The Old Oak Tree (EPISODE 11)

Father Gregory surveyed the devastation about him, wounded men and women groaning on the bloodied ground. He struggled to see, his left eye blurred and painful, the right straining to take the slack. He stifled a sob, but straightened up as he felt the accusing glances of the people around him. He had told them that the church kept the monsters at bay. He had prayed for it, believed it with the fullness of his soul. But the church had not protected them. The Others had crossed the Line, with axe and claw, and they had come to ravage and kill.
 
Bridget wept beside her husband Jack, his head partially separated from his body. Father Gregory had seen the monster that had killed him: the creature with a stump for an arm, pus oozing from the open wound, steaming hot in the frigid air. It had come for Father Gregory next, scrabbling and hissing, swinging its axe with a manic frenzy that shone in its burning eyes. Father Gregory knew that it was possessed with evil, some daemon or ancient force that had stolen Nancy’s soul and replaced it with burning coals.
 
He shuddered.
 
‘First, my son,’ Bridget cried, ‘and now Jack. Why?’ She rounded on Father Gregory. ‘Why?’
 
Father Gregory found he had no answer. He tried to place a hand on her shoulder, but she angrily shrugged it off.
 
‘If we had done as Jack said, and attacked them first, this would never have happened,’ she declared.
 
Maybe that was true. Father Gregory didn’t know anymore. His conviction had left him the moment he had seen the daemon-fire in the monster’s eyes. He still had faith – he still clung to it, grasped to it like a drowning man at a wooden plank – but he didn’t know what to do, what was happening. Was this a punishment from God? Was this the devil’s work? Or was the town of Orlow like Job, tested by Satan and God together, asked to endure and endure?
 
Each hypothesis tumbled to and fro in his head, overlapping into a wordless blather. He didn’t know what to do, what next step to take. To pray? To ask for salvation? To take up arms and fight evil? To practice forgiveness? They all seemed contradictory, and Father Gregory had no sense of which path was right.

The man sighed. Maybe it did not matter. When he looked around, the only eyes that met his were filled with resentment and accusation. Bridget was not alone in blaming him. Deep down, Father Gregory knew he had lost the respect of his flock. He could scream God’s holy judgement from the belltower, possessed with the Holy Spirit Itself, and no one would listen. He had no power over what came next, what the mob would choose. Repercussions. Violence. Abuse. Fear, panic, flight… tears: desperate, frantic tears… Father Gregory did not know. He thought he might have known, once. He thought he once had understood the people of this town. But that had all changed.
 
Now he knew only that he knew nothing.
 
As the people gathered their wounded and dead, Father Gregory found himself stumbling back towards the church. He wasn’t surprised to find that the interloper was gone. What had it wanted, sitting outside his door? Had it planned to distract them? To lull them into a false sense of ease? To taunt them? The preacher rubbed the back of his neck with a heavy hand and sighed. He gazed up at the steeple, at the cross still displayed proud and unbroken. Maybe that was the point. That they had endured evil. But why had the lesson been so brutal? Father Gregory had seen Jack die, the three brutal swings of an axe that had cleaved and severed and torn. What had that suffering proved that they did not already know? What did it mean?
 
‘Hello, Father.’
 
If he was not felt so profoundly tired, Father Gregory might have jumped in fright. Liz, the strange little girl who loved to sketch, watched him from behind the churchyard bushes. Father Gregory felt his heart fill with sympathy and grief for her lost innocence, and instinctively covered his savaged eye with his hand.
 
‘It’s over, child,’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
 
‘I’m not afraid,’ she replied, emerging from her hiding place. ‘But Mrs Butler looked very cross, so I thought it was best to hide.’
 
‘Nancy Butler?’ the preacher asked. He shuddered to hear someone speak the monster’s name, to humanise such blatant, grotesque evil.
 
‘Uh huh.’
 
‘Nancy Butler is dead, child,’ he said, with some force. If he could be sure of anything, it was that. ‘Whatever has taken her place cannot be human.’
 
Liz frowned, and shrugged. ‘She looked cross,’ she said. ‘But I think she was just here to help Peter.’
 
Father Gregory narrowed his good eye at the child, trying to work out what was going through her head. She didn’t seem to notice his scrutiny: she had her sketchbook in her arms, and stared curiously at the carnage down the path.

‘Come inside, child,’ he suggested quickly.
 
He didn’t want her to see.
 
Inside the church, it was oddly quiet, presenting an incongruous calm that was at odds with the mayhem outside. Father Gregory took a moment to stare at the altar, struck by a strange, ineffable feeling he didn’t recognise. He could feel a headache start to form, circling outwards from his strained eye. Liz just trotted up to the front, planting down on a pew and chewing on her hair. She looked a little sullen. Father Gregory sat beside her.
 
‘What do you think about all this?’ he asked gently. Liz shrugged, still chewing on her hair. She seemed uninterested by the church, having placed her sketchbook on the pew beside her. Father Gregory frowned at the second page that fluttered into view: a child’s sketch of a broken, miserable creature with loose, sloughing skin. It seemed to be sleeping, or dead, purple welts inexpertly portrayed with frantic, clumsy shading.
 
‘When did you draw this?’ he asked. When Liz shrugged again, he forced himself to smile. ‘You’re not in trouble,’ he told her. ‘I just want to know.’
 
‘Earlier,’ the girl replied.
 
‘Today?’
 
‘Uh huh. Just before everyone started fighting.’ She paused. ‘He’s not a monster, you know. When I touched his arm, he felt normal, not slimy or anything.’
 
‘Did he talk to you?’ Father Gregory asked carefully. For the sake of understanding the girl, he would use humanising pronouns.
 
‘Uh huh. He was silly. He said I looked normal and that everyone blamed him for Isaac being dead.’
 
‘Why is that silly?’
 
‘Because the tree did it,’ Liz said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
 
Father Gregory studied her expression, but she seemed genuine enough. ‘Why do you think that?’
 
She stared at him like he was stupid. ‘He fell out of the tree,’ she said.
 
‘Don’t you think someone might have put him there?’
 
Liz shook her head. ‘He climbed it, even though you told him not to. And then the old oak tree killed him, because it’s evil.’ She glanced up hopefully. ‘You should burn it or chop it down,’ she suggested.
 
‘I think people are too scared to try,’ Father Gregory admitted. Liz shrugged.
 
‘It’s just a tree,’ she said, not seeming to recognise the contradiction in what she was saying.
 
Father Gregory thought for a few moments before something clicked. ‘He said you looked normal?’ he asked.
 
‘Who?’
 
‘Th – Peter.’
 
‘Oh.’ Liz nodded. ‘Uh huh.’
 
As Father Gregory finally processed what she was saying, the truth hit him like a punch to the face. ‘They think we’re monsters?’ he asked.
 
Liz shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘But it’s silly. They’re the monsters, aren’t they, Father?’
 
Despite himself, Father Gregory laughed. He laughed as he realised the full implication of the truth, the sheer, horrifying pointlessness of it all, the misunderstanding, the violence, the illusion that had turned them against one other like rabid dogs. And then he laughed even harder, because he realised that the people would never listen to him, that they would not believe him and this strange little girl, that the truth would be choked out by grief and pain and wrath: that he had failed, completely and utterly, to kill this evil in its crib.
 
‘Why are you crying, Father?’ Liz asked.
 
Father Gregory was about to correct her, but he realised she was right. He was crying: his shoulders hunched, his body convulsing with every gasping sob.
 
‘It doesn’t matter, child,’ he managed. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
 
The girl shrugged.
 
‘Okay.’