Through a Glass Darkly

by Bill Hussey

  She had hardly spoken since he had prised her away from the dead man. The most he could get from her was that Jack was at the station. Somehow they would have to make contact with him. It was happening again. The time of Mendicant’s labour was almost up. Soon he would emerge, bloodied, triumphant. Reborn.

  Brody pulled the car into the station car park. Automatically, he slipped into neutral and pulled up the handbrake. He could make no sense of what he was seeing. The police station looked like a massive, featureless earthwork. No lights, no-one coming or going. Nothing seemed to move inside it.

  ‘Stay here.’

  The crunch of his feet on the tarmac was thrown around the concrete precinct, amplifying the sound unnaturally in the stillness. He approached the station. The automatic doors were stuck halfway open, flinching as they tried to meet. There was no-one behind the reception desk. No-one waiting on the rows of plastic seats. A sudden breeze caught an empty crisp packet and span it in balletic swoops around the foyer. Brody looked back at the car. Reflected in the windscreen, superimposed over Dawn’s face, he saw a flicker of white. He turned towards the station. Someone was staggering from the lifts, reaching as if for some invisible support.

  ‘Mendicant,’ Jack said, as Brody caught him. ‘He’s here.’

  ‘Why?’

  Jack shook his head. High above, lights began to pierce the windows. A murmur of voices reached them. The station was reawakening.

  ‘Dawn,’ said Jack, looking beyond Brody. ‘She’s with you?’

  His eyes were bright. Dazzling.

  Almost mad, Brody thought. Something working behind them.

  ‘It’s time, Jack. He’s taken the boy. You must face him now. You must go to the clearing.’

  Fifty-five

  ‘I’ve organised a body of uniform to search the station,’ said Pat Mescher, ‘but I don’t think Trent’d stick around.’

  Jarski kneaded his temples and looked from Mescher to the doctor. They were all sat in the office that Jack Trent had disappeared from not ten minutes before. Jarski knew that Pat’s concerned offer of assistance was yet another cynical attempt to worm his way into the case, but he didn’t have the energy for an argument.

  ‘How’d ya think he got out?’ Mescher asked. ‘Is the freak Houdini now?’

  ‘Christ knows. We were stood outside talking. The lights flickered for a second and the doc reckoned we should check on Jack. We opened the door, he was gone.’

  ‘Strangest thing,’ the doctor observed, tapping his digital wristwatch. ‘See this? Stopped at five to eleven. Might have been affected by the power surge, I suppose. But, when we came into the office, I saw the clock there was at five minutes past eleven.’

  ‘Maybe they came for him,’ Mescher grunted.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His brothers from beyond the stars. Stopped watches? Lost time? Classic alien abduction stuff.’

  The telephone on Jarski’s desk rang.

  ‘That’s it!’ Mescher laughed. ‘He phoned home.’

  ‘Please don’t let this be the press …’ Jarski groaned. ‘Hello? Yes, this is Jarski. What? Please, I can’t hear you, can you repeat …? Holy fucking shit.’

  Jarski felt his stomach tighten and his balls shrink against his body. As the anonymous caller made his statement, a dim, impossible truth started to slot into place.

  Jack whispered. The only response he got was an occasional flicker of her eyelids. As he drove, Brody explained what had happened in a few words. She was in shock. Her father dead, her son taken, the world she had known pulled from under her. And all of it, my fault, Jack thought. He looked at the road ahead. The red moon was high now, bleeding through the clouds. As they turned east, he could make out the jagged tree-line of Redgrave in the distance.

  ‘Did you finish my story?’ Brody asked.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. No eureka moment. That detail you thought I might come across; if you don’t know what it is, I sure as hell don’t.’

  ‘I know there’s something there, Jack. Something we’re missing.’

  ‘Well, if you haven’t figured it out after three failed attempts to stop this lunatic, what chance have I got?’

  Brody did not react, but in the brief silence that followed a knot of regret tightened in Jack’s stomach.

