The church was not in total darkness. There were no lights on inside, but the glow of the floodlights illuminated the stained glass of the windows and filled the interior with a grainy twilight. It looked almost as if a thin mist hung in the air.
Will crossed the nave and climbed up the small spiraling stone staircase to the caretaker’s office. He took a spare key for the crypt gate and a large iron key for the side door, probably the same two keys he’d returned in 1989 before taking back to the earth again.
He slipped the keys into his pocket, descended the steps, then opened up one of the storerooms, the door to which stood nearby, almost opposite the door up into the organ loft. He took two large candles, not because he needed them just yet, but because it was better to take little and often—things were less likely to be missed that way.
He closed the door and stood for a moment, looking down the length of the nave. It was very still, the air hazy with the strange light from the windows, but there was a troubling feel about the place and Will couldn’t quite work out what it was.
He heard something behind him, nothing distinct, but turned casually to look in that direction and immediately jumped in shock. One of the large candles dropped from his hand and rolled across the floor.
The woman who’d tried to throw him out earlier that day was standing just a couple of meters away, staring at him with an expression that was somehow blank and intense at the same time. But something was very wrong.
It was the same woman in almost every regard—the short gray hair, the tweed skirt and knitted sweater, the neatly laced leather shoes—but her scent was different. He could smell people the same way people could smell freshly baked bread. Earlier, this woman had been unmistakably human, but that presence had gone.
He didn’t have time to react. With a sudden burst of violence, the woman jumped into the air and he felt her foot hit him square in the chest with the power of ten men. He flew backwards and knew that he would land awkwardly, but was too amazed to try to save himself— no one had ever struck him before, certainly not with a force like this.
He landed with a crunching thud on the floor, his head hitting the stone. He felt the blow without registering any pain, but it left him disorientated for a second. He’d heard the keys fall out of his pocket as he’d landed, but astonishingly, he still clutched the other candle in his hand.
Will tried to sit up, but was once more briefly shocked by the realization that he’d been kicked maybe six meters down the nave. His attacker was walking towards him with a look of violent determination.
She was almost upon him and he knew he wouldn’t have time to get to his feet. Instead, he stayed on his back and curled up into a ball, springing out of it as she reached him, planting both feet into her chest, just as she had done to him.
He scrambled upright as she shot backwards, keeping his eyes on her all the time. He was unnerved, perhaps even afraid, for the first time in centuries because he didn’t know what this was. The woman flew through the air, as far as he had flown himself, but he’d kicked her at a slight angle and her body smashed into one of the stone pillars, bouncing off it before hitting the floor.
At that second, in the moment of impact, something even stranger happened. Her entire body seemed to melt into itself, forming a dark void, and as it landed on the floor, it was no longer a woman, but a wiry black dog.
He recognized it immediately as one of the dogs that had slept by Jex’s stove, but he no more believed the vision before him was really that dog than he believed it was the woman he’d seen earlier in the day. The dog shook itself as if pepper had been put on its nose, and transformed again, shifting through a state of liquid confusion and emerging once more as the woman.
Whatever creature this was, Will couldn’t understand why it was so intent on doing him harm, nor could he imagine how to defend himself against it. For eight centuries he had been at the top of the food chain, fearing nothing, because no other living thing had ever matched his powers.
He could only assume that all these things were connected. One divine power had led him to Jex, to the notebook that might prove the key to his existence, but another had sent this demon to attack him, perhaps to destroy him. And he didn’t know how to fight it.
The woman started towards him and immediately broke into a run. Will thought of the keys and scooped them up off the floor. She was almost on top of him when he clenched his hand around the larger key, the one for the side door of the church, and held it out directly in front of him like a dagger.
She leapt for him, but he stood firm, even as he felt the force of her body crashing into his hand. He heard a tearing crunch, felt the shuddering impact, and then her face stopped at arm’s length from his, her expression still stubbornly blank.
