The Loney

An autumn gale damages the trees on Hampstead Heath, where the adult narrator becomes so absorbed in recording the fallen trees that he misses an appointment with Doctor Baxter. Reports of flooding in northern England are followed by news of a landslide at Coldbarrow, where an old house has collapsed and a baby's body has been discovered. The place's name revives memories the narrator has tried to suppress for thirty years. He fears that what happened there will no longer remain hidden.

He considers contacting Hanny but does not know how to begin or what Hanny remembers. Hanny, now known publicly as Pastor Andrew Smith, is busy with church work and has a wife, Caroline, and two sons, Michael and Peter. His successful book, My Second Life with God, has made him widely known. The narrator finds clippings about Hanny's public appearances and growing fame tucked inside the book and realizes that the discovery at Coldbarrow could bring attention to Hanny's past. He resolves to put his own account in writing before others can shape what becomes known.

The adult narrator recalls the Loney, a dangerous coast between the Wyre and the Lune where his family and a small parish group made Easter pilgrimages to Saint Anne's shrine. Rapid tides isolate Coldbarrow from the shore, and abandoned structures and the remains of people and animals attest to the hazards of the sands. The pilgrims travel there with Mummer, Farther, Father Wilfred, and Mr and Mrs Belderboss. The narrator also remembers Billy Tapper, a local alcoholic about whom the community tells contradictory stories, often using his condition as a moral warning.

In 1973, when the narrator is twelve and Hanny sixteen, the brothers accompany Mummer to a bus stop on their way to Lancaster. Billy, sleeping there, wakes and warns them against drink, shows a scar, and secretly gives the narrator pages torn from an adult magazine. Hanny notices that the object Billy appears to be holding is actually his exposed penis. Embarrassed and disgusted, Mummer takes the boys onto the bus and tells them that the capacity for Billy's degradation exists within themselves. The narrator takes her warning literally, searching for signs of evil inside his body.

At dinner that evening, Father Wilfred condemns Billy as a man who has squandered his opportunities, whereas Farther and Mrs Belderboss express some sympathy. The narrator recalls thinking himself capable of predicting disasters and becomes certain that Billy will soon die. The chapter establishes how the adults' judgments influence the boys' understanding of sin, pity, and fate.

After the 1973 pilgrimage, Father Wilfred returns alone from the beach visibly shaken, locks himself in his room, and cries. His anxiety persists after the group returns to Saint Jude's, and they stop visiting the Loney. When he dies suddenly early in 1976, Father Bernard McGill replaces him. The new priest is younger, approachable, and popular, although Mummer continually measures his practices against Wilfred's. The bishop encourages him to revive the parish's Easter retreat tradition.

At a planning meeting at the Smith home, Father Bernard brings his black Labrador, Monro, named for the singer Matt Monro. He calls the narrator Tonto and treats the altar boys more informally than Wilfred did. Miss Bunce and her fiancé, David Hobbs, propose Glasfynydd in Wales, but Mummer presses for a return to Moorings, where she knows the area and wants the group to visit Saint Anne's shrine. Father Bernard puts the destinations to a vote and abstains; Mummer's choice wins. Her attachment to the northwest coast is rooted in her upbringing and religious traditions. Hanny is away at Pinelands, and Mummer still regards his inability to speak as a test of her faith. She believes the shrine offers her son his best chance of a cure.

Hanny returns from Pinelands for the Easter holidays, delighted with a new watch and eager to show his younger brother his drawings, including one of the Loney. The narrator explains how Hanny uses familiar objects in his coat pockets to communicate his needs and how their private understanding has made them closer than other people realize. He also notices that Hanny is growing into an adult even as Mummer and Farther continue to look to the shrine for a cure.

The pilgrims leave Saint Jude's on the Tuesday of Holy Week. Mummer reminds Father Bernard to observe Wilfred's customary prayers before departure. During the northbound minibus journey, the clutch fails near the Loney. The narrator accompanies Hanny outside and discovers a skinned hare and dead rats displayed on a fence. A costly Daimler passes carrying a sleeping girl, and Father Bernard's dog, Monro, becomes agitated. Three local men appear, including Parkinson and Collier, who help Father Bernard get the minibus running again.

As the group approaches Moorings, the narrator sees Coldbarrow and the windows of Thessaly, a house linked in local stories to a supposed witch. He recalls the prohibition against crossing the tidal sands. Clement, caretaker of Moorings and a pig farmer, receives the group with his elderly, blind mother and asks about the late Father Wilfred. Inside the cold, worn house, Mummer shows the rooms and Mr Belderboss discusses its former owners, artifacts, and changing names. The narrator remains uneasy about the apparently unchanged rooms and objects.

