The first I knew of it was a furious Meriel bearing down on me as I was judging vegetable marrows in the main marquee. I had never seen Meriel in a temper before. Every aspect of her seemed out of joint. Words poured from her in an incoherent stream; her movements were jerky and uncoordinated. Under other circumstances it might have been comical. She demanded that I make an immediate and stern request over the public address system that the offenders should immediately remove their car. This I did. I escorted Meriel back to the Old Tannery where we discovered that the car had been moved, but evidently not by its owners.
It was a medium-sized saloon car—I cannot remember the make, a Rover perhaps—quite a bulky and heavy thing, but it had been tipped over on its side into a ditch. Two strong men could not have done it, three possibly.
There was a terrible to-do about it. The owners of the car transformed themselves in an instant from offenders into irate injured parties and became particularly indignant when they discovered who the inhabitants of the Old Tannery were. The police were called in and the men interviewed, but the mystery was never resolved. Most of the men had excellent alibis for the time when the deed could have been done. Meriel happened to remark to me much later that the only one who didn’t was Mason, and he was the only one she knew had witnessed her rage about the car. But, of course, everyone agreed it would have been quite impossible for one man singlehandedly to have overturned a medium sized saloon car. What made it all the more mysterious was that there had apparently been no witnesses to the incident.
At the end of the Summer, I began to wonder why Meriel had not let Mason go, if not altogether, at least to another of her Philippian houses. He had committed no offence, of course, but the atmosphere at the Old Tannery had noticeably deteriorated. There was none of the relaxed warmth that there had been before. My weekly Compline Services were held in a stiff reverential silence. Mason was always present, but always apart and aloof. Usually he sat in the window which faced West so that his shadow blocked out the rays of the declining sun.
Eventually I tackled Meriel about it. We were taking a walk together after an early weekday communion at which she had been the only person present. When I pressed her she smiled, as I thought, in an irritatingly superior way.
She said: ‘You have heard, Rector, of the Doctrine of Substitution?’
I knew about it theoretically. Certain advanced Anglicans of a mystical persuasion were very keen on it at one time, I remember. The idea is that, like Christ, albeit in a very minor way, you can take on the sins and afflictions of others. In other words, you can not only be the beneficiary of the Passion of Christ, you can also, in a small way, participate in it.
Meriel told me that Mason was suffering from some kind of deep-seated spiritual trauma and that she had been having sessions with him, and also engaging in severe personal mortifications in order to take on some of his burden. When I pressed her for details she became vague and evasive.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I have always been somewhat wary of this Doctrine of Substitution. I think you have to be a very saintly person indeed—or a very arrogant one—to undertake such a task. So which was Meriel? You may think I have prejudged her, but I haven’t. I have no way of telling whether she was acting out of vanity and spiritual pride, or a kind of divine and humble recklessness. Or was it a strange mixture of the two?
All I was sure of then—as I am now—was that she was attempting something very dangerous and of dubious practical benefit. I told her so and she disregarded me, as she had every right to do, of course. I was not her spiritual director; that office was filled by the Abbot of a local Friary of Anglican Franciscans.
For several days after my meeting with Meriel, I did not see Mason. It was the end of summer and the earth was warm. Leaves gave off their last dusty glitter before turning yellow. I wondered whether my unaccustomed feelings of goodwill had anything to do with Mason’s absence. As each day passed I began to lose my dread of his sudden appearance in the churchyard. I wondered if he had left altogether as he did not put in an appearance at Compline for two weeks running, but Meriel assured me that he was ‘still with us’.
Then one morning he was there again. This time I knew it the moment I had stepped out of the Rectory at six forty-five. It was a pleasant morning as I remember, sunny, but moist with a slight chill in the air.
Though the Rectory is adjacent to the church you cannot see it from there. It is hidden by a belt of magnificent and ancient oaks. You walk down the Rectory drive past these trees and then, as one comes out of the drive, the church is there, embedded in its green graveyard, with its tower of knapped flint tall against the sky. That first sight of St Winifred’s used always to take me by surprise, and often filled me with joy.
On this occasion the joyous expectation was missing. When I reached the end of the drive I looked towards the church. It was the prelude to a hot day. A slight mist was rising from the dew on the grass between the tombs. Behind one of them, and slightly obscured by the haze, stood the figure of a man, rigidly still. Had I not known my own churchyard I might have taken it to be part of some funerary monument. As it was, I knew who was there, and I felt sick.
Of course, I told myself, it was only Mason, and yet the dread of having to pass him on the way into church was very great. I could not understand it. I had never quite felt fear in his presence before: annoyance certainly, and unease, but nothing worse. As I came towards him he did not move, but he was staring at me with that mirthless Hapsburg grin on his face.
He was a few feet away from the church path behind a gravestone which leaned at a slight angle away from it. One hand of Mason’s was resting on the stone. I noticed how the fingers were reddish pink but the prominent joints and knuckles were white. I felt that I must say something, because to let him speak first would be to show weakness.
I said: ‘Hello, Harry. How long have you been here?’
He did not seem to notice my question at all, but continued to stare and grin. After a pause, he said: ‘Do you believe in angels?’
I asked him what he meant by angels. He said: ‘I mean spirits of the air who fly in and out of you.’ I said nothing and he seemed to be enjoying my discomfort. When he spoke again it was in a different tone of voice, higher in pitch, and full of that intense yet understated menace which I had experienced the first time I met him. He said: ‘Tell Meriel to lay off me. It won’t work.’ Having said this he rolled up his left sleeve. His bare forearm, thin and sinuous, was covered with wiry black hairs through which I could see the livid scars of some half dozen diagonal cuts. They were very evenly spaced; it was a hideously controlled piece of mutilation.
I ran inside the church. I could not help myself. When I came out again after an hour’s prayer—I call it prayer, but it was really only a period of agonised mental confusion—he was gone. Later that morning I rang the Old Tannery and asked Meriel to come over to see me.
Once the formalities were dispensed with and she had refused refreshment—a little brusquely, I thought—she dropped into an armchair in my study and anticipated my preamble by saying: ‘It’s about Harry, isn’t it?’
When I told her what had happened I could see that the account of my flight inside the church had not raised me in her estimation. Her manner towards me changed so that she began to treat me with benign condescension, almost as if I was one of her men at the Old Tannery.
‘Oh, I know all about the self-mutilation,’ she said. ‘That’s been going on for some time now. We’ve got it down to a reasonable level. The fact that Harry told you to warn me off him is actually a hopeful sign, you know. It means I’m getting through to him.’
‘But what’s wrong with him?’ I asked.
‘He’s possessed, of course!’
It was a shockingly simple answer, but it begged a whole series of further questions. How was he possessed? And by what? I asked them and received the vaguest of answers. I think she was not quite prepared to admit her ignorance. ‘What matters is
how we heal him,’ she said. I asked her if she was considering exorcism, but she dismissed the option almost contemptuously. She said: ‘I have been involved in cases where exorcism was used. The effects are very uncertain. I believe there are other means.’ Then she looked at me with that sudden intuitive gleam which was so characteristic of her. ‘Now, I know you think I’m being very vain and full of spiritual pride, presuming that I can manage it all by myself, but I’m not, you know. I’m fully aware of the dangers involved and I know I need as much help as I can get. I’ve got the Franciscans over at the Friary all praying away for me like billy-o!’
I smiled, she laughed, the tension eased. ‘And I want you to pray too!’ she said, patting me on the knee, then, for a second, almost caressing it. In that brief space of time I was aware of another Meriel, not the pious, enthusiastic God Lover, but a rather lonely, slightly immature woman with sexual and emotional needs like the rest of us. I felt touched, honoured even, that she had allowed me to see this side of her. Not that the saintly Meriel which was what most of us saw most of the time, wasn’t perfectly real; but she was Legion like the rest of us.
So there was nothing more I could do, except pray and await developments. This is where the story becomes unsatisfactory, because I have very little idea what passed between Meriel and Harry Mason during the following days. I cannot even speculate. I can only tell you what I saw.
For three days after the events I have described I saw neither Meriel nor Mason, then on the Thursday I saw something which I hesitate to tell you. There are certain images which stay fixed in one’s mind as memories, but their vividness is no guarantee of veracity. So when I say I saw it, it would be more accurate to say that I have a strong impression of having seen it.
It was late September. I was taking a favourite walk through a little coppice of ash and hazel which bordered some fields which had been harvested a day or two previously. Clouds were high and there was a brisk little wind busying the branches. I happened to glance through the trees and into the field where I saw something moving. It was hard to tell what through the screen of twigs, but I could see that it was a four footed creature of sorts, and larger than a fox. I could not tell what colour it was—darkish brown I think—because I was looking into the sun.
My first thought was that it was one of the Muntjac deer, escaped from some country estate or other, which had just begun to become a pest to the farmers in our neighbourhood. But there was something about the posture and the shape of the legs which contradicted this theory. I pushed my way through the thicket to the edge of the field so that I could get an unimpeded view.
Then I saw that it was not an animal of any kind but a man on all fours, his legs slightly bent, his long arms serving as forelegs, so that his whole body was arched and leaning forward. I thought the man would soon stand up and assume a natural posture, but he did not. He bounded forward in an ungainly way, but with surprising speed and agility, using all four of his limbs. Moreover the man was naked. The limbs were hairy and scored with red marks and blotches. Something attracted its attention to me and it turned its head in my direction. The face was that of Harry Mason, but the eyes did not have a human expression in them. There was an instant of feral recognition before the creature started to bound away from me at extraordinary speed.
It is hard to describe the horror that filled me. That is perhaps why a part of me is still trying to insist that what I saw was some kind of hallucination.
I ran back to the Rectory to ring Meriel and found her equally agitated because Mason had disappeared the night before. When I told her what I had seen—or thought I had seem—she said nothing for a moment, then, with sudden decision, she announced that she would ring the police. Ten minutes later the police rang me to confirm the sighting. I told them that Mason was naked but not that he was on all fours, knowing that this would invite scepticism. (‘Are you sure it wasn’t an animal you saw, Reverend?’) I do not know how assiduously the search was conducted but it was fruitless. The following morning, however, on my way to the church I saw something I did not want to see.
Most of the graves in our churchyard are marked by an upright tombstone, but a few are of the flat-topped sarcophagus type, like a rectangular stone box. There was one in particular, of a pale yellow stone, which stood next to the east end of the church and housed members of a long extinguished county family called the Orlebars. It had first been erected in about 1710 and was notable for having carved in low relief on its top a cartouche of the family arms surmounted by a skull and crossed bones, as if predicting the demise of the family. The carving was much worn, but its quality still showed. That is by the by. The point is that though I could barely see it from the church path through the forest of tombstones, it was a notable feature of the place. That morning I noticed that something was different about the Orlebar tomb. Someone was lying down on it.
My heart started to bang inside me. I went to look. The figure that lay there was long and thin, so tall that the head and feet hung over either end at a slight angle. It was the body of a naked man, horribly emaciated and scarred, the limbs and chest covered in coarse dark hairs, sparse but unnaturally long. The open eyes were completely black without whites or irises, and the half open mouth was prognathous, insensately grinning. It was Mason and he was dead.
One evening a few days later, I found myself sitting in Meriel’s little study at the Old Tannery. It had been a troublesome time for all of us, so Meriel had decided to sell the Tannery and plant another Philippian House elsewhere. I asked her precisely what had brought about Mason’s terrible last journey to the tomb. Meriel was evasive. She was highly strung and in no mood to look at the events clearly or dispassionately. Her conversation kept hopping from subject to subject: the move, the future of the Philippians, the trouble she was having with her teeth. But she did let out a few hints.
The day before I saw Mason in the field she had had what she called ‘a long session’ with him. When she had asked him to unburden and ‘share’ his troubles with her he had been more forthcoming than on previous occasions and at one point had completely broken down. They had prayed together and it was while they were doing this that something had happened. She would not say what, either because she was afraid to, or because no words could describe the experience, or because it had been wiped from her memory. I do not know.
Towards the end of our talk she suddenly said: ‘The one thing I failed to realise was that after the thing had come out of him, there was very little of poor Harry left. I think he died because there was nothing left of him to live, if you see what I mean. I’m probably burbling, so you must shut me up.’
I asked Meriel if she knew anything about Mason’s past.
‘Virtually nothing. I never ask, as you know. He was an educated man. He told me he’d once been a teacher; and he implied that he could never go back to teaching. That’s all. Something had obviously gone wrong.’
Just then we both became aware of a sound. It came from over our heads, and must have emanated from the room above, but in a curious way it seemed to be in the room with us.
It was a creaking noise. Something up there was moving rapidly to and fro, not quite running but travelling fast. The feet were not heavy, they did not thump the old elm boards above our heads but they made them creak and groan as if oppressed by the weight which bore down on them. It is a strange thing to talk about a mere pressure on an old piece of wood like this, but it felt clammy and vile, conscious malice was in every footfall.
Meriel pointed upwards and said: ‘That was Harry Mason’s old room.’ I crossed myself. Meriel said: ‘Go in peace’ and the sound diminished then ceased altogether.
‘It will be back, I’m afraid’ said Meriel quite calmly. Then she leaned forward and said to me: ‘But it’s not Harry, you know.’ Her usually bright eyes were dull; it was as if the hope had gone out of them.
A week later Meriel was gone and the Old Tannery was up for sale. In case you were going to ask, the next occupa
nts experienced nothing unpleasant about the house, though I had, I must admit, thoroughly blessed the place before their arrival.
I made no effort to keep in touch with Meriel. I’m not quite sure why. It was not a conscious decision, but I have a feeling that some kind of self-protective instinct held me back. However, I did see her one last time and it was quite by chance about twelve years later. I had been asked to address a group of Anglican nuns about something or other—pastoral theology I think it was—because that was what I was teaching at the time at Cuddesdon. Well, this convent was a small establishment in Buckinghamshire, part of the Community of the Resurrection. On my arrival I was shown round the place—one always is—and made to admire its polished floors and orderliness. All was going well until we entered the chapel, when the nun who was showing me round muttered a half-suppressed, ‘Oh!’ It was an ‘Oh!’ I recognised; it said, ‘if I’d known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have brought you here.’
The chapel was lit only by a pair of candles on the altar and a sanctuary lamp. It was one of those gloomy, over-decorated places, built around 1900 at the height of the vogue for mystical Anglo-Catholicism. The architecture, by an uninspired follower of Butterfield, was a neo-Byzantine riot of liver-coloured marble columns, alabaster screens, variegated courses of brick and mosaic panels of biblical scenes: a joyless exuberance. At the ornate brass altar rail knelt a figure that I recognised instantly.
It was the same rigidly upright posture, the same small, neatly shaped head. Her hair, now white, was coiled up into the familiar bun on the back of her head like a sleeping snake. It was Meriel. I felt the nun tugging at my sleeve and urging me to come away. But I resisted, held against her will and mine.
She was the same and yet different. The stillness had gone. The head twitched slightly, as if she were constantly looking from side to side. I wondered if she had Parkinson’s disease. I explained to the nun, now very bothered and eager to get away, that I had once known Meriel well. She relaxed a little, explaining that Meriel was having ‘one of her bad days’.
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