Wakenhyrst

by Michelle Paver

  So much I knew when Maud made her suggestion. What happened next startles me still. The notion that Pyett’s husband may have commissioned the Doom instantly put me in mind of a passage in The Life of St Guthlaf. Last night I turned it up. That was when I had my appalling idea.

  I told myself I must be mistaken, so I re-read The Life from the beginning. To my horror, it only reinforced my idea – for the parallels between myself and St Guthlaf are too striking to be mere coincidence. I list them below, as they lead inexorably to the truth.

  ‘Guthlaf was tall in figure and very handsome in countenance, and he grew up pure in his ways…’ The monk who penned those words might have been describing me!

  ‘There is in Britain an immense black fen with foul streams, miry pools and desolate reeds. In the midst of this fen, Guthlaf went to live on an islet especially remote, which none dared inhabit, as that place was the haunt of an accursed spirit.’ I have always known that Guthlaf’s Fen was once the abode of the saint. But I’d forgotten about the accursed spirit. The Anglo-Saxon phrase for it is awyrigeda gæst. How ugly that looks on the page; one can’t say it without a grimace! The Latinate term ‘spirit’ evokes an airy, insubstantial being. The word gæst is earthier, more brutally corporeal. I fear that the monk who wrote The Life knew whereof he spoke.

  ‘Guthlaf was disquieted by the loneliness of the wild wilderness, and much tormented by the mischief of a magpie that lived nearby.’ The correspondence is remarkable. It is Maud’s wretched bird.

  ‘Guthlaf’s hut being surrounded by brambles, it happened that his hand was pierced by a thorn. And so strong was its point that he was grievously afflicted and could hardly write.’ I too scratched my hand in the churchyard on the very day I found the Doom! At the time I was struck by a passage in Corinthians: ‘There was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me.’ Now I turn to Revelations 13:16, concerning the mark of the beast: ‘… and he causeth all… to receive a mark in their right hand…’

  ‘One day as Guthlaf prayed by the stream that flowed behind his hut, he remembered the sin he had done, of which he could not be cleansed…’ This needs no explanation. L.

  ‘Then a demon came sliding out of the fen. It was most filthy and horrible, with squalid countenance and jagged teeth like those of a horse…’ I have seen such a one in my dreams. And there’s something else I’ve only just realised. The Anglo-Saxon word for ‘demon’ is feond. The stream that flows around Wake’s End is named Feon Lode. That is a corruption of Feond Lode: Demon Stream. All this time the Devil has been hiding in the name.

  ‘Guthlaf being much affrighted, he prayed to St Bartholomew, and the accursed spirit vanished like smoke before his face.’ Some small comfort here, I think.

  ‘But in the stillness of the night, the foul spirit came again, creeping through the cracks in the wattle of Guthlaf’s hut and under the door of the chamber where he slept. And the demon carried Guthlaf up on its creaking wings to the cloudy sky, then down through the noisome waters of the fen to the very jaws of Hell. There Guthlaf beheld the blackest torments and heard the endless screams of the unrighteous. And the demon said to Guthlaf: For thy sin, Hell’s door openeth before thee.’ I too have been visited in my sleep. I too have dreamed of the icy waters of Hell.

  The rest of The Life contains much that has no parallel in my own experience, for Guthlaf is saved by St Bartholomew and granted healing powers, &c &c. However. One of Guthlaf’s miracles struck me most forcibly. In fact, it sparked my whole dreadful idea: ‘It happened that the accursed spirit entered into the body of a boatman who lived in the fen, so that he was possessed, and wounded himself and others with an axe. Then Guthlaf prayed over the sick man and blew in his face, so that the evil one flew out of his mouth. And Guthlaf trapped the evil one in a flask and flung the flask containing the demon into the deepest part of the fen. And after that the boatman came into his right wits again. And the accursed spirit troubled the fen no more.’

  The ‘flask containing the demon’. The Anglo-Saxon phrase is flaxan mid deofol gefulde.

  Can it really be only a matter of hours since I first saw those words? It feels as if they have haunted me for years.

