Until She Sleeps Read online

  “Your bell’s knackered!” Stig shouted.

  The vicar turned, startled, and waved to the boys. He offered them a jaded smile. “Hot day today, boys.”

  “Your bell struck thirteen o’clock!” Stig shouted again, pointing up at the belfry as if to illustrate his point.

  “Maybe he’s on a twenty-four hour clock now,” Andy mused.

  The vicar waved again and entered the churchyard. If he had heard, he obviously thought he was being taken for a ride.

  “You shouldn’t take the piss out of him,” Andy said. “Poor sod is probably melting in that get-up.” And besides, he thought, Mum believes in God and it just feels a little bit odd winding up a vicar.

  “I’m not taking the piss,” Stig said, all wide-eyed and innocent.

  Andy could not quite figure out how honest his friend was being. Stig was clumsy and childish at times, but on occasion he frightened Andy with sudden bouts of extremely adult behaviour. It didn’t intimidate him, but it did make him feel as if he might just get left behind.

  “Bet it’s nice and cool in the church.” Andy picked at the collar of his T-shirt, wafting it in an effort to air his sweaty skin. All it did was to allow access for more hot air.

  “Don’t like churches.”

  “Why?”

  “Spooky.” Stig picked at the grass, letting the dried blades drop onto his knees. There was no breeze to take them away. It was unbelievably hot and still, as if the sun had scorched the breeze to nothing.

  “You’re weird,” Andy muttered.

  There were three packets of crisps and a couple of decidedly limp chocolate bars left, but neither boy wanted another scrap to eat. Andy bagged them up, lifted his bike from the heat-cracked ground and slung the bag on the handlebars. “Ready?”

  Stig nodded, stood and turned to glance at the church. “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  Stig did not reply, but stood there with his head cocked like an inquisitive dog.

  “What’s up? Hearing ghosts?” Andy was getting impatient with his mate, standing there like a girl, pretending to listen to some far-off music as if only he could hear it because it was music for the wise, or something. That’s what he’d say, anyway. Sometimes Stig was weird.

  “Vicar trouble,” Stig muttered. Father Norman hurried from the church, a black flash in the white-hot midday, and even though he was silent as he jogged across the square he seemed to bring the place to life. Each footfall sounded louder than it should have, bouncing from the hot building facades and following the vicar with echoes.

  The boys watched him open the door to the post office and Andy heard the beginnings of a panicked outburst: “Dave, quick, I need to use your phone, there’s been—“ before the door swung shut behind him.

  “So now do we go scrambling, or wait here and see what’s going on?”

  Andy shrugged. “Nothing ever goes on here, usually. Let’s see. Maybe the heat’s got to him.”

  “But it’s cool in the church,” Stig said. Andy saw he had chocolate smeared across his bottom lip, and he was glad. It made him look like a kid.

  “Well then, maybe something else has got to him.” Andy felt a small puff of satisfaction as he saw the corners of Stig’s mouth twitch down. “Something … cold.” He’d spooked him. Hah! Easily spooked, was Stig, and it was so much fun!

  Andy glanced at the church, empty now with the vicar in the post office using the phone because there’d been … whatever. Empty, maybe, it still but seemed occupied. Maybe God’s home, he thought, but then maybe not. God didn’t raise a flag when he was in residence, not like the Queen. He thought there was a breeze then because he shivered. He glanced at Stig and wondered just how he’d managed to spook himself as well.

  The vicar left the post office followed closely by Dave, the postmaster, who locked the door behind them and hurried across the square after Father Norman.

  “What’s wrong?” Stig asked. The two men glanced over at the boys but their expressions said it all: this is adult stuff, boys, you’re too young to have to worry about this. They disappeared into the church and closed the heavy doors behind them.

  That made up the boys’ minds for them. They’d stay, of course. Watch the drama unfold.

  “You want to go around back, see if we can see in the windows?” Andy’s curiosity was urging him to move. They couldn’t do much out here apart from – as his dad would say – sit in the sun and play with themselves (which was something he’d only been doing for a while, and it certainly wasn’t something he’d do in front of anyone else).

  “What, into the graveyard?”

  Andy nodded. “Yeah. Why, what’s wrong? You scared?”

  “’Course not.”

  “Scared the decomposing corpses are going to struggle out of the ground and get you? You think Bub might be back there, ready to eat your brains? Brainzzz …” Andy did a zombie-walk across the grass towards Stig, who backed away until he was standing at the edge of the little stream. It was barely a trickle now – sometimes not even that – but it was still a bit of a fall down to the stream bed.

  Stig looked angry and scared at the same time. “Fuck off!” he shouted.

  Andy dropped his hands and wiped the zombie drool from his chin. “Big pussy.”

  “Yeah, well, at least I’ve actually seen one.”

  Andy turned away and kicked at a dried-out snail shell. That stung, he thought. Stig always kept that in reserve: the fact that he’d seen a real pussy, had actually touched it and, he swore that if there hadn’t been a load of other kids there with him, she’d have let him taste it as well.

