looking over at the ruins again, like an army officer sizing up the field of battle. This was one serious fucking fruitcake.

‘And the evil is now inside... The legend says – and you’ll find references to this in most of the books written about this area – that if just one of those churches should fall, the dragon will escape.’

Then he looked directly at Robin.

Robin said, ‘But... this is a legend, Nick.’

‘The circle of St Michael churches is not a legend.’

‘You think this place is evil?’

‘It’s decommissioned. It no longer has the protection of St Michael. In this particular situation, I would suggest that’s a sign that it requires... attention.’

‘Attention?’

Robin put on a crazy laugh, but his heart wasn’t in it. And Betty didn’t laugh at all.

‘What does he want?’