Mission accomplished, anyway.
Retreating into the aisle, he glanced over his shoulder at the stone husk on
the tomb, its dead lips luminously purpled by the colour of the night through
the long windows. He would go now. He hurried down the aisle,
tock, tock, tock
.
As if to guide him on his way,
five yards distant, at the entrance to the nave, close to the font (heptagonal,
nineteenth-century replacement) a meagre flame appeared, like a taper. When he
moved forward to try and see it more clearly, the small light moved with him,
as if whoever held it was backing away.
"I'm sorry," Ingley
said, raising his head and his voice, authoritative, irascible, producing an
echo. "Who is there?"
there . . . there . . . ere . . .
He registered, disturbed, that
the little flame cast no ambience. It was like the light through a keyhole,
something on the other side of the dark.
Then it went out.
Was somebody with him now in
the church? Somebody who'd seen him by the tomb, who would tell then what he'd
been doing? Who'd now doused his light to…
Blindfold we could find our way around this place…
More likely he was simply overexcited and overtired. He stood very
still, disgusted at his heart for suddenly pulsing in his chest like some
squirming animal. Pills, where were his pills?
"Finished now.
Leaving," he said to nobody,
ving . . . ing . . .
Back in the inn, that was where
they were, the pills. On the dresser in his room.
" . . Leaving, all right . . .
?"
. . . ight.
There was nobody. Nobody at
all. He walked down the aisle to the great door, which was open a crack — had
he left like that? Thought perhaps he had, certainly didn't remember closing
it. He glanced back into the church, towards the altar and the tomb, neither
visible now. Saw only the tall Gothic windows tinctured in amethyst. He grasped
the iron ring handle and hauled the door closed behind him, hearing the muffled
echo of the latch from within.
Out then, gratefully, into the
remembered warmth of a summer night, into the churchyard's terraced circle,
from here one could look down on the yellow glowing of the village. Relieved,
he took a great gulp of the soft night air.
The air was hard and slammed
into his throat and locked there.
Ingley spun round, blinking.
No lights.
No village.
No moon.
He clutched at the stone porch
and the breath came out of him like razorblades.
The circular cemetery was an
island in a dark, polluted sea. The sky was black, and something was swirling
about him, plucking playfully at his jacket.
He hauled in another breath, it
didn't want to come. He slapped at his jacket where the dark wind was fingering
it like a pickpocket.
The breath came up like an
anchor through mud. His chest seemed to creak. Cold too out here now, and damp.
No sweet smells any more.
Then the true essence of the
place came to him, faint at first, and shocking because ...
"Oh, Christ!" The
little fat man, clamping a cupped hand over his mouth and nose, was thrown back
by the stench.
Stench?
Yes, yes, vile, decaying, putrid
... as if the season had betrayed them and the scented flowers had choked and bloated
on their stems. He knew that stink, had always known it. He knew it from hospital
wards and his stricken mother's bedroom, from dustbins in summer and the yard behind
his father's butcher's shop. And he knew, sad and angry now, that it was not as
it seemed. It was within him—had to be—the blackness, the smell, the withering.
His own lights going out.
Poor old Ingley, historian,
antiquary, awkward customer, abrupt sometimes, knew it—but so little time to do
things, always so little time. Hang on to things. Hang on to reality— single-chamber
church with tower to the West, perpendicular, wooden bell-stage, pyramidal
two-tiered roof . . .
Then, at first vaporous and
indistinct, above a middle-distant grave, possibly the grave of Ebenezer
Watkins, rose the little flame. Rose up and hovered, steamy and flickering as
if in the hand of a still, dark figure, waiting. And blue this time, a cold and
gaseous blue.
Ingley began to sob, and it was
bitterly painful in his chest.
Chapter II
The corpse wore a shroud and a silly smile, and its hair was sticking
out like wires. The five people standing around its coffin were gloomily dressed
in black or dark brown—but they too were smiling.
Bethan was not smiling. It
ought to have been comical, but it seemed all the more sinister and graphically
real without the benefit of perspective. With the figures ludicrously out of
proportion, big heads like grinning toffee apples on black sticks, it resembled
some crude medieval engraving.
She turned over the exercise
book to look at the name on the cover, and she was right. Sali Dafis, it said
unevenly in capitals. She turned back to the drawing. Underneath it the childish
script said in Welsh,
Old Mrs. Jones, Ty Canol, died on Friday. We
all went in to see her. She was in her coffin. It was on the table. Nain said
she knew Mrs. Jones would die soon because she saw the cannwyll gorff in the
churchyard and it went all the way to Mrs. Jones's door.
On the facing page, another drawing showed a white gravestone against a
sky crosshatched with dark-blue crayon. In the sky were a half-moon and several
stars and something that looked like a bigger star hanging over the grave. Underneath
this one was written,
Here is the cannwyll gorff over the grave of
Mr. Tegwyn Jones. He is sending it to fetch his wife.
"God." Bethan said
and slapped the exercise book face down on the sofa.
She'd told the children to
pretend they were working for the
papur
bro,
the community newspaper in Pontmeurig, and to write about something
that had happened in their own village which they thought people ought to know
about. Of the results she'd seen so far, most had been predictably innocuous.
