The Ghosts of Heaven (6 page)

Then,

she finds them; the torch and her fire sticks,

resting on dry rock.

She does not find the fire bow,

but it can be done by hand,

and, though it takes a little longer,

a red glow appears in front of her between her flying fingers.

She pushes on, spinning the stick between her palms,

and the glow becomes brighter,

and flicks into flame,

and soon the torch is alight once more.

She lifts it close to her skin,

feeling its warm breath on her breast.

Fire flickers in her eyes.

She's alive.

She walks.

There, at the cave mouth,

the way is blocked. It will never be opened.

So she walks

into the heart of the mountain,

hunting for that final understanding.

She walks past the black hands, past her red-black stag,

and she keeps on walking.

She walks where time never moves,

so there is plenty of space for her thoughts to come.

She climbs over rocks, and scrambles up slopes,

lets herself jump deeper and down

into the heart.

The snail goes with her,

and the ferns.

The falling falcon and the spinning bow.

The eddies in the water of the lake

light her way past the spiderweb.

She begins to understand.

She understands many things.

She remembers that she made magic of the stag,

and it did not work.

She knows why,

because though she put her red hand mark on the wall,

she did not place a mark
inside
.

The old man had his two lines,

and yet she made no mark inside her red hand.

She did not connect to the cave.

She did not become one with the cave,

and thus with the magic.

But now the cave has her,

and she will become one with it, forever.

She should have made a mark inside her red hand.

She comes to a place,

so vast her torch cannot touch its walls,

nor find its heights.

The floor is flat, but slopes gently down,

so she follows the path that lies before her,

and there, in the far wall,

lies a crevice,

a tunnel, leading still farther.

From the tunnel ahead whispers pour from the dark,

calling her on,

calling her in.

She approaches the split

the slit in the wall,

and though it's barely wider than she is herself,

she lights her way with the torch,

and goes inside.

There, immediately,

she sees:

hand prints.

Marks.

No animals, no beasts.

Just marks.

Dots and lines,

crossing and forking,

in black and in red.

Waterlike waves,

spotted points.

Mark after mark after mark after mark.

She walks past them all,

toward the end,

as her torch starts to fail.

She sees the sand by the fire pit,

back at the camp.

She sees her stick tip in the sand,

and now she finally knows what it means.

What it
could
mean,

to make a mark in the sand.

If there was a way,

she thinks.

To make a mark in the sand.

And that mark to be known by all.

And that mark to have a meaning.

A meaning known to all.

There could be different marks

for different meanings.

Then there could be a mark to mean
go

and one to mean
follow

and one to mean
find

and one to mean
help
.

And then, she thinks,

there could have been a mark to mean
run!

And if she had made that mark in the sand,

then her people might have seen it

and run,

and not died in the sand

by the dying fire pit.

Now that she understands,

it seems so easy.

The marks in the sand.

They could be charcoal on rock,

or charcoal on deer's dried skin.

They could have used them to say

go here,

do this,

I am there
.

They could even be used, she thinks, to
dream
.

But this is an idea that will die in the dark

before it even leaves the mind of she

who goes ahead,

when others fall behind.

She who goes ahead when others fall behind moves on.

Through the bone,

the black marrow of the earth,

toward the end.

She reaches it, just before her torch fails for good,

and there,

high on a wall,

she sees the uttermost secret of the innermost cave.

This is the divine heart soul fountain face,

where the blinding light takes us

and saves us all,

and upon it

a final mark.

Giant and high,

black on the moon milk.

She stands and stares,

trying to understand it;

the turning circle,

the circling line

that never meets its end,

the ever-widening line,

round and round.

Then.

The light is gone,

the last beat of the flame flutters out and is gone.

She sits down.

Places the torch on the ground.

Stares into the blackness.

Slowly, she thinks,

I will die slowly,

in this time where space does not move,

in this space where time does not move.

She does not fear, she does not cry out,

she thinks only one thing:

if I could do it again,

I know what mark I would make in my hand.

I know that now.

And as she stares,

her eyes show her things that are not really there.

Lights flicker and fizz across her mind, as her eyes

try to see where there is nothing to be seen,

here in the space where time does not move.

Bright colors flicker and fizz:

lines,

dots,

crosses,

hatches.

And spirals.

Spirals like the one that hangs above her head, invisible.

The cave had waited for them to come,

and eventually, they came.

They came and made their marks in the dark.

And long after the people stop coming to make their marks,

long after the world grows empty and quiet,

long after everything has stopped walking,

or sliding, or even crawling;

long after all that

the cave will still be there.

Waiting.

Now, here

is nowhere; the nowhere where she lies in the dark.

And here, though she is in the place where time does not move,

her life moves, regardless.

So then it is time

for her to go ahead,

through the gate,

and into the void that lies beyond.

She goes.

 

 

QUARTER TWO

THE WITCH IN THE WATER

 

1
APPROACH OF EVIL

In the mind of the minister was devilry.

He spied on the landscape passing the window of his carriage, and what he saw was not the green dale, not pasture surrounded by low stone wall, not farmstall, nor woodland, nor wavering grass, but wasteland. A spiritual wasteland.

