Communion, Chapter 8

Here's the next installment of The Communion of the Saint. Back in the so-called “real world.”

If you prefer to listen, you can hear an audio version of the book at podiobooks.com. Also free.

Chapter 8

     

      “The shy Dr. Griffin.” The editor of the Hertfordshire Advertiser leaned back in his chair. Florid and fat, he had an unruly shock of once-blond hair, now yellowish white, that stood up in all directions. “I wondered when you might appear.”

      “Shy?” I smiled, doing my best to charm him. Two weeks had passed since my experience with Alban. No one knew, except Christina, and I wanted to keep it that way. I felt as if I’d been caught doing something shameful. I’d written the manuscript I carried in an attempt to exorcise the voice—which had been remarkably silent since then—but I’d been careful to do it in third person, past tense, as if I’d learned about Alban’s murder from reading books.

      “Let’s not fence with one another.” Simon Bluetooth regarded me with tiny azure eyes that hid behind pudgy cheeks—a Viking gone to seed. He ruled his kingdom from behind a gigantic partners’ desk, almost as massive as himself. Scraps of paper lay sown across the glass-topped surface like dragon’s teeth, seed for the germination of a story.

      “You are here in hope of developing a relationship with me, and through me, the paper, so that you can print the drivel generated by the Communion of the Saint. I, on the other hand, have as my sole reason for existence the purpose of selling newspapers and thereby advertising. Lady Phelps—Leslie, to her friends and to those she wants to use—has already made arrangements to which I’ve given my tentative assent. I emphasize, you’ll note, the word ‘tentative.’ Can you write?”

      I slid ten stapled pieces of paper across the desk. He picked them up and began to read. I fidgeted. He picked up a blue pencil—so editors, at least this one, actually used them—and started making notes on my manuscript. I fidgeted some more; I hate waiting for evaluation.

      “Don’t staple it.” He tore the top left corners off my sheets, but kept reading. He grunted, noted, winced, smiled, concentrated, thought, looked away, wrote in the margin, and turned over sheet by sheet.

      “It’ll do,” he announced. “I’ll run it tomorrow, provided you give me an interview. And take this back and correct it as I’ve shown you. It’s bullshit, but it’s bloody intriguing bullshit.”

      His accent made the expletives incongruous. After a few weeks, I was starting to hear differences in inflection and tone. Leslie Phelps, except when caught unawares, sounded like the queen, Tom Dorcas like a sincere BBC announcer. Simon Bluetooth liked words and knew how to use them to effect. His accent changed according to his mood.

      “How did you come up with the detail?”

      “Imaginative reconstruction,” I lied.

      “More bullshit, but useful. Who knows where talent comes from? I see little enough of the bloody stuff on this job.” He tossed the loose pages back across the expanse of his desk. “The deadline is half three today. Meet me back here and we’ll get the interview out of the way.”

      Unwilling to give him the satisfaction of looking through the marked-up sheets in his presence, I stuffed them back into their folder.

      “Bring that back with you—on a disk, please, it will save some time.”

      The rewrite was inconsequential—mostly tightening and rearranging. My new editor apparently hated adverbs.

      When I returned for my interview, Leslie was in the office with Simon Bluetooth, seated at the side of the partners desk.

      “You were to have shown it to me.” Leslie sounded even more like the queen. She was dressed in a charcoal business suit and ivory blouse. “A simple courtesy toward your employer would have been appreciated.”

      Oops. I was used to working solo. This would take practice.

      “You’re right,” I answered. “I’m afraid I simply didn’t think—”

      Out of Leslie’s field of view, Simon shrugged and rolled his eyes.

      “Let me see it now.” She held out an imperious hand for the manuscript. I gave up the envelope containing the pages and diskette.

      For the second time in the day, I endured while someone read my work in front of me. I felt like a school girl hauled to the principal’s office.

      “Couldn’t you make it more—I don’t know—uplifting?” Leslie tapped her forefinger against the pages. The nail threatened to tear through the sheet. “It’s so...bloody. And why not tell it through the eyes of Saint Alban—why must it be the executioner? Alban is, after all, the saint here. It ought to be his story. This—this person—is so distasteful.”

      “It must be,” I answered, giving in to impulse, “because I’m an American. You know how fascinated we are with violence.”

      “That’s probably it,” Leslie said. I didn’t know whether sarcasm was lost on her, or whether she just didn’t care. “It will have to do, I suppose. It does rather ‘grab’ one, and the plebs will like that. Still, I’d much rather you show your work to me, before you bring it to Simon here. So that we’re all reading from the same page.”

      She gathered her purse and, so help me, her gloves. “Run it, Simon. But let’s make her a little less bloodthirsty in the interview.”

      Simon watched her march from his office and into the elevator before speaking.

      I opened my mouth to say something catty, but he prevented me.

      “She does have a way about her,” he said. “Don’t worry, she’ll love it when it’s in print. Let’s talk about you.”

