It was on a damp and chill November morning that Alison Hayes stood outside the locked gates of St Mathew's Church. As she gazed up at the spire and the washed-out sky, she reflected that it was a shame that such a fine building should stand empty and neglected.
Behind her, a car door slammed and Mark's bulky figure appeared at her side. He paused for a moment, eyes following hers to the tip of the spire as he fished a bunch of keys from his pocket.
"Aye, it's a nice place," he said regretfully. She nodded silently and he stepped forward and began trying different keys in the padlock. On the fourth attempt he found the correct key and undid the lock. The gate opened with a rusty creak and they walked into the church grounds.
St Mathew's Church stood on the corner of a busy junction at the edge of the city centre. Built in the 1880s, it was one of many churches that had closed due to the long decline in congregations. The church hall, a separate building erected shortly after the church itself, had remained open for a number of years, but eventually it too had closed. That was some seven years ago. Now, it was being re-opened as a community centre, run by Alison and Mark.
Alison followed Mark along the leaf-strewn path. Close to their right was a line of trees and railings, beyond which was the road. Away to their left there was a fairly large lawn between the church and the hall. In the middle of it was a twelve-foot high stone cross commemorating the dead of two world wars. The grass was unkempt and was covered in rubbish: plastic bags, beer cans, discarded clothes and broken furniture. It would all have to be cleared up.
The hall was quite a large building. Like the church, it was built from rough stone in a gothic style. The windows were acute arches, though unlike the church where the glass was protected by strong mesh, the windows in the hall had been replaced with reinforced plastic. The door was heavy oak. The handle and long hinges were painted black.
Mark unlocked the door and they stepped inside. It was a fairly small room, most of it behind a partitioned area that looked like it might serve as a reception or cloakroom. There was a double-door, painted blue. Alison tried the handle and it opened. They led into the hall. She walked through them. The hall was spacious. The ceiling was very high: six arching beams holding up simple but elegantly carved rafters. High above the door she had just come through were three windows. The light filtering through them clearly revealed the diamond pattern of wire reinforcement, making the yellowing, opaque plastic look like a grim parody of stained-glass windows.
The floor was bare concrete and the walls plain magnolia. Alison foresaw difficulties in keeping the hall tolerably warm and said so to Mark.
At the far end of the hall was a waist high wooden partition, beyond which was a corridor with a couple of murky windows to either side. Alison walked over to take a closer look. The walls in which the windows sat seemed to be made of wood and plaster and were evidently not a part of the original hall. Through the window on the right Alison could see a kitchen and through the other a room that might be an office. She stepped up to the wooden partition and pushed it, testing its stability and then noticed that the floor on the other side of it was higher than in the rest of the hall. A few metres to both the left and right were a couple of steps that led down to the floor of the hall.
"We'll need a ramp here," she called over to Mark who was examining a loose plug socket.
He left the plug and strode over to glance over the partition, before walking over to the steps. "Hmm. Twelve inches maybe... I don't think that will be a problem. I can make a ramp easily enough. Should be enough room for manoeuvring wheelchairs here..." he stretched his arms out to either side, touching the wall with his right hand and the top of the partition with his left.
Alison nodded and looked up. Above her, some fifteen feet or so above ground level was a dark-stained wooden balcony that looked out over the hall. She took several large steps back to get a better view of it.
The wall at the back of the balcony had a shallow recess in the shape of a large, broad arch, vaguely Arabic in appearance. At the centre of the recess was a double-door, painted blue.
"Wonder what that is up there," she murmured.
"Wonder where the toilets are," Mark said in a loud voice as he wandered down the corridor. Alison followed him.
"Ah, this looks like it," he said opening a door to the left marked "TOILETS". The door led into a short, narrow corridor with two adjacent blue doors on the left hand side. They opened the first.
"It's a bit small, isn't it?" Alison observed from the doorway. Mark grunted agreement. The room was somewhat spartan in appearance: the toilet had a black plastic seat with no lid, the white porcelain sink was a bit grimy, the pipes beneath it were exposed, the paint was pealing and the soap dispenser was cracked.
"Let's have a look at the other one," said Mark. Allison stepped out of his way and opened the second door.
"Just the same," she commented. It was indeed a mirror image of the first.
"Hm," Mark grunted, "looks a bit awkward for wheelchairs."
Alison nodded unhappily: "There's not really much we can do though, is there?" She paused, considering the floor space. "Looks a bit tight but... I think there should be enough room."
"I hope so," Mark sighed, "Let's have a look at the kitchen." They turned and walked back down the corridor and out the door.
The kitchen door needed painting, they noted, before stepping inside. It was a fair sized room, complete with cupboards and refrigerator.
"I don't suppose this still works," said Mark, examining the fridge, " It's been unused for a long time."
"Probably not. Looks at least fifteen years old; more than likely it was on its last legs anyhow." said Alison, "That's probably why it's been left here."
Mark closed the fridge door, stood up and looked around: "Still, it's in better nick than I'd expected. I half-expected the place being infested with mice, but I haven't seen any, ah... evidence of them..."
