The Best New Horror 6 Page 8

  He inspected them casually, brushing some of them free of webbing with his finger tips, as the rain pelted down on the window above him. He wondered about the craftsman who had used them. Dead now, no doubt, he thought; but it occurred to him that it was peculiar they had been left to spoil. Taken together, they could be quite valuable. And some of them looked rather old.

  He came up short then, because he suddenly found himself contemplating some very strange tools indeed. If they were tools, in the normal sense! Occupying a space of their own, and isolated in a frame fixed to the wall, were a number of knife-like objects with curving blades and ornately carved handles. They were all quite free of rust. They were obviously part of an incomplete collection, as they had been set out in the form of a tapering cross, and there were three gaps where the missing weapons should have been.

  Weapons?

  Ogden imagined that was what they could have been, but like none he’d ever seen before. Some of them were very small and delicate. Who would use them? And in what circumstances? Perhaps they were ceremonial; for use in some ritualistic practice?

  He lifted one off its hook and laid it on his open hand, haft towards him. It was heavier than he expected. Out of balance, it turned on his palm so the blade spun round to point to his heart. It felt strange as it moved against his skin, almost like an animal, alive! And dangerous! The cutting edge was terribly fine and, he was sure, razor sharp.

  After hastily replacing it among the others and looking at them all together, it occurred to him that they could be fragments of some quite large object that had somehow come to pieces. He shook his head. It seemed a fanciful notion.

  Turning his attention to other items stored in the shed, some piles of old magazines caught his eye: something to read to pass the time until the rain stopped. He took an ancient, flaking periodical from the top of the nearest heap. It was a Radio Times from September 1952.

  “Has this place been shut up that long?” he wondered; “almost forty years?”

  He found an article about Thomas Beecham, who was to conduct Delius on the Third Programme that week, and started to read. He didn’t notice when the rain stopped, but sunshine suddenly beamed halfheartedly down on him from the window and reached across the floor towards him through the gaping door.

  Scrambling up, he retrieved Poppy’s notes from a bench where he had dropped them, and sorted through them. They were stuck together with damp. Whole paragraphs were illegible where the ink had run, and the rain had trickled along the creases he had made when he had clumsily grabbed the sheets up after dropping them, obliterating odd words and lines here and there. The page on top, detailing facts about Wormhill parish church, looked as though it had been wiped with a sponge. He read:

  [Smudge . . . “here the rectory garden and churchyard blend . . . [smear] . . . rarely does a modern village church possess that air of repose which often broods over an ancient sanctuary – but Wormhill possesses it. [Three lines missing] . . . oices of rooks calling in the trees surrounding Wormhill Hall.”

  Frith etc., writing as recently as 1920

  Not much to go on! Obviously Poppy had copied descriptive passages from old books to compare with contemporary reality; something that gave her particular pleasure when visiting new places. Such fragments of her notes as remained were next to useless now however. Ogden stuffed them in his back-pack and decided to explore without their guidance.

  As, pushing his bike, he descended towards the trees that concealed the church, a handful of farm buildings became visible, including one quite substantial dwelling set behind what could once have been a village green. A self-important dog ran out and barked at him twice. It seemed disillusioned by the sight of him, and slunk away with a disappointed air. He saw no human inhabitant.

  Opposite an old farmhouse a sign indicated that St Margaret’s church could be found at the end of a wide path to his left. This brought him to a tiny wrought iron gate that, closed, stood next to an open, and much wider, wooden one. Ogden took the trouble to negotiate the first of these entries, since the other, for some strange reason, looked much less inviting; even, in the slovenly way it gaped, like a hungry maw, sinister.

  The sun slipped free of the thickening clouds for a few seconds as he stepped into the churchyard, stretching black shadows out from the trees around him. A breeze, the first of the day, troubled the trees and gave them goose-flesh. They shivered, sighed, and then went still.

  Ogden closed the gate behind him and, as he did so, saw and heard movement in the undergrowth that grew to the edge of the path ahead of him.

  “That damned inquisitive dog,” he thought, “come to take a second look.”

  This time the creature must have gone shy. It didn’t show its face, though sunlight glistened in raindrops shaken from leaves as it blundered on through the wild bushes.

  He thought the rain had started again: the trees above him were dripping with sullen deliberation. The dampness they deposited had a sticky feel and was slightly malodorous. He imagined caterpillars, eating the leaves overhead and mingling their body’s outpourings with the rain. An unpleasant notion. He dug out the old, grey plastic raincoat he used to protect himself from storms while cycling, draped it over him, pulled the hood up, and pressed a couple of the studs at the front to hold it in place. Then, looking suitably monkish, he ventured onto the holy ground.

  His first sight of the church almost made him laugh. The little Victorian building’s squat tower was topped with a steep spire-like roof which, though picturesque, looked highly incongruous. Not at all to Poppy’s taste. He could imagine her reaction if she had seen it and was relieved that she was not there to lecture him on the tenets of her religion: Architectural Fundamentalism. Even so, he thought he would take a snap of the building, to prove he’d been there.

  After ascertaining that the door to the church was locked he strolled out among the tombs, some of them unusual and impressive, in search of a vantage point from which to take his photograph. He had walked backwards almost to the very edge of the little graveyard, inserting a film in his camera as he did so, when he heard a noise close behind him. He turned, and fell heavily into an overgrown pit about three feet deep. He seemed to have been tripped by something emerging from this hollow. His camera arced up and away, out of his hand.

  He was fit, active, and supple jointed, so took no harm from his tumble: nevertheless, at his age, it caused quite a shock to his system. He sat still for seconds, then crawled towards his expensive, possibly damaged, camera. He’d almost reached it when he thought he saw movement in the tangled weeds ahead of him. The bloody dog again? Had it been that creature that had just tripped him on his back?

  Then he realised his camera had landed in nettles that half concealed what he first took to be part of a tomb, the visible section of which had been carved to represent a cluster of human bones: arm bones, leg bones, ribs, vertebrae; all jumbled together.

  As he pressed forward for a closer look, the screen of nettles quivered and parted. Out from behind them the fleshless fragments of three fingers and a thumb, clutching some kind of knife, stretched towards him with the persistence of a hand held out for alms.

  And rose up swiftly towards his face.

  But they didn’t move as fast as Ogden, who rose up very swiftly, and ran like hell. No cripple, cured at last by a miracle, ever flung himself into action so completely as Ogden Minton did then.

  His mind blanked out briefly, and consciousness only returned when, mere seconds later, he found himself racing out of the path that led from St Margaret’s, and onto the road that led out of Wormhill.

  Opposite, a man was walking towards him through a garden at the front of a large house. The fellow was watching him with alarm and concern. Suddenly, aware that he was making a spectacle of himself, Ogden stopped running and tried to calm down. He was drenched with sweat in his plastic coat. He pulled the hood back off his head and, as he did so, the clouds above him burst and rain machine-gunned down around him.<
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  The man who had been observing him took fright at the downpour and retreated into the building behind him. As he went he pointed to a sign on the path outside an open door.

  “TEA, COFFEE, SNACKS. HOMEMADE FOOD.”

  Hardly able to believe his luck, Ogden ran into the house and found himself in a comfortable, well-appointed tea room. The walls were covered with photographs and other relics of Wormhill’s past. The old farmhouse had been partly converted into a cosy museum. A large, smiling woman, who seemed the personification of kindly concern, took his dripping coat and hung it to dry. From the menu she handed him he selected tea, an egg and bacon sandwich (comfort food: he secretly lusted after cholesterol) and cake, which the beaming woman went to fetch.

  So sudden had been his transference from a plane of terror to one of deep domestic peace that Ogden sat gaping gawkishly for some time, like a toddler in a toffee shop.

  Then someone said, “You gave me a bit of a shock just now.”

  Ogden turned and saw, sitting in a dark corner, the man who had been in the front garden. “I did? I’m very sorry.”

