by Tim Lebbon
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maintained gardens, the six-foot boundary wall that failed miserably in keeping the local youths out … none of this mattered. All that concerned her was that this was home from home, the house of God. A refuge in plain sight.
The one place where she could let down her guard.
“Oh Jesus.” Megan never took the Lord’s name in vain, but often uttered it as a kind of invocation. If something scared her or shocked her she called on His help. “Oh my Jesus!”
At first she thought the shape was a new cross, leaning against the railings in front of the church while its mount was prepared inside. But as she drew nearer she saw hair flitting in the gentle breeze. Someone was tied to the railings, arms out, feet up off the ground, limbs twisted in and out of the uprights in a manner that must surely mean broken bones.
Then, as she came to a halt several yards in front of it, the body moved. Its arms slipped from between the iron railings, it slid to the ground and looked up at her.
“You dog, why hast thou fellated me?” Brand said.
Megan could not speak. She opened her mouth but could not breathe, as if the air had frozen around her and Brand, solidifying, allowing only the twisting of his face as he smiled, the satisfied sigh as he stretched his limbs-joints clicking, bones creaking-the only sound. She could not move, either, because he was looking at her. In the frank sunlight she could see his scars … several of them, evenly spaced across his face,
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certainly not random. Sigils, signs, wards … they were designed.
She knew this was sacrilege, yet she was fascinated.
She’d read about small rodents caught in the gaze of a cobra, pierced by its eyes and scared into a terrible paralysis that only ended as the snake struck.
Going to bite me, Megan thought, he’s really going to bite me. Brand’s grin widened and she believed it, for a crazy moment she imagined him leaning forward, clamping his jaws around her exposed, cool neck and chomping down on cartilage, carotid artery, muscle and flesh, shredding …
Then the image passed and she stepped back quickly. Her heel caught on the path edging and she was falling, Brand growing before her as he rose in her vision and the sky surrounded him. She wheeled her arms and cried out, stupidly embarrassed.
Brand grabbed her. He filled her field of vision now, just as he had that first moment they’d seen him out in the snowstorm, impossibly huge through the windscreen. She was terrified. “There is plenty covered that shall never be revealed,” he said, smiling, “and hid that can never be known.”
“Let go of me,” she hissed, but he had her. His right hand was closed around her left bicep, his left curved back under her right arm and pressed flat to her back. Her breast nudged his wrist. His eyebrows raised slightly, lifting one of the scars-it was shaped like a serpent with three heads-105
although he was not looking at her face any more. His gaze had been stolen by something across the street.
“Unlucky for some,” he said.
Megan struggled away from him, almost stumbling again but righting herself this time. He was looking over her shoulder, his amused expression doing nothing to dispel the threat he exuded. She looked. There was a small dog with something in its jaws. It was flinging it into the air and catching it again, and Megan realized after a few seconds that it was a bird, probably dead already but still being toyed with, nipped, holed so that tiny droplets of blood spattered the grey concrete it was not being allowed to rest upon. The hound seemed neither excited nor bloodthirsty, merely interested, curious as to what would happen were it to catch the bird again, fling it again, catch and fling one more time, and so on and on.
“A charming village you live in,” Brand said. “No, really, I’m not fucking with you, a lovely little place.”
“What do you want?” Megan asked, suddenly angry. How dare he scare her? And here, by the church … how dare he? “Didn’t you get your lift?”
Brand frowned and looked skyward, finger touching a ragged mark on his chin. “Hmm. Now then, did I get my lift? Well yes!”
Megan backed away a little more. His arms, they’d been between the bars, she’d seen them there but now they were whole and healthy again. A contortionist perhaps, using his unusual
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joint structure to shock and frighten?
“Well you can’t have gone very far,” she said.
“No I didn’t. My lift arrived, I asked a small favor of them and they threw me back to the storm, back into the teeth of snow and ice, into the freezer, thinking perhaps that I was warmed enough by their meagre hospitality to survive the night out there on my own.”
“You were being weird!” Megan couldn’t help justifying herself. She glanced past Brand to the church door, wondering if she could run there before he had a chance to grab her again. Her arm throbbed where his fingers had pressed in. Her breast tingled where he had nudged it, like the last dregs of a local anaesthetic.
“I was being honest!” Brand shouted.
Megan ran toward the church.
He shouted again, louder, spittle tickling the back of her neck. “I only needed a moment, just a small moment, just a few seconds-“
His voice followed her, though she could not hear his footsteps. Surely someone could hear him shouting, someone would see?
“-spent the night wandering through the snow-“
She reached the door. It was open to her, as always.
“That poor cat.” It was Brand’s voice but it was inside her head, as if he had taken her space and spoken with her mind but not her mouth. That poor cat.