In the attic bedroom at Moorings, the narrator cares for Hanny, who is fascinated by the taxidermist's collection of stuffed animals and other curiosities. Hanny becomes distressed when he realizes that they are staying rather than returning home. After dark, the narrator sees two figures crossing the fields. Hanny then uncovers the loose floorboard beneath which the brothers used to hide forbidden objects on earlier visits. Along with an old penknife, Billy Tapper's illicit pictures, and stuffed rats, they find a concealed M1 Garand rifle. The narrator claims it for himself and Hanny but does not know whether it is loaded.

Father Bernard visits to play gin rummy, telling stories of his harsh childhood on Rathlin Island, his family's pride, and a schoolmaster's severe punishments. He speaks about the biblical idea that truth brings freedom, then asks, on behalf of Mr Belderboss, about a notebook or diary that disappeared when Father Wilfred died. The narrator denies knowing where it is. Bernard mentions the confidentiality of confession without actually hearing the boy confess. Hanny wins a hand of cards.

Mummer summons Father Bernard and directs him to follow Wilfred's old practices, including confession, and to make sure Hanny fasts and drinks the shrine water in the hope of restoring his speech. When the narrator returns to the bedroom, Hanny has retrieved the rifle and points it at him. The chapter ends as Hanny pulls the trigger.

The rifle does not fire when Hanny pulls the trigger. The shaken narrator takes it away, hides it beneath the floorboards, and reads Hanny a story until he falls asleep. Unable to rest, the narrator checks the rifle's receiver and finds it empty before replacing it. He wanders into the house, where photographs of the former taxidermist and his wife remind him of stories about the man's decline after her death.

The narrator sees Mrs Belderboss go into Father Bernard's room for confession and secretly listens from an adjoining broom cupboard. She says that her husband, Reg, has begun wandering outside at night and will not explain his insomnia. Father Bernard suggests that he may be grieving Father Wilfred, who was Reg's brother, but Mrs Belderboss does not know what is troubling him. She admits that, fearing for her husband's safety and health, she crushed a sleeping pill into his Horlicks without his consent. Although Reg slept, she now feels guilty and fears he may be declining mentally.

Father Bernard responds with reassurance rather than condemnation. He urges patience, suggesting that grief after Wilfred's sudden death can be difficult to express and takes time to change. Mrs Belderboss leaves, and the narrator returns to the bedroom, where he handles the hidden rifle once more before sleeping.

After distant shouting wakes some of the pilgrims, the adults debate its source at breakfast. Father Bernard suggests it was farmers calling their dogs, but the narrator believes it came from the woods. Mummer then catches Hanny eating stew during his prescribed fast and forces him to vomit. Sick and in pain, Hanny is cared for by his younger brother, who recognizes his headache from the jar of nails he uses to communicate.

The narrator walks with Father Bernard, who says that Mummer's harshness may arise from fear for Hanny. He asks what it would mean for Hanny to be better and whether the boy's inability to speak makes him unhappy, a question the narrator cannot answer. Bernard refuses to promise a cure and encourages the narrator to acknowledge doubts about his faith. At a rock called the Panzer, he points out an old basin carved to collect rainwater, recalling that his grandmother treated such water as healing although it did not work.

From the rock, the narrator sees Parkinson and Collier watching from Clement's Land Rover. Father Bernard then admits that he did not hear the nighttime cries and invented his explanation to reassure the others. The pilgrims leave for a church service without Hanny, who has been allowed to rest. Hanny is awake when they depart, eager to go to the beach alone with his brother.

Taking the hidden rifle and Hanny's stuffed rats, the brothers go through the dunes to their old wartime pillbox, which bears new extremist graffiti. They clear sand from the fortification and resume their childhood military games. The narrator uses the rifle's sight to watch the coastline. When a gull with an injured wing struggles at the rising tide, he decides it would be merciful to kill it and proposes striking it with the rifle's butt, but a car arrives before either brother acts.

From concealment in the dunes, they recognize the Daimler that passed their stranded minibus. Its driver, Leonard, and a woman called Laura argue while a teenage girl sits in the back. Hanny realizes that his new watch has gone missing. Leonard brings a wheelchair out of the boot, and the girl, whom the narrator estimates to be about thirteen or fourteen, struggles to get into it because she is heavily pregnant. The narrator suspects the adults have brought her to the isolated coast to hide her pregnancy, but this is his speculation. Laura, not the girl, wears clothes the narrator considers old-fashioned.

Leonard wheels the girl toward the beach and investigates the pillbox, where the stuffed rats frighten him. He later finds Hanny's lost watch in the sand and pockets it. The girl remains in the wheelchair and feeds the injured gull; after seeming unable to fly, it suddenly takes wing and rejoins the other birds. The chapter offers no confirmed explanation for this apparent recovery.

Heavy rain confines the pilgrims to Moorings. Mummer pressures Father Bernard to follow Father Wilfred's old schedule of prayers throughout wet days, and privately accuses Bernard of drinking during his long walk with his dog, Monro. The narrator recalls that Mummer's own father was an alcoholic, a part of her family history she conceals. Farther discovers a locked room behind a tapestry in the study, although the prayers postpone any investigation. Mummer insists that the exhausted Hanny attend, but the others persuade her to let him rest.

