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Sungrazer

Sometimes, in the church, I see a fireball eye looking at me from the shadows. It is as tiny as a button, a glowing ember beneath a pew, or lodged like a little joke in the face of one of the scowling Jacobean angels that feature on the end of every row. An angel, made demon. I think it’s a joke, anyway. The eye never seems to appear near the altar: perhaps the power of Christ, greatest magician to walk this Earth, puts it off, or maybe it is simply shy. It is possible, indeed sometimes necessary, to imagine an angry god, but an enraged cherub is just funny. I suspect, you see, that the owner of the eye is in possession of a sense of humor.

I’ve never mentioned it to anyone, not even to my daughter or granddaughters, who have, God knows, enough secrets of their own. Women’s stuff, to which as a man I’m not supposed to be privy and I probably couldn’t see it even if I was supposed to. Presumably more proper these days to refer to it as “women’s mysteries,” but I just think of it as stuff—and before anyone starts complaining, I think of my own practice in the same way. Just stuff: the matter of Britain, the components of the World beyond the world.

Getting back to the eye, it’s unthinkable to speak to the vicar about it: the old boy (he’s younger than me, by the way) would probably have a heart attack. Or exorcise me. Good Lord, Professor Fallow! What a very extraordinary thing to say. Are you feeling quite yourself? No, let’s not tell the vicar. It has always struck me as curious that this little old English church, which has such an odd history, is invariably put into the ecclesiastic hands of the most prosaic clerics, all scones and conservatism and tea. I wonder, though, if the church actually does know what it’s doing and the incumbents are the ballast, the counterweights to the wild swing and sway of the building’s own magic.

It’s definitely not much to do with religion. Hard to say how I know: I do believe in the great Powers, you see, but I’m not entirely sure that all of them are the ones we’re supposed to be worshipping on a Sunday morning. This eye, whatever it belongs to, seems too free range, although I never see it outside the church. Trapped? Possibly. But occasionally it winks at me, and that seems a bit too frivolous an act for something desperate to be free.

And this is the story of that eye.

On one particular Sunday, I had attended church as usual. I’m not an especially religious man, but it’s the done thing in a small community, particularly if one is elderly. I’m not the local squire, but I suppose I’m the next best thing: my family has been here for a long time, in an old house. And I have two professions. One is respectable, if rather unusual: I’m an astronomer. I used to teach, at one of the Southwest universities not far from here and then at Oxford, but I’ve been retired for some years and now live permanently with my daughter and her children. My wife is dead. If you could see me now, you would see an entirely familiar sort of person: British, though not English, wearing an ancient tweed jacket and—outside church—a disreputable array of hats. I carry a walking stick, and I wish a good morning to the people I meet. It’s like a kind of protective coloration: I blend well into my native habitat, like a duck-billed platypus.

The other profession? I’m a magician. You’ll find out more about that in due course.

So, church. On that chilly January Sunday, with a bitter easterly whistling around the gargoyles and occasional thin rain, I did not see the eye. Its lack didn’t really worry me one way or another; it was not a permanent phenomenon. I listened assiduously to the sermon, which was about aid to those less fortunate than oneself—a thoroughly Christian message, hard to disagree with—and sang some hymns. Then I buttoned up my coat, located my gloves—trying to start the new year off by not losing a pair a month like some daft old bugger—and went out into the winter.

Our house, which is called Moonecote, is not far from the church. I never bother to drive. I took the south path through the churchyard, what I thought of as the “river path,” although the little Moone brook which runs alongside the bounds of the church is hardly a river. This is an old place and the graves are old, too, leaning to one side like drunks at a bar and so eroded and lichen coated that the names are scarcely visible anymore. There was a handful of daffodils on one of them now, already frost blighted, but the only other flowers in sight were a tiny bunch of snowdrops, coming up along the wall. No, there was another—I blinked.

It wasn’t a flower, there against the wall of the churchyard. It was a flame.

I gave a quick glance over my shoulder. The rest of the meager congregation was either halfway to their cars or still in conversation with the vicar, who had his back turned to me. Just as well. I sidled up to the flame, which flickered with a deep red glow, most unwintry, and pretended to be fumbling with my hat. In an undertone, I said, “Who are you?”

There was no reply. I should probably explain at this point that this sort of thing isn’t precisely unknown to me, quite apart from the presence of the eyeball in the church. The churchyard, as one might expect, is full of spirits. Most are the residue of the departed, as though a little door has been left open. And usually they’re quite happy to chat, although one has to bear in mind that you’re not always accessing the full force of the soul, which is happily elsewhere—who wants to hang around a damp English churchyard for eternity, after all? Some of them take the form of light: clusters of blue flashes, or a pale, steady glow. But I’ve seen flames before, and once a drop of water, hanging suspended in the air in a tiny lustrous globe. The elements, you see. I’m sure some of them just sink back invisibly into the earth.

This little flame was dancing. No voice answered, but it leaped up onto the wall and flickered, taking sustenance from nothing.

“Who are you?” I said again.

Help him.

Spirits speak like a breath on the wind. You have to learn how to listen.

“How can I help? Who is ‘he’?”

You have to wake him.

“But who is he?”

When we ask, you must wake him.

Then it flickered and died, retreating into the wall. There was a faint glow for a second, like a patch of sunset, and it was gone.

I plodded home, somewhat amphibiously. The brook, swollen with recent rain, was high, brimming over the water meadows, but the path was safe enough. Fire and water, I thought. Water and fire. By the time I reached the house, the sky was stormy, with a single bar of light falling in the direction of the Severn estuary. The house itself, with its long drive, was quiet; it seemed to have retreated in on itself, huddling like an animal made of red Tudor brick. The kitchen garden was tidy and bare; the orchard empty of the crop of white apple sacks that had marked it throughout the autumn. There was a drift of smoke from the chimneys, but apart from that and the bar of light, the day was sodden, the color of lead. No more fire.

Alys, tall and rangy in jeans, was preparing Sunday lunch.

“Hello, dad! How was the service?”

“Went on a bit.” I could have told her about the flickering light in the churchyard, but something held me back. Pretend we’re a normal family, even if we know different.

“Oh, dear. I thought you were later than usual. Hope the church wasn’t too cold.” She bent over the Aga, fiddling with something on the stovetop.

“How was your morning? Can I do anything?”

“Quiet. And no, I don’t think you can. Beatrice has pinched the Telegraph crossword, by the way.”

I laughed. “It’s too easy for me on a Sunday.”

“Tell her that. She’ll be annoyed.”

Leaving her in the kitchen, I hung up my coat, changed my shoes, and wandered off in the direction of my study. As I climbed the stairs I could hear, muted, the voices of my granddaughters from the sitting room, then laughter. The study is at the end of a long upstairs passage, at a sort of T-junction that branches corridors in both directions, the floor uneven from several hundred years of use and subsidence. I prefer to be higher up—perhaps it’s my profession, but I like to be able to see clearly, over the land and the sky.

But as I approached the study door, someone walked rapidly and smoothly across the opening, heading down the corridor and out of sight. I caught a glimpse of a woman in a dark green dress, very long and full-skirted like an Elizabethan gown. She had a little ruff, too, which sparkled like her hair, and she was carrying a long frond of some kind of plant.

For a moment, I thought she was one of the girls, dressed up, but she was too tall—at least six foot, my own height. Heels?

“Who’s that?” I called, but there was no reply. I trotted to the end of the corridor and looked down it. No one was there.

Well, this house is full of ghosts. We do see them, you know. Not just in the mind’s eye, a fancy of the imagination, but really and truly present, just as you yourself might stand before me. I hadn’t seen this one before, but that didn’t mean that no one else had. We’ve all got our own special spirits, the ones only particular people see, and then there are the communal ones. The child by the window, for instance: we’ve all seen him in his Kate Greenaway velvet suit, his sorrowful face, like something out of a particularly emetic Victorian painting. No idea who he is. Alys and I see a doddery gardener in eighteenth-century clothes, and I think Bea might have done as well. Stella and Serena, the middle girls, talk about a pair of ghostly gazehounds, but they’re going through an animal-mad phase, so perhaps they’re tuned in to spectral beasts. Luna’s a bit too little to say for sure: hard to know if she’s seeing people or imagining them.