The Ghosts of Heaven Page 5

there could have been a mark to mean run!

  And if she had made that mark in the sand,

  then her people might have seen it

  and run,

  and not died in the sand

  by the dying fire pit.

  Now that she understands,

  it seems so easy.

  The marks in the sand.

  They could be charcoal on rock,

  or charcoal on deer’s dried skin.

  They could have used them to say

  go here,

  do this,

  I am there.

  They could even be used, she thinks, to dream.

  But this is an idea that will die in the dark

  before it even leaves the mind of she

  who goes ahead,

  when others fall behind.

  She who goes ahead when others fall behind moves on.

  Through the bone,

  the black marrow of the earth,

  toward the end.

  She reaches it, just before her torch fails for good,

  and there,

  high on a wall,

  she sees the uttermost secret of the innermost cave.

  This is the divine heart soul fountain face,

  where the blinding light takes us

  and saves us all,

  and upon it

  a final mark.

  Giant and high,

  black on the moon milk.

  She stands and stares,

  trying to understand it;

  the turning circle,

  the circling line

  that never meets its end,

  the ever-widening line,

  round and round.

  Then.

  The light is gone,

  the last beat of the flame flutters out and is gone.

  She sits down.

  Places the torch on the ground.

  Stares into the blackness.

  Slowly, she thinks,

  I will die slowly,

  in this time where space does not move,

  in this space where time does not move.

  She does not fear, she does not cry out,

  she thinks only one thing:

  if I could do it again,

  I know what mark I would make in my hand.

  I know that now.

  And as she stares,

  her eyes show her things that are not really there.

  Lights flicker and fizz across her mind, as her eyes

  try to see where there is nothing to be seen,

  here in the space where time does not move.

  Bright colors flicker and fizz:

  lines,

  dots,

  crosses,

  hatches.

  And spirals.

  Spirals like the one that hangs above her head, invisible.

  The cave had waited for them to come,

  and eventually, they came.

  They came and made their marks in the dark.

  And long after the people stop coming to make their marks,

  long after the world grows empty and quiet,

  long after everything has stopped walking,

  or sliding, or even crawling;

  long after all that

  the cave will still be there.

  Waiting.

  Now, here

  is nowhere; the nowhere where she lies in the dark.

  And here, though she is in the place where time does not move,

  her life moves, regardless.

  So then it is time

  for her to go ahead,

  through the gate,

  and into the void that lies beyond.

  She goes.

  QUARTER TWO

  THE WITCH IN THE WATER

  1 APPROACH OF EVIL

  In the mind of the minister was devilry.

  He spied on the landscape passing the window of his carriage, and what he saw was not the green dale, not pasture surrounded by low stone wall, not farmstall, nor woodland, nor wavering grass, but wasteland. A spiritual wasteland.

  Father Escrove stifled in the carriage, whose two horses and deaf coachman had borne him with appalling lack of speed from the city and out into the world, to this countryside. He fumed silently, and despite the wicked heat he sat as far from the open window as he could manage, as if he feared contagion from the day outside.

  Outside, beyond his window, was sinfulness. It was not even a matter of certainty; it just was. Evil lay barely hidden in those hedgerows, behind those barns, under the eaves of the farmhouses passing by. All across this green nature, the Devil had surely found a comfortable resting place. Satan could and did rise from the hay fields and creep from the forest at any time; seethe his way into some simpleton’s soul and take root there. Even now, the beast was, without question, approaching through the thick hot air.

  He dared move himself a touch closer to the window; the motion of the carriage and the heat inside neatly conspired to send him a little drowsy, but he fought back. He sniffed the air outside. Heavy. Scented. Grass and dung in the heat.

  Forgetting the deafness of the driver, he called out.

  “How long?”

  His words melted and slipped onto the sun-hard mud track behind the clopping horse hooves.

  There was not one breath of wind; the stale air sat on the earth and the dale, and the minister’s carriage as in an oven.

  They were on the top of the world; on the high dale, somewhere at Black Top, he guessed, poking a skinny finger at the map he’d been given. All around the high, flat pastures spread away in easy-rolling levels of green, cut through only by weatherworn walls of stone. There were few trees; the winters up here saw to that. The winter wind made it hard for anything to hold, but now, in the summer, the minister felt pressed closer to the sun, and he sat back in his seat, hating.

  Sliding satisfied into his thoughts were memories of his work; his calling. Images of unrepentant sinners; some faces he could remember, others he could not, but that mattered little. What mattered were the numbers of those who he had brought to some kind of redemption at the end of a good length of twisted English rope.

  * * *

  Successful. That was what he was, he knew, and that was why he had been elevated to Rural Dean, with all that that brought. And what that brought was the opportunity to show the archdeacon that his faith was justified in this excursion to the wilds, and to this place. Welden—no doubt some foul and rotting sore—had had the misfortune to experience a hiatus; their vicar having upped and died without so much as a moment’s warning, leaving the isolated settlement at risk of spiritual decay. And until a new appointment could be made to the hilltop house of God, it fell to Father Escrove to guide the sheep to safety.

  They passed the church now.

  St. Mary’s. He sneered at the churchyard; the dead vicar already underground these past weeks. A man who had failed where he would not.

  * * *

  Away with his thoughts for a time, it took a jolt in the carriage to stir Escrove into piercing the world outside with his gaze once more; they had turned from the pitiful mud track of the green dale onto an even smaller one that set off swiftly down the side of the valley to his destination.

  This valley, Welden, was steep-sided; seemingly scored into the landscape by God’s chiseling fingertip, winding its way through the dales with Golden Beck at its bottom. Welden Valley was sanctuary to all the life of the place. Outside the brief moment of summer, the wind and the cold kept most life tucked into this groove in the earth; here, on its tiring slopes were the woodlands, the houses, the farmsteads, the mills, and the manor of the squire; Sir George Hamill.

  As they turned from the main track to the smaller, Father Escrove saw something.

  In the corner of the field to his right lay an area where the grass was kept short, and there, cut into that turf, was some sort of pattern low in the earth; a series of lines not even a foot deep.

  He strained his neck to make it out, but could not
measure any meaning in it.

  Then the carriage jumped over a rut and he hit his head on the window frame.

  “God’s teeth,” he muttered, grimly.

  He thought for a moment about what he had come to do.

  Then, he smiled.

  2 THE LANG CANDLE

  Despite the heat, Anna Tunstall kept the windows of the cottage shut while her mother lay on the table. Tom Tunstall watched nothing happen from the kitchen door. Over the last three days he had seen his sister do many things. He had watched with eyes wide as Anna had taken three threads as long as their mother was tall, and twisted them into one. He’d seen how she had wrapped the thread in wax till it was as fat as his little finger, and then how she’d coiled it up on itself, like the adders did under the ferns in Callis Wood, though more loosely than the snakes.

  He’d seen her set the lang candle on a small board placed on his mother’s belly, pull the center of it up, and light the wick as summer late darkness came. Anna had allowed just one third of it to burn that night, a third the second, and last night, the final third, the flame describing a slow spiral over the course of the three days.

  Now Anna sat still on the stool in the corner of the cottage, staring across her mother at the wall. Only once had she stirred, when Tom crept near to their mother on the table, as near as he dared, only for his sister to shoo him off.

  “Don’t, Tom. And if you have to, walk widdershins by her.”

  Tom had retreated to the kitchen door, from where he had kept his vigil these past days. If he had been older he might have understood that his sister was simply tired, but he was young, and neither was he quick.

  He looked at his sister as she fell asleep slowly on the stool, her head lolling forward, so that her long red hair hid her face. Her left arm slipped from her lap and fell to her side, but it did not wake her; one fingertip merely touched the dirt of the earth floor of the cottage.

  A bad thing came into Tom’s head.

  He looked at this mother of his, who had not moved for three days, and now his sister was still, too. His mind got to working.

  Very gently, he left his place by the kitchen door and approached Anna, and remembered what she had done when they’d come home to find their mother lying on the floor. She’d put her ear to her mother’s lips, as if listening.

  Tom didn’t know what he was supposed to listen for, but he crept up to his sister and lifted two of her long thick ringlets of curling red hair aside, bending his head toward her face.

  Then there was a sharp tap on the door, which opened.

  Anna’s head shot up. Her brother was by her.

  “Tom…?” she asked, but Tom had scurried away to the kitchen door.

  She stood and saw that there were people coming into the cottage.

  The first of the mourners.

  Joan Tunstall’s funeral was about to begin.

  3 THE TRYSTING TREE

  Jack and Elizabeth Smith were first.

  Anna bid them in, and she even smiled, though she knew Jack was only come because her mother owed him some money. Scared to let death cheat him of twopence.

  At least they’d left their children to prattle outside, but nevertheless she could hear Harry bossing the twins around just beyond the garden wall.

  Elizabeth’s eyes had landed on Joan Tunstall. Anna had wrapped her in a winding sheet from her toes to her head, leaving only her face exposed to the hot room. Despite this tight wrapping, the heat had not been kind.

  “She reeks,” said Jack to no one.

  He wanted badly to let his eyes run over the redheaded Tunstall girl, so he could later imagine his hands doing the same. She was plenty old enough now to be looked at, after all, but the body of her mother made him uneasy.

  “The house is terrible hot, Anna,” said Elizabeth.

  Jack barked once.

  “Hot! Spend all day in the smithy before you call this hot.”

  Elizabeth turned to Jack.

  “Yes, husband. You’re right.”

  “Acourse I’m right.”

  Anna watched Elizabeth Smith cower before her husband, whose face, it was true, was permanently red as if scorched by his blacksmith’s fire. Anna wondered how long he would manage to wait before asking for his twopence.

  More people entered the cottage.

  John Fuller, who’d been master to her father when he’d still lived, and John’s wife Helen, thin and gray, who smiled at Anna.

  “Hot in here, Anna,” said John, wrinkling his nose.

  “Yes, but the windows must be shut,” said Anna.

