The Year's Best Horror Stories: XVIII

The Deliverer by SIMON MACCULLOCH

"And that concludes this morning's service." These words, uttered in the Reverend Piper's customarily soft yet somehow vibrant rasp, emerged raw and steaming into the chill air of the little church. To Tim, at seven years old the youngest member of the sparse congregation, they were the most welcome he had heard that morning. It was unlikely that he was alone in this, for the Vicar was not popular among the inhabitants of the village in which he had taken up residence less than a year before. He lived alone, having dispensed with the services of the housekeeper, a fiercely voluble widow by the name of Mrs. Atterby, with quite remarkable ease shortly after his arrival. He took no part in the village's admittedly limited social life; if he was seen at all on weekdays it would be only on a visit to the butcher or greengrocer, where those who served him proved notably unsuccessful in drawing him into conversation. It was hardly surprising that attendance at the church, patchy at the best of times, had dwindled. The combination of the Vicar's aloofness with a predilection in his homilies for esoteric topics, abstruse arguments and dubious conclusions had seriously eroded what little loyalty to the Sabbath tradition had existed among his spiritual charges. By Christmas, it was generally predicted, he would perform his offices alone.

Yet interest in the Reverend Piper himself had increased even as the attraction of his liturgies diminished. Thus it was that, when Tim and his elder brother Robert were released after that Sunday's lunch from the confines of their terraced cottage in the upper part of the village into silvery ineffectual late autumn sunshine, their talk and their footsteps turned simultaneously towards the church again.

"Mum's decided we're not going to church any more," declared Robert.

"Why?"

"It's obvious. She doesn't like the Vicar, and Dad doesn't neither. No one can stand him. He's so boring. Ol' Thomas used to come round visiting all the time. And he had that tea party in the summer. Piper just doesn't do anything. And the way he always stares at you…"

"But what does he do all the time?" prompted Tim.

"Don't know. P'rhaps he just sits and reads books. Must be really boring. I'll bet that's why he goes on so much on Sunday mornings. He just reads all these books all week and gurgitates them."

"Ol’ Mrs. Atterby sneaked back into the vicarage, didn't she, with her spare key. And Piper scared her off. She said…"

"That silly ol' baggage is scared of her own shadow. I'll bet ol' Thomas didn't really like her either. I'll bet he was glad to get away from her."

"Why'd he have to go, anyway?"

"Cause the Bishop told him to of course, dummy."

"Why?"

"Stop asking stupid questions."

Tim contented himself with contemplation of the view from the end of a row of cottages at a sharp bend in the lane. From here he could look down over the major part of the village, a small grid of one-and two-storied gray stone terraces that looked as if it had been assembled elsewhere and dropped in one piece on the side of the valley it occupied. He could see the slate-roofed schoolhouse perched halfway up, wearing its weekend aspect of dormant foreboding. Moorland and white sky above made everything seem puny.

Soon the two boys had reached the place where the church, a building remarkable for its lack of interesting architectural features, squatted despondently on the valley floor. The sides of the valley outreached the stub of a tower with indifferent ease, excluding most of the daylight long before evening. But the glass of the windows was stained only with dust, enabling Tim and Robert to peer into the dim interior when they had scrambled up to a flaky stone sill.

They had doubtless expected no more than the fleeting satisfaction that a valedictory survey of a place of former incarceration may yield. It was with surprised delight that they discerned the tall, dark-clad figure of the Reverend Piper before the altar-stone, which was situated on a small platform at the end of the church farthest from their vantage point.

"What's he doing?" asked Tim, whispering although there seemed little likelihood of their being heard from within the church.

"Don't know." Robert's voice was uncomfortably strident in its determination not to whisper. He licked his fingers and began to rub dirt from the window. Tim strained to see through the clear patch with him. The Vicar was addressing the deserted nave as if in continuation of the morning's service, although they could not tell whether or not he was speaking. His form was indistinct in the murk. Tim squinted in an attempt to distinguish the movement of lips. The Vicar's head bent forward as if to look upon an invisible congregation. But Tim saw only featureless black where the staring eyes should have been. The blind head lacked even a mouth with which to pronounce its cryptic discourse.

Tim cried out and tugged at his brother's arm. Robert stared uncomprehendingly at him for a moment, then glanced once more toward the figure in front of the altar. When he turned back to Tim there was a certain familiar glint in his eyes, one, which promised an interlude of prolonged, and merciless teasing.

