You Will Grow Into Them

by Malcolm Devlin

  Cathy reached out and touched the glass like she was capable of feeling the texture beneath it.

  The cross-hatch man was in every picture in the church. Cathy looked at me and there was something in her eyes I had never seen before.

  *

  Outside number six, Dene Road, Janet Armstrong was trying to turn into her driveway when a schoolgirl in a pink coat walked briskly in front of her garage door and out in front of her car. It looked as though she had just cut through the garden.

  Janet worked as a dentist's assistant in Kidlington and had endured a stressful day. She slammed on the brakes and leaned heavily on the horn. The girl ignored her. She cut directly through the flower bed and continued on her way.

  It was six o'clock.

  *

  Dene Road is a long trawl of grey-rendered semis, mostly ex-councils, most blind to Cathy on the evening she came this way. Today, the windows are lit and I glance through them as I pass. I see the flicker of televisions and games consoles; people stretched out on sofas, oblivious to the outside world.

  Cathy would find all this attention funny: all these foolish people wasting their time for her benefit. A part of me imagines it's all a prank; I picture her sitting waiting for us, waiting so she can jump out and yell, 'Surprise!'

  The rest of me is not that naive.

  And besides, if she really was there waiting for me, she'd ask me about what happened with Simon. This time, I'm not sure how I'd answer her.

  *

  Sister Assumptia liked her Catholic art. She showed us slides of gory paintings depicting saints being bloodily dismembered. John the Baptist's head on a plate, Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows, Saint Bartholomew being skinned alive and Jesus himself of course, blood pouring down his face, a fey hand indicating the gaping wound in his side.

  'No one is too young to learn how the saints suffered on our behalf,' Sister Assumptia said.

  'I bet you she's a convert,' Cathy said to me one day. 'Mum says the converts are always the worst.'

  I hadn't considered that was possible. I was still at an age where the idea that nuns came into existence fully formed was a realistic possibility. Even my Aunt Susan, my father's youngest sister, was a little alien to me. She was in the Benedictine order and I had never seen more of her than the circle of her face, looking out from those black and white robes.

  We kept thinking about the cross-hatch man. When we were instructed to draw pictures at school, we'd find a place to fit him somewhere in the background. It was a tiny act of rebellion, a silly but satisfying secret which set us off in hysterics when one of our pictures was put on display with its shadowy stowaway. We weren't always subtle about it, and eventually Sister Assumptia noticed and took us to task. She wagged her finger and threatened us with severe heavenly retribution, because Mr Newland had warned her our crime wasn't serious enough to warrant a detention.

  We would imagine stories which explained who the cross-hatch man was.

  In one, he was a rich landowner who had so much influence and power he commissioned the sequence of paintings and had a portrait of himself added to each of them, so people would think he had witnessed the crucifixion in person. When some terrible, unspeakable crimes of his past were uncovered, his presence was systematically scratched out by an angry mob.

  In another version, we imagined the cross-hatch man as an alien intelligence sent to earth to observe crucial historical events. He also witnessed the rise of Hitler, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the fall of the Roman Empire.

  If all else failed, we'd grasp at wider explanations. It was a demon, a ghost, an angel. It was God Himself, come to earth to witness the death of his son.

  'The Devil cuts him out,' I said, 'jealous of His image. He claws and claws at the beauty of the paintings until He's gone.'

  Cathy shook her head.

  'He's there for the people who watched,' she said. 'The people who saw everything, and who didn't do a thing.'

  *

  Outside number 15, Coverley Road, Dipak Quereshi had just arrived back from bringing his two sons home from five-a-side football practice. The boys were arguing about a contentious penalty when they stopped mid-sentence. When Mr Quereshi asked what had happened, they told him how the girl in the pink coat had smiled at them as she walked past.

  They stared after her retreating figure, but when Mr Quereshi looked down the road he saw no one at all.

  *

  There are a bunch of girls on the corner of Coverley Road and I recognise the one at the front with one of those plunging feelings in the gut, the sort you get when you've just fallen off something and you don't know how you're going to land.

  Siobhan Breton, big and ginger, with a face that looks like it's been struck with a shovel. She's there with about five of her friends, clustered together and looking as mean as only a bunch of fifteen-year-old girls can.

  Cathy used to be more of a target than I was. Cathy had weaknesses: the fact her dad wasn't there any more, the fact her mum always was. They were licences to pass judgement, and Siobhan and her friends would judge anyone if they had the right ammunition. If some of the insults and attacks they threw at Cathy were based on nothing more than hearsay, others were aimed more accurately than even they knew.

  PC Left and PC Right are some way ahead of me, the crowd behind have become so quiet, I wonder if they're still there at all. Today I am not supposed to be alone, but the distance of everyone seems to have grown around me as Siobhan and her friends lurk like lions waiting in an arena. I look down at my feet as I pass.

  They don't say anything but they stare at me with a bitter resentment which superheats the air around them. I don't breathe until I can feel their eyes on my back.

  I'll suffer repercussions for this later in the week. But then I wonder if they're seeing me or Cathy and I wonder what they'd do if they just saw me on my own. But today, they do nothing, they just watch me, watch Cathy come forward down the road and I can feel the malice boiling up in them.

