by Bill Hussey
I pulled up at the Old Priory and collected the war souvenir my brother Charlie had left me. I prayed I would not need it. Then I drove on to the farmstead. Like all the houses in the village, the Rowbanks’ was in darkness. My headlights arched over old Ma Rowbanks who sat in the doorway, her body heavy against the jamb.
‘Jim and Mike have gone to the house,’ she called. ‘He took the boys.’
‘I know,’ I answered, getting out of the car. ‘Jim told me. The babies …’
The old woman shook her head. She had spoken in an even voice, but her natural authority had abandoned her. She had lived all her years in this pinprick-tumour on the world and had faced down the Darkness within it. But, in her last days, a new evil had come to Crow Haven and she had thrown open her door and invited it in. She saw this now and the fight had gone out of her. Ma Rowbanks would be dead and buried within a fortnight.
‘No, Father. Not the bairns. Jim’s boys. James, Luke, Josh. He has taken them into the woods.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘They’ve been gone since this morning. First light.’
‘No. That can’t be. I saw Jim this morning. He told me about the twins …’
‘The twins died two days ago, Father,’ the old woman snapped. ‘Jim’s waited for you all this time. You’ve been gone two days.’
My blood turned to water. So time had run in the Yeager Library, just not as I had first thought.
Mendicant must have tricked the children into giving him their dead brothers’ baptism dresses. Now, two of the boys would power the metempsychosis with their deaths. The third, probably James, the eldest, would become the tabula rasa. The empty vessel into which Mendicant would pour his spirit.
‘We didn’t see until it was too late, Father. We didn’t see.’
I got back into the car, threw it into reverse and tore down the dirt track, making for the Conduit Road and the tunnelled approach to the Doctor’s house. I left the car ticking over on a gravel siding and ran up the avenue.
The house slept, austere and beautiful in the darkness. I was ready to force an entrance, but found the frame already splintered and the door slack on its hinges. I crept into the hall and stood listening. There was a creak of boards from above. Someone was moving in Mendicant’s library. Deftly as I could, I climbed the iron staircase, slipped across the landing and opened the library door. All the baize antique reading desks and the red leather chairs had been pushed into the corners. The fire was dead, the coals raked over. In the centre of the library lay the bodies of two children. Both just ten years old.
They were naked. Mutilated. Laid out, face-up. Their heads were turned, so that they stared into each other’s dead eyes. As detailed in the Transmigration, cuts of flesh had been taken from their abdomens. There were dark contusions around their throats. I prayed that they had been strangled before the tearing had begun. The carpet was still wet to the touch. I put my hand over their hearts, felt the hardening musculature beneath the skin, and tried to think of an appropriate prayer. All the liturgies I knew seemed inadequate, both too grand and too pure. I reverted to the simple Prayer for the Dead.
‘We found them like this. Together,’ said Jim, coming in from the hallway. ‘They were twins you know, Luke and Josh. Just like my other babies.’
His face looked almost as pallid as Mendicant’s. The emotion contorting it, however, was of a kind that I doubted had ever knotted the Doctor’s features. He came at me, tearing my hands from his children. I felt his blows, sharp and keen. The attack was a short one.
‘You left us … you promised …’
‘I’ve done my best,’ I said, wiping blood from my mouth.
‘But where’ve you been, Father? My boys’d still be alive if you’d let me …’
‘I’ve been finding answers,’ I said.
I had a good reason for my absence. What could I have done without the knowledge that the Yeager Library had afforded me? How was I supposed to know that time would pass so quickly outside its walls? I was not to blame for this. Yet there was blame thrown at me by Jim. And there was blame in the dead eyes of those boys.
‘Finding answers,’ I repeated. ‘And finding them too late. How did it happen?’
