[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":1331},["ShallowReactive",2],{"tag-satire":3},[4,82,252,362,413,758,996,1019,1229],{"id":5,"title":6,"body":7,"date":69,"description":70,"edited":71,"extension":72,"meta":73,"navigation":74,"path":75,"seo":76,"stem":78,"tags":79,"__hash__":81},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fa-state-of-war.md","A State of War",{"type":8,"value":9,"toc":65},"minimark",[10,14,17,20,23,26,29,32,35,38,41,44,47,50,53,56,59,62],[11,12,13],"p",{},"That shameless beggar, Heloise, my cat of many years, has begun to wheedle at me from the kitchen. She is without two legs, one fore and one aft, but I suspect her of contriving their absence by some artful device, so as to play a mournful song on my tender heartstrings. I have certainly seen her with four legs. If she had not four, how would she leap? How would she bound? It must be four, two is a lie. But let her wheedle a while longer. ",[11,15,16],{},"As I was saying, matters had come to something of a tête between myself and shift manager Crenshaw, and as it was so roughly put in the official correspondence, my employment in the refuse collection department had been terminated. I was to return my overalls and hi-vis immediately.",[11,18,19],{},"Without the ballast of my employment, I was as lost as a roving tern, that solitary pilot who commands the ceaseless seas. As I lay upon my eiderdown, before my eyes there formed once more the stilly pre-dawn setting of the waste depo. Let me sound its roll of honour; “Uncle” Dave Medlar, he could lob a black back into the lorries maw like a discus thrower hurling his load from the plate. In my mind he sat once more in the cab, plumes of smoke and vapour curling from his silk cut and his macchiato. “Pangolin” Pete Higgins, supine over three plastic chairs, his arms crossed over his chest, as usual pretending to be dead. “Ordinance” Foster, limping like a stricken frigate, one leg lost in the compactor and the other viciously squashed to the proportions of a door-wedge. The rest of the crew; The Commissar, Muckle Jones, Fridge Magnet, Kentish Saunders, Bastard Phil. Ubi sunt. We may not see their like again. Ahem. Despite the arid waste of my solitude, the gates to pastures new had ope’d. I had now the requisite time and energy to turn to my neglected calling. My task comprised the production of a definitive edition of The Proceedings of the Proceeding Society, an immense and singular meisterwerk in fifty-five volumes, the life’s project of my great uncle Bartle.",[11,21,22],{},"Sergeant-Major Bartle “Shirt-Stud” Pastoon, my relative, served with the Gloucestershire Yeomanry in the Great War, and gave battle like an Alexander, from Mons to the rolling up of the Hindenburg Line. Bartle was an autodidact of great ability. Exempli gratia the famous letter which his commanding officer, The Rt Honourable Sir Percival “Googly” Fitzsimmons, wrote to The Times during a lull in the Battle of Bazentin Ridge. Sir Percival records his unalloyed astonishment at the alacrity with which the then Lance-Corporal Pastoon mastered the recondite Swabian argot spoken by the opposing troops. This feat he achieved purely by ear and without reference to any lexicon. Bartle made use of his ungrammatical fluency to upbraid the 59th Swabian Fusiliers between shell busts, expanding at length on their female kin’s unnatural passions for animal husbandry, delivered in his penetrating basso profundo. So vicious were his intimations and so precise his command of the curious inverse umlaut typical of the dialects of Upper Swabia, that several Germans came over at once with raised hands. The documentary products of his learning are no less worthy of merit. I have before me his monograph on the stilt dwelling pygmy-elks of the Canadian interior, compiled during his time as a timber merchant entre les guerres. These grotesque creatures are only two foot high but extremely wide, rather like a flat fish, but with fully sized antlers. This makes the use of stilts crucial for reasons of balance. Bartle’s diagrammatical renderings of these dwarfish elks deploying roughly gnawed pine stilts to navigate rivers in spate, or in one astonishing passage, as lances in combat with a tribe of First Nations trappers, are some of the most singular passages in whole of The Proceedings.",[11,24,25],{},"The first and loftier aim of The Proceedings is to record Uncle Bartles utopic vision of what he called “The Pro-ceeding Society”, which is to the say the society which will proceed and replace our own. I have not the space to render the lavish hues of his vision, but but in brief he would be the only person allowed to eat sausages or use an indoor toilet, and would issue stamps bearing pictures of his pet whelk Fortinbras Wibble. Of the fifty-five volumes, seventeen are devoted to an eye watering and lavishly illustrated account of the arrangements for his harem once installed in the position of Uber-Archon. The secondary aim of The Proceedings is more pedestrian. It is a record of all the proceedings which Bartle thought worthy of merit. As He was not a man who suffered from a lack of amour propre, he near-as-damn-it recorded his every thought, however fleeting, nonsensical or criminal. It is a rather silly book, all in all.",[11,27,28],{},"The essential point is that my editorial task was as dense as a thicket before a grail knight and required the utmost quiet and concentration. Two people made this impossible: Captain Toby and Fraulein Margrave. I must make clear that Terpischore Terrace where I abide, was built by the John Wayne of cowboy builders. The landlord describes himself in his correspondence as a Properti Magnet (sic). The slightest noise sounds in your ear with crystal quality.",[11,30,31],{},"One Monday, as I made a sortie for a quadruple pack of Silk Cut, two home removal vans trundled up to the opposing ends of the street, in unison turned the corner, and faced off with engines gently revving, like desperados at high noon. Finally, one van took the initiative and moved into the only available parking spot. From the passenger door hopped a woman of around seventy, whom I would soon know to be the formidable Fraulein Margrave. She was wearing a heavy maroon coat buttoned firmly to her chin and a pair of bright green leather gloves, with a fur hat crammed onto her head. She was exceedingly tall and long limbed and swung herself lithely from the cab with the grace of a gibbon. From the other van emerged a squat, compressed looking man, dressed in so astonishingly nautical a costume that he gave the impression of having fled from a piece of light entertainment. He wore a pea coat, sea boots and sported an abundance of grey beard. His powerful jaw masticated on the nib of briar pipe, as if teething, this was Captain Toby.",[11,33,34],{},"From the offing it was clear the two were natural enemies, as the mongoose is to the serpent. The Captain immediately began to bawl “get on yer way!” and produce unprintable obscenities, at which the Frauline leapt up and down in paroxysms of rage, suggesting in stentorian tones some alternative uses for his pipe. She hoisted out her driver and set him to immediate work unloading her possessions. An inordinate amount of junk appeared, culminating in a portable organ, painted garishly and with a range of porcelain song-birds affixed to the ends of the pipes. During this disembarkation Captain Toby roared and stamped like a sou’wester. When his own driver finally threatened to leave, he advanced on the Fraulein with a warriors’ light in his eye. She whirled to meet him head on, he ducked under her outstretched finger with a neat inside roll, which I thought for a moment he intended to follow with a sharp left hook. I think probably he was very drunk on a bottle of Kriegsmarine Rhum, which I would learn later he was rarely without, so he mistimed his action and ended indecorously in the gutter. The Fraulein pounced onto the stricken mariner like a jungle cat, with cries of:",[11,36,37],{},"“How dare you strike at my organ! You luddite! You philistine! How dare you!” She got in a sly headbutt to press the point home.",[11,39,40],{},"“Avast ye you loon!” Shouted the beleaguered Captain in return, his eye swelling nicely, and attempted a rather nifty wrist lock to evade her probing nails. He claimed to have picked up this trick while a trainee judoka in an Osakan dojo. In fact, he had run a fish and chip shop in Rill and was famed for his wrathful ejections of the bibulous. Their wrestle was becoming rather serious, and surely the constabulary would soon arrive, so I betook myself to The Winkle and Shaft for a few pints of brown ale. On my return, both combatants where inside with their possessions. When I entered my own abode, it was to a silence like that which falls between the chimes of a clock, only gathering itself for noise renewed. We were in a state of war.",[11,42,43],{},":paragraph-spacer",[11,45,46],{},"Before I attempt to sketch a history of this conflict, bitter as those between Rome and Carthage, as bloody as civil strife, as protracted as a siege, a brief note on the combatants. Firstly, the minds of both had been unseamed by drink and delusion. Well, it is not the worst of faults, and these are hard times after all. Fraulein Margrave made her crust from the provision of piano and organ lessons. She had a vigorous churn of students as she would insist on their perfecting a cycle of Luxembourgish Milchleider, songs sung by the farmers as they tended to their cows. These are extremely fast, technically challenging, and largely indistinguishable. Captain Toby told me that he lived solely from his merchant navy pension. He was vague on the precise nature of his naval service. He had, he told me many times, “been behind the mast” and “knew a thing or three about sailin ‘n then some.” In his cups he would recount that he had seen things “as queer as a six-legged goose and twice as rum” with produced a certain nautical frisson without contributing a great deal by way of detail.",[11,48,49],{},"Captain Toby was extremely fond of spirits, and as a result he was very un-fond of noise, until at least he had manged a lunchtime nip to “get ‘er back on an even keel.” But Fraulein Margrave liked to do her drinking in the afternoon, when she had dismissed her last student with a vigorous shake of the head and settled down for a glass of bitter alpine schnaps. The sound of vigorous Luxumbourgish tunes, the shouts of objection and correction, the tears of dejected pupils, these did nothing for Captain Toby’s hangover. This went on for months. He stumped downstairs to roar objections, he played his collection of naval hymns at extraordinary volumes, he reported her flat to the council as the site of immoral earnings. All to no avail. Until the start of what proved an extremely warm June, when the Fraulein was obliged to keep her window during her lessons. In the middle of a particularly recondite passage, her present student rose with a stilted shriek, pointed once at the window and collapsed. Margrave was about to poor cold coffee on the weakling and probably put the boot in when an awful noise sounded through the room. It was a meld of death, terror and retribution, and with unbelieving eyes the Fraulein saw the inverted head of a terrible metal dragon, or wyrm, inverted and thrust down through the window. Somehow, Captain Toby had acquired a twenty-foot bronze carnyx, or Celtic war horn. As Polybius informs us this was used by woad painted loons to terrify their opponents in battle.",[11,51,52],{},"The deployment of the carnyx marked an escalatory point in the conflict. At the slightest noise from below, down he would thrust its terrible head, away would flee the screaming pupil, and his enemy was deprived of contentment and income both. The Fraulein had to respond and respond she did. Captain Toby was both incredibly superstitious, and profoundly anxious, largely due to his staggering ingestion of rum. He lived in total fear of ghosts and spectres and carried on his person innumerable totems and trinkets from far flung shores. Captain Toby rather thought the battle was going his way after his innovation of the carnyx. Sure, of his newfound technological supremacy, he cornered me and the Fraulein in the corridor one day and subjected us to a long and involuted lecture on the threat posed by spectral apparitions. He showed off us numerous limbs in various stages of decay and separated from small animals that he kept on as protective charms. As you imagine he stank and was badly troubled by gulls.",[11,54,55],{},"That evening, I was woken to the sounds of terrified screaming from the captain’s flat above me, and the patter of fleeing feet. I found him knelt on both knees in the attitude of a supplicant, and in a state of gibbering fear. After his tears had stopped and I had prized the rum bottles out of both hands, he relayed between spiritous belches that he had been visited by his late mother wearing an exiguous shift, who had cursed his easy living and disturbance of his neighbours and promised foul tortures unless he mended his ways. Of course, he swore to heed her words and promised to reform. Until the next morning when he awoke to the effects of the rum, reached for the carnyx, and, well I think you can see the problem.",[11,57,58],{},"An impasse had been reached, he could stymie her lessons at will with his fearful bronze war horn, and she could reduce him to a state of weeping terror. This morning, I finally brought both parties together in the signing of a formal accord to secure the cessation of hostilities. They sat across the dinner table from each other, my bumblebee pattern tablecloth listless in the breeze, two equals worn down to the point mutual surrender. They could go on, expending their final reserves of physical and psychical strength, but they saw this road for what it was, a black and gibbetted highway to wrack, ruin, and utter despair. Captain Toby agreed to surrender his carnyx, the naughty man. In the mouth of the dragon, I keep peonies. Fraulein Margrave swore to abstain from all occult practices and especially, the good Captain insisted on this wording, “from callin up any of em grisly old uns” (sic). In the armistice spirit the Fraulein came clear that of course all had been a sham, she had simulated the visitations. This nearly derailed the negotiations entirely as he took this to be another one of her “witchy tricks”, and he was only supplicated when she burned a suitably old book outside near the bins, like Prospero breaking his staff. I think in fact this was an old copy of Mrs Beeton with the title faded beyond legibility, but he was content.",[11,60,61],{},"The ink is scarcely dry on the treaty I have before me. The night gathers. Will peace, unweened, yet hold? I pray to God it will, and that my labours with The Proceedings will fructify.",[11,63,64],{},"Arnold Pastoon.",{"title":66,"searchDepth":67,"depth":67,"links":68},"",2,[],"2026-03-18","That shameless beggar, Heloise, my cat of many years, has begun to wheedle at me from the kitchen. ","2026-03-19","md",{},true,"\u002Fstories\u002Fa-state-of-war",{"title":6,"description":77},"Extract from the journal of Arnold Pastoon.","stories\u002Fa-state-of-war",[80],"Satire","_7RApEjX-JHE4V8G9TxDGS-WOGhQn7bIZ2FxmSfv0KQ",{"id":83,"title":84,"body":85,"date":242,"description":243,"edited":242,"extension":72,"meta":244,"navigation":74,"path":245,"seo":246,"stem":248,"tags":249,"__hash__":251},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fan-unusual-piece.md","An Unusual Piece",{"type":8,"value":86,"toc":240},[87,90,93,101,116,119,126,129,132,135,138,141,148,151,154,157,160,163,166,169,176,179,190,193,196,203,206,209,216,219,222,225,228,231,234,237],[88,89],"h1",{"id":66},[11,91,92],{},"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.",[11,94,95,96,100],{},"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, “",[97,98,99],"em",{},"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.",[11,102,103,104,107,108,111,112,115],{},"“Hmmm. Well, ",[97,105,106],{},"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. “",[97,109,110],{},"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. “",[97,113,114],{},"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.",[11,117,118],{},"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.",[11,120,121,122,125],{},"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 ",[97,123,124],{},"Wunderkammer"," of the choicest pieces he had been unable to bare selling.",[11,127,128],{},"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.",[11,130,131],{},"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.",[11,133,134],{},"“Hetty! Phone! At work, did we not discuss? I am quite sure we did” His prim phrasing was rather out of date.",[11,136,137],{},"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.",[11,139,140],{},"“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.",[11,142,143,144,147],{},"Before him, a very young priest was saying in slow American, and with the earnest force of a missionary, “",[97,145,146],{},"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.",[11,149,150],{},"“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.",[11,152,153],{},"“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.",[11,155,156],{},"“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.",[11,158,159],{},"“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.",[11,161,162],{},"“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.",[11,164,165],{},"“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.",[11,167,168],{},"“Yes, all fine, the usual crowd were there. It was a huge place, much bigger than the last one, and up for sale too.”",[11,170,171,172,175],{},"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 ",[97,173,174],{},"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.",[11,177,178],{},"“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!”",[11,180,181,182,185,186,189],{},"“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 ",[97,183,184],{},"really"," weird. Everyone was looking at them, and you could hear literally everything he was saying. ",[97,187,188],{},"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.”",[11,191,192],{},"“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?”",[11,194,195],{},"  “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.",[11,197,198,199,202],{},"“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 ",[97,200,201],{},"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.",[11,204,205],{},"“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.",[11,207,208],{},"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.",[11,210,211,212,215],{},"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 ",[97,213,214],{},"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.",[11,217,218],{},"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.",[11,220,221],{},"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.",[11,223,224],{},"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.",[11,226,227],{},"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.",[11,229,230],{},"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.",[11,232,233],{},"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.",[11,235,236],{},"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.",[11,238,239],{},"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.”",{"title":66,"searchDepth":67,"depth":67,"links":241},[],null,"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.",{},"\u002Fstories\u002Fan-unusual-piece",{"title":247,"description":243},"An Unusual Piece file","stories\u002Fan-unusual-piece",[250,80],"Spooky","mUYknHk4ziiWqYCsGVKrMhloAKIXCgCpClgKAU-TLkE",{"id":253,"title":254,"body":255,"date":242,"description":354,"edited":242,"extension":72,"meta":355,"navigation":74,"path":356,"seo":357,"stem":359,"tags":360,"__hash__":361},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fbarker.md","Barker",{"type":8,"value":256,"toc":350},[257,260,263,268,271,274,279,282,285,290,293,298,301,304,307,312,321,328,333,338,343,347],[88,258,254],{"id":259},"barker",[11,261,262],{},"Her mouth moved silently behind the glass then she dropped back into bed, leaving a shapeless patch of breath and grease adhered to the pane. Barker smiled. The engine and the propeller met the muteness of the early morning. Two swans slid towards his stern as if pulled along by a subaqeous line, eyed him spitefully and then tacked away. Barker stroked a strand of tobacco from his lip and held his fag to his mouth, with the filter pinched between a contrived circle of thumb and index like a diver. It was was flawlessly cynlidrical, with no folds in the paper, he tore them apart if they were otherwise. Exhaling, his cloud of smoke and breath briefly held and then swam past him in the breeze. He blew softly and then puckered his lips towards his coffee in its monochrome white mug. Loud suction ensured, breaching the nacreous slick which lay over the surface of the liquid. As the boat moved along he blinked slowly against the morning breeze.",[11,264,265],{},[97,266,267],{},"White hands she had always white since I can remember never caught the sun never red always putting on sunblock and two white rings in the nostrils and the backs of the ears never rubbed in properly, disguisting and then wrinkled when she got old veined deep blue and green sat at the back with the straw hat silent and smiling while I steer and everything, do everything, and never-",[11,269,270],{},"He felt he had gained a point by disturbing those boats. He never missed a chance to with the hired ones. Barker loathed the whole crop of them which began to appear on the Avon and Kennet canal every June. He couldn’t stand their serial, swarming intrusion. They came each year, and each year he never produced a single hello, or word of advice, or even a dumb nod. They held him up, clogged the locks, got stuck at right angles to the canal. He could feel them abrading the green banks and the Cotswold stone with their endless pairs of staring eyes, they cheapened the birdsong with their straining ears. In the mornings, before he saw another boat, or stared down a woman running along the toe-path, he felt preminent. He was safely ensconsed by the buffer of the water, no crowds, no one to brush against him. He felt he owned the deeds and title of the stretch of public waterway he travelled, and couldn’t make terms with being forced to share. Barker had navigated the 90 miles or so for more of less his entire life, and had never been away from the canal for more than a month.",[11,272,273],{},"There are several categories of people who would choose to live permanetly on a canal. There are those who are following a nomadic stirring, or evading urban rents, who opt for a canal boat as an economical way to fill some inner caesura with adventure or purpose. And then a smaller group who are more of a canal born tribe. Their brightly painted signs advertise that they work with boats, operate tarot readings, or take on all repairs, tweaks and tinkerings. Barker was of course in the latter camp, but without any of the stoned cheer. He cruised silently, eyes front, like some dull and toothless fish. Everyone recognised him, with his pedanticly ironed shirts, cord trousers with the rigid fold up at the hem, the cap sunk down to his ears. When you move at three miles an hour up and down a finite stretch of river, everyone becomes a fixture.But he detested the presumption of community, no-one had ever been aboard his home.",[11,275,276],{},[97,277,278],{},"And skin thin like it was stretched but not really stretched because so many wrinkles lines of blue and green and purple swum to the surface, like an old road map, like a reeking nitted map of blood and fluid. And the hair still dyed that red blond faded colour and not coming from the top of the head anymore but going bald like a man with the patches of ashen skin and pale running eyes the colour going fading all over. How is it we look like cadavers long before, long before, we never stop growing always growing into that corpse waiting to be born at the end.",[11,280,281],{},"It was the first of June but cold enough under the heavy cloud, and rolls of mist had only just begun to shift from the woodland along the right bank as Barker steadily plugged along. He revved at his throat and spat a puck of phlegm into the blank water. Its green seemed worryingly bright. Barker was the only name anyone knew him by. Maurice was his first name, so it was Barker that was blazoned along the side of his boat in a dull red. This was a typically egotistical departure from the naming conventions of the canal, where homely kitsch abounded like \"The Peggy Sue\" or \"Snail’s Pace.\" Barker repaired boats with some skill, and cruely overcharged the unwitting, and haggled attritionally with the rest. He could do anything with a canal boat, but did this slowly and expensively, and in addition sold fire wood and coal to the holiday makers. This second stream was at least half of his income.",[11,283,284],{},"As he plugged along Barker's satisfaction was instantly jetisoned in favour of sour irritation over the foreign presence that would soon peak along his waterway.  Coming to a length of canal without any boats he let the engine idle and   took the nose in to moor.   He hadn’t really needed to take the boat out this early, but his sleep had ended abruptly in the early hours and any excuse to cause a petty nuisance he would take. Once he’d hammered the mooring pins into the bank, he began to prepare breakfast. Barker stripped nitrogenous rashers from a plastic sleeve. The liquid from the wrapper gave them a mucous sheen. He lit the gas with his lighter and the footprint shaped slices of flesh spat furiously as they shrank and curled pale lips of fat. The smell of copper rose as white crud sprouted from the bacon and gathered in the pan. He battered some neoprene squares of bread and doused them with sauce from a flatulent bottle. Eggs he carefully broke and then chased a shard of shell around the pan with a knife. The inside of the cabin was meticulously clean, like a show caravan. The walls were always recently painted, the two beds crisply made to await inspection, not a book or a mug out of place. Margerine melted into yellow and white and drained onto the plate from between the slices of bread. Barker moved very carefully down the single corridor of the boat, making no noise even though he was quite alone. He never sang, or hummed, but he had begun to mutter to himself a little in recent weeks. From the pendant silence of the banks, a crow sounded desperately from a tree overhanging his boat, and some unseen bird snapped out of the branches with a blast of wings. Barker paused and lent his head against the cold glass, massaging his chest. He looked very hard down the length of the boat. After several moments in this posture, his body facing the window and his head thrown over one shoulder, staring intently, he dug his spare hand into his pocket and moved out onto the deck with his breakfast. “Calm yerself down, calm yerself down, calm yerself down” Barker annuciates between swallows, his lips moving around the syllables without sound, the mouthfuls going down without taste.",[11,286,287],{},[97,288,289],{},"If she hadn’t stuck at it never dropping it never letting him sit silent at the boat and take her along the water, it was his money anyway he worked he cooked he did it all and if he wanted to put a bet on then that’s his right isn’t it not hers",[11,291,292],{},"The mist among the banks of trees had faded into shreds and was almost gone. The fields were clogged with heavy dew. In the strip of ground where he had hammered in the mooring pins the ferns were stuck at shallow angles smothered in a rosary of beads, waiting for the sun.  This was the time of day where Barker felt the best, these occluded, ingrown hours of summer morning. His primacy on the canal was yet to be threatened.   Free from external points of rebuttal he could construct inner fantasies of mastery. He sat on the rail around the stern of the boat one leg crossed over the other, his foot jacitating.   He observed his sandwich crust intently like it might be gearing up for some sudden manouveur. He had the expression of a person who is very much looking forward to the point at which they have chewed sufficiently that they can dispose of the mouthful with whatever they are drinking. He set his plate aside to roll a cigarette and as he stood he came to stop about three quarters of the way to vertical. In this semi-hunched position he gazed, repeatedly swallowing saliva, at a small knitted key chain which hung inside of the door by the ignition key. It was a light blue, of roughly rectangular shape, with the letters B&M in pink. He flew towards the open doors and badly bent the hook which the innocuous object hung on as he tore the fabric from the key chain, failing to detach it he hurled the whole thing into the water, sending the plate with the remains of his breakfast spinning after it. The two swans which had been following him coalesced immediately around the central point of the spreading ripples. Dissapointed, they hissed bitterly and headed for the bank.",[11,294,295],{},[97,296,297],{},"And he knew she had some stashed away she’d always be on about it on about it “don’t you think I can’t manage without you, don’t you think I don’t have any of my own” looking at him trying to put on as if she wasn’t his mother, as is if they weren’t just the same why did she stay why did she stay.",[11,299,300],{},"Barker killed the engine as the gates of the lock came into view around the corner. He had been terrified of the going through locks as a child. Two slabs of sodden wood grew above the boat. When he used to stand by his father watching their slow torturous opening, the growing smell of canal water and reeking weeds smothered him completely. The huge timbers of aging wood produced dungeons, jailers, smoking brands. And inside the lock itself, as the water poured in, hissed and rocked and leveled, Barker the boy had once been struck with a ridiculous terror, that he was trapped in the centre of some huge black heart.  