Shrine

by Herbert, James

  JAMES

  HERBERT

  Shrine

  PAN BOOKS

  Red blood out and black blood in,

  My Nannie says I’m a child of sin.

  How did I choose me my witchcraft kin?

  Know I as soon as dark’s dreams begin

  Snared is my heart in a nightmare’s gin;

  Never from terror I out may win;

  So dawn and dusk I pine, peak, thin,

  Scarcely knowing t’other from which –

  My great grandma – She was a Witch.

  Walter de la Mare, ‘The Little Creature’

  Contents

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Wilkes

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Part Two

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Wilkes

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Part Three

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Wilkes

  36

  37

  Wilkes

  38

  39

  40

  41

  Part One

  Alice! a childish story take,

  And with a childish hand

  Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined

  In memory’s mystic band,

  Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers

  Plucked in a far-off land.

  Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  1

  Down with the lambs,

  Up with the lark,

  Run to bed children

  Before it gets dark.

  Old nursery rhyme

  The small mounds of dark earth scattered around the graveyard looked as though the dead were pushing their way back into the living world. The girl smiled nervously at the thought as she hurried from grave to grave. They were molehills. Moles were difficult to get rid of; poison one, another moved into its lodgings. She had often watched the molecatcher, a round man with a pointed face, and thought he looked like a mole. He grinned as he delicately dipped stubby fingers into his baked beans tin and plucked out a strychnine-coated worm from its wriggling friends and relatives. He always grinned when she watched. And chuckled when he held it towards her and she jumped away with a silent shriek. His lips, ever wet, like his dosed worms, moved but she heard nothing. She hadn’t for as long as she remembered. A shudder as the molecatcher mimed eating the writhing pink meat, but she always stayed to watch him push his metal rod into the earth then poke the worm into the hole he had created. She imagined the mole down there, snuffling its way through solid darkness, hunting food, searching for its own death. Digging its own grave. She giggled and couldn’t hear her giggle.

  Alice stooped and took withered flowers from a mud-soiled vase. The headstone against which the flowers had rested was fairly new, its inscription not yet filled with dirt nor blurred by weather. She had known the old lady – was she just bones now? – and had found the living corpse more frightening than the dead one. Could you be alive at ninety-two? You could move, but could you live? The time-span was incomprehensible to Alice, who was just eleven years old. It was hard to imagine your own flesh dried and wrinkled, your brain shrunken by years of use so that instead of becoming wise and all-knowing you became a baby. A hunched, brittle-stick baby.

  She dumped the dead flowers into the red plastic bucket she carried and moved on, her eyes scanning the untidy rows of headstones for more. It was a weekly task for her: while her mother scrubbed, dusted and polished the church, Alice removed the drooping tributes left by relatives who thought those they had lost would appreciate the gesture. The flowers would be emptied into the groundsman’s tip of rotting branches and leaves, there to be ritually burnt once a month. When this chore was completed, Alice would hurry back into the church and join her mother. Inside she would find fresh flowers ready to adorn the altar for the following day’s Sunday services and, while her mother scrubbed, she would arrange the glass vases. Afterwards, she would dust down the benches, skimming along each row, down one, up the next, holding her breath, seeing how far she could get before her lungs exploded. Alice enjoyed the work if she could make it a game.

  Once this was accomplished, and provided her mother had no other tasks for her, she would head for her favourite spot: the end of the front pew at the right-hand side of the altar.

  Beneath the statue. Her statue.

  More fading colours caught her eye and she skipped across a low mound – this one body length and not mole-built – to gather up the dying flowers. Tiny puffs of steam escaped her mouth and she told herself they were the ghosts of words that lay dead inside her, words that had never themselves escaped.

  It was cold, although it was sunny. The trees were mostly bare, their naked branches seen for the twisted and tortured things they really were. Sheep, their bellies swollen with slow-stirring foetuses, grazed in the fields just beyond the stone wall surrounding the churchyard. Across the fields were heavy woods, sombre and greeny brown, uninviting; and behind the woods were low-lying hills, hills that were lost completely on misty days. Alice stared into the field, watching the sheep. She frowned, then turned away.

  More flowers to collect before she could go inside where the air was not quite as biting. Cold – the church was always cold – but winter’s teeth were less sharp inside the old building. She wandered through the graveyard, the tilted headstones no bother to her, the decomposed corpses hidden beneath her feet causing no concern.

  The sodden leaves and branches were piled high, higher than her, and the girl had to swoop the plastic bucket back and swiftly forward for its wasted contents to reach the top. She reached for stems that fell back down and tossed them once more, satisfied only when they settled on the heap’s summit. Alice smacked her hands together to dislodge the grime on her palms, feeling the sting, but not hearing the sound. She could once, but that was long ago. When she listened intently and there were no distractions, she thought she could hear the wind; but then Alice thought that even when no breeze brushed her cheeks or ruffled her yellow hair.