‘He came to the house the morning you left us and cried his crocodile tears. He kept asking me where you were, making snide comments about us being abandoned in our hour of need. It was all I could do to stop myself from beating him to death there and then, in front of my family. He stayed late. Then, this morning, Val came screaming across the fields. “The babies’ clothes are gone, the babies’ clothes are gone …” Just kept repeating it. We searched all over, but couldn’t find the dresses. I went to wake the boys. Their beds were cold. Michael said he’d seen them walking into Redgrave at first light. Couldn’t say why he didn’t stop them. Something was walking with them. No more than a shadow passing across the corn rows. That was when they snapped out of it. Michael and Val cottoned on straightaway, started believing what I’d been saying all along. That Mendicant wasn’t right … But Ma, it took her some time … We found the boys this morning. Broke down the door and searched the place. There’re strange things here, Father. Rooms full of statues and idols and pictures. Paintings of things you read of in the Bible. And some things even the Bible won’t name. The boys were already …’
‘And you’ve not found James?’
‘We’ve searched the woods. Tried to get men from the village, but no-one’ll come out.’
‘Have you called the police?’
‘Trouble in Crow Haven is handled by Crow Haven. Outsiders don’t understand.’
Only a month or so ago, I would have told Jim he wasn’t thinking straight. That his children had been abducted and murdered and the authorities must be contacted. But now I knew the truth of his words. Outsiders would not understand. I did not, at that moment, stop to consider that word. Outsider. Crow Haven was now my home. It was aware of me.
‘Have you been to the clearing?’ I asked.
‘Where do you mean?’
‘The island. The place where your forebears burned the witch?’
‘No-one has ever seen it. Or, if they have, they’ve never come back out of the woods to tell.’
‘I’ve been there,’ I said. ‘Have no doubt, that’s where he’s taken your son.’
We carried the children outside. Lying them side-by-side in the forecourt, we covered their faces with our coats. The house stood like a great lowering insect, gazing down on the little corpses with its clusters of glass eyes. I said a few words. Then we tore two heavy cudgels from an oak and entered the forest.
I thought I would know my way back to the clearing. It had been only a month or so since Mendicant had found me there. In vain, however, I looked about for familiar knots and whorls in tree trunks, shapes and patterns in the bracken. It was not that everything looked the same. A few steps one way brought us to a glade filled with the coppiced trunks of young trees. Straying in another direction, we found ourselves among a grove of ancient sycamores, coming together overhead and blocking out the sky. In so varied a forest the short route that Mendicant and I had taken should have been obvious. But without the Doctor, I was lost.
‘Stop for a moment,’ I said. ‘Let’s get our bearings.’
Jim grimaced: ‘Now you know why we don’t walk in the woods. It likes to play games.’
We stood in an avenue between two elm groves. Overhead the clouds were so distended they almost grazed the treetops. I have walked in many forests in my life, from the El Infierno Verde rainforest of Peru to the eucalyptus basins of the Blue Mountains near Sydney. In all of these, the prospect of rain, the lifeblood of the forest, is welcomed by the sweet, cool scent of the trees. As if they reach out and invite the downpour. But in this wood there was only the smell of rot and decay. A rumble passed through the clouds and rain pattered on the mulch at our feet. Jim opened his mouth to say something, but a gesture from me stopped him. Above the smell of putrefyi
ng vegetation, I had caught a whiff of something else. Something that I had expected, but which still hit me like a punch to the gut. An acrid scent of burnt cloth, mingled with an aroma of cooking meat.
Jim Rowbanks had not read the Transmigration of Souls, but I saw a half-realisation in his eyes nonetheless. We did not speak, but hurried as noiselessly as we could between the trees.
I held out every prayer I knew before me. In those moments, before I saw the full horror of it, I was a child again, ready for adventure. The very darkness of the wood around me seemed to retreat, just as the darkness within fell back against the renewed glare of the candle. I was God’s champion at last. Facing a truly elemental battle.
Forty-six
Brody’s Story
BUNDLE 1 –
MENDICANT IN CROW HAVEN – 1976
We were too late.