He gently reversed as he had edged two close to the gate. The two Waterways Association lock keepers automatically raised a hand and then dropped it in recognition.",[11,302,303],{},"“Morning Barker!” Shouted one and smiled at his companion, faux good humour and solicitous accommodation was a long standing approach agreed on for dealing with Barker. Screaming at in-competant or sluggish lock keepers was very much part of his signature unpleasantnesses. They began to open the gates. Barker sat at the tiller with his back to them, staring intently down the canal, the way he had come. Without looking at his work he began to coil the length of black mooring rope around his arm, holding the end in one hand with his forearm straight then wrapping the rope in loops around the bottom of his elbow in tight circles. Once the gates of the lock had opened he took the boat slowly into the space of the lock. Fibrous mosses stained the black bricks on both sides, all was damp, sprouting, jurassic. The gates touched closed behind Barker. Fifteen feet above him one of the elderly keepers silently extended a hand and Barker hurled the precisely coiled rope up to him.  The man drew the boat into the side of the lock and with some venom lashed it tightly round the metal fixture sunk into the top of the lock. Barker hurled the front and end ropes up as well. The boat bobbed in the bottom of the lock and touched up against the side of the lock walls. The keeper began to crank open the sluices of the front gate with the metal key, white water shouldered through insistently. The smell of the canal was strongest here with thousands of stagnant litres churning through and throwing up spray, sousing the walls of the lock. The June sun faltered suddenly and looking up Barker saw a great expanse of cloud, moving along in state like a frigate to bar its warmth. The rush of the water echoed from the stone walls. The two keepers, when asked later, had said two things which the investigating officer thought warrented inclusion in his notes. That they heard such a scream from Barker that they had dropped their lock keys and leapt to the top of the walls, like someone had been badly hurt they said. They saw him fallen backwards into the cabin   with his legs protruding outside   and a shaking finger extended towards some thin scratches through dingy slime of the lock walls which exposed the grey stone against black rottted vegetation, almost as if someone had been trying to pull themselves up from the water with only their fingernails. And that they had gotten a faint impression, when he had righted himself and refused their questions and sailed quickly on, that there was some swaying of the curtains against the window, or quick movement past them perhaps, as if there was more than one person on the boat.",[11,305,306],{},"Barker’s morning disposition had gone the way of the mist. He took off painful slivers of his thumb nail with probing teeth, sat with his head with his thrown over his shoulder to interrogate the way he had come. He was felt bitten short himself, the red quick exposed to the wind. When the wash from a passing cruiser caused a mug to clatter from the table inside the cabin he sat up like a shot rabbit. The aging passengers of the passing vessel pondered this odd figure, his chest and shoulders heaving, pendant tears in twin paths down his cheeks, sobs reaching through the glass as slowly he left the square vista of their window. After an hour he took the boat in to moor. There wasn’t any use continuing any further today.",[11,308,309],{},[97,310,311],{},"Not that deep a canal not really and nothing all that heavy at hand nothing really heavy enough had to get off the canal with it still there and warm and get over into the field for a few rocks and then god oh god the fucking rocks dumping them into the sack with it in there and hearing it crack as they dropped and still recent enough that the sack ran with it ran with it all up the boat and then over the side and then not enough fucking bleach in the world for that is there not enough in the world",[11,313,314,315,320],{},"Barker sat on the bench at the stern, bent over with his torso between the v of his legs, both calves jogging. The afternoon sun weakened into twilight, then the insects and birds traced their half circuits until dusk. His ash tray had become a sloppy ziggaurat, his hands quivered. Finally, Barker oiled the engine and took himself into the cabin, taking great care with padlock. He was nearly into bed when he saw the front door was open still and he had to rest his head against the cold glass once he had cravenly forced each bolt home, slicing through the inside of his thumb in haste. Blood traced the inside of his palm and dotted the floor. He closed his eyes. Blankly he fled into bed. Cocooning himself fetally in the sheets, prayers, smiles, half voiced whispers trickled from his lips. Something like sleep settled on him for a few hours. He lay just under the surface of consciousness, no rest, no repair, just a blank canvas for bloody dreams to play out on. Towards midnight Barker was spat back into the dark, more tired than when he had gone to bed. The slice of window which the curtains didn’t cover let the bland moonlight in. It washed the walls and the other empty bed across the cabin with a limpid slick of light. He turned over and closed his eyes and the movement of the body caused the boat to rock, swinging the illuminated area up to the ceiling. During the brief moment when the bed opposite him was effaced by dark, Barker sat straight up in bed and whirled round with his palms flat against he wall, taking huge gulping breaths. There had been a familiar voice from the other bed, saying his name very softly at first and then louder and louder, a broken voice, speaking from sodden lungs. He sat like this very still, the bed was empty, the bed clothes undisturbed. He smiled and tried and failed to laugh. Pulling the bed clothes tighter around him Barker pressed himself tightly to the wall. He managed about a minute of this before the rising sensation over his back caused him to whirl round just to be sure. A rotten, perforated face met his, lip to lip and eye to eye. The emetic reek of rancid flesh and canal water poured through his nose and mouth. Two hands sought his throat and insistent fingers of exposed bone seized the root of his tongue. Had anyone been observing the boat, they might have caught in the darkness a terribly thin figure, with long broken nails and matted hair, slip over the side and slink without a ripple into the waters of the canal. ",[316,317,319],"a",{"href":318},"#note-1","1"," ",[11,322,323,324],{},"Two events were naturally connected but without a posthumous conviction. The first, the eventual removal of Barker’s corpse from his boat after several weeks without anyone noticing, a period during which he freshened up considerably. He seemed to have bitten clean through his tongue and asphixiated on the resultant flesh and flow. The second was, when the canal was unusually low after a particularly hot period during the next year’s August, a woman’s badly decomposed remains were removed from the base of a clump of reeds. They had been weighed down in a sack with several large rocks. Dental records identified her as Mrs Angela Barker. ",[316,325,327],{"href":326},"#note-2","2",[329,330,332],"h3",{"id":331},"footnotes","Footnotes",[334,335,337],"h4",{"id":336},"note-1","Note 1",[11,339,340],{},[97,341,342],{},"This is to show the footnote.",[334,344,346],{"id":345},"note-2","Note 2",[11,348,349],{},"The way to make footnotes is to use the \"link\" feature in the editor then have a  hashtag whatever at the bottom. e.g this one is 2 linked to #note-2",{"title":66,"searchDepth":67,"depth":67,"links":351},[352],{"id":331,"depth":353,"text":332},3,"Barker took the turn much too fast as usual and the wash from his propelller rocked the two boats moored up by the side of the canal. ",{},"\u002Fstories\u002Fbarker",{"title":358,"description":354},"Barker  file","stories\u002Fbarker",[250],"eR95djJUOv_RmBLXj9WNP60f99op9lKVTtwbB8rPHYg",{"id":363,"title":364,"body":365,"date":69,"description":406,"edited":71,"extension":72,"meta":407,"navigation":74,"path":408,"seo":409,"stem":410,"tags":411,"__hash__":412},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-elder-keepers.md","The Elder Keepers",{"type":8,"value":366,"toc":404},[367,386,389,392,395,398,401],[11,368,369,370,373,374,376,377,379,380,382,383,385],{},"The Trinity House tug taking Stephen Thorn out from the village St Merren’s left a wake of slate coloured smoke. Thorn pulled his woollen sweater over his nose to slow the reek of the fumes. The crew, four squat Cornishmen and a slightly taller captain, were yawning and gazing dully back at the retreating village. The only breeze came from the movement of the tug and the noise of the engines cut into the chilled quiet of the morning. It was just after dawn and a purplish light was stretching slowly along the horizon. This tug been a crabbing boat which after a slap of paint had been pressed into the lighthouse service. They cut a course out into open water and their wake sluiced the weed slicked harbour wall they passed. Thorn watched the rising and falling of the small waves washing at the stones. He thought of someone pulling down their cheek to an inspect an ulcer and then releasing the flesh. Thorn shivered at the thought of the water’s temperature, with his hands in the pockets of his navy peacoat he hunched his shoulders round in front of chest for warmth. He was playing with  the question of why he was heading out as a replacement keeper.  He had been on the training station at St Merren’s for two weeks and had two to do before he was due for posting. A portentous official envelope had arrived for his principal keeper which had started Thorn’s journey. The principal had been decorated during the war for surviving three separate torpedo attacks. He had shown a talent for clinging onto drifting spars whilst all his shipmates drowned, and this talent had transferred to civilian life as he had hung onto his posting in the far west of Cornwall without promotion or notice for going on ten years. The experience, perhaps forgivably, had left him self-contained and jittery, and profoundly unsuitably for training anybody for anything, let alone for the serious business of keeping lighthouses.\nOn receiving the letter, the principal had tugged at his sideburns and strode sharply up and down the mess, before giving Thorn the attention of one yellowing eye and instructing him gravely “to pack up to ship out immediately.” There had followed a hasty briefing on Monk’s Rock, its history, and complement of equipment. In response to his question on why he was needed early he received a stern lecture on the importance of everyone mucking in and the flexibility required in this most vital of services, and did he know how during the war, and so on and so on in a lecturing tone. There were then hasty celebrations, and the other junior keepers bought him a quart of opaque and stable scented cider which the local fishermen preferred. The evening had had ended with Thorn exhuming his dinner onto the cobbles outside The Anchor, to spiteful cheers and the jaunty accompaniment of an accordion wheezing ponderously from inside.\nThe crew were silent, and their faces lined and puffy in the early cold. His accent and unsure steps while getting into the boat provoked reflexive dislike. The smell of the engine, the volume and monotony of its noise, and the lilting action of the boat worked in concert to make him increasingly nauseous. He held onto a rail and pulled himself lurchingly towards one of the crew. The man was smoking a rolled cigarette and doing something intricate with a coil of rope. The smoker watched his awkward and stumbling motion closely and neither moved nor made any sign of greeting.\nThorn shouted over the engine “How long?”\nThe man looked past him back towards the harbour and spoke softly so that had to lean in close to be able to hear, “Tha’ Depends. Two hours.”\nHe looked at Thorn curtly as if challenging him to argue, and then blew slow curls of smoke from his nose, following their path closely as the wind whipped them away. Thorn made to reply and faltered, and the man turned back to his coil without interest. He resigned himself to two hours of a turning stomach and reeking fumes. The Cornishman had a wide head with two jug-like ears, and could only be twenty-five, but early mornings and harsh spray had lined his skin with deep wrinkles. Cold and fatigue brought out a petulant desire in Thorn for the respect that he felt his position merited, despite being only a fag-end replacement for two days. That Thorn was from London, and fresh from his Trinity House exams, had become a matter of public record in a tiny fishing village like St Merren’s. For the crew Thorn was somehow shamming at being a lighthouse keeper. He was available to blame, so they clearly blamed him for dragging them out to sea this September morning when they could have been sleeping off last night’s fumes.",[371,372],"br",{},"\nHe tried again. “Look no one told me, I’m not due out on the station for another two weeks, why are we going out now?” He felt stupid for having to ask, the principal keeper seemed to maintain wartime security to prevent him having to explain anything.\nThe Cornishman looked at him with irritation, spat his cigarette butt into the sea and shrugged,“Dunno, told we’ve to go and get one of ‘em, sick most like. Distress flag bin’sin over the light, any’ow we’re back to pick you all up in two days”\nThorn wondered what injury or disease might be waiting for him on the spit of isolated rock. As he was a replacement, he had only to serve the remaining two days of the posting and then himself and the remaining two keepers would all be hauled back for a month on shore. The whole exercise of getting him out there for such a brief period was demanded by the regulation. A rock lighthouse like this, in a perilous location and situated far out at sea, could not go undermanned for any period.\nHe had decided on the lighthouse service for no stronger reason that the part of London where he spent almost every hour since he was born had begun to disgust him. He had spent ten years working as a clerk in a small factory from the age of eighteen until last year and had begun to feel the bounds of his cramped life like a nearly physical pain. There was in him the panic induced sense of fading youth, and desperate need for something interesting which masqueraded as a desire for adventure. He had enjoyed a childhood diet of pulp novels, which he found repelling and addicting in equal parts. He could mock at the preposterous twists and raise an eyebrow at, and then re-read the blue passages, while never getting past the first twenty pages of more serious books. And so, he now found himself taking a hackneyed bid for freedom like one of their protagonists. He felt vaguely that fresh air and manual work would be a healthy and restoring change, despite never having enjoyed either. His training in the lighthouse service had stocked his mind with semaphore, morse code, the typology and operating methods for numerous motors and lights. But he had no dealings with cold, and damp and work that made you sweat, and after only an hour in the roiling boat he was miserable.\nAfter another hour of acute discomfort Monk’s rock came abruptly into view out of the vacancy of the ocean, forming the single feature amongst the twin greys of the sea and sky. It was shaped rather like massive granite altar or anvil. The rock projected roughly fifty meters out of the waves and then formed a flat plateau which ran perhaps half a mile in length. The lighthouse stood on the north-eastern side, away from the westerly Atlantic winds. As they approached the wind which had been stirring for the last half hour began to pick up and a steady rain started to fall. It was a world of grey water and wind. After a freezing half an hour Thorn could make out the details of the lighthouse. He shuddered in the cold as he took in the tapered white cylinder, which protruded like some antique grave marker from the granite below. At its top was the glass surround and pulsing yellow of the light itself, faint in the dim grey of the clouds. It gave the impression of a subtle gem inlaid at the top of a sceptre. There was a door set into the curving wall of the lighthouse about twenty feet from the base. This was reached by a set of steel steps that curved around white body. The boat was heading for a small cover at the base of the light, a vertical line from the beacon down to the water would have bisected both. The shape of cove had been used to shelter a series of steps leading down from the lighthouse to a natural platform, where an iron crane was bolted to the rock. About ten meters out to sea from this was a buoy, and the boat began to slow with a roar of mechanical complaint as it manoeuvred towards it.\nOn the platform stood waiting three figures. One of these men Thorn would be replacing. The crew lashed the tug to the buoy with slickly practised motions and a rope was thrown to the three waiting men which they fastened in turn to the crane. This line was the only way to get fuel, water and keepers onto the rock. Thorn went over the useless theoretical demonstration from his training on how shimmy up it. He took a hold of the rope with hands crabbed with cold. He looked first at the waves knocking hard against the hull of the boat, and then those butting against the rocks and throwing up lashing spray towards the three waiting keepers. He felt the gaze of the crew and captain settling down to savour his screaming in fear. The wet rope dug into his uncalloused hands and the swaying of the line in the wind seemed certain to shake him off into the waiting sea. One of the crew took hold of his feet, and he forced himself to take a grip on the rope behind his head, leaning back over the water. Once he had positioned his hands the man let go, and he swung his feet up and locked them over the rope. As he bobbed with the motion of the boat, he had dizzying inverted view of the rock and the base of the lighthouse. He began to edge slowly along like an ape. The blood flushing into his head made his face feel swollen and dull against the spray. If he was dislodged, he couldn’t see the crew doing any more than was required to avoid a manslaughter charge. They would try a few times with a line before until he drank down some water with a final scream and sank under the immensity of the sea. Either that, or he'd be thrown up against the rocks, each time redder and more broken, like a dog savaging and releasing a rabbit. These meditations gave him a strong reason to keep moving and after what was probably a very brief traverse, several pairs hand caught onto his oil skins, took him under the arms and hoisted him up onto the rock.\nHe was breathing so hard he had had a coppery metallic taste in his mouth. He bend over  with his hands on his thighs to steady himself from the traverse, Thorn shouted his thanks at the keepers. The wind and thick oilskin hoods made it almost impossible to make oneself.\n“I’m Stephen Thorn, the relief keeper.” He had to lean close and bellow into their ears.\nOne of the men gave him a snide “oh you don’t say” smile. Thorn cringed slightly the obviousness of his statement but was too relieved at safely alighting to care particularly. Ten miles out into the Atlantic was a little far for casual visitors. He noticed that one of the keepers was stood father apart and hadn’t moved to help him onto the rock, his hands hung limply at his sides, while the other two formed a sort of natural pair. As they were well used to the wind no-one bothered to speak back to him. The three were dressed identically in robe like oilskins which they had banded tightly at the wrists to keep out spray, and then heavy sea boots and sou’westers. The sheen of the water on the waterproof fabric give him the image of the shining bellies and gaping mouths on an a fishmonger’s slab.  Of the two men who had assisted him one was of average build and weak features, with a neat moustache. He looked about forty. The other was a heavy man with a black beard that ran with rain as it sprouted over his chest. He seemed younger or at least more vigorous. The water and cloud cast a grey look over both. The third man was rather hunched, either to brace against the wind or from the effect of whatever illness had caused him to be recalled. While his companions busied themselves with rigging and working the crane the third man kept turning suddenly about and staring back up at the the lighthouse.\nThorn felt, even in the seriousness of the situation and the worsening conditions that there was something unsaid and awkward between the men. As the boxes of provisions and fuel were hauled onto the rock, the pair watched the third carefully whenever they had the chance. Thorn stood about rather uselessly and tried not to get in anyone’s way.  After perhaps twenty minutes all the boxes had been deposited on the small shelf of flat rock around the crane which served as the landing bay. The wind had strengthened, numbing any exposed skin and snatching at the breath, while the relief boat was beginning to dip and plunge in the swell. One of the pair made his way over to the isolated third man, clapped him roughly on the back and nudged him forcefully towards the crane. The man coming off the rock stared about him one final time, he had a harried distracted look as if he had forgotten something vital.  He looked at the rope as if he had never seen one before until, until the man with the beard clapped him hard on the back and raised one of his hands to take a grip on the rope. Thorn felt certain the man was in no position to make the traverse. The bearded man shouted something into his ear and pointed down at the waves. This seemed to bring him round, he took hold of the rope and moved with considerable deftness down it. There were no efforts at shouted speech or even a smile from the men remaining.  Thorn watched the man reach the side of the tug and be hauled over. which began to tack around and pull away, leaving two rough furrows of white water behind.",[371,375],{},"\nAs the boat departed so did Thorn’s absorption in the danger and activity of the landing. His enclosure on the rock and imminent confinement in the thin body of the lighthouse was no longer a matter of theoretical concern. One of the men, slighter but seemingly in command from the way he surveyed the supplies and then shouted in his companions’ face, gestured towards Thorn to start moving the boxes. They were sharp edged and heavy, and the pointed corners cut harshly into his legs. The three men staggered with them towards the base of lighthouse steps, dumping them out of reach from anything but an enormous swell. The slighter man climbed the steps and opened the gunmetal door which led into the station itself. This complete, he returned, and they muscled the boxes up, one at each end and a step at a time. Thorn missed his grip at once point and caught the corner of a box hard against his shoulder. After half an hour, their breath coming in steaming gusts by the end, they entered the lighthouse and shut and the door bolted, thick rectangular supports were placed diagonally against its surface and then knocked down into position to tighten their hold. The frame was inches thick and made of solid iron, like the entrance to a bunker. Inside voices could now be heard.\n“Capes, principal keeper” said leading figure said.",[371,378],{},"\nWith a Welsh voice the heavier man followed, “Benson, assistant keeper.”\nThorn thought it best to adhere to their formula “Thorn, replacement keeper”\n“Welcome aboard Thorn” and they shook hands in turn in amused awkwardness at the normality of their greeting in so extreme a location and conditions. Benson and Capes removed their oilskins and hung them on pegs by the lighthouse door to dry and Thorn followed suit. The pools of sea water gathered beneath the three sets, like the dripping skins of caught seals. The yellow pall of the gas lamps showed his two companions on Monk’s Rock in greater detail. Capes was a thin rather vulpine looking character, with hair that had ceded almost all his head, and intently blinking eyes. The assistant keeper Benson was constructed in line with his heavy beard, a strongly built man with pregnant belly and a deep Welsh voice. Despite his size he had a nervous manner. He rubbed his hands together vigorously whenever they weren’t active, and Thorn could see they were red from the action. He was always shifting his weight and rocking up onto his toes like a someone waiting to be called into an office.\nThe room which they stood in was clearly used for stores, there were boxes around with labels for flour, oil and mechanical grease. The floor was disordered and littered with broken lamps and boxes of miscellaneous junk.  Capes the principal clapped his hands loudly in front of him by way of a full stop to the pleasantries.\n“Let’s get these supplies properly stowed. Mr Thorn you’ll need to see this storeroom is kept in proper condition; things have grown rather lax lately. Benson will show you the station and your duties.” He had a lecturing and slightly burdened tone, speaking as one who must oversee every detail to stop things inevitably going awry. As they worked, breaking open the tightly sealed boxes of supplies with a chisel and stowing their contents, Thorn inspected his two companions more closely. Capes was a thin rather vulpine looking character. He would pronounce mock military orders in a parade ground voice, “By the right, stow oil” and “company, mount stairs!” After doing so he would smile roundly and play with his moustache to suggest he knew they found this quite amusing. They were all sweating when the final bags of food and tins of fuel were put away, and they sat on the empty cases in the storeroom to catch their breath. Benson said “Well, I think that’s us finished for now, more to do later, always more to do! Never an idle moment that’s the key here Mr Thorn, keep your hands occupied.” Benson had the style of one imparting bleary advice from across the bar.\nCapes smiled and nodded as if to convey that Benson had for once stumbled on an essential truth. “You’ll find what Mr Benson says is simple but sound Mr Thorn, simple but sound.”\nThorn tried to look as if he was weighing carefully their sage words. There was something quite ridiculous about the two men. Their rhythm of phrase and response ran along worn grooves like a married couple used to shared solitude. Finding his Navy Cut inside his jacket Thorn offered them both a cigarette in that readymade gesture of friendship. They lit up from a shared match and puffed away. It was a welcome moment of quiet. Benson teased a shred of tobacco from his moustache with his wide thumbnail and said, “Ah that’s a treat, a real treat, the other fella Thacker was puritanical like, he-”\nCapes cut him off rather too quickly “You could show Thorn his suite now Benson.” He drew at his cigarette and exhaled with a sigh “then take him through how the light works, or the basics rather, and I’ll be cook for this evening.” Capes nodded at them both and picked his way off up the stairs, with his hands behind his back like an imitation naval officer. It was just passed six o’clock now and the light was beginning to wane.\nFirst Benson showed him the two vast tanks holding the drinking water below the storeroom, and the two more keeping the oil. This system of reservoirs and arterial pipes fed the lighthouse and her crew and kept that at their unvarying task. As they explored the station, the constant curvature of the walls caused in Thorn a feeling of growing compression. The unfamiliar contour strained his eyes and made him feel every step was tending towards some point always out of reach, that every movement was part of a spiralling circuit the end of which was unknown.  Benson was a little too ready with slaps on the back and weak attempts at humour. Thorn saw that each time they passed one of the portholes Benson would pause and lose the thread of his banal advice or blueish anecdote and stare out at the sea floundering mid-sentence as he gazed.\nAbove the storeroom was the kitchen where Capes was cobbling dinner together from the fresh supplies which had arrived with Thorn. Bacon and eggs were spitting grease, and he had hacked slices from a loaf. He was clearly sightly deaf as he continued to sing a popular song from the radio, crooning hoarsely, “please set me free from your spell, from your spell” softly to himself for a minute while they stood in the doorway and Benson rapped gently on the frame. In a grotesque nod to domesticity Capes wore a dirty white apron over his regulation woollen jumper and navy trousers. Eventually he noticed their presence and spun around, his face admitting no trace of embarrassment, but looking at them with eyebrows raised as if mulling a polite answer to a stupid question.