Mr Jonathan Sorrell held his new acquisition away from his body at a safe distance. It always took him some time to build a rapport. He would place the candlestick, prie-dieu, or armoire, whatever it was, in the corner of the room and observe from ten paces back. He would glance from different vantages, observe from different lights, as if trying to catch it out. There was something he sought in an antique, more than value or rarity, which he liked to describe to captive dinner guest as its “quintessence.” He would waggle a finger at his listener, cozy in rather too close, like a confidence man, and become voluble on the rich emotional bonds he formed with his stock, and when he reached the right moment to speak of “quintessence” he tended to add a little saliva to his sibilance, showering them lightly as he sounded the ss. He had filched the term from a Times crossword, and he understood it to roughly denote the unique spirit or personal quality of a piece, how it made him feel, or perhaps the character to which it could be reduced, if you could somehow remove the physical carapace and leave something more fundamental behind.

Once he was sure that he had a kindred spirit in his possession, he formed a firm attachment. Then he would gasp with pleasure when he saw it from across the room, he would stroke, he would coo. Without this bond no item could hope to form part of his stock. “They are all” he would say to a buyer, with sometimes even a suggestion of impending tears, “my children.” Children which he habitually sold for the highest price. But it did pain him, truly, to part with anything he had taken into his collection. With this new find, he was not yet on first name terms. He stood with it in the centre of the storeroom, the rest of his stock out in the shop at the front, draped and hooded for the night like stabled horses. He had one plastic gloved hand on the curve of the goblet, and one at its base, with his arms nearly straight in front of him. After holding it at varied distances, handling it with careful distain, he said, “Of course, It’s utterly awful-isn’t it? Just look-” He then gave it a half turn and made a mortified sort of grimace as he does so. Sorrell clucked his tongue in thought, still undecided whether to take it into the fold. He looked like a suspicious father, eyeing carefully his newborn, and wondering who in the family has red hair.

“Hmmm. Well, rather unique, I don’t think I’ve ever had a glove on one from the same period, and” he leaned in close now, “so nearly mint.” Rather unique was one of Sorrell’s solecisms, rejecting the dictionary’s stipulation that something is either unique, or not. “Grisly looking thing. But the gilding and glass seem original, if you ask little old me.” He hmmed, he gently dandled. It was curiously light. “Well”, he exhaled finally with a flourish, “You might just have snagged a piece here, you might just have. But what’s it worth, and to whom? I think we may get some interest from one of our dear collectors.” If you were of an unartistic bent, you would think him rather camp, but this was solely a professional manner. In the provinces, such a vocal tone has a rarified, artistic association, it’s good for business. There was also a hoarse catch in his voice, from his frequent glass of wine, his eternal cigarette. He kept his ashtrays on rotation, and they brimmed with butts like a magnet carpeted with iron filings. Last night had seen a three bottle, two-pack marathon. And so this morning the bags under his eyes were white, the detailing done in red veins, his hand danced lightly to a silent tune. In the safety of the back room, he lit and drew on a Marlboro and luxuriated in the synthesis of smoke and scent.

Sorrell was fifty years of age and expansively built. His drinker’s belly was firmly convex; it pressed his shirt outward as if it had been caught and by a permanent gust. His arms struggled against his jacket like overfilled sausage. His bustling neck and long spaniel curls fell to his collar, gave him the aspect of a monarch gone to fat. His laurels were starting to fade, and these ringlets were greying gently from the roots. His face however enjoyed that temporary suspension of aging that extra ballast can provide. The weight lent a fullness to his skin, a tautness to his cheeks, only undercut by the of depth of wrinkles around the eyes. When he smiled these stretched back nearly to his temples. He had a decade lag, but booze and fags were starting to have their say. Once he hits sixty, you can tell he’ll look seventy. As you often observe in these cases, if you lose any weight the whole façade is knocked through, the skin collapses, gravity makes up for lost time. His fingernails were like prissily maintained lawns, his rich loafers unblemished like babes. He wore a cord suit of confident green, and a shirt with promiscuous collars, the angular points reaching daringly past the lapel of his jacket.

