Falling Idols

Cenotaph

After more than half a year since their debut tumble into bed, this was their first genuine trip together. But a whole month across an ocean was overdoing it. A month either cemented the bond or drove the wedge, and barely a week after debarking at Heathrow, Kate found herself warming to the idea of scrapping their return tickets in lieu of seats on the Concorde. Financial cretinism, but it would halve the hours next to Alain and his perfect face.

A few days in London, then southwest, until they’d nearly run out of England altogether in rocky, windswept Cornwall: “My gran came from here,” Kate had told him. “Left when she was a girl, but the place never left her.”

“Yeah?” Alain had said. “I guess everybody’s from somewhere, aren’t they?”

He’d not even meant it as a slight. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that he should be interested, even if it did mean a bit of diplomatic faking.

When feeling lazy or scapegoatish she was tempted to blame the bad days on the gap between their ages, her eight-year jump. Sometimes a crack, sometimes a chasm. Look at them thirteen years ago, where they’d been in the world. She’d awakened one morning after sleeping in her car, and shot the photo that won her a Pulitzer. Twenty-three years old at the time. Alain, on the other hand, would’ve been flunking driver’s ed and drowning in hormones.

Thirteen years later Alain Carreras still exuded the petulant charm of a scruffy teenager. This, she decided, was the problem: It was more appealing on paper. At least there you could furnish your own depth. Alain walked through real life as though having stepped fresh from one of his Gap ads, longish hair mussed so artfully it must’ve taken hours, and really didn’t have anything else going on beneath the surface. In some people — rarer than you might think — surface went all the way through.

Cornwall was the better part of a day behind them, the county of Shropshire ahead on the A49, when he could no longer take the weather.

“And they call this a climate? I thought climates changed.” Too bored by it to sound good and annoyed. “How long does monsoon season last in England, anyway?”

Mist. It was a heavy mist. Barely needed the wipers.

“Look on the bright side,” Kate told him. “It does wonders for your complexion. No sun? Might as well not even have packed your moisturizers. You’ll go home looking like a milkmaid.”

There. That made him happy. She was looking pretty peaches and cream herself, while the damp had fluffed her hair, not quite shoulder length, just enough to make her want to grow it again, renew the wild black mass it used to be before she got practical.

But shoot Alain in the same frame as some of the millennium-old carvings strewn about the region, and the contrasts between skin and stone would never be any more pronounced. Along with the other big difference: Some of those graven faces actually smiled, without fear of giving themselves wrinkles.

Between the two, she was already anticipating which would be better company the next few days.

*

The thing about England was, you could scarcely throw a mossy stone without hitting something to remind you of how vastly old the place was. Back home, Kate Haskins had snapped her cameras across a country that had been given birth by this one, but had lost its mother’s stately sense of time. A century just didn’t mean as much to one as it did the other.

Kate’s grandmother had cherished the antiquity of her birth country, and the history, myths, and legends left behind. Normans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Romans, Celts … from Bronze Age on, each had left its imprint on both land and psyche. The island absorbed them all, wasting nothing.

The Church of St. John the Baptist was just such a reservoir of essence. Buildings from the Middle Ages could today be found in total ruin or as well-preserved as last week’s corpse, and here stood one of the more fortunate. Stood as paradox — both monument to time, and entirely divorced from it.

West of the motorway, it was shielded from passing sight by hills, and by sufficient oaks and ash to retain just enough of the fourteenth century to send most people seeking a warm hearth the moment the sun began to blend into the Welsh border.

It had been her gran who’d discovered it to be something of a legacy from the earliest known roots of their family.

St. John the Baptist came from the second phase of English Gothic architecture known as Decorated, while still showing clear Norman roots, from the semi-circular arches of its walls, to the square bell-tower whose parapet looked better suited to archers than priests. The leaded glass of the rose window would catch the morning sun, when it shone at all. Rain or shine, though, the stone walls emitted an earthier feel. Once brownish-gray, they were now mottled green with lichen, as though having come to peaceful co-existence with the land on which they stood — a part of it, rather than its conqueror.

“So this is it?” Alain said. “This is all there is to it?”

“This may surprise you, but there’s also an inside.”

They were still in the car, parked. Alain was starting early today. If he was too bored, their bed-and-breakfast down in Craven Arms wasn’t out of hiking distance. Two mirrors, too; those would keep him entertained awhile.

“Well, the way you were talking, I was expecting, like, Notre Dame.” He shrugged. “Color me underwhelmed.”

“If we were at Notre Dame, you’d be underwhelmed because it wasn’t the Taj Mahal. Anyway, what can your family lay claim to creating?”

He turned toward her with lifted eyebrows and an upturning of the corners of his mouth that passed for a smile without actually creasing anything. “Well … me.”

“See if you’re still standing in six hundred years,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.”

They began circling the outside of the church. The closer she got, the greater the hand-me-down pride in one remote ancestor and his hammers and chisels.

The place was a well-kept wonder, a menagerie of impossible life seeming to burst from inert stone. The downspout carvings themselves were only the most obvious, jutting from the roofline as though in that instant before springing free. Here, a lion-faced dragon with fangs bared. There, a gigantic snake with its coils bunched against the eaves, mouth yawning wide. Next, a pensive creature with an apelike face and feathered wings, perhaps stymied by its own contradictions.

“Hey, look at this!” Glancing at each once and getting it over with, Alain was ahead of her, around the southwest corner. When she caught up to him, he pointed with delight.