      I gave Simon a censored version of myself. This was for publication, and the old Viking was a newsman, first and foremost, not someone to trust on first meeting. We covered the basics—birth, upbringing, education, academic achievement—in a few minutes.

      “Why you?” Simon’s bluntness caught me off guard, in spite of my caution. “On the face of it, there must be two dozen English scholars who fit the qualifications. Then you show up, half Jamaican, half American, and waltz off with the job. It’s not as if—what do you Yanks call it?—affirmative action were at work here.”

      I explained about losing my job, and the academically only semi-respectable nature of the work I was called to do.

      “I can’t print that,” he said. “We need something better than its being the bottom of the barrel for both parties. More ‘uplifting,’ in Lady Phelps’ words. There has to be something about you that makes you the one.”

      “What did Leslie say?”

      “She wants me to ‘ride herd’ on you, as you Yanks say. She’s worried that you may turn out to be a mystic.”

      “Unlikely,” I answered. God knows, I didn’t want to be mystical. It was hard enough just getting through the days ordinarily, without visitations from the beyond.

      “So—why you?” I’d dodged the question, and Simon knew it. “There must be something about you that appeals to them.”

      “Naiveté?”

      “Hmm.” Simon drummed a pencil on his desk. “Partly.” The pressure of his gaze grew. I flustered.

      “I think she’s right. It takes a certain sympathy to write this stuff.” He brandished my pages. “You’ll bear watching. If you write any visionary bullshit for me, I’ll chop it to pieces.”

      I raised my right hand. “I promise.”

      Something moved in my peripheral vision. I turned in my chair, hand still upraised. A blue-white flash blinded me.

      “Need another?” the editor asked.

      “That’ll do.” A photographer rewound the film in her camera. I hadn’t even seen her come in. She slipped out the door, camera in hand.

      “That’s it?” I asked.

      “If Shelly says that it’ll do, it’ll do,” Simon answered, as if I were questioning his competence. “Now get out of here. I have a paper to publish.”

      “That’s it?” I repeated, still taken aback. “End of interview?”

      “If I need anything else, I’ll make it up. Go on. Give me the next episode next week. People have been writing this damn saint bullshit for years. Centuries. This,” he said, waving the pages again, “is the first thing I’ve seen that doesn’t reek of piety.” His eyes twinkled from underneath his pudgy brows. “Make it real. Kill a few sacred cows—it will sell papers.”

      When the next edition came out, I clipped the interview and my story—reflexively, because Papa always got a kick out of seeing his girl’s name in print. Then I stopped short. Papa was in his grave now, forever gone. There should have been somebody I could brag to besides myself.

     

American Heads Saints’ Project

         Clio Griffin is well named. The young American academic left a university position in her home country to take up residence in Saint Albans and work as the director of research for the local historical organization, the Communion of the Saint.

                  Dr. Griffin’s Christian name, Clio—not Cleopatra, she insists—is a constant reminder of her chosen field of work. Clio was the ancient muse of history, Dr. Griffin’s passion. Her surname, Griffin, also derives from myth. A griffin has the body and legs of a lion, with the head, claws and wings of an eagle.

                  But there is nothing mythical about this American scholar’s grasp of history. Lady Verulam, Leslie Phelps, president of the Communion, characterized Dr. Griffin’s scholarship as “cutting edge.”

                  “She has a way of bringing the past to life that we found quite attractive, and certainly suited to the needs of our project,” Lady Phelps stated. “Her previous work, although somewhat controversial, has just the spark that we were looking for.”

     

      The article went on at length. A color photo of me garnished the story. I avoid pictures of myself whenever I can. This one was as bad as usual; it made me look like some kind of multi-ethnic mutant. Thin, unpainted lips curved in the crooked grimace that passed for my smile. My not-quite-kinky hair looked as if I’d been caught in a hurricane. My eyes, caught by the camera, glared pale blue with a wide, wild look from a face the color of coffee with cream. I looked alarmed, trapped by the photographer’s strobe light. My upraised hand made me look as if I was being sworn in as a witness in a trial.

      I hate photographs. This one reminded me to avoid them in the future.

      When I came down for breakfast, the day the story came out, Mrs. Fern was reading the article. She was unimpressed.

      I held out an envelope with the next week’s rent. She ignored it, so I set it on the kitchen table and helped myself to a cup of tea.

      “You’re staying then?”

      “I thought so.”

      “You could have asked. I might have taken a reservation. You didn’t say.”

      “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fern. I just assumed—”

      “You seem to be quite the celebrity.”

      The voice had been leaving me alone. I felt pretty chipper, as if I were running my own show.

      “It’s just a story in the paper.”

      “I didn’t know I was housing such a famous person.”

      The tea turned sour in my mouth. I pushed the cup away.

      “What’s the matter?” I asked.

