The Lamp of the Wicked (22 page)

‘The saintly Father Colm, with his stately manners and his high-flown rhetoric and his political friends, and his thin, white hands all over a quiet girl, Niamh Fagan, who was my friend. But that… Ah, you see, it’s too perfect, that’s the real problem.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Too neat and hard, it seems to me now, and it doesn’t capture the glory of it all. The picture, Merrily – doesn’t capture the quite
explosive
glory of the moment, and I never really expected it to, but I thought the moment should be commemorated here nonetheless.’

Merrily moistened dry lips.

‘The moment?’

The unsettling thing was that Merrily was sure she could remember the exact day, last April or May… a ferocious electric storm heralding rain that had been almost equatorial. A Sunday. Tourists in the village hurrying into the church porch. Jane bored because Eirion had the flu and she’d been stuck indoors all weekend.

‘A flash of lightning, Merrily! A flash so wild and bright I had to shut my eyes against it. And when I opened them, the whole of the sky was as black as a peatbog, and then’ – the soft voice putting a thrill in the still air of the underground chapel – ‘came the tiny light, right at the centre, in the very darkest part of the storm.’

The church steeple in the painting was, without any doubt, Ledwardine’s, shooting out of crowded apple trees, with the wooded hills behind it and the stormy sky above, charcoal clouds delicately parted as if by the point of the sword, and the light oozing through in violet-magnesium bubbles.

‘The little light’s growing larger before my eyes, until it’s like a ball, or an egg shape, like some UFO thing. But I knew from the first that it would be more than that, more glorious.’

Merrily looked at the white figure, the sword-bearer: not Michael nor Gabriel but, apparently, Uriel, a peripheral archangel. Uriel came from the Biblical fringe, the Apocrypha.

As I stood there on that little hill’ – Jenny Box stood up – ‘absolutely transfixed, there was a sudden’ – she swung her arm – ‘
slash
of fork lightning, and the lightning itself became the sword. The sword
was
the lightning. You know? And I just shut my eyes, Merrily, and the rain came down, so very hard that I was soaked to the skin inside a minute. Soaked through, and laughing like a fool.’

Jenny Box’s face shone with joy in the altar lights. She’d stolen the show, had been in charge from the beginning. There had been no way of putting
that
question –
So
was
it you who brought a sack full of money into the church last night?
– not now, not here in Jenny’s private chapel, Jenny’s holy space, in the light of the candles and Jenny’s holy vision.

‘So I drove down to the village, and by the time I got here, in less than ten minutes, it had almost stopped raining and the weakest of suns had come out. And here I am, walking around the village in a dream, burning inside with the white heat of pure joy. I’m walking around the square, looking up at the old buildings and just
revelling
in the atmosphere… not the quaintness – that’s all rubbish – but this tenuous strand of sanctity that still threaded its way through the streets in spite of all this commercialism. I seemed to see the thread unravelling before me, and so I followed it and… you can guess the rest.’

‘It led you here?’

‘There was a FOR SALE sign. The only one in the whole village, as I remember.’

Merrily tried for a smile. ‘These things happen.’

But they didn’t really, did they? Not very often.

‘They do. I know that now.’ Mrs Box’s face was flooded with happiness. But, at the same time, Merrily was recalling the sense of loneliness and
disturbance
which had blown like dry leaves around the woman in the square on the night of the fire.

‘And I knocked on the door, and the people didn’t want to show me around at all – “Oh, you’ve got to go through the agent,” they said, but I insisted, I was very strong that day, and I felt the absolute rightness of it and I virtually made an offer there and then. I don’t think for one minute they believed me – thought I ‘was some stupid, doolally tourist woman, but it didn’t matter. I left the house and the sun was shining, and I walked down to the church, and it was there – it was right there in the churchyard – that I was granted another small vision: the one that clinched it.’

Merrily was silent. Too many visions.

Mrs Jenny Box, née Jenny Driscoll, this former model, this former minor TV-person turned successful businesswoman, said, ‘What I saw was… I saw
you
.’

