Lazar

by Lawrence Heath

  “Come on, come on,” he urged, but nothing happened. He turned to Jan. “Why won’t it let me go any further?”

  “Because that’s as far as I went in my dream.”

  “Oh.” Hal sounded disappointed. “Is that it, then? I thought you said this was a nightmare? The only frightening bit was my skeletons.”

  Jan stared at her cousin in disbelief.

  “Didn’t you feel anything?”

  “Only when the skeletons appeared,” he quipped.

  “This isn’t funny,” Jan responded sharply. “I was talking about before that. When you were ‘walking’ down the road, didn’t you feel it coming straight at you – the terror, the hatred, the fear?”

  “Nope – not a thing,” Hal smiled. “Computer’s aren’t very good on emotions.”

  “Ha!” Jan exclaimed scornfully, “so much for your virtual reality. It might be good at sights and sounds, but your computer’s nowhere when it comes to thoughts and feelings – the things that real life’s all about. My dreams have more to do with virtual reality than your stupid software.”

  It was now Hal’s turn to stare at Jan. He waited a moment until she had calmed down.

  “Er, perhaps it’s a good thing it can’t record feelings,” he suggested. “They don’t sound like the sort of thing you’d want to replay over and over again. Not that they were real feelings anyway – they were only symptoms of the ‘virus’.”

  “Of course they were real feelings,” Jan protested, “feelings can’t be anything else but real. And it’s not a ‘virus’, it’s a ghost – a person. It was a person you saw yesterday, not an aberration of your senses.”

  “That’s a point,” Hal looked puzzled. “If I’ve got the virus then why didn’t I have the dream as well?”

  “Because it’s not a virus!”

  “No, no,” Hal was thinking on his feet, “no, no – it must be something else. I know. It’s that ring – it must be something to do with that ring she gave you. But how…”

  “But why?” Jan interrupted. “It’s not the ‘how’ but the ‘why’ that’s important. Why is Margaret haunting us? What was it that caused her to be so terrified?”

  Hal was not listening. He had turned back to the computer, closed down the virtual reality program and loaded up his CAD software. A three-dimensional map sprang up on the screen.

  “Yes!” Hal punched the air. “It’s just as I thought.”

  Jan looked over her cousin’s shoulder at an aerial view of her dreamscape. The chapel, the lane, the cottages – they were all there in every detail. Hal moved the cursor up. The scene shifted to the windmill. This time the scene was not as richly detailed. Some of the surfaces were little more than an outline and others had been simply rendered in flat colours with no texture.

  Hal moved the cursor onward. A wire-frame model of the monastery came into view with only the western end and the side toward the lane displaying any detail in its walls and windows.

  “Why is the monastery only half completed?” enquired Jan, in spite of herself. She leaned forward to look more closely at the screen.

  “Well,” Hal began, tentatively, uncertain of his cousin’s reaction. “According to my theory, the virus hasn’t fully taken hold there yet. I reckon it gets its energy, or instructions, from that ring of yours, and since you didn’t get that close to the monastery in your dream it hasn’t been able to completely recreate it. Not yet.”

  He turned and smiled at Jan.

  “Remember what I was saying yesterday? About your going down to the chapel while I stayed here to see if your ‘ring’ came up on the screen? How about going down to the ruins of the monastery instead?”

  Jan stood upright and gazed into the distance.

  “Come on,” Hal urged, “you’ll be all right – it won’t be like your nightmare. I just want to see whether you – well, sort of radiate completed buildings wherever you go, when you’ve got that ring on.”

  Jan turned her gaze toward her cousin, her eyes not quite focusing on his.

  “This isn’t about recreating medieval cities,” she said, coldly. “This is about finding out what it was that terrified a girl so much that she’s haunted the vicinity for 700 years.”

