Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

  There was a clattering behind us as a small party of visitors burst through the west door. One of them had a guidebook in hand and was acting as tour leader.

  None of them gave us a second glance, but we scurried away like a pair of startled animals.

  10

  I had underestimated Faraday, or perhaps underestimated the power of his desperation. When we went to the Veals’ for tea that evening, Mr Veal was not at home. He had gone to visit an assistant verger who was in hospital after breaking his leg by falling off his bicycle.

  ‘Never liked those bicycles,’ Mrs Veal said. ‘Nasty dangerous things. Against nature.’

  She gave us scrambled eggs and filled us up afterwards with bread and dripping. It’s strange how clearly I remember the food she gave us. I suppose it must be because we were so poorly fed in term time.

  After we had finished, Faraday touched my arm. ‘Take the plates out to her,’ he whispered. ‘Ask her how she makes her eggs like that.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Go on.’ He gave me a little push. ‘Ask her anything you like. Just keep her in the kitchen for a few minutes.’

  I did as he told me, though it seemed quite wrong that Faraday should be giving me instructions. I didn’t need to ask Mrs Veal about her scrambled eggs. She was already washing up so I dried the plates and cutlery for her, and she asked me about my aunt in hospital and my parents in India. She was a kind woman, kinder than we deserved.

  When I returned to the parlour, Faraday was sitting by the lamp and reading, or pretending to read, the local paper, which Mr Veal had left on the arm of a chair. He looked up as I entered and gave me a small, sly smile.

  We walked back to the Sacrist’s Lodging through the College.

  ‘I’ve got the key,’ he said. ‘It says “West Tower Stair” on it.’

  ‘Won’t Veal notice?’

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s two other ones there on the same hook. This is one of the spares.’

  We walked in silence for a moment. Faraday was probably right. The verger had finished his inventory of the keys, so he would have no need to look closely at them. Besides, the Cathedral was now locked up for the night.

  I was suddenly struck by such an obvious and insuperable objection that I laughed out loud – partly, I suspect, from relief.

  ‘What is it?’ Faraday said, staring down and looking at me.

  ‘It’s all very well, us having the key to the stairs,’ I said. ‘But the Cathedral’s locked up at night. And we can’t go up in daytime. Someone would see us for sure.’

  He gave a snicker of laughter. ‘Don’t worry about that. I can get in the Cathedral whenever I want. We can go tonight.’

  I nearly kicked him. The smug little Rabbit.

  We passed an interminable evening with Mr Ratcliffe, the three us reading by the fire. I was bored. Living with Mr Ratcliffe was turning me into an old man like him, a creature of habit. On the other hand, part of me wanted this time by the fire to last for ever. Part of me wanted to be bored.

  Mordred disgraced himself again. He brought in another mouse, which he played with, despite our attempts to stop him, and then allowed it to escape for the time being into the relatively safe haven of the floor beneath the piano. During the struggle, he scratched my hand, drawing blood. Finally he went to sleep on the hearthrug with the air of a job well done.

  ‘I’m so sorry he injured you again,’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘He’s quite unteachable, I’m afraid, and I suspect he doesn’t have a very nice nature to begin with.’

  ‘Why do you keep him then, sir?’ Faraday asked.

  ‘One must try to make the best of animals, don’t you think? And of people, for that matter. He’s a farm cat by breeding, you see. Mrs Thing’s sister is married to a farmer, and I believe he came from there … But farm cats never truly adjust to living in houses. They never quite lose their wildness.’

  At last it was time for bed. The sky was still cloudy but the rain had gone, and most of the wind. It was colder.

  ‘We’ll have snow before long, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Mr Ratcliffe said.

  Faraday nudged me behind Mr Ratcliffe’s back. This time I kicked him. I was growing tired of his nudges.

  Mordred rose and stretched. He stalked out of the sitting room and sat by the front door, where he miaowed like a rusty hinge.

  ‘Let him out, would you?’ Mr Ratcliffe said.

