Lazar
Authors: Lawrence Heath
LAZAR
A tale of the spirit of the place
LAWRENCE H.
HEATH
Text, cover, map and icons copyright © 2014 Lawrence H Heath
All Rights Reserved
To Linda, Liam and Lucy with all my love.
To Ian with all my thanks.
A special thank you to Bill Wakefield for permission to use his
photograph “Sepia photo of stormy sky” in the creation of the cover.
“It’s pronounced Wickidge, by the way Miss, not Wick-witch.”
As he spoke, the driver glanced at the rear-view mirror
reflecting the passenger in the back seat of his cab. She did not hear him. She
was staring out of the window toward the horizon – a spirit-levelling
line where the land met the sky and the sea. He spoke a little louder.
“It’s
spelt
Wickwich,
but the locals…”
“Sorry,” said the girl, turning away from the window, “I was
miles away. What’s that ruin over there? It looks like an abbey or something.”
“That’s all that’s left of the last of Old Wickwich’s
churches.”
“Wickidge?”
“Yes, Miss. Like I was saying – the locals call it
Wickidge, not Wick-witch like you asked for when you got in at the station.
They say it got its name ’cause of all the
wicked
ness
that happened there. That’s why the old town got swallowed up by the sea all those
centuries ago.”
The taxi-driver glanced at his mirror again. This time he had
his passenger’s full attention.
“Like I was saying, that ruin’s all that’s left of Old
Wickwich’s 52 churches – one for every week of the year. The others are
at the bottom of the sea. Some say you can hear their bells tolling when the
wind blows up a storm, and others reckon their towers rise up through the
waves, all ghostly like, at midnight once a year.”
“When’s that?”
“On the anniversary of their drowning, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Yes, but when’s
that
?”
“I’m not altogether sure, Miss, but the end of this month
rings a bell.
Rings a bell!
” The
driver laughed out loud at his unintended pun. His passenger did not laugh. She
did not even smile as she turned back and looked out of the window.
“Next week, you mean?”
By the time the taxi reached the village of Wickwich, Jan’s
imagination had conjured up an entire phantom city drowned beneath a moonlit
sea. But her dreams of sunken steeples and tidal death-knells were soon
dispersed by the reality of new Wickwich. When her eyes refocused on the
outside world
there was little more that a row of post-war bungalows
and
a line of windbreak trees to be seen. Nothing supernatural; quite the opposite
in fact. She could almost smell the newly painted windows and the freshly mown front
lawns. “Hardly the stuff that daydreams are made of,” she thought, and smiled
at her reflection as the taxi turned left into the shade of a wooded lane.
Halfway along the lane the taxi turned left again, up a
gravel drive, and crunched softly to a halt in front of a plain Edwardian house
that fell somewhat short of the imposing Gothic pile Jan had been expecting
from its name.
“Old Priory House, Miss. I’ll get your things out of the
boot.”
No sooner had the car doors slammed shut than the front door
of Old Priory House flew open. A tall man with smiling eyes and greying temples
strode out, his hand outstretched in welcome.
“You must be Janet. Good heavens, how you’ve grown.”
Why do grown-ups always say that, thought Jan? I don’t go up
to my long-lost adult relatives saying, “My goodness, Uncle, you’re exactly the
same height as when I last saw you.” But all she said was, “Hello, Uncle Bill. Do
you mind if you call me Jan? All my friends do.”
“Jan it is – as long as you promise not to call me
Uncle; it makes me feel so old. Bill will do.”
By this time Jan’s uncle had been joined by his wife.
“You remember Auntie Jill – sorry, Jill. Jill, this is
Jan.”
“My goodness, Jan – how you’ve grown.”
“Hal! Your cousin’s here.”
“Hal?” said Jan, quizzically.
Jan and her aunt had gone indoors and were standing in the
hallway at the foot of the stairs.
“Hal?” repeated Jan.
“Ah yes,” began her uncle as he entered through the front
door carrying Jan’s suitcase and rucksack. “While we’re on the subject of names,
your cousin Harry now insists we all call him Hal – after some computer
in a science-fiction film. He’s obsessed with the things – spends all his
time up in his room playing games and writing software.”
“And who’s fault is that?” Aunt Jill asked rhetorically. “Who
was it gave him a computer of his own in the first place?
“Hal!” she shouted up the stairs again, then turned to Jan. “You
can look upon it as your task for the holidays; to get him away from his
computer and out into the fresh air. We’ve been here nearly four months now and
I know for a fact that he’s not once walked into the village or gone down to
the sea.
“
Hal!
”
“He’s probably got his headphones on,” suggested Uncle Bill
as he put Jan’s luggage down, “or else he’s trying out that new 3D headset he’s
just spent all his money on. I wouldn’t mind betting he’s miles away in a world
of his own – literally his own – completely unaware of what’s going
on around him.”
“Then I suggest we go and make him aware,” Aunt Jill proposed
decisively as she turned to go upstairs. Uncle Bill bent down to pick the luggage
up again.
“It looks as though I’ve got my work cut out,” said Jan,
conversationally, attempting to make light of her aunt’s obvious irritation.
