Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Ejecting the cartridge from the firing chamber, he pocketed it. From one of the many other pockets in his bush jacket, he took out the shining silver cartridge he kept in reserve, and slid it home.

  He patted little Joy on the head and offered her a bar of Kilimanjaro chocolate, which she seized eagerly.

  ‘I’ll handle this,’ he told the crowd. ‘But mind you, leave the real wolves alone. They’re innocent. And they’re here to stay – for good.’

  ‘For evil!’ called out somebody. Joshua couldn’t identify who it was.

  ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘for evil…’ In a sense. In a very strange sense indeed. Of course, experienced game wardens knew something about this, well, undercurrent. But there was little point in reporting it back to Regional HQ in London Town, thence to HQ in Nairobi. It would merely be assumed that the warden in question had succumbed to one of the notorious maladies of England, which often seemed as much psychological as physical: the Grey Fever, or the Damp, or Apathy.

  And really, it was only an undercurrent, something trivial compared with the main current of the great ecological reshaping of this stripped land, which had lost all sense of its original nature.

  It was the rape of the land which had sent these people forth, to rape lands not their own. It would be healed, and they would be healed.

  Or would they be?

  Was it so trivial after all?

  Already strange symptoms showed forth. Any warden worth his salt suspected this, from time to time. Wardens were the only Africans closely enough in touch with the rural heart of the people, to guess it. (‘In touch,’ he thought, ‘with the heart of oak. Of ancient oak, and ash …’) Wardens dealt with these symptoms as best they could, improvising, trusting to their instincts; and only seldom, during the immensely long evenings when sun-downer followed sundowner, did a warden really confide his worries and useful hints to another. By which time they were usually ‘plastered’, as the locals put it, on some foaming nutty ale in some remote village station far removed from the ecological certainties of the planners in Nairobi. Seen from the air, of course, or from London Town or Nairobi, the multi-decade plan was proceeding magnificently.

  Joshua’s route to Plumpton Wood took him through the dilapidated churchyard. Worn, wordless headstones, healthy with yellow lichen, canted this way and that amidst the grass, some of which was scythed, most of which was rank and lush. Good fodder, this. No bells had rung out from the church tower for many years. If they did, it would probably fall down.

  Supposing, that is, that anyone was interested in ringing bells…

  He paused, noticing trampled grass in a far corner of the graveyard.

  Forcing his way through the herbage, he discovered a heap of yellowy soil – as though some huge mole had burrowed up here from under a grave, tipping the memorial stone aside.

  Someone had been buried recently, in this secluded corner. But there was no withered posy of wild flowers. Rather, a rough-cut stave had been jammed into the soil. Cloves of garlic were tied to it.

  ‘Be alert for little signs,’ he reminded himself. Heaving the stave out of the soil, he found the buried end pared to a wicked, fire-blackened point. Hastily he thrust it back.

  As though someone had been buried… or someone had burrowed out…?

  Was the tip really blackened by fire? Or was it with dried blood?

  With all his weight he thrust down on the stave, driving it deeper and deeper till it met some obstruction: stone, or coffin…

  If he asked the villagers about this, they would meet his questions with blank stares of ridicule and incomprehension. With silent insolence. What business of his was the churchyard, after all?

  He mopped his brow, though it was cool in the graveyard underneath the elms.

  Oh for the dryness and the clarity of the light of Moshi, under Kilimanjaro – with his white pate and his flowing locks of clouds! Oh for the brightness.

  Shouldering his rifle again, he hoped that he was not succumbing to the Damp or the Grey Fever.

  It was a sunny day, now. The sun shone down as brightly as it could, for this latitude. Yet wherever foliage shaded the ground, the real truth was told…

  ‘And that’s what we’re aiming to do: shade the whole land of England with the ancient forests…’

  It couldn’t be, could it, that when the English first tore down their forests, laying the land bare for farming and destroying the habitat of the wolves and deer and bears in the process, that then at the same time a certain clarity had entered their souls? Could it be that the wolves and bears – of the soul! – were banished as much by the increase in light, as anything? Then ensued laws, a constitution and the Church of England, as remote from ritual and mystery as any public health department.

  ‘The English,’ he thought, contriving a grim pun, ‘never bared their souls thereafter…’

  And now the bears of the soul were back in Rockingham Forest.

  Cheered, nonetheless, by his witticism, he resumed his safari up to the cottage in Plumpton Wood.

  With its old sagging slate roof patched with rusty corrugated iron, Granny Butler’s cottage resembled a gingerbread house. Inside was impeccably tidy – except for the patchwork-quilted bed, which was in disorder as though it had been slept in recently.

  Joshua felt the sheets.

  Cold, of course.

  He could find no bloodstains.

  But there were hairs a-plenty: wiry black hairs which could hardly have come from a Grandmother’s whitening, thready head.

  He stepped outside and cast around for spoor: broken twigs, pebbles turned aside…

  As if in answer, from deep in the wood came a single mournful howl.

  He set off in quick pursuit of the sound, trampling through purple dead-nettles and claret-stained wood woundwort, cursing his carelessness as he almost stepped on a rare orchis. Columns of ivy cloaked some of the trees, with occasional balls of mistletoe high up, like rooks’ nests.

  The howl sounded again, and now it was closer. The wolf was heading back towards the cottage. Unshouldering his gun, he decided to wait. It was better this way. With his green ranger’s jacket and his black face, he faded into the background more effectively than any dough-faced-Englishman. Besides, how they sweated. Even in this climate, they gave off body odour.

  He had guessed correctly. This was indeed the wolf’s private path. Presently it slunk into sight at the end of the glade, then trotted forward confidently. A handsome beast; female, he was sure. But old, quite old.

  Lining it up in his sights, he examined her eyes, magnified, for signs of errant humanity.

  When she was ten yards away the wolf saw Joshua.

  Without shifting his finger from the trigger, he called out, ‘Granny! Mrs Butler!’

  Baring her yellow teeth in a snarl, the wolf bounded at him. Dropping the rifle slightly, so that it was now aimed at the beast’s heart, he squeezed the trigger. Startled wood pigeons clattered out of the trees.

  The wolf tumbled on towards him. But she was already dead. He walked a few steps and turned her with his boot.

  For a moment, weakness, doubt and depression swept over him like an instant bout of cold.

  ‘Oh God, I’ve shot a wolf. A precious, wonderful wolf. Even if she was old, and a bit grizzled, I’ve shot a wolf, that I swore to protect.’

  He started hacking at the ground with the butt of his gun to dig a trench deep enough to bury the corpse. The rifle butt was hardly the ideal tool, but the compacted leaf mould and friable soil beneath scattered easily.

  He lugged the corpse into the shallow trench and covered it over with his own hands. For a while he sat beside the grave in silent vigil and weariness.

  Obviously he couldn’t officially report shooting the wolf. Nor could he tell the villagers of Oakley Gibion exactly what he had done. If he did, he would be drawn into their sticky predicament like a fly into a web. He would be infected with the same symptom which was creeping up out of the tree-shaded soil o
f England, as a night mist creeps.

  Officially he could know nothing about this incident. But at least he could indicate that he understood, and sympathized – while disapproving. Thus his working relationship with them would remain effective. And he could watch and ward as the forests marched over the land, and the deer bounded through them, and the wolves hunted the deer in packs, and the bears ambled about.

  But he knew now for sure: that as the greenwood spread, so also was the ancient soul coming out of its hiding place.

  How long would it be, in the old villages buried in the fastnesses of the national forest, before the witches danced again?

  Joshua hoped that before that happened, he would have been posted back to the bright sanity of Nairobi or Moshi in a more senior administrative capacity.

  He stood up. Shouldering the burden of his gun, and his responsibility, he trekked back down towards Oakley Gibion.

  The Mole Field

  ‘That’s the church up there!’ exclaimed Ruth.

  Squat tower and red-tiled roof peered over the brown of the hill. Like a stooping grandfather the building looked shrunken by age. The Cross of St George fluttered on a flagpole. This was New Year’s Day so she could understand a flag being flown, but why was it at half mast? Was the village in mourning for the death of the old year, grieving for the past?