  The small, thin girl turned and began to walk towards the ancient church, the empty bucket swinging easily by her side. Back, forwards, back, forwards, gleaming red in the cold sunlight. Back, forwards, back – and she looked behind her.

  The plastic bucket slipped from her fingers and clattered to the ground, rolling in a tight semi-circle until it came to rest against a stained green headstone. Alice cocked her head to one side as though listening. There was a puzzlement in her eyes and she half-smiled.

  She stood still for several seconds before allowing her body to turn fully, staying in that frozen position for several more long seconds. Her half-smile faded and her face became anxious. She moved slowly at first, making for the rough stone wall at the rear of the churchyard, then broke into a run.

  Something tripped her – probably the corner of a flattened gravestone – and she tumbled forward, her knees smearing green and brown from the soft earth. She cried out, but there was no sound, and quickly regained her feet, eager to reach the wall and not knowing why. She kept to the narrow path leading through the cluttered graveyard and stopped only when she had reached the wall. Alice peered over, the highest stone on a level wi
th her chest. The pregnant sheep were no longer munching grass; all heads were raised and looking in the same direction.

  They did not move even when Alice clambered over the wall and ran among them.

  Her footsteps slowed, her shoes and socks soaked by the long grass. She seemed confused and swivelled her head from left to right. Her small hands were clenched tight.

  She looked directly ahead once more and the half-smile returned, gradually broadening until her face showed only rapturous wonder.

  A solitary tree stood in the centre of the field, an oak, centuries old, its body thick and gnarled, its stout lower branches sweeping outwards, their furthest points striving to touch the ground again. Alice walked towards the tree, her steps slow but not hesitant, and fell to her knees when she was ten yards away.

  Her mouth opened wide, and her eyes narrowed, the pupils squeezing down to tiny apertures. She raised a hand to protect them from the blinding white light that shimmered from the base of the tree.

  Then her smile returned as the light dazzled into a brilliant sun, an unblemished whiteness. A holy radiance.

  2

  Another Maiden like herself,

  Translucent, lovely, shining clear,

  Threefold each in the other clos’d –

  O, What a pleasant trembling fear!

  William Blake,

  ‘The Crystal Cabinet’

  The white van slid to an abrupt halt and the driver’s head came uncomfortably close to the windscreen. Cursing, he pushed himself back off the steering wheel and smacked the hardened plastic as though it were the hand of an errant child.

  The van’s headlights lit up the trees on the other side of the T-junction and the driver peered left and right, grumbling to himself as he tried to penetrate the surrounding darkness.

  ‘Should be right, got to be right.’

  There was no one else in the van to hear, but that didn’t bother him: he was used to talking to himself. ‘Right it is.’

  He shoved the gear lever into first and winced at the grinding sound. The van lurched forward and he swung the wheel to the right. Gerry Fenn was tired, angry, and a little drunk. The public meeting he had attended earlier that evening had been dull to say the least, dreary to say the most. Who gave a shit whether or not the more remote houses in the locale went on to main drainage? Not the occupiers, that was for sure; a link-up with the sewage system meant higher rates for them. Nearly two hours to decide nobody wanted drains. They preferred their cesspits. As usual, Rent-a-Left had prolonged proceedings. A totalitarian sewer network was good for the cause, Fenn supposed. He hadn’t intended to stay that long, hadn’t even needed to. The fact was, he had fallen asleep at the back of the hall and only the noisy conclusion to the meeting had aroused him. The agitators were angry that the motion for had been defeated – good headline in that: ‘LOCAL SEWER MOTION DEFEATED’. Too pithy for the Courier, though. Pithy. That wasn’t bad either. He nodded his head in appreciation of his own wit.

  Gerry Fenn had been with the Brighton Evening Courier for more than five years now – man and boy, he told himself – and was still waiting for the big one, the story that would make world headlines, the scoop that would transport him from the seaside town’s local rag to the heart of the journalistic world: FLEET STREET! Kermit applause for FLEET STREET! YEEAAAY! Three years indenture at Eastbourne, five on the Courier. Next step: leader of the Insight team on the Sunday Times. Failing that, News of the World would do. Plenty of human interest there. Dig up the dirt, dole out the trash. File the writs.

