The Priest Hole

by Amy Cross

  “That's just the point,” the man replies. “Would you... We'll pay you, if necessary, but please... You have to kill the child for us.”

  Chapter Seven

  Laura

  “And there we go,” Joe says, pulling the final board away and then coughing as a swirl of brick-dust fills briefly fills the air. “Still no body.”

  “There has to be,” I reply, climbing off the stool and limping over. Pushing past him, I lean through the hole in the wall and use my phone's torch app to light the narrow, cramped space hidden between the walls, but he's right.

  There's nothing in here.

  “Where the hell did it go?” I whisper.

  “Thank you so much for coming out at short notice,” Mum says, clearly convinced that this is the end of it all. “It's good to know there's a carpenter in the area who can be here so quickly.”

  “I'm not only the local carpenter,” Joe replies behind me, as I continue to shine a light around the narrow space, “I'm also the plumber, the electrician, the gardener, the dog-groomer and the general handyman. It pays to diversify around here.”

  “What's in here?” Suzie asks, joining me to peer into the gap as Mum and Joe continue to talk. “Did you really see a skeleton's hand under the floor?”

  “I thought it was poking out from here,” I mutter, looking down at the bottom of the passage before turning to her. There's definitely enough room in here for someone to fit, even if the space is empty right now. “When you found me, was there anything in that hole on the floor? Did you look?”

  “I don't know,” she replies.

  “Think!” I hiss. “Are you sure you didn't see or hear anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a hand,” I reply, holding my own hand up, “but with no skin. Just bones.”

  “Ew!” she says, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

  “I'm not mad!” I continue. “Even if everything else was a dream, I know I saw a -”

  Suddenly realizing that Mum and Joe have stopped talking, I turn to see that they're listening in on our conversation, and they both have a vaguely amused smile on their faces. I guess I'm starting to seem like a complete lunatic.

  “Okay,” Mum says finally, “I think maybe it's time to put the wall back in place.”

  I sigh. “But -”

  “I indulged you this once,” she continues, coming over and taking my hand before leading me back to the counter. “Plus, you seemed so certain and you'd already got your sister all worked up over the idea of there being a skeleton behind the wall, what choice did I have? But...” She forces a smile as Joe gets to work behind her, setting the wall back into place. “Can you try not to fill your sister's mind with all sorts of crazy ideas? She's so young, she really doesn't know how to separate fantasy and reality.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “You were on the floor, in your pajamas, with a nosebleed.” She reaches toward my face and tucks a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “We're going to get you checked out by a doctor, just to make sure there's nothing wrong. While we're doing that, Joe's going to fix that rotten floorboard and check the rest to make sure they're safe, and then we're going to get on with our new life here, free of lurid fantasies and creepy stories, okay?”

  “But -”

  “Okay?”

  Seeing Suzie standing nearby, waiting for my answer, I realize that I have to play things cool for her sake. “Okay,” I say finally, figuring that there's no point fighting. As Mum, seemingly relieved, heads over to grab her car keys, I take a step back and then glance down at Joe as he puts the first part of the wall back in place. He turns and smiles at me, but I can tell that he thinks I'm completely insane. Hell, I don't blame him. If I heard someone else saying all these things, I'd write them off as a nutter too.

  “Hey,” I whisper, “can I ask you something?”

  He glances up at me.

  “If I wanted to know about the history of this place,” I continue, “where would I start?”

  ***

  “Well this place is... different,” I mutter, looking out the car's side window as we drive along Offingham's main street. “Seems like a local town for local people.”

  She taps my elbow. “Laura! Don't be so rude, this is just an ordinary little place. You're going to have to get used to the slower pace of life now we're not living in London.”

  “Can we go there for lunch?” I ask, spotting a pub. “The Offingham Arms. They must do food, right?”

  “I don't like it here,” Suzie says from the back seat. “The people here look creepy.”

  “She's right,” I add.

  Mum sighs as she parks the car in front of the doctor's surgery, next to what looks like some kind of old, boarded-up well. “You both need to be polite and friendly,” she says with a hint of grit in her voice. “This isn't some backwards little place populated by a bunch of country bumpkins. Don't stereotype people?”

  “What does stereotype mean?” Suzie asks.

  Climbing out of the car, I wince a little as I set my weight on my damaged ankle. Looking around, I can't shake the feeling that this is one of those towns that just gets left to rot. After all, the main street is almost completely deserted, and when I look up at the windows of a nearby house I see the curtains being quickly drawn. Mum's right, I shouldn't stereotype every village in this part of the country, but at the same time the people of Offingham are serving up weirdness on a plate. I can't help wondering if something happened here once, something that left a mark on the people.

  Slipping my phone from my pocket, I quickly search online and find a wiki entry about the place.

  “Nykolas Freeman,” I mutter, before turning to Mum. “Hey, it says here the only notable thing about Offingham is that some psycho priest hunter was born here.”

  “Lovely, dear,” she replies with a force smile as she locks the car. “Please continue to fill your sister's head with such nonsense while we go in for your appointment.”

