A Soul of Stone

by Lee A Jackson

  Peyroux had spent his fitful waking moments in the hospital staring at the open mouthed Gargoyle perching on the Cathedral wall. To his bedside nurses came, doctors went, but Peyroux paid them no heed, holding his tongue and keeping his attention fixed on the twisted features of the stone character. He knew that he could not run and hide and he knew that he had no Sebastian, who had not returned since Peyroux’s waking in the hospital, to watch over him.

  Peyroux would not face the people that visited his bedside, for he believed that if he couldn’t see which doctor was looming over him, he would have no reason to be so afraid. That way he could imagine that it wasn’t his father standing beside him. Although he could feel the doctor’s presence, as long as he could not see into his eyes he could in fact picture Sebastian instead standing at his back. Peyroux kept his back turned to them all as his hours were passed intently staring at the statuesque replica of the slain monster on Rouen Cathedral, trying in vain to somehow fill the void that Sebastian had left. As time wasted away for Peyroux, his imagination of La Gargouille grew. He imaged the mischievous beast shedding its strong exterior at night, and letting its wings spread free as it took to the night sky. It would circle Rouen preying on miscreants and ill-doers.

  For those five days since waking in the hospital bed, Peyroux had still not heard from Sebastian. With each passing day, he quietly felt his own strength returning though, fuelled by a new ire which was boiling steadily inside him. When the doctors spoke to him, he didn’t understand their words because he chose not to listen. He didn’t care what they had to say, he just cared that they were the ones responsible for having taken Sebastian away. Through all his time there, Peyroux remained silent towards the doctors. He did not trust them. He’d hated the alien voices that had plagued his head since childhood, but would now welcome them all back en-masse if it meant a little guidance from Sebastian.

  One morning Peyroux was rudely awoken and before him stood the doctor that reminded him so much of his father. Peyroux could see the same spite in his eyes that had kept him ill all through his childhood. Peyroux called out silently, screaming in anguish to be left alone. Suddenly with a crash, a shower of broken glass split the air. Shards hit Peyroux and covered his bed, other pieces shattering against the tile floor. The magnificent Gargoyle stood at the foot of Peyroux’s bed. Its skin a texture of stone, but rippling, pliable scales oscillated with each breath as the creature glared deeply into the soul of the doctor. Peyroux was exhilarated and tried to sit up. Rouen’s Gargoyle was here for him, sensing Peyroux’s fears and it had come to his rescue. It has come to punish the doctor, his father. He watched on with perverse pleasure as the Gargoyle tore into the man. Slashing with stone claws and biting with jagged teeth. The screams of the doctor and the eruptions of blood animated Peyroux further as he watched the doppelganger of his father being torn limb from limb until the tiled floor was awash with a pool of blood.

  Peyroux stared silently at the attending doctor by his bed, closing off his imagination and ignoring the words falling from the doctor’s mouth, before turning again to look out through the window towards his stone saviour who sat motionless on the Cathedral.

  Upon snapping back from a sleep, a new voice had drifted into Peyroux’s consciousness and he focused himself towards its source. In the previously unoccupied bed to his left, an old white-haired man was sitting up, staring off into the middle distance. Without listening to the words, fixing on the motion of the old man’s wobbling jowls and slowly blinking eyes, Peyroux watched him talk to the opposite wall. Almost sensing as if he was being watched, the old man jerked his head around to face Peyroux who didn’t have time to look away into solitude. The old man introduced himself as Clotaire the “nurses favourite”. Peyroux wasn’t sure whether this was irony or not, for the expression on the old man’s sagging face revealed nothing. Without waiting for Peyroux to reply he proceeded to tell his new neighbour about the hospital. How everyone that came in through the front doors went away with something less than what they had come in with. He’d been here several times and there wasn’t much left inside of him to take, but the doctors, they’d still find something, some part of him to throw away. Blood, cancer, muscles, tissue, they’d had it all, he explained. Every time he’d walked out of the front doors he’d parted a lesser man than when he’d entered.

