The Vicar of Morbing Vile

by Richard Harland

  “Watching pictures!” gurgled Mr Quode. “But what about the feel? What about the smell?”

  “Oh, you’re not even trying to understand!”

  “But we understand completely, Mr Smythe.” Mr Caulkiss brought his fist down on the table with a crash. “We understand that the world is exactly the same as when we left it. In our time it was radio and motorcars and antibiotics – now it’s Tee Vee and space exploration and heart transplants. Just as secularized and materialistic as ever. No belief in anything – except personal comfort and physical well-being.”

  “No commitment!” Craylene piped up.

  “No sense of the sacred!” added Mr Quode.

  “The modern world has no true religion!” thundered Melestrina. “Only we have true religion! Here in Morbing Vyle!”

  “What religion is that?” I asked innocently.

  “True religion!”

  “I mean, what do you believe in?”

  “We believe in the Great Return!” Melestrina flung her head and made her hair fly out around in a wild black halo. “When the Lord will return! And walk once more! In human form! Upon the earth!”

  She was as if inspired. But all the others had fallen suddenly silent.

  “You mean a Second Coming?” I suggested. “You believe that – ”

  “Wonder! Awe! Worship!” Arms raised in the air, legs massively braced, she stood in the centre of the room and bellowed towards the ceiling. “I shall enact a dramatic representation before your very eyes!”

  But the other three rose suddenly against her.

  “That’s enough!”

  “Hush!”

  “It’s not time!”

  Still Melestrina wanted to continue. She projected her bosom forward in a pose of determination.

  “I am an actress and I must act!”

  But Mr Caulkiss quelled her, showing his great horsey teeth in a very threatening manner.

  “Desist!” he said.

  Melestrina desisted. She changed from a pose of determination to a pose of despair. Her head sank down, her bosom drooped, she clapped her hands to her forehead. Then she went and sat down by the table.

  The topic was closed. I could see it was no use asking any further questions. It was just as I suspected: they were deliberately holding something back from me. There was a long period of silence.

  I scanned around and took a good long look at each of them. Craylene was sitting like a doll, with her make-up fixed in a perpetual smile. Mr Quode fondled his glass of liqueur, licking at it exquisitely with the tip of his tongue. Melestrina had immobilised herself in a gesture of clasped hands and raised eyes, the perfect sculptural expression of martyrdom. And Mr Caulkiss was staring off into space, having already forgotten about his liqueur and Melestrina and everything else in the room. I could see that he was going to deliver another disquisition on energy and the bloodstream. Any minute now.

  But I had been given my clue. “The Lord will return and walk once more in human form…” The Great Return was their term for the Second Coming. A common enough belief amongst Fundamentalists. They believed that Christ would be reborn upon the earth, inaugurating an era of justice and righteousness. So that must be what the vicar had taught! I felt that I was getting somewhere at last.

  ∨ The Vicar of Morbing Vile ∧

  Twenty-Two

  The next morning I decided to do some exploring. I felt stronger now, strong enough to walk about on my own. I decided to have a look around the vicarage while the inhabitants were out at the building site.

  There was only one problem: Panker. I didn’t like the idea of him sneaking along after me, reporting my every move. So I laid a trap. When everyone had left and the vicarage was quiet, I stretched in my chair and said in a loud voice:

  “Phew, I’m hot today. I think I’ll have to take something off.”

  I took off my pyjama pants. Mr Quode’s dressing-gown still kept me decently covered. I dropped the pants on the floor beside my chair, so that they fell in a loose sort of heap. Just the sort of heap to appeal to a hiding spying baby…

  Then I lay back in my chair and pretended to be reading Mr Caulkiss’s manuscripts and monographs. I had four hefty folders piled up on my lap. Ten minutes passed…then fifteen…twenty…

  At last my patience was rewarded. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a sudden movement. A bulge had appeared in my pyjama pants. It wriggled slowly forward, probing and burrowing down one of the legs. I waited until it was half way down.