"He's standing with his back to you, stupid! You stupid idiot. 'Where's his face gone?' " (This last with devastatingly accurate mimicry.) "Can't you see what he's doing? I don't know how someone of your age can be so stupid…" And so forth. When Tim looked at the altar again he saw that, rather than facing the body of the church as he had supposed, the Vicar had his back turned to the dusty pews and was gazing into what appeared to be a full-length mirror, mounted where the lectern was usually placed. It was impossible to see what the mirror was reflecting, but it appeared from the man's stance before it and occasional movement of the hands and arms that he must be practicing the delivery of a sermon. This amusing inference was confirmed for the boys when, presumably as a result of the Vicar's rising enthusiasm for his text, they began to catch brief phrases and, shortly, what sounded like whole sentences, echoing strangely and disjointedly in the emptiness within.

"What language is that he's talking?"

"Must be Latin. They used to talk that all the time in church."

"How can he give his sermon in Latin, stupid," retorted Tim, trying by his scornful tone to regain some lost dignity. "It doesn't sound anything like Latin to me."

"Well, I don't know. Who cares?" Robert's lack of a knowledgeable rejoinder was the signal for the end of the conversation, and of their inconclusive eavesdropping. The pair slipped off their ledge and began to dawdle homeward. Tim wanted to mention that his final glimpse of the Reverend Piper had caught him in the act of kneeling down before his mirror, but as Robert's scathing commentary upon the Man With No Face incident extended itself he began to wish the subject closed, so held his peace.

It must have been about the beginning of Advent that services at the Reverend Piper's church ceased, although no one could be certain about this afterward. The few in whom force of habit had proved equal to the increasingly bitter weather did not protest very strongly when they found the church door locked one Sunday morning, and as far as anyone knew it remained so until the following summer, when the building was reopened and reconsecrated by a new minister. That the vicarage was still inhabited was evident only from the fact that the groceries, which were by then being delivered to its door, continued to be paid for and, presumably, consumed. The local doctor had earlier exerted his strength of personality long enough to confirm that the Vicar was probably not ill, although undoubtedly very rude, and the village settled down thereafter to a seasonal feast of speculation.

If the various hypotheses that were aired in adult circles were improbable, their translation to the realm of juvenile theorization rendered them entirely fantastic. An eyewitness report of the arrival by van at the vicarage during the preceding summer of some unidentifiable item of furniture came to be viewed by Robert and certain of his acquaintances as the most trifling in an endless series of clandestine deliveries, and the incontrovertible evidence of the Vicar's involvement in criminal activities on the grandest scale imaginable. Schemes were devised whereby unlawful entry to the church or the vicarage might be obtained, and the Reverend Piper's booty brought to light by heroically public-spirited investigators. This would all be of little interest, save that one of the proposed methods of secret ingress to the church turned out to be feasible, and Tim felt that his status among his peers had yet to recover from the blow dealt it by his brother's widespread publication of the earlier adventure and Tim's less than impressive contribution to it. Even so, it seems unlikely that matters would have progressed as they did had not Tim committed another embarrassing indiscretion by letting slip to Robert something of his long-standing ambition to "stay awake and see Santa Claus" on Christmas Eve. Perhaps it was the added humiliation resulting from this that finally propelled Tim in the direction of the church again and, more specifically, toward a broken window in the vestry that the boys had noted on a previous expedition.

It was with a sense of unreality that Tim found himself crouching alone on the stone floor of the deserted vestry to recover his breath, the window having proved unexpectedly amenable to his half-hearted attempt to open it. It was not quite full night outside, and once he could identify the furnishings of the meager antechamber with reasonable confidence, he forced himself to move toward its door to commence the brief circumnavigation of the building that he intended should restore his prestige among his schoolfellows.

The vestry door opened into the chancel behind the altar. The scuff of Tim's shoes was amplified as he stepped out into the larger space. The interior of the church had expanded since he had last been there, its sides visible solely on account of the dead gray oblongs of the windows, its roof a vault of darkness that sucked echoes from the slightest sound. Tim became conscious of his breathing, of the faint rustling of his clothes. It seemed as if even the contact of his eyelashes each time he blinked must be audible in the depthless hush. But the gaunt, cloaked figure that waited by the altar-stone made no sound at all, and Tim was almost upon it before he saw it. Terror held him immobile just long enough to enable him to recognize the oval outline of the Reverend Piper's mirror, now covered with a dustsheet. He turned away from it hastily and began to pace stiffly down the center aisle, determined to go at least as far as the main door at its other end before the inclination to flee from the whispering shadows became irresistible.

