The Venemous Serpent. Brian Ball
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“I don’t think it’s been used for a couple of hundred years.”
It was looking better and better. Obviously no church ever crumbles away without being noticed—the church authorities are excellent guardians of their buildings; but, for some reason, this particular building had been allowed to fall down. It might be a lapse on the part of the diocesan authority, but it seemed likely that a decision had been made to let the place slowly fall apart. If no one was interested in it, then we would make a stack of rubbings and sell them on the stall later in the summer when we got the Americans, Germans, Japanese, and Canadians—all would pay well for a bit of genuine English craftwork. As it was.
All we had to do was keep quiet about our discovery, and make our rubbings at times when we weren’t likely to be seen approaching the ruined church.
The kittens decided to spring up at Sally—they think she’s a sort of cat-goddess, and she might very well be just that, so what with one thing and another we shut the shop and listened to the wind and the rain in our leaky bedroom-lounge-dining room. As a sort of gesture to celebrate Sal’s find, I put the brass-rubbing on the wall opposite the high window.
Sally wanted to paste onto it the sweet, serene face she had drawn for the disfigured image on Sybil, but somehow she didn’t get around to it. In the grey light of the Pennines early evening, we lay close together, occasionally looking up with a smug satisfaction at the source of our good fortune.
Later we went out to the local pub. Sally attracted the attention of a party of rock-climbers. I found myself glaring at them, but they weren’t impressed; she didn’t seem to notice their flattering gaze. She had been rather quiet during our meal of sausage and beans—we aren’t gourmets.
“Tired, Sal?” I asked.
She had been up early, and she looked rather pale.
“A bit, yes. But a thought’s been bothering me ever since I got back.”
“What is it?” She was an impressionable girl, with the kind of imaginative powers that make me feel like a robot.
Her paintings—which are good—have a deep sense of mystery, She does horses with wide, flat moorland background; the horses look lost, as if they were in a ghost-land.
“Nothing—”
“The church? Is that it, Sal? It frightened you a bit?”
She shook her head. One of the rock-climbers looked hopeful. “Not much. Not more than any old building does—there’s always a touch of sadness about any ruin, but it wasn’t that.”
She looked at me directly. Her deep blue eyes were almost violet-black. “You know I come from Derbyshire, Andy? Not from here, but not too far away.”
Of course I did. I’m strictly a town bird, reared amongst high-rise flats and traffic. She was born in Sheffield, on the Derbyshire side. We had settled in the High Peak because she loved it there and I would go anywhere she wished. I liked it too.
“So what’s the trouble, Sal?”
“Today—in the church—I had the oddest sensation. Only for a moment, and it didn’t particularly frighten me. A sort of chill, but not the rain.” She leant forward and took my hands. “Andy, I had the weirdest feeling that I’ve seen the church before.”
I knew what she meant, We all have these odd dreams when we’re rambling through some strange place, and then months or years later we found ourselves in it and we say something like it’s broken my dream. There’s a fancy term for it and plenty of books about it. I told her what I knew.
She didn’t smile, so I didn’t make the rather silly jokes I was going to make. “If you like, we’ll go together to do the rubbings,” I told her.
“Oh, I’m not afraid of the church!”
Her vehemence startled me. The rock-climbers were interested again. They would be delighted if she quarrelled with me.
“That’s good.”
We looked at one another rather uncomfortably. Only for a minute or two though. Sally has this way of knowing when a bit of physical contact is necessary. She wound her leg around mine and linked hands again with me. The rock-climbers recognised defeat and turned back to their beer.
We didn’t talk about the rubbing again, not that night.
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