  Then I moved fast. I leaned over the pyjama leg and dropped two of the folders across the bottom, two across the top. Triumph! The bulge squirmed furiously back and forth. The folders shook but they didn’t shift. Baby Panker was trapped in the middle.

  “Ho hum,” I said in a loud voice, “I’m tired of reading. I think I’ll just lie back and have a little snooze.”

  But I didn’t. Instead I rose to my feet and tiptoed soundlessly away across the parlour. My first stop was the parlour window.

  Because of the veiling muslin under-curtain, I had never yet been able to see out through the window. But now I pulled aside the under-curtain and contemplated the view. The window looked out from the front of the vicarage, over the building site.

  Of course, it was the same building site through which I had come when I first arrived at Morbing Vyle. Not that I remembered any of it. I gazed at trenches and mounds, at partly-constructed walls, at fragments of piers and pillars. The site occupied a vast clearing, at least one mile long by half a mile wide. The burned-out forest lay in the distance, surrounding the clearing on all sides.

  I started to trace out the pattern of the trenches in my mind. I could see how the lines joined together in the cruciform shape of a church. I could recognise where the choir was to be erected, and the transepts. The outer walls of the church went right out to the very edges of the clearing…

  That was when I realised the incredible dimensions of the thing. The church they were building was planned to be bigger than St. Peters, bigger than Milan, bigger than any cathedral in the world. One mile long by half a mile wide! It was awesome – and at the same time ludicrous. Because the resources of the inhabitants of Morbing Vyle were obviously not on the same scale as their ambitions. So far – in eighty years! – they had hardly got beyond the stage of digging the foundations.

  For a while I stood there gazing. Then baby Panker started squirming more furiously than ever. I let the muslin curtain drop and moved towards the parlour door. Time to press on with my explorations.

  It was cold and draughty out in the hall, away from the warmth of the fire. I had Mr Quode’s slippers on my feet, but my legs were bare below the dressing-gown. I could feel my skin goosebumping all over.

  I stood for a moment considering where to start. Upstairs, presumably, were the bedrooms. But I was more interested in the opening at the end of the hall, where the steps led down to Craylene’s secret cellar. Yes, that was the mystery I wanted to solve first.

  But I didn’t get to solve it – not then. When I came to the opening and peered down the steps, there was a great wooden door at the bottom. And the door was shut and bolted. I could see a massive padlock clamped over the bolt.

  I decided to follow the continuation of the hall, where the passage swung sharply to the left. Here it was less of a hall and more of a corridor, narrow and dark with a low ceiling. The black-and-white tiled floor gave way to brown linoleum. After the sharp turn to the left came an equally sharp turn to the right.

  Now I could see two doorways ahead, facing each other across the passage. One door was open, the other closed. The closed one carried a notice stencilled on cardboard in big red letters:

  LABORATORY

  KNOCK FIRST

  DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMISION

  I smiled to myself. So! I had found Mr Caulkiss’s laboratory. I reached down and turned the doorknob.

  But again I was thwarted. The knob rotated but the door wouldn’t budge. It must be locked. I gav
e it an angry shove and a rattle – no use.

  “Ooh la la!” Suddenly a voice sang out from the room on the other side of the passage. “Is that somebody there?”

  With small soundless steps I sped on down the corridor. It was Mr Quode’s voice. He must have come back to the vicarage to do some cooking. No doubt the room on the other side of the passage was his kitchen.

  At the end of the corridor was the back door. I shrank against the wall, wondering if the shadows would hide me. But I needn’t have worried. Mr Quode didn’t even come out to investigate. After a while I heard his voice start up in a different tone, repeating the words of some recipe to himself. I breathed a sigh of relief. He was busy with his cooking again.

  I considered my next move. I could retrace my steps and search upstairs for any unlocked rooms. Or I could go out through the back door and take a look outside. I decided to try the back door. Very carefully and quietly, I turned the knob. The door swung open.