Sorrell peddled his wares in the small Cotswold village of Alncombe, whose affluent honeycomb coloured houses owed their standing to the medieval wool boom. Now it had a train to take you into The City in an hour, dozens of thoughtfully curated boutiques, and two Michelin guide pubs. It was a Potemkin village of rural life, with those born in the county priced out from living or shopping here. Instead, financiers inhabited the aging pads of long dead wool merchants, and aspired to culture as much as their predecessors. Mr Sorrell ’s shop catered to these needs, and sat elegantly on the high street with a regal sign of gold lettering on a warm blue pediment. His customers tended to be plump investors, shaved to an infantile pink and squeezed into shirts of Levantine cotton, who nodded with gravity as their wives disgorged the jot and title of their interior ambitions. Sorrell was a consummate, therapeutic listener. His attentive poise added weight to anything said to him. When he did his accounts, stabbing anachronistically at a calculator with a Cumberland finger, he could not quite believe how much money his customers parted with, and so often, and with such gratitude. His own house was perhaps half mile outside of the village. Towards the end of the high street, moving north from the village, a lane ran gently up-hill for a few hundred yards. Then a wooden gate took him to the bottom of his lawn, and he had short walk over the grass before he came to his house. This was a rather lovely 18th century farmhouse, a Wunderkammer of the choicest pieces he had been unable to bare selling.

Sorrell placed the object delicately onto the inspection table and snapped off his gloves. His fingers had pruned and puckered with sweat. Raising his glasses and placing his hands onto hips, he said rapidly as if answering a quiz question, “reliquary, 16th century, I’d say Italian?” This question was rhetorical but superficially addressed to a girl of nineteen, sat at the end of the table in a mid-Victorian armchair, her head resting on the original antimacassar. She had been entirely silent and unstirring throughout his earlier pronouncements, as she was solely focused on video playing on her phone, air pods firmly in, as a “do-not-disturb” bars entry to a hotel room door.

Mr Sorrell thought with fondness of how she had once said “original anti-massacre” to a long-time and deep-pocketed customer. The man mocked her at length, Sorrell had said nothing.

“Hetty! Phone! At work, did we not discuss? I am quite sure we did” His prim phrasing was rather out of date.

Hetty removed her headphones and in the same motion held the phone out towards his face. He had a stunted impulse to crush it under his feet or hurl it into the corner of the room.

“What’s this? Let me-” The glasses dropped back down. He inspected the screen distantly, as if it were a very small television. In his hand it was a clumsy tool rather than an extension of the personhood. He had the awkward telephonic habitus of the digital immigrant.

Before him, a very young priest was saying in slow American, and with the earnest force of a missionary, “reliquary: any box, casket, or shrine destined for the reception of relics, normally part of the body or clothes, of a departed saint, kept as a memorial. Reliquaries have existed in some shape or form almost from the beginning of Christianity.” This text is subtitled onto the priest’s chest in a faux-gothic script, a sort of sub-blackletter.

“See its work” says Hetty. How did this come to pass, thought Sorrell, she is bartering with me now, I pay her wages. His irritation at her indolence and inattention flared but never got going, she could set him easily onto another road like a wind-up car.

“He’s a priest” says Hetty “His channel has lots of videos on church antiques, I’ve been watching them. Look” She scrolls through them for his benefit. “Ecclesiastical, not church” thought Sorrell to himself. He deigned to inspect the offered screen. There were some gothic chairs, admittedly exquisite, a prie-dieu with wonderful barley sugar columns, and a collection of filigreed plate. Each video had the priest, the limpid tones, the archaising font.

“And this man a real priest you suppose?” He said, in wry, jocular, un-funny tones. This phrasing, which he adopted after university (red brick, scraped a third) was imitative, faux toff. He had perfected this during his apprenticeship at a London dealer, before settling in the provinces.

“Um yes he is a priest- look he shows you his church” She scrolled, and indeed the man was ministering to his congregation. The camera was positioned from behind the altar, you saw the priest with his back to the nave, you watched as he prepared the eucharist, closing his eyes in modest rapture. He blessed, he genuflected, he preached and proselytized. A glossy tour of his ministry was made in thirty second segments.