He looked down. The large black key was embedded up to his knuckles in her chest. No blood came from the wound, but around it the flesh appeared to be turning fluid, just as her entire body had turned fluid after hitting the pillar a minute before.
Will looked back at her face. Slowly, her mouth opened, and then in a detached voice, like the echo of someone talking in another room, she said, “The cathedral’s closed, I’m afraid. From six o’clock on winter Tuesdays.”
“Who are you?”
She smiled and once more said, “The cathedral’s closed, I’m afraid. From six o’clock on winter Tuesdays.” But this time he could hear another voice whispering behind hers, and as she repeated the phrase yet again, he clearly made out the words, “Death to you, William of Mercia.”
He didn’t have the chance to ask his question again. The woman’s form turned transparent, becoming some liquid element of darkness. Then, as silently as she’d first appeared, so she had gone, into the air itself, leaving the key clenched uselessly in his outstretched hand.
Will spun around, immediately fearing that this was just the prelude to yet another attack, but there was nothing, no sound, nothing in the air. Whatever had attacked him had been destabilized enough to retreat, but he had a feeling this wouldn’t be the end of it.
He gathered up the dropped candle and returned quickly to his lair. Even as he sealed the chamber door with the stone, he knew that it would be no protection from whatever demon had just shown itself to him in the church above.
What defense could he have against something that had the ability to appear and disappear at will, to shift itself from one form to another, a demon that seemed to match him for strength? Its only weakness seemed to be an inability to hold its shape when a great enough violence was done to it.
He wondered, too, why it had come to him in those forms, as a busybody old woman and a wiry black dog. Was it somehow reading his mind, making itself into the people and creatures he’d encountered in the recent past? Perhaps it would come to him next as Jex or the fireman or the girl by the river.
He opened the chest that contained his library, a collection of just a hundred or so books, accumulated over the centuries, some of them taken from the library in the church above, some from the wider city. He’d read many thousands of books across the centuries, but had discarded most, even from his memory.
This chest held all those Will considered important enough to treasure. He looked at them now, heavy volumes stacked upon each other, their ancient pages and covers, vellum and hide, protected from dust and time by the chest in which they were locked away.
There were volumes in Latin and Greek, and many more in English, or rather in many varieties of English, charting the course of his language over all this time. He could still read the handwritten and illuminated English of his childhood as easily as he could read the scribblings he’d found in Jex’s notebook, even though they were almost two separate languages.
The thought of the notebook made him lower the lid of the chest again. He knew there wouldn’t be anything in the books of his library that would help him understand what had just happened in the church. If anything, if there were answers, they’d be found in the notebook itself because he was convinced the events were related.
He felt a slight prickling on his skin, a sixth sense telling him that the sun had broken over the horizon in the city above. He knew how differently the city looked now, but when he thought of it at dawn, he couldn’t help but see the early mornings of his childhood and it filled him with a wrenching sadness, for the mother he’d never known, for the half-brother who’d overtaken him and grown old and died, for the father who’d mourned his death, for the lost world of that other England.
Will slumped into a chair with the notebook and flicked through its pages. This is what that world had become, Jex and his dogs living in a disused warehouse where once there had been fields, surrounded by light and noise and machines where once there had been tranquility.
But his mood lifted when he thought of all that had remained the same over the centuries, the city walls, some of its buildings and streets, and above all this church, standing proud like a beacon across time. And the people themselves, some of whom might have stepped with him from his own past, stopping only for a change of clothes.
He caught a glimpse of the girl’s picture and stopped, opening the notebook to look at it once more. Something about her had enchanted him and he didn’t know whether it was simply her beauty, for she was beautiful in an unhappy way, or a deeper sense that she was a part of all of this.
He didn’t entirely believe in omens and portents, but Jex had given him a strange and demented sign in the form of this book and his dying words. It implied a destiny, just as the demon above had suggested there were forces that wanted to keep him from that destiny. And if Will had understood correctly, this girl was a part of it, perhaps even the key. If she was the girl Jex had spoken of then Will needed her, and though she probably didn’t know it, she needed him.