She turned and started shoving the big door shut, but stopped when she saw him. He had backed up to the gate in the railings, staring up
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at the spire and the unlit neon cross. “Fucking monstrosity,” he said. Then he looked down at Megan and smiled that dreadful smile once more. “He’s forsaken you to me.” And although it was merely a whisper, and Megan’s heart was thumping, and there were agitated voices behind her in the church, she heard his words as though his breath gushed them across her skin.
Megan slammed the door shut on his grin. Perhaps that would break it. She moved to the fullheight window next to the door, but it was as if the scene was printed there from some cumulative image of the church garden: no Brand; neutral sunlight; the grass cut; the flowers tended.
No Brand. Yet again, he had vanished in the space of a second.
“That poor cat,” someone said behind her. She spun around, wanting to shout but unable to find her breath. Leave me alone, the silent shout echoed in her mind, just leave me alone, go away, get lost … Brand had frightened her. His coldness, his mirthless humor, his emphasis slipping from one subject to another, all combined to disturb. Those terrible scars cut into his flesh with intent, gruesome tattoos using his own damaged tissue as ink. And his eyes. Blue, but dark. Bright, but bland. The eyes of a corpse that doesn’t know it’s dead. His arms, twisted but straight again … and the way he’d been looking at Nikki in the car…
There were three people gathered in front of the cross, none of them Brand, all of them female. And they were looking at something down by their feet. One of the women had her hands
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to her mouth, the other to her ears, and if the third had not been smoking a cigarette she could have completed the threesome by covering her eyes.
The woman holding her ears shook her head once more. “Poor, poor thing.”
“Who the hell-?”
“I’ll get onto Father Peter about this, you know,” the smoking woman said. “I’m not having sickos breaking into our church and doing this, it’s just not … fair.” She turned and looked at Megan. Megan had seen her a few times in church, but did not know her name. “Not fair at all.”
“What happened?” Megan asked.
The other two women looked up and moved back for her to see. Megan walked between the rows of chairs, inhaling and taking comfort in the familiar sme
lls of well-thumbed Bibles and old prayers tumbled into dusty corners. She glanced back once, but the doors were shut, the handles were still, and if Brand did want to come in at least he would be faced with the four of them now. He would not find her on her own.
There was something on the floor at the women’s feet. Megan could only identify it as a cat because one of the women said so. The face still had whiskers, she supposed, and the dry leathery nose was there, and the fur was black and white, but splashed a dark, crispy red.
“Poor cat,” someone said once more, but Megan thought it must have been an echo.
She gagged. Her mouth filled with bile, her
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stomach rose up and clenched tight, muscles hardening. “Oh shit.”
The creature was on its back. Its legs had been snapped to the side so that they lay flat against the floor, and rusted nails had been driven through its paws.
“I know who did this,” Megan said. That poor cat, Brand had said. Or had he? Had his lips really moved or had the words only been imagined?
“Who?” said the smoking woman. The word blew out in an angry puff.
Megan looked up. She smiled at the other two women, only now recognizing them: Jane Weeks from the council estate and Marjorie Bellamy, the just-retired nurse who ran the Women’s Night at the social club. Then she looked at the smoking woman and shook her head, almost imperceptibly, as if to dislodge a sticky memory.
“I said who? Who would break in here and do …” The woman nodded down at the crucified animal, taking another heavy drag on her cigarette.
“No smoking in here,” Megan said.
The woman stared. “It’s to calm my nerves,” she said very slowly, as if talking to a child in a foreign language.
“Do you really know?” Marjorie asked.
Megan shook her head and pressed close to one of the tall windows. “No, not really,” she said, her breath misting on the glass. She turned one way then the other, trying to see as much as she could. On this side of the church the railings gave way to the old boundary wall. A path ran
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behind, high trees standing like sentinels on the other side, and there were a couple of breaches where frost had shattered stone over the years. The wall had been here long before the church. Some said they had built on the site of a slaughter house, but even the oldest people in the village claimed not to remember that far back.
Nothing. No one. The tall trees shifted slightly in the breeze, still naked and awaiting spring to finally come along and clothe them. Something moved on top of the wall and Megan thought it was a cat, but when she turned to look full-on there was nothing there, not even a shadow.
“We should call the police,” Jane said. “This is vandalism. Desecration. It must be a crime, mustn’t it?”
“In Tall Stennington this is akin to murder,” Marjorie said. “Nothing ever happens here.”
Why do you think I want to go? Megan thought, and Brand passed one of the breaks in the wall. She stiffened, pressing her face close to the glass and holding her breath so that her vision did not mist over. At least, she’d thought it was Brand. A black shape, a quick wave of hair, taunting. Nothing now, but then she thought that if she stared at the gap forever nothing else would pass by.
The wall was only four feet high. He must have been intentionally hunkered down to only appear in the gap.
“Anyone got a mobile?” the smoking woman asked.
Megan thought about the phone in her bag but did not volunteer it. If they called the police they
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would come, see the cat, find Brand wandering around outside, question him, and he would mention her name and the brief lift her family had offered in the snowstorm … No, she did not want that sort of trouble.
