by Ali Shaw
They leaned in with their cigarettes between their lips, and the vicar struck the lighter and the flame danced in front of their faces. The priest’s hands looked older than the rest of him. Adrien found himself weirdly reassured by their proximity, sucking in on the cigarette and watching the tip of it glow red.
‘So,’ asked the vicar of Hannah, when they were all set, ‘why are you insisting on getting soaked out here?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Hannah, blushing. ‘And I’m very grateful that you came out here with tea and smokes.’
‘Religion, right? You don’t have much truck with it.’
‘Something like that, yeah.’
The vicar laughed grimly into his mug of tea. ‘We’re a nicer bunch these days, I promise, or at least some of us are. Not so many wars and burnings at the stake around these parts. But don’t worry, it’s nice to see someone sticking to their principles.’
‘Um, if you must know, it’s not specifically those things that put me off. It’s just the thing about the garden.’
‘Eden?’
Hannah nodded. ‘Just, you know, that idea that the world is supposed to be our garden.’
The vicar mulled it over. ‘Hmm. Most people pick something else to object to. I’d never even thought of that one before. I suppose I’d once have told you that Eden was only ever a story, to try to help us understand why the world always seems to hurt so much. Now, I don’t know. I don’t know what I believe any more.’ He sipped his tea.
‘Sometimes I wish I was a vicar,’ piped up Adrien. ‘I’ve always thought there must be a lot of comfort to be had from believing in God, and all his angels and stuff. Especially after a disaster like this.’
‘I don’t, though,’ said the vicar. ‘Don’t believe. I lost my faith years ago, and disasters have only made it harder.’
Adrien didn’t know what to say. There would have been a time when he might have taken a certain perverse glee in hearing what the vicar had just told him. It would have been an intellectual victory of a sort, for an unbeliever such as himself. Today, to his surprise, he realised he was sorry to hear it.
‘Do you mind me asking why?’
The vicar shrugged. The branches dripped behind him. ‘Long story. I converted my wife. Took me fifteen years to do so, and in that time a lot of tragedies and funerals and disappointments and all the other things that normally tip people towards God. I was pleased about it for maybe a day or two, but some new converts become really zealous and, as it turned out, Celia was one of them. All of a sudden she had such concrete opinions. She took it a step beyond anything I’d ever thought . . . kept making grandiose statements about how this thing was godly and this ungodly, this person good and that bad. I listened to her and I had a kind of counter-epiphany. Realised I’d long been drifting, and that my only real faith was in . . . was in . . . I suppose you could say it was in surprises.’
‘There are bad people, though,’ said Hannah, as if seeking affirmation. ‘There are good people and there are bad. Your wife is right about that.’
‘Was,’ flinched the vicar. ‘You mean my wife was right . . .’
‘Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry.’
‘No need to be. How were you supposed to know? But a tree came up through the vicarage and pulled the roof down on her. She had got up to pour me a glass of water because I was thirsty in bed and too lazy to do anything about it. Now she is the one in heaven and I am the heathen bound for hell, if I’m not there already.’
That’s so sad,’ said Hannah tenderly. ‘I’ve . . . lost my brother. And . . . too many have died.’
‘Yes. That they have.’
‘Too many,’ she said again, staring at the ground.
Adrien stepped in. ‘So,’ he asked the vicar, ‘why are you still wearing a dog collar, if you’ve come over to the side of the Philistines?’
The vicar laughed. ‘I never told my congregation about my dilemma. Still haven’t. I don’t think they’d understand. And anyway, old churches like this one are about much more than belief. Some of the old folks inside had great-grandparents who used to come here every Sunday. Some of them had great-great-grandparents, and some even greater greats than that. There’s one or two here reckon they’re descended from the carpenters who made this place what it is . . . or what it was.’
‘I saw the carvings inside,’ said Adrien.
