Shadows and a vacuous quiet filled the Vicarage with a rigid presence that seemed, momentarily, to still the waking hunger inside Freya.
With shaking hands, Ms. Andrews unscrewed a dusty bottle and poured two splashes of amber coloured liquid into glasses. The old woman sat across from her in the drawing room, which had the same stale air, Freya thought, as Allerwood Church. An effort had been made to soften the room and make it more hospitable, but not a great one. Varnished elm bookcases lined the walls, filled with volumes of texts, and a vase of lilies wilted on the windowsill. A plate of scones filled the table between the two women, small pots of jam and cream beside it. The smell of brandy blossomed in the room.
“Lynnwood is an old village,” said Ms. Andrews, sipping slowly from her glass. “The old ways still hold sway here, though there are few who see it.”
“Yes, we have a longstanding heritage here –”
“I see it, though,” she went on. “I notice these things. I know what to look for, especially of late. So I realise the importance of our church here in Lynnwood.”
“What do you mean?”
She indicated wildly to the bookcases, a drop of liquor spilling from her glass. Again, she did not seem to notice. “There are books, parchments and diaries here, which date back to the earliest days of the village. There are still more in the study. I have read many, although it would take another lifetime to read them all. These matters interest me.”
They sat in silence for some minutes. Freya expected Ms. Andrews to continue, to expand on her observations, but she seemed distracted, her eyes fixed over her drink. Freya had a short sip of her own brandy, which tasted as it had smelled, then prepared her scone out of politeness. They were freshly baked, she noted, probably bought at market that morning.
She was spreading jam when Ms. Andrews chose to speak again.
“We didn’t always have such comforts. Those early days were dark ones. I was unsurprised when I learned our church was among the first of the buildings to be fashioned here.”
“I had read similarly –”
“People always turned to God in those times. He was a means of coping, a source of spiritual strength, a means, they thought, of elevation from the beasts of the earth.”
Freya was surprised at the note of disdain in the vicar’s voice. “You think this has changed?”
“Of course it has, Freya. People don’t come to church anymore, not for God anyhow. I’m not sure if they ever really did come for Him. People’s reasons are generally their own.”
Freya felt herself blushing, but nodded and took another hurried sip of alcohol. It stung her tongue and cheeks.
“But enough of that,” said Ms. Andrews. “Tell me, what is it you remember?”
Warm and liberated by brandy and the frankness of her host, she recounted to Ms. Andrews honestly the dream that had filled her sleeping thoughts for over a week now. All the time that she spoke, the old woman watched her, nodding occasionally. Otherwise she was silent. Those loose, watery eyes stared right into her own, unafraid; an adult, listening to the anxieties of a child. Encouraged, Freya then spoke of her uneasiness, of the unrest she sensed in Lynnwood.
“It is strange that you dream of the Forest,” Ms. Andrews said finally, when she had heard everything.
“Is it?”
“Yes, you see, I too have been dreaming of it. Not memories, or pleasant, energetic dreams, as yours sound, but dreams all the same.”
The words that spilled from Ms. Andrews’s mouth that afternoon took firm, wild root in Freya’s head. She talked of horrible things, made all the more so for the righteous voice that spoke them. Freya couldn’t help but worry for the troubled mind that formed such fantasies, or worse, endured them, night on night.
* * *
Ms. Andrews’s dream was always the same; a woman with a housefly face and wings like stained church glass. Only each time she dreamt it was longer and longer before she woke from them. No matter how much she prayed when she rose each morning, or how softly she appeared to sleep, it was the same. And as her dreams deepened, playing out longer in her mind, she found herself approaching this figure in the Forest. She was helpless to move otherwise, no matter how much she struggled to turn, to run back through the trees, to the Vicarage and home.
The figure under the trees was a horrible sight to behold. Ms. Andrews had thought she had seen her fair share of suffering in her life-time; her sermons preached often of lepers and she had worked with other, more unfortunate souls during the years of her service. But this woman, if she could even be called such, was by far the most abhorrent. Each night that Ms. Andrews dreamt, the figure took a step closer, and each night a little more of her became visible under the fading light.
Smooth, supple curves made up her human parts; pale, Elizabethan skin, soft and naked. Her legs were long but well-proportioned, her hips broad, as Sarah’s, blessed mother of Isaac. Then she saw the face of the woman, her large head that of a housefly, like the ones that crawled behind the curtains in the drawing room to die. Its flesh was mottled and leathery and its eyes were like fractured glass, or, she thought, morality, from the way that it looked at her; a thousand glittering facets, strangely human, staring from across the clearing.
And most unsettling to Ms. Andrews was that each step across the forest floor brought the uneasy apparition itself closer. Every step that she took was mirrored by the horrid, fly-shaped figure opposite; until she knew one evening they would meet.
It was always with this realisation, she said, that she woke, sweating, damp and with a thirst only alcohol would slake.
* * *
Every resident of Lynnwood knew its vicar, though few found need to call Joan Andrews by her first name. A polite, private woman to meet, this changed when she preached, as if in doing so she was forced to expend herself, to draw deep from within. The lessons of her life became the subject of her sermons. And they were righteous speeches. Her voice, deceptively strong for one so physically frail, carried far over the pews.
Freya had sat through more than enough of these sermons to piece together the old woman’s past, without their own private conversations taken into consideration. The rarer details of her history were imparted over cream tea and drink, such as they had taken the afternoon they discussed their dreams, and if she was an outspoken woman with a long life story to share, brandy only served to loosen her tongue.
Ms. Andrews was born and bred of the village. Christ was in her blood, she said; passed down from her father, and his father before him. She was the first and last woman in her lineage to take the title as vicar of Lynnwood. She had never seen fit to marry and, at seventy one, was childless.
There had been one man in her life, beside the Lord himself; a Frederick Mangel, travelling from Brittany the summer of ’63. Already in Normandy visiting family, it had been the small matter of a ferry across the waters and he was among the Forest. He had remained in Lymington for three days before venturing deeper into the trees. It was his purpose to see as much of the place as he could; he had desired to visit for many years and, with business growing – he ran a small recruitment agency – he doubted he would have the time again for months to come.
On the fourth day he discovered Lynnwood and that, as Ms. Andrews put it, was that. A Romanticist at heart, he found an intense, spiritual satisfaction in the dappled light of the trees, the intoxicating freshness of the air, the carefree birdsong in the branches.
Ms. Andrews first met him in the churchyard while laying flowers by the headstones. He asked her to dinner. She accepted and they ate matelote, which he cooked himself using fish from Bauchan Brook. She could not remember ever having eaten such delicious food and it was true to say she melted somewhat under the warmth of that sharp cider stew.
It wasn’t meant to last, however. That very Christmas – on the twenty-first, to be exact – he excused himself politely from dinner, citing reasons she couldn’t since recall. She couldn’t remember seeing him leave the Vicarage, or whether he had packed any clothes. All she did know was that she never saw him again. He flashed behind her eyes sometimes, when the dogs howled or the winter air rattled at the windows. All other times he was a shadow. A ghost of her past. He had proposed only three days prior to his leaving and, against every doubt, every pang of uncertainty, she had said yes.
That, she confessed over a glass or three of mulled wine two winters ago, was her one regret. She had been quite tipsy at the time and the confession had brought tears to both of their eyes, for Ms. Andrews deserved better. She was mild-mannered but stern, loving but fair, and charitable. When she encountered those people down on their luck, drinkers and the homeless, she would often sit and talk with them. Sometimes she gave them her blessings and when she prayed they were never far from her thoughts. Such charity, she said, cost nothing.
It was this grounded sensibility, this honesty and good nature, that endeared her to Freya and ensured that, when she voiced her unsettling dream, Freya listened. These were not the ravings of a mad old woman. Ms. Andrews was no Dickensian spinster, no matter her circumstances. And had they been ravings, she would have humoured them with her time anyway. Joan Andrews deserved that much.