The E-Word 'OH MY GOD,' Betty said. 'The only time I go out on my own, in walks number one on the list of situations I wouldn't trust you to handle.'

Robin couldn't keep still. He was pacing the kitchen, touching walls and doors, the sink, the fridge as if the permanence of this place in his life was no longer certain.

'So he's in this old green Cherokee, right? And he has on this well-worn army jacket with, like, camouflage patches. And it's unzipped, and all the time I'm hoping what's underneath is just gonna turn out to be some kind of black turtleneck. With, like, a thick white stripe around the neck.'

Betty took off her coat, hung it behind the door and came to sit down. It wasn't the vicar that worried her every newcomer sooner or later had a visit from the vicar. It was how Robin had dealt with him.

'Pretty damn clear from the start he wasn't just coming to ask the way to someplace.' Robin went over to the kitchen table; there were two half-pint glasses on it and four small beer bottles, all empty. 'Guy wanted to talk. He was waiting for me to ask him in.'

'I don't suppose he had to wait long.'

'Soon's we get inside, it's the firm handshake. "Hi, I'm Nick Ellis." And I'm wondering do these guys drink beer? So I offer him a Michelob from the refrigerator.'

'Normal practice is to offer them tea, Robin.'

'No... wait... Transpires he spent some years in the States which became detectable in his accent. And then what can I say? we...'

'You exchanged history. You drank beer together.'

'I confess, I'm standing there pouring out the stuff and I'm like...' Robin held up a glass with a trembling hand. 'Like, all the time, I'm half-expecting him to leap up in horror, pull out his cross... slam it in my face, like the guy in the Dracula movies. But he was fine.'

She looked sceptical. 'What did you tell him about us?'

'Well... this was hard for me. I'm a straight person, I've no time for deception, you know that.'

'What did you tell him?' Clenching her hands. 'What did you say about us?'

'Fucksake, whaddaya think I said? "Hey, priest, guess how we spent Halloween"?' Robin went over and pulled out a chair and slumped down. 'I told him I was an illustrator and that you were into alternative therapy. I told him you were British and we met when we were both attending a conference in New England. I somehow refrained from identifying the conference as the Wiccan International Moot in Salem, Mass. And although I did not say we were married I didn't mention handfasting either. I said we had gotten hitched.'

'Hitched?'

'Uh-huh. And when he brought up the subject of religion, as priests are inclined to do when they get through with football and stuff, I was quite awesomely discreet. I simply said we were not churchgoers.'

Betty breathed out properly for the first time since sitting down. 'All right. I'm sorry. I do trust you. I've just been feeling a little uptight.'

'Because you're not being true to yourself and your beliefs,' Robin said severely.

'So what was he like?'

'Unexceptional at first. Friendly, but also watchful. Open, but... holding back. He's of medium height but the way he holds himself makes him look taller. Rangy, you know? Looks like a backwoods boy. Looks fit. He drank just one beer while I appear to have drunk three. His hair is fairish and he wears it brushed straight back, and in a ponytail, which is cool. I mean, I have no basic problem with these guys as a spiritual grouping. As a profession.'

'But?'

Robin got up and fed the Rayburn some pine. The Rayburn spat in disgust. Robin looked up at Betty; his eyes were unsteady.

'But, if you want the truth, babe, I guess this is probably a very sick and dangerous example of the species.'

Robin had been anxious the priest remained in the kitchen. He would have had problems explaining the brass pentacle over the living-room fireplace. Would not be happy to have had the Reverend Nicholas Ellis browsing through those books on the shelves. He was glad his guest consumed only one beer and therefore would be less likely to need the bathroom.

And when Ellis asked if he might take a look at the ancient church of St Michael, Robin had the back door open faster than was entirely polite.

Still raining out there. The priest wore hiking boots and pulled out a camouflage beret. They strolled back across the farmyard, around the barn into the field, where the ground was uneven and boggy. And there it was, on its promontory above the water, its stones glistening, its tower proud but its roofless body like a split, gutted fish.

'Cool, huh, Nick?' Robin had told the priest about St Michael's probably becoming disused on account of the Hindwell Brook, the problem of getting cars close enough to the church in the wintertime.

The priest smiled sceptically. 'That's your theory, is it, Robin?'

'Well, that and the general decline in, uh, faith. I guess some people'd started looking for something a little more progressive, dynamic.'

The Reverend Ellis stopped. He had a wide, loose mouth. And though his face was a touch weathered, it had no lines, no wrinkles. He was maybe forty.

'What do you mean by that, Robin?'

