Grandma's Halloween Rules

a shop counter — прилавок

a customer — покупатель

a notice board — доска объявлений

a churchyard — кладбище при церкви

a gravestone — надгробие

the vicar — приходской священник

a parish — приход

a record — запись, документ

to mention — упоминать

to avoid — избегать

polite — вежливый

awkward — неловкий

to change the subject — сменить тему

a stranger — незнакомец, приезжий

local — местный

The village shop opened at eight and closed at four and had a sign in the window that said WE HAVE BREAD, which suggested that this was not always true.

It also had a bell on the door that had clearly been there since before either of them was born, and which announced every customer to the entire village.

Kate walked in at half past ten on Sunday morning while her mother was on the phone to a solicitor.

Inside it was one room with four narrow aisles. There were tins, there was a fridge, there was a rack of newspapers with three copies of a Saturday paper still on it, and there was a counter with a till, a jar of sweets and a man of about seventy reading a magazine about tractors.

—Morning, he said, without looking up.

—Morning.

—You’re the Mercer girl.

Kate stopped in the middle of the second aisle.

—How does everybody know that?

Now he looked up. He had a round red face and white eyebrows that went in several directions.

—There are four hundred and ten people in this village, he said, and I have sold most of them a pint of milk this week. You are not one of them. Therefore you are new. There are two houses with new people in them and one of them is Iris Mercer’s. Amos Pratt.

—Sorry?

—That’s my name. Amos Pratt. You looked like you were waiting for it.

—Is there anywhere in this village to get a signal? she asked.

—Top of the church tower, Mr. Pratt said. Or Barford.

—Is the church tower open?

—No.

—Right.

—People do go up it, he said, turning a page. I am not going to tell you how, because you are fifteen and I would like to keep my licence.

Kate bought bread, milk, teabags and a chocolate bar, and while Mr. Pratt was putting them in a bag she looked at the notice board by the door.

There was a card about a lost cat. There was a poster for a quiz night in the Drowned Man on the eighth of November. There was a printed sheet about a mobile library that came on alternate Thursdays. And in the middle, on a piece of yellow paper, there was a notice in large letters:

THE QUIET NIGHT

31 October

Candles from six. Please keep to the usual arrangements.

—What’s the Quiet Night? Kate asked.

Mr. Pratt continued putting things in the bag.

—It’s what we call it, he said.

—Call what?

—Halloween.

—Why?

—Because that’s what it’s called here.

Kate waited. He put the last item in the bag, folded the top over, and pushed it across the counter.

—Four pounds twenty.

—Mr. Pratt, why is it called the Quiet Night?

—Because it’s quiet, he said. Four pounds twenty, please, my love.

She paid. He gave her the change and went back to his magazine, and Kate stood there for three more seconds and then gave up and left, and it was only outside on the green that she realised he had not looked at her once during the entire second half of the conversation.

She stood on the green for a minute with the bag in her hand.

It was a perfectly ordinary Sunday. A man was washing a car. Two women were talking outside the pub with their coats open because the sun had come out. A dog was asleep on the step of the telephone box. Nothing about any of it was strange, and that was what made the yellow notice strange, because a village that put up a poster about a quiz night in the same week also put up a poster telling everybody to light candles and stay in.

A dog crossed the green in front of her, considered her carefully, and went away again.

She went to the church.

St. Botolph’s stood at the top of the only slope in the village, which was about four metres high. It was flint and grey stone with a square tower, and the churchyard around it was full of leaning stones with names worn off them.

Kate walked round it slowly, twice, because there was nobody there to think it was odd.

It was a bright cold morning, and the wind was moving in the yew trees, and it was, she thought, one of the least frightening places she had ever been. Somebody was doing something at the far end with a wheelbarrow and a rake.

She read the stones as she went, because she always read stones, and because there is something about a churchyard that makes you walk more slowly whether you intend to or not. Mercer, Mercer, Ward, Pratt, Pratt, Pratt, Vance, Mercer.

She found her grandmother almost immediately, because the earth was still new and the stone was not there yet, only a small wooden marker with a printed card in a plastic cover.

IRIS MARGARET MERCER · 1949 to 2025

Kate stood in front of it for a while and did not know what she was supposed to feel, which was, she suspected, quite normal, and she stayed until she got cold.

Then she went looking for Nell.

She was thorough about it. She started at the wall by the gate and walked every row, reading every stone, including the ones so old that the writing had gone. There were eleven Mercers. There was Iris’s mother, Margaret Mercer, 1921 to 1989. There was a Thomas Mercer, 1918 to 1974, who was presumably Iris’s father. There were Mercers from the 1880s and one from 1809.