  He had phoned the newsdesk after the meeting, telling the night news editor (who hadn’t been amused by Fenn’s instruction to HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!) that the meeting had ended in near-riot and he had barely escaped with his vitals intact let alone his notebook. When the news editor had informed him that the office junior had just resigned because of an emotional crisis in his sixteen-year-old life, so the vacancy was available, Fenn had modified his story, explaining that the meeting really had been lively and maybe he should have left sooner but when the wild-eyed Leftie had rushed the platform and tried to stuff a turd (it looked like a dog’s, obviously just used for effect) into the nostrils of a surprised lady councillor, he figured . . . Fenn held the phone away, almost seeing the spit spluttering from the earpiece. Excited pips brought the tirade to an end, and a fresh coin renewed the connection. The news editor had gained control by then, but only just. Since Fenn enjoyed the country route so much, there were a couple of little items he could cover in that area. Fenn groaned; the news editor went on. A trip to the local cop shop: find out if the boy scout impersonators (bob-a-job, once inside, pension books, loose money, small valuables, gone) were still impersonating boy scouts. Pop into the local flea-pit: were feminists still daubing the sexy posters outside with anti-rape graffiti and chucking runny tomatoes at the screen inside? On the way back, visit the caravan site at Partridge Green: see if they’ve got their power yet (the Courier had run a small campaign for the residents encouraging Seeboard to connect the site to the grid – so far it had taken six months). Fenn asked if the news editor knew what the bloody time was and was assured of course he bloody did and was Fenn aware that all his night shift had produced for tomorrow’s editions was one RTA (Road Traffic Accident) and one diabetic poodle who went for check-ups in a bloody Rolls-Royce? And the RTA wasn’t even fatal.

  Fenn got mad and advised the news editor of his agitated state and informed him that when he returned to the office he would show the news editor just how mad he really was by shoving his copy spike right up his tiny arse, wooden end first, and by stuffing the nearest typewriter into the fat mouth which was always full of shit but never kind shit, then brain- drain the Courier totally by handing in his resignation. He told the news editor good, but made sure the receiver was resting on its cradle before he did so.

  His next call was to Sue to tell her to expect him when he got there, but there was no reply from his flat. Then none from hers. He wished for Chrissakes she would move in with him permanently; it was a pain never knowing where she was likely to be.

  Thoroughly morose, he did what he was paid for. The boy scout impersonators were now impersonating jumble-sale collectors (one old lady had even lost her false teeth – she’d left them on the kitchen table – but was understandably reluctant to talk about it). The flea-pit had been running Bambi for the past fortnight (expected trouble next week when Teenage Goddesses of Love and Sex in the Swamps were playing). He drove to Partridge Green and saw only candlelight through the caravan windows (he knocked on one door and was told to piss off so didn’t bother with any more).

  He scraped in to the nearest pub just five minutes before closing time and fortunately the landlord wasn’t adverse to afters once the main crowd – two domino players and a woman with a cat in a wooden cage – was cleared. Fenn let it slip that he was from the Brighton Evening Courier, an admission that could have got him shown the door pretty promptly, or engaged in an informative after-hours drink. Landlords generally sought the good will of the local press (even the most drab were contenders for the Pub of the Year Award) unless they had some private reason for feeling bitter towards journalists (exposed marital upsets, too many voluptuous barmaids in the business, or reported unhygienic kitchens was usually the cause for their distrust). This one was okay, he even allowed Fenn to buy him a rum and pep, a gesture that had the reporter mentally scratching his head – shouldn’t the landlord be cosying up to him, not the other way round? He wasn’t into investigative journalism tonight – Fleet Street and the world’s wire services would have to wait until he was in the mood – so why the hell was he treating the landlord? Oh yeah, so he could drink after time, that was it. Fenn was tired.

  Three pints and forty minutes of unexciting conversation later, Fenn found himself outside in the cold night air, bolts snapping behind telling him the drawbridge was up, the public house was no longer a refuge but a stronghold, built to resist the strongest invaders. He kicked the side
of the white van before throwing himself into the driver’s seat.

  The vehicle was an embarrassment. It carried his newspaper’s name, white lettering in a brilliant red flash, on both sides. Very discreet. Very undercover. The Courier had fallen out with their usual fleet hire company and now the journalists had either to use their own cars, for which there was no petrol allowance, or the one and only spare delivery van. Great for tailing suspected arsonists or dope peddlers. Great for keeping an eye on illicit rendezvous between well-knowns who should well-know better. Ideal for secret meetings with your favourite grass. Would Woodstock and Bernstein have met ‘Deep Throat’ in a fucking white van with Washington Post emblazoned on its sides?

  The headlights barely pierced the darkness ahead and Fenn shook his head in further disgust. Bloody things were never cleaned. Christ, what a night. Sometimes the late shift could be good. A nice rape or mugging. The occasional murder. Brighton was full of weirdos nowadays. And Arabs. And antique dealers. Funny things happened when they all got together. Trouble was, many of the best stories never got into print. Or if they did, they were toned down. It wasn’t the Courier’s policy to denigrate the seaside town’s image. Bad for business. Great for family trade, Brighton. Mustn’t scare off the punters. Unfortunately his earlier routine calls had produced nothing of interest. He always made the standard calls when he came on duty: police, hospitals, undertakers and fire stations were all on his regular list. Even the clergy merited a bell. Nothing much doing with any of them. The newspaper’s Diary, listing events of the day (and night) which had to be covered, offered little to excite. If it had, he could have probably ducked out of tonight’s council meeting; as it was, there wasn’t much else to do.