  “Hold on a minute,” It was Hal’s turn to sound serious. “I thought recreating old Wickwich was exactly what this was all about. And it strikes me that it’s precisely what your Margaret wants us to do. We wouldn’t have got this far otherwise.” He placed his hand on the computer’s monitor. “Perhaps this holds the key. Perhaps, by completing the task we’ve set ourselves, we’ll actually discover Margaret’s secret.”

  Jan thought for a moment before responding.

  “Maybe, but…” Her eyes turned and focused on the outline of the monastery. “Perhaps the monastery’s as far as we need to go. I certainly didn’t get any further in my dream. In any case, you’ve got the framework of the building – couldn’t you just use your software to fill it in?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s find out.” Hal began clicking his mouse buttons and jabbing at the keyboard straight away.

  “Which do you reckon’s the best match?” he asked, pointing at a palette of textures on the screen consisting of rows of rectangles displaying samples of wall surfaces, from warm red brick to cold grey granite. None of them were quite right, but Jan pointed to a square of golden yellow sandstone. With a quick click, and a drag of the cursor, Hal transformed the wire-frame monastery into a solid-looking building.

  “There. What do you think?”

  Jan screwed up her nose and moved her head from side to side.

  “So so,” she commented.

  “I know – it needs buttresses,” Hal suggested, and began drawing shapes, in three dimensions, coming out of the wall. He then duplicated them, and then duplicated them again until a full battalion of buttresses was evenly spaced along the wall, one between each pair of windows.

  “There. Now for the windows.” He pulled up a selection from the system’s database of stained glass – more suited to a Victorian semi-detached than a house of God. Hal copied and pasted one of them, then repeated his trick of duplication.

  “Not bad, eh?” Hal leant back to admire his handiwork.

  “It’s really naff,” Jan exclaimed. Then, as if in sympathy, each feature Hal had created popped off the screen in the same order in which they had been added until only the original wire-frame monastery remained.

  “Ha!” Jan laughed. “I don’t think your virus thought very much of that.”

  “Yeah. It looks as though you’ll have to go down to the monastery after all,” retorted Hal. “But don’t tell my Mum and Dad what we’re up to. After the way they made fun of us when we told them about Margaret, I want to check out every bit of this before we tell them any more.”

  Jan stopped when she reached the church and glanced at the map on her smartphone.

  “Come on, come on,” she cajoled, but despite her entreaties the screen remained blank. “Hal’s right, the signal here is rubbish,” she thought, as she pushed the phone back into her pocket and pulled out the folded guidebook she had brought with her just in case. “I’ll have to rely on old technology,” she smiled.

  She quickly found the map at the back of the guidebook and studied it with care before looking up.

  “Fork right at St James’,” she instructed herself.

  Before doing so, she stood for a moment and looked at the Victorian church and the ancient chapel in its graveyard. She tried to superimpose her dream upon the ruin, but found it impossible under the blazing July sun. She frowned beneath the hand that shaded her eyes, and bit her lip. It would be so easy to shrug the whole thing off as just a stupid nightmare if it hadn’t been for what had happened to Hal’s computer.

  And what had happened to Hal’s computer, Jan pondered. Could a virus really do that? Could she have done it, the thought suddenly occurred to her? Could she have got up, in her sleep, walked into Hal’s bedroom, gone over to his computer and typ
ed in all that detail and thought it was a dream? No, surely not. She wouldn’t know where to begin on Hal’s computer even when wide awake, let alone when fast asleep.

  Her speculations gradually subsided into reverie and she stood gazing into the graveyard for some time before the roar of a motorbike speeding past brought her back to the present.

  No sign of Margaret today, she heard herself thinking aloud as she turned, and was surprised at her sudden sense of disappointment as she continued on her way. I wonder what it is she wants? And why has she chosen me? Why not Hal? Perhaps she wants to tell me something – something she can only tell a ‘friend’. Or perhaps there’s something she wants me to do. But what?

