The Plague Stones

by James Brogden

  ‘Sorry, Reverend,’ said Rajko, stepping aside to make way for his friends. ‘But we can’t have you blessing the stones again after all the trouble it took to bring them down.’ He was seized with another coughing fit, bent double with his hands propped on his knees, and blood spattered the floor between his feet.

  ‘Priest,’ repeated Hester. ‘Come out and I will make it quick for you.’ When Joyce didn’t move She added, ‘Get a move on, slowcoach!’ and giggled.

  ‘The God of my rock; in him will I trust,’ Joyce babbled, the words falling over themselves in her panic. ‘He is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my saviour; thou savest me from violence…’ Still backing away, her heels bumped against the step up to the chancel and she fought to keep her balance. A tiny and utterly superstitious part of her was convinced that if she could stay upright they wouldn’t be able to get her.

  But they came for her anyway. The dead villagers of Clegeham poured into the church, hacking apart the pews with mattocks and billhooks and smashing the stained-glass windows into rainbow shards with rakes and pitchforks, gouging the memorial boards and ripping down from the walls the pictures drawn by Sunday school children. They seized her with cold, black hands and dragged her back down the aisle to where Hester was waiting by the well and forced her to her knees at Hester’s feet so that she could see her own face reflected in the water.

  ‘Please…’ she whispered. ‘We’re sorry…’

  ‘And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry,’ declared Hester, preaching to the chaos, ‘and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day. And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones.’

  ‘I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to help you find peace.’

  Hester paused in Her preaching. ‘Save your pity for yourself,’ She sneered. ‘Though doubtless you have faith that the Lord will save your soul. He won’t. There is no God, nor is there a devil. There is only the gwrach clefyd. Only the rake or the broom.’

  The reflection of the dead girl rose up high behind Joyce, and she saw now that in Her hand was a sickle of the kind used for reaping crops. Joyce struggled then, but the dead hands held her fast, bending her lower, one fist bunched in her hair and stretching her throat out taut over the brimming water of Saint Sebastian’s holy well. It wasn’t just terror for her own life, though that was sharp enough – it was a soul-deep horror at the desecration Hester Attlowe was about to commit.

  ‘And thou shalt be like a watered garden,’ Hester said, finishing the verse from Isaiah, ‘and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.’

  The sickle swept across Reverend Dobson’s throat so swiftly and deeply that at first she felt nothing except a numb surprise at how the water seemed to have darkened. The realisation that it was her own life blood jetting into the water hit her at the same time as the pain, but then both flooded away into oblivion.

  * * *

  They bled her body into the well and left it amongst the rest of the carnage. The flow of water wasn’t especially fast, so it took some time for all of the blood to rinse clear through the culvert and out into the world where it joined the network of streams and rivers which eventually fed into the ocean, but before long the spring ran as clean as if nothing had ever happened, and the church was silent again except for the soft whisper of trickling water.

  * * *

  Rajko found himself standing in a dark side street behind a different expensive-looking house with no clear recollection of how he’d got there beyond the fact that Hester and Her people had brought him. There was a dim sense of cold hands all around him, pulling, pushing, urging, and carrying him rapidly through some non-place that was all shadows, but that might have been caused by the fire in his head. He might simply have just taken to his heels and run, and somehow managed to escape the helicopter. He heard it throbbing in the distance, but again that could have been just coming from inside his burning head. The gash in his forehead was swollen and sticky with blood and he was running with sweat, but at the same time shivering as if he was naked in the snow.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked through chattering teeth.

  ‘At the house of the bailiff,’ She replied. ‘The man responsible for your pain.’

  ‘You mean Nash?’

  ‘His name is not important.’

  ‘His name might not be but his security fucking is. How are we going to get in there? His place is going to be even harder than the Feenans’.’ They hadn’t meant to be first – they were just a target of opportunity – but it had nearly finished him all the same. The priest and the bailiff were the main threats. With them out of the way, Hester could pick off the rest of the Trustees at leisure.