The figure overhead was entirely human, enviably limber. Its feet and face were flush with the stone, while it bent double, thrusting a naked rump toward Wales. Undeniably male — a plump scrotum bulged down between its legs — his hands reached back to grip both buttocks and wrench them wide apart. On rainy days … well, no imagination needed.

“There’s a rumor going around that’s how Fabio got his big break,” Alain said. “I might’ve been the one who started it, too. I can’t remember.”

She stared without comment. This was the first one that she suddenly remembered, the first thread between now and nearly three decades ago. Her parents had brought her on vacation — seven, eight years old, had she been? — and it made sense that nudity would’ve made the biggest impression. At that age, fanciful beasts were one thing, but genitalia quite another. Each inspired its own terror, curiosity, and awe; but for staying power it was no contest.

Kate remembered her mother’s hand on the back of her head, trying to redirect her attention. More than once. Inside and out, icons of fertility and sexuality abounded here, to the chagrin of parents of precocious children: a man sporting ram’s horns and a proud erection; a hag stretching open her oversized vagina. And every few minutes, Mom’s hand and an exclamation of wonder at some more benign thing invariably in the opposite direction. Must’ve thought she was being subtle about it, as subtle as the carvings weren’t, but the real message had been quite clear.

Their circuit brought them back around to the front, where serpents twined up the columns on either side of the wooden double-doors. Every overlapping scale was distinct, while together the serpents made a weave of Celtic knotwork too intricate for her eye to unravel. Each column was crowned with a fearsome head whose toothy mouth chomped down over its top with grim relish.

The bas-relief arch above the doorway showed a row of bearded Celtic heads, smooth-faced and oval-eyed. Below them, a row of ravens whose beaks pecked and tore at less placid faces. And below those, the centerpiece: a huge, robust face grinning defiantly from out of a nest of oak leaves. Between face and hair and leaf there was no distinction. All were one and the same.

“The Green Man,” Kate murmured.

Alain blinked up at him. “You mean one of these ugly things really has a name?”

“He’s a kind of forest spirit. Growth, regeneration, renewal, like that,” she said. “It’s all coming back now. My gran used to tell me about some of this ancient imagery. And they’re not ugly.”

“Between me or him, now, really: Whose tongue would you rather suck on?”

“You never know. Maybe I wouldn’t mind a mouthful of sap.”

“I think you may be as kinked as your—” Alain rolled his eyes up at the carvings “—whatever he was to you.”

“Grandfather, a few dozen times removed. And he had a name. Geoffrey Blackburn.”

And here he’d stood. Shaped that stone, breathed life into it as surely as those he’d chiseled it for believed God had breathed life into Adam. She wished she could see with gargoyles’ eyes, back through time, see him as these sculptures would’ve seen the face of their maker. What Geoffrey had looked like, if after six-and-a-half centuries there was still some family resemblance.

Had he used himself as a model? Left his face slyly wrought somewhere in these stone tapestries? You’d think so, that there’d have to be enough ego to strive for whatever immortality it could. Maybe right above these doors, in the Green Man himself.

Sacred? This place was that, all right. But it was becoming harder and harder to think of it as a site that would’ve had any connection with Rome.

Certainly Rome — as well as the Anglicans — had nothing to do with it now. The Church of St. John the Baptist was time’s relic, administered by English Heritage. That they charged her a fee to get past the door seemed a minor slight; but how would they know?

Inside, more of everything … more faces, more beasts, more fabulous hybrids. If there’d ever been so much as one crucifix here, it had been carried away, rather than anchored in rock.

Besides the woman posted at the door, there were only three others here. The man she took for the curator was serving as guide to a pair of elderly women who clutched ghastly handbags and hung on his every word.

“Oh yes, quite the risqué rogue, was our Geoffrey,” he was saying. “Didn’t waste many opportunities to raise an eyebrow.”

“Filthy, just dreadfully filthy,” one of the ladies said. “I can scarcely bring myself to even look at some of them.”

“You must put yourself in the medieval mind.” The curator was all tweeds and patience. “Had a belief, they did, that the forces of darkness and evil were all around, but one good look beneath a pair of dropped knickers was enough to send them running.”

“Why, good lord. Whatever for?” said the other woman. “No. Don’t tell me. I don’t wish to know.”

“Shame, maybe,” Alain muttered to Kate, but by some prank of acoustics the other three heard him plainly as well. An audience was irresistible, so he elaborated: “I mean, you always think of demons as being well-hung, don’t you? But what if they’re not? What if that’s part of their punishment?”

They simply stared, all three, with their mortified British faces. One of the women lingered on Kate’s photographer’s vest and its bulging pockets as though they must’ve held weapons.

Don’t mind us, she wanted to tell them. Just the barbarians from America.

“No?” Alain said to their silence. “Just a thought.”

“First one today?” Kate whispered through clenched teeth.

So much for a genteel homecoming.

*

After she’d tried her best to salvage first impressions, the curator, Nigel Crenshaw, began to thaw. The old women wasted no time in retreating, trailing wisps of lavender in their wake, but Crenshaw seemed to study her and Alain as if they were as exotic as anything chipped out of limestone here.

“A Pulitzer, how very interesting,” Crenshaw said. “Yes, I remember that photo quite well. Not often that one sees so much historical nastiness summed up so … succinctly.”

Nastiness. Typical British understatement. Her famous photo had been taken during a protest siege laid to government land in South Dakota’s Black Hills by militants who’d broken away from the American Indian Movement. She’d been clicking away on one of their leaders, on an observation deck, the instant he’d been shot by a sniper with the U.S. Marshals Service. By a fluke of perspective, a streamer of the man’s blood looked as though it might spatter the four gargantuan witnesses behind him: the sixty-foot granite heads of Mt. Rushmore.

Everyone remembered that photo. She’d met a few who hated her for it, but only in her own country. Crenshaw wasn’t one of them.

He was, in fact, delighted by the documentation showing her to be a lineal descendant of Geoffrey Blackburn. Her grandmother had spent a quarter-century tracing the family tree to learn this, finding Blackburn and his works quite the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Maybe it would pass, but Kate had been bitten by the notion that there might be a photo book in him. If Hildegard von Bingen could become fashionable, why not Geoffrey Blackburn?

On the spot, Crenshaw began bursting with fact, hearsay, and legend — his, the zeal of a man who’d devoted his life to something without having found nearly enough ears to share it with.

“You know what they called him, don’t you? ‘The Michelangelo of the Gargoyles’?”

She’d heard that much, at least.

“Predated Michelangelo by a century, so not in Geoffrey’s time, of course. But what a testament to the man’s genius, that that’s the artistic standard future generations measured him by. Some of the work he did, why, stand it next to ‘David,’ I say.”

“Wouldn’t you have to break it loose of the church first?”

Crenshaw sighed. “Thereby hangs the pity.”

The makers of most ecclesiastical sculpture had labored in anonymity, he told her, but even in his own lifetime Blackburn had enjoyed renown, although some would’ve said infamy was the better word. Wherever he employed his craft, there soon followed claims of people seeing movement in his creations.

“Not just the common rabble, either,” Crenshaw said. “Plenty of priests, too. Bishops, cardinals. Even a pope or two. People have been claiming it for centuries. Still do, but it wouldn’t be force of suggestion. I daresay most have never even heard of Geoffrey Blackburn or his reputation.”

“And this followed him everywhere he worked?” she asked.

“More or less. Although — and mind, I’ve never undertaken a formal study — it would seem that the later in Geoffrey’s life he worked on a church, the more instances you have of people claiming to see movement in the carvings he did there. Makes sense, though. He continually refines his skills, his works appear progressively more lifelike.”

“And the Church of St. John the Baptist is…?” Kate said. “My grandmother told us…”

Crenshaw nodded proudly. “The last and greatest jewel in our Geoffrey’s formidable crown.”

“So most of those reported movements, they’ve come from here, then,” she said. “Have you ever…?”

“Oh heavens no. Perhaps I stare at them too directly for them to ever get the better of me.”

He filled in the sketchy background. Blackburn had supposedly apprenticed under the master sculptor hired for the Octagon at Ely Cathedral, built to replace a tower that had collapsed in 1322.

“Surviving records indicate he worked on the roof bosses.” Crenshaw pointed to a face leering from a junction of two ceiling beams. “Same thing, only in stone, and much higher. Where the ribs of the vaults meet. Gossip had it that his master was more than a bit consumed with jealousy by the end of his apprenticeship.”

After Ely, he’d worked on other churches, abbeys, and priories in East Anglia, and within a decade his reputation had taken him even to France, to supervise the sculpture workshop at the cathedral nearing completion in Chutreaux.

It was this aspect of construction that gave her pause. That Geoffrey had been the master sculptor of record someplace — or one of many, on a two-century project like Chutreaux — didn’t mean any particular piece had come from his chisel. In fact, most couldn’t have. A few, maybe, but the rest only done under his tutelage.

“When comparing, one can tell,” said Crenshaw. “I’ve been to Chutreaux. Been to most of the others. And everywhere, it’s two different classes of work: Geoffrey’s. And everyone else’s.”

“But here, though. My gran said he—”

“Did very nearly the whole thing. Yes. You’ll find the odd bit here and there that doesn’t seem up to his standards, so he must’ve had apprentices from time to time. But overall? If you see it, chances are he did it. Evidently devoted the last two decades of his life to just this one building.”

“Wouldn’t that have been a little atypical?”

“Too right. Perhaps a bit mad, considering the ah, well … subject matter.”

“Are there any records saying why?”

“Nothing ever found from the time, no. References in a couple of late-sixteenth century histories, now, yes, claiming all sorts of deviltry had been got up to here, but one must consider intent. They’d just had the Reformation, so such accounts do tend to smack of appalled Puritans tarnishing the repute of Catholic leftovers.” He broke with an unexpectedly mirthful smile. “Rather like what those two lavender-scented lovelies will be telling whomever will listen about your gentleman friend.”

Alain. She’d forgotten about him, and glanced around until Crenshaw pointed him out, dozing on a seat while slumped against the outer wall of one of the congregational stalls.

“Except,” Kate went on, “I don’t see anything here that’s patently Catholic.”

“Precisely why the Calvinists and their ilk were convinced that Catholics were idolaters, if not outright devil-worshippers. Quite the inharmonious—”

Abruptly, Crenshaw cut himself off in mid-sentence, glaring across the church at something behind her. Kate’s first thought was that Alain had roused, and what was he desecrating?

“You there!” Crenshaw shouted. “Get out of here! Right now!”

She turned. Not Alain — he was blinking drowsily at the ruckus. Instead, it was somebody past him, lingering beside one of the carved pillars. Kate couldn’t see him well. He was backlit by the light coming in through a lancet window.

“Out of here this minute or I’ll have the police down, this is the last time, do you hear me?”

