There are myths that mirrors steal souls and keep evil spirits imprisoned. Peyroux stared long and deep into the reflective realm. He sat and waited for the demons to emerge. Sat staring, taunting them with his visage. But the only thing looking back at him was his newly characterised face. It had started months ago outside of the Cathedral, drawing his own blood from his cheeks and leaving scars. Now he wore pitted craters where chunks of his face he had cut away with shards of glass. Under his unruly, straggling hair, his forehead wore deep rivets of bloodied scars. The nose, recently broken by his own fists. The mouth, split at both sides in a deformed smile. One eye, glued shut still burned him. A mouth with teeth few and far between. Peyroux listened for Sebastian, awaiting his final approval, believing at the end, when his transformation was complete, he would hear his companion return.
He turned to face the hanging canvas of a Gargoyle overlooking Paris from the Galerie des Chimères and there he knew he saw his true reflection. His path to serenity was almost complete. The demon doctors wouldn’t be able to touch him anymore. The soulless society couldn’t interfere with his life anymore.
To become Gargoyle. To have the power to ward off all evil menace just by wearing a grotesque appearance. Peyroux slammed his jaw against a doorjamb to feel that lightness of being. To embrace the total power it afforded. With deformations having reached their apex, Peyroux had only one stop left to complete his transformation. He needed a pure soul. To reach purity he had to taste pure evil, to sample for himself the pure essence of terror that life affords by someone looking upon his own hideous face. He would have to ultimately taint his soul, so that it could be redeemed in absolution.
The once reviled beast becoming the saviour of the people.
Peyroux picked up his knife, turned out the light and perched himself, statuesque on a stool. Looking out of the window over the rooftops of Rouen, Peyroux placed the blade between his lips and in contemplation searched for the glimmer of moonlight in his own personal sky of black. The chimerical tear. Grotesque. But Peyroux was happy. Statuesque in his world. The tools of his deformity displayed in glass. The bitter pill of humanity had sent him there. Society had put the furrowed brown upon his face. His glaucomic eye infected by rejection. There was a higher calling in Peyroux, a peaceful place to reach where he wouldn’t forget that he was alive. He came to understand that his life was not to just pale away into a dark, earthly coffin to be forgotten. Thanks to Sebastian, there was a path Peyroux had chosen to turn towards which extended beyond the corporeal. For Peyroux, there was no religious doctrine to be guided by. No comfort from the cloistered souls closer to heaven than he.
Sebastian had shown him this. Had shown him that he had to go his own way. How his father couldn’t hurt him anymore, how the doctors could be avoided, just by becoming still inside. Becoming statuesque.
Sebastian had gone and he hadn’t been strong enough to take the voices with him. But floating away on the water, Sebastian had at least shown Peyroux that he needed to be different than himself, so that he could find his own strengths to battle them. To battle as Sebastian had bravely done without ever asking for recognition.
The painful tears on his face brought him closer to a kind of peace which those underlings way below him could never have imagined. Peyroux was a man-made Gargoyle. His scarred and swollen cheeks and disjointed jawbone were a statue of peace. Sitting high on his balcony, overlooking the streets of Rouen, Peyroux saw through the eyes of his statuesque peers. Night after night, Peyroux ignored the rain beating down upon him. The noise of the water pummeling the world he closed from his mind as he continued to squat on the edge of the balcony. On the outside of himself, his legs were screaming with frozen pain, having endured another night of sentry. Inside himself, he continued to struggle against the renewed onslaught of the voices in his head.
He watched over the city and could sense all the evil rising in fine mists of heat against the moonlight. Temptations for sin were everywhere and with each new voice in his head, Peyroux could feel the inner most emotion of each one. The temptations of evil roamed his head like winds across the rolling hills to the east. The evils of the city taunted him, dared him to do something about them. Peyroux fought, fought for Sebastian. With the night air whispering around him Peyroux listened for his companion, listened for Sebastian’s instructions and guidance which he knew weren’t coming.
Then he saw a familiar figure on the streets below, slowly ambling along. His nights of freezing perseverance had paid off. He felt ready. He felt that Sebastian would be proud of his choice.
There are targets and victims to be found everywhere, he told himself. On every street, around every corner there are people destined to face an early death. The innocent, they are oblivious to the selective eyes of their tormentors. They avert their eyes away from people they pass in the street, preferring to acknowledge instead the pavement than get drawn into someone else’s world. But their blindness and efforts to cower from society, leads them up dark alleys and into the arms of irrevocable damage. If only they’d stop to look around and see that they were targets. This was his path to perfection.
Peyroux swooped from his perch on the balcony, leaping down the fire escape stairs and down the rain sodden streets.
The old man was on his knees before the shock-wave of pain in the back of his head had fully registered. He cried out weakly as his knees crumbled against the ground and felt his arms being controlled by another.
Peyroux dragged his small-framed victim back up the fire escape, climbing swiftly all the way to the rooftop. The world above was blanketed in anonymity and mystery. The people down below never looked up to the tops of the world to see who was looking down upon them. The familiar view of the rooftops of Rouen had offered more and more isolation to Peyroux during his transformation. Up there he could feel the fresh winds, uninhibited by landmarks, and he could sense the freedom it expelled. In stark contrast to the streets he watched over, there was no-one else around to cause him vexation up there. He could be himself, be what Sebastian wanted him to be.
As Peyroux stared out across at the views, the old man was still taking in the sight of his captor with disbelief. Was this really the man he’d shared the hospital ward with? The hideous face had replaced the look of forlorn pain and suffering and twisted it into this nightmarish visage. But more than that, the evils had wormed their way inside in his head, thrown him onto this path of desperation which was a million miles away from the direction the doctors had tried to steer him. The old man, felt his own life being taken away from his own destiny.
“You were right,” said Peyroux turning to look at Clotaire, bound and shivering. “There were bigger gains. I lost the one thing that was important to me, but I gained something more. A purpose. A goal.”
“And what does this have to do with me, son?” sputtered Clotaire, gasping for his words through terror. “The doctors are the ones who did this, not me.”
“The answer was in front of me all the time. Look at my face. I wear the solutions on my face. I have to become Gargoyle. It is the only way to defeat them. The voices, the doctors – they all played their part in taking Sebastian. What did it leave me to look forward to? What has all this left me with? Voices constant in my head, people on the street hurting me with their ignorance. The evil is everywhere. I have to make it stop once and for all. I have to commit the ultimate sin so I can then feel true remorse and absolution in my soul. There will be no further depths to sink to and my soul will be of purest stone. It will complete my transformation. The physical scars you see are only the half of it. A temporary measure to help to keep the lesser evils at bay.”
Peyroux walked towards Clotaire who was too weak to move. Peyroux stood over the small man and pointed at his forehead with the knife. He took a small moment to search amongst the crashing waves of voices inside his skull to see if Sebastian had washed up on the shore. He looked across the town to admire the Cathedral’s spire piercing the distant heavens. Nothing
but a wall of burning noise inside him.
“Now it is time to complete this,” said Peyroux. “To become Gargoyle.”
The rain exploded tears of blood.
High on the rooftop, the fallen figure clutching at the knife in his heart was in his final throes. A haunting, anguished look etched in stone upon his face. The rain, mercilessly beating down formed a mattress of cold water for the dying man, and matted his hair to his face.
Clotaire looked down up the fallen, disfigured and tortured soul of Peyroux. As the rain continued to fall and the clouds grew ever darker and lower, the old man said a silent prayer for the lost soul of Peyroux.
He knelt down beside Peyroux and, fighting repulsion at the thought of touching him, wiped away the hair that was sticking to his damaged face. Slowly he pulled the knife that Peyroux had first cut Clotaire’s binds with before plunging it into his own chest, free from its victim. Summoning all his strength, the trembling old man pulled the dead weight to the edge of the rooftop. Heaving Peyroux to his knees, the old man folded Peyroux’s arms on the raised ledge that ran around the edge of the building’s summit. Carefully, fighting back an urge to vomit, Clotaire rested Peyroux’s chin on his folded arms so that his one dead open eye could overlook the city towards the Cathedral. As per Peyroux’s last wish before committing his ultimate sin of taking his own life, the old man put the blade of the knife between Peyroux’s cracked remaining teeth and wedged his loose jaw shut.
“You are the only one I can trust,” Peyroux had told Clotaire. “I don’t want to fall over the edge when I go, I want to peacefully watch the Cathedral and La Gargouille forever, and I need you to make that happen. I need you to help me complete my quest, to meet my destiny and rest in peace as a dutiful Gargoyle.”
In his kneeling stance Peyroux, statuesque and grotesque watched Rouen life. He never felt the rain. The evil voices in his head able to penetrate this guardian of purity no more.
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Lee A Jackson
About the author:
I began writing in my mid to late teens, sequestered away in my bedroom in rural south west England. The writing was borne out of a need to express myself and to communicate with the world, something I was not good at doing verbally. It became an outlet for me and my writing grew with me through the years.
For the longest time I had a fear of being forgotten and the way I figured to combat that would be to have a published book sat on a library shelf somewhere. I would have indelibly left my mark somewhere, long after I passed. To this day, the enduring nature of my words in print following my end, is comforting.
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A Soul of Stone Page 3