THE STONEMASON

DANNY RHODES

What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters before the eyes of the brothers as they read?

—BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX (CIRCA 1130 CE)

When he found a moment for a hurried lunch, he carried his satchel through the cathedral grounds to his favorite spot in the walled garden, a little bench there. He liked to observe the visitors as they appeared through the stone archway and crossed the garden, following the path towards the Queningate. Such ordinary things soothed him.

It was one of those bright winter days, the light sharp and exacting, the keen air piercing to the nose, but there was a gentle touch of warmth in the sunlight, a soft caress on his forehead and cheekbones.

He rested his satchel on his lap, opened it and took out his foil wrapped sandwiches. He felt the soft texture of the bread between his fingers, lifted the sandwich to his mouth and took a bite. He savored the rich, oily taste of the cheese, stared upwards at the blue sky, stared into the blue, through and beyond the blue. He ate his sandwiches like that, present in one place but drifting towards another, thinking, the best he could, of nothing, and trying not to think of what happened to him in the Dark Entry.

It was so, incredibly hard.

Birdsong. On the outer edge of his hearing. He focused on it. A blackbird.

Da-de-dilly-da-dot.

De-dilly-da-dot-dot.

The song lasted for a time, settled his inner being, aided his escape from the demands that had been heaped upon him, the demands he’d heaped upon himself, but inevitably the blackbird’s song became the chirp-chirp of starlings and then, abruptly, the chip of his pitcher on the stone, the chip-chip of his pitcher, repetitive, deliberate, busy. Always busy. Became chattering, the chattering of tiny voices, then just one voice, a disturbing presence, something that had been bothering him since that evening in the Dark Entry. Something intrusive. Something that refused to let him be.

He startled himself awake. His sandwich lay half-eaten on his lap. A robin appeared beneath the bench, picked up a crumb and zipped away. He sighed. The long days on the project, the intricate precision of the work, were doing things to his nerves. He was flattered to have been given the task, but he’d not truly understood the gravity of it, not foreseen the extended hours, the lost weekends, the stress it would cause at home. He’d not realized how Lucy would be less than understanding, less than appreciative of the extra income, somehow unable, or unwilling, to connect one with the other.

It wasn’t working out with Lucy. They had become separate, connected only by their joint responsibility for Ava. For a while work had been a welcome respite, but it hadn’t lasted. The feeling of escape had become tainted by the daily anxiety of returning to an emotionally cold house, a tense atmosphere, mounting resentment on both sides.

And then everything shifted.

First there had been the incident in the Dark Entry. It happened one evening after work. He’d locked up his studio and made his way through the Dark Entry in the direction of the Green Court. He surely hadn’t imagined the unnatural presence that revealed itself, the disturbed thing at his shoulder, somehow both pressing against and recoiling from him in the same instant, hadn’t imagined the profound feeling of dread that had overcome him, a feeling that seemed to emanate from the very shadows themselves. Nor had he imagined the smell that infiltrated his nostrils, not just damp, not just decay. If malignity had an odor, that is what he had smelt.

He spoke about it. Of course he did. The others, those that knew, smiled impishly as they told him the tale of the servant who had been walled up in the Dark Entry, the suffering she’d endured, the things she’d cried out about the father of her unborn child, the curses she’d made before she fell silent, until she was just a story, someone who may or may not have been, something that had happened or never happened.

Two days later, whilst he was still reeling from the experience, still trying to make sense of it, came the discovery of the raised gland on Ava’s neck.

He remembered the cold, indefatigable terror of the moment, the ill-advised internet searches that followed, the alarm bells ringing louder and louder. He recalled Ava’s eyes looking up at his, the fear he felt as he looked back at her. Him trying to hide his fear. To not let it out.

“How do you feel?” he asked, again and again.

“Fine,” she said.

“You don’t feel tired? You don’t feel unwell?”

“No, silly,” she said. And smiled. Enough to melt his heart.

