The Mammoth Book of Monsters by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780786719761
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2010-05-14T05:00:00+00:00

The bell was yet ringing for all it was worth, much louder and more alarming in the open air and under the hanging swags of black moonless foliage. I set off down the drive and along the lane at a brisk trot. It was generally a dawdle of twenty minutes, but I covered the ground in ten.

There were plenty of lights on in the village too, and in the church. People stood out on the street along the graveyard wall, or leaned from cottage windows. I noted the pub had opened up again too, and was now serving drinks at three twenty-five in the morning. In just over an hour the sun would rise.

As I entered the main street, the clangour of the bell suddenly ended.

The whole landscape now rang with silence. Everyone ceased to move, myself included. While from the church tower came a faint shout. The crowd repeated the message to itself and so to me. "They've got 'un - it's Jim Hardy, is it? What's he at? Has he gone off his onion?"

Presently two men and the little vicar, all in dressing-gowns, appeared in the church door, supporting another man of sturdy middle years. He was dressed for the day in labourer's clothes, but all awry, his hair over his face and his coat trailing half off. As they tried to bring him out of the door, he started to roar. It seemed he would fight them all rather than leave the church. But then abruptly his legs gave. He stopped roaring, and they partly carried him up the path between the graves, to the gate in the wall, and so through groups of people to the welcoming pub.

I stood decorously with a bundle of women outside. We looked in on the lighted saloon bar. Everything that was said in there we all heard clearly enough.

After the second brandy, the man called Hardy responded to the oft-asked question "What were up with you, Jim, ringing the bell like that?"

"I see it," he said. "Plain as I see you."

"See what, Jim?"

"Like it says," said Jim Hardy, "in the Bible. The graves giving them up, and the dead a-walking."

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