Wayne followed.
A gusting breeze swept down the hillside. When it reached the shadow, it became a swarm of huge black insects that buzzed straight at Wayne.
He squealed and threw up an arm. A gust of warm air washed over him.
He lowered his arm. No sign of the insects remained.
The shadow reached a small copse of trees. Branches and leaves became the gnarled limbs and hairy tufts of alien animals grazing on dark red shrubs.
Wayne froze. The creatures didn’t appear to notice him. They were too busy grunting and snuffling and jostling amongst each other to get their snouts to the best feeding.
And then they were trees again.
Wayne ran up to the copse and pushed his way through the tangled wood. The bestial noises ahead stopped shortly before he broke out onto another empty field.
Breathing hard, he surveyed the grassland. There were no anomalous rocks ahead, no displaced water and no unearthly animals.
Wayne frowned and looked up.
The cloud hung overhead, motionless.
He looked around and saw the door for the first time. It stood off to his left, at the edge of the trees. Dark wooden planks were held together by heavy iron brackets. A thick black ring served as a handle and hung over a star-shaped keyhole. The ground in front of the door was a circle of black dirt that extended for about eight feet before giving way to the grass of God’s own country. Surrounding the door was a frame of black marble formed out of thorny bramble. The veins that ran through this stone pulsed and flowed and Wayne fancied they might even be ghostly worms tunnelling through the inside. He moved closer, keen to investigate further, then abruptly choked back his curiosity. The line of black dirt was barely an inch from his leading foot.
He scurried back into the shade of the trees and returned with a large stone. He hurled it at the door.
When it passed into the shadow, the stone exploded into a cloud of parasol-like seeds that floated aimlessly for a few moments before a gust of wind blew them back again. A dozen tiny pebbles dropped out of the air and onto the grass.
Wayne picked up one of the stones and rolled it between a finger and thumb. He tossed it back at the door and again it became a floating seed.
More experiments were needed. Twigs, berries and fallen leaves were gathered up. A worm trying to escape into the ground almost joined the collection when a sound caused Wayne to turn toward the door.
A key was turning in the lock.
Wayne scrambled away, finding cover in the undergrowth. He peered out past the leaves of the thicket, heedless of the scratches it had left on his bare arms and face.
The thick black ring swung clockwise and the door opened. Beyond lay darkness. From the darkness stepped a man. He had a lop-sided beard and badly-cut hair that appeared to shiver when he looked around. His clothes were deeply worn and patchwork, but a pristine gold watch bound his wrist. A glance at this watch removed the frown creasing the man’s face. Reassured by whatever time it was, he closed the door, lay down on the ground, rested his hands behind his head and closed his eyes for a nap.
For a fleeting second Wayne wondered if this was God, back from playing video games. But surely God wouldn’t look like this?
A minute or two of watching the stranger lie there caused Wayne to grow restless. He moved slowly and quietly, daring to venture up to the edge of the trees. Comfortable he could duck back out of sight if need be, Wayne held up one of the collected twigs and threw it at the man.
It fell short. The tumbling stick landed on black soil and immediately expressed displeasure by stamping tiny feet on the ground. Wayne did a double-take and craned his neck forward for a closer look.
The twig now possessed a thin, lizard-like body, with five stumpy legs jutting out at random points. It had a tail that forked into twin barbs and a pointed head sporting beady eyes and a flicking red tongue.
The bemused creature padded around in a circle, then advanced on the resting man. It climbed up a shoe, taking a few teasing bites out of the leather on the way.
Wayne bit his lip, but refrained from calling out a warning.
The lizard continued up the stranger’s trousers and across his chest, seemingly drawn by the ebb and flow of warm breath.
Inches from the man’s face, the lizard stopped. Its tongue flicked in and out once, twice more. Then it raised its tail and jabbed forward with those wicked barbs.
But the man was quicker. He deftly rolled over and swept up the lizard in a torn off strip of jacket.
