Touch Not The Cat by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

church showed only as a looming shadow against the furred and shifting shadows of the trees. The yews flowed upwards in the breeze like smoke.
    I didn't mind the dark. I had trodden every centimeter of this path since I could remember.
    Someone had mowed the graveyard grass recently, and there was the smell of the sweet cuttings in the air; some of the swaths had fallen and dried on the pathway. I could not hear my own footsteps until I trod on the stone of the church porch and, shifting the crematorium's casket carefully into my left hand, groped for the big iron ring of the south door.
    It opened readily. Ashley (it seemed) was still secure from the contagion of the world's slow stain; we had never locked our doors; and please heaven we might never need to. Inside the church it was almost dark. The smells, familiar as childhood, met me as I went in and shut the door behind me; old dusty hassocks, wood gently warping in the scent of the beeswax and turpentine still used by Miss Marget the church cleaner, like her mother and her mother's mother before her. The smell of leftover Easter lilies rather past their best. The smell of hymnbooks and dead candles.
    I didn't touch the light switches. I walked slowly up the center aisle towards the faint glimmer of the east window.
    I had come tonight with the casket, instead of in the morning when the Vicar expected me, because there was a kind of vigil I wanted to keep first. I would leave the casket overnight in the church where all the Ashleys had been baptized and married and buried, and where my father's memorial stone would stand with the rest; then in the morning—early, early, when there was no one to see—I would come and scatter his dust. So much I had decided for myself, and it seemed right.
    But now that I was here, alone in the dark church, there was no more self-deception possible. I had not come just to keep vigil. I had come for something of my own. I wanted, with a queer uncomfortable mixture of longing and guilty hope, to try with all the strange power that I knew I had in me, to see if here, in the place where the Ashleys came from and returned to, I could open my mind to whatever message Jonathan Ashley's maimed brain had tried to send me. "Tell Bryony. Tell her. . . . My little Bryony be careful. Danger."
    When I was halfway up the chancel, I paused. There were ways and ways of trying to talk with the souls of the dead, and here, I knew suddenly, darkness was wrong, smacking of things which a church should not be asked to house. I would light the sanctuary lights. Feeling somehow absolved of what I meant to do, I took the casket up to the altar steps and laid it there. Some faint residue of light from the east window showed the great jars of lilies, ghosts full of fading scent. These, I knew, would have come from the Court. Rob and the Vicar, between them, grew them each year for Easter. . . . Again, familiar as the cot blanket of childhood, the place wrapped itself about me. I stepped back, rehooked the cord across the chancel rail, and went to the vestry where the switches were.

    This door, too, was unlocked. I pushed it open, fumbled on the wall beside it, found the switch and pressed. Nothing. I flicked it again. Nothing. Tried the other three on the board, and with each one, nothing.
    All this took only a few seconds, but I suppose my mind was preoccupied, so I took in, but failed to register, that the vestry was as airy and as full of tree sounds and rookery sounds as the churchyard itself. Also, that the papers on the Vicar's table were lifting in the light breeze. Even as I noticed them, one or two drifted to the floor. Simultaneously another movement caught my eye, sending the blood out of my heart with a contraction as painful as a blow. The outer door of the vestry stood open, and against the darkness beyond it, another darkness moved. A tall figure, robed. Then the door shut with a click of the Yale lock. The papers subsided with a rustle to the