Neither Blood Nor Seed

"I have no idea." The female copper fixed him with a decidedly more suspicious glare. "What's this, then?"

"I had some questions about something found inside the church, and the superintendent suggested I might find an answer here? And also I was imagining I might be of some assistance to, ah, to the young lady." I turned my attention to the young woman in the robe. "If there's any way I can console you in your time of loss."

She cocked her head, giving every indication of complete confusion. "Loss?"

Norris began to wonder whether he'd gotten something wrong. "Ah, the deceased gentleman down below? I'd understood you were with him at the time of his passing?" He was very aware, for the first time, that the woman must be naked under the bathrobe. His eyes strayed to her hand, seeking a ring. "That you were close to him?"

She nodded once, decisively. "Davey."

He grasped at the name like a drowning man grasps a lifeline. "Davey, yes. I'm sorry for your loss."

He was quite unprepared for her to chuckle. "Not my loss, padre. He's the one lying with no head." She sighed and looked off to the side. "It's a real shame, though. He was a nice fellow."

"The deceased and Miss Evans," the other woman began with an air of ponderous formality, "were not too well acquainted."

"We were just fuckin,'" the witness nodded. "It wasn't nothing serious."

He made a strong effort not to gape down at her, instead substituting a prim little nod. "Well." He'd seldom felt more useless. "Condolences all the same."

She shrugged. Whatever her ordeal had been, she seemed quite past it now. The two police constables, realizing that his arrival wasn't anything all that interesting, once again relaxed into the torpor of two am. "Were you saying you had questions for me, though, padre?"

He cleared his throat and rummaged in his bag. "We found something in the church, and I was wondering whether you might shed some light?" The constables leaned in to look at the box with some interest as he laid it on the little table. A moment of silence became two, then five, then ten before the girl cleared her throat.

"I've never seen that thing before in all my life," she declared. Her accent was just as Welsh as the rest of the ones around here, though she spoke much more quickly.

"Oh," Norris replied, a little deflated. "It was on the floor of the church, beside the... the grave? You didn't see it there?"

"Didn't see no grave, padre. Not when I got there. And when I left, I was moving too fast to be doing any sightseeing."

"The grave... you didn't see it?"

"Nope. When I walked into that church, there was nothing but floor."

He blinked. The grave had been massive, a rend stretching nearly all the way up the nave. "That seems a bit unlikely, miss, if you'll pardon me."

"Unlikely or no, that's the way it was." She crossed her arms over the shapeless robe, clearly in no mood to be second-guessed.

Norris glanced at the coppers, but he saw at once he'd get no help there. He stirred. "Would you mind just telling me what happened, then? So I can understand better?"

She gazed at him for a rapt second or two, then held up an empty cup at her elbow. "More tea," she commanded, and once the quiet milky-tea'd chap in the corner had refilled her cup from a battered kettle, she took a deep breath. "Where to begin?" she asked him quietly.

Another chair stood near the door flap, and at her invitation he felt comfortable enough to pull it toward him and take a seat facing her. She was young, perhaps twenty or so, with big dark eyes now ringed with exhaustion over a pert nose and a quirky, expressive mouth. He nodded agreeably. "Why don't you begin at the beginning, Miss..."

"Evans. Cassandra Evans." She sighed. "Well, all right. You're a local, are you?"

"I am English," he smiled.

"Well then. I'm not from around here either, but the other day I read about how the water level up here had, what you call it, retreated?"

"Receded."

"Yeah. So there was a big photo on the internet of the old church there, standing all alone on the mud with all those other building foundations around. 'A time capsule,' the website said. 'A look into the past.'" She shrugged. "So I reckoned it might be a good lark to come up and have a bit of fun in the church."

Norris coughed into an uncomfortable silence. "I see." She just stared back through the steam from her cup. "And your friend Davey?"

She tossed her hair back. "He's not a friend. We meet sometimes to keep company, you know?" Her lips curled into a sly smile. "He likes me, and I like him, so we sometimes, you might say, pass the time of day together."

"Snogging," the female cop sighed, "in churches."

"No ma'am. Fucking in churches." It was obvious to Norris that the Evans girl did not like the police constable much. "I'm no tease, at least. We're only up here tonight because my monthlies are due any day now." She glared over until the copper looked away, then smiled at Norris. "So we hopped into his car and we drove up here this afternoon. Arrived around dusk and had a picnic dinner. Parked. Snogged." She winked at the angry cop. "Then we hiked on down to look around in the old village."

