Broken Voices (Kindle Single) (8 page)

‘We had better
walk across the grass,’ Faraday whispered in my ear. ‘Quieter.’

We tiptoed
across the gravel path and set off across the lawn in the direction of the
further light.

‘Where the
devil are we going?’ I said. ‘How are we going to get inside?’

He ignored me.
He ploughed on, head down against the cold wind. I plodded after him.

‘God, it’s
freezing,’ I whispered.

‘I feel
boiling. Come on.’

Faraday led us
right round the east end of the church and down to the flagged path leading to
the south door. I glanced back. Our ragged footprints marched across the frosty
grass. We were now in the larger, grander part of the College, where the houses
of the Dean and Chapter were.

I looked about
us. All the windows I could see were in darkness. But there were more lamps
here, stretching down the road leading to the Porta and the Veals’ house.

Faraday made
for the south door.

I hurried after
him. ‘What are you doing? It’ll be locked.’

He took no
notice but led the way into the south porch. This had been formed by an
accident of history from the one surviving fragment of the east walk of the
mediaeval cloister.

It was darker here
but Faraday did not slacken his place. I blundered after him. He stopped
abruptly just before the door into the Cathedral and I bumped into him.

He didn’t try
to open the door. Instead he moved to the left. There was another door here,
much smaller, set in a square-headed archway. He reached up, as high as he
could, and ran his fingertips along the top of the lintel, palpating the stone.
I heard a faint chink. A key turned in the lock. The door scraped open and a
current of cool air smelling of candles swept out to meet us.

Faraday took my
arm and drew me after him through the doorway. It was much darker here, an
enclosed space. Faraday closed the door behind us.

‘Where are we?’
I whispered.

‘The choir
vestry.’

‘But the door
for that’s in the nave.’

He laughed,
showing his knowledge. ‘This is the other door. Dr Atkinson uses it when he
needs to come in at night, or early in the morning, when the Cathedral’s
locked. He sent me to fetch something once. He said it could be useful for the
head of choir to know where to find the key.’

‘You’re not
head of the choir now,’ I said, too scared to be kind. ‘You’re not even in the
choir.’

Faraday lit a
match. We were in a long room with the central aisle across which benches faced
each other. There was a grand piano at the far end, with a dozen or so music
stands huddled together like a herd of skeletal creatures. This was where the
choir practised.

Before the
flame had died, Faraday had reached a cupboard and opened its door. He asked me
to light and hold up another match.

‘We mustn’t
risk the gas,’ he said. ‘But there are some candles here.’

Most of the
shelves held books of music. But the top shelf was filled with a jumble of
objects, through which Faraday rummaged while I lit match after match. He
unearthed three candle stumps, a candle lantern and another box of matches. He
lit one of them, put it in the lantern and closed the glass. A faint radiance
spread through the vestry. It made me feel better. It made what we were doing
seem a little less strange.

Holding up the
lantern, Faraday opened a desk that stood at the far end of the room. In a
moment he gave a little cry of triumph and held up a long key.

‘What’s that
for?’

‘The door from
the choir vestry to the Cathedral.’

‘All these keys
without labels,’ I said. ‘Old Veal would have a fit if he knew.’

We snorted with
suppressed laughter, the tension forcing its way out as a bubble of mirth.

‘Atky doesn’t
let him in here,’ Faraday said. ‘They hate each other.’

He unlocked the
door into the Cathedral. This was nine feet tall beneath a pointed archway; I
had often seen the choir marching through it, two by two, processing into the
Cathedral in their cassocks and surplices.

We passed into
the south aisle. Faraday pulled the door to behind us but did not latch it.

For a moment we
stood still, shocked by the immense, cold darkness around us. We were in the
belly of a huge and unimaginably heavy stone beast. I had been scared before — but
what I felt now was something different — terror, yes, but there was an element
of awe mixed in with it. At night the Cathedral lost its familiarity and became
strange.

‘Oh God.’
Faraday sounded close to tears. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘It’s all
right,’ I said. ‘It’s just dark, that’s all. You’re not scared, are you?’