He was a sturdy sort, she could tell that much, with broad, heavy shoulders, and hair that in silhouette appeared shaggy and unkempt. When he moved out of the direct light, she saw that he wore a topcoat that might’ve once been pricey, but had more likely been salvaged from a wealthier man’s trash, and beneath it, a dark cableknit sweater, tattered here, unraveling there. His beard hadn’t fully grown in, a few weeks’ worth. Age? Hard to determine. Old enough to have earned a few lines. More than she had.

“He’s only annoyed he didn’t collect his fee.” It took Kate a moment to realize the man was addressing her. He then turned his amusement on Crenshaw. “Oh, I have it. All you need do is come take it from me. Fair enough, innit?”

Crenshaw didn’t move, seething at the man, who held his own ground. Alain glanced back and forth between them as though having awakened in the middle of the wrong movie. Finally the man relented, but with an air of having once more proved a point he’d proven times before. He strolled toward the narthex and Crenshaw followed, marching a consistent dozen paces behind, until the man was out the door, leaving behind his own distinctive odor.

“Bloody vagabond,” Crenshaw said. “How it is he gets in here I’ll never know.”

“There aren’t any other entrances?”

“None we’ve found in six hundred years. Slips in when both Mrs. Webster and I are distracted, then hides, is my guess, but I’ll give him this: He’s a first-rank sneak. Been doing it for years, on and off, and we’ve never caught him.”

“Do you even know who he is?”

Alain was walking up, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Somebody who’s never learned why God invented Calvin Klein.”

“Must live around here somewhere,” said Crenshaw. “I’m sure the locals know him, but Mrs. Webster and I motor up from Ludlow, so these are hardly our people.” He shook his head. “Never harms anything, it’s just the idea. But should you encounter him whilst taking your pictures, I’d keep my distance if I were you.”

Kate nodded, more to pacify than agree, then registered with a shock what she’d missed until now. Surely she’d have seen it as a child, but the recollection wasn’t there. Today, for all intents and purposes, was the first time.

It stood upon the wide platform above the doors, a lifesize effigy whose heavy-lidded eyes stared the length of the nave, toward the rose window where he would greet each rising sun. In shadows now, his mystery was heightened tenfold, hunching with muscled body and sinewed limbs, balanced on wide-stanced cloven feet. His magnificent head was ever-so-slightly inclined downward, as though deigning to acknowledge whoever paused to stare. Alain, she knew, would kill for his cheekbones, while shunning the wild serpentine beard. And he’d have no use at all for the goat horns, sprouting robustly from either side of the forehead, curving back and to each side. A long tongue wagged from between parted lips with a grin of lascivious delight.

Here was the face that had given medieval churchmen all the devil they’d ever needed.

“Pan, right?” she said.

“Or Cernunnos. Call him what you will.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice him before now.”

“You’d be amazed how many don’t, until they leave,” Crenshaw said. “One could be excused for thinking he enjoys it that way.”

*

She was a betting woman all right, but knew no one here well enough to make the bet in the first place. It was nothing to be proud of, anyway: She was giving the relationship another week at most, after which Alain would find an excuse to go home early.

It’d been entirely physical anyway, had just run its course sooner than expected. With his mussed raven hair and caramel skin and long-lashed eyes, he’d never been less than beautiful, always a willing model for her artier, more indulgent shots. Most were admittedly Mapplethorpe-influenced, somewhere between deifying and fetishizing. She’d strip him down and zoom in for the kill, the shadowy, side-lit curves of his arm or ass like a blown-glass vase, then devour everything the camera had left. By now, it didn’t amount to much.

After early enthusiasm, Alain now hated England, she deduced, because nobody recognized him. Maybe two dozen ads and dialogue-free parts in three music videos meant he didn’t have to walk far back home before inspiring double-takes, but fame apparently ended in U.S. territorial waters and it was eating him alive.

He sulked. He was depressed by British television — not enough channels and he claimed he couldn’t find anything but snooker tournaments and sheepdog trials. He logged epic phone time calling home to reassure himself that his world still existed. She’d thrust the keys to the rental car at him — “Take it, go, go find something you are interested in” — but he wouldn’t hear of it. Steering from the right on the wrong side of the road? It was no way to drive, not on these twisty, narrow lanes.

Meanwhile, Kate settled day by day into this green and misty autumn sojourn, realizing, Alain’s kvetching aside, she’d not been this content in … she couldn’t remember.

Nigel Crenshaw entrusted her with a spare key to the church so she could come early or stay late if she pleased. He loaned her books about the region, which she eagerly perused at the bed-and-breakfast in Craven Arms and in the area pubs. Little, if anything, was said about Geoffrey Blackburn, but they did help her lift him farther out of the vacuum of dry intellect and make him into a fuller person, in the context of a real time and place.

With every day, the more her camera captured of his labors, the more Kate wondered about him: What had driven him to such excellence instead of settling for being a merely competent artisan; why he’d so thoroughly committed himself to rendering the grotesque instead of threatless, tranquil beauty.

She thought she understood after a few days, understood as one can only after admitting to infatuation with someone not only never met, but who never could be.

Perhaps, despite the institution behind his commissions, he had seen enough of the world to harbor no illusions of any divine goodness, and spent a lifetime chipping its cruelty into something more manageable. Or making intimate friends of its harsher faces. Or telling everyone else what he knew in metaphors they would understand.

She could identify. So maybe Geoffrey Blackburn wasn’t so much ancestor as mirror.

Despite everything it had brought her, she often felt that winning the Pulitzer for that hateful photo had been the worst thing that could’ve happened to her, at least at such a young age. Not that recognition itself was harmful; more that she’d been left with the inevitable what-next syndrome. The odds against her ever again being in such a right time and place were astronomical.

