The Lamp of the Wicked (34 page)

‘Only it came to Ross first. Prosperous-looking place, even then, but the streets were thick with filth and packs of rats. Most of the rich folk left town. But the minister stayed, to bless the sick and the dying.’ Sam turned to Moira. ‘You’d have heard of this man, maybe?’

‘Me?’

‘Name was the Reverend Price. At the height of the plague, the darkest hour, he had all the townsfolk that could make it to their feet join him in a procession – all walking with this desperate dignity through the town streets at five a.m. chanting a litany, a solemn appeal to the Lord for deliverance.’

A light came on in one of the houses across the street, making it seem darker in the churchyard.

‘And his faith was rewarded. When the sun rose that day, it was said, the plague went on the run.’ Sam Hall stepped down from the cross. ‘And you’re wondering why I’m showing you this, right? Well, see, a plague is how I think of it. The Great Plague of the Twenty-first Century. I have an engraving of this cross as the motif on my notepaper.’

‘This new plague is about power lines?’ Lol said.

‘The power towers are the enemy we can see.’ Sam stared up into the sepia sky. ‘If we could see all the TV and satellite signals, all the radio waves serving mobile phones, police communications, cab fleets, air networks, the sky would be this kind of poisonous black the whole day long. If we could smell them like exhaust fumes, we’d all choke to death. But it’s a whole lot more subtle than that. They zip unseen and unfelt through our atmosphere and through our bodies and our brains. They are the insidious wind that blows right through us all – through flesh and tissue, through bones.’

It sounded like a speech he’d made before. Sam was back on the path.

‘You’ll notice I came down off of the cross before I said all that. I’m no preacher, just a guy who seethes inside whenever ‘he sees some twelve-year-old kid in the street, calling up her pal on a piece of pink plastic that burns brains.’

‘Which is always gonnae be denied,’ Moira murmured.

‘Oh, sure. The bigger the investment, the stronger the denial. Like the electricity industry denied the report that came out of Bristol University a couple years ago linking overhead power lines to leukaemia, skin cancer, lung cancer – you name it.’

‘A plague on all humanity, huh?’

‘Sure. And we’re all of us guilty to some extent, even me. I won permission for a windmill to generate clean power for my place up on Howle Hill. I don’t have a phone, let alone a mobile. But if I want to get on the Web, I’ll still go down the hall, use one of Cody’s community computers. Act of plain hypocrisy, with the guy hell-bent on turning Underhowle into the hot spot to end all hot spots.’

‘Hot spots?’ Lol said.

‘ “Hot spot” is the term for a dangerous configuration of transmitters, pylons, what-have-you which renders an area… let’s say difficult to reside in. Cody’s computer plant came to the area on account of a development grant and a derelict site going for peanuts, and now they want to… but you know all this.’

‘I’m a stranger,’ Moira said. ‘I don’t know any of it.’

Sam Hall looked hard at her in the dimness. Moira folded her arms in her wrap.

‘We have a complex situation,’ Sam said. ‘The small industries which once built up Underhowle into a community with three, four pubs, a bunch of shops and its own school went to the wall long ago. By the mid-nineties, the shops had all gone out of business, the school was threatened with closure, and the village wasn’t pretty enough to attract the cottage-hunters from London – specially with these damn pylons like watchtowers around Belsen and Auschwitz.’

It was almost night now and growing cold. Somewhere at the back of his mind Lol could hear Prof Levin saying,
The one thing you, of all people, do not need at this stage is to get in with crazies
.

Biggest disease in Underhowle, when I came back from the States, was apathy,’ Sam Hall said. ‘I didn’t mind. I just wanted a place I could afford and where I’d be left alone to be a crank and a pain-in-the-ass idealist, sustain my fantasy that we could live without the goddam mains services run by fat cats who’d watch us die one by one, to stave off wasting-disease of the wallet.’

Lol wondered if Sam saw himself as the new Reverend Price, who’d chosen to live and fight in the plague hot spot.

‘At first, I was as pleased as anyone,’ Sam said, ‘when, like the recipient of a touch of magic, Underhowle began to undergo a small revival.’

Two things happened, almost simultaneously, he told them. Two new elements of growth that fed one another, two men with compatible dreams. Fergus Young, a teacher with real vision, took over a dying primary school, down to fourteen pupils. And Chris Cody, this computer whizz, brought in enough employees with young families to fill it up again.

