The Gatekeeper

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Book excerpt

Chapter One 

Low Moor was a village of forty semi-detached rented cottages, that formed the shape of a vesica piscis around the village green. The cottages were inhabited entirely by local families, none of whom had ever left, but had handed their tenancies down through succeeding generations for as long as anyone could remember. Their landlord was the Church of England and the rents were comparatively low, as a result it was a community where change was minimal.

            All the cottages in the village had large gardens, where tenants grew vegetables and fruit and kept livestock. The largest garden to the eastern end of the village green was the walled garden that belonged to the vicarage. Its neatly trimmed lawn was surrounded by mature native trees – mostly oak and birch – and flowering shrubs. A flight of stone steps led up from the front lawn to a paved terrace, bordered by shapely stone balusters supporting a balustrade of the same stone and ornamental urns. The impression was not one of opulence, but of considerable status and aspiring gentility.

            Beyond the terrace the three-storey gritstone Victorian vicarage was dark and silent under its heavy slab roof. In contrast with the tidy garden the house had the appearance of a place recently abandoned, an impression suggested by a broken first-floor window and sagging curtains detached from their runners. The massive oaken front door beneath its columned portico was deepy scarred by time and uncontrolled ivy rioted over the facade and dangled from the guttering in tangled clumps. Its visual appearance added to the building's atmosphere of neglect and incipient decay.

            A small stone-built cottage sat in the south-east corner of the garden, bordered on the two inward-facing sides by low box hedges and rose bushes. On the eastern side of the vicarage was a well stocked kitchen garden. To the rear was a cobbled yard with old stone ranges, mostly used in the past for stabling. On the west was a short gravelled drive leading from an imposing gritstone-pillared gateway with tall wrought-iron gates.

            It was a vicarage typical of its period: large, austere and a little forbidding.

            A tall dog-collared figure, dressed entirely in black, including an old-fashioned preacher-style hat, strode up the drive from the wrought-iron entrance gates. The figure carried an ebony staff held tightly against his right shoulder. A sunwheel symbol showing the cardinal points and the cross-quarters occupied the crook at the head of the staff.

            At sixty years of age Reverend Julius Dodds was a man who projected an air of absolute authority. His height of six feet five inches was intimidating enough. Add a sleek mane of steel-grey hair, eyes of the coldest blue that rarely blinked and a voice whose power and resonance could fill a cathedral, you had a man accustomed to getting his own way. Even the bishop felt reduced in his presence. Julius Dodds was a man who brushed obstacles aside like a gardener might waft away summer flies.

            Four monks, young, blond and oddly expressionless, clad in dark brown habits, followed Dodds to the vicarage door. They stood behind him as he thundered on the door with his staff, as if he meant to shatter the time-worn oak to splinters.

            "Reverend Oliver," Dodds boomed, "you must answer the door! If you do not, we will enter the house!"

            Michael Oliver, the forty-year-old vicar, wild-haired, unshaven and unwashed, was too preoccupied to pay attention to Dodds's summons. He was chasing Olwen Williams, a local beauty from the nearby village of Walden, around his bedroom in his underwear. It was a ritual they indulged in most days.

            "Oh, Olwen, you are so unkind," the vicar cried, "let me touch your gorgeous breasts, just for a moment, you know how they excite me!"

            Olwen laughed and threw off her clothes. "You must do something for me first, my handsome priest. Down on your knees!"

            The vicar obeyed. "Oh, Olwen, let me drink from your endless fountain of life!"

            She grasped his hair and pressed his head between her legs. "Drink, priest! And be reborn!"

            Moments later they flung themselves on to the bed in a wild embrace…

            Dodds continued to hammer on the battered door. "I'm asking you again, Reverend Oliver. Come to the door or we will open it ourselves!"

            In the bedroom Olwen and the vicar, sweating heavily, rolled apart.

            "Knock, knock! Who's there i' the name of Beelzebub?" The vicar laughed, quoting the Porter from Macbeth.

            The thundering on the door came again.

            "Knock, knock! Who's there, in the other devil's name?"

            "Don't you want to know who it is?" Olwen asked, running her fingers along the vicar's thighs. "It might be important."

            The vicar gazed at her like a lovesick adolescent. "Nothing's more important than this. Being here with you. You're my life, you know you are."

            Dodds pounded on the door.

            "Knock, knock! This is hell-gate indeed!" The vicar rolled off the bed. "I'll get rid of them and be right back." He pulled on his shirt and pants and hurried from the room.

            When he had gone Olwen morphed from her seductress to her maternal archetype and left the room. Her long-term lover Gareth met her on the landing.

            "It's Dodds," he said.

            "I know. Let's watch from the garden."

            They hurried down the back stairs and out into the yard.

            The churchwardens of Low Moor benefice, a couple in their mid-sixties, appeared from the corner cottage: Arthur Hall, wiry and weather-beaten and his wife Beryl, stocky and strong.

            They looked troubled as they hurried across the lawn towards Dodds and his monks by the vicarage door.

