The Hiding Place(30)

“Now?”

“Right now.”

“You’ve got class in thirty minutes.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Good to know, Arnie.”

I shrug on my jacket, and wince. “I’ll see you later.”

“Watch your step.”

I frown. “Why?”

She cocks an eyebrow. “You don’t want to fall down any more stairs, now, do you?”





13





St. Jude’s is a small soot-crusted building that looks more like a run-down scout hut than a village church. There is no spire, just an uneven and pitted roof, tiles missing, holes in places. The windows are grilled, the door boarded up. The only congregations filling its pews and raising the rafters are the nesting crows and pigeons.

I push open the gate and walk up the rutted pathway. The churchyard is similarly neglected. It hasn’t been used for burials for a very long time. My sister and my parents were cremated at the large crematorium in Mansfield.

The headstones here are chipped and cracked, the inscriptions eroded by the weather and the passing of the years, some completely worn away. Tree roots have undermined a few of the oldest graves, toppling them over to be reclaimed by the grass and weeds.

We try so hard, I think, to mark our place on this earth. To leave something of ourselves. But in the end, even those markers are transitory, impermanent. We can’t fight against time. It’s like trying to run uphill on an ever-accelerating descending escalator. Time is always moving, always busy, always cleaning up after itself, removing the detritus of the old and sweeping in the new.

I walk slowly around the church to the rear. The ground rises a little; there are fewer headstones. I stand and look around. For a moment, I can’t see her. Maybe she’s gone. Maybe the text was just some…and then I spot her, lurking at the far end of the graveyard. Half hidden, overgrown with ivy and creepers.

The Angel. Not a memorial or a headstone. Apparently, she was placed here in the Victorian era by the owners of the mine. Some say it was after the family’s twin daughters died as infants, but the grave was once exhumed (something to do with the church being worried about it being unmarked) and no human remains were discovered beneath.

No one really knows where she came from or to what purpose. She doesn’t even look much like an angel these days. Her hands are broken stumps and her head has gone. She tilts a little, unsteady on her square stone feet. The once gracefully flowing robes are chipped and broken, crusted with furry moss, as though nature has wrapped an extra layer around her to keep her stony bones warm.

I bend down—a new and interesting burst of pain reminding me that I need to take some more painkillers soon—and brush away moss and grass from the base. The inscription is a little faded but still legible.

But Jesus said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

I look again at the message on my phone:

Suffocate the little children. Fuck them. Rest in Pieces.

A long time ago a gang of teenagers sprayed graffiti all over the Angel. The same ones who brought a shovel and scythed off her head and hands, decapitating and maiming her. There was no real reason for the attack. Just mindless vandalism, spurred on by cheap cider and teenage bravado.

The dismemberment and spray cans had been Hurst’s idea. But the words, I am ashamed to say, were mine. At the time, with a bladder full of booze and the jeering encouragement of the rest of our gang, I had felt pretty pleased with myself.

Later, hanging over the toilet, spewing out bile and shame, I had felt like shit. I wasn’t religious, none of my family was, but I still knew what we had done was wrong.

Even twenty-five years later I feel discomfort at the memory. Funny how the good memories flit by like butterflies: fleeting, fragile, impossible to capture without crushing them. But the bad ones—the guilt, the shame—they hang on in there, like parasites. Quietly eating you away from the inside.

Four of us were here that day. Hurst, me, Fletch and Chris. Marie was absent. She hung around with our gang more and more—much to the irritation of Fletch, who resented a girl in our midst—but not all the time. Hurst probably told her about it, though. And in a school word gets around; rumors spread. Just because we were the only ones here that day doesn’t mean that no one else knew.

Still, it does mean that whoever sent the text must have been at school with us back then. Perhaps the same person who sent the email? I tried to call the number. It went to voicemail. I sent a text. I’m not expecting a reply. I don’t think the sender wanted a conversation. They wanted me to come here. But why?

I straighten and stare at the headless angel. She steadfastly refuses to offer me any divine enlightenment. I wonder what happened to her head and hands. The church probably stored them away, or maybe some weirdo took them for a memento, to keep under their floorboards. Better than a real head, I suppose.

I’m missing something. Something obvious. I regard the Angel’s oddly tilted posture. And then it comes to me. I walk around the back and crouch down again.

Where the roots of the creepers have started to push her from the ground there’s a hollow. A recess in the damp earth. Something has been wedged underneath. I stick my hand in, grimacing at the feel of the cold, dank soil. There’s a package of some sort in there, bound up in plastic. It takes a couple of tugs and I pull it out, shaking off dirt and a few slugs and earwigs. I study the package, turning it over in my hands: letter-sized, about half the thickness of an average paperback. It’s been wrapped in a trash bag and secured with electrical tape. I’m going to need scissors to open it. Which means I need to get back to school.