And she doubted she would have the stomach to again witness anything comparable. Even the first time, she’d shot the picture like a pro, but later cried for a day and a half.

She’d shot news only for another thirteen months.

Commercial photography paid better, after all, and nobody died in front of the lens. Only their careers, if they’d had the audacity to age badly, or even at all.

*

At least once per day, while working outside the church, she caught him watching from varying distances and differing vantages: the man Crenshaw seemed to believe he’d run off.

Some days he stood in the meadows, others near the treeline. Never any threat, hardly a movement at all out of him, he’d stand with his hands in his pockets while autumn’s bluster flapped his coat about his knees; stand there like a displaced and rough-hewn Heathcliff.

At first she ignored him, turning away nearly as soon as she saw him. He’d be gone the next time she checked. Day by day she grew bolder, returning his gaze unfazed, and finally snapping his picture, then crossing arms over chest, determined to outstare him. He threw his head back with a hearty laugh, then walked into the trees until trunks and leaves swallowed him up.

She inquired about him of the locals — as long as there were pubs, there was no shortage of opinions on anything — finding that no one knew much about him, only that if he made his home nearby, none could tell you how to get there.

“Jack” was the best anyone could do for a name — this from a man who swore his good friend’s cousin had been drunk with the fellow. Popular opinion pegged him as a full-time wanderer — maybe a refugee from one of those rolling communes that motored up and down Britain — most certainly on the dole, and that the area around the Church of St. Johnny B was the crossroads of his travels.

“Fixate on an area, some of ‘em, they do,” she was told amid the warm, rugged timbers of the Rose & Thistle. It boasted more Jack-sightings than anywhere else, until the next pub. “Get it in their heads it’s a holy place, from back before God had whiskers, and next thing you know, you’re up to your bollocks in Druids.”

“Bollocks is right,” countered another. “You wouldn’t know a Druid if he hoisted his robe and showed you his own two.”

She joined in the beery laughter, but still, this could’ve been close to the truth. Many of these medieval churches had been built on the ruins of far more ancient sites. Some contended it symbolized a triumph over pre-Christian beliefs, others that it was a way of coaxing stubborn pagans toward conversion.

If this was Jack’s interest in the place, she approved, even found something endearing about it, the romanticism of clinging to what time had rendered obsolete before you ever had a chance to call it yours. Longing to reclaim it despite the world’s derision.

Kate thought of Jack from that first day inside the church, however brief the encounter. Recalling his smell, of all things, a not-unpleasant musk of maleness and the outdoors, as though he’d slept beneath a blanket of decaying leaves, on a pillow of moss.

Alain’s liberal dousing with cologne seemed more ridiculous every day, and the nights when they made what passed for love, in a kind of energized mutual loathing, she wondered how he would react if she came to bed with that green and woody scent on her. If he would recoil in disgust, accuse her of going native. If his rejection would be her own rite of passage, an emancipation to proclaim: I’m sick of you, sick of your kind altogether, finally, ready for real human beings again, real passions instead of plastic.

The next day there was no good reason to devote time to more exterior shots, but she did it anyway, working until he was simply there, Jack on the crest of a green-domed rise. She took a chance.

“I’ll bet you know things about this church,” she called to him, “that even Crenshaw doesn’t.”

“Not much challenge in that,” he called back. “But don’t get me started on what you won’t want me to finish.”

She waved him forward, and he came, in nearly every way the antithesis of Alain. Quick to smile, with the crinkles to prove it, and probably just as quick to show anger. If he gave one thought to his appearance you’d never know it. And that wafting scent, as earthy as Alain’s was bottled.

“So let’s have one of them,” she said. “Crenshaw’s blind spots.”

Jack stroked and scratched at his days of beard. Threads of gray she hadn’t noticed before were obvious now, in the sun.

“Didn’t happen to tell you anything about the money running out, did he? During construction? And how they remedied that?”

“Not a word.”

“I didn’t think he knew of that one. Well, then. It was the early 1350s when the coffers scraped empty, and they had to close down. Stonemasons, carpenters, mortar makers … nothing to pay them with. How you going to raise the rest, if you’ve half a church?”

“I don’t know. Fleece the flock?”

“Good start, but you’ll need more than what you can tap them for. So, for the next two years, they displayed their relic. It’s to be St. John the Baptist’s, right? If you remember your church schooling, maybe you’ll remember the way he ended up.”

“His head on a platter, right,” she said. “For Salome.”

“The very same.” Jack grinned. “Got themselves a stray head, then, put it in a box, called it John’s own noggin, and charged by the peek. Did a fine pilgrimage business with it, too. Enough to finish what you see here.”

“How do you know this and Crenshaw doesn’t?”

“Well, now, that you’d have to ask him.” Jack shook his great shaggy head. “Not to be too hard on the old boy. It’s good that he cares as much as he does about the place. Just that he’s too much of a Presbyterian to really understand it.”

“No such obstacles with me,” she said. “Agnostic, reformed.”

“Oh, better than that. This place was in your blood from the start.”

“I didn’t realize you knew. About my ancestry.”

“Got ears, haven’t I? They work just fine.” When he smiled, his weathered face became a splendid interplay of crease and hair and twinkle. Such pictures he would take, in his natural element; for her, an antidote, maybe, to the vapidity that came out of her studio, every blemish erased by microchip.

