Herald of the Hidden

by Valentine, Mark

  First, there was what seemed to him the startling originality of the style. The brevity and economy of line left the spaces to convey most of the intention. Yet this simple clarity achieved more than the most earnest, dense facsimile ever could.

  Then; there was the content. He perceived that the artist had caught with pen and paper all of the subtle interplay of light and dark which he had experienced via the medium of the candles the night before. Gardens, streets, studies, follies, nearly all of them in dusk or penumbral day—and in some, the twin tapering candlesticks he knew so well.

  But, beyond both the style and the content, though they were compelling enough, lay what he thought was the intent, the inner mood that had created such scenes . . . and he began to realise how so powerful and spiritual a vision might have lingered on, undaunted by the termination of the physical form.

  After a few further questions to the landlady, he sought out the discreet chapel in one of the backstreets, set amongst cultivated evergreen shrubs. The priest was able to spare him a little time.

  ‘Yes, he used to worship here, sometimes; I visited him once or twice. I wasn’t aware of his illness, I don’t think he ever made much of it. At the funeral? It was a cremation. An uncle and aunt I think. Some local people. A publisher, or agent, or somebody like that. That’s all. Not more than nine or ten. A curious thing though—he had a little memorial plaque made long before he died. They found it in his room. It bears his name, and year of birth, and an inscription—but not of course the date of death. Here it is—over here. None of the, errrhm, bereaved, seemed to have the time, or, perhaps, opportunity, to have the details completed, but I had it set up anyway. Perhaps if you have a connection, you might . . .’

  He murmured thanks for the priest’s helpful recollections. No, he thought, no date of death. It’s not apt.

  ‘I wonder . . .’ he began, tentatively, ‘. . . he was very fond of a pair of candlesticks.’

  ‘I remember them. He drew my attention to them; They were very striking.’

  ‘In his papers, there is a note about preserving them for him. Might I place them by his memorial?’

  The priest pursed his lips and pondered. ‘They were . . . a little exotic, if I recall.’

  ‘It was his wish,’ he urged. The clergyman gave in.

  ‘Very well. But on one condition, you will attend to them?’

  And that means visiting the chapel often, they both thought simultaneously.

  ‘I will.’

  **

  He returned to his own bedsit in a flux of exhilaration and trepidation, and his thoughts turned to the future. First he must move—that would be quite an upheaval. Then, there was the difficult task of continuing work whilst living within the ethereal vision of the art he had found; a dichotomy it would be hard to sustain. But, there were two challenges greater than both; to put what the artist had created before a public that might be at best indifferent—and to begin to appease the desire in himself to do more than preserve books, as if they were ancient monuments, but to contribute what he believed and knew to be true.

  And he recognised the irony, too. In a world where there are mechanical contrivances capable of transforming our knowledge about every aspect of our environment, when few secrets are impenetrable to the scientist’s gaze, all of that had achieved nothing for him. Yet one inexplicable experience, one taste of what might be termed by some the miraculous, by others the supernatural, had awoken his soul in a way that went beyond just the preservation of an artist’s work, or the development of his own latent abilities; he felt a sacred awe at that interplay of shadow and light that lies behind all our everyday things. That insight could never, whatever vicissitudes lay ahead, be diminished.

  Their Special Glee

  Her lips were hued like yew-berries, her eyebrows and hair were the silvered black you see on the napes of jackdaws, and her powdered face had the dull, dun, crumbling coating of old grave-slabs. All these things were her own embellishments, inaptly worked upon a head that had the shape and tough skin of an old swollen turnip. And she made it her duty to walk the village, looking out for wickedness.

  She had no dog, and so people thought it odd that she walked around all the time. With a dog, you may walk when you please, where you please. In any road, in any field, in the dim light of dawn or in the lamplight of evening, if you lead, or are led, by a dog, and if you talk to it, or whistle to it, all that is quite natural. But, peculiarly, a person who walks alone, with no obvious object, is less fondly regarded.

  And so, I think she soon discovered, she needed a reason for walking. What drove her to walk was a form of loneliness, I suppose. She had no other company in her house at the end of the village, and so no talk except such as she could strike up with the other villagers. By seeing, and stopping, the wrong things that were going on, she put us in her debt. We were glad that someone was watching, and noticing. So at first we paused when we saw her in the street, and listened and looked shocked about what she told us: and she was gratified.

  She saw a heather fire when it was still just smouldering upon the moor above us: most would not have noticed it so soon. Something of the sort seemed to happen most years, but not amount to much. The moor had caught badly at least once before, leaving swathes of blackened stalks, and pits of bare, dark scars in the soil, leaving also patches of ash, and soot-blemished stone, and a sense, when you walked there, of desolation. This had happened before she started her walking: and this time, when she found the fire, she was ready for it. She hurried down the hill, enlisting others she saw walking, the people with dogs, to go and watch it and ward it off as best they could, while she summoned aid. The firemen came, there was a great to-do, with hoses snaking from the nearest burn, they put it out, and she was praised.