The vicar smiled, then said to Hannah, ‘It’s a shame you won’t come in. We’re lucky. We’ve got – we’ve still got, miraculously – some of the finest examples of medieval carpentry in the country. Mine’s a biased opinion of course, but if you won’t come inside, at least look at this one above the door . . .’ He stepped out into the open rain and at once it began to splatter his hair and gem his eyelashes. Hannah and Adrien joined him, and they stood in a huddle with the brolly too small to stop the falling water from striking, and they looked at the carving atop the porch.
It was a flat gargoyle with a face made of leaves and arms made from branches. Its tongue was a long veined frond, from the end of which wiggled drop after drop, as if the tongue itself were salivating. Adrien shuddered at the sight of it. When he looked back down, the vicar was watching him closely, and he tried to pretend he’d shuddered because of the rain.
‘This is something you recognise,’ said the vicar.
‘Umm . . .’ said Adrien with a glance at Hannah, who was still lost in the carving. ‘Sort of.’
‘You wouldn’t be the first.’
Adrien immediately dropped all pretence. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘A fair few travellers have stopped here since the trees came, some of them in need of directions, some with a compass like you have. One time there was a whole busload, hungry as horses, and we had a bit of a standoff. Regardless, I’ve shown all of them these carvings . . . and watched their reactions.’
Now Hannah looked confused. ‘What exactly are you two talking about?’
‘A few other people,’ continued the vicar, ‘have told me they’ve seen them. The rest, of course, haven’t a clue what I mean. Don’t ask me why one person sees and most don’t. Maybe it’s a matter of faith. Maybe it depends on whether the creatures want to be seen.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Hannah, looking from one man to the other. ‘You’re still talking about these carvings, right?’
‘Whisperers, I call them,’ said the vicar. ‘Because of the noise they make. Three times I’ve seen one. Each time it’s been sitting on the church roof looking down at me. One of them had ears as big as a rabbit’s, and I could have sworn they were made out of leaves. They were angled at the sun, if you know what I mean, the way leaves always are. Anyway, each time I blinked and it had vanished. Gone, just like that.’
Hannah gaped from the vicar to Adrien. ‘Have you seen this, Adrien?’
‘Hannah,’ he began awkwardly. ‘If I’d had the chance I’d have told you about them. But it was . . . hard to know how to begin.’
‘Are you kidding me? How long have you been seeing them for?’
‘Since not long after the trees came. I suppose it’s a bit like how you saw a kirin. And I saw these . . . these . . .’
‘Whisperers,’ suggested the vicar.
Adrien nodded. The name was right for them. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he asked, ‘that you, or anyone else you asked, ever saw them running towards something? As if they . . . almost as if they wanted you to follow?’
The vicar frowned. ‘Running towards what?’
‘Er . . . a tree.’
‘A tree?’ asked the vicar and Hannah at once.
Adrien spread out his arms. ‘Like this. With two big arms, almost like a seat. Huge and . . . and . . . dark and . . .’ He lowered his arms again. ‘You haven’t seen it, have you?’
The vicar shook his head. ‘Sorry. Nobody I’ve spoken to has mentioned that.’
‘Okay,’ said Adrien, worried and disappointed in equal measure as the rain slapped down around them.
‘I’m
still really confused,’ said Hannah. ‘What exactly are they?’
‘I wish I knew,’ said the vicar. ‘There’s a sweet old lady inside who I confided all this to, and she keeps telling me they’re a sign from the Almighty. Why shouldn’t she think that, when they look so much like these faces carved all over her church? I don’t argue with her, but there are devils carved in churches, too.’
‘Is that what you think they are?’ asked Adrien anxiously. ‘Devils?’
The vicar shrugged again. ‘They could be angels, for all I know. They could be anything. There’s nothing like them anywhere in scripture.’
Hannah looked back up at the sculpture jutting out from the porch. ‘Then what are these . . . whisperers . . . doing all over a church?’
‘Not just this one,’ said the vicar. ‘You’ll find them in many old churches, not only in this country but in mainland Europe, too. I did some research on the carvings a few years back. Nothing very scholarly, you have to understand, just stuff for the parish newsletter. Turns out that nobody really knows what they’re doing here. The carpenters and stonemasons who made them never recorded why or where they got their ideas from.’