Alison laughed: "Maybe it's all been eaten by dung beetles..."
"God, I hope not," Mark winced.
"Oh look, I've found a kettle," said Alison, taking it from a cupboard she'd just opened, "and some cups..."
"Wonderful," said Mark dryly, "now all we need is milk and coffee and sugar and biscuits... And that's assuming the kettle still works."
"Well let's try it," Alison countered. She walked over to the sink and filled the kettle with water before plugging it into a socket and switching it on. The light flicked on and the kettle slowly began to boil.
"Alright, you win," said Mark amiably, "We'll have a cuppa before we get down to work. Custard creams alright with you?"
"I only said there's a kettle here should we fancy a cuppa; I never said we had to have a cuppa now," she laughed.
"I know but that's what you were hinting at and don't deny it. I know how your devious mind works, Miss Hayes..."
Alison burst out laughing and Mark continued with a straight face and undue gravity, "So I'll just take a walk to the shop, strictly as a special favour to you, you understand, because I know you can't operate without coffee and biscuits..." Alison was now giggling uncontrollably. "Will you be okay here?" he asked and she nodded, trying to calm down and get her breath back, "Okay, I won't be long." He turned and walked out.
Still smiling, Alison took a couple of mugs from the cupboard and washed them out, emptied the kettle and a rinsed it out a couple of times before refilling it. She tried opening the drawers beneath the sink. The first wouldn't open and it was only after some violent tugging that she realised to her embarrassment that it was a dummy. She tried the second and it opened easily. She searched through it for a teaspoon and after a moment found one, which she washed and then, unable to find a cloth, dried on the sleeve of her baggy pink pullover.
Alison was a small, shy woman, thirty-two years old, with shoulder length blonde hair and a nervous, eager-to-please smile. She had met Mark at a prayer meeting nearly five years earlier, in the midst of a personal crisis; a crisis which, as she reminded herself on a more or less daily basis, she was now, thankfully, over.
He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, somewhat overweight, twelve or thirteen years her senior, with short dark hair, now greying. When they'd first met, he was a recovering alcoholic, having already gone eighteen months without drinking, while she had been very lonely, clinically depressed and in serious need of help.
It was something that had been coming for a long time. She had been suffering from mild depression from early adolescence and had been having panic attacks from her mid-teens. By the age of twenty-four it had become a serious problem: she lost her job because she was unable to get out of bed in the mornings and was unemployed for long stretches, too scared to attend interviews. Her personal life was non-existent as she was terrified of going out and meeting people. She got heavily into debt through mail order catalogues. She kept buying things as treats for herself, hoping to cheer herself up, but it never worked. If she bought clothes she invariably found that they didn't fit, or didn't suit her or she didn't like them after all. She never sent anything back. Her house quickly filled up with unwanted presents to herself: masses of clothes and jewellery, pointless novelties, dozens of expensive yet vulgar ornaments, a bookshelf she hadn't even unpacked, let alone tried to assemble, a rowing machine she never had the energy to use, a talking alarm clock that scared the hell out of her... Her phone connection was cut off but she never noticed because no-one ever called her anyway. The electricity soon went the same way. It got to the stage where it seemed the only human contact was with people demanding money from her.
Then, miraculously, she got not one job but two: a temporary contract as a sewing-machinist at a garment factory and a part-time job delivering leaflets for a pizza shop. For a while it seemed things were beginning to look up: the meagre pay from her two jobs at least meant that she could begin to pay off all her bills and thus save herself from imminent court appearances and a probable jail sentence.
But then it all started to go wrong. First she lost her leaflet delivery job. Not really a problem by itself because there were plenty of other takeaways' that wanted the same job doing. It only got to be a problem when the others also decided she was unreliable. Before long she had been fired by just about every chip shop, pizza parlour and Chinese takeaway within a five mile radius of her home.
When she came to the end of her six month contract at the factory, she was told she wouldn't be offered another. Two weeks later her father died of a heart attack.
Having gone through all of that, Alison was in a bad way. She felt certain that she was going insane, completely losing all control and sense of herself. Day after day passed in a black haze. She almost forgot to attend her father's funeral, and afterwards found she could scarcely remember anything of it.
It was in this state of mind, dazed, half-crazy and totally desperate that she had wandered into a prayer meeting at St Hilda's church one evening in December. This was, for her, the penultimate resort. Raised by strict Anglican parents, who dragged her to church and forced her to attend Sunday school, Alison had a strong dislike for religion. She had spent half her life trying to get away from it. And yet, here she was, praying for a miracle.
Alison attended church every night for a week, her precarious and despairing demeanour becoming a matter of some concern among the regulars, Mark included. Then on the eighth day she decided that either miracles don't exist or that she didn't deserve one. She resolved to end her life.
She bought a craft knife from a stationary shop, took it home and then tested each of the six blades on her arm to see which she preferred to use. She decided in favour of a blade with a rounded edge, a bit like a miniature scimitar.
