A Crown of Lights

earth, this soured soil. Oh Lord, wash this place clean of Satan’s stain!’

His voice rode the slanting rain, his hair pasted to his forehead, the hissing torchlight reflected in his eyes. Until I attended one of Father Ellis’s services I did not truly believe in God as a supernatural being.

Now Ellis was spinning round in the mud, his white robe aswirl, and putting his weight against the gate and bellowing, ‘Come out! Come out, you snivelling servants of the Adversary. Come out and face the sorrow and the wrath of the one true God.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Nick...’

Ellis sprang back.

The weary, American voice came from the other side of the gate. The TV camera lights found a slightly built young guy with long, shaggy hair. He wore a plain T-shirt as white as Ellis’s robe, but a good deal less suited to the time of year. He was just standing there, arms by his side, getting soaked. When he spoke, the tremor in his voice indicated not so much that he was afraid but that he was freezing.

‘Nick, we don’t need this shit, OK? We never touched your lousy church. There’s no dragon here, no Satan. So just... just, like, go back and tell your God we won’t hold you or your crazy stuff against him.’

The man with the cross stood alongside Ellis, like a sentinel. One of the garden torches fizzed, flared and went out. There was a gasp from the crowd, as though the flame had been a casualty of demonic breath. To charismatics, everything was a sign. Merrily moved in close to the gate. She needed to hear this.

Ellis put on a grim smile for the cameras. ‘Let us in, then, Robin. Open the gate of your own free will and let us – and Almighty God – be readmitted to the church of St Michael.’

He waited, his white habit aglow. ‘Praise God!’ a man’s voice cried.

Robin Thorogood didn’t move. ‘I don’t think so, Nick.’

He was watching Ellis through the driving rain – and fighting just to keep his eyes open. To Merrily, he looked bewildered, as if he was struggling to comprehend the motivation of this man who was now his enemy on a level he’d never before experienced. He finally hugged himself, bare-armed, his T-shirt soaked, grey and wrinkled, into his chest. Then, defiantly, he let his arms fall back to his sides, still staring at Nick Ellis, who was now addressing him sorrowfully and reasonably in a low voice which the TV people might not pick up through the splashing of the rain.

‘Robin, you know that we cannot allow this to go on. Whether you understand it or not – and I believe you fully understand it – if you and your kind proceed to worship your profane, heathen deities in a temple once consecrated in His holy name, you commit an act of gross sacrilege. You thereby commend this church into the arms of Satan himself. And you curse the community into which you and your wife were innocently welcomed.’

‘No.’ Robin Thorogood shook his sodden hair. ‘That is bullshit.’

‘Robin, if you don’t recognize it, I can’t help you.’

The big cross was shaking in the air. One of the men screamed out, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!’

Merrily tensed, expecting an invasion – when something struck Ellis in the chest.

34 Kali

JANE AGONIZED FOR a while, cuddling Ethel the cat, and then rang Eirion at what she always pictured as a grim, greystone mansion beyond Abergavenny. The line was engaged.

She went back to the sitting room, still holding the cat, and replayed the tape she had recorded of the Old Hindwell story on the TV news.

There was a shot of the church from across a river. The male voice-over commented, ‘The last religious service at Old Hindwell Parish Church took place more than thirty years ago. Tomorrow night, however, this church could be back in business.’

Cut to a shot of a dreary-looking street, backing onto hills and forestry.

‘But the people of this remote village close to the border of England and Wales are far from happy. Because at tomorrow night’s service, the ancient walls will echo to a different liturgy.’

Ancient black and white footage of naked witches around a fire, chanting, ‘Eko, eko, azarak...’

‘And to one local minister, this is the sound of Satan.’

Talking head (Eirion had taught her the jargon) of a really ordinary-looking priest, except that he was wearing a monk’s habit. The caption read: ‘Father Nicholas Ellis, Rector’.

This Nicholas Ellis then came out with all this bullshit about there being no such thing as white witchcraft. His voice was overlaid with pictures of candles burning in people’s windows – seriously weird – and then they cut back to Ellis saying, ‘It’s out of our hands. It’s in God’s hands now. We shall do whatever he wants of us.’

Over shots of their farmhouse, the reporter said that Robin and Betty – Betty, Jesus, whoever heard of a witch called Betty? – were in hiding today, but ‘a member of their coven’ had confirmed that the witches’ sabbath would definitely be going ahead tomorrow at the church, to celebrate the coming of the Celtic spring.

‘The Diocese of Hereford says it broadly supports Father Ellis, but seems to be distancing itself from any extreme measures.’

Then up came Mum: ‘Personally, I don’t care too much for witch-hunts.’

On the whole, Jane felt deeply relieved.

She called Eirion again. This time it rang, and she prepared to crawl.

Eirion’s stepmother, Gwennan, answered – a voice to match the house, or maybe it just sounded that way because she answered in Welsh. Jane almost expected her to hang up in disgust when she found it was someone who could only speak English, but the woman was actually quite pleasant in the end.

‘He’s in his room, on the Internet. Seventeen years old and still playing with the Internet, how sad is that? Hold on, I’ll get him.’

‘OK. I’m sorry,’ Jane said when he came on. ‘I am so totally sorry. Everything I said... I’m brain-damaged. I make wrong connections. I don’t deserve to live.’

‘I agree, but forget that. Listen...’

‘Charming.’

‘Are you online yet?’

‘No, I keep telling you. Mum’s got the Internet at the office in Hereford. If there’s anything I need, I look it up there. Too much surfing damages your—’

‘I was going to give you a Web site to visit.’ Eirion sounded different, preoccupied, like something was really getting to him. ‘I’d like you to see it for yourself, then you’ll know I’m not making it up.’

‘Why would I think that?’

‘I mean, the Web... sometimes it’s like committing yourself into this great, massive asylum.’

‘Irene...?’

‘I was checking out pagan Web sites, trying to find out what I could about Ned Bain and these other people, OK?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m off school and I got fed up with walking the grounds contemplating the infinite.’

‘And where did it get you?’

‘To be really honest, into places I didn’t think existed. You start off on the pagan Web sites, which are fairly innocent, or at least they seem innocent afterwards, compared with the serious occult sites you get referred to. It’s like you’re into a weedingout process and after a while it’s kind of, only totally depraved screwballs need apply, you know? Like, you can learn, among other things, how to effectively curse someone.’

‘What’s the address for that one? Let me grab a pen.’

‘Jane,’ he sounded serious, ‘take my word for it, when you actually see it on the screen it suddenly becomes