As he set out, Max could see the Cavalier, alight like a beacon against the darkening storm. In springtime, the seductive aroma of hot cross buns would fill the High, a temptation to anyone trying to lose that extra half stone before swimsuit season. The ever-enterprising Elka, who had started her business serving customers on her mother’s old wedding china, would also offer egg-shaped Easter biscuits and marzipan bunnies with near-transparent ears. Max’s favorite Easter treat was the simnel cake, a tradition believed to have originated in the Middle Ages, with its eleven marzipan balls representing Jesus’ disciples, minus the one who had betrayed him.
At this time of year, with Hallowe’en approaching, Elka’s shop would be filled with the aroma of bread pudding and plum and blackberry crumble and apple pie and hot spiced drinks, with a bit of rum-soaked cake thrown in to keep her customers warm.
The early church had tried to stop the Samhain practices that welcomed the return of the dead, along with other pagan customs like the sacred springtime cakes, but in the end the church fathers had decided to pick their battles more wisely. As Samhain became All Souls’ Day, so the pagan celebrations of the spring equinox had morphed into the Feast of the Annunciation. The date for Easter itself was not fixed and unchanging, but tied in a most paganlike fashion to the phases of the moon. There had been various other Christian fiddles designed to win converts. It was overall a better plan than annihilating people outright, Max felt.
As his steps took him past Miss Pitchford’s cottage, he threw a glance over his shoulder to see if Eugenia had followed him to catch him in a lie. She had not. He did see the telltale twitch of Miss Pitchford’s lace curtains. She must be feeling better if she was spying on the neighborhood again. “Keeping tabs,” as she called it. “For security’s sake.” At least, she had the sense to hang curtains to hide behind, but then she had her standards. Those curtains, to his certain knowledge, were washed and starched every month. That was how she had suffered her last fall, rehanging them from a stepladder. But she would suffer in steely-eyed silence rather than allow the white lace to yellow.
Miss Pitchford would sometimes lure Max to her cottage with the guilty pleasure of a Battenberg cake, a checkered edifice glued together with a hardened sugary frosting. These were special occasions, when Max had a bit of information she was anxious to pry loose, generally having to do with a murder investigation. The fact that Max remained incorruptible despite these blandishments did not stop her from trying. She would sit before him, her black skirt primly tucked over her support hose—pink industrial-grade stockings that looked as if they could be used in bridge construction—and prod and insinuate until Max was forced into a defensive posture, attempting to save her latest target from social ostracism. He was quite certain that given recent events in the village, one of these cakes awaited him, threatening to spoil his dinner. His biggest debate with himself for the moment was whether to allow this to happen.
The sight of Miss Pitchford’s curtains returned him to a rare memory of his MI5 days, when he had helped crack a case of corporate espionage. The corporation had been housed in one of those glass monstrosities ubiquitous in London, and Max quickly realized the spy had only to rent a flat across the way and use binoculars to watch through the plate-glass windows as workers logged in to their computers. A search for the flat most recently let had led straight to the culprit.
But his days with Five were long over, put on the shelf with a sigh of relief.
Max passed the churchyard, on the lookout for dormice; Awena had told him a family of them was nesting there. She had come into the vicarage carrying a hazelnut, announcing that she was going to mail it to the Dormouse Officer at the People’s Trust for Endangered Species.
“They can tell by the teeth marks if a dormouse has nibbled it open. The hazel dormouse is vanishing and they’ve started a project to monitor where they live.”
“The Dormouse Officer?”
“Officer. That’s right. I’m sure they mean it as a little joke, but it’s tremendously serious. The mice are dying out because we’ve destroyed their native habitats. The Trust has resorted to catch-and-release programs.”
“They must be rather easy to catch,” said Max.
“How, easy?”
“They’re generally asleep. It must be a matter of just scooping them up with a spatula and relocating them to a nearby woods. If they’re anything like my church mice, they can sleep through anything, even organ and choir practice. Not to mention my sermons.”