  “Still I keep coming back though, simply because the more they take, the less there is to go wrong inside of me. So what are they taking from you?” asked Clotaire.

  “A friend,” replied Peyroux softly, quietly.

  “Well, son. Sometimes it’s necessary to lose something in order to gain a great deal.”

  “It’s not like that,” said Peyroux thoughtfully. “I gain nothing.”

  “That’s just the hospital depression talking,” said Clotaire. “There’s a greater good at the end, believe me. There has to be else you wouldn’t be in here. You’d be lying in the gutter somewhere with someone itching to put coins on your eyes.”

  “I’m not here by choice,” Peyroux protested.

  “Have you told them you want to leave?”

  “No. But I can’t leave without my friend. I can go nowhere until they give back what they’ve taken.”

  “Son, in here it doesn’t work like that,” mused the old man. “You don’t get back anything you once had. Not in here. If you’re lucky you just get whatever new thing it is that they give and that’s it.”

  “Emptiness?” questioned Peyroux, more to himself than to Clotaire.

  “They patch you up and hope for the best. Hope that you’ll get by OK in the big bad world, or throw yourself off a rooftop to save them the hassle of fighting lost causes. They don’t care about you, they just care for you.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s why the trick is for you to focus on what you have gained in here. Another 24 hours to live maybe. A new heart. Fresh new blood pumping through your veins. What have you gained? Ask yourself that.”

  “A silence, which is what I thought I wanted,” said Peyroux, slowly shaking his head. “All I have gained is an unwelcome loneliness. It’s all that I have been left with. You see that Gargoyle on the Cathedral opposite. La Gargouille. It just sits there, not asking anything of me, just that I look at it so that it exists. All this time I’ve found it so hard to listen, and now I can, I’m afraid no-one will have words that I want to hear. The Gargoyle, he says so much without being the slightest bit animated. It’s just a statue I know, but it has more morals and values than the people it’s supposed to be guarding. Unquestioning faith and loyalty it displays. The Gargoyle and its kind are all around us but do we pay them any heed? Do we learn from them? Learn how to show a little concern for those around us without asking anything in return? To not invade our spaces, not to scream walls of noise at you when all you want is a little quiet. To not kill your companion because they never looked at the individuals in the multitude to see if they were all evil or not. For the sake of the one voice I wanted to hear, to not just eradicate every one of them in my head with one fell swoop without question. But no, they’ve taken him. I didn’t ask them to. They cut down the crowd with no regard for the one good voice buried amongst them. So I have lost Sebastian, my guide through this darkness, and a barrenness is what I have gained.”

  “But son,” said Clotaire. “You have gained something much more than that. Take another look out of the window.”

  With his mind more active than his body, Peyroux became severely embittered the more he was routinely disturbed by doctors for inspections. They couldn’t understand his reticence, and with Peyroux spitting and cursing at them for having drowned Sebastian with drugs that he’d never asked for, it led them to believe that his state of mind was not improving. As the orderlies came to restrain him, he’d look to the Gargoyle for strength and more often than not, Peyroux could swear he could see a glint in the creature’s one good eye.

  But the orderlies would always get the better of him, and wrists
tied to the bed, he’d sink further into helpless despair as he felt more drugs sedating his mind, emptying it of the voices that plagued him for so long, and simultaneously purging Sebastian.

  But one moment was all it took.

  The one moment the orderlies had been distracted. That one moment which Peyroux took to strike back at his father, all of the rage surging forth from his childhood was all it took. Recalling the ease with which the Gargoyle had destroyed the doctor in his imagination, Peyroux summoned its strength into his own muscles and smiled wildly. He lurched up, releasing a feral scream as he felt the skin upon the cheek of that one doctor gathering under his nails. He embraced the sensation of warm blood dripping onto his fingers.