“Mmm but do try and stay off your phone at work Hetty please. Our dear customers, they can be bloody picky, and they will behave like sodding rabbits, absolutely anything can set off them! We wouldn’t want a stray phone to jilt the sale of a Chippendale” He is unduly pleased with his facile rhyme. Over the space of his short speech, he has morphed from complaining to conspiratorially bitching with her. He cringes a little at his weakness. Why does he always have to wrangle with her when he wants something done, or something stopped? Why can’t he insist? He is solicitous towards his customers, which is all to the good in this business. There is no hard sell. You cultivate a genteel atmosphere of comfort and taste, and so they cough up, and feel it a privilege, that they are buying a richer vein of life. If a retired doctor wishes to spend thirty minutes describing all the furniture his grandmother ever owned, covering at length its origin, style and price, Mr Sorrell will even pretend to note down the more recondite details as if he intends further research at a more convenient time. If a former headmistress, with a puckered, reeking dog stuffed into in her handbag, provides a family update the length of an Icelandic saga, he tuts and coos as if he knows each name personally, as if each birth melts his heart, each knee replacement touches him to the quick. This fawning, chameleon nature, which caters on demand to the needs of his interlocuter, strips him of any capacity for command. Hetty has slid her phone into her pocket without complaint, but there is a vestigial smile, as if on this occasion she has indulged him. Had she refused, he would have simply acquiesced, something which he tries to be amused by.

“And I meant to ask, how was the sale? See any of the usual scroungers?” He collates a good deal of stock in this manner. In this part of the country, larger farmhouses frequently pass into the hands of poorer offspring, and heirlooms are tenderly shown to the grandchildren, and then promptly sold, either at the property or sent to a dealer.

“Yes, all fine, the usual crowd were there. It was a huge place, much bigger than the last one, and up for sale too.”

More rarely, as in this instance, a family seat comes onto the market, and a full auction takes place. The big London houses might send someone on the qui vive, you might get a sheik, a footballer, or more usually some stocky finance chaps in immaculate Barbours. It’s largely predictable stuff. What the buyers are after is the whiff of faded grandeur. The crowd stump up over the odds in a rococo dining room, the eldest son sat solemnly in his tweeds behind the auctioneer, keeping a running tally behind his mourning. But amongst the sylvan scenes in oil, the Victorian copies of French canapés, the racks of medals undeserved and priced at many unnecessary deaths, you might find a choice item of real value, a long-off-the-market rarity, and that is what Mr Sorrell is after. He likes to arrange his shop around a carefully selected central piece, and when a country pile is being stripped, he sends Hetty off to represent the firm on the hope that she might snag something that will tie the whole show room together. He delegates this to give her vital experience, he says, to acquire the essential nose for duds and gems. In fact, he is very nervous driver, and his blood alcohol might be slightly elevated on the odd morning. They consult in lights-out whispers over the phone if a price seems too high or a pedigree doubtful, it’s all rather fun.

“There was one bloke who seemed very interested in this piece, he made a bit of scene after we out bid him.” She gives Sorrell a smile, savouring a victory, although they money spent and the advantage won is all his. “Before the auction had started, he’s seen the lot online and really liked it or whatever. And when the lot came up, he’s already up at the front arguing with the auctioneer, all waving his arms and lent in really close. And like he must have known the owner of the place, or they were related or something, ‘cos they were sat up at the front also, he went to speak to him, begging I would have said, lent up close to his chair saying “you mustn’t Anthony, you mustn’t, not at a public sale!”

“And this bloke, the one waving his arms, pulls something out of his pocket and shows the owner, like a little locket it was, but the owner chap just turns his head away, doesn’t say anything. It was weird, like really weird. Everyone was looking at them, and you could hear literally everything he was saying. So awkward.” Hetty narrows her eyes and contracts with a little shudder, with the acute pain that the young can feel for others when they embarrass themselves in front of a crowd. Sorrell nodded and sighing sententiously raised his palms in front of him in a “what is to be done” sort of gesture, he said “well these things do bring out the worst, all skeletons come out of the closet when the silver’s being hawked.”

