A Crown of Lights

Betty said that Robin had tried to work out a pattern on the map, but they had been aware of only three St Michael churches at the time.

‘OK.’ Jane had returned with the map, spread it out on the table. ‘You’ll have to help me out here, Gomer. Where’s Cascob?’

Gomer found it after a bit of peering. He also found St Michael’s, Cefnllys, then Llanfihangel Rhydithon and Llanfihangel nant Melan. Jane encircled them – along with Old Hindwell (ruins of).

‘Five now.’ Jane drew a ring round the last one. ‘And they do go right around the Forest.’

Betty was silently contemplating the map. ‘It’s too big, this,’ she said at last. You wouldn’t have anything smaller scale?’

‘Only a road map.’ Jane bounced up again. ‘I’ll get it.’

‘And some paper?’ Betty said.

Neither Cascob nor Cefnllys was marked on the road map, but she put circles on the approximate spots, and pushed the map and the paper and a pencil towards Betty.

Betty copied the pattern onto the paper. ‘It’s not perfect, but it’s there.’

‘It’s a five-pointed star,’ Merrily said. ‘A pentagram.’ She looked at Betty. ‘Can you explain?’

Betty swallowed. ‘Could I have another cigarette?’

Merrily lit it for her. Betty was now looking uncertain, perhaps worried.

‘If these churches were built to form not a circle but a five-pointed star, that would represent a defensive thing, OK? The pentagram’s a powerful protective symbol. It’s used in banishing rituals. Like if you’re faced with... an evil entity... and you draw a big pentagram in the air, it ought to go away. So the medieval Christians might have wanted to enclose Radnor Forest in a giant pentagram of St Michael churches for the purpose of containing the dragon. Or whatever the dragon represented for them.’

‘It’s hardly a perfect pentagram,’ Merrily pointed out. ‘It could be purely coincidental.’

But then, she thought, in Ellis’s ministry, nothing is coincidental.

‘There’s another connection here,’ Betty said, ‘with Cascob. The word “abracadabra” is used in a charm – an exorcism – which was found buried in the churchyard. The word “abracadabra” has become devalued because of all those stage conjurors using it, but it’s actually very, very old and very powerful, and it’s believed to represent the pentagram because it contains the letter “A” five times. And if you put the “A”s together...’ Betty pulled Jane’s pencil and paper across and drew:

‘Cool,’ Jane said.

‘Actually, it’s not,’ Betty said soberly. ‘The defensive, white magic pentagram has the point at the top. What you’ve just found on the map is an inverted pentagram.’ She put down the pencil and looked at Merrily. ‘I don’t think I need to explain what that means.’

‘No.’ Merrily pulled out a cigarette. ‘Probably not.’

Jane looked mystified. ‘You mean it’s like an aggressive thing?’

Betty said, ‘It tended to be used in black magic. See the horns? Even pagans accept that horns are not invariably a good sign. Look... I went to Cascob the other day. That exorcism’s displayed on the wall, in a frame. It dates back to about seventeen hundred, and was used to purge a woman called Elizabeth Loyd of evil spirits and alleged assaults of the Devil. I... got a bad feeling from it.’

‘In what way?’

Betty looked embarrassed.

‘You mean the exorcism itself?’

‘I don’t know. My first thought was that Elizabeth Loyd was just some poor epileptic or schizophrenic girl who somebody decided must be possessed. Then I... got the feeling that maybe she did have something... satanic... inside her. I don’t know. The wording was a mixture of Roman Catholic and pagan and cabbalistic references.’

‘Oh?’

‘A combination of religion and magic, therefore. I suppose what really scared me was that the words were so very similar to the ones used in a charm that was found in a box concealed in an old fireplace at our house. And that one was dated over a century later. Nothing had changed.’

Nothing had changed.

Nothing changes. Merrily tried to focus. There was something very important here.

‘You found this charm?’

‘No, it was delivered to us. The box was placed on our doorstep just after we moved in. It spooked us quite a bit, because it was a charm against witchcraft. It seemed to be saying, “We know what you are and we know how to deal with you.” There was a note with it, signed “The Local People”.’

‘Nasty,’ Jane murmured.

‘The wording of this exorcism,’ Merrily said, ‘do you remember how it went?’

‘It invoked God and the Trinity. It said it would deliver Elizabeth Loyd from all witchcraft and spirits and hardness of heart. It had Roman Catholic stuff, kind of Ave Maria, and it used these cabbalistic names of power – Tetragrammaton, the mighty name of God.’

‘Did it really?’

‘That means something?’

‘I don’t know. OK, something else... Cascob. Apparently, Penney approached the then vicar or rector of Cascob and suggested he get his church decommissioned. He talked about the St Michael churches around Radnor Forest. The vicar reminded him of a folk tale implying that if one of those churches were destroyed it would allow the dragon to escape.’

‘Right.’

‘Penney said it was... quite the reverse.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘like the reverse pentagram. I don’t get it.’

‘Nor me.’ Merrily stared at the irregular star of churches. ‘Whether the churches were intended to be a circle and just happened to fall into this rather vague star shape... or whether it’s all complete coincidence. And, when you think about it, if you turn the map upside down, it’s not inverted any more, is it?’

‘Wrong!’ Jane cried. ‘Because pagans always work to the north, right, Betty? Their altars are north-facing. The two prongs, the horns, are pointing north.’

Merrily nodded, with reluctance. ‘Yeah, OK. I think it’s at least fair to say that Penney became convinced this was bad news. If his LSD experience – and, in those days, the feeling was that this wasn’t just another drug – if his experience convinced him that the unfortunate layout of the churches invited the old serpent to slither in... then that would explain why he was so determined to destroy the pattern by taking out one of the churches.’

‘I wonder how much of this Ellis knows?’ Betty said.

Possibly quite a lot, Merrily thought. She was considering the distinctly medieval aspects of Ellis’s unnecessary exorcism of Marianne Starkey.

She dreamed, through most of that night it seemed, in colour.

Deep velvet purples and wild, slashing yellows. Abstract images, and then the church at Old Hindwell, vibrating blue against a pink evening sky. White-clad Ellis and his followers walking like pilgrims through the woods with their Bibles and bottles of holy water to exorcize the pagan place by night. Betty, in a robe of pale mauve.

Jesus Christ screaming on the cross.

Fire sizzling. Yellow fire in the kindling. The robe shrivelled and blackened. Betty’s golden hair alight.

At the foot of the cross, Marianne Starkey in a torn white nightdress, blood-flecked.

Out of a dream full of savage heat, Merrily awoke into the cold. The sizzling became the metallic rattle of night hail on the bedroom window. Merrily wrapped herself in the too-thin duvet and prayed for the blue and the gold, but they wouldn’t come.

41 The Kindling in the Forest