Lazar (15 page)

In fact, there was nothing special about the sensation at all
– at least as regards her sense of touch. It was simply that it
emphatically contradicted everything her eyes were telling her. She was not experiencing
a new sensation, she was missing an old one.

Jan reached for her back pocket.

“I must get a photo of this,” she said to herself as she
opened the camera app on her smartphone. She moved her legs slightly apart and
then took several pictures of the ground between, and some distance beneath,
them. She lay down on her back and held her phone out in front of her to get a
photograph of her head and shoulders hovering in midair.

She then sat up and carefully shuffled over to the edge of
the invisible bridge, where she twisted round and dangled her legs over the
side. As she sat there in the dappled sunlight, her gently swinging feet the
only sign of movement, she inspected the photos on her smartphone one by one.

“If only Hal was here,” she thought, “he could have got a
shot of me from below.”

 
As much as she
was delighting in the phenomenon of sky-walking, it all seemed pretty pointless
if there was no one there to witness her aerial acrobatics.

Pointless? How could she be so selfish, Jan chastised herself.
This supernatural medieval world had not been created for her amusement. It had
been brought into being for a specific purpose, and she was supposed to be
investigating what that purpose was.

Jan took one last look along the length of the ancient earthwork,
glanced down at the undergrowth way beneath her feet, then got up and walked
determinedly to where the West Gate had once stood – and should be
standing once again, at least as far as her sense of touch was concerned. Not
that she had the chance to test this out. The far side of the dyke was so
densely populated by more recent impediments to progress – a thick
hedgerow, a rusted barbed-wire fence and the bole of a fallen tree – that
Jan did not get the opportunity to reach out and try to feel the contours of
the gateway. All her efforts had to be concentrated on simply moving straight
ahead.

On the far side of the broken fence was a small wood. After
the exertion of negotiating the barbed wire and the brambles its cool shade was
very welcome. Jan leant her back against a tree and pulled a crumpled map from
her pocket. She stared at it for several seconds before turning it the right
way up. If she had got her bearings right there should be a building not that
far from where she stood.

Jan stepped forward and began to raise her arms, and
immediately felt something right in front of her. She turned her hands around
so that she could press her palms against the invisible surface. It was hard
and warm and rough, and she could feel small particles of dirt rubbing off on
to her fingertips as she began to run them gently across the unseen wall. It
appeared to be made of dried mud and straw. She moved sideways, trying to find
a window or a door, but the surface disappeared into a tree.

With her arms outstretched Jan continued to feel her way down
the long lost street, picking her way between the visible foliage of the
present and the invisible buildings of the past. Her progress was extremely
slow, and sometimes perilous, either bumping into the corner of an unseen house
or walking into stinging nettles while engrossed in the sensations of touching
and tapping and holding and handling things she could not see.

Eventually the wood began to clear and the facades of the
buildings became easier to detect. But they lost their fascination as soon as
Jan espied the monolithic object standing stark against the sky beyond the
trees. She walked toward it as quickly as she dared and came out of the wood on
to a narrow strip of land high above the sea. She could hear the distant sound
of waves smashing into surf upon the shingle beach below. Seagulls scuttered
overhead.

Jan stopped and stared. The scene was dominated by a massive
ruined tower – the tower she had seen when she first arrived at Wickwich,
the tower of the church in last night’s nightmare. It stood alone, completely
desolate, at the top of a sandstone cliff, precariously close to the edge of
the precipice.

The elements had pitted themselves against its walls for
centuries – the winds had slashed its fabric and the sea-spray had rubbed
salt into its wounds. Jan looked up, past the gouged-out windows to the
crumbling crenellations at the top. They bit into the sky like broken teeth.

She looked down at the foot of the tower. It was encircled by
a fence of rusted iron railings; presumably erected to stop people approaching
such an unstable structure. It did not work in Jan’s case. She climbed over the
barrier in a matter of seconds and was soon standing right up against the
ruined edifice. She put out her hands to touch it.

As with the walls of the monastery, Jan could not quite make
contact with its visible surface. Her fingers stopped just short of it, their
tips a centimetre from the gritty, weather-beaten masonry. She moved sideways,
to her left, feeling her way toward a jagged line of battered stone that jutted
from the corner by the sea. That must be where the tower had once been joined
to the missing church. She stretched out her arm and, sure enough, there was
the west wall, exactly where she had predicted.

Jan spread her hands as wide as she could and swept them over
the exterior of the unseen building until she came up against a buttress. Guided
by her probing fingers, Jan soon negotiated this obstacle, turning through
three-quarters of a circle as she did so. She began feeling her way along the
north wall of the nave.

What was that? Something curved and carved was standing proud
of the wall just above her head. Her fingers investigated further. Was it the
stone sill of a window? She reached up as far as she could. Yes! She could feel
the glass smooth beneath her fingers. Was it lead-paned? She stretched out to
her right.

Suddenly the ground collapsed beneath her feet. Immediately
her fingers latched on to the sill and hung on in desperation, frantically
clinging to the narrow strip of masonry as her legs dangled helplessly in the
air. She looked down. There was nothing beneath her feet – only a
heart-stopping, panoramic view of the shingle beach thirty metres below. She
looked to the left. The scars in the soil, at the edge of the cliff, marked
where she had lost her footing. What could she do? She was hanging on for dear
life by her fingertips from a windowsill she couldn’t see on the side of an
invisible building. Just how solid was this illusory medieval church? How long
could it bear her weight? What would happen if it vanished?

