Nocturnal Emissions (2 page)

“Thank you.” Venn then started away, around the side of the tent, before the sister could get out whatever sly-voiced question he knew she was on the verge of forming.

At the back of the tent, on the ground, was the mason jar—resting where he had pushed it under the tent’s hem. He scooped it up and cradled it under his arm, then walked swiftly away, intending to leave the fair immediately before the theft was noted. Just once did he glance down at the head directly, to note that those horrible eyes which only he could see were contemplating him steadily.

He might have paid for the item, but he didn’t know if his remaining funds were sufficient or even if the man would be willing to part with it. Stealing was an unpriestly act, but again, he no longer knew what God might tolerate or desire from his priests. From all humans.

In life, his faith had been simple, without question of God’s will; his vision had been clear. But Venn had become more philosophical in the year since he had died.

Father Venn knew only one thing for certain.

He must return to Candleton.

II: The Straight Path

Leaving Bere Regis behind, Father Venn’s trek to the town of Candleton took him west through Cerne Abbas, with its hills and gullies, the deeply rutted road becoming muddy in these depressions. Venn had visited Cerne Abbas before. There had once been an ancient Benedictine Abbey here, but it had been given up to Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries of his country. This was shortly after Henry founded the Anglican Church—the Church of England—so that he could divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry the beguiling and six-fingered Anne Boleyn (though this marriage would be quickly and rudely abbreviated). Henry’s Act of Supremacy had transferred power from the Pope to the King, and the Catholic Church had been struggling to regain its lost ground since.

Though he had a set destination again at last, after the more or less aim-less wanderings of recent months, Venn went out of his way slightly to view the 180 foot tall “Rude Man”, the Giant of Cerne Abbas carved in chalk on the side of a hill, said to be two thousand years old. He removed his specs to see it more clearly, the figure rising across the sloping hill above a clumped stand of trees. The giant held a club in one hand, and an erection stabbed up the front of his belly. A fertility figure, most said. Once Venn had been embarrassed by the sight of it, but now he only gave a faint smile at its lack of modesty. The pagan giant was as incomprehensible to him as his own god. Some said it was a hoax, created as late as the seventeenth century. One legend held that the giant had been a Danish invader, who while sleeping on the hill had been decapitated by the townspeople. Venn had once heard a young scholar suggest that the figure was Hercules, and that its empty left hand had once been holding a severed head—which made Venn feel some affinity for it, given his own package, now wrapped thickly in his removed greatcoat to prevent it from being gazed upon by others. And to prevent it from gazing upon him.

Another bit of folklore, which had stimulated his imagination unpleasantly as a child, was that sometimes the chalk giant came alive at night, and walked to a local stream to drink from it.

Venn continued along, but the mysterious giant and the waning of day had put him uneasily in mind of other legends that had haunted his childhood—of the phantasmal, antlered and trumpeting Herne the Hunter, and the “Wild Troop” that came rushing out of the night across the moors like a whirlwind that roared with hooves and voices. The Wild Troop was said to follow the ancient “straight paths,” a system of roads along which were aligned pagan sites such as prehistoric earthworks, Neolithic standing stones,
Stonehenge
itself. It was considered unlucky, even dangerous, for modern men to block these routes by building upon them. The long, precisely straight tracts were believed by some to convey magnetic force, or more obscure forms of energy, like some great circulatory system. They were also called “fairy paths,”

because processions of fairies were said to travel along them. This notion had also painted fanciful but disturbing visions in Venn’s boyhood mind.

But the young Venn had been most afraid of stories of the elemental Black Shuck, a great black dog that also rushed along the ancient straight tracts like a train along its rail, its eyes burning and sulphur billowing out of its jaws. Old Shock, as this beast or race of beasts was also called, was known to explode into a burst of fire like a will-o’-the-wisp when it reached a crossroad, blasting the spot a carbonized black as if lightning had struck there. Venn’s grandfather had told him how a man who had once tried to strike a black dog had been utterly incinerated, along with his horse and cart.