      Mrs. Fern pulled her white dressing gown more tightly around her. “Not a thing—only you won’t get a true word out of that Phelps woman. I don’t know why you put such stock in her.”

      “I don’t. She’s my employer,” I said, “that’s all.”

      “You might talk to the real people around here, before you go publishing.”

      “What are we arguing about?” I asked.

      “I’m not arguing,” Mrs. Fern said. She forced a thin smile onto her face. “But I thought you might want to know some real people—not just the swells.”

      “Swells?”

      “What you Americans call the movers and shakers. Like Lady Phelps.”

      “Leslie,” I said automatically.

      “There—you see? Any ordinary person calls her Lady Phelps, as a sign of respect. Only swells call her by her Christian name, though I’m not sure she is a Christian.”

      I wasn’t either, but hadn’t given it much thought.

      “Who do you know here, dear?”

      I rattled off the names of most of the people I’d met so far.

      “One priest, a handful of swells, and Simon. Simon’s not so bad, but he works for them.”

      I hadn’t mentioned Christina. She was different. Mrs. Fern criticized all the others I had met. I felt protective of Christina.

      “What do you want to be here?” Mrs. Fern demanded.

      “I don’t understand.”

      “It’s a simple question. What you do in this place matters. It matters to me and all the rest of us, and it matters to you. What you do here will change the rest of your life. Believe me, I know.” In her face I saw the evidence of a decision taken long ago, now regretted but still a part of her after many years.

      So much for feeling in control. I gave her the most honest answer I could.

      “I want to do the work that has been given to me to do. I want to prove to myself that I am capable. This is my chance. If I do it well, then I will be what I—”

      She stood suddenly and stripped off her white terry gown.

      “Bloody fools, that’s what we are. The two of us.”

      She was dressed to go out. I wasn’t quite sure what I had expected.

      “Come,” she ordered.

      “I can’t,” I protested. My watch showed nearly nine o’clock. “I have an appointment with the Bishop—”

      “Another swell.”

      “Maybe later—”

      “And maybe not.” She waited in the entry to the kitchen until I got up and went with her. Like me, she preferred Reeboks to leather, at least today. Jeaned and sneakered, she led the way out of the house. I followed, in my skirt and blouse. If I kept meeting more “swells,” I would need more clothes.

      She moved fast, across the street and onto the abbey green. A left turn led us toward the medieval cemetery. She stopped at a sunken spot.

      “I rather like the dead,” Mrs. Fern said. “They’re so stable.” She knelt, removed a pair of clippers from her purse, and trimmed the grass with quick, crisp snips. The act was practiced, but performed with conscious care.

      “Whose is it?” We were exposed to the eyes of passersby. Some ignored us. Others peered through the decrepit iron fence to see what we were up to. I shifted from foot to foot, wishing for invisibility and not getting it.

      “Goodness, I wouldn’t know.” The sound of her clippers fluttered above the nearby street’s traffic. “Some old monk, long dead, about whom no one cares any more.”

      “Except you.” I knelt at her side, close enough to smell the faint sachet that clung to her, a delicate hint of violets.

      “And a few others.”

      A voice sounded low and angry behind me. “See now, what are you doing here?”

      I turned and looked up: Sexton.

      Mrs. Fern’s clippers didn’t pause. “Leave her alone, Sexton.”

      His stare mesmerized me. I wanted to stand, but his eyes, bright with threat, locked me in place, one knee on the ground, my other foot poised to lift me up.

      Mrs. Fern kept clipping the grass, apparently unconcerned.

      I wasn’t so blithe as she. The muscles in my leg trembled.

      “You were foolish and wrong. Now you must suffer the consequences.” Mrs. Fern’s clippers kept moving.

      Sexton’s face betrayed a surprising hurt. “I am not stupid, Mrs. Fern. I only seem that way because I’m slow.”

      “Slow to listen, sometimes, I think, but not to understand. There’s too much pretense in your manner, Sexton.” She rose and stood between me and the big man. “No hurt’s to come to her. Do you understand?”

      He nodded like an ox, then lumbered away.

      “He’s not nearly so frightening as he appears.” Mrs. Fern knelt and the sound of her clippers resumed.

      “Good.” I didn’t believe her. I was still frozen in my half-kneeling squat. My leg ached from tension. Sexton moved out of sight around a flying buttress; his slowness might be deceptive, a pretense like his apparent mental dullness. If nothing else, he was cunning.

      “I’ve never done anything to him. Why is he like that?” I asked, but I knew at least part of the answer. A bloody wog, as Sexton had called me at our first meeting, is what some Brits call a dark-skinned foreigner. The nearest American equivalent is nigger.

      “You’re a stranger, dear one. Caution is only prudent. Everyone looks askance at a new person; we don’t know you.”

      We know you.

      The voice had never troubled me while others were present. I ignored its existence and concentrated on reality. Mrs. Fern’s clippers clicked; shards of grass fell to earth. The bleeding ends of the stalks lifted the almost-sneezing smell of fresh-cut grass to my nose. Traffic still rumbled by on the far side of the graveyard wall. The cool, morning air glowed with clarity in this archive of ancient death.

      I caressed the brooch, hidden in my pocket. Even through the denim it felt rough and pitted. As long as it stayed that way, I remained in the present, where I very much wanted to be.

      “Where are the markers?” I asked.

      “Oh, long gone to dust, or stolen.” Mrs. Fern’s busy hands never paused. “Some of them went to be building stones, when the abbey was broken up. Cromwell’s troops overturned what was left, broke them down to pebbles. Time did the rest.”

      She spoke about the Puritan revolution as if it were yesterday; it had been in the 1640s. To Mrs. Fern the breakup of the monasteries was an event in memory; it had happened in 1539. I worked hard to bring the past into the present, but for her, it had never left.

      She sat back on her haunches. “There! That’s for today.”

      “Today?”

      “I do a little each morning. It keeps the task from being too daunting. There’s a company of men that mow the main part; I just keep the graves neat. It wouldn’t do to have weed whackers snapping at the dead. Better to do it by hand.”

      She put her clippers away in her huge black leather purse and stood. “Shall we?”

      “Shall we what?”

      “Continue the tour. Let’s go!” She brushed a few blades of grass from her hands and set off with a business-like stride. I followed as we circled the outside of the cathedral.

      Mrs. Fern lectured like a tour guide as we traversed the south side of the grounds. “The abbey is over five hundred feet long, from the east window, behind the altar, to the west door of the nave.” She rattled off the vital statistics of the building, pointing to the old reused Roman bricks that formed the structure; she complained about some of the restoration work performed over a century before, as if she were talking about something that had just been finished last month, as if changes were still possible.

      Pointing at a course of stone, she said, “You can see—it’s the wrong color, and the shape of the stones is not what it ought to be.”

      Finally, we reached the western end of the nave, having come more than halfway around the abbey from the old grave yard. She heaved open the massive door. I had been in the church before, but still it took me by surprise.

      Light and shadow dappled the tourists who shuffled through the building. The sightseers’ cameras clicked, their flashbulbs sparkled inadequately. Their children’s feet pounded the stone as if the floor itself were an amusement ride. Noise echoed from the walls and ceiling. We had entered a theme park, a Disneyland of the past.

      I began to understand something about Sexton.

      “This way.” Mrs. Fern led me up the southern aisle of the nave toward the transept. We dodged the tourists’ backpacks and strollers, stepped around their unruly children.

      “They’ll bring in roller skates, next.” Mrs. Fern removed a key from her purse and fit it into a narrow door to the south of the crossing, beyond the bookstall. As it closed behind us, the noise fell off.

      “This is the slype,” she announced.

      She unlocked another narrow door and stood aside for me.

      “The chapter house,” she announced in a whisper. The building was new, put up in the nineteen-eighties, modern brick as opposed to the flatter Roman bricks and the harsh flint of the older buildings. It stood on the site of the medieval chapter house. It housed a cafeteria, a library, and a series of modernistic wooden tables. At the far window stood a prie-dieu, which was tenanted by a black-clothed man, his head bent. I cleared my throat. He turned, surprise opening his face.

      Father Tom.

      “How did you get in here?”

      “Mrs. Fern was showing me around.”

      “Who?”

      “Mrs. Fer—” I looked back toward the slype. Jane Fern’s retreating form slipped through the door at the far end. Father Tom couldn’t see her, I was sure. “She was just here,” I explained lamely. Why had she done this?

      Anger clouded his face. “How did you get here? Tourists aren’t supposed to—“

      “Mrs. Fern—like I said—”

      Grotesques grinned down at us from the junction of ceiling and walls, their faces frozen in stone. A figure caught my eye—a cleric, mouth open, tongue protruding, forever haranguing an absent congregation of sinners.

      “The Bishop’s been called away, to Canterbury.” Father Tom’s shoulders slumped, then he smiled, like a little boy appealing for mercy. “He ordered me to meet with you, in his stead. I thought I was praying, but now that you’ve appeared, I find I was avoiding you.”

      Another grotesque swam into my field of view. I recognized this one—the former archbishop of Canterbury, Runcie, stared at me from the corner of his eyes, wearing heavy-framed glasses.

       “What did you pray for?”

      “Vision. Knowledge.” Father Tom shrugged. “The usual mystical stuff.”

      “It’s overrated.” The words popped out of me before I could censor them.

      “Easy for you to say.”

      “Not easy to know. That’s the trouble.” I knelt at the prie-dieu. It felt strange, humbling. I’m not a humble person. I don’t like feeling small and insignificant. The kneeler was uncushioned. My kneecaps grated against the bones within.

      “Do you pray?” Father Tom asked.