'Well... uh...' Robin had felt himself blushing. He talked on about how maybe the Church had become kind of hidebound: same old hymns, same old... you know?

The minister had said nothing, just stood there looking even taller, watching Robin sinking into the mud.

'Uh... what I meant... maybe they began to feel the Church wasn't offering too much in the direction of personal development, you know?'

And then Ellis went, 'Yeah, I do know. And you're dead right.'

'Oh. For a minute, I was worried I was offending you.'

'The Church over here has lost much of its dynamism. Don't suppose I need tell you that in most areas of the United States a far higher proportion of the population attends regular services than in this country.'

'So how come you were over there?' Robin had grabbed his chance to edge the talk away from religion.

'Went over with my mother as a teenager. After her marriage ended. We moved around quite a bit, mainly in the South.'

'Really? That's interesting. My mom was English and she met my dad when he was serving with the Air Force in the north of England, and she went home with him, to New Jersey. So, like-'

'And it was there,' Nicholas Ellis continued steadily, 'that I first became exposed to what you might consider a more "dynamic" manifestation of Christianity.'

'In the, uh, Bible Belt?' Snakes and hot coals?

'Where I became fully aware of the power of God.' The priest looked up at the veiled church. 'Where, if you like, the power of the Holy Spirit reached out and touched me.'

No, Robin did not like. 'You notice how the mist winds itself around the tower? As a painter, that fascinates me.'

'The sheer fervour, the electric momentum, you encountered in little...' Ellis's hands forming fists for emphasis, 'little clapboard chapels. The living church I knew what that meant for the first time. Over here, we have all these exquisite ancient buildings, steeped in centuries of worship... and we're losing it, losing it, Robin.'

'Right,' Robin had said neutrally.

Ellis nodded toward the ruins. 'Poets eulogizing the beauty of country churches... and they meant the buildings, the surroundings. Man, is that not beauty at its most superficial?'

'Uh... I guess.' Robin considered how Betty would want him to play this and so didn't rise to it. But he knew in his soul that what those poets were evoking, whether they were aware of it or not, was an energy of place which long pre-dated Christianity. The energy Robin was experiencing right there, right this minute, with the tower uniting with the mist and the water surging below. Sure, the Christians picked up on that, mainly in medieval times, with all those soaring Gothic cathedrals, but basically it was out of their league.

Because, Robin thought, meeting the priest's pale eyes, this is a pagan thing, man.

And this was when he had first become aware of an agenda. Sensing that whatever the future held for him and this casual-looking priest in his army cast-offs, it was not going to involve friendly rivalry and good-natured badinage.

'Buildings are jewellery,' Ellis had said, 'baubles. When I came home, I felt like a missionary in my own land. I was working as a teacher at the time. But when I was subsequently ordained, ended up here, I knew this was where I was destined to be. These people have their priorities right.'

'How's that?'

Ellis let the question go by. He was now talking about how the States also had its bad side. How he had spent time in California, where people threw away their souls like candy wrappers, where the Devil squatted in shop windows like Santa Claus, handing out packs of tarot cards and runes and I Ching sets.

'Can you believe those people?' Robin turned away to control a grin. For, albeit he was East Coast raised, he was those people.

'Over here, it's less obvious.' Ellis shuddered suddenly. 'Far more deeply embedded. Like bindweed, the worst of it's underground.'

Robin hadn't reacted, though he was unsure of whether this was the best response or not. Maybe some normal person bombarded with this bullshit would, by now, be telling this guy he had things to do, someplace else to go, calls to make nice talking with you, Reverend, maybe see you around.

Looking over at the rain-screened hills, Ellis was saying how, the very week he had arrived here, it was announced that archaeologists had stumbled on something in the Radnor Valley evidence of one of the biggest prehistoric wooden temples ever discovered in Europe.

Robin's response had been, 'Yeah, wasn't that terrific?'

When Ellis had turned to him, there was a light in his eyes which Robin perceived as like a gas jet.

'He said it was a sign of something coming to the surface.'

'Them finding the prehistoric site?' Betty sat up, pushing her golden hair behind her ears.

'It was coming out like a rash, was how he put it,' Robin said. 'Like the disease under the surface the disease which you only identify when the rash starts coming out?'

'What's he talking about?'

'Man with an agenda, Bets.' Robin detected a half-inch of beer in one of the Michelob bottles and drained it, laid down the bottle with a thump. 'If there's anything I can recognize straight off, it's another guy with an agenda.'

'Robin, you don't have an agenda, you just have woolly dreams.'

