A Crown of Lights

‘Mind the step, George.’

‘He could use a light.’

‘Knows his way down yere in his sleep, I reckon.’

The undertakers maybe? Must be the departure of the last outsiders.

Feeling very much on her own now, Merrily moved down the lawn, stopping about fifteen yards from the door of the mausoleum. From an oblique angle, she could see inside, to where mourners were grouped around a stone trough set into the middle of the floor. She saw Ellis, in his white robe. She saw a wiry bearded man, a squat bulky man, and a woman. They were still as a painted tableau, faces lit with a Rembrandt glow. And she thought, aghast, This is intrusion, this is voyeurism, this is none of my business!

This was about a man – not an affable man, not an immediately likeable man, but a man who had loved his wife, who had treated her with great tenderness till the last seconds of her life. Who had – whatever you thought of rebaptism, rebirth in the faith – come with her to Christ. Who could not bear to be entirely parted from her. Who had chosen to gaze out every morning from their bedroom window, probably for the rest of his life, across to where she lay.

That’s it. I’m going. She turned abruptly away.

And walked into the man himself.

Her face was suddenly buried in the cold, crisp shirt-front in the V of his waistcoat.

It smelled of camphor.

For a moment, she was frozen with shock, let out a small ‘Oh’ before his big arms came around her, lifting her off her feet. For a flowing second, she was spun in space through the path of light from the tomb, and then put down in shadow and held.

‘Men-na,’ he breathed.

The great body rigid, compressing her. Camphor. Carbolic. She was gripped for a too-long moment, like a captured bird, and then the arms sprang apart.

‘I’m sorry...’ she whispered.

He was silent. Neither of them moved.

A small night breeze had arisen, was rippling the laurels and sighing in the conifers. The firs and pines were like sentries with spears. J.W. Weal was just another shadow now; she didn’t feel that he was looking at her. The line of light shivered, and Merrily saw figures standing in the doorway of the mausoleum. Nobody spoke, nobody called to her. It was dreamlike, slow-motion.

She turned and walked away – trying not to run – across the lawn, in and out of the path of light, her arms pressed into her sides, as though his arms were still around her. The strong light from the mausoleum haloed the old rectory, illuminating the inside of the bay-windowed room on the ground floor.

And then, as she was looking up at that same window, it became dark all round. The door of the mausoleum had been closed. They’d been waiting for Jeffery Weal to return from the house, and now they’d shut themselves away for the finale, leaving darkness outside. The lawn was black, the track of light from the tomb having vanished. Merrily felt small and bewildered and ashamed, like a child who should be in bed but had peered through the bannisters into an unknown, unknowable, grown-up world.

Men-na.

What was he thinking then?

She searched for the entrance to the drive. Without light, she would need to go carefully.

Yet there was light: a dull, diffused haze behind the bay window, where the backs of chairs threw rearing shadows up the interior walls. She now hated that room. She knew it was very cold in there, colder than it was out here. She didn’t want to be looking in. She didn’t want to see...

... the pale figure flitting across the wide windows, from pane to pane.

The slight, moth-like thing, the wisp of despair.

She didn’t want to see it. She couldn’t see it.

But as the room came out to her, enclosing her in its pocket of cold, she could almost hear the flimsy, flightless, jittering thing beating itself against the glass in its frenzy, with a noise like tiny crackling bones.

Merrily flailed and stumbled into the laurels, slipped on numbed legs and grabbed handfuls of leaves to keep from falling. Only these weren’t the laurels; they had thorns, winter-vicious. Still she clutched them in both hands, almost relishing the entirely physical pain, then she scrambled up and onto the drive, hobbling away towards the gateposts.

Part Three

The vast majority of charismatic churches are aware of the dangers of confusing demonic attack with psychological problems... There are, however, some charismatic groups which are inclined to carry out a ministry of deliverance which concerns most other charismatic churches and which leads to ‘casualties’.

Deliverance (ed. Michael Perry) The Christian Deliverance Study Group

23 Tango with Satan

SINCE COMING HOME to her apartment at the vicarage, Jane had... well, just slept, actually. Longer, probably, than she’d ever slept before. She woke up briefly, thought of something crucially important, went back to sleep, forgot about it. Just like that for most of a day.

It was the hospital’s fault. Hospitals were, like, totally knackering. Unless you were drugged to the eyeballs, you never slept in a hospital – be more relaxing bedding down on a factory floor during the night shift. Naturally, Jane had tried telling them this, but no, they’d insisted on keeping her in, in case her skull was fractured or something worse. Which she knew it wasn’t, and they knew really, but it was, like – yawn, yawn – procedure, to forestall people suing the Health Service for half a million on account of her having gone into a coma on the bus.

Sleep was all you really needed. Real sleep, home sleep. Sleep was crucial, because it gave the body and the brain time to repair themselves, and because it was a natural thing.

And, also, in this particular case, because it postponed that inevitable Long Talk With Mum.

The Long Talk had not taken place, as expected, in the car coming home from Worcester Royal Infirmary last night, because it was Sophie’s car and Sophie was driving it, and Sophie – to Jane’s slight resentment – seemed more concerned about Mum, who had herself at one point fallen asleep in the passenger seat and awoken with a start – like a really seismic start – which made Sophie judderingly slam on the brakes going down Fromes Hill. Mum had shaken herself fully awake and said – in that flustered, half-embarrassed way of hers when lying – that something must have walked over her grave.

And, like, trod on her hands? Why were both her hands clumsily criss-crossed with broad strips of Elastoplast, like she was the motorway pile-up casualty?

Fell among thorns, was all Mum would say when they finally got home, must have been around ten. Bewilderingly, she’d hugged Jane for a long time before they’d staggered off to their respective bedrooms, without mention of the impending Long Talk.

Odd.

Jane slept through most of Sunday morning, venturing dowstairs just once for a bite to eat from the fridge – lump of cheese, handful of digestive biscuits – while Mum was out, doing the weekly pulpit gig. Then leaving her