CHAPTER ONE
Margaret Whitfield had never liked using the side door.
Beyond, in the main building, she could hear the staff cleaning up after last night’s reception.
Occasional, desultory scrapes of chairs and tables, the tinny, scratchy sound of music from a mobile phone.
She’d permitted herself a peek into the Great Hall on her way over, taking in the debris of a hundred and twenty guests, a cargo-boat’s worth of canapes and Lord-knew how many bottles of French champagne.
Half a dozen, stout Hispanic women were just standing there in the midst of it, trash bags hanging loosely in their hands, dappled rainbows of light shining through the huge, arch-shaped picture windows.
They could have been receiving a vision.
But really, they just barely knew where to start.
Or they knew, but they felt hugely disinclined to get started.
And who could blame them? The floors were sticky, someone needed to fetch the ladder to open the windows, let fresh air replace the old perfume and spilt booze.
Only one of the women had a plan, it seemed: she was plugging a radio into one of the sockets at the edge of the vast room, so they’d have non-stop salsa tunes to work to.
Margaret had to admire their sense of priority.
The lock was stiff, darts of pain shot through her knuckles as she turned the key.
If she took her pills before she ate, she felt sick.
But the pains in her fingers and her wrists…
they made her feel sick, too. Healing Prayers, the laying on of hands…
none of her brother-in-law’s prescribed remedies had worked against the rheumatoid arthritis.
Because, apparently, she didn’t have faith.
She didn’t have enough of it. Or she didn’t have enough of the right kind of faith.
Jonathan had explained it, and it had seemed reasonable at the time, as it always did when those eyes of his gazed right down into her soul, and the rhythm of his voice rocked sense and peace and understanding into everything.
And yet she couldn’t quite remember what he’d said.
In fact, she realised, she could hardly remember anything he’d said to her, ever. The thought alarmed her briefly. Did he put her in some kind of trance? Another, even more frightening thought entered her mind; so shocking, so heretical that she quickly shut it down.
What if the Pastor never said anything that was truly worth remembering?
“Jonathan?” she called, forcing brightness into her voice.
Her brother-in-law was a creature of ritual.
Every Friday morning for the last decade, he’d been in his office by dawn, praying, scribbling, polishing the sermon he’d deliver at Sunday’s mega-service, watched by tens of thousands of the faithful, planet-wide.
Margaret would fetch him coffee sometimes, watching him hunched over his desk, lips moving silently as he rehearsed.
This morning she had every reason to expect the same: his door cracked open, the warm smell of French roast drifting down the hall, maybe a faint growl from his throat as he tested a line of scripture aloud.
But the corridors yawned with silence.
She let her heels click against the polished marble, a deliberate sound to chase away the eerie stillness.
The atrium remained dark, chandeliers off, sunlight only barely prying through tinted panes high above.
The megachurch always felt too big before the crowds came—like a stadium waiting for a team that might never arrive.
She told herself not to be silly. She’d seen all the cleaners, busy in the hall, or about to be.
Jonathan’s secretary had been at the reception, and if she’d been pulling the trick she usually pulled at these events – one glass, topped up endlessly, so that ‘just the one’ became enough to sink a battle-ship – then she’d be in well after eight this morning.
Meanwhile, the prayer-breakfast stalwarts never showed up until just before nine.
Of course everything was going to be quiet. What did she expect?
Still, she called his name again.
“Jonathan? Are you in your office?”
Her voice bounced back at her from the plaster columns.
Sometimes, he could be peculiar about how he was addressed. So she cleared her throat and tried again. ‘Pastor?’
Nothing.
She passed the bookstore, its ranks of devotional paperbacks and prosperity-gospel textbooks locked behind glass. Past the little café counter where volunteers would later brew gallon after gallon of coffee and unload boxes of muffins. Everything in order. Everything waiting.
She told herself to hurry—there were tablecloths to spread, the urn needed switching on.
For some reason, most of the breakfast ladies drank tea, and gallons of it.
But her feet carried her deeper down the corridor, toward the wing where the Pastor and his ever-shifting team of associates had their offices.
Jonathan’s door at the end, larger and heavier than the rest, brass plate glinting: Pastor The Rev. Jonathan Whitfield.
The handle gave as she pushed.
At first, she only saw the glow of the desk lamp. A yellow circle spilling over paper, polished wood, Jonathan’s broad shoulders. Relief began to rise—he was here, just working too hard to answer.
Then the details caught up with her eyes.
Jonathan was wearing the suit he’d worn at the reception last night: forest green, needle-corduroy, three-piece with covered buttons and a pink carnation. In all the years she’d known him, he’d never worn the same suit two days running…
And he wasn’t writing his Sunday sermon. He wasn’t even sitting upright. He was pitched forward, slumped over the vast mahogany desk, cheek pressed against the blotter, arm dangling at an angle too stiff to be sleep. His suit was stained dark at the back and side, fabric clinging as if soaked.
Margaret froze in the doorway. Her mind threw up all the wrong explanations first. He’d fainted. He’d spilled coffee. He’d…what?
Her gaze shifted to the desk itself. For some reason, she remembered the day it had arrived, handmade, from Italy, all wrapped up in thick sheaves of Italian newspapers.
They’d had lots of naked or barely dressed women in them.
No Italian news story, it seemed, was complete without an accompanying image of someone in a Wonderbra.
Jonathan had called them ‘devilment’ and gathered them all up to burn them.
They belonged in the fire, he said. But he took a long time to get round to it.
Carved into the glossy wood were markings. Not scratches from a fall, not idle doodles. These were deliberate grooves, cut deep by a blade. Shapes. Lines. Something resembling letters—or symbols. They looked familiar, but she couldn’t take them in all at once.
“Jonathan?” The name came out thin, almost childish. She took one step, then another.
The smell reached her. Metallic, raw, under the faint, sweet oud he dabbed behind his ears each morning.
Her brain stuttered, refused to accept what it saw. No. No, no.
Then, like a lens snapping into focus, she knew what she was looking upon: the open eyes, the unnatural stillness of his chest. The tortured angle of his head, the open mouth and the peculiar, liquid blackness behind his teeth. What was there?
Her heart jumped as a new question hit her. What wasn’t there?
And then her scream ripped the quiet to shreds.
She staggered back, hand groping for her purse. Her phone was somewhere inside, buried under tissues and her address book. She clawed for it, fingers trembling so hard she dropped it once, twice, before she managed to unlock the screen
Her thumb slipped, smearing the numbers into nonsense.
She wiped it on her skirt, tried again. Her breath came in harsh sobs, vision streaked with tears.
She couldn’t seem to make her hands obey.
Finally, she dialled it right, but it rang, and rang without answering, and as she waited, she found her eyes drawn to the body on the desk, the sight she knew she would never forget until her own time on earth was over.
When at last the call connected, her voice broke in gasps.
“H-he’s—please—my brother-in-law, the Pastor, he’s—there’s blood, oh God, oh God—his tongue it’s his tongue it’s his tongue send someone, please, please—”
She sank against the doorframe, phone clamped to her ear, eyes locked still on the tongue as the dispatcher’s calm questions tried to pull her back into order.
She felt light-headed, and the markings carved into the desk seemed to shimmer in the lamplight, clamouring for her gaze, like some message Jonathan had tried to leave, or some message left for her.
And she knew, she didn’t know how, but she knew it with a clarity colder than ice, that whatever devilment had happened here was just the beginning.