It was bravado
that made me say that, together with the desire to contradict and needle
Faraday. The more signs of fear he showed, the more my bravado increased.

‘Come on,
Rabbit. We haven’t got all night.’

We set off down
to the south aisle, which would take us the length of the nave to the west
tower. At first we walked slowly and then more quickly. I tried to suppress the
idea that there might be someone behind us.

I glanced
upward. I could not even see the vault of the aisle. On our right were the
massive pillars of the nave, looming palely like a line of great grey oak
trees. The lantern cast a puddle of light on the grounds, enough to see where
we were going, but little else.

Faraday touched
my arm. ‘We had better stay together.’ I felt his hand sliding around my elbow
and gripping it. ‘If - if we hold onto each other, we can’t get lost.’

He spoke in a
whisper. All the time we were in the Cathedral that night, we spoke in whispers
— except, of course, at the end. I felt there was a danger that we might be
overheard: that someone or something was listening.

For me, the worst thing at that point
was not the darkness but the sound of our footsteps on the flagstones. Try as
we might, we could not walk quietly. Our steps sounded louder than usual, but
muffled and dead, as if sinking into cotton wool.

At the end of
the aisle we came to the south-west transept and the west tower. Our footsteps
changed as they entered these wider, taller spaces. They sharpened and acquired
an echo.

Faraday’s grip
tightened. ‘Did you hear that? Someone’s behind us.’

‘Don’t talk
rot. You’re getting windy. Let’s go and look for your beastly anthem.’

Clinging to
each other, we crossed to the door leading to the tower stairs. Faraday let go
of me while he fumbled for the key he had borrowed from Mr Veal. I had
privately cherished the hope that it would turn out to be the wrong key. But it
turned sweetly in the lock.

The door opened
outwards. We pulled it to its full extent, so it grated against the wall. The
light from the lantern showed only the first two or three steps, spiralling in
a clockwise direction into the utter blackness above.

We climbed,
side-by-side, for the staircase at the lower level was wide enough for this.
The air became colder and colder. After the vastness of the nave, the enclosed
space pressed in on us. I was soon out of breath — from the climb and from
fear. So was Faraday. Our laboured breathing was deafening. I wanted to put my
hands over my ears.

At first I
tried to count the steps as a distraction. We had been told that the west tower
had nearly three hundred of them. But I lost my concentration somewhere in the
forties. Then it was just us with no distractions: our footsteps, our breathing
and the light from our lantern sliding ahead into the darkness.

Faraday’s
breathing became irregular. He sniffed. Once or twice he gave an audible sob
which he tried to disguise with a cough. He was crying. I pretended to ignore
it.

I felt dizzy. I
kept staggering against the outer wall of the staircase. It felt increasingly
unnatural to be turning only in one direction and my body was making futile
attempts to correct the situation.

We came at last
to a small landing with a door set in the wall. There was no lock, only a
latch. I lifted it and pulled the door open. I felt a current of air on my face.

‘What’s that?’
Faraday said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘I thought I
saw something. Over there.’ He pointed over my shoulder, through the archway.
‘A — sort of shadow.’

‘That’s just
what it was,’ I said. ‘Stop being so jumpy.’

I stepped
through the archway. We were on the walkway that ran behind the arcade across
the west wall. Faraday held up the lantern. The arcading stretched away from us
to the right; a miniature, almost domesticated version of the great pillars and
arches that marched up either side of the nave.

Automatically
my hand felt for the iron railing that ran between the pillars of the arcade.
There was no other barrier between us and a drop of ninety-odd feet to the
floor of the tower. It was a thin iron rod, cold and rough to the touch.

‘It’s too
narrow,’ Faraday wailed. ‘We can’t go side by side.’

‘Give me the
lantern. Hold on to the belt of my coat.’

In the daytime,
when we had been taken up the tower, this passage had been exciting, with its
views into the tower and the body of the church right up to the huge east
window beyond the choir. We had laughed at the squashed figures moving below
and made jokes about dropping things on them.

