A Crown of Lights (44 page)

And for some – like Danny Thomas, dreamy, faraway farmer’s boy – this was what they’d been waiting for all their lives. When it was really happening Danny was good and ready; he figured he must’ve been born a hippy – growing up on Elvis, then the Beatles, popping purple hearts to groove all night and still be awake in time to milk the cows.

Merrily smiled.

And then cannabis. Danny had acquired his first joint at a dance in Llandod, with another to smoke in the top field after sunset. He did a bit of dealing for a while, but he was never much good at that and, besides, there was a much more reliable dealer emerging in the area. Better just to grow the stuff – nice, sheltered spot, in Bryncot Dingle – and then give it away. Danny was so excited by the dawning of this incredible new world that, by the summer of 1975, he was wanting to turn on the whole Forest.

‘Who was this “more reliable dealer”?’ Merrily asked. ‘Can I take a guess?’

Danny was talking freely now, his voice hoarse but liquid, like wet ash. Dr Coll had been the son of a surgeon at Hereford Hospital with a house in New Radnor. Still a medical student back then, in need of a few quid, like all your students. ‘Medical students always got their sources, ennit?’ Danny said.

‘He was a hippy, too?’

‘Lord, no. Dr Coll en’t never been a hippy, not even as a boy. Just a feller with a eye to a few quid. Course when he qualified as a doctor, that all come to an end. Gotter keep ’is nose clean. Or at least keep it
lookin’
clean.’

And there would have been better ways of making money by then, Merrily thought. ‘What about Terry Penney? When did he appear?’ From what Betty had learned from Mrs Pottinger and from what Sophie had passed on to Merrily, Penney had emerged as a bright boy, but impressionable, and not too well-off. But what Danny was saying produced a different picture: Terry was an upper-middle-class radical with a posh, wealthy girlfriend who everyone thought was his wife, until she found life in Radnor seriously lacking and went back to the Smoke, leaving the vicar of Old Hindwell to grow his hair and smoke dope with the likes of Danny Thomas.

Terry, like Danny, was finding the times life-enhancing and life-changing. But Terry also saw it from a religious perspective: drugs opening the doors of perception, the gates of the soul. Terry was a fan of the seventeenth-century poet, Thomas
Traherne, who had found secrets of the universe in Herefordshire meadows.

The dope had certainly elevated and coloured Terry’s faith in God. Today, perhaps he’d be all happy-clappy and singing-in-tongues, like Ellis, and perhaps the drugs would have represented a passing phase. But it was a never-ending inner journey, then. Terry and Danny would smoke dope, untroubled by the law and Danny discovered that he loved the whole world and Terry loved the world and God. Terry believed that the time was coming when all mankind would be herbally awakened to the splendour of the Lord.

Then Dr Coll brought the acid along.

Merrily nodded. Acid had been something different. Not just another drug, but the key to serious religious experience, a direct line to God. To Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, all those guys, LSD was the light on the road to Damascus, and anyone could get there.

So, one fine, warm day, Terry Penney and Danny Thomas and Dr Coll had found a shady corner of a Radnor Valley field, overlooking the Four Stones. They had their lumps of sugar and Dr Coll brought out the lysergic acid. An experiment, he said. He wouldn’t take any himself; he’d supervise, make sure they came to no harm.

Danny’s trip lasted for ever. Under the perfumed, satin sky, he went through whole lifetimes in one afternoon. He found that the Radnor Valley was in his blood...
really in his blood
– the whole landscape turning to liquid and jetting through his veins. When he looked at the inside of his wrist he could see through the skin and into that fast-flowing land. He
was
the land, he was the valley, he was the forest. He walked through the silken grass down to the Four Stones, which he now understood to hold the mind of the valley, and Dr Coll said afterwards he had to stop Danny beating his head on the prehistoric stones to get inside them because the stones knew the secret.

The Reverend Penney, meanwhile, came to believe he’d been granted access to the very kingdom of heaven.

He saw an angel, a giant angel with his feet astride the valley. Merrily imagined a great William Blake angel with the red sun in his wings and a raised sword which cleaved the hills.

