Vessels of Light, Chapels of Darkness

Paul Edwards

The sky was violet. The cloudline in the distance was a black crust, the edge of night. The man parked his battered Toyota by the side of the road then killed the engine. Sunflowers rustled in a nearby field. A dead yew raised twisted black arms to the sky, as if in praise of the incoming night.

The man glanced in the rear-view mirror. He looked at the four little girls in the back, their eyes black-ringed and red. He felt for each of them; he wanted to end their pain. 

He opened the car door. 

“Daddy?”

“Ssh,” he said.

He closed the door softly, then approached a tiny chapel on the other side of the road. Dead leaves swirled slowly about his ankles.

He opened the wooden door, then slipped into the enveloping darkness. For a while, there was silence: it was as though the world was holding its breath. Eventually he re-emerged, looking confused and scared. His eyes seemed to shine in the purplish twilight.

He walked to the car and opened the back passenger door. He knelt down to face the first little girl.

She felt afraid – there was something about the look on her daddy’s face that didn’t seem right.

“You have to do something for me,” he said. “I want you to go in that chapel.” He looked at the other girls. “All of you. One at a time.”

The first little girl began to cry. “I don’t want to, daddy.”

He lifted her out of the car. “You must,” he said. “It’s for your own good.”

Slowly, very slowly, the first little girl made her way to the chapel. 

It loomed over her like a bird of doom. 

* * *

“I don’t know how you did it,” he said, scratching at his eyebrow. “I don’t know how you managed to talk me into coming out here.”

Phil was hot. He tugged at the collar of his shirt.

“Relax,” sighed Megan, opening the shutters to the window. “It’ll be fine. Trust me.”

As soon as they’d reached the hotel, Megan had charged their luggage up to their room, leaving Phil alone in the foyer with the proprietor – a large and impatient woman with thick lipstick smeared around her mouth and short dark hair. 

Megan parked her elbows on the windowsill. “So what did she say?” she asked.

“How on Earth should I know? I don’t speak a word of French. You know that!”

“Oh, don’t exaggerate, Phil.”

She fingered the crucifix around her neck. “You must have caught the gist of it, surely?”

He rubbed at his eyes, feeling wretched.

She said, “She was probably asking if you were wanting breakfast in the morning. Or if you wanted to eat in the restaurant this evening.”  

He looked away. He knew he shouldn’t get like this. It was the heat, and the fear of being in a strange place. But Megan spoke French. Not fluently, but well enough. She could have at least considered this before dashing off like that.

* * *

It was dark, and he was in a graveyard – the one his parents and brother were buried in. Families clustered around graves, smiling and laughing.  

“They’ll be here soon,” Phil heard someone say. “Just you wait.”

Phil sat down at the base of a monument. He wrapped his arms around his legs. Patiently, he waited.

Moments later a hush fell upon the graveyard.

The dead had come. 

Candles went out as one by one people left the cemetery with their loved ones. Phil waited for his father, for his mother, his brother. For anyone. He called out their names.

“Hey, hey, it’s all right,” Megan said quietly, stroking his face. Disorientated, he glanced quickly about the hotel room. “You were dreaming,” she whispered. “It was a dream, love; just a dream.”

* * *

Before they went away, Phil and Megan had visited Michael’s grave. Phil’s brother had been taken suddenly, aged just thirty-one. A car accident: a head-on collision with a drunk-driver who’d strayed onto the wrong side of the road.

Together, they’d stood over the grave, her hair licking and whipping about her face in the wind.

“I think we should find a pub,” she had said, “and we should spend this afternoon talking about Mike. What do you say?”

The one thing Phil loved most about Megan was her indefatigable optimism. She rarely showed signs of uncertainty or fear. Most of the time she knew what she wanted out of life, and how to go about getting it. Phil was bewitched; they’d only been together for three months, and already it felt as though he’d known her his whole life.  

“I needed this today,” he had said over a pint in the Red Dragon. “It’s like you know me better than I know myself.”

She’d laughed and touched his hand, and then they’d talked about Mike until the bell rang for last orders.

“It would be nice,” he had said, “to see him again, for one last time, you know?” 

Megan had smiled. “I know.”

* * *

Phil blinked into the afternoon light. They were in a village called Brain sur Longenee and there was a fete on – the narrow streets were trimmed with streamers, signs and colourful banners. There were rides for the children, market stalls, a garage sale. 

They sat in the heart of the village on a bench in the shade, eating crepes and ice-cream from small plastic bowls. 

“You okay?” she asked as he placed his unfinished bowl down on the table in front of them.

Phil nodded. “Yes,” he said, but meant no.

Tannoys were lashed to lamps in the streets and every now and then a man’s voice blurted rapid French from them. The language barrier reminded Phil of the funeral – how, at the wake, he had struggled to convey his loss. His words had sounded empty, clichéd, doing Michael absolutely no justice at all.