Awena smiled. “Dearest, no mouse would think of sleeping through a sermon of yours. Anyway, they generally hibernate between October and May. I understand they do snore a bit.”
“But quietly. Unlike some of the parishioners.”
In the middle of his reverie, a black cat seemed to drop from the sky, landing at his feet. A startled Max realized it had jumped from the top of the church’s lych-gate. A pair of yellow eyes stared at him briefly, dismissively. He was reminded of the irredeemable Luther, whom he had often been tempted to excommunicate, as the eccentric poet and vicar of Morwenstow had done to his cat, allegedly for mousing on a Sunday. Unsettled, Max looked behind him to see if the cat was following, or Eugenia, but the cat had vanished. He saw Eugenia slipping into the Cavalier.
He shook off his feeling of unease. What was the superstition about black cats anyway? It had looked a perfectly nice cat, well fed and loved.
Max passed the Plague Tree on his way through the churchyard. The tree was believed to have been planted centuries ago and was said to mark the final resting place of dozens of Nether Monkslippers, who had been deposited there when there were too many corpses to bury and too few people left alive to bury them properly. Max could not walk by the tree without an inward shudder at their fate. Even in a time when medicine could seemingly cure anything, there remained the threat to mankind of the rogue virus that no vaccination could prevent and no treatment cure.
* * *
St. Edwold’s was as typical an old village English church as could be found. But everyone agreed it was a special place, preserved in an amber glow of rare tranquility. Its very air seemed permeated with a calm that cloaked the visitor on entering.
Max had often thought the building resembled an illuminated manuscript. Skilled masons had chiseled the stone surrounding each of its windows to encase the precious glass; the wood had been embossed at each point of intersection in the roof, the designs picked out by colorful paints.
As Max entered, shutting the door on the wind at his back, a small group of women was emerging from St. Eddie’s, the church’s coffee shop. Located in a corner of the crypt, it had begun as an experiment, opening after Morning Prayer to give people a place to gather and chat. Max had given Elka Garth the concession, limiting the coffee shop’s open hours so as not to cut into her tearoom profits. St. Eddie’s was soon a great success as a meeting place for young mothers and pensioners, and had expanded into an evening gathering spot for village youth. Elka welcomed the new revenue stream, once she was able to hire reliable help to man the coffeepots and serve fairy cakes from behind the small counter. That this reliable help took the form of her formerly lackadaisical son was a source of wonder to all who knew them and their fraught history.
Max stopped to shake the rain from his mac. Unusually, the church had a small fireplace built into the wall of its porch, near the entrance door, and a stone bench protruding from the adjoining wall. In times past, before the Village Hall had been built, the village worthies would hold their meetings there. He tried and failed to picture today’s villagers draped in old-time costume, something grayly medieval with intricately starched collars, or perhaps looking like characters sprung to life from A Christmas Carol. Would they have gathered to discuss the duck race? The Harvest Fayre? A sighting of witches?
Max stepped into the jewel-like interior of the nave, anticipating the peace he knew would descend on his spirit. St. Edwold’s was a still and holy place, hushed and waiting for the centuries to p
ass. It always seemed to Max as if God had just left the space for a moment and that if one waited patiently enough, God would return. Canterbury Cathedral, a sort of hub for Anglicans, might be awesome, a place Thomas à Becket had made holy by having been murdered there. But St. Edwold’s humbled and lifted the spirit as no grand cathedral could. It spoke immediately of centuries of worship, of its centrality to village life—an intimate place of baptisms and weddings and burials of members of the local families. Lord Bayer Baaden-Boomethistle was simply the latest Totleigh Hall noble to be laid to rest from St. Edwold’s.
Max walked past a stall where jars of donated jams and chutneys were displayed, there to help raise funds for the church. There had been a significant uptick in these sales from visitors in recent weeks, so he had been told by Mr. Stackpole, the church sexton.