  ‘I was wondering about your injuries,’ Jack said. ‘The ones Simon … Mendicant, inflicted.’

  ‘Mere scratches when I came to,’ Brody replied. ‘You must never believe what he shows you.’

  Jack sat back and stretched his arm around Dawn, making sure their skin did not meet. He tried to concentrate on Brody’s story. Had there been anything that might help him? Some clue that …

  A human helpmeet who will take care of the messy business of the ritual …

  ‘Mendicant’s accomplice …’ Jack whispered. ‘You said someone might be helping him. Someone who killed Oliver and Stephen, someone who extracted their fat. Someone …’ ‘Garret … Father Garret …’

  Dawn’s voice was very weak. Spittle hung from her mouth and she shivered. Jack held her close. Her eyes remained fixed and staring.

  ‘Dawn? Can you hear me? Listen, you …’

  ‘In the cellar … Something in the cellar.’

  As she spoke, they crested the hill. Below, in its basin cradle, Crow Haven waited. They wound down into the village and passed darkened house after darkened house, until they reached the Old Priory. Having covered Dawn in a blanket he had found in the boot, Jack followed Brody up the rise to the rectory.

  ‘Just like the night the Rowbanks children died,’ Brody observed, looking over the village. ‘Curtains tightly drawn, doors firmly bolted. They know, you see. They have an atavistic sense of when the darkness draws in … Do you sense it? The feel of the night. As if it’s the same moment, playing over again …’

  Brody’s hand went to his breast.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ Brody sighed. ‘I see his face all around me. James Rowbanks. I seem to feel the gun in my hand again. Was I sure …? I can’t think about it. Look, you should go.’

  ‘You’re taking a risk going into that house alone …’

  ‘I’m not alone.’

  ‘Didn’t your faith abandon you? Wasn’t that the librarian’s price?’

  ‘For a time, perhaps. But true faith can’t be taken; only undermined if one allows it to be.’

  ‘And the protections you set for Jamie? How much of your faith was in them?’

  ‘Well, let’s be pragmatic if nothing else,’ Brody countered. ‘If Garret has been the Doctor’s puppet, he may know something. Go.’

  Jack was reluctant to leave the priest.

  ‘Stopping him, that’s all that matters, Jack.’

  ‘And saving Jamie.’

  ‘If possible,’ Brody said. ‘But if …’

  The man hesitated, and Jack saw the effort written in his face as the old priest tried to give expression to his thoughts. There was a tangible sense that Brody was disgusted with what he was about to say.

  ‘If you’re too late, he will speak to you with the boy’s voice,’ Brody said. ‘Try to convince you he is still Jamie. But remember, this will not be a metempsychosis like Simon’s. In the normal working of the ritual, the child’s soul is eclipsed. There will be nothing left of him.’

  Jack looked down, unable to disguise his distaste.

  ‘Remember, Jack: God is with you.’

  Jack put out his hand. A few spots of rain pattered onto his palm.

  ‘God’s a fair weather friend, Father,’ he said, ‘and the forecast don’t look too bright.’

  ‘Well, goodbye. Good luck.’

  Before Jack could stop him, Brody had grasped his hand.

  They were loose in a moment, firing through Jack’s arm, dragging him into the priest’s thoughts and memories. There were a thousand doubts and horrors that plagued the old man, yet the creatures drew
out only one image. Jack saw Brody, semi-conscious on the ground in the clearing, blood pouring from the wounds Mendicant had inflicted. He did indeed look like an aged Christ, brought down from the Cross before his time. Beside Brody lay the child. He was not moving but thin, age-cracked laughter came from his lips.

  Jack looked around himself. He stood in the dim, peripheral edges of Brody’s mind. The scene from the ‘final chapter’ played out before him, as if he were in a darkened theatre, watching actors on stage. Making up the rest of the audience were the creatures that had murdered his mother. They stood beside him, chattering, braying and screaming. They were looking at Jack, but pointing towards Brody’s memory. They seemed to be trying to tell him something. One of them came forward. Jack backed away, but the creature’s arm stretched out to meet him. A cold hand was laid upon Jack’s chest. Suddenly, he understood.

  ‘Yes, that’s how it will end,’ he said. ‘We’ll do it together.’

  And they smiled.

  Jack pulled his hand from Brody’s. His vision returned. The priest looked very grey.

  ‘I saw,’ Brody whispered. ‘What are they?’

  ‘You have the Doctor,’ Jack said. ‘And I have my own demons.’

  He turned away and headed for the Range Rover.

  Brody walked towards the house. A moment later, he heard the roar of the engine. At the door, he looked back and saw headlights spill down the mouth of trees. Who is this man? he thought. And what kind of dark angels are those that haunt him? How did they bear him into me? How did he see …? Too late to wonder now … Yet, a persistent thought nagged him. Had he sent one form of evil to meet another?

  There were no lights in the windows of the Old Priory. Perhaps Dawn, her mind addled by the tragedy and inexplicability of what she had seen that night, had been wrong. Perhaps Garret was tucked up in bed, dreaming innocent dreams.

  Shadows sat beneath the portico, and Brody did not see that the door was standing open until he was within a few feet of it. Autumn leaves had been blown into the house, laying a brown, chattering carpet across the floor. On the wall were the familiar portraits of the old priests of Crow Haven. His own photograph nearest, then the monochrome face of Father Tolly … Robert Tolly, who had died alone in this house.

  Its evil abideth within and without; until the Darkness exhausts Itself …

  The leaves rustled at Brody’s feet. He went to the study and tried the lights. Nothing. The electricity must have tripped out. The fuse box was in the cellar. He pulled back the curtains and looked out onto the road and forest. Something cracked beneath his foot. He bent down and picked up a broken crucifix. His eyes snapped to the wall. There was a ghostly impression where he had hung the cross years before.

  He went to the cellar door and ducked into the stairway. He tried the cord and tapped the bulb. Nothing. A shadow passed over the wet stone flags at the bottom of the stairs. Brody descended.

  At first the cellar appeared to be empty. Brody’s eyes wandered over the changes that had been made. The coal chute had been ripped out and the ground-level hatch boarded up. The floor had been cleared of debris. A flame burned behind the grate of the old furnace and slashed bars of light across the walls.

  ‘Have you ever thought, Asher, what a terrible thing it must be to have great faith and a weak nature?’

  Garret stepped out from the alcove on the far side of the cellar.

  ‘Of course you haven’t. You are a Samson among men. But I know. I know, without question, that Hell waits for me. I have known it since the day I smothered my father. I prayed for forgiveness … But I have faith. Faith that Hell is waiting …’

  ‘What did he promise you?’ Brody asked.

  ‘He came to me when the cancer was young. My doctor had given me a timetable for damnation. Mendicant promised me a way to keep my soul from judgement.’

  ‘Christopher, why didn’t you tell me? I could have …’

  ‘We lived together for ten years and never knew each other. You want to absolve my sins now? You are too arrogant, Asher. There are works beyond even you.’

  ‘He’s false. Whatever he’s promised …’

  ‘Deceived. Yes, I know.’

  ‘Then help us. Tell me how and why he fixed on the child.’

  Garret took a thin blade from his pocket and waved it before his eyes.

  ‘Stay back. I could be taken at any moment, you see,’ he laughed. ‘Too close and you might be pulled down with me. Down into the depths. It is because ‘I wept not, and so to stone within I grew …’ My father comes to the cellar; they all come here, Asher. Little Oliver is waking just now, he crawls across the stones. He pleads … I wrapped his body in fine linen and laid him in the sepulchre hewn from rock.’

  ‘You left him naked at a lay-by. His brains were beaten in …’ Brody suppressed his revulsion. ‘Tell me how Mendicant selected the boy.’

  Garret held up the scalpel, delighting in how the light played across the blade.

