Fallam's Secret

by Denise Giardina

  “We are gathered this morning in a building set aside for the worship of God which has been stained by idolatrous and illegal practices.” He here cast a severe eye on the Reverend Smythe, who instead of standing in his own pulpit was slumped in the front pew. Then Fallam continued.

  “And there is more. For this is a church bewitched.”

  He got no further, for Jacob Woodcock stood and pointed a trembling finger at the women in the back of the church.

  “And yonder sits the witch!” he cried. “For we had none of this upset before that girl came among us from Bristol. And my wife, who died, as you will recall, four months past, believed that girl was trying to poison her!”

  A general tumult then, while Mary sat with a stricken look on her face. Mother Bunch put her arm protectively around the girl while fighting back angry tears.

  “Why would they single her out?” Lydde whispered angrily to Uncle John. “I thought they would pick on me, if anyone.”

  “But you’re a boy,” Uncle John answered. “They rarely charge a man with witchcraft unless he’s thought to be homosexual. They think the Devil uses seduction to win his converts, and only women and homosexuals would yield to him.”

  Mary had buried her head on Mother Bunch’s shoulder while Jacob Woodcock shouted above the others, “She delivers the doctor’s medicines, that one does. And the doctor may mean well, but the girl serves another master, who is Satan!”

  Then Noah Fallam brought his Bible down upon the pulpit with a crash and cried, “Silence!”

  And amazingly the din ceased.

  Then he said, “You are not here to accuse this girl, or anyone else, of witchcraft. You are here to listen to the word of God. Sit down, all of you.”

  And they sat, Uncle John with a relieved sigh and a whispered, “Thank God for that, at least.”

  “As I said,” Fallam continued, biting off his words as though lecturing unruly children, “a church bewitched. Not by a poor girl in league with the Devil. That is fantasy, as much so as belief in fairies and such. Satan has no such power. But by these fantasies does the Fiend truly tempt us, for they close our eyes to the true sources of evil. I speak of disobedience. The bewitchment of this church was brought about by those who mock God with their Book of Common Prayer, their clandestine games and revels, their morris dances, their plays.” Like Woodcock he was pointing his finger, ranging across the congregation and beyond, in the direction of the Norchester walls. “Oh, yes. A play was performed in Norchester just before my arrival, while God’s servants slept. Adultery and gaming continue. And in this church, idolatry is practiced, with a pagan worshiping of a piece of bread as the supposed body of Christ, with the debauched prayer book. Here is the evil. It must end, once and for all.”

  He went on with a slew of Bible verses which seemed to Lydde to have little to do with his point. But she was grateful attention had been deflected from Mary, who was still trembling and sobbing silently.

  “Here is what the sinner believes,” Fallam continued. “The sinner hears beautiful music and is moved. Because the sinner is moved, he mistakenly believes God loves him. Nothing could be further from the truth. God hates the sinner and loves only the elect. And the elect are known by their obedience to the word of God.”

  The heads of all the Puritans in attendance were bobbing in agreement. They were the elect, all of them were certain, not one of them or any member of their families a hated sinner.

  “The sinner,” said Fallam “straps bells on his legs and goes morris dancing at Michaelmas, and taunts God at Christmas with trees and candles and Yule logs, worshiping the pagan deities of light and trees rather than the one true God. The sinner attends a play where so-called actors pretend to be someone other than who they are, and where chastity is mocked, where demons are conjured and a love of violence tempted, where young boys in the guise of actors are lured into lewdness. The sinner’s mind is on the play he sees, not on God. He believes what he sees is true, not a mockery of truth. Then there are the women among us who sin, who think not at all, but only feel, which is a woman’s nature. Vain women gossip and spread the knowledge of evil. Women are as weak and giddy as children, and that is how Satan captures them.”

  Here Lydde sat up straight and looked around. No one seemed outraged, so she bit her lip and ducked her head. “Jerk,” she muttered under her breath.

