Another bit of folklore, which had stimulated his imagination unpleasantly as a child, was that sometimes the chalk giant came alive at night, and walked to a local stream to drink from it.
Venn continued along, but the mysterious giant and the waning of day had put him uneasily in mind of other legends that had haunted his childhood—of the phantasmal, antlered and trumpeting Herne the Hunter, and the “Wild Troop” that came rushing out of the night across the moors like a whirlwind that roared with hooves and voices. The Wild Troop was said to follow the ancient “straight paths,” a system of roads along which were aligned pagan sites such as prehistoric earthworks, Neolithic standing stones, Stonehenge itself. It was considered unlucky, even dangerous, for modern men to block these routes by building upon them. The long, precisely straight tracts were believed by some to convey magnetic force, or more obscure forms of energy, like some great circulatory system. They were also called “fairy paths,”
because processions of fairies were said to travel along them. This notion had also painted fanciful but disturbing visions in Venn’s boyhood mind.
But the young Venn had been most afraid of stories of the elemental Black Shuck, a great black dog that also rushed along the ancient straight tracts like a train along its rail, its eyes burning and sulphur billowing out of its jaws. Old Shock, as this beast or race of beasts was also called, was known to explode into a burst of fire like a will-o’-the-wisp when it reached a crossroad, blasting the spot a carbonized black as if lightning had struck there. Venn’s grandfather had told him how a man who had once tried to strike a black dog had been utterly incinerated, along with his horse and cart.
His grandfather had seemed especially to savor terrifying him about a black dog attack in the sixteenth century, witnessed by many. During a violent thunderstorm — in which a bolt of lightning knocked off the church roof a man who was cleaning its gutters—a black dog manifested itself directly inside the church. Crackling with lightning, the dog raced straight through the central aisle, striking and killing two of the congregation along the way. Another man was struck and survived, though he was left horribly withered. When the dog had vanished, the church’s clock was found to be ruined, and claw marks were left in the church’s door that were visible to this day. The very same day, apparently the same black dog also tore through a church some miles distant, killing three people this time. Perhaps this ancient force had resented the invasion of the comparatively new worship of Man instead of Nature.
It was stories like these, particularly concerning the seemingly elemental spirit’s ability to strike like ball lightning, that had left Father Venn to wonder more than once whether it had been Black Shuck who had burned his cathedral in Candleton.
His old stone cathedral had, after all, been built directly on one of the ancient straight paths as so many were, as if in an attempt to tap into this grid of force, or in an arrogant effort to overwhelm it, superimpose their will over those energies. Over Nature herself.
As he walked—the ever cooling breeze ruffling his hair, whistling across the grassy downs, the sky growing dark so that only shreds of sunlight like ribbons of flesh bled along the horizon, silhouetting ominous clusters of trees where anything might be lying in wait—Father Venn caught himself nervously glancing over his shoulder.
But when he discovered himself doing this, he tried to laugh at himself deri-sively. Black Shuck could scarcely kill him now, though perhaps it already had.
For Venn had been inside his church in Candleton when it had mysteriously caught fire, just over a year ago now.
««—»»
Because he had nearly run out of money, and because he preferred solitary ways, Venn spent the night standing under a tree not far off this gorse-lined stretch of road across the desolate heath. A sprinkling of rain fell but the tree shielded him from becoming too wet. He rested one palm flat across its grooved bark, taking in its ridged hardness, the damp of it, and wondering as he had many times before how he could sense these impressions when his nerves were dead and rotten. How he could feel cold, and see the wisping of his exhaled breath, when his actual body had been burned and buried under the tons of rubble that had once been his church.
Due to night’s chill, he had unwrapped the mason jar and donned his greatcoat, turned up its collar. He stared down at the jar near his feet, just a black lump in the shadows. Reluctantly, he put on his spectacles. Now, two red coals with flashing silvery centers glowed from those shadows. Unearthly eyes fixed directly on his own.
He lifted his gaze, swept it across the dark heath, as if scanning about. But his red lenses revealed no lurking black dogs, spying upon him, stalking nearer. No spectral horned hunters. No demon—or had it been an angel?—like the one he had caught a glimpse of, hovering outside one stained glass window as his church had raged with fire.
The memory came back to Venn vividly, so that he nearly flinched with its impact. He recalled—no, relived—standing dazed amid that smoldering rubble, before he realized that he actually lay buried beneath it. This understanding had come to him gradually, not through some sudden revelation like discovering his own crisped remains. His remains had never, in fact, been discovered.
And thus, his congregation—and even those fellow priests who had miraculously survived the catastrophe—had never even been aware of his death. Had taken this doppleganger to be its original. This spirit that could somehow choke from the rising smoke, and burn its fingers on the glowing embers that had once been pews.
He remembered being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the ruin, the heaps of tumbled stone that had once been walls, flames flickering throughout it all. A landscape that seemed to spread to every horizon like Hell itself. He remembered crouching down, and dragging from the cinders an ash-covered section broken from the glass window through which he had glimpsed that winged form just as the cathedral had burst suddenly, explosively, and inex-plicably into flame.
He had pressed a shard of red glass out of its lead frame with his thumb.
And later, it was this fragment of glass that he would have made into spectacles, through which he had hoped to one day, again, see that winged mysterious figure. So that he might punish it, have revenge upon it, if a demon it was. So that he might interrogate it, demand answers from it, if the creature proved to be an angel instead.
Though he was cold, and though he was afraid—not just of the night and its mysteries, but of returning to haunted Candleton—Father Venn stood in that one spot the whole of the night. Weary but not tiring, resting but not at rest.
««—»»
The next day was clear again, the sharp air invigorating, and despite its various sinister legends, the town of Candleton in its little bowl-like hollow unfolded below Venn in bright welcome as he descended into the vale.
He hoped he would not be spotted, stopped and welcomed. He had found it difficult to explain why he had left Candleton some months after the burning of the cathedral. He would find it harder still explaining his return.
He had not remained to rebuild and reestablish his church. And since leaving Candleton—to widen his search for answers to the church’s destruction, and to his very presence still on this corporeal plane—Venn had heard that his surviving colleagues had dispersed to other parishes, and that most of his former congregation had joined instead the church of the Anglican vicar, Reverend Trendle. Venn suspected the conversion had as much to do with superstitious fear as with practicality. Reverend Trendle’s much humbler church lay further along the same straight path Venn’s more ostentatious church had rested upon, and despite their theological divide, Venn hoped that no demon or Old Shock ever visited its fury upon that place of worship, too.
Along the road, Venn came upon an elderly farmer with a sun-burnished face and asked him where he might find a sheep owner named Brook, whom Venn himself did not recall from his congregation. The farmer looked at Venn a bit warily. Venn had pulled his greatcoat around his collar to disguise his priestly garb some
what, and had removed his strange tinted glasses by which he might be recognized. He held the jar under the flap of his coat to keep it from view, but the shape was conspicuous and suspicious. Nevertheless, he received his directions, thanked the man—who fortunately did not recognize him, though he himself looked familiar to Venn—and proceeded on.
Venn might have seen this Brook about in the past, as well. Despite his vocation, however, he had always been of a solitary leaning, even wondering at times if he would have been a better monk than priest. Some in his congregation, he had heard, had found him a bit aloof. Fortunately, fellow priests like Father Lodge and especially the young Irish priest, Father Dewy, had been more approachable, or else the townsfolk might have joined Reverend Trendle’s parish much sooner.
Now, on his way to Brook’s little farm at the opposite end of the town, Venn was already moving along the so-called straight path that would take him, before that, past the ruins of his church. He had dimly spied it from the lip of the vale earlier. Even collapsed as it was, resembling from the distance a vast pagan burial cairn, it could not be ignored.
He had wanted to avoid the ruins. Had he not already spent the first months after the fire visiting them daily, each time hoping to uncover some clue or glean some answers about the cause for the tragedy, about the reason he was trapped here between the worlds of the living and the dead? Damned in this walking purgatory?
But it was inevitable, he knew. He was drawn magnetically to the ruins along this fairy path which ran right through the town, as though the town had grown around its spinal column.
As if to put off the homecoming just a few moments longer, Venn stopped in the road to look at a series of four great, lichen-spotted stones that rested just off to his left. These standing stones, called the Four Sisters by the locals, were said to lie at the nexus point of a number of fairy paths. The townsfolk had long related how these stones could roll themselves at night to a little nearby pond to quench their thirst, before they rolled themselves back to their spot by the road before dawn. Some had even claimed to see the matted tracks they left in the grass in their wake.
Briefly, Venn donned his spectacles again, to study the rounded stones.
He saw no fairies, no spirits hiding amongst them, no mysterious signs marked on their pitted surfaces. He slipped the specs away once more, and resumed his journey toward the farm where the head he carried under his arm had originated.
“Come, Baphomet,” he whispered to it, referring to the horned head, possibly of an animal, said to be worshiped in secret by the Templars—who were later persecuted, and executed, for their supposed blasphemies.
III: The Remains
In the year 1092, only five days after being consecrated, St. Osmund’s cathedral at Old Sarum was destroyed during a thunderstorm, the roof ruined and the entire structure damaged, as if somehow God had not been satisfied with the endeavor. Or, as if Old Shock had come to visit.
Still, standing before the ruins of his own church again, Father Venn couldn’t imagine that even that ancient catastrophe could equal the one evidenced here.
The roof had crushed most of the structure beneath it, and even the bell tower had fallen, leaving only the broad stump of its base propped up by mounds of stone blocks. Gorse and other bushes were growing up between the piles, green life working at burying these gray remnants. Perhaps, unless it was all eventually carted away, this place would ultimately resemble a humped barrow like those of the pagans.
Two ragged walls met in a corner, all that really remained erect, and this with the help of lumber propped against the sagging outsides. Children had been warned not to play near the ruins lest they be crushed, but no one seemed much inclined to venture near the spot in any case. Even the priests who had lived through the fire and collapse had seemed disinclined to ever return.
Himself included.
And yet, here he was again.
Standing at the periphery of the ruins, not far from the road, Venn stared into the shadows formed by those meeting walls. He did not wear his spectacles. He did not want to don them. But he knew that he would. He knew that his feet would carry him closer, into that chill blue shade. And as he approached, a rising breeze whistled through the empty arched sockets of windows in the blasted walls.
Now in the shadows himself, Venn fitted the red-lensed specs to his face and squinted through them warily.
Father Dewy stood in the very corner, hunched somewhat behind a pile of broken masonry as if he meant to duck out of sight. But he did not see Venn, his eyes elsewhere, flicking madly like those of a startled horse. Blood had run down his face from an awful V-shaped wound gashed into the front of his skull as if an axe had bashed him there. The blood still glistened wetly, a year after it had been drawn. A year after the blood had turned to black sludge in the veins of the actual Father Dewy, buried back in Ireland.
Venn edged a little closer. Still the young priest did not notice him, his eyes bulging, his fingers whitely gripping a block of stone. The side of his face was charred black, his ear a crisp, his clothing having been badly scorched.
His red hair was white with the dust of centuries: the pulverized stone of the cathedral’s body.
“My friend,” Venn said to him softly, afraid that those eyes might lock on his yet. But at the same time, wishing that they would.
They did not. The man was sobbing desperately but Venn couldn’t hear him. His spectacles, despite their mysterious properties, could not relate that sound to him.
It agonized Venn to see him this way. Dewy had been the youngest, the most vibrant of the priests. Always laughing, always buoyant. Of the three who had died that day—of all the priests, in fact—Dewy had been the one most loved by the townspeople. And though living here in England, his beloved Ireland had been his true home. Almost more than it pained Venn to see Dewy trapped in this limbo, it pained him that the young man haunted this country rather than his own.
“I wish I could bring you peace,” Venn said to him. Rising to his forgotten duties as a comforter of his fellow creatures, Venn stepped over and between the rubble, reached out to touch Father Dewy’s shoulder. He felt nothing there but a more concentrated chill in the air. Dewy was a ghost even to this ghost.
Venn did not understand why one ghost could act upon its surroundings when another couldn’t, why some were mute and mindless while others spoke and sought to communicate some message to the living. Why some realized they were dead and others, Dewy perhaps, did not. Being dead had not solved such mysteries for Venn but only heightened them, made them more maddening.
Venn withdrew his hand. Stared at his friend a few moments longer. Then, as a mercy to himself, he removed his spectacles. The true colors of the church’s ruins revealed no such being lurking in its shadows. It was a poor excuse for an exorcism.
Venn turned and picked his way out of the rubble, so as to continue on his way toward the farm of this fearsome-eyed Mr. Brook.
««—»»
There was another place that Father Venn had not wanted to revisit upon his return to Candleton, and that was the crossroads appropriately named the Cross, a short distance beyond the remains of his church. But again, he knew it was inevitable. It blocked his path. It was his path.
More in times past than recently, so-called witches and those who had died by their own hand had been buried at crossroads such as this. Even the
“conjurer” named Baptista Stockdale had been interred here. Years before his death, and resurrection, Father Venn had been summoned by Baptista’s cousin to the bedside of the dying woman. The cousin explained that Reverend Trendle had refused to come.
Venn administered last rites to the dying woman, who hadn’t protested despite her reputation as a witch—though she had, to be fair, been wildly delirious through his vigil. Regardless of her lofty name, she was not considered worthy of interment in consecrated ground, and despite the young priest’s misgivings, she had been buried at the crossroads. The last such addition, to his kno
wledge, to this sad little graveyard of sorts.
Since his death—and before he ultimately left Candleton in a mostly random search for answers as to why he still roamed this material world—
Venn had come here a number of times to say prayers, in the hopes of blessing and freeing the souls of those damned to be buried here.
As he entered into the crossing of the two roads, however, he knew his prayers had not been entirely successful, for he heard a soft voice behind him say, “So…you have not yet found your peace either, Alec.”
Venn turned about and through his red spectacles saw a man standing just at the side of the road. It was a priest, older than himself. He had recognized already, by the voice, that it was his old friend Father Lodge.
“Hello, Edmond.”
Father Lodge did not come forward to meet the young priest, as if he were rooted to the spot like a stake in the earth. From an old choir song, he quoted,
“‘He comes the prisoners to release, in Satan’s bondage held.’”
It was Venn who stepped closer to him. “I am not here to say prayers again at this place, Edmond. They seem to do no good to release you.”
“That does indeed seem to be the case.” Father Lodge smiled sadly. “I am trapped here, for whatever reason our Father desires.”
“I am not so certain that it is a conscious act on His part,” Venn said, “but a callous disregard. You are more likely overlooked. Forgotten.”
“We can not know these things, Alec,” Lodge admonished him gently.
“Have you been to see Father Dewy?”
“I have. He is also still trapped on this earth.”
“That is sad,” Lodge said. “And still, you could not communicate with him, as you can with me?”
“I could not.”
Neither man understood why it was that one should be chained into one spot, while another of them could move about freely. Why Venn could converse with Lodge, but not hear or be heard by Father Dewy. Why Dewy looked as he had when he’d been killed, whereas Lodge bore not a mark upon him. Why one spirit could effect its surroundings when another could not.
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