Father Escrove stifled in the carriage, whose two horses and deaf coachman had borne him with appalling lack of speed from the city and out into the world, to this countryside. He fumed silently, and despite the wicked heat he sat as far from the open window as he could manage, as if he feared contagion from the day outside.

Outside, beyond his window, was sinfulness. It was not even a matter of certainty; it just
was
. Evil lay barely hidden in those hedgerows, behind those barns, under the eaves of the farmhouses passing by. All across this green nature, the Devil had surely found a comfortable resting place. Satan
could
and
did
rise from the hay fields and creep from the forest at any time; seethe his way into some simpleton's soul and take root there. Even now,
the beast
was, without question, approaching through the thick hot air.

He dared move himself a touch closer to the window; the motion of the carriage and the heat inside neatly conspired to send him a little drowsy, but he fought back. He sniffed the air outside. Heavy. Scented. Grass and dung in the heat.

Forgetting the deafness of the driver, he called out.

“How long?”

His words melted and slipped onto the sun-hard mud track behind the clopping horse hooves.

There was not one breath of wind; the stale air sat on the earth and the dale, and the minister's carriage as in an oven.

They were on the top of the world; on the high dale, somewhere at Black Top, he guessed, poking a skinny finger at the map he'd been given. All around the high, flat pastures spread away in easy-rolling levels of green, cut through only by weatherworn walls of stone. There were few trees; the winters up here saw to that. The winter wind made it hard for anything to hold, but now, in the summer, the minister felt pressed closer to the sun, and he sat back in his seat, hating.

Sliding satisfied into his thoughts were memories of his work; his calling. Images of unrepentant sinners; some faces he could remember, others he could not, but that mattered little. What mattered were the numbers of those who he had brought to some kind of redemption at the end of a good length of twisted English rope.

*   *   *

Successful. That was what he was, he knew, and that was why he had been elevated to Rural Dean, with all that that brought. And what that brought was the opportunity to show the archdeacon that his faith was justified in this excursion to the wilds, and to this place. Welden—no doubt some foul and rotting sore—had had the misfortune to experience a hiatus; their vicar having upped and died without so much as a moment's warning, leaving the isolated settlement at risk of spiritual decay. And until a new appointment could be made to the hilltop house of God, it fell to Father Escrove to guide the sheep to safety.

They passed the church now.

St. Mary's. He sneered at the churchyard; the dead vicar already underground these past weeks. A man who had failed where he would not.

*   *   *

Away with his thoughts for a time, it took a jolt in the carriage to stir Escrove into piercing the world outside with his gaze once more; they had turned from the pitiful mud track of the green dale onto an even smaller one that set off swiftly down the side of the valley to his destination.

This valley, Welden, was steep-sided; seemingly scored into the landscape by God's chiseling fingertip, winding its way through the dales with Golden Beck at its bottom. Welden Valley was sanctuary to all the life of the place. Outside the brief moment of summer, the wind and the cold kept most life tucked into this groove in the earth; here, on its tiring slopes were the woodlands, the houses, the farmsteads, the mills, and the manor of the squire; Sir George Hamill.

As they turned from the main track to the smaller, Father Escrove saw something.

In the corner of the field to his right lay an area where the grass was kept short, and there, cut into that turf, was some sort of pattern low in the earth; a series of lines not even a foot deep.

He strained his neck to make it out, but could not measure any meaning in it.

Then the carriage jumped over a rut and he hit his head on the window frame.

“God's teeth,” he muttered, grimly.

He thought for a moment about what he had come to do.

Then, he smiled.

 

2
THE LANG CANDLE

Despite the heat, Anna Tunstall kept the windows of the cottage shut while her mother lay on the table. Tom Tunstall watched nothing happen from the kitchen door. Over the last three days he had seen his sister do many things. He had watched with eyes wide as Anna had taken three threads as long as their mother was tall, and twisted them into one. He'd seen how she had wrapped the thread in wax till it was as fat as his little finger, and then how she'd coiled it up on itself, like the adders did under the ferns in Callis Wood, though more loosely than the snakes.

He'd seen her set the lang candle on a small board placed on his mother's belly, pull the center of it up, and light the wick as summer late darkness came. Anna had allowed just one third of it to burn that night, a third the second, and last night, the final third, the flame describing a slow spiral over the course of the three days.

Now Anna sat still on the stool in the corner of the cottage, staring across her mother at the wall. Only once had she stirred, when Tom crept near to their mother on the table, as near as he dared, only for his sister to shoo him off.

“Don't, Tom. And if you have to, walk widdershins by her.”

Tom had retreated to the kitchen door, from where he had kept his vigil these past days. If he had been older he might have understood that his sister was simply tired, but he was young, and neither was he quick.

He looked at his sister as she fell asleep slowly on the stool, her head lolling forward, so that her long red hair hid her face. Her left arm slipped from her lap and fell to her side, but it did not wake her; one fingertip merely touched the dirt of the earth floor of the cottage.

A bad thing came into Tom's head.

He looked at this mother of his, who had not moved for three days, and now his sister was still, too. His mind got to working.

Very gently, he left his place by the kitchen door and approached Anna, and remembered what she had done when they'd come home to find their mother lying on the floor. She'd put her ear to her mother's lips, as if listening.