‘Then . . . they’re an old thing?’
‘This one’s as old as the church rafters, which are seven hundred years and counting.’
‘There would have been forests everywhere back then,’ mused Hannah. ‘The people here would have lived their whole lives in the woods.’
The rain wetted the foliate gargoyle’s lips, and seemed to make them salivate. Its eyes, livened by the moisture, stared keenly down. For a moment Adrien felt as if they were searching him, although what they hoped to find he could not guess. All he knew was that they made his skin prickle, and he had to look away.
Once the rain had stopped falling, the four travellers bade their thank yous and farewells to the vicar and tried to cover a few more miles before sundown. That evening and night remained dry, but the days that followed brought more thunderous showers, from which they had scarce luck finding shelter. They camped twice in wild places and once in someone’s sitting room, where they took it in turns to slouch in an armchair that had survived the trees’ coming. The land rose and fell as they travelled, sometimes so steeply that they had to use branches for handholds. Other times they crossed trenches that the roots had crowbarred open, and in one saw a glimmering mineral seam polished bright by the rain.
Adrien found it had become second nature to plug the poles of their tent together and drag the canvas over the frame. Setting up camp remained his responsibility, while Hiroko and Seb continued to seek out food. He had begun to pride himself on his knack with Hiroko’s tinderbox, but he knew that his real task was to look out for Hannah. Some nights she seemed almost to have come to terms with what she had done to the gunman, and the two of them would laugh and swap stories. Other nights she was monosyllabic and had to hold her forefinger still to stop it from twitching. Always she seemed exhausted, and Adrien wished she would try to get more sleep. Yet every morning she was awake the first of them, and every night she lay wide awake long after the others had dozed off.
Adrien was pleased, therefore, when on one such evening, nearly a week after leaving the church, while the teenagers were out hunting and the fire already brought to life, and while he was in the middle of telling Hannah an old staffroom tale he thought she might find amusing, he heard her start to snore. He didn’t care if he had bored her to sleep, in fact he was delighted if he’d done so. He crept around the fire and laid his jacket across her, then returned to his post and smiled to hear her mumbling into dreams.
The hour was growing late and the woods were fading into a drowsy evening murk, but Adrien made sure to stay alert for Hiroko and Seb’s return. He didn’t want them to come back loudly and wake Hannah, so when he heard something like a footfall, he looked up and said, ‘Shh,’ with a finger to his lips.
Sshhhh, came the reply from the forest, and Adrien spun around in alarm. It was not, after all, the teenagers returning.
It was a whisperer.
Its head was so crooked it was almost at a right angle, and its back arched up behind it like a cat’s. It stalked slowly towards Adrien on all fours, with a ridge of thorns protruding from its wooden spine.
Adrien sprang to his feet, hissing Hannah’s name across the fire. She did not wake.
There was no breeze, and the campfire’s smoke rose straight and true. Nevertheless the leaves stirred, and when Adrien followed the sound up into the branches he saw three more whisperers crouched in a line, as motionless as sleeping owls.
‘Hannah!’ he said, and would have hurried around the fire to wake her, had not the first whisperer already crept so close. Now, in every direction Adrien looked, he noticed more and more of the things. One had a face of gilled fungus, and was hanging off the underside of a branch. Another was a graceless knot of briars, seeming to possess no head at all.
‘Hannah!’ yelled Adrien. ‘Please! Hannah, wake up!’
Hannah only slept. The flicker of a smile crossed her face.
The whisperers began to come down from the branches. They sprang and scrambled and flopped to the forest floor, and several Adrien had not yet spotted reared up out of the weeds and leaf mush, raising whatever ears, ruffs and craggy shackles they possessed.
