Church Mouse (eBook)

RH Hale (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
100 Seiten
Help For Writers Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-910823-23-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Rona never imagined her old church housed a terrible secret, until immortal eyes flickered from the dark and a mutilated manservant fell at her feet. Coerced into replacing him as ‘watchdog’ for the undead, Rona must discover her own dark side in order to survive.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

Do you find that in the phantasm of memory, places are larger than their physical reality? That a set of walls, columns, ceiling or windows, surface in your mind then tower over you like a Sphinx, contemplating you with entrenched superiority? History grows on places like a fungus until they have eyes of their own, a secret soul, a hidden murmur.

I can still feel the invasive pollen in my nose from the orchids in the chancel. On a bright day, the sun would turn stained glass faces, robes, angels, saints, skies and disciples of every shade and hue into a bewitching seduction. In my mind's eye, I walk slowly down the nave of my old friend, enemy and companion. As ever my tentative footsteps, light as they are, make the empty church certain to betray me; each step lets the watchful air cry out my presence, from the slow deep thud of my boot heel to its chorus of echoes rippling like alarm bells off the aisles to the chancel, through the transept arches and back to the nave again. Funny how it always seems louder the slower you walk. It is a comforting sound, but only when you know you are alone, and always loudest when you desperately need to be invisible.

I look up. The old beams are of pale timber, like the revamped floor, thanks or no thanks to council-funded refurbishment rather too garish for a church this age. Authentic in swerving elegance, those beams are insulted by walls of cheap white paint, where the original Renaissance stone claws its way back through the papery layer in grey patches and cracks, glaring at the modern floor as if to spit on it. I take comfort in that, too.

I was a curious sort of girl, I suppose. As long as no one watched me, this building, the stained glass and meditative echoes, were all mine. As a child I was granted the freedom to play solo games, imaginary adventures or hide and seek with myself, running up and down the aisles, finding secluded shadows in and out of the transepts, usually hiding from my elderly aunts behind the arcade pillars, my trusty allies.

Aunts Pam and Alison would spend ages at a time chatting with Minister Falkirk, complimenting his altar flowers, where did he buy them, might they have a cutting, and so on, incessantly tedious babble. Whereas I, from the age of three onwards, was given free rein, a temporary window of liberty to run around the church on their nagging condition that I stay indoors. I soon found some favourite spots.

The pipe organ always unnerved me. Classical in appearance, oversized for the building, to me it was a gigantic overbearing leviathan; I was afraid to go near it, half-certain it waited ready to open its mouth in some great gape of baleen pipes and chew me, further, further in, and gulp. I grew bolder with age while the organ comparatively shrank in size, until ultimately, we reached a truce, the company of that loud beast preferable to the two elderly ladies I was obliged to call family.

Family. Related by blood. I found it hard to believe. I saw nothing of myself in them; they raised me on the principle that family is a good thing, where all caring and self-sacrifice comes from, but if I was already at odds with run-of-the-mill normality, I was certainly at odds with them. Their reaction to my perpetual indifference was to try and ‘smooth out the inconsistencies in her character’, all because normality, according to popular opinion, is also supposed to be a good thing.

I feel it necessary to explain to you my connection with this church, so let's just clear up something important first, shall we: God, religion, prayers, Moses, the Ten so-called Commandments? It did not occur to me to care, I was taken to sermons and told to sing hymns because that is what little girls are expected to do – what they're told. While heads bowed in prayer, and Falkirk, astute and gloomy in his ministerial garb, prattled on from his lectern, I lost myself in the stained glass.

I knew every inch of these kaleidoscopic windows.

The splashes of luscious purple were my favourite – such a juicy tint that always made me thirsty – and I loved the crusading figures in armour, straining hard to see every detail on their weaponry and the haloed beings to which they played martyr, fashioning my own stories for them a thousand times over. Sadly, with age I became jaded. The windows never changed. No new stories. In the disheartening wisdom that comes with maturity, their faces became tired, their gestures lazy, their stories and adventures fading to be replaced by something blandly biblical. I could not help feeling, like a sharp snag in my side, that the glass figures had let me down, they had sided with the very normality I once used them to escape from. I grew bitter towards the glass effigies and forgot their stories; they blended into a meaningless population, like everyone else.

