6. A Gift from a Saint

A QUESTION OF TIME Part 6

“Dear Lord,” gasped the Reverend Phoenix Pyke, “if this is the work of your timeless and everlasting foe then forgive me…” and he reached as far as he could towards the fleshy hand that had appeared in front of him, and brushed against it just to test that it had the warmth of life in it.

No hand was ever so cold, and he yanked his fingers away from it as quickly as he could.

“Begone, foul ambassador from the Necromancer!” he shouted just as old Ma Foggerty struggled through the small side door that connected her back yard with the body of the church.

“I’ve come to bring you a ham sandwich,” she squawked, and this is all the thanks I get! Well then, I’ll give it t the birds, see if I don’t.”

Confused, as could only be expected, Colin Wharton decided his best option was to withdraw, and that is precisely what he did: a spirit with a hand, and a cold hand at that, he faded away from the inside of Saint Angelo’s little church..

I need to find my grave and sink into it, he decided. The churchyard was connected to the church via a short walkway that had been trodden over the centuries by tribes of mourners carrying a variety of wooden boxes complete with decomposing contents, so had anyone been watching his hand could have been seen moving that way.

His own grave might have been in a completely different cemetery, but that didn’t matter. He felt a oneness with the ambience all around him and as if by a kind of supernatural magic he found himself drifting away without putting the least bit of effort into it until he was standing by the already weathered headstone that announced that Colin Wharton lay entombed beneath the weedy sods that covered an earthy mound, several miles away.

“So it’s come to this,” he sighed, “both alive and dead at the same moment but needing a place to call home, and that’s got to be a wooden box buried deep in the clay soils of this neck of the woods.”

“There was a time,” came a female voice from nowhere, “when I felt like that, but it’s really not that bad. Let me introduce myself. I’m Marline Hampdown and I’ve been waiting for you to visit.”

“Oh dear,” he said, “I can’t see you. Can it be that in addition to everything else I’ve lost my sight and am suddenly blind?”

“Silly boy,” said the voice, “of course you’re blind! But then, so am I so it doesn’t matter, does it? You can’t see how pretty my face is, how cute my nose, how bright my eyes, and I can’t see anything more exciting than one of your hands! Tell me, how did that come to be? I mean, I’d die to have a hand, only one, it wouldn’t matter if I’d lost the other one. No I wouldn’t die. Or would I? It’s confusing being trapped as we are between life and death.”

“Are you like me, then?” asked Colin, “everyone else I’ve been to discuss matters with has been alive and I’ve been able to talk to them even though they couldn’t see me, but you’re the first soul I’ve spoken to who I can’t actually see.”

“We’re few and far between,” sighed the voice, “call me Marline and we’ll get along quite fine. I’ll tell you about me. I was twenty seven when I was killed by the b*****d I married, and it turned out it wasn’t love he wanted but my fortune. We’d barely been married for a fortnight when he poisoned me. And the spooky thing, if under these circumstances I can use that term, is I was on the cusp of murdering him too. For his fortune, which would have become mine on his sad demise and made me very rich indeed, and incidentally the very fortune that he murdered me for!”

“That doesn’t make sense at all,” Colin said after a thoughtful pause.

“I know that now, silly! I’ve had, let me see, a very long time to work it out. Fifty years at the last count. But come here, young fellow me lad and tell me, are you as handsome as that hand looks?”

“I’m thirteen and you can call me Colin,” he told her.

“Oops. I wasn’t intending to chat you up! A teenage boy with acne when I wanted a man with a hairy chest! Never mind. I’ll find my beau one day and settle down in my subterranean paradise with him, slowly decomposing until our two fleshes are joined into a lovely slurpy goo as one…”

“If you’ve been around for fifty years haven’t you sort of decomposed already?” he asked.

“Go away!” she snapped, “what a wretched thought! Of course I haven’t! I pop back from time to time to make sure! In fact, I’ll go back down now and make absolutely certain. How rotten of you to have put that into my mind!”

He could tell, without looking or hearing or smelling that she was suddenly not there, which was a shame because she sounded like the sort of person who might have made the hereafter more interesting than it was becoming.

“There are some odd people drifting through the air of graveyards,” he told Eleanor.

“Where in the name of goodness have you sprung from! I thought I’d got rid of you for good!” she snapped, “I got the Priest in and he splashed his holy water everywhere and said a few weird sounding prayers and told me you’d not be back. He charged me a small fortune for the exorcism!”

“That’s twice I’ve heard talk of fortunes in half an hour,” muttered Colin, “but it didn’t work, did it? I’d get my money back, if I were you. Now when are we going to get married?”

“You’ll need more than a hand with grubby finger nails if you’re going to have any chance of marrying me,” she told him, quite firmly, “A girl needs warm flesh to cuddle up to on cold winter nights. But you must know that, Colin. Remember no man’s land?”

He would have grinned had he a mouth with which to do it. “How could I ever forget,” he murmured, “it’s why I love you. You’ll have to wait for me, Eleanor. I found myself a hand and now I’m off to find a few more bits of me. Before long, the saints willing, I’ll be whole again.”

“You called?” asked Saint Nicholas, shaking flakes of snow off his green wellington boots, “here, take this.”

A second hand appeared from nowhere, and it shook the other warmly.

“That’s just what you need,” groaned Eleanor, “two left hands!”

© Peter Rogerson 06.06.21

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