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Philip Maxwell

Deliver Us from Evil · the opening

The Drowned Village

Monday 13 August, 21:16. Lake La Concepción, in the mountains above Marbella.

Karl Petersen and his friend Erik are two weeks into a holiday from Denmark, with two nights left. This afternoon they hired canoes on a reservoir the drought has almost drained. This is Karl’s phone.

Swipe up to unlock it. Read the messages, look through the photos. It’s his phone; look wherever you like.

Messages are shown translated from Danish. The photos are real places standing in for Karl’s; credits below.

Night and thick fog on the Black Sea. A frigate lies at anchor with its lanterns lit while two longboats full of men row away from it under a reddish moon.

February 1807 · The Black Sea, off Rumelia

Two centuries earlier

Two long boats slip away from HMS Raquel through the sea mist. Through the gaps, a copper-red full moon. In the prow sits Captain Richard Bulkeley, who learned to sail on the Menai Straits below his family’s estate at Beaumaris.

His orders: meet Russian troops on an enemy shore, at night, and take possession of a sealed package. He had asked the Admiral how big.

‘A crate… a man-sized crate.’

‘The crate must remain sealed… if all you hold dear matters anything to you, you will obey that order come what may.’

Admiral Duckworth to Captain Bulkeley

‘No uniforms, sir. They’re cloaked, but one appears to be a priest.’

‘A priest! The Admiral made no mention of a priest.’

‘He appears to be blessing something, sir.’

Watch the 1807 concept teaser, with sound

Deliver Us from Evil

A drowned crypt in Spain. A sealed crate on a Black Sea beach. A ruined mansion on Anglesey.

A ruined stone rotunda, its columns green with moss, lost in woodland
The woods at Baron Hill, near Beaumaris. Photo: Philip Maxwell

This is where Philip Maxwell’s novel begins. What Erik finds at the bottom of the steps stays in the manuscript, which is available to producers on request.

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Photo credits

Karl’s photos are stood in for by real photographs of Marbella, Puerto Banús and the Embalse de la Concepción, and by drought-exposed ruins and an old church elsewhere in Spain.