“You go back to the car,” he’d told her. “But carefully, mind you—don’t be like me and go banging your skis up! Start the car and get the heater going. It’s not much more than a mile, so by the time I get back you’ll have that old beetle good and warm for me. No point both of us freezing.”
“No!” She’d refused point-blank. “We go back together. I—”
“Georgina.” He’d spoken quietly, which meant that he was getting angry. “Look, if we go back together, it means we’ll both get back wet, tired, and very, very cold. Now that’s OK for me, and I deserve it, but you don’t. My way you’ll soon be warm, and I’ll be warm a lot sooner! Also, night is coming on. You get back to the car now, in the twilight, and you’ll be able to put on the lights as a marker. You can beep the horn now and then to let me know you’re safe and warm, and to give me an incentive. You see?”
She had seen, but his arguments hadn’t swayed her. “If we stick together, at least we’ll be together! What if I did fall down and get stuck, eh? You’d get back to the car and I wouldn’t be there. What then? Ilya, I’d be frightened on my own. For myself and for you!”
For a second his eyes had narrowed more yet. But then he’d nodded. “You’re right, of course.” And again he’d looked all about. Then, taking off his skis: “Very well, this is what we’ll do. Look down there.”
The firebreak had continued for maybe another half kilometre, running steeply downhill. To both sides full-grown trees, some of them hoary with age, stood thick and dark, with the snow drifted in banks under them where they bordered the firebreak. They stood so close that overhead their branches often interlocked. They hadn’t been cut for five hundred years, those trees. Beneath them the snow was mostly patchy, kept from the earth by the thick fir canopy, which it covered like a mantle.
“The car’s over there,” said Ilya, pointing east, “around the curve of the hill and behind the trees. We’ll cut through the trees downhill to the track, then follow our own ski-tracks back to the car. Cutting off the corner will save us maybe half a kilometre, and it will be a lot easier than walking in deep snow. Easier for me, anyway. Once we’re back on the track you can go on skis, a gentle glide; and when the car’s in sight, then you can go on ahead and get her going. But we’ll have to get a move on. It will be gloomy now under those trees, and in another half-hour the sun will be down. We won’t want to be in the wood too long after that.”
Then he’d hoisted Georgina’s skis to his shoulder and they’d left the firebreak for the shelter and the silence of the trees.
At first they’d made good headway, so good in fact that she had almost stopped worrying. But there was that about the hillside which oppressed—a quiet too intense, a sense of ages passing or passed like a few ticks of some vast clock, and of something waiting, watching—so that she only desired to get down off the hill and back out into the open. She supposed that Ilya felt it, too, this strange genius loci, for he had said very little and even his breathing was quiet as they made their way diagonally down through the trees, moving from bole to black bole, avoiding the more precipitous places as much as possible.
Then they had reached a place where leaning stumps of stone, the bedrock itself, stuck up through the soil and leaf-mould; following which they had to negotiate an almost sheer face of crumbling rock down to a levelled area. And as he helped her down, so they had noticed the handiwork of man there under the dark trees.
They stood upon lichen-clad stone flags in front of … a mausoleum? That’s what the tumbled ruins had looked like, anyway. But here? Georgina had nervously clutched Ilya’s arm. This could hardly be considered a holy place or hallowed ground, not by any stretch of the imagination. It seemed that unseen presences moved here, lending their motion to the musty air without disturbing the festoons of cobwebs and dangling fingers of dead twigs that hung down from higher areas of gloom. It was a cold place—but lacking the normal, invigorating cold of winter—where the sun had only rarely broken through in … how many centuries?
Hewn from the raw stone of the hillside itself, the tomb had long since caved in; most of its roof of massive slabs lay in a tangle of broken masonry, where the flags of the floor were cracked and arched upwards from the achingly slow groping of great roots. A broken stone joist, leaning now against the thickly matted ruin of a side wall, had once formed the lintel above the tomb’s wide entrance; it bore a vague motif or coat of arms, hard to make out in the gloom.
