A Shadow on the Wall Read online

  Suddenly, the thing grew silent. Foam lay on the corners of its mouth. Animated though it was, it had not lost that waxen pallor of absolute death that lay on the skin of face and hands. It was silent, but I knew it kept cold watch on me. I opened my mouth to speak again, but before I could do so, it addressed me, and this time I understood.

  “Guillielmus sum. Pro qua disfidete me?” The speech was soft, almost silken, but overlaid with a tone of arrogance or superciliousness that took my breath away.

  I stared speechlessly at the thing on the bed. It had spoken in clear Latin, or, if I am to be precise, Church Latin of the Middle Ages. “I am William,” it had said. “Why do you defy me?”

  It is hard to explain in simple words the impact of that declaration and the demand that followed it; nor am I able to give a lucid description of the emotions I felt on hearing words uttered in a language I had only ever seen before written on the pages of long-forgotten manuscripts. The eyes blazed at me, mocking my horror and my silence. I had to struggle to dredge up the right Latin words with which to formulate an adequate response.

  “Go back whence you came. You are not wanted here.”

  I was answered by a long laugh that faded slowly into silence.

  “You have no right here. You have no authority to command me.”

  “If you will not be commanded, then you must be forced.”

  The laugh again, from deep in the throat, less mocking than before, touched with the beginnings of triumph. I saw a hand move, slowly, but with growing strength. Soon it would have command of all the limbs. I went to the door and called out, “Atherton! Hurry, man, hurry! You must come now or all is lost.”

  And, suddenly, Atherton’s feet on the stairs, and the shaking of the light as he hurried up, bounding from step to step. He reached the bedroom door and thrust a small box of engraved silver into my hands. I lifted the lid. Inside lay about two dozen wafers, each stamped with the cross.

  I turned to face the bed. As the thing caught sight of the wafer, its expression altered.

  “Out! Thou nart a prest,” it said, and I realised it had switched from Latin to Middle English. “Thou hast noon auctoritee over me.”

  Ignoring this, I stepped towards the bed.

  “Help me,” I appealed to Atherton. “It may try to fight against us.”

  To his very great credit, Atherton did not protest. He came forward and held down his brother’s body, growing as it was now in strength, and vehement against our interference. While he did so, I forced the lips open and laid the wafer on the corpse’s tongue. It tossed its head from side to side, crying aloud, but it could not spit out the offending substance. Suddenly, the body went rigid, and a great trembling followed, passing through every limb and muscle.

  “Hold fast,” I said. I did not know the words of the Latin exorcism, but I had by heart the Lord’s Prayer, and so recited it in a loud voice, over the sound of cries and protests. Pater noster . . .

  It seemed to take an eternity, but at last I came to the “Amen,” which word I uttered in unison with Atherton. By then the crying and shouting had stopped.

  A dense silence followed, a silence full of other silences, so deep and so prolonged it seemed the night must pass before it ended. We stood bent over Edward Atherton’s reclaimed body, and at every moment I feared the return of what I had banished. But there was neither sound nor motion, and, in the end, I stepped back from the bed and looked down at the corpse, cold and unmoving as I had first seen it.

  “Thank God,” whispered Atherton. Thank God it’s all over.”

  I looked at him. His face was ashen, and his sunken eyes betrayed a weariness and dread that had not been in him before. Perhaps I should have said nothing, perhaps I should have left him with his illusions, for a time at least. But I was tired too, and cold.

  “Over?” I said. I shook my head. “On the contrary, it has just begun.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The next day dawned, grey and dismal, as a cold wind swept across the fens, bringing rain in its wake. Neither Atherton nor I had closed our eyes for the remainder of that night. We had stayed up together in his room, feeding the fire with coals from downstairs, talking of what we had just witnessed. I think he wanted to confront a reality that contradicted all he knew and had experienced.

  For my part, it was something of a relief to lay before him what I could of my own experience and knowledge, for I have had long acquaintance with matters of this kind. I told him of other hauntings I had seen, of visitations from beyond the grave, and the descent of evil into the world.

  “I will know more,” I said, “when I have had time to study your brother’s church. I mean to take a close look at the tomb he had opened. It’s my firm conviction that it will prove to be the source of whatever evil there is in this place. Only when I know with greater certainty what lies behind it all can I take action to lay it to rest for good.”

  “But surely, what took place tonight—”

  I shook my head.

  “That was only a temporary measure. The visitant was right: I am not a priest, and I had no authority over him. All I’ve done is hold him off for a while.”

  * * *

  The service was set to begin at ten. At eight, Atherton and I ventured out, in time to see the locksmith open the south door of the church. The paper pinned there by Atherton’s brother had been removed. Lethaby let us in, oblivious of our mood. He seemed smug and well pleased with his dinner the night before.

  “Sir Philip sends his very best regards, and his condolences. You must dine with him on a more auspicious occasion, he is most emphatic on that point. You, my dear Professor Asquith, will find him congenial. He is something of an amateur historian. Indeed, he has published a pamphlet on the history of his family which I am sure you will find most interesting. Permit me to give you a copy before you leave.”