  The man shrugged. “Not your fault. Reminded me of something, that’s all.”

  Ogden said, “Ah,” not too encouragingly.

  “Took me back a few years,” the man observed. “Seeing you running towards me in that coat did it.”

  Ogden felt he had been offered bait, but did not rise to it. He hoped the man wasn’t an obsessive chatterbox; people who dwell in tiny villages tend to be.

  “Been having a look at the church have you?” the man persisted. “Nice spot. Peaceful. Got a charm of its own.”

  Unable to concur, Ogden felt obliged to say something. “Peculiar place; I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

  “It’s a one-off, that’s for sure. Interested in churches, are you? I could tell you stories about St Margaret’s that never got written down in books, and for very good reasons too.”

  Ogden took the man to be hinting at local legends, a topic his wife had an insatiable interest in. In spite of a continuing sense of disorientation, he found himself responding to his interlocutor. If nothing else, he could take Poppy back a folk tale as a souvenir of his day in Wormhill.

  He pursed his lips and raised his brow in an expression of mild curiosity; a strong enough signal to his companion.

  “For instance, there’s a tale that back in the thirteenth century someone brought a relic of St Margaret of Antioch here to Wormhill. Some say it was a cross; some say a sword. You know about our saint, perhaps?”

  Ogden nodded. “A little. Had a nasty boyfriend who cut her up because she wouldn’t relinquish her religion and her virginity. Eaten by a dragon, wasn’t she?”

  “By the Devil himself in that form, yes. She got free though, either by the power of a cross she wore, which somehow caused the dragon’s breast to burst open, or by flourishing her pagan father’s sword and slashing her way free through the creature’s belly: opinions vary. Anyway, a sword is very like a cross when held by the blade and, be it ever so sharp, probably wouldn’t cut the fingers of a bona fide saint.”

  Ogden smiled politely at this conceit and turned his attention to the excellent food the woman was placing before him. When she had gone, the man, who spoke with a local accent, but who Ogden had no trouble understanding, resumed his yarn.

  “Whichever it was she used, sword or cross, it somehow turned up here at Wormhill, where it became an object of veneration. It performed miracles by the dozen. Under its influence the community prospered, became influential and, inevitably, corrupt. People abused the power of the relic to such an extent that, in the end, on her name day, when the population were gathered on the village green to celebrate (in an inappropriately riotous way), St Margaret herself stepped down out of the sky onto the street, in full view of everyone. She strode into the church, took up the relic, held it high above her head, and smashed it to pieces on a stone gatepost at the entrance of the graveyard. Then she vanished. She hasn’t been back since.”

  The man fell silent for a while. Leaning back, with his eyes almost shut, he had the air of one recollecting distant events in present tranquillity. Then he stirred himself and continued:

  “The fragments of the relic were gathered up by one Peter Comfrey, who had served old Sir Godfrey Foljambe, the last in line of the most powerful family in the district at that time. Those fragments had their uses. Whatever the cross (or sword) had been made of, the fragments, sharpened, provided fine blades that did not ever blunt. Peter Comfrey and his son, Howard, earned a reputation locally for chirurgery, and made a poor living plying these tools. But they never thrived so well in later years as they had done in the service of the Foljambe family.

  “At that time Wormhill was part of the Royal Forest, and governed by harsh laws going back to the time of Richard. The preservation of the Royal Game for hunting was paramount. Punishments for poaching or even harming the creatures of the Forest were terrible beyond description. The wolves were culled annually, after their young were born, but were treated as almost sacred for the rest of the year.

  “One day a man, a forester himself, was found by his companions standing over the dead body of a male wolf. There was blood on his shirt and the point of his hunting knife was in the beast’s heart. He told some tale about coming across an intruder who he suspected was out poaching. When challenged, the felon tried to run off, but the forester, after shouting to his fellows for help, soon caught him. There was a short, hard fight that ended when the King’s man drove his knife into the breast of the interloper, who was savagely biting his upper arm. It was then, according to the forester, that he looked down and discovered the corpse of a huge wolf at his feet, with his blade between its ribs. The body of the poacher had vanished.