She went round a second time in case she had missed a row, and then a third time along the wall where the oldest stones were, where the names had gone soft and green and she had to touch them with her fingers to read anything at all.

There was no Nell.

She stood in the middle of the churchyard with cold hands and read the list again in her head to be sure.

There was no Eleanor, no Ellen, no Helena, no Petronella, and nobody at all who had died as a child in the nineteen sixties.

—Can I help you?

Kate turned round. The person with the wheelbarrow had come up the path behind her and turned out to be a woman of about forty in a waterproof coat, muddy boots and a clerical collar.

—Are you the vicar?

—I am. Alice Sandoe. And you are standing on my grandfather.

Kate looked down and moved.

—Sorry.

—He won’t mind. He was a very forgiving man and also he is extremely dead. You’re Iris’s granddaughter.

—Does everyone in this village just know things?

—Yes, Reverend Sandoe said. It’s the main hobby. What are you looking for?

Kate hesitated for about half a second and then decided that there was no point in being clever.

—I’m looking for a grave for somebody called Nell Mercer. She’d have been born around 1951 or 1952.

The vicar put down the handles of the wheelbarrow.

—There isn’t one, she said.

—I know. I’ve looked at everything.

—No, I mean I know there isn’t one. I’ve been here six years and I’ve read the whole burial register twice, because it’s interesting and because in this job you have very long evenings. There is no Nell Mercer in this churchyard.

—Could she be somewhere else?

—She could be anywhere. But if she was a Mercer of Wraycombe and she died here, she would be here. This family has been putting people in this ground since before the church had a roof.

Kate took out her phone and showed the photograph, which she had taken a picture of that morning.

Reverend Sandoe looked at it for a long moment.

—Nineteen sixty-two, she said, reading the back.

—Yes.

—And you have never heard of this child.

—My mother has never heard of her. And my mother lived with Iris for eighteen years.

The vicar handed the phone back.

—Come to the vestry, she said. I’ll put the kettle on and get the registers out. And I want to say something first, and I want you to hear it properly rather than think I’m being dramatic.

—All right.

—I have been the vicar of this parish for six years, and in that time three people have mentioned something that happened in 1963, and all three of them stopped in the middle of the sentence. Not because I asked them to. They simply stopped. One of them was your grandmother.

Kate felt the cold arrive properly, all at once, in the middle of a bright morning.

—What did she say?

—She said, and I remember it exactly because of how strange it was, she said: you don’t need to know about that, it’s a village thing, we manage it.

—Manage it?

—Manage it, Reverend Sandoe said. And then she asked me about the guttering on the south porch, and we talked about guttering for twenty minutes, and I have thought about that conversation approximately once a month ever since.

They walked up the path together. The vicar left the wheelbarrow by the porch and pushed open a small door in the side of the tower with her shoulder, in the way that people open doors they have opened a thousand times.

The vestry was cold and smelled of paper and candle wax, and there was a kettle on the floor next to a box of hymn books, which told Kate almost everything she needed to know about how the parish was doing. There was a table, a cupboard, a filing box and a electric heater with one bar working.

The burial register for the 1960s was a large book with a hard green cover. Reverend Sandoe found 1963 in under a minute.

There were nine burials that year in Wraycombe. Kate read all nine names twice.

None of them was a child. None of them was a Mercer.

—Well, the vicar said. There we are.

—So she didn’t die.

—Or she died somewhere else. Or she moved away. Or she was never born and somebody wrote the wrong name on a photograph, which happens more often than you would think.

Kate looked at the green book, at the nine ordinary names in careful handwriting, and thought about a list of rules in a tin.

—Reverend Sandoe.

—Alice.

—Alice. Do you know what the Quiet Night is?

The vicar closed the register.

—I know what people do, she said. They put a candle in every window facing the road, at six o’clock, and they stay in. Nobody goes out. Nobody has a party. The pub is open but it’s empty. There is no trick or treating in Wraycombe and there never has been. Children in this village go to Barford, four miles away, and everybody thinks this is completely normal.

—And why?

—That, said Reverend Sandoe, is the interesting part. I have asked eleven people over six years. Do you know what every single one of them said?

—No.

—They said: it’s just what we do.

Kate walked home along the lane with the shopping bag banging against her leg.

Halfway back she stopped and turned round and looked at the village from a distance: sixty houses, one tower, a green, a shop with bread in it. It looked like every small place she had ever driven through without stopping.

Then she thought about a woman standing in a church porch, being asked a direct question by her own vicar, and choosing instead to talk about guttering for twenty minutes.

She started walking again, rather faster than before.

1. Complete the sentences