  Yet we never knew who had set the fire. Some claimed to have seen glints on the moor at night, the sparks that could have started it. And at the inn, the imps were blamed, to the delight of visitors, in the quips that passed among the regulars between their sips of beer and the thoughtful placing of cards. The thwarted imps would get her back, they said. They like a fire and if it is put out, they are very much put out.

  The imps are the village’s mascots and can be seen on our emblem. Dundle has its maypole, Weathercliff has a wolf legend, Hoarwick has its beacon and we have our imps. They do not, in fact, go back much more than a century, when Mrs Shieling, a popular children’s author (though perhaps more popular with parents than the children as such), made them up while staying here. She said (of course) she heard of them from the villagers, and even exchanged notes about them with Mrs Ella Leather, a grand-dame of folklore. These tales of the imps’ malice and mischief, always put right by good and (moderately) devout children, soon made their own folklore anyway. There are few of their supposed doings now, those black creatures with pointed heads and tails, who live in the grey and slumbering stones on the moor, that cannot be traced to Mrs Shieling’s Tales of the Tantry Imps (1884; seventeen impressions). It is also true that in these yarns the imps often retaliate, though this rarely comes beyond stealing Curlyhead’s favourite hat (‘was it the hill-wind that made it leap from her golden tresses, or was it . . . ?’) or tweaking Timothy’s ears (‘was it the old thorn-bush that caught him so, or was it . . . ?’) Such little tricks were their special glee, she said.

  And I know where the drinkers’ witticisms must have started. For there is a picture in the book of the King of the Imps, who is nearer normal human size than his minions, standing on a crag, scaly arms akimbo, limned in black against a blazing orange sunset, laughing as the fires catch below, while Timothy and Curlyhead lurk in a niche beneath, fresh and upturned faces pink with excitement, blue eyes wide with trepidation. However, the artist, to my mind, has done their work just a little too well. Even the sturdiest Victorian child, looking at that, might (I thought) hesitate a bit before taking the wrong side against him. A lost hat and a nipped ear might seem the least of it.

  Anyway, moor fires
do happen. And really, the likeliest thing was a walker’s careless cigarette.

  Next, some workmen came to prise up the stones in the church path, old, good, strong slabs, much-coveted. They came with crowbars and picks, quick hammers for the mortar, and even a striped shelter where they stored things, made tea and took their breaks. There were not many of those, and they started early, and worked hard. The path sloped slowly up to the arch of the church door, and was uneven, and older worshippers had sometimes nearly fallen: so to those of us who saw the work, it seemed obvious the parson was having this seen to, at last.

  But not to her, our unofficial warden. So she asked them what they were doing, those dark-eyed men, and when they gave a story more or less like what the rest of us had supposed, she stood stock still in the middle of them, and told them to stop everything at once. Since she made it her business to know everything, she knew that no such work had been ordered: she knew that these were thieves. And while at first they tried to bluff it out and urge her off, coarsely, she soon made them afraid, with her wagging, talking head of painted turnip, and they went quickly away, taking nothing they had not come with, leaving, even, an iron tool or two. Even as they left so hastily, those who happened to pass by said they were still brazen, insisting some one had summoned them to do the work.

  The postmistress, Miss Prean, told me all this (and many others too), while we all marvelled at the audacity of the thing, with much ‘It just shows you’, and ‘You could scarcely credit it, could you?’ in return. They are such liars, too, she said. They actually said the verger had been to see them and told them to do the work; very likely. A verger, they said, in a long black cassock that came down to the ground. Well, there they went too far. That might be what the churchmen wear over there, where they (travelling tinkers, for sure) come from, but it’s not worn here, not even by the vicar. So they gave themselves away.

  So these incidents were the greater things that our self-appointed ‘patrol lady’ did for the village, but there were many minor tales and incidents too, so that we all, in some way, had cause to be grateful to her.

  But then things changed, became less clear. I went out one morning of February frost, when all the moors were white and the trees and stones were blacker than ever in their bareness against that bright and crystalline white. The early risers had already started their hearth-fires against the brittle chill, and the subtle tang of wood-smoke hung in the air: that old, redolent smell. All my flesh was on edge because of the cold, but pleasurably so, and my visible breath was like an exhalation of joy. So I did not want to hear of bad doings, yet she found me out.

  I went to my car, in the empty street below the house, to take out a woollen jumper I’d left there. She saw me and crossed the road for a word. Without preamble, she said: ‘The children were jumping on your car this morning. I chased them off. They were even on the roof!’ I thanked her automatically, remarked on the weather, and shifted about until she could see that this was all the conversation she could get from me, not because of her, but because that’s how I am with everybody. I watched her waddle away, determinedly on her round. Then I turned to the car.

  It was crusted with white. Pure, unblemished white. Not a mark on it. Very delicate children, I thought.

  I called to her, but she had already made some distance in her fierce quest for wickedness, and might have been pursuing the culprits, if there were any, for I could make out that she was approaching a group of children, who all looked indistinguishable in their black blazers. As I watched, they scurried off. Well, no doubt she had seen them doing something around my car, and (even allowing for embellishments) had stopped them doing worse.