‘I like Fergus. He’s evangelical, like me. Gave up a lot for that school – even his marriage, in the end. Hell, I even like Chris. Fergus knows how to inspire kids, he was getting incredible results very quickly, but I guess it was the computer input that revolutionized everything.’

‘They provided computers for the school?’ Lol recalled the Efflapure owner, Mike Sandford, telling him about the children’s computers they were manufacturing – for four-year-olds, three-year-olds, two… younger.

‘They
donated
computers,’ Sam Hall said. ‘Not only to the school, but to every household in the catchment area with a small kid. Time the kid reaches school, it’s computer-literate, with all the educational benefits that brings. Plus most of them could read and write by age five or earlier. So between them, at this run-down school in a run-down village, Fergus and Chris have already created a generation of very smart kids.’

Lol recalled Mike Sandford again:
Might look run-down, but this place is the future
.

‘This been publicized?’ Moira wondered.

‘In all the right journals. Result: Cody’s kiddie computers are starting to sell, internationally – so yet more jobs. Parents squeezing themselves into the catchment area to get their kids into Fergus’s school. Property prices rising. Place still isn’t pretty, but it’s changing fast – two shops reopened in the past year, one by Cody, as a retail software outlet, but the other sells food. And we have a hairdresser, we have the refurbishment of the village hall as a sophisticated community centre. And – you know – so far, so good. We were all getting along together fine on the Underhowle Development Committee. Till we fell out.’

Sam said that although he’d been less enthused than some by the idea of Underhowle becoming a blueprint for rural regrowth, he’d kept quiet about the aspects that worried him. Until the demands for better communications began bringing results. Until the growing complaints about the poor mobile- phone signals in the valley and the bad quality of TV reception began to have enough relevance for the fat cats who ran the networks to act on them.

When the Development Committee had voted to express its approval of a plan for a new and powerful mobile-phone transmitter on the side of Howle Hill, along with a TV booster less than half a mile away, Sam had quit the committee in an atmosphere of serious acrimony. Now the booster was up and shooting signals at Underhowle, the new phone mast only awaiting the green light from the council. And no groundswell of opposition to get in the way. Only Sam, the crank, the fruitcake.

‘I expected support from the newcomers, but hell, with the village taking off the way it is, they’re scared to be seen as blocking progress. In most cases, their jobs depend on it. But it’s… with the number of goddam power lines we already got intersecting here, it’s my absolutely unswerving belief we’re in for one
hell
of a hot spot. Health problems – and
mental
health problems – on a scale you can’t imagine. Signs are there. I can give you a long list of people who died prematurely – people living too close to 140,000 volts. When that damn mast goes up, it’s gonna be electric soup. But… I got no proof and no back-up.’

Lol was thinking Sam was going to need more than a rally and protest song to raise any. He didn’t know what to say.

Sam said, ‘Sure, I have friends
outside
– links with Green organizations. But Green activists, they tend to be gentle people. They don’t have maybe the blind
rage
needed to tackle what is one enormous ecological problem and – I would venture to suggest, Reverend – a spiritual one.’

Moira said, ‘Huh?’

‘I can explain this aspect, if you’ll give me some time. If we can meet this week, perhaps, I can explain it in detail. But, essentially, our local minister, Reverend Banks, is a man with – and, as someone who’s at least half a Christian, I make no apology for this – a man with a small, closed mind, who refuses to absorb or even to consider—’

‘Mr Hall, I wouldnae doubt that he is, but if I could—’

‘I realize your position’s bound to be sensitive, where another clergyperson’s concerned. But there are some things I need to get aligned in my own mind, and I could use some advice from someone… such as yourself.’

He stood at the foot of the Plague Cross, shoulders slumped, sagging a little, looking more like his age. He unshouldered his knapsack, as if it had suddenly become too much of a burden, and laid it on the bottom step.

‘Sam,’ Lol said gently, ‘I think…’

Lol drove around the island and back onto the A40, from which the town of Ross glittered in the early night, like a birthday cake, across three lanes of traffic and the river. He drew a fold of paper from his jacket pocket.

‘Gave me this just as we were walking back into town. I guess it’s the poem. The song. He took it out of his bag almost like an afterthought, just before we went our separate ways.’ He handed the paper across to Moira. ‘Sorry, the interior light doesn’t work, but there’s a torch in the glove compartment.’

‘I suppose I ought to feel flattered,’ Moira said. ‘This could be the first time in ma whole life I was ever mistaken for a good and devout person.’

There was only one way this misunderstanding could have come about: Sam had talked to Frannie Bliss, and Bliss had disclosed Lol’s close friendship with the diocesan exorcist for Hereford. Lol had introduced Moira to Sam only by her first name. Moira – Merrily? It was an honest mistake.

‘I don’t think he’s crazy,’ Lol said. ‘But he certainly seems less stable than he did the other night. Or maybe it’s me who’s more stable than I was then.’

‘Well…’ He heard the snap of the torch switch. ‘I don’t think he’s crazy either, but he sure is no poet.’

‘Not good?’

‘It’s like he just scribbled it down, off the top of his head, before he came out.’

‘Maybe he did.’

‘Aye.’

In the darkness of the car, Lol was aware of Moira’s scent; it made him think of deserted sand dunes in the Hebrides. Or maybe that wasn’t the scent at all. Her voice came back, low.

‘He doesnae want you at all, Laurence. Or your talents. It was a wee ploy and not a very convincing one. He wants your friend. He wants an exorcist. It’s why he asked you to bring your lady.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you’d been alone, I guess he’d’ve sounded you out about an introduction. When he thought
I
was her, he went for it: “an ecological problem, but also a spiritual one”. But when he found out I wasnae exactly ordained, the spiritual part stayed under his woolly hat. I guess he’ll find your wee reverend some other way.’

Lol said, ‘What if he’s a
little
crazy?’

‘Ach, Laurence, we’re all of us a little crazy.’

‘And the Plague Cross?’

‘Well… there’s a sickness there, all right,’ Moira said.

Still?’

She was quiet for a moment. ‘He’s scared of something, and he’s no’ sure exactly what.’

Lol was puzzled. ‘He
is
sure, isn’t he?’

‘He knows what he can see – the pylons and the TV masts and those sinister mobile-phone masts with the bits sticking out. But he cannae see electricity and he cannae see evil.’

Lol said after a while, ‘Is this a warning?’

‘Oh, Laurence,’ Moira said, ‘if it was all as simple and direct as, like, “Don’t get on any planes on the 18th”. What do I say to you here? I’m standing by the Plague Cross and this guy’s talking about people buried without coffins, and then I start thinking about you and your friend digging for dead people, and I get this rather loathsome curling sensation down in ma gut –
which
I believe I managed to conceal rather well.
I
don’t know what that means, do I?’

‘What should I say to Merrily?’

She let him drive in silence for a while.

‘Aye well,’ she said, ‘that’s a difficult one.’

That night Lol called Merrily on the mobile, from his loft.

‘Mmm,’ she said, ‘I met Sam Hall when I was in Underhowle with Frannie Bliss. He didn’t go out of his way to speak to me then. On the other hand, Bliss had introduced me as a DC. Which nobody seemed to question at the time.’

‘Maybe assuming there must have been a change in the height regulations,’ Lol said.

‘Ho ho. So am I supposed to go and see him?’

‘Why would you need to? I was just warning you he might try and get in touch. So you’d know what it was about, vaguely, if he did. And if I could just—’

Merrily said, ‘Only, I’ve been asked to bury Roddy Lodge, you see.’

‘Bury him?’

‘Not dig the hole – conduct the funeral.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a Christian tradition. But if you mean
why me
, it’s because a large number of people in Underhowle are saying,
We
don’t want this murderer in
our
churchyard, and the local minister’s got cold feet from sitting on the fence. And I’m like your Mr Hall. An established fruitcake.’

Lol said, ‘Do you have to do it?’

‘I don’t
have
to.’ A pause. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

Lol imagined her at her desk, shoes off, toes curled under the electric fire. He felt that, whatever she was getting into, she should not be left in there alone.

H
E
’
D COME DOWN
from the hill on his quad bike as soon as his wife had reached him on the mobile. ‘I can’t discuss this,’ she’d said miserably when she saw the dog collar. ‘You’ll have to speak to Mr Lodge.’ And went on talking about the rain and how much of it there was these days, until he was pulling off his wellies at the kitchen door.