CHAPTER 13
Hreodwater, England
From the gateway into the working part of the mine, the salt light flared and shone the image of Saint Hildegard and the King down across the congregation.
It was uncanny to know nobody else could see it.
All anyone else knew was that the candlelit darkness was a little bit warmer.
As the salt light rippled, so did the image of the King: he was all whirling half shapes, wings, horns, faces, wheels, eyes.
Typical, Avelyn thought grumpily. When Hildegard had built the abbey, she must have known that the Hreoda were saying she had fought the Salt King, and by way of making sure that the annoying paganism didn’t get out of hand, she’d mixed that story thoroughly with the Book of Ezekiel and said, No, no, honest, they think the Salt King is some spirit of the fen but really he’s an angel, ta-dah.
That was how you did missionary work in those days.
You used Christianity like a red sock in a white wash.
Launder it together with other faiths, and everything turns pink before long.
He surfaced when he realized he’d just heard his own name from the priest leading the Mass.
“And finally, let us welcome Father Avelyn Brocken, who has come to us from Rome to begin the process of verifying the miracles here for the Holy See.”
To Avelyn’s surprise, there was a little cheer. That was unusual for an early morning Mass where most people were still wearing pyjamas under their clericals.
The priest smiled encouragingly, in that particular way older people tended to do with Avelyn’s generation; the way that said, I know you were probably raised on a smartphone and now you have overpowering anxiety and ADHD but you really must learn to function in the real world and I’m about to make you do just that in a super-supportive and definitely not impatiently aggressive way.
“Father Brocken, would you like to say a little something?”
Avelyn stood up, tickled in advance. “Well, that wasn’t how people normally react to the sudden appearance of a Jesuit, was it,” he said, and a little run of laughter went around.
“Thanks. Right, as many of you will probably know, my job here is not to disprove what’s happened: we’re well past that now.
The task is to find out whether these occurrences are miraculous, or just supernatural.
That means I’ll be talking to all of you, starting with those who have experienced some kind of cure, and those of you coming to the end of your stay here.
It’s not going to be scary; all I’m after is what you think and how you feel about it all.
I’m supposed to tell you that nothing you say is going to be wrong, but that is of course a lie: if you do say anything disparaging about the Welsh rugby team, you will be immediately punished. ”
“Yes, bach!” someone at back called.
Avelyn laughed. “Thanks, everyone.”
The priest looked disgruntled, remembered to thank him, and took over again for the final prayers.
“Did you prepare that in advance?” Annunciata whispered to him.
“No?” said Avelyn, distracted, because someone was eating behind him and he was suffering the urgent need to scream and set them on fire.
“Jesuits are scary.”
“You’re scary,” he said.
“Ssh,” the man behind them hissed.
Avelyn broke. “Ssh yourself. What kind of sociopath eats a peach during Mass anyway?”
The man scowled at him but put the peach awkwardly in his pocket.
On Avelyn’s other side, Jericho put one hand over his mouth, but not in time to cover up how he was smiling.
The priest was praying for the usual things; peace in the Middle East, good health for the afflicted.
Avelyn watched everyone. The people who seemed most ill were sitting at the front, and there was a raptness to them—to the whole congregation—that he almost never saw. The salt light from the great window scattered colours across them.
He waited for the priest to mention Matthew, but he didn’t.
That was a significant thing to leave out, but nobody else seemed surprised.
The priest moved straight on to the Eucharist. Avelyn shot a puzzled look at Jericho.
A man had died here: there should have been prayers for weeks.
Jericho shook his head slightly, like someone witnessing a bad verdict in a courtroom.
Avelyn opened his hands, a little mime: Why?
“A lot of people think Matthew must have done something wrong,” Jericho whispered, leaning closer. So near to him, Avelyn could feel how cold the mine was without the salt light. “Sin, something, a misuse of his cure; and the salt was judgement. There haven’t been any prayers.”
“Great,” Avelyn muttered.