Mr Belderboss remembers Wilfred as once happy and certain of his faith, then begins to describe how he changed after their last earlier pilgrimage. Mummer's look silences him. As the narrator reads a passage about betrayal and endurance for the group, he remembers becoming an altar boy at Saint Jude's alongside Henry McCullough. Mummer encouraged the vocation, but the narrator was also curious about the church's restricted spaces. The stern Father Wilfred tested and instructed the boys.

During the narrator's first training visit, he entered the vestry office and found a photograph album of the Loney. Its pictures had been taken during the final morning of the old pilgrimage. A magnifying glass lay on an image of the low-tide mudflats and the route to Coldbarrow. The narrator could not see what Wilfred was investigating, and when Wilfred caught him he resumed examining the album himself.

Early on Good Friday, Father Bernard places fourteen crosses around Moorings, and the pilgrims follow the Stations of the Cross in the rain. Hanny is required to fast. At breakfast, Farther reveals he has opened the room concealed behind the study tapestry and found a bed and toys. He suspects it once isolated children with tuberculosis, but the room's original purpose is not established.

After the service, the narrator takes Hanny across the exposed tidal sands toward Coldbarrow to recover his watch from Leonard. They have lost their old knowledge of the tides and follow the remains of the causeway and the Daimler's tyre marks. Near Thessaly, an albino cat appears, and the narrator identifies a faint ringing as wind sounding against the bell of the old tower.

At the house they meet the pregnant girl again and learn that her name is Else. Laura reluctantly lets the brothers enter and searches for the watch. Else invites Hanny to feel her baby move, kisses him, and gives him several old books. She remarks that she has experienced pregnancy before, but her circumstances remain uncertain. Laura tries to pay the brothers to leave without the watch. Leonard then arrives, wipes Else's lipstick from Hanny's mouth, returns Hanny's watch from his own wrist, and warns both brothers that the tides can trap or kill them. His warning has an intimidating force in context, though its full intent remains unclear. The chapter ends as Leonard takes Else back inside.

The brothers return from Coldbarrow just before the tidal sands are submerged. They arrive late to rejoin the pilgrims. Hanny repeatedly touches his lips where Else kissed him, and the narrator, initially worried that Mummer will notice, later acknowledges jealousy. He envies the social status that a similar experience might have given him among boys who bullied him at school.

On the minibus, Mrs Belderboss sees an unexpected swarm of red butterflies and interprets it as a sign of divine favor for the coming shrine visit. The narrator reflects on Mummer's and Father Wilfred's tendency to explain good and bad fortune as God's rewards and punishments and on Wilfred's insistence that suffering is necessary for genuine religious devotion.

In a flashback to his altar-boy training, the narrator recalls Wilfred's severe treatment of Henry McCullough. After Henry says a punctured bicycle tyre caused his lateness, Wilfred cuts his knuckles with a metal ruler, accuses him of lying without establishing that he has lied, and uses Bible passages about deceit and damnation to force Henry to agree he was lazy. The narrator sees the unfairness but does not intervene. Wilfred commands Henry to come to confession. The episode contrasts the group's claims of religious compassion with the cruelty of their instruction.

The pilgrims attend the Good Friday Tenebrae service at the old Church of the Sacred Heart. Its surviving medieval furnishings and a disturbing Doom painting revive the narrator's childhood terror of Hell and remind him of cruelty among schoolchildren. Candles are extinguished one by one through the Latin service until the doors are slammed to symbolize the earthquake at Christ's death. Clement sits alone in a side pew, without his mother.

Afterward, the group follows its old Good Friday custom of buying fish from a roadside stall. Parkinson, Collier, and an older, ill-looking man arrive in Clement's Land Rover without Clement. Their attention to the pilgrims unsettles some of the visitors, though Mummer dismisses the concern. On the return journey, they find Clement walking in the rain and give him a lift as far as Moorings.

When the others enter the house, Clement warns Father Bernard and the narrator to avoid unnecessary contact with local people who resent the pilgrims' presence. Bernard says he recently stopped at the Bell and Anchor, where Parkinson, a butcher, bought him a drink. Clement is alarmed and asks whether Bernard invited Parkinson to Moorings. He explains that Parkinson uses favors to make people feel indebted and might treat even a casual invitation as permission to arrive with others. Bernard cannot give a clear answer, and Clement refuses to explain the danger in detail before leaving for his mother's home.

The pilgrims dismiss Clement's warning as eccentricity and share their Good Friday meal at Moorings. Farther studies a nativity set recovered from the hidden room and notices its missing figure of Jesus. Miss Bunce and David go for a penitential walk with Monro, while Hanny shows his brother an envelope he secretly removed from among Leonard's belongings at Thessaly. It contains numerous ten-pound notes and a list of names, including Hale, Parry, Parkinson, and Collier. Frightened by the apparent value and its connection to the men Clement warned against, the narrator threatens Hanny and insists that he return it the next day.

