Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Once, Venn had been called to bless a home in which dishes would fly and shatter on their own, furniture would move about and empty clothing be arranged into a strange tableau of praying scarecrow figures. Donning his red spectacles, Venn had seen a glassy-eyed, mad-looking young girl picking up and throwing a plate in the kitchen. But the strangest thing was that this apparition was the exact double of the nervous and sickly teenage daughter who dwelled in the house—a ghost of a being still alive. Another mystery of the life of spirits to confound him.

  “What brings you back here, Alec?” Lodge asked him. Months ago, Venn had come to say goodbye to Lodge before leaving Candleton to expand his quest.

  Venn drew nearer yet to the older priest, to show him the large container he carried with him. He explained how he had come upon it.

  “Brook,” Lodge mused. “The name is familiar, but I didn’t know the man personally. Young, I believe. With a pretty wife. No children. If I recall, his farm abutted the vicar’s church.”

  “Can you see the thing’s eyes?” Venn asked, holding the jar up higher. He hoped no one would come along just then, to see him conversing to empty air, and holding up a jar containing a lamb’s head though no one was there to view it.

  Father Lodge wagged his head. “I can not, Alec,” he told him.

  Venn knew better than to offer the older priest his specs. He had previously tried to touch Lodge, but found that he did not have anything like the sham body he himself possessed.

  Behind Father Lodge, Venn caught a glimpse of an old woman peeking out furtively from behind a misshapen furze bush. Though a wide grin carved her wrinkled features, she quickly and shyly ducked behind the bush again.

  “Baptista,” he said. “She has not yet been freed, either. And will she ever be? Will you be, my friend, who was a servant of our Lord and never dis-graced Him?”

  “One day, we will all have our answers,” Lodge told him.

  “On the day of the Apocalypse, I reckon,” Venn said bitterly. “Can you speak with Baptista? Does she know anything you yourself don’t know?”

  “No, we can not converse. She seems more removed than I. But what is it you think she might be privy to, Alec? You don’t believe she truly was a conjurer?”

  “It was she who told me about the invading spirit that might reside within an animal, like a parasite inside its host. Like a genie in its lamp, waiting to be released.” He lifted higher the mason jar again. “Like a demon in the body of one who is possessed.”

  Lodge frowned. “She was addled, Alec, that was all.”

  But Venn persisted. “On her sickbed, as I prayed over her, she babbled to me of strange things. At the time I thought she was mad with fever, but now that I have come into possession of this I have other thoughts. One of the things she told me is that demons can only smuggle themselves into an earthly existence inside the bodies of certain animals when these animals are born.

  And when the animal is sacrificed, the parasitic spirit is freed and becomes beholden to whomever it was that released it.”

  “Alec, if that were true, every butcher in the land would have an army of demons as his servants. Why would she tell you this, in any case?”

  “Perhaps she foresaw that it would be a matter of significance to me, one day.”“Do you at all suspect Baptista as being the one who brought forth the demon you say inhabits that thing in your hands?”

  “Not her. If I suspect anyone of such, it is this farmer, Brook. I need to meet him, to know what he is like. To find out what malignant practices or worship he might be taking part in.”

  Lodge’s face was as mournful as any ghost’s might be. “In your zeal for answers, my friend, I’m afraid you may become as delusional as the old woman herself. How do you know that your spectacles do not in fact lie to you, rather than reveal the truth? Make you see things you only wish, or dread, to see?”

  “Edmond, if you could see the eyes staring out of this eyeless head, you would believe the old witch’s words as I do. Why is it any madder than the fact that the two of us are here at this moment, having this conversation? Or are you yourself simply my delusion, then?”

  “As you know, Alec,” Lodge sighed, “these matters are as much a mystery to me as they are to you.”

  Venn’s face and voice grew more intense. “Well I will have my answers, and I will not wait for Doomsday for them. I will free you…and Dewy…and myself.” He nodded at the furze bush behind which the old woman had crouched. “And her. It isn’t right that any of us should be damned, so.”

  “Your heart is good, Alec, but…”

  “Yes. Better than our Lord’s, I reckon.”

  “Alec!”

  “I will be back to see you, Edmond,” Father Venn said, returning to the road.

  Leaving the crossroads behind, and those spirits that were imprisoned there.

  IV: Two Shepherds

  Keeping his head low and his walk brisk, Venn made it through the thick of Candleton without being stopped. If he had at any time been recognized, at least he wasn’t aware of it. By keeping his eyes on the path directly before him, he was also better able to avoid the nostalgic pangs of this homecoming.

  Outside the center of the town again, and passing alongside a farm that bordered the road, Venn stopped to read something written on the rails of a gate leading into a pasture. In crudely rendered letters, colored red, it said:

  “There is a fortune for you in John iii.16.”

  On the rail below that was emblazoned:

  “Now is the accepted time.”

  It wasn’t the first time he had seen such sentiments painted on gates and stiles across the countryside.

