A Crown of Lights

friend. We’ll sort this now.’

Walking back towards Intensive Care, shouldering her bag, she encountered Gomer Parry smoking under a red No Smoking sign in the main corridor. He probably hadn’t even noticed it. He slouched towards her, hands in his pockets, ciggy winking between his teeth like a distant stop-light.

‘Sorry about that, Gomer. I was—’

‘May’s well get off home, vicar. Keepin’ you up all night.’

‘Don’t be daft. I’ll stay as long as you stay.’

‘Ar, well, no point, see,’ Gomer said. He looked small and beaten hollow. ‘No point now.’

The scene froze.

‘Oh God.’

She’d left him barely half an hour to go off on a futile errand which she wasn’t up to handling, and in her absence...

In the scruffy silence of the hospital corridor, she thought she heard Minnie Parry at her most comfortably Brummy: Yow don’t go worrying about us, my duck. We’re retired, got all the time in the world to worry about ourselves.

Instinctively she unslung her bag, plunged a hand in. But Gomer was there first.

‘Have one o’ mine, vicar. Extra-high tar, see.’

4 Repaganization

TUESDAY BEGAN WITH a brown fog over the windows like dirty lace curtains. The house was too quiet. They ought to get a dog. Two dogs, Robin had said after breakfast, before going off for a walk on his own.

He’d end up, inevitably, at the church, just to satisfy himself it hadn’t disappeared in the mist. He would walk all around the ruins, and the ruins would look spectacularly eerie and Robin would think, Yes!

From the kitchen window, Betty watched him cross the yard between dank and oily puddles, then let himself into the old barn, where they’d stowed the oak box. Robin also thought it was seriously cool having a barn of your own. Hey! How about I stash this in... the barn?

When she was sure he wouldn’t be coming back for a while, Betty brought out, from the bottom shelf of the dampest kitchen cupboard, the secret copy she’d managed to make of that awful witch charm. She’d done this on Robin’s photocopier while he’d gone for a tour of Old Hindwell with George and Vivvie, their weekend visitors who – for several reasons – she could have done without.

Betty now took the copy over to the window sill. Produced in high contrast, for definition, it looked even more obscurely threatening than the original.

First the flash-vision of the praying man in the church, then this.

O Lord, Jesus Christ Saviour Salvator I beseech the salvation of all who dwell within from witchcraft and from the power of all evil... Amen Amen Amen... Dei nunce... Amen Amen Amen Amen Amen.

Ritualistic repetition. A curious mixture of Catholic and Anglican. And also:

By Jehovah, Jehovah and by the Ineffable Names 17317... Holy Names... Elohim... Emmanuel...

Jewish mysticism... the Kabbalah. A strong hint of ritual magic. And then those symbols – planetary, Betty thought, astrological.

It was bizarre and muddled, a nineteenth-century cobbling together of Christianity and the occult. And it seemed utterly genuine.

It was someone saying: We know about you. We know what you are.

And we know how to deal with you.

Inside the barn, the mysterious box was still there, tucked down the side of a manger. All the hassle it was causing with Betty, Robin had been kind of hoping the Local People would somehow have spirited this item away again. It was cute, it was weird but it was, essentially, a crock of shit. A joke, right?

The Local People? He’d found he was beginning to think of ‘the local people’ the way the Irish thought of ‘the little people’: shadowy, mischievous, will-o’-the-wispish. A different species.

Robin had established that the box did originally come from this house. Or, at least, there were signs of an old hiding place inside the living-room inglenook – new cement, where a brick had been replaced. So was this the reason Betty had resisted the consecration of their living room as a temple? Because it was there that the anti- witchcraft charm had been secreted?

Betty’s behaviour had been altogether difficult most of the weekend. George Webster and his lady, the volatile Vivvie, Craft-buddies from Manchester, had come down on Saturday to help the Thorogoods get the place together, and hadn’t left until Monday afternoon. It ought to have been a good weekend, with loud music, wine and the biggest fires you could make out of resinous green pine. But Betty had kept on complaining of headaches and tiredness.

Which wasn’t like her at all. As a celebratory climax, Robin had wanted the four of them to gather at the top of the tower on Sunday night to welcome the new moon. But – wouldn’t you know? – it was overcast, cold and raining. And Betty had kept on and on about safety. Like, would that old platform support as many as four people? What did she think, that he was planning an orgy?

Standing by the barn door, Robin could just about see the top of the tower, atmospherically wreathed in fog. One day soon, he would produce a painting of it in blurry watercolour, style of Turner, and mail it to his folks in New York. This is a sketch of the church. Did I mention the ancient church we have out back?

And ancient was right.

This was the real thing. The wedge of land overlooking the creek, the glorious plot on which the medieval church of St Michael at Old Hindwell had been built by the goddamn Christians, was most definitely an ancient pagan sacred site. George Webster had confirmed it. And George had expertise in this subject.

Just take a look at these yew trees, Robin, still roughly forming a circle. That one and that one... could be well over a thousand years old.

Red-haired, beardy George running his hands down the ravines in those huge, twisting trunks and then cutting some forks of hazel, so he and Robin could do some exploratory dowsing. What you did, you asked questions – Were there standing stones here? Was this an old burial place, pre-Christianity? How many bodies are lying under here? – and you waited for the twig to twitch in response. Admittedly, a response didn’t happen too often for Robin, but George was adept.

No, there’d been no stones but perhaps wooden poles – a woodhenge kind of arrangement – where the yews now grew. And yes, there had been pre-Christian burials here. George made it 300-plus bodies at one time. But the area had been excavated and skeletons taken away for reburial before the Church sold off the site, so there was the possibility that some pagan people been taken away for Christian burial. The arrogance of those bastards!

What happened, way back when the Christians were moving into Britain, was some smart-ass pope had decreed that they should place their churches on existing sites of worship. This served two purposes: it would demonstrate the dominance of the new religion over the old and, if the site was the same, that might persuade the local tribes to keep on coming there to worship.

But that was all gonna be turned around at last. Boy, was it!

Robin stood down by the noisesome water, lining up the church with Burfa Hill, site of an Iron Age camp. He couldn’t remember when – outside of a rite – he’d last felt so exalted. Sure, it only backed up what he’d already