  This morning I went to church and made the necessary enquiries. I had forgotten that today is Christmas Eve, but I prevailed upon a grumpy and ‘extremely busy’ Broadstairs to let me examine the parish records.

  First question: Did Pyett’s husband in fact commission the Doom, as his wife says? Answer: yes. In 1492, one Adam Pyett is recorded as having paid twelvepence for a new candlebeam.

  Second question: What was the purpose of the Doom? According to Pyett, she stood accused of being possessed, so her husband commissioned the painting to save her. As well as commissioning the Doom, he also – and this is crucial – ‘paid threepence to the priest for certain prayers to be said over the carter who was possessed.’

  The importance of these ‘prayers’ cannot be overstated. They are nothing less than a veiled reference to an exorcism. That is what Adam Pyett paid for. He paid the priest to banish the demon from the carter – thereby exonerating his wife from ‘false blame’. And the Doom was part of the exorcism.

  Why, one might ask, doesn’t Pyett’s Book explicitly mention this exorcism? I think she was afraid, for she lived in perilous times. In the past she had nearly been burned as a Lollard; but later, this part of Suffolk became a hotbed of Lollardism – and it was a movement that denounced exorcism as necromancy. Pyett must have been unsure where people’s sympathies lay, so she took refuge in vagueness – hence the reference to ‘certain prayers’ being said over the possessed man. But clearly the exorcism worked, for ‘the evil spirit plagued the parish no more’.

  There is one further piece of evidence which confirms that an exorcism was performed. On Pyett’s first pilgrimage she went to North Marston in Buckinghamshire. That is the shrine of the well-known pseudo-saint John Schorne, who is said to have imprisoned the Devil in a boot. In Pyett’s time his cult was widespread, and people afflicted by demons often visited his shrine. Doubtless Pyett went there to give thanks for her deliverance. Perhaps she was accompanied by the carter who had been possessed.

  But to return to the Doom. Having concluded my perusal of the parish records, the vital question remained: how was the exorcism carried out – and in what way was the Doom involved?

  This brought me back to Wake’s End around midday, for I hoped to find the answer in my own volumes on mediæval beliefs.

  I turned out to be right – but not in the way I had anticipated.

  Christmas Eve, 10 p.m.

  I must set down everything before I go to Midnight Mass. I must not shrink from my task, however dreadful.

  The question before me when I returned to Wake’s End was this: How was the Doom involved in the exorcism? In short, how would Pyett’s parish priest have rid the carter of the demon in 1492?

  The casting out of demons has been well known since long before Christ, and by Pyett’s time it involved both spoken and written prayers, the use of certain herbs, and bizarre and often fatal ‘treatments’ meted out to the afflicted person. I already knew much of this, and naturally my extensive collection of volumes on the period contains a good deal on the topic.

  To my surprise, none of it helped in the least. Assistance came from a most unlikely quarter.

  My father’s younger brother Octavius was a keen folk-lorist. Papa always ridiculed his hobby as unscientific, but he was fond of his brother, so he preserved the latter’s collection of local folklore after Octavius’ untimely death. It was among those papers that I found a volume amateurishly bound in blue American cloth, entitled The Folk-Lore of West Suffolk by one Enid Gurdon. It was published by The Folk-Lore Society in 1882. The chapter on exorcisms proved startling.

  The form of exorcism local to this part of Suffolk derives from both Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse practices brought over by the Vikings. In essence, the priest reads the Bible ‘at’ the evil spirit o
r the possessed person, thus progressively shrinking the spirit until it is small enough to be overcome. The priest then imprisons the tiny, furious demon in some sort of receptacle: a box, a jar or a bottle. This receptacle is then either placed under a boulder, or flung into a pool (as in Guthlaf) – or secured behind a monument in church.

  People in Suffolk have long memories. They think nothing of telling stories rooted in the Middle Ages. In her book Miss Gurdon includes one such tale about an exorcism which she took down from an old ploughman in Wakenhyrst in 1878. According to the old man, the exorcism occurred ‘in the years arter the Great Death’. In other words, in Pyett’s time.