      “I don’t have the talent for it.”

      “Try.”

      I shook my head, but stayed put, trying humility on for size, letting the hard wooden kneeler press on the bones within. I shut my eyes, in spite of Father Tom’s presence behind me.

      When I opened them, Alban stood before me, grinning like a gargoyle.

      “Welcome back,” he said. “Let’s take another ride.”

Communion, Chapter 7

Here's the next installment of The Communion of the Saint. Things are getting serious now.

If you prefer to listen, you can hear an audio version of the book at podiobooks.com. Also free.

Chapter 7

     

      The brooch’s pin, though long oxidized away, was back in place as it once had been. The thin, soft metal rod bent slightly as I took the brooch in my trembling hand.

      This couldn’t be happening.

      I ran down to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator; the light inside came on. I flicked the wall switch; the overhead fixture glowed. When I turned the tap, water ran into the sink.

      Out back, the steps now led down to a small, overgrown clearing filled with brush and tall, untrimmed grasses.

      I ran upstairs again. Everything was as I had left it a moment before. I put down the brooch, lifted the phone, and dialed the number Leslie had left me.

      “Why won’t you believe?” It was the voice in the ear piece, the voice I’d heard in the chanting, the voice that sent me to find the brooch, the voice that sent me to Mrs. Fern’s.

      I slammed down the receiver and turned. A young man, barely old enough to shave, stood before me. I let out a shriek. He wore a tunic, dirty white, with brown streaks of dried blood around the neck.

      “Now you want more proof,” he said. It was the same voice.

      I ran down the stairs again, back to the kitchen. He followed. His sandals slapped on the oak steps, then the bare floor until he reached me.

      “Will you ever have enough?” he asked. His hair was short, curly, and brown, to match his eyes. They looked ordinary, human, young.

      Mama had lost it, near the end. She talked to people who weren’t there, dead people that she should only remember. Daddy had been more tolerant than I.

      “She isn’t hurting anyone,” he told me, over and over. “Why don’t you leave her be?”

      But I couldn’t bear her being crazy, and Papa was old, too, and didn’t understand me. She didn’t recognize either of us, except on the rare good days. She spent most of her time talking to the dead.

      “But it’s not real!” I objected.

      “For her, reality is pretty awful,” Papa explained, but I wasn’t hearing any of it, then. “She’s old, she feels bad, and she’s dying. She knows all that. If you love her, you’ll let her be.”

      I loved her, but I hated her going away before she had to. I hated her flight from reality. Reality was where I lived.

      “This is not real!” I complained to the ghost.

      He shrugged and extended his hand, beckoning. “Come outside. I don’t see how you can stand to be all cooped up in here.”

      I backed away from his outstretched hand and fetched up, hard, against the refrigerator, and huddled myself to its cool, domestic solidity. The motor kicked in as I clutched the machine.

      “I won’t hurt you. Come out. I want to show you something.”

      If I went outside, anything might happen. Here, at least, some of the things were familiar, known. I tried another argument.

      “You’re not real—it’s a crazy dream, a hallucination.”

      He moved closer. I shrank back against the ‘fridge, afraid he would try to grab me, my heart thudding, sweat jumping out from my skin, but he slipped past me and disappeared into the hall. I heard his sandals on the stairs, up, then footfalls soft overhead. I dashed for the door and actually opened it before I stopped to think. To get away from him I would have to leave the house, and I couldn’t.

      When he came back, I stood locked in an agony of indecision, panting with frustration, damned if I did and damned if I didn’t.

      “You forgot this.” He held the brooch out to me. It glowed in his hand. “Take it.”

      I hesitated, afraid.

      “Why is all this happening?” I demanded.

      “God knows,” came the answer, “but he’s not telling.” He laughed, low in the back of his throat. It wasn’t a laugh I could have imagined from this slender boy. He looked too young.

      He tossed the brooch to me. I squawked in fear and caught it after a hurried fit of juggling. “You could have broken it,” I complained. “It’s old”

      “Is it? Let’s go.”

      I looked outside. The wicker furniture I should have seen, painted white, with floral cushions, was gone. The overgrown meadow confronted me. I leaned forward, to peer around the door.

      He pushed me.

      I whirled, falling, and managed to grab his hand. We fell down the wooden steps together, bumping and tumbling over each other. I scrambled to my feet and regained the steps.

      “You’re quick.” He lay on his back, propped on his elbows, and laughed his throaty laugh at me.

      My hands clutched the wood of the door frame for reassurance. “Where are we?”

      “Just where you were before, only somewhat earlier. I’ve been sent to you.”

      “By whom?”

      “Just sent.”

      “Where is everything else?”

      “Where you left it. When you lose something, where does it go?”

      “It doesn’t go anywhere. You just don’t remember.”

      “Exactly.”

      “This is crazy. Lunatic. I ought to be locked up. You’re a hallucination, and what’s worse, I’m talking to you as if you were real.”