The car parks. The waiting. The doctors and nurses. The stark, sterile corridors. The immeasurable contrast between the hospital buildings and his place of work. The tests. The impenetrable numbers. The opaque unknowing mixed with the stark clarity of the process. The long dark hours. The lying awake. The pondering. The searching. The burrowing deep, deep, deep into the soul. The silent, hypocritical prayers. To anybody and anything that might answer.

The promises he’d made.

That he knew he couldn’t keep.

And all the while, Lucy more distant, further and further removed, unrecognizable from the person he had once thought he loved.

And all the while that smell infiltrating his nostrils, so that he caught it here and there unexpectedly. Something threatening. Something hostile. Something taking pleasure in his torment. Something that wanted to deny others what had been denied of itself.

Meanwhile, the job forever pressing.

“Take your time,” they said. “There’s no rush.”

“Let us know,” they said.

“Someone else can do it,” they said.

“No,” he said. “No, they can’t do it. No. No. No.”

So here he was, wrestling with the work, fighting to meet a deadline that had been stretched as far as it could possibly be stretched. The scaffolding was due to come down. The sculpture would be the last thing to go up and then the scaffolding would come down. So the sculpture had to be ready.

The robin made one more trip and then didn’t reappear. He walked back through the gardens and the herbarium. A cluster of half-bored schoolchildren were gathered in the Great cloisters, a guide talking to them about the origins of the cathedral stone. Their blue and white uniforms. Their bags of many colors. He met eyes with a young girl. Her dark hair. Her perfect skin. He thought of Ava, not yet at school, and felt the dread of a moment yet to pass. What if she never went to school, wore a uniform, the little white socks and black shoes?

He ducked indoors, made his way through the choir and down the stone steps into the crypt. The smell of damp. The mustiness. More noticeable to him now. He passed the smudged black shape on one of the columns there. Always fun to watch the tourists encounter it for the first time. The ghost of a clergyman according to the story. Hardly imaginative. But only a story, one he would have dismissed under normal circumstances, one he had dismissed. Except now he found himself stopping at the column and studying it.

And wondering.

Tall and shrouded it loomed over him. For the first time, he saw something darker in its form, malevolent intent, and for a second, no more than a second, he felt an uncomfortable tremor in the base of his spine.

Something had loosened his grip on things. Since that singular, almost imperceptible moment in the Dark Entry he’d started imagining the stories of tormented monks and tortured servants to be real, so that every moment he spent alone in the vaults of the cathedral, in the silent gardens and surrounds, filled him with anxiety. And sadness. As if he was akin to the many ghosts about the estate and capable of experiencing their suffering. He told himself nothing had changed, that he didn’t believe in any of it, but he felt as though he believed in all of it. Perhaps this was what it meant to be haunted. Not so much a fear of what one had witnessed, more the fear of what one might witness, so that living became ominous expectancy and a person strung out.

He worked in a place that held death at its core. It was present in everything. Once it had been a comfort to him, made him feel time was not linear but circular instead, so that everything was part of what had come before and what was yet to be. Now though, with Ava on his mind, such thoughts terrified him, as though there would be no escaping the agony of losing her, just an endless spiral of recurring despair.

He reached his studio, pushed open the door and flicked on the light. There were mouse droppings on the floor. He brushed them away. The sculpture was as he’d left it. Of course it was. He circled it, trying to comprehend it. He was meant to be following the drawing but the thing coming out of the stone was nothing like the drawing. He didn’t understand how it had come to be so. But here it was, a monstrosity unfolding before him. It was meant to be a human face, and it was, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, but he hadn’t intended it to look this way, so hostile, so twisted, so angry with the world. He imagined the face a century from now, high on the north-west tower, eaten by wind and rain. He imagined a future stonemason scratching his head, trying somehow to reconcile the drawing with the horrific thing it had become. It was meant to be male but this thing he’d created was discernibly female.

