Vicious Circle

He jerked his head away from me, flailing to fend me off now that it was too late. I brought my knees up to my chest and kicked outward with both legs, sending him flying backward against a gravestone, where he fell in an untidy heap. He clawed weakly at his face, mewling like an animal. Slow spasms passed through his body, and his legs moved alternately as if he thought he was upright and walking. He reminded me of a toy robot I’d had as a kid; a clockwork one, made in Hong Kong, that kept on striding along until it wound down, even if you kicked it over onto its side, even if it wasn’t going anywhere.

I got up and staggered toward him, resting my weight against the gravestone so I could lean forward and look at him. If the damage was bad enough, his ghost would let go its hold on his ruined flesh, but it might take a long time. And in the meantime he was trapped in there, blinded, terrified, his immortal spirit still shackled to his half-pulped brain and trying to make it work.

I didn’t have any choice. I took out my whistle, my hands shaking, and put it to my lips. Our little tussle among the tombstones had given me a reasonably strong sense of his essence, his “this-ness”: enough to get me started. The notes tumbled out into the darkening sky, feeble and tentative but enlivened by an unintentional vibrato. The dead man stared up at me with the sightless holes that had been his eyes. His mouth moved, made a string of incoherent sounds that rumbled beneath my playing as if he was trying to sing along. Then he stopped, and whatever spark was still animating him went out for good.

I went to put the whistle away, but then thought better of it. Holding it clutched in my two hands, ready to play, I crossed the grass toward the vestry door.

It was hanging on one hinge: without Susan Book to unlock it for her, Juliet must have just kicked it open. I stepped inside, the bitter chill closing over me as though I’d stepped through a hanging curtain, invisible but tangible.

The church was dark. Of course it was: light had a tough time of it in here. I hadn’t brought a flashlight, but I wasn’t sure how much use it would have been in any case.

The heartbeat was clearly audible now: a slowed down loop of sound, lapping insinuatingly against my ears like waves against a rock.

I went forward one step at a time: slowly, slowly, letting my feet slide across the floor rather than lifting them, so I didn’t go arse over tip in the dark. The frigid air was absolutely still: the only thing that told me when I’d reached the end of the transept and stepped out into the larger gulf of the nave was a change in the timbre of the echoes my footsteps raised. My arm brushed heavily against something, and there was a reverberating din as the something fell over and unseen objects rolled away across the floor. The table where the votive candles stood. I ignored it and kept on going.

Maybe a dozen steps farther on, the tip of my foot touched something on the floor. I knelt down carefully, explored its outlines gingerly. It was a human body, completely unmoving.

I had to put the whistle away now, though I’d been clutching it like a diver clutches his lifeline. I got my hands underneath the body at shoulder and knee, and hefted it up. I suppose I’d expected Juliet to be heavy, because the impression she makes is so strong: because her physicality is denser and more vivid than anyone else’s by an order of magnitude. But then again, her body is made of something other than flesh. In the event, she seemed almost weightless.

As I lifted her, I felt the presence that was living in the stones of the church turn its massive attention toward me. There was no sound; no vibration of any kind in the still air. It acknowledged me without sound, and with a vast, vindictive amusement.

I staggered back the way I’d come, Juliet cradled in my arms. But I lost my way in the dark and walked into a wall. I had to follow the wall along, bumping my shoulder against it every few yards to keep my bearings, until I found the transept going off at right angles. I trod on one of the fallen candles and my foot twisted out from under me, so that I almost fell. The building was throwing everything it had at me, trying to keep me inside while the cold worked on me. My teeth were starting to chatter, and my chest hurt as though I were breathing in icicles.

But I made it to the door and staggered back out into the gathering night. It had felt cold on the way in: now it was like stepping out on a sunny day and feeling the warm breeze on your cheek.

I still didn’t feel exactly safe, though: not this close to those spirit-soaked stones. I staggered across the narrow gravel path and laid Juliet down carefully in the deep grass between two graves. I stood there, leaned against one of the gravestones with my head down, breathing raggedly, until the chill left my bones.