  “It's not nonsense,” I reply, waiting as they head inside. I turn and look along the street, still feeling as if I'm being watched. “It's history.”

  ***

  Although I find it a little hard to believe what he told me earlier, Joe the all-round handyman turns out to have been right. About an hour's walk from the house, along a path that winds through the forest and then along the side of a river, there's a large, overgrown and seemingly-abandoned field that stretches all the way to the main road in the distance. And on one side of that field, nestled back against some trees, there's an old stone church.

  Limping carefully to avoid putting too much weight on my right ankle, I make my way across the field, through waist-high weeds, until I reach the wooden fence that runs around the edge of the church's land, marking the transition point from the untamed landscape and the well-maintained cemetery. Seeing no sign of a gate nearby, I climb over the fence, taking extra care with my ankle as I hop down on the other side and start picking a path between the old, moss-covered gravestones that are dotted all around at seemingly random angles.

  The whole scene is so beautifully peaceful, I actually think I'm starting to understand why some people prefer the countryside over the city. Away from places like Offingham, at least.

  “Hello?” I call out as I reach the door to the church. Trying the handle and fully expecting it to be locked, I'm surprised when the door creaks open. Then again, I guess there's less crime out here in the middle of nowhere. In the city, Mum would never have let me head out and explore alone, but after we left the doctor's surgery she was only too happy to drop me off at a nearby crossroads when I said I wanted to check out the church. Then again, maybe she just wanted to get rid of me for an hour or two...

  I limp inside, finding myself in a large, tall open space with stone walls, lit only by the mottled light that falls through a set of three stained-glass windows behind the altar at the far end. There are empty wooden pews on either side and it feels as if no-one has been here fo
r a long time, but as I make my way along the central aisle I can't help feeling as if I'm intruding. Joe told me that there's a woman who keeps the place going even though no-one else has been here for many years, but I almost feel guilty for breathing while I'm here, in case I disturb the air.

  Finally I reach the steps that lead to the altar and I stop, wondering whether I'm allowed to go any further. I've never really spent much time in churches and although I usually wouldn't care about the rules, somehow I feel as if I want to be a little respectful.

  “Damn it!” a female voice cries out suddenly, from somewhere in the back of the church, accompanied by what sounds like the collapse of a small tower. “Great, now -”

  I take a step back, bumping against one of the pews.

  The voice falls silent.

  I wait.

  A moment later, a face pokes out from behind a wall beyond the altar. A middle-aged woman with dark hair and a friendly smile, she quickly dusts herself down.

  “Sorry,” she says with a cautious smile, pulling the door shut and hurrying over to meet me. “I just dropped a load of books everywhere. It's going to take me ages to pick them all up, but -” As she reaches me, she holds a hand out for me to shake. “It's not often we get visitors here, I'm usually alone. My name's Kate and I... Well, I do my best to look after the place.”

  “I didn't mean to disturb you,” I reply, shaking her hand cautiously. “I was just looking around.”

  “There's not much to see,” she points out. “St. Michael's isn't exactly lined up to appear in Songs of Praise, if you know what I mean.”

  “I was looking for...” I pause, before realizing that I can probably trust her. “I was told that there are some old records here, covering the history of the parish. A guy named Joe Adams said if I came along, I might be able to take a look through.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “He said they go back almost a thousand years.”

  “Huh. He said that?”

  “He...” I pause again, feeling a little uncomfortable. “Well, he said you wouldn't mind.”

  She stares at me for a moment, as if she's trying to understand me better. “He said I wouldn't mind? Well...” She looks around, as if she's worried someone else might be here, before turning and heading back toward the door beyond the altar. “You're lucky you caught me in,” she continues, gesturing for me to follow. “Like I said, I don't get to come this way too often, I spend a lot of my time on the road, but I like to drop in at least once a month just to make sure that everything's okay. Not that I'm part of the church, of course. I suppose you could just call me a concerned passerby.”

  Following her into the small office, I'm surprised to see that there's paperwork covering several desks, some of it even spilling down onto the floor. Books are piled high too, along with boxes that contain some kind of herb mixture.

  “Excuse the mess,” she says, heading to a bookcase in the corner. “Now, what exactly are you after?”

  “We just moved into the area,” I tell her. “I want to find out about our new house.”

  “Where are you living?”

  “It's called Baxendale House. It's a few miles from here.”

  I wait for a reply, but she continues to look at the bookshelf for a moment longer before slowly turning to me. “Baxendale House?” she asks cautiously. “Someone finally bought the place, did they?”

  “It's cool,” I tell her, feeling as if there's been a subtle shift in her demeanor, “I just... I wanted to find out a few things about it's history.”

  She stares at me for a moment, before shaking her head. “No.”

  I frown. “Sorry?”

  “History's dangerous. You should keep well clear, unless...” She comes back over to me and puts a hand on my shoulder, as if she's trying to hold me still while she gets a better look at me. “I suppose...” she whispers, clearly lost in thought. “No, you should definitely keep away from the history of that place. Put it out of your mind and hope that's the end of it all.”

