Dead Letters Anthology (20 page)

I burst through the door and into the main body of the church. The vicar was still there, still in the pulpit, and she glanced up as I staggered down the aisle.

‘Please – I need sanctuary!’ I cried.

She shook her head sadly. ‘You have come to the wrong place. There is no sanctuary for you here.’

‘You’re not part of this! You can help me!’ I was approaching the pulpit as I shouted this, ready to pull her out and demand that she call the police, or confront the villagers in the name of God with a Bible in her hand, or something. Anything.

‘I can’t help you,’ she said. As I came around the side of the pulpit and started to climb the few steps that led up to where she was standing, I saw why.

Thick white stems, glistening with moisture, had broken up through the flagstones at some stage in the past. They curled up the back of the stone platform on which the pulpit stood, twisting around the sides and pushing through any gap. They vanished beneath her cassock. As she turned her upper body to face me, her expression compassionate but sad, the cassock rode up and I saw that her feet, her ankles, her legs were all encased in the roots. No, not encased. I saw the way the cassock clung to her lower body, and I knew that everything from her hips down had been… overgrown. Replaced.

Absorbed.

‘What happened?’ I cried.

Incredibly, she smiled. ‘There are things we are taught, in the seminary, that we never talk about to parishioners, and never preach about,’ she said quietly. ‘We say that God created Satan as an angel but that he was allowed to rebel against God’s authority, and that daemons are either fallen angels or Satan’s attempts at creating angels in his own image, but that’s not what we believe. Not really. We are taught that there are older things than angels, and that there are things that God did not create. This village has fallen under their sway. I tried to help them find the Light, but they had fallen prey to the blandishments of the Old Gods. They had accepted the bargain that was offered without consideration of the ultimate price.’

‘You… you should have left,’ I said. ‘You should have told someone!’

She shook her head. ‘It creeps up on you, and by the time you are trapped it is too late. There was a time I could have bargained my way out. That letter you have – the one you said was for number 7 Vicarage Close? I think you’ll find that the ‘7’ is actually a ‘1’, clumsily written. A friend of mine in America said he would send me something that I could use to make a deal, to assure my safety, but that was three months ago. The letter never arrived.’

‘I only got it today,’ I whispered, appalled.

‘Nothing is accidental,’ she said, smiling sadly. ‘Everything happens for a reason. I was never meant to get out of here, but you are.’

‘I tried!’ I held up the plastic envelopes with the fragments of parchment inside. ‘They weren’t enough to exchange for a single book,’ I shouted, ‘let alone for my safety – or yours.’

Instead of answering, the vicar opened her Bible to a place which I saw was marked with a plastic envelope the size of a sheet of paper. She pulled it out from where it was caught in the Bible’s spine.

‘The Pnakotic Manuscripts,’ she whispered. ‘A part of them, at least.’

Inside the envelope were more fragments of a parchment sheet, like the ones I had, pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. On them was a drawing in faded brown ink that my mind rebelled from. I couldn’t take it in. I could, however, see the gaps in the jigsaw: gaps that the fragments I held would fit into perfectly.

‘With the pieces that I assembled, during my time in the village, and the pieces that my friend was sending me, there would be enough to form a single page of a single volume of the Pnakotic Manuscripts. That would be enough for me to bargain my way out of here, but it arrived too late for me.’ She reached out, handing the transparent envelope to me. ‘But not too late for you.’

‘Are you sure?’ I whispered.

‘Go,’ she said in a suddenly commanding voice. ‘Go from this place. Go in peace, but when you get to a place of safety… then start a war. Burn them all.’

I nodded, and took the envelope from her. I gazed into her soft brown eyes, at her benign, almost triumphant expression, and then I turned around and left. I walked down the central aisle towards the door of the church, and I didn’t look back, but as I walked I took the fragments of parchment that had been in the letter and I pushed them into the gaps in the parchment that was held in the plastic envelope that the vicar had given me. They fitted perfectly, and they formed a whole.