“Yeah no, absolutely.” Said Hetty and briskly continued “Anyway the auctioneer was obviously being super polite, but he had to tell him to sit down in the end, and the man just stood here, like all still and very cold, just looking at him like he wanted to hurt him. People were staring, getting nervous. And then he just smiles and nods his head, and says not a problem, sits down at the end of my row. That’s when I called you and we agreed a price. He was a weird looking bloke, sat only a few seats from me, all stiff and upright and dressed posh.” Sorrell winces a little. “Well in clothes that had been posh if you know what I mean, dark suit and dark tie but holes at his elbows and his collar all patchy. When I started bidding, he stared at me for a good minute, he had these bruised bags under his eyes and the colour all drained from him, like wall-paper, that white. Had a look about him, like he didn’t go outside much, locked away with a lot of books. His pockets were full of them, with this proper foul mouldy smell coming off them. It was like obvious we were going to win, he was out after about a grand, one other lady bid, then I get it for two, like we said. When I go up to collect it, I pass him, its more awkward than usual, when you win something someone really wants, but he says “you might find that has another owner” and he’s got one of his books out in his lap, a note book, and he was writing your name down? How did he know that?”

  “Well we were listed as one of the dealers who would be attending, he’ll come in with a sob story and try and buy it back off us I shouldn’t wonder” said Sorrell. “Hmm yeah just made me feel proper weird though.”   She paused, thinking, and said seemingly without relevance “Like I don’t think he followed me or anything, but all very weird.” As she said this, Sorrell saw her looking very hard at the front door, and in the pause that followed, she tilted her head ever so slightly, as if listening.

“Well Hetty, home time I think” says Mr Sorrell, breaking the heavy silence of the shop, and consulting his stubbornly analogue watch. “Thank you, quite the addition to our dear shop. And on time tomorrow please, not fifteen minutes late with a tall tale and half a latte.” Hetty gave him an innocent sort of smile and began to pack her bag.

“I’ll just write a little note on the thing to entice any lovely prospective buyers and then I’ll be on my way too.” As he says this, he can already hear her feet receding towards the back door.

Sorrell put on a fresh pair of gloves to inspect it more thoroughly. He clicked on the vintage angle poise which he used for this purpose. The reliquary was perhaps a foot and a half in height. It was comprised of a silver chalice with detailed carving covering the base. Moving upwards, the foot was fluted, morphing into a thick stem and then into a wide bowl. Nothing all that remarkable in that. But what caused Sorrell to firmly return his glasses to his nose, was the construction enclosing the bowl itself. It was topped by a curious sort of lid. This comprised a small container made of two circular panes of glass, clearly original and now rather warped. They were held together by bands of silver, so as to form the thin cross section of a cylinder. This unusual construction must be where the relic itself was intended to be kept. At the bottom of this circular container, there was a black residue, a sort of claggy dust which contained larger particulates. It had at an organic look about it. Sorrell placed a gloved finger onto the glass and looked closer. The panes could be opened by a clasp on one side, which allowed the holy substance to be enclosed or removed. A closer look at the clasp caused a curious pang of disgust to flit up his spine. It was formed of a veiled, skeletal head. You could make this out as the material covering the skull sagged slightly inwards the eye sockets, horribly suggestive of their vacancy. Within the mouth of the death’s-head was a bone, seemingly of the leg, and by unfastening the clasp this was withdrawn from the mouth. Despite its grimness, Sorrell noted the additional value this would provide to a committed collector.

He tilted the chalice upwards; he noticed a small funnel shaped opening at the very top of the lid. “Highly unusual” muttered Sorrell. “Well, of course the whole thing is unusual, but it looks like you could get a tube in there, or a funnel.” And indeed, the walls of the opening narrowed as they approached the final hole giving onto the glass compartment, as if a funnel could be placed easily within it and some liquid poured inside, passing over the relic and down into the vessel below. He held the reliquary up to the light. “Remarkable detailing all over” he said, “and the patina still quite bright.” He was reluctantly impressed. Yet it was the decoration on the foot of the stem that made the thing remarkable. It was divided into four sections each with its own engraved scene. The first showed a man, dressed in a rough tunic and bound in irons, before some kind of court of tribunal. His judges had evidently found him guilty from his downcast face and fallen shoulders. In the next the same man was held in a cell where he had been left to die. His face was famine stricken, his tunic fell from his wrists to show skin which hung slackly away from the bone. In the third, the man sat knelt against the wall, reduced to a barely living skeleton, with his hands clasped in front of him in the gesture of a supplicant. Through the bars of his cell, came a series of black tendrils, which reached out before him. In two of the thickest were held a dish a meat, and a flask of wine. In the fourth, and Mr Sorrell felt this same trilling sensation up his back, the man stood at the centre of his cell, the door now open. He had both arms flung out at his sides to form a cross and the black tendrils encircled his torso and limbs like ivy. But it was his face that caused the same frisson of disgust, the figure looked straight out from the carving at the viewer. His eyes were wide and entirely black, his mouth open in a hysterical, screaming, laugh.

Mr Sorrell placed the chalice back onto the countertop. Under the lamp light its patina shone with a nacreous, changing sheen. It would need to be properly catalogued and listed for display. It was Friday evening now, and he would either come in tomorrow or wait for Monday morning. For some reason, he didn’t feel inclined to spend more time along with the carving. The alarm system primed, the system of bolts and shutters in place, he placed it into a box and put it onto the table at the back wall of the showroom. He said, as was his custom, “good night, all” to the empty blackness of the shop, and stood a little longer than usual, his smile faltering a little, detecting perhaps an additional resonance in the answering quiet.

On this evening it was a warm evening in late August, with a wide sky of grey cloud trimmed with red, and around nine o’clock. Mr Sorrell made the walk there and back to the shop every day, in any weather, despite the serial cigarettes required to get there. He filled half the pavement with his breadth and puffed incessantly, like a rather ragged tug making its habitual way. This evening was the same, and he fiddled with the rosary of keys in his coat pocket with one hand, while the yellowing fingers of the other escorted a Marlboro. He thought, as he always did, that he might stop in in The Three Tuns for a quick glass of something on the way.

When he sat down, Bill the publican snagged a clean glass and chucked in a generous measure of Beefeater’s, which he elevated with Sorrell’s preferred hint of tonic. Having done this, he looked over Mr Sorrell’s shoulder and half opened his mouth as if intending to take another order. He quickly closed it again, and slapped his tea towel over his shoulder, muttering “funny, that’s funny int’it.” Mr Sorrell turned to look. No one had come through the door after him, and the only other patrons were quietly sat over their drinks on the other side of the bar. He swallowed his drink in deliberate gulps as if instructed by his doctor to up his fluid intake. In the hour that followed he managed four doubles without difficulty. At one point he was quite sure he heard a sort of thin whispering right by his right ear. He stood rather to quickly to go to gents, and as vision filled with points of bright static, he had the brief image of something being dragged backwards through dead leaves. Mr Sorrell looked up at the mirror behind the bar which was reassuringly empty, but Bill was staring closely at the same spot beside him. When nine o’clock came, Mr Sorrell realised that he was delaying his walk home. He paid his tab and said his goodbyes and went outside into the dusk.

The gin gave him its normal lacquer of absorbed seriousness, forming a ruddy barrier against the evening air. Despite this, Sorrell could not dismiss the persistent feeling that he was observed or accompanied by someone that kept strictly to the edge of his vision. At this time on a Wednesday evening the high street was deserted, but there was a suggestion of a second set of footsteps that sounded so closely after his own that he was unable to tell one from the other. When he stopped, they did. When he passed the long glass window of the post office, he turned slightly to look back the way he had come. His heart began to stomp, and he massaged away a familiar bolt of cardiac pain. As he had turned, he had half caught in the reflection of the window a tall but very stooped figure, with an ill-defined silhouette, and he had the impression that strands of some black substance seemed to reach out in front of them, as if searching for his back. He stopped quite still. Sorrell turned around, his hands bunched into whitened fists and there was, of course there was, nothing there. He upped his pace, laughing at himself for this ridiculous panic, brought on clearly by too much booze and not enough sleep, and Hetty’s strange encounter from the sale. Yet he found himself pushing his legs to move faster than they had for decades. His lungs struggled with the pace, and he cursed at his stubborn refusal to switch to an electronic cigarette. His chest felt heavy and cloyed, he had the coppery taste of blood in his mouth. As he reached the turning for the lane leading towards his house, he heard the same hoarse whisper from the bar, which sounded as if it was spoken through a mouth long unused. It coaxed and cajoled, wheedling at him to turn around and face whatever was walking, or moving, in his footsteps. It was the wheedling voice, which rasped out its words as if an ancient thing spoke. It crowed triumphantly at his terror. Sorrell had an inkling that his pursuer was not quite strong enough to seize him unawares, that it needed for some reason to approach him head on. The voice asked over and over for him to turn around, to face it. He was now nearly running and he felt, very lightly at first and then with a growing pressure, a touch upon the nape of his neck. He flung a hand up and his fingers were immediately grasped by a sticky whisps of some grainy substance, like fronds of seaweed drying on a beach. He tore it away. He crashed through the gate leading onto his lawn, his chest now creaking from bouts of sharp pain. Yet he seemed to have made some headway on his pursuer and felt no more tendrils as he thrashed around at the lock to the solid oak door, finally bursting through after several seconds and feeling desperately glad for the heavy bolts which he shut from the inside.

