Shrine
Page 43
She began to whine.
Something was moving through the farmyard, quietly, stealthily, something that had no smell, that made no sound, that had no shape. The dog’s tail dropped and her legs bent, her back bowed. Biddy whimpered. She whined. She shook. The dog crawled beneath the kitchen table.
And one eye watched the kitchen door, fearful of what was out there.
It crept through the night, unseen, intangible, a thing of no substance, which existed, but only in the deep corridors of the mind. Now it was drawn inwards, focusing towards a centre induced by a kindred power, slithering through the darkness like an eager reptile towards a helpless insect, guided by someone, something, that had transcended the natural.
It was sucked into the vortex to be absorbed and used.
But evil belongs to the individual and, as any one marching soldier can upset a platoon’s rhythm, so individual evil can disrupt the purpose of the whole.
Wilkes
‘I did it,’ he said, reflecting. ‘When ladies used to come to me in dreams, I said, “Pretty mother, pretty mother”. But when at last she really came, I shot her.’
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
The third hymn was drawing to its close and he tucked his hands between his thighs so that those around him would not see how much they trembled. His head was bowed, lank yellow hair falling across his forehead, curling inwards and almost touching the tip of his nose. He stared into his lap and there was a shiny brightness to his eyes that was not akin to the brightness in the eyes of other worshippers. His vision was not focused on his own body; it was focused on the future. Pictures of his own destiny flashed before him: he saw his name written in large, black headlines, his face, smiling, flashed on screens all over the world, his life, his motive, discussed, dissected and wondered at by knowledgeable persons, by eminent persons, by . . . everybody!
He could hardly contain the shuddering expansion of his inner self, the blinding whiteness that pushed outwards against his chest. The sensation left him so weak he could hardly breathe.
He had travelled down the night before, sleeping rough inside a bus shelter near the village, feeling certain he would freeze to death with the cold, only the thought of what was to come sustaining him, giving him comfort. He had hardly slept, his brief dozes fitful and full of bad images.
He had been dismayed at the size of the gathering outside the church of St Joseph’s next morning, thinking he would be first there, wanting to find a prime position on the benches inside the field. To his further dismay, no one was allowed into the shrine that early; work was still in progress to accommodate the expected crowds, and entrance would not be permitted until early evening. So he had queued with the rest of them, joking with his fellow pilgrims, playing the good guy, pretending interest in boring stories of their little lives, feigning devotion to the Church and all its works, secretly laughing at these insignificant fools who had no idea whom they were standing next to.
At last they were granted entry and he faced what he imagined might be the severest test. But, although bags and containers of any kind were glanced into for security purposes, no body searches were made; so the object tucked into his underpants and taped against his groin, and which caused a semi-erection whenever he was conscious of its weight (which was most of the time), was not found nor even suspected. Even if they had asked him to unbutton his old grey overcoat, the shirt he wore outside his trousers would have covered any unnatural (or unseemly) bulge around his fly area.
Although it was hours before the benches were filled and the procession started, he was not bored with the wait; too many visions screamed into his mind for that.
Like everybody else, he craned his neck to see the girl when she arrived with the procession and, because he had chosen a seat right on the centre aisle, as near to the altar as possible, Alice passed within feet of him. The urge to do it there and then – no one could have stopped him – was almost overwhelming but he knew it would be better, more spectacular, to wait. He wanted them all to see.
And now the third hymn was almost over. He had watched her at the beginning of the service, had soon found he could not study her small, enraptured face for too long; her goodness, her divinity, seemed to spread outwards and it made him uncomfortable. The words of the Mass were just a mumble in the back of his chaotic thoughts and, although he stood when the congregation stood, knelt when they knelt, sat when they sat, he did it in automated fashion, a robot response to the activity around him. And all the while he kept his head bowed.
The smiling suddenly began to fade, taking a short while to die completely, for not everyone saw Alice rise to her feet and walk to the centre of the platform at the same time.
He looked up, puzzled by the interruption to the background wall of noise, and he saw the little girl in the middle of the stage, her face pointed upwards, her glazed eyes looking at something no one else could see. Behind her was the altar and, behind that, the brilliantly illuminated and grotesquely twisted oak tree.
The field was quiet, all eyes on the small figure in white, breaths held in excited anticipation. There was fear also in their expectancy, for the unknown always generates such emotion.
Alice lowered her head and looked down at the crowd, scanning the multitude of adoring, fearing faces. She smiled and to most it was enigmatic.
In the distance, thunder rumbled.
She spread her arms outwards and began to rise into the air.
He left the bench and nobody saw him unbutton his coat, lift his shirt and reach into his trousers, for everyone was transfixed by the small figure in white rising above them.
He strode down the aisle to the altar, the German Luger, the Pistole ’38, a relic of the last big war when half the world had gone mad with bloodlust, held down by his side, barrel pointed towards the churned earth.
When he was directly below the platform and just a few feet away from the girl in white who hovered at least eighteen inches in the air, and before anyone could realize what he was about to do, Wilkes raised the gun and fired point-blank into Alice’s young body.