  He then dropped me as smoothly as any politician, and turned to Atherton, saying he must discuss with him the details of the service that was to follow. While Atherton meekly followed the curate into the nave, I slipped outside in order to get my bearings.

  Under happier circumstances, I should have enjoyed immensely my first acquaintance with St Stephen’s. It is one of our finest parish churches, whose glories have been in no way diminished by the obscurity into which it has so undeservedly fallen. If ever I find the leisure, I shall one day compose a monograph on it, in the hope that it may, in time, take its rightful place among the great English churches. Or, perhaps not: I should not like it to fall into the hands of assorted ecclesiologists, local historians, and tourists, all intent on making it something it is not. And there are, besides, graver considerations that hold me back from ever publicizing Thornham St Stephen and its church too widely.

  Of the church’s history and features, I shall set down here only as much as may shed light on what passed there, or provide the reader with a more vivid image of the place in which so many of these events took place. St Stephen’s began life as a dower church of the Benedictine Abbey at Thornham, now sadly fallen into ruin. The church had been granted to the abbey by Sir Roger FitzJocelin, an eleventh-century benefactor, and had remained in its ownership until the dissolution.

  The original abbey having been destroyed by the Danes in 864, it was refounded by the Benedictines some one hundred years later. It was a little after the Norman invasion that Sir Roger undertook to expand the abbey and its revenues. Not long after that, a group of monks travelled several miles east of the original foundation to set up a small priory next to the Anglo-Saxon church of St Stephen, whose foundation stone is said to have been laid by St Felix not long after he founded his cathedral at Soham.

  But for a stone coffin lid, nothing now remains of that original church now, and precious little of the eleventh-century abbey church. I believe the small crypt contains walls from that period, and there is a stone font next the galilee that shows signs of an early Norman hand; but St Stephen’s is essentially a late Norman building that evol
ves rapidly into Early English and is overlaid at last by the very best of the Perpendicular. With the Dissolution, the buildings of the little monastery were demolished, and their stones removed for the building of Kennett House. But the church, by now the centre of a thriving parish, did not suffer the fate of the mother foundation at Thornham, and in time it passed unscathed through Cromwell’s depredations to emerge as an almost intact example of a pre-Reformation English church.

  Coming upon it with so little preparation in the greyness of that flat funeral morning, I stood for a long time staring from a distance, as though lost out among the softly moulded graves of the churchyard. An old man, white-bearded and stooped, stood watching from a distance, the only villager in sight.

  I glanced up at the church tower, shuddering as I thought of the shadow I had seen on the previous evening. It is an octagonal structure, typical of the region, a turreted Perpendicular shaft soaring high above a circular base to just over one hundred feet—a dizzying height for anyone to climb, even in the most clement of conditions.

  The west door had been opened, and I made my way into the church through it, conscious as always of the ambivalence of my feelings. An unbeliever, I am not awed by any sense of the numinous, and yet I am not altogether immune to the air of sanctity and consecrated antiquity common to the very best of churches. It is something I can’t explain, a sort of gap in my mental apparatus, an interstice between mind and feeling. Reason and intellect tell me there is no God, that salvation is a fancy, that heaven and hell are peopled by imagination, that the sacraments are rituals for human comfort, nothing more. And yet I know there is damnation for the living, I have seen evil in more than human weakness, I am sensible that not everything may be explained by what we know of the material.

  My sensations on entering St Stephen’s were, at first, little different from those I had experienced in a hundred other churches, complicated emotions wakened by a mixture of things visual, things audible, and things olfactory—light falling dimly through high lancet windows in a tall clerestory, stone mellowed by the warm breath of generations, lozenges of colour on a marbled floor, the scent of incense, the odours of candle-wax and smoke, and, above everything, that most profound of silences, that very essence of hushed wakefulness that is to be found only in sacred places.

  Those, at least, were my first sensations as I stepped into the nave. There, I halted in simple admiration of its unexpected magnificence. Atherton had in some measure prepared me, of course, but I was nonetheless taken aback by the beauty of the place. On either side stretched rows of slender piers, alternately circular and octagonal, lifting pointed arches. As I raised my eyes, the whole effect was repeated in the tall arched windows of the clerestory.

  I took my time, examining everything I could before moving on, not knowing quite what I was looking for, yet dimly expecting at every moment to sense it, to know it as if, all along, I had expected exactly that and nothing else.

  Gradually, I could see what had inspired Atherton to embark upon his plan of restoration. Though the fabric of St Stephen’s had been largely completed by the end of the Perpendicular period and little altered since then, and though its interior had been preserved virtually intact through the vandalism of the Commonwealth, it was nonetheless evident that time and fashion had done much to alter its original aspect and make drab or incongruous what had once been so harmonious.

  The chancel screen, though still in place, was topped, not by its original rood cross, but by the coat of arms of Queen Elizabeth. In three or four places, painted commandment boards done in the same reign, and other boards with various specimens of holy writ, obscured earlier and finer embellishments. Higher up, coated with dust and shabby among scraps of regimental colours, diamond-shaped hatchments hung as stark reminders of dead nobility.

