THE KING'S KINGDOM

The coincidence of Josiah's proximity to a third woman who died whilst he was sleeping was too much for a Detective Sergeant, who was maybe a little over-confident.

The Reverend Josiah Pyke knew he shouldn’t be where he was, but somehow he was. Once or twice before in his life he’d been in the wrong place, and here he was again, but this time it was the worst possible wrong place.

That awful police sergeant had told him quite bluntly that she was totally convinced that he was responsible for the death of the lady Reverend and probably every other woman he’d bumped into during his miserable life, and no matter what he said, no matter what the pathologist (natural causes, was his conclusion) put in his report, that Detective Sergeant was adamant that murder had been done and she had the murderer in her grips.

And hadn’t his own mother died? Shouldn’t that be looked into? And that other woman, she who had as good as adopted him… she was gone too, wasn’t she?

So he was in a grim and urine-stinking cell and there was nothing he could do about it. Doors had clanged shut, obscene bunches of keys had rattled like keys can, and he was finally on his own. Totally on his own, minus shoe laces and trouser belt. They weren’t going to let him take the law into his own hands and put his own ending to things in any foreseeable way.

There were shadows everywhere in his cell. Night had started falling in the world outside, a nightmare day was drawing to its ending, a day that had dawned with the cold flesh of Beryl nestling against him as her dead eyes had glinted with the last remnants of a faded ecstasy and it had proceeded to a nightmare of accusation, of denial, of tears, (his tears, born of frustration and sorrow mixed into a soup of unadulterated misery) until finally that awful woman’s patience had snapped and he’d been almost dragged to this cell.

This little, smelly, poky smell with its wafer-thin mattress where he was supposed to sleep.

My Kingdom, he thought, my wretched little kingdom…

And the dying light drew onto him as he closed his eyes. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that, closed his eyes, for maybe they’d never open again...

There was Ricky! Little Ricky who’d probably been a Richard but his name had been distorted in the cheeky way small boys distort their names when they seek for that little bit of affection that the grown ups can’t understand.

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, whispered the shadow in his head, the Ricky he’d forgotten well above half a century ago. But he was here now, crawling from the depths of a memory he’d long forgotten that he’d ever had.

“Ricky,” he whispered, but Ricky, who’d been loud in his head, was gone.

Instead it was his father, wielding a cane walking stick with ferocious eyes as his need to confirm his little son as a candidate for his version of the Hereafter caused it to crash down across his back, leaving a savage weal behind it. And not once. Not even twice, but on and on until the boy collapsed to the floor and lay still.

One long agony amongst many. One last lesson about love and death and the Hereafter amongst a nightmare of others.

In his cell, with eyes fast shut, he squirmed.

You can live here with me, whispered Mildred Haystack from the air all around him, and he heard the generous magic of her voice as she held him by one hand and pulled him gently into her cottage.

I know what it’s been like for you. The man’s a b*****d. A true heathen b*****d, she told him before the air plucked the spirit from her and swirled it away to where there might have been an ether, but wasn’t.

A door where there wasn’t a door opened anyway, and Penny Longlane with her ravishing long hair and dressed in almost nothing as he remembered her at the swimming baths sidled in, right up to him, stood next to him and smiled at his closed eyes and shallow breathing, whispered with that familiar lovely voice of hers that now he was on his way she was waiting for him... then melted away like people never do, became one with all those shadows, and his mind reached out to touch her.

But it touched nothing.

The King’s kingdom was collapsing.

And hovering in the breeze just by his head smiled Ophelia.

My love, my wonderful love… the thought reached out to him.

My love, my wonderful love… he replied.

I’m sorry that I left you, I’m sorry I had to go…

But she had gone. The illness saw to that, and there was no way it was ever her fault. People lose their loved ones, men and women, boys and girls, even cats and dogs… And that had been that. He had been left with Jodie, and she was sweet as an angel.

The cell darkened. He couldn’t open his eyes, couldn’t make out a single feature in the Stygian blackness that surged and swamped inside his head.

Beryl smiled from nowhere, smiled that lovely Reverend smile of hers, beckoned him, though he couldn’t see her. But he knew, all right. She was beckoning and he would go wherever it was she wanted him to go. He would follow. Who wouldn’t?

I’m coming… screeched out in his head.

And then there was silence.

An awful silence that went on and on and on, then faded into an even deeper silence, and the Reverend Josiah Pyke went colder than the black cell.

Just in time for Sergeant Ruth Coxon to rattle her keys and plunge the cell with the light of the corridor outside and the darkness of her voice.

“Right! You! On your feet! Now! You’re free to go!” she bawled.

But there is no silence more engulfing than that which faced her as the Reverend Josiah Pyke lay on his thin mattress, growing ever colder as the lights all finally flickered out and the silence grew more intense.

“Get up! This is beyond a joke!” screeched the detective sergeant, but her shouting and histrionics were all in vain.

The Reverend Josiah Pyke would never hear anything again.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 22.04.18