The Cold Calling

XVIII

Inside the body of the Old One, the Green Man awakes.

His muscles are stiffened and numbed after his long, foetal sleep. A rich, resinous, ancient life soaks his senses. It is a while before he understands where he is.

Above him, all around him, dawn birds sing. Birds rattling in the branches, their twittering lives come and gone in a heartbeat.

The Green Man feels the silence of the Old One. Who watched them build the church. Who stood here while the bones of the Barber-Surgeon were crushed beneath an Avebury megalith. Who thrived before Rufus died on Walter Tirel’s bolt in the New Forest.

And still lives.

Awaiting, perhaps, his third millennium.

Because of its size, the oak is more honoured, but the yew has more mystery. It is often referred to as the Death Tree because of its ubiquity in and around graveyards. Few realize that the yews were here long before the graves … that the churches were only built on these sites because they were already sacred, with the yew tree a symbol of that sanctity. Our oldest symbol of immortality.

The sign in this churchyard says, ALTHOUGH YEW TREES ARE DIFFICULT TO DATE, THIS VENERABLE SPECIMEN IS BELIEVED TO BE WELL OVER A THOUSAND YEARS OLD. THE WOODEN BENCH INSIDE THE HOLLOW TRUNK WILL SEAT UP TO TEN ADULTS SIDE BY SIDE.

Or one man sleeping.

It has been an experiment. How will a night in an ancient sacred tree differ from one atop a burial chamber or inside a circle of ritual stones?

The living yew might be expected to record stories, impressions and dreams in a different way from stone, and so it transpires. When he rises from the bench, the Green Man’s dream is still alive and vibrating in colours in his head. He sees clearly what he must do, as if in a film. As if it has already taken place.

Not in or around the yew, but inside the church.

While many centuries younger than the yew, the church is medieval. It stands a hundred yards outside this Worcestershire village, screened from the nearest houses — on an ugly council estate — by a dense copse. He tried the two doors last night and found both locked.

Someone, at some time, will have to let him in.

No-one has passed through in the night. No-one disturbed the Green Man where he lay, his back arched into the yew. He steps outside the tree now, stretches. Goes to release his morning water among the bushes.

And scarcely has he sheathed his tool than he hears the click of the wicket gate in the churchyard wall.

It is not yet seven a.m.

Never has a sacrifice been delivered so promptly.

The Green Man slides to his knees in the bushes. The visitor walks along the gravelled path and into his place in the Green Man’s living dream.

He is elderly, perhaps in his seventies, and slight of build with a bald, bony head and spectacles. He does not appear to be a clergyman, perhaps a verger or sexton. A ring of keys rattles loosely from his right hand.

Big keys. Church keys.

His keys to the afterlife.

The old man whistles as he enters the porch. The Green Man hears him fitting a key into the lock, jiggling it about.

He rises from the bushes.

He strides towards the porch, unarmed. No knife, no crossbow, no gun, no sharp-edged rock.

Just inside the porch is a stone baptismal font, the church’s oldest artefact.

At the end of his living dream, the bowl of the font is glistening with blood and bone and brains.

The verger whistles a tune from some old musical as the church door swings open.