by Jonathan Day
was the tenet that the Jews killed their Christ. Despite Father Ronald's protestations that Sarah was a good woman who had saved them from an epidemic, the townspeople were incited to stone her to death.
In their fury, because Father Ronald and Father Asha had tried to reason with them, the mob turned on the timber church which had given her sanctuary and burnt it to the ground. All that remained was the large alabaster font donated by the lord of the local estates, the intense heat cracking the effigies of the apostles carved into it. By the time his soldiers arrived the rabble had melted away. There was nothing left but the gutted church and incinerated remains of Sarah.
The Lord vowed to rebuild the church and punish anyone found responsible for its desecration and Sarah’s murder, but the people refused to stand witness against those involved and the radical preacher had long since left to spread his poisonous doctrine elsewhere.
The predicament confronting Rev. Palmarsh now became Dr Stephen Joy’s. The present day residents of Weaving Todbury could hardly be held responsible for the mediaeval atrocity, yet the achievements of a remarkable woman risked being lost to history if the crime was not exposed. Now facing the same problem, the history scholar wished he had never accepted the cleric's invitation to witness the celebration of “Our Lady of the Herbs”.
Fortunately his pragmatism enabled him to believe that fate always had a way of paying back the misdemeanours of presumptuous humans. It was probably living with that statuette of Nemesis, finger to her lips to warn mortals against attracting her attention to their clamouring. She had been standing on the mantelpiece of his study ever since he had taken over the rooms from the previous master. Not his choice of deity, she nevertheless seemed to be telling him that the citizens of Weaving Todbury had already paid for their crime.
Dr Joy was inclined to reveal all and compel the residents of the small town to face their hollow, reprehensible history, but a reluctant glance at Nemesis persuaded him to look at the matter from a different perspective. It took hours of research, but he eventually discovered that two years after Sarah's murder there had been another shipwreck off the shore of Weaving Todbury.
This time the only survivors were black rats.
The plaque they brought swept through the town.
The few left alive took this to be God’s punishment for murdering the only one who could have saved them and, to conceal their guilt, allowed Father Ronald to create the myth of “Our Lady of the Herbs”. Now the origin of the legend made sense. The only way of secretly honouring Sarah had been to claim that Our Lady had scattered the herbs along the aisle of the church to cure the first plague to visit the town. Any mention of Sarah could well have attracted the visit from another priest preaching a poisonous doctrine. Father Asha agreed and, as magistrate, authorised the annual festival which had taken place ever since.
As Dr Joy laid his findings on the vestry table Rev. Palmarsh brought out an ancient casket and placed it beside the neatly printed pages. ‘So Saint Sarah is actually being celebrated, but no one here realises it.’
‘What's that?’
She pointed to the faded inscription. ‘Sarah's mortal remains.’ The vicar gave a conspiratorial smile. ‘Father Ronald had them walled up behind the altar of the new church built by the Lord of the estates. The cavity was discovered when surveyors were checking the foundations.’
The scholar needed to touch the woman he had come to admire and laid both hands on the ancient wood. ‘The plague that swept through Weaving Todbury shortly after her murder took most of the population. So Nemesis was here after all.’
‘Well, it wasn’t Jesus.’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘She solved my problem of whether to reveal what happened,’ acknowledged Rev. Palmarsh.
‘I take it you’re not going to? People here celebrating Our Lady would be mortified to know what their forebears did.’
‘Crimes of the ancestors...’
‘And there is a corollary which adds a sting to the whole sorry affair.’
A sparkle entered the cleric's eyes. ‘Tell me?’
‘The name of the ship which brought the Black Death… It was called “Santa Sarah”.’
The Greening of Toby Jug
Toby Jug was short, round, lived in a crypt, and hunted ghosts.
Haunted houses were his natural element. However, ghosts, by their intangible nature, were difficult to catch. The best he had managed to record were the drops in temperature that accompanied their appearance and, when really lucky, a blurred image on emulsion (for some reason they escaped the pixels of digital cameras).
