rippling towards them in a wave of despair and anxiety. Church heard the rattle of the nurse's feet as she ran from their side and then the bang of the swing door as she disappeared back towards the operating theatre. The cry that squeezed out from the farmer's throat was filled with such devastation that Church felt tears sting his eyes. A man calling out, 'They're dying! They're dying!' reverberated up the stairwell, followed by the jarring punch of a woman screaming, 'Do something!'
The movement came out of nowhere; people rushing by in the dark, what could have been a hair's breadth away, or several feet. Church tried to remember where the wall was for safety, but before he could move someone clipped him hard and he slammed against it with such force he lost consciousness.
When he recovered, the chaos had reached a crescendo. He didn't know how long he had been out, but screams and shouts punctuated the gloom, along with the sound of running feet like machine-gun fire. Church called out for the farmer, but there was no reply. He felt a sudden wave of despair when he realised there was no way the surgeons would be able to finish the operation; Marianne would be dying, if she wasn't already dead.
Before he could dwell on it, someone came hurrying along the corridor and knocked him over again.
The intense confusion and claustrophobia left his thoughts in a whirl, but he know he ought to get to the ground floor as soon as possible. He found the stairwell easily enough by scrambling along the wall. Negotiating the descent was trickier; he clung to the railing and felt for each step like a blind man.
As he reached the next floor, a burst of the purest white light suddenly flared through the glass panel in the door, so bright it lit the entire stairwell. It faded just as quickly, leaving flashes of purple dancing across his retinas. It had been far too dazzling for a torch, and without electricity nothing else could have explained the quality or the intensity of the illumination. He fumbled for the door handle and stepped out into the hall.
Oddly, the screams and cries on that ward had died away, leaving an incongruous atmosphere of tranquillity. The stillness was broken a second or two later by the sound of a man crying, only the sobbing didn't seem despairing. Then there was laughter, tinged with an obvious note of disbelief, and someone whispering, 'Thank God!' over and over again.
Another flash of the burning white light erupted through the double doors that led to the wider ward and in its glare Church caught a glimpse of a scene he would never forget. The woman the nurse had told him was in a coma and dying of leukaemia stood in the doorway of her room, tubes trailing from her arms and nose like decorations. She was staring at her hands in incomprehension, a smile of amazement drawn across her face. Her husband and son had their arms around her, burying their faces into her neck, their bodies racked with sobs of joy. And then the darkness returned again.
Desperate to understand, Church propelled himself through the double doors. As he crossed the threshold into the larger ward the power came back on. The patients, many of whom had seemed close to death, were sitting up in their beds, examining themselves with new eyes, smiling, chatting to those around them. Some were clambering out, testing legs that hadn't walked with strength for weeks, pulling out chemotherapy drips with distaste.
One tall man, his skin sun-browned but his body wasted by the illness, smiled broadly at Church. 'What ho! I feel like I could run a marathon!' He pulled back the sheets to reveal a long scar on his lower belly. 'Cancer. They said the op hadn't worked.' He held out his hands in joyous disbelief.
Moving through the wave of uplifting emotion, Church looked for some clue to what had happened. Then, when he reached the far wall, he noticed a small figure slumped on the floor like a bundle of dirty clothes. With shock, he realised it was Marianne. Before he had even knelt at her side, he could tell she was dead; she was covered in blood which had poured from the open incision on her shaved head. The wound seemed to have partly sealed itself-there was no evidence of stitching-but it was still impossible to believe she could have made it even a few feet from the operating table. Inexplicably, there was faint charring of the skin around her eyes so that it appeared she was wearing a black mask; despite that, her pale face was composed.
Church took her hand, marvelling at the softness of her skin as stinging tears sprang to his eyes.
'She did it.' A short, dumpy man with chemo-baldness stood behind him. 'At first I thought she was a ghost walking through the ward. After the lights went, I thought it was the end-I was a bit delirious, I think. And then there she was.' He raised his hands in awe. 'Suddenly she burned with the brightest white light. It was the most amazing thing. I thought, `She's an angel come for me.' And when the light fell on me I suddenly felt better.' The tears were streaming down his cheeks at the memory. 'She carried on through the ward and did it again. She made everybody better. And then she just fell down here like she'd burned herself out.'
Church brushed a stray hair from her forehead, touched her cheek with his fingertips, as if the contact would in some way impart an awareness of what had truly happened. He took out the locket she had lent him-only the previous day-and considered fastening it around her neck; let Princess Diana guide her into the light. But then he hesitated, before slipping it back into his pocket. Even though their meeting had been brief, Marianne had been inspirational to him and he wanted something to remind him of her. Perhaps the new saint for the new age really would do him good too. All he could think was that in that terrible, awesome new world, belief and faith really could move mountains. Magic was alive, and it wasn't just the providence of the dark side; good people could make a difference too, lighting a beacon that would shine out in the coming night.
Chapter Nine
Ruth and Laura were waiting anxiously for Church in reception. They were surrounded by a chaotic mass of distraught relatives, bewildered patients and hard-pressed hospital staff, their faces uniformly etched with painful disbelief. Church felt sick from the piercing noise; alarms were ringing throughout the building, mingling with the terrible sounds of grief and the barking of orders. Occasionally he caught a whiff of smoke carried on draughts from the heart of the hospital.
His journey from the cancer ward had been one of the most painful he had ever made. All the nurses had been caught up in the crisis, so he carried Marianne to a bed and drew a sheet over her before setting off in search of her father to break the news. Church found him in a state of near breakdown, running frantically around outside the operating theatre, desperately begging any passing hospital employee for information on his daughter's whereabouts. When he read Church's face he crumpled like a sick child, lost in tearing sobs that seemed to suck the breath from him. Church felt broken inside; it was even more unfair than the farmer realised: two months ago, a week ago, perhaps only a day earlier, the power cut would not have happened and Marianne might have lived.
Her father was immune to any attempts to comfort him and Church could do nothing but leave him there. As he hurried down through the floors, all his own painful thoughts about Marianne were lost as he became aware of the true devastation the power cut had wrought. On each floor the victims of failed life support systems were laid out on trolleys with sheets thrown over them. The hospital staff seemed to be wandering around dumbly. One nurse was in tears as she demanded answers from a colleague; not only had the power supply failed to a regulated drip, but the back-up battery had also ceased to work. 'How do you explain that?' she pleaded. By the time Church reached reception, he felt nauseous. He couldn't bring himself to answer Ruth and Laura's questions, and headed out to the car in silence, head bowed into the raging storm.
They picked up the M5 in the city and followed the lantern's flame back south. High winds buffeted the car and the rain lashed the windscreen with such force the wipers could barely function.
'Think of those cancer patients-they've survived. Some good has come of it,' Ruth said hopefully. 'Marianne did that. She achieved something wonderful with her life, gave hope … magic … to people lost in despair. That's more than most could ever dream of doing. It made her life mean something.'
'I can see that,' Church replied darkly, 'but it doesn't make it better.' He smiled bitterly as a flash of lightning glared off the roof of a Porsche going too fast for the weather, the driver unaware that his gleaming status symbol would soon be going the way of the dinosaurs. 'That scene at the hospital was like something out of the Middle Ages. And it's going to be like that all over the country … all over the world … before too long. I understood what was happening in an abstract way, but that's the true cost of the upheaval that's being inflicted on us. It's not about TVs breaking down and cars working randomly. It's about human suffering on an unimaginable scale. It's