Life was never going to be the same again for either Terry or Danny. Danny was still tripping when he got home to the farm and he walked down the yard and saw the depth of sorrow in the eyes of the beautiful pigs and realized how much he loved those pigs. To this day, Danny Thomas said, he wouldn’t see a pig ever killed.

He and Terry took four more trips together. Terry told Danny that he knew now that he had seen the Archangel Michael, who had been appointed to guard the forest and the Radnor Valley, because this was a great doorway through which you could enter the kingdom. Terry found a book by the Reverend Parry-Jones who’d been vicar at Llanfihangel Rhydithon back in the twenties and he too thought the Forest was special, but he also mentioned a dragon that you could hear breathing in the night, and Terry said this was no surprise because places of great spiritual power were equally attractive to devilish forces.

Terry considered it no accident that he had been brought here, now, at this time of spiritual awakening, to be the priest of one of St Michael’s churches. He had told Danny he was going to call a meeting of all the other St Michael clergy around the Forest because they were destined to work together. But this never happened, because the other ministers had all heard about Terry Penney.

Still Terry insisted he was being groomed by God for the Big Task. Every day, before dawn, he’d kneel before his altar in Old Hindwell Church and beg God and St Michael that his mission might be revealed to him.

But God held out on him.

Terry decided he was not yet worthy, did not yet know enough, was not yet pure enough. He stopped smoking cannabis and concentrated on reading the Book of Revelation a hundred times. He wrote out important verses from it on
sheets of white card and hung them around his room at the old rectory. His sermons became impenetrably apocalyptic. He began to research St Michael and the lives of those saints and mystics who had become obsessed by the warrior archangel. He made solemn pilgrimages to all the St Michael churches around Radnor Forest... approaching each from the direction of the last, walking the final mile barefoot after a day’s fasting.

‘Local people was startin’ to go off him in a big way,’ Danny said. ‘Local people don’t like it when their vicar gets talked about in other parishes.’

Terry Penney had walked barefoot across the bridge to the church of St Michael, Cefnllys – an awesome setting, where an entire medieval town had been laid out under its castle. Then Terry had hiked unshod across the bleak Penybont Common to Llanfihangel Rhydithon. Next, he’d come down from the Forest to the yews encircling the rebuilt roadside church at Llanfihangel nant Melan. And finally he’d tramped on callused feet along the sombre, narrow road to Cascob, where he’d stood before the old
Abracadabra
charm.

It was three weeks after this that Terry had that visit from Councillor Prosser, wondering why he hadn’t applied for a grant towards the upkeep of the old building.

Two weeks later, Terry trashed the church.

What had happened, Danny said, was that one night Terry came to the conclusion that God wanted him to go alone into St Michael’s, Old Hindwell, and open himself to revelation.

In fact, drop some acid.

Danny had obtained the LSD for Terry from Dr Coll. The price had gone up by then, acid being in demand, but Terry didn’t care. In fact, the idea of the priest taking a trip in his own parish church bothered Danny more than Terry.

‘For starters, he wouldn’t ’ave nobody with him. Dr Coll was back home at the time, but Terry wouldn’t ’ave him to supervise – nor me. Had to be just him an’ God, see. Terry reckoned nothin’ bad was gonner happen to him in the house of God. But
me, I wouldn’t’ve gone in there alone at night in a million year, with or without drugs – creepy ole place like that.’

‘Bad trip?’

‘Had a bad one meself, few months later,’ Danny said. ‘Kept gettin’ flashbacks for bloody weeks. Scared the shit out o’ me. Anyway, the next time I seen Terry, the boy was a mess. Hadn’t shaved, din’t smell too good. Smelt of
fear
, you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘
I
don’t know what ’appened to Terry Penney that night. I just sits in yere, hammering buggery out o’ the ole Les Paul and I remembers the good times.’

‘You must have asked him about it?’

‘Terry din’t wanner talk about it at all, vicar. Kept ’isself to ’isself. And then they finds bits o’ church floatin’ down the brook, and Terry’s gone. I used to wonder whether the boy seen the carvings on the wood screen come alive, or whether he seen... I dunno...’

