December (92 page)

      
'Not God,' Moira says. 'Not the angelic host.'
      
'I don't like to think what he saw,
but he needed a sacrifice. And then along comes the famous Aelwyn the Dreamer,
bard and peacemonger. He's on the run, he needs somewhere de Braose can't touch
him.
Come in, come in
, says genial
Richard.
Sit down, have a glass of French
plonk, give us a song.'

      
'And then,' says Moira, 'one of the monks gets on his horse and
goes back to this guy de Braose and says, "Hey, guess who we've got!"
I don't think we need to go into the rest.'

      
She bends over the hole, sifts gently about with her fingers, looks
up. 'Guess what.'

      
'He's here?' Simon joins her. 'I wondered about that.'
      
'These fragments are bone. Look ...
You reckon they maybe chopped down the oak and built this stone thing around it
and then put his body ...?'

      
'No room for a body,' Simon says. 'How about just his head?
Maybe they put his head on the stump and erected the tomb around it. You can't
tell from this mush.'
      
A shadow falls across the hole.

      
It is Tom. He takes a resigned breath and looks down. After a
minute or two, he begins to shudder rigidly. Moira takes his hand, holds him
back.

      
'What they did,' Tom says slowly, 'is dug the original foundations
around the roots. Can you see the roots? No? They chop off the poor bleeder's
head and they shove it into the roots.
So that the roots is, like, enclosing his head. Like serpents. Representing ...
well, we all know what serpents represent. And then they wall him up. Encoded
in evil. His eyes open, staring up
 
into
darkness. For centuries.'
      
Tom steps back, his own eyes hot
with pain.
      
'We got to get this poor sucker
out,' Tom says.

Squatting in bracken, Meryl
is covered in blue light.

      
She looks at her hands: they glow softly blue. When she opens
her mouth, she breathes in blue air.

      
She looked up once - almost - but the light was too bright and
her head is bowed again.

      
Has she been praying? Did she pray to the Lady Bluefoot and
the Lady answered?

      
Diaphanous curtains of blue, the luminescence of a grotto,
fall around her. Like the grotto at Lourdes, recreated here in the wintry hills
of Gwent. Meryl's whole body is racked with long shivers of ecstasy, a body electric
in a cloak of electric blue.

      
Can she look into the face of the Lady Bluefoot, who stands so
tall and still not three yards away?
      
Can she?
      
Dare she?

      
Meryl covers her face with her hands. Blue light seeps through
her fingers.

      
Slowly, reverently, she rises to her feet. The Lady, her
silvery-blue hair loosely bunched in a net, turns imperiously and glides away,
those tiny, blue-shod feet lost now in the folds of her long gown, which falls
into powder and tints the mist.

      
Meryl follows, bathed in grace.
      
Where are they going? Back to the
cold stones of the Abbey? She thinks not. They are going home. Back to Hall
Farm, where poor Martin waits, in mourning for his housekeeper and his house-ghost.

      
We're coming, Martin, we're
coming.

      
The Lady Bluefoot flickers in the mist and Meryl hurries
behind. The lovely ghost makes her own tunnel of light, and it's so warm inside
that Meryl sheds her coat and lets the mist take it. Cocooned in blue, she skips
across the bracken and down into frosted pastures.

      
We're coming, Martin,
We're coming back.

      
Meryl dances freely, at one with the winter night. She glides
over furrows filled with fresh ice, through a hawthorn hedge without feeling
it, between the boughs of sleeping trees.

      
And she's waiting.

      
The Lady Bluefoot has stopped and turned to face Meryl,
opening her arms, her long sleeves a blur of light.
      
Oh,
yes.

      
They're standing on level ground in a clearing; no trees, no
stones. The Lady beckons and Meryl hesitates for a second.

      
This is the moment.
      
Can she?
      
Dare she?

      
A blue finger is crooked.

      
'Oh
, yes!
' Laughing
with joy, Meryl runs into the clearing, a roaring in her ears, a squealing
she's never felt so happy - and her own arms open wide to embrace …

      
... the rigid, bony shoulders.

      
To kiss ...

      
... the rotting, withered corpse-cheek.

There was no way he could
have seen her. Even Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones, following close behind in
his own car, will testify to this.

      
Well, sure, they were going fast, both of them - a child's
life at stake.

      
'Martin! No!
'
Shelley screams, and rams her back into the seat, instinctively bracing herself
for the impact, thinking this will add reverse momentum as Martin hits the
brakes.

      
But Shelley never thought this was how it happens, that it
could be quite so horrible, as the Jaguar breaks both the woman's legs and
throws her spinning on to the bonnet, so that her face is suddenly in the
windscreen, wide-eyed, wide mouthed, lips torn back over teeth smashed by the
glass.

      
Shelley cowers as the car howls and lurches to a stop, full of
headlights from behind, to show the empty driver's seat, the blur of Martin
hurling himself out, leaving his door wide open.
      
She sits there, almost relaxed, for
what could be minutes but was probably only seconds, listens to the soporific,
low hum of voices. And then she quietly lets herself out of the car and walks
around the bonnet on legs like sponge.

      
The woman in the headlights is flimsily clad for such a night,
pale silk blouse is torn and soaked with blood. Martin is kneeling over her,
his head buried in a half-exposed breast.
      
The scene shimmers, dreamlike.

      
Martin's sobbing. There's blood all over the breast and over
his face. He doesn't care; he presses his face into the breast. He's shaking,
his arms tightly around her; she isn't. She's very calm and still.

      
Meryl smiles happily through the bubbling blood where she's
bitten through her tongue.

VII

Stricken Angel

The words
C. F. Martin & Co
are indented in
the side of the black guitar case Simon carries out of the door of the studio.
      
Tom, Moira and Prof follow him out.
      
'Excuse me,' Prof says, 'but I'm
not getting this. Where is he going?'

      
'He's going to the other tower, Prof.' Moira stops in the
doorway and they watch Simon stroll, head down, across the frosted grass, the
guitar case swinging from his right hand. The tower with no roof. He reckons
you can climb to the top and when you emerge you're above the mist line when
the sun comes up over the Skirrid. When the sun rises you're no longer the Abbey's,
you're under the influence of... something else.'

      
'But that's hours off. He's gonna stay up there until daylight?
Just him and the bones?'

      
'Hopefully, just him and the bones.'

      
She doesn't sound too sure.

      
'You're worried, aren't you, girl?'

      
'Maybe. Just give me a few minutes, huh?' Moira walked away from
him into the mist. 'I need to think.'

The mist lit by blue.

      
Gwyn Arthur Jones stands up, a reassuring hand on Martin's
shoulder, to find blue revolving lights behind him. What's going on? He's not
sent for any troops. Has that bloody Eddie ...?

      
Blue revolving beacons, the simultaneous slamming of doors.

      
'OK, just stay where you are, please.'

      
Gwyn recognises them both. PCs Burwarton and Griffiths.
      
'Radio for an ambulance, boy,' Gwyn
says. 'Come on, don't piss about.'

      
'I beg your pardon, mate,
we
decide when to ...'
      
Gwyn directs his torch beam at his
own face.
      
'Oh, shit. Sorry, sir, I didn't recognise
you, sir.' The boy looks confused. 'What's happening, sir? We were told a chap
had electrocuted himself up at the Abbey.'

      
'Were you indeed? Well, now you're dealing with an RTA. Get an
ambulance.'
      
'One's already on its way, sir. For
the chap at the Ab—'
      
'That's a formality, Kelvyn? Is he
dead?'
      
'So we understand.'

      
In that case, when it comes, get this woman shipped to Nevill
Hall. Not that there's any hope here either. You'll need a statement from this
gentleman. Be kind to him; she dashed out
in the road directly in front of him, as I'll be confirming when you take
my
statement. Later. Understood?'
      
'What about the Abbey, sir?'

      
'
I
shall deal with
that. And I'll be taking the lady with me. Is all that clear, Kelvyn?'

      
'Yes, sir.'

      
'Splendid,' says Gwyn Arthur. 'Come away now, Mrs Storey,
there's nothing you can do.'

In the corner of the ruins,
where it seems a bite has been taken out of the tower, where there are fences
for the protection of the public and a sign that warns you to keep out, a
shadow detaches

itself from the wall and
stands amid the rubble in front of Simon.

      
'You feeling brave tonight, Simon?'

      
Simon stops. The plastic handle of the guitar case is sweaty
in his hand.
      
'Piss off, Sile.'
      
'Nice language for a vicar.'

      
'If you don't get out of my way,' Simon says, keeping his voice
tight, 'the vicar's going to take this guitar case and ram it up your fucking
balls.'

      
Sile sniffs. 'That's Reilly's case, isn't it? Why do you want
to take Reilly's guitar for a walk? Some mystical ritual I don't know about?'

      
Simon makes no reply.

      
'What's in the case, Simon? Aelwyn's bits?'

      
Simon says, 'I'm going to count to five.'

      
Sile laughs. 'Which film was that in, lad?' He puts out an
amused hand to pat Simon gently on the cheek. Simon reels back, but he isn't
quick enough. He feels a bite of cold air on the left side of his face.

      
Sile chuckles. As he walks away, Simon hears the click of the knife
blade snapped back into the handle. 'That should fetch him,' Sile says
nonchalantly. 'Good luck, lad.'

Her long skirt skims over
the ankle-deep frozen grass; it's like walking across a hairbrush.

      
The thought of a hairbrush leads to thoughts of a comb held in
dead hands on a white-clad, dead breast six feet under Scotland. And from there
to loneliness, emptiness, helplessness and depression.

      
It would never have worked out with Davey, would it? All these
years knowing they were consecutive links on the Abbey's chain of death. Well, she
knew it - all he could see, presumably, was his own death taunting him as a
black halo around Moira's head.

      
You can't win. Don't ever think you can interpret the signs
and the portents; you're always going to be wrong in one tiny crucial detail.

      
Oh,
Davey
.

      
She inhales a sob, seeing again that vivid blue flash which lights
up the whole booth. And thinking of another blue flash, a glorious delphinium
blue, in a seedy room in the Clydeview Private Hotel.

      
Deathoak, breadwinner
- all the clues written in neon.