Volleys of rain rattled through the tree to which the boy was tethered. From this distance, we could not see what Mendicant had made of him, but his head lay slumped against his chest and he was not moving. In a rough circle around the tree, the grass was dyed dark red. At the boy’s feet, rags smouldered in the embers of a collapsing fire. The last of the smoke from the burnt baptism dresses rolled up and disappeared as it touched James Rowbanks’ face.
‘I confess, I had expected better from you, Father.’
Mendicant stood in the shadows. A skeletal creature, running his fingers through the boy’s hair. He stepped forward, into the light.
His eyes had shrunk further into his skull. The skin was so taut around his head that his lips had drawn back over his gums. Blood smeared his mouth and stained his teeth. I felt hollow – tabula rasa – but I was filled only with rage. I grasped the cold metal in my pocket.
‘I am strong in the Lord and the Power of His Might,’ I whispered.
The rotting face smiled. He started across the clearing towards us. With every step he took, it was as if some invisible force flayed him alive. His nose was now no more than two thin slits. The rain slipped beneath the cracks in his scalp and ran inside his face. Only a strip or two of skin connected his cheek and jaw. Glistening in the gap sat a long tongue, visible from tip to root. The orbs of his eyes, robbed of lids, rolled in their sockets. Membrane and muscle, sinew and cartilage were torn back to the bone. The stink of decomposition bowled ahead of him. Putrefying juices dribbled from his mouth, and I could smell the work of spilled stomach acid as it burned through soft tissue.
I called out to Jim to stand his ground, but the man looked at me with an expression of dazed horror and lurched back into the forest.
‘It’s almost done,’ Mendicant spat. ‘All you can do now is kill me.’
I pulled the weapon. The Doctor stopped in his tracks. A look of satisfaction passed across the remnants of his features. He thought I meant the bullets for him; that I would speed his regeneration. I told myself that it was just an empty carcass now, ready for him to fill. Just tabula rasa …
I aimed Charlie’s Webley MkVI.
‘No, Father. God, no,’ Jim called.
‘The boy’s dead, Jim,’ I shouted, keeping Mendicant in my sights. ‘If I don’t, he’ll have him. He’ll keep James locked inside …’
Sweat lathered my hands. My finger slipped on the trigger. Was there another way? No time to think now. No time for anything except …
The Doctor was almost upon me when I emptied all six chambers. Fire whipped out of the barrel. With a sickening report, the top half of the boy’s head exploded against the tree. The force of the impact bucked him free of his bonds. As if a desperate penitence had taken command of him, James fell to his knees. His torso remained upright while a dying nervous system galvanised his hands. They snatched and searched for a face that was no longer there. It was a cruel animation; a false life persisting inside a form that could not endure. Broken tombstones of teeth still adhered to the lower jaw, but everything above had been obliterated. Inside the angry red star that now adorned the tree, slivers of brain tissue flopped like earthworms along the bark. Finally, the body ceased twitching and collapsed to the ground.
Mendicant screamed.
Jim came to his senses. He ran, and dashed his branch against Mendicant’s skull. There was a crack followed by the sound of splintering shockwaves. A valley had been punched into the Doctor’s head, cleaving his temple into a spear of bone. As Jim tore the branch free, a needle of wood caught like a fish hook and ripped Mendicant’s left eye from its socket.
The Doctor turned his head and laughed.
‘I fucked your son before I ate him.’
The words were the spite of a frustrated child.
‘I fucked him and I ate him.’
Jim’s grasp on the branch tightened. I saw his knuckles wet and white.
‘I fucked them all.’
Jim rained down blow after blow, until he could no longer lift the branch. Despite the massive trauma to his head, and the crippling blows to his body, Mendicant was still alive. His degeneration halted, he lay on the earth and whispered words beyond my comprehension. I thought I recognised a fragment of Aramaic, but I may have been mistaken. Whatever the origin of his utterances, they rang in my ear as both poetic and ancient.
