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She watched it zigzag across the surface of the water, sleek and shiny.

It had a green back with vertical black bars along its sides and a yellow neck patch. Slowly and silently it approached the frog before striking with such speed and agility that Chase stepped back in shock, her hand at her mouth. It swallowed the frog in two gulps, constricting its throat to accommodate the meal before gliding away into the marginal plants like the memory of a bad dream.

There were serpents in
Paradise
.

CHAPTER 10

The episode with the snake and the frog had upset Chase more than she realised. She knew it was only nature at work, performing the cycle of life, but she didn’t like it. It was too brutal. Combined with Mr
Grimshaw
in the surgery and her distress at not being able to contact Jane, she felt sick.

She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t heard Jane leave. A light sleeper at the best of times, even Mat used to joke that he was scared to fart in his sleep in case it woke her.

Perhaps she had been too hasty deciding to move out here. She considered going back to the house and reading through the contract before she remembered Moon hadn’t given her a copy. There was no proof of anything.

There had to be a telephone somewhere that she could use. She tried to recall whether she had seen one in the public house the night before, but it had been so dark inside the building that she hadn’t been able to see much of anything. She considered the church hall, then remembered the vicar – if anyone could help her, it would be the vicar. Weren’t they the pillars of the community?

Walking through the lanes toward the church, she heard something rustling in the hedge; she imagined the snake (absently wondered if it was poisonous) following her and she increased her pace, her eyes alert for any movement.

The church was a small stone building with a spire that reached up to the heavens. You had to walk through the small cemetery to reach it, and as she walked toward the church, Chase absently regarded the tombstones. She noticed some of the older graves were covered in weeds, the gravestone inscriptions weathered and hidden by lichen. Some graves contained generations of families, all piled on top of each other in a macabre genealogy ladder. Other graves were more recent, the soil freshly tilled. The graveyard was unkempt, left to grow wild. The smell of grass filled the air, but there was also the putrescent aroma of decay, as if something had been left to rot.

She could see the fog hanging on the perimeter of the graveyard like a curtain, a barrier from the world, and she had the uncanny feeling someone was watching her from within its cold embrace, and the hairs prickled at the nape of her neck. Hesitating, she thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and she spun around to see strands of fog stretching tentacle-like from the main mass, as though someone had run out of the ethereal cloud. Narrowing her eyes, she scanned the area, but couldn’t see anyone. She trembled. Suppose it was a ghost? But that was stupid. There was no such thing. She laughed at her foolishness, but the fog was now losing its charm, becoming something sinister.

Eventually she put the movement down to the wind, fully aware that her mind was capable of playing tricks on her, especially as she was alone and vulnerable at the moment.

With a shake of her head, she carried on walking.

The door to the church was ajar, and Chase pushed it and stepped inside. The interior was cool and she trembled at the sudden climatic change, rubbing her arms to warm herself. It’s no wonder the congregation’s fallen, she thought. Perhaps if they had a bit of heating ...

At the back of the church a stained glass window depicting the crucifixion of Christ cast shards of colour across the wooden floor. The blood dripping from the wounds looked too red and vivid, as though it was real blood, and not just coloured glass. Chase looked away. Walking between the pews, her footsteps echoed eerily from the eaves. At the front of the church, the altar was adorned with two white candles and a large, gold cross. The candles were lit, the guttering flames causing shadows to dance around the walls; a white linen cloth hanging from the front of the altar billowed slightly.

Chase frowned as she studied the altar cloth. She couldn’t feel any discernible breeze, certainly not enough to stir the heavy cloth, so why was it moving? As she cautiously approached the altar she heard a noise, a soft sigh. Her heart missed a beat. Something wasn’t right here. Standing in front of the altar, she steeled herself and grabbed the cloth. Heart in her mouth, she quickly tugged it aside and a figure fell out and rolled across the ground. Chase jumped back in alarm before she recognised the vicar. An empty whisky bottle rolled out with him.

What the hell was he playing at?

The vicar looked up at Chase with bloodshot eyes. She was sure there was fear in his gaze. Mumbling to himself, he scuttled away, crab-like, sending the bottle spinning.

“Are you okay?” she asked. She hurried across and crouched down, placing a hand on his shoulder.

“Get away from me,” the vicar hissed, smacking her hand away. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

“Here, let me help you up.” Chase was shocked by his outburst, but she was also concerned for him.

“I am beyond help. We are all beyond help. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened——”

“I know what you need. A good, strong cup of coffee.”

“——by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.”

Chase shook her head. The vicar was obviously drunk. She considered getting help, but she didn’t want to jeopardise his position or embarrass him. “Have you got a kitchen where I can make you a drink?”

The vicar grinned. “Behold I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed——”

“You really should drink some coffee.”

“——In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” He started to giggle, rocking backward and forward on his haunches.

Chase shook her head, sighed and walked away toward a door at the side of the church, which she hoped would lead to the rectory.

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us ...”