His grandfather had seemed especially to savor terrifying him about a black dog attack in the sixteenth century, witnessed by many. During a violent thunderstorm — in which a bolt of lightning knocked off the church roof a man who was cleaning its gutters—a black dog manifested itself directly inside the church. Crackling with lightning, the dog raced straight through the central aisle, striking and killing two of the congregation along the way. Another man was struck and survived, though he was left horribly withered. When the dog had vanished, the church’s clock was found to be ruined, and claw marks were left in the church’s door that were visible to this day. The very same day, apparently the same black dog also tore through a church some miles distant, killing three people this time. Perhaps this ancient force had resented the invasion of the comparatively new worship of Man instead of Nature.

It was stories like these, particularly concerning the seemingly elemental spirit’s ability to strike like ball lightning, that had left Father Venn to wonder more than once whether it had been Black Shuck who had burned his cathedral in Candleton.

His old stone cathedral had, after all, been built directly on one of the ancient straight paths as so many were, as if in an attempt to tap into this grid of force, or in an arrogant effort to overwhelm it, superimpose their will over those energies. Over Nature herself.

As he walked—the ever cooling breeze ruffling his hair, whistling across the grassy downs, the sky growing dark so that only shreds of sunlight like ribbons of flesh bled along the horizon, silhouetting ominous clusters of trees where anything might be lying in wait—Father Venn caught himself nervously glancing over his shoulder.

But when he discovered himself doing this, he tried to laugh at himself deri-sively. Black Shuck could scarcely kill him now, though perhaps it already had.

For Venn had been inside his church in Candleton when it had mysteriously caught fire, just over a year ago now.

««—»»

Because he had nearly run out of money, and because he preferred solitary ways, Venn spent the night standing under a tree not far off this gorse-lined stretch of road across the desolate heath. A sprinkling of rain fell but the tree shielded him from becoming too wet. He rested one palm flat across its grooved bark, taking in its ridged hardness, the damp of it, and wondering as he had many times before how he could sense these impressions when his nerves were dead and rotten. How he could feel cold, and see the wisping of his exhaled breath, when his actual body had been burned and buried under the tons of rubble that had once been his church.

Due to night’s chill, he had unwrapped the mason jar and donned his greatcoat, turned up its collar. He stared down at the jar near his feet, just a black lump in the shadows. Reluctantly, he put on his spectacles. Now, two red coals with flashing silvery centers glowed from those shadows. Unearthly eyes fixed directly on his own.

He lifted his gaze, swept it across the dark heath, as if scanning about. But his red lenses revealed no lurking black dogs, spying upon him, stalking nearer. No spectral horned hunters. No demon—or had it been an angel?—like the one he had caught a glimpse of, hovering outside one stained glass window as his church had raged with fire.

The memory came back to Venn vividly, so that he nearly flinched with its impact. He recalled—no, relived—standing dazed amid that smoldering rubble, before he realized that he actually lay buried beneath it. This understanding had come to him gradually, not through some sudden revelation like discovering his own crisped remains. His remains had never, in fact, been discovered.

And thus, his congregation—and even those fellow priests who had miraculously survived the catastrophe—had never even been aware of his death. Had taken this doppleganger to be its original. This spirit that could somehow choke from the rising smoke, and burn its fingers on the glowing embers that had once been pews.

He remembered being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the ruin, the heaps of tumbled stone that had once been walls, flames flickering throughout it all. A landscape that seemed to spread to every horizon like Hell itself. He remembered crouching down, and dragging from the cinders an ash-covered section broken from the glass window through which he had glimpsed that winged form just as the cathedral had burst suddenly, explosively, and inex-plicably into flame.

He had pressed a shard of red glass out of its lead frame with his thumb.

And later, it was this fragment of glass that he would have made into spectacles, through which he had hoped to one day, again, see that winged mysterious figure. So that he might punish it, have revenge upon it, if a demon it was. So that he might interrogate it, demand answers from it, if the creature proved to be an angel instead.

Though he was cold, and though he was afraid—not just of the night and its mysteries, but of returning to haunted Candleton—Father Venn stood in that one spot the whole of the night. Weary but not tiring, resting but not at rest.

««—»»

The next day was clear again, the sharp air invigorating, and despite its various sinister legends, the town of Candleton in its little bowl-like hollow unfolded below Venn in bright welcome as he descended into the vale.

He hoped he would not be spotted, stopped and welcomed. He had found it difficult to explain why he had left Candleton some months after the burning of the cathedral. He would find it harder still explaining his return.

He had not remained to rebuild and reestablish his church. And since leaving Candleton—to widen his search for answers to the church’s destruction, and to his very presence still on this corporeal plane—Venn had heard that his surviving colleagues had dispersed to other parishes, and that most of his former congregation had joined instead the church of the Anglican vicar, Reverend Trendle. Venn suspected the conversion had as much to do with superstitious fear as with practicality. Reverend Trendle’s much humbler church lay further along the same straight path Venn’s more ostentatious church had rested upon, and despite their theological divide, Venn hoped that no demon or Old Shock ever visited its fury upon that place of worship, too.

Along the road, Venn came upon an elderly farmer with a sun-burnished face and asked him where he might find a sheep owner named Brook, whom Venn himself did not recall from his congregation. The farmer looked at Venn a bit warily. Venn had pulled his greatcoat around his collar to disguise his priestly garb somewhat, and had removed his strange tinted glasses by which he might be recognized. He held the jar under the flap of his coat to keep it from view, but the shape was conspicuous and suspicious. Nevertheless, he received his directions, thanked the man—who fortunately did not recognize him, though he himself looked familiar to Venn—and proceeded on.

Venn might have seen this Brook about in the past, as well. Despite his vocation, however, he had always been of a solitary leaning, even wondering at times if he would have been a better monk than priest. Some in his congregation, he had heard, had found him a bit aloof. Fortunately, fellow priests like Father Lodge and especially the young Irish priest, Father Dewy, had been more approachable, or else the townsfolk might have joined Reverend Trendle’s parish much sooner.

Now, on his way to Brook’s little farm at the opposite end of the town, Venn was already moving along the so-called straight path that would take him, before that, past the ruins of his church. He had dimly spied it from the lip of the vale earlier. Even collapsed as it was, resembling from the distance a vast pagan burial cairn, it could not be ignored.

He had wanted to avoid the ruins. Had he not already spent the first months after the fire visiting them daily, each time hoping to uncover some clue or glean some answers about the cause for the tragedy, about the reason he was trapped here between the worlds of the living and the dead? Damned in this walking purgatory?

But it was inevitable, he knew. He was drawn magnetically to the ruins along this fairy path which ran right through the town, as though the town had grown around its spinal column.

As if to put off the homecoming just a few moments longer, Venn stopped in the road to look at a series of four great, lichen-spotted stones that rested just off to his left. These standing stones, called the Four Sisters by the locals, were said to lie at the nexus point of a number of fairy paths. The townsfolk had long related how these stones could roll themselves at night to a little nearby pond to quench their thirst, before they rolled themselves back to their spot by the road before dawn. Some had even claimed to see the matted tracks they left in the grass in their wake.

Briefly, Venn donned his spectacles again, to study the rounded stones.

He saw no fairies, no spirits hiding amongst them, no mysterious signs marked on their pitted surfaces. He slipped the specs away once more, and resumed his journey toward the farm where the head he carried under his arm had originated.

“Come, Baphomet,” he whispered to it, referring to the horned head, possibly of an animal, said to be worshiped in secret by the Templars—who were later persecuted, and executed, for their supposed blasphemies.