It thrashed and hissed beneath the fabric.
He held it fast and calmly shuffled over the edge of the circle. Half of the creature was pushed out onto the grass. Where it left the shadow, ragged sackcloth became golden thread and the creature held captive within became still.
The man pressed it down against the ground. Wayne heard the twig snap. The half of the lizard within the circle abruptly stopped struggling.
“I remember the first time I found myself lost and far from home,” said the stranger, speaking with a foreign accent that littered his sentences with random pauses and unusual emphasis. “Everything was strange and I didn’t understand the rules of how things worked. A boy in such a situation can easily confuse fear and excitement. He finds it easy to do the wrong thing because he knows no better. I learned that it was often advisable to do nothing instead. That’s a lesson you would do well to learn, young Master Todd.”
A sickening chill caught in Wayne’s chest. He wanted to run, but didn’t dare move. He wanted to breathe, but was too scared to make a noise. He even tried to clear his mind of the questions that raced through it, fearful even they might be heard.
“Your choice is wise, even if your reasoning is flawed,” said the man. “The only excuse for not asking a question is if you are incapable of understanding the answer. That can be your second lesson of the day.”
The stranger retreated to the door and sat down beside it. He shook open the strip of torn jacket and the two severed halves of the lizard fell to the ground.
Wayne looked back along the ragged path he’d made for himself through the copse of trees. On the far side, down a slope, across the wall and up a hill, his family waited. They wouldn’t be waiting quietly or patiently, they’d be arguing or screaming. His urgent desire to leave quickly faded.
He clenched his fists and edged clear of the trees.
The man did not look up. Instead, he was busy stuffing the head of the lizard into a peculiar-looking pipe, which, though relatively small and slender, still found space for an abundance of dials, switches and twirling widgets. Despite this, he managed to offer an explanation of sorts.
“Satisfy yourself with the knowledge that I possess an uncanny knack for finding things. Such a talent meant finding out your name was trivial.” He lifted his head to meet Wayne’s uncertain gaze for the first time. “But I do not wish to put you at a disadvantage. It is only fair that you know my name, even though it is a long time since I have spoken it aloud.”
The man put down the pipe and walked over to the edge of the circle. Wayne took a step back. The man held out a hand for him to shake.
“I am Joseph Humberstone Ward. You may call me whatever you wish, given this will only be a fleeting acquaintance.”
Wayne eyed the hand. It did not extend beyond the line of shadow. He decided to remain where he was.
“You have evidently learned the first of our lessons. That is good to see.” The proffered hand waved a finger at Wayne. “You should look more pleased with yourself. Self-improvement is a marvellous thing.”
Mr Ward returned to his pipe. He twiddled some widgets, flicked a few switches, checked a number of dials and then placed the pipe to his lips. He closed his eyes and a puff of lavender smoke rose from the bowl.
Wayne studied the man and then the door.
“Keep those foolish thoughts to yourself if you please,” advised Mr Ward. “Such questions require no answer from me. The door is not locked. Open i
t and see with your own eyes where I came from.”
Wayne did not move.
Mr Ward opened his eyes and stared at the child in front of him. Embers in the pipe glowed a fierce green.
“Now I begin to wonder whether this inaction tells of a lesson learned or a boy unable to act. So, to our final lesson of the day – you always have a choice. For a long time I didn’t think I had a choice. I was trapped in a life lived according to the whims of another. You know what that’s like, don’t you, Wayne? You don’t have a life. You do what your parents tell you. You suffer your brother’s cries day after day, night after night and there’s nothing you can do about it except lament how everything was just fine and dandy before he came along. You think yourself trapped, but you are not. You are constrained only by what you believe is possible. You have a choice, just like I did. Every second of every day you can make the choice to change things. You just need to see the line in front of you and then step across.”
