Lazar

by Lawrence Heath

  He returned to his keyboard and smiled at the screen. “Now that would make this legend of yours real.”

  Jan smiled as well – to herself.

  “Well, Jan, I must say I’m impressed, completing the task I set you within an hour,” Aunt Jill smiled as she sliced two rounds of sandwiches in half.

  “It was Hal’s idea. He wants to go out and measure things.”

  “He hasn’t been down to the beach since we moved here,” Jan’s aunt continued, not listening to her niece. “His father and I thought that would be one of the attractions of moving to Wickwich, being so close to the sea.”

  “We’re not going to the beach, exactly. We’re going to the cliff top. Hal wants to get the dimensions of the ruined tower so he can feed them into his computer. He’s gone to ask Uncle Bill – sorry – Bill if he can borrow some of his surveying equipment.”

  Aunt Jill was still not listening.

  “I’ve made some sandwiches and prepared some drinks. Now, if you run upstairs and fetch your swimming costume from your suitcase, I’ll find a towel…”

  At that moment Hal entered the kitchen, loaded down with a theodolite, a measuring rod, a tripod and an aluminium case.

  “What on earth…?” exclaimed Aunt Jill.

  Jan and Hal stepped out into the sunshine and then back into the shade as they strode along the wooded lane until they reached a crossroads. Hal stopped for a moment as if to get his bearings. In fact he was getting his breath back. The equipment, that he had been carrying over his shoulder but was now leaning on, was extremely heavy and the weather very hot.

  “Now, let me see. This way, I think,” he said, re-shouldering his load and setting off across the road. The corner opposite was surrounded by an old stone wall behind which stood a clump of trees that blotted out the sky. Hal took the lane directly ahead, signposted ‘To the seafront’.

  “Yes, here we are,” he called out almost immediately.

  Beyond the trees stood an unimpressive church of flint and sandstone. Hal looked up at its narrow tower as he passed beneath the lychgate and entered the graveyard.

  “It doesn’t look much like a ruin to me,” he said as he searched for somewhere to lay down his load. “In fact it doesn’t look very old at all.”

  “That’s because it isn’t,” Jan explained as she caught him up. “This isn’t the tower I meant. The one I’m talking about is standing on its own right by the sea. You must have seen it – it’s on the horizon as you come into the village.”

  “Oh, that,” said Hal. “You mean you want me to carry this lot all the way up there?”

  “It’s you that wants its dimensions to put in your computer,” retorted Jan. “I’m quite happy just to tune in to the spirit of the place; to soak up the atmosphere. It’s you that wants to measure it.”

  “OK, OK,” conceded Hal, as he hoisted the rod and tripod back on to his shoulder, picked up the case and marched out through the lychgate. He stopped and turned as he adjusted his load to make it less uncomfortable. His cousin hadn’t moved.

  “Come on,” he shouted, “this stuff’s really heavy.”

  Jan’s response was to walk away from him, further into the graveyard. She pointed at something beyond the east end of the church.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “You tell me, I can’t see from here.”

  “It’s a ruin of some sort. A chapel, by the look of it.”

  Jan disappeared round the corner. Hal groaned, then followed her. By the time he caught up she was standing in front of a plaque and reading the inscription aloud.

  “‘The Chapel to the Leper Hospital of St James. Built in the 12th century it stood outside of the walls of medieval Wickwich. All that remains is the chancel and the sanctuary…’”

  Hal stepped back while Jan continued reading. Actually, all that remained of the ancient chapel was a roofless shell. The pitted sandstone walls formed a horseshoe about ten metres long with a crumbling archway at its open end.

  “‘During the excavation of the foundations of the present church a large number of burials were found’,” Jan continued.

  Next to the plaque was a low, round-headed doorway. Hal stooped down and went under its sandstone arch, calling to his cousin as he passed.

  “Come on – let’s take a look inside.”