'You wanna hear this, or not?'

'Sorry,' Betty said, frayed. 'Go on.'

Robin told her that when Ellis had first come here, before the Church let him go his own way, he looked after four small parishes, on both sides of the border. New Radnor was the biggest. All the parishes possessed churches, except one of these was in ruins.

'But don't take this the wrong way. Remember this is a guy doesn't go for churches. He's into clapboard shacks. Now, Old Hindwell is a village with no church any more, not even a Baptist chapel. But one thing it does have is a clapboard fucking shack. Well, not exactly clapboard more like concrete and steel. The parish hall in fact.'

'Is there one?'

'Up some steps, top of the village. Built, not too well, in the early sixties. Close to derelict, when Ellis arrived. He hacks through the brambles one day and a big light comes down on him, like that guy on the road to Damascus, and he's like, "This is it. This is my church!" You recall that film Witness, where the Amish community build this huge barn in, like, one day?'

'Everybody mucking in. Brilliant.'

'Yeah, well, what happens here is Christians converge from miles around to help Nick Ellis realize his vision. Money comes pouring in. Carpenters, plumbers, sundry artisans giving their work for free. No time at all, the parish hall's good as new... better than new. And there's a nice big cross sticking out the roof, with a light inside the porch. And every Sunday the place is packed with more people than all the other local churches put together.'

Robin paused.

Betty opened out her hands. 'What do you want me to say? Triumph of the spirit? You think I should knock that?'

'Wait,' Robin told her. 'How come all this goes down in a place with so little religious feeling they abandoned the original goddamn church?'

'Evangelism, Robin. It spreads like a grass fire when it gets going. He's a new kind of priest with all that American... whatever. If it can happen there, it can happen here and obviously has. Which shows how right we were to keep a low profile, because those born-again people, to put it mildly, are not tolerant towards paganism.'

Robin shook his head. 'Ellis denies responsibility for the upsurge. Figures it was waiting to happen to deal with something that went wrong. Something of which Old Hindwell church is symptomatic.'

Betty waited.

'So we're both moving in closer to the church, and I'm finding him a little irritating by now, so I start to point out these wonderful ancient yew trees how the building itself might be medieval but I'm told that the yews in a circle and the general positioning of the church indicate that it occupies a pre-Christian site. I'm talking in a "this doesn't mean much to me but it's interesting, isn't it?" kind of voice.'

'Robin,' Betty said, 'you don't possess that voice.'

Ellis was staring at him. 'Who told you that, Robin?'

Robin floundered. 'Oh... the real estate agent, I guess.'

Furious with himself that, instead of speaking up for the oldest religion of these islands, he was scuttling away like some shamed vampire at dawn, allowing this humourless bastard to go on assuming without question that his own 2,000-year-old cult had established a right to the moral high ground. So how did they achieve that, Nick? By waging countless so-called holy wars against other faiths? By fighting amongst themselves with bombs and midnight kneecappings, blowing guys away in front of their kids?

'All right,' Ellis had then said, 'let me tell you the truth about this church, Robin. This church was dedicated to St Michael. How much do you know about him?'

Robin could only think of Marks and freaking Spencer, but was wise enough to say nothing.

'The Revelation of St John the Divine, Chapter Twelve. "And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought Michael and his angels." '

Robin had looked down at his boots.

' "And the great dragon was cast out... that old serpent called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world. He was cast out... into the earth." '

'Uh, right,' Robin said, 'I'd forgotten about that.'

'Interestingly, around the perimeter of Radnor Forest are several other churches dedicated to St Michael.'

'Not too much imagination in those days, I guess.'

Ellis had now taken off his beret. His face was shining with rain.

'The Archangel Michael is the most formidable warrior in God's army. Therefore a number of churches dedicated to him would represent a very powerful barrier against evil.'

'What evil would this be precisely, Nick?' Robin was becoming majorly exasperated by Ellis's habit of not answering questions like your questions are sure to be stupid and inexact, so he was answering the ones you ought to have asked. It also bugged Robin when people talked so loosely about 'evil' a coverall for fanatics.

Ellis said, 'I visit the local schools. Children still talk of a dragon in Radnor Forest. It's part of the folklore of the area. There's even a line of hills a few miles from here they call the Dragon's Back.'

Robin shrugged. 'Local place names. That so uncommon, Nick?'

'Not awfully. Satanic evil is ubiquitous.'

'Yeah, but is a dragon necessarily evil?' Robin was thinking of the fantasy novels of Kirk Blackmore, where dragons were fearsome forces for positive change.