Didn’t look at his feet, a voice said in her head, the voice she recognised as her Honest side trying to pierce the lies she blanketed herself beneath. Didn’t look to see what shape they were.
“Not me,” Jane said.
“Nope.” Marjorie glanced at Megan.
She shook her head. “Someone should move it,” she said. She imagined touching the cat and retched again, trying hard to keep her mouth shut and her face neutral. She swallowed and felt the bile burning its way back into her. Turning back to the window seemed to provide some privacy, but it meant she had to look out into the church gardens, between the rose bushes and the small trees that barely seemed to grow.
“It’s evidence,” someone said behind her, but she ignored them. She needed to pray. That’s why she had come here this lunchtime, to pray for help and protection from whatever had passed them by in the snowstorm. Not the Devil-of course not-but something had happened to their family, she had felt it then and she could still feel it now, a prying eye trying to see past her shell and probe inside. When Dan attempted to winkle a truth from her she could feel it, sense his concern or curiosity working at her, and it was easy to shield against that. Now, she was not entirely sure what was happening.
She did know what Brand was trying to do.
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She needed to pray.
Megan went and knelt before the cross, forcing herself to stare up as she did every time, hating the symbol of His pain. The voices of the women drifted away, her senses turned inwards, the black space behind her closed eyelids grew, her own breathing came heavy and closer than ever, and in seconds Jesus was breathing along with her.
She muttered her prayers but only to give them weight. She was never loud enough for others to hear because her prayers were private, known only to her and God. She honored Him forever, occasionally asking for help, more often simply revelling in His being there for her, exhalations of love and devotion and humility.
Today, things felt different. “My Jesus, I don’t know exactly what’s going on, I want to leave this place and Dan doesn’t want to go, and there’s the prints … those footprints over our house … and Brand-“
Something touched her leg. It was so unexpected, so personal-and she was immersed in prayer-that she screeched.
“What!” someone shouted, but Megan was trying to catch her breath, looking down at her leg where she’d felt fingertips brush at the fine hairs there, dreadfully, hopelessly sure that there would be nothing but the thin red lines of nail scratches.
A spider. She watched it scurry across the polished timber floor and disappear beneath the first row of chairs. It was a normal house spider, not
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huge, yet she was sure she heard a tappitytappity-tap as it made its escape.
“Just a spider,” she said, and then something darkened the window to her left. She glanced up but there was nothing there. “Did you see that?”
“Yes,” Jane said. “Euch, I hate spiders.”
“No, the window, there was…” Megan trailed off, realizing how paranoid she would sound. A spider touched my leg, I know who did the cat, something at the window … She went to the window and looked out. Opposite the church on this side was a row of old cottages, whitewashed and thatched, small windows often containing the original distorted glass. Glass is a liquid, she remembered someone saying, it runs with time. Between the church and the cottages was a narrow road, wide enough for one car at a time, no pavements, no border between the road and the church. The bricks along this facade were scratched by wing-mirrors, and on more than one occasion the congregation had been startled during a service by the low growl of a new rut being carved by an unwary driver.
No Brand. No signs at all. Again Megan pressed her face to the window and looked left, thinking that maybe she’d see him walking up the slow hill towards the village square. She sighed, the window misted, and the spider ran across right by her face. She did not screech this time but she did take a step back. It scurried along the mullion and down to the sill, and then headed off across the wall towards the next window. Megan squeezed past the end chairs to get there. Behind her, the three women were again
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discussing the d
ead cat as if Megan was no longer with them.
The next window darkened and remained dark. From this angle Megan could not quite see out. She did not know if she really wanted to, but still she jumped onto a chair and climbed over to the next one, looking at the window all the time, not minding her footing.
Brand’s face disappeared just as she came near enough to see. He’d been grinning, she was sure. Her heart stammered, and just as it kicked back in with a painful punch she went tumbling, slipping and landing on her side on the connected chairs, then rolling to the floor. The fall was hard enough to knock the wind from her. Unable to breathe, her throat painfully closed and her chest burning, Megan hauled herself into a sitting position to look at the window.
Sun shone in.
Hands closed around Megan’s arms and lifted her up. She caught her breath, and even though she knew that it was the women helping her she couldn’t hold in the scream. Fingers dug into her left arm and a hand nudged her breast, reawakening the tingle from where Brand had touched her, making her puke, spattering her skirt, the chairs and the floor with what was left of her breakfast.
“Oh Jesus,” someone said.
That’s right, Megan thought, and then she heaved again. She was bathed in cold sweat. Trickles ran down her side, from her forehead and into her eyes. Her stomach ached. It felt like the worst hangover of her life.
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The women helped her sit on a chair, exuding concern but still careful not to touch where she was speckled with her own puke.
“I know it’s come as a shock,” Marjorie said, “someone doing something terrible like this. But really, dear, it’s just some poor stray moggie. Kids, I expect.” Every word was tainted with doubt.