Chase walked through the doorway and closed the door behind her, shutting out the vicar’s rambling sermons. She didn’t like to admit it, but he was scaring her.

Finding herself in a small annex, she walked through another door and eventually found a kitchen. She picked up the kettle, carried it to the sink and turned the tap, wrinkling her nose as the water ran brown as though it hadn’t been run for a long while. A stagnant smell emanated from it and she turned her head away to breathe in fresh air. When the water ran clear, she filled the kettle, found a jar of coffee in the cupboard and brewed a black coffee, which she carried back to the vicar who was still sitting on the floor of the church. She passed him the drink and sat on the end of a pew and looked at him, shaking her head and sighing.

The vicar stared wild-eyed at her, looked at the cup in his hands and then threw it against the wall where it shattered, showering the pews with coffee. “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and
thine
often infirmities,” he boomed.

Chase flinched. “Bloody hell,” she mumbled. She never imagined she would be nursemaid to a vicar. Weren’t they the ones meant to offer comfort?

She hurried back to the kitchen, found a cloth and a dustpan and returned to the church to try and clear the mess as best she could. When she had finished, she stepped back, eerily noticing that the coffee had stained the wall with a brown mark that bore an uncanny resemblance to a horned devil. Thinking that the image looked sacrilegious in a church, she tried scrubbing it, but the stain just got more vivid, as though she was uncovering a picture hidden by years of grime, so she gave up, hoping that when it dried out, no one would notice.

Although it was a struggle, and she ended up almost carrying him, she coaxed the vicar through to the rectory where she eventually managed to put him to bed. She sat with him for a while until she heard him snoring. She reasoned that he would wake up with a well-deserved sore head.

Although she felt guilty about snooping through someone else’s house, she needed to find a telephone. Through a door in the kitchen, she discovered a larder full of recognisable brand name, tinned food. There were none of the nondescript white cans from the local store. Not that she could blame him. She knew from her own experience that the white tinned food tasted a little bland. There were also a number of whisky bottles in the larder that she viewed with distaste.

In the antiquated lounge, she noticed photographs on a Victorian bureau. They showed the vicar and a cheerfully rotund woman (the vicar didn’t have his red cheeks in the photographs). Both of them wore wedding rings and happy smiles. The present state of the house didn’t reflect a woman’s general housekeeping, and she wondered where the woman (who was most likely his wife) was now. Had she left due to her husband’s drink problem? If she had, then Chase couldn’t blame her.

She found what she was looking for in the hall, but when she lifted the receiver, the line was dead. Why were none of the phones working? And how had she received a text message on her mobile when there was no signal available to make calls? Ideas bloomed in her mind, but she quashed them before they were fully grown. Exhaling a frustrated sigh, she slammed the receiver down and checked back on the vicar. He was snoring away and leaving him to sleep it off, she walked back through into the church. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the devilish stain, and for a moment she could have sworn that the silhouetted head turned toward her, but when she looked straight at it, nothing had changed.

She left the church feeling depressed, scared and lonely.

Walking up Slaughter Hill, she noticed Belinda was no longer in her garden. She was relieved. She couldn’t face seeing her, not after the vicar.

When she entered the
garden
of
High Top Cottage
, she felt a sense of relief, and when she entered the house and shut the door, she felt safe, as though the house had now accepted her. She glanced at her watch, saw she still had hours before meeting Adam, and decided to have a lie down. It had been an exhausting morning.

In the bedroom, she lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, pondering on the day’s events when she noticed the entrance to the loft. She hadn’t really noticed it before. Curious, she slipped off the bed and walked across the room to the dressing table where a long wooden pole with a hook on the end was leaning against the wall. She had wondered what it was for. Now its purpose was evident. She used the pole to push open the hatch, then used the hook to pull down the loft ladder that descended in a cloud of dust.

Chase coughed and wafted the dust away, and then she climbed the ladder and peered into the dark loft. Just able to make out a light pull, she tugged it, flooding the room with light from a bare bulb in the rafters. Cobwebs hung like macabre decorations from every available crevice and she decided not to venture any further when she suddenly caught sight of a box, half hidden in the corner. Curious, she stepped into the loft and crossed the creaking floor, squirming as she brushed away the cobwebs.

The box was an old wooden packing crate and she lifted the lid to reveal a few old clothes. Sifting through them with an air of trepidation, she half expected to see a large spider scurry out. Finding nothing else in the crate, she shut the lid and turned to descend the ladder when she noticed a hole in the wall. She only really noticed it because the light failed to penetrate around the edge, making it stand out from the rest of the brickwork. A cobweb hung over the hole like a gossamer veil and she was going to ignore it when she noticed there was something in there. Crouching down to get a better look, she was wary of putting her hand in. The cobweb meant there was a spider somewhere, but curiosity got the better of her. Screwing her face up in disgust, she brushed the cobweb away and hurriedly slipped her hand inside, snatching out the object and dropping it on the floor as she wiped her hands on her jeans, a tremor of disgust making her shake.