Someone had left a Hansel and Gretel trail of Cheerios on the floor of the fourth pew from the altar. No doubt these spores had been left by the Rancine child, who seemed to require constant bribery and attention from his parents. Not like Owen, thought Max complacently, who fusses only when an undeniably good reason presents itself.
Max paused in front of the altar, making a reverent bow. The altar wore the prescribed green of the church season, for through October they were in Ordinary Time. The lessons and hymns followed their set rotation, as well. Each cycle of the year told a different story, the symbolism and routine as comforting to Max as the return of the harvest moon.
A woman was praying in a pew near the face—the image that stubbornly reappeared on the wall of the north aisle, near the Lady Chapel. If anything, the visage of the bearded man with closed eyes practically shone from the wall, now outlined with a startling clarity. The woman—middle-aged and smartly dressed in cotton slacks and a colorful print blouse, a scarf around her neck and gold at her ears—was not anyone he recognized from the village, but that was becoming a common occurrence. She may have been visiting, one of the many being drawn by the stories of the face’s miraculous properties. She may even have been one of the weekenders from London; although Nether Monkslip was too far away for anything like daily use of one of the cottages, the trade in second homes was booming. The distance did not stop people from buying up any of the charming thatched cottages they could, for a price that no elderly pensioner could refuse.
In a corner of the church, nearly hidden behind a pillar, sat Ana Cutler, one of his parishioners. The sight of her sent a rush of pity through him, along with a sense of how prideful he was—Owen, the perfect baby!—and how delicate was the foothold these fragile lives had on this life.
He called up the small face of the Cutler boy from his memory. Not all babies are by definition cute, although all are adorable. The Cutler baby had been born looking like a wizened old man, with a prominent nose and gooseberry eyes. His saving grace, and every baby had one, was his calm and quiet demeanor. Nothing upset him. If he was hungry or wet, he waited patiently until someone remembered to feed or change him. Nothing seemed to excite him, either. He regarded the world with that pop-eyed, good-natured but detached stare and seemed to have no comment to make on it.
By the time he was four years old, it was evident something was seriously wrong with little Bruce. He began an ordeal of specialists and hospitals—“trial by doctor,” as his mother put it.
Max visited him in hospital as often as he could. The boy seemed to sprout more tubes and wires each time Max saw him. Finally, his immune system completely compromised, he was moved to a sterile hospital unit where only his parents, shrouded in space-age high-tech gear, were allowed their too-brief visits. The visits finally became about saying good-bye.
“I’ve told him I will see him in heaven,” his mother had told Max. “And he’s starting to fret about that. ‘When will I get there? How will you find me?’ I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t want to lie, but I don’t want to frighten him, either.”
Max had thought about it overnight, and called on her the next day.
“Has he ever been in an airport?” he asked her.
“Several times. We visit my mother in Portugal whenever we can.”
“Then tell him this. When he gets to heaven, he is to have a sign made up with your name on it. Like the drivers do at the airport. Your full name: Mrs. Ana Marie Regis Cutler. Then he is to wait at the entrance to heaven, where the new arrivals disembark, and where you are sure to see him with the sign. If he asks, tell him he won’t have to wait but a few minutes. Time is different there.”
Ana Marie had smiled a rather wobbly smile and said she thought that would work. Then she had burst into uncontrollable floods of tears.
It was the maddest sort of improvisation on Max’s part, but it had worked, easing the child over the roughest spots.
The hardest parts for Ana, of course, came after.
The well-dressed woman from “away” had left now, a gold-bedecked stranger who had come seeking solace. Praying for a miracle cure? The theme all around the village of Nether Monkslip seems to be healing, Max reflected.
He thought he saw Bree just then, leaving the church. Was it she he had seen kneeling in prayer in one of the pews? Perhaps her husband’s death had affected her more deeply than she was being given credit for in the village—more deeply than he or anyone knew. Just because she had never been a regular at services did not mean she wasn’t a believer.
