Lazar (9 page)

Hal looked at her, then at the screen, then laughed out loud
himself.

“Caught in my own trap, eh?” he smiled broadly when the
laughter had finally subsided. “I’d forgotten that I’d put the ‘skeleton’ VR
software into the helmet’s driver program.”

“Really?” Jan feigned wonderment at her cousin’s jargon-laden
explanation. For once Hal actually picked up on the tone of what Jan said.

“OK, OK. Basically, the program that makes the skeletons
appear – I set it up with a time delay so they don’t pop up until the
helmet’s been switched on for a couple of minutes. If I switch it off,” he
clicked a button at the back of the apparatus, “they disappear.”

The screen went blank, except for a distant hilltop and a
dull, foreboding sky.

“Right,” Hal turned back toward the screen, “where was I before
I was so rudely interrupted?” He grabbed the mouse and began to move it forward
in a vain attempt to resume his progress down the image of the lane.

“Come on, come on,” he urged, but nothing happened. He turned
to Jan. “Why won’t it let me go any further?”

“Because that’s as far as I went in my dream.”

“Oh.” Hal sounded disappointed. “Is that it, then? I thought
you said this was a nightmare? The only frightening bit was my skeletons.”

Jan stared at her cousin in disbelief.

“Didn’t you
feel
anything?”

“Only when the skeletons appeared,” he quipped.

“This isn’t funny,” Jan responded sharply. “I was talking
about before that. When you were ‘walking’ down the road, didn’t you feel it
coming straight at you – the terror, the hatred, the fear?”

“Nope – not a thing,” Hal smiled. “Computer’s aren’t
very good on emotions.”

“Ha!” Jan exclaimed scornfully, “so much for your virtual
reality. It might be good at sights and sounds, but your computer’s nowhere
when it comes to thoughts and feelings – the things that
real
life’s all about. My dreams have
more to do with virtual reality than your stupid software.”

It was now Hal’s turn to stare at Jan. He waited a moment
until she had calmed down.

“Er, perhaps it’s a good thing it
can’t
record feelings,” he suggested. “They don’t sound like the
sort of thing you’d want to replay over and over again. Not that they were
real
feelings anyway – they were
only symptoms of the ‘virus’.”

“Of course they were
real
feelings,” Jan protested, “feelings can’t be anything else but real. And
it’s not a ‘virus’, it’s a ghost – a person. It was a
person
you saw yesterday, not an
aberration of your senses.”

 
“That’s a
point,” Hal looked puzzled. “If I’ve got the virus then why didn’t
I
have the dream as well?”

“Because it’s
not
a
virus!”

“No, no,” Hal was thinking on his feet, “no, no – it
must be something else. I know. It’s that ring – it must be something to
do with that ring she gave you. But how…”

 
“But
why?
” Jan interrupted. “It’s not the
‘how’ but the ‘why’ that’s important.
Why
is Margaret haunting us? What was it that caused her to be so terrified?”

Hal was not listening. He had turned back to the computer,
closed down the virtual reality program and loaded up his CAD software. A
three-dimensional map sprang up on the screen.

“Yes!” Hal punched the air. “It’s just as I thought.”

Jan looked over her cousin’s shoulder at an aerial view of
her dreamscape. The chapel, the lane, the cottages – they were all there
in every detail. Hal moved the cursor up. The scene shifted to the windmill. This
time the scene was not as richly detailed. Some of the surfaces were little more
than an outline and others had been simply rendered in flat colours with no
texture.

Hal moved the cursor onward. A wire-frame model of the
monastery came into view with only the western end and the side toward the lane
displaying any detail in its walls and windows.

“Why is the monastery only half completed?” enquired Jan, in
spite of herself. She leaned forward to look more closely at the screen.

“Well,” Hal began, tentatively, uncertain of his cousin’s
reaction. “According to my theory, the virus hasn’t fully taken hold there yet.
I reckon it gets its energy, or instructions, from that ring of yours, and
since you didn’t get that close to the monastery in your dream it hasn’t been
able to completely recreate it. Not
yet
.”

He turned and smiled at Jan.

“Remember what I was saying yesterday? About your going down
to the chapel while I stayed here to see if your ‘ring’ came up on the screen? How
about going down to the ruins of the monastery instead?”

Jan stood upright and gazed into the distance.

“Come on,” Hal urged, “you’ll be all right – it won’t
be like your nightmare. I just want to see whether you – well, sort of
radiate completed buildings wherever you go, when you’ve got that ring on.”

Jan turned her gaze toward her cousin, her eyes not quite
focusing on his.

“This isn’t about recreating medieval cities,” she said,
coldly. “This is about finding out what it was that terrified a girl so much
that she’s haunted the vicinity for 700 years.”

“Hold on a minute,” It was Hal’s turn to sound serious. “I thought
recreating old Wickwich was
exactly
what this was all about. And it strikes me that it’s
precisely
what your Margaret wants us to do. We wouldn’t have got
this far otherwise.” He placed his hand on the computer’s monitor. “Perhaps
this holds the key. Perhaps, by completing the task we’ve set ourselves, we’ll
actually discover Margaret’s secret.”

Jan thought for a moment before responding.

“Maybe, but…” Her eyes turned and focused on the outline of
the monastery. “Perhaps the monastery’s as far as we need to go. I certainly
didn’t get any further in my dream. In any case, you’ve got the framework of
the building – couldn’t you just use your software to fill it in?”