Wayne stared at Mr Ward. While the strange man spoke, the quality of the air changed, becoming charged with a prickling humidity that promised of a storm to come; a storm whose distant rumbling could be felt as a tremor beneath his feet. Yet all was still within the shadow of the cloud, where Mr Ward sat, staring back at Wayne, eyes unblinking, ghostly worms swimming through the stone behind him. His next words were soft, wistful and cut into the heart of Wayne’s oft-imagined desire.
“Silencing the cries of a baby is the easiest thing in the world.”
Wayne stumbled backwards. Mr Ward checked his watch and flashed a brief, eldritch smile.
“Here endeth the final lesson.”
Distant lightning caused the land to flicker a momentary white. Thunder rolled over them a few seconds later.
“Time to make a choice, Wayne. The ticking clock brings change whether we like it or not. The only question is: will you be responsible for making that change?”
Wayne fled.
He blundered through the copse of trees, hands held up to keep the branches from his face, gaze fixed on the ground just ahead, which suddenly opened into sunlight and a slope that he tumbled down for a dozen feet before he was on his own feet once again and running.
The field at the bottom was a blur in his peripheral vision. His sole focus was reaching the stone wall.
He stumbled. For a few seconds he was on all fours, loping along like an injured sheep with a wolf at its back.
Another flash of lightning. The thunder came almost at once.
Wayne reached the wall gasping for breath. He scrambled over and dropped into another shadow on the far side. The sun behind him painted the hillside ahead a bright green. The sky above was dark. He listened for sounds of pursuit. The only noise to reach his ears was an anguished scream and Wayne was thankful. He now appreciated his brother’s cries in a way he couldn’t before.
“Wayne! Where are you!” called out his mother.
“You’re going to get a soaking if you don’t get back to the car right now!” added his father, before the parents’ bickering resumed.
“Are you just leaving the cool box there or taking it with us?”
“Of course I’m taking it with us, I was just busy packing up the blanket first.”
“Well, don’t go forgetting it and then blaming it on me.”
Wayne walked up the hillside to the site of his family’s picnic. As he neared the top, he finally risked a look back. The verdant meadows, purple heather and gently rolling hills looked just as serene before, the copse of trees an unremarkable point of detail. God’s own country was boring once more, save for the solitary white cloud. It still hung motionless against bare sky. Wayne couldn’t shake the sense it was waiting for something.
He crested the rise and found his parents desperately loading up the car as black clouds riven with lightning bore down upon them. Torrents of rain cast the world below into a murky fog.
“Into the car, Wayne, quickly—” An unearthly roar drowned out the rest of his father’s words.
“Have you ever heard thunder so loud?” shouted his mother, strapping Levi into a child seat.
But it wasn’t thunder. The noise came from within the shadow of the storm, which had swept across forests and villages and now sent them raging forth as stampeding beasts and fire-breathing machines and things with flailing, blackened limbs that chased the line of rain.
“I said into the car, Wayne!”
His father reached out a hand to grab his son by the arm. He did not see the car behind him rise up as golden-robed giant with tentacle arms. He did not see it swallow up his wife. There was no telling if he was aware of his eyes becoming vacant black discs buried in flesh turned to pale wax or if he felt his outstretched fingers melt away to nothing beneath the downpour.
Wayne Todd, aged nine and three quarters, watched all of this in horror, before he too was caught in the shadow and became Wayne Todd no longer.
BIBLE BASHER
by
JAMES LOVEGROVE
Helen Forester looked across the table at her husband, the Reverend Christopher Forester, as he ate his Sunday lunch, and she loathed him.