“For God’s sake, Hal,” her thoughts screamed out, “please,
please don’t turn your damned computer off.”

Jan could feel herself beginning to panic. She took several
deep breaths, then began to concentrate on trying to gain a foothold. If only
she could see the wall. She moved her left leg slowly, scraping the inside of
her shoe along the surface. Yes! There was something jutting out, protruding
from the masonry. She dug her toe in. She slowly, slowly raised her other foot
until it also found the ledge.

Hardly daring to breath, she pulled herself up – inch
by tortuous inch – until she felt confident enough to let go with her
right hand and try to move toward the buttress and firm ground. Her right foot
slipped. Her left hand failed. Her heart stopped. In an instant she was falling
like a stone.

But not very far.

Almost within the same instant she found herself standing
only centimetres below where she had fallen. She looked down. There was still
nothing there. The view was still as panoramic. And although her heart had momentarily
stopped, it was now pounding away again, so hard that she could hear it.

Jan knelt down and placed her hands right next to where her
feet were firmly planted in thin air. Blades of grass caressed her fingers. Jan
let herself roll backward until she was lying at full stretch in the medieval
cemetery. She stared up at the sky. Tears rolled softly down her cheeks as she
began to laugh out loud. How could she have been so stupid. If the phantom
church had been solid enough to hang from, why had she not realised that the
ground on which it had once stood would be strong enough to take her weight?
But why had she fallen in the first place? She turned over and looked at the edge
of the cliff. Of course – the topsoil had slowly built up over the
centuries until the present ground level was nearly thirty centimetres above
that of the long lost medieval churchyard.

Jan sat up and looked out over the sea toward the horizon. Just
how far could she go? Would she be able to follow the entire route of her
nightmare, right down to the medieval shoreline? She got to her feet and pulled
the map from her back pocket. As she did so something heavy slipped out with
it, plummeting immediately like a stone. Tumbling with alarming speed and
smacking hard into the cliff face it span off in a jagged arc, its shattered
screen in splinters, sparkling in the sun.

“Oh no, my phone!” Jan cried involuntarily.

Her cry was answered by a piercing scream. She shot a glance toward
the beach below. A family was out walking. The children were pointing up at her
and shouting to their parents.

Jan turned, ran and hurled herself headlong on to the strip
of land on which the church tower stood. She rolled over and over until she was
well clear of the cliff edge, and lay there without moving until the voices far
below had faded away.

She would have to leave her expedition to the waterfront
until after dark.

“Walked in the air?” Hal’s cry of amazement was tinged with
the laughter of disbelief. “You mean you actually walked in the air?” He
repeated his exclamation very slowly, but this time without any trace of
laughter.

“Did you get a photo?”

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Jan glared at her cousin.

“A photo would help…”

“Well, I took several photographs as it happens,” Jan
retorted, then she faltered. “But I dropped my phone when I was standing at the
top of the cliff. It’s probably smashed to pieces somewhere on the beach.”

“You’re lucky it was only your phone,” Hal smiled. “What
would my mother have said if you’d fallen off the cliff as well?”

“It’s not funny, Hal,” Jan shouted. “I really thought I was
going to fall when the cliff edge gave way and I was hanging there by my
fingers. I was terrified.”

“I’m sorry,” Hal apologised. He stared into the middle
distance and then back at Jan. She was still glaring hard at him. “It’s just
that I’m still having trouble even getting my head around that trick you did
with the monastery wall,” he attempted to explain.

“It was not a trick.”

“No, sorry, I didn’t mean ‘trick’ as such, not literally. I
meant…”

“In any case,” Jan interrupted her cousin’s fumbling apology,
“if I’d come back and told you that I’d seen a phantom building that I couldn’t
touch you wouldn’t have had a problem getting your head round that. What’s so
difficult about it being the other way round?”

“Actually,” Hal was back on the attack, “I would have had a
problem with a phantom building, seeing as I don’t believe in ghosts. But I
take your point – ghosts have a reputation for being immaterial.

“On the other hand…” he continued. Jan could see the light of
theorising shining in his eyes. “I’ve seen photos of people at seances who are
supposed to be levitating themselves – hovering in the air. Perhaps the
‘Margaret virus’ has reawakened some primitive power of levitation, deep down
in your brain, and mapped it on to the image of Old Wickwich that it’s created
on my PC.”

Jan stared incredulously at her cousin.

“I really don’t understand you, Hal. You just can’t accept
that something’s happened unless you’ve come up with a theory to explain how it
works. You can’t get your head round anything unless you’ve worked out the
mechanics.”

“Well I don’t understand you,” Hal retorted defensively. “How
can anyone explain anything unless they know how it’s happened?”

“Oh Hal!” Jan threw her hands up in the air in exasperation. “‘How’
only describes what’s happening. It’s ‘why’ that explains the reason something
happens – what’s caused it to take place. That’s what’s important. Especially
now – now that we know why all this is happening to us.”