  “I have heard rumors,” Fallam continued, “that another play may be performed in Norchester. I assure you, it will not. Michaelmas is only days away, and I have heard morris men are ready to dance. I assure you, they will not. Nor when so-called Christ-mass comes will there be pagan or papist celebration, for the godly constables of Norchester shall go from house to house if necessary and root out all such evil. Christmas is but another form of playacting, and I forbid the mention even of its name. The risen Christ would not condone a papish mass nor have his name linked with one.”

  Lydde stole a glance at Mother Bunch, who was seething. Then they all gave a great start, many crying out in fear, for the doors at the back of the church were just then violently thrown open. A man stood outlined by the sunlight, and when he stepped forward he was seen to be roughly dressed and wearing a black hood over his face. He pointed a long arm—people here do point a lot, Lydde thought—at the pulpit.

  “Noah Fallam!” the man cried. “I have a message for you from the Raven.”

  And even as a dozen men rose to go and throttle the man, he dropped a dagger on the stone floor with a clatter and was gone. He was pursued, but because his horse was waiting and ready, he was easily away, as his pursuers later reported.

  In the meantime Fallam had involuntarily flinched at the man’s entrance but now gathered his composure. He came forward from the pulpit and strode down the aisle, holding out his hand. Lydde sat nearest to the dagger and Fallam looked at her as though he expected her to hand it to him. She picked it up gingerly and turned its hilt toward him.

  “There is a paper attached,” she said.

  “So I see.” His voice was cold. He grasped the hilt so forcefully that Lydde failed to let go soon enough and the sharp edge of the knife cut her finger. She winced. Fallam reached out and grasped her wrist tightly, held up her hand to examine the wound. A thin line of blood rose from the tip of her forefinger. Then he just as abruptly dropped her hand, turned on his heel, and was back at the front of the church, unwrapping the parchment as he went. He read the message silently, then aloud.

  “‘Brother Fallam,’” he read, “‘you set yourself above all before God. The Raven shall bring you down. Call not your Elisha Sitwell from Bristol to harass poor men, or I shall hang you myself from a limb in Oxgodby Forest. The Raven.’”

  Fallam held the note out between thumb and forefinger as though it were infected. “Here is what I think of such crude threats,” he said in a clear voice. He crumpled the parchment into a ball, dropped it, and placed a booted foot firmly upon it. “This Raven and his men are brigands who do not care for the souls of poor men, for they do tempt them to sin unto hell. Major-General Sitwell will not be deterred. As for myself, I assure you, I shall not cease to protect property or souls in my jurisdiction. In Norchester, I am the law.”

  With that, he bowed his head, prayed for a length of time, and dismissed the congregation, who left hastily, noisily, and with great relief. But while most were distracted with loudly discussing the strange events piled one upon another in the last two days, Uncle John and his little band were caught up short when Noah Fallam, accompanied by a flustered-looking Constable Baxter, appeared in front of them. He spoke to Uncle John but was looking at Lydde.

  “Send the boy to me tomorrow,” he said. “As near to noon as possible.”

  “B-but why must—” Uncle John was slowly replying, but he spoke to the air, for Noah Fallam was away toward his horse, the constable in tow.

  SOANE’S Croft was quiet the rest of the day. John Soane did not see patients on Sundays, as all observed the Sabbath, but there was sometimes
an emergency which called him out. No such event troubled him today. Mother Bunch and Mary did no Sabbath work in the garden; the flowers and herbs were left to fend for themselves, and Mother Bunch served a cold dinner of old bread, cheese, and cold bacon. Uncle John stood up when this frugal meal was done and said, “Pardon, Mary, Mother Bunch, but I must speak now with the boy. He will face a trial tomorrow.” So Mary went off to study her letters, which Uncle John insisted upon, since she had never learned them before. Mother Bunch sat in a rocking chair outside the kitchen door, casting her thoughts here and there and silently offering encouragement to her herbs.