Megan stared at a cow, tethered to a tree by the river. A semi-circle of children crowded it, laughing, and she felt a stab of melancholy. 

“I’m sorry,” he sighed. “I’m sorry for being like this.”

She turned to him and smiled sadly. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

They toiled up the steep, shady little main street, past a pond and a row of antiquated shops. At the top of the hill was an old, ivy-clad church with baskets of scarlet geraniums on the window ledges. 

It was cooler inside. Dust swirled through the air. Half-eroded faces glowed in the darkness: angels, saints, the Virgin Mary. 

“It’s so beautiful here,” whispered Megan. “It’s just like…”

She stopped. She stared at something over his shoulder. Phil turned, unnerved. A wide-eyed priest rose from the pews and said something to Phil in French. Alarmed and embarrassed, Phil shook his head and turned away.  The priest looked at Megan instead, and smiled oddly.

“What did he say?” he asked, later, as they sat on a wooden bench in the churchyard.

“Nothing,” shrugged Megan.

Phil narrowed his eyes. “Come on, Meg – what was it?”

She gazed at all those crooked headstones and rusting crosses jutting at angles from the earth. Then: “He said he could sense pain in you.”

“What?”

She blinked. “Let’s go find somewhere to eat,” she said. “Then I can tell you why I wanted us to come out here. The real reason.”

* * *

The sky was violet. Stars winked behind gnarled cypress trees. They sat outside a quiet restaurant, under a green plastic canopy. The air carried the scent of the trees. Megan ordered mussels, Phil an omelette. As they waited, Megan folded out her roadmap of the region across the small plastic table. “I know it’s around here somewhere,” she said. She glanced up. “You look tired,” she whispered. She reached over the table for his hand. “Your eyes are red.”

“I didn’t sleep so well last night,” he shrugged. 

He leaned back in his seat. He recalled waking in the early hours of the morning, only to see Megan by the window, staring out at the darkness. He’d thrown back the sheets, called out her name.

No response.

He’d walked towards her.

“The light must spread,” she had whispered, over and over, like it was some kind of mantra.

In the window, there had been dozens of moths, wings whispering against the pane in a frantic effort to come in.  

Phil had placed a hand on her arm. As she’d turned around, he’d realised two things: one, that she was still asleep, and two, that her open eyes were blind and white and luminous in the darkness. He’d cupped his hands over his mouth and emitted a muffled cry, and Megan had blinked rapidly out of her trance to stare disorientated about the room.

The waiter arrived and placed their food down in front of them. Had it been a dream? Phil pondered idly. Somehow, it didn’t seem real now. 

As they ate, he asked: “So what are we trying to find?”

* * *

“Shouldn’t we be looking for a hotel for the night?” he complained as she drove them along autoroute 162. They passed dark fields and dilapidated barns and black, shapeless farmhouses.  

“We’re close now,” she whispered, touching his knee. 

Halfway between Le Lion D’Angers and Chateau-Gontier, they stopped. Megan cranked the handbrake. He looked at her, and she pointed to a tiny chapel on the other side of the road. “Would you do me a favour?” she asked. “Would you go in there?”

He leaned forward. “In there?”

She sighed. “Please, Phil. No questions. Just go in.”

He dropped his shoulders, laughed. Then he opened up the passenger door. Sunflowers rustled in a nearby field. A tree chuckled. Stars glinted between the knotted branches of a dead yew.

He opened up a rusting iron gate and edged down a path to the chapel’s wooden door. On a ledge above the door were trinkets: faded photographs of loved ones, beads, necklaces, lockets, even strands of hair in small polythene bags.

The door creaked open. The moon spread its light onto a statue of a saint in an alcove. In front of the saint was a table, a chair, an altar. The table and altar were cluttered with tiny, unlit tealights. Phil stooped, lit a couple of the candles with his lighter, and then closed the door behind him.

He sat down on the chair.

The darkness pressed against him.

Jesus.

He wasn’t alone in here…

Moments later he stumbled outside to where Megan was waiting. She helped him back into the car. He was bone white, trembling. 

She twisted the ignition key and started to drive. The white markings in the centre of the road flashed under them through the headlights.

“We came along this road,” she explained, “after mum had died. We stopped there, at that…place. Dad went in first. Then we all did – me, my sisters: Lucy, Tash, Hayley.”

She pulled in a breath. “That place… It spoke to us, Phil…to all of us… Like nobody else could have at the time.”

Her voice trembled. “It’s good… right?”

The markings flashed by. He couldn’t speak. He stared at their ghostly reflections in the dark of the windscreen, saw that his eyes were shining. Then he covered his face quickly with his hands and wept.