Being Dead Part Eight

I've moved on to new laptop and my have left a few more typos than usual...

The rain was slashing down outside the church, and odd dribbles of it were finding their way in between gaps on the roof and dripping into the body of the building, splashing disconsolately onto wooden pews and stone floor and a dead priest alike. And all I was wearing was a tee shirt and shorts! It had seemed sensible the morning I dressed in it, but now, here, in a cold wet church, it was most inappropriate. As for Megan, when it had been sunny she’d looked splendid in a summer dress that was what some might have considered to be a little on the short side, but I didn’t.

 Now it seemed unsuitable bearing in mind the weather. We pulled ourselves tight against the stone wall that had sort of overhanging eaves above it, offering only a modicum of shelter. It wasn’t the ferocity of the siling rain that affected me so much as the smell, and it could only have been the acrid aroma of death that filled the air even though I’d have thought the rain slashing down from heavy skies would have combed any fragrance out of the air. “I don’t like this,” muttered Megan, and Tiller nodded his head in a sort of agreement. 

“It’s wet,” he agreed, “and we get wet.” 

“So where do we go from here?” I asked him, and went on in the friendliest of tones, “I mean, Tiller, where do you live?”

 He pointed down the hill on which the church had been built, no doubt to make sure it was as close to a god that it could be. There was a row of very small houses, where he was pointing, little single storey places, and thatched. “The third one along, counting from here,” he mumbled, “and my Esmerelda lies on her bed in there, dying, and I came up here to beg the Priest to intercede on her behalf, for she is too young to pass out of this life and go on her own to Heaven. I would rather go in her stead, though I fear, knowing the way I have been in my youth, that my own destination would surely be hell!” 

I looked at him and it was hard to imagine him committing any dreadful sin and certainly not one sufficiently evil as to upset a deity, not that I have believed in such beings since, as a teenager, I had asked difficult questions of the leader of the Sunday School, the chapel that I was obliged to attend in order that my parents got as many intimate moments together as they could, and his answers had betrayed his own lack of belief in what he was meant to be preaching 

Our guide set off when the rain seemed to have reached a pause in its fury and like obedient chickens we went with him. The village, if village it was, consisted of a few isolated dwellings, many of them small and surely no size for a family that included kids, the church we had just left and on the horizon a larger place where I assumed the local squire lived and ruled his roost.

 “Tiller,” I asked, “tell me: who is the chief round here? I mean, who is you all bow down to and pay your taxes to?”

 He looked up the hill at the larger house and snorted. “Him up there, the Lord take him,” he managed to squeeze out without too much vitriol in his voice, “though truth to tell I did hear that his precious lady, Prudence by name, has come down with the present malady that has taken a good half of the folks round here…”

 “I know how bad it is,” I told him. “though truth to tell it will soon get better.” 

“So who are you to foretell the future when even the priest who communes daily with our Lord has fallen to its evil power? These are bad times, man in pants that show the women all he has to show them and probably even more than that! There are those round here who would call you a servant of the necromancer just be catching a glimpse of you, dressed as you are,”

 “Where I come from this is perfectly acceptable,” I growled, needing to acknowledge his comments and yet not annoy him, for neither I nor Megan knew much about where we were nor, indeed, when we were, and he was the only guide we had. I was saved from any more opportunities to show my personal ignorance, at least for the time being, for we had arrived at the third shack from the church, which glowered down at us from its perch on a hill. Inside the humble cottage, if cottage it actually was, the air was leaden and dark. There wasn’t what I would call a bed anywhere but rather a sort of mattress spread on the floor with tell-tale wisps of its filling protruding like dank stalks. And on it lay the woman, and she looked far from comfortable as she rasped her life away with painful gasp after painful gasp of fetid air. 

“The priest is no longer breathing, my dearest Esmeralda,” he said, “but I have with me strangers who may be our only hope, for neither he nor she is showing any signs of the plague that is taking us one by one… But I pray that they may help us, for if they can’t I fear that all is lost…” 

 Her voice, when she spoke, was painful and weak. “Then save me, strange man, save me…” she gasped from the untidy bed on the floor. As she spoke a rat, grey and swollen, squeezed out of the bedding she was lying on and scurried towards the door, which Tiller rather courteously opened for it. 

“It is that creature and its fleas who are killing you all,” said Megan suddenly, “When I was a nipper at school we did the Black Death in history, for that’s what it’s called. And it was caused by the fleas on rats! While you allow rats and their fleas to share your beds then you are sure to catch the illness, and die. There can be no other outcome.” 

“You talk like an idiot!” almost shouted Tiller at Megan, “and I curse you as a witch! You are in league with the devil, and I can see it in your eyes and the flimsy garment you torment our eyes with as you flaunt yourself in front of us!”

 Then he opened the door and bellowed out “A witch! A witch! She has come to lead us all to the everlasting night where sin rules and the Necromancer holds sway!” 

And as his voice faded away the sound of footsteps, some of them weary and possible the very last thing the feet that made them did in this life, approached the open door...

 © Peter Rogerson, 01.09.24

 xxx