Hiding From the Light Read Online Free PDF

the air was growing hotter. He could smell the wild honeysuckle in the hawthorn hedges, and the hot floury scent of the stubble in the fields.
    He paused, looking round. There was still no one about. It was extraordinarily quiet. Turning slowly he found himself wishing suddenly that he had a dog to walk. It would be company on his early-morning strolls. In the distance he could see the huddled roofs of the small hamlet of Old Mistley, while behind him sprawled the houses of the new developments. But here, in the fields he was completely alone.
    The site of the church was unmarked. All he could see was the brick wall which had surrounded the churchyard. It was almost buried under brambles and nettles now and behind it was what looked like a small orchard or paddock. There was no sign of the church itself at all. Within living memory, so he understood, the tower had still been standing and had been used to conduct funerals, then it had been declared unsafe and demolished. The site had been sold.
    On the opposite side of the road was a pink-washed cottage, set back behind a wild tangled hedge. Its windows were dark and bare of curtains. A drunken-looking For Sale sign lounged beside the gate.
    ‘Can I help you?’
    A stocky, bearded man had appeared in the lane behind him, two black labradors waiting patiently at his heels. The man’s eyes were hard with suspicion.
    Mike shook his head. ‘I was just looking. I wondered if anything remained of the old church.’
    ‘It’s long gone.’ The man’s expression did not invite confidences and Mike found himself biting back his intention of introducing himself.
    ‘A shame,’ he said mildly.
    ‘Damn good thing. Evil place! You keep out of there. It’s private property.’ Whistling to his dogs, the man walked on up the road.
    Mike exhaled loudly. Evil? No, how can it be, it’s church property, he wanted to shout. Mine! But of course it wasn’t true. Not any more. He watched the retreating back for a minute or two, then resumed his inspection of the site. As far as he could see there were no yew trees, no grave stones, no sign at all that there had ever been a church there except for the wall, and, he squinted through the nettles, the twisted remains of a gate lying below what had once been a gatepost deep in the undergrowth.
    The wall beyond it, round the corner, had begun to crumble away. Without giving himself time to think Mike pushed his way through the nettles and scrambled over the broken bricks into what had once been the churchyard itself. Branches swung across behind him and within seconds he was totally screened from the road. He smiled to himself. It probably wasn’t wise for the rector to be caught trespassing but on the other hand his curiosity had been intensified by the man’s aggressive manner.
    He moved forward into a patch of sunlight and stared round. He could see signs of old walls now, and a faint rectangular depression in the ground where the church must have stood. The whole area was thickly wooded. As far as he remembered from its description in The Lost Parish Churches of Essex it had been a beautiful medieval church with nave, aisle, porch and tower. The village had moved, the population drifting down the hill towards the bustle of the small port on the river’s edge, but that did not explain why it had been so completely lost. After all, there were other remote churches around; churches in the centre of a field or a wood and they had not been pulled down. They had been treasured and preserved. The voice of the man in the lane echoed suddenly in his head. ‘Evil place!’ he had said. Why evil? Was it something to do with Matthew Hopkins and the witches, or was it something else? Something infinitely older? An ancient ash tree shaded the ground and everywhere there were hawthorns and elders, heavy with ripening berries. The grass was kept short, he saw now, by some half-dozen sheep which were grazing on the far side of the trees. It was a