  “Those the forester had summoned to his assistance heard his story, then took him to their Master, John Le Wolfhunte, who, after questioning him, had the man’s shirt torn off to reveal, on his arm, the unmistakable tooth-marks of a wolf. The forester was declared guilty of the wilful slaughter of the King’s Game, and sentenced to death by torture.

  “Le Wolfhunte was outraged at his employee’s flagrant criminality, and sorely provoked by his stubborn refusal to admit his guilt. He decided to make an example of him. Instead of employing the crude craft of his personal torturer to inflict the prescribed punishment, he summoned Howard Comfrey to him, with his blades and tools, and ordered him to use his chirurgeon’s art and knowledge to prolong and intensify the death agony of the accused man. Also, Le Wolfhunte wanted the satisfaction of hearing the man retract the story, that had demoralised his simple, superstitious foresters.

  “Howard Comfrey was instructed to remove those parts of the accused that were not essential to his existence, slowly, one by one. It was not work he relished, but to decline to undertake it would have meant his death, so he decided to take the opportunity to demonstrate his skills, knowing he would be generously rewarded for a job well done. He managed to stretch the process over three weeks, to the gratification of John Le Wolfhunte, who had the wolf-slayer’s jointed limbs and other parts hung above his head for his entertainment and his victim’s instruction.

  “But the man didn’t change his story, up to the time of his death. His various parts were buried together in a place a good distance from the churchyard, and without ceremony.

  “The fee paid to Howard for the satisfactory completion of his task was the last sizeable sum that ever fell into the hands of a Comfrey. Each subsequent generation fell a little lower than that preceding it. Local people were reluctant to go to the descendants of a torturer for help when they were sick. The Comfreys became pariahs and turned from cutting flesh to carving stone and joining wood. That they were able to survive at all was due to the tools they used which, made from parts of the relic of Margaret of Antioch, gave such quality to their work as was hard to find elsewhere. But they were never liked, and often loathed, in the community.”

  The man paused again,
and turned to Ogden, presumably to ensure he still had his attention. Ogden, who had been making a few notes to pass on to Poppy as the tale unravelled, smiled his approval. “Very interesting,” he said, “and . . . quaint. The Comfreys died out long since, I suppose?”

  The man shook his head. “Somehow, they hung on into this century. The last male, Nev Comfrey, died in the early fifties, and a terrible end he had too.”

  Ogden poured himself a third cup of tea and sank deeper into his chair. He was feeling pleasantly relaxed now, and was glad the continuation of his companion’s narrative gave him an excuse to remain where he was. Outside, the rain had stopped, but he was in no hurry to continue his tour of inspection.

  “Nev Comfrey’s wife told me some of what happened, a few days before she died,” the man continued.

  (Ogden took no more notes. This was recent history, not legend, and would have little appeal to Poppy.)

  “Nev, though a fool, was a fine craftsman, but no good with money. He did wonderful work with stone and wood, but didn’t know its worth. People paid him a pittance; in kind, more often than not, and, as a result, he and his wife were slim as scarecrows, and dressed in rags. Nev wore the same old grey gabardine coat, a good few sizes too big for him, for years. In winter, he belted it with string; in summer, it flapped round him like a badly pitched tent. He looked a tramp, and people took advantage of him, but he had their respect, because he was sexton to the parish, kept the churchyard neat, and dug a deep, straight grave. And it was to do with that work that he got in trouble.

  “He was digging one day in his own garden when he found bones. A man’s bones. He called his wife to see them. Later, she told me they were all mixed up; not laid out end to end, like the remains of the decent dead. The two of them talked it over, and Nev put the lot in a sack, took them to the graveyard, then, when nobody was about, gave them what he thought was a Christian burial.

  “He spent the rest of the day weeding and cutting grass on graves, and clipping back the ivy on the walls. He worked well into the evening.