No, she decided. If I'd thought
that I would have gone.
Saturday night was probably the reason the seventeen pubs survived.
They had come into Pontmeurig
now, from all the outlying villages and the hill farms, sometimes six or seven
of them in a single Land-Rover. Farmers, farmers' sons, farmers' grandsons. Even
a few women, these days. Some of the men would get quietly and expertly drunk.
A handful would make a macho celebration out of it, and there would perhaps be
a fight, a smashed window, a beer glass flung in the street, splintering
against the kerb or somebody's head.
A yellow haze of smoke and
steam, beer fumes and chip fat settled on the street below the lighted window
of the apartment over Hampton's bookshop. In the window, Bethan was a still
silhouette.
She drew the thin curtains,
turned back to the sadly over-crowded sitting room, drank tea and glared at the
dark green cover of the book lying on the sofa. Sali Dafis. Aged seven.
A bright child. Confident
too—winner of the recitation prize for her age-group at this year's Urdd
Eisteddfod, where three other children from the school had also won prizes. Which
was incredible for a little village school with twenty-four pupils. One of the
judges had commented this was clearly a school where children were encouraged
to be imaginative. He could say that again. Bethan thought. She remembered
Buddug, huge and beaming, in audience. Buddug, quite rightly, taking all the
credit because Bethan had been away looking after a sick husband,
Then mourning for a dead husband.
She was back now. She didn't have to
return, she'd terminated her lease on the cottage. She could have gone anywhere,
stayed in the city, where there was no silence and no sense of a gathering
darkness.
Parting the curtains, Bethan
looked down into the street, watched four youths standing outside the Drovers'
Arms nursing beer glasses, admiring a motor bike. She thought, I should have
gone. Maybe it was my last chance. I've been too long with death.
Irritated and restless now, she
snatched the green exercise book from the sofa. Sali Dafis was the daughter of
the man who ran the garage. Her mother had died when Sali was a baby; the child
had been raised by her grandmother, Mrs. Bronwen Dafis. a withered crone who
dispensed heart remedies and told fortunes.
And who, Bethan thought,
frowning, was also a friend of Buddug's.
She got out her red pen,
intending not to mark Sali's exercise but to write, "See me after
school" at the bottom it, because the child needed help. She had a vague
memory of Sali's mother, a little blonde-haired secretary from Essex whom
Dilwyn had met on holiday.
As she started to write "
gwel
. . at the bottom of the second
drawing, Bethan's red ballpoint pen ran out. Without thinking, she bustled into
the bedroom to pinch a pen from the inside pocket of Robin's jacket in the
wardrobe. Stood there with the wardrobe door half-open, a hand inside feeling
from coat to coat. Her coats. Realising then that Robin's jacket had never been
in this bedroom, had gone long ago to the Oxfam shop, probably with the pens
still in the pocket.
I'm not going to cry, she told
herself. I'm going to laugh. But she couldn't make her lips go through the
motions.
She heard a scornful, trailing
cheer from the street outside, as she went back into the living room, edging around
cumbersome furniture she didn't need any more..
A male voice hooted and a girl
screamed in excitement as Bethan sat down at the table to continue her note to
Sali in pencil.
"Geraint, don't . . .
!" the girl squealed in the street and Bethan knew that whatever it was
Geraint was doing the girl really didn't mind. It was about romance.
Bethan looked up from the
table. By the wan light of the Victorian brass standard lamp, their first
Christmas present from Robin's mother in Durham, she saw a little attic flat
over somebody else's failed bookshop in a town which had been falling apart for
five centuries.
Single person's accommodation,
Bethan thought.
She broke down then, a hot rush
of despair, over the horror-comic drawings of Sali Dafis, aged seven.
For three nights before Robin died, the village women said, the
cannwyll gorff
had been seen. First in
the churchyard, then over the river.
Finally, hanging solemnly in the
still air outside their cottage.
When Bethan raised her head from the table she saw that the pages of the
exercise book were crumpled and tear-stained,
I spilled tea on your book, she would
tell Sali on Monday, I shall have to give you a new one. I'm sorry. All your
nice drawings.
Feeling suddenly light-headed,
she almost rang Guto back to say yes, she would go out with him and they would
get very, very drunk.
She didn't, though. It was not
the time.
Chapter III
Above him the whitewashed ceiling gleamed faintly between beams as thick
as railway sleepers. The heavy bed of Victorian mahogany was creaking below
like the timbers a sailing ship.
Sinking.
Head rolling back on the
pillow, he closed his eyes.
. . . And his mind was alive
with images, burgling his brain like fragments of a dream getting through from other
side of sleep, as if they couldn't wait. Black tower in a purple sky,
perpendicular tower, wooden bell-stage, in tiers . . .
Always ends in tiers, he
thought ludicrously. Opening his eyes again, he tried to calm his thoughts,
remembering pushing at the door of the inn to escape from the cloying dark. Then
the yellow light, beer haze, oak beams, the ceaseless banter—the overwhelming
relief of it, of being back amongst these tiresome people with their
impenetrable language. Still not closing time when he'd returned. How had he
made it back so quickly?
Pounding pain in his chest now.
