Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(28)

“I had a similar experience recently,” Randolph said. “Perhaps we should expect more.”

“The veil is hanging in tatters, I know, but that has been the case since the War. It surely ought to be getting better, not worse. Why now?”

“Damned—I beg your pardon—bothered if I know. I’ll take a look around.”

“I wish you would. I don’t like it, Mr. Glyde. I—frankly I find myself struggling. I have told you I would like to be relieved of this responsibility.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” Randolph said with perfunctory sympathy. “A shame it’s not possible.”

“I am, I regret to say, too old,” the Vicar persisted. “Surely a younger man—”

“Of course, of course. If only they weren’t all dead.”

The Vicar recoiled slightly. Randolph supposed he should be kinder, but he had limited patience for shirkers at the best of times and he’d got up at five in the morning to come here, sustained only by railway coffee. “Since you’re here, let me try something on you, Mr. Herbert. No sign will guide you; no gun will save you; a fool and a knave may do what an emperor could not, and the unenlightened man brings light. Ring any bells?”

The Vicar gave that due consideration and said, “Not a one. The light-bearer—could that be a reference to Lucifer?”

“We can only hope not. Never mind, it was a long shot. May I make free of your church?”

“Of course. Er, you may wish to...” He tailed off, indicating a corner of the chancel arch. “The locals call it the silent watcher. I try not to look at it.”

Mr. Herbert retreated. Randolph stood, stretched, and began to prowl.

He wasn’t a religious man in any normal sense, although he bore the words of a god, but churches were a vital part of the land’s fabric, and lasting ones too. St. Mary’s had stood for at least six centuries in something like this form, with worship on this site for far longer. It was a place of sanctuary and protection, a candle against the dark. Randolph would take any of those he could get.

The corner to which he’d been directed was dark, pierced by beams of glowing green from the corner of a window, and one of those made it just possible to discern a crude carving in one of the oak supports. The light, Randolph calculated, would never fall directly on it. It was a rough shape in which at first one could only see deep bores for eyes, and a gaping square-edged pillarbox mouth from which tendrils curled.

Ivy. Randolph could taste it in his own mouth, feel the push of roots and branches, the spring of leaves. The face in the forest, the watcher in the woods. The Green Man.

What have you beheld? he asked the silent watcher in his mind, and let the impressions flood in.





He was sitting in a pew in the green glass light some time later, nursing a persistent headache, when a creak and footsteps indicated visitors to the church. Someone coming to pray, he hoped; he could use a bit of honest faith.

The footsteps came forward, paused, approached again, and an all too familiar voice said, “Do you know, I’m not even surprised.”

“Do you know, nor am I. Have a pew.” He slid along the wood polished by years of reverent bottoms.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard that offered literally.” Lazenby came and sat by him. Randolph glanced round and thought: yes, still beautiful.

He really was. Dark, intent passionate eyes; that constant little frown; the curved perfection of his top lip. The aching need and want and vulnerability that Randolph recognised too well, as though whatever strings he plucked in Lazenby resonated in his own chest.

Beautiful, wanting, and in the wrong bloody place again.

“Well,” he said.

“Yes, well. Are you— No.” Lazenby had his hands locked together, knuckles showing white. “I suppose you’re here for your usual mysterious reasons.”

“For my own reasons, yes. And you are—?”

“With Major Peabody. You said I could come to you if I found myself out of my depth.” Lazenby was looking straight ahead, chin up, but his hands were working. “Did you mean it?”

“I did. Have you?”

“In the sense that either I’m going mad or the world is.”

“Sadly,” Randolph said, “it’s probably not you. Would you care to come for a walk?”

They left the church together. Randolph paused in the porch, taking a quick look up at the ancient stonework.

“What are you looking at?”

“Wodewoses.” Randolph indicated the shaggy semi-human figures carved on the arch above them, lines blunted by the centuries. “Wild men of the woods, although that’s in areas with more trees. They call them fen-grendels here.”

“Yes, I expect they’d be more...fenny, wouldn’t they. Bedraggled fur. Wet and reedy and stinking.”

Lazenby wasn’t panicking, but only because he wasn’t letting himself panic. Randolph knew that note in a man’s voice. “I expect so,” he said, keeping his tone light and unemotional. “Off you go, Mr. Lazenby, talk to me. Whatever you have to say, I assure you I’ll have heard stranger.”

They set off on the road out of the village together as the clock chimed eleven. Randolph rarely walked with anyone who kept a satisfactory pace, but Lazenby strolled at just the right speed, a leisurely stride that would eat up the ground without tiring. The fenland stretched around them in shades of green, grey, and brown under the May sun.