“Wind,” said Dr. Planck thoughtfully. “Yes, I felt it too. It smelt of… elsewhere.”

“So perhaps it was coming from the other side of the portal,” said Maria. “But its force wasn’t very strong. You’re the expert, Dr. Planck, but isn’t it true that, in theory, a portal like that would allow only a one-way trip?”

“Well, according to some theories, yes, and assuming the portal was sufficiently stable. It’s to do with the force of gravity,” Dr. Planck added, to a confused-looking Mrs. Johnson, and an even more confused-looking Tom.

“But that kind of force would hurl the travelers out the far side, wouldn’t it?” said Maria. “There should be a howling gale tearing this town apart, but there isn’t.”

“You may be right,” said Professor Planck. “I mean, this is all speculative.”

“So there isn’t that force of gravity,” said Maria.

“It appears not. There’s some, but not sufficient to suggest a perfect balance between gravity and centrifugal force.”

“Then suppose that we collapse it.”

“But how?” asked Dr. Planck. Even as he asked the question, he seemed to come up with an answer, for his face cleared for the first time since he had arrived at the house. Nevertheless, it was Maria who was left to make the suggestion.

“By sending something in the opposite direction,” she said.

“Like two cars meeting on a bridge and destroying themselves, and the bridge,” said Samuel.

“Two cars meeting on a narrow, unstable bridge,” said Maria.

“You know,” said Dr. Planck, “that just might work. The questions are, where do we find our car, and who will drive it?”

XXVII In Which We Meet Bishop Bernard the Bad at Last, and Constable Peel Enjoys Himself Immensely

OVER AT THE FIG and Parrot, Shan and Gath were having a rare old time. Someone had started playing the piano, and Shan and Gath were doing their best to grunt along to “My Old Man’s a Dustman.” Earlier, someone had sung “Danny Boy,” which, although they had never heard it before, Shan and Gath sensed was a very sad song. It had caused a tear to well up in Gath ’s eyes, leading Shan to give him a consoling hug.

“One more for the road?” asked someone, waving a handful of beer vouchers in their faces.

Why, Shan and Gath thought, spying the vouchers, we don’t mind if we do…

Reverend Ussher and Mr. Berkeley were in real trouble. In the first place, the risen dead were proving to be a great deal cleverer than skeletons whose brains had rotted and turned to mush centuries before had any right to be. The main windows of the church were set about eight feet above the ground, which made them hard to reach without the aid of a stepladder. In the absence of said stepladder, some of the dead had formed a skeleton pyramid, with three corpses providing support for two further corpses, while a final corpse on top was using one of the stone gargoyles, which was complaining loudly, to break the glass. Two of the small panes had already broken, and Reverend Ussher could see a mouth grinning at him through the gap, a mouth with only a couple of broken black teeth still visible, which said a lot about dental care in olden days.

At the same time, more of the dead were thumping at the front door of the church and at the back door that led into the vestry, from which the verger had called the police to inform them of all that was occurring. The verger thought that the policeman who answered the phone had sounded a lot less surprised than he might have done, under the circumstances. In fact, he sounded like the dead rising was the least of his worries.

The vicar and verger had taken the precaution of pushing chairs and pews up against the doors in an effort to hold off the attacking corpses if they did manage to break through. There also continued to be worrying sounds from the vicinity of Bishop Bernard the Bad’s tomb, the marker stone of which was piled high with just about every available piece of furniture and statuary stored in the little room. Between the pounding and the laughing they could also hear what sounded like, “Free me!” along with the occasional swear word.

“Bishop Bernard seems most irate,” said Reverend Ussher as Mr. Berkeley returned from checking on the storeroom. “I do hope you haven’t been trying to reason with him again. And he does swear a lot for a bishop.”

“He shouldn’t be able to talk at all,” said Mr. Berkeley. “Limestone or no limestone, he’s a corpse.”

“Mr. Berkeley,” said the vicar patiently, “in case you haven’t noticed, the dead have arisen, there are gargoyles bouncing around on the church lawn, and we have been insulted by a stone monk. Under those circumstances, Bishop Bernard’s conversational skills are unremarkable.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said the verger. “We need to do something about those skeletons, though. They’ll be on top of us in a minute if we’re not careful.”

The vicar grabbed a brass candlestick and moved to the wall of the church.

“Help me up,” he said. The verger leaned down, cupped his hands, and, with some effort, boosted Reverend Ussher up close to the windowsill, onto which the vicar managed to haul himself with some effort. There were now four broken panes in the window, and the dead had succeeded in breaking the lead that had surrounded them, leaving a considerable gap. As Reverend Ussher steadied himself, a bony hand reached through and grabbed his trouser leg.

“Oh no you don’t,” he said as he brought the candlestick down hard upon the skeletal hand. It smashed into pieces, scattering dismembered bones. The rest of the arm was quickly withdrawn.

Through the stained glass, Reverend Ussher could see the pyramid of skeletons tottering. He waited for it to draw closer once again, and for the lead skeleton to reach for the glass. When it did so the vicar opened the lower half of the window from inside, whacking the skeleton on the head and overbalancing the pyramid entirely. The three top corpses tumbled hard, and broke various limbs when they hit the ground. Reverend Ussher whooped in triumph, but his delight was short-lived. Dozens of bodies in various stages of decay looked from the vicar to the broken skeletons, then back again. It was hard for skulls without much flesh to look any angrier than they already did, but somehow these managed it.

“Oh dear.”

“Oh dear what?” asked Mr. Berkeley from below.

“I think I’ve annoyed them.”

“And it wasn’t like they weren’t miffed to begin with. Well done, Vicar!”

Hurriedly, Reverend Ussher began to close the window, but it now appeared to be stuck. He tugged, but it just wouldn’t move.

“Oh dear,” he said, again.

“Don’t tell me,” said the verger.

“I really think that I should,” said the vicar.

“Go on, then.”

“The window won’t close.”

Below him, the dead began to form not one but two more pyramids. They were about to attack on twin fronts. At the same time there came a great crashing noise from the storeroom, and a single word was roared from within.

That word was: “Free!”

“Oh dear,” said the vicar and the verger together.

And then, just as the two pyramids of the dead began to approach the wall, a police car shot around the corner and ran straight at them, turning twelve rather innovative dead people into a pile of rotting limbs and broken bones. The car spun and came to rest facing the skeleton host, and Sergeant Rowan’s voice resounded across the churchyard.

“Right, you dead lot,” it said. “This is the police. We’re giving you five seconds to get back to wherever you came from, or there’s going to be trouble.” The dead did not move. To be fair, their hearing wasn’t great. In addition, none of them had ever seen a police car before, or indeed anything with four wheels that wasn’t being pulled by a horse or an ox.

“Your choice,” said Sergeant Rowan. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”