  I reproduce his tale in the vernacular in which Miss Gurdon recorded it: ‘They duh say that the passon read that sperrit daown small into a bottle, and he tied its stopper about with reeds. Then they put that bottle agin an owd beam in the church, and arter that the sperrit worn’t heard no more for ivver so long, for that owd beam han’t been interfered with sence.’

  When I read that, I was physically sick. I knew at once that the church was St Guthlaf’s, and that the ‘owd beam’ was the Doom. This is why I’ve always hated it. It isn’t the painting that frightens me. It is what was trapped behind it.

  The old ploughman said that the spirit – the demon – had never been heard of since, because the beam (i.e. the Doom) had remained undisturbed. Doubtless that was correct at the time he told his tale to Miss Gurdon. But now the Doom has been disturbed. Last year I gave orders to strip the chancel arch of those whitewashed planks. All this is my fault.

  Later

  I was too overcome to go on, but a little brandy has given me strength. I still have a few minutes before Midnight Mass, and I must finish. It is my duty.

  Once I had found that description of the exorcism in Miss Gurdon’s book, I could have stopped there – but I had to know for sure. Accordingly, around three o’clock I hurried back to church and collared the sexton. Old Farrow wasn’t best pleased to be questioned on Christmas Eve, but when he saw that I would not relent, he capitulated.

  Like most locals he is intensely superstitious, and he only told his story with the utmost reluctance. He confirmed that last year, while he was supervising the work of removing the planks from the chancel arch – those very planks which were later found to comprise the Doom – something fell from behind them and shattered on the flags. Close examination showed it to have been a small flask of greenish glass, which had been stoppered and bound with a kind of string made of dried reeds. This flask had been fastened to the back of the Doom, in the angle between a baton and one of the planks. When the planks were torn from the wall, the flask had fallen and smashed to pieces on the stones.

  I didn’t ask Farrow whether he’d ever heard the ploughman’s tale of the exorcism. I knew that he had when he told me that he’d preserved the bottle’s remains: ‘not liking to destroy it’. In other words, out of fear.

  Those shards lie before me now on my desk. The glass is thick, greenish, and in places smeared with an oily black residue that smells most foul. Nothing would induce me to touch them with my bare hands. I even fear to look at them too closely, lest I glimpse not my own reflection, but something worse.

  Later

  Farrow gave the remains of the bottle into my keeping with undisguised relief. I wrapped them in my handkerchief. Then I made him give me the key to the room in the tower, and I forced myself to go in and confront the Doom.

  By then it was past three in the afternoon and the light was beginning to fail. The devil leered from its corner. It knows all about me. It knows everything. It is a creature of the swamp and it squats among the reeds, mocking and obscene. Since I first saw its eye in the grass, I have hated and feared this painting. At last I know why.

  I think some part of me sensed from the beginning what lay behind it. And tonight, on Christmas Eve, I am sure: whoever painted that picture painted the demon from life.

  The devil in the corner is real. For four hundred years it was imprisoned behind the Doom.

  Now it’s loose.

  Christmas Day 1912, 3 a.m.

  For Midnight Mass I wore my limmell stone under my shirt along with my crucifix. I hoped it would make me feel less alone.

  Never before have I realised how isolated one can feel in a throng of people. Everyone around me was singing and praying, unaware of what is happening. They have no idea there’s a devil in their midst. I’m the only one.

  At last I know the true nature of the threat. I suppose that’s something. It’s always better to know.

  It’s also startling to look back to when it all began: to that day in the churchyard when I saw the eye in the grass. The signs were there from the very beginning. The sky was overcast, and now I remember (although I didn’t before) that in the east I saw thunderclouds and a distant bolt of lightning. There was lightning at Blythburgh too, in the great tempest of 1577 when the Devil attacked the church of the Holy Trinity as a monstrous dog. And lightning attended the Devil in the Bible. Luke 10:18: ‘I beheld Satan as lightning fall from Heaven.’

  As I made my way towards our pew, I felt as if I’d gained an extra sense, or a third eye; isn’t that what the Hindoos call it? I felt the stone demons on the corbels peering down at me.

