Long Lankin (23 page)

“Unless it’s the person’s name who painted the picture — the artist. They always put their names on.”

“Well, it’s still old.”

“That first word,
Petrus,
” he said. “It’s Latin for Peter. It’s in my missal —
Tu es Petrus
— it means ‘Thou art Peter.’”

Mrs. Jotman came out. “Roger, I’m going over to Auntie Barbara’s. She’s poorly, so I’ve done some of her laundry. Pamela’s just gone down for her nap, so she won’t be any bother. If I’m not back, can you do cheese on toast for everyone for dinner? Don’t forget to bring anything in that’s dry, and
fold
it — don’t just shove it in the basket. If Pamela wakes up, you’d better come and get me, but she should be all right for a couple of hours. And keep an eye on Dennis. Pete couldn’t find his penknife this morning, and I expect Dennis’s got it. He swears blind he hasn’t, but I know he’s fibbing. I don’t want him ripping up the curtains.”

“All right. See you.”

“The best bit, though,” I said, when Mrs. Jotman had gone round the side of the house, “is that Father Mansell said there was this list of all the rectors there’s been at All Hallows, and it’s somewhere in the church.”

“But like I said, we don’t even know if this bloke Hillyard was a rector, do we?” said Roger.

“Well, we won’t know nothing if we don’t look.”

“All right, but we’ll have to wait till Mum comes back.”

Cora and I had a quick look round to make sure nobody was about, then squeezed ourselves through the bit of broken fence. The old ruins aren’t far from the lane. There’s so many trees growing around, you wouldn’t know the ruins were there if you didn’t really look — not that there’s much to see: some bits of wall, all green and mossy, and small heaps of half-buried stuff with weeds all over. Most of it is just smooth mounds, but if you scrape away the earth and moss with a stick, some of the bricks are quite near the top.

“Once you know there’s been a fire, then you can see,” said Cora, poking about among the stones. “Some of these bricks are black.”

We went a bit farther into the woods, wondering how far the ruins went.

“Must have been an enormous great place,” Cora said.

We went back into the lane, then put our heads down and ran all the way to the church.

“What are we looking for, actually?” I panted, pushing open the door.

“No idea. Pete interrupted Father Mansell just as he was saying.”

We went inside.

“Don’t it feel horrible in here today,” Cora whispered.

“Just what I was thinking,” I said. “Somebody’s cleared up since we last came in. There are new candles in the candlesticks. Was there a service yesterday morning?”

“Haven’t a clue,” Cora said. “Mrs. Campbell must’ve been in and done it.”

We look everywhere for the list of rectors — on the memorials on the walls, in hymnbooks, out in the porch, on the grave slabs set into the floor.

“What about behind that curtain then?” says Roger.

We stand in front of the altar and gaze at the heavy embroidered curtain that hangs behind it, the full width of the stained-glass window. Running along the whole length of the bottom of the wall from one side of the church to the other is a wooden step.

“If I stand on this, I might be able to see round the back of the curtain,” I say. I climb up, but the step is too narrow for my feet. I begin to lose my balance. I grab the fabric. The metal rings slip to one side with a coarse jangling. I land on the floor, having dragged the curtain along the pole as I went.

“Crikey!” Roger whispers.

“What is it?”

“Pull it all the way back,” he says, “then come and stand here.”

I gather up the curtain to one side, then go and join Roger.

I draw in my breath.

On the wall, scratched deep into the stone in huge jagged letters, is written:

And underneath is more scrawled writing, gouged out with a screwdriver or a chisel by someone in such a frenzy that the plaster has broken off in flakes around the letters:

We walk quickly back down the aisle, yank open the church door, and rush out into the sunshine.

I balance myself on a gravestone.

For a long time, we can’t speak.

“We’ll have to go back in,” Roger says. “We’ll have to cover it up again.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“I’ll — I’ll go if you like.”

“No, it’s all right. I’ll come.”

We drag ourselves back to the porch and go into the church once more. The air inside seems thick. Together we pull the curtain over the writing and turn our backs on it.

“We’ll have to try in here,” I say as we walk towards the arch of the tower. “I don’t ever want to come back in this church again as long as I live, and this is the only place left we haven’t looked in.”

Cora’s skin was damp and shiny. She stared up at the ceiling of the tower almost as if she were seeing straight through it. She rubbed her hand on her forehead.

