CHAPTER 19
Ashamed, Avelyn went to the Lodge anyway, though he hesitated outside the door.
He could see Jericho through the pointed window, lit up in salt light and firelight.
The opinionated snail had acquired its own aquarium, an exciting moss-and-water habitat, and half a cauliflower.
It was enthroned on the cauliflower, glowing regally.
“Yes,” said Jericho the second Avelyn came in, as if Avelyn weren’t just expected but late. “Good. Take a picture of the stitches and show it to me before you die of sepsis.”
“I’m pretty certain you assured me I’d be fine?”
“Well, yes, but I can always hope for something medically more interesting than a papercut,” Jericho said.
Avelyn took the silver camera into the bathroom.
When he came back with the picture, he had to hold it face down so he couldn’t look at it.
Of course it was much better than having to undress in front of Jericho again, but there was a dull, carbon-dioxide hollow in him that couldn’t see past how excruciating it was for a picture like that to exist. It showed the whole scar and the bruising, all the way up to his hip, and the lines of the tattoos he hadn’t burnt off, and for all it was just a medical record, he felt like he was handing over something dirty.
“Ugh,” Jericho said, disgusted. “It’s perfect. Why couldn’t you make an effort and contract some kind of interesting flesh-eating disease? I haven’t amputated anyone’s leg for ages. Do you know how bored I am?”
Then he did something that Avelyn knew, even while it was happening, he was going to remember forever as one of those tiny things that held a universe of grace.
Jericho frisbeed the photograph into the fire, and managed to make it look like part of his general discontent with his empty office hours, and nothing to do with the humiliation that must have been written across every line of Avelyn’s body.
“Although,” Jericho said, as if he hadn’t just performed the single greatest act of kindness Avelyn had experienced for years, “Father Reyes does seem to want to kill you, so I might yet see some fascinating compound fractures if he gets you at the top of the tower staircase. What are you saying to people that has this effect?”
Avelyn hinged into the spare chair at the desk, flooding with disproportionate relief that the photograph was gone—and that Jericho wasn’t sick of the sight of him yet. “I told him his exorcisms are bullshit, and that the Witan will probably castrate him.”
Jericho thought about it. “But . . . you believe in demons.”
“Yes, demons, not punishing guilt complexes that appear after someone faithful does tarot cards one time at university. No true-born atheist is ever possessed, have you noticed that? It’s only ever people who were religious to start with.
It happens when someone does something they can’t reconcile with their faith: that’s why exorcisms work, it’s a faith problem so you need a faith representative like a priest or a nun to convince you that you can be forgiven.
If you want never to be possessed, don’t believe in God. There, I solved it.”
Jericho was laughing that fantastic chorister’s laugh. “So you’re feeling better then. How are the interviews going?”
“Strange,” said Avelyn, glad for the chance to tell him. “The people with some kind of cure—they have a . . . halo. In the salt light. Annunciata too. Actually it’s brightest on her. She looks like the Holy Mother in a painting.”
“A halo,” Jericho repeated, sketching a circle above his own head.
“Ah—like they’re glowing, all over,” Avelyn said, and then thought: loaded word, isn’t it, halo. Why did I say that, and not aura, or glow? “They’re attracting salt light. It’s the opposite of what happens to you. You repel it.”
Jericho studied the air, then opened a desk drawer and brought out a photograph.
It was Matthew, or just about; the picture had been obscured by what, on film, looked like a ferocious lens flare.
“This happened on any images he tried to take of himself after the first couple of days. We thought it was a faulty batch of film. Is this . . .”
“Yes,” Avelyn said. “The light’s between you and him.
Annunciata’s going to come out as a blur.
” He remembered the photograph he had taken of the whole congregation in the chapel and wondered where it had got to.
It had been in his soutane pocket, so it was probably at the bottom of a laundry vat somewhere.
“What is it?”
“No idea. I need to ask someone Hreod,” he said, but then felt tired at the thought. Probably they would tell him Annunciata and the others were imaginary too. “A miner. They know salt light.”
Jericho was thinking, a concerned line between his eyebrows now. “Once people start to notice this . . .”
