CHAPTER 1 #2
He never asked anyone to close his office door.
Avelyn shut it, not sure what was going on, and filling up with the sense that he’d done something wrong.
Christ, it was going to be about that glassy seminarian who kept talking about how normal love was like McDonald’s but God’s love was like steak.
Avelyn had hit him over the head with the diaries of Saint Teresa of Avila and told him to get a grip.
Technically you were supposed to be more supportive than that.
On the left of the door was a beautiful seventeenth-century painting of the Virgin Mary; on the other, in exactly the same proportions, was a poster of Freddie Mercury.
You could tell everything you needed to know about anybody, Father Li said, from their reaction to that.
His favourite anecdote to tell new employees was that the Pope had seen it, failed to mention it at all, but left singing “We Will Rock You.” Avelyn still couldn’t decide if that was made up.
“Happy birthday,” Avelyn said, ready to say that he regretted nothing, because if more trainee priests would pay more attention to getting a grip, helped along by book-wielding Jesuits, then the Church would be in less of a mess.
“Oh—God, I’d forgotten. Thank you.” Li leaned up and hugged him. He was tiny and Welsh, sixty-one today, and much bigger on the inside. “Right—news from England,” he said, sounding grim. “I’ve been contacted by the Diocese of East Anglia.”
Avelyn had been pulling off his scarf, but he stopped halfway out of the knot. He couldn’t think of any reason for that diocese to contact the Vatican, and for Li to tell him about it, but one.
Dread. A gut-thump of dread.
Li turned around a tablet and touched the play sign on a video. Avelyn, whose instinct was always to move himself rather than move things, bent to see. He had to pull his sleeves over his hands because the ghosts of his old tattoos were prickling. It felt like spiders.
The video showed a young man talking animatedly to the camera.
He was dressed in a Franciscan habit, and he was young, and American, but he wasn’t in America.
He was standing on the edge of a narrow country way that could have been anywhere in England except for the salt that sparkled on the verges.
Avelyn had a little thud of recognition.
Behind the man was a cluster of standing stones, person-sized and made of the garnet-red halite that no one had ever actually found in the salt mine: they were strung out across about three miles outside Hreodwater, and they were called the Northmen.
“Hi, I’m Matthew, I’m a Franciscan friar, and this is a special episode of Beyond the Veil, which I usually cohost with my sister, Sister Mary, who says I should do this one by myself. Say hi, Mary.”
A woman with a blue veil leaned around the camera. “Hi everyone!”
“I know that hardly anyone watching will believe this,” the young man was saying, with laughter bubbling under his voice, “but three days ago, I was in a wheelchair. I was an aid worker and I was shot in the spine: I was supposed to never walk again. But then I went to stay at An El, which is a beautiful abbey here in Hreodwater in the UK . . . and after thirty days, I got up out of that chair and walked for the first time in two years.”
Avelyn flicked a glance at Father Li. A tiny, tiny spark of hope lit up in a deep chamber of his mind that had seen no light for a long time.
“That’s not even the point,” Li said. “Keep watching.”
The man pointed sideways on the screen, and a picture of him flashed up: he was in a wheelchair, looking a lot less healthy than he did now.
“That, folks, was taken last week. I don’t know what happened, but there are miracles at An El, and you guys need to get on the waiting list to come on pilgrimage here right now.
It’s the most incredible place: the abbey is down a mine, and the mine belongs to a village called Hreodwater, where they live without electricity, which is why I can’t film this down .
. . there.” He stopped, and shifted his weight.
He looked like he had just had a wave of nausea.
He drew his hand over his forehead. “Sorry, just felt dizzy there. It’s been happening since I started walking, it’s a little like seasickness.
I guess my balance isn’t right yet! But anyway, get on the website of the Diocese of East Anglia in the UK, get yourself registered for a pilgrim visa to visit Hreodwater and the abbey, but definitely do it now, because they only assign limited numbers of visas every year, and you will see why when you .
. .” He stopped again. “When you get there.”
“Matt?” said his sister’s voice off camera. “Are you okay?”
“Uh . . .”
The light seemed to change on him, and he looked .
. . dull. The colour went out of his hair, turning it a dim grey, then his clothes too.