Miss Bunce runs back from the woods terrified and without David, saying she has seen a hanged man. Father Bernard, Farther, and the narrator find David, who explains that Monro discovered the figure. In a clearing they encounter animal remains around an old fire and a hanging figure assembled from sandbags, wood, and a sheep's skull. A barbed-wire crown identifies it as a grotesque representation of Christ. The narrator and Father Bernard suspect Parkinson and Collier, but this remains unproved.

Opening a compartment in the figure's chest dislodges a pig's heart pierced with nails, which Monro briefly seizes. The men flee the woods. By tacit agreement, they decide to describe the figure to the others as a harmless joke while concealing the heart.

When Father Bernard, Farther, and the narrator return to Moorings, they falsely reassure the others that the figure in the woods was merely an old blanket hung as a joke. Miss Bunce, still badly frightened, wants to leave with David and spend the night in Little Hagby before catching a train. Father Bernard persuades her to stay until the shrine pilgrimage; he asks Mummer to fetch brandy for her, provoking Mummer's objection that it is Lent.

Upstairs, the narrator finds that Hanny has taken the stolen envelope from under his pillow and scattered the money. He hides it under the mattress. He also takes away the pornographic pictures Billy Tapper once gave him and crumples them, planning to burn them later; he has not yet destroyed them.

This recalls another episode of Father Wilfred's cruelty toward the altar boys. After Henry McCullough was discovered looking at his mother's underwear catalogues, Wilfred recruited the narrator and a newly introduced altar server, Paul Peavey, to collect stinging nettles. Wilfred interrogated Henry about sexual misconduct, forced him to close his hands around the nettles, and crushed them tighter while Henry cried out. He ordered Henry to pray and told the other boys not to reveal the punishment. The narrator recalls finding Henry crying before the Virgin with his hands swollen, while Paul laughed. The episode exposes religious discipline enforced through humiliation, violence, and secrecy.

Still fearful after seeing the effigy in the woods, the narrator sleeps with the unloaded rifle near him. That night, he secretly listens from the understairs cupboard as Reg Belderboss asks Father Bernard for confession. Reg reveals that police recently found him at his brother Father Wilfred's grave in the middle of the night. He had gone to check on flowers left there, then confronted an apparently intoxicated and partly undressed woman who had taken them and who addressed him as Nathaniel. The police arrived after she screamed; Reg allowed them to think him confused rather than tell Mary about the incident.

Father Bernard does not consider Reg's secrecy a clear-cut sin and encourages him to reflect on how to tell Mary, if at all, rather than seeking punishment. Reg says that Wilfred's chosen burial place does not feel right. Asked about the change in Wilfred after the parish's last earlier visit to the Loney, Reg says he believes his brother may have lost his faith. Wilfred continued preaching but seemed to Reg to be going through the motions, withdrawing even from his family. Reg cannot explain what caused this change.

After Reg leaves, Bernard sits troubled, drinks the remaining brandy, and reads. The narrator stays hidden. Reg's assessment of Wilfred remains his perception, not a confirmed account of what Wilfred experienced.

A gale tears the doors off an outbuilding at Moorings. The narrator and Hanny investigate and find neglected taxidermy, a tandem bicycle, spent cartridge cases, and boxes of rifle ammunition. The narrator secretly takes a clip of bullets, intending to use it with the M1 Garand and potentially defend himself against Parkinson and Collier. Father Bernard begins to repair the tandem, drawing Mummer's disapproval because he delays breakfast and the expected ritual.

Farther has found an earthenware bottle containing an unidentified liquid wedged into the barred window of the concealed room. Conversation turns to Father Wilfred's travels and Miss Bunce's journey with him to the Holy Land, a continuing source of jealousy for Mummer. Clement's mother, addressed as Mrs Parry, unexpectedly brings firewood while Clement is away. Although she appeared blind only days earlier, she navigates the house independently without her glasses and now has clear blue eyes. The pilgrims cannot explain the apparent change.

The narrator and Hanny cross to Coldbarrow again to return the stolen envelope. He takes the money and the ammunition clip with him and warns Hanny not to provoke the locals. At Thessaly, Leonard appears with dried blood on his forearms. The narrator lies that the envelope was accidentally left inside a book Else gave Hanny. A baby can be heard crying inside, but Leonard refuses Hanny's request to see Else. Leonard presses money into the narrator's pocket and pointedly asks whether he remembers any names on the list; the narrator denies remembering. As they leave, Else briefly appears at a window to wave to Hanny before disappearing.

