Hiding From the Light. Barbara Erskine
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corner, had begun to crumble away. Without giving himself time to think Mike pushed his way through the nettles and scrambled over the broken bricks into what had once been the churchyard itself. Branches swung across behind him and within seconds he was totally screened from the road. He smiled to himself. It probably wasn’t wise for the rector to be caught trespassing but on the other hand his curiosity had been intensified by the man’s aggressive manner.
He moved forward into a patch of sunlight and stared round. He could see signs of old walls now, and a faint rectangular depression in the ground where the church must have stood. The whole area was thickly wooded. As far as he remembered from its description in The Lost Parish Churches of Essex it had been a beautiful medieval church with nave, aisle, porch and tower. The village had moved, the population drifting down the hill towards the bustle of the small port on the river’s edge, but that did not explain why it had been so completely lost. After all, there were other remote churches around; churches in the centre of a field or a wood and they had not been pulled down. They had been treasured and preserved. The voice of the man in the lane echoed suddenly in his head. ‘Evil place!’ he had said. Why evil? Was it something to do with Matthew Hopkins and the witches, or was it something else? Something infinitely older? An ancient ash tree shaded the ground and everywhere there were hawthorns and elders, heavy with ripening berries. The grass was kept short, he saw now, by some half-dozen sheep which were grazing on the far side of the trees. It was a beautiful, peaceful place. He took a couple of steps forward and paused. The birds had fallen silent. He shivered as a shadow fell across the ground at his feet.
Why exactly had they demolished the church? And if it was because it had grown dangerous, why had they allowed that to happen? And why had they to all intents and purposes flattened the graveyard? Not a single stone survived upright as far as he could see. And why, on this once-hallowed ground, was there not even one single cross as a memorial to the building that had once stood here?
Slowly he turned. The sun had disappeared behind a single stormy cloud and the warmth of colour had gone out of the morning. Making his way towards the gate he found himself conscious suddenly that someone was watching him. The skin on the back of his neck prickled and he glanced round again. He could see no one.
‘Hello?’ His voice sounded curiously flat in the silence. ‘Is there someone there?’
There was no answer.
By the distant wall the leaves rustled briefly and he swung round. ‘Hello?’ he called again. The wall was in shadow now, the bricks uneven, covered in moss and ivy. Something moved suddenly and he focused on it carefully. A tiny, mouse-like brown bird was running in and out amongst the ivy. A wren. He watched it for a minute and found he was smiling, his sudden tension defused.
Making his way back to where the gate had been he stared down at the gap in the wall. It had been filled with barbed wire. A rusty chain which had once held the gate closed dangled emptily in space. He fingered it slowly, then climbed back over the wall. Clearly he wasn’t the first to do so. He could see the signs now of other feet on the crumbling mortar, bent and broken vegetation, an old footprint set into the mud, long dried and baked in the August sun.
Once in the lane, he turned away from the church and began to walk briskly back towards Mistley. Next time he came up here he would drive up the hill, wear his dog collar and make a few calls. Whilst attending to his parochial duties he could ask a few questions about the church that was no more. He did not even glance at the cottage across the road.
Lyndsey Clark had lived in Mistley for five out of her twenty-five years. She knew every inch of this place – the church ruins, the churchyard, Liza’s – and regarded them all as her own. She had recognised the rector as soon as he had emerged from the path across the field and she watched curiously to see what he was up to, catching her breath suspiciously as he climbed into the churchyard, creeping forward in the shelter of the hawthorns to see what he was going to do. He shouldn’t be here. She shivered violently. He was disturbing the place, she could sense it already, although – she frowned, her head cocked like a dog picking up a scent – not intentionally. He didn’t know what he was doing. She shook her head in an anguish of worry suddenly, pushing her short dark hair back off her face.
Leave. Please leave. Quickly. Before you do damage.
Biting her lip, she craned between two branches, her vivid blue eyes focused intently on the figure under the trees.
He was feeling his way. After a while he turned back towards the road, then he stopped and looked straight at her even though she knew he couldn’t see her. She was wearing a dark green T-shirt and black jeans which must have blended into the shadows, and yet – she held her breath. Yes, he was a sensitive. That would be dangerous in a man of the church, although in her admittedly somewhat limited experience, those were rare these days.
She heard the wren in the ivy near her, saw him spot the bird and watch it for a moment, smiling to himself, then he was on his way over the wall and out into the lane. He did not even glance in her direction.
Silently she whispered a thank you to the little bird which had taken his attention. It paused, cocked its head in her direction, bobbed a quick acknowledgement and it was gone.
She gave him a minute or two to get well down the lane, then she made her way to the crumbling part of the wall where it was easy to climb in. The atmosphere, usually, thanks largely to her efforts, so placid and dreamlike, was uncomfortable, the air tense and jumpy. She made her way slowly towards a rough patch of grass where lichen and moss had grown over the foundations of the long-fallen wall. It was near here she felt Hopkins most strongly, the man whose evil haunted her life. It wasn’t the grave, of course, but too many people had thought it was even after the church was finally demolished, the graveyard destroyed, the land deconsecrated. Especially after it was deconsecrated. Their thoughts, their fears, their excitement and their malice had congealed into a tangible weight of sorrow and fear. Most of the time she could contain it. She knew the ways. Counter spell and spell. Prayer. Binding charms. They all worked if one knew what one was doing; all prevented the reality manifesting from the thought. As long as nothing – no one – upset the balance.
Glancing round to make doubly sure no one was there, she fished in the pocket of her jeans for a small pouch. In it were dried herbs. Herbs gathered from the garden at Liza’s. Carefully she scattered the dusty leaves around the inside of the walls before going back to the centre, where she crouched down on the ground and scraped a small hole amongst the grasses with her fingernail. She tucked the pins and the small piece of knotted thread into the soil and covered them, rearranging the grass around the place. In seconds all signs of her intervention had gone. Standing up again she wandered over to a tree stump where for a moment she sat down, the sun on her back. She could hear the bees humming in the flowers nearby. They were calm now, their agitation soothed. If she listened she could hear their gossip, the hive memory, relayed down the years …
The garden had been smaller in Cromwell’s time, enclosed within a picket fence, the small neat beds in summer a riot of undisciplined bounty. Fruit and flowers, herbs and vegetables, all crammed into the spaces between the gravel paths where yet more herbs had seeded in a riot of colour. Marigold and feverfew, dandelion and hyssop, thyme and marjoram. Liza made her way slowly between the rosemary bushes, her basket in her hand, plucking a sprig here, a leaf there as the sun dried the dew and the plant oils began to release their scents into the morning air. She woke at dawn on these summer mornings, glad to lever her aching bones from her bed. As her body bent and grew frail the pain became more intense. It was hard to look up now, the curve of her back was so pronounced. Hard to look at the sky, to see the sun, to watch the birds fly over. Her knowledge and experience of remedies and medicines was of little use to her now. Nothing she did seemed to help. Only the sunshine, with its blessed warmth shining down on her eased her a little. She crooned a greeting to the old cat sitting on the path ahead of her and it rose, coming to rub against her legs, before