He had almost reached his destination when something slithered behind him. He turned. Disturbed, presumably, by a draught from the open window in the vestry, the sheet that had veiled the mirror now lay in a heap at its base. The mirror's frame held only a clot of thick darkness. Tim's nerve had all but gone. He began the walk back to the altar, this being the sole route by which he could regain the vestry door; only his reluctance to pass by the mirror again prevented him from running. The echoes of his footsteps became louder than ever, and the aisle now seemed like a long dim tunnel, with the mirror forming a patch of inky black instead of light at its end. As he drew nearer, the patch took on a dull sheen and he began to make out his dark twin emerging from the oily deep of its own tunnel. He was still trying to recognize his own features on the rapidly distending silhouette when his foot struck the first of the steps leading up to the altar, and he began to topple forward. One knee cracked painfully against the third step up, but then he had regained his balance and was running for the door, overwhelmed by panic. Half a minute later he was out of the church.

He told no one of the incident. Indeed, he found difficulty in remembering afterward exactly what had happened. His breathless race home proved sufficient to relegate to his subconscious the realization that, as he had raised himself from his involuntary genuflection before the abandoned altar-stone, the echo of his footsteps had continued with purposeful regularity, and the shadow in the mirror had not stopped growing.

The expected snow did not come that year, although the sky looked heavy with it, and perhaps it was this that produced a sense of imminence in the village during the fortnight preceding Christmas. Such an atmosphere was unusual, for the villagers never displayed much fervor in their celebration of the midwinter festival, anticipation of the event usually being confined to the youngest among them, for whom the promise of midnight-delivered bounty still held magic. Otherwise the season was marked by the odd sprig of holly on doors that closed earlier than usual, or a candle faint behind a window's winter grime, and each slow dawn found the streets as uninviting as the frost-bound fields beyond, and as desolate.

The school holiday began a week before Christmas. The light was already poor when Robert made his typically erratic way home on the last day of term, so he had scarcely noticed the hunched shape that waited in a doorway, its face engulfed in a dark shawl, before it stepped forward to block his path. It was Mrs. Atterby, who it seemed had observed Robert in the vicinity of the church (over which she still liked to "keep watch," as she put it) and was intent upon the dispensation of appropriate admonitions. Familiar as he was with the format of such reprimands, Robert could not help noticing as he waited for the old woman to finish that hers contained an element of the uncommon. References to "the book" and "the arched portal" occurred frequently, intermingled with phrases such as "the word made flesh and the flesh made word," "the black despoiler," and "the tenth plague of Egypt." The Biblical overtones were vaguely apparent to Robert; perhaps it was the fog that puffed from Mrs. Atterby's lips that shrouded their sense. Her disapproval of the new Vicar was the most clearly expressed part of her monologue — "Ought to have defrocked him, but they said they didn't have the evidence. They knew what they were doing, be certain of that!" She ended by exhorting Robert to "flee to the hills lest you be consumed." Her arthritic fingers clawed the air in what might have been meant as a blessing before she retreated, wheezing, to her doorway.

It was not until late in the afternoon of Christmas Eve that Robert saw Mrs. Atterby again. He poised himself to evade her, but her attention was concentrated upon the application to her front door of some late decoration, and his backward glance at the end of the lane found her still groping at her task as the darkness of the valley overflowed its sides and seeped into the sky.

The moon that rose on Christmas night brought stillness to the air. Tim had lain wide-eyed in his bed for hours, awaiting the time when he could be sure that Robert, with whom he shared the room, was asleep, so as to take up his vigil at the window. His brother's derision had not swayed him from his purpose; he was determined that if he did not attain a conclusive sighting of the nocturnal benefactor of infant legend that Christmas it would be through no lack of will on his part. Soon after midnight he crept to the window, which overlooked the lane from the upper floor of the house. Softly he opened the curtains to the deep night. The world was empty, and shadows gaped everywhere like glimpses of the abyss.

After he had watched for half an hour or so, Tim perceived that one of these shadows was moving slowly toward the house and, as it passed through a pool of moonlight, he saw that it was a dark-cloaked figure trudging soundlessly up the lane. With a barely controlled sense of elation Tim noted the heavy sack that it dragged behind it over the cobblestones. At first he thought that the object of his now fervent scrutiny would pass by his home as it had the others in the terrace, but as it drew level with his window, it paused and raised its cowled head. Tim prepared to withdraw from view, for his parents had warned him of the effect that the discovery of spectators was said to have upon the good Saint's seasonal generosity. He delayed for another few seconds when he noticed that this personage had not yet turned its gaze upon the house. Instead, it continued to face straight ahead, the angle of its hood suggesting that it was listening for something, or perhaps sniffing the air. After another moment or so had passed, however, it began to turn around, and Tim retreated hastily to his bed.

