Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

I felt like that was the last thing I needed. But I stayed with her as she set off down the small hill towards the church, taking the same direction in which Susan Book had gone.

The verger was waiting for us at the door of the vestry, a much smaller stone doghouse attached to the wall of the church at the back. She’d already opened the door, but she hadn’t gone inside. She looked more nervous and unhappy than ever – and she looked to Juliet for instructions with the same sad hunger that I’d noticed before.

‘You can wait here,’ Juliet told her, sounding almost gentle. ‘We’ll be five minutes. I just think it will be better if Castor sees for himself.’

Susan shook her head. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘In case you’ve got any questions. The canon told me to give you any help I could.’ She visibly steeled herself, and stepped inside first. Juliet nodded me forward, so I went next in line, with her bringing up the rear.

The vestry was about the size of a large toilet, and it was empty apart from a cupboard for ecclesiastical vestments and half a dozen hooks screwed into the wall. We went on through, via a second, wide-open door, into the north transept of the church, a low-roofed side tunnel looking towards the majestic main corridor of the nave. It was completely unlit, apart from the last red rays spilling through the stained-glass windows to our left. It made for a fairly forbidding prospect: it was hard to imagine anyone being inspired to devotion by it. Mind you, I wouldn’t say a paternoster if you put a gun to my head, so I’m probably not an unbiased witness there.

I felt it before I’d taken three steps: the chill. It was more like December than May, and more like the High Andes than East Acton. It ate into the bone. No wonder I’d felt cold when I was trying the door outside: the chill must have been radiating out through the stone. I suppressed a shudder and moved on.

But another few steps brought an even bigger surprise. I turned and shot a glance at Juliet, who looked keenly back at me. ‘Tell me what you’re feeling now,’ she said.

I wanted to confirm it first. I walked left, then right, then forwards.

‘It changes,’ I muttered. ‘Son of a bitch. It’s like – there are pockets of cold, in the air, not moving.’

‘Whatever happened here, it happened very quickly. I think that’s why it hasn’t—’

She hesitated, looking for the right word.

‘Hasn’t what?’

‘Spread evenly.’

My laugh was incredulous, and slightly pained.

Susan Book was waiting for us at the end of the transept, and she was looking back towards us, not expectantly but with anxious intensity. She clearly wasn’t going to take a step further without us. So we walked on and joined her.

The shadows were deeper in the nave, because only the windows at the farther end were getting any light. The rest of the cavernous space was a dimensionless black void. The grey flagstones under our feet faded into the dark a scant three or four yards from where we were, as though we stood on a stone outcrop at the edge of a cliff face.

Now that none of us was moving, I was suddenly aware of a sound. It was very low, both in volume and in pitch: very different from the susurration of echoes our footsteps had raised. It rose and fell, rose and fell again over the space of several seconds, dying away so slowly I was left wondering whether I’d imagined it.

Before I could resolve that question, Juliet was on the move again. She crossed the nave into the featureless dark and came back a few moments later, carrying a candle. How she’d even been able to see what she was aiming for was beyond me.

The candle was plain and white, about eight inches long and with a slight taper at the wick end. Susan looked at it with solemn unhappiness. Juliet took a lighter from her pocket and held it over the wick. ‘That’s a votive candle,’ Susan said, a little plaintively. ‘You’re meant to light it when you say a prayer.’

‘Then say one,’ Juliet suggested.

She touched the wick to the lighter flame, and after a moment it flared and caught.

I thought she was going to lead us on up the nave towards the altar, but she just waited, one hand cupped around the candle flame to shield it from any draughts that might gust in from the open door behind us. But the air was as still as the air inside a coffin must be. The flame rose straight and flicker-free, giving off a single wisp of smoke as the wick burned in.

Then it guttered and almost went out. It shrivelled, if a flame can be said to shrivel, and it shrank in on itself. It was as though the darkness and the cold were feeding on it, suckling on the tiny pinpoint of warmth and light and in the process killing it. As the flame surrendered and gave ground, the shadows came back deeper and more opaque than before, and the cold seemed to become a little more intense. In the dead silence, I heard that sound again: the double-spiked, deep-throated murmur at the limit of hearing.

‘You were expecting that?’ I asked Juliet, my eyes on the beleaguered candle flame.

‘It was the first thing I tried. And that was the second.’ She was pointing to the wall over to my right. Glancing in that direction, I saw a row of six squat shapes which resolved themselves, when I took a step towards them, into black plastic plant pots.

Each pot had something dead in it. Leafless stems; sagging, frost-burned blossoms; desiccated corms.

‘The cold will do that,’ I pointed out. ‘You don’t need anything supernatural.’

‘True,’ Juliet agreed. ‘But not in the space of five minutes. Look at your hand. The skin on your wrist.’

I did. It was already starting to pucker and dry: when I ran a finger across it, there was a dull ache.

‘The longer you stay in here, the worse it will get. If you lingered long enough, I suppose—’ Juliet’s gaze flicked across the plant pots with their freeze-dried, grey-green cargoes. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Again, in the hush after she spoke, a bass rumble in the air or in the stone or in the darkness itself rose and peaked and fell, rose and peaked and died away into silence.

‘What the hell is that?’ I asked. ‘That noise?’

Juliet seemed surprised. ‘You mean you don’t recognise it?’

‘Not so far.’

‘It’ll come to you.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure,’ I said, a little piqued. ‘But probably not before my leaves start to fall off.’

I blew out the candle flame, just before it died of its own accord, and headed for the exit.

It had happened during the evensong service, Susan Book said, the night before last.

Saint Michael’s didn’t have a resident priest, and there were no services there during the week. It was only open on Saturdays and Sundays, when Canon Ben Coombes came across from Hammersmith to lead the services for a congregation that was only half as big as it had been even ten years ago. The rest of the time, Susan looked after the place along with a sexton named Patricks who mainly tended the graves but could occasionally be prevailed on to clean graffiti off the walls.

Evensong was her favourite service. She liked the hymns, which always started with ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us’, and the canticles which sometimes made her cry, they were so beautiful; and she liked the lighting of the candles – especially around this time of year, when they seemed to take up the work of the sun as the sunlight failed. Like the light of the spirit, picking up the slack for the fallible and beleaguered flesh.

We were out among the gravestones again, warming ourselves in the last red rays of sunset after the midnight chill of the church. I was reclining at my ease, more or less, on MICHAEL MACLEAN GREATLY MISSED HUSBAND AND FATHER. Juliet was perched elegantly on the headstone of ELAINE FARRAH-BEAUMONT, TAKEN FROM US MUCH TOO SOON, and Susan was sitting on the grass between us, unwilling to disturb the rest of the dearly departed. Under the circumstances, I didn’t take that as empty sentimentality. Nor did I take it personally that her eyes never wavered from Juliet’s face.