I achieved independent thought by way of solitude, and through this established my tolerant non-belief. From puberty onwards, my attendance at sermons became less and less, and yet you would still find me there alone on random days of the week, daydreaming or reading Dickens, Carl Sagan, the Brontës and Oscar Wilde in the pews or my habitual hideaways. There was no hypocrisy in my private detours there after school or on weekends, the church and I had a relationship: I loved the building. It was a simple pleasure compared to living in my aunts’ house, the Christianity, hymns and psalms being immaterial.

I also had an addiction. The smell. Not the obtrusive reek of orchids, daffodils or lilies on the altar – the real smell of the church and its stonework. My favourite features were those small, unnoticed fingerprints of the past: old nails in the wall, so rusted and bent they appeared melted; shafts of wood in the mortar, worn down to stumps; a crooked hook, once smooth and round, now a jagged talon. I would find them in overlooked corners and then seek out more, I would touch them, running my finger slowly, almost lovingly, over the texture, taking care to do no harm, thinking all the time, This is a piece of time travel. When hammered into the wall, this world was so different. The man standing here, the clothes he wore, the masons, the scents, the things he heard. What did the worker look like, sound like? I'm touching a piece of life from a world nobody remembers. In this hypnotic bliss, I let the earthen scent transcend me. Old stone, like a quiet old man, immune to the fast track of unwary humanity, humbled and wizened with age – this was the building I knew and loved. Time leaves its breath on places, if you know where to look.

This young girl's fancy envisaged that the heart and soul of a place known to her for so long, that had absorbed revolutions, sickness, poverty and the smoke of wars, could warmly look upon her and whisper, You and I, friend. Let them stay numb. We can smell the true essence beneath conventional niceties and flowers on Sunday; we know each other's secrets, don't we, Rona?

Secrets.

Well, it did. It looked at me. Looked me up and down. And as if the hideousness of that organ served as a premonitory warning, indeed it came to pass that I was chewed, gulped and swallowed. By the time I reached adulthood, I still knew less of my church than I know of you, Stranger.

Instances from this early phase of my life bear mentioning. I have explained that there were nooks and crannies, and though to a small child that is a playground, by church standards St Patrick's was not particularly big.

You enter the front portal through a large pair of arched doors, the ceiling of a narthex passes over you. The other entrance is for staff only, an uninteresting single door hidden under the arcade in the south aisle to your right. Don't bother trying it, it is always locked. You walk east into the nave between a small sea of church benches; above you are the timber beams and badly-painted walls we have already met; far left and right, the transepts. Approaching you from both sides, the aisles are lined with stone pillars.

Look right. The south aisle houses an old vestry, since partitioned into a unisex toilet and miniaturised vestry for Falkirk to hoard his teabags and biscuit tins. Further along is the pipe organ, do you see the heavy curtain by it, the burgundy one? Good. Now, turn around and look up.

What you see is a balcony, directly above the narthex. Its decorated stone balustrade is appealing, is it not? As dated as the church itself. If you want to sneak a peek, go and draw the burgundy curtain. A narrow helical staircase rises spirals upwards, its metal railing and steps painted black, it winds, round and round like the skeleton of an upturned python. Ugly, isn't it. Climb it.

You find yourself on a small landing. Face west and keep walking, it is not far.

Turn right. You're there, you can now wave down at me from the balcony, or, ‘Haunted Balcony’ as Little Rona dubbed it. If there ever was a ghost up there I only saw it once and too briefly, barely more than an outline. You see, I thought it was my mother, it certainly resembled her photograph, but my aunts kept so few after she died and I knew her face from nowhere else.

I have introduced you to an integral element in this story: the gallery.

The gallery was shady, charming in its way. The stair was marked ‘Private’, for boring reasons, I assumed, because, unless they were hiding a bomb up there, sensible reasons are pathetic to a ghost-hunting seven-year-old. I, who otherwise knew every yard of the church, was magnetised to this unexplored zone, leaving...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.10.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Horror
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 1-910823-23-6 / 1910823236
• ISBN-13: 978-1-910823-23-1 / 9781910823231