Vicious Circle

The verger was waiting for us at the door of the vestry, a much smaller stone doghouse attached to the wall of the church at the back. She’d already opened the door, but she hadn’t gone inside. She looked more nervous and unhappy than ever—and she looked to Juliet for instructions with the same sad hunger that I’d noticed before.

“You can wait here,” Juliet told her, sounding almost gentle. “We’ll be five minutes. I just think it will be better if Castor sees for himself.”

Susan shook her head. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “In case you’ve got any questions. The canon told me to give you any help I could.” She visibly steeled herself, and stepped inside first. Juliet nodded me forward, so I went next in line, with her bringing up the rear.

The vestry was about the size of a large toilet, and it was empty apart from a cupboard for ecclesiastical vestments and half a dozen hooks screwed into the wall. We went on through, via a second, wide open door, into the west transept of the church, a low-roofed side tunnel looking toward the majestic main corridor of the nave. It was completely unlit, apart from the last red rays spilling through the stained-glass windows behind us. It made for a fairly forbidding prospect: it was hard to imagine anyone being inspired to devotion by it. Mind you, I wouldn’t say a paternoster if you put a gun to my head, so I’m probably not an unbiased witness there.

I felt it before I’d taken three steps: the chill. It was more like December than May, and more like the High Andes than East Acton. It ate into the bone. No wonder I’d felt cold when I was trying the door outside: the chill must have been radiating out through the stone. I suppressed a shudder and moved on.

But another few steps brought an even bigger surprise. I turned and shot a glance at Juliet, who looked keenly back at me. “Tell me what you’re feeling now,” she said.

I wanted to confirm it first. I walked left, then right, then forward.

“It changes,” I muttered. “Son of a bitch. It’s like—there are pockets of cold, in the air, not moving.”

“Whatever happened here, it happened very quickly. I think that’s why it hasn’t—”

She hesitated, looking for the right word.

“Hasn’t what?”

“Spread evenly.”

My laugh was incredulous, and slightly pained.

Susan Book was waiting for us at the end of the transept, and she was looking back toward us, not expectantly but with anxious intensity. She clearly wasn’t going to take a step farther without us. So we walked on and joined her.

The shadows were deeper in the nave, because only the windows to the left-hand side were getting any light. The far side, to the east, was a dimensionless black void. The gray flagstones under our feet faded into the dark a scant three or four yards from where we were, as though we stood on a stone outcrop at the edge of a cliff face.

Now that none of us was moving, I was suddenly aware of a sound. It was very low, both in volume and in pitch: very different from the susurration of echoes our footsteps had raised. It rose and fell, rose and fell again over the space of several seconds, dying away so slowly I was left wondering whether I’d imagined it.

Before I could resolve that question, Juliet was on the move again. She crossed the nave into the featureless dark, and came back a few moments later carrying a candle. How she’d even been able to see what she was aiming for was beyond me.

The candle was plain and white, about eight inches long and with a slight taper at the wick end. Susan looked at it with solemn unhappiness. Juliet took a lighter from her pocket and held it over the wick. “That’s a votive candle,” Susan said, a little plaintively. “You’re meant to light it when you say a prayer.”

“Then say one,” Juliet suggested.

She touched the wick to the lighter flame, and after a moment it flared and caught.

I thought she was going to lead us on up the nave toward the altar, but she just waited, one hand cupped around the candle flame to shield it from any drafts that might gust in from the open door behind us. But the air was as still as the air inside a coffin must be. The flame rose straight and flicker-free, giving off a single wisp of smoke as the wick burned in.

Then it guttered and almost went out. It shriveled, if a flame can be said to shrivel, and it shrank in on itself. It was as though the darkness and the cold were feeding on it, suckling on the tiny pinpoint of warmth and light and in the process killing it. As the flame surrendered and gave ground, the shadows came back deeper and more opaque than before, and the cold seemed to become a little more intense. In the dead silence, I heard that sound again: the double-spiked, deep-throated murmur at the limit of hearing.

“You were expecting that?” I asked Juliet, my eyes on the beleaguered candle flame.