“They’re going to start talking about God’s chosen ones,” Avelyn said. “I know. Fabian’s going to be even more of a sanctimonious prick than normal. I thought you’d be happy though, honestly? You were sure it’s something good, and . . .?”
Jericho smiled his mercury smile, the one that was more about assuring you he wasn’t picking a fight than any humour.
“I don’t like how these things are being interpreted.
I don’t like this general conviction that Matthew deserved what happened to him.
I don’t like that people might start talking to Father Reyes as if he is special in any sense other than that he’s lucky not to be in prison.
” His eyes caught across Avelyn’s face. “What about you, do you still think it’s a demon? ”
Avelyn had been trying to decide what he thought all afternoon.
“I don’t know. I want to say that I don’t care how many lovely nuns and bishops it cures of blindness or cancer, or how indiscriminately it helps people, even Fabian.
I think the bread and the wine was fucking horrendous.
I want to say we should all be waiting for the other shoe. ”
“But . . .?”
“But—my whole family was killed in this mine. I’m never going to expect anything good here.
Maybe I’m . . . that’s the thing, right?
If I say, ‘I don’t care how many people are cured, how much good is done here, I don’t care if Christ appears and walks on water in front of me’—that isn’t logical, that’s just a frame of mind.
” He sighed. “Father Li even said that to me. He told me to remember that God is here too. And they all report experiencing God very directly just before it happened, or began to happen. They all say, ‘A door opened and God was there,’ or ‘I felt as though there was a new light in my head somewhere,’ but I just . . .” He shook his head and had to look away towards the fire, trying to think of a way to say what he wanted to without making himself feel too exposed.
“The ras,” Jericho said for him. “What they’re attributing to God might be the ras, and you’re sure that the ras isn’t God but the Salt King. But . . . you can’t ask them to tell the difference, because how would they know? And how would you know?”
“Exactly,” Avelyn said. “Exactly. I’m worried everyone is just . . . feeling something vast and inhuman and lovely, and so they think it must be God.”
“Do any of them have your hesitation about whatever it is they’re perceiving?” Jericho asked.
Avelyn shook his head a little. “No. They all seem convinced they’re experiencing something good.”
Jericho had been sitting exactly still for the whole conversation, and now it had lasted for so long it was uncanny.
It was just how a person was when there were no smartphones or endless email pings and messages to make them jittery, the stillness that came from life down here, but the longer it lasted, the more extraordinary a contrast it struck with the flickering speed Jericho had when he did choose to move, the one that had seemed so like nervous energy at first and just . . . didn’t, now.
Stillness; he was right. It was a fine thing.
Avelyn mirrored him, and when he let his breath out, he didn’t take another for a while.
In that stillness, the ras settled against him, like someone fitting themselves against his back and wrapping both arms around him, and he was calmer then than he had ever been. Consolation, through his whole soul.
He had to stand up and put another log on the fire.
“Is it possible you’re wrong about the ras?” Jericho asked. “Maybe it’s not meant badly, and . . . I mean, your family died in an accident, it wasn’t—”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Avelyn said, too sharply. “The ceiling didn’t just collapse, Jericho. My grandmother smashed the support pillars with a sledgehammer.”
Jericho looked as though Avelyn had just slashed him across the chest with a knife.
Annunciata pushed the door open and then closed it quickly behind her.
“Am I interrupting?” she asked, looking between them.
Even to her, new to body language and expressions, the way they were staring at each other must have looked as though they were about to either have a huge fight or begin confession.
Avelyn swallowed, honestly not sure which it would have been.
“No, come in,” said Jericho.
“Um. Small request.” She looked worried. “I was hoping Avelyn would be available to bite the people who keep following me around.”
“Following you around?” Avelyn echoed, going to the window. Jericho came too. He was silent on the flagstones, but Avelyn could feel the cool of that void in the salt light close on his left side.
It was true. In the courtyard, a knot of people were talking excitably. They were all watching the Lodge door, clearly waiting for Annunciata to come out again.
“They want to know what kind of prayers I did,” she said awkwardly. “And whether I pray the rosary, and what I read, and . . . I can’t get them to go away. I might need a bit more firepower?”
Avelyn wasn’t sure he had ever been more relieved not to have to finish a conversation. “It would be my pleasure to bite some people for you,” he said, not looking at Jericho.