THE BOY FROM THE PAST (3)

The conclusion

Timmy led the way back out of the house because there was nothing Arthur said he wanted more than to get away from the confusing nonsense of a later age return to the tiny coffin-vault he called home, where he somehow felt comfortable. The world around him was just too much, and when an international airline could be heard overhead he would probably have passed out had it been possible bearing in mind his apparent lack of a physical body.

After a while Lorna decided to satisfy her curiosity on one point at least. They were already passing Saint Ursula’s church, which meant the graveyard wasn’t so far away, and her curiosity made her ask Arthur how he had died so young.

“My father was a priest,” he said, “and also quite a strict man, and he took a stick to me once too often. I wasn’t ready to take punishment for just looking at Fanny Grimshaw from a distance, but father thought my looks were hiding a hidden desire, and maybe they were, how would I know at the age I was?.”

“So he punished you for that?” asked a shocked Timmy.

“He did. That was his intention. And as he was the priest he had control over what went into the graveyard, and so he had already ordered that a deep hole be dug and kept unused. He told me he intended it for me to spend eternity in if I didn’t change my ways and stop staring at evil girls.”

“That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard!” gasped Lorna.

Having started his tale, Arthur continued. “One evening after a service in the church he grabbed hold of me by one ear and dragged me towards the grave that he’d had dug, but I was ready for him. Oh yes I was! I had taken a knife from the kitchen and concealed it beneath my clothing, and when he raised his walking stick to beat my back when we were next to the unused grave I whipped it out and tried to plunge it into his heart, as hard and as deelpy as I could. Yes, I was intent on killing my own father.”

“I suppose it might be said that he deserved something, but killing?” queried Timmy.

“But I didn’t kill him,” sighed Arthur ruefully, “It was in my heart to do so, but when he saw what I was planning, when he saw the knife with its wooden handle in my hand and raised as high above my head as I could manage, he sneered at me and told me that I wasn’t big enough, and anyway there was already a place in hell reserved for me, a place in which scorching flames ate away at any mortal flesh they found, for I was evil, the way my eyes devoured the girl, who, herself, was a sinner…”

“What was she like?” asked Lorna sympathetically.

Arthur shivered. “As pretty as a summer’s day, love;iest of all fair woman,” he replied.

“But you didn’t kill your father?” urged Timmy. They had reached the graveyard gate and the boy from the past had been sounding increasingly quiet, his voice having slowly gained a kind of hollow echo as if it was being spoken down a tunnel quite a long way away.

“I tried to,” replied an increasingly distant Arthur as Timmy pushed the graveyard gate open for them to pass through. “Yes, I tried to, but my father, being both bigger and stronger than I was, managed to take it from me, and he plunged it straight through my chest and into my beating heart, sneering at me as he did so. So that’ to reply to your question, is how I died. The last words my father said to me were that my endless punishment in the pits of hell were my own dirty fault. But it was worth it, I suppose, because Fanny Grimshaw was a sight for sore eyes, and that’s what my own eyes were. Sore.”

“And did you reach the pits of hell and all that torment through fire and burning?” asked Lorna.

”I am still on my way there,” sighed Arthur. “For a long age, or so it seemed to me, I have lain in my resting place with soil piled high over the wooden box that had been put waiting for me in the deep hole, and in which I now lay. I didn’t even know that I was actually dead, for there was no wonderful heaven nor any fiendish hell for me to look upon, just the dark drabness of my underground bed.”

“And your father?” asked Timmy.

“I don’t know. I have no idea. Now please leave me here, my friends, if friends you are… I am returning to my eternal home. Thank you for terrifying me with insights into a future that my early death has avoided.”

As he bade them that last farewell they could sense rather than see the boy as he seemed to drift with the air towards the grave he had so recently exited. But it wasn’t alone. The damage caused when Arthur had joined them had been reported to the police as the work of vandals, and there was a constable ordered to guard it.

But Arthur didn’t know what a policeman was. He had no idea that the man he saw holding a scary flickering torch meant him no harm. So he moved as close to him as his tenuous flesh could manage, and spoke. But by then, so close to his lonely coffin, his voice had a thin, almost inaudible quality to it.

“Can I assist you, sir?” he asked.

The constable heard the sound and felt tha breath of it against his face, and to him, when he looked towards where it seemed to come from, all he could see was a darker smudge of cloud on te evening air.

“Who’s that?” he asked. “This is the police, and you are under arrest!” He didn’t explain why Arthur was under arrest or what the officer thought he might have done wrong. It was what he normally said in what he saw as a threatening situation when he was unsure what words he ought to use.

But Arthur ignored him, and with the sound of gravestones being invisibly urged to move followed by a series of clunks as his particular monument fell into its age-old position, the disturbance the policeman was guarding smoothed itself out, and with an almost inaudible hum settled as neatly into place as any gravestone might have when being lain into place by the gravedigger.

Quietly, Timmy and Lorna made their way from the graveyard and its squeaky gate, past Saint Ursula’s Georgian church, and to his home, and for the first time ever he found himself holding her by one hand while she gently squeezed his fingers.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson, 22.11.24

xxx