Sarah said nothing as she absorbed the terms of the deal. She lifted the briefcase onto the table, and the priest eyed it hungrily. She looked at Andrew, who reluctantly nodded, biting his lip as he did so. She pushed the briefcase across the table as the priest nodded his thanks to her and immediately stood.
“Well, if you would like to transport me to Wrestlingworth, we can get to work.” He smiled and carried the briefcase out of the door without another word, as though completely carefree.
Sarah thought she could hear him happily whistling a tune as he went about this unhappy business.
The darkness in the room had formed into a thick cloud that, now, though it didn’t affect their breathing, made Sarah and Andrew squirm uncomfortably. Sarah could hear nothing apart from the rushing sound of the dark storm and the continued mutterings of the priest, increasing in volume as the swirling cloud continued to fill their ears.
Sarah felt a burning sensation rise in her throat before she sickly swallowed it back down. She felt lightheaded and her legs were shaking, as though unable to support her own weight. Andrew had withdrawn his arm from her hold at some point, so now Sarah faced the dark madness engulfing her alone, with fresh tears rolling down her cheeks.
Amid the cold cloud, the priest’s spell, and her own fear, Sarah heard the scream of a child. She screamed back, instantly recognising the scream that belonged to her daughter, Lucy. The cloud continued to swell more rapidly, as though taking hold of that scream and working harder to maintain it.
The priest had been at the mill for two weeks. At first, when he walked about the town with both Sarah and Andrew, the villagers were curious.
“Have they turned to religion to get over their grief?” they would ask each other in worry for the two mourning parents.
Some sympathised, some approved, and some simply took no notice. After a week, the people of Wrestlingworth simply ignored this new addition to their village and got on with their daily lives.
Within the mill, Sarah only ever saw the priest when he was giving her errands—clearing a space on the top floor of the mill for the ritual, ensuring the mill was completely soundproofed, and choosing a time when both the church and graveyard were unattended. Other small jobs included cleaning the priest’s bedroom every afternoon, though he made it clear that Sarah would not have to make him meals.
The priest never seemed to be dressed in anything but his black robes, always perfectly ironed, despite their obvious faded and worn look. They were particularly tight around the middle, forcing his belly to fold over his waistband in an ugly fashion. Neither Sarah nor Andrew had asked him any questions during his stay; the same strange compulsion they felt during their first meeting seemed to hold them both in place against questioning the man living under their roof.
When Lucy passed away, Andrew quit his job at the law firm to “grieve,” though by this point, his grieving had turned simply into drinking his sadness away. Sarah became robotic in everything she did. Cooking, cleaning, sleeping, and weeping daily. Between her buried emotions and Andrew’s bitter drinking, their love for each other had turned into disgust. The wedge that was driven between the two of them had never been clearer than that current moment.
Andrew sat in the living room on an old, worn sofa, staring into space with a half-drained bottle in his hand. Before Lucy’s death, the walls were a light blue and adorned with photos. The room was supposed to be open and airy, letting the sunshine illuminate it with as much light as possible. Now, however, the curtains were drawn tightly closed, allowing only a thin stream of light to penetrate, enough to highlight the figure of Andrew.
The kitchen was also dark whilst Sarah set about cleaning appliances that hadn’t yet been touched. The room was immaculately clean, making the image seem even more painful when compared to the mess that was supposed to be caused by a mother baking cakes and entertaining a child. The sound of the room had, in the space of six months, turned from a girl’s laughter, a mother nagging, and a father cooing, to nothing more than a heavy silence—a silence that weighed on the hearts of those involved, both desperate to break it with some form of conversation, apology, even tears, while they also wanted to preserve it to protect their hearts from being shown to the stranger in the next room.
Sarah was cleaning the oven when she heard heavy creaking down the wooden stairs above her. Moments later, the priest was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Sarah immediately stood and watched him, her eyes begging for news of the service being ready.
He smiled at her thinly before speaking. “First, I want to thank you both for your hospitality and your patience with me. I can happily announce that everything is finally ready for Lucy to be returned to you tonight. There are two last things I will need done before the ritual, however. Lucy’s body must be dug up and brought here, and I need the body of the man who killed her.” He stopped talking for a moment before being prompted by a confused look from Andrew. The priest sighed before continuing to speak. “He offers the closest link to her, being the man whose life she was most closely tied to at her death. Those kinds of souls tend to stick together.” After this, the priest crossed his arms and waited for a response, eventually losing patience and breathing deeply. “Both tasks must be completed by midnight or else I will be unable to carry out the service for you.” At this, he turned and walked upstairs with a confident air about him.
Sarah went into the living room to look at Andrew, who grimaced and stood.
“I know. I’ll get the bodies, don’t worry. I’ll be back tonight.” At this, Andrew walked upstairs drunkenly, slowly pacing each step.
Eventually he reached the top and made his way to their bedroom, where Sarah heard the door slam behind him. She stooped down and continued to mindlessly clean, the same smile twitching her lips that had appeared at the priest’s apartment. She couldn’t understand why she smiled at this dark business, so she shook her head and returned to cleaning blankly, her hands shaking as she did so.
Preston Addams hadn’t slept properly in months. Images of a dead girl haunted his dreams, turning them to guilt-ridden nightmares. Every day he went to work at the office and spent his time idly typing, his co-workers watched him suspiciously, hate blazing in their eyes.
“How did he not get sentenced for murder?”
“What monster does that to a child?”
Whether his co-workers said this or not, Preston could read it from their faces and how they looked away from him whenever eye contact was made.
He worked in a call centre; he was lucky to still have a job there, his bosses having had to place him on a three-month suspension. He was allowed to return on the condition that he had proven his innocence and was demoted from a team leader back down to a caller. He would spend eight hours a day being given abuse on the phone by anyone he tried to call offering PPI and broadband. They would listen amicably until price and subscription was mentioned, then, as though by magic, the perfectly civilised folk he spoke to became hateful monsters, screaming insults at him before angrily hanging up.
He had planned to speak to his wife that night, the reminder he’d set on his phone making it vibrate. He reached down into the glovebox as he drove to look at his phone. Immediately dropping it at the memory of the girl he’d hit with the front of his car only six months ago whilst checking his phone. Something he’d chosen to not tell the police about. With no witnesses able to contradict him, the guilt of the life he’d taken and the lie he’d told for self-preservation had haunted him since. His wife moved away to stay with her family and took his two children with her.
He tried to pick his phone back up from the floor of his car but decided to keep driving, clearing the highway he was cruising down and turning at the next sign offering a service stop. The car park was empty—strange as it was only 10 p.m. on a Saturday. A car followed him closely up through the services lanes, a small Ford that rumbled and lurched, as though the person driving was having trouble keeping control of it
s steering and pedals. It was tiny in comparison to the black Range Rover Preston drove. Though with his lowered wage, he faced the prospect of losing it, along with his house.
He parked in the first empty space he saw in the service station. The small car stopped next to him, parking diagonally and taking up two spaces. Preston took no notice, instead fishing out his phone from underneath him. He switched off the vibrating alarm, knowing he would be home in an hour, just in time.
He looked up at a knock on his window. The person knocking wore a balaclava and roughly opened the door, dragging out Preston as he did so. The man was large and built, as though a former rugby player. Preston was small, forever sitting at a computer or a help desk. The man’s breath carried the stench of whiskey as he shouted into Preston’s face, wrestling him to the ground.
“Do you remember Lucy Berkley?”
Preston became limp and nodded dumbly. Looking up at the masked man as the knife was drawn across his throat, Preston didn’t register the quick tear of pain before slipping away into darkness. His final thought was of his wife and children.
Andrew quickly picked up the limp corpse, blood gushing from the incision in its throat and spilling onto his shirt. He opened the Ford’s boot and threw the body of Preston into it with disgust before getting back into the driver’s seat, switching on the engine, which rumbled to life after a couple of angry whirs. He took his time trying to find the clutch before giving up entirely and simply laying his head on the wheel. He took a deep breath before lifting his head and allowed tears to roll down his face as he sobbed in the way only a grieving, desperate parent could. Finally, after what felt like hours, Andrew sat up straight and drove back to Wrestlingworth with determination, thinking nothing of the fresh corpse in his boot.
Soon enough, Andrew was passing the mill and going on to the churchyard. It was abandoned now. Andrew did his best to ignore the school as he drove past it, instead focusing on the church. He kept his eyes on Lucy’s plot, her grave lying directly underneath a small, thin tree she used to climb when she didn’t think her parents were watching.
He parked the car in front of the gates, hastily stopping and retrieving a shovel from the backseats. He walked through the black gate, freshly painted to hide its rust; it let out a high-pitched creak as he pushed it open. He could hear youths in the nearby park shouting, and their voices made Andrew catch his breath in his throat. He froze before dropping slightly, hoping no one saw him. He quickly jogged to Lucy’s grave, staying low as he went. Finally, he stood, placing himself behind the tree to search the graveyard.
Satisfied he was alone, Andrew let go of his paranoia and began to dig, planting his shovel firmly into the ground and scooping out mounds of dirt. Fear of being discovered gave him speed, and he dug fast enough to build up a sweat. Voices of kids came and went, and there was more than one occasion when he had to duck low just to make sure he wasn’t seen. Fitting his large frame into a small ball, he would wait for the voices or a set of footsteps to subside, feeling his heart beating out of his chest before he would rise and continue to dig.
Eventually his shovel landed on a hard surface, and in seemingly no time at all, he’d widened the hole enough to pull out the small, black coffin, roughly half the size of him. He pried off the lid with the shovel and pulled a small body in a white dress out of it, not yet able to recognise his daughter’s features due to the darkness all around him. He placed the lid back onto the coffin, laid it back into the ground, and piled the earth back over the spot to cover it. Andrew could only pray nobody would notice.
Picking up the shovel in one hand and the dark bundle of his daughter in the other, Andrew ran across the graveyard and back to his car as fast as possible. He carefully placed Lucy on the backseat, keeping the lights off so as not to look at his child. He placed the shovel next to her and jumped into the driver’s seat before revving the engine and speeding back to the mill. He was almost fully sober by the time he returned and could feel a headache begin to pulse in his skull.
