A Crown of Lights

less amusing. It’s like getting into some ancient library, where all the corridors stink of mould and mildew. All these arcane symbols.’

‘Sounds like Dungeons and Dragons.’

‘Only for real. You start thinking, Shit, suppose I pick up some... I don’t know... virus. And periodically you get casually asked to tap in your e-mail address or your name and your home address... or maybe just the town. And sometimes you almost do it automatically and then you think, Christ, they’ll know where to find me...’

‘Wimp.’

‘No. Even if you put in a false name, they can trace you, and they can feed you viruses. So, anyway, I got deeper and deeper and eventually I reached a site called Kali Three.’

‘You mean, like...’

‘Like the Indian goddess of death and destruction. That Kali.’ Eirion paused. ‘And that was where I found her.’

Found her? For some reason, Jane started thinking about Barbara Buckingham. A shadow crossed the room and she sat up, startled.

It was Ethel. Only Ethel.

Jane said, ‘Who?’

‘Your mum,’ Eirion said. ‘Merrily Watkins, Deliverance Consultant to the Diocese of Hereford, UK.’

‘Wha—’

‘She came up on Kali Three pretty much immediately. There was a picture of her. Black and white – looked like a newspaper mugshot. And then inside there was kind of a potted biography. Date of birth. Details of the parish in Liverpool where she was curate. Date of her installation as priest-in-charge at Ledwardine, Herefordshire. Oh... and “daughter: Jane, date of birth...” ’

‘Picture?’ Jane said bravely.

‘No. But there’s a picture of your dad.’

‘What?’

‘Another black and white. Bit fuzzy, like a blow-up from a group picture. Sean Barrow. Date of birth. Date of... death. And the place. I mean the exact place, the flyover, the nearest junction. And the circumstances. All of what Gerry said at Livenight and more. It says “Sean and Merrily were estranged at the time, which explains why she afterwards retained the title Mrs but switched back to her maiden name.” It says that “She is”... hang on, the print goes a bit funny here... yeah, that “she is still vulnerable”... something... “the death of her husband. Without which she might have found it harder to enter the Church.” ’

Jane exploded. ‘Who are these bastards?’

‘I don’t know. There are several names, but I don’t think they’re real names. I think it’d take you a long time to find out who they are – if you ever could. They could be really heavy-duty occultists or they could just be students. That’s the problem with the Net, you can’t trust anything on there. A lot of it’s lies.’

‘But... why? What kind of...?’

‘That’s what scares me. There’s a line at the bottom. It says, “The use of the word ‘Deliverance’ is the Church’s latest attempt to sanitize exorcism. Having a woman in the role, particularly one who is fairly young and attractive, is an attempt to mask what remains a regime of metaphysical oppression. This woman should be regarded as an enemy.’

Jane felt herself going pale. ‘Mum?’

‘And there are all these curious symbols around the bottom, like runes or something – I’ve no idea what a rune looks like. But it – this is the worrying bit – it points out that “Anyone with an interest can see Merrily Watkins on the Livenight television programme”, and it gives the date, and it says that the programme will be coming live from a new Midlands studio complex, just off the M5. So that’s out of date now, but it must have been there before the programme took place, obviously. And it says that if anyone is interested in further information, they can get it from... and then there’s a sequence of numbers and squiggles which I can’t make any sense of, but I don’t think it’s another Web site, more like a code, so... Jane?’

‘Yeah.’ A whisper.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to hear it like this, because I could be making it up, couldn’t I? To support the stuff you were rubbishing this morning.’

‘Irene... what am I going to do?’

‘I don’t know. What happened... happened to other people. It’s not even a good coincidence. I mean, who believes in any of this crap?’

‘You do.’

‘I don’t know whether I do or not. And anyway, I’m just a fundamentalist Welsh Chapel bigot.’

‘Were there any other people mentioned on this Web site, apart from Mum?’

‘Probably. I didn’t look, to be honest. What if there’d turned out to be a whole bunch of names and biographies of people and they were all recently dead or...? Shit, that’s how it’s supposed to work, isn’t it? Preying on your mind?’

‘Like, suppose there was this big hex thing and people... all over the country... the world... were being invited to, like, tune in and focus on Mum, the enemy, to put her off. Because, we both know how rubbish she was on that programme. I mean, she was fine on TV tonight, wasn’t she? Kind of cool, almost. Suppose it wasn’t just nerves that night. Suppose there were hundreds – thousands – of people sending her hate vibes or something. And then they all started focusing on that piece of road, where Dad... It’s horrible!’

‘It’s also complete crap, Jane. We’re just stretching things to fit the facts. We’re playing right into their hands.’

‘Whose hands?’

‘Anybody who frequents the Web site – including, presumably, Ned Bain, if he was the one putting it round about your mum. That doesn’t mean he’s behind any of it. It just tells us where he got his information.’

‘It’s still creepy.’

‘It’s meant to be creepy.’

‘Can you tell when it was originally pasted on the site?’

‘Somebody else might be able to, but not me. For all I know, somebody could have pushed it out after the show, to make it look... I don’t know. It’s all crap, and it makes me mad.’

‘Irene, I’m going to have to tell her.’

‘I think you should. I’ll try and find out some more.’

‘You’re wonderful,’ Jane said. Whoops. ‘Er... how’s the whiplash?’

‘Well, it just kind of hurts when I look over my shoulder.’

Jane instinctively looked over hers and shivered, and it wasn’t an exciting frisson kind of shiver. Not now.

35 This is History

‘A MARTYR?’ THE rain had eased. Merrily pushed back the dripping hood of her saturated, once-waxed jacket. ‘With his chest all splattered. Perhaps that was what he wanted.’

When the police had gone in, she’d walked away from it all. Her first instinct had been to stay on Robin Thorogood’s side of the fence, maybe go and talk to him, but now the cops were doing that. Journalists and cameramen were together in another group by the gate at St Michael’s Farm, waiting for someone to emerge.

Ellis had been driven away in a white Transit van, the cross and the torches packed away in the back. His followers watched the white van’s tail lights disappear along the end of the track, talking quietly in groups. There was an air of damp anticlimax.

‘For just one moment,’ Merrily said to Gomer, ‘I thought—’

‘Coppers thought that, too. Out o’ their car in a flash.’

‘It looked like blood.’