  Once inside, Hal turned and with an involuntary sigh, leant the equipment up against the wall and placed the case upon ground. Having relieved himself of his burden Hal stood up straight and looked about him, letting out an exclamation of approval as he did so.

  “Yeah! This place is perfect – just lines and circles. It’ll be a piece of cake putting it on the computer.”

  “Is that all that you can see – lines and circle?” Jan said incredulously as she joined Hal in the chancel.

  “That’s all there is to see,” responded Hal, as he walked away from her toward the open end.

  “Can’t you feel the atmosphere?” Jan shouted after him. “Can’t you sense the spirit of the place – the souls of all those lepers who prayed here all those centuries ago, hoping for a miracle to cure them?”

  “Nope. That’s just your overheated imagination at work again,” Hal called back over his shoulder. “All that’s here is a pile of stones. Come on – give me a hand to measure it.”

  “Measure it yourself,” retorted Jan. “I’m going to make some sketches.”

  “Get the proportions right, then, so I can feed them into the computer.”

  “They’re going to be pictures of how I see the place – artistic impressions, not technical drawings.”

  Jan stormed off toward the far end of the chapel. ‘Overheated imagination’ – how dare he. It was more a case of his being totally insensitive, she thought to herself as she reached the wall, along the bottom of which ran an arcade of decorative arches. Could he really not feel the atmosphere of this ancient place? ‘A pile of stones’ indeed! These stone had soaked up half a millennium of prayer – had witnessed faith and suffering way beyond the comprehension of a 21st-century nerd.

  She reached out and ran her fingers over the patterns on the wall. As she did so, she tried to put herself in the place of the medieval stonemasons who had sculpted the decorations, back in the middle ages. What did it feel like? What were they thinking as they chiselled with such painstaking care? Were they pleased with what they had achieved? It must have looked sensational.

  Jan cast her eye along the arcade of intricately carved arches. Unfortunately the impact of their dazzling complexity had been diminished by the passage of time; the detail lost or damaged by weathering and desecration. Jan squinted and tried very hard to use her imagination to fill all the gaps, but it was impossible to restore it to its original splendour.

  Grudgingly, she had to admit that Hal’s computer might have some advantages over her imagination. It could at least give some impression of the decorations as they might have first appeared. It could restore their line and symmetry.

  “Haven’t you started sketching yet?” Hal interrupted Jan’s reverie. He was dragging the extended measuring tape behind him. “Hey, that’s neat.”

  “You mean the carvings on the arches?”

  “Yeah – they’re really something.”

  Jan stared at her cousin in surprise.

  “You mean you actually appreciate the craftsmanship?”

  “I don’t know about that – but I reckon once I’ve got the coordinates and fed them into the computer that’ll look mind-blowing in 3D.”

  “It’s already in 3D.”

  “Not real 3D.”

  Jan was just about to react when she saw a slight smile at the corners of Hal’s mouth. Instead, she turned her back on him and started drawing.

  “Where’s Hal?”

  Jan was sitting at the dining room table with her uncle when her aunt came in carrying a tray and asking the question.

  “He’s still in his room.”

  “I see,” Aunt Jill sighed. “I kne
w his wanting to get out of his room and into the fresh air was too good to last.”

  She placed the dinner on the table, then went out into the hallway to call her son down to his evening meal. Uncle Bill smiled at Jan.

  “Out into the fresh air, eh?” he said. “Where did you go?”

  Jan described the visit to the churchyard and explained why Hal was still busy upstairs feeding measurements into his computer.

  “And you say he’s managed to interface the CAD and virtual reality software?” Hal’s father sounded intrigued. “If he has, then I could try it out on my clients – walk them round the houses I’ve designed for them.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” dissuaded Jan. “It’s not that impressive, really. OK, so it gives you some idea of the shape of the place, but it doesn’t help you feel what it would be like to be there.”

  “You don’t seem to be particularly enthused by Hal’s project, Jan,” Aunt Jill said as she joined them at the table.

