Hidden gargoyle

The tea was refreshing and bitter, and Geraldinium stared out at the sunset.  Her studio was the attic rooms of an entire row of terraced houses, whose occupants were unaware that they had even had attics once.  The view of the sunset was through a huge window that was the width of number 17 in the terrace, slightly angled because of the slope of the roof and was soul-shiftingly vivid.  There was a storm on the way and the saccharine colours that reminded her of the kind of cheap paintings you could find in pound-shops, all horses on the beach and unicorns shedding tears for sleeping teenage girls, but at the edges there were hints of darkness, clouds that edges themselves with hate rather than silver.  It seemed like an auspicious night for her sculpting.

When she set the tea-cup down on the scarred wooden table in front of the window she picked her hammer and chisel back up again.  The noise of her sculpting would undoubtedly cause worry to the Daily Mail reader in the house below where she sculpted, but she considered that to be something readers of that vile rag to deserve.  She crossed to the keystone, and paused.  While she’d been drinking her tea and watching the sunset, surely no more than half-an-hour, three spiders had emerged from somewhere and built webs on and across the stone.  The webs covered the gargoyle’s lumpy, sketched-in head, and two of the spiders were sat, staring malignly at her, right where she’d intended the gargoyle’s main eyes to be.  The third spider scuttered away at her approach and had disappeared down the side of the stone.  She regarded them for a moment, and then picked up a rough cloth from her work desk and wiped the webs and spiders away.  They were too early; they could come and contribute to the project when she was done with the carving.

The rhythmic tap of the hammer on the chisel, and the steady work of looking at what had been removed and what had been discovered as a result of that was soothing work, and as she steadily brought the gargoyle out of hiding and into the light her mind wandered back to the records from the Orphanage.

The Orphanage had originally been called the Home for Wastrels and Waifs and had been founded by a Mr. and Mrs. Gentlescot in the early 1800s.  The founding date wasn’t written down anywhere that Geraldinium had been able to find, but allusions to various events in the records suggested that it was probably somewhere between 1810 and 1816.  He had been a butcher, and she appeared to have been a monster hiding in human skin.  There were a number of letters written by her, in a crabbed hand that needed careful study, to various dignitaries and philanthropists of the time, which had been returned with responses to her pleas for money (and occasionally unwanted children).  The letters revealed that she viewed the children essentially as a cash-crop, a way of extorting money from people with either principles or emotions or both, and she would describe their piteous states in elaborate detail in an attempt to ensure a cheque by return of post.  Reading through these descriptions Geraldinium had been struck by the unneccessity of them: if this woman had spent more time (and money) looking after the children then they wouldn’t have been in this state yet.  When she described the four-year old being washed in cold water by a one-armed girl and a blind boy Geraldinium noted that two paragraphs earlier there had been mention of children far more able to look after ablutions.  The accident that had caused the girl to become one-armed sounded contrived to her as well.  There was, to her mind, a definite whiff of unpleasantness around the butcher’s wife.  The implicit threats in her letters, too, “Please send money as it seems unlikely that poor Clara will last the night without it; rest assured I shall keep you abreast of her progress…”.  There had never been any hope for these poor children.

She tapped a new part of the keystone sharply, and with a sudden crack a thin rectangular piece of stone broke free and fell to the floor, smashing.  Geraldinium cursed, and then paused.  The piece of stone had revealed a date incised into the keystone, and she realised that the rectangular piece must have been added later on to cover up the date.  This had to be the founding date that wasn’t written down anywhere, but… it said 1618.  For a moment her skin crawled and she wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake in choosing this stone.  Then she looked at the gargoyle, now appearing almost to be clawing its own way out of the stone and knew that this creature needed to be on display and not hidden any longer.

Sad sculpture

Geraldinium Holmes lifted her hammer and regarded the stone with a critical eye.  It had been a keystone for the entrance to an orphanage and so was about the size of a man’s torso and wedge shaped.  It had maintained the integrity of the arch of a huge doorway through which hundreds of children had passed.  According to the records – which were sporadic, and rather ashy from where they’d been rescued from fire at least twice – this had been a Victorian orphanage where the ideals had been rather higher than the reality.  There had been several owners; Geraldinium had been fascinated to learn that the second owner, a Mr. Walscotte, had viewed it as a profit-making venture and had actually been selling a number of the children to the poor-house and various unscrupulous factory owners when he felt that there was little hope of getting them adopted out.  Two owners later there was a possession by the church which had resulted in sixteen exorcisms being performed, three deaths, and the defrocking of a priest.  Geraldinium couldn’t begin to imagine what the priest could have done that was more hideous than performing exorcisms and killing children, but apparently he’d found something and had been expelled from the church.  When it was finally turned over to the newly formed Council for the area, the children in it were downtrodden, browbeaten, and generally unhealthy and desperately unhappy.  The Council hadn’t bothered trying to run it, they’d simply shipped the children out to other places and closed the building down.

Geraldinium had taken the keystone by the simple expedient of breaking into the grounds of the Orphanage with a hammer, chisel, large square of heavy tarpaulin and a frame and chiselling it out.  The arch had been holding still as she dragged the keystone down the stairs and back to the hole she’d made in the walls, and for all she knew it might still be holding now.  She rather hoped it wasn’t.  The place had felt unhappy to the core.

She laid the blade of the chisel at the top of the stone and tapped gently, experimentally, with the hammer.  The chisel rang, and the stone cracked a little, splintering as she’d hoped for.  It was solid, good quality stone.  It would definitely do for sculpture.

She worked quickly and crudely initially.  It had been obvious to her when she saw the stone that there was  gargoyle hiding in there, waiting to come out.  A gargoyle that had been hiding, always sitting above the door to the Orphanage, counting the children as they went in, and feeding on the misery that the Orphanage created, like some huge, edificial engine of torment.  A gargoyle with curling ram’s horns, with six legs and two arms that had fourteen fingers on each hand.  A gargoyle with hidden, secret eyes in folds of stone flesh, under arms and hiding between toes.  A vigilant gargoyle, in league with the forces that turned neglect in to malice, that turned unconcern into acts of violence in dark, basement rooms to preserve a crumbling façade of rightness.  A gargoyle that held together black webs of grey actions and unwashed thoughts, trapping evil in the interstices and letting it drip like poisonous venom from its fangs until it had polluted every soul that breathed its tainted air.

The hammer tapped and the chisel sang, and the percussion was the noise of hate pounding on the walls of its cell, demanding its freedom once again.

Four hours later, Geraldinium laid down the hammer and looked.  The gargoyle was roughed out now, but there was much more to do to bring it fully out of the stone, uncover its lines and creases, its folds and its misshapes.  She allowed herself a thin smile; this was bringing back too many memories for now.  She would allow herself a small break and then return to it.