"The drowned village," Norris nodded. It was an endless source of fascination to the whole area, the old streets and the crumbling basement holes revealed now by the blazing summer and its dried-up lake.

"Yeah. So. We made sure there was nobody else there, because I don't usually like being watched, you know?" The lady copper looked pointedly away and traded a look with Milky Tea, who gave no reaction. "Usually, when we do it, there's a place we can lie down, or bend over, or whatnot. But that place?" She shuddered, and Norris nodded: the ancient church had been bare as a cleaned-out egg, everything useful stripped before the dam was built, before the church and the town it had sustained since the middle ages was overtaken by the dark waters. "Empty."

"I saw it." Empty, Norris, thought, but for an unholy tomb, now shattered. "What happened next, Miss Evans?"

She cocked her head, lips quirking into a secret little smile. "You're a churchman, padre, but I'm sure you know the answer to that?" She sipped at her tea once more. "We did it against the wall, sorta standing, like. It was fast; he kept slipping out." Norris knew he was turning red. "But Davey's a persistent fellow, so he kept on trying, and finally... well? It was over." She shot a venomous glance at the police constables. "I had a wonderful little orgasm, didn't I? No idea where my clothes went, unfortunately, and that's a real hardship now, I don't mind telling you."

The woman was too angry to speak, but Milky Tea finally opened his mouth. "We found your clothing at the church, Miss. I'm sure it'll be returned to you when the Guv says so."

"Yeah?" She turned in the chair, the robe slipping from her shoulder. "And when will that be?"

"When you're no longer a suspect, I suppose." The man smiled with his mouth, but not his eyes. "It's evidence in what I'm sure you'll agree was an unusual and dramatic criminal act."

"Don't I know it," the girl muttered.

Norris pondered, something odd sticking in his mind. "And you're saying there was no grave in the floor when you went in there?"

"Oh no. If there had been, we'd have gone down in there to do it. David was never squeamish." She smiled faintly, her mind sliding off into memory, but before Norris could ask the obvious question she shivered. "That came next. Next after Davey came first."

Norris found his throat had gone dry. "The floor? It just, what, caved in?"

"Oh no, padre. It caved out, more like." She shrugged. "Just exploded upward, all of a sudden, and then everything went very bad." Norris nodded, compassionate, quiet. You let them get themselves there at times like this. She'd tell, in her own time. "I remember we'd just took off the flunky, and Davey tossed it off into the shadows, all full of his muck, and all of a sudden the whole place shook. Noise. Dust. And the smell!" She shook her head and fell silent into her tea, leaving Norris to frown at the coppers.

"Flunky?"

Milky Tea smiled. "Slang, sir. She means a full condom."

"Yeah, padre," the Evans girl shrugged, "the spunkbag. I remember. He'd just pulled it off, and I made a joke about it, and then he threw it aside and that's when it started."

"The smell?" Norris tried to keep his tone even. "You were saying?"

She shook her head. "Death, padre. Smelled like death." She gave a heavy sigh. "Not much more to tell after that, I'm afraid. I couldn't see nothing, with the dust and the dark. I remember Davey pushing me toward the door, and shouting, and I was running blindly until I got out into the open air. I remember turning, real quick-like, and calling his name, and that's when he showed up in the doorway all coughing. Dusty, like, and his eyes were big. I remember that: they were so big in the moonlight." She shook a bit, and Norris didn't stop himself from reaching a hand out to her knee. "That's when... I mean, his head..."

"In your own time." Norris was using his most soothing tones, what he thought of as hospice voice.

"It was like the doorway, the darkness of the doorway, like it came out and wrapped all round him." She was hushed now, staring at the ground. In the corner of his eye Norris became aware that the woman copper was studying a clipboard, comparing this story with whatever the girl had told her already. "And he screamed, but the darkness became, like, a pair of hands. Or, like, claws? And then one of the hands closed around his mouth, and there was this sound like wet meat on a counter, and next I knew his head was rolling off into the dark, down along the mud." She sighed. "I wonder if they'll find it."

"They found it." Norris was glad to be able to give her some news. "Just a moment ago."