It occurred to her Jack could’ve wrought a thousand delusions about this place and believed every one of them. Sometimes the mad did speak with the most conviction. He could’ve left a dozen bodies buried along his wanderings, for that matter.

“They worshipped heads, you know, back when,” he said, with a nod toward the church, as if reading her mind and deciding to play with any misapprehension rather than assuage it. “The Celts. The reverence outlasted the actual headhunting itself. Still, you have to know that before you can ever understand this place.”

It made sense. This region, she’d already learned, had seen a tenacious holding to Celtic tradition from the murkiest antiquity, surviving well past Saxon times. That much was clear enough from the edifice itself. The gods of old religions become the devils of the ones that follow, and the Christian hell was full of them, but here in this particular stone they straddled two worlds in uneasy collusion.

“Then the dedication to John the Baptist,” she said, “wasn’t just coincidence.”

“Now you follow. What you had here were people who found this headless saint a lot more interesting than the main character. You should count the heads carved here. Inside, out. Forget anything with a body, just heads. Come up short of a hundred, I say you’re not trying very hard.”

Kate looked above, found two within a few paces of where she stood. One was clutched in the hands of a giant who was stuffing it into his maw.

“Geoffrey, they hardly knew ye,” she said, and wasn’t it the truth. Inside, in less obvious nooks and crannies, she’d found the editorial imprints of a man clearly antagonistic to Rome. One bas-relief depicted a fox in bishop’s robes preaching to a flock of geese. Another, a bloated pig in a papal miter guarding a horde of coins.

“That two-year down spell they had?” Jack said. “Didn’t apply to him. Geoffrey Blackburn never stopped work.”

“Meaning they paid him on the sly, or…?”

Jack shook his head. “Meaning he thought it more important this place be finished before he died. Never went hungry or cold, him nor his family, though. Always some dressed venison or fowl showing up at the door, baskets of vegetables. Wood pile never ran low.” A broad grin. “There’s instant karma for you.”

She looked into his eyes, green and merry, for any hint he’d been pulling her leg for minutes and was about to slap his thigh and howl. But no.

“What is your story, Jack?” she asked.

“Mine?” He looked taken aback. “Now, how can I tell you that? It’s got no ending yet.”

She took him by the arm, steering him toward the west end. “Come on. We’re going inside. To count heads. My treat. They can’t throw you out then, can they?”

“You’re missing the point of all the fun.”

“Like hell,” she said. “Wait’ll you see Crenshaw’s face when he sees you have every right to be there.”

*

When he did it, Alain took the easy way out, the time-honored tactic of cads and cowards: told her in a public place so she’d be less likely to cause a scene.

Showed how much he’d been paying attention. Opinion on them at the Rose & Thistle was neatly divided. She was liked, he wasn’t. It wouldn’t be difficult to make his strategy backfire. Making two ways the joke was on him.

“I didn’t think you’d last this long,” she said. “I had a bet with myself you’d crack by day before yesterday.”

Alain masked every emotion well but surprise. She knew he was thinking it wasn’t supposed to be this way, she was supposed to be devastated. To plead. How could any woman in her right mind not? Especially her — older by nearly a decade, and getting no younger.

The truth? His youth and beauty really had been good for her ego. What she hadn’t expected was how elevating it felt to discover she could wave goodbye to all that as easily as she could a pigeon who’d eaten popcorn at her feet. Now that he’d seen that departure alone wasn’t going to ruin her, he progressed to petty jealousy.

“I thought I’d hang in London for a couple days first.” All nonchalance, holding up his cell phone. “Guess who’s in for a shoot. Andi Wexler. I called my agent earlier and got her number, so she’s … expecting me.”

Kate nodded. “When you kiss her, make sure it’s before she disappears to poke a finger down her throat. Otherwise, she might not’ve rinsed well. You knew about the bulemia, didn’t you? No? Forget it, then. Just try not to think about it.”

Low, but the only kind of parry he would understand.

She could’ve told him of the past few nights: Sixteen hours ago, in bed? In my mind it wasn’t even you. I replaced you with a stranger whose last name I don’t know and it was better that way, and it was just as better the night before when I dreamed of him, when I pulled him deeper into me than I ever did you on your best day. I did it because he smells of an earth you don’t even like to touch. I did it because he’s real. More real in a dream than you are in the flesh. Could’ve told him, but didn’t, because Alain’s comprehension stretched only so far.

As easily as that, they were done. He got a few steps away, then turned as if he wanted to say more but had no idea how it was done. As emotions went, he handled bewilderment well, too.

Amid stone and timber, fire and ale, she wished for misery but felt only relief. Misery would be proof of something, that she’d risked and cared enough to want to die for a day or two. That she’d been alive. That for the next few hours she was entitled to drink with strangers until she was stupid, and listen to their advice, their comforts, cry if she wanted.

Instead, she couldn’t even imagine tearing up his pictures after she got home because they were technically flawless. Good god, had it always been this hollow? Sometimes she thought herself cut from denser stuff than Geoffrey Blackburn had ever worked on.

She ordered a shot of Welsh single-malt anyway, and they all laughed when she told them that his name wasn’t even Alain, but Albert. He’d been held in low regard ever since loudly observing that most of the local faces seemed modeled on the potato.

She drank for an hour, then another. The fire had warmed her body, the whiskey her belly, the company her soul, and she allowed how much better this trip would’ve been if she could’ve shared it with someone who appreciated such modest provincialities.

