[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":114},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-there-was-a-man-who-dwelt-by-a-churchyard":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":102,"description":103,"edited":102,"extension":104,"meta":105,"navigation":106,"path":107,"seo":108,"stem":110,"tags":111,"__hash__":113},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthere-was-a-man-who-dwelt-by-a-churchyard.md","There Was a Man Who Dwelt By A Churchyard",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":98},"minimark",[9,13,17,20,23,26,29,32,35,38,41,44,47,50,53,56,59,62,65,68,71,74,77,80,83,86,89,92,95],[10,11,5],"h1",{"id":12},"there-was-a-man-who-dwelt-by-a-churchyard",[14,15,16],"p",{},"There was a Man who Dwelt by a Churchyard",[14,18,19],{},"In a small redbrick house overlooking a churchyard, Gilbert Payne sat nearly swallowed in his armchair, staring fixedly ahead. His thin body had sunk deeply into the slabs of the wildly frayed cushions. The angle of the armrests and the expansive size of the chair gave the impression that he had been caught and held there under duress, like some fly seized by a sinister plant. Payne reached to the floor and bent his head and raised his cracked glass in unison so lips and whisky encountered each other along the most efficient of all possible paths.  The bell of St Martin’s rang, marking eight o’clock, with its rich plenary anachronism, and in counterpoint Payne belched softly, sotto voce, and sucked at his teeth with the thin, violent expresssion of a man who has just lost a considerable bet.   He had in some sense, the bet that the heavy drinker places each evening, knowing that they will lose, the bet that this time, unlike the others, some warm blanket of fine feeling and contentment will settle over them.   He sat completely still, his expression terse and tense, like a minor and petty idol, conducting the evening drinking session that was the only event of his day. Payne was alone, no music played, no television babble trickled out in the background, he was entirely absorbed with transfering the contents of a bottle of whisky from outside him to inside, like the simplest children's chemistry experiment. Each evening he kept himself to one bottle by a significant personal effort, and this ingestion had taken place   for some twenty years. It showed, Payne's meager hair resemebled remnant strands left behind by a riotous wind, at the corner’s of swimming eyes crows feet clawed, the lines on his forehead where carved to the bone. These hours of scotch and silence were the only real event in Payne's calendar, but he worked, or rather attended a workplace, in a public library in South London. There he was theoretically responsible for a historical archive, although responsibility was not evident in the precipitous towers of papers, the dust which lay like an oil slick, the brimming shelves with a reference system known by him alone, as un-navigable and perplexing to the un-initiated as some remote delta. Payne had some of the qualities which made him well suited to the role of public librarian, but none of those which would make a librarian suitable for contact with the public. He liked utter quiet and solitude, he liked books more than anything else, which was to say not very much, and he detested the beaming, youthful questioners who distrubed his nest. Enthusiasm was anathema to Payne, he couldn’t understand the motivation, and inner snarling was his allergic response. He required extensive coaxing, prodding, and cajoling to perform the most basic functions associated with his position. Payne would eventually trudge back from the depths of the archive with a slip of paper, in a script which may as well have been Ogham for all its use, inevitably bearing the wrong name, the wrong place, the wrong century. Luckily for Payne, he recieved the bare minimum of visitors, his place of work held geneaological long since digitised, but as the council was required by the original bequest to hold the physical copies, he remained ployed, and no-one cared enough to shut him down.",[14,21,22],{},"But now Payne is stirring from his evening session. He propels himself from his chair with some effort and slowly stands, his interlocked fingers and palms driven over his head as his shoulders and knuckles snap like flints. He sucks his lips back over his tongue like a stray dog after a stolen meal, panting. As you will have perhaps deduced he lives alone. And these manerisms, the sucking of teeth, the crunching of joints, the sodden silence, would be enough to repel any partner if his entirely negative personal qualities weren’t already. Payne, breaking into a rather grotesque shuffle, reaches into his pocket and produces a thin wadge of cash, and croons:",[14,24,25],{},"“In dreams ur-iiiine, all-of-the-time, togeth-errr in dreams, in dreams”",[14,27,28],{},"This is a great joke to him, he erupts with a smile. Payne matches Orbison’s creepy style to perfection, and as for the lyrics, well in a little while he may have cause to regret some his his night-time visitors, but for now his burst of song is motifivated by a large bet he had on horse, InDreamsURMine, which came in at 10\u002F1 at the 3.30 at Kempton. He knows nothing about horse racing, this had been a random act motivated by the unsubstantiated optimism of drink, and he could hardly afford the stake, but it had come in and £300 in hand he was left with the opportunity of an evening in the pub. This is a rare treat for Payne. The house he had inherited, his mother had