Carys Huws had written about the haymaking, and how the famers were hoping to
have it finished in time to go to the Royal Welsh agricultural show. Bobi Fon
had described the chairman's chair his father, the carpenter, had made for
Glanmeurig District Council.
But both Cefyn Lewis and Glyn
Jones had described the
Gorsedd Ddu
meeting in the oakwoods
at dead of night to judge the traitors and the cowards—writing as if it had really
happened, although both were old enough to know the difference between history
and legend.
And now Sali had written again
of some sinister, imaginary aspect of death.
Slowly, to calm herself, Bethan
poured out a mug of tea. Yesterday she'd overheard Glyn and Cefyn telling
little Nerys Roberts about the
toili
,
as if it were a regular feature of village life. Nerys was big-eyed and pale.
Bethan, furious, had sent the two boys out into the yard, from where they'd
grinned slyly at her through the window.
Buddug, she thought. Buddug is
behind this.
She sipped the tea; it was
horribly strong and bitter. Bethan grimaced. Corpse candles, phantom funerals.
The knocking, the moaning, the bird of death. It was insidious.
The tea in the pot was as dense
as peat. She went into the kitchen to make some more, pulling the rubber band
from her black hair, shaking her head and letting the hair fall softly,
comfortingly around her shoulders. She felt very alone.
Waiting for the kettle to boil,
Bethan stood by the window, wondering whether to take up smoking again, and she
thought, I hate weekends.
Outside the window it was
Saturday night in Pontmeurig. Only eight miles—and yet a whole world—away from
the village of Y Groes. Barely four thousand people lived in this town now, but
it still had seventeen pubs. Considering how much of the population was either
too young, too sick or too ostensibly clean-living to go out for a drink, that
left…well, it made Bethan wonder how they'd all survived, the seventeen pubs.
She took off her glasses and
rubbed at her eyes, smudging the remains of her make-up and not caring; she
would not be going anywhere tonight.
Just before ten o'clock, Guto Evans phoned.
"What are you doing then, Bethan,
at this moment?"
"Nothing illegal," Bethan
said cautiously.
"That's a shame," Guto said.
He paused, hesitated. "Look, the night, as they say, is young. Why don't
we go out and paint the town? Any colour you like, except for grey, which
nobody would notice."
Bethan pictured him with the
phone tucked into his shaggy beard, like a big terrier with a bone, his stocky
frame wedged into a comer of his mother's front parlour amid hundreds of plates
and china ornaments.
"I don't think so," Bethan
said solemnly into the phone, her glasses slipped and with one finger she
pushed them back along her nose. "I have my reputation to protect. You could
lead me into bad ways."
"One drink, then? A chat?"
"I'm sorry, Guto, I do
appreciate it. It's just . . . well, I've such a lot of work to catch up
on."
And she drew him away from the subject
by asking if he'd heard about the unfortunate incident at that afternoon's protest
demo by some of their mutual friends in the sometimes-militant Welsh Language
Society. The society targeted a particular estate agent in Aberystwyth who specialised
in selling country' cottages in Welsh-speaking areas to affluent English people
looking for holiday homes.
"It got seriously out of hand, of
course." Bethan said, some of the boys had collected For Sale signs out of
people's gardens and heaped them up outside Hughes's door. And what should someone
do but pour paraffin over the pile and set them alight. If the fire brigade had
not arrived in time, who knows, the whole building might have gone up."
"Would have been no great
loss. Bloody Emyr Hughes. Him and his new Mercedes. And a helicopter now, did
you hear?" Guto snorted. "Traitorous fat bastard. Grown fat on
English gold."
Bethan smiled. Guto sharpening
up his rhetoric, now, because it was rumoured Burnham-Lloyd was a very sick man
and there might soon be a by-election. "So Dewi and Alun Phillips were
arrested," she said. 'They will probably be charged tomorrow. Wilful
damage, I hope. Not arson."
"Of course, I would have
been there myself," Guto said. "But I am keeping a low political
profile until such time I am called."
"Well, there's sensible."
said Bethan, in mock-surprise. She paused, "Um, it was nice of you to ask
me out."
"Yes," said Guto. "I am
a nice man, this is true."
"But I must get back to my
marking."
"Should I call again some
time?"
"Yes. When I'm not so busy."
"And when will that be? No,
no, it's all right. I might be nice but I'm not daft. Goodnight, Bethan.
Nos da
."
"Guto, have you ever found . . . ?"
"What?"
She had been going to ask about
the
cannwyll gorff
. She stopped
herself. What could she say? Guto, I'm scared. There is something badly wrong
in the village and I don't think I can handle it.
"Hello . . . Bethan . . .
?"
But if she said any more then
Guto would say it was quite clear that in her state of mind Bethan should not
be spending the night alone, and so . . .
"Are you still there,
Bethan?"
"Yes ... I ... It doesn't
matter," she said. "
Nos da
,
Guto."
"You take care of
yourself," he said.
It would have been nice to go out for
a drink. And a chat, Just a chat. She wondered: did I say no because it would not
be seemly for a widow of less than a year to be seen out with Guto Evans on a Saturday
night in Pontmeurig?