  “But -”

  “It's an old house,” she continues, leading me back out of the office and then pulling the door shut. “It was built, people lived in it, now you live in it! What else is there to know?”

  “I want to know if anything ever happened there,” I reply, feeling distinctly ill-at-ease. “I want to know if there's anything I should know.”

  “What do you know so far?” she asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “That's because there's nothing to know.”

  “Except...” I pause again. “I know about Henry Baxendale,” I say finally, figuring that I might as well mention the name from my dream in the hope that it gets me somewhere, “and Jessica Baxendale, and... Darian Kinner?”

  I wait for a reply, but she's simply staring at me now, as if those names have made her a little uncomfortable. I was hoping that she'd tell me I was crazy, that the names are just nonsense, but somehow I don't think that's her response at all.

  “So,” I continue finally, “what really happened up at the house?”

  ***

  “You have to understand that it was a very dark time in this country's history,” Kate says a few minutes later, as she leads me across the cemetery. “Civil war was just a few decades away, and already the early warning signs had started to mount up. Queen Elizabeth had persecuted Catholics mercilessly, and the policy was continued by her successor, James. Other groups were persecuted too, it wasn't just Catholics.”

  “Who else?”

  She opens the gate and steps out into the field, where weeds are growing waist-high.

  “England wasn't a good place to be back then,” she continues, “not if you were a Catholic or... different.”

  “The Baxendales were Catholic?” I ask, following her out as he leads me along the edge of the fence, through the weeds.

  “Not openly,” she explains. “No-one could be openly Catholic, not in those days. Catholics were being hunted down and executed all across the country. Even after they were dead...” She stops and crouches down, pulling weeds aside next to the fence until she uncovers a small headstone, no more than a couple of feet tall and with no obvious markings. “These poor souls were buried in unmarked graves,” she continues. “Even that was a risk back in the seventeenth century, but the priest here at the time felt that it was better than leaving their bones in the ruins of the house.”

  Stepping closer, I feel a shiver run up my spine as I think of the people in my dream.

  “Henry, Elizabeth and Jessica Baxendale,” Kate says, turning to look up at me. “By all accounts, among the final victims of one of this country's most infamous priest hunters. Ever heard of a man by the name of Nykolas Freeman?”

  “Only briefly.”

  “For thirty years, Freeman terrorized several local counties. He'd been authorized by the queen, and then by the king, to hunt down priests, but he took that role beyond the bounds of anyone else. He believed he was charged equally by his country and his god to get rid of every priest and every so-called heretic he could find, but to others he was a dangerous lunatic who killed hundreds of men, women and children. Even for the period, he was unquestionably cruel and vicious.”

  “And he killed the Baxendales?” I ask.

  “He slaughtered them,” she replies. “In fact, it's said that his display of cruelty that night was so extreme, it's almost as if he knew his reign of terror was close to the end.”

  “So he was stopped?”

  “The history books don't record his fate with any degree of certainty, but after Freeman left the Baxendale house he was never seen again. Most people believed that a carpenter named Harold Connaught rode after him and killed him somewhere on the road to Birmingham, and then dumped the body so it could never be found. Some, though...” She pauses, before turning and looking back toward the forest. “You won't find it in any history books, but the smart money is on Freeman having finally been tracked down by someone he'd wronged. Not that it did m
uch good, the country still drifted toward barbarity, cruelty and ultimately war. Nykolas Freeman was a symptom of his times, not the cause.” She pauses again, before forcing a smile and getting to her feet, letting the weeds reclaim the Baxendales' headstone. “Some even think Freeman still...”

  Her voice trails off.

  “Well,” she adds finally, “never mind that, although...” She eyes me with caution for a moment. “You look familiar. I almost feel as if we've met before.”

  “I doubt it,” I tell her, even though my dream from last night is making me feel distinctly uneasy. “I'm new here.”

  “Of course you are,” she replies, “although... You're so lucky, you know. You have no idea what it was like back then, living at a time when savagery and barbarity could come knocking on the door at any moment. You don't know the feeling of having people out there who want you dead, who are actively hunting you down so they torture you and kill you in the most painful, humiliating manner possible. You don't...” She pauses again, eying me with a hint of sadness. “You do look so familiar, though,” she whispers. “I hope I'm wrong about that.”

  I smile uneasily, even though this Kate woman is staring to freak me out a little. “Well, it's all in the past,” I point out. Turning, I look toward the forest. “It was all, like, four hundred years ago. I'm not saying we should forget it, but at least we can move on, right?”

  I wait for an answer, before turning to her.

  She's gone.

  Looking around, I try to work out which way she went, but there's no sign of her at all. Figuring that she must have quickly and quietly slipped back into the church, I decide against going after her; after all, something about Kate made me feel distinctly uneasy, so I figure I should just get home before any more of the local craziness manages to seep into my thoughts.

  Chapter Eight

  Daniel