Entity story · 3 min read · Set in St. Brannoc's Hill ·
The Parish That Moves Four Metres
A parish priest on St Brannoc's Hill discovers that his church is slowly sliding down the slope on the back of a slug the size of a village, and the congregation has never once noticed the ground under the nave is moving.
Father Anselm Greaves had been priest of St Brannoc's on the hill for eleven years when he first noticed that the altar was in the wrong place. It was not a large error. He had set out the candlesticks on the Sunday as he always did, and when he came to the morning service he found the altar some four metres further down the chancel than he remembered, and the stained-glass window behind it had shifted to show the lower half of the Nativity. He moved the altar back himself with the help of the sexton. The congregation said nothing. Nobody else had noticed.
The next week the pews had moved.
They were still in their rows, and the aisles were still straight, but the entire nave had slid a few inches toward the west door, and the font was now in the porch. The bell rope, which hung from a gallery over the north wall, was swaying very gently, though there was no wind. Greaves went down into the crypt with a torch and found, at the bottom of the stairs, a long slick trail of silver across the flagstones, and a wet pale wall where the rock should have been.
He went up the hill to the old spring at the top of the churchyard, where the village had gathered its water for seven hundred years. The spring was dry. The stone basin was filled instead with a grey, glistening mucus that reached to his knees, and beneath it, as he cleared it with his hands, he felt something shift, very slowly, like a great animal turning over in its sleep.
He told the bishop. The bishop said the church had been subsiding for years, and that the diocese had a file on the hill going back to 1870. Greaves asked whether the file mentioned a slug. The bishop was quiet for a long time, and then he asked Greaves to write it down in a report, with the measurements, and to avoid speaking to the press.
The congregation, when Greaves gently told them, took it very calmly. Mrs Ellis said she had always thought the church was a bit too close to the lych-gate. Mr Yardley said the choir had been singing a shade flat for years, which might explain it. Nobody wanted to leave. Greaves found, as the autumn wore on, that they were content to sit in the moving nave and hear the sermon, and that the parish seemed to carry itself down the hill more gently than it had ever gone up.
By November the church had slid nearly thirty metres. The village below could see the tower coming down the slope through the autumn fog, lit from within by candles, a slow lantern moving on the back of something very large. The children called it the Procession. The adults called it nothing at all.
In December Greaves went down into the crypt again. The trail of silver had reached the lower wall, and the wall had opened, quite cleanly, into a broad passage of wet dark stone that led away under the hill. He could hear, far off, a sound like many small voices singing the same hymn at different speeds. He did not follow the passage. He climbed back up the stairs and rang the bell for evensong, and the whole parish came in out of the cold, and sat down, and began to sing. Somewhere under the floor the great soft body turned a little, carefully, to keep the choir in tune.