He stood before the face, the face “painted,” or whatever it was, on the wall. Steeped, somehow, into the very fabric of the wall. Noticed first by Tom, still so small that when he knelt in church beside his mother, he disappeared from Max’s view at the altar.
How often Max had requested the stain be painted over, because of its potential to draw media attention—which it had done, slowly and surely. It wouldn’t be long before television reporters descended on the village, shirttails out and microphones blazing.
Max had often reflected that it might be a first, trying to whitewash a miracle.
If it were a miracle.
According to the sexton, it was. And if ever there lived a man not given to fanciful ideas, it was Mr. Stackpole. Dry and humorless, literal-minded and punctilious. The melancholy, rail-thin Mr. Stackpole would no more dream up a miracle than he would file a false report with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs Office. It was unthinkable.
Mr. Stackpole emerged daily from his uncluttered cottage with its neatly shorn thatched roof, regular as clockwork, to attend to his duties at the church. These duties were carried out with military precision and a minimum of fuss, for which Max was grateful, even though anything like ebullience and human warmth were sadly not in Mr. Stackpole’s repertoire. Where others might feud over the interpretation of a passage in Isaiah, Mr. Stackpole did not stoop to feud—not he. What he knew to be true was right and incontrovertible and any suggestion of a different understanding of the facts was preposterous.
As he undoubtedly would have said at one time, miracles were for those of the Roman persuasion. The Anglican Communion had not been tested in the fires of the Reformation only to revert in the twenty-first century to popish ways.
So if he said they were living in a time of miracles, no doubt they were.
It was little Tom who had walked into Max’s study just the other week and announced, “Jesus is back.”
And Max’s spirits fell at the news. Because he knew this was not news of the Second Coming, but a statement of fact. The Christ-like visage that kept appearing on the wall of St. Edwold’s Church, despite repeated lashings of whitewash by Maurice, the church handyman, had somehow once again managed to emerge.
No one could guess the cause of this apparition, and Max had had experts in to look. Leaks had been ruled out: The roof was brand-new, thanks to the unexpected legacy, so that wasn’t the answer. There were no pipes to burst behind that wall, and no strange mold was growing, although bleach also had been tried.
There was no answer for it. Most of all there was no answer for the fact that the face did not just sort of l
ook like a face—the kind of image that might be imagined on a slice of toast in some online hoax. It looked like a very good negative image of a man’s face, the eyes closed in death. It looked exactly like the face on the famous Shroud of Turin. An image some scientists claimed had been created by ultraviolet lasers, in an age without such a thing. A negative image, created by a sudden flash of light.
Created using a technology that did not yet exist.
Max now stood staring again at this apparition, this source of such consternation. The draw for thrill seekers and cure seekers. Today was a slow day; generally, there would have been a dozen or more people here, staring and gawking or devoutly praying before the image. Tomorrow there would be more. And probably exponentially more after that. For adding to the cult of fascination that was forming around this image at St. Edwold’s was the fact that news of his find at Monkbury Abbey had now hit the airwaves.
There had been a slow trickle of curiosity seekers at first, then a flood, for Suzanna in her capacity as editor of the parish newsletter had chosen to write an article about the face, and she had put the newsletter online before Max could stop her. From there, it had spread like wildfire. Like a plague of locusts. Like—whatever was unstoppable.
He looked again at the image. Surely its eyes were not beginning to open, just slightly? Mentally, Max shook himself and the illusion wavered and disappeared.
Max closed his own eyes in brief prayer, and when he opened them again, the face was back to the way it always had been. He thought, Let it stand. Just let it be. He would give up all attempts at whitewashing the face on the wall. It was increasingly pointless to try. The face kept coming back, showing through, now shining through.
Maurice, when asked, had professed to be as baffled as Max.
“It’s good-quality paint I’ve been using. No cheap stuff,” he told Max.
“I know. I believe you.”
“There’s no good reason for this.”
The Haunted Season Page 15