  Helen agreed.

  “No breezes above a body. Where’s little Tom?”

  Anna started as if remembering her brother for the first time in days. She knew Helen was kindly to children, even though Anna’s mother Joan, the village gracewife, had delivered four dead babies of Helen Fuller. No more had come, alive or dead, but still Helen Fuller smiled at the sight of a young child.

  “There!” said Anna. “Tom, come.”

  Tom stayed where he was by the kitchen door, and Anna let him alone. More people entered the door, and the small room became full, so that people edged closer to Joan.

  With surprise, Anna saw that even Adam Dolen was there, though there was no sign of his wife, Maggie or their daughter, Grace.

  Three empty days of silence and now this noise. Neither the emptiness nor the noise seemed real to Anna, but she wasn’t aware of thinking that; it was only important to stop people passing anything over her mother’s body. Sweat ran from Anna’s neck and down her back, itching against the threadbare cloth of her long black dress.

  She tried to speak, but found her voice too frail to be heard.

  She tugged at John Fuller’s sleeve.

  He turned and his eyes softened.

  “Anna?”

  “Mother ought to go now.”

  John nodded. His wife was trying to talk to the idiot boy. He wanted to touch Anna’s skin, but he could feel her mother watching him from two feet off, even though her eyes stayed dead shut.

  Instead, he turned to the room.

  He clapped his hands and everyone stopped talking. Though he didn’t own the mill, half of the room worked there, and therefore they worked for him. They did as he bid.

  “We’ll take Joan to the tree now.”

  The villagers worked.

  Helen Fuller and Elizabeth Smith opened the window that looked over Welden valley, while the Byatt brothers fetched in a single wide oak floorboard. They stood by as Anna finished winding the sheet over her mother’s face, and then Tom was suddenly at her elbow.

  “I want to say goodbye to Mother,” he said to Anna, and Anna died, wishing the room was empty of people and that she could wind her mother’s face away alone.

  But everyone was waiting.

  She unwound the cloth a way, till Joan Tunstall’s closed eyes showed.

  “Go on,” Anna said.

  Tom whispered something, and then as Anna began winding again, he reached up and tried to help his sister, his clumsy hands slowing her, but calming her some, too.

  That done, Anna stepped back, pulling Tom by the shoulders, squeezing them tightly.

  She watched as the Byatts and Jack Smith and John Fuller lifted their mother onto the floorboard, and passed her out of the now-open window to the other villagers waiting outside.

  Then came the cry of “to the tree!” and away they went.

  Somewhere above thirty of the villagers had come out, come out from their homes dotted through the woods in Welden Valley.

  Anna clung to Tom. They came behind the others. Tom’s mind was empty. Anna wondered at the size of the wake; perhaps they’d come because they’d liked Joan Tunstall. Perhaps they’d come because they were afraid of her, even in death—the gracewife, the cunning woman. Anna had seen almost everyone there come through their door in the year before her mother’s death; they all used Joan for this and for that. For swollen knees, or to bring a fever down, to take an
ointment that would make a husband a better lover, or for some herbs to stop a wound going bad.

  The Tunstalls’ cottage was at the top edge of Callis Wood, near the top of the valley, above them were the tentergrounds, where Anna spent so much time working for John Fuller. Below them were the trees, lining the steep valley sides like green velvet in a rich lady’s coffin.

  The funeral party moved down the path that led beside Tunstall Cottage, zickzacking through the trees, left and right, left and right, to the valley floor where Golden Beck flowed.

  The tall trees were towers around them; the floor was flat with flagstones where the narrow river ran left, artificially underground for a fifty-yard stretch before emerging at the wheel of Fuller’s Mill.

  They turned to the right, and a short walk led them to the trysting tree; not one tree in fact, but two that had grown close together, and somehow the trunks had fused near the bases, leaving a perfect neat archway between them. Above this natural arch, the two trunks grew apart again and thrust up to join the leaf top canopy of the forest.

  No one alive had a memory of a time before the trysting tree, and thus it had existed forever. Therefore it had been made either by God, or one of the older sort. Therefore it was magical.

  The villagers wasted no time.

  Two of the men went to the far side of the tree, while the four who’d carried Joan through the woodland bent and passed the body, floorboard and all, through the hole, through the heart of the trysting tree.

  Without touching the ground, Joan emerged from other side, a little safer than before she went through.

  Tom clung to Anna’s side as they watched.

  Adam Dolen was there, then. Fat.

  “Shame it is, to bury your mother while there’s no vicar in the house.”

  Helen Fuller heard him from where she stood.

  “What difference does it make? We know our business as well as the vicar did.”

  Adam said nothing else because he was too slow to think of anything to say before the procession moved off again.

  Back down from the tree, they made their way over the flags that hid the river, then followed the path that led around beside the mill pool, past Fuller’s Mill, along the valley bottom with Horsehold Wood on the left and the river on the right. Beyond the river, Arton Wood clung to the hillside, all the way up to Dolen’s farm, where Grace’s mother no doubt sat, stewing.