  I happened to mention this to my neighbour, who parks not far from me, in case she was mistaken and it was his car that they had leapt upon. Stephen grinned from his flinty face, said, ‘I doubt it,’ and beckoned me inside for a coffee.

  ‘I think she’s going a bit potty,’ he said.

  ‘Why, because she was wrong about the car?’

  ‘That’s nothing. She told me last week to watch out, because there was a black man living in the bus shelter, who was stealing people’s flowers.’

  Tantry’s bus shelter—there is only one—is by the triangle of village green and it is hefty—made of stone, slate roof, a tree-trunk bench. In the Summer, a tramp could sleep there a night or two and no-one much the wiser, or worse for it, since there are no buses at night anyway (and hardly any during the day). But in February?

  ‘And was there?’ I asked.

  Stephen put his cup down and looked at me incredulously, shaking his head. ‘I didn’t look,’ he responded at last. ‘What do you think? Honestly! Anyway, it gets worse. Don’t you ever talk to anyone? She told me the black man was living in the bus shelter, she told old Acton—he keeps the parish books, you must know that—the same thing, but this time the dossing was done in the village hall, and she even told the vicar she’d seen this intruder in the church porch. He gets around, apparently. The thing is, it’s not quite the thing to say, is it? Why has she got something about a black man? Anyway, nobody else has seen him.’

  Of course, I went to look, alone. It is true there was a little spray of daffodils, wilting and browned at the edges, and a cluster of soiled snowdrops, thrown down in one corner of the bus shelter. But there was certainly no other sign that someone had slept there: no litter, no detritus, no grease, no stench. There was only the slightest hint of a faint circle of ash around where the flowers had been thrown. So, I reasoned, some of the children have picked some flowers and left them here. And maybe she has seen a stranger in the shadows of the shelter, waiting for a bus, mistaken, or over-optimistic, about when one might come, maybe even waiting there later than when they ever come. As for the ash, well, clearly they waited so long that they had several cigarettes—there was quite a lot of it. Perhaps, even, if they were marooned here at night, and couldn’t afford the inn, or had left it after closing time, they actually did try and kip in the hall or the church porch, though they couldn’t possibly have stayed, as both would be far too draughty. I went and looked at those. There was nothing much to be seen, except more vestiges of ash, which could be from my theoretical, or indeed, any other smoker. There were a few more dying flowers too, but then they are hardly unusual either in the hall, which gets used for functions, or in the porch abutting the churchyard. Well, there might be something behind what she said, and I had already spent too much time on it. She had simply associated a few things and put together a story that fitted the facts for her.

  There could be another story still though, I thought, albeit not one people would easily believe. So I took my thoughts on a long walk on the moor. My way took me past the carved stones that rest on the eastern edge of the moor. There are six or seven of them, lying flat, embedded in moss and thick yellowy twists of grass: and they have on them indistinct prehistoric markings, such as hollows and spirals. Sometimes it is hard to tell these apart from the natural erosions made by the encroachments of lichen or sockets of rain-water, or the wind-scourings of years. But to the expert the ancient and artificial signs are sufficiently distinguishable. I am not such an expert, but I have read the books of those who are, and also their theories about what they were for and how they were made. None of these struck me as entirely satisfactory.

  Especially when I found, as I looked upon the larger stone, with its many markings, like a map of some unknown world, that someone had started adding some more. Very deftly and perfectly, too, so that (unless you had a most certain knowledge of what was on it before), you could not tell the old and riddled from the fresh, with whatever new meanings they had. Well, that introduced, for me anyway, a whole new theory, and one I should have to act upon. I thought quite a bit about who could make such markings, and what it implied about them. And then I stayed up on the moors quite a bit longer. As I came down, there was the faintest hint of smoke in the air, not wood-smoke from the village, but some other smoke, more acrid, more bitter, less
comforting.

  Even someone so evidently doing so much good is not necessarily welcome, when they are over-avid. For most of us just want to go our own way, don’t we? We are intent on that and don’t always want to hear of things going wrong. The occasional alarum is welcome, especially if it does not directly affect us, since it brings prickles of interest to our otherwise unthwarted routines. But to be told of something untoward with an almost weekly frequency is rather more than most of us want: and anyone then would begin to associate the bearer with the bad news itself. I am sure that this is what happened here.

  Also, the stories and reports began to become less convenient. Miss Prean, for example, lives in a room at the back of the post office, so, while her front door is the official entrance, used only during working hours, her personal visitors call around the back, which is her own business. To find her heroine of the church-path incident warning her against a possible burglar—a strange man seen approaching her gate late at night—was perhaps not entirely to Miss Prean’s satisfaction, especially if she suspected that the warning had been widely shared. Nor did it help to tell the village cribbage champion, Harry Manning (and more to the point his wife), that she had seen an assailant push him over the memorial garden wall on his way home from the pub. It is undeniable that he had found himself somewhat dazed among the dahlias, but he had carefully brushed the mud off before returning home, and had righted the crushed stalks as much as he could: and he would, by all accounts, have landed there perfectly well without the aid of an assailant, and not for the first time.