\nLeaving Capes to his cooking, Thorn was then shown the sleeping chamber for the three men. the bunks were curved against the contour of the wall, so forcing the sleeper to curl, like a child. The thick white paint of the wall and thin white drapes of the beds gave it the aspect of a hospital room with its incumbents just now wheeled out. Above was the service room. Here the man would sit to make sure the light and fog signals ran through the night. In this room was the heaped line of spare equipment in the middle of the room, over which a white dust sheet had been thrown, beside which was a rocking chair for the duty keeper. Under the dust sheet a can protruded at one end, at the other end the back of a chair, causing the unfortunate impression of the head and toe of a corpse laid out with a chair beside it for a mourner to keep watch.",[371,381],{},"\nThorn smiled at Benson “Bit of a sinister shape under the cloth, no? I wouldn’t fancy-” As he spoke the wind came hard through the gantry above them which circled the light, and the force of the gust caused a rising moan to sound from the vibration of the metal. The plaintive sound rang around the lighthouse as the wind was forced in a curving pattern by the shape of wall. Thorn who had paused to listen to the desolate sound, now saw that Benson had a hand up to his face as if to cover his eyes from a sight he could not bear. Benson leapt forward to snatch the cloth away, and desperately patted his hands over the junk underneath, confirming what his eyes were telling him.\nThorn had seen real fear in his face and moved forward to touch his shoulder “All, all alright Benson? Just the wind, no?” Benson jumped at the contact and half raised his hands towards Thorn’s throat but caught himself quickly.\n“Sorry I, sorry I didn’t, just caught me funny like, it looked like… just a load of kit isn’t it, no…” He lost the end of his sentence and straightened up, rubbing his hands together again and making an odd gesture of hugging himself, wrapping both arms over his chest. He dropped Thorn’s gaze with emphasis and moved towards the door and the final staircase. “Well, the light’ sup here like, which won’t come as no surprise!” Benson seemed resolved to forget the whole thing and Thorn was happy to. Benson’s nerves were wound very tight it was clear. Even two days in such close quarters with him would need care.\nThey picked their way up the narrow and nearly vertical stairs to the light room itself. From outside they could hear the loud working of the mechanism. They entered and the grinding and thrumming bloomed to fill the room. The space was formed of a huge section of cylindrical glass, facing out now to the dark of the night. At its centre was a stanchion made of steel arms, perhaps twice Thorn’s height, which held the slowly spinning light. From his position on the floor, he could see the powerful burner head over which sat an incandescent mantle. The already powerful luminescence was immensely magnified by the reflective lens which encased it. This was formed of a complex pattern of panels and ridges, which through repeated reflection concentrated the light into its knifing beam. Its constant rotation meant that ships at sea saw a series of bunched flashes at ten second intervals. Thorn had found the study of lamps and their intricate assembly the most engaging part of his training. He found the action of the lamp mesmeric, as it worked at its solitary purpose. This was the crucial object of the rock. A perfectly engineered beacon of relief to all at sea. The appearance of the lens and the central position of the lamp recalled that of an immense and incalculably precious jewel, of such value that it had to be kept out in the remoteness of the sea in this solitary tower. A jewel, or some ancient helmet with the power to turn any blade, which had armed the grave of a king. Or more than these, thought Thorn as watched the Benson run a gentle hand over the surface of the light, it was the crowning relic of a remote hermitage, housing the salted bones of an itinerant saint, an object of devotion tended to by three sea faring priests, with the power to grant a sailor’s prayers.\n“Well, this is the business we are in boy” said Benson, stopping the romance of Thorn’s thoughts, “tending the light ‘ere, when you’re on shift you check it on the hour, you check the pumps and make sure the oil is running, the mechanism is turning, and in a storm that we are battened down like and spray hasn’t put her out!”\n“Spray? we must be over 150 feet”\nBenson took the chance to correct him with the pleasure of a man who knows only a few facts and means to use them “161 feet, in an ‘eavy sea the gantry round the light has been carried off before, the main door below been stove in and them metal supports bent double. So, you make bloody sure those windows is all bolted tight if a gale picks up.” There was the relish of the prefect scaring the new boy. The welshman moved around the light with his hands behind his back, craning an ear to check all was running smoothly, and said\n“The weather is looking foul like, very bad indeed, so you make sure, you make bloody sure.”\n“Understood Mr Benson, absolutely understood.”\n“Good that’s good, I’ll show you the gantry like, though you haven’t much cause to be out here.” Benson manoeuvred the heavy metal supports away from the door and shouldered it open. The wind, although by no means a gale, burst past as soon as he did so and coursed and teamed around the confined room. The air filled with the reek of salt. Benson hooked the doors against the walls to keep them from slamming and they went out into the black. It was like dropping a thick sack over your head. The dark was so thick and muffling you could shovel it. Not a sound or light existed at sea other than the whinging of the generator and the passing beam. This went out into the night desperately like a shout into a cave which echoes a while and then is lost. From ambit of the beam the area of Monk’s Rock was visible in sections as the light passed over. The diminished rays of the beam passing sixty meters above the rock on each pass. On the southwestern side of the rock, facing out into the Atlantic, Thorn could only just make the outlines of an elevated square. He leant forward from the parapet and the glacial wind bit at his cheeks. When the beam had swung round and if he strained his eyes, he could make out very short collapsed walls, with some stone blocks scattered around them. The structure was sunk into a shallow declivity.\n“What’s that down there Benson? Are those walls?”\n“Supposed to be some bloody old building or something out there, built by monk’s I think, give the name to the rock like.”\n“Medieval? How on earth did they row anything out here?”\nBenson shrugged and spat into the wind. The beam swung ponderously, like a slingshot that never reached velocity. Thorn could make out a gap in one of the walls that seemed a likely place for a door. If he could get away from his duties and if the weather laid off for a few hours he would make a trip down there and do some sketching, yes…Benson disturbed his plans by barking at him “It’s bloody freezing man and that wind can put the burner out if the doors open too long, get inside or I’ll leave you out there.” “Sorry! Sorry!” Thorn moved quickly back inside. The light revolving in its glass carapace was like the seeking pupil of a great eye on the top of its stone stalk.\nThey clumped down the precipitous stairs in their sea boots. There was the smell of frying bacon and jaunty whistling from the kitchen. When they ducked to enter through the low door, Capes removed his apron in a series of movements as if he was sloping arms and then saluted. “All present and correct gentlemen three regulation dinners.” He set three giant plates of bacon, eggs and intermittently charred bread on the small deal table. All components of the meal had been fried to an identical consistency.\n“Starving I am Mr Capes, shifting those boxes all afternoon and up and down the light with this one.” Benson performed an enthusiastic rub of the hands and applied himself to his food as if he was being timed, punctuating mouthfuls with long drafts of weak tea. This was the colour of clay run-off and Thorn found it both scalding hot and tasteless.\n“You’ve had the grand tour then Mr Thorn, we take eight-hour shifts in a rotation, you tend to the light, see that its fuelled and you make sure the mechanism is in working order and keeps it turning. It’s all down in the manual.” This was a haggard looking volume on the table entitled “Instructions for lighthouse keepers” which bore the distant date of 1909. Capes applied himself to a mouthful of egg, chewed wetly and addressed a nauseating handkerchief to a drop of yolk leaking through his stubble.\nHe leant forward and dragged his chair across the tiles with a shriek, and looked him seriously in the eyes “Mr Thorn, the essence of the thing, is that the light must never go out! Not for a second! We protect the shipping that is this nation’s lifeline” Capes nodded slowly “its lifeline yes, you remember to that, and you can’t go far wrong.” He thinks the war’s still on, and we are out in some Artic convey watching for periscopes thought Thorn.\nThorn replied with too much sincerity “Thank you Mr Benson, I’ll benefit from your instruction greatly, I’m sure.”\nEven Capes looked like he could detect an undertone here, but settled for “Well, you discharge your duties as in the manual and we’ll get along fine, just fine.” He spoke with the deflating tone of an adult reminding a child of their many undone tasks.\n“I meant to ask; I noticed from the gantry that there looks to be some sort of structure out on the rock” Benson and Capes both seemed to bend a little closer to their dinners as he said this and did not reply. Benson scraped at his plate with his fork\nRather weakly Thorn continued “is it left over from when the light was built? Mr Benson thought it was medieval…”\nCapes looked at him then pushed his chair back from the table and laced his hands sententiously over his belly. He was settling in for a speech clearly.\n“Mr Thorn, the subject seems unavoidable, so I must tell you that we had a deal of trouble with your predecessor, Thacker, whom you saw earlier of course.” Of course-fucking-of course thought Thorn who else would be-\n“At the bottom of the matter, Thacker was unsuitable for the service I think, utterly unsuitable. He was here for solitude to allow him to pursue his artistic inclinations”\nCapes pronounced artistic with enunciated sibilance, as if it was some socially dangerous sexual proclivity.\n“Several times, yes several times, I found him asleep at his watch, had to reprimand him, unpleasant, most unpleasant.”\nIt didn’t sound like Capes had found the process entirely unpleasant. Capes paused to show he was selecting his words with utmost care and inhaled his tea noisily in punctuation.\n“The structure you mention. As you rightly say it’s medieval, left by some monks, Benedictine I believe, the white monks.”\nThorn savoured a chance to correct him “Ah the black monks I think Mr Capes, Cistercians wear the white cowls.”\nCapes eyed him briefly. Thorn applied himself awkwardly to his tea. After a moment too long Capes conceded “Ah yes of course my mistake, my mistake. In any case Mr Thorn, Thacker became rather obsessed with that building and the monks that had lived there. He was I think not quite well, not quite well.” Capes’ spoke as if this was a delicate shame, as if discussing family member with ruinous appetite for horses or drink.\n“In the hardest gales and despite the heavy swell which you’ll find sluices the whole rock, Thacker would spend his night watches making notes on the place, and then during the day he would set up out there to sketch. On one utterly stupid occasion we had to drag back in the middle of the night as he’d made his way out there with a lantern.” Capes was growing angry as he spoke and spitting his words with precision.\nBenson put in “Fool, bloody fool, nearly got us killed didn’t he Mr Capes”\n“It was indeed very dangerous, very dangerous indeed.” The tick of doubling phrases is well suited to one who gives a such weight to his own pronouncements thought Thorn.\n“I must say we were not sorry to see him leave, Mr Thorn, not sorry at all. Thacker was a danger to the operation of this station, and danger to us and a danger to himself. He had become obsessed, he developed in the final weeks he was, here a disorder of the brain, no doubt from some hereditary defect-\n“The parents, it’ll be the parents, comes out in the wash.” Benson cut in venomously. Capes eyed him with the indulgent disapproval of one who hears what they are really thinking put into stronger words than they might use themselves.\n“As I say some hereditary defect no doubt, worsened I should think by lack of proper sleep as he spent his nights down by the rocks. I have written a long report for my superiors which I shall delivery on my return, and I recommend immediate dismissal on the ground medical unfitness for the service.” Capes paused to carefully aling the handle of his tea mug with its coaster. He resumed\n“He had allowed himself delusions about the monks who had built that early station, that’s what it appears to have been, an early form of beacon which lent its name to rock. Thacker had begun to prepare a volume “The Benedictine Cell of Monk’s Rock.”\n“Always scribbling and sketching, workshy was Thacker” was Benson’s damning remark.\n“Indeed Mr Benson, yes indeed. I fear Mr Thorn, and not to indulge in frivolities, that the monks were not a historical presence for Thacker” As Benson spoke, he gazed vaguely into the corner of the room and very lightly tapped the end of his fork against the table over and over. He suddenly grasped it very hard and then dropped it loudly onto the plate. He redirected himself at Thorn,\n“Mr Thorn, several times we came upon him in the attitude of prayer, gibbering I would say the word is, up above in the service room, on his knees and gazing out to sea. Repeating some Latin words, part of the mass I assume”\n“Popish” said Benson with great gravity, as if passing a sentence of death. The Welshman then coughed in derision and shook his head. He lunged with some venom towards the stove and began stuffing more wood into the dying embers.\n“Indeed, yes Mr Benson, certainly Catholic. Although, and we both have found this hard to comprehend, Mr Thacker boastfully professed his non-belief to Mr Benson in his early weeks on this station and laughed openly at our singing of hymns on a Sunday.” Capes smiled archly at Thorn as if he was reaching the grisliest part of a horrible tale, but he could see that his leg was jogging very rapidly under the table, it had been throughout his speech.  Despite Capes’ affections and Benson’s hammer-like sensibility, both men were clearly unnerved thought Thorn, it sounded like a case of burgeoning insanity had preceded his arrival.\n“You will understand then Mr Thorn if we would rather avoid any discussion of the dwelling of those former keepers out on the rock, we have had enough of it. Can we come to that agreement?”\n“Yes of course Mr Capes, certainly! It only struck me as a curious thing and…\n“Excellent thank you Mr Thorn” interrupted Capes in a way that suggested the matter was closed, archived and wiped from the memories. “If we all attend to our duties, we will get on swimmingly, although no swimming will be required, I hope!”\nBenson gave a forced laugh which only made the growing sense of strangeness more acute “Very good Mr Capes! Always ready with a joke aren’t you. No swimming no, bloody cold it would be! Bloody cold, makes me shiver jus’ thinking about it.”\nWith that Benson performed his usual enthusiastic hand rubbing, like a portly blue bottle cleaning its appendage, and then stood up and made a great show of whistling while noisily tidying up the dinner things. Capes began to very carefully roll a cigarette from a packet of tobacco previously unadvertised, wiping stray shreds of tobacco back into his pouch with a jaundiced finger. The nail, noticed Thorn, had been bitten haggardly down to the quick. They spent their evening in drinking strong tea and playing cards. Benson swore and slammed his lump like fists on the table when he lost, and Capes grinned and boasted softly before he slid down his winning tricks. Thorn had the first watch and left them at around nine o’clock, taking the manual with him at Capes’ rather officious suggestion. Benson was to come and replace him at six o’clock the following morning.\nHis silent watch in the service room passed without event. Thorn wrote a journal of his arrival on the rock and the disturbed atmosphere that he had entered. Once, and laughing out loud as he did so to mask a ridiculous and titillating anticipation as to the result, he lifted the sheet at the base of the equipment pile. The wind picked up throughout the night and coursed and whistled through the metal steps at the base of light and the gantry above, in a constant shrill thrum. This noise combined with the stolid mass of the walls and the utter confinement of their location generated a creeping sense of pressure and weight. Thorn had the feeling that he was trapped in some sealed ancient tomb that stood unvisited in the middle of the sea.\nOnce during the night, he got the stairs to make himself some tea, and he felt his neck chill at the unseen space behind him, and he had to fight the child’s urge to whirl about and confront the darkness. In the deserted silence of the kitchen, he tiptoed and winced as cupboards creaked and mugs clinked. Back in the service room the gulls seemed to be unaffected entirely by the wind, they shrieked and keened all around the gantry.\nTowards dawn Benson came in quietly through the door as if hoping to catch him asleep and so confirm his suspicions. He nodded with reluctant approval at Thorn who was making a good show of diligently reading the manual. He made it down to the sleeping quarters and eventually settled himself in his curved bed. Sleep came on instantly despite the chorus of the wind and the oily chug of the generator which echoed throughout the station. He awoke in the treacly confusion of deep sleep, unsure where he was and for what purpose. The miles of sea between him and shore, the exiled separation of the Monk’s Rock, congealed into his bleary consciousness. He dug his fingers through the roots of hair and sat on the edge of the bed to regain himself. He focused on the contents of the room. Benson and Capes had few personal possessions on the curved shelves above their beds, just a few photographs and their shaving kits.\nAs Thorn lay back and stretched his hands over his head in a yawn, the fingers of his right hand brushed against a texture which was neither wall nor duvet. A piece of paper had been folded into four quarters and placed down the side of the bed against the wall, the bedclothes had concealed it until now. It was lined and with torn edges as if ripped from a diary or notebook. The top half of the page bore two portions of text. The first was written in an intricate hand.\n“We tend the light and feed it, and conduct the offices and oblations, for truly it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living god.” Thorn read it several times and felt slightly unnerved by the strangeness of the words.\nAnd then below, in a more regular script but with similarly curlicued fs and ls, as if the first hand had bled faintly through to the second, Thorn read these obscure words:\n“For the third day I have seen the light burning and the brothers dancing, and they have laid the oil and that which was as wine on my brows. I am blessed with the second cowl, so that I have eyes to sea” and undesigned “John Thacker, keeper of the light.”\nThe bottom half of the page was taken up by a drawing sketched in black charcoal vivid against the paper. It showed a tiny cove formed of jagged rock with a path leading down to a portion of pebbled beach which reached the sea. A man knelt by the shore, wearing a keeper’s oilskins, but with an inverted hood under his sou’wester so that the material covered his face. He had his hands in front of him clasped in prayer, but as Thorn looked more closely, he saw that this gesture had been inverted, the backs of the hands were pressed together with the palms facing outwards. The artist had shown considerable skill so that one could discern that the material of the hood was drawn in towards the mouth, suggesting that the figure was breathing deeply in excitement or distress. The most arresting point of the work was not on land but some distance out to sea beyond the breakers.  The moon was shrouded with cloud and its light failed away from the shore, but Thorn could make out that the surface sea was disturbed. There was a swelling, pressing up from the water like a huge boil perhaps ten feet across. Above this, very dark strokes sketched out what seemed to be two horns curled like twisted pillars. Strands of weed or detritus hang lankly from them in rotten pennants. Behind the figure there was a wake of light shading, suggesting some trail of liquid or luminescence. Throne shuddered in the morning cold. Clearly Thacker had undergone a form of obsessive collapse. Even after a day on the rock Thorn could understand this. The concentrated isolation of the lighthouse meant that the three men were in effect trapped on one spiral staircase, constantly passing and repassing each other as they carried out their duties. The pressurised feeling that this caused was then reflected and magnified by the bleak surroundings of grey sea and sky and constant refrain of the wind and rain. Deliberate effort was required to behave like these were normal circumstances. In an unsuitable temperament left here for any time, something would yield.\nHis second day on Monk’s Rock Capes was on duty in the service room, keeping a lookout and minding the generator in the safer hours of daylight. Thorn stoked the stove and cooked and ate a breakfast of anonymous but heavily salted tinned meat accompanied by toast and tea. He brought Capes a plateful and found he had removed the sheet from the dump of equipment and arranged it against the wall.\nCapes was writing in his journal when Thorn entered the room. Noticing his arrival he immediately snapped it shut and placed beneath his chair. Both Capes and Benson both looked aged and raw, as if they had not enjoyed the healthiest sleep. The main object of Thorn’s thoughts was the structure out on the rock. The strange pall which Thacker seemed to have cast, the hysterics of Benson in the service room, and the already growing need for distraction from his companions made the tumbled stones of the first light fascinating. One of the duties set out in the manual was that when the weather was calm the junior keeper should make a survey of the coves and rough beaches of the rock. They were to gather any detritus that might suggest a shipwrecked or in difficulty, and record and any identifying features in the station’s log. There were only three places to check on the rock, the landing point attached to the lighthouse at the northeast, a small cove nearly at due east, and then on the other side of the rock the beach near to the remains of the elder light, to the south-west. Benson was the easier target, so Thorn waited until the Welshman was dozing in his chair and then leant close to his ear to nearly shout “Mr Benson I’m off to see to Paragraph 49 in the manual!” to which he got an abrupt snort followed by some startled nods and an “ah yes Para 49 of course see you do and leave it where you found it afterwards” before the snoring swiftly resumed.\nOnce he was through the lighthouse door the wind robbed him for his all his warmth. It dug in at the gap at his neck and stung at his eyes.  It jostled at him hard; movement was like struggling through a whipped-up crowd. The air stank of salt the way some hovel full of drying fish might, it was crystalline, reeking. It roughed and reddened all exposed skin like a scouring fabric. It was a physical, confronting presence which opposed every action with the weight of its gusts. The lighthouse door could be bolted from the outside, and Thorn slotted the heavy bolt into position, which left his hand flecked with dead paint and rufous metal. The rock around the base of the lighthouse was a colony for the gulls. They flecked the rock white with their presence, like lichen, colouring it with both their bodies and droppings both. The steps rang with his sea boots like the slow sound of a bell. At this the gulls hawked out their rusty sounded calls rose in a loose body, like a mass of flies disturbed, wings plunging at the wind. The sound of the steps meant a keeper was chucking out scraps and they circled and shrieked in complaint, landing to onto the handrails with their gobbling beaks open in demand, cocking their heads at Thorn with their pinpoint eyes. He pulled his sou’wester down against them and nearly ran down the steps. They stared and screeched until resettling to form another white patch further off. At the bottom of the Thorn stood and took in the sea; he was the still point in a world of seething waves. He could feel physically the massed presence of the water directed towards the rock. From each compass point the same horizon returned a blank stare. The rock and lighthouse station were as foreign and distinct to their blank surroundings as a baroque cathedral would be on a mountaintop. They were the only solidity, the only substance, and against this the weather protested. Wherever sea met rock its action sapped and mined, while the wind coursed over all like a trawler’s net.\nThorn felt a heady nausea at the absurd isolation and hostility of the scene. His hands had a weak early morning feeling as he tried to clench them. He sat down on the base of the steps and rubbed fast at his temples. The three of them were of as much consequence amongst all this water and wind as three specks of grit in the lees of a swirling vat. His mind was full of storms and waves. He caught himself rocking forward in an imitation of Benson, which was ridiculous enough to bring him round. Some clear thinking was needed. He had only been here a day, and he would be relieved in another. Getting down to inspect Thacker’s building would distract him at the least. He could make some quick drawings and notes and then write them when he got back to the shore. A newspaper might take them. The wind hummed above him through the metal the grating, a sound almost like pan pipes which rose and fell with the gusts.\nHe would first check the landing area and went down the mirror smooth and spray slicked stairs cut into the granite. He descended in the mode his grandmother had used in her senescence, moving sideways with a hand pressed against the wall, and then placing one foot onto a step before the other joined it. The spray from the waves crashing at the bottom lashed up at him as he descended At the bottom there was nothing but water, nearly black against the shallow rocks and lilting and sucking with the action of the sea, like an enormous tongue against a rotting tooth.\nBack at the top of the steps he could take in the surface of the rock properly. It was carpeted in a fragmented gravel which was varied only by boulders. These were teetering jagged things which stood stubbornly like standing stones. Several had been shattered by frost or storm and showed their strata like wounds, layered and stippled with white streaks and red cut-throughs. The dual assault of the rain-soaked wind and the spray thrown up from the shore slicked everything with a thin sheen.\nDriven in at intervals over the plateau, were thick iron rods, put in place by former keepers. At the top of these there were eyelets one could thread a rope through, to trace a path in fog or storm. The pattern of the rods formed a Y shape. They went out a straight line perhaps halfway into the rock, and then branched off in two at 45-degree angles, one towards the small cover and one towards the elder light and the beach. In case of fog, he scrounged a coil of rope from the mess of the storeroom and tied it awkwardly around the first rod, struggling to remember the sequence of a binding knot. The wind made him walk at an angle and he had strain to drive his legs forwards. The wind probed under his sou’wester and slapped at his oilskins. It took him nearly twenty minutes to cover the two hundred feet to the first branch of the Y. Thorn could feel his undershirt coating his skin as he began to sweat with the effort. The final iron rod was driven into the rock close to the edge, and he knelt beside it and hooked an elbow tightly around it as insurance from the wind. From there he worked his way through thirty meter of sloping fissured granite, which slanted down towards the waves. At the end of this was the cove, which dropped down in a sheer arc to the waves below. Thorn went over with derision the images he had formed in training for his first posting. Deeply lit scenes of sublime drama, of noble lighthouses and the harsh beauty of the elements. There was nothing beautiful here. Everything was hostile, everything drowned or cut or froze. The station had only been built here has the rocks and tides had gutted so many ships. It was inimical to human life.  