"I ran, padre." The steel had come back into the young woman's voice now, a hint of the kind of girl who'd drop everything just to come have a fling in a distant church. "Ran. Didn't stop, really, only I looked back once and saw that shape, with the hands, shaking Davey and, like, bending over his neck. Or, where his neck should have been?" She glanced at the police. "Looked like he was eating. Or drinking. And when I reached the parking lot and looked back? He was still doing it."

A chill ran up Norris' spine. "Drinking? Surely not."

"It's what I saw, padre." She leaned back in the chair and yawned. "I've no reason to lie."

"Well," the lady constable put in nastily, "I'm not sure I'd put it quite like that."

Norris nodded, then smiled gently at the constables. "She's plainly upset. Is there no way she can go home?"

Two thin smiles greeted him before the lady shrugged. "She can't leave until the Guv says she can leave. Superintendent Wynn," she smiled. It wasn't a pleasant smile.

Cassandra Evans glared over at the woman. "I don't like you very much."

"Be that as it may, Miss Evans. You're not going anywhere."

"Yes she is." We all started and turned, the tent flap moving aside like a matador's cape before the superintendent strode in. "You can go, Miss Evans, but not far. I'm fairly sure you didn't kill Mr McCormick, but I'd like you to stay nearby until I can rule you out completely."

"Stay? Nearby?" She blinked up at him, her eyes narrowing eventually. "Where?"

He glared back down at her. Anthony Wynn was not generally a very sympathetic man. "Somewhere," he growled.

She looked from him, to Norris, to the lady copper, then back to Wynn. "Is there a hotel?"

"There's a gaol," Wynn shrugged, "where we can give you a place to stay and some food. We'd charge, though, since you're not under arrest."

"If I'm not under arrest," she snapped, "then I can leave and go home, can I not?"

"Home? Back down south?" He smiled faintly. "I'm afraid we're impounding Mr McCormick's car, as evidence. So your transportation options might be limited, I'm afraid."

The Evans girl's mouth fell open, fishlike, her eyes going wide. "What?"

"The blue Ford Fiesta, from the parking lot here? Registered to Mr McCormick?" The superintendent sighed and poured himself a cup of tea. "Standard procedure, Miss Evans. Your clothing, too, until we've had a chance to analyze it." He sniffed. "Sometime tomorrow, I would think." Plainly, even if he didn't believe Cassandra Evans guilty of ripping her friend's head off, he did not approve of her conduct and was in no mood to help her.

She did not sound cowed when she spoke. On the contrary; she was a woman girding for battle. "And no hotels, you say."

"I've heard there are some bed and breakfasts in the country round, but alas. I'm not certain how to get hold of them so late at night." He sipped, grimacing at the overbrewed tea. "And my people are all going to be quite busy cleaning up after the mess you and your unfortunate friend have brought us." He said it without rancor, but his tone made it clear that if she objected, she'd be talking to a brick wall. "I'll call Constable Davis and have him take you to the gaol, after he gives the parson a ride back to his. Should be just a few minutes."

Norris cleared his throat, his heart sinking. If Superintendent Wynn was "fairly sure" the girl was not guilty, Norris was absolutely certain. "I've space at the parsonage, Mr Wynn. And clothes from the charity bank." His voice strengthened as he took in the doubt in the policeman's eyes. "I'm quite comfortable offering Miss Evans a place to stay, and answering for her availability."

The superintendent had bushy eyebrows, and when he raised one the effect was dramatic. "Are you." He ruminated a moment, his mouth working slowly as though he was chewing the tea, then nodded. "I don't suppose that'll be a problem. If Miss Evans agrees?" That fearsome eyebrow turned toward the girl, who nodded quickly.

"Hell yes."

The woman constable gave an audible sigh, then burst out with something in low-pitched Welsh. A growl from Wynn shut her up, whereupon he turned a silky smile on Norris. "Very well. I'll call Davis, parson, and you can take our witness here into your care." He glanced again at his bag. "Do remember to let me know about that box, would you? If anything's in there."

"Of course." Norris pondered a moment whether he should ask for at least the girl's underwear, but the superintendent was already passing from the tent like an elephant finishing at the circus. He had a long night down on the mud, no doubt: photos. Moving the body. Paperwork. Norris gave a quick smile to the girl. "Cassandra, was it?"

"Cassie." She sniffed. "When can we go? I need to use the toilet."

