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“Whether there’s more to the world than meets the eye? Of course there is, one way or another. People create poetry and mustard gas. We invent gods and monsters and gods that might as well be monsters. We act with extraordinary grace and unfathomable cruelty. We’re so terribly intelligent, and dreadfully easy to fool. I’m ready to believe you mesmerised me on Camlet Moat; I’ve seen odder things done. I don’t need to believe in mystical hexagrams to explain a tree bursting into flame—”
He didn’t have much to smile about himself; it struck him now that Glyde seemed not to find much joy in the world either.
It made him touchable, or it made Saul want to touch him.
Wines, spirits, and cryptic disappearances.”
“I can’t tell you Major Peabody is harmless, or if he intends ill, or if he is doing ill without intending it. I don’t know what he’s doing, or if it’s for anyone but himself. I will not lie to you: I am concerned.
“Plenty of things, one way and another. It never stops, does it? ‘It isn’t the fighting that fucks you up—’” “‘It’s the fucking fucking around,’”
I believe that you do not want to do harm; I shan’t let you be tricked into it.
he hated the small scarred part of his mind that pointed out, He knows your story. He knows what will bring you to your knees. If he wanted to manipulate you, how better?
“Another villainy,”
“Do you always speak in double talk?” “Habitually. It’s terribly vulgar to say what one means.”
He wanted it to be kindness.
He wanted his belief back. He wanted to know the things he’d thought he had—love, liking, companionship, and trust—could be real.
constitutionally incapable of giving a direct answer,
“You’ve had a hell of a time, haven’t you?” “Others worse,” Saul managed. “That is the most specious form of consolation possible. One can always find someone who has it worse. If I’m having my fingernails torn out with pincers, it is unhelpful to observe that my neighbour has been hanged, drawn, and quartered.”
“Well, yes. But if one has brought one’s trouble on oneself—” “You had your nature turned against you,”
“The War took too many decent people. I find myself disinclined to let it take any more.”
i do love a trashfire w a soft heart
wanting made you vulnerable, and he was afraid to be vulnerable again.
It was eccentricity, or a game—or it was meaningful, which made it doubly dangerous.
Saul had been unwillingly caught up in the secret side of the War; he had no desire to find himsel...
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To do no more harm, to risk no more hurt.
It didn’t make him happy. It hurt like hell, like the agony of blood returning to a long-numbed limb, but, Saul realised, the painful prospect of hoping again was better than the dull knowledge he never would.
It was a summary of the various accounts of Geoffrey de Mandeville’s twelfth-century death and burial, on which no two chroniclers seemed able to agree. His corpse had been gibbetted in Temple Church orchard, or he’d hidden in a tree that had broken and dropped him into a sacred well, or he’d simply been killed in battle up near Ramsey Abbey in Cambridgeshire. The litany of possible dooms ran through Saul’s head, adapting itself to the tune of ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor’. Hanging off a tree in a leaden coffin; drowned in a well with a tree grown over it; arrow to the eye and
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You could see for miles, because there was damn all to see. The skies were huge.
Roestock House,
Instead they discussed local history, and folklore, and how the two intertwined
the Devil in Human Form,”
a monster of the Fens, a Grendel.
“The Anarchy, then, when King Stephen and Empress Matilda battled for supremacy. The old men who tell the tale place it in ‘days gone by’, or ‘the Dark Ages’. They will all tell you that this was ‘when God and his angels slept’; that phrase has become as much part of the language of this tale as Once upon a time. But it might be the first century, or the fifth, or the fifteenth for all they know. They speak only of a King and a Queen fighting over England’s crown; and some say that the battle was between King Arthur and his sorceress sister Morgan le Fay.”
“During the wars of the King and Queen, when God and his angels slept, there lived a baron named Geoffrey Man-Devil, for he was the devil in human form. He turned his coat from King to Queen and Queen to King again as the fortunes of war ebbed and flowed between them, and at each turning, the treacherous baron was rewarded. Geoffrey became lord of three counties, and even Master of London. “But the people loathed him for his cruelty and arrogance, and at last his pride became too much for the King. He was arrested and given a choice: execution, or giving up his lands and his castles—which
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“As Geoffrey was more devil than man, so his hordes became monstrous in their cruelty and appearance. They were beasts of the Fens, poised between man and animal, land and water. They ravaged the land so that not an ox could plough, a man dig, or a woman spin her wool in safety for thirty miles around. The people cried out for help, but no army could make its way through the watery Fens to defeat Geoffrey’s evil. “At last the King decreed that a great castle should be raised at Burwell, and garrisoned against Geoffrey’s monstrous horde. Geoffrey in his pride attacked the castle, holding that
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“As Geoffrey lay dying, a party of holy knights came by, wearing the red crosses of their order. They were knights of London, and some say they had been set to kill the oathbreaker. They laid a surplice on Geoffrey, claiming him for their order, and took his body back in solemn procession to London. There they encased him in a shroud of lead and suspended him from a tree in the orchard of London’s ancient Temple, for they dared not bury a body whose soul the Church had refused. And there we leave him, whether buried or not buried, damned or saved, I do not know; I cannot tell.”
His mind was full of pictures, of medieval knights and fur-draggled man-beasts dripping with slime, statues that hid their faces and walls that bled, and the bleak endlessness of the untamed fens.
and the lights went out. Every light.
DUM DUM DUUUUUUUUUUM
Something outside chuckled.
THAT IS A CONCERN
Outside, Saul told himself. It’s outside.
“They’re on the mantelpiece,” Mr. Abchurch whispered, in quiet horror.
The smell of wet rot was unbearable.
If he lit a candle, he might see something in the room.
“What if it doesn’t come on? What if it doesn’t ever—”
The laughter came again, sweeping around them, filling the air, and at the end of it a last little noise. It was almost a giggle, and it came from right behind Saul’s ear.
AAAAAAAAAA
Saul would have liked to pray. He couldn’t even remember how it was done, but he knew, urgently, that there must be a way, and the thought brought a sudden vivid image to him: Randolph Glyde on Camlet Moat, wiping the handkerchief over his face like a sacred rite. The vibrant life of the great forest around him, the well water cool in his throat, the green and gold light through the leaves, as dappled as Glyde’s hazel eyes. He shut his own eyes in the darkness, willing the image into his mind, and told himself the wet cold on his face was the clear burn of the well water.
adam parrish so lives in this thought
Light flared, blinding in the absolute dark. There was nothing but the flame for a second, and then Saul could see.
Saul looked between his companions. He was absolutely sure they had felt the terror too, and he was all too familiar with the stiff upper lip as required response to bowel-loosening fear, but this wasn’t people putting a brave face on things.
Nobody mentioned Geoffrey de Mandeville again that night.
sunlight that streamed in to turn the church interior to a petrified forest.
It wasn’t an inspired church, because inspiration was a luxury.
Perpendicular style,
It was old, as everything here is old. Old and deep, and it came out roaring. From nothing. I should not have expected it to come from nothing.”
“The locals call it the silent watcher. I try not to look at it.”
although he bore the words of a god, but churches were a vital part of the land’s fabric, and lasting ones too. St. Mary’s had stood for at least six centuries in something like this form, with worship on this site for far longer. It was a place of sanctuary and protection, a candle against the dark.
