Hark, the glad sound - the Saviour comes!

A very short horror story. The church building is based on my curacy church, but absolutely none of this ever happened and the lovely people of my curacy church certainly don't care this much about linens! She never turned the lights on when she arrived. It was habit, mostly. Electricity bills were high enough as it was. And even with the door locked behind her, no point announcing with blazing windows that she was there on her own. Not that she didn’t trust the estate, but she hadn’t been there that long and it was as well to be realistic. And anyway, she needed to learn to love this church, to become at home in it, as her faithful were. Generations of the faithful, in this place; all living on the estate, all coming to St Peter’s. It was their church, really, she sometimes thought, and she was still a foreigner. An interloper, and told herself not to be silly. Can’t be a foreigner if you live here. Can’t be a foreigner if you wander round the church at night without even needing...

This is the story of Benjamin.  He’s been a shepherd all his life; he started as an apprentice to his father when he was eight, and in the years in between he has slept out on hillsides more nights than he can count. Now he’s forty. He’s getting a bit old for sleeping on the ground. His sons, like him, have been his apprentices; now they’re coming up to twenty, they’re doing more of the night work. He still takes the sheep, and the fleeces, to market, though, and he still looks after them in the daytime. And if there’s a wolf around, he won’t find Benjamin an easy mark.  One market day, Benjamin took the fleeces in to Jerusalem as usual. It was the usual bustle of market day – people selling, people buying, crowds pushing their way towards the Temple, a stream of people trying to get out of the Temple, street preachers and Roman soldiers and who knows who else. He never gets used to it. But this morning, his attention was caught by one of the street preachers. He was telling a...