The Haunted Season (20 page)

As Max entered, shutting the door on the wind at his back, a small group of women was emerging from St. Eddie's, the church's coffee shop. Located in a corner of the crypt, it had begun as an experiment, opening after Morning Prayer to give people a place to gather and chat. Max had given Elka Garth the concession, limiting the coffee shop's open hours so as not to cut into her tearoom profits. St. Eddie's was soon a great success as a meeting place for young mothers and pensioners, and had expanded into an evening gathering spot for village youth. Elka welcomed the new revenue stream, once she was able to hire reliable help to man the coffeepots and serve fairy cakes from behind the small counter. That this reliable help took the form of her formerly lackadaisical son was a source of wonder to all who knew them and their fraught history.

Max stopped to shake the rain from his mac. Unusually, the church had a small fireplace built into the wall of its porch, near the entrance door, and a stone bench protruding from the adjoining wall. In times past, before the Village Hall had been built, the village worthies would hold their meetings there. He tried and failed to picture today's villagers draped in old-time costume, something grayly medieval with intricately starched collars, or perhaps looking like characters sprung to life from
A Christmas Carol.
Would they have gathered to discuss the duck race? The Harvest Fayre? A sighting of witches?

Max stepped into the jewel-like interior of the nave, anticipating the peace he knew would descend on his spirit. St. Edwold's was a still and holy place, hushed and waiting for the centuries to pass. It always seemed to Max as if God had just left the space for a moment and that if one waited patiently enough, God would return. Canterbury Cathedral, a sort of hub for Anglicans, might be awesome, a place Thomas à Becket had made holy by having been murdered there. But St. Edwold's humbled and lifted the spirit as no grand cathedral could. It spoke immediately of centuries of worship, of its centrality to village life—an intimate place of baptisms and weddings and burials of members of the local families. Lord Bayer Baaden-Boomethistle was simply the latest Totleigh Hall noble to be laid to rest from St. Edwold's.

Max walked past a stall where jars of donated jams and chutneys were displayed, there to help raise funds for the church. There had been a significant uptick in these sales from visitors in recent weeks, so he had been told by Mr. Stackpole, the church sexton.

Someone had left a Hansel and Gretel trail of Cheerios on the floor of the fourth pew from the altar. No doubt these spores had been left by the Rancine child, who seemed to require constant bribery and attention from his parents. Not like Owen, thought Max complacently, who fusses only when an undeniably good reason presents itself.

Max paused in front of the altar, making a reverent bow. The altar wore the prescribed green of the church season, for through October they were in Ordinary Time. The lessons and hymns followed their set rotation, as well. Each cycle of the year told a different story, the symbolism and routine as comforting to Max as the return of the harvest moon.

A woman was praying in a pew near the face—the image that stubbornly reappeared on the wall of the north aisle, near the Lady Chapel. If anything, the visage of the bearded man with closed eyes practically shone from the wall, now outlined with a startling clarity. The woman—middle-aged and smartly dressed in cotton slacks and a colorful print blouse, a scarf around her neck and gold at her ears—was not anyone he recognized from the village, but that was becoming a common occurrence. She may have been visiting, one of the many being drawn by the stories of the face's miraculous properties. She may even have been one of the weekenders from London; although Nether Monkslip was too far away for anything like daily use of one of the cottages, the trade in second homes was booming. The distance did not stop people from buying up any of the charming thatched cottages they could, for a price that no elderly pensioner could refuse.

In a corner of the church, nearly hidden behind a pillar, sat Ana Cutler, one of his parishioners. The sight of her sent a rush of pity through him, along with a sense of how prideful he was—Owen, the perfect baby!—and how delicate was the foothold these fragile lives had on this life.

He called up the small face of the Cutler boy from his memory. Not all babies are by definition cute, although all are adorable. The Cutler baby had been born looking like a wizened old man, with a prominent nose and gooseberry eyes. His saving grace, and every baby had one, was his calm and quiet demeanor. Nothing upset him. If he was hungry or wet, he waited patiently until someone remembered to feed or change him. Nothing seemed to excite him, either. He regarded the world with that pop-eyed, good-natured but detached stare and seemed to have no comment to make on it.

