A Crown of Lights

‘There’s a speed limit.’

‘I can’t even see any fog now. Because if she catches us up...’

‘There’s still a speed limit. And so your dad was killed?’

‘He hit a motorway bridge. They were both killed. I mean, Karen, too. I read some newspaper cuttings I wasn’t supposed to find. It was horrible – a ball of fire.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was years ago,’ Jane said without emotion.

‘Which motorway?’

‘The M5. I suppose this is the M5, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a long motorway.’

‘Well, it wasn’t on this stretch, I don’t think. I don’t quite know where it was. I didn’t read that bit. You don’t want to keep looking out for a certain bridge all your life, do you?’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘What Gerry said about a guilt trip, that’s bullshit. I mean, why should she feel guilty? She was never mixed up in any of those crooked deals. Well, all right, it’s easier for a widow to get into the Church than a newly divorced woman. Maybe she did feel guilty at the way that decision was so neatly taken out of her hands.’

‘How do you feel about your dad?’

‘He was kind of fun,’ Jane said, ‘but I was very little. Your dad’s always fun when you’re little. What was your home like? Did you all speak Welsh? I mean, do you?’

‘Only when we have certain visitors. As everybody can speak English and English is a much bigger language and more versatile, you don’t have to speak Welsh to anybody. But there are some people it’s more correct to speak Welsh to. If you see what I mean.’

‘Wow, minefield.’

‘It’s a cultural minefield, yeah. But I like Welsh. It’s not my first language, but it’s not that far behind.’

‘Do you swear in Welsh? I mean you could swear in Welsh at school, in front of the teachers, and nobody would know.’

‘That’s an interesting point,’ Eirion said. ‘Actually, most Welsh people, when they swear, revert automatically to English. They’re walking along the street conversing happily in Welsh, then one trips over the kerb and it’s, like, “Oh, shit!” ’

‘Oh shit,’ Jane whispered.

It was sudden – like a grey woollen blanket flung over your head.

‘Oh, dear God,’ Jane said.

It was like they’d entered some weird fairground. Red lights in the air. Also white lights, at skewed angles, intersecting across all three carriageways.

She heard Eirion breathe in sharply as he hit the brakes and spun the wheel. Spun into a carnival of lights. Lights all over the place. False lights in the night of filth. Grabbed by her seatbelt, Jane heard screams, dipping and rising like the screams of women on a roller coaster.

The engine stalled. The car slid and juddered.

And stopped? Had they stopped?

Under the fuzzed and shivering lights, there was a moment of massive stillness in which Jane registered that Eirion had managed to bring the car to a halt without hitting anything. She breathed out in shattered relief. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

‘It’s a pile-up,’ Eirion said. ‘I don’t know what to do. Should we get out?’

‘We might be able to help someone.’

‘Yeah.’

There was fog and there was also steam or something. And the silhouettes of figures moving. Even inside the car, there was a smell of petrol. Jane scrubbed at the windscreen, saw metal scrunched, twisted, stretched and pulled like intestine. The fog swirled like poison gas, alive with shouting and wailing and the waxy, solidified beams of headlights.

Jane screamed suddenly and thudded back into the passenger seat. Eirion frenziedly unbuckled his seatbelt, leaned across her. ‘Jane?’

‘I saw an arm. In the road. An arm sticking out. With a hand and fingers all splayed out and white. Just an arm, it was just—’

Brakes shrieked behind them.

Behind.

You never thought about behind. Jane actually turned in time to see it, the monster with many eyes, before it reared and snarled and crushed them.

16 Lurid Bit

GARETH PROSSER WAS loading hay or silage or whatever the hell they called it in these parts onto a trailer for his sheep out on the hills. He was panting out small balloons of white breath. He didn’t even look up when Robin strolled over, just muttered once into the trailer.

‘’Ow’re you?’

Robin deduced that his neighbour was enquiring after his health.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, although he still felt like shit after the Blackmore put-down. ‘Nice morning. Specially after all that fog last night.’

‘Not bad.’

Gareth Prosser straightened up. He wore a dark green nylon coverall and an old discoloured cap. Behind him, you could hardly distinguish the grey farmhouse from the barns and tin-roofed shacks. There was a cold mist snaking amongst a clump of conifers on the hillside, but the sun had risen out of it. The sun looked somehow forlorn and out of place, like an orange beachball in the roadway. It was around eight-fifteen a.m.

‘Wonder if you can give me some advice,’ Robin said.

Gareth Prosser looked at him. Well, not in fact at him, but at a point just a couple degrees to his left, which was disconcerting – made you think there was someone behind you with an axe.

‘Firewood,’ Robin said. ‘We need some dry wood for the stove, and I figured you would know a reputable dealer.’

Gareth Prosser thought this over. He was a shortish, thickset guy in his fifties and now well overweight. His face was jowly, the colour and texture of cement.

Eventually, he said, ‘Mansel Smith’s your man.’

‘Ah.’ Robin was unsure how to proceed, on account of, if his recollection was accurate, the dealer who had sold them the notorious trailerload of damp and resinous pine also answered to the name of Mansel Smith.

‘You get your own wood from, uh, Mansel?’

Prosser slammed up the tailgate on the trailer.

‘We burns anthracite,’ he said.

‘Right.’ If Mansel Smith was the only wood dealer around, Robin could believe that. And yet somehow he thought that if Gareth Prosser did ever require a cord of firewood from Mansel it would not be pine and it would not be wet.

‘Well, thanks for your advice.’

‘No problem,’ Prosser said.

Right now, if this situation was the other way about, Robin figured he himself would be asking his neighbour in for a coffee, but Prosser just stood there, up against his trailer, like one of those monuments where the figure kind of dissolves into uncarved rock. No particular hostility; chances were this guy didn’t know or didn’t care that Robin was pagan.

Well, this was all fine by Robin, who stayed put, stayed cool. If there was one thing he’d learned from the