  So many questions tumbled about in Jan’s head that it was not until she came another fork in the road that she realised that she had walked too far. She retraced her steps, this time taking careful note of her surroundings, and soon found the gap between two bungalows she was looking for. It marked the start of the footpath that, according to the guidebook, led directly to the monastery. She climbed over the stile that blocked the entrance and followed a vague line of trodden grass around the perimeter of an empty meadow until she reached another stile embedded in another hedgerow.

  On the far side stood the monastery.

  Jan climbed the step and stood astride the stile for a second while she looked at the broken piles of stone and masonry stretched across the field. In her imagination they looked like the weathered bones of some great, beached leviathan washed ashore and left stranded by the storm that had swept the medieval town away. The fractured arches were its ribcage, the window in the east wall a socket in its skull. Jan shook the image from her head and smiled, and then jumped down.

  Having now served its purpose, Jan thrust the guidebook into her back pocket as she walked across the sun-baked meadow toward one of the few remaining monastery walls that still stood to its full height. At its centre was a doorway. Jan paused, when she reached it, and looked through the opening, down the hollow body of the nave toward the pointed arch of the east window. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to recall the image of the monastery that had appeared on Hal’s computer screen. This was the main entrance to the church, if she remembered rightly – the west door.

  She stepped through it. As she did so, she felt her left arm knock against something, or somebody. She turned round and stepped back in a single movement. The entrance was empty. There was nothing, or nobody, there – nor in the field beyond. All was silent and still and clear-cut in the bright July sunlight. Jan stared hard at the doorway. It was far too wide for her to have brushed against its stone jamb accidentally. But she had definitely bumped into something. Or had she? She was rubbing her elbow, but that was instinctive. Perhaps it was all in her mind.

  She shivered. It suddenly occurred to her that there was more of the chill of stone than the warmth of summer skies on this side of the entrance. She looked around. The walls along either side were hardly higher than one metre and the sun was directly overhead. There was hardly a shadow to be seen. So why did she feel so cold? Was that all in her mind as well?

  What Jan saw next made her blood run even colder.

  It was Margaret. There was no doubt about it. Even though the vague, white figure was a long way off, Jan just knew that it was her. But how did she know? She could not possibly recognise her from this distance. And how could she be so sure? The Margaret she had met before had been melancholic – despairing, even. This girl was skipping carefree across the grass swinging a basket in her hand. But it was her.

  Or is she just a figment of my imagination, along with everything else? Jan questioned her own senses for the third time. Perhaps there’s a part of me that wants so much to see Margaret again that it’s conjured up her image in my mind’s eye.

  Whoever, or whatever, she was, she was fast approaching the monastery. Jan walked over to the remains of the wall along the north side of the aisle. It came up to just below Jan’s waist, and at first she considered climbing over it, but in the end decided to stand and wait for Margaret to come to her.

  As the girl came nearer Jan noticed that she wasn’t wearing modern clothes – she had a long, grey woollen dress on, that reached down to the ground. “I don’t think I’ve got an outfit like that in my mental databank,” Jan said to herself, and smiled, and as she did so she realised that she wasn’t frightened. “She may be dressed like a medieval ghost this time, but she’s nothing like as sinister as she was before.”

  But there was something slightly odd in her demeanour. Although Margaret was heading in Jan’s direction, she was not coming directly toward her. In fact, Margaret didn’t seem to be aware of Jan’s existence at all. Jan waved; she failed to notice. Jan called her name; she didn’t hear.

  As much irritated as fazed by Margaret’s behaviour, Jan made to climb over the wall in order to confront her, but she hit her knee against … against what? There was nothing there to hit her knee against. She rubbed her kneecap. Instinctively?

  Jan held up her hand in front of, but away from, her face. She moved it forward tentatively. Her fingers touched a wall. That is, her fingers touched the cold, rough, unyielding surface of dressed stone – but there was nothing there for her eyes to see. She put her other hand forward. It touched a wall. She reached out in all directions. Where her eyes could see only the weathered fragments of a wall up to the level of her knees, her hands could feel the fabric of a whole one.