  First Sebastian and now his Gargoyle. With his mind stronger than his body, he could only resist for a few seconds, but he had had enough energy in reserve to get his one blow in before being manhandled into submission. It was a blow that felt good despite the consequences. His strength was slowly returning over the days, and he was able to fight back with more vigour, but still not enough to prevent himself from being overwhelmed by the orderlies.

  Then came the punishment for stepping out of line. Punishment for spitting, swearing and trying to claw at the attending orderlies after taking a chunk out of the doctors’ face. The sensation of the foreign hands on his arms repulsed him. The sudden bite of the cold leather on his wrists frightened him. He tried to look towards the window, but a burly orderly obstructed his view. Peyroux screamed and with the powers in his head, he willed the Gargoyle to come and do its job and ward off these evil predators. Still worse was to come for Peyroux however. Suddenly he felt himself moving. With his body restrained it was a sensation of floating weightlessness. As the wheels on the bed turned, they took Peyroux further away from the window. Tears swelled in Peyroux’s eyes as he could feel the bond between himself and the statue being stretched to breaking point. As the door in a new, isolated room slammed shut, it enforced a terrifying darkness of abandonment again upon Peyroux.

  Though the voices themselves remained silent, he could hear the memories of them in his mind, he could again smell stale vomit burning his nose, and he stopped to listen for a familiar chink of glass on stone. But inside that large dark room, trying to call out to Sebastian though his tears, was like scratching at an itch with a razorblade. He felt lonely without his tormentors and now his mind was quiet enough to think and dwell on unsavoury occurrences. Tortuous thoughts like the loss of his childhood, the loss of Sebastian and now, the evil doctors had taken away the Gargoyle too. Peyroux screamed from so far down in his lungs that he felt as if it was his last panicked, dying breath. The shattered, empty, broken man in the darkness of a new, windowless room. Everything had gone. Even the ability to lose himself forever in the lost sea of voices.

  Peyroux awoke with a start, not aware that he’d been sleeping, or for how long. Suddenly a voice in the darkness was there with him. Peyroux whispered into the pitch black room to see who was there. No reply. He tried his arms and legs to see if they were free if he needed to run, but he was still held tightly, bound by the leather straps. The voice again. A faint whisper. Sebastian? No. Another voice. More. Peyroux started to shake and sweat as he heard the crowd of whispering voices assembling in the dark. Inside the room? Inside his mind? He felt the panic rising inside him, but before hysteria could take a firm hold, a strong voice broke through the ever increasing swell of noise. For the first time Peyroux heard the clear comforting voice of Sebastian’s words. Sebastian was there in the room, beside his bed, telling him to be calm.

  Peyroux eased back from his restraints and sank into the bed. Sebastian was telling him that the only way out of this polluting illness was to think of him. Yes, the voices were slowly coming back to haunt him, they too had been gathering their strength to repel the doctors’ onslaught of drugs. Sebastian was doing all he could to keep them locked away, but even he wasn’t strong enough anymore to keep his voice dominant for long. The doctors had weakened him too. He told Peyroux that if he wasn’t around, just to concentrate on the Gargoyle and to forget the evils that kept him there. Sebastian would endeavour to keep the masses inside his head quiet for him, but one against the numbers may be a lost cause over time. Sebastian told Peyroux to be calm, to rest, to gather strength in his mind and body, and prepare himself to escape that place forever. The resurgent voices would soon drown Sebastian for good, but no matter what, Peyroux must keep fighting and to look for help and strength elsewhere.

  Peyroux stood with the ocean lapping at his feet. The water was cold and it sent shivers throughout his body. Sebastian was on a ramshackle raft, bobbing just a few feet away on the unsteady surface of the sea. With a low sun on the horizon, Sebastian was cast into shadow. Peyroux could not see his face but he was close enough to hear him clearly above the waves. Peyroux stood and listened transfixed on all that Sebastian communicated with his words.

