CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE STONECUTTER THRUST HIS COPPER CHISEL INTO THE SLAB OF granite laid out before him. Sweat dripped from his sullen face in a steady stream. His eyes ached of a sudden glare as he raised his mallet. He marveled at the power which had been bestowed upon him. His heart beat faster as he brought down the mallet.

Shadows suddenly shifted, the moon dipped behind the mountains, and the town of Brackston sank into complete darkness. Below, in the black corridors, the halls beneath the stone, there were also crepitations of darkness, ferments, chemical nightmares of pitch blackness.

It was only the glare in the old man’s eyes and the flame of a single squat candle that kept the blackness alive. And the old man knew this to be so. He knew that with each meticulous blow of his mallet—the night belonged to him. He was night. Eternally.

Now in the flickering light, his gaunt, wrinkled face flashed arrogancy, pride, and seemed the incarnation of Death. His long thin fingers loosened their grip on the chisel for a moment, and his eyes slowly, imperceptibly, became glazed with intense concentration.

He willed himself to recall the memories of torment he had suffered and the faces of his tormentors. He willed himself never to forget his father’s face, a ghostly haze, hanging from the lowest bow of the highest tree. His body ached with a thousand wounds as he recalled his mother’s body broken and beaten, her flesh covered with scabs of vile treatment. He himself had helped to put them there. Let me carve all this, he told himself, into the stone. Let me carve the names of those departed with the names of those among the living. Let suffering beget suffering. Let the future belong to us. Let this stone be our salvation. He paused to let the ghosts of his words sink deeper into his tortured, yet unrepentant, soul.

Without warning, he heard the clicking of footsteps. He turned swiftly around on his heels looking outward, his eyes staring wildly into the darkness.

In the flickering half-light he could make out his wife’s face. The oil lamp shook in her trembling hand.

“May I enter?” asked his wife.

“Not yet,” answered the stonecutter. “I have not finished.”

His wife muttered to herself and, like a phantom, disappeared into the darkness beyond. Faint footsteps growing fainter, then silence. Total silence.

He nodded his farewell and smiled, the passageway ahead dimming as he looked away. He felt painfully alone, yet a smile hovered on his lips nonetheless.

Once again his eyes fixed upon the slab of stone before him. From the very bowels of the earth there came a distant sound. It was the sound of voices, human, not yet, but growing in numbers and strength. His energy had begun to wane badly. It frightened him. He wept.

With tears in his eyes, he raised his mallet high over his head, then brought it down hard. As his chisel cut deep into the stone, his head rolled from side to side, shaking in time with a mystic chant known only to himself. Intense joy magnified through tears shone on his face with each new thud of his mallet.

As he worked, the stonecutter remembered the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen, which contained some of the rarest of stone carvings. He brought the mallet down again. From this ancient art of stonecutting, his people had learned how to survive. Just like the great pharaohs of Egypt, they would, within hollowed walls of stone, live on for all eternity.

The stonecutter paused, looked with satisfaction upon his work. Now that the name had been engraved, nothing— absolutely nothing—could change it.