Human life was alien here, he felt utterly the invasiveness and presumption of his species.\nLeaning forward while keeping firmly hooked to the metal post, he could see the white water at the cliff’s base. Of course, there was no wreckage or junk floating on the tide. As he looked at the sea, he had the impression that he could feel the immense weight and profundity somewhere inside. Water pressed in towards him from everywhere, eating at the rock and moving ever closer to the slow beat of elemental time. The wind sought him like a pack of angry spirits. He felt this pressure and erosion was being worked on his brain. It made Thorn want to shout or thrash or run. He was like one walking through a vast forest who begins to cower in the presence of the trees. To disrupt the feeling, he kicked out at a pebble and sent it spinning over the side. As he followed its arc, he had a glimpse of something staring intently back then sliding quickly down into the waves. Below the surface was a black mass, like a pall of weeds, which seemed to coil and swirl and then bolt off at great speed out towards the deeper water, where it blended into the dark unity of the sea. It had to have been a seal, although a rather large one. Thorn had the impression of a loose coagulation around it, as if it was clothed in some kind of fabric. And the face, if he had been asked to give an account, he would have said was rather hollow.\nTwenty minutes of sweat and effort later he had made it back to the centre line of iron markers. Unused to the exercise his thighs were cramping painfully, and he could feel a tear blossoming at the base his right calf. From this ridge the granite then sloped down into a flattish hollow which contained the elder lighthouse. The structure was about halfway between the central ridge and the shore. There were shallow foundations dug into the rock then several courses of rough stone and mortar remaining.  The uppermost course of stones had been worn smooth like shore glass. The outline of the structure was cruciform, perhaps ten meters in length. About two feet of the wall remained all the way around apart from the eastern end which had entirely given way. Thorn was sure this had been some kind of monastic church. He dimly remembered reading of something similar in a fantastically dull Trinity House history of early lighthouses, where monastic communities had set beacons in the church towers and used the bells as fog lights.\nIt was a desolate, utterly bleak place, facing out towards the westerly Atlantic gales. Rowing materials and men out here must often have been lethal, and weather could have held the builders out there for weeks without shelter. Thorn found some longer curved stones which looked like they may have formed part of a window, set into the tower to show the beacon. He stepped over the wall at the western end into the interior of the church. To the east and just past the transept, in the chancel, there was a rough stone altar. Compared to the smooth surface of the walls it was almost untouched by the elements; it had retained all its sharpness of line and bore all the crisp angles of unworked rock. It was a glassy black like jet or obsidian and had a glassy patina. It looked old, and he thought rather wicked, like a leering red mask in the British Museum which had terrified him as a child. He spasmed slightly in the cold and then stepped forward towards the altar. Thorn was aware of the saliva in his mouth and the marching thud of his heart. There were two black gulls laid on the ground behind the black stone, their beaks resting against its base and their feet pointing slackly towards the space left by the collapsed eastern wall. Their heads had been wrapped tightly with pieces of grey cloth to cover their eyes and their throats had been messily cut. Around them were lavish splashes of blood and gusts of feathers. There was a new shine to scarlet pools like wet paint.\nThorn weakly ran through any conceivable scenarios which could have led to this. There were of course none. He looked ridiculously out to sea, in hope of seeing some vessel that could have supplied the culprit. He was adrift in the grey mass of water, on this savage rock, with someone capable of this. Thorn was quietly sick. The acid cut at the back of his throat, and he wiped his mouth. The thought of going back to confront Capes and Benson repelled him. What had the three men been up to out here before he had arrived? What did they have planned for him? He sat on down on the wall and ground his clenched fists into his eyes. The sensation absorbed some of the panic, and when the resulting blur cleared, he looked back towards the lighthouse. Capes and Benson stood on the gantry both looking out towards him. Capes had his arms thrust above his head. In a gesture of, what? Perhaps of warning or to summon him back to the light. But the first impression Thorn formed was that the man was in the act of worship, of adulation. Thorn waved back at them. Both now waved exaggeratedly, and pointed repeatedly towards their heads, the danger sign indicated clearly that he should return. The reason for his summons became clear. A huge bank of fog was blowing steadily onto the station. He could see its unrolling bulk spread almost across the horizon in unvarying blankness to supplement that of the sea. It would overtake the lighthouse soon and he would have only the line of rods to take him back. There was almost no time to deliberate so he retraced the rope which led him up from the church and onto the main body of the rock, and the line of iron rods leading back to the light. He spooled the rope tightly around his arm as he went. The rain had become more serious and rung like falling gravel on his oilskins. As he picked and stumbled his way back, he started at a deep sonorous note sounding close by his ear. It rose in scale and weight with a great force until its head was filled with its dark sound. Thorn felt his body shake and then he wept in little jerks, the tears denied by the rain. He looked up at the gantry for the source of the noise but both men had gone inside. Perhaps they had dropped a piece of spare equipment or kicked against the rungs of the stairs leading down from the light. Neither explanation quite seemed to do. The sound was the sombre ringing of a church bell.\nThe regulations stipulated that all keepers be awake and active in a period of fog and the foghorn had to been sounded at minute intervals and tended to until full visibility had returned. He moved mechanically like a log behind hauled along by rope, but there was no option but the warmth inside the lighthouse and scheduled relief boat. The wind and shifted to blow in towards him, bringing the fog and batting at his oilskins. He used the rope to steady and pull himself along, the rock surface was shining with rain now and he gashed his knee badly when he fell against the sharp lip of a stone. By the time he had made it to the base of the lighthouse steps the fog had come down like a blindfold. He could hear the ringing of the metal under his feet as he curled around the body of the light but could not even see the rungs; everything was a weak milky white. Even voice of the waves was muted under the fog. Tracing his way up to the door he tried it, it had been bolted from the inside. He felt a fresh bloom of panic and nausea and swore desperately into the air. Thorn beat against the door twice and on the third beat Capes screamed out in response\n“Who’s there?? For god’s sake is it you Thorn!!”\nThe pitch of Cape’s voice had risen with strain. He had the craven shriek of one beyond their limit of panic and pressure. Thorn heard Capes fumbling at the bolt and then beating at the simple mechanism in frustration.\n“Calm down Mr Capes! Just lift the bolt up gently and it’ll open!”\nThe unbridled panic of the other man forced Thorn to calm down and he managed to speak as if he was addressing a particularly slow child. He heard the clack as the bolt lifted, and a slice of Capes’ face appeared. He was horribly white, and he had the rolling eye of a panicked beast. He gazed at Thorn in myopic terror, making sure it was only him outside while throwing desperate glances past him and out into the world of fog.",[371,384],{},"\n“Mr Capes if you’ll move away from the door, just move back sir.” He spoke coaxingly and was able to edge the door open and move into the storeroom. Capes threw his weight against the now open door to close it, and Thorn had to help him get the bolt closed again. Capes was shaking like a hopeless drunk halfway through drying out. He juddered and spasmed continuously, he was clearly in a state of severe shock.\n“Where’s Benson? What’s happened?” Thorn managed to get him to sit in the casement of the window. Capes wept savagely, childishly and choked on his tears between words.\n“Gone! Run out to the waves to meet them! Gone to keep the elder light!” He was almost unable to speak.\n“Gone? How can he have gone? What’s been happening Capes?\nCape’s could barely speak, but after several slow demands he told his tale. As he spoke, Capes would whirl about to cringe and supplicate vague figures, to gibber and plead, to shout and then reason, nodding and shrugging as if arriving at terms with unseen authorities.\nFrom what Thorn could glean from Capes’ account, Benson had entered a period of deep and silent prayer. Suddenly rousing himself, he had sung psalms and given a sermon, even stood on a chair in the corner of the light room, shouting over the roar of the engine and cursing and admonishing a flock that argued and mocked in his mind.\nOne passage which Capes repeated over and over like a chant, recalled the endless Sunday school preaching of Thorn’s childhood. He had a vague impression it was from the book of Job:\nHe maketh the deep to boil like a pot.\nHe makes the sea like a pot of ointment.\nHe leaves a shining wake behind him;\nOne would think the deep had white hair.”",[11,387,388],{},"Capes repeated the “he leaves a shining wake behind him” over and over, the phrase sounding in Thorn’s mind like the foghorn, and Capes’ face now scarred with joy as he repeated the words. As he spoke, Capes made a gesture with the index fingers of both hands, moving them slowly towards his face. As if horned thing came towards him through the sea. Capes’ rambling delusion had brought Thorn undistracted purpose that a crisis brings. But now as he watched the figure of this man chanting like a broken priest, he felt the weight of his situation. He sat down on a case on the in the middle of the room. His legs ached from his journey out on the rocks, he felt suddenly very cold. Benson was somewhere in the featureless expanse of fog, a step away from death or injury on the rocks, if not there already. Capes was deranged and needed medical treatment or confinement. One of them had been mad enough to butcher and arrange two gulls. Thorn’s watch told 6 o’clock, at some point on the following day the relief boat would arrive if the weather allowed, but he was nearing the point of disintegration. Horrible to his ear, the constant noise of the engines rotating the light was punctuated with a series of snapping bangs, then a loud grinding, then silence. The gas lamps lighting the walls flickered, shone brightly once more, and died out. The mechanical organs of the station were still, the pulse had stopped.",[11,390,391],{},"Capes stood and raised both his hands in the same contorted gesture Thorn had seen in the drawing, the backs placed together and the palms outwards. His face was lit by the pale gloam of the fog coming through the porthole, the whites of the eyes burning,\n“The elder keepers! The elder keepers have lit their beacon! It is a terrible thing, a wonderful thing to behold!",[11,393,394],{},"Ranting like a firebrand preacher, he dashed towards the door and had lifted the bolt and thrown himself outside before Thorn had a chance to take a step. He heard the clanging of sea boots down the lighthouse steps and muffled shouting, but when he reached the door there was only the blank immensity of the fog. Thorn stood breathing deeply and trembling, feeling billows of vapour curling past the door. The thick salt smell filling the room. Thorn groped desperately around the floor testing the contents of each crate by touch until eventually found an emergency packet of candles. He lit one with his matches and held the sinuous flame in front of him. Each coil of rope and hanging oilskin menaced and morphed in the guttering light. He moved through the station as slowly and silently as if leading a hearse. As he reached the stair before the light room itself, he heard a sound that nearly brought him to the point of fainting. Plainsong came from the room. Dry voices like the sound of winter wind over dead leaves.",[11,396,397],{},"semita alba leviathan, semita alba leviathan.",[11,399,400],{},"Thorn screamed in the darkness. As his scream rose, a screeching laugh like the sound of a gull rose to meet it and there came a horribly fast clacking over the tiles of the light room, the noise of bare bones. Thin arms caught him as he turned to run, the dank smell of rotten cloth left long in the ground filled his nostrils. From out at sea, the light on oMnk’s rock roared up into the blackness of the sky.",[11,402,403],{},"The relief boat bobbed off the shore for an hour, huddled on the water like a sea bird. No shout or waving arms came to beckon them into the bay. Growing alarmed the captain took her towards the landing, made her fast and sent the went ashore with two men. They found Capes and Benson on the far side of the rock, by a small structure which the captain described his is evidence as a “decayed and desolate spot. The stench of rot caused one of the seamen to vomit before they had come within sight of it. Both men had their throats raggedly cut. They had been laid out on the ground so that their mouths touched the two rear corners of the altar, and their torsos and feet pointed away at angles. Thorn, they found in the light room itself. He had been placed in the kneeling attitude of a supplicant. Throughout the room there was a sickly rich smell of incense and around him silver chalices, as used for the eucharist, and full. The captain reported that his skin had the puckered grey tone of flesh left long in water. And from all over his body small round pieces of skin had been excised, about the size of a communion wafer.",{"title":66,"searchDepth":67,"depth":67,"links":405},[],"The Trinity House tug taking Stephen Thorn out from the village St Merren’s left a wake of slate coloured smoke.",{},"\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-elder-keepers",{"title":364,"description":406},"stories\u002Fthe-elder-keepers",[250],"qoKQqA3uNInmHG4lihyipgsCLkrfzxN15BvoqsZFSUs",{"id":414,"title":415,"body":416,"date":242,"description":750,"edited":242,"extension":72,"meta":751,"navigation":74,"path":752,"seo":753,"stem":755,"tags":756,"__hash__":757},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-incumbents.md","The Incumbents",{"type":8,"value":417,"toc":748},[418,421,424,435,442,445,448,451,458,461,464,467,470,473,476,479,482,489,496,499,502,505,508,511,514,517,520,523,526,529,532,535,538,541,544,547,550,553,556,559,562,565,568,571,574,577,580,583,586,589,592,595,598,601,604,607,610,613,616,619,622,625,628,631,634,637,640,643,646,649,652,655,658,661,664,667,670,673,676,679,682,685,688,691,694,700,703,706,709,712,715,718,721,727,730,733,736,739,742,745],[88,419,415],{"id":420},"the-incumbents",[11,422,423],{},"Even for the hopeless enthusiast, the collector that chases after churches like butterflies for his pinboard, this was not an inviting specimen. The dull, exceedingly low church of Thenford had no point of even provincial note. There was no piece of plate or ornament worth a pause, no name recorded anywhere on headstone or wall plaque, that had could have possibly enjoyed longer fame than the memories of those who had known them. I must confess here to being an archetypal specimen of that compulsive category, the church addict. My predilection is rural. For me there is no dearer thing than an antique sight which has lain long and steady since the conquest. The thoroughbred of this breed will be a composite of many styles, like some portmanteau creature of a medieval bestiary. Its crux might be a Norman arch, but then add a storied tower of Early English type, perhaps a few Jacobean wall plaques, all scrolls and filigreed Latin, and finish with a fine voiced Victorian organ, and you have something very near perfection. It should be a slow formed, nearly geological thing, to which the folie and fervour of each century has lent its contribution. In the yard, there should be a brace of yews like parishioners’ frozen mid gossip on their Sunday way to the porch. There should be headstones all around, slanted together for warmth during their long wait for the hereafter. I have sought these places out since boyhood in every county of England. It has been my abiding and single passion. It is in the presence of such places, that I have my ration of peace, it is here alone that I am capable of unconcerned absorption.",[11,425,426,427,430,431,434],{},"The true enthusiast is not rigid in their taste, and so my interests are ecumenical. A business-like piece of urban gothic, its sleeves rolled up to deal with the pressing masses, a deliciously fragile rococo chapel appended to a shaggy rustic pile, a shard of concrete cathedral making its great atonal yell to heaven, all of these will more than do. Pathologically, to deploy the obligatory psycho-jargon of the times, I cannot leave unanswered the summons I hear from a passing church. I must stop to confirm a suspicious of hidden riches. I must put a pompous façade to the sword by a survey its banal insides. Even if hopelessly late for some appointment or exhausted by the day, most likely spent in bagging other specimens, an unexamined church will lodge in my mind like a spur, like an indeterminate memory of switching off the oven, like the door with a knack to its lock. I might walk boldly on with my hands thrust in my pockets, or drive a few hundred meters up the lane, but I will be duly hoisted back.  I am sure you have this feeling too sometimes before you take a course of action for reasons which remain opaque. That it is not really you, or not consciously you, who has decided. My inner voice whines and stamps, but my feet are already on the move. I must. I have to. To borrow a phrase from my schoolboy Greek, it behoves me to go. In this case, when I consider that day left me without the slightest interest in churches for nearly a year, when I think how I let so many go unexamined, their call unrequited, the question of why I ",[97,428,429],{},"did"," stop, and its twin, what if I ",[97,432,433],{},"hadn’t",", what if I had ground on up the hill, leaving that unhappy place in a pall of exhaust, these questions present themselves before me on a heavy schedule. They are my matins, compline and vespers. I construct happier pasts and deponent futures where I didn’t, where I hadn’t.",[11,436,437,438,441],{},"I had nowhere particular to be on that bright October afternoon. As I drove through the narrow Somerset lanes the sun reached with boles of light through gaps in the hedges. The sky was a rare and vivid blue . Now that I am retired, I am learning to accommodate the weightless feeling of having nowhere to be.  Like the examination dreams that pursued me after finals, I have frequently that horrid jolt as when you realise you should have been in a meeting twenty minutes ago. I am shaken from my paper or crossword puzzle, and then realise, slightly sadly, that this is the only demand on my time. One often reads of the ache that wracks the severed limb. Some part of my mind in a melded in a Pavlovian fashion to the dictates of a working schedule. This is the effect of a long, unvaried career and not particularly remunerative career. I imagine it will be permanent. I wait for the phone to go, for the inbox to ping. My conclusion that ails me is that I derived rather more, not purpose, not meaning, but ",[97,439,440],{},"substance"," from the work that didn’t interest me. Without it I am rather formless.   I have become a sort of ghost that haunts its metalled ways. I miss even, if that is word, perhaps rather I lack the colleagues who tended to scare me slightly, whom I only spoke with when it was unavoidable. However, on that day in question I had the slightly nauseous sense of freedom that a car journey through empty country lanes can engender. A deliciously false sense that I was speeding toward a deck of possibilities just over the next rise. I had pulled into a stopping point and checked the name of the village shown on the sign I had just passed, against its reference in Pevsner’s Buildings of England. It was a pauper’s grave of an entry for Thenford, a few lines on the manor, a peremptory note on some palaeolithic tombs, and then this scant note.",[11,443,444],{},"“The Church of St Erewyn Ad Vincula. Rather dull mid-Victorian red brick gothic. Formed of a squat nave with no clerestory. Two-light tower with a crenelated parapet. Clearly local work, compare with entry for the neighbouring St Jude’s.  Architect’s name does not survive. Apparently built on an early Anglo-Saxon foundation but no trace of this remains and the attribution is probably spurious. The interior and overall effect is extremely low in design and whitewashed so as to recall the most stringent days of the Commonwealth.”",[11,446,447],{},"Not much to entice the passing traveller. But I had nowhere to be and no one expecting me, and even if I had, a passing glance at least would have been obligatory. I ground up the next three hundred meters of steep and potholed lane, the Beatle’s engine crying as usual, and then pulled into the patch of slanted tarmac patch provided as a car park. The entry had precisely captured the dull pedestrian aspect of building’s fabric. Yet the setting itself was  pleasant enough. The lane was screened on the far side by a thick hedge of trees. These were snarled and matted so as to admit only the occasional shaft of light. In front of the church was gravel and then a retaining wall between this and the graveyard with an decrepit iron gate giving entrance to the latter. Behind the church itself was a patch of similarly knotted woodland and the day was clear enough to see across to the Mendip hills. Thenford was barely more than a few houses huddled around a pub, quickly turning to farms on the outskirts.",[11,449,450],{},"I parked noisily on the crunching gravel and levered myself out of the Beatle. I subject this car to acid abuse when it fails me only to defend it fanatically from mechanics and worried friends. As I massaged two plaintive knees I formed I traced the silhouette of the nave, chancel and squat tower. Uniformly dull was my verdict and there was little to suggest that this might need revising. As I stood there, I had for the first time that vestigial sensation at the nape which suggests an unseen observer, bringing my shoulders up in an involuntary contraction. I spun theatrically on one heel, to dispel any fear by through ridiculousness. There was a slight flash of light from the dark of the hedge row as I did so, caused perhaps by a branch rebounding from the weight of a departing verge. Or perhaps from quick the motion of a figure evading my line of sight. In any case I saw no one, and after testing my breath against the cold air for a little longer than required, I turned back to the church. The paintwork on the gate into the yard was leprous with rust and the dry hinges made a wincing shriek as they moved. The headstones were very sparse, with no new burials apparent. The stones were arranged in shoddy broken links, as if hurriedly dug and planned without much care. Several careered forward or back and were not many years from lying as flat as their owners. There was the standard yew whose carmine berries were starting to fall, leaving a bright ring at its base against the grass. The porch was plain, a chamfered arch and no more, and only one notice displayed inside.",[11,452,453,454,457],{},"“",[97,455,456],{},"Service on the final Sunday of the month, Father Saunders serves the parish churches of Linstone, Shepbury and Ampney Barton on the first, second and third Sundays of the month respectively",".”",[11,459,460],{},"The paper on which this was typed was Rorschached with water and the laminated plastic had bubbled away. In one corner of the noticeboard the felt had rotted from emerald to a sodden black. There was no other information of any kind, not even the standard lines on anti-climb paint. The arch of the door itself was low, and the stone of the porch floor rose perhaps a foot above the bottom of its planks. It was like the entrance to a tunnel or dug out so squat and compact was its design. The door would certainly be locked I thought as I tried the handle compulsively, looking back over my shoulder as I did so. It echoed the wincing noise of the grave yard gate and began to swing with a resistance in its arc, no doubt from the hinges, as if pushing back to shut me out. I lent my shoulder into it, not that this provided a great deal more force, and it opened. I stepped into a thick and heady scent of damp. From the bright warmth of the afternoon, it was as cold and dark as an underground pool. I closed the door behind me, which swung eagerly shut on its return, concluding with a final clang of bolt on lock.",[11,462,463],{},"The floor was of grey slab, not long enough in place to be worn smooth. My brogue made an echoing clack as I walked. As is my usual practice I selected a pew at the back of the nave to sit on. These were grim things of dark wood, tightly packed and so narrow that my knees were painfully pressed into the back of the one in front, and I am not the tallest of men. The whole interior was extremely low in design. The walls were puritanically whitewashed, the altar was a stone block draped in a sparse white cloth. Without any plate or dressing you felt the full force of the sacrifice supposedly performed there. There was no side chapel off either aisle and the organ was drab and small. Neither was there any information board with church histories and leaflets for sale, nor adverts for charitable ventures or even an appeal to give what you could to save the roof. There was a small wooden box, apparently for donations, but no suggested amount or reminder of what it cost to keep the place open each day. As I think back over my initial minutes in the church, weighing each of my moves to find the Rubicon which I could not have crossed back over, I think it was the unaccommodating plainness of the place that caused me to linger. Although it was of no real antiquity, there was nothing to suggest any time had passed since its construction. Once you were inside, it gave no inkling of the present, one passed into a time where church going was like getting dressed, obligatory if you wanted to play any social role at all.",[11,465,466],{},"The total absence of ornament made the church into a kind of monastic cell, a rocky hermitage chosen to focus the attention onto God alone, to banish by pain and plainness all worldly thought. The illusion that the 19th century had lingered on was strengthened by the sconces that sat in every window and were set into the wall at intervals. There were the fag ends of candles and stalactite-esque formations of wax from frequent and recent use. Some standing electric lights made a brief concession to modernity, but these cast only a pale and invalid gloom. One sputtered and blinked pathetically as I watched. I stood up from my pew and walked up the north aisle with my soles artificially loud in the silence. I thought I would see what the peripatetic vicar had holding forth on recently, and took an order of service from a pew as I passed. The folded leaflet informed me that the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity had just come, and the lessons chosen were from Job, Jeremiah and Luke. I made it to the lectern which was plain and pared down in design as expected. I thought I would read a little from the oversized bible that lay weightily shut upon it. It was interspersed with bookmarks of a sort of black leather, close to a vellum. When I removed one I was left with a perfect thumbprint of fine black dust. The page was from the first book of Samuel, someone had been clearly doing a little bible study of their own. My eye fell on the following verse:",[11,468,469],{},"“And he said unto her,",[11,471,472],{},"What form is he of?",[11,474,475],{},"And she said,",[11,477,478],{},"An old man cometh up;",[11,480,481],{},"  and he is covered with a mantle.”",[11,483,484,485,488],{},"With an empty church as my audience and no chance of reply, I couldn’t resist a reading. My shyness is stippled with a pompous strain. I gave something of the firebrand to my rendition and ended rather forcefully on “",[97,486,487],{},"mantle","”, blasting the word out with more volume than I had intended. Rather than a dismal acoustic that would have been in keeping with the character of the church, my words echoed lengthily around the nave and chancel. I stopped in a ridiculous pose with one ear slanted towards the ceiling, in an exaggerated attitude of listening, as the sound finally faded. On the final echo, I caught a curious note, like a thin laugh which faded like waning gust. It