  ∨ The Vicar of Morbing Vile ∧

  Twenty-Three

  I came out into a courtyard, the same courtyard that I’d seen from the nursery window. On the far side of the courtyard was the long low building. Instead of windows it had wide wooden doors like a barn or stable. It was built of red brick with a grey slate roof. The vicarage behind me was also of red brick, heavily overgrown with ivy. Pebblestone walls ran between the vicarage and the long low building, closing the courtyard off at the sides. Against one of the walls stood a trellis carrying runner beans and other climbing vines.

  In fact the whole yard was a kind of vegetable patch. A network of paths divided the area into twenty or thirty small plots. There was a plot of brussels and a plot of beetroot, a plot of onions and a plot of mint and parsley. The majority of the plots were naturally bare at this time of year. But every plot had a marker to indicate its own particular crop. ‘MARROWS’, ‘POTATOES’, ‘PEAS’, ‘CABBAGES’ I read, along with a great many more unfamiliar names: ‘BUTTER-LETTUCES’, ‘CELERIAC’, ‘PINARETTE’, ‘YELLOW PEPPER’. Some of the plots were protected with mounted frames and panes of glass.

  I stepped forward into the sunshine. It was one of those winter days when the sky is perfectly blue and cloudless, the air very crisp but the sunlight bright and penetrating. I could feel the warmth seeping into my bones.

  I passed between parsnips and roses and redcurrant bushes, between plots labelled ‘CAULIFLOWERS’ and ‘STRAWBERRIES’ and ‘IRISH BARLEYGRASS’. Under my feet the path was soft and velvety, carpeted with dark green moss. I looked back at the vicarage, wondering if Mr Quode’s kitchen had a window that opened onto the courtyard. But the two ground-floor windows were both curtained over with the same white muslin as the window of the parlour. I felt reasonably safe from detection.

  In the centre of the courtyard was a small square area covered with flagstones. And in the centre of the flagstones was an old-fashioned well. It had a low circular wall, only a couple of feet high, and there was no roof. A bucket and rope lay on the ground close by.

  I came up and peered down into the well. I could just make out the glimmer of the water, far far below. Then suddenly my heart skipped a beat.

  HEUGH! HEUGH! HEUGH!

  It was a horrible rasping catarrhal sound – the sound of someone coughing. It came not from the well but from right underneath my feet. I looked down.

  I found that I was standing on top of a small metal grate, set into the ground like a drain. There was something there beneath the bars. A face was looking up at me.

  HEUGH! HEUGH! HEUGH!

  My first impulse was to run. But my second impulse was to investigate. Yet another mysterious inhabitant of Morbing Vyle! And a very foul-smelling one too. There was a ripe rotten whiff rising up from the grate. I bent down closer to investigate.

  HEUGH! HEUGH! A-HEUGH-HEUGH-HUKKKK!!!

  I moved my head just in time, as a great green gob of catarrh shot up through the bars. High in the air it sailed, hovered for a moment, then back down splattering onto the grate.

  “Arrrrggh!” said the face. “That’s better!”

  It was a revolting old man’s face, diseased and sickly. Just looking at it made my stomach turn. The pockmarked cheeks, the hairless scalp, the tiny pustules all over the skin. And then the two red boils swelling up on the chin, the dry cracked lips crusted over with sores. And the eyes! worst of all, the huge bloodshot eyes oozing at the corners with a gummy white liquid. They stared up at me like the slow unwavering eyes of some deep-sea creature.

  “Arrggh! And who be you then?”

  The breath from his mouth befouled the air. I clamped my hand tightly over my nose.

  “I’m Martin Smythe.”

  “Newcomer, is it? Come to join us here in Morbing Vyle?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Good, good. We need new people. Many a year since our last one joined. That actress woman – what was her name now?”

  “Melestrina.”

  “Ay, Melestrina. She was the last.”

  He nodded to himself. The tip of his nose and his forehead scraped against the underside of the bars.

  “And who,” I asked, “are you?”

  “Me? I’m Scrab, Mr Scrab. Have they not told you about Mr Scrab?”

  “No.”

  “Pah!” He spat. I saw it coming and dodged the spray. “Not tell you about me! The oldest inhabitant in Morbing Vyle!”

  “You were here before the Caulkisses?”