During confession with Father Bernard, Miss Bunce recounts her last conversation with Father Wilfred. She found him agitated and frightened by something he would not identify. Wilfred wanted her to accompany him on a longer return trip to Jerusalem because he said he felt safe there. When she declined because of her approaching marriage, he demanded that she end her engagement to David, again without explaining a convincing reason. They parted unhappily. Miss Bunce, who later found Wilfred dead, has been tormented by the unresolved disagreement.

She also admits that she drank heavily after the confrontation, partly to defy Wilfred and partly because she felt unable to defend David. Father Bernard suggests her prolonged guilt has already been punishment enough, tells her to marry David, and offers his blessing. His account of Wilfred's motives is consoling interpretation, not knowledge of what had frightened the older priest.

The narrator recalls seeing Miss Bunce searching the vestry for her umbrella and weeping after a Christmas carol service. As he and Henry McCullough worked, Paul Peavey taunted Henry about his sexuality and threatened to report him to Wilfred. Wilfred then arrived, more concerned about Miss Bunce's distress than Paul's complaint about the boys, and took her forgotten umbrella in an attempt to find her. The events help connect Wilfred's final weeks to both his sudden fear and his increasingly intrusive treatment of those around him.

At dawn on Easter Sunday, the pilgrims follow a tradition of carrying egg-shaped stones up a bare strip through Brownslack Wood called Nick's Lane and rolling them downhill while praying. Hanny leads the group to a ewe giving birth. Father Bernard assists the struggling lamb, although he says the mother would have freed it herself. Mrs Belderboss interprets the event, like the red butterflies, as a divine sign of the wonders she hopes will occur at Saint Anne's shrine.

The narrator recalls the decline of Father Wilfred in late 1975. After withdrawing from the parish, he became enraged when his black diary vanished from the vestry. Paul Peavey blamed Henry McCullough and hid Henry's coat. Wilfred seized and accused Henry, who pulled the priest's wrist away and accidentally knocked him to the floor. Outside, Henry confronted Paul, who disclosed that the diary was in the belfry. Henry declared he would never return to Saint Jude's, fearing his mother would not believe his account of Wilfred's treatment.

The narrator returned alone to tell Wilfred where the diary was, protecting Henry without naming Paul. Wilfred, holding an antique sword, spoke anxiously about his attempts to 'save' Henry through punishment and about his own fear for his soul. He described the diary as a record that let him trace his thoughts and identify where things had gone wrong, apparently concentrating his concern on Henry. He then went toward the belfry with the sword still in his hand. The chapter does not establish how the diary first came to be hidden there or what occurred afterward.

The group travels to the Church of the Sacred Heart for Easter Mass, buoyed by the lamb's birth and the prospect of visiting Saint Anne's shrine the next day. They find the church doors chained shut and its centuries-old wooden figure of Jesus smashed outside. The local priest suspects vandals but cannot identify them. Mass is celebrated outdoors while police investigate. Clement, among the congregation, appears to suspect people he will not name.

Father Bernard invites Clement to Easter dinner at Moorings. Clement says he and his mother must sell their farm. When the pilgrims ask how his formerly blind mother regained her sight, Clement says she had an operation. Later, the others assume the farm is being sold to pay for private surgery, but neither the cost nor the reason for the sale is established. The group follows Mummer's elaborate Easter cake custom, with Clement reluctantly chosen to throw the marzipan Judas into the fire.

Outside, a little white dog associated with Collier drags an unidentified, shrieking object through the field, then abandons it when called. Monro becomes agitated and knocks over the earthenware jar found in the concealed room. It breaks, releasing a foul-smelling yellow liquid, apparently urine, along with small bones, nails, hair, nail clippings, a leather heart and the missing Jesus figure from the nativity set. Clement is deeply alarmed. Father Bernard proposes helping him, but Mummer and others argue that the pilgrims should keep to themselves.

As Bernard prepares to take Clement home, Clement privately claims that Parkinson and Collier reopened and rang the bell on Coldbarrow around New Year's Eve, after which Thessaly was occupied and the trouble began. He says they threatened to send him back to Haverigg if he interfered, and identifies the broken jar as a protective object meant to keep witches away so long as it remains sealed. Bernard is skeptical and suggests seeking medical help for Clement. Before Clement can explain further, visitors knock rhythmically at the door and begin singing outside.

The visitors at Moorings are the Pace Eggers, local men performing a traditional Easter mumming play. Parkinson leads them as Saint George, Collier plays Brownbags, and other performers include a Turkish Knight, a mock doctor, and a horned figure called Devil Doubt. Parkinson claims they have come by agreement. Father Bernard admits to the narrator that Parkinson proposed the visit during their earlier drinking encounter, although Bernard did not expect him to follow through. Worried by Clement's warnings and the effigy in the woods, the narrator remains skeptical of Bernard's view that the troupe is harmless.