There remained but one obstacle to the satisfaction of Tim's curiosity. He had begged his father to leave the front door unbolted that night, but had met with intransigent refusal and an assurance that locks were no hindrance to the visitor he expected. This was proven when, less than a minute later, he felt the rush of frigid air that signaled the opening of the door. Almost simultaneously, his straining ears detected the sound of a heavy tread upon the bottom step of the staircase. The sound ascended slowly but unfalteringly, counter-pointed by the soft bumping of the sack as it was pulled up behind. There was a further accompaniment that Tim's imagination, which was at that time generating all manner of fascinating images, failed to account for in any way, although a moment's consideration might have suggested that it was the product of the damage which was being done to the wooden banisters by the intruder's progress.

Similar damage was sustained by the paneling of the bedroom door during the brief period of fumbling that preceded the admission into Tim's room of something he could distinguish in outline only; his first irrational impression was not so much that someone had come in as that a part of his bedroom wall by the door had been removed instantaneously, leaving in its place a hole into nowhere. The creaking of floorboards that marked the shadow's advance to a point some three feet inside the room enabled Tim to discard this disconcerting notion quickly and turn to the question of the procedure the visitant would follow in accomplishing his purpose. This even yet remained a matter for conjecture, for he now stood utterly motionless, an indeterminate bulk in the darkness. As Tim stared in an effort to penetrate the seamless black of the figure's robes, so as to obtain some sign of its intent, the first cold drops of fear began to trickle through the warmth of his excitement. The perfect stillness with which the figure held its pose, its bowed head still concealed beneath the hood, seemed unnatural, although Tim could not quite grasp why. He knew only that he could not bear to look upon that disquieting spectacle for long, and was parting his lips to call to his brother, when the dark head lifted at last.

Tim's next conscious memory was of the awakening of Robert and his parents by his screams, by which time the stranger had quit their home. That the boy had suffered a nightmare was a theory swiftly disposed of when the gouged and splintered condition of the woodwork, where inexplicably powerful hands had clutched it exploratively, was noticed. There was also the lingering odor, a fleshy reek that reminded Robert of the butcher's shop on a hot afternoon. But Tim could tell them little of what had transpired, or of the source of the horror that was subsequently to invest his every sight or remembrance of an unlit room, a hooded figure, or a sack that bulged with an anonymous burden. That which had answered his unvoiced invitation had granted him only the briefest communion before passing on to the fulfillment of its mission elsewhere. But in dreams to come, the dark bud of that moment would unfold, and in a world composed of shadow and crooked moon-washed lanes he would alternately run from or kneel before some ancient creature of the void, whose eyes glowed like hot cinders in the smoky pit where its face should have been, lit by the furnace of its eternal hunger.

The Reverend Piper's corpse was found in his church on Boxing Day. Of the myriad rumors that swarmed about this discovery, one of the more fanciful suggested that the intricate patterns that he had carved into his own flesh with a paper-knife were characters in an unknown language. What was eventually established was that he had bled to death from these wounds shortly before sunset on Christmas Eve. It was probably only this fact that caused the villagers to hesitate in attributing to the insane Vicar the kidnap of six children, all under the age of two, from their homes in the village between nightfall on the 24th of December and daybreak on the 25th. The largest police operation that the district had ever seen failed to trace the babies' bodies, much less any clue as to the whereabouts or motive of the perpetrator, the signs of whose passage through his victims' homes were as baffling as they were abundant.

The case was still "under investigation" on the first anniversary of the tragedy, but by then the villagers had given up hope of its being solved by the authorities. Perhaps the red painted crosses that began to appear that next December on the doors of the village, doubtless following the example of Mrs. Atterby, were a commemorative gesture. The new Vicar, at least, was happy to regard them as such, and to tolerate what he sometimes described to himself as an undercurrent of superstition, which happily did not seem to impede the rebirth of orthodox religious observance following his arrival in the parish. An upsurge of faith was, he knew, to be expected after a calamity of the type that had stricken these simple people, and he regarded himself as rather privileged to be in many ways the focus of their reawakened piety. Of course, there was the decidedly unpleasant business of his predecessor's history to be lived with; fortunately, the Church authorities had been most thorough in their removal of the deceased's effects, including the antique mirror in which it was said the madman had contrived to view his bizarre self-immolation. Even the vicarage's stock of books — «library» would be far too generous a term — had been rigorously weeded of any suspected to have been added during the previous eighteen months. The newly reap-pointed housekeeper, an efficient if overly talkative soul, was of the opinion that these items "ought to have been buried with him," and for all that his successor cared they could have been; but the old woman had concluded with a sigh that "they won't want to get rid of them, though; mayhap they'll find further use for them yet," and he supposed that this was fair enough also.