Still, he set himself to work, trying to save it, chipping away, chip-chip chipping, shaving, sculpting, as was his craft, his vocation. He worked beyond his hours, focused wholly on the task. Then he downed tools and set about tidying up for the night. He stepped back, eyed it from a distance. It was no better. If anything it was angrier. He lifted the dust sheet to cover it, moved to the door and turned out the light. The sudden dark reached out toward him as he pulled the door shut. He felt its chill fingers on his collar.

He walked down the Long Passage, avoiding the Dark Entry, experiencing the now familiar reluctance to go home, the gathering dread. He wanted to see Ava before her bedtime but he did not want to see Lucy. He wondered when that had changed.

He drifted to the pub instead, ordered a pint and took himself to a quiet corner where he could see what was coming at him. He supped his pint and sketched in his little notebook, not thinking, just affecting something on the page, shaping how he imagined the sculpture was meant to look, recalling what he had seen in the shape of it before he covered it with the sheet.

And how the two were not the same.

It was in the anguished nature of the eyes, the overextended mouth. It was in those things.

The pub door opened. For a moment he felt the darkness enter the place and the menace of its presence. A couple walked in. They sat across from him. They laughed about something. A shared secret. He thought about Lucy, their lack of laughter. He thought about the future. It stretched before him, barren and featureless. But first there was Ava to consider, another round of tests. She was all that mattered. She really was.

He finished his pint and left. Deep winter. Mist in the air. Everything shrouded and ambiguous. The darkness thick and heavy, threatening in a way he’d forgotten it could be threatening.

The alleyway leading to his gate was the worst part. It reminded him of the Dark Entry. He felt something behind him, something on the path. He smelled something, a smell like wet stone, or he thought he did. The job was seeping into his being.

When he reached the house it was quiet. He closed the door silently behind and him sat in the kitchen for a time, watching the mist through the window.

He and Lucy were renting a place that backed on to the city cemetery. So there was that too, a constant reminder of mortality. Sometimes he walked amongst the stones, and lately, only lately, he’d found himself singling out the delicately decorated shrines of newly buried children.

He couldn’t imagine. He truly couldn’t imagine.

The cemetery contained further oddities, foxes, owls, other creatures of the night. He heard them in the dark hours. He’d come home a few weeks back to find the scattered, bloodied remnants of some poor creature on his lawn. He’d feared it was Ava’s rabbit, but it wasn’t. Clearing the carcass away with a shovel he’d turned to look at the house to find Ava staring at him out of the conservatory window. He’d raced inside, ushered her away.

None of Ava’s test results led in a specific direction. They meandered from specialist to specialist, Ava showing no signs of being ill, but the gland remaining pronounced, as if her body knew something nobody else knew. And deep down inside a particular dread wouldn’t leave him, that it was only a matter of time before the symptoms of something serious presented themselves.

In bed beside Lucy, a presence filled the space between them. Something cold. He stared over her shoulder at the bedroom window, the gap in the curtains, the prowling darkness beyond. He watched it as it watched him. He woke three times in the night to the sound of Ava coughing. Each time, he rose and stood in the moonlit room gazing down at his daughter, filled by a surge of love so powerful it almost overwhelmed him.

He told himself it was just a cough.

Just a cough.

Into the vaults then. Another day on the job. Into the dark recesses, the underbelly of the cathedral beyond the trail and traipse of visitors, feeling the darkness seeping into his soul, a burrowing cold in his body and his mind, his mental state affected, darkly damaged.

The Long Passage seemed longer, unfamiliar to him. He heard a noise, a door closing, and turned his head, expecting to see someone behind him, one of the clergy, a member of facilities, an archivist, a guide. There was nobody. Just the hollow echo of his footsteps. But still he felt it, the presence of something, an otherness. He reached the studio door and took out his keys. The metallic jangle was amplified in the passage. He pushed the key into the lock. As he did, he heard a sound beyond the door, a startled movement he thought, something alarmed by his arrival. Interrupted.

He hesitated.