  “Not really. That’s why I left him up there to get on with it on his own. It was my idea to start with but now it seems too sort of, well, clinical. When I was there I simply wanted to relax and soak up the atmosphere, get a feel for the place, but all Hal wanted to do was clamber over everything taking measurements. He spent over an hour looking at the chapel through the theodolite, but he still hasn’t really seen the place at all. He’s got all its dimensions, but they don’t add up to the experience of actually being there – its aura, its vibrations. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Aunt Jill nodded her agreement. “Mere measurements can’t capture the chapel’s genius loci – the spirit of the place.”

  “Talking of geniuses,” interrupted Uncle Bill, “here’s Hal, looking very pleased with himself. Well, have you succeeded in interfacing the CAD and virtual reality programs?”

  Hal grimaced and answered his father’s question by holding out his hand, spreading his fingers wide and waggling them slightly as if to say “So, so”.

  False modesty, thought Jan. She could tell by the shine in his eyes that he was really excited about what he had achieved. “Damned if I’m going to ask him anything about it,” she thought. “He can blooming well tell me if he wants me to find out.”

  Uncle Bill, though, persisted in his questioning.

  “Not 100 per cent successful, then?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Hal responded indifferently, as though the immediate task of eating his dinner was infinitely more interesting.

  “What would you say, then?”

  “I’d say 200 per cent successful!” Hal’s excitement finally got the better of him and his face broke into a smile. “It’s brilliant, Dad, absolutely brilliant. Once I’d worked out the algorithm…” He explained the software engineering while his father tried to eat and pretend he understood simultaneously.

  Hal suddenly turned toward his cousin.

  “Your drawings were great,” he enthused. “I managed to work out the coordinates and feed in the parameters, no problem. They look completely amazing. You must go up and see them.”

  It was Jan’s turn to feign indifference.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  Thank goodness, thought Jan as she entered Hal’s bedroom, he’s left his computer on. She went over to the screen. Even better, the virtual reality program was up and running. The image on the screen showed her cousin’s attempt at recreating the medieval chapel in the churchyard. Its proportions were exactly right; the arches, doors and windows, each precisely in its place. Even the zigzag carvings were arithmetically accurate – every line and every arc and every angle. But something was missing. Jan sat down and looked more closely.

  The sensation of three dimensions was totally convincing, even she had to admit that. The computer software had filled in all the surfaces and cast shadows at exactly the locations the laws of geometry dictated. She lifted the head-mounted device; then gazed in amazement as a million minute trigonometric changes in the image created the illusion of the exact corresponding shift in perspective. It was absolutely perfect.

  That was it – it was too perfect. There were no irregularities to relieve it of the monotony of perfection; there were no flaws or foibles. Its lines had not been softened by the weather, its surfaces worn down by wear and tear. The rigid mapping of reality had made it unrealistic.

  Even so, Jan put the helmet on.

  Once inside the virtual world Jan’s reservations vanished in an instant. The illusion of reality was overwhelming. Everywhere she looked the floors spread out; the walls rose up; the ceiling spanned above her head. She ‘walked’ toward the far end of the chapel. Around the bottom of the wall ran the row of decorated arches that Jan had sketched so painstakingly in the churchyard. There they were, in every detail; immaculate and flawless. The precision dazzled Jan into believing it was tangible, even though she knew it had been plotted by a program, not carved by craftsmen. She instinctively reached out to run her fingers over the patterns, but instead she hit the corner of the desk.

  Perhaps a cyber-glove isn’t so stupid an idea after all, she thought. She turned to continue her inspection of the chapel. In front of her stood the entrance that had been empty in the ruin but which was now filled by a ‘wooden’ door. Jan smiled. It had a letterbox. Hal had obviously selected it from the CAD database of standard doors. Its solid appearance and oaken grain had been the best match for the chapel.

  “Hell-o, Jan-net, well-come to Wick-witch.”

