The Break by Sean Gabb

Author:Sean Gabb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, young adult, science fiction, satire, catholic church, political thriller, alternative history, police state, norman conquest, byzantium, time slip, dystopian apocalyptic, disaster apocalyptic, sean gabb, st margarets

Chapter Twenty Eight

The priest opened the door a little wider. “Don’t you know what time it is?” He squinted and tried to look past her into the gloom of the vicarage front garden. Jennifer stood back a little, to let him see that she was alone. “Stay here,” she’d told Michael after much quiet but angry argument out in the street. She’d looked at the darkened and very unexpected Church of All the Saints—it looked more Greek Revival than Greek Orthodox. She’d turned her attention to what might, when it was built, have been a semi-rural home for the priest given that particular living. “No!” she’d finally insisted after more arguing. “If there is anyone lying in wait, he’ll be after you, not me. Let me go and check things out. The worst anyone there will do is send me away.” Michael had looked as if he might strike her, he was so angry. But every argument he’d made about his “duty” was now magnified by thoughts of what the Turks might be about in England. That, plus the fact that they were standing outside the church, had shut him up long enough for her to get her way.

So, here she was by herself, outside the door of the vicarage not long before midnight. “I am in search of spiritual comfort,” she said, putting into her voice the sort of tone she’d heard the night before in Oxford Street. She gave a puzzled look at the priest, then at the building. “But I was given to understand this would be an Anglican church.”

The door opened wider, and Jennifer blinked in the light of a dozen candles from the hall table. “And an Anglican church it formerly was,” the priest said with a contortion of his bearded mouth that might have been an attempted smile. “The first Orthodox prayers were said here in 1948. It was raised to the status of a cathedral in 1991. That was by Archbishop Gregorios of Thyateira and Great Britain. I am Father Athanasios, and have been Archimandrite here since 2016.” He stopped and looked into her face. He sighed and took a step backward. “Do come in, my daughter,” he said in the tone of one who gives way to the inevitable.

Jennifer was wondering yet again if this had been entirely the best plan of action. But it was too late to pull back now. She tried for a weak smile at Father Athanasios. Though he looked like all the other scowling, black-robed clerics she’d seen in Greece, his foreign lilt was overlain by a North London accent. She got out her smile and thought of the cosh that she’d been bullied into carrying. It was in the breast pocket of her dry but still smelly overcoat. All she had to do was reach inside. What she’d manage to do with it if the priest turned nasty was another matter.

“But come in, my daughter,” he muttered with a reluctant show of duty. “The March nights are very chill.

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