  ‘He will come when I call. He possesses an object that he believes protects him, and in his arrogance he will not be able to resist the chance to flaunt it in my face.’

  ‘Is he right?’

  Her answer came slowly, as if extracted with pain. ‘It is an object which I find… disagreeable. But he will not be expecting you; you will take it from him and destroy it, and then I will take vengeance for all of us.’

  ‘What does this thing look like?’

  She described the pilgrim badge. He didn’t understand why such a thing would make a difference to Her, but She’d been as good as Her word so far, and besides, it hurt so much to think that it was easier to simply agree.

  Nash’s back garden was a lot larger than the Feenans’ and more expansively landscaped. Rajko crossed a wide koi pond by a replica Japanese bridge and worked his way around the side through the shadows of sculpted topiary while Hester and Her people marched right up to an elaborate conservatory which took up most of the back of the house. If there was a security light, it didn’t trip, which meant either that their cold, dead bodies were invisible against the background, or that they weren’t really there at all and he was simply insane.

  ‘Bailiff!’ cried Hester. ‘Come out and I promise to make it quick!’

  Rajko waited. Sirens wailed in the distance, along with the helicopter’s grumble.

  ‘Bailiff!’ She called again. ‘You will—’

  A light went on in the conservatory, and Nash was standing there by its wide double sliding doors. Despite the early hour he was fully dressed in suit and tie, with his hands in his trouser pockets as if out for nothing more adventurous than a stroll in the moonlight. His official Haleswell Village Trust lanyard hung around his neck, and attached to that was something small that glinted silver which must have been the pilgrim badge that She’d described.

  ‘I heard you,’ said Nash, and he opened the conservatory doors to walk outside and parley with the dead.

  * * *

  There was nothing very original in seeing his suit as a form of armour, Nash knew, but that didn’t stop it being true. As a schoolboy, the neatness of his uniform was a source of pride in the face of the older boys’ bullying. At the age of eleven he was ironing his own shirts. At college and university through the seventies and eighties, when white kids wore their hair like Africans and everybody seemed to want to look like they lived in a van despite coming from cosy, affluent middle-class families, Nash turned up to lectures in jacket and tie because that was exactly where he did come from, and that was what he was. He scorned their counter-cultural affectations as a form of childish self-delusion. Look how individual and free I am, their Doc Martens and badge-covered army surplus jackets said. If his suits said anything, it was Stop fucking around and just get on with it.

  There was a very good chance that Hester was going to tear him to pieces, but if so he wouldn’t be naked when it happened. He’d thought he would be more frightened, but he felt strangely calm, as if there were something familiar about all of this.

  ‘I heard you,’ he said. ‘I would ask what you want, but that’s pretty obvious.’ He nodded at the farm tools carried by Her people. ‘The answer is what it
has always been: no. Fuck off back to hell or wherever it is you come from.’ It was just noise to provoke a reaction, but none of the dead mob had made a move towards him yet. He removed his left hand from its pocket and grasped the lanyard just above the badge, took a deep breath and a step forward.

  He saw Hester’s glare flicker down to the pilgrim badge, and what might have been a twitch of something like pain snag the corner of Her mouth.

  She retreated a step, and his soul blazed with triumph.

  ‘Oh you stupid dead bitch!’ he crowed. ‘I’m going to—’

  Then a shadow with grasping hands launched itself at him from the left.

  He jumped back into the doorway of the conservatory, withdrawing his right hand from where it had been holding a personal self-defence Taser the size of a Dictaphone, pivoted into the attack and unloaded the device’s ten thousand volts full in his attacker’s throat. There was a sound of dry twigs cracking, and the man fell to his knees over the threshold, clutching his neck with both hands and making agonised gargling noises. Nash watched with distaste as he writhed.

  ‘Did you actually think that I wouldn’t see you climbing over my wall?’ he asked, and turned to Hester. ‘Or that I wouldn’t be alerted the moment you started desecrating the stones? I let you get this far to see if this…’ and he waved the pilgrim badge at Her, ‘…works, and it looks like it does. This is what we call in the trade a game-changer, my dear.’

  Abruptly, without appearing to move, Hester was gone, and Her mob with Her.

  Nash let out a great shuddering sigh of relief and sat down heavily on one of the conservatory chairs, propping his elbows on his knees and leaning forward as if he were about to pass out or vomit, and right now he felt like doing both. His attacker was still choking, but also trying to squirm to his feet, so Nash leaned forward and Tasered him again in the neck. He screamed and flopped, and for the first time Nash got a proper look at him.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he muttered to Rajko. ‘Well I suppose it’s not that surprising.’ There was probably only one charge left but hopefully the police would be here soon. They were going to be having a busy night. Not all of his fellow Trustees would survive until dawn, which was a shame, and he wished he could have warned them that Hester had broken the Beating, but it would have made luring Her much more difficult if they’d all been running around like headless chickens. Assessing the effectiveness of the pilgrim badge was much more important than any single one of their lives, even his own. It was the first time anything approaching a weapon had been found that could be used against Her. The very future of the village was at stake – a future in which they might not need the Beating, or even the Trust at all. Why put a whole committee of other people’s lives needlessly at risk when one man, properly protected, could take charge of the whole thing?

  ‘I’m doing this for you, you know,’ he said to the semiconscious young man at his feet. ‘All of you.’

  35

  THE MORNING AFTER

  ‘HE’S NOT ANSWERING,’ MUTTERED NATALIE, PACING the living-room floor of her apartment with her phone. ‘It just keeps diverting me to voicemail.’

  ‘He’s probably giving a statement to the cops,’ said Peter. He was sitting at one end of the sofa with Trish at the other and Toby lying with his head in her lap, looking pale and haggard despite having finally been able to shower off the mess of Rajko’s attack. The extra police units had eventually arrived to confirm that their attackers weren’t hiding in the house, but there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t return and with so many windows broken PC Owen wouldn’t let her and Peter and Toby go back in for anything more than to pick up some belongings. When he’d asked if there was anybody that they could stay with – friends or relatives – Trish had laughed bitterly, remembering her conversation with Peter in which they’d joked about running away to draw Hester down on someone they didn’t like. The only people that they could turn to for refuge were the other Trustees, who were in just as much danger, and the only one of them left that Trish felt comfortable enough with was Natalie.

  The White Hart would have been the more sensible choice, if it hadn’t been gutted by fire – besides which, nobody had been able to contact Al either, and the thought that Hester might have already killed him made her feel sick. Joyce Dobson had been her next best choice. PCs Owen and Karim had driven them into the village to the rectory, but pulled up short at the sight of the church door wide open and all its windows smashed, light pouring out into the night. Telling the Feenans to stay in the car, the two police officers had radioed it in and checked out St Sebastian’s with great caution. But PC Owen had come back to the car looking ashen and shaking his head in disbelief; he wouldn’t tell them what was inside but Trish knew that Joyce was dead when he asked her if there was anybody else that they could stay with.

  So they’d gone to Natalie’s to answer the police’s questions. Full statements weren’t needed right at that moment, besides which Trish gathered from the half-conversations she heard through their personal radios that the emergency services were a bit stretched tonight. The one piece of good news that they could offer was that the Gorić boy had been arrested at Nash’s house, but, other than calling them to say that he’d been attacked, the chief executive himself was nowhere to be found. By the time the police left it was well after dawn.

  ‘Nash would only be making a statement if something had happened to him,’ Trish replied.

  Peter flapped a hand distractedly. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he protested. ‘I’m sure he’s fine.’ He’d complained of a growing headache and taken a couple of paracetamol, but they didn’t seem to be having much effect. Trish put it down to exhaustion and the after-effects of the attack; she felt like she was ready to drop herself. ‘If anybody can take care of themselves it’s your chief executive.’

  ‘But what if Hester’s got him?’ said Anik Singh. His hair was in wild tufts and he was chewing and picking at the corners of his fingernails.

  ‘Well then there’s not a huge amount we can do about it, is there?’ Sean Trevorrow called in from the balcony where he was having a vape. Rather than the large detached houses of the other Trustees, Natalie Markes had opted for a penthouse apartment in a discreet but luxuriously appointed complex on the edge of the village but still within the boundary of the plague stones, for whatever good that was worth now. An intruder would have to go through a concierge and seven lower floors, though whether that would deter Hester was anybody’s guess. ‘Seriously though,’ Trevorrow added, blowing a billowing cloud. ‘What does She want?’

  ‘I think it’s pretty fucking obvious what She wants, don’t you?’ Anik retorted. ‘She wants us dead!’

  ‘So why has She stopped, then? Why are we still alive?’

  ‘Maybe because it’s daylight?’ suggested Natalie.

  ‘Why would that make a difference?’ said Trish.

  Anik stared at them, his brown eyes very wide. ‘Because She’s one of the walking dead – all right, yes, I said it, shut up – so maybe it’s like vampires.’

  Trish wasn’t so sure. ‘Daylight doesn’t seem to have been a problem before, when all She could do was trick us. I don’t see why it would be now, when She can actually do physical harm. And anyway, vampires aren’t real.’

  Anik uttered a short bark of laughter. ‘Will you listen to yourself? Go outside and ask anybody if a dead medieval peasant girl walking around killing people with a fucking scythe is real!’

  ‘I’m trying to keep a level head about this,’ replied Trish. ‘Someone has to.’

  Esme Barlow, who had been quiet for most of the morning, said, ‘Maybe it’s just because it’s easier to get away with it in the dark, like any other criminal.’ She was nursing a large mug of coffee but Trish could see from the way she kept glancing at the bottles of wine in Natalie’s kitchen that the sun might be going over the yardarm a lot earlier for her today.

  ‘She’s not just—’ protested Anik.

  ‘Okay, okay, we get
it,’ interrupted Natalie. ‘Anik, do us a favour – Peter’s looking pretty grim there and I don’t have anything much stronger than paracetamol. Can you go out to the pharmacy and get something for colds and flu? We’re also almost out of milk and I don’t know about you, but I need another brew.’

  Anik looked like he was about to argue the toss but looked at Peter, who was pale and clammy, with red-rimmed eyes and a damp cloth on his forehead. Peter gave him a tired thumbs-up. ‘Okay, fine. But I’m not going out there on my own.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Esme sighed, and got to her feet.

  After they’d left, Trevorrow came back in from the balcony and shut the sliding door.

  ‘Let’s track this back,’ said Natalie. ‘Rajko wrecks the stones between two and three in the morning. Hester attacks Trish’s house because it’s the last stone, but is chased off by the police and goes straight for Joyce just after three. Why Joyce first? Because of the attempt to bless Hester’s resting place? The rectory is right in the centre of the village; some of us live a lot closer to you,’ she gestured at the Feenan family, ‘so why ignore us and go straight for Joyce?’

  ‘It’s raiding tactics,’ said Toby, and everybody looked at him. It was the first thing he’d said since they’d arrived, and he’d been curled up on the sofa between his parents with his head in his mother’s lap and his eyes closed, so the others had assumed he was asleep. He pulled himself into a sitting position. ‘If you’re pillaging a town repeatedly from a remote stronghold you need to stop the inhabitants from rebuilding their defences so you kill off the stonemasons and the builders, or you wreck their quarries. The reverend could have blessed all the stones again first thing and kept Hester out, so she was a priority target.’

  The four adults stared.

  ‘I play a lot of computer games.’