  It's a real, physical thing. And I've felt it before.

  *

  The last time we went to the church of St Michael on the Mount was a mistake. It had been Cathy's idea.

  She was over at my place where we were pretending to help each other with homework, but we were distracting each other instead with music, magazines and video clips on the internet.

  Cathy was in no mood to go home. Her father had turned up on their doorstep and, rather than her mum sending him away again like Cathy demanded, she'd invited him back inside. Cathy refused to talk to him, she refused to be in the same room as him, but her mum was caught in some make-believe that he'd never been away.

  'There's something about those pictures which isn't right to me,' Cathy said.

  'No shit,' I said.

  She punched me on the arm.

  'I don't mean the obvious, I mean we're missing something else. I want to look at them more closely.'

  I was only half listening. I was distracted by something I had found online. Some animal video. Something fluffy doing something cute.

  'Seriously though,' I said, 'who cares?'

  'I do. I want to know just how weird it is. I want to know who painted them, maybe see if they've done this before. They might have something written on the back, some label we could look up.'

  We had both been back to the church to make sure we hadn't fooled ourselves and on the second visit, the priest had been there, dressed in civvies and going about his business. He had asked us if he could help us with anything but we were too embarrassed to even raise the question – it just sounded too silly to share with others. We had left no wiser, and I'd assumed we were both content the figure in the paintings was nothing more than an engine for our imaginations with no real relevance to the outside world.

  'So what?' I said. 'You going to talk to the priest? Ask him to take a look?'

  'He's already said no,' Cathy said. 'I went back yesterday. Said they were antiques. They look like
prints to me.'

  I shut down the laptop and looked up at her, surprised by how hurt I was she had gone back without me.

  'Well,' I said. 'Shame.'

  I realised then, how Cathy's interest outweighed my own. I was content with the day-to-day trappings of the catechism, fed to me by my mother, the school or the priest at St William's when we went on Sundays. Cathy was interested in none of that. For her, the cross-hatch man was the more worthy mystery, one which she might even be able to solve. I don't think I understood why, but it was something she thought she might be capable of believing in.

  'I'm not going back there on my own,' she said. 'You're staying over at mine this evening. I've already asked your mum.'

  She didn't really tell me much else until later. She told me to bring a coat, a torch and shoes I could run in. I don't think anyone would believe me if I told them I didn't imagine what she had in mind.

  *

  Millie Bernard was cleaning the window of her semi-detached house on Glebeland Road when the girl in the pink coat walked through her lounge. Mrs Bernard was waiting for University Challenge to begin on BBC Two. Her husband, Derek, was watching the end of Pointless with a notepad on his lap so he could play along.

  The girl walked in the main door and out through the kitchen. She did not look up or pay any attention to them as she passed.

  Derek did not see her in the house at all. He only saw her on the television, walking through the set of the quiz show; head down, headphones in.

  It was nearly half-past seven.

  *

  At the end of Glebeland Road, I can make out the square shape of the church of St Michael on the Mount marked against the fading blue of the sky. My route will not take me inside, but passing by is enough to make my stomach knot.

  At the moment, it feels as though PC Left and PC Right are very far away. I want to glance back to confirm I'm not as alone as I feel. Instead, I slow until I can almost hear the voices of the people following me. They don't sound like voices, they sound discordant and broken. A whisper of white noise like a radio caught between stations.

  *

  The church looked different at night. The yellow Cotswold stone walls which glowed warm in the sunlight were grey and stark under the moon, everything looked sharper, more severe.

  I let Cathy lead me around the side. I was still wide-eyed she had suggested something so extreme and that I had not refused her. The path was narrow, the fence on one side bordering the edge of the nature reserve. Behind it, I could see nothing but a mass of shadows dropping away into the valley; the dark grasping plants clustered at the foot of the fence, reaching through the wire.

  Behind the church was a small yard, mostly empty except for a few wheelie bins. Cathy unhooked her bag and searched through it.

  'Hold the torch steady,' she said.

  The last time she had been in the church, she had seen the priest fastening the door at the back with a simple hook-and-eye latch. The door was locked from the inside but it did not quite close snug to the frame.

  She found a penknife from her bag and unfolded the blade.

  'Dad gave it me,' she said, seeing my reaction. 'Or at least, I say “gave”…'

  She slipped the blade through the gap between the door and its frame, and snicked the hook free from its latch.

  'We're breaking into a church,' I whispered, understanding only as I spoke how useless a statement it was. My mind was stitching together words with weighty meanings: desecration, blasphemy, sacrilege, but at that moment I could pronounce none of them.

  Cathy put a finger to her lips and scowled. She pushed the door open.

  The church was not completely dark. The full moon hung behind the rose window, and the way the moonlight refracted through the glass, made it look as though a net of grey shapes had been thrown across the transept.

  I stood there like an idiot, and Cathy pushed past. She worked swiftly, picking one of the pictures at random. She took it in both hands and unhooked it, setting it down on the pew beside her. She looked up at me.

  'Torch,' she said.

  'Sorry.'