By the time he was four years old, it was evident something was seriously wrong with little Bruce. He began an ordeal of specialists and hospitals—“trial by doctor,” as his mother put it.

Max visited him in hospital as often as he could. The boy seemed to sprout more tubes and wires each time Max saw him. Finally, his immune system completely compromised, he was moved to a sterile hospital unit where only his parents, shrouded in space-age high-tech gear, were allowed their too-brief visits. The visits finally became about saying good-bye.

“I've told him I will see him in heaven,” his mother had told Max. “And he's starting to fret about that. ‘When will I get there? How will you find me?' I don't know what to tell him. I don't want to lie, but I don't want to frighten him, either.”

Max had thought about it overnight, and called on her the next day.

“Has he ever been in an airport?” he asked her.

“Several times. We visit my mother in Portugal whenever we can.”

“Then tell him this. When he gets to heaven, he is to have a sign made up with your name on it. Like the drivers do at the airport. Your full name: Mrs. Ana Marie Regis Cutler. Then he is to wait at the entrance to heaven, where the new arrivals disembark, and where you are sure to see him with the sign. If he asks, tell him he won't have to wait but a few minutes. Time is different there.”

Ana Marie had smiled a rather wobbly smile and said she thought that would work. Then she had burst into uncontrollable floods of tears.

It was the maddest sort of improvisation on Max's part, but it had worked, easing the child over the roughest spots.

The hardest parts for Ana, of course, came after.

The well-dressed woman from “away” had left now, a gold-bedecked stranger who had come seeking solace. Praying for a miracle cure? The theme all around the village of Nether Monkslip seems to be healing, Max reflected.

He thought he saw Bree just then, leaving the church. Was it she he had seen kneeling in prayer in one of the pews? Perhaps her husband's death had affected her more deeply than she was being given credit for in the village—more deeply than he or anyone knew. Just because she had never been a regular at services did not mean she wasn't a believer.

He stood before the face, the face “painted,” or whatever it was, on the wall. Steeped, somehow, into the very fabric of the wall. Noticed first by Tom, still so small that when he knelt in church beside his mother, he disappeared from Max's view at the altar.

How often Max had requested the stain be painted over, because of its potential to draw media attention—which it had done, slowly and surely. It wouldn't be long before television reporters descended on the village, shirttails out and microphones blazing.

Max had often reflected that it might be a first, trying to whitewash a miracle.

If
it were a miracle.

According to the sexton, it was. And if ever there lived a man not given to fanciful ideas, it was Mr. Stackpole. Dry and humorless, literal-minded and punctilious. The melancholy, rail-thin Mr. Stackpole would no more dream up a miracle than he would file a false report with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs Office. It was unthinkable.

Mr. Stackpole emerged daily from his uncluttered cottage with its neatly shorn thatched roof, regular as clockwork, to attend to his duties at the church. These duties were carried out with military precision and a minimum of fuss, for which Max was grateful, even though anything like ebullience and human warmth were sadly not in Mr. Stackpole's repertoire. Where others might feud over the interpretation of a passage in Isaiah, Mr. Stackpole did not stoop to feud—not he. What he knew to be true was right and incontrovertible and any suggestion of a different understanding of the facts was preposterous.

As he undoubtedly would have said at one time, miracles were for those of the Roman persuasion. The Anglican Communion had not been tested in the fires of the Reformation only to revert in the twenty-first century to popish ways.

So if he said they were living in a time of miracles, no doubt they were.

It was little Tom who had walked into Max's study just the other week and announced, “Jesus is back.”

And Max's spirits fell at the news. Because he knew this was not news of the Second Coming, but a statement of fact. The Christ-like visage that kept appearing on the wall of St. Edwold's Church, despite repeated lashings of whitewash by Maurice, the church handyman, had somehow once again managed to emerge.