The play stages a duel between Saint George and the Turkish Knight and a comic doctor's apparent resurrection of the defeated knight. The final Devil Doubt figure appears, and Hanny slips away from his brother's side. The narrator cannot find him upstairs or outside. In the kitchen, he sees the elderly man from Parkinson's party, now identified as Hale, looking unexpectedly healthy after previously appearing gravely ill. Parkinson calls Hale's recovery a miracle, but its cause is not established. Hale's name matches one on the cash list stolen from Thessaly.

Parkinson then confronts the narrator privately about his visits to Leonard's house and the twenty pounds Leonard gave him. He says money is not enough to ensure silence and proposes that the brothers come to Thessaly for Hanny to be made better, as he claims Hale was. He also mentions how readily an old house like Moorings could catch fire. The exchange combines an apparent offer of healing with intimidation. Parkinson expects them at Thessaly or threatens to fetch them, while Clement remains apart from the festivities with Monro. Hanny's whereabouts are not resolved in this chapter.

The narrator finds Hanny asleep among drawings of Else, including one depicting himself beside her with a smiling baby. The narrator concludes that Hanny believes the child is a gift intended for him. He dreads the following day's visit to Saint Anne's shrine and remembers the group's earlier attempt to restore Hanny's speech, when Father Wilfred stopped Mummer from helping as Hanny choked on the well water and then demanded that he speak. The narrator considers hiding Hanny but feels certain he will be forced to participate in the new ritual.

In the field, he finds the lamb born on Easter morning torn apart, apparently by Collier's dog. Father Bernard returns from delivering Clement home with apples picked from trees that seem unusually full of fruit for the season. He acknowledges the danger of further contact with Parkinson and Collier but is reluctant to leave before the shrine visit.

The narrator then eavesdrops as Mummer confronts Father Bernard about his conduct as the new parish priest. She argues that the pilgrims need the discipline and fear of punishment taught by Father Wilfred, not Bernard's sympathetic efforts to question old practices or investigate Wilfred's final months. Mummer asks him not to challenge Wilfred's reputation or interfere in Clement's troubles. When Bernard points out that Wilfred is gone and asks what remains to sustain the group, Mummer says they have Andrew. Bernard asks whether anyone has considered Andrew's own wishes. Mummer leaves rather than answer. The conflict exposes Hanny's role as a person on whom the adults' religious expectations have been imposed.

On the day of the pilgrimage, the adults prepare Hanny for Saint Anne's shrine, washing him and dressing him in a white shirt embroidered with a crucifix. The Belderbosses give him a blessed candle. Hanny remains excited, apparently thinking the preparations concern Else and her baby. Mummer warns him that God will leave if he becomes frightened or disobedient.

The party walks through muddy fields to the deserted and overgrown shrine, where fallen statues and an untended path contrast with the pilgrims' earlier memories. Father Bernard tells the narrator not to expect an immediate miracle and suggests that divine action may be gradual. At the spring, each pilgrim drinks the water in turn. When Hanny is asked to kneel and drink, he becomes frightened, knocks his London-bus mug against the wall, and runs up the steps. David is injured as he tries to stop him.

Mummer brings Hanny back despite objections. Bernard suggests returning alone with him the next day, but she refuses, insisting that the ritual occur immediately. Over the protests of Bernard, the Belderbosses, and Farther, she restrains Hanny, pinches his cheeks to force his mouth open, and pours grimy water from a jam jar. Hanny coughs, chokes, and spits it into her face. Mummer seals the remaining water in the jar and pockets it. Bernard leads the group out, while Farther stays behind looking at his wife. No restoration of Hanny's speech occurs during the ceremony.

After Miss Bunce and David leave for London, Mummer secretly adds saved shrine water to Hanny's tea and marks his forehead with it. She gathers Farther and the Belderbosses to pray over him. The narrator remembers helping prepare Father Wilfred's corpse for burial and wondering whether the priest reached heaven.

Father Bernard returns from taking Miss Bunce and David to the station and declines to join their late-night prayers. Mummer condemns his informal ways and the problems he has allowed at Moorings. Farther argues that she must accept Hanny as he is and never bring him back to the Loney. He describes evidence in the concealed room: children's names scratched out on the wall and letters from Gregson asking their governess whether they had recovered. He concludes that Moorings was built as a hospice for sick children taken repeatedly to the shrine, but the underlying history remains incompletely known.

The adults debate their suspicion that Father Wilfred may have taken his own life. They cannot prove it. Mummer and the Belderbosses seek to protect his reputation by keeping quiet, while Farther says they should tell the police. The narrator sees Hanny frightened behind his gorilla mask and connects the sight to a similar expression years later, when the narrator was arrested outside Hanny's home.

In a present-day flash-forward, the narrator describes a consultation with Doctor Baxter a few days before the discovery of the baby's body at Coldbarrow. He has been arrested for lingering outside Hanny and Caroline's house, claiming to protect Hanny. Baxter encourages the narrator to see that his brother's life does not require such surveillance. The narrator deliberately says what he thinks Baxter wants to hear, admitting he wishes to appear cured. Baxter's belief in progress therefore cannot be treated as evidence the narrator has genuinely changed.