  I joined her, aiming the light at the picture so she could work. The frame was held in place with a number of metal shards, wedged into the woodwork. Using her penknife, Cathy started folding them back one-by-one to release the backing board.

  I looked around, conscious I had my back to an awful lot of the room. There were only two ways in that I could see: the door we had used and the heavy looking main door which was bolted shut.

  The church's emptiness made it feel larger. There was something unnerving about the silence of the rows of unoccupied pews, each with their neat little stacks of hymn books and embroidered hassocks.

  'Hold this,' Cathy said. She was struggling to remove the backing board without warping the frame. I planted my hand on it, then snatched it away again.

  'Ow!'

  'Mind those metal bits,' Cathy said. 'They're sharp. And don't bleed on it. Some idiot might mistake it for a miracle.'

  She pried the backing off and teased the painting out carefully. It looked like it was painted on a thin wooden board. Perhaps they were antique after all.

  'Light,' she said.

  I redirected the torch as she turned it over. Without the glass, and under the scrutiny of the torchlight, the painting seemed starker and crueller. Simon of Cyrene bearing the weight of the cross looked as if he was in agony, while the face of Jesus watched him with a heartbreaking and impotent compassion.

  And behind them was the cross-hatch man. Cathy hesitated a moment before tracing her finger over the paint. She frowned.

  'It's all the same,' she said. 'It's painted on like this. It's not scratched in at all. Here, try.'

  There was a texture to the surface of the painting, but it was subtle and my fingers were too cold to make any judgement.

  'Jesus, you freak,' Cathy said, 'I told you not to bleed on the thing.'

  She batted my hand away and I realised then I had left a smear of blood across the face of the cross-hatch man. I stuttered an apology but Cathy ignored me. She spat on her fingers to clean the painting, then turned it over to check the back.

  'Nothing here,' she said. 'No name, no sticker or anything.'

  She swore and started putting the painting back in the frame. Around us, the dark gathered. I heard something outside: an owl, I think. An owl and the teasing of the wind in the nearby trees. I have honestly never wanted to be somewhere else as much in my life.

  'We should go,' I said. 'We should go now.'

  'Not yet.' Cathy shook her head. She was looking around the church. I couldn't understand why she wasn't in more of a hurry; her patience was infuriating.

  She hung the picture back where she found it, taking a step back to inspect it and make sure it was straight.

  'I want to check another one,' she said. 'One of them must have the artist's name on it.'

  'You've got to be kidding me,' I said but she was already pulling another picture off the wall. She shot me an irritable look.

  'Keep the torch steady.'

  I felt it before I saw anything. A fringe of absolute darkness glowering at the edge of my vision. A weight of something gathering behind me, a faint smell like woodsmoke and meat on the turn.

  Cathy didn't seem to have noticed. She was working on the second picture with such an intensity everything else was blind to her. I felt isolated, nauseatingly aware I was on the wrong end of the cone of torchlight. I turned to face the empty church.

  Behind me, the darkness clotted and became malevolent. I heard a deep discordant note which filled me and scraped at my skull. It grew fat and thick around me. It edged closer, pulsing in violent spasms, burning up the air between us.

  I must have said something, I must have made some noise of distress because the next thing I knew, Cathy was holding me and staring at me and saying my name.

  'What is it?' she said. She looked back at the door, commandeering the torch and sweeping it thr
ough the darkness like a broom. The church was empty and Cathy was looking at me like I needed taking care of. Right then I resented that above all else; I felt like an idiot.

  'What is it?' Cathy said again. 'What did you see?'

  I shook my head.

  'Nothing,' I said. 'I let myself get freaked out, that's all.'

  'Do you want to go home?'

  Of course I wanted to go home. I wanted to be in my room, in my bed. I wanted so desperately for this whole thing to have never happened. But I wasn't going to let her know that, so I dug up some stupid smile from somewhere and tried it on.

  'Only when you're ready,' I said.

  *

  A couple of hundred yards up the road from the church of St Michael on the Mount, a small wooden gateway leads into the Lye Valley Nature Reserve. The valley is a shallow gorge, curving around and down behind the church, following the shape of Glebeland Road. During the day, you can read a board at its entrance which will tell you that the plant species growing in the valley are thought to have been there since they colonised the area following the retreat of the last ice age, some ten thousand years ago.

  On the morning of Wednesday, February 18th, a pink Superdry raincoat was found discarded near the entrance to the valley. Farther along the path lay a grey shoulder bag, its contents scattered and damp from the evening's rain.

  *

  I didn't tell Cathy about what I had seen until the day before she went missing. Even as we had left the church, even as we had fled down the passageway beside it, even as we had taken off down the road, I was already working back and forth over what I had seen and slowly but surely scratching it out, rationalising it and making it safe.

  By the time I got home, I think I believed I could explain everything I had seen; I'd only allowed myself to get scared, I told myself, and I had let my imagination fill in the gaps between the darkness.

  So I was far too embarrassed to mention it to Cathy. But then maybe there was another reason for my silence: perhaps I had seen what Cathy so desperately wanted to believe in, and deep down, I don't think I wanted to share it with her.