Free The Haunted Storm by Philip Pullman Page B

at the notice-board by the lych-gate. He didn’t recognise the vicar’s name; he only vaguely remembered the man who’d been here when he was a child and had gone to the Sunday School. The church itself was not especially beautiful, but it was old and untouched and fairly small. The graveyard rose steeply behind it and bordered a green field, where sheep were grazing and where a hawthorn hedge led up and across the brow of the tiny hill. The weather was exhilarating. The sky was clear one minute and half-covered with huge dazzling billowing white clouds the next, that raced and swept across the whole intense blueness of it and disappeared. The sun was warm, except when a cloud crossed it momentarily, and the air was fresh and cool.
    Matthew leant on the wall until the bell began to ring, and then wandered slowly inside.
    He sat in a pew at the back of the church, on the right hand side next to a window, and watched the rest of the congregation come in. There were not many of them, naturally; a few old ladies, a smartly-dressed man who might have been a doctor or a lawyer and his wife, two or three other middle-aged couples, and that was all. Matthew thought he recognised some of them, but he was not sure, and in any case no-one seemed to know him. He sat still, feeling oddly peaceful.
    As the organist began to play a prelude he realised that he would not, after all, find much of an answer here, if he had ever really expected to. It was all too familiar and ordinary. Salvation lay in extremes, in things like that murder, even, and unless the vicar was a saint or a madman he wouldn’t find it here.
    Then from the back of the church the vicar’s voice announced the first hymn; and immediately Matthew felt a small obscure shock, and involuntarily turned round. He saw a small man, slightly balding, looking mild and preoccupied, whom he’d certainly never seen before. It was his voice that puzzled Matthew, because it was loud and rich, and intensely melodious, almost the voice of an actor.
    He stood up with the rest of the congregation and sang dutifully as they did. It was a short hymn, and when it was over and they were kneeling down Matthew was astonished again at the volume and richness of the man’s voice, reading the prayers. It was not a “parsonic” voice, over-ripe with self-admiration and piety; but it rang out like a bell, effortlessly powerful. “He should have been an actor,” thought Matthew, wondering at it.
    It formed a great contrast with his appearance: for he looked ill-at-ease, absent, even slightly nervous. His eyes were very light in colour and made him look half-blind and a little weak. He was not looking at the prayer-book, but staring obliquely down the church, with an uncertain frown on his forehead every now and then.
    As the service went by the sun crept round and a beam fell through the window beside him on to Matthew’s side, warming him and causing red and green pools of light to shimmer and coalesce on the wood of the pew in front of him. They sang the psalms, and recited the creed, and sang another hymn which the vicar did not join in, rather to Matthew’s surprise. “Perhaps he’s tone-deaf and doesn’t like to throw everyone off their pitch,” he thought; “but he ought to sing well, with that voice.” And then the vicar went to the pulpit and arranged his notes, and waited impatiently for the hymn to end.
    He opened the Bible before the congregation had sat down and began to read his text. He read a sentence from St. John which Matthew didn’t recognise: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” Then, without any other preamble, he went straight into an extraordinary, rambling, wandering maze of a sermon that worked itself up into a vivid excess of passion. Matthew listened greedily.
    “You will have noticed that whenever we talk about the entry of God into the world we use the word descent. Christ,