  Then I saw those toads carved on the oak chest against the wall. They too were staring at me: We know what you did. It came to me suddenly that this chest was made in the same century as Pyett and the Doom, and that it was fashioned from what locals call ‘black oak’. It came from the fen. Pyett called the demon ‘the thing that cries in the night’. Whoever carved those toad-like faces on the chest did so ‘from life’. He had seen the thing that cries in the night.

  After coming to this realisation, I couldn’t endure to be near that chest, so I decided to move to another pew, much to the consternation of old Broadstairs and the wonderment of the congregation. Well, let them talk. I knew where I had to be: on the other side, by the door to the tower.

  The demon comes and goes at will. When all is quiet, it slithers out from behind its erstwhile prison, the Doom, and slips under the door. At other times it slinks back and conceals itself once more. I could feel it there now. And I sensed that it knew that it was perceived – but that it would not show itself while I was there to keep watch. It is a creature of shadows. It hates to be observed.

  As the congregation embarked on another carol, I had a second astonishing idea. Covertly, I turned up the passage in Revelations where the angel comes down to earth and seizes the Devil. And there it was as plain as day. It might have been written for me! The angel ‘bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up… And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.’

  It all fits, all. At the beginning of the world – that is to say, a little over four thousand years ago – the angel caught the devil and bound it and cast it into the bottomless fen. Then after a thousand years, the devil was ‘loosed out of his prison’. Who knows for how many centuries it roamed at large? But eventually St Guthlaf trapped it in the flask and flung it back into the deepest part of the fen.

  There the devil lay imprisoned once more; this time not for millennia but for seven hundred years – until in Pyett’s time the cycle began again. The devil was loosed. It haunted the fen as the thing that cries in the night. Then Adam Pyett paid a priest to ‘read it down’ into a bottle – which bottle was secured behind the Doom. And there the devil lay trapped for over four hundred years. Until last September, when I ordered those ‘planks’ torn down – and I set the demon free.

  The entire pattern flashed before my eyes as the congregation sang the last verse of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. One might have thought I would be appalled at the cosmic battle in which I am caught up, but instead I felt the most enormous surge of power – for in grasping the pattern, I also perceived the working of Providence. First, St Guthlaf fought the demon. Then came the turn of Adam Pyett. Now the flaming sword has
passed to me.

  I have been chosen for this task by God.

  Later

  I’ve been sipping brandy and watching dawn break on the morning Our Saviour was born. No snow. Not even a frost to brighten the outlook. And yet I feel so blessed.

  My whole life has been leading up to this. It is for this that I took honours at Cambridge. For this that I laboured for years to find The Book of Alice Pyett. Only I, with my unrivalled knowledge of Pyett and her time, could have read the clues and deciphered what is really happening.

  People in ancient times believed that the world was a battleground between God and Satan: two vast cosmic forces fighting an endless struggle for men’s souls.

  Pyett and her contemporaries would have regarded that view as wicked, since it denies the omnipotence of God. She was right. The truth is, God rules all. He sends devils to test us. By sending them, He shows His great love for us – for how else could we perceive His ineffable goodness, save through the presence of the blackest evil?

  It is God who put into my mind the notion of renovating the chancel arch. It is God who made me order the Doom to be torn down, thereby setting the demon loose. And now it is God who commands me to go into battle.

  I know what I have to do, and I shall not shirk my appointed task.

  I must hunt down the demon and destroy it.

  Christmas Day, Later

  The question is: how? Draining the fen will merely destroy its hunting-ground. Besides, once Guthlaf’s Fen is gone, it will take refuge in North Fen – and that’s common land, I could do nothing about it.

  Moreover the threat is more proximate than the fen. It can get inside the house. I haven’t forgotten those noises at my bedroom door, or those eyes at the foot of the stairs. Priorities, Edmund. First, find some way to keep it outside. Once the house is secure, proceed to the exorcism. My expertise as an historian makes me well suited to undertake the necessary research about the latter. I may also need to enlist the help of the Church, although I shall consider carefully before taking any steps in that direction.