  It was last Christmas at a Saturday afternoon party thrown by Samantha Begbie. Andy hadn’t been able to go because he’d had chicken pox, but Stig and a load of others had piled into the Begbie residence and heartily set about dismantling the food spread which Samantha’s mum had spent all morning preparing. The girls’ parents had taken the opportunity to go into town to finish their Christmas shopping, content in the knowledge that her older sister Jenny – sixteen, and an object of youthful lust for many of the village boys – was in charge of the shindig.

  What they had not banked upon was Jenny finding a half-finished bottle of cooking sherry in the pantry.

  The games had changed rapidly from a daring round of truth and dare, to a spate of brave insults and suggestions, to Jenny standing shakily and beginning a slow, stumbling strip. Samantha had begged her, so Stig said, tried to drag her upstairs, cried and screamed, and then she and her girlfriends left the house to the boys and the ever-more-naked Jenny.

  Andy hated hearing about it. He’d managed to convince himself that Stig had been lying until Pete White had told him too, a frantically relayed story over the phone, the details so similar to Stig’s tale that Andy could do nothing but admit it as the truth.

  He’d missed the party.

  Jenny – sixteen and gorgeous – had stripped and shown the boys her bits.

  And for the rest of his life, Andy knew, he’d look back on this as a missed opportunity, and sometimes perhaps he’d lean over his empty glass in a pub – because that’s what pissed off men were supposed to do – and slowly fill it with regretful tears.

  She let us touch it! Stig had gasped, and it was soft and the fur was smooth, not wiry like it looks in the magazines. And it felt … sort of warm. And Pete White swears his finger went in. But he’s talking bullshit, of course. At least, Andy thought, there’s a part of the story that Stig tried to deny as well.

  “Well I’m going around back,” Andy said sulkily. “If there’s a dead body or someone hanging from the beams, or if someone’s shat in a pew, I want to see it before it’s all cleared up.”

  “Andy …” Stig was genuinely worried, Andy saw. It was one thing to frighten his mate, but seeing that expression on his face was just plain unsettling.

  “Come on,” Andy said. “It’s midday, the sun’s out, the earth’s cooked hard. There’s nothing to worry about.”<
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  “Well, isn’t it … trespassing?”

  “It’s the house of God,” Andy said. “Mum reckons it’s always open. To anyone.”

  “That’s not what it says on the gate.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s just Father Norman. But if God says it should always be open I don’t see how a vicar can change that.”

  Stig frowned, looked up at the belfry – the clock read twelve-twenty, it had missed it’s quarterly chime – and nodded. “There must be something weird. Did you see their faces?”

  Andy remembered the quick glances the two men had thrown their way. Adult stuff, their faces had said. They may as well have been painted warning-red. Stay away. Danger here. Nothing for you boys here. To Andy, it was obvious that Father Norman and Dave the postmaster had forgotten a lot about what it was to be a young lad.

  “Come on,” he said. He didn’t wait for his mate. If Stig came, he came. If not ... well, he’d be left standing in the square, playing with himself in the sun. The choice was his.

  As Andy approached the gate into the churchyard he heard Stig’s footsteps behind him. He smiled; he was relieved, although he wasn’t sure why. He would not admit to being nervous, even to himself.

  Then he heard more footsteps, someone running along the road between the post office and church. A big someone, running fast.

  “Who’s that?” Stig said. A man ran into the square, dressed in tatty shorts, trainers and nothing else. Andy had seen him around the village a few times but he wasn’t sure of his name, and they’d never exchanged more than a quick hello. He thought he worked on one of the farms. Now, the man passed them by without a glance. He looked straight ahead, with an occasional look back over his shoulder, but he seemed to ignore the boys entirely. He was sweating profusely. The stench hung around after he’d passed as if the air itself was perspiring. His flesh jiggled – he wasn’t fat, exactly, just not very toned – and his face …at first Andy thought he looked like that because of the exertion. But as the man exited the square down a lane that led out between two huge orchards, glanced over his shoulder and put on a spurt of speed, Andy realised that he looked scared.

  Terrified.

  “Fucking hell,” Stig said.

  “Yeah. Bit hot for a jog.”

  “Did you see his tits going?”

  “Stig …”

  “But they were. And he’s sunburned, his shoulders and back are all red.”

  Andy had noticed that, yes, but it was only when Stig pointed it out that it really registered. “Must have been running for a while.”

  Stig was looking back along the road at the post office.

  “What?” Andy said.

  “Waiting to see what he was running from.”

  That sent a chill through Andy, a feeling emphasised here and now because of the scorcher the day was fast becoming. The two boys stood there by the church gate looking along the side of the square at the post office, waiting to see whatever it was that had scared the man into sprinting through like that.

  It could have been anything.

  “Dog?” Stig whispered, but there was no clatter of claws on concrete.

  They waited. The passing of time eased their tension.

  “Beast of Bodmin?” Andy said after a few more seconds, and they both chuckled … but quietly.

  Then a cloud passed briefly across the sun and the boys turned back to the church.

  “Must have been out for a jog after all. Hey, let’s go!” Andy punched Stig softly on the bare shoulder, and they crept through the gate and up the stone steps to the level of the church.