  I opened the door. Mordred slunk outside and disappeared into the darkness.

  ‘Where does he go at night, sir?’ I asked.

  ‘Mordred? Heaven knows. Best not to enquire.’

  ‘He can’t stay outside all night, can he? Not in this weather.’

  ‘I’m sure he manages quite well.’ Mr Ratcliffe locked up and hung the key on the hook beside the front door. ‘He’s not an animal to go without his creature comforts.’

  In our bedroom, I began to undress.

  ‘Don’t take too much off,’ Faraday hissed. ‘There’s no point. It’ll probably be freezing.’

  ‘I’m tired. Let’s do it tomorrow.’

  ‘No, it’s got to be tonight. We need to get the key back tomorrow. Besides, it’s going to snow. If we wait till after that, we’ll leave tracks.’

  I shrugged. ‘This is stupid.’

  ‘I know what it is,’ Faraday said. ‘You’re yellow.’

  ‘I’m not yellow.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  We glared at each other across the room.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s easy enough to prove it, isn’t it?’

  I said nothing. But I put on my pyjamas over my underclothes.

  He was still watching me. His face was flushed. ‘We’ll have to wait until Ratty’s in bed and fast asleep.’

  ‘It’ll be hours.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’ll stay awake.’

  We got into bed. I didn’t bother reading. I turned on my side, away from Faraday, and closed my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I was too angry. Too afraid. So I sent up a prayer to my provisional God, promising to believe in Him for the rest of my life if He made Faraday fall asleep at once and stay asleep until morning.

  11

  Later, much later, I was wrenched from a deep sleep. Faraday was standing over me. He hadn’t lit the gas but a candle was burning on the mantelpiece, sending shadows flickering across the room.

  ‘Go away,’ I said and shut my eyes again.

  ‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘It’s time.’

  He pulled back the covers and cold air washed over me. I sat up abruptly and pushed him away.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘Mad as a coot.’ I tried to pull the covers back over me.

  ‘You’re yellow,’ he said. ‘Yellow.’

  I swore at him and swung my legs out of bed. The bed creaked.

  ‘Don’t make a noise,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up, you ape. Bloody Rabbit. Go to hell.’

  I pulled on the rest of my clothes, fumbling interminably with the buttons. Faraday opened the door. Carrying our shoes, we tiptoed out of the room and down the stairs. At every step we paused to listen for sounds from Mr Ratcliffe’s bedroom.

  We reached the hall without mishap and put on our shoes, hats and coats. We took it in turns to shield the candle flame, for light can betray you as much as noise.

  By now I was fully awake. It would be too much to say that I was entering into the spirit of the thing, but taking second place to Faraday was beginning to irk me. I pushed him aside when he was about to lift the key from its hook. I was the one who unlocked the door and lifted the heavy latch. It made much less noise than I had expected. We slipped outside and closed the door behind us.

  There were still clouds, though fewer and wispier than before and moving rapidly across the sky. The stars shone down between them.

  We crossed the yard in front of the Sacrist’s Lodging and let ourselves out through the gate in the wall. The lawn that bordered the east end of the Cathedral was
covered in frost. Two of the lamps that burned all night stood at this end of the College – one nearby, at the gate leading to the north door, the other on the far side of the lawn. Yellow coronas of moisture hung around their lamps.

  ‘We had better walk across the grass,’ Faraday whispered in my ear. ‘Quieter.’

  We tiptoed across the gravel path and set off across the lawn in the direction of the further light.

  ‘Where the devil are we going?’ I said. ‘How are we supposed to get inside?’

  He ignored me. He ploughed on, head down against the cold wind. I plodded after him.

  ‘God, it’s freezing,’ I whispered.

  ‘I feel boiling. Come on.’

  Faraday led us right round the east end of the church and down to the flagged path leading to the south door. I glanced back. Our ragged footprints marched across the frosty grass. We were now in the larger, grander part of the College, where the houses of the Dean and Chapter were.