The salt light glowed around the bread and the chalice. “This is my body,” the priest intoned, in the singsong way an awful lot of priests fell into when they had said Mass too often, “and this is the chalice of my blood . . .”
Jericho gave it an uneasy look. Avelyn understood. If you weren’t a Catholic, it all looked like so much cannibalism. Avelyn caught his eye to say it was all right to ask if he wanted to.
“Is it really true it isn’t symbolic?” Jericho asked him. “People—genuinely believe it’s actually transforming into flesh and blood?”
“We do,” said Avelyn. “The substance changes, the accidents are the same.” He winced.
If you weren’t careful with a theology degree, you ended up quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle to innocent passersby.
He kept catching himself doing it. “It looks like bread, it’s still made of flour and water, but it is God.
The breadness has gone and been replaced by Godness.
” He thought some more, trying to find a way to it that would make sense if you were outside the faith.
“It just means . . . things can be two things,” he said at last.
“Oh, so like trans people,” Jericho said, sounding relieved.
“Sorry?”
“Like, you can have the physical attributes of a woman but really you’re a man. Accidents: ovaries, oestrogen. Substance: man. It’s the same idea, isn’t it? Things can be two things?”
Avelyn watched him for a second, almost angry, before he realized that Jericho meant it genuinely and that in fact, Jericho probably didn’t understand the idea of being anything but genuine. “Y . . . es, though my thing is a holy sacrament and your thing is a mental illness.”
Jericho gave him a look that Avelyn just had time to be concerned about: it was full of quiet merriment. “In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”
“Exactly?”
“Why does that have to mean two separate things and not that we all have both inside us?”
Avelyn blinked. “Sorry, are you . . .?”
“I,” said Jericho cheerfully, “am not going to tell you.”
“No. No!” Avelyn only felt the full diabolical genius of it in stages.
“You bastard! This is anti-weaselling protocol, isn’t it?
That isn’t fair! Why would you lay cruel and unusual weasel traps?
Just tell me things about yourself like a normal person!
You don’t need to be all cool and mysterious, you need to be nice to weasels! ”
“Weasels? What?” said Jericho, the very picture of mildness. “Anyway, hadn’t you better go up?” he added, about Communion.
“I can’t,” said Avelyn.
“How come?”
Avelyn inclined his head, not wanting to say it aloud again and hoping that Jericho knew that lust was a mortal sin, and that you shouldn’t take Communion in a state of mortal sin any more than you should go home to your partner covered in the gore of your latest victims. If you had to murder someone, then you did, but you didn’t have to get it all over the carpets.
“This is a challenging faith, isn’t it.” Jericho sighed.
“When you say ‘challenging,’ do you mean ‘stupid’?”
“No,” Jericho said quickly.
“Will one of you be taking me up to the altar, or will you be flirting some more?” said Annunciata.
Jericho looked like he was having a fantasy about locking himself in the Lodge and staring at a wall, untormented by Jesuits or Carmelites.
“Yes, sorry,” said Avelyn. And then, because he wanted revenge for the weasel trap, “Can I flirt with you instead?”
Annunciata was right on it. “Only if you promise we’re going on a dazzling sex romp after?”
“A thousand times yes.” Avelyn laughed, and Jericho put his hands over his face.
The queue was quite long, and it wasn’t moving yet.
The priest was—probably because of an admittedly sensible health and safety edict aimed at making sure people didn’t give each other herpes all drinking from the same chalice—pouring the communion wine into dozens of those tiny plastic thimbles that doctors gave you pills in.
“So what do people think Matthew did?” Avelyn whispered to Annunciata.
“Oh, he was a right prick,” she said unexpectedly. “Ran a YouTube channel, he did all sorts of stupid bollocks for a picture. I know the channel was part of his mission, but he never thought of anything else. He took a Hreod lad over the Flood to see the Outside. Kid was only ten.”
Avelyn stared at her. Hreod children didn’t leave Hreodwater until they were at least fifteen, and never alone. “Really.”
