There was a loud hammering at my door and I jerked, dropping the needle again.

“Father! Come quickly. He’s gone! He’s gone!”

“I’m coming,” I called. “There’s no need to break my door down.”

But the yells and banging only redoubled. I groped for the latch. As the door swung wide, I had to leap back to avoid the wildly beating fists. One of the village women stood on the threshold. It took me a moment to recognise her, for her face was streaked with tears and mud.

“It’s Aldith, isn’t it?” I said. “What’s happened? Who’s gone?”

“Oliver, my little Oliver. He’s not there. I went to where… and he wasn’t there!” She broke off in a fit of sobbing, running back and forth in front of my door like a crazed dog.

Several women were beginning to gather on the other side of the path, clutching each other and staring, but not daring to approach, afraid that her madness might be catching.

I seized Aldith by the arm. “Come now, you must calm yourself, Mistress. This won’t do you any good. Oliver’s dead, don’t you remember? I buried him myself three days ago.”

Grief does strange things to a woman. Some refuse to accept that their children or husband are dead. I’d even known women to set a place for the deceased at the table or wash their clothes as if they would return to wear them.

Aldith shook her head violently. “No, Father, you don’t understand-his body… it’s gone… from the grave.”

“What! Are you sure?”

“Grave’s empty, Father. I went to lay some meat and drink on it for All Hallows’, so he’d not feel neglected, but the grave… it was open and his little body was gone.”

She froze, a look of wonderment spreading slowly across her face, then she clutched my arm. “Father, maybe he wasn’t dead after all, or… maybe God heard my prayers and brought him back to life. Three days, Father, three days, don’t you see… I have to go home. He’ll be there waiting for me.”

She hitched up her skirts and began to run.

“Wait!” I called after her. “Aldith, come back. It is not possible. He can’t…” But she only ran faster.

I snatched up my cloak and hurried down towards the churchyard.

Oliver had been just five years old, and when he had first fallen ill, it seemed nothing unusual, a sore throat, a slight fever, some vomiting. It was a touch of ague, his mother had said, brought on by the cold weather. But two days later, little Oliver was writhing in agony, his belly swollen up as if he had the dropsy, and he was vomiting blood. Death had followed within the week.

We had laid the child’s body straight into the half-frozen earth, wrapped only in a simple winding sheet. His mother couldn’t afford a coffin; it was all she could do to raise the money for the soul-scot. I’d thrown earth onto the small body, and watched the villagers add their own clods, while the mother howled and rocked in the arms of her neighbours. Then the grave had been filled in.

I had seen it myself only yesterday, a slender mound of earth, fresh and dark against the surrounding grass and marked with a small wooden cross. What could Aldith have possibly seen to make her doubt her son was in there? The poor woman had been deranged by grief. She must surely have gone to the wrong grave.

As I hurried towards the church I could see a group of men standing in the doorway under the obscene carving of the naked old hag, which the villagers call Black Anu. Martin the sexton, the blacksmith John, and two other villagers were deep in conversation. They stopped talking and nudged one another as I approached, as if they’d been discussing me.

“Martin, Mistress Aldith has just come to me with some tale about her son’s grave. She told me…” I felt foolish even saying it, “… that it has been disturbed. There is no truth in this, I take it.”

“Grave’s empty,” Martin said tersely.

“Show me,” I demanded.

The men glanced at one another.

“Your memory going, is it, Father?” The sexton coughed and spat a gob of phlegm onto the church step. “You know where the grave is, Father; you buried the lad in it.”

“I can still remember who pays your wages. This churchyard is your responsibility. Your job is to ensure that the dead are allowed to rest in peace. So if you’ve been negligent in carrying out your duties, I want to see.”

Martin at least had the grace to look uncomfortable. With another glance at his companions, he led the four of us reluctantly around the side of the church.

The grave was tucked away beneath an overhanging oak in the far corner of the churchyard. It had not been dug deep; the sexton had complained that tree roots and icy ground had made it hard to go down as far as usual, though I suspected it was because Aldith hadn’t given the man an extra coin, which he seemed to expect as his right.

Even as we approached I saw that the earth was not heaped over the grave as it should have been, but piled on either side of it. I stared down into the narrow pit. The outline in the wet earth where the small body had lain was plainly visible, but the body itself had vanished.

An icy shiver crawled up my back. Could Oliver have risen as Aldith said, not as our Lord rose, but as one of the revenant dead, the corpses which clamber from their graves and feast on the living? I crossed myself. “God have mercy on us,” I murmured.

There’d been such a case when I lived in Norwich. A man, newly buried, had risen from the churchyard and wandered through the streets throttling anyone he encountered. He had been followed by a pack of yellow-eyed cats whose savage yowling terrified all who heard them. In the end Bishop Salmon had commanded the grave be opened and the head of the corpse cut off with the spade that had been used to bury him. When they dug the dead man up, they’d found his corpse as fat and bloated as a leech and when they severed his head, a great scarlet spurt had gushed from his neck until the grave was filled with blood.

Was it possible this boy too had become a revenant? He’d had the simplest of burials, it was true enough, but I had been diligent in giving him all due rites of the Holy Church. And the sins of a child that young could surely not have been as grievous as to make him unworthy of a Christian burial.

“Do you think…” I stammered. “Is it…is it possible that the corpse has walked?”

The sexton coughed again and spat into the dark hole. “He’d not be able to leave his grave. I made sure of that myself. I opened it up after his mam had left and hammered iron nails into the soles of the lad’s feet, so he couldn’t walk.”

I didn’t know whether I was relieved or angry. “You violated a grave after he’d been given a Christian burial?”

Martin shrugged. “That weren’t the ague that killed him. Bairn died from witchcraft, plain as day. Crosses and holy water wouldn’t be enough to hold him in the grave, not if he was killed by witchery.”

The other men nodded.

Blacksmith John exchanged a look with the sexton, then cleared his throat. “Thing is, Father, if the corpse didn’t clamber out of the grave by itself, then someone must have taken it.”

I gaped at him. “But why? Who could possibly want to steal a corpse?”

John scratched at a scab on his huge muscular arm. “The way I see it, Father, is the one who killed him is the one that’s taken his corpse. Why else would she want to put the evil eye on a little lad? She needed his body for her black arts.”

“She? You think a woman in Ulewic, one of my own flock, would-”

John gave a great mirthless bellow of laughter. “She’s not one of your flock, Father. That old witch would never set foot in a church. Her soul’s so black, if one drop of holy water was to touch her withered old hide, she’d likely burn to ashes on the spot.”

“Old Gwenith, he means.” Martin explained. “She never sets foot in the village in daylight, except for the fairs and then only when she’s something to buy or sell. But at night…” He glanced at the other men. “At night it’s a different story, that’s when she comes down from her lair to make mischief.” There were murmurs of agreement from the others.