  I looked about us. All the windows I could see were in darkness. But there were more lamps here, stretching down the road leading to the Porta and the Veals’ house.

  Faraday made for the south door.

  I hurried after him. ‘What are you doing? It’ll be locked.’

  He took no notice but led the way into the south porch. This had been formed by an accident of history from the one surviving fragment of the east walk of the mediaeval cloister.

  It was darker here, but Faraday did not slacken his pace. I blundered after him. He stopped abruptly just before the door into the Cathedral and I bumped into him.

  He didn’t try to open the door. Instead, he moved to the left. There was another door here, much smaller, set in a square-headed archway. He reached up, as high as he could, and ran his fingertips along the top of the lintel, palpating the stone. I heard a faint chink. A key turned in the lock. The door scraped open and a current of cool air smelling of candles swept out to meet us.

  Faraday took my arm and drew me after him through the doorway. It was much darker here, an enclosed space. Faraday closed the door behind us.

  ‘Where are we?’ I whispered.

  ‘The choir vestry.’

  ‘But the door for that’s in the nave.’

  He laughed, showing his knowledge. ‘This is the other door, the one Dr Atkinson uses when he needs to come in at night, or early in the morning, when the Cathedral’s locked. He sent me to fetch something once. He said it could be useful for the head of the choir to know where to find the key.’

  ‘You’re not head of the choir now,’ I said, too scared to be kind. ‘You’re not even in the choir.’

  Faraday lit a match. We were in a long room with a central aisle across which benches faced each other. There was a grand piano at the far end, with a dozen or so music stands huddled together like a herd of skeletal creatures. This was where the choir practised.

  Before the flame had died, Faraday had reached a cupboard and opened its door. He asked me to light and hold up another match.

  ‘We mustn’t risk the gas,’ he said. ‘But there are some candles here.’

  Most of the shelves held books of music. But the top shelf was filled with a jumble of objects, through which Faraday rummaged while I lit match after match. He unearthed three candle stumps, a candle lantern and another box of matches. He lit one of them, put it in the lantern and closed the glass. A faint radiance spread through the vestry. It made me feel better. It made what we were doing seem less strange.

  Holding up the lantern, Faraday opened a desk that stood at the far end of the room. In a moment he gave a cry of triumph and held up a long key.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘The door from the choir vestry to the Cathedral.’

  ‘All these keys without labels,’ I said. ‘Old Veal would have a fit if he knew.’

  We snorted with suppressed laughter, the tension forcing its way out as a bubble of mirth.

  ‘Atky doesn’t let him in here,’ Faraday said. ‘They hate each other.’

  He unlocked the door into the Cathedral. This was nine feet tall beneath a pointed archway; I had often seen the choir marching through it, two by two, processing into the Cathedral in their cassocks and surplices.

  We passed into the south aisle. Faraday pulled the door to behind us but did not latch it.

  For a moment we stood still, shocked by the immense, cold darkness around us. We were in the belly of a huge and unimaginably heavy stone beast. I had been scared before – but what I felt now was something different – terror, yes, but there was an element of awe mixed in with it. At night, the Cathedral lost its familiarity and became alien.

  ‘Oh God.’ Faraday sounded close to tears. ‘It’s horrible.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s just dark, that’s all. You’re not scared, are you?’

  It was bravado that made me say that, together with the desire to contradict and needle Faraday. The more signs of fear he showed, the more my bravado increased.

  ‘Come on, Rabbit. We haven’t got all night.’

  We set off down to the south aisle, which would take us the length of the nave to the west tower. At first we walked slowly, and then more quickly. I tried to suppress the idea that there might be someone behind us.

  I glanced upward. I could not even see the vault of the aisle. On our right were the massive pillars of the nave, looming palely like a line of great grey oak trees. The lantern cast a puddle of light on the ground, enough to see where we were going, but little else.