      He glanced at the sun. The light struck him full in the face, and he glowed, like my brooch. I still clutched it, despite my tumble.

      “We need to go,” he said. “I’ve lost track of time. I’ve gotten used to not thinking about it, and now I’m late.”

      I sat on the top step, folded my legs underneath me, and shut down—eyes, mouth, ears and mind. For days now, people and events had pushed me in one direction or another. It was time to stop. I still couldn’t explain the brooch I clutched in my hand. I couldn’t explain the voice, now embodied, that continued to coax me deeper into whatever it planned for me. I couldn’t explain the obsession and series of coincidences that had brought me far from home, but I could stop.

      The young man’s voice now came from a distance. He still tried to persuade me, but I heard him as a bird chattering in a faraway tree, then he fell silent.

      When I opened my eyes, I would be back in my office, I’d shake the cobwebs of dream from my mind, and get to work. My breathing slowed. The fear receded. The sweat that had gathered on my forehead dried.

      I opened my eyes, but I was still at the edge of the small rough meadow. Disappointed, I reached to open the door.

      It didn’t budge.

      I leapt back down to the ground and found a rock. I heaved it through the glass, ran back up, and reached through the new opening in the door. The bolt was already open. I twisted at the knob and pulled at the door. Again. Another time. Nothing. The house resisted, refused me entrance. I collapsed on the steps and cried in frustration.

      Voices intruded. A quick babble in the distance deepened as it approached, then passed me by. It drew me out of my funk. Wherever I was, something was happening. I could not resist the pull. I followed.

      Then I was running. My feet slapped hard on the turf, then the shadow of the woods swallowed me, but I kept running, pulled toward the mob ahead. I caught up with them from behind.

      We burst into another clearing. I was somehow at the front of the crowd. My left hand held a thick, fibrous rope. I jogged, pulling my prisoner along. My right hand held a sword—the gladius of a Roman soldier. My hands were huge and rough—a man’s fist curled around the handle of my sword. Black hair grew out of the back of my hand and up along my heavily muscled, white-skinned arm. An alien weight flopped between my legs, a heaviness that I had never felt before. My chest was flat with muscle, wrapped in leather armor that squeaked with every movement.

      My prisoner was the young man, the young man with the voice that had been talking to me for days.

      The meadow was our destination. We trampled a carpet of wildflowers, their juices staining the earth with sweet perfume. The odor overwhelmed the rank smell of the hundred or so people who milled about.

      In the middle of the clearing, a single ash tree grew.

      The young man looked up at me. His eyes watered. Sweat ran down his face.

      “Pay attention,” he whispered. “You’ll learn something.”

      An official barked an order. We stopped under the shade of the ash. The crowd milled around the center of the clearing, jostling each other for a good view. Shadow dappled us from the branches above.

      I couldn’t pay attention to all that was happening. I was worried about my body—where had it gone? Why was I inhabiting another, decidedly male, human form?

      “Bring the prisoner forward.”

      The guard holding the young man’s opposite arm dragged us to the official, a man in his forties, balding, with a grizzled fringe of hair around his skull. His nostrils flared in time with his breath. His jaw quivered with anger. He wore a tunic edged with gold thread and stained with sweat.

      I glanced past my young man to the other guard. He shifted from one foot to the other and spent more time with his eyes on our prisoner than on the magistrate.

      “Alban,” proclaimed the latter, “you are accused of atheism and impiety, and of harboring a fugitive from the emperor’s justice.”

      He was talking to my young man.

      The other guard, in his late teens like the one I now knew as Alban, kept his eyes on our prisoner, with no regard to the official in front of us. Those eyes burned with an intensity I had never seen before. Something mattered to the seer behind those eyes, unremarkable in themselves, a dusty brown peering out from black, Mediterranean brows. Like me, he wore leather armor. A gladius hung from his waist. In his free hand he carried a longer sword, the length of a baseball bat. The blade glittered silvery-gold in the afternoon sun.

      The official leaned closer to Alban. His eyes brimmed with unshed tears. The stubble of a day’s growth of whiskers roughened his lined face.

      “Give this thing up,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to kill you. Your father and I—”

      “I can not,” Alban said. “I can not. You do me a favor by killing me, uncle.”

      “What favor?” The official roared in frustration. “Aren’t you afraid?”

      “Yes.”

      “Then give it up. Your father’s ghost will never forgive me.”

      “But I do.” Alban looked up to the sky, leading my gaze. Through the branches, it was as blue and clear overhead as sapphire. “I am ready.”

      The magistrate raised his hand. The crowd jeered. Alban knelt to receive the sword. I stepped back, to be out of the range of the stroke, but held on to my rope.

      The other soldier was to be the executioner. He moved to stand over Alban. The long sword rose against the blue sky.