must have accompanied my echo and only just outlasted it. I thought the sound came from behind me. It’s tone it was dry and thwarted, as if made by vocal organs long unused for this purpose. I was in the process of turning around to assure myself that the church was still empty, when the obvious sound of sobbing came from a door I had not noticed in my survey. This had my attention immediately and the laugh, imagined or not, was forgotten. The door from which this wretched sound came, was set into the western wall under the tower. It stood slightly ajar. I felt a surge of embarrassment that my ridiculous reading at the lectern had been overheard. Perhaps the noise coming from behind the door meant that I had been taken as a burglar or vandal. I took the steps over floor of the church at some speed, my feet clopping like a hurrying doctor marching down their corridors. I was desperate to apologise for my noisy intrusion. As I tried to find a suitable form of words I began to pant heavily despite the shortness of the distance. Retirement has brought me both mental and physical expansion. The sound of approaching feet and stertorous breath seemed to provoke a rise in both the pitch and vehemence of weeping so that I came to the door sweating heavily and in a paroxysm of embarrassment. I knocked ridiculously, stuck outside like a servant or a penitent child, while the wailing continued within. The fire paint on the door had peeled with the damp and stuck to my knuckles, showing patches of long corroded wood beneath. This gave off strongly the wet sour smell released by kicking over a fallen log. My knock brought no reply only a loud “oh god!” in a terrified voice, which I thought was probably a woman’s. This was no euphemistic replacement of an obscenity, her address to god was a personal, direct call to an existing thing. If I recall my Latin rightly, one would have said that it was in the vocative case. This dolorous and abject call must have pronounced with the same intensity of belief by martyred Christians in the arena in their final moments. Chivalry has long been aspiration of mine, kept unrealised by cowardice, but I had to take some action now, and so stuck only my head around the door.",[11,490,491,492,495],{},"This was an absurd gesture, and I had opened my mouth to begin grovelling but quickly shut again as I had managed to provoke a desperate shriek from the woman of about sixty, whom I saw to be the origin of the noise. She was dressed in vestments and was positioned in the corner of the small room in the archetypal attitude of prayer. She knelt on the plain stones, which must have been both cold and painful unless her joints were in much finer condition than mine. Behind her was an armchair, which for some reason she had eschewed. Her hands were clasped in front or her with a simple wooden crucifix held between them. This was attached around her neck with a bare string. She quite literally wrung her hands, trying to squeeze some protective or apotropaic relief from the wood. Either that or they trembled so violently as to give the same effect. Her eyes were not just shut but clamped bitterly together, so that her whole brow was disfigured with line and tension, as if what might be approaching should be denied the slightest chance of apparition by any means. In a racing voice she spoke to herself ",[97,493,494],{},"sotto voce",", reciting I think the twenty third psalm. It was a rendition closer to a spell or incantation than I have ever heard.",[11,497,498],{},"“The lord is my shepherd I shall not want,",[11,500,501],{},"  he maketh me to lie down.",[11,503,504],{},"He restoreth my soul,",[11,506,507],{},"he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness.",[11,509,510],{},"He prepareth a table for me in the presence of my enemies,",[11,512,513],{},"he annointeth my head with oil-“",[11,515,516],{},"I had to say something to bring her out of this distressing state.",[11,518,519],{},"“My goodness I’m so sorry I thought the place was deserted” I said.",[11,521,522],{},"My tone was rather prissy, exculpatory, I was making excuses rather than an apology. I have never been able to find a soothing tone, a consoling mode. It is not a question of empathy. I was quite aware of the fear this woman was feeling and was mortified at having so clearly been its cause. It is warmth that I struggle to produce. I can manage the appropriate string of apologetic words, but completely without the concern or care needed when faced with discomfort. I find also that I tend to revert to an outmoded diction with strangers. In part I think I am attempting to convey a superiority, an intellectual quality, a distinction of breeding and origin, but the largest factor I think is a fear of being thought a fool. Or rather, without this posture of refined, affected thoughtfulness, what else is it that I have? What could they possibly find in me of any note? You will note that self-criticism is a strength while self-correction is not. I lack the necessaries. The point I am seeking to make is that my words were entirely unfit for the occasion. However, when she heard my voice, my weak home counties tones, I like to think she was quickly assured that I was unlikely to mean her deliberate ill. In any case the wailing and gnashing of teeth abated. Instead, she gave a series of shallow, whimpering breaths that often mark the end of a heavy bout of crying. Crying is something I’ve a history with. I’ve been in the crying business a long time. Boarding school with its feral tormentors, parents distant and then abruptly dead. All of this was unoriginal in its particulars or its effect. Crying and me, we grew up together. I knew then that she had left the maelstrom and were heading for choppy but calmer water. The compression of the brows needed to force her eyes closed began to give. I thought of a newborn mewling thing preparing to open them for the first time while unsure of the technique. They opened. They Her eyes were of amber brown colour, rather like an owl or falcon, and they were light and sharp in their movement, and lambent with salt drops and a residual fierceness. There was Ithink, an understandable anger at being made so afraid. She blinked and took me in, summed me up as an object of terror. There was a hesitant relief.",[11,524,525],{},"“I’m so sorry to have startled you, I just came in to have a look and- are you alright?” I should have started with that basic inquiry.",[11,527,528],{},"She spoke “I’m, you are-yes I’m alright” and then she added a slightly defensive “thank you.”",[11,530,531],{},"These were aimless and embarrassed thanks. She kept looking at me all the while, blinking away the tears as quickly as she could as if not wanting to lose sight of me. She dug an execrable handkerchief from the pocket of her cassock. I saw that the black fabric of her vestment was decked in many polychrome and richly textured stains. She blew with a raucous and productive effort, and looked at me with the look of someone waking from a concussion or coming round from a delusion, who is struggling to reconcile the dissonance between an inner and outer reality. She rocked forward to gain the momentum to rise from her knees. She sharply as she did so and massaged at her right hip with her hand. I stepped forward to help her.",[11,533,534],{},"  “oh do you need a-let me”",[11,536,537],{},"Reluctantly, compelled by the pain, she took hold my hands and I pulled her upright. We stood there, inclined towards each other in a nearly amorous attitude. I was hunched with effort and she by protesting joints. In the motion of getting her to her feet, and for seconds longer that I thought necessary to get her balance, she squeezed tightly at my wrists, gripped, released and gripped again, trying to confirm, I now realise, that I was safely corporeal.",[11,539,540],{},"She took some heavy, settling breaths.",[11,542,543],{},"“Are you sure you are alright? I really didn’t-“",[11,545,546],{},"“I’m quite alright thank you” she cut me off sharply, as if wanting to establish herself as a person of sound mind and managed emotions.",[11,548,549],{},"  “You don’t need to apologise, I reacted very foolishly.”",[11,551,552],{},"There was some self-recrimination in her voice, and this is a tone I am familiar with. She stopped here without further comment. There was a hiatus where you would have expected a fulsome explanation of why it was in my entrance and admittedly pretentious reading had precipitated such a torrent of fear. Her eyes which had been so fixed on mine were now intent on my feet.",[11,554,555],{},"“No you weren’t foolish at all” I tried to protest “And really I am terribly sorry”",[11,557,558],{},"She cut in a little too quickly “It’s just we had had some burglars,  and they, well they broke some things and caused a lot of damage. We had to involve the police. I thought you might have been them coming back”",[11,560,561],{},"I had the impression both that she was lying and that she wasn’t used to doing so. Burglars are not normally prone to readings from the book of Samuel. She spoke a little too haltingly, as if adding information on the fly.",[11,563,564],{},"“Oh that’s awful. Is nothing sacred these days!” I couldn’t get enough sincerity into this cliché and she looked at me sharply for any mockery.",[11,566,567],{},"“Were you hurt at all? by these vandals I mean?”",[11,569,570],{},"She shook her head. “No no I wasn’t here. But I thought they might have come back, you hear stories.”",[11,572,573],{},"“Yes I understand perfectly” I said untruthfully.",[11,575,576],{},"She looked at me with the slightly startled look of the liar who thinks they will be caught out. She smiled, I think to reassure me, but in a stillborn sort of way that didn’t reach anywhere near her eyes. She was on her way to unhealthily thin. Her cassock hung shapelessly like a monastic habit. Her hair was tied back into a perfunctory bun and didn’t look like it had seen a brush for some time. The corners of her eyes were so lined with the deeply cut and crazily arranged trench system you usually see in the heavy drinker or smoker. Unlikely but not impossible in this case I thought.",[11,578,579],{},"“Is there anyone I could call for you? Are you feeling better?”",[11,581,582],{},"She looked at me now a with a little mocking sadness",[11,584,585],{},"“Thank you there is no one you could call, but I am feeling better. I’ll be alright.” She had a crisply factual voice with a very slight trace of the local accent. I tried a smile and said",[11,587,588],{},"“Well I won’t impose on you, if you are feeling better, I should get back in the light, headlights on the blink, and again I am really very sorry to have frightened you”",[11,590,591],{},"As I was saying this, she broke eye contact several times to look towards the open door, out into the body of the church. There were in fact several loud creaks as if some weight was being placed or removed from one of the pews, habitual sounds in an old building such as this one.",[11,593,594],{},"She rather jumped on me with “Oh but won’t you stay for some tea? I have some biscuits somewhere here too”",[11,596,597],{},"She moved quickly across the room and began to ferret around a in chaotic corner of dirty mugs, saucers and mauled packets of biscuits, all centred round a dented kettle. Through its measuring window rich deposits of limescale were visible, as it if it had been used to boil some chemical solution. As she did this she looked back over her shoulder at me several times, smiling but with a lingering trace of her former fear, waiting for my answer, her hands pulling items onto a tray as she did so.She aimed to make my ascent inevitable through her preparation for it being given.",[11,599,600],{},"“No that’s very kind but I won’t impose on you, I should start making tracks.” I am indeed averse to driving in the dark, but more truthfully, I had no great desire to spend much more time with this woman who had exhibited what could have easily been madness.",[11,602,603],{},"She turned to face me. Her arms fell limply to her slides. The consuming fear, provoked for some reason by being along in the church, had returned. She looked past me again towards the open door and chewed savagely at her lip as if masochistically testing some ulcerous part. I saw them that her lips were badly chapped and bled at various points. There were marks around her neck which appears to be the result of fingernails. Her hands were scabrous and patched with livid red, as if from constant itching. This was a woman, not overcome with a passing fit of fright, but one who lived in a state of habitual terror . This seemed like a more likely explanation for her outburst, her appearance and the state of the room. On each of the four wall there were crucifixes of every size. They were all plain, without the sagging figure of Christ, just a simple wooden cross. There must have been over fifty of the things. The room itself was a small rectangle. I had entered through one of the short sides. Set into the other short side was a door which was also open, and gave onto a bedroom. This was clearly a manse or living attached to the church. In the room we stood in there was a desk along one side with the disordered tea things at one end, while the other was swamped in a mess of papers. In the corner of the other long wall was the collapsed armchair which she had been kneeling in front of. On either arm was a crucifix, the bottom portion of the uprights polished and shining, worn from constant contact with the skin. She was clearly a woman of great, or extreme piety, on the fringe of religious mania if not already there. But there was something in her manner, in the way she spoke once she had collected herself, which was too well formed to support this diagnosis.",[11,605,606],{},"“Please, look, I’ve had a bad shock, you wouldn’t be imposing at all. I feel a little faint, if you could stay with me little while. Please stay”",[11,608,609],{},"There was such dejection, such entreaty in her final words that I began to waiver. ",[11,611,612],{},"“Oh my name is Judith” She added, a little more brightly, trying to form a bond with me to force my hand, like the hostage trying to garner sympathy with their captor.",[11,614,615],{},"A good Christian name I thought, as I shook her optimistic hand. Like her garments the fingers were mottled with varied stains. It trembled noticeably on its way towards me and clung clammily at mine.",[11,617,618],{},"“Jonathan” I replied.",[11,620,621],{},"The state of her living indicated that visitors were as sparse as her congregation. Now that she had recovered from her shock she was either keen to make conversation when she had the chance, or to demonstrate that she was saner than suggested so far. I hadn’t the heart or courage to refuse again, and I had done sufficient stints with aging relatives in their dotage. I could spare thirty minutes.",[11,623,624],{},"I found myself saying",[11,626,627],{},"“Well I could stay for a short while until you are feeling better”",[11,629,630],{},"I smiled at her as I spoke, and saw a look of consuming relief pass briefly over her face, tempered then by an attempt to conceal her too obvious emotion, and then swamped again by her cares, as she glanced out into the church.",[11,632,633],{},"I said “do let me sort out the tea, you sit down”",[11,635,636],{},"To which she replied with a vague “well, yes”",[11,638,639],{},"She positioned herself awkwardly in the armchair. Automatically she began to trace the outline of one of the crosses as she sat, her knee jogging at speed. She was an archetype of absent distraction. I boiled the kettle and inspected two of the few mugs still sporting handles. They were caked with a dense brown residue that only lifted with deliberate scrubbing. I filled the sink with hot water and coaxed the dregs of some dish soap out of its crumpled bottle. Not wanting to draw too much attention to my remedial cleaning, although she seemed absorbed entirely in staring out into church, I asked",[11,641,642],{},"“How long have you been here then Judith?”",[11,644,645],{},"“I’ve been the vicar here for ten, no eleven, years now” there was a pensive hardness to her tone. She spoke as this was a place she had been marooned in. She caught herself and gave me a weak tea smile “eleven years, how time flies.”",[11,647,648],{},"And then, with a collaborating intimacy that was entirely new to our conversation, and something approaching a true smile, said “Why is it seem to speak of the flow of time, its unrecoverable loss, in trite banalities like “how time flies” or “they grew up so fast.” These are desperate phrase don’t you think? We have a need to say to the other person “I’m suffering too! I’m dying too!”",[11,650,651],{},"There was none of the abject terror now. Her speech and thought was too considered for for a mad woman. I frowned slightly and rifled around for a quotation, as I often do when I have nothing much to say",[11,653,654],{},"“The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”",[11,656,657],{},"With another smile she followed on with the lines",[11,659,660],{},"“Nor all thy piety nor wit, shall lure it back to cancel half a line, or all thy tears wash out a word of it.”",[11,662,663],{},"I had the combined sensations of annoyance at finding my quotation to be less recondite than I had reckoned, and intrigue as to quite who it was I was speaking with. She no longer seemed either fanatically pious or to be kicking her legs over the brink of madness. There was clearly a mental acuity that was belied by her recent collapse.  Making it all the more concerning and harder to parse. The kettle had reached a dull boil and I added hot water and then tea bags to the old metal tea pot I had recovered from under a cereal packet.",[11,665,666],{},"“Ah you like your Khayyam then?” I asked, fatuously, trying to conceal a snobbish irritation to which I am prone.",[11,668,669],{},"“English literature degree, for my sins, Durham. I don’t get much of a chance to read these days.” Her vacant sadness returned for the final phrase. The only books on her shelf were various editions of the bible. I sifted through the several open packets of biscuits, discarding several softening specimens and positioned them the only plate that was not missing significant portions of its circle.",[11,671,672],{},"“Ah well you must be kept busy with your work, I saw from the porch that you only have one service a month, do you minister to the other churches in the area too?”",[11,674,675],{},"“Yes, I do St Ebbes, St James and Mary the Virgin as well, umm, so I do one each Sunday on rotation. We simply don’t have the congregation or indeed the priests to run regular services at each.”",[11,677,678],{},"I replied with genuine feeling. I am not a believer, but I have what you could call Anglican sympathies. The god in which I do not believe is that of the Church of England. With each church that can no longer draw enough parishioners for even a monthly service, or with each that is sold for novelty flats, or horror of horrors as a bar, that is one less location for me to satisfy my hobby.",[11,680,681],{},"“Ah yes it must be very hard for you with falling church attendance. You would face the same problem all over the country I should think, but more acutely in somewhere as rural as this. Such a loss for a local community when a church must close, or sits around locked up all week.”",[11,683,684],{},"She paused for a moment before making any reply. This took a little longer that you would likely need to consider the substance of what I said, as it was neither particularly interesting or particularly original. She traced once more the outline of the crucifix on the arm of the chair.",[11,686,687],{},"“You are right of course. God is not particularly fashionable these days, and the flock is dwindling all over the country.Many churches are simply forced to close.” I was prepared for a lament on the godless times in which we lived but this wasn’t forthcoming. She looked at me very seriously with those hawkish eyes that were intent and careful, and then spoke faster than she had before, as if not quite trusting herself to finish.",[11,689,690],{},"“This church, has never been popular with its priest or parishioners. In the other three I can draw enough to justify making the visit one Sunday each month. Here I have no congregation at all. There perhaps are one or two, the very pious and elderly, who force themselves with the help of god to sit through his-” There were tears her eyes now, she sobbed as she took a breath, bracing herself for the word that followed, and taking a grip on both crucifixes “-his devilry.” Her use of “devilry” was literal. It recalled a wall painting illuminating the torments of hell for the gawping peasantry. I think this perhaps was the first time she had given this account, at least to a stranger. Delusion hadn’t been far from the mark as a diagnosis, and I couldn’t hide a half curious smile. Content that my initial judgement had been the correct one, I tried to look sufficiently credulous.",[11,692,693],{},"“But no-one can stand it for long, he tries to stop, he tries to stop the liturgy-“ She gave way to convulsive sobs. She was bent double in her chair as if wracked with stomach pains, the crucifixes forgotten she had both hands over her eyes, stopping her sight. Throughout our conversation I had been sat on the edge of the table along the other side of the room. Now I lent hesitantly towards her and placed a useless hand on her shoulder. There was a concentrated scent as I did so, the importunate animal odour of the habitually unwashed. The top of her scalp showed a growing patch of baldness and a liberal carpet of seborrheic flakes, pasty white against the grey of her hair. She clasped at my hand; she massaged the bones and flesh. It was then I heard a swishing sound from inside the church. It was like the wind at a broken pane, or the fingers of a neighbouring tree dragging against the clerestory. Or perhaps the sound of vestments moving over a stone floor. I had then the first sense not of fear, but of the disconcerting strangeness of my position, this strange church which had maddened its incumbent. Her grip on my hand became desperate. She said, in a voice that was childlike in its complete loss of resolve, in its total fear",[11,695,696,697,457],{},"  “",[97,698,699],{},"He’s here",[11,701,702],{},"“Who is here?” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. The clear signs of delusion or possible psychosis in her speech, set against the falling light outside the church were not making me feel easy. There were two onyx lamps on her desk which provided the only illumination in her room, and outside of their ambit a deep shadow waxed.",[11,704,705],{},"She looked at me, there was no trace of either education or piety in her face, but a blank horror. In a whispering voice she said",[11,707,708],{},"“He’s buried in the yard, but he hasn’t left, he never left, he was the priest here, a fallen priest. It’s at dusk when it’s worse, in the dark”",[11,710,711],{},"This was now a matter for a professional. I had firstly to try and calm her down, and then to call someone to come and collect her. This was presumably not her first episode given the state of her room, and a doctor or friend would have a much better grasp of what to do than I. I forced what was probably not a very reassuring smile and said clearly and at half speed",[11,713,714],{},"“You mean you think the burglars might have come back? We would have heard the door open if anyone had come into the church, so I don’t think you need to worry. Would you feel better if we closed the door? Is there anyone I could call for you?”",[11,716,717],{},"She shook her head, so tensely it was more like a spasm and still gripping me like a child at the gate of a detested school and said in the same tone",[11,719,720],{},"“I have to be able to see. He waits, he waits at the door. I must know where he is, so I can make it over the nave and out of the porch before he comes. He is weaker outside in the yard. No one can help, there is no help. They would think I was mad.”",[11,722,723,724,457],{},"I had to use both hands to extricate myself from her grip. She took hold of both crucifixes again and fell into a mumbled prayer. I think she was repeating the words of Christ at Golgotha “",[97,725,726],{},"father, why hast though forsaken me",[11,728,729],{},"I spoke again in the exaggerated manner used for the elderly and infirm",[11,731,732],{},"  “I’m just going to look around the church to make sure no-one is there and then I’ll get someone to help you.”",[11,734,735],{},"I wanted to be away from her company so as to consider my options. She seemed to be beyond hearing now, although I’m not sure she didn’t laugh, a desperate empty laugh, when I said I would look in the church itself.",[11,737,738],{},"The door stood open. I walked out into the nave, my soles echoing with uncomfortable volume into the empty space. It was approaching five o’clock and the light had almost failed. I was walking down the aisle towards the altar when I became of a whispering sound that seemed to both fill the building and to be directed into my ears. It was rasping and weak, and cycled over and over between a question and a horribly malevolent and disdainful laugh. The question was from some judge or interrogator,",[11,740,741],{},"“does your office of priest mean nothing to you?”",[11,743,744],{},"Then two things happened which caused me stop utterly still before the chancel. Two candle sticks arranged on the altar fell at the same time and at the same angle onto the floor with a enormous clang. The bible still open on the lectern slammed shut. I stood there in dumb panic, trying to place this into a plausible sequence of cause and effect. At that moment, I was conscious of something pushing past me at speed, which caused me stumble in a half turn back towards Judith’s rooms. As I turned, I had a brief but indelible image, like a flash of a light bulb in a darkened room, of a cowled deaths head which turned to stare at me as it passed, the flesh all but stripped to the bone, the lip curled into a vicious leer, and a blast of carious breath into my mouth. I ran. My feet had started to carry my before I had paused to think. Or that is what I try to convince myself of. I stopped only once at the door. I looked back. Judith’s door was open only partially, her weight clearly thrown behind it. On the other side of the door billowed a mass of torn robes, horribly thin limbs of greater number than could belong to any man were thrown around the crack of the door and grasped at her on the other side.",[11,746,747],{},"I drove desperately. I thought of calling the police, but to report what exactly? I called the ambulance to report a woman having a mental breakdown but of course I have no idea what result that came to. I assume they arrived two hours later and if she lived, they were met with feigned surprise. No further action possible would be recorded on some distant file. She was a woman caught between faith and horror, unable to abandon her church but tormented every night she spent there, with no ministry to perform, no congregation to shepherd. I think of her often at her desperate prayers, tracing and tracing again the lines of her crucifixes, wondering why she has been abandoned by her god.",{"title":66,"searchDepth":67,"depth":67,"links":749},[],"Even for the hopeless enthusiast, the collector that chases after churches like butterflies for his pinboard, this was not an inviting specimen. ",{},"\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-incumbents",{"title":754,"description":750},"The Incumbents file","stories\u002Fthe-incumbents",[250],"bguVyPA_u-fpRcbq6Rv7PPvjrsZfMe93Pi3Z_8OfibE",{"id":759,"title":760,"body":761,"date":242,"description":988,"edited":242,"extension":72,"meta":989,"navigation":74,"path":990,"seo":991,"stem":993,"tags":994,"__hash__":995},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-little-man-in-the-velveteen-jacket.md","The Little Man in the Velveteen Jacket",{"type":8,"value":762,"toc":986},[763,767,770,773,785,800,807,810,817,827,857,868,871,874,877,880,883,886,889,892,895,908,913,922,927,932,937,942,947,956,961,966,971,976,981],[88,764,766],{"id":765},"the-little-man-in-the-velveteen-jacket-an-incident","The Little Man in the Velveteen Jacket-An Incident ",[11,768,769],{},"Mr Farley paused and looked back down the slowly falling hillocks over which he had walked. He enjoyed the slight pant of his breathing, proof of his effort. With he applied his handkerchief to a rolling bead of sweat, in repeated, rather pedantic movements. He inspected the linen as if expecting the residue to be of some unusual colour. He folded and smoothed his handkerchief, before neatly placing it into his top pocket with a lozenge shaped tail left poking out. He took some deep inhales through his nose to recover his wind, and rounded his lips rather on the exhale, as if about to whistle. Farley was an unfit but enthusiastic walker of about 45, with a promising paunch.   