He kept firing until the fifth of the Luger’s eight bullets jammed between chamber and magazine.
38
And it was only a moment before she opened her eyes, raised up the lid of the coffin, and sat up alive again.
The Brothers Grimm, ‘Little Snow White’
It was a scene from a nightmare, a sluggishly unfolding drama of horror.
Fenn saw but could not understand.
Alice had walked to the centre of the platform and the hymn had faltered, then died on the people’s lips. Her face had been beatific – even he, knowing what he did – had been enchanted. She had looked skywards and then slowly down, scanning the crowd; and that was when he had shuddered. She had smiled. And it seemed that her eyes had found his. He saw her smile as a rictus grin, wide, malevolent and, somehow, greedy. It mocked him personally and sneered at the crowd generally.
Yet it was just a child’s sweet smile.
The crowd was mesmerized and, to him, it was the fascination of a fear-paralysed rabbit staring into the deadly eyes of a snake.
Yet it was just a child standing there.
He felt weak once more, his vitality drawn from him and those around him, drawn into this malignant thing standing in a blaze of light.
Yet she was just a child too young to know evil.
The lights had flickered, dimmed, and then Alice was moving upwards, rising above them in a slow but steady ascent, her arms stretched outwards as though beseeching their love. Their trust.
The crowd moaned as if in rapture, and there were gasps and cries from different parts of the field. Fenn felt his throat constricting and dizziness invaded him once more. It was difficult to breathe, difficult to keep on his feet.
He was only vaguely conscious of the thin, blond person striding down the aisle towards the altar and did not understand when that person raised his arm and pointed something at the small figure floating above him.
There was shock, disbelief, and finally pain in her small face, before she fell to the platform to lie in a crumpled heap. The blood spread outwards, finding the edge of the platform, flowing over in two sickeningly plentiful streams.
There was no sound among the crowd. The pilgrims, the sightseers, the believers, the unbelievers, all stood in total, uncomprehending silence.
Until thunder roared directly overhead, and pandemonium erupted in the field.
Fenn caught Sue as she slumped against him.
The rush of noise was terrifying, a chaotic babble of screams and shouts that soon became a wailing lamentation, the anguish affecting groups, individuals, in different ways: many – men as well as women – were reduced to hysterics, while others merely wept quietly; some just stood in numbed silence, too shocked to do or say anything; the anguish of others quickly turned to rage, shouts of vilification against the assassin passing from person to person, joining in a vehement chant for revenge. There were yet others among them who had not seen the brutal act and who pulled at their neighbours, demanding to be told what had happened.
Ben was frightened and grabbed at his mother’s limp body. Fenn put a protective arm around him while still holding Sue upright.
Figures broke from the mass to rush at the blond man who had shot Alice Pagett and who still held the German pistol at his side. He went down under a tumult of bodies and screamed as he was flailed by fists and feet. Sharp fingernails raked his face, a lower eyelid was pulled down and torn, bones in the bridge of his nose were crushed and he felt the crushed fragments pour from his nostrils with the blood. The gun was torn from his grasp and the fingers on that hand were caught awkwardly beneath someone’s weight. The snapping sound was lost in the cries of the mob, but the sharpness of the pain could not be lost to his own consciousness.
He shrieked as his limbs were pulled and joints were stretched free of their sockets. His tears ran into his own blood as impossible, suffocating weight pushed against his chest. Something was giving way there and he could not quite reason what. The bones in his chest slowly caved in, pressing against his heart and lungs, restricting the pumping organ and squeezing life-giving air from the delicate sacs. It slowly dawned on him that perhaps he had made a mistake.
Nearby, a young girl who had come to the shrine to pay homage to the little miracle worker for the gift she had bestowed on her, stared at the still, blood-stained bundle before the altar. The girl’s face suddenly twitched. One side of her mouth moved downwards, grotesquely twisting into a gargoyle’s grimace. An eyelid flickered once, twice, and then would not stop. Her arm jerked, then shuddered; it began to move spasmodically. Then her leg joined in the unsightly and uncontrolled dance, the girl screamed and collapsed to the ground.
– As did the boy in another part of the field, who had come back to the shrine in adoration of the child called Alice, the living saint who had restored the use of his legs. Their strength was gone and he floundered between the benches, calling out in frustration, afraid to be a cripple once more –
– Elsewhere, a man’s vision rapidly began to fade, the blaze of light in the middle of the field becoming a hazy cloud, the cataracts which the child had caused to clear returning with a speed that was unnatural and inexplicable – just as their disappearance had been. He cupped his hands to his face and slowly sat down on a bench, a low moaning sound coming from him—
– While in a different part of the field a young girl found once more that sounds emitted from her throat could not be formed into words and that her distressed mother did not understand her when she asked what was happening—
– And a boy in the crowd whose hands had begun to fill with ugly verrucas could only wail and beat his fists against the bench in front—
– A bench where, further along, a man felt his face exploding into open sores, his skin cracking like parched earth. He gasped, not just because the opening wounds hurt, but because he knew he was becoming a freak once more, a man wearing a dog’s muzzle of hideous lacerations and dripping ulcers.