The effect was odd, as if someone had put a filter over him, but the light wasn’t changing on the path, nor the grass around him.
The grey began to turn russet. Then little by little, there was no person anymore, but a person-sized stone that glittered ruby where the light shone through its crystalline places.
Red halite.
The glow down in that deep chamber flickered stronger, even under all the rubble Avelyn had buried it under. It was wonderful, and horrible. God, but hope could be a rancid thing.
“Turns to salt, funny,” Avelyn remembered to say, ex-tattoos burning. He forced himself to pan slowly back through the video, looking for impossible angles or moments when there were too many fingers, but every frame looked right.
That’s because, said a little voice from close by the glow, in Hreod, though he hadn’t thought in Hreod for years, it is real.
“AI’s getting good,” he said aloud. “You can’t tell if anything’s real anymore, and the only way to get news is from someone you trust and probably they’ve misheard. Blessed are the cheese-makers.”
Yes, that was quite convincing, the buried voice of Hreodwater Avelyn whispered, but you know this isn’t that.
“The tech people say,” Li said carefully, “that it isn’t AI. Or any kind of fake.”
One after another, some fast, some ponderous, the bells across Rome began to toll four into the darkening afternoon.
A few of them happened to hit an old, old pattern, and instead of random chimes, Avelyn heard the snatch of a hymn that had never been sung to any god so new as Christ.
All hail, He wakes . . .
Li waited for them to quiet down. “The young man in the video is indeed missing. He was supposed to get on a plane six hours after this was filmed. He missed his flight. His family haven’t heard from him, and nor has anyone else.”
Avelyn tried to shove the vault door closed on that deep chamber where the hope-fire was burning. “So his sister posted this.”
“She went out with him to help him travel. They operate this account together. It’s part of their respective missions: it’s just about different aspects of Catholicism.
They go into why this or that is dogma but this or that isn’t, questions about the order of Mass, a few serious ones about the scandals and the Church’s position on abortion, that kind of thing. Not . . . stunts.”
Avelyn looked through the other videos posted by the same account.
Li was right. The videos had names like “The Worst Baptism EVER” and “What Confession Is Like for Priests” and “Nuns Answer Ten Questions from Atheists.” Just little insights into life in holy orders.
Nothing designed to go viral. Perhaps because of that, the turning-to-salt post didn’t have an extraordinary number of views.
In the comments, lots of people were complaining that Matthew and Mary didn’t usually do silly fake things.
“Have the police been involved?” he asked.
“Unfortunately. Mary called them straightaway. But they in their supreme bloody wisdom thought she was having a psychotic break and arrested her.” Li was routinely told by American priests that swearing let in the Evil One, and he told them in return that if there was one certain way to provoke any normal person to murder, it was to go around saying “gosh dang” at them.
“She then contacted the diocese, on the reasoning that they had some distant chance of actually believing her. The bishop went to find out what had happened, and immediately found witnesses. The stable master at the paddock, which is just out of shot here, saw it too, and swears it happened just like the video shows. So do two people who were behind them on the path. And so”—he took the tablet back to show Avelyn a new video, this time grainy and distant, but still clear enough—“does the CCTV in front of the Hreodwater border station. Which was also not tampered with.”
Avelyn watched it twice. It was a much shorter clip, but it showed Matthew and his sister.
It also showed her yell and drop her phone, and tear at the salt, clearly trying to find her brother inside it, then collapse next to it.
The stable master, a big Hreod man, ran over then, and so did two people from further behind on the path.
“Well, it must be fake, because he didn’t turn to salt, did he,” Avelyn said.
The hymn was singing itself in his head.
Bring him oak and bring him silver now,
And carve the black salt crown . . .
Li was giving him a painful, sympathetic study. “Those standing stones on the fen, the . . .?”
“The Northmen.”
“How many are there?”
“Forty-eight.”
“Forty-nine now,” Li said. “And . . . they look the same. Isn’t there a Hreod story that the Northmen themselves were . . . people? Real Vikings, who tried to attack the town, but ran afoul of . . .”
Avelyn scanned Li for a tell. This felt like a test. Maybe Li was showing him this because even after twelve years, Avelyn hadn’t done enough to prove he truly believed there was nothing at Hreodwater except a cult. No magic in the deep, no truth in the stories, and no Salt King.