No one could guess the cause of this apparition, and Max had had experts in to look. Leaks had been ruled out: The roof was brand-new, thanks to the unexpected legacy, so that wasn't the answer. There were no pipes to burst behind that wall, and no strange mold was growing, although bleach also had been tried.

There was no answer for it. Most of all there was no answer for the fact that the face did not just sort of look like a face—the kind of image that might be imagined on a slice of toast in some online hoax. It looked like a very good negative image of a man's face, the eyes closed in death. It looked exactly like the face on the famous Shroud of Turin. An image some scientists claimed had been created by ultraviolet lasers, in an age without such a thing. A negative image, created by a sudden flash of light.

Created using a technology that did not yet exist.

Max now stood staring again at this apparition, this source of such consternation. The draw for thrill seekers and cure seekers. Today was a slow day; generally, there would have been a dozen or more people here, staring and gawking or devoutly praying before the image. Tomorrow there would be more. And probably exponentially more after that. For adding to the cult of fascination that was forming around this image at St. Edwold's was the fact that news of his find at Monkbury Abbey had now hit the airwaves.

There had been a slow trickle of curiosity seekers at first, then a flood, for Suzanna in her capacity as editor of the parish newsletter had chosen to write an article about the face, and she had put the newsletter online before Max could stop her. From there, it had spread like wildfire. Like a plague of locusts. Like—whatever was unstoppable.

He looked again at the image. Surely its eyes were not beginning to open, just slightly? Mentally, Max shook himself and the illusion wavered and disappeared.

Max closed his own eyes in brief prayer, and when he opened them again, the face was back to the way it always had been. He thought,
Let it stand. Just let it be.
He would give up all attempts at whitewashing the face on the wall. It was increasingly pointless to try. The face kept coming back, showing through, now shining through.

Maurice, when asked, had professed to be as baffled as Max.

“It's good-quality paint I've been using. No cheap stuff,” he told Max.

“I know. I believe you.”

“There's no good reason for this.”

“I know.”

Max was overwhelmed by it all. He had first roped off the area to keep the curious at a distance; then he had had to institute opening and closing hours for the church itself. For the first time in its history, St. Edwold's Church was closed and locked at night. The fear was that someone would damage the face, try to steal it by cutting it out of the wall, plaster and all. Why they should do this, Max couldn't say, but there was an element of crazed frenzy growing. The halt and the lame came to pray, and most particularly, those losing their sight came to pray before the face.

For that was its legend, that it could cure blindness.

And many had reported a cure. They would return from a doctor's visit with documentation that their eyesight was clearing, all without medical intervention.

Max was glad for them, even as he assumed a placebo effect was at work.

He was also frightened. How to maintain the pristine serenity of his church once it became a focus of international attention?

The face may have struck him initially as more of a Catholic relic—a hangover from the days of miracles and wonder. But he had also thought, pragmatically, it might bring people back to faith—to believing in something outside themselves, to asking the age-old questions of why we humans are here in the first place.

All of Nether Monkslip, he realized now, gathering all the threads in one hand, was awash in this theme of healing. Awena herself was a healer—of that, he was sure. A healer of souls, a healer of bodies; Awena with her salves and herbs and potions.

There was also the healing spring by the menhirs on Hawk Crest, where holy relics had been buried.

And now the healing attributed to St. Edwold's, with its miraculous face.

Was all of Nether Monkslip a holy place, a sort of spiritual nexus in one of the world's thin places?

He remembered a conversation back in his student days. The conversation over several beers had drifted to Joan of Arc and her Cross of Lorraine, and to her miraculous pipeline to heaven, and the question had been, first of all, whether God had involved Himself in a matter that amounted to local politics.

As for Joan herself, was she delusional? Schizophrenic? Or was she simply a superior sort of teenager, endowed with perceptiveness and courage beyond her years? Certainly she deserved better than she got, to be left to her ghastly fate by the man she had been sent by her God to save.