Poltergeists were the trickiest. They had attitude. Their motives for lingering in the mortal world were usually disruptive. Ghosts were benign shadows of what had once been. Poltergeists were manifested from mortal motivations, which were seldom benign; they could pop out of the ether like will o’ the wisps.
Most of all, Toby Jug wanted to trap a poltergeist. He believed it was one of these responsible for haunting his dreams since infancy and, as he grew older, even remaining with him when awake. He had learned to live with the green afterglow on his retina that persisted after he had turned quickly. Frustratingly, it never lasted long enough for him to identify his phantom.
That was the reason he became a ghost hunter.
His Puritan parents had damned him at the age of five as the spawn of a Devil he could not comprehend. And Toby never did understand their concept of God either. So the family suffered each other in resentful silence. The young man was cajoled into taking a course in theology with the hope it would cure his disbelief. All it did was compound his reluctance to accept an Almighty Omnipotent Being: to him life was more complex than the absolutes expounded by any religion. So Toby Jug remained committed to revealing those mysteries the human mind could not understand, those glimpses of the supernatural just out of peripheral vision. He did not want to exorcise ghosts, but communicate with them. Unlike the cleric with bell, book and candle, Toby believed that they were fleeting impressions of a previous time imprinted onto the fabric of the present, unaware that they frightened people.
The green demon that had haunted him from infancy was another matter. Toby sensed that it disliked humans - apart from him - intensely, and he needed to know why.
The books Toby wrote on the supernatural were popular and their royalties had enabled him to set up his HQ in the renovated crypt of a disused church. It was so creepy there it should have been haunted, but nothing, apart from the occasional rat’s pattering feet or pigeon pecking at the skylights, broke the silence. He would sit and write by candlelight until the early hours, subconsciously in the hope that some spirit, however insignificant, would manifest itself. Even the personal phantom peering over his shoulder resolutely remained out of sight.
Then a letter arrived. The sender seemed somewhat annoyed that the ghost hunter could not be reached by phone or email, and there was a pompous tone to the demand that he attend the address under the pretentious letterhead. Toby knew he should have tossed the letter in the waste bin, but was intrigued by this summons to deal with the elementals undermining a wealthy man's attempt to build his palatial residence in greenbelt countryside. It seemed more plausible that these mischief-makers were human, some that Jerome Christian Dribblet Jnr had alienated whilst trampling over lesser people on the road to prosperity.
On the off chance that the mayhem was being caused by poltergeists, Toby Jug dutifully arrived at the designated time and was shown around the large grounds by the site manager. As he viewed the smashed concrete, overturned bulldozer, and flooded foundations of the proposed mansion, the ghost hunter could tell that there was more than mortal vandalism at work here. The woodland being despoiled was ancient. The building site was surrounded by trees and hedgerows going back to the Bronze Age, and probably long before that. Archaeological excavations might well have uncovered no proof of human disturbance other than the postholes of modest homesteads and flint tools. The authorisation for this
development must have been acquired by corrupt means. Had planning permission been applied for legally and published there would have been a storm of protest.
Toby experienced a chill of excitement. To him, it was obvious that the damage had been caused by a very angry, powerful, supernatural entity - no mere poltergeist. He had not heard of such a force of Nature before, and certainly not one possessing the strength to overturn a bulldozer.
The site manager could tell that the visitor knew what had happened.
‘Well, can you do something about these pesky entities?’
Toby Jug took a deep breath. ‘Not likely. The guardians of the land you are desecrating cannot be exorcised by me or the might of any church.’
‘So what do I tell the boss?’
‘Tell him to build his mansion somewhere else.’
‘You've got to be joking!’
‘His choice. I'm merely being consulted here. Take my advice or leave it. No charge.’
The way the tubby Toby Jug strode nonchalantly away to catch the taxi that would take him to the train station belied the fact that he was facing a serious dilemma. Something had to be done to stop the destruction. Pleas to common sense and the ecological good obviously would not work on Christian Dribblet Jnr. This was a man used to getting his own way and he would have probably levelled all the surrounding
