The Lamp of the Wicked Read Online Free Page A

for two – was this great long blue and cream Cadillac.
    Ridiculous, really. Soon, it was going to be like living in one of those pottery villages that Ledwardine Fine Art was too upmarket ever to sell. Maybe each pottery village should have its own bijou pottery lady vicar. So much more tourist appeal than a crumpled old priest with a frayed dog collar and breath that smelled of communion wine.
    ‘Once upon a time,’ Huw said wistfully, ‘folk believed the world were surrounded by angels, wing-tip to wing-tip. Interesting concept, eh? Everybody under the protection of vast, angelic wings, like newborn chicks.’
    ‘Bit claustrophobic, though, when you think about it,’ Merrily said.
    ‘Also, the ultimate communication system. Safe, reliable…’
    ‘Ah. Right. I see where you’re coming from.’
    ‘But where do they go now, the angels? No room left up there for the poor buggers, with all them signals clogging up the atmosphere – radio waves, satellite TV, daft sods in supermarkets ‘ringing home half a mile away.’ Huw put on a whiny Home Counties drawl. ‘“Darling, I’m at the cheese counter now – do we want Emmental or smoked Cheddar?”’
    ‘So it’s fair to say you’re against masts, then.’ Merrily wondered if Huw ever visited a supermarket, the way she often wondered why no woman appeared to have shared his life. He’d mentioned one once, in passing – just the once – but she’d sensed there was sadness attached.
    ‘It’s easy money, lass,’ he said. ‘Lot of space doing nowt inside church spires. No maintenance costs. Ten grand a year or more in the parish coffers. Environmentally friendly, too, on one level. Saves putting up them unsightly steel things on the hills.’
    ‘But on another level, it could be causing cancer, damaging people’s brains, et cetera. A lot of evidence piling up there.’
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘However, we’re likely to get a mast anyway. Some farmer or other’s going to give permission sooner or later for one of your unsightly steel things. So that’s still bad health all round
and
a spoiled view.’
    ‘You’d be reluctantly in favour, then,’ Huw said.
    ‘Well, no. I’m instinctively against it. But we could use the money, and Uncle Ted’s smart. He knows that if he backs down on mobile phones, it’ll be much harder for me to resist his plans for putting a gift shop in the vestry. I’m in a corner, Huw, and the meeting starts in about forty minutes.’
    Merrily glanced at the scullery window, where the climbing rose used to knock against the glass in the night wind. Although she’d pruned it last spring, she half expected it to have grown back:
tock… tock… tock…
    ‘
And
the
Hereford Times
is hovering, because the mobile phone company looks like it’s one of those about to start transmitting soft porn to new-generation handsets. I don’t want to wind up in the papers again.’
    ‘Stay out of it,’ Huw said. ‘Let the parish council take the decision, but make sure you nobble a few of them first.’
    Politics. I hate all that.’ Merrily gazed into the Anglepoise circle of light enclosing the Bible, her sermon pad and a volume of the Alternative Service Book, 1980.
In His Presence
, it said on the front. ‘Erm… would there be a Deliverance angle?’
    ‘On mobile phones?’
    ‘Transmissions. Signals… all that. I suppose that’s why I’m ringing, really.’ She heard footsteps on the kitchen flags; the chips had come.
    ‘Spirits in the air?’ Huw said.
    ‘Something like that.’
    ‘Or you could say the spire, which should be pointing to heaven, would be acting instead as a conductor for all kinds of shit thrown up from the earth.’
    ‘You put these things so elegantly,’ Merrily said.
    ‘Stuff the Parish Council. Say
no
to it, lass.’
    ‘Right.’

3
Something Ancient Being Lost
    I MEAN, LET’S face it, nobody comes to church just to hear
me
preach…
    It had just slipped out, and now they were all staring at her, as though