no other family and certainly was not of a charitable disposition, so although it bitterly pained her she left it to him. By the obscene joke of the London property market this had eventually made him a millionnaire on paper, but his council wage was slim, and his routine of nightly ingestion took up a sizeable portion of his income. Tonight however, armed with his winnings, Payne will make a sortie to The Green Man, which has little to commend it as an establishment other than proximity, and a surly barman who will make no effort to engage him in conversation. He cuts a leprous figure, as his normal attire of ambiguously cut trousers with frayed hems, encrusted boots and pullover with a Rorshack test of stains, and covered over with a thick black peacoat with collars that cover his face up to the temples. This is finished off with a shapeless brimmed hat pulled half-way down his forehead, and the thick glasses from which he suspicously peers. He looks something like a b-movie spy, or a frotteur fallen on hard times, there is an occluded, concealed look to Payne. The message from this get-up, from the high-tide of scotch on his breath, his whispered fragments of obscenity, is in short, don’t fucking talk to me, leave me well alone, it’s not worth it. And so, shielded from and set  against the world, Payne has made it to the snug of the Green Man:",[14,30,31],{},"“HELLO, fucks sake, HELLO.”",[14,33,34],{},"The 20 something barman had been talking quietly to a friend at the other end of the bar and was on his way to Payne at the time of this opening pleasantry.",[14,36,37],{},"“Yep just coming mate.”",[14,39,40],{},"“Well you can fucking hurry up can’t you, what am I not here?”*",[14,42,43],{},"Payne has the inaccessible stare, the set jaw, of someone keen for  violence, verbal, physical, whatever. We don’t believe in auras until you see someone with a reeking black one.   If he was larger and less obviously pissed this would be more threatening, and he is a librarian afterall, there are limits, but for anyone around he can be extremely unpleasant.",[14,45,46],{},"“Sorry, sorry what can I get you?” It is clear to the barman that resistance equals explosion.",[14,48,49],{},"“Guinnissss” Relishing the sybilence, Payne is tapping the edge of his  card on the bar and rotating it through his fingers “large whisky”",[14,51,52],{},"Doubled parked thus, he sticks himself in the snug and the first draw on the pint takes him three fingers under the harp. He eyes the glass, heavy breath comes like sea swell, and moves the bottom of his pint through half circles on the table. The scotch next, Payne weighs the whisky with his mouth and luxuriates over the burn long lost in familiarity, the vapour rising to the top of his skull. And there he sits in the corner, like some backing sot in a Brueghel, and so the silent film of his evening plays through, the Guinness refilling and emptying like breathing aparatus, the scotch gone each time in a gulp. He wants to inflict himself on the other inhabitants, but the idea of conversation disgusts him, so his eyes work their ways over each group that makes it to the bar, with their invading, acid touch. The initially curious break out in a sweat, whole groups swivel to cover him with their backs, like a mirror near a funeral. And so he dispatches five, ten, fifteen glasses, completely absorbed by the precision of his task. It is work for Payne, he is grimacing as the stuff slips down, ingestion is his calling. The supra-social drinker is compelled by, what? Necessitity in part, but loathing also, the injurious quality of drink is part of the internal mythologising which tells him that he has some heroic quality, belied by the emetic meal times, the quivering hands, the chilled balm of morning sweat. Eventually even Payne reaches the brim. Tottering slightly he cuts a deliberate tack towards the bar, quickly catching hold of it for anchor and then propelling himself towards the door and out into the smacking cold, arms swinging low by his sides in a simian style.  When he would recall the sequence of events later on, pouring back over the hours, parsing out the minutes, teasing out from seconds where, exactly,   he had set in chain the events set on swallowing his life, the journey from pub to churchyard was a caesura in the text. It was largely mumbles and hiccups in any case with a few minor events for our protagonist:",[14,54,55],{},"“Fuck” he had burped in frustration, as he aimed a boot at a recycling bin and merely skimmed the edge ",[14,57,58],{},"“Shit, have got to...” as he came face to face with the concrete,  stones pressing redly into his palms, after a tap dancing encounter with the curb.",[14,60,61],{},"“Jesus Christ” as before him, in a pool, the liquid contents of his stomach spread searchingly over the pavement.",[14,63,64],{},"But when he reached the cobbled path leading to the churchyard his bladder was urgently protesting and his stalled mind resumed a service of sorts. With the bouncing trot of the irredimeably pissed he managed a controlled slump against the low gate. Breathing heavily he held himself against the council green bars, until he started back into action and managed to grope the latch open. Payne swung forwards into the churchyard attached to the bars like a scarecrow.  