‘The dragon?’ Merrily said.

‘He seen St Michael out in that field. Mabbe ’e seen the dragon in ’is own church?’

Merrily recalled the William Blake print in Nick Ellis’s war room.
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun
– relating to an image from Revelation about the dragon waiting for the woman to give birth so that it could devour the child. The dragon was said to have seven heads and ten horns. It was not a nice dragon, and Blake’s painting throbbed with a transcendent evil.

‘I don’t know how much of this Ellis knows,’ Merrily said, telling them as they sat around the kitchen table, ‘but it would account for a lot. If he believes Penney had a black vision of the dragon inside that church – Satan rising, or in his view paganism rising – and if we believe what he told me about being the subject of some kind of hate campaign, forecasting a return of the dragon...’

Poison-pen letters for months. And phone calls – cackling voices in the night. Recently had a jagged scratch removed from my car bonnet. Series of chevrons... like a dragon’s back.

‘... then, to him, Betty, you and Robin are the embodiment of something that already exists in those ruins on a metaphysical level.’

‘It’s not true, though,’ Betty said. ‘We didn’t know anything about Penney. We didn’t even know for certain that the church had been built on an ancient site until we’d bought it.’

‘How do you know that now?’

‘Well, after we learned about all the prehistoric archaeology in the area, it seemed like it was on the cards. Also – this probably won’t cut much ice with you – a friend of ours went round with a dowsing rod and pendulum.’

‘Jane, do we have an Ordnance Survey map handy?’

‘Brilliant!’ Jane leapt up.

Mr Penney came out with what was described to me as a lot of nonsensical gobbledegook relating to the layout of churches around Radnor Forest.

Betty said that Robin had tried to work out a pattern on the map, but they had been aware of only three St Michael churches at the time.

‘OK.’ Jane had returned with the map, spread it out on the table. ‘You’ll have to help me out here, Gomer. Where’s Cascob?’

Gomer found it after a bit of peering. He also found St Michael’s, Cefnllys, then Llanfihangel Rhydithon and Llanfihangel nant Melan. Jane encircled them – along with Old Hindwell (ruins of).

‘Five now.’ Jane drew a ring round the last one. ‘And they do go right around the Forest.’

Betty was silently contemplating the map. ‘It’s too big, this,’ she said at last. You wouldn’t have anything smaller scale?’

‘Only a road map.’ Jane bounced up again. ‘I’ll get it.’

‘And some paper?’ Betty said.

Neither Cascob nor Cefnllys was marked on the road map,
but she put circles on the approximate spots, and pushed the map and the paper and a pencil towards Betty.

Betty copied the pattern onto the paper. ‘It’s not perfect, but it’s there.’

‘It’s a five-pointed star,’ Merrily said. ‘A pentagram.’ She looked at Betty. ‘Can you explain?’

Betty swallowed. ‘Could I have another cigarette?’

Merrily lit it for her. Betty was now looking uncertain, perhaps worried.

‘If these churches were built to form not a circle but a five-pointed star, that would represent a defensive thing, OK? The pentagram’s a powerful protective symbol. It’s used in banishing rituals. Like if you’re faced with... an evil entity... and you draw a big pentagram in the air, it ought to go away. So the medieval Christians might have wanted to enclose Radnor Forest in a giant pentagram of St Michael churches for the purpose of containing the dragon. Or whatever the dragon represented for
them
.’

‘It’s hardly a perfect pentagram,’ Merrily pointed out. ‘It could be purely coincidental.’

But then, she thought, in Ellis’s ministry, nothing is coincidental.

‘There’s another connection here,’ Betty said, ‘with Cascob. The word “abracadabra” is used in a charm – an exorcism – which was found buried in the churchyard. The word “abracadabra” has become devalued because of all those stage conjurors using it, but it’s actually very, very old and very powerful, and it’s believed to represent the pentagram because it contains the letter “A” five times. And if you put the “A”s together...’ Betty pulled Jane’s pencil and paper across and drew: