The top was a stone slab; and on the slab was a mason’s mark; several mason’s marks, and none of them known to me; they had a foreign look.
‘Something?’ asked Hughie. His voice seemed to echo away up the stone spiral. Something, something, something, something, coming back off every turn of the wall.
‘Maybe,’ I said, and got as good a swing on the hammer as I could, in that confined space, and hit the jutting-out corner of the ledge.
Sparks flew; the slab broke free from the surrounding stonework and moved out a couple of inches, leaving a wedge of darkness below. And out of that wedge of dark came a stink, the like of which I’d never smelt in my life.
‘Dead rat?’ gasped Morris, gagging on his own breath.
‘Dead rat nothing,’ I said, reversing the sledgehammer and using the handle as a lever to widen the crack of darkness.
Then we shone a torch down; down a deep narrow slot about ten inches wide.
Something shone in the light of the torch. Something round and white like an oversized billiard-ball, only with strands coming out of dark holes, strands of shining grey that seemed to grow into the stonework. Like a spider’s web, but with much thicker strands. More like the roots of some plant. But the round billiard-ball thing . . .
‘A . . . skull,’ said Hughie Allardyce. ‘A little . . . child’s . . . skull.’ And hardened policeman that he was, he turned away and threw up, down the spiral stair. You could hear the spew splashing away, down below.
But I looked further. There was more than a skull; there was a whole tiny skeleton wedged down into the narrow slot, still sitting with its knees forced up near its head, and its arms folded in between. And down below, the grey shining strands grew thicker and thicker through the bones, tying the tiny form to the stone.
‘The miracles of Jacopo of Milan,’ said Morris in a very small voice.
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘The Abbot got what he wanted. At a price. No wonder they smashed his face out of that stained-glass window.’
‘He could never have known . . .’
‘He never even bothered to find out. He got his tower. That was enough for him.’
‘I can’t believe . . .’
‘Oh, c’mon,’ I said. ‘Any cathedral was built on the deaths of children. Where d’you think the money came from? How else could they afford to build, in a country where half the people nigh starved to death every winter? The money came from the workers, and the workers’ children starved. Every stone must be a death, nearly. To the glory of God. This Jacopo just had a new recipe, that was all.’
But he wasn’t listening any more. His face, in the torchlight, was an agony of pity. ‘This child . . . can’t have been more than eight or nine.’
‘Maybe older. You stay small, when you’re starving . . .’
‘This . . . stuff . . . growing on it. It’s like a plant. Is it dry rot?’
‘No, it’s not dry rot. I’ve seen dry rot at its worst. It’s never like this. I reckon it’s taking the goodness out of the child, feeding it into . . . the stone. All these years . . .’
His hand reached down into that dreadful space. I think he had some thought of rescuing the tiny frail bones. Something . . . the very look of the strands warned me.
‘Don’t touch it!’
But it was too late. He was trying to pull the thick strand from the tiny knees.
The next second, he screamed.
I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him back. His shoulders were as rigid as a board. The strand tore, and came away with his hand. The torn piece writhed, as if it was trying to dig into his flesh. There was blood on his hand, then red raw flesh, then a glint of white bone, as he held it up before his face. Then the piece of broken strand writhed once more, then curled up rigid and fell back into the slot where the child lay.
‘God,’ said Hughie, ‘half the flesh of his hand is gone.’
‘Get him out, quick! Get an ambulance! He could lose that hand. Go on, get moving,’ I shouted.
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I shouted. ‘I know now. I know!’
He gave me a white-faced look, and led the stumbling Reverend Morris back down the spiral stair.
I listened to their retreating footsteps, until there was silence. Then I went on up that stair, by the light of my solitary torch, with my sledge-hammer in my other hand.
‘All right, mate,’ I said to the walls. ‘Don’t you worry. I’m coming, I’m coming. I’m coming as quick as I can, you bastard.’
Just for a second, I could have sworn I felt the whole tower sway around me. Towers do sway, of course, like chimneys do – in a high wind; when the bells are rung. But there was no sound of wind tonight; and no bells were being rung.
He knew I was coming for him.
I reached the parapet door. It seemed to be locked or jammed. I smashed it open with one blow of the hammer, and stepped out into the clean smell of the night. It wasn’t all the smell of plants and growing things; there was soot in it, and chemicals. But after that stair, it smelt as good as the air in the Outer Hebrides.
Far off, I could see the police panda at the entrance to the cathedral green, and two figures standing by it. Hughie and the Reverend Morris were safe, then. Further off, I could hear a siren. Maybe the ambulance was on its way. But it was all a long way off, and no longer anything to do with me really.
Just me and the gargoyle; the gargoyle of Jacopo of Milan, worker of miracles in the art of building; with letters of praise from three cardinals of Mother Church.
‘Aye well,’ I said. ‘You knew your trade, Jacopo. And I know mine.’
And I raised the sledge-hammer as if it was an executioner’s axe, and brought it down on the rotten stone behind the gargoyle.
And as the stone fell in a yellow, rolling crumble at my feet, I smelt the smell again, the smell they’d all talked about, over all the years.
I got all the rotten surface blocks off first. I wasn’t in any hurry, and I didn’t want to go blundering into anything clumsy-like; especially not the stuff that had done for the Reverend Morris.
Then I began to smash in deeper.
The gargoyle-head broke loose, as its support fell away, and rolled under my feet. It got in my way, almost as if it was trying to trip me up and send me reeling over the parapet.
‘Careful, Clarke,’ I said to myself. ‘Careful, Clarke!’
It was not that I was afraid; but I had a job to do, and I meant to finish it in a workmanlike way, like I’d always done.
But under my feet, I felt the tower sway again. As if there was a wind, and yet there was no wind.
I knew I’d broken through, when the smell really hit me. Even in the open air, I was nearly as sick as poor Hughie. When I got the torch, from where I’d left it shining on the parapet to light my way, I saw that a big crack had developed in the stonework of the corner of the lower steeple, where the gargoyle had been. Again I reversed the hammer, and inserted it in the crack, and levered.
A whole side fell away.
And there he squatted, as a man might squat on a primitive privy. Stuffed inside the stone, as he had stuffed his victims. Alive, buried alive, I’d have guessed. For he wasn’t a skeleton, as his victims had become skeletons. He was much worse than any skeleton. He was alive as a turnip in the ground is alive. Half skeleton, and half obscene bulging turnip, with a great thick root running down between his skeleton legs into the stone. A root thicker than a man’s . . .
I nearly threw up then.
Did he look at me? Can a turnip look at you?
But he was aware of me, I swear. That’s why I spoke to him; so he would know for sure.
‘No, I’m not touchin’ you,’ I said to him. ‘I’m not such a fool as that. No, I’ll leave the sun to touch you, and the rain, and the clean air. I’m not a fool like the Reverend Morris. An’ I’m not a fool like them that buried you alive an’ left you in the stone to die. That was the worst day’s work they ever did, poor sods,
God rest them. No, we’ll see what the sun will do to you. It’ll be up in a few hours. You can wait till then. You can think about it. Sun’s hot. It’ll dry you up by inches, an’ no one’ll even hear you scream.’
I think he understood. For just then the tower gave a great shudder; and the steeplejack in me warned me it was going. Maybe, down there, the serpent in the sand was loose again. Maybe what had held the tower up for centuries was giving way.
‘Starting to despair, are you?’ I spat in at him. ‘I’m glad.’
And then, horribly, I realized that he wanted me for his last victim. If I started down the spiral stair now, the tower would fall when I was half-way down, and I’d be crushed to pulp, and his roots would come and eat my pulp, and God knew where my soul would be.
I knew I wouldn’t do it. I’d rather jump from the parapet and die in clean air. I’d jump as far out as I could, so the fallen stone would not enclose my bones, and he wouldn’t get me. That was the way to do it.
The tower swayed again; it was time to go.
I was gathering myself for the jump; thinking a last sad quick thought about our Barbara and Kevin, when I saw it.
The rope of the parapet hoist, hanging loose, the sling on the end of it empty. The parapet hoist that was stiff and slow-working, with the rusty pulley. Maybe it was just stiff enough to slow my fall . . .
I didn’t give myself time to think, time to panic. I leapt outwards and grabbed the empty sling with both hands. I began to drop quickly. And then when I was half-way to the ground, the pulley above my head began to screech like a harpy and I felt my fall slowed. The sling nearly pulled my arms out of their sockets, but I clung on somehow.
And then the pulley seized up solid, when I was about twenty feet from the ground. But I just trusted to luck and let go and dropped. Well, I think my arms gave way really, I had no choice. But I remembered to bend my legs and roll as I hit the ground.
A man can survive a drop of twenty feet; landing in a parachute is like dropping from seventeen feet, and I’ve done that.
I just felt as if both my legs were broken.
But I got up and ran. Ran before the tower fell on me. Because all the way down, I’d seen the cracks in its walls growing upwards like black lightning, in the yellow light of the street-lamps.
And I ran like bloody hell; because I somehow knew that whichever way I ran, the tower would fall after me. Just like a great factory chimney, laid to within an inch of its target.
As I ran, I felt the tremor in the earth; I heard the rumble starting in my ears. How high was the spire? How far was it across the cathedral green to the entrance where the panda car stood? All the way across the green, hobbling like a madman, I kept doing those sums in my head.
Nearly there. If I could turn the corner into Cathedral Street, there was hope for me. My lungs were going like old bellows, but above them I could hear the rumble of the fall. She’d be coming down slow and graceful, reaching for me, reaching for me. Like a leaping tiger. I could smell her smell now, the disturbed dust of centuries, swept past me by the wind of her falling.
I didn’t make it. I ran into the shop doorway of Harrison’s the Stationers by mistake, in my sweaty-eyed panic and blindness. I turned in that doorway, and watched her come. Graceful as a woman lying down, blowing her black cloud of smoke before her.
And then, oh glory, she was falling short of me. She was running out of spire. I could see the very top about to hit the earth, twenty yards in front of me. Even allowing for rebounding stones, I had a chance . . .
And then out of the black smoke of falling it came. My death. The gargoyle-head itself, bounding and rolling and leaping like an animal, with all the force of gravity in the world behind it. Like a black misshapen cricket ball, bowled by the biggest fast bowler the world had ever seen.
‘Oh God,’ I said. So near and yet so far. Barbara. Kevin.
The gargoyle-head leapt at my face.
And I had the wit to duck.
And it leapt over my bent body, and straight through the plate-glass door, and I heard it rolling and rattling to rest among the racks of Harrison’s stationery.
And then there was shouting and policemen running, and lights going on all over Cathedral Close.
Hughie Allardyce looked really stupid with a bunch of flowers in his hand, sitting by my hospital bed. But I was pleased to see his old face.
‘Rather have had chocolates,’ I said, to keep my end up.
‘That’s why I brought flowers,’ he said, to keep his end up. ‘Well, you certainly settled the tower. They’re still shovelling it up. Eight days, and that’s wi’ bulldozers. Twenty thousand tons, they reckon the stone weighed. What the hell did you do? Blow it up wi’ jelly?’
‘I showed our friend the light of day. An’ he didn’t fancy it. So he sort of gave up. Was there any . . . trace?’
‘The contractors haven’t reported finding owt unusual. I expect everything was crushed by the falling stone. Crushed to bits. They haven’t even found those bones we saw . . .’
He shuddered delicately. ‘I can’t believe I ever saw them. It just seems like a bad dream now . . .’
‘What’re they doing with the stone?’
‘Crushing it and using it as hardcore for a hypermarket car-park out Sandeston way. He’ll be buried under a foot o’ Tarmac.’
I lay back and smiled. I liked that idea very much.
‘They’re not blaming you,’ he said. ‘The architect reckons that the foundations gave way. Underground springs.’
‘Salt subsidence, I expect. Anyway, nothing for you to put into a report.’
‘Nothing for me to put in a report,’ he echoed.
‘Between you and me,’ he said, ‘half the stuff that happens in the world goes into reports, and half doesn’t. And it’s the important part that doesn’t.’
‘How’s the Reverend?’
‘They’ve managed to save his hand. He’ll need a lot of skin-grafts though. And his cricket days are over. So are his vicaring days, apparently. He’s thinking of training to become a social worker.’
‘That’d be a pity,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘When that gargoyle was heading straight at me, someone told me to duck, in time. Except there was nobody there . . . I thought it might have been some Friend of his . . .’
‘Never know, do you?’ And with that, he got up and went. Hasn’t got much time for religion, Hughie Allardyce.
As for me, I’ve still got time for steeplejacking.
But no more cathedrals; I’ll stick to chimneys in future.
BRANGWYN GARDENS
Students lived off the fat of the land in 1955. The full grant was two hundred and fifty a year, and you could live in London very nicely on five pounds a week, including a good night out on a Saturday night.
And yet Harry Shaftoe was a bit mean, like many of the male students. Every term he changed his digs to avoid paying the landlady a retainer over the vacation. Every start of a new term, he turned up at the Lodgings Office to ask for a new list of addresses. The Lodgings Officer was sick to death of him; which was why she gave him the address in Brangwyn Gardens.
Nobody stayed long in Brangwyn Gardens; as she gave Harry the address, she also gave him a look that said so. Harry thought he knew what to expect: squalling kids, a dotty landlady, even half-full piss-pots standing all day in the hall. He didn’t care; he didn’t see why he should pay landladies his own good money for doing nothing, for keeping his room idle. He was used to roughing it; his back was broad.
But Brangwyn Gardens wasn’t at all what he expected. Brangwyn Gardens had been rather grand; a tall, early Victorian terrace near the open greenery of Parliament Hill Fields. He could walk in to the Slade from there.
Except that the bombers had come to Brangwyn Gardens at the height of the Blitz, cutting the terrace into segments as easily as a grocer cuts cheese. And number eleven stood quite alone, like an elegant severed head. A severed head, thought Harry a bit wildly, held up on crutches. For t
wo houses had gone from its left, and three from its right, leaving a series of low bricky mounds where blitzweed grew to near shoulder height, and out of those scrawny grey-green bushes, with their drifting loads of old man’s beard, reared the vast baulks of timber that held number eleven upright. The baulks had been there so long that they in their turn had grown old; riven with damp cracks, and stained with the streams of rust that grew out of the nuts and bolts that held them together, which looked like old bloodstains.
Number eleven itself looked very spruce: the Doric pillars that framed the door were newly painted, and so were the many sash windows; but it just looked like cosmetics on a carefully made-up severed head.
That was the front; the sides of the house hadn’t been touched since 1940. Strips of bleached wallpaper, high up on the long-gone fourth floors of numbers nine and thirteen still stirred in the breeze. Up there, there was still a bathroom mirror screwed to the wall, glinting in the afternoon sun; and the cistern of a long-gone toilet, and a white hand-basin, clinging to the ancient scarred brick like strange white limpets.
Harry screwed up his face in distaste. As a little kid, in the Blitz, he’d enjoyed such strangenesses. But all that was old hat now; he hadn’t thought of such things for years. Now his life was the new sculpture of Henry Moore and his own tutor at the Slade, Reg Butler; foreign movies and thoughts of girls.
Sadly, it wasn’t a girl who opened the door of number eleven to his ring. Just a landlady, and odder than most. A landlady in a headscarf, though it was tied behind her head in the upper class way, not in front like the workers did it. Thick pebbly glasses, behind which her muddy eyes swam away furtively like unattractive goldfish startled by the light. Thick lumpish grey cardigan, washed till it had pilled across the front and under the armpits. Below, lumpy navy slacks, shiny with age, and black lace-up shoes. Harry, from long and bitter experience, crossed her off the list of the human race and said, ‘I’ve come about the room.’
‘Oh yes, the room,’ said the woman. ‘I’m afraid it’s on the top floor. I hope you don’t mind an attic?’ But she didn’t say it to him. She was already swimming away into the gloom of her hall. Harry picked up his battered suitcase and holdall and went in pursuit. Laden as he was, he had a hard time catching up with her. She must not be quite so decrepit as she looked. Steep flights of stairs, dark and highly polished, succeeded each other. It felt like climbing up inside the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Strange and exotic items floated past him as he panted upwards. A grandfather clock, ticking loudly and slowly. Three cases of stuffed fish, screwed to the wall one above the other. A great white polar bear rearing up to threaten him. The stair-carpet was soft and thick under his feet, so that he climbed in silence, apart from the sound of his own panting. He had a sense of leaving the world behind, climbing into silence and darkness.
The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral Page 8