  Peyroux heard his warnings of the evils dwelling within. Soon the armies forever amassing in his mind would conquer and Peyroux would fall into temptation of giving in to them. How far he would fall would be down to his resolve. From his raft Sebastian described the Gargoyle, steadfast in its duty to ward off all evil. To protect the fragile sanctuary inside. He spoke of Peyroux’s quest to become more than what he was, in order to be able to drive the evils from his mind. A quest to become Gargoyle. To shun all temptation by not having any one look upon his face. To weaken the stance of the call to sin, by performing an act that would render them all insignificant. Sebastian’s words fell silent. Peyroux understood.

  He understood the quest and started out into the sea. The cold sea that beckoned him, coaxing him further into the freezing depths, trying to make headway to Sebastian. But as the water rose up to his waist, Peyroux could only see Sebastian drifting further out towards the horizon. He thought for a second of just walking into that ocean and letting it consume him and wash away his tainted mind. But he realised that Sebastian would soon be gone forever and that he needed to combat the voices in his mind before they could haunt him in death. He had to exorcise his demons before he could rest in the silent world his new life would afford him.

  Peyroux held the knife up in the rain, voices in his head singing a painful tune. In the pristine blade shone a reflection of what remained for Peyroux. The old man still bound tightly through fear and weakness, shuddered as the blade cut the night air. He could hear Peyroux muttering words but couldn’t make any sense of them. The old man tried not to look into the disfigured face as Peyroux turned back to face him. But what confronted him through a veil of rain, was unlike anything he’d ever seen before.

  Life had started again for Peyroux the day the hospital released him, and passed all responsibility of welfare onto himself. Desperation to leave the hospital, to see the Gargoyle on Rouen Cathedral up close had honed Peyroux’s strength to feign normality. He convinced them that all was well inside his head, and with platitudes and submissive behaviour they had eventually believed him.

  Immediately upon being discharged from the hospital Peyroux made his way to the Cathedral where he could view the Gargoyle up close in all its glory.

  But the streets again were no comfort to him. The voices had fully returned, back to claim their authority over his mind. They did not like him being out there, exposed to other influences where theirs may not be as commanding. As he ran through the streets to reach his destination, he was fearful of slowing down, for upon the faces of the people, there were dark Halloween masks of menace, conspiring to lure him to his demise.

  Panting and doubled over from the exertion, Peyroux stood across from the entrance of the Cathedral, trying to gain some breath. He wasn’t alone here either, a congregation of people were milling around, ignorant of Peyroux’s trials. As he stood motionless, blood rushing in his ears, the speeches around him began to grate on his frayed nerves. He couldn’t run from them anymore. Standing upright, he spun around looking at all the talking mouths, whispering
, conspiring, laughing at him. With a sudden cry of rage, Peyroux pushed out hard at the nearest person to him, a middle aged man with a briefcase, talking into a telephone. Peyroux’s palms hit the man’s chest so hard that man lost his balance and fell onto the pavement. Everything around Peyroux seemed to freeze in the moment. Peyroux was unbalanced himself and anyone in his immediate vicinity was a target for his eruption. He began pushing wildly at everyone within his personal space, hitting arms, backs, heads, anything to drive the crowds back and away from him. The citizens around him started to disperse themselves from the frenzied Peyroux.

  Inside, as all around him was blurring, Peyroux was still fully to come to terms with the silence of Sebastian. The loneliest silence that the doctors and their drugs had enforced upon him. His hatred first for taking away everything and then letting the evil voices come back again still raged. Peyroux stared up at the Gargoyle and wondered what Sebastian would now be trying to tell him. Looking up, he strained hard again to hear for the faintest whisper in his head of a voice he could trust. But Sebastian’s silence told Peyroux that he had lost everything. Peyroux beat on his head and screamed through frustration. Before he knew it his fingernails were entrenched in his own cheeks, drawing blood. Then a vision of doctors coming to steal more parts of him away flashed in his mind, and, taking one final look at the Gargoyle, a calmness washed over him. Standing in the eye of his storm, he understood. He understood where he might find Sebastian and he ran from the Cathedral grounds, blood streaming down his cheek, leaving a trail of disgusted onlookers.