Nocturnal Emissions Read Online Free PDF Page A

able to avoid the nostalgic pangs of this homecoming.
    Outside the center of the town again, and passing alongside a farm that bordered the road, Venn stopped to read something written on the rails of a gate leading into a pasture. In crudely rendered letters, colored red, it said:
    “There is a fortune for you in John iii.16.”
    On the rail below that was emblazoned:
    “Now is the accepted time.”
    It wasn’t the first time he had seen such sentiments painted on gates and stiles across the countryside.
    Further down the road, Venn came upon the Anglican church of Reverend Trendle, and was surprised to see it surrounded in scaffolding and ladders, with three workers currently upon its roof in the shadow of its short stone tower. For a moment, Venn wondered if Black Shuck had indeed paid the church a visit after all, demolishing it as his own much larger church had been blasted. But he soon enough realized that the church was merely one of many in Dorset that, since 1840, had come under restoration, though Venn had thought that this trend had largely died out in the 1870’s. The crooked and moss-stained headstones in the adjacent churchyard seemed to watch the workers as Venn did, lined up like parishioners waiting to enter the church for a service.
    A dog inside the church itself must have spotted Venn through a window, and began barking. The noise caused the workers on the roof to notice him below, gazing up at them, and they paused in their work. Venn nodded to them and turned to be on his way, but just then he saw a man emerge from the church itself and stand in its threshold. This man stared at him as well, and Venn recognized him as the vicar himself.
    After a hesitation, Reverend Trendle took a step or two beyond his threshold, shutting the door behind him to keep inside the watchful dog.
    “Father Venn?” he said.
    “Yes, John…how are you?”
    Trendle only advanced another few steps, narrowing his eyes as if dis-trusting them. Trendle had seemed to age since last Venn had seen him, grown more frail and hunched. Then again, Trendle was in his mid seventies and no doubt his formerly robust health had at last come to fade, in contrast to the for-tification of his church.
    “What brings you back this way, Father?” the vicar called.
    Venn closed some of the distance between them, groping quickly for some excuse and wishing he had planned better in the event of such a question from one of the townspeople. “I am merely here to visit certain members of my former congregation, some of whom it comes to me are in need of a measure of comfort.”
    “Many of your former congregation now belong to my congregation, Father,” Trendle said a bit gruffly. “And it is now for me to see to their comfort in all matters.”
    Venn nodded indulgently. There had never been outright animosity between his fellow Catholic priests and the Protestant Trendle, but he knew some of Trendle’s history…
    After Henry VIII founded the Church of England, Catholics had been treated as a despised minority, denied civil rights such as owning certain types of property, attending universities such as Oxford , and serving in Parliament.
    This hadn’t been rectified until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, when full civil rights were restored. In 1850, when thousands of Irish Catholics poured into England to escape the great famine, Pope Pius IX reinstated the Roman Catholic church organization, re-establishing its full hierarchy, the better to administer to the immigrants’ needs.
    The ensuing controversy had stoked a great deal of resentment between the Catholics and the Anglicans, with the latter seeing this as a threat and an invasion, fearing that they would one day become the minority themselves. In 1851, a journal called The Bulwark or Reformation Journal began being pub-lished in Scotland , spreading venomous anti-Catholic rants. From a tattered old copy of its first issue, Venn himself had once read, “The very principles of