He reached to the bedside cabinet for a Trinitrin. Slipped it under his tongue.
How had he got back? He remembered the
stink of decay all around him in the churchyard. Remembered trying to find the
steps in the mist. Then nothing until the door and the yellow light. Inside,
they had seemed almost pleased to see him.
"All right then, Professor?"
"Well hell, man, you look
cold . . ."
"Course he's cold, Morgan.
Bloody church—sorry, Reverend—always cold, that church. No heating, see. Get him
a drink, for God's sake, Aled."
"Oh, I'm so sorry. Doctor
Ingley. Should have replaced these batteries weeks ago, but you know how it is.
Look, my fault, have a drink. What is it to be now, nice drop of brandy? Best
Welsh brandy, mind…"
"Thank you, no. I think
I'll go directly to bed."
"Big mistake, Professor.
First time this year Aled's offered anybody a free tot of his precious bloody
brandy. Never see it again."
"Leave him be, Morgan.
Poor man's knackered."
"Oh aye, leave him be,
now, is it Aled? Any excuse, you bugger."
"I'm sorry, I. . . good
night."
"Night, Professor."
"
Nos da i chi!
"
Still the pain.
Another Trinitrin. Worked in
seconds, they always worked in seconds. He lay there in the bed, not moving,
the pill under his tongue. It was a small room; just beyond the bed was a lumbering
Victorian wardrobe, to its right the uncurtained window hanging open for air,
bringing in the sounds of glasses jingling as they were collected in the bar
below, laughter, oaths, a
nos da
or
two.
He was uncomfortable and tried
to roll over. But when he moved the pain ripped through his chest like the
roots of a tree being torn out of the ground,
Christ.
Breathe. Come on, breathe
steadily.
His eyes closed by themselves.
Creaking of the bed. Wooden
bed. Wooden bellstage, moulded doorway eighteenth-century, heptagonal font,
perpendicular tower . . . black on purple . . . falling . . .
God in heaven, I don't know where I am
. . .
Blindfold
we could find our way . . .
Calm down. It wasn't a candle,
candle, andle, ndle . . .
Sharp, probing pain now, deep
in his chest, like a slender knife going in . . .
. . . and his eyes came open,
to show him there
was
a candle. At
the bottom of the bed. Just above his feet. The flame did not waver.
He shut out the image in frozen
panic. It was only a symbol, a motif summoned by his subconscious, an hallucination,
a manifestation of the corruption in his system - a sick body's attempt to bring
down the mind to its own level of decay.
Dying people, he thought in
silent hysteria, conjured up choirs of angels, all that nonsense. Chemicals.
And his own chemicals now, flooding about uncontrollably, mixing the toxic
cocktails, how ironic they should throw off such an image. The corpse candle.
Harbinger of death. Flickering from the periphery of his scholarly probings
into a society still obsessed with its own mythology.
He could make this candle go
away. He could send it back to his subconscious. He was furious now. He would not
submit to this invasion. And he would not die. Damned if he would.
Damned if he . . .
Ingley squeezed his eyes shut,
trying to squeeze rationality into his thoughts . . . and found himself walking
up the aisle of the church, footsteps on stone,
tock, tock, tock
. . .
Turn back, turn back, turn back . . . !
tock, tock, tock
. . .
Can't . . . Can't go on . . .
Must go back . . .
Drawn steadily down the aisle
towards the steep window leaking livid light into the nave.
He struggled frantically to open his eyes, didn't care now what arcane
symbol they would show him, so long as it could pull him out of this place of
old, forgotten, stinking evil. He felt himself rolling about in the bed,
sweating cold fluid, screaming inside. But his eyelids, fastened down like heavy
blinds, would not move. He remembered as a boy being shut by older boys inside
a wall cupboard where there was barely room to breathe and heaving at the door
in helpless panic, his first experience of claustrophobia, the stifling terror.
tock . . . tock . . .
Please. Let me go. I'm sorry,
oh God, I'm sorry.
It was cold in the church. The
altar cloth was white, with a mulberry splash, like an old bloodstain, where it
caught light through the long windows. The altar was where you turned left,
three paces to . . .
No . . . !"
Three paces.
tock
. . .
The air thickened and vibrated
with a frigid energy.
tock
. . .
No. Please . . . Can't . . .
Jesus Christ, let me out!
tock
A long black shadow arose in
his path. He screamed. Screamed to get out of the church. Screamed for his eyes
to open. But it was as if, while his mind was elsewhere, both lids had been
very precisely stitched up.
. . . but the stone eyelids of the
knight sprang open, and his eyes were of cold amethyst light. His hands
unclasped from prayer, chipped knuckles, white bone beneath the stone, seeking
one's throat. His stone mouth splintered into a grin.
Thomas Ingley threw all that
remained of his strength into the fight to re-enter his bedroom at the inn,
like pushing and pushing at a seized-up manhole cover to escape from the fetid
cellar, the strain tearing at his poor exhausted heart, stretching and popping
like rotted rubber.
Don't
want to know who you are. Don't care anymore who you are! But please . . .
don't let it happen here, to be held forever among the deep shadows and the
misty mauveness. . .