Ilya, who had always had a fascination for antiquities of all sorts, had gone to kneel beside the great sloping slab and gouge dirt from its carved legend. “Well, now!” his voice had sounded hushed. “And what are we to make of this, eh?”
Georgina had shuddered. “I don’t want to make anything of it! This is an entirely horrid place. Come away, let’s go on.”
“But look—there are heraldic markings here. At least I suppose that’s what they are. This one, at the bottom is … a dragon? Yes, with one forepaw raised, see? And above it—I can’t quite make it out.”
“Because the sun is setting!” she’d cried. “It’s getting gloomier by the moment.” But she had gone to peer over his shoulder anyway. The dragon had been quite clearly worked, a proud-looking creature chipped from the stone.
“And that’s a bat!” Georgina had said at once. “A bat in flight, over the dragon’s back.”
Ilya had hurriedly cleaned away more dirt and lichen from the old chiselled grooves, and a third carved symbol had come to light. But the great lintel, which had seemed firmly enough bedded, had suddenly shifted, starting to topple as the rotting wall gave way.
Pushing Georgina back, Ilya had thrown himself off balance. Trying to scramble backwards himself, he’d somehow got his leg sticking straight out in front of him, directly under the toppling lintel. Still sprawling there as the slab fell, his cry of agony and the nerve-grating crunch as his leg broke and jagged bone sheared through his flesh came simultaneous with Georgina’s scream.
Then, perhaps mercifully, he had lost consciousness. She had leaped to free him from the lintel, only to discover that while it had broken his leg, it had not trapped him. The lower part of his leg flopped uselessly and fell at an odd angle when she touched it, but miraculously it was not pinned. Then Georgina had seen and felt the break, the splintered bone projecting through red flesh and cloth, and the repetitive spurt of blood against her hands and jacket.
And that, until the moment of her awakening, had been the last that Georgia saw, felt or heard. Or rather, she had seen one other thing, and then forgotten it once she slumped to the ground. The thing she saw had remained forgotten, or more properly suppressed: it was the third symbol, carved above the dragon and the bat, which had seemed to leer at her even as the blackness closed in …
“Georgy? We’re there!” Anne’s voice broke the spell.
Georgina, reclining in the back of the car, eyes almost closed in her suddenly pale face, gave a start and sat upright. She had been on the verge of remembering something about the place where Ilya died, something she hadn’t wanted to remember. Now she gulped air gratefully, forced a smile. “There already?” She managed to get the words out. “I … I must have been miles away!”
Anne pulled the big car into the car park behind the church, braking to a gentle halt. Then she turned to look at her passenger. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
Georgina nodded. “Yes, I’m fine. Maybe a little tired, that’s all. Come on, help me with the carry-cot.”
The church was of old stone, all stained glass and Gothic arches, with a cemetery to one side where the headstones were leaning and crusted with grey-green lichens. Georgina couldn’t bear lichens, especially when they covered old legends gouged in leaning slabs. She looked the other way as she hurried by the graveyard and turned left around the buttressed corner of the church towards its entrance. Anne, almost dragged along on the other handle of the carry-cot, had to break into a trot to keep up.
“Goodness!” she protested. “You
’d think we were late or something!” And in fact they were, almost.
Waiting on the steps in front of the church, there stood Anne’s fiancé, George Lake. They had lived together for three years and only just set a date; and they were to be Yulian’s godparents. There had been several christenings this morning; the most recent party of beaming parents, godparents and relatives was just leaving, the mother radiant as she held her child in its christening-gown. George skipped by them, came hurrying down the steps, took the carry-cot and said, “I sat through the entire service, four christenings, all that mumbling and muttering and splashing—and screaming! But I thought it was only right that one of us be here from start to finish. But the old vicar—Lord, he’s a boring old fart! God forgive me!”
George and Anne might well have been brother and sister, even twins. Toss opposites attracting out the window, thought Georgina. They were both five-ninish, a bit plump if not actually fat; both blondes, grey-eyed, soft-spoken. A few weeks separated their birth-dates: George was a Sagittarius and Anne a Capricorn. Typically, he would sometimes put his foot in it; she had sufficient of her sign’s stability to pull him out of it. That was Anne’s interpretation of their relationship, she being a lifelong advocate of astrology.
Leaving Georgina’s hands free to tidy herself up a little, they now took the carry-cot between them and made to enter the church. The twin doors were of oak under a Gothic arch, one standing half open outwards on to the landing at the head of the steps. A wind came up from nowhere, blew yesterday’s confetti up in mad swirls and slammed the door resoundingly in their faces. Earlier there had been the odd ray of sunshine filtering through wispy grey clouds, but now the clouds seemed to mass, the sun was switched off like a light and it grew noticeably darker.
“Not cold enough for snow,” said George, turning his eyes apprehensively up to the sky. “My guess is it’s going to chuck it down!”
“Chuck it or bucket?” Anne was still reeling from the door’s slamming, her expression puzzled.
“Fuck it!” said George, irreverently. “Let’s get in!”
A moment more and the door was shoved open from inside by the vicar. He was lean, getting on a bit in years, close to bald. His one advantage was of great height, so that he could look down on them all. He had little eyes made huge by thick-lensed spectacles, and a veined beak of a nose that seemed to turn his head as if it were a weathercock. His thinness gave the impression of a mantis, but at the same time he managed to look owlish.
A bird of pray! thought George, and grinned to himself. But at the same time he noted that the old vicar’s handshake was warm and full of comfort, however trembly, and that his smile was a beam of pure goodness. Nor was he lacking in his own brand of dry wit.
“So glad you could make it,” he smiled, and nodded over Yulian in his carry-cot. The baby was awake, his round eyes moving to and fro. The vicar chucked him under his chubby chin, said, “Young man, it’s always a good idea to be early for one’s christening, punctual for one’s wedding, and as late as one can get for one’s funeral!” Then he peered frowningly at the door.
The freak gust of wind had disappeared, taking its confetti with it. “What happened here?” the old man lifted his eyebrows. “That’s odd! I had thought the bolt was home. But in any case, it takes a wind of some power to slam shut a door heavy as this one. Perhaps we’re in for a storm.” At the foot of the door a bolt dragged squealingly along the groove it had worn in old stone flags, and thudded down into its bolthole as the vicar gave the door a final push. “There!” He wiped his hands, nodded his satisfaction.
Not such a boring old fart after all, all three thought the identical thought as he led them inside and up to the font.
In his time, the old clergyman had baptized Georgina; he’d married her, too, and was aware that she was now a widow. This was the church her parents had attended for most of their declining years, the church her father had attended as a boy and young man. There was no need for long preliminaries, and so he began at once. As George and Anne put the cot down, and as Georgina took up Yulian in her arms, he began to intone: “Hath this child been already baptized, or no?”
“No,” Georgina shook her head.
“Dearly beloved,” the vicar began in earnest, “foreasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin—”
Sin, thought Georgina, the old man’s words flowing over her. Yulian wasn’t conceived in sin. This had ever been a part of the service that got her back up. Sin, indeed! Conceived in joy and love and sweetest sweet pleasure, yes—unless pleasure were to be construed as sin …
She looked down at Yulian in her arms; he was alert, staring at the vicar as he mumbled over his book. It was a funny expression on the baby’s face: not quite vacant, not exactly a drool. Somehow intense. They had all kinds of looks, babies.
“ … that thou wilt mercifully look upon this child; wash him, sanctify him with the Holy Ghost; that he, being—”
The Holy Ghost. Ghosts had stirred under those stirless trees on the cruciform hills, but in no way holy ones. Unholy ones!
Thunder rumbled distantly and the high stained glass windows brightened momentarily from a far flash of lightning before falling into deeper gloom. A light burned over the font, however, sufficient for the vicar’s eyes behind their thick lenses. He shivered visibly as he read his lines, for suddenly the temperature had seemed to fall dramatically.