            "Whatever's going on?" Beryl queried anxiously.

            "Is there a problem, Reverend Dodds?" Arthur asked.

            Dodds glared at them coldly. Arthur and Beryl looked down, intimidated.

            "The spare key, if you please," Dodds demanded.

            Without a word Arthur handed over a large iron key. At a sign from Dodds a monk ushered them back towards their cottage.

            "Return to your house," the monk intoned flatly, but firmly. "There's nothing to concern you here."

            Arthur and Beryl turned unhappily away. They stood in the cottage doorway, watching apprehensively, as Dodds inserted the key and unlocked the vicarage door. The four monks followed him into the house.

             A wide oak-panelled staircase led off the stone-flagged entrance hall. The walls of the staircase and the landing above were hung with paintings: a dozen dark moorland scenes filled with strange swirling energy, slightly reminiscent of the work of Edvard Munch. Sinister anthropomorphic rocks occupied the foreground. Dodds scowled at the paintings with obvious repugnance.

            Michael Oliver appeared on the landing. He glared at Dodds and his monks in outrage.

            "How dare you come in here? Out of my house, Julius Dodds – and take your brown thugs with you!"

            Dodds ignored the vicar's words. He turned to the monks. "Take him!"

            The four monks sprang up the stairs and grabbed the vicar, forcing him to the floor.

            "You can't do this! You have no authority!" the vicar cried in furious dismay.

            Dodds's glance of icy wrath reduced him to silence. "You're a disgrace to the cloth, Reverend Oliver! The bishop has requested your removal. Bring him down!"

            The monks frogmarched the vicar down the stairs. Their captive struggled vainly to free himself. "No! No! Let me go!"

            Dodds ignored the vicar's cries. The monks brought the wretched man down to the entrance hall and stood him before Dodds. Even the outraged vicar was unable to meet the man's domineering gaze.

            "You have made a mockery of your vocation. You have allowed that witch to defile this sacred institution. I am officially removing you from office.Take him away!" Dodds added as an afterthought: "Two of you stay and get rid of those vile paintings."

            Two monks dragged Michael Oliver to the door. The others started removing the paintings from the landing walls. Dodds looked on in grim satisfaction, then turned on his heel and left the house.

            The two monks propelled their captive down the drive towards the wrought-iron gates and a waiting Mercedes Panel Van. They paid no attention to the ex-vicar's cries. Dodds followed them, deep in his thoughts.

            A slight movement among the garden bushes revealed Olwen, with her long dark hair and sallow complexion, watching triumphantly as Michael Oliver, weeping now, was led away…

            One of the monks made a bonfire at the northern end of the kitchen garden next to the wall of the old stable block. He prepared a solid base of kindling, on to which he threw the paintings one at a time. His companion carried more paintings from the house and placed them ready to be cast on the fire.

            Meanwhile, in the yard at the back of the vicarage, Olwen and her companions, the sultry Rhiannon, dark-haired Gareth, fair-complexioned Rhys and Gwenda with her head of auburn curls, assembled new paintings and carried them into the house through the back door. The paintings revealed similar moorland scenes, with sinister anthropomorphic rocks in the foreground. Olwen and her friends laughed, darkly amused.       

            They leaned the paintings against the wall in an empty attic at the eastern end of the house and covered them with a dust sheet. They looked from the gable-end window, which had a view of the two monks tending their fire in the kitchen garden.

            "We've lost a vicar," Gwenda said with feigned regret. "The poor man was weeping for the joys he left behind."

            "We'll soon get another," Rhys commented. "Dodds makes John Knox look like a pussy. He'll never give up."

            "Let's hope the next vicar will be as obliging as dear old Olly!" Rhiannon's comment had them all laughing, but their light-hearted banter was belied by the expression of dark purpose in their eyes.

            "What fun!" Gareth announced, looking down at the monks. "Dodds has left us a little game to play."

            "I'll bet his cyborgs can't afford life insurance!" Rhiannon laughed.

            Opening the window, they took deep breaths and blew hard towards the fire. The monks choked with the sudden billowing clouds of bonfire smoke and clutched their throats. The fire leaped at them like a living being, clinging to them like napalm. The monks' habits quickly began to burn.

            Olwen and her companions continued to blow from the open window.

            Arthur and Beryl, clutching blankets, ran from their cottage towards the fire. They tried to smother the burning monks, who writhed and cried out in increasing agony.

            Quick, Beryl! Fetch more blankets!" Arthur urged in desperation.

            "Oh, God help us!" Beryl ran back in panic to the cottage.

            No matter how many blankets Beryl brought the fire devoured them in a matter of seconds. It was as if the flames were possessed by a ferocious spirit that was impossible to subdue. The heat became too intense for the churchwardens to bear.

            "Get back!" Arthur yelled. "It's no good!"

            Arthur and Beryl moved away from the fire, clinging to each other in terror.

            The fire consumed the monks. They screamed and collapsed to the ground, reduced to charred residues, like victims of a rocket attack.

            The sound of Olwen's laughter wafted across the garden in the wind.