  ‘He wasn’t the intended vessel,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No, no, no. We had another child selected first. Oliver’s brother, his twin. But then the Doctor saw Jack Trent. In the cabin. In the woods. Saw inside his mind … saw the child there …’

  ‘But why that child? If Mendicant changed his mind, if he altered his plans at so late a stage, there must have been a good reason. Why does he want Jamie?’

  Garret knitted his brow. He looked at Brody and said in a plaintive voice:

  ‘Who is Jamie, Father?’ Then turned to his right and fixed his gaze on some imagined figure. ‘Who is Jamie, father?’

  Why did they return so easily to the toy box? Jack hadn’t even needed to recite the mathematical formula. Why hadn’t they tried to flood out of him and murder the old priest? A tantalising sliver of memory teased him. They had tried to communicate something. Some pact had been made; promises given on either side … He could not remember.

  Jack continued to focus on the unmoving face in the rear-view mirror, hardly aware of the blur of passing elms and the trembling arc of the accelerator needle. His heart burned in his chest as he watched her. After her outburst, Dawn had lapsed back into an almost comatose state. He tried calling her name, asking her mundane questions about her age, her favourite flowers, but she remained insensible.

  He had brought them to this. During their meeting in the Lazarus Club, Mendicant said that he had first seen his new vessel by looking into Jack’s mind. His fucked up brain had betrayed Jamie.

  Dawn’s scream cut through his thoughts. At the last moment, he saw a black figure swaying against the gate. He tried to wrench the steering wheel left, but it locked. He slammed on the brakes. The back of the car swung around, tyres screeching, and smashed into the gate. A branch, thick as a caber, punched through the windscreen. Wet bark tore through Jack’s earlobe. From behind he heard the sound of crumpling fibreglass. For a moment he thought the gate, with its flutes of barbed metal, might topple, crushing the car’s roof. It gave an ominous groan, but remained upright. The car came to a steaming standstill.

  Jesus Christ, be all right …

  The branch had sloped down and punched through Dawn’s seat. He tried to lean round, but the seatbelt pinioned him. He could not see her from this angle. He tore the buckle from its fitting, kicked his way out and threw open the back door.

  The tears rolled hot against the cuts to his face. She lay crumpled beneath the branch, her breathing steady. As gently as he could, he pulled her from the car and carried her some distance along the road. Laying her on the dank grass, he checked her for injuries. Her ankle was purple and swelling, but she was otherwise unharmed. He held her close. A few, shuddering sobs rose from him.

  ‘No-one will cry for her,’ she whispered.

  Dawn stared at the gate. Sorrow wrote itself across her features. Jack had forgotten the cause of the accident. The black figure …

  Anne Malahyde. Strung from the cross-section of the gate. Her arms tied behind her back, her feet pointing downw
ards, her body twisted with the rope as if she were a pirouetting ballerina.

  ‘Someone should cry for her.’

  ‘Dawn, can you hear me? Can you …?’

  ‘I believe,’ she said. Her hand rested against his face. ‘Save him.’

  And then, impossible as it was, they heard the toll of the cathedral’s great solstice clock. The sweet, heavy tones they had heard on their summer walks, reaching them from a distance of over twenty miles. As the last chime faded, the screams rang out.

  Midnight had come to the forest. And with it, the tenth day.

  THURSDAY 31st OCTOBER 2002

  This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest …

  DH Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923

  He was transfigured before them

  Matthew 17:2

  Fifty-six

  Jack ran along the path. His soul was not split, as it had been in the dreaming. The forest, born out of the ancient marshlands, really did press about him. Thorns scratched his skin and roots caught at his feet. He followed the acrid scent of fire and the screams which called to him from the clearing.

  Primitive instincts railed against the strength he had drawn from Dawn’s belief in him. He wanted to go back, to escape, to be far away from what would happen. What must happen. Mendicant would have his new vessel. What could he do to stop it? He did not even possess Brody’s depleted faith. He had nothing … Except that wasn’t quite true. Before Dawn and Jamie he had had nothing. He might have faced the Doctor willingly then, welcoming the end of his lonely existence. But now she believed him. Wasn’t there a chance that they could build a real relationship based upon that belief?