Hanny silently leaves Moorings during the night after laying towels over creaking floorboards and giving biscuits to Monro. He takes the hidden rifle and ammunition with him. The narrator finds Father Bernard's repaired tandem and pursues him toward Coldbarrow, noticing hawthorn in flower earlier than expected.

As the tide advances over the sands, the narrator spots Hanny near the island and attempts to cross. He slips into a deep channel and nearly drowns, but Hanny extends the rifle strap and hauls him to the slipway. Exhausted and furious, the narrator scolds Hanny and throws his cherished gorilla mask into the sea. Hanny refuses to hand over the rifle, pushes his brother away and strikes his wrist with its butt after the narrator attempts to overpower him.

Determined to see Else, Hanny continues toward Thessaly through mist. The narrator hears voices and a dog's bark and even kicks Hanny down to make him stop and listen. Hanny retrieves the rifle and walks on. At a stream, they witness a dog seize and kill a hare. Two men then come out of the fog and confront the brothers. Their identities and intentions are not confirmed before the chapter ends.

The two men who emerge from the fog are Parkinson and Collier. Parkinson seizes the loaded M1 Garand from Hanny, and the men prevent the brothers from leaving Coldbarrow. Parkinson says they must take the boys to Thessaly as 'insurance' because the brothers have seen too much. The tide makes escape to the mainland impossible.

At Thessaly, Leonard and Clement are loading the Daimler. Leonard initially argues that the boys know too little to pose a threat, but Parkinson overrules him. A baby cries from behind the cellar door. Leonard says that Else is not his daughter, that Laura took her away the preceding day, and that both women were paid. Parkinson then holds out apparent changes in the men's health as evidence that he can cure Hanny: Collier's badly damaged hand functions again, Parkinson says a throat cancer has disappeared, and Leonard no longer limps. The causes of these reported changes are not verified.

When the narrator insists that Hanny needs no treatment, Collier seizes Hanny and Parkinson shoots him in the thigh with the rifle, leaving him severely injured. Parkinson declares that they will now have to rely on his supposed healing power. He threatens Clement with a renewed prison sentence, accusing him of still owing favors and describing a plan to blame him for a fire at Moorings. Under coercion, Clement and the narrator support the bleeding, nearly unconscious Hanny. Leonard opens the cellar door and goes down as the baby's cries intensify. The chapter ends before the brothers enter or the treatment is shown.

On June 1, roughly two months after the pilgrimage, the narrator is nearly sixteen and revising for his last school examination. He recalls that after the shooting at Thessaly, Hanny somehow walked unaided out of the cellar, across Coldbarrow, and back to Father Bernard. The narrator does not know how Hanny's shattered leg was restored. He concealed the shooting by saying that Hanny injured his trousers in a fall, and the party left Moorings. Since their return, however, Hanny has seemed withdrawn, inattentive, and unfamiliar with things he once knew, a change the narrator calls regression.

That afternoon Hanny unexpectedly speaks intelligible words in the family's kitchen. Mummer, Farther, the Belderbosses, and eventually a crowd from Saint Jude's celebrate what they consider a miracle. They credit the accumulated prayers and the shrine water, even though the new speech has appeared only months later and the narrator knows other events occurred at Thessaly. Father Bernard arrives and asks the narrator privately what happened on Coldbarrow. He doubts the community's explanation and suspects deception or some kind of technique, but he cannot supply a verified alternative. The narrator continues to conceal the shooting and apparent recovery.

Bernard says he intends to leave Saint Jude's and return to Belfast, believing he has not met the parish's expectations. The narrator produces Father Wilfred's black diary from its hiding place in the garden shed and urges Bernard to read it as evidence that Wilfred lost his faith. Bernard looks at a little of it, refuses to use it to expose Wilfred's private distress, and insists that the official verdict on his death remain an accident in the absence of proof otherwise. He explains, drawing on his experience amid sectarian tension in Belfast, why he sometimes considers selective disclosure necessary to protect people from rumors and further harm. He advises the narrator to destroy the diary rather than reveal its contents.

A flashback establishes that Miss Bunce found Wilfred dead at the foot of the Saint Jude's belfry stairs, an antique sword nearby. Police noted a defective handrail, poor lighting, warped flooring, and reports of a bell ringing, but no evidence of another person, and recorded an accidental fall. After Wilfred's funeral, while a temporary priest was running the parish, the narrator went to the belfry to look for nesting birds. There he found Wilfred's carefully folded robes, crucifix, Bible, collar and missing diary. Neither the novel nor Bernard confirms that Wilfred died by suicide, and the precise circumstances of the fall remain unresolved.