“Oh, yeah, they nearly chucked him out for that, and they only didn’t because he convinced them he didn’t know it was so bad, but he feckin did.
He just wanted footage. I don’t know what tipped God over the edge.
Perhaps Matthew was being called to a new purpose after the cure and he said, ‘Balls to that, I’m after three million views. ’”
“God or something else?” Avelyn said.
“Ah, your man the Salt King?” She sounded amused. “Doesn’t An El mean ‘the angel’?”
“No it does not,” Avelyn grumbled, but he didn’t start with how, in Hreod, An El had been a title of the Salt King long before the abbey was built, but when Hreoda told Saint Hildegard it meant “the spirit that burns,” she had played fast and loose with the translation and behold!
A seraph.11 If Annunciata was a linguist, then she would know a damn sight more about it than he did.
She gave him a wicked sparkle that suggested he had just dodged a trap full of spikes, but she had no chance to say anything else, because at the front of the queue down the nave, there was a disturbed flurry.
“What have you put in that stuff? It tastes of metal!”
The elderly priest looked flustered. “Oh—I apologise, it just came out of the bottle, I think it’s, er . . . some ordinary merlot . . .”
Someone choked. “Oh, my God! That is not merlot!”
“That’s blood,” someone else said, to an appalled and curious muttering.
Back in the pews, Jericho had straightened.
“It is. Look.” Someone held up a piece of cloth, stained very red. Not red in the way wine was red.
“Sorry about this,” Avelyn said to Annunciata, and wove his way to the front.
People let him through, and someone handed him the chalice.
What was inside was too viscous to be wine.
He dipped his fingertip into it. Yes: blood.
He looked back and showed the chalice to Jericho, who had come up close after him.
Jericho nodded, dark eyes troubled. There was an excited murmur through everyone around them. The queue had bunched up into a crowd.
The flustered priest was showing him the bottle of wine. It was just wine.
“Can I see the bread?” Avelyn asked, and there was a weird, instant hush.
The priest looked at him uncomprehendingly for a half second, then turned back and gave him the consecrated bread on its silver plate.
It looked like bread, but when Avelyn touched it, he pulled his hand back, because the crust didn’t feel anything like baked dough. It was like . . . skin.
When he tore off a tiny piece, he saw the membranes stretch and tear, and so did miniature thread veins, just perceptibly blue and purple. Then the bread started to bleed. He dropped it, and the noise it made was the thwack of a raw steak.
There was a yell from almost everyone who had seen, and in a surge, some people went down onto their knees, praying.
Others stood frozen. Feeling as though his heart had climbed up his throat like a toad to sit behind his wisdom teeth, Avelyn raised the silver camera that was still resting on his hip and took pictures.
The elderly priest, hands shaking and tears running down his face, eased the plate back onto the altar.
The noise of the prayers and the exclamations and shouts morphed little by little into singing.
Avelyn didn’t take the priest aside to ask him if he had faked it somehow.
Perhaps with access to a very sophisticated laboratory, a person with the right kind of doctorate could have grown something like this, but there was no lab here.
The rest of the loaf was ordinary Hreod bread, dense and dark and full of seeds.
He had everything packed up all the same, to be sent for analysis, but he already knew what the results would show.
Whatever the flesh on the silver plate was, it wouldn’t be lab-grown, and tests on the blood were going to show that it came from someone healthy, probably in their early thirties, and the genetic markers would suggest it was a man from somewhere around the Dead Sea.
11 Seraph, pl. seraphim: literally “the burning ones.” People new to the Church were often surprised that the Bible described angels in a way so similar to demons, but it only made sense—they had started out as the same thing, and all this rubbish about demons appearing in a puff of sulphur and leering at you with rotten teeth and cloven hoofs was, as far as Avelyn was concerned, a frankly ingenious piece of propaganda from Hell.
If you were looking for a cartoon devil, you didn’t recognise the real thing when it glided up to you smiling.