As they climbed the stairs Jan tried to imagine what her
cousin Hal would look like. They hadn’t met for years, and now, it would
appear, he had turned into a computer freak. Was he a nerd or a cyberpunk, she
wondered?
There was no way of knowing immediately when they entered
Hal’s bedroom. It was in almost total darkness – the curtains were drawn
to; the lights turned off; and the only source of illumination was a square of
greenish grey which glimmered dimly in a corner. Then, suddenly, a carillon of
bells peeled out and a disembodied voice intoned “Hell-o Jan-net well-come to
Wick-witch” at full volume.
Jan and her aunt and uncle nearly jumped out of their skins
before they realised that the deafening sounds came from two speakers either
side of the computer screen – which had burst into garish life, the words
of welcome spiralling round and round in an animated whirlpool of throbbing
colours.
Hal, who was sitting side-on to the screen, turned his head toward
them.
“It’s my multimedia welcome – good, eh?”
Jan waited a moment, while her heart slowed down, then said,
as coldly as she could, “My name is Jan. And it’s pronounced Wickidge, not
Wick-witch.”
She was thinking:
Nerd.
As she spoke, her aunt strode over to the window and threw
back the curtains, enabling Jan to see her cousin for the first time in years. He
frowned as the daylight flooded in, and the deep shadow cast by his brow made
his skin look almost white by comparison and prevented Jan from discerning the
colour of his eyes. His hair was fair; cut stylishly but unkempt, in keeping
with his overall appearance. His choice of clothes showed some awareness of
what was fashionable, but on him, somehow, they simply looked dishevelled.
Hal’s frown turned to one of puzzlement. He appeared to be
genuinely surprised by the hostile reaction to his welcome. His hand reached
out and tapped a key. The computerised fanfare ceased immediately and a silence
descended upon the room – a silence more profound than simply the absence
of the din. But it did not last long. Aunt Jill soon broke it by walking
briskly to the door and declaring that she was going to get the guest room
ready.
“Er, yes,” Hal’s father stuttered awkwardly. “I’ll just take
your things up there as well, Jan, while the two of you say hello properly.
“You’re going to be the first person to use our new guest
room in the loft conversion,” he added as he backed out of Hal’s room.
He left, and the silence descended once again.
After what appeared, to Jan, to be an age, Hal smiled and
commented to no one in particular, “The guest room’s been ready for days. It
couldn’t get more ready unless Dad redecorated it.”
Jan heard herself let out a laugh. The sound appeared to
remind Hal that she was there.
“Sorry if I my welcome startled you,” Hal apologised, without
looking up.
“You didn’t,” Jan responded. “It would take more than that to
startle me – though I think you gave your Mum a shock.”
“Oh, Mum just doesn’t like my computer – thinks I spend
too much time mucking about on it.”
“And do you?”
“I don’t play games, if that’s what you mean. I spend most of
my time experimenting – finding out what the machine’s capable of. That’s
why I thought I’d have a go at a personalised, multimedia welcome. I was trying
out the functions on the sound card. Sorry I got your name wrong, by the way.”
“That’s all right,
Harry
,”
quipped Jan. She thought she saw her cousin smile as he turned back toward his
keyboard to resume tapping in instructions.
“What was that about getting ‘Wick-witch’ wrong?” he asked,
without taking his eyes off the computer screen.
“According to the cab driver the locals pronounce it
‘Wickidge’ – because of ‘all the
wicked
ness
that happened there’. Apparently things got so wicked that the town was
swallowed up by the sea and all the inhabitants were drowned. The ghost of the
city is supposed to rise up out of the sea on the same night every year.”
“Is that so?” said Hal distractedly, more interested in
correcting his program than in Jan’s explanation. “Just some silly legend, I
suppose.”
“No, it’s true. There was a town here once – you can
see the ruins of the last remaining church as you drive into the village. You
must have seen it, surely?”
Hal did not answer. He did not appear to have even heard the
question. He was engrossed in his computer.
Jan looked at her cousin as his eyes and fingers darted from
screen to keyboard and back again, his tongue protruding slightly between tight
lips. At first she found it mildly amusing, but after a while it began to
irritate her. Was he going to ignore her throughout her stay at Wickwich? Not
if she could help it.
“Boys and their toys,” Jan commented provocatively, as though
speaking to herself. She smiled in the same way. Would her cousin rise to the
bait? He did.
“This is
not
a
toy,” Hal insisted quietly. “It’s got a 3.6 gigahertz processor, 16 gigabytes
of memory and a three terabyte hard drive.”
Jan turned her back on Hal and walked over to the window,
muttering “OK then, big boys and their
big
toys,” just loud enough to be heard. Or so she thought. But she had stared
out of the window for nearly a minute before Hal made any sound, and that was
only the resumption of the tapping rattle of his keyboard.
“So,” resumed Jan, “if it’s
not
a toy, what do you do on it that’s really useful or creative or
original?”
Hal stopped typing for a moment and stared hard at his
computer. Then, in answer to his cousin’s question he began punching keys and
clicking on his mouse.
“This computer’s more than capable of doing ‘really useful’
things,” he retorted, without taking his eyes off the series of icons, messages
and menus that flashed across the screen in quick succession. “When Dad used it
at his office, before he gave it to me, he designed all his houses on it. He’s
an architect by the way.