The old man paused for a moment, looked up and blinked. His eyes went from the faces of the three adults to the baby, paused there for a moment, blinked rapidly. He looked at the light over the font, then at the high windows. For all his shivering, sweat gleamed on his brow and upper lip. “I … I …” he said.
“Are you all right?” George was concerned. He took the vicar’s arm.
“A cold,” the old man tried to smile, only succeeding in looking sick. His lips seemed to stick to his teeth, which were false and rather loose, and he was immediately apologetic. “I’m sorry, but this is not really surprising. A draughty place, you know? But don’t worry, I won’t let you down. We’ll get this finished. It just came on so quickly, that’s all.” The sick smile twitched from his face.
“After this,” said Anne, “you should spend what’s left of the weekend in bed!”
“I believe I will, my dear.” Fumblingly, the vicar went back to his text.
Georgina said nothing. She felt the strangeness. Something was unreal, out of focus. Did churches frown? This one was frowning. It had been hostile from the moment they’d arrived. That’s what was wrong with the vicar: he could feel it too, but he didn’t know what it was.
But how do I know what it is? Georgian wondered. Have I felt it before?
“ … They brought young children to Christ, that he should touch them; and his disciples rebuked those that brought them …”
Georgian felt the church groaning around her, trying to expel her. No, trying to expel … Yulian? She looked at the baby and he looked back: his face broke into that unsmile which small babies smile. But his eyes were fixed, steady, unblinking. Even as she stared at him, she saw those darling eyes swivel in their sockets to gaze full upon the old vicar. Nothing wrong with that—it was just that it had looked so deliberate.
Yulian is ordinary! Georgina denied what she was thinking. She’d had this feeling before and denied it, and now she must do it again. He is ordinary! It was her, not the baby. She was blaming him for Ilya. It was the only explanation.
She glanced at George and Anne, and they smiled back reassuringly. Didn’t they feel the cold, the strangeness? They obviously thought she was concerned about the vicar, the service. Other than that, they felt nothing. Oh, maybe they felt how draughty the place was, but that was all.
Georgina felt more than the cold. And so did the vicar. He was skipping lines now, hurrying through the service almost mechanically, about as human as some gaunt robot penguin. He avoided looking at them, especially Yulian. Maybe he could feel the infant’s eyes on him, unwaveringly.<
br />
“Dearly beloved,” the old man was chanting at Anne and George now, the godparents, “ye have brought this child here to be baptized …”
I have to stop it. Georgina’s thought were growing wilder. She started to panic. Have to, before it—but before what?—happens!
“ … to release him of his sins, to sanctify him with …”
Outside, much closer now, thunder rumbled, accompanied by lightning that lit up the west-facing windows and sent kaleidoscopic beams of bright colours lancing through the interior. The group about the font was first gold, then green, finally crimson. Yulian was blood in Georgina’s arms; his eyes were blood where they stared at the vicar.
At the back of the church, under the pulpit, almost unnoticed all of this time, a funereal man had been sweeping up, his broom scraping on the stone flags. Now, for no apparent reason, he threw the broom down, tore off his apron and rolled it up, almost ran from the church. He could be heard grumbling to himself, angry about something. Another flash of lightning turned him blue, green, finally white as an undeveloped photograph as he reached the door and plunged out of sight.
“Eccentric!” The vicar, seeming a little more in control of himself, frowned after him, blinked at his abrupt disappearance. “He cleans the church because he has a ‘feel’ for it! So he tells me.”
“Er, can we get on?” George had apparently had enough of interruptions.
“Of course, of course,” the old man peered again at his book, skipped several more lines. “Er … promise that you are his sureties, that he will renounce the devil and all his works, and constantly believe …”
Yulian had also had enough. He began to kick, gathered air for the howling session. His face puffed up and started to turn a little blue, which would normally mean that frustration and anger were coming to the boil just beneath the surface. Georgina couldn’t keep back a great sigh of relief at that. What was Yulian but a helpless baby after all?