  Further down the road, Venn came upon the Anglican church of Reverend Trendle, and was surprised to see it surrounded in scaffolding and ladders, with three workers currently upon its roof in the shadow of its short stone tower. For a moment, Venn wondered if Black Shuck had indeed paid the church a visit after all, demolishing it as his own much larger church had been blasted. But he soon enough realized that the church was merely one of many in Dorset that, since 1840, had come under restoration, though Venn had thought that this trend had largely died out in the 1870’s. The crooked and moss-stained headstones in the adjacent churchyard seemed to watch the workers as Venn did, lined up like parishioners waiting to enter the church for a service.

  A dog inside the church itself must have spotted Venn through a window, and began barking. The noise caused the workers on the roof to notice him below, gazing up at them, and they paused in their work. Venn nodded to them and turned to be on his way, but just then he saw a man emerge from the church itself and stand in its threshold. This man stared at him as well, and Venn recognized him as the vicar himself.

  After a hesitation, Reverend Trendle took a step or two beyond his threshold, shutting the door behind him to keep inside the watchful dog.

  “Father Venn?” he said.

  “Yes, John…how are you?”

  Trendle only advanced another few steps, narrowing his eyes as if dis-trusting them. Trendle had seemed to age since last Venn had seen him, grown more frail and hunched. Then again, Trendle was in his mid seventies and no doubt his formerly robust health had at last come to fade, in contrast to the for-tification of his church.

  “What brings you back this way, Father?” the vicar called.

  Venn closed some of the distance between them, groping quickly for some excuse and wishing he had planned better in the event of such a question from one of the townspeople. “I am merely here to visit certain members of my former congregation, some of whom it comes to me are in need of a measure of comfort.”

  “Many of your former congregation now belong to my congregation, Father,” Trendle said a bit gruffly. “And it is now for me to see to their comfort in all matters.”

  Venn nodded indulgently. There had never been outright animosity between his fellow Catholic priests and the Protestant Trendle, but he knew some of Trendle’s history…

&
nbsp; After Henry VIII founded the Church of England, Catholics had been treated as a despised minority, denied civil rights such as owning certain types of property, attending universities such as Oxford, and serving in Parliament.

  This hadn’t been rectified until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, when full civil rights were restored. In 1850, when thousands of Irish Catholics poured into England to escape the great famine, Pope Pius IX reinstated the Roman Catholic church organization, re-establishing its full hierarchy, the better to administer to the immigrants’ needs.

  The ensuing controversy had stoked a great deal of resentment between the Catholics and the Anglicans, with the latter seeing this as a threat and an invasion, fearing that they would one day become the minority themselves. In 1851, a journal called The Bulwark or Reformation Journal began being pub-lished in Scotland, spreading venomous anti-Catholic rants. From a tattered old copy of its first issue, Venn himself had once read, “The very principles of Popery, since it reached the zenith of its power, and obtained a perfect organization, are such as must work for evil to the mass of a population. As its power rises, the people must fall. It is in direct antagonism to the free and healthful play of the human faculties, to mental enlightenment, to civil progression, to social worth and domestic happiness.”

  During this period of uproar, important figures like Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman were burned in effigy, “No Popery” marches were held, and windows were broken in a number of Catholic churches.

  Venn had heard from some of the older priests that Trendle had written articles for The Reformation Journal, being in Scotland in those years. Further rumor had it that the fiery young reverend himself might have thrown a rock at a stained glass window or two in those days.

  But Venn and his fellows had always been polite to the man, and while they had heard that during his sermons he was known to rail against the Catholic church that shared his town, he had always treated its priests with grudging respect when meeting them in person. Venn attributed his gruff tone today simply to his advancing years and failing health.

  “Who in particular is it that needs your assistance, Father?” Trendle went on, as if testing him.

  “Ahh…I’ve been summoned by the farmer named Brook, in fact. Do you know him?”

  “Brook? I knew him, Father, his property bordering upon that of my church,” he inclined his head down the road, “though he has never been one of my congregation. I am surprised to hear that he was one of yours. I thought he was quite godless…an unbeliever.”

  “Perhaps he once was. Nevertheless, he must have had a change of heart.”

  Trendle smiled oddly. “Then his change of heart must have occurred as soon as he found himself at the gates of the underworld, because the man perished several months ago.”

  “Perished?”

  “Have you been delayed these months in seeing him, Father? Or was it his wife, more recently, who summoned you?”

  “Yes…perhaps it was his wife who sent for me,” Venn stammered, “and I was simply mistaken. I did not know that the farmer had died. I confess to not remembering the man and his wife very well.”

  “I suspect it is the wife who has had a change of heart, following the death of her young husband. Perhaps she desires to change her own godless ways, having seen the fate visited upon her spouse.”

  “And how did he die, John?”

  “In a fire. He burned to a handful of ash while in his reading chair.

  Perhaps he dropped his pipe while dozing. Funny, though, how nothing else in the room was so much as singed.” Trendle shared a little smile again. “Like Mr. Krook, in Bleak House.”

  “How terrible!”

  “I could little blame his wife for wishing to mend her ways,” Trendle repeated.

  “You say he was godless, John. Did you ever hear rumors of Brook being involved in, ah,” he hesitated, “blasphemous rituals? The worship of Satan?”

