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Though the funeral would not be for a few days, and Sunday was two days away, there was nonetheless a small service held at the church to mark the passing of young Nicolette’s life. Not many came, though perhaps if her repute was as ill as indicated then the male mourners likely did her memory a service by staying away. The vicar was kind enough to take Justin and the distraught Mrs. Tellman in to comfort them and help them find solace in the words of God. While these words gave me no real solace, I attended all the same in order to show my support, as well as to show my respect to the woman that was, for a time, to be my wife and the mother of my children. I sat in a pew a few rows back, giving a respectable distance, and left myself to my own thoughts while the actions of Jesus were relayed and somehow meant to be of comfort.

  After they had left the vicar came and sat down next to me. I must say I did not even note his presence at first, and it was not until he spoke that I became aware.

  “T’is a funny old thing, this world,” he began. “We tell ourselves that a divine reward beyond our imagining awaits us at the end, yet when one of us passes on we lament their loss, and fear our own demise as well. In the end what are we but a gaggle of panicky fools wary of receiving our own just reward?” He patted my knee in a fatherly fashion. “Care to speak your mind?”

  I did not intend to unburden my sole to this man, a receiver of confessions, but alas I found that my weighted mind was too much to bare.

  “I would have cared for her, you know,” I insisted. “She would have made a fine wife, and I a fine husband. We had no plan to marry, but when circumstances advanced beyond our control, well...what choice had I to do but the right thing?”

  Mr. Grisham smiled warmly. “You are a man of great integrity,” he said. “Far more so than any other in this village. Your actions did not require you to be chained to a woman you knew little of, but it is a credit to you that you were willing. Nicolette did not have to die in order for you to be free of her, Tempus. She was never your burden to begin with.”

  Hardly the words you’d expect of a holy man, but comforting words nonetheless.

  “Thank you, vicar.”

  He chuckled to himself. “Well that is the first time I’ve ever heard you refer to me as that. Perhaps we are making headway.” He sighed deeply to himself. “Oh I don’t know, what kind of day are we living in? Petty crime is on the rise, and now two murders in one week?”

  “Is there to be no investigation?”

  He shook his head and held up his hands. “There’s no need. Just like with the Gallows boys, we’ve had a full and total confession. It was Saul Coaltree.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Aye. He said she rejected him and he simply reacted.”

  Had this happened after I had left the pub? If I had not acted so foolishly and been able to stay could I have averted such a disaster? I suddenly felt partially responsible, although I had no hand in her actual murder.

  “I’m as busy as the police are, it seems,” he said. “I’ve received more confessions in this past week than I can possibly recall! This is barely fitting of Gravesend, let alone Greyfield. Never seen anything like it in all my days,” he concluded, shaking his head.

  I raised my head and turned to him. “How long have you been...in service?”

  He chuckled at the awkward phrasing of my question. “I've been in God’s service a whopping fifty one years now. Not a bad record for an old fool, hm? Fifty one of my eighty three years doing His good work - I reckon that shall grant me safe passage, don’t you? That is if you believe in said passage, that is.”

  “I don’t know what I believe anymore, vicar.”

  “Aye, I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. At times like this I prefer to ask myself the same question, time and again. Do I wish to put my faith in what I can see, or what I can believe? I would imagine that the same would hold true for you.”

  I thought about it, and at the time I agreed. I still do, at times.

  I found myself, some time later, at Greyfield Park, laying upon the green and looking not at the Mews across the stream, but rather the clouds overhead. Jill sat alongside me, clearly fidgety and unprepared to be sitting so idle.

  “I thought we were going ghost-busting,” she pouted. “I came prepared and everything.” She gestured to a backpack that was bulging with content. Flashlights and additional batteries, I'd suspect. “What’s the deal?”

  “Did you know that a woman gives birth to a baby every eight seconds?”

  “Wow,” she muttered. “We really should stop her.”

