The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [97]
‘Yaaah!’
I almost wet myself with fright. A figure bobbed up like a jack-in-a-box from the rows of pews, waving its arms. ‘Caughtcha!’
‘Sssh. They’ll hear!
‘There’s no one. We’re on our own.’
‘That could be…as bad.’ Christians, after all, were people. But Jesus–Jesus was a dead person who’d come back to life. What if Jesus was lurking in the shadows behind the wooden screen? I’d seen Dawn of the Dead. They ate you. I said as much to Keir.
‘No, you got it the wrong way round. Christians ate Jesus.’
I hadn’t realized they were cannibals. This was getting worse.
Keir pranced off along the pews, giggling. There was a big book, open on top of a high stand. ‘Double dare me?’ he called.
‘To what?’
‘Touch the book.’
‘No!
He was on tiptoe already, trying to reach up to it. Desperate to distract him from this almost certainly lethal experiment, I ran in the opposite direction.
‘Hey, look at this,’ I called.
I’d only meant to grab his attention with a cartwheel in the aisle, but then I saw it, this beautiful stone tub with a wooden lid, and carvings on the side. It stood in a shaft of sunlight under the tall window.
‘I mean, wow. It must be really old.’ I walked round it, tracing the patterns on it. The stone was wonderfully cool under my trailing fingers. ‘There’s a snake!
I couldn’t have said anything more likely to attract him. He forgot the book and belted after me, thinking I meant a real one.
‘Oh.’ Disappointment in his voice when he saw it was only a pockmarked stone carving.
‘Yeah, but look. There’s a bloke stabbing it with his spear.’
‘Maybe it’s a dinosaur!
There was another rusty clunk, a rattle. Somebody was turning the handle of the big wooden door, the wrong way, trying to open it. Keir and I looked at each other. There was panic in his eyes. I’d have felt smug, if I hadn’t been scared shitless too.
‘Hide,’ he hissed.
‘Where?’ The tub wasn’t big enough to conceal even one of us, or I’d have lifted the lid. Keir was already darting through the wooden screen, and I followed him into the part of the church that was darker and spookier. I didn’t understand why the seats here faced inwards, instead of forwards, though I supposed the table with a cross must be the altar.
The heavy church door swung slowly open. In came the curly-headed friend of Keir’s father, one of the others camping in Tolemac. He’d been with us when John had made a crop circle, a couple of nights ago, right after Solstice. He had his back to us, looking at leaflets on the stand by the door, but at any minute he could turn and see us through the screen, two splashes of brightness in our yellow and red hippie kids’ clothes. I looked for somewhere better to hide–under the altar cloth?–but it was too late.
‘It’s only Riz.’ Keir was walking out into the middle of the church. ‘Hi, Riz!’
A frown screwed up Riz’s face, only for a second, to be replaced by a wide smile. ‘Whatchoo doin’ in here? You pair of monkeys, Meg’ll give you what-for.’
‘What are you doin’ in here, then?’ asked Keir. Hadn’t given him credit for so much boldness: he never had a problem talking to me, but was usually shy with grown-ups.
‘Sizin’ up the opposition,’ said Riz. He pulled open the top of his shirt, revealing a peace symbol on a chain. ‘See, I’m protected. You two got summat like this? If you ain’t, you better get out quick because the old man with the long white beard don’t like pagan kids.’
‘Nothing happened to us yet,’ said Keir.
Riz looked at his watch. ‘How long you bin in here?’
Keir looked uncertainly at me. ‘How long, Ind?’
‘Maybe ten minutes,’ I said.
Riz shook his head slowly. ‘You bin lucky. Good thing I found you. Reckon you got three, four more minutes at most before he sees you. It’s like a searchlight, see–God’s eye swings back an’ forth, but there’s a lot of churches for him to keep his eye on.’
‘I don’t think that’s right,’ I said. ‘My gran told me God can see everything at once.’
Riz’s dark button eyes narrowed. ‘You doubtin’ me, Ind? Because God and