From all over the field came such moans and cries of piteous despair, for there were others who fell to the ground, others whose limbs became useless, others whose afflictions suddenly and cruelly returned to dominate their lives. They had thought, had prayed, that their cures were permanent, that Alice Pagett had granted them a new and lasting hope, a divine manifestation of God’s caring that would not be erased with time. Now they were betrayed, lost. Defeated.
Fenn no longer felt weakened, and the dizziness had left him. His nerves were taut, tightened, so that his actions were swift, his senses aware. He huddled Sue and Ben close to him, protecting them from the confusion all around. Sue began to revive and her legs took her own weight.
‘Gerry?’ she said, still dazed.
‘It’s okay, Sue,’ he replied, his head nestling hers. ‘I’m here; so’s Ben.’
‘Is she . . . is she dead?’
He closed his eyes for a second. ‘I think so. She must be.’
‘Oh, Gerry, how could it happen?’ She was sobbing. ‘How could someone do that to her?’
Ben clutched at his mother, wanting to comfort her, upset but still not understanding everything that was happening. ‘Let’s go home, Mummy. I don’t like it here any more. Please let’s go home.’
Fenn looked over the sea of moving heads towards the altar. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘nobody’s gone to her yet. They’re all too shocked.’ And he knew that they were all too afraid, even her own mother, to approach the inert body. Afraid, possibly, to discover that Alice really was dead.
‘I’ve got to get up there,’ he said.
Sue’s grip tightened on him. ‘No, Gerry. Let’s just get away from here. There’s nothing we can do.’
He looked down at her. ‘I’ve got to make sure . . .’ He could only shake his head. ‘You wait here with Ben; you’ll be okay.’
‘Gerry, it’s not safe. I can feel it’s not safe.’
‘Sit here.’ He gently lowered her to the bench. ‘Ben, keep hold of your mother; don’t let go.’ He knelt beside them both, oblivious to the chaos around them. ‘Stay here and wait for me. Just don’t move from this spot.’
She opened her mouth to protest, but he quickly kissed her forehead and then was gone, climbing over benches, pushing his way through the disoriented crowd.
Fenn found himself in the clearing before the platform, the ground littered with beseeching invalids, a battleground after the war had passed. To his right was a mob of shouting, tearing people, and he knew what lay beneath their stomping feet, sure that the man with the gun could no longer be alive. They had always been impotent over past publicity-blazed assassinations and assassination attempts, forced to contain their anger, their spite, against the perpetrators, frustrated in their grief, despising those who mocked and flaunted the very rules of civilization. But now the aggressor was within their reach, one of the Devil’s legion lay beneath their feet; for once the people had the power to take revenge.
He kept clear of them, making for the stairs at the side of the platform. A man, visibly distressed and wearing a steward’s armband, made a half-hearted attempt to bar his way, but the reporter easily brushed him aside. Fenn was almost at the top of the steps when he stopped.
Most of the altar-servers were weeping; some were on their knees praying, their faces wet with tears, while others could only rock their bodies to and fro, heads buried in their hands. The priest who had been conducting the service, ashen-faced, his lips moving in silent prayer, supported Molly Pagett; she was obviously in a state of extreme shock, for her eyes were wide, her mouth open and her movements stiff. Bishop Caines, in all his finery, had the same unsteady awkwardness, the blood d
rained from his face.
Fenn shared their grief and wondered if he had been wrong about her. It was impossible to believe that evil could exist in that tiny prone body, in a child that had brought so much happiness and renewed faith.
He climbed another step and the lights – even the candles – began to dim.
He fell to one knee, a hand dropping to the platform to steady himself. Giddiness struck him once again and he fought against nausea. He was faintly conscious of the lightning flash, followed by rolling thunder.
He shook his head and looked towards the group on the stage. Bishop Caines, the priest, and others around them, were sinking to their knees. Only Molly Pagett stood transfixed, one hand outstretched towards the bloodied bundle that had been her daughter.
The bundle that was beginning to stir, beginning to sit up. The daughter who had been shot four times and who was rising slowly to her feet.
The daughter whose face no longer resembled any earthly child’s, who looked around with malevolent intent and smiled. And grinned. And chuckled.
39
We spelled our loves until close of day.
I wished her good-night and walked away,
But she put out a tongue that was long and red
And swallowed me down like a crumb of bread.
Robert Graves, ‘The Two Witches’
Fenn slumped against the steps, one elbow supporting his upper body, a hand still on the platform itself. He wanted to run; if not to run, then at least to slither down the steps and crawl away from this monstrosity that stood in the centre of the sanctified stage. But there was little strength in him. He could hardly move. He could only watch.
Her head was turning in his direction and every nerve in his body tensed; it seemed as though a deeply cold shock were running through him, paralysing his muscles, scraping the inside of his skin, working its way into his bloodstream so that even his life’s fluid was almost frozen, moving slowly, nearly stopping. He tried to draw in breath, but his lungs would hardly stretch, would hardly expand to take in air.