She walked away down the street without looking back. Welsh snowflakes landing tentatively, with a hint of deference, in her angry red hair.
They cleared most of the snow from the Peugeot, chipped ice from the windscreen. "It's terribly cold for December," Bethan said, patting gloved hands together to remove the sticky snow. "We rarely see much of this before New Year."
It was coming down in wild spasms, the white-crusted castle looking almost picturesque against a sky like dense, billowing smoke.
"You're right, of course," Berry said. "One of us gets stuck, we at least have a second chance."
The engine started at the fourth attempt. Bethan let it run, switched on the lights, pulled her pink woolly hat over her ears. "OK," she said. "You follow me. When we get there, we park behind the school, out of sight."
The equipment was in the Sprite, behind the seats. Early that afternoon they'd been to see Dai Death who, in turn, had consulted his friend, the local monumental mason, supplier of gravestones over an area stretching from Pont down to Lampeter. Dai had been suspicious, but he'd done it — for Bethan.
"But first," Berry said. "We go see this friend of yours."
"I doubt I have any actual friends there," Bethan said. "This is just the one person I can think of who won't bar his door when he sees me coming."
Chapter LXIV
Up in the Nearly Mountains, headlights on, the snow was all there was. It came at the windscreen at first in harmless feathery clouds, like being in a pillow fight. Could send you to sleep, Berry thought.
The higher they climbed, the denser it became. Cold cobs, now, the size of table-tennis balls. The two small, red taillights of Bethan's Peugeot bobbed in the blizzard.
"Get me through this, baby, I'll buy you an overhaul," he told the Sprite, pulling it down to second gear on a nasty incline, wheels whirring. Ice under this stuff up here.
At least the snow was a natural hazard. we in same shit, you find out…
Like all his life had been propelling him into this. Leaving the US with his ass in a sling, so to speak. The disillusion of London and an England full of yuppies and video stores and American burger joints. Old Winstone dying on him. Giles.
All this he saw through the snow.
No family. No job. Now everything he had was out here in this cold, isolated graveyard of a region where people saw their own mortality gleaming in the darkness.
Everything he had amounted to a geriatric little car and — maybe — a woman who needed the kind of help he wasn't sure he had the balls to provide.
But if all his life was converging on this woman, it had to be worth walking into the graveyard, just hoping the Goddamn corpse candle wasn't shining for him.
For the first time since putting on Robin's flying jacket he went into a hopeless shivering fit, scared shitless.
Only five-thirty and Y Groes was midnight-still and midnight-dark.
Berry parked next to the Peugeot behind the school and got out, closing his driver's door just as quietly as he could, and looked around, disturbed.
"This is weird," he said and wondered how many times he'd expressed that opinion in the past week.
But, yeah, it was weird. No snow falling any more, only a light covering on the ground, a passing nod to winter, an acknowledgement that the season was out there but wasn't permitted to enter without an invite.
"The blue hole," Bethan said, taking off her woolly hat, shaking her hair; it was warm enough to do that. "It might be quite natural. One of those places where the arrangement of the hills—"
"You believe that?"
"No," she said. "Not entirely."
The sky was clear; you could even see stars, except for where the black tube of the church tower rose in the east. But only a few meagre lights in the houses. Power cut maybe.
He breathed out hard. "Beth, listen, from now on, we have to start believing all this other stuff is real. The corpse candles, the bird of death, the whole cartload of shit. Because in this place it is real. We left the civilised world behind, we don't play by those rules any more."
"I think I always did believe they were real," she said.
"Beth, before we go in there. I just wanna say—"
Bethan put the pink hat back on. "Save it. Please."
"But if—"
"I know," she said.
Aled looked far worse than she remembered. Perhaps it was the light from the oil lamp in the porch which yellowed his skin, made his eyes seem to bulge. His white hair was stiff- no spring to it, and his Lloyd George moustache misshapen and discoloured.
"Bethan." Disappointment there, but no real surprise; even his voice sagged. "Why do you have to do this to me?"
He didn't even seem to have noticed Berry Morelli standing behind her.
"You don't know why I've come yet," Bethan said.
"Oh, I know, girl. I know all right. And I'll tell you, you didn't realise when you were lucky. Take your friend with you and get back to Pont. If you can still make it."
"Still make it?"
"With the snow. That is all I mean."
"No, it isn't all you mean," Bethan said firmly. "Let us in, Aled."
"We open at seven."
"Good. That leaves us plenty of time to talk."
"Bethan, you don't want to do this. Too many people—"
"I'm allowed to do it. I'm Welsh."
"But he isn't." Aled didn't look at Berry.
"I'm not English either," Berry said. "And I'm not polite, so—"
"No." Bethan put a hand on his arm.
But Aled sighed and stepped back then and held open the door from the inside. Bethan walked in and Berry followed, and Aled closed the door and bolted it, top and bottom. "No lights," he said. "Snow brought down the power lines. Go through to the dining room where we can't be seen from the street."
Through the dining room window, they could see a small yard and the church hill rising sheer beyond it, palely visible because of its light dusting of snow. Aled make them sit around a square dining table, one of only five in the room. Then he lit a candle in a glass holder on the table — the only source of light or heat; just dead ash and the husk of a log in the grate.
"For a schoolteacher," Aled said, "you don't learn anything, do you girl?"
The convoy assembled at six on the castle car park. A Range Rover, a Daihatsu and a little Fiat Panda which was all Dai Death had been able to borrow from the garage at short notice.
Guto was furious when he saw who was piling into the six-seater Daihatsu.
"You said supporters," he snarled at Alun, the General Secretary.
"It'll be fine," Alun whispered back. "A little adventure for them."
"I hope there's a bloody pub there," Charlie Firth was saying, getting into the back between ski-jacketed Shirley Gillies with her Uher tape-recorder on her knee, and "Bill" Sykes in an ancient overcoat with a vicuna collar. Ray Wheeler was in the front with young Gary, Giles Freeman's replacement, and a farmer called Emlyn, who was driving.
It was still snowing, and there must have been four or five inches of it on the ground.
"Flaming cold," Firth said.
"We'll just have to bunch together," said Shirley. She was on her own tonight, TV news having been affected by a ludicrously timed cameramen's dispute about overtime payments.
Idwal Roberts, tweed trousers stuffed into his wellingtons, looked at the Fiat Panda and then looked at Dai. "You're sure this thing is four-wheel-drive?" Dai pointed to the appropriate lettering on the little car's rear door. Idwal looked unconvinced.
"I'm sorry. I've forgotten — which paper are you with?" Alun asked Miranda, who was looking startling in a huge lemon-coloured designer parka with lots of fake fur.