      The intake of a hundred breaths came from the mob, then silence. The sword trembled in the broken sunlight. The young soldier’s muscles tightened; the sinews of his hands and forearms bunched up from the bone.

      He flung the long blade far into the meadow, over the heads of the witnesses. Light flashed as the shining blade tumbled through the air, end over end. Finally, it fell beyond them, among the wildflowers.

      Alban released a long sigh.

      “Get the fucking sword,” the official screamed. “Go get it!”

      It took a moment to realize that he was talking to me. I ran through the crowd. The blade stood upright, its point buried in the earth. It made a soft, gritty sound when I drew it from the soil. The juices of the flowers melted over the blade. I ran back to the tree.

      “Kill them both.” The official wiped his face with both hands. “Get it over with.”

      Both young men knelt before me. I didn’t want to do this thing, but my arms moved, my feet planted.

      “Father, forgive them—”

      Alban never finished what he meant to say.

      The blood was awful. It gouted from the stump of his neck, splashing over me, the trembling guard, even the official.

      “Hurry!” the magistrate shouted.

      I stepped to the young man. Sweat, blood and tears dripped from him. “Hurry,” he hissed from between clenched teeth, “before I shit myself.”

      I struck off his head, too. The strength it took surprised me even more than the blood had, and God knows there was enough of that.

      Both heads lay among the trampled flowers. The crowd released its breath and disappeared, giving way to background. The magistrate and the guard vanished likewise. I must have been in shock. The next thing I knew, Alban’s voice was in my ear and I was back in my own body, no longer a hairy-armed Roman soldier, but myself.

      “Oh, God, forgive me—I didn’t mean to—” Revulsion flushed through me. I had the clearest memory, down to the metallic smell of blood, of performing the murder. I scraped at my skin, but the splashes of blood disappeared along with the other people. Alban and I were alone in the clearing, under a single ash tree.

      The shade still covered us from the heat of the sun. The smell of blood had disappeared. His head was back on his shoulders.

      “Oh, God, I’m confused,” I said.

      “You’re going to have to watch that tendency toward understatement.” He grinned like a wild man. The smile split his young, unlined face. He looked even younger—sixteen, maybe fifteen.

      He knelt again in a cluster of wildflowers and bent his head to drink in their smell.

     

* * *

     

      I came back to myself in a wicker chair, under bright sunshine. It was like waking from a dream—not a nightmare, precisely, because I didn’t feel panic, not at first. The memory of the double execution was vivid, as strong as the fear that made my heart thump in my breast and drove me through the back door of the cottage.

      The door’s window was unbroken, but I remembered smashing through it. The latch turned easily in my hand. I hurried through the house to the front door. Outside, the sleepy street was back in all its everyday-ness. At a distance, traffic hummed through the town.

      From upstairs, the abbey’s spire showed through smog that had migrated from London. The ancient, corroded brooch was still where I had left it, next to the quietly humming computer. I was back.

      But what was I back from? I desperately wanted to talk to someone, but whom could I trust? I couldn’t just walk up to my employer’s door and confess to a mental breakdown. Or to a vision that it was impossible for me to have.

      While I was staring out the window, a large, black taxi cab pulled up to the house. The driver got out first, opened the back door, and helped a heavyset woman emerge. He steadied her for a moment before she handed him the fare. He waited while she lumbered up the short flight of steps and out of sight.

      My doorbell rang.

      Please, I prayed, though I didn’t know to what, please, let this be real.

      My feet slapped against the bare oak of the stairway. I opened the front door.

      The woman was even larger than I had thought. Her skin was pale, with an unhealthy flush in the cheeks. She was stuffed like a sausage. “May I help you?” I asked.

      She studied me even more closely than I was looking at her. Her eyes moved over me, slipping through my pretense of normality.

      “I am Christina—of Markyate,” she said, as if in explanation. Her voice was high, yet somehow authoritative. A slight wheeze thinned her speech.

      I had heard of Markyate. It had been a tiny village near Saint Albans in the Middle Ages. A local hermitess, also a Christina, had lived there. A wave of caution swirled inside me. She might be crazier than I.

      “Please, come in.” I stood back from the door and led her into the parlor, where the magazines were still perfectly fanned on the coffee table. “I’m Clio Griffin.”

      She ignored my gesture toward the couch and perched daintily, in spite of her bulk, on a stiff wingback chair. I settled on the edge of its mate.

      “So it’s to be you.”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “You are not at all what was expected.” Christina had to pause in mid-phrase to catch her breath. “Still, what’s done is done, and there’s no use worrying.” She studied me, as a zoologist studies a creature under her microscope.

      “I’m sorry, I—”

      She shushed me and closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. I could only sit there, dumbfounded.

      “I apologize,” Christina said. “I have been rebuked. You are the one. Again, I apologize.”

      Then she told me what I had just been through. I do not often lack for something to say, but when her recital was over, I was speechless. Thoughts raced through my mind. No one could know what I’d seen and felt this morning. None of it could be happening anyway.