He looked back over his shoulder and down the Long Passage, unusually eager for company. But there was no one. Only him. As he pushed the door open something dropped to the floor in his studio. He heard the sharp sound of one of his tools striking the stone tiles, bouncing and clattering to a standstill. There was a terrible moment when he was met by an impenetrable slab of darkness. He reached for the light switch and could not find it, felt himself stricken, horrifyingly exposed, with the emptiness of the Long Passage behind him and the smothering blackness of his studio ahead. His fingers located the switch and in the nanosecond before the light flooded the room, he saw something, or he thought he did, a pair of tormented eyes peering back at him. And then the light filled the space and all was ordinary.

Or almost ordinary.

One of his pointing trowels was lying on the stone floor. Perhaps he’d left it precariously placed on his bench. The rush of air had dislodged it. The eyes were just a reflection of the light from the corridor on a surface. Of course they were.

And a dead mouse. Wet fur. Tiny teeth laced with blood. Its eye looked up at him, through him, beyond him, into a vast emptiness.

He pulled the cover off the sculpture. The grotesque stared back at him. Its expression had changed. It seemed to be smirking. He carried the dead mouse to the bin. He must tell facilities about them, about how they were everywhere.

He worked through the morning under the bare light. Now and then, between the chip-chip of his pitcher, he heard the sound of staff walking along the Long Passage, and voices, mumbled and indecipherable. Nobody came to see how he was getting on. Nobody at all.

Lunch in the garden. His respite. A golden carpet of leaves on the foursquare lawn, the steps slippery with fallen leaves and matter, precarious, dangerous, a devil to navigate. A person could fall, bang their head on the stone. The unsettling silence of the garden on this day. Nobody came through the stone archway. Nobody walked across the garden, following the path. The air was thick with moisture that clung to him, a heavy, cloying fog that seemed a sentient being, capable, almost, of life.

He consumed his sandwiches, rose to his feet and walked, tentatively, back in the direction of his studio, the mist thickening, rolling and rippling all around him. The path at his feet. The border of the path at the very edge of his vision. The manicured lawn swallowed by mist. The hulking, monolithic cathedral nothing but a dull and shapeless shadow, monstrous and massive, reducing him to insignificant nothingness. As he turned down the little path by the yew tree the cathedral rose up before him, doubling and trebling in its vastness.

Over there was the Dark Entry. He couldn’t see it. He could only sense it. Only feel the thing that was confined within it. But it had touched him. It had singled him out and cursed him. Cursed him, his wife and his daughter. He was certain of it. Or she had.

He hurried, dangerously, back inside. He stopped in the choir. The stalls were empty. He stood amongst them, listening. Something above him. Something high up. A movement there. Something watching him. Something concealing itself. Something that wanted to inflict pain upon him. He studied the balcony. There was nothing to see, except perhaps the light and shadow fluctuating there, creating soft shapes that ebbed and billowed, neither there or not there, real or unreal. He turned away, pushed open the door to the Long Passage, made his way back to his studio.

Later, much later, he draped the dust sheet over the sculpture, moved to the door. He turned to look at the sculpture one more time. A single draped sheet in the middle of the studio. A shapeless ghost. He closed the door and walked down the Long Passage. He told himself he couldn’t hear the sheet dragging along the floor, that if he returned to the studio now he would not find the sheet in a crumpled heap on the stone tiles, that the sculpture was not living, that it could not live, that it was only made of stone.

He turned into the cobbled streets, the mist thick in the darkness, the Christmas lights subdued and softened, people hunkered close to each other, or into themselves, shoulders pulled tight, collars high, hands buried in pockets. Music from a bar somewhere. Muffled and muted. He thought about Christmas drawing forever closer, and that led him, rapidly, to thoughts of Ava. He felt a chill in his bones and a desperate longing for a past domestic contentedness that he could barely recall.

He spent the night drifting in and out of nightmares.

Arguments with Lucy.

Ava’s cough.

The timeless thing in the Dark Entry. He felt its loitering presence in the heavy darkness of the room and the heavier darkness of sleep. He felt her presence.

