EVERLASTING PEACE

an abused boy, a lonely housewife and aconfused vicar combine togther on a dark night in a graveyard

    It was midnight when the shadow took shape. Before then he had been Adrian Pinchbeck, a small-time teenage thief on the look out for the wherewithal to obtain a bag of chips if the chippie was still open because wasn’t he starving, and then, on the sound of the church bell striking twelve, he morphed into the shadow.

And not just any shadow.

It was all in his head, of course. He’d read too many horror stories when he’d been young enough not to be discouraged from reading anything by the sneering attitude of his peers. They’d put a stop to anything remotely cerebral for him, but he had a memory and in that memory the shadow lurked the streets once it was midnight. Before then he was merely a person, and in this case Adrian Pinchbeck.

It was the vicar who saw the metamorphosis as Adrian became the shadow, and he couldn’t believe his eyes because Adrian Pinchbeck was, actually, a reprehensible brat and the shadow was his Creator, the good Lord himself who sometimes chose the early hours of the morning to reveal himself to the Reverend Simon Simpson, vicar of All Saints in Brumpton who occasionally chose to take a stroll round his church yard during those early hours in order to recover from the pint or so of communion wine that he kept hidden on a shelf in his pulpit for nights such as this one. Mrs Cleverly wouldn’t approve if he joined her in bed drunk as a lord or even drunk as a bishop and she might swear at him in Anglo Saxon and return to her husband, who was no doubt oblivious to her absence from his bed. And the Reverend Simon Simpson didn’t want that to happen because he was a man and men have needs.

Mostly his maker chose to reveal himself in the form of black cats, white cats, cats of every other hue, and even every so often a red fox because his Lord chose to appear to him in the shapes of such every day creatures that had a habit of haunting the church yard. It was assumed by his Reverence that the dead called out to the Lord Almighty for no better reason than because they could. The dead, he really believed, could do all manner of things or there’d be no point in sleeping in a cosy lined coffin, whiling the centuries away until someone blew a special note on the last trumpet, or something like that. That much was postulated in his Bible, or at least he thought it was. He wasn’t so keen on reading the last part of his New Testament because, well, he always liked to imagine the start of the story, the scene that led to Mary telling Joseph she was in the family way and what could he do to help her, and then, fully replete with an imagined fantasy of love and support, he would join Mrs Cleverly (who always told him that the vicarage bed was infinitely more comfortable than her own where Mr Cleverly never noticed her and spent half the night farting.

But back to Adrian Pinchbeck.

He wasn’t a bad lad, not as some lads that are called bad go. He’d just had a lousy start in life, his mother dying when he was born and his father then blaming him for it. So he was fed, but only just enough to stave off starvation, loved because he was a boy and his dad preferred cuddling up to him rather than turning to their pet poodle when it was cold, and then he was sent off to school without the wherewithal to buy a lunch when lunch time came, so he was obliged to spend the afternoons and even longer if he was unlucky with hunger gnawing away in his belly.

But Adrian knew a thing or two, and he was well aware that if a man was staggering on his way home from the Garter’s Arms two things were probably true: firstly that he was skint and secondly that his imagination might be tempted to work overtime if something occurred to arouse it. If he was skint Adrian could forget him and find another victim and if he had coins in his pocket he could take advantage of him and scare the living daylights out of him due to the presence of gravestones and a great deal of buried death, and Adrian himself a supernatural shadow..

On this particular night there was nobody about except for the spooky old vicar who was staggering around the graveyard and singing about all things being bright and beautiful as he went. They weren’t, but he didn’t seem to know. But Adrian was loth to trap the vicar in a cycle of fear because the poor man was already trapped by a whole load of irrational fears of his own. He’d tried before and hadn’t liked or gained from it. Since then the silly old vicar had been a last resort.

But, he supposed, he’d better give it a go or the chippie would be definitely closed and he’d have to go home extremely hungry, where his father would be waiting to thump him senseless for being out late.

So he slipped invisibly to his favourite marble gravestone and waited for the vicar to draw near. He knew he would. He had memorised the drunken fellow’s route as he staggered among the dead enough times to know which way he went..

Then, at the appropriate moment and as the church clock deafeningly struck midnight he became the shadow, rising up, waving his arms wildly and howling.

But this was not any normal night because Mrs Cleverley had her own part to play in the comi-tragedy that was Adrian’s life.

She had been waiting in the vicar’s luxurious bed for at least an hour and was afraid she might fall to sleep before he lit his normal range of fleshly fireworks after joining her, and decided to go and find him. He wasn’t evident in the church but an empty bottle of communion wine was and she knew what that meant. The vicar, poor man, was troubled and had sought enlightenment from his faith, which involved him getting drunk enough to be able to translate the odd noises an elderly building might make as it cooled down after a warm sunny day into meaningful and comforting little homilies. And, she knew, he occasionally went among the buried dead outside in the graveyard because, she assumed, their very existence reminded him of his own mortality.

So we have the scene. A vicar, still in his pristine white surplice which sought the odd breath of breeze in order to float majestically with his every step, then poor Adrian Pinchbeck morphing into the Shadow by rising above a marble stone memorial and waving his arms around whilst creating the sort of noise his less than perfect imagination supposed a spirit from the underworld might make, and finally Mrs Cleverly in her much-too-brief nightie, hands on hips, staring.

“Adrian Pinchbeck!” she shrieked threateningly.

The shadow morphed back into a teenage boy, his ghostly howl was stopped to a ragged silence when he knew he’d been rumbled, and the vicar spun round, saw his housekeeper-cum-nocturnal companion apparently enraged, and fell to his knees to pray.

“Oh sweet Lord, forgive me,” he mumbled, and maybe it was the communion wine or maybe some other force at play, but he he fell sideways against the marble memorial, his weight making it move to one side with a grinding sound, stone on stone..

He couldn’t help looking at it.

“Whosoever disturbs his peace will find none of his own until the world’s ending” he read in the light from the church window

And the name above it, beautifully engraved, was “The Reverend Simon Simpson, RIP”

“I’m dead,” he thought, and Adrian watched in horror as he writhed in the throes of a majestic heart attack.

© Peter Rogerson, 18.04.23

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Reviews

[AYVID N]

A very comic story that ended on a slightly sad note. Perhaps, the vicar brought it upon himself. The wages of sin are death after all lol. Such a twisted everlasting peace for him.
It was funny how Adrian spooked the men but his hunger was so touching too. The vicar was hilarious as was his companion, Mrs Cleverly. Laughed so much today. One of the toughest things to do is humor and you did humor and pathos both equally effectively and at the same time. It's a class act. Kudos. Not everyone can do this.
Your stories are just awesome and I look forward to reading them whenever I have some time off a busy day. Please keep up the good work and keep sharing. Already looking forward to the next story you may be writing. Thank you so much.

[Peter Rogerson]

I'm always happy to read your comments. I guess my stories turn out as they do because when I start I haven't a clue how they're going to end so it's like they tell themselves.

[AYVID N]

Thank you for sharing that.