Placing both hands over the crook of his walking stick he lent his head at an angle and stared, like a child at the end of the school day, lulled by their teacher’s golden words.",[11,771,772],{},"He saw the green shock of trees at the foot of the valley. He traced the gentle progress of the path which led to the cottage where he was holidaying and followed its contour over the curves and folds leading to his present spot. The temperate hours of the morning had been spent in measured ascents and declines as he made his way over the dales. Behind him, and he was postponing the delicious moment when he clapped his hands and pressed on into its depths, was the mouth of a large cave, teeming with geological promise, which had been the purpose and goal of his journey. The great orifice beckoned, as the ruddy gums and lapidary teeth of a favourite patient summon a cooing dentist. Sun beams glinted on the back wall, whisking up thoughts of obscure and delectable minerals. Perhaps even a “Farleyorum.” A footnote in the textbooks edged itself in his imagination. Needed some work certainly, certainly it did, but it would do.",[11,774,775,776,780,781,784],{},"He would postpone his afternoon’s pleasure a little longer and savour it all the more when it came. Refreshing his brow with his handkerchief one more, Farley eyed a small and conveniently placed depression, with a gently sloping rock on one side to stand in for a table. Geology had provided again! This would be the ideal spot for the consumption of sandwiches, cake and tea. It would also provide shelter from the wind, which blew sporadically but cold, in spite of the midday warmth. Leaning his stick against a small boulder, Farley squatted to interrogate the contents of his rucksack, his recalcitrant knees saluting he did so, and his back registering its standing twinge. Nestled preciously on top of his navy pullover was a small geological hammer in a calves’ leather case. The red-brown wood of the handle was richly oiled and the head thoroughly polished. It would not be untrue to say he loved this hammer: he venerated it as a cherished ikon of quiet study. It gave Farley a frisson of thrilling pleasure to take it from its case, to test with a surgically clipped thumb nail, the bite of it’s He patted it gently and moved on. Wrapped tightly in brown paper were Eccles cakes, beef sandwiches spread generously with horseradish and in a flask, earl grey with a suspicion of scotch. These were the lunch items of a man with mild scholarly manners but with none of the timorous or fussy elements that might have stemmed from an abiding interest in old rocks. The same held for his clothes. His trousers were of Harris tweed, still gently redolent of peat from his fire. The leather of his boots was waxed to a high sheen and laced tightly with draftsman’s precision. The socks were thick and deeply green with a bold weave. Socks of the type which many a hardy chap had pulled up before summiting some jagged crag or setting off from a remote camp. The shirt was so crisply tucked as to look freshly laundered despite the walk, and the jacket teemed with pens, pockets, sweets, and oddments. In this array practicality was deftly courted by questions of taste and tone, one could tell from a perfunctory glance this man was an amateur in the finest English tradition. Other items included a geological guide to the region, committed largely to memory but brought along to propitiate charges of hubris. But most significantly for this episode was a tenderly thumbed copy of “The lives and sayings of Filber Crane",[777,778,779],"span",{},"[1"," ], Geological Anthropologist and man of genius ",[777,782,783],{},"[2"," ].”",[11,786,787,788,791,792,795,796,799],{},"Rising with rucksack in hand Mr Farley trotted swiftly down into the depression with a few short steps. He removed his lunch items and arranged himself with back and head against the slope of the declivity and with one leg drawn up against the other. Supine and composed he began on his lunch in a manner neither languid or rushing, neither indecently savouring or drily neglectful. By god that man knew how to eat a sandwich, a real joy to watch, crust held gently between thumb and forefinger as molar, canine and incisor leapt and darted in their merry dance. A polished performance from start to finish, not a crumb displaced. Masticating gently upon asoupçon of Eccles cake, the rich perfume of tea and finest Islay curled upwards, the perfect marriage of occident and orient. Farley opened his copy of Crane to glean some pithy apothegm or salutary maxim as was his mealtime wont. ",[777,789,790],{},"[3"," ] What precisely Crane had meant by “Geological Anthropologist” is a matter which standing pools of ink have long been spilt. The arresting and somewhat disturbing conclusion which scholars of the “vivarary” school have come to is that Crane had regarded geological formations as possessing a social life. That is to say they were, in some admittedly opaque sense, alive. The other school hold that Crane was a craven huckster and simpering cretin, and loudly berated the “vivarary” crowd for wasting time on so clear a wool puller. Such are the dark clouds which befog on occasion the dreaming spires of the academy. ",[97,793,794],{},"Sic transit gloria mundi",". They point with great fervour to the passage of “the lives and sayings” in which Crane describes in reverent and theosophical tones his “road to Damascus” moment regarding his theories. Having consumed four or five bottles of Bordeaux Crane had taken a nighttime perambulation to a particularly beloved cave system. Many an hour had been spent here declaiming his own verses loudly and at length and Crane had taken the step of installing a trouser-press, mangle and bathtub therein. ",[777,797,798],{},"[4"," ] Working himself up into towering passion of the muse he leapt towards the ceiling and was struck soundly on the head by a heavy stalactite-",[11,801,802,803,806],{},"“On awaking I saw with new eyes the mouths and limbs which protruded from the nude elemental rock, I danced and conversed in the language of ages with my igneous brethren, I carolled with granite and cavorted with quartz I drank deep from the delights of the seam.”",[777,804,805],{},"[5"," ]",[11,808,809],{},"It continues at length in this vein. Needless to say, critics of Crane read this as a clear account of petty drunkenness, deserved brain injury and resulting mania and find the whole passage rather sordid and disturbing. One struggles to find fault with this analysis.",[11,811,812,813,816],{},"Anyhow this is neither here nor there but perhaps more there than here so we shall leap back to Farley. The passage of Crane which struck his roving eye was from the controversial and recondite passage on the religious beliefs of metamorphic rocks. “The prevalence of mole hills in proximity to rocks invites, nay proclaims, that the mole enjoys the status of totem or deity in the metamorphic polity.”",[777,814,815],{},"[6"," ] Crane continues-",[11,818,819,820,823,824,806],{},"“I have it firsthand from a sagacious lump of Carrara marble, interviewed in a Naples taverna with classical pretentions, that the mole is known as the “little man in the velveteen jacket” by the priestly and aristocratic class of metamorphics. The etymology stems from a lay belief that moles skin their dead and wear the pelts as a winter coat.",[777,821,822],{},"[7"," ] His cardinal attributes are the trinity of pipe, porter glass and fez, and he is called on to bring fecundity to barren crags and as an apotropaic deity invoked against the crawling threat of lichen. Reciprocal offerings known as ‘emolements’ are placed into the proffered pipe and glass of small mole statues which litter the caverns of the pious.” ",[777,825,826],{},"[8",[11,828,829,830,833,834,837,838,841,842,845,846,849,850,853,854,806],{},"Mr Farley digested this passage ruminatively. He had discovered the writings of Crane in his early youth during a series of seaside holidays with his late grandmother. Perhaps inevitably he had formed something of an emotional attachment to the texts. Of course, Crane’s suggestion that conversational relationships with rocks could be attained was of obvious interest to the budding geologist",[777,831,832],{},"[9"," ]. Crane insists that ‘foliation’, the formation of metamorphic rocks into layers, betrays itself through its nomenclature as the sister process of the generation of new leaves and shrubs. Rocks sit somewhere below trees, trees below animates, ",[97,835,836],{},"ispo facto"," rocks have the quality of ‘dilute intelligibility’. ",[777,839,840],{},"[10"," ] He interposed a new taxonomic kingdom of “",[97,843,844],{},"minerata",".” This was the seminal moment with sparked his career long study of the social lives of rocks and was his stated justification for conducting thousands of “field interviews” with geological formations. ",[777,847,848],{},"[11"," ]   Like many a staunch believer Farley’s personal failure to verify, observe or replicate any of Crane’s theories or experiments was no great deterrence, he merely put it down to disparity of genius between acolyte and master. ",[777,851,852],{},"[12"," ] God knows Farley had spent many an hour, megaphone to his straining lips and wireless receiver clasped in his clammy hand, interrogating stubbornly inarticulate boulders throughout the Northern counties. One can perhaps then begin imagine in some timid way the emotions of Mr Farley, when as he lowered his copy of Crane to chew his lip deliberatively,   a mole clad in a finely cut velvet jacket of lush burgundy hue, yawned loudly and stepped out from behind a small rock some two feet in front of him, at the very centre of the depression. But it would be too much to even seek to dream of the thoughts which burst across his brain as he wonderingly took in several details which precisely replicated the passage of Crane. The mole wore a richly patterned fez and held in one set of claws a softly smoking pipe. With the other he delicately wiped from his snout the cream left by a long draw on his pint of porter. ",[777,855,856],{},"[13",[11,858,859,860,863,864,867],{},"Mr Farley gulped ominously. The mole eyed him languidly. Farley, eyes nailed to the mole, sought succour from the scotch and tea, holding the flask in shuddering hands.",[777,861,862],{},"[14"," ] The mole drained his porter with aplomb, placed his glass behind the rock and drew on the pipe,   fixing Farley with profoundly brown eyes. The pipe drew with a sizzle and he blew from his snout two tight coils of smoke vertically downwards. The mole reached behind the rock and removed a now full porter glass, Farley struggled down another gulp, his trachea appeared to be contracting at pace. Crane’s words made flesh, porter, pipe, apparent provision of emolements. ",[777,865,866],{},"[15"," ] The mole held his glass aloft and half sang-",[11,869,870],{},"“Mrs Port-er and her daught-er they wash their feet in sodah wat-er” Fan of the old T.S.E? Fan of the old Eliot? The Wasteland eh? Just the stuff, just the stuff. Mrs Porter. If Porter was a Mrs, I should marry her. Marriage made in heaven. Seraphic stuff this porter, gratis for moles, a granite gratuity hahaha! Pretty good, pretty good, pretty good.”",[11,872,873],{},"Farley managed something like a grimace, he scrabbled inside his head for some glint of a precedent or experience which might avail him now. His brain was unapologetically vacant. The mole eyed him expectantly. No answer came. The mole sighed and took another singeing drag on his pipe. As he exhaled no smoke left his snout. Rather two circling helices of the stuff rose from under the fez and propelled it rapidly aloft to a height of some meters, very quickly, then slower, then it stopped and the smoke whisked away, the fez falling precisely back onto the moles head. Mr Farley turned sallow, then really quite grey, then he adopted the pallor of a man recently exhumed.",[11,875,876],{},"He managed quietly but desperately to say,",[11,878,879],{},"“if you do something like that again I shall probably be ill.”",[11,881,882],{},"The mole winked as if acknowledging a common objection and smoked his pipe snoutwards as before.",[11,884,885],{},"Farley realised he was still lying down; this did not seem like the appropriate position to deal with the apparition of a talking mole. Equally assuming the vertical would have required the cooperation of nerves, sinew, and tendons all of which seemed to be suffering from an out of body experience. He felt he really should address the situation immediately before things got further out of hand. Farley began to form an exclamation relating to the statistical likelihood of his meeting a talking mole. He then considered doubting out loud the believability of his senses and the soundness of his mind. Perhaps he could manage a comment on how even he, devoted disciple, had find not a glimmer of corroboration for any of Crane’s theories ever before. But then given that the mole had not only talked, but quoted T.S. Eliot, not only stood before him, but did so in a snappily tailored velvet jacket, not only suggested Crane but mirrored him in every aspect rendered these theoretical objections somewhat insufficient.",[11,887,888],{},"  Questions or objections paled in the face of the pipe trick. Farley ran. The mole sighed the sigh of a man who is disappointed,   but not exactly surprised,   and meditatively raised his glass of porter up to the sunlight.",[11,890,891],{},"--- Unknown node: hardBreak ---",[893,894],"hr",{},[11,896,897,899,900,903,904,907],{},[777,898,779],{}," ] Self-published by Crane, errant use of capitalisation reflects the title of the text as produced. Those critical of Crane have fulminated at length on his self-categorisation as a genius. Those who knew Crane at his preparatory school said he was so fantastically poor at books and games that the headmistress refused to included him the school photograph, substituting a straw doll instead. His English mistress provided the following account to the Lancashire evening star: “After one assignment, I asked Crane whether the dog had in fact ",[97,901,902],{},"done"," his homework, so poor was his submission in conception and design, rather than having ",[97,905,906],{},"eaten"," his homework, as he had told me the last five weeks on the trot. He told me calmy he didn’t have a dog. I began to pretend he was invisible from then on, which suited us both very well.”",[11,909,910,912],{},[777,911,783],{}," ] What on Jehovas’ merry green orb he sought so suggest by the use of ‘lives’ in the plural is best left entirely unexplored in the view of this author. Those unfamiliar with Crane’s academic reputation should note that he is the only man known to have been publicly traduced for the plagiarism of a forgery of which he himself was the author. In the words of his most charitable biographer Tander “Sidcup” Montmorency “Crane lacked the patience and soundness of mind for quiet study, and it is quiet study that makes the geologist. That he produced such an expansive body of work is a testament to his fervid confidence in his own theories, in the face of, or as sometimes implied by his later work, because of, the near total lack of substantive evidence to support them. He was prone to shoddy errors of the most school boy sort. The reader will of course remember, the fiasco of the rubber hammer, or his early proposal for a graduate thesis on the tectonic formation of Brighton Rock.”",[11,914,915,917,918,921],{},[777,916,790],{}," ] Farley more or less wrote that passage and insisted I put it in with much tawdry threatening. I did so as I still owe him twelve pounds in outstanding badminton debts, but I will admit he is extremely adept with a crust. By the immaculate underclothes of the Virgin is the man a bore, but the famous badminton “pro” Lascaux St-John-St-Fritz, was Farley’s first love. This ",[97,919,920],{},"amour foudre"," cut tragically short by a Pastis fuelled dalliance in the wolf enclose at the Frankfort Tiergarten after the keepers had headed home for their pork knuckle. All they recovered of the sinuous athlete was a pocket watch and, rather shockingly, a set of false uppers. Farley’s time in Lascaux’s pupiledge left him with a scorching back hand and balletic command of the court, I will grant him that. F*** the sententious p*** with a barge****",[11,923,924,926],{},[777,925,798],{}," ] Crane claims the Bordeaux was prescribed by his doctor to alleviate an acute attack of gout. The biographer of Crane, A. Thomas St John, failed to clear up this point as the doctor in question immediately assumed a feigned identity of a Belgian road sweeper as soon as the name of Crane passed his lips. Needless to say Crane’s gout alibi has raised eyebrows to an acute height the world over, and seems like desperate blame shifting of the first order. See A. Thomas St John “Squeezing claret for crystal- dipsomania and the thought of Filber Crane” The Geological Review Vol. 34 Winter 1987.",[11,928,929,931],{},[777,930,805],{}," ] p. 37, Crane, F., ‘The Lives and Sayings of Filber Crane Geological Anthropologist and man of genius, Stork and Crane Publishing, 1949.",[11,933,934,936],{},[777,935,815],{}," ] This statement seems entirely redundant given the proximity of rocks to more or less anything. Crane’s argumentation here is typically bizarre and at best specious.",[11,938,939,941],{},[777,940,822],{}," ] This is perhaps one of the most ridiculous and enraging sentences in any printed material. It has the unique quality of seeming to be facile on more points than are actually expressed. One elderly geology professor of famed mildness was heard to actually scream aloud on the first reading and on the second was observed to attack the book with a poker in a manner normally associated with commando units far behind enemy lines. So benumbed were his senses that he dunked his tie into his tea and attempted to tighten his shortbread biscuit. Later the sorry professor was detained by special constables when discovered in Crane’s garden, disguised as a rather convincing gnome, pockets stuffed with hand grenades and a sharpened fishing rod in his hands.",[11,943,944,946],{},[777,945,826],{}," ] p. 37, Crane, F., The Lives and Sayings of Filber Crane Geological Anthropologist and man of no small genius, Stork and Crane Publishing, 1949. N.B review by L.V Crenshaw “Filber Crane, the case for rapid and permanent institutionalisation.” The Lancaster Herald May 1953.",[11,948,949,951,952,955],{},[777,950,832],{}," ] Crane posited in one article “Foliative Action and the Arboreal Thesis”, ",[97,953,954],{},"The Wisconsin Journal of Model Trains and Their Enthusiasts",", Vol. 3, Fall 1947, an essential affinity between rocks and trees, thrusting minerals into the evolutionary ladder. The academic reception of his theory is loudly indicated by the title of the publication which was happy to receive it. The Wisconsin Journal’s pool of normal contributors in the autumn of 1947 had been sadly decimated by a freak ‘Anderson’s 3-1 Metal Lubricant’ and turkey gravy mix up, an incident resulting from the rapidly deteriorating eyesight of one the member’s wives and the curiously avine aroma which lifelong users of Anderson’s have come to love so well.",[11,957,958,960],{},[777,959,840],{}," ] Ibid. This is the crux and central matter of Crane’s thought. The ‘vivarariasts’ hold this to be gnomic, deliciously opaque and occupying a point in the interstice of geology, philosophy, evolutionary biology, sociology and poetry (according to the more fawning.) The prevailing view however is that the syllogism (a generous term) is chicanerous, quite obviously spurious, hair wrenchingly stupid from fatuous start to hateful finish etc… ",[11,962,963,965],{},[777,964,848],{}," ] Crane conducted all these interviews absolutely solo with no printed elaboration on his method whatsoever, aside from the rather cryptic note in ‘I have found that gneiss speaks clearest in aniconic terms. Lipids are the obvious aid in this regard.’ Crane, F. “The Ontology of Foliate Inquiry” Stork and Crane Publishing, 1948.",[11,967,968,970],{},[777,969,852],{}," ] Indeed after 1949 Crane offered no written or verbal elaboration on his thought and methods at all. He responded neither to contumely or praise and spent his later life in silent contemplation at the end of the pier in Rabblethorpe, of his native Lancashire. Often surrounded by a buffet of disciples, interviewers and gulls (he plugged his ears with the interior parts of crabs) Crane would stare serenely over the foam breaking beneath him, “intractable and essentially unknowable like his companions the rocks.” Interestingly Crane’s wife and housekeeper have stated under oath that Crane could in fact sleep with his eyes open and had often lauded westerly sea breezes as narcoleptic aids. They allege Crane had in fact been asleep at the end of the pier for twelve-fifteen hours a day from 1949 until his death in 1958.",[11,972,973,975],{},[777,974,856],{}," ] Farley swears that the sweet skein of smells drifting from the pipe immediately placed it as finest Turkish shag and has even dared to name a brand to me on a previous occasion. He claims it brought him straight back to his time in Cairo in 1919. I do not believe him for a second, for starters he was twelve in 1919. The man really does read too much cheap wartime fiction for his own good and has taken to immoderate consumption of equally cheap and bellicose rioja. He should stick to eating sandwiches, he does this so well as you know, rather than inventing silly asides about tobacco brands. The man is trying to the point of sighs, but what are you going to do, he’s an old friend.",[11,977,978,980],{},[777,979,862],{}," ] Farley insisted I put “suspicion of scotch” earlier in the piece to describe his concoction, but the phrasing is laughable. Clear guilt should be read for ‘suspicion’, it’s a foul brew he drinks on those walks, just warm scotch, milk and a teabag in when you get down to brass tacks, the man is pickled like a cucumber half the time stumbling around up on the dales.",[11,982,983,985],{},[777,984,866],{}," ] The emolements are perhaps the most fantastical element in Crane’s mature work.",{"title":66,"searchDepth":67,"depth":67,"links":987},[],"Mr Farley paused and looked back down the slowly falling hillocks over which he had walked. ",{},"\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-little-man-in-the-velveteen-jacket",{"title":992,"description":988},"The Little Man in the Velveteen Jacket file","stories\u002Fthe-little-man-in-the-velveteen-jacket",[80],"gNnJTwisUZU7qXBhgPJfONxtm--oUYlAzligXUMMzRA",{"id":997,"title":998,"body":999,"date":242,"description":1006,"edited":242,"extension":72,"meta":1012,"navigation":74,"path":1013,"seo":1014,"stem":1016,"tags":1017,"__hash__":1018},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-lord-of-flies.md","The Lord of Flies",{"type":8,"value":1000,"toc":1010},[1001,1004,1007],[88,1002,998],{"id":1003},"the-lord-of-flies",[11,1005,1006],{},"Perhaps this story will serve as one of those episodes of country life which my children often wheedle at. They have been studiously uninterested until now. But in the last year, after Monica finally left us, and after I have developed sympathetic and ominous signs, they tell me; for the grandchildren, to give them a sense of their history. They want this rural stuff as compost for their kids, to give them \"roots\", to help them grow more fully. Roots are for tearing away when proper ripeness has been reached. We have never been able to speak to each very much, my children and I. Their mother could better pretend. I do not know where this nostalgia for a period of time in which they never lived, for a place they never dwelt, might have come from. They also think that this record keeping will have a tonic effect on my mental state, so they encourage me to pic up my pen as one encourages a surly youth to keep a diary. They try and lamp me like a rabbit with pitying eyes.",[11,1008,1009],{},"Although as I enter the ever emptying waiting room of my 70s, perhaps it is best that I set down the stories I have often told them of my Shropshire childhood passed in that remote decade of the 1950s. As the future narrows the past proportionally widens, and I fritter much of my time amongst the spent years, on the qui vive for a one sided conversation with those long since keeping green the graveyard grass. We oldsters scour this fallow, discharged time, like the optimistic gardener looking for new shoots in frosty ground, on the hunt for some pleasing memory, forgotten and remembered a dozen times before, in order that we may spend some happy hours in the company of the dead. The older one gets, the less elective is one’s circle of companions. It narrows insidiously to encompass only your children, and your doctor. In the forty years which I have spent, spent with a little too much thrift, between then and now, I have worked as a lawyer, helping others to commit moral if not technical crimes. I have now retired to the county of my parents, which my children visit perhaps twice a year for holidays we no longer celebrate. From my father’s desk I can see the edge of the farm where it all happened, and the pub in which I was told some of it. These events played out long before my children were born, when I was still a person with parents. Now that I've stepped into the vanguard against the encroach of time, I have the dubious pleasure of ticking off another chapter of my own life whenever my offspring attain some new step on the cursus honorem of their marital and public lives. The relationship between oneself and one’s children is governed by a sympathetic black magic. As they blossom and mature, we wither and wane. But as children go, they are attentive without being solicitous and respectful without being fawning, and they indulge me in these crepuscular years. Perhaps it is unfair to wonder if they calculate that time spent writing is time not spent squandering their inheritance on fragments of first folios and incunabula. In any case, before I lose you completely, the countryside in as sparse a county as Shropshire, in as spare a decade as the 1950s, was not a well connected place. Our horizon stopped at the county border. Introspection governed each of our thoughts, habits and concerns. Church going was the norm, and where there is church going, the ancillary practices of, shall we say, less official belief, will tend to thrive equally. There is a consanguinity between doctrine and superstition. There were fortune tellers and dowsers, gypsies and those “who had the knack of herbs.” Grandmothers would urge children to keep clear of some ancient copse where they had “seen those who had no cause to stir abroad, out in their last white suit.” And there was belief and scoffing in equal measure, but there wasn’t the bland ignorance of these sort of things which pervades today. I shall avoid the name of our village in case some camera wielding dolt makes a visit, but where I grew up there was a cunning man, named Thomas Theake. “Theake” is a very old name, and has always been spoken with knowing care in this corner of the county, the current heir claiming to practise his craft by primogeniture from the dusty years when a Stuart warmed the throne. Tom is an old man in my first memories of him, and was the same rather vacant, pent up figure when I saw him for the last time. He would sit up by the fire in the King’s Head, applying himself to his pipe without any apparent pleasure. On occasion he would deign to baffle some auslanders with cheap card tricks in exchange for an afternoon of free jars. He mainly eked out a crust from the small farmers that comprised most of the village’s inhabitants, and whose rugged network of farms lent the countryside its cobbled, hugger-mugger feel. Cows that couldn’t calf, lame sheep, dogs that wouldn’t bark, these were Tom’s patients. A folk vet in essence, who took the odd mole or cold away from human invalids as well. He would croon something into the ear of a beast while stroking its withers, or apply a little ointment from a dark blue bottle kept in his jacket pocket, and when the animal walked contentedly but gravely away he would take a few coins and plod home with a wink and a nod. The Squire, or the the largest farmer who happened to keen a library and styled himself thus, would tell anyone he could that Old Tom wasn’t much more than a confidence man. He even cajoled the Reverend into preaching on the-extra Biblical nature of superstitious beliefs. Neither of them were too familiar with the witch of Endor, whereas Tom could gleefully quote the passage at length. The Squire’s easy scorn was made possible by deep enough pockets for the vet and his antibiotics. Once I was taking a message to the squire’s place from my father, probably a further request for money, and when I rounded the gatepost I saw Old Tom sat on a pail. l I couldn’t say what he exactly he was saying and whether it was backwards or forwards, but he was softly intoning into the ear of a cow that was off its feed and nearly starved, its ribs sticking out like the black keys of a piano. The squire was stood a way off, nervously swinging his thick hands together in front of him. When he saw me his wine red cheeks reddened still more, and he shouted “belt and braces I know but the vets been out twice to no avail! Hah!” He was quieter on the efficacy of Old Tom after that. Well the mind wanders and the pen follows. The subject of this story, its agonist, is Charles Charington, my closest friend with whom I shared the fields, streams and hidden woodlands of youth. All closed off now behind a door at the end of memory’s lengthening corridor. I can see him in the pose I always lent to him even as a boy. Long hair down over his collar, thin, pencil sharpened fingers playing indulgently over his face, caressing it as if he was touching for the first time. Open on the desk a rare tome, which he read