  ‘The sign says Chapel Lane,’ said Alan.

  ‘Yes, and the other road was Church Lane, but it didn’t lead anywhere, did it?’ Only to a cul-de-sac of bungalows and a few parked cars.

  Maybe they ought to have left their Metro and followed the field path behind a stand of trees, but a low gusty grey sky was distributing a chilly gruel of drizzle. Amazing that in such a tiny village as Pritwell you could lose the church. Surely there was vehicle access somewhere? Yet Pritwell itself was well lost down a twisty minor road cloaked in trees. Not a soul in sight; people would be nursing their hangovers.

  They had been told about Pritwell by a lively Yugoslav woman whom they met at a pre-Christmas party. Dana and her husband Bill had lived in Pritwell some ten years earlier, though they didn’t stay too long. ‘An evil place,’ Dana said. ‘There’s no pub,’ Bill commented. According to Dana the village had housed an old woman, now dead, who practised witchcraft. She made wax dolls of her enemies and stuck pins into these inside the church, where she supposedly held black magic ceremonies. The little church also boasted some peculiar medieval wall paintings.

  Dana never explained how the old woman was able to use the church for devilry if her antics were well known, unless everyone in the village, vicar included, was either terrified of her or else an accomplice. Dana and Bill seemed neither. Perhaps Dana was spinning Alan a mischievous yarn, knowing that he was a writer of horror novels. She certainly sparked his interest – in those wall paintings. Precious few frescoes survived in English churches. That was because they were viewed as Popish during the Reformation. If they survived the sixteenth-century zeal for whitewash, a hundred years later they ran the gauntlet of the Puritans. Pritwell was safely off the beaten track.

  Alan turned the car up narrow Chapel Lane and, sure enough, they soon passed a Methodist chapel built of red brick with corrugated iron roof, before coming to a cattle grid. The potholed road beyond led through tussocky, muddy pasture grazed by Friesians and studded with brown mole-heaps, round to a manor house and farm. At the bend in the road was the church gate, a rickety in-and-out affair secured by a loop of blue baling twine. A patch of stones and mud outside the gate provided a single parking bay. A narrow, wire-fenced path led away past trees that sheltered the graveyard, no doubt emerging at the top of Church Lane. That must be the route to church for most parishioners.

  The gate was a tight squeeze.

  ‘Wonder how they get coffins into the graveyard?’ mused Alan. ‘Probably don’t any more. Cremate them in town.’ He read off the dates on some nearby gravestones, which were all small, canted, weather-worn, and lapped by long wet grass. Eighteen hundreds, some seventeen hundreds. ‘Wonder if she’s buried here? Dana’s witch? That looks a newish stone over there. And fresh earth. Hmm, after ten years? Must be moles. Never mind her. Don’t want to get our shoes soaked.’ And his fawn corduroy jeans, and her long russet tweed skirt. ‘Let’s see those frescoes.’

  ‘Alan.’

  ‘What is it, Ruthie?’

  He must have mistaken the angle of her pointing.

  ‘That’s just a death’s-head, carved over the porch.’

  ‘No, higher. Look at the way the flag’s blowing. Look at the weathercock; it’s facing in a different direction.’

  ‘Must be stuck. Hey Ruthie, let’s not scare ourselves.’ He winked, and added, ‘Prematurely.’

  Yes, he was going into the church to scare himself. Like a kid. Alan hoped to psych himself up into an idea, an inspiration; but it should be nothing to do with Dana’s witch, which was a banal idea. Wax dolls and magic; blah. The wall paintings, on the other hand, had sounded heretical the way that Dana described them.

  Ruth suspected that the frescoes might simply turn out to be badly drawn, daubs produced by peasants whose only knowledge was of the Bible read to them from the pulpit week after week. Yet Alan might suss out something about Templars and unholy grails, or pagan practices and conspiracy, the sort of subterranean conspiracy which burrows through the underground of history from its starting point in something (pause for effect) inhuman, some alien power on Earth which nourishes itself on sacrifice, on torment and corruption, as worms feeding on a corpse, soon to be the corpse of civilization. She knew the keynotes by heart; and her heart was just a little sick of them.