Adrien’s breath caught in his throat. He feared they were going to swarm him, but instead they all just turned and ran. They teetered away at zigzag pace with their arms held aloft and their misshapen heads bobbing, and Adrien might have been relieved had he not looked up and seen what they were running towards. There it stood, in the place before the limit of sight, just as he had known it would when he looked. It was the darkest part of the evening, the tree shaped something like a chair, with its two lower boughs stretching to right and left. Its higher branches spread out symmetrically, much further up its mighty trunk.
A groan came out of the tree, as if some invisible giant was shifting its weight on its seat. Now that Adrien stared harder he could see that there was movement on it, but all of it was small. The whisperers were crawling on its bark, hurrying over its trunk like ants on a hive.
Suddenly the fire went out.
It died with a hiss of smoke, which rose and dispersed in a grey-blue cloud. Adrien squealed and held his hands to his collar. The logs fumed as if they had been put out by the ensuing darkness. Gloom doused the woods, washing the half-light of the evening from every branch.
‘Hannah!’ shouted Adrien, and was about to rush to her and shake her awake when something sighed in the smouldering remains of the fire. The burned sticks lifted, pushed themselves off the ground, and were a pair of arms and a rack of ribs. An ashen whisperer climbed to its feet, its legs wonky struts, its head a burn-blister of log. It stared at Adrien for a moment, and a dozen beats of his heart pounded by. Then it limped away, after the others of its kind, towards the massive tree. It paused and looked back after a dozen paces, as if to ensure that Adrien was still watching, then continued on its path.
The great tree groaned, as if calling the whisperer home. Its wooden creak seemed to take a hundred years to fade away, and through all that time Adrien stood transfixed and listening to its long note. The loss of the light had turned it to a vast silhouette whose many upper branches were arranged against the canopy like a crown of antlers. Then, just as Adrien was coming back to his senses, one of them moved. It straightened out and bent back into shape.
With a yawn, Hannah rolled over and woke up. At once Adrien dashed to her side and yanked her to her feet, yelling, ‘Come on! No time!’ She spluttered and protested, but he began to drag her away. They had gone only a few paces before she dug her heels in. ‘Adrien! What’s going on?’
He turned to point to the tree, but it was gone. The whisperers were gone too, even that last one who had risen from the ash. There was only what remained of the fire, a fizzled pile of sticks in the dark.
‘It was . . . it was . . .’ said Adrien, blinking and
staring around him.
‘What’s going on? Why did you put the fire out?’
‘I didn’t! It was . . . was . . .’
Hannah rubbed her eyes. ‘Jesus, I must have been sleeping really deeply. My body feels so heavy . . .’
‘There was a moving branch!’
‘What do you mean? What’s spooked you, Adrien? Hang on a minute, did you see those things again?’
But before Adrien could elaborate, Seb called faintly out of the distance. ‘Mum? Adrien? Where are you guys?’
‘Over here!’ yelled Hannah, then looked back to Adrien. ‘Tell me what just happened. Was it the whisperers?’
Adrien nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, taking deep breaths and smoothing out his jacket. ‘Yes, it was them. But it was something else, too.’
III
1
The Coast
Adrien Thomas had feared many things in his life, but when seabirds shrieked overhead at the end of another week’s walking, he felt a jolt of terror so sharp that he had to sit down on a log with a hand over his heart.
A change had come over the forest that week, just as the dusks had come incrementally earlier each night. A yellow tint had fringed the leaves, while those trees that had arrived thinking it summer or spring had grown harder to spot among the ones who’d thought it autumn. Villages came and went, obstacles of brick and glass. Unframed doors led to nowhere. Drainpipes collected the water of afternoon rain showers and ran it aimlessly from branch to branch. One time, after heavy rain had fallen and the travellers had emerged from a ruined village hall, they looked up through thinning foliage and saw many blocks of cloud levitating above the streets, like the ghosts of the buildings that had once stood there.
Then came the day they heard the seabirds. A shriek and then another, and then a squabbling overhead. Adrien looked up from his seat on the log to see black and white feathers raking the canopy. It was gulls mobbing a crow, and at the sight of them a strong north-westerly blew up out of nowhere and put salt in his nostrils.