Stopped at the altar as if about to offer a prayer or to cross himself.
Hardly. Ingley didn't sneer this time, but it was close.
Table laid for God. A millennium or more of devotion, hopes and dreads heaped up here and left to go cold. Confirmed atheist, Thomas Ingley. Found the altar just about the least interesting part of the church.
He'd stopped because this was where one turned sharply left, three paces, to get to the secret core of the place, the heart of it all. Simply hadn't realised it until tonight. Been up here five times over the weekend. Missing, each time, the obvious.
Decidedly cool in the church, but Ingley was sweating in anticipation and the torch was sticky in his hand. A weeping sound, a skittering far above him in the rafters: bats again. Then a silence in which even the flashlight switch sounded like the breach of a rifle.
Clack!
And the beam was thrown full in the face of the knight.
Like a gauntlet, Thomas Ingley thought, in challenge. Slap on one cheek, slap on the other. This is it. Lain there for centuries and nobody's given a sod who you were or what you were doing here. But you've slept long enough. Taking you on now, sir, taking you on.
The stone eyelids of the knight stayed shut. His petrified lips wore a furtive smile. His stone hands, three knuckles badly chipped, were on his breast, together in prayer. The beam of light tracked downwards, over the codpiece to the pointed feet.
'All right, friend,' Thomas Ingley said, speaking aloud again, laying the torch on the effigy, taking out a notebook, felt-tip pen, his reading glasses. Nuts and bolts time. 'Let's get on with it.'
He made detailed notes, with small drawings and diagrams, balancing the notebook on the edge of the tomb beneath the light. He drew outlines of the patterns in the stone. He copied the inscriptions in Latin and in Welsh, at least some of which he suspected had been added later, maybe centuries after the installation of the tomb. Tomorrow, perhaps, buy a camera with a flash, do the thing properly. Tonight, just had to know.
Finally he took from his jacket pocket a retractable metal rule and very carefully measured the tomb. It was about two feet longer than the effigy. The inscription in stone identified its occupant as Sir Robert Meredydd. An obscure figure. If indeed, thought Ingley, he had ever existed.
The main inscription, he was now convinced, had been done later, the slab cemented to the side of the tomb; he could see an ancient crack where something had gone amiss, been repaired. He put away rule, notebook, pen, spectacles. Picked up his torch from the knight's armoured belly.
Got you now, friend. Yes.
For a moment, in the heat of certainty, all his principles deserted him and he wanted to tear the tomb open, take up a sledgehammer or something and smash his way in.
Involuntarily, he shouted out, 'Got you!' And now he really did slap the effigy, full in its smug, smiling face.
A certain coldness spread up his arm as the slap resounded from the rafters.
Ingley stepped back, panting, shocked at himself. He felt silence swelling in the church.
The knight's cold face flickered. The torch went out.
Batteries.
Couldn't say he hadn't been warned. Too absorbed in his work to notice it growing dim. He shook the torch; a mean amber glimmer, then it died.
Mission accomplished, anyway. Retreating into the aisle, he glanced over his shoulder at the stone husk on the tomb, its dead lips luminously purpled by the colour of the night through the long windows. He would go now. He hurried down the aisle,
As if to guide him on his way, five yards distant, at the entrance to the nave, close to the font (heptagonal, nineteenth-century replacement) a meagre flame appeared, like a taper. When he moved forward to try and see it more clearly, the small light moved with him, as if whoever held it was backing away.
'I'm sorry,' Ingley said, raising his head and his voice, authoritative, irascible, producing an echo. 'Who is there?'
there… there… ere…
He registered, disturbed, that the little flame cast no ambience. It was like the light through a keyhole, something on the other side of the dark.
Then it went out.
Was somebody with him now in the church? Somebody who'd seen him by the tomb, who would tell then what he'd been doing? Who'd now doused his light to…
More likely he was simply overexcited and overtired. He stood very still, disgusted at his heart for suddenly pulsing in his chest like some squirming animal. Pills, where were his pills?
'Finished now. Leaving,' he said to nobody, ving… ing…
Back in the inn, that was where they were, the pills. On the dresser in his room.
'. Leaving, all right…?'
… ight.
There was nobody. Nobody at all. He walked down the aisle to the great door, which was open a crack — had he left like that? Thought perhaps he had, certainly didn't remember closing it. He glanced back into the church, towards the altar and the tomb, neither visible now. Saw only the tall Gothic windows tinctured in amethyst. He grasped the iron ring handle and hauled the door closed behind him, hearing the muffled echo of the latch from within.
Out then, gratefully, into the remembered warmth of a summer night, into the churchyard's terraced circle, from here one could look down on the yellow glowing of the village. Relieved, he took a great gulp of the soft night air.
The air was hard and slammed into his throat and locked there.
Ingley spun round, blinking.
No lights.
No village.
No moon.
He clutched at the stone porch and the breath came out of him like razorblades.
The circular cemetery was an island in a dark, polluted sea. The sky was black, and something was swirling about him, plucking playfully at his jacket.
He hauled in another breath, it didn't want to come. He slapped at his jacket where the dark wind was fingering it like a pickpocket.
The breath came up like an anchor through mud. His chest seemed to creak. Cold too out here now, and damp. No sweet smells any more.
Then the true essence of the place came to him, faint at first, and shocking because…
'Oh, Christ!' The little fat man, clamping a cupped hand over his mouth and nose, was thrown back by the stench.
Stench?
Yes, yes, vile, decaying, putrid… as if the season had betrayed them and the scented flowers had choked and bloated on their stems. He knew that stink, had always known it. He knew it from hospital wards and his stricken mother's bedroom, from dustbins in summer and the yard behind his father's butcher's shop. And he knew, sad and angry now, that it was not as it seemed. It was within him — had to be — the blackness, the smell, the withering.
His own lights going out.
Poor old Ingley, historian, antiquary, awkward customer, abrupt sometimes, knew it — but so little time to do things, always so little time. Hang on to things. Hang on to reality— single-chamber church with tower to the West, perpendicular, wooden bell-stage, pyramidal two-tiered roof…
Then, at first vaporous and indistinct, above a middle-distant grave, possibly the grave of Ebenezer Watkins, rose the little flame. Rose up and hovered, steamy and flickering as if in the hand of a still, dark figure, waiting. And blue this time, a cold and gaseous blue.
Ingley began to sob, and it was bitterly painful in his chest.