The storm eased. The clouds rolled away and the night sky domed the clearing with cold, indifferent moonlight. I kept watch over the Doctor while Jim, gasping and sobbing, gathered up the remains of his son.
We lifted the Doctor between us and lashed him to the same tree that had held James Rowbanks. There was no murmur from him, only a thin, reedy breathing. When he was secured, I suggested that Jim find Michael and go back to the farmhouse. I would watch Mendicant until the end.
‘You’re sure he was dead, Father?’
‘Yes. There was nothing else we could do,’ I said, and wondered at the lie.
Had I been sure? Wasn’t it the case that I had been so desperate to stop Mendicant proving the impotence of my faith that I had deceived myself into thinking that I could not help the child? Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the sparks from the gun barrel and asked myself that question. I ask it still.
The hours passed in blessed silence. Not until dawn touched the treetops did Mendicant speak his last.
‘The end of one life, the beginning of something new.’
He lifted his head and stared at the light cresting the forest.
‘Non omnis moriar. So said Horace in his Odes. Do you know what that means?’
As I crossed the clearing, the sun reached out a tentative finger and shone upon the strange creature we had crucified.
‘Come closer, Asher, I won’t bite. It means I shall not altogether die. Others have attempted to stop the metempsychosis before. I was ungenerous in my earlier estimation. You have done rather better than I expected. But this is not the end. I will still dance on your grave. When darkness creeps from the corners of the room, I promise that you will see my face before you die.’
‘What are you?’ I whispered.
‘I am all you fear. I am the manifestation of your creeping doubts. Because if I am tolerated, then all you believe is a lie and all you thought of as heresy is true. Did Adam lay with the Lilith, and am I her child? I was shaped from fear, Asher, and I show you yours. Do you feel it now, as your faith closes in about you?’
He looked beyond me, sweeping the clearing with his gaze.
‘But do not look to me to find the proof of your doubts. There is great evil here. Even I do not quite understand it. What I do know, is that it is aware. And it is focused on this sad little village. Before I came here, I heard it calling to me in my dreams. Telling me to compound the misery of these wretched people. It was the sacrifice of the witch that did it. Her will gave a once undisciplined force a kind of intelligent determination. Do you know what she said as she burned?’
I shook my head, like a dull child.
‘“Each generation shall be mine. All shall be bound to the town that will come; all shall perish according to the choosing of the Darkness I
lay upon you, or until the Darkness sickens of Itself and can bear no more. Then shall the town fall back into the shifting wastes”. The Darkness endures and I shall, for the time being, endure with it.’
I heard its call before I saw it. A crow, like tattered black cloth, flew into the clearing.
‘Goodbye Asher,’ Mendicant said. ‘We will meet again, by and by.’
They passed in a wave from the trees: hundreds of crows following that first scout. The birds reached the centre of the clearing and wheeled in a huge black column. The clamouring cyclone soared forty feet overhead, its shadow cast across Mendicant and myself, the sun rippling over its body. Then, from the conical top, one bird broke away and plummeted back towards the clearing. Bending low, I staggered to the shelter of the tree line.
Mendicant was soon cocooned in a shrieking mass, each bird fighting for its chance to pluck and gorge. I heard no murmur from him, but it would have been difficult to hear anything above the cackling of that host ‘of dark and rapier-beaked birds …’. As if they wanted to show off their work for a moment, the curtain spread apart and I glimpsed what they had made of him. His remaining eye had been plucked out, and now two deep hollows stared at me. His clothes hung from him in shreds. The fingers of his ribcage were visible, arching through the husk of his torso. Most of the remaining skin on his face had been snatched away and his throat had been exposed. As they vied for the slivers of his cheeks, Mendicant’s head turned from side-to-side in a strange, almost rhythmic motion. Left to right, left to right, left to right …
When they were done, the birds cawed happily at each other and took flight. Like a storm cloud caught on the breeze, they passed over the treetops.
I cut down the dead thing they had left and buried it in a shallow grave.