  She moved sideways, feeling her way as though blind, until she came to the point at which the invisible wall met the west end of the church. She turned the corner, and dragged her fingers with her. She stared at them. The west wall was still standing – she could see it – but her fingers could not touch it. Although she pushed as hard as she could, until her fingertips bulged outwards with the pressure, they remained resolutely at least one centimetre away from the weathered surface of the ancient edifice.

  It was as though she was able to experience the wall, through her sense of touch, as it had been when first built, in medieval times … when Margaret was alive.

  Jan scrambled toward the doorway, never once taking her hands away from the wall. She felt her fingers run over the ornately carved stone jamb, and then along the grainy surface of a heavy wooden door – presumably the door that she had bumped into when she entered. Halfway across the opening her fingers met thin air – the other of the double doors was seemingly open. Jan fell through it and then stumbled down a step she could not see. She regained her footing straight away. Where was Margaret? Jan turned sharply to the right. She was nowhere to be seen. Jan hurried along the wall and quickly turned the corner of the church – and nearly ran straight into Margaret.

  The girl screamed and dropped her basket.

  Jan took a sharp intake of breath and placed her hands across her mouth as if to never let it out again. She stared at Margaret. Her face!

  It was beautiful.

  Her complexion was fresh and softly tanned; her eyes were wide and bright and blue; her nose was … perfect. There were no marks or scars to spoil its gentle curves and arches. The skin was flawless. The only blemish on the young girl’s face was the expression of sheer terror that twisted her pale lips and cut furrows in her brow.

  Margaret was the first to speak.

  “Who are you?” Her voice was hardly louder than a whisper. Jan’s answer was just as tremulous.

  “I’m Jan, don’t you remember? You gave me this –” She held up her hand and showed the girl her half of the ring. Margaret’s eyes grew even wider, then narrowed.

  “Where did you get that?” The question scythed the summer air with the cold, hard edge of interrogation.

  “Over by the city wall.” Jan pointed past Margaret in the general direction of the ditch. “I found it in the dyke, right next to the west gate.”

  “That was where I lost it.” Margaret’s frown had turned to one of anguish. Tears rushed into her eyes. “I should never have taken it off my finger.
The rings should never have been parted – not until I had found the one with whom I wished to share my life.” Her piercing light blue eyes glared directly into Jan’s. “That ring is mine to bestow, not yours to steal.”

  She lunged forward and grabbed Jan’s wrist. Her fingers felt like ice upon Jan’s skin. Both girls recoiled immediately and snatched their hands away from one another. Margaret let out a yelp of pain.

  “Aargh! Your flesh – it burns! In God’s name, who or what are you?” she screamed – there was nothing cold or hard about her questions now. “Are you some spirit of the dead or a messenger sent from Heaven or come from Hell? And why, oh why, by all that’s Holy, have you chosen me? Did I summon you here when I lost my ring? Is it that that has brought you to me?”

  Jan felt herself stifle the desire to laugh out loud. Was it in reaction to the shock, she asked herself, or was it because Margaret was asking the very same questions that she herself was thinking? In God’s name, who or what was Margaret? Surely it was she who was some spirit of the dead or a messenger?

  A messenger. Yes, that was it. That’s what this is all about – I’ve got to send a message back through time. The thought dawned on Jan with sudden clarity. I’ve got to warn Margaret of the storm and the floods and the drowning of Old Wickwich.

  “What day is it?” she blurted out. Margaret stepped backward. Jan could see from her expression that the girl was far more frightened and confused by the encounter than she was. She repeated her question more precisely. “What is the date? What year is it?”

  “’Tis the Year of Our Lord 1286.”

  “I thought so,” Jan felt something inside her leap for joy. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. It’s the twenty-eighth of July – am I right?”

  “Yes.” Margaret took another step backward.

  “And the weather – what’s the weather like?”

  For the first time since they had met, Margaret took her eyes off Jan and looked nervously from side to side then up at the sky.

  “’Tis warm and dry. Why?”

  “Warm and dry? Is there no sign of a storm?”