* * *

Daybreak as the sun rose over the distant Eryri, and Adam Rees was up early in the last shadows of the fading night. He had a fence to repair far down the valley, and a lamed mule to get his wagon down there, and that meant an early start. There were a lot of early starts among the men who tried to scratch a living out of these hills. His nearest neighbors, the Joneses down by the River Swarle, were still sleeping as he yawned through his courtyard. Rees knew nothing of the horror that had emerged from the drowned church up at Bwgan Vale Reservoir. It would not reach the newspapers until the following day, and even the Constabulary website would be silent about it until lunchtime.

Not that it would have helped Mr Rees, knowing. Because it would not have saved him.

The shape which melted out of the shadows by the barn was slippery in his vision, a black blur out of the corner of his eyes. He turned, picking up a sense-impression of great, snatching claws moving toward him, toward his neck, and before he could so much as draw a breath he felt those claws sink deep into his skin, piercing flesh and vessels, punching into his windpipe as easily as a pin into a corkboard.

He felt an overwhelming sensation of tiredness and then cold, then an urge to sit down right there in the deep grass at the corner of his courtyard, where his son Dwayne would find him after breakfast. His father would be lying there like a puppet with snipped strings, an expression of wonder on his face, completely drained of blood. And when Doctor Meredith came late in the afternoon, she'd find odd perimortem bruising around that ruptured neck, in a strange pattern reminiscent of some of the fainter bruising she'd found on that Caerphilly boy's severed neck after midnight up at the diminished reservoir.

And by evening, there'd be not one, but two suspicious deaths posted on the Constabulary website.

* * *

Yr Achos/The Box

* * *

The girl slept late in the pull-out sofa bed in the vicarage, her breathing slow and easy under the musty sheets as a blear-eyed Reverend Mr Norris wondered where he should go to do his morning devotions.

Normally, he did a meditation over some tea, reflecting in prayer in the morning quiet of his parlor. Then he studied his Welsh for half an hour or so. But he did these things on the couch that was now pulled out into Cassandra Evans' bed. So he dithered awkwardly, peering out the window while wondering whether he should risk a kettle in the little kitchen. For he had seldom needed tea more.

It had been many years since he'd had a woman sleeping in his home. Since medical school, all those years ago, before Janine had moved out. He'd long since made his peace with the way he'd once lived his life, but now as he stood by the window in the early morning, gazing over at the sleeping young woman, he got one of those pinpricks of thought, the idea of what might have been if he'd become a doctor, had a family. If God had chosen a different life for him.

He was just on the verge of deciding to boil his kettle and be damned to the noise it might make when he saw a police car jerk to a halt just outside. A flurry of activity inside suggested haste, and then Superintendent Anthony Wynn was blasting from the car like a bull from the chute, striding toward the door with his brow truculently set. Norris was already moving toward the front door even before the heavy knock rattled it. "Mr Wynn," he nodded. He was using a quiet voice; Cassandra was only in the next room, but as the policeman barged past into the foyer, it was clear that silence was no longer an option.

"Good morning, parson. Is the girl still here?" The voice was loud enough to be heard in the church itself, clear across the churchyard, and Norris cringed to himself as he realized she'd be stirring.

"She is."

"All night? She's not left?" He peered around, through the doorways and into the kitchen. "Any tea on?"

"Er, no. Not yet. And yes. She's been here all night."

The superintendent's shoulders seemed to slump, just slightly, an odd glint in his eyes. He nodded. "There's another body. Have you opened that box yet?"

Norris' eyebrows rose. "Another body. Let me just get my boots."

"No. The doctor's already there; his family might want you later, but there's no time now. I need that box. If there's something inside it? I want to know."

"Oh, it's still in my bag." He led the way into the parlor, both men stopping short at the sight of Cassandra Evans, sitting up on the pull-out bed. "Oh dear."

A silence fell over the scene before the superintendent looked pointedly away. "Sleeping naked is bad for the digestion, miss," he said sternly.

"And a fine morning to you too," she called out gaily. She stretched her arms up high, and in the split second before Norris looked toward the front door he felt a moment's twinge of jealousy toward poor headless Davey McCormick. The woman's body was delicious, twined in the sheets as she wriggled awake. "Where's the coffee, then?"

"Umm." Norris had not had coffee in years, since he'd traveled to America.

"Business first," the superintendent boomed, "then breakfast. Let's crack that box open, parson." He cast a skeptical eye toward the pull-out. "And you, miss, ought to get dressed. It's been a busy night, but no rest for the weary."