      Christina must have read my mind. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth...’” she quoted. “You would do well to accustom yourself to the idea.”

      “How do you—” I stopped, wondering just what my question for Christina was.

      “Why, dear one, don’t you know?”

      I shook my head. “I hardly know my name, today.” It came out in a whisper. I was more frightened than I had let on even to myself.

      “I know just what you mean. It came on me strangely, too. And I was even more of a child of reason than you; my mother was a Victorian lady, and I was her daughter, in mind as well as in body. Science, reason—these were all the world in the days of my childhood.”

      Christina paused for breath and inhaled the scent of the house.

      “Do I smell an open tin of butter biscuits?” She frowned. “It’s dreadfully rude of me to ask, I know, but I must keep this old body fully fueled.” She touched her ample stomach and smiled. “It will be the death of me some day, I imagine. The medical profession would have us all live forever, if they could just whip this nasty aging business. Can you think of anything more ghastly than never dying, always going on, growing older and older, more and more filled with experience? It won’t do. I look forward to dying almost as much as I look forward to eating, which, you can see, is my besetting temptation.”

      “The cookies are upstairs in my office. I’ll be right back.”

      Christina bounced to her feet; the flesh on her arms jiggled. “May I see where you intend to work?”

      “It’s up the stairs,” I warned.

      “Oh, I don’t mind. It’s just a little huffing and puffing.”

      Christina seemed immune to the discomforts of her weight. She followed me up the stairs, even hurrying the pace slightly in her eagerness. She panted, her face turned red, and she grinned in anticipation.

      “Splendid!” she exclaimed on entering my office. “They’ve done it right, then. Trust Leslie Phelps.” The tin of biscuits found its way into her hand as if it sought her out, rather than the other way around. She wandered the room, and touched each piece of electronic equipment, each piece of furniture. She reminded me of an old lady I’d known who walked around my childhood neighborhood, touching things, patting them, as if to reassure either them or herself that everything was okay. The old lady of my girlhood had mainly specialized in trees and telephone poles, at least while outdoors, but Christina bestowed her caresses more widely.

      “You simply must get to work, doctor. I know you feel emo-tionally wrung out, and find the whole business quite unbelievable. That’s exactly why you must get it down on paper. You are being given these insights so that they can be shared. Of that I am quite certain. And the writing will fix it in your memory, too.” She held out the tin. “Biscuit? They’re quite good.” A film of butterfat glistened on her lips; a stray crumb clung to the corner of her mouth. I must have made some kind of gesture, for she excused herself and brushed it away immediately.

      “If you pretend not to know what you know—” Her hand hovered over my brooch, then touched it, ever so gently. “—if you refuse the gift, you won’t be scoring any points in heaven.”

      I hadn’t expected a sports metaphor from her.

      “I don’t believe in—”

      “Sshh!” Christina raised a buttery finger to her lips. “Don’t hurry to declare your unbelief. Say rather, I don’t know. Or better, say, Surprise me, God. And write it down.”

     

* * *

     

      The proposition: The saint was talking to me.

      The counter-proposition: I was talking to myself.

      I was alone, days later, sitting in my office, trying to make some sense out of the mass of paper lying on my desk, when Alban came back.

      That is not true, he reminded me. And he was right. I had been staring off into space, dreading the mind-numbing necessity of trying to make some sense out of what had happened, what I was doing there. Avoiding the issue.

      Satisfied? I asked.

      For now.

      Thanks.

      Honesty has its perils. I never knew self-deception held such pleasure, until deprived of it.

      You’re wasting time, he said.

      You should have plenty of that.

      But you might not.

      Thanks for the reminder.

      Silence.

      I couldn’t see him. He didn’t sit in the visitor’s chair and nibble at the butter biscuits, like Christina. But I could “hear” his voice as clearly as Joan d’Arc could hear hers.

      Those poor, deluded people, I thought—schizophrenics all, who in their madness turned to the most powerful myth of their time for explanation—Francis, running naked through the town square in front of his parents’ home, giving his clothing to the poor; Paul, racked with guilt on the road to Damascus; poor, sad Maria Goretti, wrestling with her libido.

      And now, me. It could have been worse. Luther had his visions on the toilet. At least Alban comes at more seemly times. What I want had nothing to do with it.

      A soft tsk-tsk emanated from the neighborhood of the visitor’s chair, a sound impossible to write down, made by the clicking of the tongue against the palate, and therefore impossible for an incorporeal spirit.

      He was right. What I wanted had everything to do with it. I wanted to understand. I wanted it—the gigantic, incomprehensible IT—to make some kind of human sense. I wanted the gaps filled in. I wanted the story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like Eve, I wanted to understand.

      Impossible, I knew. Human pictures are fragmentary, distorted, broken. No one ever understands. IT never makes sense. Failure is inevitable

      But one must try.