  “Dang the Caulkisses! I’ve lived here for ninety eight years! I was here in the time of the vicar himself!”

  “The vicar –?”

  “The vicar of Morbing Vyle! With these two eyes I saw him! How about that!”

  “Remarkable,” I murmured.

  “Yes, I was a follower in the early days. There were more of us then. ‘Course, I was still only a boy at the time. But I tell you this. I was one of the ones was with him when – when…”

  He broke off in mid-sentence. Suddenly his face flushed a bright red colour. The sweat started to pour from his skin. I could feel a wave of heat rising up through the bars.

  “Here it comes,” he muttered. He screwed up his eyes and clenched his jaws. “Mmmrrr!”

  With a sudden loud POP! one of his two boils exploded. Yellow pus spattered over his face and neck and over the underside of the grate. The smell was worse than ever.

  “Enough of these bloated boils,” he gritted through his teeth. “I feel a change coming on.”

  Again his face took on a straining pained expression. There was another loud POP! The second boil vanished in a second pus-spattering explosion.

  “Filth! Slime! Infection!” he cried, opening his eyes again.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. I didn’t like to see the putrid yellow matter just lying there on his face and neck.

  “Of course I’m not!” he yelled. “Look!”

  I looked. A succession of gruesome dark patches were appearing above his eyebrows. Wider and wider they grew, like blots of ink. In a matter of moments, right before my eyes, a new form of disease had spread across his entire forehead.

  “What’s happening?” I was really alarmed. “Is it some kind of fever?”

  “Anthrosis Perichondritis.” He poked out his tongue as he spoke. His tongue had swollen and turned a livid shade of brown.

  “Is it serious? It’s not fatal, is it?”

  “Everything I catch is serious,” said Mr Scrab. Now his voice was thick and slurry. “I am the breeding-ground!”

  “What’s that? What do you mean? The breeding-ground?”

  I bent down low over the grate to catch his reply. But I never got to hear it. Suddenly my attention was caught by a strange sort of heap lying on the flagstones just behind me. I swung around. It was the bulged-up heap of my own pymama pants. Panker! Somehow he must have managed to dislodge the folders. Once again he was spying on me!

  I stood there staring. My pyjama pants stared back. I couldn’t actually see the tiny blue e
yes, but I knew they were staring back. I darted forward and made a wild lunge.

  But Panker was too quick. He shot away like a blue-and-white striped rabbit. One bulging pyjama leg scurried off in front, the other empty leg trailed out behind. I gave chase.

  Down one path we raced, then another, then another. We switched direction until I was dizzy. All I needed was to catch up with the trailing pyjama leg. But Panker was always ten feet ahead. I was still no match for him.

  I puffed to a halt beside a plot of ‘POLISH CUCUMBERS’. But Panker kept on going. We had come quite close to the long low building. I watched as my pyjama pants bustled up towards one of the blank wooden doors. What was he going to do now?

  He jumped. Suddenly the blue-and-white bundle seemed to take off vertically, climbing the front of the door. Half way up, it attached itself to a kind of wooden crossbar – obviously the latch that held the door shut. As I watched the bar slowly tilted and swivelled, unlatching the door.

  There was a great muffled noise from within. It was a barn. I could hear animals moving and snorting and stirring and stamping. Then the door swung open.

  They emerged in military formation. At the front was a hen, flanked by several ducks. Behind the ducks were half a dozen sheep, followed by pigs, goats and cows. They took up positions like a well-trained army unit, spreading out to form a semi-circle. A semi-circle deployed against me!

  I took a step forward and waved my arms.

  “Shoo!” I shouted. “Shoooo! Clear off!”

  But they didn’t clear off. The leading hen rose up on her legs and flapped her wings. Then slowly and silently the whole formation began to advance.

  I was transfixed with amazement. Their eyes were fixed upon me with a sort of deadly intelligence. And yet they were only farmyard animals! What could they possibly do?

  A moment later I found out what they could do. The leading hen made a sudden flying rush. She flung herself at me with her beak wide open. Inside her beak were two rows of glittering metallic needle-sharp teeth.