Outside the door, in the darkness of the churchyard, they were waiting for me: the robed, shrouded figures with the sodden white skin, and behind them the more human inhabitants of Winterbourne Abase. They had knives, and curved metal weapons the like of which I had never seen before, and they had lit torches that flared in the darkness, casting shifting shadows everywhere.

I held the plastic envelope up where they could see it. Some of them fell to their knees. One of the robed elders reached out a trembling hand and took the envelope from me. He – or she, or even it, I couldn’t tell – brought the envelope up close to where its eyes should have been, and examined it.

‘What is the price?’ it asked in a voice that sounded and smelled like it was bubbling up from beneath a swamp.

I touched my chest, and I gestured towards the road. ‘My life,’ I said.

After a moment that felt like eternity, it raised a hand. ‘The offer is accepted,’ it replied.

I left the village of Winterbourne Abase in the same way that I had arrived: on my Italjet Velocifero and along a rutted dirt track, but I wasn’t the same person. I had seen things, and I knew things, that had changed me. I returned home, and I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since.

My interests have changed, as well. Yes, I’m still fascinated by lost spaces and ambiguous or forgotten locations, but it’s not just an academic thing anymore. I know that these places exist, but I also know that they aren’t barren. Things are living there, breeding there. Spreading their influence.

They have to be fought, and thanks to a misdirected letter and a vicar’s sacrifice I appear to have been chosen to take part in that fight.

Was that letter really misdirected, I wonder, or was it meant to have landed on my mat? There are a lot of things that I suspect I will never really know, and that is probably the smallest of them.

Andrew Lane has written over thirty books in fields as varied as science fiction, horror and crime, non-fiction, adult and young adult. Most recently he has been engaged on a series of YA novels concerning a fourteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes (eight to date) which attempt to be as faithful to history and to Arthur Conan Doyle as possible.

‘Buyer’s Remorse’ is a story written against the fictional and nihilistic mythological background invented by 1930s pulp American horror author H.P. Lovecraft (generally known as the Cthulhu Mythos), but transplanted to the backwaters of England rather than its native New England. It only occurred to the writer afterwards that instead of the jumble sale in the story he could have had a Lovecraft Fayre…

It’s always been a matter of curiosity to me why postmen persist in wearing shorts regardless of the viciously unpredictable seasons of England. Perhaps it’s a badge of honour in an occupation so starved of appreciation. For a short while we had a postwoman who eschewed her small red van for a bike, and she was possibly the only one who dressed appropriately for the elements.

Last week, however, it was our usual bare-legged chap, and on account of the driving rain, and the fact I had taken shelter from it under the grandest of our sweet chestnut trees, I decided to save the poor wretch the business of continuing all the way up the drive to the house by relieving him of his deliveries.

Had I given it rational thought I would have stayed put and let him pass me by, since there is always a terrific amount of last-minute post before Grandfather’s party. But having unburdened him from an armful of letters and small packages I found myself remaining under a dripping tree waiting for the shower to pass lest I should ruin the paper. There is no other reason than this that I would have found myself browsing idly through the pile of RSVPs, bills, catalogues and flyers that would have normally never attracted my attention, since our post is separated by Adam every morning and all items redistributed discreetly to their intended recipients, which judging by what I held in my arms, must often include the dustbin.

On coming across an opened and resealed letter amongst this most mundane pile of paper, my interest was stirred. The curious thing was that this piece of returned mail did not have our address on it.

We are not hard to find. The correct address is ‘Bosmaine House, Fieldings, By Catscombury, Gloucester’. There is no need for anything as vulgar as a postcode, since the estate encompasses two villages in the area, including Catscombury itself, and its small, irritatingly but picturesquely inefficient post office. Hence Grandfather regards having to identify the family seat by numbers and letters an intolerable insult which is why no such thing is included on our writing sets.