He woke with a start, sat up, sucked in a lungful of air. He stared about the room, orientating himself, securing himself. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. He stood over the toilet for a time. But he didn’t need the toilet. It was all in his head. He wandered back along the landing and poked his head into Ava’s room. It was dark inside. He couldn’t see anything. He considered creeping up to her bed, making sure she was okay, but he chose not to. The last thing they needed now was for him to wake her.

He returned to his own bed, rested his head on the pillow and turned to face Lucy’s back, stared at the curve of her shoulder and her skin that looked like stone. He reached out across the space between them to touch her and then drew his hand away. He lay in bed listening to the sound of Lucy breathing, a sound like a breeze gusting through a stone archway, and listening to the sounds of the night. He drifted towards sleep, was awakened by squealing and screaming. A fox at the rabbit? He leapt out of bed, raced across the landing and down the stairs. He reached the back door, opened it, stared out on to the lawn, felt the chill air on his nakedness.

The sound transformed, became the sound of Ava screaming from within the house. He ran back up the stairs and into Ava’s room. He flicked on the light. Ava’s bed was empty. Her bedroom window was open. He ran to the window and looked down upon the moonlit gardens. He thought he saw something underneath the neighbor’s cherry tree, something skulking away with something struggling in its arms. Something with a stretched mouth and anguish ridden eyes. Something like a woman but not a woman. Something unimaginable.

He ran back downstairs and out onto the lawn. He peered over the fence. The thing was gone. There was just the smell, the lingering odor, something festering. He thought of the Dark Entry. Surely not. He turned, raced back upstairs. Frantic. Breathless. Hot despite the chill. Ava stood in the bathroom doorway, bleary eyed.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

He picked her up, pulled her close to him.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

He carried Ava to her room, lay her in bed, tucked her in with her favorite teddy. He waited for her to drift off. He felt the side of her neck with the ends of his fingers, pressed his fingertips against the hardened, exaggerated lump that would not go away. He walked to the bedroom window and looked down into the neighbor’s garden. Everything was ordinary. Everything was as it should be. He wondered if he was losing his mind.

“A few more days,” he said to Lucy the next morning. “Then we’ll talk.”

“What if I don’t want to talk,” she said.

“Then we won’t talk.”

“Good,” she said. “Because there’s nothing to talk about.”

“I can’t believe you slept through all of that last night,” he said.

“I can’t believe you didn’t wake me,” she said.

He looked at the clock.

“I have to go,” he said.

He walked into the living room, kissed Ava on the forehead. He reached to feel her neck. She pushed him away.

“I’ll see you later,” he said.

He pulled on his boots by the back door, grabbed his jacket. The sky was gray. It was drizzling with rain. He closed the door behind him, walked down the garden, reached the gate and swung it open.

He was at the end of the road when his phone buzzed into life. A message from Lucy.

I want a separation.

Four words. Clear and precise. He stared at them.

He felt nothing except an emptiness, a hollow acceptance of what had come to pass between them.

He pulled his hood tight, slogged down the alleyway, trudged through the next alley and the next, keeping his head low, striding as purposefully as he could. He continued down the hill into town. Everything dark. Everything dismal. Barely anybody around. The streets sodden with rain. The fast-flowing, mud-brown river churning as it went.

The city center was quiet, the cobbles glazed with rain. Everything miserable. Everything lifeless. He reached the Butter-Market. A few souls milling about, hardy tourists in outdoor wear, cagoules, and umbrellas, the coffee shop opposite the cathedral gate full to bursting, the window misty with condensation.

He traipsed through the gathering puddles, pulled out his pass and showed it to the woman in the little shelter. Her in her blue anorak. She nodded silently. He looked up to see the great tower looming over him. The heavy clouds rolled over it so that it looked as if it were falling. But it wasn’t falling. It was stalwart and timeless. Long after he and Lucy and Ava had gone, the tower would still be there. It would be there forever.

The Dark Entry would be there forever.

Lucy called him. He pondered not answering his phone, then relented. He stood in the cloisters by the Chapter House and talked to the mother of his sick child.

“I’m taking Ava to my mum’s,” she said.

“How can you think about this now?” he said. “How can you think about anything at a time like this?”

“It’s this that’s made things clear,” she said.

He called the hospital. The specialist wasn’t available. He spoke to a nurse instead.

“I’m waiting on some test results,” he said. “My child. My daughter.”

He gave Ava’s name.

No tests results had come in.

“I’m sure they’ll be here soon,” said the nurse.

“But when?” he asked.

“Soon,” said the nurse. “Any time now. Perhaps today even. We’ll call you the moment they arrive.”

He put the phone down.

He wandered in the direction of the Dark Entry, stopped before the arch. There was nobody around. He scanned the shadows. There was nothing there. He thought about the thing he had seen in the garden, the terrible thing cradling something in its arms. Beyond the Dark Entry was the tunnel that led by the infirmary hall to the Long Passage, a route he’d taken a thousand times, but he hesitated this time, frightened of the thing he had seen.

“No,” he said to himself. “Come on.”

He stepped forwards, felt the shadows tighten around him, like a shroud, like a heavy blanket. He stopped. He stood perfectly still. He felt something at his shoulder, but he didn’t turn around. He would not look at it. Would not look at her. But he knew for certain that she was there. He could smell her. He could sense her here in the Dark Entry, a place that never knew sunlight. That had never known sunlight. Or warmth.

And this thing, he knew now, had never known sunlight or warmth, had never known touch or intimacy or love. Or if she had, she had lost those things in unimaginable ways. He felt her move, felt her shift in the space behind him. He felt the anger emanating from her, the suppression of all things good for all things evil. Because of what had happened to her.

“What do you want?” he asked.

He felt her breath on his neck and he knew that if he turned he would see her, that she would be the same as the sculpture he was creating against his will, that she would have the same eyes, the same mouth, the same agonized expression.

He knew he was paying for her torment, that after him there would be others, that there was nothing he could do to save himself.

Unless.

He left the Dark Entry behind him, marched into the vaults, into the chill and the damp. Those things were inside him now. They had infiltrated his being, become part of him. He didn’t care about those things any longer. He would destroy the sculpture, take his hammer and chisel and smash it to pieces. He would do that and then it would be over. All of it would be over. That thing, looking at him. That face. Those eyes. The thing it had become. He would drive the chisel through it. Through her.

When he reached the studio the door was wedged open. He turned on the light. The sculpture wasn’t there. There was just the empty bench. He turned and raced along the passage, through the nave and out into the grounds. He reached the fenced off section beneath the scaffolding. He stared through the mesh. They were hoisting the sculpture towards its home on the corner of the tower. He watched it slowly rise towards the rolling clouds.

The sound of a forklift reversing broke the spell, the repetitive warning of the alarm incongruous in this place, an intrusion. He shouted out over it, caught the attention of the supervisor in his hi-vis jacket and white helmet. The supervisor turned and walked towards him, clipboard in hand.

“We had to take her,” said the supervisor. “It was now or never, and they wouldn’t accept never.”

The sculpture reached its level. Three or four men were up there. He saw them pull it in towards them.

“She looks great,” said the supervisor. “She really does. You’ve done a fantastic job.”

“But she’s not finished,” he shouted through the mesh. “You can’t take her yet. She’s not finished.”

The supervisor shrugged. The forklift trundled to a stop. The alarm cut out. For a long second there was just the somber clouds, the crane jib and the empty hook swinging in the void where the sculpture had been.

His phone started ringing. He lifted it from his pocket and stared at the screen. The hospital was calling him.

He hesitated.

He turned to look back at the Dark Entry. The shadows under the archway were deep and condemning and he knew she was watching him, reveling in this moment, reveling in his dread. She was gaunt and naked and her mottled skin was like wet stone. She was cradling her stomach in such a way. Her face was frozen in a silent, grief-stricken scream.

His phone was still ringing. The supervisor was staring at him.

He couldn’t answer his phone.

He simply couldn’t.