  The graveyard was well-tended – in a village of this size there was always someone looking for casual work – and the grass had recently been cut. Andy thought they probably watered the lawns at night in contravention of the hosepipe ban, such was their lushness compared to the rest of the village. There were nightly pictures on TV of reservoirs dried up and their beds baked hard, and somewhere up in mid-Wales a whole drowned village had been revealed, the first time it had breathed air for thirty years. The thought of all those uninhabited houses, all that space left to the ghosts of people long-since moved out ... it had spooked Andy, but excited him as well.

  Of course, there was another explanation as to why the grass was so green and healthy, one that Andy’s macabre side much preferred. It was a graveyard, after all. The ground must be good.

  “Which way?” Stig said.

  Andy indicated the path leading around to the rear of the church. The largest spread of graves lay there, their occupants in their loamy beds unaware of the scorching day it had become. He shook his head, wondering why he was thinking such morbid thoughts … but really he knew where they came from. His mum liked him reading, she always said that, and she was pretty open-minded when it came to letting him choose his next book. He was old enough to make his own choices and opinions, she said. Of course, that hadn’t stopped her trying to hide a copy of The Perfumed Garden when he brought it home from a school fete. Andy was amazed by the text, and ‘after the fashion of the ram’ fuelled many a steamy dream. But lately she had voiced some displeasure when he’d started bringing tatty, well-thumbed horror novels home from the second-hand shop in town. Their covers displayed grinning skeletons, skulls dripping with insects, scantily-clad women clasped in the claws of giant crabs or covered in flesh-eating slugs (although Andy had always wondered why the people in that book hadn’t just run). She said she was afraid they would give him nightmares. And sometimes they did. But he liked them anyway.

  Lying in their loamy beds, he thought, staring at the gravestones in varying states of disrepair. There were some monuments at the rear of the churchyard, which were almost destroyed by the actions of frost, their inscriptions long-since worn away by time, their occupants mysterious and forgotten except by God. And surely even He couldn’t remember everyone?

  “It’s quiet in here,” Stig said.

  “It was quiet in the square. It’s the sun. My dad says when it heats the air it stops sounds from travelling so far.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, really,” Andy said, but he couldn’t keep from giggling. Stig gave him a poke in the ribs and he gasped, falling against the outside wall of the church.

  Which was vibrating.

  “Jesus!” he said, pushing himself away from the cool stone and staring up at the belfry towering above them.

  “What?” Stig asked, wide-eyed.

  “I felt the wall moving.”

  “Andy, don’t—“

  “Really, Stig. It was vibrating, like there’s an engine revving up behind it, or something.” He thought of the Morlocks but tried to shove them straight from his mind. Now they really did scare him.

  “Maybe we should go,” Stig said. He turned his back on the church and looked out over the graves; Andy could see them reflected in his eyes. “I really don’t like it here, and what if someone comes to visit a grave and we’re pissing about? It’s disrespectful.”

  Andy should have laughed at that, but he could not conjure it up. He was still feeling that cold stone moving – twisting – against his bare, sunburned arm. “I want to see what’s going on,” he said. “Give me a foot up.” He stood on one foot and raised the other, inviting Stig to cup his hands.

  “Just once,” Stig said, and relented.

  Andy stepped into his friends knotted hands, held onto his shoulders and heaved himself up. He had to hold onto the window sill and lift up just a little bit to be able to see in – at least it didn’t feel like it was moving anymore, must have been his sun-frazzled imagination – and he heard Stig grunting down below. He wouldn’t have long to take a look, and he had a feeling that Stig had meant what he’d said. Once Andy’s feet were back on terra firma they would both be leaving the churchyard.

  Of course, they could have just walked to the closed front doors and knocked … but Andy liked an adventure. Today it was hot and sunny and he and his best friend had the whole of time to themselves. The
y wouldn’t be kids for much longer. Andy was pretty sure it all got more complicated from now on.

  He just didn’t know how soon that would begin.

  It was one of the very old stained glass windows he’d chosen to look through, no real colour to the design, just old lead peeling outward and threatening to drop a riot of glass at any time. A couple of the lower pieces were too distorted to see through clearly, but he found a large triangular pane that offered him a good view of the interior of the church. Stig grunted again down below and shifted slightly, and Andy had to grasp onto the sill to prevent himself from tumbling.

  “One minute!” he hissed. His biceps were burning, and he guessed Stig’s must be too, but he had to see what was going on. The Vicar’s face … the fact that he’d run to the post office to use their telephone … the men’s worried expressions as they’d hurried back into the church. There was a mystery here, and although it would probably be chatted about throughout the village by this time tomorrow, Andy wanted to know now. He wanted to know while it was still a mystery.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d expected to see when he looked into the church. Slaughtered bodies sprawled across the pews, perhaps, their blood soaking into those weird little cushions meant for kneeling on but which nobody ever used. Or naked female witches slaughtering chickens on the altar and indulging in a little ‘after the fashion of the ram’ with some satyr.

  The one thing he had most definitely not expected to see was nothing.

  The two men, Vicar and postmaster, sat on a pew at the front of the church, obviously deep in conversation. The centuries-old glass made the vicar’s face look very white.

  “What’s going on?” Stig asked.