Sorrell waited for some minutes in the dark of the hall, his ear desperate for the silence to continue, for no scratch or whisper to come from the other side of the door. Nothing did. He fled gasping up the stairs, over the landing and like a child flung himself into bed. Sorrell was a light sleeper who needed total dark and quiet, and so he had rigged a sheet over the black-out blinds his bedroom to stop any final dregs of light. But on a warm August night like they had been having, the heat forced him to take up the blind and let the sheet hang down with the window open. Sorrell kept a torch beside his bed for use when the fuse frequently tripped. Its yellow eye shuddered across the walls with his shaking hand. As it passed the window he watched as the sheet billowed and slapped at the sill or sucked through the window to form a white hollow, before slackening and falling level once more. But the night had been airlessly calm. With utter horror he saw a face given shape against the hanging fabric, black tendrils slink past the edges of the sheet, and in the next few seconds a terrible, ancient face, stripped of flesh but for some black tatters, flew through the room, with sightless eyes but summoned by his screams.

The reliquary was sold very cheaply when Mr Sorrel’s stock was put up for sale. A pale, bookish fellow came to buy it and parted with around £500. Mr Sorrell’s only living relative had been a nephew who was keen to turn the shop and its contents into cash as soon as he was able. Hetty told the story rarely, of the condition she had found him in when he failed to appear to unlock to the shop the next morning. He had been completely white, drained white she would have said, and with his hands clasped tightly over his face, the fingers locked so hard together that he had broken some of them, covering his eyes.

A shabby county museum now holds the chalice. The retired volunteers who keep the place open, often wonder why it is so unpopular with small children, and provokes so many bursts of tears or why they find the need to keep it firmly in sight when they are closing in the early winter’s dark. If you were to spend half an hour there, on your way to somewhere else and breaking your drive, you might spend a few minutes over the handwritten note at the side of the chalice.

Reliquary, likely mid-late 16th century. German work. Thought to have survived the iconoclasm of the reformation in the possession of a Dutch merchant. The piece was taken from a small abbey perhaps as an example of the superstitious idolatry from which the Dutch states had broken clean. Came into the possessions of the Squires at Alncombe after the revolution of 1688. The carving at the base of the piece suggests its maker had been an acolyte of the martyres lapsi. This sect held in veneration those early Christians who on the point of being put to death for their recalcitrance, invoked not Christ, but the enemy, and so were spared their pains, but at an ultimate price. The ritual practiced by their adherents was a base parody of Christian worship. The more credulous accounts of their black rites were produced largely during the hotter years of the reformation, no doubt as sensational proxy for anti-catholic sentiment. They speak of a bloody ceremony, centred on the use of the vital essence of a victim to douse the relics of the fallen martyrs and to so bring them up. A cadet branch of Alncombe squires, one Steven Lacy, was burned at the stake in 1649 for his rumoured occultism. This reliquary was presented in evidence of his heresy. When asked to confirm he was its owner by one Justice Aston he replied “Yes my Lord, but were you to take if from me, you might find it had another.”