CHAPTER 18 #2
“People . . . see things in the deep,” Avelyn said, very carefully.
“The salt light can be quite bright, and it can be like . . . Have you ever seen mirages in fog? If you stare at it for long enough, you see towers and giants. It’s the same in the deep.
The deeper you go, the more salt light there is, the more it happens.
People can . . .” He drew his breath in slowly.
“People go mad down there. They do all kinds of dangerous things.”
Jericho looked troubled. “Maybe, but he didn’t bite himself. Too big a mark for a human.”
“Maybe someone’s dog, or a hunting fox? Animals go nuts too, it’s why they don’t use horses to pull the carts.”
Jericho rolled his head a fraction in a way that said he had long since given up on trying to extract a lot of sense from life. “Anyway, do you want some coffee? I just made some.”
“God, yes, please. Just black.”
Jericho held out the cup, right at arm’s length, so that he didn’t come any closer than he had to.
Avelyn took it and held it against his heart, because he had cooled down suddenly, and now he felt as though the fen had knitted cold into his bones. “Thank you. I don’t expect the ferry is running again yet?”
“No, I’m sorry. Some of them went to look about an hour ago. But even if it were, you wouldn’t be going anywhere,” Jericho said, much fiercer when he was being a doctor than when he was being a Jericho.
In all honesty, Avelyn wasn’t sure that he could. He felt much better than he’d thought he would, but that still wasn’t brilliant. “No. I’m going to start interviewing people though. You wouldn’t happen to have a list of the people who’ve had some kind of major cure, would you?”
Jericho made an unwilling sound. “I’d really prefer you didn’t work today.”
“I’d really prefer it if I was allowed to nuke the South African rugby team and keep the World Cup permanently in Cardiff, but you know,” Avelyn said.
“I—this might be a silly question, but how does a Hreoda come to support the Welsh . . .?”
“Father Li,” Avelyn explained. “When I first went with him to Rome he made it pretty clear that unless I cultivated a good interest in the fate of the Welsh team, we couldn’t be associated anymore.”
“Oh, I see. It’s Stockholm Rugby Syndrome.”
Avelyn stared at him for half a second, and then the laughter cracked through, because that was another joke like “appalling allegations.” People who liked Father Li twisted themselves in knots not to mention he had technically kidnapped a child; people who didn’t absolutely did mention it.
He had never once met anyone who understood so entirely that it was a benign kidnapping that they could joke about what it wasn’t.
Jericho sparkled at him and went to a filing cabinet. “I’ll get you that list.”
Avelyn didn’t want to sit in silence with the ras, so he turned down Jericho’s offer of a spare office and set up at the end of one of the long tables in the dining room instead.
It also had the effect of making the interviews feel more like a casual chat over a hot drink, and it was much easier to stop people and ask if someone could find this or that person for him, and tell them the Inquisition wanted to see them.
He had already spoken to Fabian and didn’t want to do that again, and nobody could find Annunciata,15 so he started with another nun from Lagos. She had shaken off lung cancer, as far as Jericho could tell. She also had a faint but distinct salt light halo.
“And when did the cure happen—can you pin it down?” Avelyn asked.
She looked awkward. “Sorry, can you say that again? I’m . . .”
Having trouble with his accent. He repeated it.
“About a week ago, Father. It was just after Matthew.”
He looked up. Fabian had said the same thing. “Why, do you know?”
“I can’t understand,” she said with a hint of frustration, as if she wanted to accuse him of not trying hard enough. “Where are you from?”
He pointed to the floor to say here, and felt defeated.
“I said, why did it happen just after Matthew’s cure?” he said again, concentrating on flattening all the intonation right down. It didn’t help that he couldn’t hear it. Father Li said he sang his English, which seemed ominous coming from a Welsh person.
She nodded once, decisive. “It was that I truly believed. I saw Matthew walk, and . . . well, I hadn’t asked for any cure before.
I try not to ask God for anything. He isn’t a vending machine.
But then . . . I just realized it could genuinely, truly happen, Father, do you understand?
And once I did . . . it was as though a light opened in me somewhere, and God was in it. ”
Avelyn wrote that down.
She was watching him closely. “Father, I should say, I find God through my work. I’m not the sort of person who talks about a deep personal relationship with the Lord. Those people always sound to me like one beer off telling you they once met Elvis serving burgers in a diner.”
He wasn’t sure she could have said anything that would have made him take her more seriously.
