Vicious Circle

“It was the first thing I tried. And that was the second.” She was pointing to the wall over to my right. Glancing in that direction, I saw a row of six squat shapes that resolved themselves, when I took a step toward them, into black plastic plant pots.

Each pot had something dead in it. Leafless stems; sagging, frost-burned blossoms; desiccated corms.

“The cold will do that,” I pointed out. “You don’t need anything supernatural.”

“True,” Juliet agreed. “But not in the space of five minutes. Look at your hand. The skin on your wrist.”

I did. It was already starting to pucker and dry: when I ran a finger across it, there was a dull ache.

“The longer you stay in here, the worse it will get. If you lingered long enough, I suppose—” Juliet’s gaze flicked across the plant pots with their freeze-dried, gray-green cargoes. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Again, in the hush after she spoke, a bass rumble in the air or in the stone or in the darkness itself rose and peaked and fell, rose and peaked and died away into silence.

“What the hell is that?” I asked. “That noise?”

Juliet seemed surprised. “You mean you don’t recognize it?”

“Not so far.”

“It’ll come to you.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, a little piqued. “But probably not before my leaves start to fall off.”

I blew out the candle flame, just before it died of its own accord, and headed for the exit.

* * *

It had happened during the evensong service, Susan Book said, the night before last.

St. Michael’s didn’t have a resident priest, and there were no services there during the week. It was only open on Saturdays and Sundays, when Canon Ben Coombes came across from Hammersmith to lead the services for a congregation that was only half as big as it was even ten years ago. The rest of the time, Susan looked after the place along with a sexton named Patricks, who mainly tended the graves but could occasionally be prevailed on to clean graffiti off the walls.

Evensong was her favorite service. She liked the hymns, which always started with “Lead us, heavenly father, lead us,” and the canticles that sometimes made her cry, they were so beautiful. And she liked the lighting of the candles—especially around this time of year, when they seemed to take up the work of the sun as the sun failed. Like the light of the spirit, picking up the slack for the fallible and beleaguered flesh.

We were out among the gravestones again, warming ourselves on the last red rays of sunset after the midnight chill of the church. I was reclining at my ease, more or less, on MICHAEL MACLEAN GREATLY MISSED HUSBAND AND FATHER. Juliet was perched elegantly on the headstone of ELAINE FARRAH-BEAUMONT, TAKEN FROM US MUCH TOO SOON, and Susan was sitting on the grass between us, unwilling to disturb the rest of the dearly departed. Under the circumstances, I didn’t take that as empty sentimentality. Nor did I take it personally that her eyes never wavered from Juliet’s face.

There were about eighty people in the church, she went on: a good house, the canon had said jocularly as Susan helped him into his vestments, so we’d better give them a good show. He’d led the responses and read a psalm—just as he did every week. They were into the first of the two canticles, which was the cantate domino: “Oh sing unto the Lord a new song, for he hath done marvelous things . . .”

She stared at the ground, remembering.

“There’s a place in the cantate,” she murmured, “where the choir invite the sea and the earth to make a joyous noise . . .” I remembered it as she said it, thinking back without enthusiasm to my own confused religious education. It had never made a hell of a lot of sense to me. “Let the floods clap their hands.” How, exactly? “And let the hills be joyful.” Was there any way we’d be able to tell the difference?

But Susan was still talking, and I reined in my jaundiced memories.

When Canon Coombes got to “Let the sea make a noise,” there was a noise; from outside, in the street. A shriek of brakes, very loud, followed by the sound of an impact: metal crunching against metal, or against something else. The mood was broken. Even the choir faltered into silence, and every eye looked toward the door.

Canon Coombes cleared his throat, and the congregation faced front again. He nodded to the choir, expecting them to take up where they’d left off. But though they opened their mouths to sing, no sound came out.

“It got cold,” Susan said, her voice sounding a little ragged at the edges. “All at once, just . . . terribly, terribly cold. I heard people gasp, and everyone was looking at everyone else, or jumping to their feet. Shocked. Scared. Not understanding it, because it was so fast.

“And then there was something a lot worse.”

I waited, but she didn’t seem to want to say any more. She looked at Juliet, as if she needed to be told to come out with the rest of it. But Juliet just returned the stare with her own unreadable gaze, until eventually, abashed, Susan looked down at the ground.