  Uncle John led Lydde to a stone enclosure at the back of the garden. Empty niches two feet high were chiseled into the wall. Uncle John sat on a bench.

  “Used to be a chapel to the Virgin,” he explained. “And when that became forbidden, the statues were removed. So it just became a quiet place.”

  “A good place for making out,” Lydde observed.

  “That too, I bet,” Uncle John agreed with a grin. Then he sighed. “God, I miss Lavinia.”

  “At least you know she’s alive. That’s more than she can say.”

  He shrugged and only said, “That won’t last long,” then looked away.

  “I’m waiting for more explanation,” Lydde said. “And I want it now. Especially if I’ve got to go before the Inquisition tomorrow.”

  “I know. So here it is. Not that you can tell any of this to Fallam, but you should know. I’d rather have told you back home, but you wouldn’t have believed it anyway. Now”—he waved his arm to encompass the grounds of Soane’s Croft—“you will.”

  “You bet,” Lydde said. “And I remember things you used to tell me when I was a kid. You may have forgotten, but they were important to me. You said when people die they can go anywhere they want to, even across time. Is that what you want to tell me about?”

  He took her hand.

  “That’s it,” he said. “But now you don’t have to die.”

  Chapter 9

  Thin Places

  UNCLE JOHN EXPLAINED about thin places. A thin place, he said, is located at the boundary between heaven and earth. A place where you can ever so briefly glimpse what lies beyond, perhaps even talk to God. When Moses met Yahweh in the burning bush he was standing on a thin place. The Celtic monks who came from Ireland to pagan England identified thin places, like the island of Iona, for their monasteries.

  Thin places were like any other at first glance. If one goes into such a place heedless, nothing may appear out of the ordinary. But in these places only the most delicate of membranes separates mundane reality from the Infinite. Go in with eyes and heart open and you can sense this.

  “Diaphanous,” Uncle John said. “I love that word. That’s how to describe the membrane between dimensions. You could call the altar rail of a church a thin place, where people kneel and meet the divine as though God stretched an invisible hand through a curtain. Or the New River cutting its old, old way through ancient mountains, God’s finger tracing a jagged path. And the thinnest of all places, where the jagged crests of those old mountains touch the sky. Stand on such a place and you’re close to true reality. Destroy it and you rip a hole in the fabric of creation.”

  “Hold on!” Lydde held up her hand. “You’re talking like a mystic or something.”

  “You’re here and confused,” he said. “That should be enough to make you listen to me.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’m tired of the weirdness. You’re a scientist. I want a scientific explanation.”

  He smiled. “Okay. You don’t want thin places. How about a combination of relativity and quantum theory that posits ten or more dimensions including more than one dimension of time? Each dimension separated from the other by the thinnest of membranes pierced by wormholes too small to be detected. How about space-time so elastic that you can’t even get an agreed-upon sequence of events? Time not as a straight line but like—like a handful of shaving cream. How about universes that continually split off one from another into an infinite number of universes that proceed in infinite parallels?”

  She sat back against the bench. “You’re not making any sense!”

  “You of all people should understand,” he said. “What’s a well-told story but a parallel universe? When you step onto a stage and become another person, you pass into another dimension. The book, the play, that’s the wormhole.”

  “That’s not real.”

  “Yes, it is. You certainly believe it at the time, or you wouldn’t read the book or play the part.” He rubbed his head in an old familiar gesture. “Look. There’s not a physicist in the world who understands how this works. I can barely begin to grasp it. All I understand really is what I’m working with here, and that mostly because I’m living it.”

  “Then start with that,” Lydde said.

  “All I know,” Uncle John repeated, “is the math I’m working with to plot the dimensions of the New River Gorge. Because the Gorge is a place where the membrane between universes has been ruptured. We’ve known about wormholes for a while, but the technology doesn’t exist to pass through them. Now, back home in the Gorge, you don’t need any kind of futuristic technology. At least one of the wormholes has been enlarged.”

  “The one you and I passed through?”

  THE one Uncle John inadvertently discovered back in 1950. He explained to Lydde how he’d been looking for runes in caves and fallen into the seventeenth century by mistake.

  “Same as you,” he reminded Lydde.

  “Okay,” she said. “So how did the wormhole become large enough to pass through?”

  Instead of answering, he asked, “Have you ever been to a battlefield? One time Lavinia and I were on vacation up in the Eastern Panhandle at Shepherdstown and we decided to drive across the river to Antietam. It was October, a cold blustery day, and there weren’t any other tourists around. We got out of the car and I took a few steps and stopped. I saw that Lavinia had stopped too. And she said, ‘Do you feel something?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I sure do. Want to go back?’ And we got back in the car and drove back to Shepherdstown.”

  “What was it you felt?”

  “A heaviness. A dread. The atmosphere trying to bear the weight of thousands dying in agony, was how I thought of it later. The departure of all those souls at once, even if you don’t believe in an afterlife, even if they were just extinguished, it would have to scratch the thin membrane between dimensions. Though not tear it completely. And if you went in summer in the heat with cars and buses and people everywhere yakking about this and that, taking pictures just to say they were there, wondering where to buy souvenirs, kids crying—you’d feel nothing then. Do you understand? It takes silence to sense the closeness of another dimension. And a battle may not be enough to tear the fabric in a place that was ordinary otherwise, but a battle in a thin place might do it.”

  “What’s happened in the Gorge that could do that?”

  “I don’t know for certain. But I think it may have started with the blasting of the tunnel under Gauley Mountain back in 1931.”

  “You think the blasting shook something loose?”

  “Maybe. The unprecedented blasting combined with something else. The inhumanity. What you had was a company sending hundreds of poor men, mostly black men, to their deaths. Knowingly. They were blasting through pure silica without protection, going in and breathing ground glass every day.”

  “It’s not the only place people have been treated inhumanely.”

  “No. But thin places are by their nature recognized as special, even holy. They’re usually protected, a focus of pilgrimage, not atrocities. It’s so seldom that terrible evil is committed in a thin place. You know how special the Gorge is. You know you can stand and look down along the river and it’s like a force that tries to draw you in. The entire Gorge seems to exist in another dimension. A thin place. Yet we’ve killed people there, and since then there’s the strip-mining nearby, blowing apart the mountains. So
much blasted earth you can see it from outer space. And all this in a place already thin, with the divine already pressing in like an aneurysm ready to burst.”

  “In which case you end up here.”

  “Or somewhere. Where you end depends on who you are, I think, and who you’re connected to.”

  The light was fading so she could no longer see his face. “Are you trying to find my brothers and sisters? Do you think they ended up here?”

  He shook his head. “Not here. I don’t think they would have found that particular wormhole. It’s too far down the hollow from Montefalco. But I think there might be other wormholes. That’s what I’ve been trying to calculate. I’ve done a lot of the math already. I’ve superimposed a Chartres labyrinth on the Gorge and tried to plot out my calculations.”

  “So that’s what the red notebook in your desk is all about. Why a labyrinth?”

  “It’s a geometrical figure,” he said, “but with spiritual implications. I’ve tried other things, squares, trapezoids, rectangles, but didn’t see much of a pattern. With a labyrinth, with its entrance superimposed over the Mystery Hole, some interesting things show up.”

  “Like what?”

  “It doesn’t totally work yet. But how about a potential wormhole across the river on Gauley Mountain where there are other cliffs? Or in the town of Lafayette? And near Montefalco, although that one is covered by a valley fill now.”

  Lydde leaned back. “My God,” she whispered. Then she looked at Uncle John. “But we’ve found Mary. Except you say it isn’t really Mary.”

  “Not the Mary Falcone who lived at Montefalco in the 1940s. And yet she is the same Mary. I knew her, remember. This is Mary, same face, same voice, same personality. She’s just had different experiences and she has different memories.”