  Alan originally wrote crime novels. However, the clear logic by which corruption, murder, rape, mutilation was resolved and justice done, social sanity restored by rational thought and compassionate dedication – even if his detective was an oddball with a personal grief, operating in a world gone awry with greed; this meaningful weaving back together of a finite number of broken threads, this reassembly of a shattered jigsaw into a completely revealing picture, began to pall on him. Perhaps this was because his crime books hadn’t done as well as they might. Well enough, but not well. Thus he became a little sick inside, at the same time as he began spooking himself with mysteries which had no sane resolution, because the key to them was terror, not detection; with crimes that couldn’t be solved because their real perpetrators lurked in some other dimension, and were unhuman.

  More: Alan did not so much feed upon these later books – though he and Ruth fed more adequately than before – as the books fed on him. He seemed jaunty and rational enough, yet Ruth noted his occasional flares of temper which were not exactly directed at her so much as being undirected anger seeking a focus. These days, too, Alan’s sex life must be occurring largely in his head since it had almost ceased happening in bed; and into his books spilled some brutal, kinky fantasies which she preferred not to think too much about. ‘Necessary ingredients,’ he had growled at her; she wasn’t involved in them.

  He was festering inside, rottening instead of ripening, though to all appearances the skin of the apple was still bright and firm. Alan, her apple, still freshly complexioned though beginning to blotch with the assistance of a little too much booze. Still passably slim, though his flesh was filling out. Still with most of his fair curly hair. The apple tasted less of a crisp, sharp, acid-sweet enlightenment, more of dark and hidden, hurtful things, of bruises and rot in the inner core of him. Yet by and large he was still her old Alan – just as she was still his Ruthie, leaving her youth behind and childless now perhaps forever, though not yet abandoning her sweet looks or her long, never-hacked auburn hair.

  She didn’t wish to squeeze the apple too tightly… in case it burst. Being apprehensive, she saw signs where he ignored them – such as that weathercock and the flag at odds – and perhaps she saw the wrong signs, preferring to notice the wrong and blatant signs rather than the more subtle, awful ones.

  The little old church
, St Botolph’s was so gloomy within as to resemble a crypt. A maroon blanket, acting as a great shaggy draft excluder, shrouded the inside of the oak door, with a raggy slit through which to reach the latch which had already clicked home. The fibres strove to knit together, a wound closing. To leave, she or Alan would need to slide their hand through that wound, opening it, groping behind for the hidden metal which they couldn’t see and must take on trust. If it was she, she feared that something else might touch her hand.

  Limbs of unidentifiable monster figures loomed in red and black outline from the leprous, plastered walls. A framed, typed history which hung alongside the door was unreadable until Alan flared his cigarette lighter like a monk holding up a candle.

  Ruth shivered. ‘God, it’s cold in here.’

  ‘Always is, in churches,’ he remarked while speed-reading to himself. ‘They point to sunny skies but they’re rooted in the clay. A church is a stone tooth in the jawbone of the ground. That’s why the cold bites. The toothache of antiquity, the twinges of time. A church gets you ready for your coffin.’

  He skipped away from the framed text to circuit the church, staring up at the partial figures which now seemed to Ruth more definite, as if they were emerging from the plasterwork, rising to the surface. Of course her eyes were simply accommodating to dimness.

  She noticed a bank of switches lurking on the other side of the draught-shroud and hit them all. Instantly St Botolph’s flooded with radiance from a dozen spotlights mounted around the tops of the walls, angled mainly at the frescoes… which stepped out, fully visible. Startled by the sudden illumination, Alan cried incoherently.

  ‘Let there be light,’ Ruth said hopefully. ‘Sorry I didn’t warn you. Sorry, Alan!’

  ‘Let there be darkness,’ he retorted.

  Was he asking, telling, her to turn the spotlights off again? Her hands fluttered by the switches, unwilling to rob herself of the bright clarity, the dispelling of shadows. The soft hairy wound in the door-blanket was only a simple hole, a letterbox through which she could see part of the iron latch. Had the cut been made with a knife or scissors? Why hadn’t the edges been bound and stitched?