Into his mouth went forkload after forkload of chicken, roast potato, carrot, and broccoli, the food disappearing with metronomic regularity, as though he were some eating automaton. His gaze did not waver from the middle distance. A dollop of gravy had dropped onto his chin and glistened there brownly, looking vaguely faecal, diarrheic. He was unaware of it. Once in a while he might pause from his rhythmic cutting/spearing/lifting/chewing routine, as if about to speak, and Helen would wonder what he might possibly have to say. A compliment on her cooking? A query about what she intended to do with herself this afternoon? Unlikely. Then he would resume feeding, the pause having served no other function than to give a stray thought time to cross his mind, or perhaps allow him to savour the memory of a neat turn of phrase from the morning’s sermon. The meal seemed incidental to Christopher’s presence at the table. He was there, mainly, to muse. And Helen, provider of the meal, might as well have not been there at all, given how much attention he was paying her.
Sometimes she thought that if she screamed or threw something at him, or stripped naked and waggled her crotch in front of his nose, Christopher would not even notice.
There was fruit salad to follow. Helen served her husband, retired to her end of the table, served herself. Christopher lathered double cream over his helping, all but hiding the fruit pieces from sight, then tucked in. The dollop of gravy was still there on his chin, congealing. A dollop of cream soon joined it, looking vaguely… Helen did not want to think what it resembled. A wife who loved her husband would have informed him that he had besmirched himself; perhaps would have offered to wipe the offending blobs away with her napkin. Helen Forester stared flatly across the table at the man she had married, and her napkin stayed on her lap.
Christopher had been young once, and good-looking. As had she. He had been, if not dashing, at least possessed of a certain charm. His haircut then, the same haircut he had now, had been contemporary and cool. Before his hair went grey and frizzy, wearing it chunky and collar-length had lent him a rakish, almost cavalier air. A haircut very much of its time. Very much not of its time now. And something more than mere ageing had happened to Christopher’s features over the last three decades. A face that had been angular but not unattractive, fresh without being innocent, had coarsened and hardened, becoming fixed and red and lumpen. His nose, if such a thing were possible, had grown. Perhaps the weight of the thick glasses that sat on it had squeezed it down somehow, forcing more of it to extrude, as though cartilage were clay. The Christopher who had wooed Helen at university, the theology student who had impressed her with his single-minded ambition to join the priesthood, the young man to whom she had more or less willingly surrendered her virginity one drunken night when they were celebrating the end of their Finals, was not the fifty-something village vicar who sat before her here in the dining room. Not a trace of that
erstwhile Christopher remained. The man opposite her bore the same name and a vague physical resemblance, but was an impostor.
Having scraped his dessert bowl clean, Christopher looked up and finally, after twenty minutes of silence, spoke.
“Any chance of a coffee?”
A half-dozen tart answers suggested themselves to Helen, crowding at the forefront of her mind like frantic people trying to escape a burning building. She almost let one of them free; but instead, at the last moment, settled for, “Of course, Christopher. Shall I bring it to you in the study?”
“That would be nice.”
As Helen stacked crockery in the dishwasher and the coffee percolator spluttered, she replayed the four monosyllables in her head: That would be nice. There was a time when she would have cherished such words. Since they got married, affection from Christopher had been at such a premium that any display of kindliness, however meagre, had meant much. She would have interpreted depths to that nice which it could not conceivably have contained. Nice implying steadfastness, fidelity, caring, dutifulness, diligence, love. Nice not simply as compliment but as benediction. When all it really was, as she had come to understand, was an empty adjective, a sound, a hollow conjunction of labial and sibilant into which Christopher put no more thought than was required to utter it.
Yet here was a man whose sermons were the toast of the parish. A man whose vim and eloquence in the pulpit drew congregants from miles around. A man whose effusive wit at fêtes, bring-and-buy sales, coffee mornings and other local events raised universal smiles and admiration. A man so delightfully verbal on public occasions, so in command of English when he needed to be, that nobody would believe how brusque and uncommunicative he was in private. Countless parishioners, particularly ladies, had told Helen how fortunate she was to have a husband with such a gift for language. Life at home with the Reverend Forester must, these people seemed to suggest, be infinitely pleasurable for her; a privilege to have a man of such loquacious talent always on hand, all to herself. Evenings at the vicarage must fly by.
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