Before him lay the broken rows of tombstones, ever serious. He wasn’t going to make it back into the house, and he had frequently soaked his jeans before with the intake of hours not unloosed in time. Payne plumped for a gravestone which   sloped forward at nearly oblique angle. He sucked his teeth and smiled with the consuming pleasure of relieving a highly pressurised bladder. He stood lightly swaggering over the stone now sluiced with barely-processed pints, beer half an hour before, turned to piss like paper to ash. Even he felt a slight pang of wrongdoing. It was too dark for anyone to have seen him, no street lights in the graveyard. He bent forward slightly to inspect the stone.",[14,66,67],{},"“Oh fucksake” as he miscalculated and had to put both palms down to get a thin coating of his own emenation. Wiping this pragmatically over his jacket he fished out his phone and shone the torch over the face of the tombstone.",[14,69,70],{},"Deeply carved letters, brought out by pale lichen, read",[14,72,73],{},"“Hic jacet Isiah Heselius”",[14,75,76],{},"“Obit 1634”",[14,78,79],{},"and then in small letters “doctor invisbilium” and at either end of this line, two hour glass memento moris, with the sand contained in the upper part of the glass. Payne, from some burried religous impulse, crossed himself. He shivered in a spasm as a fresh gust of wind came through the square and swept through the yew trees of the graveyard.",[14,81,82],{},"“Apologies, hic-, apologies, call of nature, you understand of course, hehe” and considering restitution made, and indeed this was the first apology he had made to anyone, living or dead, for most of his adult life. Had Payne been more attentive and less drunk, he would have seen around the horseshoe top of the gravestone, a rather grisly band of figures. A cartouche was engraved into this upper part of the stone, and it showed, or seemed to show, the progression of a skeleton. At first it was hardly discernable as such, as it wore a thick mantle and stood with its back towards the viewer. Slowly as it turned by increments, like a Muybridge picture, the mantle slipped further and further down, showing the horribly hairless babies’ head, the thinness of the arms with something like scraps of flesh attached, until the whole creature was visible and crouched to spring out from the stone.",[14,84,85],{},"Payne, normally so effusive when alone, holding forth to his own captive audience, muttering, swearing, getting verbal revenge against those who had marred his day by looking his way,  safely inured against   consequence, now he sits silent, gone a shade of white that would have priests and doctors on the trout for fresh business. The breeze which came gently through his open window, had been slowly rocking the pine doors his shabby wardrobe, until a stronger gust had abruptly swung it open. Hung over the back door, retained to feed some scholarly fantasy, was his university gown. As this swung round with the path of the door the thick black material of the sleeve caught and billowed in the wind, and pointed dead at Payne, lacking only an accusing finger. He sprang from his arm chair blood beating in his head, and leant his back on the door, with a weak-tea smile as he traced with a thin finger the vein which wormed down his temple. Payne drank down some deep breaths and quieted a little, he moved to shut the open window. He must go back to the doctor, perhaps the medication which he had mentioned afterall- he shrieked horribly and recklessly threw the glass down with a crash, on every grave, with crooked necks and skewering eyes, fat, slick, purple-black ravens sat, starring, expectantly, at Payne.",[14,87,88],{},"Payne locked the door, the key sounding inside the metal as his hand dances, the taste of copper in his mouth. The door made safe he flicked off the light and plunged back across the room, drawing desperate gasping breaths. He collided with his armchair and fell down into it. At this point, Payne felt with utter, blank horror, a very thin set of nails slide softly over his forehead, softly, almost caressingly.  His eyes balooned into wells of black. And he felt a rush of carious breath, as from frayed lips pressed closed to his ear came:",[14,90,91],{},"well well, now we are locked in for the night.",[14,93,94],{},"Payne screamed, he screamed and screamed, and no one stirred, and no one came. And when two bored, polite, proffessional young officers dispatched his door with their boots a few weeks later, they remarked in their evidence, that the smell which had greeted them was so utterly the smell of death that they had been sent reeling into the hallway. When they had tenatively returned with streaming eyes and covered faces, they found the deceased in his chair, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans tongue, and with his mouth agape at such an angle they didn’t need the coroner to tell them that somehow his jaws had been violently disarticulated. And without eyes, without a tongue, left with the remants of a face incapable of showing anyting like an expression, Payne still screamed the unvoiced scream of utter, impossible terror. Perhaps you will consider, when you bolt and bar your home flushed with relief, not just what you are keeping out, but what you may be locking in. ",[14,96,97],{},"* Edward is this a footnote ",{"title":99,"searchDepth":100,"depth":100,"links":101},"",2,[],null,"In a small redbrick house overlooking a churchyard, Gilbert Payne sat nearly swallowed in his armchair, staring fixedly ahead.","md",{},true,"\u002Fstories\u002Fthere-was-a-man-who-dwelt-by-a-churchyard",{"title":109,"description":103},"There Was a Man Who Dwelt By A Churchyard file","stories\u002Fthere-was-a-man-who-dwelt-by-a-churchyard",[112],"Spooky","ECCZbpYHqz-v2ennCn6mJEi7aHYNeqg51JWtiprtcLE",1793724018844]