  Jan leapt up in her chair, and in the chapel. Her smile vanished. She felt a breathless hollow where a heartbeat should have been. She span round. Behind her stood a skeleton, hollow-boned and hardly visible. It stared with eyeless sockets, it intoned through lipless jaws – “Hell-o, Jan-net, well-come to Wick-witch”; and every time it spoke another wraith sprang up alongside, rising from the ground like dragons’ teeth. They were all identical; their chant a dreadful unison – “Hell-o, Jan-net, well-come to Wick-witch.”

  Then, above the monotone, Jan heard a sudden peel of laugher, bursting out from inside the chapel walls. It came from everywhere and nowhere; shrieking on and on and on. Jan scrabbled at the headset. In an instant it was off.

  And there stood Hal, a broad grin on his face.

  Jan stared at the screen, then at the headset, and then back at her cousin.

  “Oh, very funny – not.” she said sarcastically, trying hard to disguise the urge to laugh herself – partly in reaction to the fright she had just received, but mostly because she could see the funny side. But Hal had made her jump out of her skin twice that day, so blowed if she was going to let him know how smart she thought he was for having caught her out.

  “Good, eh?” beamed Hal. “I got the skeletons from my computer game.”

  “You still haven’t sorted out the pronunciation,” Jan responded tartly.

  “No – but I’ve certainly recreated the spirit of the place, don’t you think?” He started laughing again. Jan found herself laughing with him.

  “OK, so it’s pretty impressive,” Jan conceded when the hilarity finally subsided. She noticed her cousin’s chest swell with pride. “But,” she added, “there’s not much skill involved.”

  “You’re joking, aren’t you?” Hal reacted. “It took me the best part of three hours to input all the parameters.”

  “Yes, but it would have taken the original craftsmen a lifetime’s experience and several years to carve it out of stone.”

  “Exactly! That’s why virtual reality’s better than the real thing.”

  Hal pulled up a chair and sat next to his cousin. He reached over and tapped some instructions on the keyboard. The image on the screen changed to a hollow 3D outline of the chapel – thin lines drawn in austere isolation at the centre of a plain white background.

  “Not much to show for a day’s work,” he commented. “There must be an easier way to get hold of the data.”

  “Aren’t there any books a
bout Old Wickwich?” asked Jan, by way of a suggestion. “Or a museum, maybe?”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Yes, loads of things.” Jan slammed a pile of leaflets, books and postcards down on Hal’s desk, next to his computer. He took his eyes off the screen momentarily.

  “Anything useful?”

  “I hope so. I tried to phone from the museum to check whether some of the stuff was really what you were looking for, but I couldn’t get a signal.”

  “Not surprised, it’s rubbish round here. No 3G either,” Hal said disparagingly as he turned back toward the screen.

  Jan began sorting through the pile, looking for something that might engage her cousin’s attention.

  “I must say, for a small museum it’s got a pretty big shop.”

  “That’ll be for the tourists,” Hal explained. “A lot of people come here to walk along the coast or go bird-watching on the marshes.”

  Jan handed him a book. “This one looked interesting – The Legends of Old Wickwich.”

  “That’s interesting?”

  “It could be. It’ll tell us about the old churches tolling beneath the sea for a start.”

  “How will that help us?” Hal asked, scornfully. “Legends aren’t real. You can’t recreate them, they’ve never existed.”

  “Neither has your ‘virtual reality’,” retorted Jan, “but you reckon that’s real.”

  “Yeah, but virtual reality has dimensions and shapes and surfaces,” defended Hal. “Legend’s don’t have anything, they’re nothing but dreams and stuff – flights of the imagination. If it can’t be measured, it can’t be real.”

  “Is this real enough for you then?”

  Jan tossed a map on to Hal’s keyboard. He snatched it up and frowned.

  “Yeah, that’s much more like it.” He unfolded it and spread it over his desk. As he studied the map his right hand reached out and positioned itself instinctively on the mouse by his computer. A couple of clicks of a button later a new piece of software popped up on the screen. Hal carefully placed the map to one side and began tapping in instructions.