After the parish gathers to hear Hanny read, Father Bernard again asks the narrator to destroy Wilfred's diary. The narrator agrees but admits to his readers that he has kept and reread it for decades. He recounts the entry describing Wilfred's last earlier pilgrimage to Moorings, when an unanticipated spell of evening sunshine drew the priest down to the Loney's shore. At first Wilfred interpreted the marshes, birds, tides, and sea as evidence of God's presence. The diary also exposes his rigid division between the privileged, disciplined congregation of Saint Jude's and an outside world he treated as morally inferior.

Wilfred noticed gulls gathered around a body at the water's edge. Reaching the shore, he recognized a drowned alcoholic vagrant whom he had previously encountered and whose condition had been discussed at dinner. The incoming and receding waves rapidly undermined the sand beneath the corpse. Wilfred attempted to pull it out of a deep channel but was nearly dragged underwater himself; he let go and watched the body disappear with the current. There was no way to summon help in time, and the body left no visible trace.

The experience destroyed the religious assurance with which he had set out. After initially dismissing the man's death as deserved, Wilfred felt suddenly alone and abandoned. He concluded that God was absent from the Loney and, by extension, from everywhere, and saw natural processes as indifferent to human life and death. In the diary's account, he spent an hour walking the beach searching for something to restore his certainty but found nothing. These are Wilfred's written perceptions as retrospectively presented by the narrator, not evidence resolving any supernatural question or establishing how Wilfred later died.

In the present-day memory of Hanny first speaking, Mummer assembles the parish to hear him read Mark's account of signs accompanying believers, including new tongues and the healing of the sick. The congregation takes his fluent reading as confirmation of a miracle. The narrator then returns to the event he has delayed recounting: what happened in Thessaly's cellar after Parkinson deliberately shot Hanny.

Clement and the narrator carry the bleeding, unconscious Hanny down to a damp room containing a bloodied mattress, medical instruments and a newborn child. The narrator concludes that Else delivered the baby there. Leonard orders the narrator out; Clement reluctantly escorts him upstairs, insisting that the men are not themselves doing the healing. After an unknown interval, Leonard summons them back. In the candlelit cellar, Hanny is alive, no longer bleeding, and can walk without a limp. Nearby the infant is motionless, with severe bodily abnormalities that lead the narrator to question its humanity. He does not witness the intervention that changes Hanny's condition, and cannot establish its mechanism or the child's condition by medical examination.

Parkinson then stages a draw of palm leaves to allocate 'disposal' of the child. Leonard insists he had already excluded himself from that responsibility. Hanny appears to draw the shortest straw, though Clement says Parkinson rigged the result. Parkinson puts the rifle into Hanny's hands, apparently to make him kill or dispose of the child. Clement intervenes, takes the rifle, and sends the brothers away. Leonard warns that their presence implicates them regardless of who carries out the act, using potential police prosecution to secure their silence. Clement prays for forgiveness as the boys ascend the stairs. The novel does not show who subsequently fires a gun or the precise circumstances of the infant's death.

The adult narrator adds that Doctor Baxter dismissed him in notes as a fantasist, while he believes that recording every detail is necessary. His certainty and his delayed disclosure both complicate the status of the account.

News of the discovery at Coldbarrow dominates the media. Police have opened a murder investigation into the remains of a child from the 1970s who apparently died from a gunshot wound. Two elderly local men have been taken for questioning and a third is being sought. The narrator believes that his carefully written record will protect Hanny, while acknowledging to himself that those involved relied on silence rather than anticipating that the house and its secrets would be exposed.

During heavy snow, the narrator goes to work at the museum, where he restores old books in a basement archive. His colleague Helen offers him a lift home when the museum closes, but he declines, preferring to work alone. His attention to the conservation of books and their marginal notes reflects his insistence that details matter. Later Hanny visits, having been unable to reach him at his flat. The brothers discuss the narrator's sessions with Doctor Baxter, Hanny's pastoral work, and the family's continuing prayers for the narrator.

Hanny then admits that reports about the child's death have revived fragmentary childhood memories: a beach, a girl, an old house, fear and confinement, and a loud report with a jolt against his shoulder, as if he had fired a gun. He fears he may have shot the child, but he cannot recall doing so. He also feels an overwhelming guilt that he cannot explain. The narrator assures Hanny that the memories may derive from childhood war games or from survivor guilt, emphasizes the good he has done through his ministry, and promises to speak on his behalf if police inquire. Hanny accepts the reassurance, thanks his brother for watching over him, and invites him home, saying that Caroline will understand.

They leave together and take the Underground through the snowbound city. The narrator reflects on Father Bernard's teaching that truth can be presented in different versions and decides in advance what account he will give investigators: that the brothers were away from Thessaly, crossing back to the mainland, when they heard a single gunshot. The reader knows that this proposed alibi is false. The novel ends without revealing who actually fired the shot that killed the child, whether Hanny's fragmentary recollection is accurate, or the mechanism of the earlier apparent healing. The narrator's effort to control the police narrative leaves his reliability and the brothers' possible complicity unresolved.