Merrily looked down at her own hands, one squeezing the other.

‘In your dog collar and your long white tunic. Walking out of the church, talking to some visitor-type people with their anoraks and their cameras. I saw
you
…
all in white
. And I felt I was in the centre… of the future.’

Merrily became aware that she was no longer the least bit cold. Too warm, if anything.

‘Will we pray now?’ Mrs Box said very softly. ‘Will we pray together?’

By the time Merrily got back to the vicarage, she was disgusted with herself: woman of straw.

In the scullery, the computer took for ever to boot up. It was a reconditioned PC bought primarily to receive e-mails, mainly from Sophie, and it hadn’t seemed too healthy for some weeks now.

There was one message highlighted, from ‘Deliverance’, subject ‘Extraterrestrial’, and she printed it out. Couldn’t get her feet under the desk because of the bin sack, which she now had no damn choice but to take to Uncle Ted.

After those brief and nervous prayers, Mrs Box had been very gracious, giving Merrily tea, giving her fruit cake, in a white-walled, low-beamed parlour that was furnished almost frugally: two grey sofas, a low, Shaker-style table, no pictures on the walls. And Merrily, sitting in the middle of one of the sofas, on the crack between two cushions, had said, eventually, ‘We’ve had… there’s been a donation.’

Watching Jenny Box who knew it, arranging herself on one of the sofas, a bleached sunbeam stroking her hair.

‘To the church,’ Merrily said. ‘A substantial donation.’

‘Really?’ Mrs Box smiling vaguely. ‘That’s really wonderful. I’m so glad.’

‘It’s a very large amount, in cash. So large that… I’m not sure I can keep it.’

‘Oh? Why ever not?’

‘Because a cash donation of that size is bound to be considered—’

‘Miraculous?’ said Mrs Box. ‘An answer to a prayer? To a dilemma?’

‘Suspicious. Because it’s anonymous, and in cash.’

Jenny Box inclined her head to one side, appearing to consider the implications and then said, in that light, velvety voice of hers, ‘Well, now, surely, if the donor didn’t want to put his or her name on the bottom of a cheque, then it would not be in the spirit of the gift for you to institute inquiries and thus risk causing unwarranted embarrassment. Would it not be the thing to treat it as just the most lovely coincidence and perhaps even an indication from God that turning His House into a place of business was not the way ahead?’

Merrily nodded, smiling weakly. Had she really been expecting a confession? Under the surface vulnerability, Jenny Box was clever, a slick operator – and rich. But that didn’t make it feel any more right. So much of this seemed wavery, blurred by an intermittent aura of flickering instability.
I saw you… all in white. And I felt I was in the centre… of the future
.

Had she been wearing the surplice that afternoon… the white alb? She didn’t remember.

But, to Merrily’s knowledge, no one throughout the recorded history of the village had ever claimed to have seen an angel lighting up the sky over Ledwardine Church.

Hard to say which was the most unlikely: that or aliens in Underhowle.

***

I’m sorry, Merrily, this took rather a long time to find, and as, like most of Canon Dobbs’s files, it was handwritten, I’m afraid I had to type it out. I’m now back in the office, if you have any more queries.

Sophie.

How extraordinary! Not, I would have thought, Canon

Dobbs’s ‘thing’ at all.

The report itself, dated April 1997, was quite short.

Subject:

Miss Melanie Pullman, of 14 Goodrich Close, Underhowle, near Ross-on-Wye.

Source:

The Reverend Iain Ossler, temporary priest-in-charge, Ross Rural.

Nature of the problem:

Nocturnal disturbances of unknown origins.

The attending minister, Canon THB Dobbs, states: I was asked to look into this most bemusing case by the Reverend Ossler who, having been consulted by the family of the subject, was unable to determine whether or not it fell within the purview of the Christian Ministry of Exorcism. I found Miss Melanie Pullman to be a relatively articulate young woman of some eighteen years, an employee of Boots the Chemist in Ross-on-Wye, who had been left in a somewhat confused and, I would say, debilitated condition, allegedly resulting from a series of ‘experiences’ at her home over a period of four to six months.

Merrily wondered what Melanie Pullman had made of Canon Dobbs with his eroded graveyard archangel’s face and no discernible sense of humour. A man who had rejected the term ‘Deliverance’ and all attempts to introduce a series of guidelines for Anglican exorcists.

I interviewed Miss Pullman in the presence of her mother, Mrs Audrey Pullman, and her elder brother, Mr Terence Pullman. Throughout the interview, Miss Pullman complained of headaches and said she had been experiencing a number of physical symptoms, which the family general practitioner had diagnosed as a nervous condition, subsequently prescribing small amounts of Valium. The family dwelling is a former council house on an estate of similar homes and has no record of psychic disturbance, according to my inquiries with previous owners/tenants. Miss Pullman recounted a number of incidents, an example of which I quote here, from my notes. ‘I awoke in the early hours of the morning to find that the television set in the corner of my bedroom had inexplicably activated itself. I am certain that I had switched it off, as usual, before falling asleep. However, there was neither picture nor sound, only a blinding white light on the screen which I could not look at for long.’

Inexplicably activated itself
. Merrily wondered what terminology Melanie had actually used.

‘This light eventually became dimmer and finally faded away. However, concurrent with this, I became aware that my bed itself was becoming bathed in an orange light which became increasingly bright.’ Miss Pullman then related a most confusing story of apparently being taken from her bed and losing consciousness and subsequently awakening in what she described as a ‘spacecraft’ of a spherical nature where she was laid upon a white metal table and subjected to an intimate physical examination by humanoid creatures, which she described as being thin and grey with unusually large heads and eyes like black mirrors. She claimed the examination concluded with one of the creatures having sexual intercourse with her. Asked if she would describe this experience as rape, Miss Pullman became embarrassed and said that she would not. Her mother later explained that, some days afterwards, Miss Pullman had been treated by her doctor for what was described as a vaginal infection. Whilst my information is that reports of this type of alleged experience are not uncommon, particularly in the United States of America, it was my impression that Miss Pullman had indeed undergone some manner of hallucinatory or ‘dream’ experience. That is, I did not believe that she was ‘making it up’. The central question, however, remains: was demonic interference involved? I have learned that some investigators of the phenomenon known as ‘alien abduction’ have proposed a correlation between this type of experience and folkloric tales of people who were ‘taken by the fairies’ as they slept, sometimes with similar suggestions of sexual interference, often resulting in the birth of a ‘changeling’ offspring. As Miss Pullman does not appear to have become pregnant, I would be inclined to rule out any involvement of so-called elemental forces! My own tests, through prayer and meditation, failed to detect the presence of a demonic evil, but I remained concerned by Miss Pullman’s physical conditions, which had led to her taking considerable time off work and, according to her mother ‘moping about the house’. Accordingly, after blessing the premises, with the use of holy water, I had a short meeting with the general practitioner, Dr Ruck, whom I must say I found to be less than helpful. Dr Ruck stated that this was the second such case reported to him within a year, from the same housing development in Underhowle, and he considered it to be a ‘fad’ among young people, arising from certain popular films and television programmes. I asked the Pullman family to keep me informed about any future developments but have not heard from them since.

CANON T. H. B. DOBBS,
DIOCESAN EXORCIST,
HEREFORD.

Merrily was unexpectedly impressed by Canon Dobbs’s general diligence and open-mindedness. OK, this hadn’t, unfortunately, extended to women priests – and women exorcists in particular. But he
had
done his best with what, to him, must have been a perplexingly contemporary kind of haunting.

The idea of aliens as post-modern fairies was one she’d heard before. True, there was no suggestion of the demonic here, nothing for the Deliverance ministry to combat with traditional means. But who
did
you go to when you were convinced that something which you couldn’t resist had arrived in the night and taken you away for experimentation?

Certainly not the police. If she showed this to Frannie Bliss, it would only put question marks over Melanie’s mental state. As for the doctor: bloody Valium, the universal panacea.