“Can we be quick?” she said irritably. “I can’t stand it in here.”

On the right-hand wall was a locked wooden door that I thought must lead up to the bells, and on the left hung the other thick curtain. I took hold of the edge. “Shall we look?”

Cora sighed, then nodded.

Behind the curtain was an old wooden door, small, grey with age, riddled with wormholes and rotten at the bottom. I rattled the bolt and drew it open. The long plate on the door slipped away from the wood and into my hand.

“Oi!” cried Cora. “What are you playing at?”

“Most of the screws are missing,” I said, carefully trying to line up the remaining rusty screws and pushing the bolt back in place.

“Leave the blimmin’ thing alone. Look, this is it.”

Above the door was a long slab of marble carved with a list of names in two columns under the heading
RECTORS OF THIS PARISH
.

At the top of the list were just names:
Guillaume de Pycard,
Guillaume de Machaut,
Jean de Fontcheval
. The first with a date was
William de Sutton 1231–1237
and the last,
Jasper Scaplehorn 1932–1948
.

“Jasper Scaplehorn — JS. Could he have written that stuff on the wall?”

“Could have done, I suppose.
JS 1948
— the year he left.”

Cora reached up and ran her finger down the names, and there it was, towards the bottom of the first column:
Piers Hillyard 1540–1584
. After Piers Hillyard there was no rector named until
Walter Gomeringe 1643–1652
.

We replaced the curtain.

“Let’s get out,” said Cora. “I don’t feel well.”

I pulled open the door and screwed up my eyes against the bright sunlight that blazed from the churchyard on the other side of the dark arch of the porch. For a second, through my half-closed eyes, I thought I saw something move.

Just as Roger and I step onto the path, the sky is disturbed with squawks of alarm and the rushing of wings. Hundreds of birds take off from the surrounding trees. As the cries fade and the birds wheel and turn and gradually disappear over the line of the hill, an odd stillness falls upon the graveyard. We seem to have brought the tight, close air of the church outside with us, air that feels charged with discomfort.

We start to walk towards the lane. A light wind begins to drift through the grass among the gravestones. All is quiet, but for a low buzzing in my ears like the noise of flies. Maybe it is the sound of my own blood.

Something makes me look towards the old gate.

My feet freeze to the path. Roger doesn’t move. He has seen him, too, the man standing by the gate, the man wearing a long black robe. Wisps of grey hair frame the man’s blistered face. The top of his head is bald. His thin beard blows to one side.

He gazes at us, at Roger and me, without blinking.

In a moment, he vanishes. As I gasp with relief, he appears again, behind a headstone a little nearer to us. He disappears again, then reappears still closer, each time closer, closer still, disappearing and then appearing once more.

My mouth goes dry.

The man is only ten feet away. His skin looks raw.

Then, out of him, though his lips barely move, comes a voice, a thin faraway voice that seems to reach out to us from across some great sea of time, from another shore a million miles away.

Leave this place,
he says from this distant country, this other world.
He walks again. Leave this place. Take the child away. He is hunting. He will find her
.

Then, among the tombstones, out of the air, small figures appear. They are the size of little children, but their colourless faces are old and rotten, like the faces of the dead, their eyes nothing more than black holes, their hair grizzled and sparse.

They open their pale, cracked lips and begin to cry out with high, wailing voices,
Save us, save us. . . .

As I stare, open-mouthed, mute with horror, I see that some are not as far decayed as the others. One of these little ones, a girl with her fair wavy hair still remaining, steps forward from the group and reaches out to me. I stand rigid. She looks like Mimi. . . . She fixes me with her dark hollow eyes.
Save me, save me. . . .

The old man calls out to the children,
You are lost. Go back. Go back
.

They begin to moan, their voices rising and falling in desolate waves.

After what seems a long, long time, I begin to see the grass, the wildflowers, and the gravestones through the children’s bodies. They are fading into nothing, but the moaning goes on and on, long after they have gone. The small girl is the last to disappear, her arms still stretched out in front of her, towards me.

Take the child away,
the man says again as his body becomes air.
He walks again. He knows she is here. . . .

I don’t know how many minutes pass by. The breeze dies down. Shadows move across the grass as the birds return and the trees fill with song once more. I am not sure I am in the world I know or not.