She was achieving her latest annual drunken epiphany that it was time to change her life, when a regular came in shrugging the October chill off himself and telling of the wreck he’d passed a few miles down the road. Police already on the scene, but what a mess, some idiot driving too fast for the curves, looked like, slamming head-on into a stone fence and through the windscreen he went, straight at the curled-up edge of the smashed bonnet.

That son of a bitch, was the first thing she thought. Doesn’t drive one mile since we came here and now he takes the car? Thinks he’ll drive it to London?

For the rest of the night, the mood in the Rose & Thistle was glum. She remained by the fireside, listening to talk and awkward condolences, clutching her thick pullover sweater tightly about her, and fearing if she left the fire she’d freeze.

And by last orders, word had it that, peculiarly enough, the authorities still hadn’t recovered Alain’s head.

*

Late in the night, unable to sleep, Kate left the bed-and-breakfast before its walls grew more claustrophobic. Earth and sky and stone seemed the only things lasting enough tonight, so she walked in their company. Around her the town lay in stillness so deep it felt as though her heartbeat might wake it.

She was more than a mile along to the church before she even knew she was going there, and quickened her pace once she did. The town behind her, meadow and pasture rolling away to either side of the lane, she felt the deep age of the land as she rarely had during the day. Now and again, something would rustle, out of sight, on the other side of hedgerows and stone fences. Foxes, maybe. Once, a vigilant border collie.

Near the church she spotted a sheep, strayed from its fold, thick-shagged and four-horned, a breed she’d never seen back home. She knew in her heart that a sheep was all it was, but as it stood against the fence, munching vigorously on grass with the moonlight glinting off eyes like wet glass, it seemed less beast and more facade for an intelligence that lurked and watched, biding its time with inhuman patience.

The church’s bell tower and faces rose black against a few moonlit gray clouds as she ascended the hill. Below the eternally grinning visage of the Green Man, she used the key entrusted to her by Crenshaw. This was the first time she’d entered without a camera dangling from her neck.

Kate turned on only as much light as needed to prevent collision with anything; would’ve brought candles had she known the night would end here.

Step back, look up, and there he was, Pan in bestial glory.

“Go on. Move,” she commanded. As its maker’s descendant, who was more entitled to see this happen? “Move. Prove it. What are you waiting for?”

Nothing. Neither shift of cloven hoof, nor waggle of tongue.

Down the aisle, to the altar, to her knees. It seemed that at some point tonight she should offer a prayer for Alain, but no time or place had seemed right earlier. Now that they were she couldn’t think of what to say, or where to send it.

“Why are you crying?”

She thought she’d heard someone enter. Suspecting who it was before his voice confirmed it.

“Is that what I’m doing?”

Jack allowed her her space, coming no closer than the first congregational stall and sitting inside. “Saw you from the trees. Thought I’d pop in.”

“Don’t you ever sleep in a bed? Or anyplace with a roof?”

“Not if I can avoid it.”

“Well, you can’t for much longer. In another month you’ll freeze to death out there.”

“Won’t I just,” he said, with his broad merry grin — vagabond, madman, whatever he was. “But, death … its longevity? Exaggerated a bit, you ask me.”

“Not in my experience.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. What a sight she must’ve presented, no longer feeling capable of even seducing the village hobo.

“Why are you here, Kate?” he wondered. “Not tonight, I don’t mean tonight. Not even asking you, really. Just … Blackburn’s granddaughter: Why her, why here, why now?”

If there were reasons they were beyond her, beyond Jack too, but the faith he held in their being was touching. He left the oaken stall to wander, hands trailing over wood and stone, caressing each surface as though an immortal beloved.

“I’ve seen a lot of Britain,” he said. “Seen it thrive, seen it fall. Rise, fall again. One group taking it from another, ‘til they lose it themselves. What it is now? A ghost of someone’s old dead ideas of glory. But no matter who’s mucking about on top, it’s always been the land itself that holds the magic. Can’t kill a thing like that, now, can you? Drive it deeper underground, maybe, but never kill it.”

He’d done it so smoothly, she nearly missed the way Jack had begun talking as someone who’d witnessed more history than was one person’s due.

“Don’t know much of America. I know it’s there,” he said. “I’ve wondered if any of you ever look this way and realize it’s your own future, too. Are you that far along yet?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We just pretend we don’t notice.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He began moving closer. “Let me tell you a story. Used to be an island, there did. Full of forests so deep and thick, you could drop in something big as London is now, never find it again. Not everything that lived there stuck with either four legs or two. Good days, those. But nothing stays the same forever. People come in, they bring their own ideas along, chase out the old if they don’t murder it first.

“What you had here over six centuries ago were amongst the last people to remember the forests as they’d been. Put yourself in their place. Got no use for any pale dead god all the rest are only too eager to kill you for, if you don’t convert. Not when the forests gave you all the gods you’d ever need. Gods that were old before that pale dead one was even born. So what do you do?”

Was he insane? Or merely eccentric?

“Hide in plain sight?” she said.

“Now you’re thinking like a wily pagan. If the Church steals the faces of your gods and turns them to devils, who’s to say you can’t steal them back, and right under the Pope’s nose.

“But they didn’t stop there. When time came to build, they found themselves a likeminded man who knew stone so well it was said he could talk it into making room for a soul. So that’s where the old gods went.” He lifted his hands as if to seize the church and wrap it around him. “Geoffrey Blackburn sealed them in, on every side.”

It made a fine story. Now, if only it were true.

“Why bother with that?” she asked, because it was fun to play along, and meant she didn’t have to think of Alain. “Why couldn’t the gods take care of themselves?”