  Beyond these accretions, most of them easily enough got rid of, there were less welcome signs of decay. Stonework had crumbled in places, plaster had fallen, gilt had been eroded, woodwork had succumbed to damp and worms. There lay over St Stephen’s church an air of benign neglect, as though all down the years its congregations had entered it in a state of trance, not quite seeing, not quite hearing, while all around them the fabric of the place dwindled and grew ragged at the edges.

  Near the chancel, where the altar stood, someone had long ago hung a plain board, on which words from Scripture had been painted in black edged with gold, the latter now much tarnished: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” I stood a long time in contemplation of this curious object, whose text every eye must have traced Sunday after Sunday, through the long hours of the weekly sermon, and I wondered why it had been hung in such a prominent place.

  The chancel stalls were greater in number than might have been expected in a parish church, whose choir can never have been large. I counted ten stalls on the north, another ten on the south, and three each side of the opening at the west end. The stalls were fitted with misericords carved in the form of grotesque faces, some amusing, others faintly disturbing. One I particularly noticed was situated towards the east end of the choir, a monk’s head, cowled, with a low forehead and deep-set eyes.

  It was there, in the chancel, that I set eyes at last on William de Lindesey’s tomb, as though, all along, it had been waiting for me in that waxy silence. I could not have mistaken it, of course, among the eight or nine tombs that jostled for their share of sanctity within the chancel walls. It stood close by the altar rail, a wretched thing draped in a stained tarpaulin.

  There was no sign of the wooden winch or the trestles that had been brought in on Atherton’s instructions to raise and carry the lid. No doubt Cowper the stonemason had reckoned it unlikely he would need them again, and even more unlikely he would find men willing to operate it within a mile of St Stephen’s Church after the accident that had taken Ezekiel Finch’s life. For my part, I regretted the winch’s absence, since I was sure it would be essential to restore the lid to its original position.

  I glanced nervously about me. Atherton and Lethaby were, I knew, somewhere in the vicinity, but I could neither see nor hear them, and I felt very much as though I stood alone in that sequestered place. A dim morning light came sullenly through the tall east window, casting half lights and impressions that were not quite shadows. I coughed once, and the sound echoed a moment or two among the naked stones, then vanished into the vast space beneath the roof. Looking up, I followed the tracery of the ceiling, the play of light and shadow across the stone, and for a fleeting instant I had a feeling that I was being watched.

  My hand shook as I took the edge of the tarpaulin and pulled it gingerly from the tomb. It was not that I expected any sudden manifestation, any physical expression of last night’s evil; I merely knew that I had come upon a work of immense despair, something I did not, as yet, understand, but which I feared as though I had understood it perfectly.

  The lid had been left where it had been dropped when the accident happened. Thankfully, it had not been moved far, and was in no danger of toppling. I glanced uneasily at the gap between it and the wall of the tomb-chest, then turned my attention to the lid itself.

  Where one might have expected to find the effigy of a knight in armour or his wife in her best robes, here instead was the cowled figure of a monk, elevated only partly above the flat surface of the tomb, and set inside thin shafts beneath a trefoiled canopy. [It was only a year or so afterwards that I remarked the resemblance between this figure and that of Bishop Kilkenny on the latter’s tomb in the north chancel aisle of Ely cathedral. This correspondence, I subsequently learned, had already been noted by Canon Wilfred Thomas in his Monuments of the Fen Churches (p. 275): “The conceit of angels hovering in the spandrels on either side of the canopy recurs as a motif in the altar-tomb of Abbot William de Lindesey in the parish church of Thornham St Stephen, and we may conclude on the basis of both dating and style the work of a single hand.”] Such a tomb is, of course, extreme
ly unusual and much against monastic principles, but I think I understand it now. Why it was designed in that fashion, why it was there at all.

  Around the trefoiled canopy the sculptor had carved de Lindesey’s name in full, with the date of his death, 8 November 1359. On each of the four sides of the tomb, Latin inscriptions had been incised in elegant Gothic letters, each one a biblical verse (in whole or in part), but curiously chosen, and with a logic (if logic it may be called) that quite defeated me.

  On the west and east sides were the following, whose meaning was reasonably clear (or so I then thought): In tenebris stravilectulum meum: “I have made my bed in the darkness” and Conlocavit me in obscuris: “He hath made me to dwell in darkness.” Beneath the first of these was a verse that occurs twice in the Book of Ruth: “To raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance”, and beneath the second “it watcheth for thee; behold, it is come.” Of these two latter inscriptions, I could make no sense.

  Beneath these, but set in a quite separate panel that ran all the way along the bottom of the tomb-chest, was what seemed at first to be a lengthy inscription. I bent down to read it, only to find myself unable to make any sense of it at all. My first thought was that it had been written in a language unknown to me, but it rapidly became clear that what I was reading was, in fact, some sort of code in which the letters had been jumbled up and set down wholly out of order. I tried the most obvious permutations—every other letter, every other letter backwards, substituting for each letter the one before or after it in the alphabet, but all without success.

  In the end, I simply wrote the whole thing down, starting at the western end of the south side and working my way round to the beginning—though I had, in truth, as little idea of where the inscription began and ended than I had of what it meant. Strung together, the letters—or, rather, clusters of letters—appeared like this: