Candlenight (61 page)

Hunched on a stool in the dark beside the kitchen stove, his head in his
hands, Aled wept savage tears, while the crazy-drunk reporter banged his fist
on the bartop and screamed abuse at the Welsh nation.

   
Aled was not weeping for the
Welsh nation.

   
He was weeping because it was
the end of everything.

   
".
. . on to the line at Aber station. Some sort of dizzy spell, perhaps . . . no,
nothing anyone could do ... So sorry, we are, Aled, sorry I have to tell you
like this, too, but the weather ..."

   
"Come out, you little twat!
No sodding guts, any of you. Come out. I want a bleeding drink!"

   
A shattering. Glasses, newly-rinsed.

   
The most beautiful pub in the
most beautiful village in . . .

   
Aled howled aloud at the night,
at the village, at the heat, at the snow, at the
Gorsedd
.
   
"
What time?"

   
"Not
long after seven. Apparently, she just disappeared, went out alone . . . must
have been confused, see, they said . . ."

   
Seven o'clock.

   
"
Bethan
, why do you have to do this to me . . . ?"
   
He came slowly to his feet.
   
"I'm helping myself, Alec, all
right?"
   
"Don't be a pillock,
Charlie." Another English voice.
   
"Yeah, well, this way I
know
I'm not being bleeding poisoned.
All right. Alec? That make sense to you?"
   
More glasses smashing.

   
But Aled's fingers were no
longer shaking as he lit a candle, set it on a saucer and, holding the candle
before him, went out of the kitchen the back way, through the scullery
and into a stone-walled storeroom with no windows.

   
The storeroom had a long,
narrow, metal cupboard, which was padlocked.

   
Aled put the candle on an old
worktable, his hands flat on the cool metal cupboard door. Hesitated there a
moment. And then felt about on the ledge above the storeroom door, where the
key lay in grease and dust.

   
He undid the padlock, left it
hanging from the lock as he felt inside the cupboard and found what he'd come
for.

Guto and Alun lifted Miranda, all legs, into the back seat of the Range
Rover.

   
"This is folly. Guto.
Isn't there supposed to be a doctor here in the village?"

   
"Are you going to drive,
or shall I?"

   
"Let me at least knock on
a few doors first, get word to Emlyn to come and pick up the other reporters.
Will take me no more than two minutes. We brought them here, after all."

   
"Stuff the party image,"
Guto shouted, loud enough to have awoken Miranda from any normal slumber.
"For God's sake, look at the place! You'll knock and knock and no bugger
will answer!"

   
Few of the cottages even showed
the glow of candlelight or an oil-lamp now, and yet there was somehow a sense
of silent, listening people behind every door.

   
"I mean, is this flaming
normal? Atmosphere is as if there's been a nuclear alert."

   
"Yes. It's strange."

   
"So get moving, man. We
have to get her to the hospital in Pont. And anyway—" Guto got in the
back, lifting Miranda's head onto his knees, "—I wouldn't trust the bastard
doctor here, and don't ask me why."

   
Alun climbed into the driver's
seat. Guto saying, "In fact I wouldn't trust any bastard in Y Groes. Don't
worry, Emlyn'll go back for them when he's ready."

   
The elderly Range Rover clattered
into life, was rapidly reversed by Alun into the alleyway by the useless
electricity sub-station, wheels spinning in the thin skim of snow.
         
Guto, looking over at the hills, made
majestic by the snow, thinking. Oh God, don't let us get stuck up there.

   
"Jesus," he said, a
hand on Miranda's check. "She's not even warm. Heat. Put the heat
on."

   
"You're joking,
it's—"

   
"Put the bugger on full
blast, man!" He smoothed Miranda's icy brow. "She can't — I mean,
people can't just die, just like that, can they?"

   
"So who is she really?"
Alun steered the Range Rover across the bridge. "Not a journalist, then
"

   
Guto's hand moved over
Miranda's throat, searching for a pulse, not knowing where it was supposed to
be.

   
"Does it matter?" He
felt his voice beginning to crack. Oh, Jesus, how abruptly, and with what brutality,
life was coming at him these days. Despair to euphoria to an even deeper
despair.

   
Alun braked hard.

   
"Strewth man, you'll have
her on the floor."
   
"What is it?" Alun said.
   
"Whatever it is, sod it."

   
"No, something odd here.
Guto. A jacket over the wall. And—trousers. No, a skirt. It's a skirt."

   
"Bloody hell, Alun, were
you never young? Step on it!"

   
"In the middle of the road,
Guto? A skirt discarded in the middle of the road?"

   
Following a scuffle of footprints,
he swung the Range Rover off the road and into the entrance to the track that
led into the woods, drove up it until it became too narrow for a
vehicle.

   
Where he braked hard again and
the engine stalled. And the headlights illuminated a wondrously ghastly
tableau.

   
"God," Alun whispered
in horror, and in awe.

   
He seemed uncertain, at first,
about what to do. Then, efficient as ever, he calmly opened the driver's door,
leaned out and was copiously sick in the snow.

   
Grabbing up a handful of
unsoiled snow, he washed around his mouth, rubbed some into his eyes and sat
back and closed them, reaching out with his right hand to pull the door shut.