  “He was an atheist,” Trendle growled, “and that’s quite the same thing, isn’t it?”

  “Well…thank you for better informing me of these matters, John. I must be off now to see the woman, and comfort her.”

  “Save her soul if you can, Father, before something of the same happens to her.”

  Venn gave a thoughtful nod, looking back down the road in the direction of his own ruined church. Whatever force had obliterated it was still at work in Candleton. Its hunger still not sated.

  He turned to Trendle as if to warn him, too, to beware this force, but the man had already disappeared back inside his church.

  ««—»»

  The property of the sheep owner, Brook, did indeed commence shortly beyond that of the vicar’s church. No sooner had Venn left the church behind when he began to see sheep like lone clouds scattered across the sky, grazing in the deceased farmer’s vividly green pasture.

  Several of these sheep grazed close to the road, behind the rough fence that marked the small farm’s border. First looking up and down the road, Venn moved closer to the fence and reached over it to pet the fleecy side of a ram, which went on chewing placidly the clover that was sowed for these beasts to feed on. But it wasn’t to stroke the animal that Venn had left the road. He scru-tinized the ram grimly through his red spectacles. Then, its comrades, a bit further beyond. He saw no fiery eyes gazing out of their heads, or any other part of them. They ignored the jar he carried as much as they ignored him.

  For the moment satisfied that Brook had raised no further demons on his farm, Venn continued on. He saw the shearing barn, pens with high hurdles, and in the background, the farm owner’s stone cottage itself, with two storeys and a roof of thatch. This was his destination, specifically.

  Though this Mr. Brook had recently become deceased, it became apparent that his widow had managed to keep his farm in operation. Venn saw two men working about the property, and an energetic little sheep dog began barking at Venn’s approach until one of the men, who leaned on his crook, gave the mon-grel a command to desist. Venn lifted a hand to the man as he continued on to the cottage, and found that the dog had aroused the curiosity of a woman who now stood on the threshold to greet him.

  “May I help you, Father?” the woman asked. Judging from her stained pinafore and the slight dishevelment of her bundled dark hair, Venn took the pretty young woman to be another of the laborers.

  “Good afternoon. Might I have a word with Mrs. Brook?”

  “I am Mrs. Brook, Father.” She self-consciously brushed a curled twist of hair off her eyebrow.

  “Ahh, I see.” He smiled apologetically. “I am terribly sorry to appear here unannounced, but I was hoping to ask you several questions about your late husband…if it is not too much for you to bear.”

  “It is not too much,” the widow said, though looking a bit confused or perhaps even wary. Venn noticed that her eyes were repeatedly falling to the bundle he carried, which a few minutes earlier he had again wrapped up in his greatcoat. “Please come inside.”

  The widow seated the priest for tea, and when she reappeared had thrown on a clean white apron. She again flicked aside a stray tangle of hair as she seated herself nervously opposite him. Venn watched her face as she poured for him.

  She was exceptionally lovely, with skin very pale for a farm owner, large eyes so dark as to almost be black, a small pursed mouth as intently composed as her brows were drawn. To mar her beauty, there was a deeply indented scar along the delicate edge of her jaw, which he noticed as shadow slipped in to define it, as if someone had tried to cut the artery in her neck and missed. When she sat back to meet his eyes again, he lifted his gaze from the old wound quickly.

  “Did your husband own this farm, then, Mrs. Brook?” Venn asked.

  “No, Father…it is under our lease. There is a dealer in sheep who has stocked us, and with whom we share our profits until such time as we can fully reimburse him.”

  “And you have continued on with the operation, even after the sad demise of your husband? It is to your cred
it.”

  “Thank you, Father.” A pale but still pretty smile.

  Venn sighed uneasily, and shifted in his seat. “I need to show you something rather unpleasant, Mrs. Brook, if I may,” he said, indicating the bundle he had set on the floor beside him.

  Uncertainly, the woman assented. He saw her swallow. He hoped that her nerves were not too tender to be viewing such a horror, so soon after her young husband’s shocking demise. (And Venn had surreptitiously been glancing about him for signs of charring on the floor and walls, thinking that this might have been the very room where the man had been burned to death—but he saw nothing unusual, and remembered how the vicar had told him the fire had been unnaturally concentrated on Brook himself.) Venn lifted the jar onto the edge of the table, in the same motion that he drew his heavy coat away. He guiltily noted the little gasp from his host as the object was revealed. He was at least grateful for the fact that she could not see the living eyes staring from the blank hollows where the lamb’s skull itself possessed no true sockets. Without his spectacles, he could not presently see the eyes, either, though he felt their gaze upon him just as strongly.

  Venn noted in his host’s expression of dread a measure of recognition.

  And in fact, she muttered, “That…”

  “So your husband showed this to you, then, before he sold it to the man I acquired it from, at Woodbury Fair?”

  “Yes, Father.” The widow averted her eyes from it, sipped from her tea a bit tremulously. “I saw the poor blighted thing when it was still alive. It was only one of the badly formed creatures that were born this past Spring.”

  “There were others, then?” Venn found himself leaning forward more intensely. “How many? And did your husband sell those, as well?”