searchingly, almost aggressively, like some chess prodigy in battle with a recalcitrant position. He dressed, anachronistically even then, in a well cut dark suit, silk socks and always a tie, undone. His eyes were a very cold, patient, grey. Despite his breeding and despite his dress, he had a look of indecent hunger, spiritual rather than material, carnivorous is the word perhaps. However sleek the plumage of a vulture, it is a vulture still. Charles was primarily interested in books, and we spent many weekends in the dust blanketed second hand shops of the nearby market town, our grubby fumblings at the shelves observed by the aquiline former school mistresses who invariably ran these places. I suppose we were in love, in the bitterly jealous and rather hostile way that young boys are, mocking and teasing each other while scarcely able to endure an hour apart. It was a tortured, platonic attachment, which at least in those early days was mutual I like to think. When it came to books my tastes were in the classics, my prize subject at school, and then the old guard of English literature, Thackeray, Scott and Dickens were my only real friends bar Charles. His interests, well they were a little more recondite. I assume reader you are unfamiliar with “Saint Bessarions Disquisition with the Satyr”, “The Lyrics of the Faun”, and “The Purpure Phoenix”. These were the occluded, unusual subjects of his literary attentions. He would wheedle and cajole the vendors to notify him immediately of any volumes which might meet his requirements of antiquity and rarity. They would arrive in grease paper packets, perhaps a single page, or a sheaf of papers or some creaking tome, scented with age and mounted with a crest from a now stricken noble family. These were times prior to the vast expansion of museums and the facility of digital search. You could take possession of some truly unique pieces, and Charles often did. His room in his father’s rather genteel Queen Anne house was a teeming wunderkammer. Beside the collection of books which would have befitted any professional antiquarian, there was a rack of richly made and finely embroidered vestments which I can’t recall having seen in a church of any denomination, there were specimens of bone which he said he had uncovered while assisting with an excavation one holiday. There were clusters of objet d’art and Classical statuettes in the most looming or harried of poses. And the whole was illuminated entirely by thick, ever burning candles, which diffused a torpid, sepulchral atmosphere through the bedroom. I thought his collecting stemmed from the anachronistic passion of an endearingly pretentious youth who had perhaps read a little too much Verlaine. But it morphed into something of an obsession as he reached the tortured brink of manhood. He would borrow his father’s car, which predated the Somme and looked as if it had been shelled itself, and would scour the bordering counties for a vanishingly rare volume or piece thereof. He always seemed to know when a country house was due to finally shut its doors in the face of a rising tax bill, and auction off its library, curated for five centuries and more than likely to contain a new sheaf of mildewed paper for his shelves. It was in the summer of 1958 that he first mentioned the Lord of Flies. A phrase which spread like an invasive species in a country garden, a creeping progenitive vine, which throttled other growths and filled his mind entirely. He had obtained, for a minimal fee, a tract entitled Signa Legatorum, which dated from the 17th century. It contained illustrations of heraldic achievements of a most distinct type. Sable, gules, and a particularly calcareous cendrée were the colours most favoured. Rampant lions with gore encrusted manes and claws that steamed and reeked, scenes of pursuit by adumbrated figures with hands that pawed and reached, riven sepulchra, laden gibbets. The supporters of these oblique blazons were neither wholly human nor wholly animal, the heraldic lexicon would struggle to define them. They were a miscegenated menagerie with brimming eyes, hanging tongues, the flesh decaying and the bones exposed, all was suppuration, all chaos. One particular leaf became Charles’ utter totem, his fetish, like the favoured rattle to the screaming child, the questing needling to the opiate fiend. This page was titled Dominus Muscarum. Charles, in an act of vandalism I had never seen him perform before, excised the page from the book and kept it in his breast pocket at all times. I’m fairly sure that he slept with it stashed under his pillow. I only saw it once, when he was proudly displaying the new acquisition, a procedure he could never resist. As far as I could tell he never let it out of his sight or under the eyes of another from them on. The device itself was formed from a dark, raised material, a sort of viscous lacquer which had been applied to the page. The supporters on either side of the central shield were not animal but human. Two monks, deeply shrouded in the folds of their habits, stood with bowed heads, the hands each plunged into the opposite sleeve. From the hang of their vestments, one had the impression, of a profound, rather too profound, thinness of bone, with little accompanying flesh. The head above bore a sable helmet, severed. The shield itself, sable again, bore an inverse cross on which was nailed a satyr, one cloven leg too short and thus evading its fastening. From the weeping palms two swarms of flies poured out, and the mouth of the creature hung open in a slack laugh. As Carrington showed me I lent forward to touch, quite involuntarily, and which he snatched the page away cursing at me, like some startled animal with its young, and bundled me forcefully from the room. I began to see rather less of Charles from then. Our conversations became bloodless, atrophied, then we were barely on nodding terms. I was taking a desultory walk one summer’s morning, with the fog still bedded down over the fields like resting cattle, and the drew worming through the uppers of my shoes, when I found myself, quite deliberately I would think, walking down the avenue of lime trees which led to his door. I looked up to his window, as many a lover has done before, and immediately stopped in that rather pathetic attitude. The window sill was entirely covered with rooks, thick as a carpet. Their black bodies and talons traced out its line entirely, on the vertical parts they dug their claws into the rotten frame and jutted out at precarious angles all along the base, top and sides. Every single bird had its beak pointed at Charles’ window, staring fixedly into his room without a caw, or twitch, or ruffle of features. I stood there for some minutes enrapt by this image. Eventually I moved off to continue my walk, but ran into Charles the next day, walking along in his deliberate way with a book and the thick yew stick he had taken to carrying. He looked almost cadaverous, he clearly hadn’t slept for at least a night. When I jokingly described the strange behaviour, all he had to offer by way of a rather gnomic excuse was that the “the lord of swarms preaches to a broad church.” And he strode off, stopping abruptly and looking back, perhaps at me although he hardly seemed to register my presence, and disputing with himself sotto voce all the while. I continued to see Charles at our minor, rather rustic, public school where we had the lesser status of day boys. His eyes were circled with sleepless nights and his hands trembled over his books. I must begin to draw these strands together. Charles’ father, one of the larger farmers in the district, had been struck very suddenly with a bad case of scrapie in his sheep, with no other cases reported nearby. Old Tom was quietly engaged as usual, more to avoid any perception of negligence than any particular superstition,. And as I was told in the King’s Head something like the following transpired. Tom was in Toby Charrington’s farmyard, to attend to his best ram. The animal was wheezing horribly, black blood and spittle bloomed around its jaw each time it did so, and its fleece corroding away. Tom knelt to whisper one some words into its ear as he often did, but as he spoke, the animal looked fully into his face, and as he later swore, spoke the words back to him, its eyes on his all the while, two obsidian orbs. He put a hand on the animal to steady himself, but immediately tore it away like one catching themselves on a stove. Where his hand had made contact the skin was a vicious red and badly blistered. At this the animal bleated in a high pitched, keening way, almost as if in laughter. Tom left his herbs, his moles feet, uttered his words for some hours, and left eventually looking very grave indeed, having returned the money Carrington senior had given him. The farmhand present told me that all of this had been watched intently by Charles from his window, and that as Tom left he directed a very hard look up towards the casement, at which Charles slipped quickly from view. A few more episodes from that summer protrude in the memory. In one of the fields near the village, there was a largely intact long barrow, ignored or at least left alone by any official body which would nowadays be gravely concerned with charging entrance fees. It presided like a rough openair altar over a field used for grazing. We were warned off from approaching the structure by our teachers, on the grounds that it could collapse, although I’m not quite sure that was the whole reason. I should say that this was a large mound, perhaps twenty or thirty feet long, with two large upright stones at the entrance end with a capstone above. The farmer who owned the land would muse over his beer, that although he grazed his sheep in that field, they gave the barrow a wide berth. By his account, the only animals who would go near it were rooks, who would hop about rather horribly over the top of the barrow, switching stiffly from leg to leg and cawing all the while. He had erected a tall spiked fence around the structure, mainly to prevent inquisitive children from tramping through his field. One did hear of boys, of the daring and truant type, who made a nighttime visit. They were never very forthcoming afterwards, but I can’t recall a boy making the trip more than once. In any case, it was rather late one evening, and I will proudly confess that I was waiting for a girl. The copse in the bottom portion of the field was used for what we euphemistically termed courting in those days. As I sat with jogging legs, slightly nauseous with the weight of anticipation for this most serious and entertaining of entertainments, I saw a light placed by the entrance to the barrow, and what looked like movement in and around its ambit. The whole scene was rather potent, the ancient tomb, the midnight visitor, the vague figure in the struggling light. I left the screen of trees and made my way around the wet grass, tracing the boundary of the field, to gain a better view. There was no wind. From the tomb there seemed to be a conversation taking place, one voice, a man’s, asking and pleading, and one very thin voice that answered in an sardonic tone. The timbre of the voice, well, one thought of ash, of dust, of things long left in the earth. It seemed unwise to be discovered by either party, so I crawled along until I was some twenty feet from the tomb. Charles was illumined in the light which seized on his pale face among the shadows. On the ground around his feet there red ribbon laid out, part of which was lit, and which seemed to encircle him. As he moved and gesticulated he would reach the border of ribbon and then step quickly back, taking great care not to cross it, as he imprecated the black entrance of the tomb. I hear Charles gradually grow louder and more forceful in his demands. He gesticulated wildly and was nearly shouting at his interlocutor. As he leant forward in one particularly emphatic movement towards the entrance of the tomb his toe crossed the boundary of the red cloth. The voice from inside the tomb suddenly laughed brutally, no longer thin but very material indeed. And there was the very rapid sound of something moving within the tomb, and its limbs dragging over some material which sounded and echoed with its passing, clinking rather like shattered bone. I saw, very distinctly in Charles light, two very long white hands reach out and seize upon both sides of the tomb, the fingernails facing out into the night, as if something was trying to pull itself out and free. Charles seized the lantern immediately and ran, the light juddering and swooping with his speed. As I watched he made a mad dash over the hundred feet or so of field, and once, around halfway looked desperately over his shoulder and held the lantern up behind him. At this the laugh sounded once more and lit by the outstretched lantern where two sets of black ragged nails reached out towards him, lunging towards his wrist. Charles whirled about and put on a new burst, and I saw the light go swinging over the stile which he took at a bound. I ran myself, the copse a distant memory, across the fence and back down the lane. I didn’t stop until my lungs were ragged and I had the metal taste of blood in my throat. As August came, Charles’ became even more spectral in appearance. Sleep was clearly a distant memory. He would sit at his desk at school, swaying forward nearly swooning into sleep. His father, not the most caring of parents, suspected drink or some other depravity and beat him badly for it. His marks, which previously earmarked him for Cambridge, reached a nadir. Carrington, perhaps you won’t be too shocked or indeed upset to read, was found dead later that month. Outside the barrow, fallen forward as in pursuit, with his neck twisted back over his shoulder almost to the point of breaking. His fingers were dug into the soil almost to the third knuckle. His father had seen him only the night before he was found, and the body had only lain undiscovered for perhaps twelve hours. Yet he was thickly matted with flies, which formed a humming, and quite horribly, digesting shroud. The policemen coming to remove the body were badly bitten by the insects which left large blistered marks one normally finds after a serious burn. His chosen page, the object of his delirious attentions, I never saw or heard of again. When I returned to the country after some years spent in London, I ventured back to the barrow field to find it was no longer used for grazing.”No good keeping sheep there” the farmer sourly relayed “on account of a devilish problem with flies.”",{"title":66,"searchDepth":67,"depth":67,"links":1011},[],{},"\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-lord-of-flies",{"title":1015,"description":1006},"The Lord of Flies file","stories\u002Fthe-lord-of-flies",[250],"bCnATArA4JIpDgk6LLyuAvKHQ4XSJYrEvIS9hbcaQos",{"id":1020,"title":1021,"body":1022,"date":242,"description":1029,"edited":242,"extension":72,"meta":1222,"navigation":74,"path":1223,"seo":1224,"stem":1226,"tags":1227,"__hash__":1228},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-night-of-christmas-eve.md","The Night of Christmas Eve",{"type":8,"value":1023,"toc":1220},[1024,1027,1030,1033,1036,1039,1042,1045,1048,1051,1054,1057,1063,1066,1072,1075,1078,1081,1084,1087,1090,1093,1096,1103,1106,1109,1116,1119,1122,1125,1132,1135,1138,1141,1144,1147,1150,1153,1156,1159,1162,1165,1168,1171,1178,1181,1184,1187,1190,1193,1196,1199,1202,1208,1210,1212],[88,1025,1021],{"id":1026},"the-night-of-christmas-eve",[11,1028,1029],{},"The Boar’s Head is the only pub in a small village in Gloucestershire, the name of which is not particularly important to this story, other than to say you are very unlikely to have heard of it unless you were born there, and to mention it can only offend without profit.",[11,1031,1032],{},"It was late on the night of Christmas eve, at the veil of Christmas day, and the front room of the Boar’s was in a serious condition. It looked like a party had had a party, and invited all its dubious but unshakable friends, for whom prison had done little but increase their appetites for riot and ingestion. Folk-loreish quantities of beer, wine and spirit had been ingested, and this great consumption had given the pub a desiccated, parched look. The taps at the bar dripped weakly, the bottles behind were now only empty glass, and froth-encrusted empties cluttered every surface like a hoard of collector’s tat. Hungover is the word, the pub looked hungover. The grey blinds were sunk low as if in mourning. The chairs and tables were at odds and ends, all the noise and bustle had packed up and gone. Like spent cartridges after a battle, endless packets of scampi fries littered the floor, frozen in their last crushed state. A pair of heels sat tamely in front of a stool, as if their owner had been whisked away by unseen spirits. It was a like a stage after the final night.",[11,1034,1035],{},"The enforcement of the smoking ban at the Boar’s had tended to mirror the asthma attacks of the publican, Bill, and Bill would chokingly swear that smoking helped his condition, and so each table had an ashtray. Each of these was such a cornucopia of chewed and lipstick-stained butts, that they resembled magnets which attracted fag ends like iron filings. There began at the level of the intermittently plastered architrave a turgid cloud of spent smoke which lent a rather louche theatrical air. The scent was that delinquent blend of stale tobacco and spilt booze, tempered with one additional farmyard note, that of Ron.  The bar ran in the shape of a hockey stick, and Ron was prostrate over the short arm of the L, with his torso flush against the wood and his chin latched over the far edge, his head like a puck ready to be spun aloft. He made some sodden smacking and gruntling noises, like a truffle pig dreaming of earthy pickings. His left arm hung over the bar so that his unspeakable nails dangled into the old ice cream tub which held the lemon slices. Ron’s bald patch had been of an imperialist bent since his mid-forties, and at sixty it now proudly occupied such a swathe of his bonce that a good portion of denuded patina pointed brightly at the glass-effect chandelier. His grey hair, which had the colour and texture of wet chemical fog, and which through careful grooming and salving Ron kept looking like a violently rung dish cloth, this grey hair reached generously down into the piled dishes in the sink, so gaining some jauntily frosted tips from a mauled saucer of mustard.",[11,1037,1038],{},"Ron snorted, blinked soggily, and nestled back against the bar. He began to snore, with a sound like a handsaw struggling through a knotty log. His nasal passages had been given a good hiding by three decades of committed insufflation, and so he breathed ravenously through his mouth, nearly chewing at his air. With each creaking expansion of his lungs two articulated projections pushed rhythmically against the back of his jacket, like the anonymous appendages you find on chickens which have been cruelly farmed and then hastily fried. These were his scapulas, which led to his convex shoulders, then to his arms like two lengths of plastic piping. In contrast his waist, hips and belly pushed firmly outwards in separate directions like a crowd wrestling with a police cordon. He was built like a shovel set on its end. Had there been anyone else in the bar, and had that person been reckless enough to approach the reeking anti-dentistry of his mouth, they would have deserved what they got. He was wearing a nearly formless cord jacket which was partially brown and entirely elbow-less. Underneath was a bright green shirt with a plastic sheen, one collar point of which was cocked up at an angle like a dog’s ear. The costume concluded in trousers that were lavishly caked with mud. He looked like he needed a sheep dip, or perhaps de-worming.",[11,1040,1041],{},"Ron’s beverage of choice over the past twelve hours, and over the past fifty years, hwas Scratterz Gold. This was a profoundly local cider which ran somewhere between 5-10% depending on the whims of the maker, who was known on a winter’s night to chuckle darkly and bung several bags of sugar into the barrel, producing something like a barley wine crossed with a toothache, and so by sympathetic magic sending cars swerving from the roads and A&E admissions into the red. Ron had seen off half-a-dozen poorly pickled eggs to temper the twelve pints of Scratterz, eggs which he had ingested whole in a serpentine fashion. These he had bolstered with several lbs of his personal recipe pork scratchings. The sight of Ron in his Jason Pollock-stained tracksuit, clad in an apron and swearing lovingly at the dancing morsels of flesh as he fried them in their own tallow, could have been a scene from a modernising adaptation of Dr Faustus. He confected these larded snacks solely from the deep-fried nipples of the sow, as he would tell anyone with a pale lupine grin, only after they had begun waveringly to chew.",[11,1043,1044],{},"The combination Scratterz, eggs, and porcine teats had produced in his stomach a wicked brew of acid, sulphur and salt, and fomented an unspeakably gaseous substance which could have been put to sound military use. This came from one end with the regular noise of a back firing car, and from the other, bloomed slowly past the shattered sepulchres of his teeth like a thick fog through a graveyard. These pensionable gnashers wore a thick impasto of lichen and jaundice. Ron’s clothing was also doing its bit on the odour front. He had taken a tumble on the poorly lit track which led from his cottage to the Boar’s when making his already well lubricated way twelve hours ago. He had fallen, stared blankly at the track of cloudy sky bordered by rough hedge, sworn expansively and precisely like someone reciting magic words, which I suppose they are really, and had then rolled and cursed his way upright, aiming a vicious kick at an entirely innocent piece of the bank and then trundling off. As I say, his nasal function had been reduced to a formality by decades of Peruvian party powder, and so Ron was oblivious to the fact that he had landed plumb into a copious offering left behind by a skittish mare. Large portions of his cord jacket and trousers were therefore curiously marked and profoundly scented.",[11,1046,1047],{},"The part of the bar unoccupied by Ron wore a high patina, worked up by the rub of slumped drunks’ arms, by last ditch elbows posted to bolster drooping heads, and from all the heat and scrummage down the years. The wood had the dull sheen of a lucky penny, although Bill the owner never took a rag or suds to it, and it grinned up at the customers, stripping their faces of features and showing them in lurid outline, as ragged silhouettes that grew truer to life as the evening wore off. There was no one there to gurn at their reflections now. Ron was the Boar’s last occupant. From midday onwards all his fellow punters had began to amble ruddily off, to enter their well-worn grooves of Christmas customs, filtering down the bars occupancy to the rather-more-than-social drinkers, until even Bill had mountaineered his way up the carpeted stairs to don a limp hat from a solitary cracker, settling down to swearing at the telly, and so only Ron was left, a man apart, a Crusoe, a Prometheus.",[11,1049,1050],{},"Ron lived alone and so had no Christmas agenda, no variation on the theme of lunch then televisual stupor. There was no-one to entertain, no presents to buy or receive. As every year Ron had been in the Boar’s all day. Bill had feigned surprise when on opening the bar at 10 he found Ron stopped on the step to tie his shoe. Duly Ron feigned astonishment and said how this was good timing, and Bill gestured him through the door and asked superfluously what he’d be having. This was a well-worn duet, like the ritual of two courting birds. Bill was a tall man with an antique nose who held all his weight round his belly. He preferred a black leather jacket and jeans and dredged back his equally black hair with an unctuous gel, and so achieved the look of the serially divorced bassist in an aging tribute act. By operating a chain pub in rural England Bill considered himself to be involved in some vague countercultural activity which reflected his innate artistry. He had been born in what could technically described as a town about ten miles from the village and so regarded his cliental as troglodyte bumpkins. In fact, he had been to school with many of them, where his main achievements being some petty acts of minor arson. Bill smoked liquorice cigarettes and enjoyed gameshows, muttering the answers after they had been produced by the contestants.",[11,1052,1053],{},"On Christmas eve Bill saw the full gamut of the Boar’s customers, whom he surveilled from behind the bar, as a prison warden might scrutinise the crowd when accompanying an inmate to a funeral. Elderly couples dropped in for sherries and hot toddies, with Barbour jackets and cheeks waxed to the same sheen. Escaped husbands and wives with  haggard, pursued looks, ran in to down doubles before sighingly bitterly and heading out with a Captain Oates-like resignation to their last minute shopping. Groups of 25 year olds in torrents of humour and that Christmas suspension of responsibility, for those who aren’t doing the cooking or paying for it, poured in for pints. Amongst all this was Ron, a rather dank and ignoble rock amongst the breakers, defending his barstool like an enclave and blearily applying himself steadily to his Scratterz.",[11,1055,1056],{},"Ron had worked for the council for thirty years doing various things involving roads, which he had been fairly good at, provided no one looked at him, or spoke to him or asked him anything, which is hard to avoid when wearing a high vis and holding up large volumes of traffic, and on several occasions had been lucky to avoid a custodial after some roadside wrestles with the public. All that is to say, we are discussing of man to whom the milk human kindness, and the gift of conversation were as little known as the properties of the quark. This is a man, and you know this man, you have met them already, if you consider for a moment, this is a man who was at the level of his fundamental quintessence, unable to say that they did know the answer to a question, or to concede that what somebody was saying could be new or interesting. Who lied fluently, who stole with a devout surety. Everyone was a fool, everyone was foe. He lived a bitter inner life, where he was the victim of great injustices, which in fact he perpetrated. He was his only priority, that he was not everyone else’s confirmed their idiocy and bile. Booze fed these delusions; it etched them in the chemistry of his brain and salted his inner earth against any new shoots of growth.",[11,1058,1059,1060,1062],{},"To illustrate, let us consider Ron’s typical evening. Ron’s decades with the council had left him with an excellent pension, and a back injury, which he had fabricated as thoroughly as a forged Picasso, had given him a tidy payout on top. So, he was flush, he had the cottage his mother had left him, he had no real out goings but in the Boar’s. He would start his evenings in a foul mood as he wasn’t drunk. After the first five he would loosen slightly, like a resting steak, and begin to sneer and lech impotently from behind eyes yellowed like smoker’s wallpaper. After the next five, he became profoundly and undiscriminatingly argumentative. Ron would sit tautly at the bar with an ear cocked, monitoring the sound waves, waiting to pounce on someone’s conversation like a malignant cuckoo. He would hear some simple statement of fact or declaration of preference and would snort savagely to himself, as if confronted with an abject act of cowardice or treachery. Then he would begin to shake his ravaged head, and mutter in crescendo “no no no no no NO”. The unsuspecting party would normally frown at this point, and raise their voices to cover his noise, or even worse, repeat themselves. They had sprung the trap. At their repetition of the offending words, Ron would hammer both fists into the bar top, and lurch towards them with a face of determined hatred, which combined with his sailor’s gait to make him look like someone re-learning how to walk in order to wreak vengeance on whoever had injured them. He would butt his gargoyles head into the middle of a table and grit his nightmare teeth, objections not even denting the armour of his bog-body skin. He would spit out something like “Rovers won the league in fucking nineteen-ninety-FIVE, not nineteen-ninety-SIX, you cu-“ at which point there was normally a fight, which he invariably lost, or he was hoisted out by Bill to “cool off” in the garden, which meant he smoked 10 Rothmans and argued with himself ",[97,1061,494],{},", playing the parts of agonist and antagonist both, which did not speak to the ruddiest mental health, even an amateur psychologist could conclude. During these “cooling off” periods, Ron would work himself up into a lather, shadow boxing with the parasols and cursing percussively at the ground, until he burst back into the bar with clenched fists, usually to find that the offending party had left, scared off by this sinister worzle-gummage, and Bill would raise an eyebrow and point a finger at Ron’s usual stool, so ingestion could commence again.",[11,1064,1065],{},"This kind of pathological behaviour had reduced Ron’s social circle to Bill. Policemen