The Lamp of the Wicked

not—’

‘You’ve mislaid him, haven’t you?’ a man with a white beard said. ‘You don’t have Roddy right now.’

‘I’m telling you not to come any further. Stay together. And

‘don’t let anyone else in here. Can you do that? Can you do that for the sake of the community?’ Bliss began to walk away.

The bearded man said, ‘You don’t look very far, do you?’ He had a vaguely transatlantic accent. He wore a loose denim jacket and a plaid cap, and he had a canvas bag hanging from a shoulder strap. Also good night-vision, Lol figured; although he didn’t have a torch, he was peering around into the dark areas.

Bliss continued for a couple of paces and then stopped.

Lol saw exactly where the bearded man was gazing.

Up.

19 On Angels

JANE HAD GONE upstairs for a bath, leaving Merrily hunched by the sitting-room fire, feet in woolly socks, cardigan buttoned to the top, but still feeling cold. She pulled St Thomas Aquinas from the shelf: Aquinas on Angels. Intellectual exercise could sometimes deflate anxiety.

She opened the paperback, immediately shut it again, snatched up the cordless and tried Lol’s phone. It was now over a week since she’d seen him, and, OK, it felt very much longer – really, what kind of relationship was this? To Jane, for whom two nights without a call from Eirion was cause for sleep- loss, it must look like a trial separation.

Merrily felt angry, frustrated, losing her grip – a marionette with its strings pulled in different directions by Jenny Box, Uncle Ted, Frannie Bliss and… Jane? Like, what had happened suddenly to turn the kid into the self-appointed voice of rationality in this household?

‘The phone you are calling is switched off…’

Inevitably.

Nearly two hours into darkness, now. Were they still out there digging for Frannie’s corpses on the windy fringe of the Forest? Merrily tapped in Gomer’s home number, on the off chance that they were out of there.

‘This yere is Gomer Parry Plant Hire. We en’t in, but that don’t mean we en’t available, so you be sure and leave your number.’

Damn.

Merrily hit end and tossed the phone on the sofa. Slumping down with the book, she found St Thomas Aquinas no more accessible.

It is not necessary that the place where an angel is should be spatially indivisible; it can be divisible or indivisible, greater or less, according as the angel chooses, voluntarily, to apply his power to a more or less extended body. And the whole body, whatever it be, will be as one place to him.

She read the paragraph twice more. You could always rely on Thomas to make you feel totally thick. Hard to imagine a mind this colossal functioning within a society of bows and arrows, boiling oil, trial by ordeal… but then, inside grey walls in the thirteenth century, with no TV or radio or phones or kids, only a solitary circle of candlelight, a trained intellect powered by spiritual energy might well acquire laserlike focus.

In the dog grate, a mix of coal and apple logs burned with an intensity that she could neither feel nor find in herself. To be a serious student of Aquinas, theology was not enough. You also needed to be Stephen Hawking.

An angel is in contact with a given place simply and solely through his power there. Hence his movement from place to place can be nothing but a succession of distinct power contacts.

What she was hoping for was… OK, a sign. Like, sometimes, you could open a book – it didn’t have to be the Bible – to a random page, and the solution would be there, as though at the end of a shaft of light. The answer might not depend on a literal interpretation of the text; it might be a certain metaphor which sprang a diversion, lit some indirect path to an unexpected truth.

Jenny Box: what the hell does she want from me?

Jenny’s angel: was that a metaphor, or what? A person coming from New Age spirituality – from earth-powers, shamanism and healing crystals – to Christianity would probably need some kind of visionary incentive, real or imagined. Jenny Box would have to find ample metaphysical justification for her move to an obscure village in Herefordshire: Ledwardine as Glastonbury, Ledwardine as Lourdes. Just as Merrily herself often wondered if she’d been washed up here for a reason – at college, she’d always seen herself as an urban priest, firing faith in concrete alleys full of vomit and discarded syringes.

She lay back on the sofa with the Aquinas paperback on her lap, closed her eyes and saw four possibilities:

1. Jenny Box had hallucinated the angel.

2. Jenny Box had invented the angel.

3. An optical illusion.

4. An angel.

Floodlit by a dozen small lamps, it looked like a gigantic headless metal puppet, with six arms rigidly outstretched – wires from its pendulous fingers, wires from its elbow joints.

If there was a formidable elemental force travelling those wires, the pylon itself looked dangerously unstable, Lol thought. And archaic. A skeletal survivor of the days when cars broke down every few weeks and a single computer filled a whole room.

This was your standard National Grid tower, the bearded man in denims had explained in his relaxed, tour- guide kind of way. He’d hung around with Lol when the adrenalin kicked into Frannie Bliss. There were over fifty pylons in this part of the valley, he said, and this was one of the big ones. It was carrying 400,000 volts.

And Roddy Lodge.

Lodge was about forty feet up, like a crawling insect, not far beneath the first pair of arms, at the end of which the live powerlines were coiled around insulators resembling hanging candles of knobbly green glass.

Lol heard Bliss telling someone to call for an ambulance and the fire brigade. He was standing about twenty feet from the pylon’s splayed legs of reinforced steel, hands in the pockets of his hiking jacket, more controlled now that he could see his prisoner again – could see that the prisoner had nowhere to go.

Nowhere in this world.

Lol wiped his glasses on the sleeve of his jacket. It had stopped raining, but the wind was up. The wires were zinging in his head. Vicarious vertigo.

‘You’re not with the police, then,’ the bearded man said. Directly in front of them was the abandoned excavation, the spade still sticking out of it. From here they could see the whole of the pylon, maybe 150 feet tall, and the shape of Howle Hill behind it, a black thumbprint on the sky.

‘I’m just one of the gravediggers,’ Lol said.

‘That mean I can actually talk to you without I get told to climb back on the school bus and leave it to the grown-ups?’

‘Least the police don’t have guns,’ Lol said, hoping he was right about this.

‘One of the reasons I came home, my friend. Protest about something in New Labour Britain, you don’t get shot, you just get patronized. Name’s Sam Hall, by the way.’

‘Lol. Lol Robinson.’ He saw that Sam Hall was older than he’d first appeared, well into his sixties, maybe beyond that – that backwoods-pioneer look grizzling over the years.

‘Tough day, Lol?’ Sam said mildly. As if they were unwinding at something not over-exciting, like crown- green bowling.

Before Lol could reply, a woman screamed. He saw Roddy Lodge gripping an overhead girder, swinging