  I paid no attention to her jest. “It has always been a firmly held belief of mine that, when a child is born, for the first eight seconds of his life he is in fact the newest human being on the planet and, for those mere seconds, the absolute pinnacle of human evolution. The most absolute and indisputable example of all our species has to offer. I don’t know if I am so certain of that anymore.”

  “Provided this leads to a plan to exterminate some ghosts, explain.”

  “We view time as a horizontal line, and we assume that every current second represents the ever travelling tip of that spear that plunges headlong into the unknown and un-occurred. Yet what if we are not the trail blazing pencil that defines the line, but rather differential points along an already sketched path? If time is a line from Point A to Point B, who is to say that Point B hasn't already been determined, and we are only occupying a small space midway through to that goal? Mere filler in this cosmic puzzle.”

  She responded to my commentary with a deep and insightful “Huh”.

  “I dispute the existence of God because I refuse to believe that our lives are predetermined, and that we are all living an elaborate play that has already had it’s beginning and end scripted. Perhaps there is little difference between science and religion after all, save but their approach.”

  “I brought a halogen light. Ghosts hate halogen light, don’t they?”

  I sighed, rolling my eyes as I sat up. “And what exactly is it you suggest we do?”

  “I have no idea. That’s your department. I’m just here to back you up.”

  “Need I remind you of how terrified you were yesterday?”

  She sighed impatiently. “That’s because we weren’t prepared.” She then reached into her backpack and pulled out a string of garlic. “Check it out! Pretty sweet, eh?”

  “I have no intention of entering that cellar again until I feel I have a better understanding of what is down there. I took too grave a chance yesterday, jumping into something that could well have been the result of excessive radiation for all I knew, simply because it intrigued me. Everything we saw, or thought we saw, could be no more than hallucinations caused by damage to our neural cortex.”

  She gasped. “Is that possible?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “So is that why we're looking at clouds? Doing fluffy white Rorschach tests?”

  “To think, something which I am having trouble doing right now.”

  “Hey, you invited me.”

  “I don’t recall that.”

  “You would have eventually.”

  I shook my head dismissively. I then pointed to my partially deflated makeshift weather balloon. “I’m here to take some readings.

  “What’s that going to tell us?”

  “If that wall did separate flowing time from frozen time, then the air itself would have been displaced. Much like Archimedes’ discovery of water displacement, in a sense. If you somehow replace a compressed litre of water in a bathtub with a litre of tea, that tea will eventually distribute itself throughout the rest of the bathtub, diluting itself into the water. However that water will not be pure water anymore. It will be tainted.”

  “Kinda like peeing in the pool, huh?”

  “Just follow me,” I said as I walked down the length of the park and headed toward the stream. “High air pressure brings warmer weather, as it is compressed. If
you recall, the closer we got to the disturbance, the colder it became. I'm merely looking for sudden deviations in air pressure both near and far from the epicentre of the disturbance.” We crossed the stream and reached the debris upon which I had anchored my weather balloon. I reeled it in. “It’s been a day or two since I tested the relative pressure over the park, but the weather has been pretty constant, and I am only looking for a slight indication.”

  Jill helped me pull down the balloon, whereupon I looked at the gauge and compared the readings to what they read over the park earlier.

  “Different?”

  I nodded.

  “This is hardly conclusive, but it does back up a theory.”

  “So now what?”

  “Well...” I began, but trailed off. I really wasn’t that sure.

  “Oh God, Tempus look!”

  Jill had gasped and jabbed her fist into my shoulder as she pointed. I looked across the overgrown garden before us and towards the west wing. In the window, as I had seen before, stood the same visage of the decrepit woman. She seemed to gaze emptily outward, scanning the grounds, then began to dematerialize. The exact same process as before, in an identical repeated pattern.

  “My God...” Jill gasped. “What...what does this mean?”

  “It means,” I replied, “that we will have to pay another visit to the constable.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE