‘It was a kind of wind, Father,’ he jittered. ‘A kind of bumpy wind, like being pushed about in the market, but there was nobody there.’
He was standing outside in the sun an hour later, his breathing almost returned to normal, talking animatedly to the old priest and one of the city’s watchmen. The old man was watching him intently, while the other puffed knowingly on a curved briar pipe. As he described his extraordinary experience of that morning, it suddenly became much, much stranger.
As the images appeared before his eyes, the young priest fell off his chair, screaming and scrambling a pointless retreat.
‘Oh God, oh Jesus!’ he flailed in fright. ‘It’s them! They’ve come back!’
It took them a long time to calm him down. All the while, he looked about him fearfully, gripping the elder priest’s arm with a strength that had almost become painful.
‘It was them, Father, I saw them, they were here! Running at me. Terrible things. Oh, Jesus, protect me!’
‘Be calm, my son, be calm; God is with you.’
‘But Father, it was them, I know it was. It was everything I felt them to be this morning; it was as if their visual form appeared to me from an hour before. How could that be?!’
The old priest was very concerned, but tried hard not to show it. ‘They have gone now, they won’t come back,’ he said, and the words sounded like they had been said before. ‘Tell me one thing, my son.’
‘Yes, Father?’
‘Were they frightened?’
The young man pulled himself up the older man’s arm in small grabs, until their faces were almost touching. ‘They were terrified,’ he said.
The old man sent the boy home with the watchman and made his way back into the chapel. He was in little doubt as to what he would find. He went to where the visitation had occurred, taking in the knocked print hanging askew on the wall. He looked at the floor and, slipping his shoes off, he walked carefully in tight, quiet little circles, a small, solemn dance in threadbare stocking feet. Occasionally, he flinched or abruptly lifted his foot, as if from the piercing of an invisible sharpness; his expressions flickered, wavering between a grimace and a smile, the bare environment seeming to send a message that he alone could interpret. Eventually, his circles locked into a shuffle, and he moved intuitively across the room, where he discovered the rubbed-away slot in the chapel’s side wall. He had found their entry place.
He walked slowly back to the print, brushing his socks with his hand before slipping his shoes back on. The crooked picture caught his eye and he felt compelled to level it before he left. Reaching out to straighten it, his touch jolted it from the wall and he felt its weight drop into his hands. With a start, he pushed his hands up to return it to its nail, but it resisted and, as he drew slowly away, it remained in place, an inch away from the wall, unattached.
Though his instinct was to recoil, he had seen much stranger than this, and he refused to be shaken by it. He lifted the dusty string from the back of the frame and re-hung the picture, its weight shifting again to the accepted limitations of gravity. He considered the image for a moment, a rendering of the angelic host from Gustave Doré’s most revered work. And then he turned and left, deep in thought, the illustration hanging limply in his wake.
‘Twigs,’ said the old priest to the forest guardian. ‘Twigs and leaves. A path of them, from the lesion in the wall to the point where they stood. All invisible, which means they came out of the Vorrh again.’
Sidrus regarded the old man contemplatively. He and his tribe – all named Sidrus after the centurion who had saved the Sefer haYashar from extinction in the ruins of Jerusalem – had started as a scholastic branch growing out of the split tree of the Tubal-Cain. Somewhere in its tangled history, it had bred with the testaments of Enoch and Lilithian blasphemies, to produce the hieratic order that Sidrus now fervently represented. The warrant he carried was of the Boundary Holders of the Forest, a position of responsible fanaticism which suited him well.
Their relationship was not a comfortable one: many of the things the guardian and the priest believed and stood for were in opposition. Then there was the problem with Sidrus’ face: the old priest had tried to avoid direct confrontation with it for years. However, in the working business of policing the sanctity of the forest, they were united.
‘Surely ‘invisible’ is a contradiction?’ said Sidrus, in response to the old man’s comment. ‘I prefer to refer to them as ‘visually elsewhere’.’
‘The elsewhere of the Erstwhile,’ Lutchen mused, without the faintest sign of humour.
‘It’s the same old problem of resemblance,’ Sidrus said in a weary tone. ‘Not holding their form away from the forest’s time, which is the very substance that bonds them; the delays of similitude slicing them into separation outside of its boundaries.’
‘Well, their dislocation must not be witnessed here,’ said Lutchen, ‘and they cannot be allowed to take our cause and effect back into the Vorrh.’ He looked resignedly at the forest guardian. There was nothing more to be done: life had to be preserved in its current state, and for that to happen, action had to be taken.
They set about constructing the deceptively simple trap. A square section was cut out of the panelled wall where the Doré print hung. It was then set on a long, vertical spindle, so that it could rotate freely, and a small, wooden wheel was attached to the top of the spindle, just above one of the u-shaped brackets that kept it in place. Strong, thin string was wound around the wheel, then looped out into the yard at the back. Sidrus had small, crude, paper copies made of the print. He trailed them back to the forest, to the point where the Erstwhile had first escaped. The damp and sun would exhaust the pictures in three days, but hopefully not before one of them caught hold of the scent and was reminded of the larger, more vivid version. Now it was just a question of waiting.
They sat in the stillness for four nights, the young priest trying to keep his eyes open and away from the white, distorted countenance of the heretic at his side. The old priest had warned him of the night’s requirements – he had assured his young apprentice that it would be a test of his strength and of his faith. As he shivered in the moonlight, trying not to stare at the abnormality standing next to him, the young man could not be sure if Father Lutchen had referred to the trapping of the Erstwhile or the malign warden himself.
On the fifth night of waiting, the young priest spotted movement between the trees and hurried to tell Sidrus and Lutchen, who quickly made their way into the yard to take hold of the string.
In moments, there was a scraping sound around the worn-away slit in the wall, a rustling of entrance. They waited ten minutes and then, very gently, the guardian pulled on the string. After a pause and a little tug, the wooden panel with the picture hanging on it spun around to face the outside of the church. There was an immediate shuffling inside the wooden building, like animals running through a stormy forest. After a while, it quietened. The three men held their breath: a faint movement could be heard outside and they correctly assumed that the Erstwhile were very close. The picture frame swayed a little, touched by an unseeable force. Lutchen nodded to Sidrus, who again pulled the string. The panel turned back on itself, the picture again facing the inside of the chapel. The rustling grew frantic, but without the hollow resonance of size or weight. It distanced itself from the three men, as its creators returned to the chapel’s interior. The process was repeated for the next hour. At one point, when the ethereal beings were once more inside, the young priest began to giggle. Lutchen hushed him severely.