crossed the street when they saw him, to save themselves a furious lecture on rising agricultural crime. If anyone were to have a close look in his garage they might have found a few quadbikes unaccompanied by receipts. He had screamed and shouted at the bus conductor, the postman, the keeper of the general store, he was a standing agenda item for the parish council, from which he had been excommunicated after he attended for the first time at the age of twenty having subjected an eighty year old grandmother to a thirty minute obloquy on the wasp-summoning qualities of her rose bushes. Which was so false in its content and extreme in its tone, that it recalled an anti-papist tract.",[11,1067,1068,1069,1071],{},"The exception to this isolation was Ron’s dog, Trevor. Trevor was a deeply sensitive and aging hound, lent a patrician aspect by drooping whiskers and rings of grey fur around his eyes, giving the impression of a spectacled don pacing the quad of an Oxford college. Ron had long concluded that Trevor was entirely deaf, in fact Trevor only answered to the name Percival, and Ron was unlikely to work that one out. Quite independently Trevor\u002FPercival would take himself for walks up and down the lane outside of Ron’s cottage, rolling his arthritic with his stiff but noble gait. He would stand out in the fields, with the nobility of age, recording through diming eyes the patterned flight of birds. In the lane he would deploy his muzzle as an instrument of science, as spring brought fresh scent to the flowers. He was in essence a naturalist, and Ron had spent much cidrous",[777,1070,779],{}," ] sweat trying to teach Trevor to hunt and kill small creatures. Trevor would regard Ron, who tried to set him on rabbits, or send him after pheasants, with the principled pitying look of the conscientious objector regarding his firing squad. Forgive them father, for they know not what they do. In fact, Trevor saw Ron as an example of what the Bolsheviks termed “useful idiots”, though he would not have used language this strong. The useful idiot is one who will supply money and resources to aid revolutionary ventures, and so Trevor deigned to reside with Ron whilst he conducted his studies of the flora and fauna of Gloucestershire. As Trevor traced the dipping flight of the skylark with a lover’s rapture, or basked in the hedgerow’s choir of springtime colour, he would chuckle tolerantly and woof gently under his breath, that all things considered, someone should keep an eye on the old boy, knowing what he was like and all.",[11,1073,1074],{},"Ron’s relations with Bill were based purely on exchange and guised as friendship, as almost invariable the case between punter and publican. If you intend to make your salt from selling someone a drink that makes them talkative, and you then confine them to a seat opposite you while they drink it, you will have to at least do a decent impression of being chummy. Ron had consumed a minimum ration of ten pints a day every day, bank holidays included, since the early nineties, and that kind of custom you couldn’t ignore, thought Bill to himself, even if there was everything else to loathe about the man. As you know, the Boar is the only pub in the village, so Ron’s impact on Bill’s other custom was conveniently limited. There existed around Ron a sort of exclusion zone, a line over which it was reckless to cross, as you might find around a cache of nerve agent, or a reactor on the blink. The short arm of the L shaped bar was Ron’s. The stool next to his was always left empty by the locals, a sort of DMZ. He occupied it like a diminutive troll, and if any un-initiated passer took the adjacent one, he imposed a toll. This was either acrimonious interrogation about every detail of their life and what they thought they were doing here, or he launched into an endless account of something he had watched on television last year, stalling any attempt by his victim to withdraw by placing an execrable paw on their shoulder and guiding them back to their seat to resume spitting his narrative into their face.",[11,1076,1077],{},"In any case, let us return to Christmas eve, and Ron is stirring, he raised his head slowly, blinking like a new-born thing. A fire alarm sensation was radiating between his desiccated brain and the dingy wall of his skull. His eyes narrowed around a point of pain somewhere the right of his forehead. He swore at length and ground his fingers into eyes.  After ten seconds of this he gave up, laid his head on the table like a cartoon of a beaten man, and his lids closed on ruddy eyes. He had his cheek flush to the bar and the pressure puckered his open mouth like a particularly stupid deep-sea fish. A cidrous tear welled; drool spooled out onto the wood. Something like sleep came. And then, so unexpected as penetrate even this booze-trepanned state, a very thin and manicured hand tapped a pencil beyond the point of his nose, this officious gesture punctuated with a polite cough. Ron could tell from the hallmark, and from his passion for larceny, that the pencil was solid gold. His watering and begrimed eyes, now both open, formed a blurred impression of a singular design on the metal. It showed goat, wearing a priestly robe, and with two sharp horns upon its head. It had one human foot, and one cloven hoof. The cough returned.",[11,1079,1080],{},"Ron battled his way to more vertical position and looked. The man was dressed in a well-cut grey suit, was of a very slim build, and had the comportment of a butler from a black and white film, or one of those aristocratic porters you see outside of London hotels. His tie was deep blue silk with a shine on it like the belly of a fish. His Oxfords were polished to an obsidian lacquer. He had a surgical shave, apparently recently, which has brought a light pink complexion nearly suggesting makeup. He held before him a folder, bound in leather, only rather pale, and there are a series of subtle white ridges, rather like scars. The face is vague, neither round nor thin, without a feature of note or absence, although the eyebrows are very black. The eyes are a bright amber colour, nearly orange. Jaundice thinks Ron, inaccurately, piss artist.",[11,1082,1083],{},"Opening the folder and casting a perfunctory eye at its contents, and listed off-“Higgins, Ron. Age 55, address Manor Cottage, occupation, council labourer, now retired. Dependents none. Situation, damned.” The visitor trots out this information like one reciting before a blackboard. The accent is unspecific, the cadence unhurried. He has an expression of concentrated blandness, of professional distance. ",[11,1085,1086],{},"Ron’s mental state during these proceedings has been akin to a pathologically unmathematical child sliding counters around an abacus.",[11,1088,1089],{},"“Ummm, what you, what you doing here? I paid that one anyway, didn’t I, paid it, so you can fuck off and all, spoke to lady on the phone-.”",[11,1091,1092],{},"“Mr Higgins I am not a debt collector” He smiles at Ron, with an opposite effect.",[11,1094,1095],{},"“Yeah well, what, ummm. Fuck” Ron kneads the side of his head with one scraggy fist like a prisoner in a therapeutic bread making class. This headache is getting personal. “Wass all this in aid of, you’re not local” he raises his head to look at the man as he pronounces this, like a canny punter sniffing out fake goods “Bill’s the owner like, he’ll sort you out…”",[11,1097,1098,1099,1102],{},"“Mr Higgins” cuts in the visitor “are you a religious man?” The sibilance of religious hisses like from his mouth like a coiled warning at the approach of careless boots. As he speaks this final phrase there comes from his mouth, not just his mouth, from his pores, from the air around him, a warm and horrible stench. Ron is engulfed by the memory of when, last year, on his lurching way back from The Boar, he fell on top of, or rather fell through, the bloated carcass of a sheep lain dead in a ditch for some time. One outstretched arm had punched through the swollen stomach cavity to bring him ",[97,1100,1101],{},"tete a tete"," with the mottled green smile of an exposed jawbone, picked out by the moonlight. And now again he has the close and heavy smell of death in his nostrils and mouth, like his head has been plunged into an unspeakable sack. He gags, “what the fuck is that smel-? Religious? Fuck no, not religious. No chance.”",[11,1104,1105],{},"While the smell has caused Ron to lose his colour like a lift dropping too fast, he has roused a little as this chance to argue, to dissent. The visitor makes a small note in his folder, Ron watches the work of the golden pen. He looks around for a drink, he snags half a pint of tepid ale left on the counter and swallows it in one, with an expansive motion of the jaw. Figuring that Bill isn’t around to charge him, he hooks a bottle of scotch from behind the bar, Johnny Walker Black.",[11,1107,1108],{},"Ron waggles the bottle in the air at man in the universal gesture of “will you join me?”, he nods and smiles lightly in assent.",[11,1110,1111,1112,1115],{},"“Thank you yes.” The man darts to one end of the bar and sends a tumbler skimming across the polished surface to come to a dead stop in front of Ron. Ron inclines his head and does something with his lower lip to indicate that he has seen better. The man looks at Ron with a cocked head, with what could be called perspicuous cruelty, he has seen and parsed all that is mean and false here. Ron looks at him bleakly, his normal aggressive quibbling and bovine stubbornness aren’t getting very far, some inner command centre is realising it is up against an unusual obstacle, he feels weak, dissipated. Ron unscrews the cap. Something is off about this fella, he’s after something, wass he after. Ron pours what can only be described as a punishment measure of scotch, about four doubles worth. Lets see how he fuckin copes with that un, thinks Ron, ever on the ",[97,1113,1114],{},"qui vive"," for a win of any proportions.",[11,1117,1118],{},"“Thank you” said the man and swallowed his whisky in one, without the glimmer of a grimace, or any sign of that this was more than a glass of milk. Ron had the obviously impossible impression, that as the spirit touched the back of the man’s throat, for an instant, there was a tongue of blue flame, as when you light the Christmas pudding. He placed his glass on the bar and scanned once more and then snapped tight his binder.",[11,1120,1121],{},"“Mr Higgins I will be brief, for you are as a grain of sand under the waves of the sea, a droplet, a particle. You hang in the balance. Tonight, we barter for your soul.”",[11,1123,1124],{},"Ron, despite his booze denuded faculties and the vicious business going on with his head, still senses a slight. “What you on about? What you fucking on about any how?”",[11,1126,1127,1128,1131],{},"There follows a smile like the black eye of a shark rolling back as it surges forwards. “I think the discursive method will render little profit, no? You are not by nature, as they say in modern parlance, “a good listener”? As I have been led to understand, to converse with you, again I search for the ",[97,1129,1130],{},"bon mot",", is like “speaking with a brick wall.” The man seems to occupy a space much larger than before. He was a little shorter than Ron, but all he sees now is the amber eyes, all he smells is the rank breath. He has a giddy lightness in his legs, like that sick point at the top of a swing’s arc. He limply asks “wass…wass your name?”",[11,1133,1134],{},"Very slowly. “My name, Mr Higgins?” The smile again. He leans in and opens his mouth very wide, the lower jaw racks and drops very low, too low, as a moray does to gorge. The tongue is crimson and split down its length, the two strips coiling around each other like the foliate border of an illuminated manuscript. They play over what seems, to Ron’s befogged brain, to be serried ranks of thin and whetted teeth. He places a hand on Ron’s arm, very lightly. Throughout the remaining portion of his life Ron recalled the following moments as the point from which it really started to get a bit too much. These moments flanked his sleep; they were the clock chimes of his day. Ron flinched from the touch the a pale hand on his jacket sleeve, a hand which radiated the hot dry heat of an iron. The amber eyes grew, they fixed him like the pin through a butterfly. There echoed through Ron’s skull a wind which keened over desert rocks, bringing with it a deep note of lamentation. A great funeral wailing of sorrow without answer, and the tearing of hair, and the swallowing of ash, the rending of breasts. He saw the triumph of death, the antic dance of the grave. Legions of corpses in their pageantry and decay, capering and cackling across a great dearth of white stone. Written in the sky in fast strokes of red, was the name of Belial, the Duke of Hell. The name was on the tongue all the dancers, written on their grey skey which gave onto ragged bones. He screamed as the dancers came towards in an legion, they grasped his limbs, they pressed rotting lips onto his, they threw him aloft and caught him in rotten hands.",[11,1136,1137],{},"Ron came to. Like the diver who has drowned and seen a glimmer of whatever they had coming, only to be hauled back from the beyond to spew water under a circle of peering faces. Ron has the taste of bitter smoke in his mouth. As the Boar’s reassembles itself, he sees Belial, smoking a black tipped cigarette. The smoke is richly scented, of deep forests, aged spices. Ron places a juddering hand on the neck of the whisky bottle and ingests a tumbler worth. Ron’s mental condition has become unsanitary. The nuclear hangover, the unsettling presence, the images he has just endured.  Belial interrogates his folder with a perfunctory look and clacks it shut once more, he gives him the smile. Like a bank manager, Ron thinks, like a fucking horrible bank manager.",[11,1139,1140],{},"Belial “You have my name then Mr Higgins. That little phantasmagoria has stirred something perhaps in the brimming midden of your mind? You have I think an inkling of the reason for my visit.”",[11,1142,1143],{},"Ron “You’re like the police of something, I done something, you fink I done something.”",[11,1145,1146],{},"Even Belial adjusts an eyebrow upwards to indicate the sybaritic richness of this statement.",[11,1148,1149],{},"“Mr Higgins. You have sinned rather lavishly in you own small way. And-”",[11,1151,1152],{},"Even in his broken state Ron looks like he is going to indulge his reflexive urge to argue.",[11,1154,1155],{},"Belial’s gives him the eye treatment. “You would do well to shut-up-now.” Ron quails, swallows, and pours himself another expansive scotch.",[11,1157,1158],{},"“Mr Higgins, I am here in an official capacity as a denizen of hell and an envoy of his dread Satanic majesty, lord of flies, prince of lies etcetera etcetera you’ve seen enough films. This isn’t a social call in short. And if you are indulging any soothing doubts that this is one of the hallucinations that occasionally trouble you, or that I am some itinerant loon, we can do the vision part over again-“",[11,1160,1161],{},"Ron screams.",[11,1163,1164],{},"Belial continues “Well then this is your final notice, if you will, there is no additional chance, this is the last stop. Your triplicate taste for that barely potable cider, endless grams of cocaine, and cigarettes have done things to your heart and liver that one only does to such organs before serving them with a side salad. Cured, salted, pickled, you’ve shrivelled your innards and ravaged your mind. It’s an empty death that awaits you, clutching plaintively at your chest, a vacant funeral, a homeless urn. And then we’ll get you. Me personally in fact. I’ve got your number, as they say on television. This is a very poor outcome for both of us.",[11,1166,1167],{},"As you can imagine we have significant overcrowding problems in the lower Kingdom. I won’t bother you too much with the minutiae of centuries of scholastic debate, but yes Hell is finite in its bounds.”",[11,1169,1170],{},"At this point, Belial has forgotten the precise reason for his visit and is lecturing rather than terrifying, pointing with his golden pen on certain points of emphasis. He is walking up and down in front of Ron’s bar stool, turning after seven paces exactly, twisting on a polished heel, and resuming his walk. The twist makes an acute squeaking sound, the Oxfords clack out neat trochees from heel to toe. Ron is still very scared, still sure that this is the evening the buck will come to a disastrous stop, but this is tempered now with some bemusement.",[11,1172,1173,1174,1177],{},"Belial makes one of his pivots. “And here we get to the crux, the nature of the demon, as we all know ",[97,1175,1176],{},"pace"," Lexter Van Rodolph, that reckless Dutchman who drank deep, too deep, that the nature of the demon is to inflict pain and suffering, that is his quiddity, his essence, his art. But the demon is not infinite, he is not timeless, he has his limits. We are confined for eternity with the dross of humanity. Yes, we get the big names, the celebs, but mainly its people like you Mr Higgins. The egoists, the small-minded bigots, those for who have no sympathy for anything beyond the point of their nose. Subsequently, we do our best to keep numbers down to a minimum, a minimum. We have absolutely no interest in your company, and as for ensnaring new souls for the devil, we haven’t really needed to evangelise on that front for quite a while. So, I am here as a form of final demand notice, stump up, morally speaking, or face the consequences. You are with me so far?”",[11,1179,1180],{},"Ron whimpers gently. He wears a look of terrible strain. Bloodless, white, like a carcass. The eyes are roving dots. What is going on? Who is this terrifying bank manager?",[11,1182,1183],{},"Belial places his folder behind his back and inclines his head towards Ron. “You are not in the most dynamic of mental states this evening Mr Higgins, I will grant you. I chose this time by design. What you lack in comprehension, you will make up for in, shall we say, a certain rawness of nerve which might accentuate the experience you are about to have, and by any chance, will help it stick. What follows, is what the sorcerers have sought for millennia, a window into eternity. And so-“",[11,1185,1186],{},"With a flourish he steps forward, the folder is gone. Where the manicured hands were, there are the long and sinewed paws of an enormous wolf. The banal face is the great rasping mouth of a bottom-feeding crab, with feathering antennae tracing the air. The body is now the bristled and gravid belly of a sow with endless teats weeping crimson and the kicking legs of its farrow pushing against the skin. And the legs, as Ron’s failing brain comprehended the legs, he began to scream, rising so vigorously in intensity and pitch to suggest only complete collapse would silence him. Belial’s chimerical torso sat on the terrible clacking legs of a huge spider, thick as fence poles and horribly segmented, covered in silvery hair. At the end of each was like a thick brush, which danced in eight separate rhythms on the floor. The touch of the brushes whispered a diabolic susurrus. There rang through the room a high and bitter laugh, that came and went like an enormous rush of wind, and on came Belial.",[11,1188,1189],{},"You will be familiar with The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Boche, or perhaps Grunewald’s temptation of Saint Anthony, where a squadron of grotesque demons torture the elderly divine, dragging him by his venerable locks. These are mere fancies; they can only adumbrate Ron’s night with Belial. What these paintings do convey is the polyphony of assailants, that for the damned every angle contains a nameless horror advancing with a smoking poker. And if they can wrest their head up for second, while the half toad half kangaroo looks about for a larger skewer, there is before them a vast panoply of torturous depredation. They descended into hell, the physical lay-out according exactly with the Inferno. If asked, Ron would have guessed “the Inferno” was a sort of potent vindaloo. Belial gave him a few introductory skewerings. He liked to rhyme the torment with something from the human’s life, so Ron was briefly a gristly puck of donner kebab, turning slowly in one of those sinister sun-bed like contraptions you find behind the windows of late-night grease shacks. Belial took the guise of a kebab shop worker and brandished his scything knife to great effect. He sliced thin portions of Ron into an enormous flat bread, with salad and hot sauce, which stung no end, as you can imagine. Ron felt the full enormity of the pain, screaming and weeping hysterically, but like a hydra, as a portion was severed and served, it sprang up a new, and Belial grinned and came on once more. Ron was reduce to miserable jelly, in this condition, he was exposed to a Plato’s cave of all his failings and faults. Chained immobile to a rock, before him played out all the scenes of his selfishness, all the people he had packed off weeping, all the pointless fights. This was more for completeness rather than any great transformative effect. Do not believe any wishful theological teaching to the effect of hell is merely the absence from God. It is astronomically painful, the apogee of torment, for ever, without cessation or respite.",[11,1191,1192],{},"The next morning a tear spattered Ron is running towards his sister Sandra’s house, he makes in the back of his throat a sort of yodelling whine, his hands hang at his sides and bounce as he runs, rather like a chimp. While he does not bleed, or show any outward sign of injury, he is a craven, utterly disassembled man. Belial trots along beside him making the occasional note in his binder. He has not seen Sandra for forty years, after she stopped responding to his requests for money.  Ron kneels on the doorway, hiccupping with grief and pounding on the door with a desperate fist. while from across the road, a generic looking man in a suit snap shut a binder and promptly vanishes. Ron is a supplicant seeking refuge at the abbey door. Sandra appears with a sleepy and recently clothed child on one hip. This is Ron’s nephew, Peter, who regards Ron gently and without comment, like a beneficent potentate waiting for a courtier to come circuitously to the point. Initially she assumes this man intends to beg from, and if that fails, then rob her. Ron has not clouded her door for decades years and in that time, something has gone rather wrong with his face. Time has been unforgivably cruel to him, appearing to have placed a withered finger on the dial of the biological clock, and thought fuck it lets see what this baby can do. He has the whitening and patchy beard of the octogenarian; the drinker’s lines form a crazed warren around his eyes. His clothes have the formless slept-in slouch, the reek of scotch and residual note of dung, and a stubborn whiff of sulphur which she assumes is a digestive complaint. But as it must, it dawns that this her brother, he has the broken nose, the heavy brow, and despite the tears the large brown eyes.",[11,1194,1195],{},"Sandra considers Ron for additional minute, as he continues to lament. In this period he does not ask for money or say anything cruel, he is beyond dispute. Clearly the bottom has dropped out of Ron’s inner life. Sandra thinks: prison sentence, been given serious bird, or something terminal. Ron is trying to fashion a word, but this is getting lodged in his ribs somewhere, he heaves it out in stages.",[11,1197,1198],{},"“So-huh, Sor-huh-Sorry!” And then collapses forward, in prayer, clasping Sandra around the knees, repeating desperately his newly found coda. There follows a series of miraculous Christmas scenes. John, Sandra’s husband, who one point had been driven to making idle inquiries in dubious pubs as to the cost of kneecap shattering, as a solution to the Ron question, is restrained gently by his wife. There are several hours of sobbing amends. He weeps and sneezes as Sandra lays out a full reckoning of his cruel thoughtless past, he doesn’t argue with a word. There is silence, tissues are produced, wry smiles, the first embrace in two decades, and then tears of a warmer and richer kind. Ron produces a little finger which Peter holds onto very solemnly with his tiny hand, like an elderly grandee being helped from the bath, and walks him around the room. Ron has a very serious look as the boy toddles beside him, this is the tectonic shift of love. Of course Ron is invited for lunch, he of course he accepts. He offers to help, which provokes thirty seconds of catacomb like silence, and then he is shown how to peel a potato. Once the bleeding has stopped he lays the table, which Sandra then has re-do entirely, and she does not begrudge this one iota. Ron heroically turns down the offered mulled wine and instead drinks twenty five cans of coke and four double espressos, running outside every quarter of an hour to inhale four in succession cigarettes, lighting the second from the failing end of the first. This cocktail him keeps sober for the first day in roughly forty years. And although he shudders and sweats, and considers a short encounter with some Albanian ex-pats, he has a child’s look as he takes in the small rituals of family life, which Christmas elevates with its special stage. He spent every remaining Christmas of his life in this way, which was surprisingly long, and increasingly happy.",[11,1200,1201],{},"In short, go easy on the booze and fags if you can. There isn’t a great deal of moral to be gleaned other than that.",[11,1203,453,1204,1207],{},[97,1205,1206],{},"Thank your lucky stars that matters are no worse, and read your bible sir, and mind your purse.”"," Byron.",[11,1209,891],{},[893,1211],{},[11,1213,1214,1216,1217,1219],{},[777,1215,779],{}," ] ",[777,1218,779],{}," ] “Being strongly redolent of cider as a consequence of wanton over consumption.” Neologism, Aplin 2025.",{"title":66,"searchDepth":67,"depth":67,"links":1221},[],{},"\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-night-of-christmas-eve",{"title":1225,"description":1029},"The Night of Christmas Eve file","stories\u002Fthe-night-of-christmas-eve",[250,80],"BKyZeBgrRujo1Q-gE9J5cSFfVwc2Yz2BqyGwknX-4oI",{"id":1230,"title":1231,"body":1232,"date":242,"description":1323,"edited":242,"extension":72,"meta":1324,"navigation":74,"path":1325,"seo":1326,"stem":1328,"tags":1329,"__hash__":1330},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthere-was-a-man-who-dwelt-by-a-churchyard.md","There Was a Man Who Dwelt By A Churchyard",{"type":8,"value":1233,"toc":1321},[1234,1237,1240,1243,1246,1249,1252,1255,1258,1261,1264,1267,1270,1273,1276,1279,1282,1285,1288,1291,1294,1297,1300,1303,1306,1309,1312,1315,1318],[88,1235,1231],{"id":1236},"there-was-a-man-who-dwelt-by-a-churchyard",[11,1238,1239],{},"There was a Man who Dwelt by a Churchyard",[11,1241,1242],{},"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.",[11,1244,1245],{},"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:",[11,1247,1248],{},"“In dreams ur-iiiine, all-of-the-time, togeth-errr in dreams, in dreams”",[11,1250,1251],{},"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:",[11,1253,1254],{},"“HELLO, fucks sake, HELLO.”",[11,1256,1257],{},"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.",[11,1259,1260],{},"“Yep just coming mate.”",[11,1262,1263],{},"“Well you can fucking hurry up can’t you, what am I not here?”*",[11,1265,1266],{},"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.",[11,1268,1269],{},"“Sorry, sorry what can I get you?” It is clear to the barman that resistance equals explosion.",[11,1271,1272],{},"“Guinnissss” Relishing the sybilence, Payne is tapping the edge of his  card on the bar and rotating it through his fingers “large whisky”",[11,1274,1275],{},"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:",[11,1277,1278],{},"“Fuck” he had burped in frustration, as he aimed a boot at a recycling bin and merely skimmed the edge ",[11,1280,1281],{},"“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.",[11,1283,1284],{},"“Jesus Christ” as before him, in a pool, the liquid contents of his stomach spread searchingly over the pavement.",[11,1286,1287],{},"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.",[11,1289,1290],{},"“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.",[11,1292,1293],{},"Deeply carved letters, brought out by pale lichen, read",[11,1295,1296],{},"“Hic jacet Isiah Heselius”",[11,1298,1299],{},"“Obit 1634”",[11,1301,1302],{},"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.",[11,1304,1305],{},"“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.",[11,1307,1308],{},"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.",[11,1310,1311],{},"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:",[11,1313,1314],{},"well well, now we are locked in for the night.",[11,1316,1317],{},"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. ",[11,1319,1320],{},"* Edward is this a footnote ",{"title":66,"searchDepth":67,"depth":67,"links":1322},[],"In a small redbrick house overlooking a churchyard, Gilbert Payne sat nearly swallowed in his armchair, staring fixedly ahead.",{},"\u002Fstories\u002Fthere-was-a-man-who-dwelt-by-a-churchyard",{"title":1327,"description":1323},"There Was a Man Who Dwelt By A Churchyard file","stories\u002Fthere-was-a-man-who-dwelt-by-a-churchyard",[250],"ECCZbpYHqz-v2ennCn6mJEi7aHYNeqg51JWtiprtcLE",1793724018773]