  Faraday touched my arm. ‘We had better stay together.’ I felt his hand sliding around my elbow and gripping it. ‘If – if we hold on to each other, we can’t get lost.’

  He spoke in a whisper. All the time we were in the Cathedral that night, we spoke in whispers – except, of course, at the end. I felt there was a danger that we might be overheard: that someone or something was listening.

  12

  For me, the worst thing at that point was not the darkness but the sound of our footsteps on the flagstones. Try as we might, we could not walk quietly. Our steps sounded louder than usual, but muffled and dead, as if sinking into cotton wool.

  At the end of the aisle we came to the south-west transept and the west tower. Our footsteps changed as they entered these wider, taller spaces. They sharpened and acquired an echo.

  Faraday’s grip tightened. ‘Did you hear that? Someone’s behind us.’

  ‘Don’t talk rot. You’re getting windy. Let’s go and look for your beastly anthem.’

  Clinging to each other, we crossed to the door leading to the tower stairs. Faraday let go of me while he fumbled for the key he had borrowed from Mr Veal. I had privately cherished the hope that it would turn out to be the wrong key. But it turned sweetly in the lock.

  The door opened outwards. We pulled it to its full extent, so it grated against the wall. The light from the lantern showed only the first two or three steps, spiralling in a clockwise direction into the utter blackness above.

  We climbed, side by side, for the staircase at the lower level was wide enough for this. The air became colder and colder. After the vastness of the nave, the enclosed space pressed in on us. I was soon out of breath – from the climb and from fear. So was Faraday. Our laboured breathing was deafening. I wanted to put my hands over my ears.

  I tried to count the steps as a distraction. We had been told that the west tower had nearly three hundred of them. But I lost my concentration somewhere in the forties. Then it was just ourselves with no distractions: our footsteps, our breathing and the light from our lantern sliding ahead into the darkness.

  Faraday’s breathing became irregular. He sniffed. Once or twice he gave an audible sob which he tried to disguise with a cough. He was crying. I pretended to ignore it.

  I felt dizzy. I kept staggering against the outer wall of the staircase. It felt increasingly unnatural to be turning only in one direction and my body was making futile attempts to correct the situation.


  We came at last to a small landing with a door set in the wall. There was no lock, only a latch. I lifted it and pulled the door open. I felt a current of air on my face.

  ‘What’s that?’ Faraday said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought I saw something. Over there.’ He pointed over my shoulder, through the archway. ‘A – sort of shadow.’

  ‘That’s just what it was,’ I said. ‘Stop being so jumpy.’

  I stepped through the archway. We were on the walkway that ran behind the arcade across the west wall. Faraday held up the lantern. The arcading stretched away from us to the right; a miniature, almost domesticated version of the great pillars and arches that marched up either side of the nave.

  Automatically my hand felt for the iron railing that ran between the pillars of the arcade. There was no other barrier between us and a drop of ninety-odd feet to the floor of the tower. It was a thin iron rod, cold and rough to the touch.

  ‘It’s too narrow,’ Faraday wailed. ‘We can’t go side by side.’

  ‘Give me the lantern. Hold on to the belt of my coat.’

  In the daytime, when I had been taken up here with my classmates, this passage had been exciting, with its views into the tower and the body of the church right up to the huge east window beyond the choir. We had laughed at the squashed figures moving below and made jokes about dropping things on them.

  By night, the passage was terrifying. I was standing on the edge of the world and the slightest misstep could send me tumbling away into the darkness.

  I made myself let go of the rail. I focused my eyes on the light on the floor of the walkway, on the line on the left where it met the tower wall. I marched forward at a slow but steady pace, towing Faraday behind me.

  On the far side, there was an archway. I passed beneath it and slumped against the wall. I felt the cold, rough stone against my cheek. I was trembling. I felt sick. I felt triumphant.

  We were at the foot of another flight of steps, narrower than the first.

  ‘Nearly there,’ I said. My voice sounded like a stranger’s.