“Because their time was up. For a while, at least.” Jack’s furrowed brow creased deeply. Was it only poor lighting that he looked worse than he did before? “The other day, I told you of the Celts, their reverence for the severed head? One of the women from those final days, she could work a real magic with heads. They’d talk to her. Sing for her. See where she couldn’t — even into the future. They saw what was coming. Had two hundred years of bloody Crusades by then, and they’d already come home to the west. Wasn’t a time to be clinging to gods that would get you killed, and the gods of the woods loved their followers too much to let that keep happening to them. Rather sleep than see it happen. So sleep they did. Waiting for a better time to wake again.”

It was such an Arthurian notion, she thought, the once and future king become once and future gods. Again, if only it could be true.

Kate was about to excuse herself, time to go back to the B&B, when Jack straightened to his full bearish height and smiled down at her, such a peculiar smile, protective and courtly and wistful.

“I should be saying goodbye to you now, Kate Blackburn. I’m glad I have the chance. Didn’t expect I would. You don’t mind if I call you by that name instead?”

She told him of course not, asked where he was off to. Jack turned at the waist to gaze toward the narthex and doors.

“Autumn, nearly over. Winter, nearly here. Said it yourself already, Kate. Time for me to find someplace to freeze.”

She went to him, near tears again, gripping him by shoulders stout as oak boughs. For one night, for one lifetime, she’d seen enough of delusions and death. She hit him, cursed him, trying to beat sense into him, then he pulled her close to still her arms, like a child, and stroked her hair. She breathed in the scent of him, so rich and green and woody it had to come from someplace far deeper than the shabby fibers of his clothes.

“I watched you from those same trees, when you were a wee girl,” Jack whispered. “‘She’ll be back,’ I told myself. ‘She’ll be back one day.’”

Then his mouth was upon hers, with a kiss that tasted of time and seasons, loss and renewal, and if her intellect yet resisted, her body knew, and her blood. These obeyed the cycles of the moon already, didn’t they? They knew that if she plunged into him, and he into her, there awaited for her wonders of which she could scarcely conceive. And conceive she would, if the time was right.

But not tonight. When he pulled his mouth away it broke her heart.

“No,” he said. “Not as I am now. Not half-dead.”

Half-dead? Even now he was more alive than most she knew. “Then when?”

“Come spring. When I live again.”

So easy for him to say. He would be the one for whom those months meant nothing. What a long, terrible, cold winter hers would be.

“I’ve one more thing needs doing,” he said. “You won’t like it. I’d rather you not watch.”

She wouldn’t be dissuaded. He could do no worse than she’d seen already.

Solemn, Jack left the church a moment. When he returned she understood his concern, and despite her resolve, she still had to avert her eyes. Mangled by glass and steel, yes, it was, but the head was recognizably Alain’s.

“I know what you’re thinking. You’d be a fool not to,” Jack said. “But he did lose it by accident, nothing more. I’ll not be a fool, then, and waste it.”

The head was bled clean by now, and he set it aside while grappling with the altar. He struggled, strained, and with a deep grinding of stone it shifted, tilting up and to the side. If doubts still lingered, this did them in. No one man could lift this hollowed limestone block.

Beneath the altar was concealed a round cavity, a shallow well. When he dropped the head inside, she winced at the rattling of its moist heft against dried old ivory domes and mandibles. Jack heaved the altar back, the shadow of its base sliding slowly across Alain’s upturned face like the fall of his final night.

Jack nodded out over the menagerie of spirits. “To give them dreams,” he said. “To strengthen them against the winter, ‘til I see them again.”

In the narthex, as the doors swung wide into the moonlit dark beyond, she wanted to cling to him, possess him, to know more and listen to everything he could tell her about … well, where she had come from wouldn’t be a bad start.

“Why you?” she asked instead. “Why did you get the job of staying up to watch so much of it die around you?”

While it seemed a hideously lonely vigil, if he regarded it that way, you’d never know it. Could he even feel such a thing as loneliness?

“Who better?” he said. “Who else tracks time the way it was meant to be measured?”

Just past the doors, he stared up at the pattern of leaf and hair and face carved above them centuries before, by bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.

“Not a very good likeness, really. I’m much better looking.” He laughed with her, and in that moment she knew that, no, even a god was not beyond loneliness. Else why had he told her any of this, and who else could he have told?

“Called me Jack-o’-the-Green, too, they did. And I think, deep in his heart, Crenshaw knows exactly who I am … and that’s what scares him so.”

He drew his pitiful coat about him, looking to the sky, to the vast ocean of stars. Above them, Orion, the Hunter. It was his season. She could always find Orion.

“Best go, luv,” he said. “Not nearly as much forest as there was once. And I have to go deep, where I’ll not be disturbed.”

She imagined him in sacred hibernation, fetally curled or regally prone, beneath a blanket of brittle leaves, hair and beard dusted white with frost, snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes. Waiting for warmth.

He drew a huge breath, held it, let it out in a noisy gust and broad grin. “I’ve a splendid sense of smell, Kate. And I smell a great wildness coming. Maybe not next spring. Nor the spring past that. But it’s coming. The land always takes back its own.”

He left her soon after, a bulking shape made smaller, darker, with every stride toward the treeline. She lost sight of him even before he entered. Heard the crack and crunch of his passage, then even that was gone.

She returned inside the church, intending to lock up, and got as far as turning out the lights before she knew its floor was all the bed she would need tonight.

And swaddled by spirits, she did not sleep alone that night, dreaming of longer days and the fall of empires, while warmed by the breath of goats.