But this envelope, a small affair, calling-card size, had merely the words ‘Squire-966’ scribbled on the back in pen, and yet had been delivered to our door. Since it clearly belonged to nobody at this address I pocketed it without conscience. I confess I was intrigued. The rain softened and I walked up the driveway, anticipating with pleasure a hot bath, and less so an evening of dull conversation.

Grandfather had three ‘Amusantes’ staying. One apparently presented a political late-night television programme that nobody watches but everybody admires. Another was an artist of some sort whose work involves decaying fruit, and the third was a female bullfighter and is now an architect of perfectly preposterous structures, admired and written about by people who live in Georgian townhouses. They were all terribly pleased with themselves, and adopted that easy posture that the lower classes care to affect to indicate they are not impressed by being entertained by the last remains of English aristocracy, but which in fact reveals they believe quite the contrary. We do not slump casually at dinner and undermine etiquette. We sit properly and attend to our manners. I judged them accordingly.

I know I am a plain woman, but unlike my ancestors, modern life affords me the freedom to enjoy my privilege without the intolerable pressure they suffered of marrying unattractive wretches who pitied them but required an increase in status.

Grandfather has often remarked on his relief at my genetic predisposition to clumsy, ungainly, sexual unattractiveness, as he says it ‘brings less trouble to the door’. He may be right. Untroubled by suitors, I have a quiet, if splendid life.

Grandfather sits, of course, in the Lords, and I am titled, and when he dies I shall inherit Bosmaine, which, unlike the properties of many of our friends and family who are obliged to sell cream teas to obese people with tattoos and screaming children in fold-away buggies just to have the roof repairs done, remains an estate that more than earns its keep.

It’s assisted, of course, by substantial investments Grandfather made in Africa via the great friends he made when his parents were mine owners, whom I know, though it’s never discussed, he continues to assist in siphoning foreign aid into private bank accounts with a skill that would make him the greatest chancellor Great Britain never had. The upshot is, we are a rarity. We are an aristocratic family that still has money.

Of course when I say family, we are certainly diminished in that respect. When mother and father and Hugo and James died in the Cessna plane crash off Antigua (the pilot was a drunk; Grandfather ensured his family were subsequently made destitute), Grandfather was apparently a broken man. But even though I was only three, and Grandfather is not the most emotionally demonstrative of human beings, he was all I had left, and indeed I was all he had left, and so we love each other in a cautious but unbreakable bond that is unspoken but ever present. It’s admittedly lonely at times, but then I imagine, if called for, I would take a bullet for the old goat.

The dinner was as tedious as anticipated, with the architect and the TV presenter fighting for attention as they argued about politics in Europe and I saw my opportunity to slip away. Nobody, I imagine, mourned my leaving. My contribution to the evening was watching and listening, and despising these monkeys we have never met, and will never meet again, ‘busy’ people, yet not busy enough to turn down a weekend invitation from a stranger to dance to the tune of money. Before pudding was served the artist did at least turn to me and ask, ‘And what is it you do then, Sarah?’ I replied, ‘I am currently a visiting professor at Harvard researching the outcomes of proto isolated genetics.’ She nodded sagely, waiting, and when I added nothing further said, ‘Very very cool,’ and turned away again.

Grandfather loves this. Of course I am no such thing. I made it up. But I know he enjoys the discomfort of the Amusantes when they curse themselves for not having thoroughly googled me. There always follows a great deal of barely disguised regret that there might have been someone useful at the table whom they ignored, and they may have seemed foolish, and so with that triumph I chose that moment to leave.

I kissed Grandfather on the head and retired. I smiled, feeling their palpable uneasiness that they were the only ones there, and there was no A-list party other than themselves, no ‘networking’ opportunities, their sole chore being to amuse Grandfather over his pigeon pie. These are the people who write in the
Guardian
about refusing honours, and reforming the second chamber, yet they can all be summoned with merely the opening of a gold-trimmed invitation card. Anticipating their horror at reading the reports in all the society magazines of his summer solstice party only two weeks from their dinner, to which none of them would be invited, sealed the schadenfreude.