“I don’t know. Let’s find out.” Hal began clicking his mouse
buttons and jabbing at the keyboard straight away.

“Which do you reckon’s the best match?” he asked, pointing at
a palette of textures on the screen consisting of rows of rectangles displaying
samples of wall surfaces, from warm red brick to cold grey granite. None of
them were quite right, but Jan pointed to a square of golden yellow sandstone. With
a quick click, and a drag of the cursor, Hal transformed the wire-frame
monastery into a solid-looking building.

“There. What do you think?”

Jan screwed up her nose and moved her head from side to side.

“So so,” she commented.

“I know – it needs buttresses,” Hal suggested, and
began drawing shapes, in three dimensions, coming out of the wall. He then
duplicated them, and then duplicated them again until a full battalion of
buttresses was evenly spaced along the wall, one between each pair of windows.

“There. Now for the windows.” He pulled up a selection from
the system’s database of stained glass – more suited to a Victorian
semi-detached than a house of God. Hal copied and pasted one of them, then
repeated his trick of duplication.

“Not bad, eh?” Hal leant back to admire his handiwork.

“It’s really naff,” Jan exclaimed. Then, as if in sympathy,
each feature Hal had created popped off the screen in the same order in which
they had been added until only the original wire-frame monastery remained.

“Ha!” Jan laughed. “I don’t think your virus thought very
much of that.”

“Yeah. It looks as though you’ll have to go down to the
monastery after all,” retorted Hal. “But don’t tell my Mum and Dad what we’re
up to. After the way they made fun of us when we told them about Margaret, I
want to check out every bit of this before we tell them any more.”

Jan stopped when she reached the church and glanced at the
map on her smartphone.

“Come on, come on,” she cajoled, but despite her entreaties
the screen remained blank. “Hal’s right, the signal here is rubbish,” she
thought, as she pushed the phone back into her pocket and pulled out the folded
guidebook she had brought with her just in case. “I’ll have to rely on
old
technology,” she smiled.

She quickly found the map at the back of the guidebook and
studied it with care before looking up.

“Fork right at St James’,” she instructed herself.

Before doing so, she stood for a moment and looked at the
Victorian church and the ancient chapel in its graveyard. She tried to
superimpose her dream upon the ruin, but found it impossible under the blazing
July sun. She frowned beneath the hand that shaded her eyes, and bit her lip. It
would be so easy to shrug the whole thing off as just a stupid nightmare if it
hadn’t been for what had happened to Hal’s computer.

And what
had
happened
to Hal’s computer, Jan pondered. Could a virus
really
do that? Could
she
have done it, the thought suddenly occurred to her? Could she have got up, in
her sleep, walked into Hal’s bedroom, gone over to his computer and typed in
all that detail and thought it was a dream? No, surely not. She wouldn’t know
where to begin on Hal’s computer even when wide awake, let alone when fast
asleep.

Her speculations gradually subsided into reverie and she
stood gazing into the graveyard for some time before the roar of a motorbike
speeding past brought her back to the present.

No sign of Margaret today, she heard herself thinking aloud
as she turned, and was surprised at her sudden sense of disappointment as she
continued on her way. I wonder what it is she wants? And why has she chosen
me
? Why not Hal? Perhaps she wants to
tell me something – something she can only tell a ‘friend’. Or perhaps
there’s something she wants me to do. But what?

So many questions tumbled about in Jan’s head that it was not
until she came another fork in the road that she realised that she had walked
too far. She retraced her steps, this time taking careful note of her surroundings,
and soon found the gap between two bungalows she was looking for. It marked the
start of the footpath that, according to the guidebook, led directly to the
monastery. She climbed over the stile that blocked the entrance and followed a
vague line of trodden grass around the perimeter of an empty meadow until she
reached another stile embedded in another hedgerow.

On the far side stood the monastery.

Jan climbed the step and stood astride the stile for a second
while she looked at the broken piles of stone and masonry stretched across the
field. In her imagination they looked like the weathered bones of some great,
beached leviathan washed ashore and left stranded by the storm that had swept
the medieval town away. The fractured arches were its ribcage, the window in
the east wall a socket in its skull. Jan shook the image from her head and
smiled, and then jumped down.

Having now served its purpose, Jan thrust the guidebook into
her back pocket as she walked across the sun-baked meadow toward one of the few
remaining monastery walls that still stood to its full height. At its centre
was a doorway. Jan paused, when she reached it, and looked through the opening,
down the hollow body of the nave toward the pointed arch of the east window. She
closed her eyes for a moment and tried to recall the image of the monastery
that had appeared on Hal’s computer screen. This was the main entrance to the
church, if she remembered rightly – the west door.

She stepped through it. As she did so, she felt her left arm
knock against something, or somebody. She turned round and stepped back in a
single movement. The entrance was empty. There was nothing, or nobody, there
– nor in the field beyond. All was silent and still and clear-cut in the
bright July sunlight. Jan stared hard at the doorway. It was far too wide for
her to have brushed against its stone jamb accidentally. But she had definitely
bumped into something. Or had she? She was rubbing her elbow, but that was
instinctive. Perhaps it was all in her mind.

She shivered. It suddenly occurred to her that there was more
of the chill of stone than the warmth of summer skies on this side of the
entrance. She looked around. The walls along either side were hardly higher
than one metre and the sun was directly overhead. There was hardly a shadow to
be seen. So why did she feel so cold? Was that all in her mind as well?