Reginald Hill: The Stranger House

First off, she tried a backward somersault to straighten herself up, but all it did halfway through was bring her in violent collision with the back wall.

This however turned out to be her salvation. Instead of sliding down it at great speed to make contact with the floor, she hit the stack of hassocks and hymn books piled there in anticipation of some future full house sellout. The hands of angels might have done a better job at bearing her up, but maybe this kind of divine intercession was the best an Aussie atheist could look for.

This was her last absurd thought before she hit the ground with sufficient force to drive all the breath out of her lungs but not to kill her. An avalanche of hassocks and hymn books swept down after her, filling the air with swirling dust. She twisted round to protect her face from the holy debris and cried out as it clattered and bounced against her back. Fear of heights she didn’t have, but most of her childhood nightmares had been associated with fear of being trapped in a constricted dark place.

The downslide seemed to go on forever. She felt as if she were being buried alive under a mountain of dusty books and cushions. And even when they stopped crashing upon her, through the roar of terrified blood rushing along her veins she seemed still to hear noises: creaking wood, steps, doors opening and shutting.

Till finally these too, whether imagined or real, died away, leaving her to something more frightening than any sound.

The silence of the dark.

Later Sam worked out she probably lay there only a matter of seconds, certainly less than a minute. Also that she could have dislodged the hymn books and hassocks simply by sitting up. But at the time it felt as if she lay there an age, fearful that the slightest movement would bring the whole weight of the tower crashing down upon her.

And finally a voice.

“Jesus Christ! Gerry, give me a hand. Miss Flood! Miss Flood! Are you all right?”

Someone was pulling the books and hassocks from her body. Someone who knew her name. Maybe it was God. Though surely the All-knowing wouldn’t need to inquire after her health?

She squinted sideways and saw a pair of knees. Would God wear blue denim? She didn’t care. She could see, not too clearly, but at least she was out of the dark.

“What happened?” she gasped.

“You fell. Stay still. Gerry, don’t just stand there. Get some water.”

Gerry? God’s second son, maybe. Jesus and Gerry. Now she was being silly. On the other hand this Gerry did seem able to conjure up rain which was now falling in very welcome cool drops on her exposed cheek.

Her mouth felt dry as dust. She swallowed and realized that in fact her mouth was full of dust. She needed to get some of this delicious liquid down her throat. She struggled to turn her face upward.

“No! Don’t move till we get help.”

Right, of course. She should lie still until experts had assessed the extent of damage and how best to proceed without causing more.

But even as this eminently sensible response was struggling along the self-repairing synapses of her brain, she was twisting round from prone to supine and flexing everything that she felt ought to be flexible.

“I’m OK,” she gasped. “Water.”

The source of the rain she now traced to a shallow silver platter from which Gerry the Son was flicking water with his finger. God the Blue-jeaned was still kneeling by her. She used his shoulder to haul herself into the sitting position, grabbed the salver, and drained what little water it still contained. Then with the instinct of a thirsty animal in the outback, she pushed herself upright, tottered to the font and buried her face in its cool dark pool. When her mouth was washed clean of dust, she cupped her hands and threw the water against her face and gasped with pleasure as it trickled down her body.

“This is good stuff,” she said finally. “Does this mean I’ve been baptized? My pa will kill me.”

The frivolity popped out as it often did at moments of high stress. Her rescuers didn’t seem to find it funny.

God was a six-footer, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, though the barrel showed signs of rolling downhill into a beer gut. Way back he must have been a craggy good looker, but now he was definitely the ancient of days, in his sixties she guessed, his weathered face lined and crinkled. But his eyes still sparkled a bright blue and his thatch of silvery hair was still touched here and there with starts of gold.

The other one, Gerry the rainmaker, was a bit younger, mid-fifties maybe, his hair still black with only a slight frosting at the edges. His rather chubby face looked as if it could relax into a kind of koala attractiveness, but for now it was set in a blank from which his slatey eyes viewed her more like a strange animal who might be a threat than a young stranger who’d just had an accident. In contrast to God’s sports shirt and jeans, he wore a dark suit and a collar and tie.

“I still think we should get you checked out,” said God. “That was a nasty tumble you took.”

“You saw it?” said Sam.

“No. I came in and saw you lying on the floor under all that crap. It didn’t take Miss Marple to work out you must have fallen off the loft ladder, right?”

“It might have tested her to work out what my name was,” said Sam.

Before he could reply, the porch door opened and another man came in, this one wearing a priest’s cassock and collar. He too was in his fifties, medium height, slightly built, with a salt-and-pepper shag of hair, and a matching tangle of beard, which, if the moistly anxious brown eyes peering out above it were anything to go by, had been cultivated to conceal meekness rather than express aggression.

“Thor,” he said. “And Gerry. Hello. What on earth’s happened here?”

As he spoke his gaze swung rapidly from the pile of hassocks and hymn books on the floor to Sam, and stuck. His mouth opened and white teeth gleamed through his beard like the moon through a bramble bush in what may have been intended as a welcoming smile but came over more as a grimace.

The man called Thor (right name for a god, wrong religion, thought Sam) said, “I came down to make sure young Billy got screwed in properly. This young lady seems to have slipped off the tower ladder. You should get it fixed. It’s a death trap.”

“Oh dear. I’m so sorry. Are you all right, Miss…?”

“Flood. Sam Flood,” said Sam. “Yeah, I’m fine. Few bruises, nothing broken. And I didn’t slip. Someone slammed the trap shut on my fingers.”

Something in what she said robbed the vicar of the power of response for a moment and when he got it back, it hardly seemed worth the effort.

“What…? You’re sure…? Who would do such a thing…? It hardly seems likely…”

While the vicar was wittering, God ran up the ladder with the casual ease of an ancient mariner and pushed open the trap.

“No one up here now,” he declared. “Wind must have blown it shut.”

He slid down, landing easily.

“You’d need a bloody gale!” protested Sam.

“Gales are what we get round here,” said the man. “Did you actually see anyone?”

“No, not really,” she admitted. “But I did hear something. And he had time to come down and get away…”

She moved away from the support of the font and was pleased to find she was pretty well back in control of her limbs. Standing under the once more open trap, she peered up at the clouds and recalled that sense of a presence just before it slammed shut. No features, just that frightening feeling of being at the focal point of a predatory stare…

“There was a guy outside digging a grave when I arrived,” she said. “Was he still there when you arrived?”