Having written her note she took up the scalpel and drew it hard and fast down her arm, elbow to wrist and then quickly slashed a series of cuts up her arm crossing the first wound at right-angles. The blood flowed fast and free, and it scared her. She suddenly thought of her mother and how she'd feel losing her daughter right after her husband, and then she panicked. She tried to call for an ambulance, but her phone was still disconnected.
Bleeding heavily, she staggered out into the street, looking for a phone box. It was then that a neighbour came to her aid and called an ambulance for her.
Alison spent a couple of days in hospital, where she was stitched up and given an appointment with a psychiatrist. A few days later, after being discharged, she bumped into Mark in the street. His tactful enquiries as to her recent well-being and whereabouts did much to persuade her that the gentle, sympathetic atmosphere of the prayer meetings at St Hilda's were just what she needed while she waited for the Prozac to take effect.
All of that was now, of course, in the past. She had gone through psychotherapy, gone through three courses of anti-depressants, paid off her debts with the money from her father's will and found some measure of consolation in Christ.
Alison didn't like to think of the past; she kept it hidden from herself, just like she hid the scars on her arms by always wearing long sleeves. Out of sight, out of mind.
As she walked out of the kitchen and down the corridor to a large room full of tables and chairs, she thought instead about the future. She wandered aimlessly among them for a moment, mind miles away, and then walked back towards the kitchen.
She stopped outside a door that she hadn't really noticed earlier and stared at it for a long moment before trying the handle. It opened onto a steep and narrow flight of stairs. She stepped through the door and began climbing them.
At the top was a large room cluttered with old furniture: tables, chairs, bookshelves, a portable blackboard and numerous faded and tatty artefacts from some long forgotten summer fair, including a hoopla board and a stand painted with a jungle scene where the intention was apparently to throw balls into the mouths of various animals.
To her right was a double-door and to her left three arched windows stretching from the floor almost to the ceiling, which, she noticed, was carved in the same manner as in the hall. She guessed that the doors led out onto the balcony that overlooked the hall. The light was soft and hazy as it came through the reinforced plastic. The air had that dusty, attic smell with a hint of something else she couldn't quite put her finger on.
Directly before of her was an antique-looking leather settee. She stepped forward and sat down on it, surprised at just how comfy it was. She sat there for several minutes, relaxing, enjoying the silence and the mellow light and the pleasant attic-smell that evoked strange and vague but powerful memories. She supposed that she may have dozed off because what followed had a surreal, dreamlike feel to it.
The first thing was the smell; not the attic-smell but the other. It was familiar and not exactly unpleasant, but she couldn't quite place it. It seemed out of place, out of context, and what's more, it seemed to be getting stronger.
Alison opened her eyes and found to her surprise that she was not alone. In a chair by the wall was a figure, dressed in some indeterminate grey-brown garb, very pale and thin-lipped, dark shaggy hair and large clear eyes that seemed so sad. The figure slowly raised a long, slender finger to its lips.
"Please be quiet," it whispered anxiously, "please don't tell anyone I'm here..."
"Who are you?" Alison asked, a little frightened.
The figure ignored her question and continued in a quiet, desperate voice: "Don't tell anyone. It's just that I needed somewhere to stay. I had nowhere to go... everyone needs somewhere to go..."
Alison felt strange, detached and lightheaded.
"Please don't be frightened, I mean no harm. I just needed somewhere to stay, that's all... People are so cruel, they care nothing for my needs..."
Alison sat entranced, bewitched; dazed but unafraid. The voice was so soothing, the eyes so deeply melancholy, her chair so comfortable, the light so unearthly.
"You are different, I sense that," the figure continued, "You are kind, you can help me. Please help me... All I need is somewhere to hide, that's all... Somewhere to hide... and something to eat. Everyone must eat, surely..."
The smell now was very strong, overpowering. Finally she recognized it: earth. Damp earth. And decaying leaves. It was comforting and cloying. Damp earth and dead leaves. The smell of the grave.
"You can help me. Please help me. I need you..." the figure implored, "I need you. Everyone needs something to eat. So young, so tender, so kind..."
In some increasingly distant part of her mind, Alison was dumbfounded to see that the figure had somehow appeared beside her on the settee without her recalling it moving from the chair by the wall. The smell was overwhelming, so rich and vital. She watched, surprised as the figure gently took her hand in its own. Its skin was cold and clammy yet she felt no disgust and was anyhow powerless to remove it. Its other hand crept up to her face where it lightly brushed her cheek, eyes always on hers.
"So good, so sweet, I'll feast then hide again, feast then hide... you don't mind that, do you?"
On some level, Alison was dimly aware that the figure was no longer making sense to her. Its voice calmed and reassured her but the actual words scared her. It was all so weird she decided she had to be dreaming.
"Feast and hide," it whispered with relish as it softly kissed her cheek and began stroking her neck, "Feast and hide again... You don't mind that do you? Of course not; you are sweet and kind... You don't mind, do you? You don't mind at all..."
It sank its teeth into her throat, and she didn't mind at all.
The End