By night the
passage was terrifying. I was standing on the edge of the world and the
slightest misstep could send me tumbling away into the darkness.

I made myself
let go of the rail. I focused my eyes on the light on the floor of the walkway,
on the line on the left where it met the tower wall. I marched forward at a
slow but steady pace, towing Faraday behind me.

On the far
side, there was an archway. I passed beneath it and slumped against the wall. I
felt the cold, rough stone against my cheek. I was trembling. I felt sick. I
felt triumphant.

We were at the
foot of another flight of steps, narrower than the first.

‘Nearly there,’
I said. My voice sounded like a stranger’s.

We began to
climb. Faraday stayed behind me, holding my belt. I reassured myself with the
thought of all the people who must have climbed the stairs and walked across
the arcade above the tower — the bell-ringers, the workmen, the tourists:
hundreds of them, at least, if not thousands over the eight centuries this
tower had stood here. It hadn’t harmed them, and they had all come safely back
to the ground. So why should it harm us?

But something
had harmed Mr Goldsworthy.

This staircase
was much shorter than the first, for the arcade was not far below the tower’s
painted ceiling. We came to another little landing, this one with a door. There
was also a third, even narrower spiral staircase that continued the ascent of
the tower. But we were going no higher.

I opened the
door. As I did so, something touched my ankles. I glanced down but nothing was
there. I thought I would have heard a rat on these hard surfaces. And would a
rat climb this high without the lure of food? The touch had been so light it
could have been a draught of air.

‘Is this it?’
Faraday said. ‘Are we here?’

‘Yes,’ I said.
‘This is what you wanted, the place where they used to ring the bells.’

‘Where Mr
Goldsworthy fell from.’

‘I tell you one
thing, Rabbit: I’m not going any higher.’

‘All right.
It’s here somewhere. I’m sure.’

‘For God’s sake
be careful.’

We advanced
slowly into the ringing chamber. In daylight, it was bright enough — there were
great windows on all four sides. It occupied the entire internal area of the
tower. I looked up, remembering from my last visit a floor of huge, roughly
trimmed planks on the network of beams. I couldn’t see anything at all above
our heads. A sense of futility washed over me.

‘You won’t find
anything here,’ I said. ‘This is stupid. It would have been better to come in
daytime, if you had to come at all.’

‘It’s not
stupid. Anyway we agreed — we’d have been seen if we’d come in the day.’

‘Well, you’re
here now. Hurry up and find it.’

‘We can search
with the lantern. Maybe... maybe there’s a loose stone or a board that lifts up
or—’

‘And maybe pigs
fly,’ I interrupted. ‘You can look if you want. I’m staying here. But don’t
take long or I’ll leave without you. And I’ll leave you in the dark.’

Faraday took
the lantern from me and held it up. All it did was emphasize how much darkness
there was. He looked so forlorn, holding up the lantern, so pathetic, like one
of those sentimental engravings my aunt had in her drawing room with titles
like ‘His Father’s Son’ or ‘The Light of the World’.

He went down on
his hands and knees and crawled slowly across the room, examining each board.
He was such a ridiculous sight, a black blob on all fours, an enormous
nocturnal insect. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. Most of all, I wanted to
escape from the Cathedral, go back to the Sacrist’s Lodging, crawl into my bed
and pull the covers over my head.

Suddenly,
Faraday raised his hand. ‘Did you hear it?’ He was so excited he forgot to
whisper. ‘And there it is again.’

I thought he
had gone mad. ‘What?’

‘Those notes — the
music I heard. Those four notes.’ He sang them to me in his pure treble voice:
‘La-la-la-la.’

‘I can’t hear
it.’

 ‘Shh — there’s
more. Listen.’

He tried to
sing the new notes but this time his voice betrayed him. He croaked like a
frog. Not that it mattered one way or another to me because the la-la-la-la was
just noise as far as I was concerned.

Anyway, I
didn’t believe him, not really.

‘There’s
something here,’ he said in a different voice, excited and breathless. ‘I think
it’s moving. Yes, it does. It’s showing me where to look.’