The next person was a fire-breathing conservative priest from the States who appeared on exorcism podcasts and was emphatic that he wasn’t at An El because he was hiding from the accusations.
He talked as if Avelyn would have heard about them, and Avelyn, who hadn’t but had very much met a hundred versions of him before, didn’t ask.
The man looked like he lurked outside secondary schools.
He had a halo almost as bright as Annunciata’s.
“Yeah, it happened a week ago,” the priest said, flexing his hands to show Avelyn that he could. His name was Reyes. “Awful arthritis until then. You should have seen my hands, knotted like rope.”
No doubt from all the grabbing of unconsenting passersby.
“But I prayed on it, and over maybe three days, the pain went away and I played the piano for the first time in ten years.”
A week ago.
“How do you pray?” Avelyn asked.
“Say that again, sorry?”
Avelyn considered making flash cards to hold up, then said it again.
“Like, tell it to you?”
“Yes please.”
“Sure. Dear Almighty God, please grant a favour to this humble servant of yours, and relieve of me the terrible pain I’ve been suffering. I know there’s redemption in suffering, but I reckon I’m as redeemed as an old sinner is likely to get.”
Avelyn let that canter a few laps around his head. “Did you have any expectation that that might be effective?”
Reyes made a meowing noise.
“No, it was a genuine question,” said Avelyn.
“Oh, okay. At first, not really. But I’d been talking to Jericho, and he said, well, things like that really can get better here, and after a while . . . yeah. I guess I wouldn’t say I expected it, but I was alive to the possibility that it could happen.”
“Did you perceive God at any point?”
Reyes smiled. “You don’t take no prisoners, do you, son? I like that.”
Avelyn lifted his eyes from his notes, halfway to amused.
He got this kind of thing plenty from older men.
He knew why: he looked so innocent, what with being small and diligently obedient.
People liked to explain things to him and feel that they’d taught him something, until he said more than two sentences.
Then they remembered an urgent appointment five hundred miles away.
“No, only scalps. Did you perceive God at any point?” he repeated.
There was a tiny pause in which Reyes was clearly a little taken aback, but then he covered it over with a big easy laugh. “Well—yeah, I guess I did.”
“In what way? Can you describe it?”
“Say, where are you from?”
Avelyn rested his cheek on his knuckles. “Can you describe it?”
“You’re no fun.”
Avelyn checked his list. “All right. Thank you for your time. Could you find Sister Grace Kim for me?”
“What, that’s it?” Reyes said, indignant.
“Yes. This is an inquisitorial investigation into a miracle, but you won’t answer the questions, and I don’t like you.”
Reyes sighed. “Okay, okay, no need to overreact. It was . . . like . . . a window opened in my head, and he was on the other side.”
Avelyn almost said it along with him, because it was so close to what the others had said. A door opened, a light came on, a window opened, and God was there.
He paused, because Reyes was, in however showy a way, an exorcist. “Definitely God?” he asked.
“Rather than . . .?”
“Anything else.”
Reyes lifted his eyebrows. “Anything demonic? Have you ever met a demon?”
Avelyn thought about saying that he had.
Reyes laughed. “They don’t go round filling you with joy and curing you of awful things.
They make housewives throw grown men across rooms and they cripple faithful people with injuries as real as that one.
” He nodded at Avelyn’s leg. “They shriek at the name of the Holy Mother. That ain’t what’s here. ”
Avelyn passed his pen to his other hand.
He saw Reyes’ eyes follow it, surprised, as he kept writing.
“Have you ever seen anything not explained by the fact that women are much stronger than men think, or that horrible religious guilt can cause equally horrible and real but thoroughly unsupernatural effects?”
The good cheer vanished. “I didn’t come here to be spoken down to by some kid from the Society of Jesus. Damn it, son, you all talk like the Lord signs himself ‘God, SJ’! What are you writing? What is that writing?” he added, as though he suspected Avelyn might be sacrificing a black ram later.
It was Hreod, because even after so long, Roman letters all looked the same if he was tired or ill. You wrote Hreod with both hands; Avelyn had spent a long time feeling mystified by the idea of handedness in the Outside. “Satanic runes,” said Avelyn.
“You’re a little shit, aren’t you.”
Avelyn decided that if he ever got properly bored here, he would find Reyes again and wind him up and up to see if he popped. “Good luck with the accusations, Father. Though careful of Hreod boys. If one of them reports you to the Witan . . .” He mimed scissors.
“I’m reporting you.”
Avelyn smiled his most cherubic smile. “Do it, you minx.”