   
Al the very instant it slammed
into place, Guto thought he was aware of a distant blast, someone shooting at a
rabbit in the winter hills.

   
Hesitantly, he lifted up Miranda's
head, leaned across the back of Alun's seat, looked out through the windscreen
and sat down very quickly.

   
"Jesus," he said.

   
Alun sat up, put the Range
Rover into reverse and looked constantly over his shoulder until they were back
on the road and the headlights no longer lit a recumbent, erotic sculpture in
marble, two figures coitally entwined, utterly still, frozen together for ever.

   
"It's a nightmare,
Guto," Alun said. "It has got to be a nightmare."

Yes. Of course. Sure. A nightmare. A dream from which you had to free
yourself. The difference was that, in a dream, when that thought came to you,
the realisation that you were in fact dreaming would wake you up at once.
   
This was the difference.

   
He tried to speak, to scream at
the circle of black, malevolent trees under the white moon. He tried to scream
out, you are not here, you are someplace else, this is a church for Chrissake .
. .

   
These lines only came to him as
vague things, nothing so solid as words.

   
Sice
, the mist said, blown from the bellows. The mist had risen to
cover the altar, but it may have been a mist inside his own head because this
was how it was in dreams.

   
siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!

   
"
Sais,"
Giles Freeman hissed, a red spectre staggering out of
the mist in a torn and soaking suit, with a bulging black eye. "Means
English. Often used in a derogatory way,
like the Scots say Sassenach. Satisfied now?"

   
A string somewhere was pulled.
A big door opened and closed. Thunk. Breath came back to Berry Morelli, air blasting
down a wind-tunnel.

   
"DIM SAIS!," he cried
out. stumbling out into the nave, arms waving, "DYDWY DDIM YN SAIS, YOU
BASTARDS!"

   
"We never said you was,
man," Dai Death said calmly. "Come on out now."

Bethan, waiting by the lych gate, saw Dai Williams and Idwal Pugh
leaving the church with Berry Morelli, him gesturing at them, as if arguing. He
was all right. He was not dying by the tomb, leaking dark blood over the stone
flags.

   
Bethan's relief was stifled by
the realisation that nothing had changed. The air still was fetid, the
moonstreaked sky bulging over Y Groes like the skin of a rotting plum.

   
She did not go to him but
slipped back through the lych gate and hurried a little way along the road
until she saw a track winding between the silhouettes of two giant sycamores.

Chapter LXXI

Around the timber framed porch for several yards in all directions, the
snow was as pink as birthday-cake icing and this had nothing to do with the
strawberry sky.

   
When they dragged his body out,
Charlie Firth seemed to have a hole in him the size of a grapefruit. As if he'd
been punched by a fist in a boxing glove and the glove and gone through him.

   
Bill and Ray dragged him out on
the off chance that he was still alive.

   
He wasn't.

   
The mistake he'd made had been
to laugh when Aled had emerged from the back room holding out the
double-barrelled twelve bore shotgun and hoarsely ordering them all to leave
his inn. Charlie had made some reference to Old Winstone's mother and a shotgun
and that she, being English, at least had the nerve to use it.

   
Ray Wheeler remembered Aled's
hollowed-out face in the wan ambience of the candle, by then not much more than
a wick floating in an ashtray full of liquid wax. He thought he remembered a
glaze of tears in the licensee's eyes as he poked the gun barrel under Charlie
Firth's ribcage.

   
Ray certainly remembered Aled
reloading the twelve-bore from a box of cartridges on the bartop, Sykes shakily
saying something along the lines of, "Now look, old boy, no need for this,
surely?" The banalities people came out with when something utterly
appalling had occurred.

   
Blood and obscene bits of
tissue had been slurping out of Charlie all the way to the door and Bill was
relieved to leave him in the snow. He and Ray, liberally spattered with pieces
of their colleague, backed away from the body, looking for some cover in case the
mad landlord should come charging out after them.

   
They hid in the car park at the
side of the inn, behind the Daihatsu. "So where's everybody gone?"
Ray said. "It's like bloody High Noon. What the fuck's wrong with this
place?"

   
Bill Sykes ran in a crouch—how
he thought that would make him less of a target for a man with a twelve-bore,
Ray couldn't fathom—across the road to the only cottage with some sort of light
burning inside. He heard Bill hammering at the cottage door hard enough to take
all the skin off his knuckles and then enunciating in his polite and formal Old
Telegraph way, "Hello, excuse me, but would it be possible to use your
phone?"

   
There was no response at all
from within, where a single small, yellow light never wavered. Not even an
invitation to go away.

   
"I need to telephone the
police," Bill said loudly into the woodwork.
   
To nil response.

   
"Well, could
you
perhaps telephone the police? Tell
them to come at once. Please. Just dial nine nine nine. Think you could do
that?"

   
The cottage was silent. The air
was still. The burgeoning
sky seemed to have sucked warm blood out of the snow.

   
"Oh, bollocks to
this," Ray yelled. "Let's get the fuck out of here."

   
In thirty years of journalism,
in Africa, South America, he'd never known a place, an atmosphere, quite so unearthly.
He climbed into the Daihatsu, fumbled around and almost wept with relief when
he discovered the key in the ignition. Obviously nobody worried about teenage
joyriders on the loose in a place as remote as this.