He walked through the front door where the priest stood, waiting, as though expecting him. Sarah was in the kitchen and broke down into sobs at the sight of the bundle Andrew was holding. She fell to her knees and held her head in her hands. Andrew ignored her as he softly walked to the sofa to lay Lucy down. He examined her corpse.
Dark spots of mould infested her once perfect face, and her blonde hair had become dirty, discoloured, and bald in places. Her body was curved and broken from where the car had hit her tiny frame, and yet Andrew knew immediately it was his daughter. Her nose, though broken, matched his own, and she had her mother’s blonde curls. She was also a broader girl than most ten-year-olds and boyish in her own way.
Andrew smiled at the corpse of his daughter as tears began to roll from his eyes again. He quickly stood, wiped his eyes dry, and walked back to the car, his feet crunching on the gravel as he replaced the warm living room with the cold darkness of the outside. Nervous, Andrew looked around for anyone watching the mill. Finally satisfied, Andrew opened the boot of his car and dragged out Preston’s body, grunting with the effort. Preston’s blood had dried around his neck; cracking and flaking off as his corpse was dragged across the gravel.
Andrew brought him into the living room, closed the front door behind him, and then simply let go for Preston to flop to the ground. He looked at the priest.
“Well done. I knew you could do it, Andrew. Now they just need to come to the top of the mill and we can begin.” With that the priest picked up Preston’s corpse and held it under one arm while Andrew just stared after him, open-mouthed at the strength of the whistling priest.
He gently picked up Lucy and, biting his trembling lip, slowly walked upstairs. After a few more minutes of sobbing, Sarah finally followed them. Ready to bring her daughter back to life.
All the priest remembered from his life, before his death and rebirth, was that he was a priest. All his other memories seemed too distant and blurry to remember. He could vaguely recall the laughter of children. Apart from these small fragments though, his memory from that life mainly consisted of fractured prayers and bible verses.
The earliest complete memory he had was that of the afterlife. An empty white void that defied all logic. Loneliness and anger set in for the priest as he simply waited with as much patience as he could muster for his heavenly reward.
One day, sick of waiting patiently, he started walking and didn’t stop. The priest walked for what felt like an eternity. Being dead had its perks. His body was returned to its youth, turning the priest from the old, fat man he’d died in the body of, to a forty-year-old.
Another perk was that his body didn’t have limits, he didn’t get hungry or thirsty. He felt no need to sleep, and his body never seemed to require rest. He walked for years, sometimes coming across other souls begging for help and direction. The priest tried to point them toward God, convinced that he, along with all the other souls, were in purgatory. After an impossible amount of time, the priest lost even that faith, and instead, simply left the souls to their begging and madness. He only believed he should continue to walk.
After walking farther than he ever had when alive, the priest came upon something called The Field: a place full of souls, emanating the same aura as his own—either black or white. The priest’s aura had started white at the beginning of his walk but had become grey and discoloured by the time he reached The Field. The less help he offered the other souls, the darker his aura became. It was here, amongst these auras, that he was offered a way out.
It wasn’t anywhere noteworthy, as all of The Field looked alike. Even the people seemed to blend into a mixture of white, black, and all the shades in between. A man stopped the priest and caught his arm. He seemed to have all the world’s accents and yet none of them at the same time, and his smile was artificial, as though he was only wearing his body as a costume. He was tall and built, making for an intimidating figure to any, though the priest knew by this point that the size
of a person’s body was irrelevant. Everyone was the same in that respect, from children to old men.
“Well hello, Priest. I am Light, I think. I have been waiting to give you a tour.” With that the strange man began to walk as the priest spluttered behind him in shock, only just noticing that Light didn’t have an aura at all.
“I’m sorry, who are you? What do you mean, tour? And where is your aura?” The priest shot these questions all at once at Light, partly out of shock and partly out of a need to talk to someone who was sane. Something souls in the afterlife seemed to lack.
“Oh, I don’t really know who I am. No one does. All I know is what is here, what I can do for you, and that I don’t have an aura, but it doesn’t make a difference anyway.” Light spoke quickly and seemed to skip as he walked.
The priest didn’t know if this change of pace excited or worried him. He started to wonder what would happen if someone hit him whilst he was a soul.
He looked around to realise Light had dragged him out of earshot of the other souls and suddenly hunched lower, coming down to the priest’s eye level and speaking in almost a whisper. “Listen, I have a way for you to get out of here. Only certain people can go back to the world of the living, and you can. I know that. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. If I can send you back to the world of the living, you must promise to find my grave and resurrect me. If I’m right, then the ritual for resurrecting me should just come naturally to you. Please, don’t you want to escape too?” Light spoke with urgency and madness in his eyes before looking down apologetically. “Look, I’ve spent God knows how long in this world. It doesn’t get better. We don’t even get to die again. Instead, everyone wanders aimlessly, losing their fucking minds, and I couldn’t live with it anymore, so … so I prayed …” He looked down with shame as he spoke. “I prayed and I was given the instructions for getting out of here but was told I would need to wait for someone. I know now it was you I was waiting for!” He grabbed the priest and pulled him close, smiling as he did so.
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