PRATTLING STONES

Published 'The Weirdmonger's Tales' 1994

            The voice followed me everywhere, even into those open squares of the city where ornamental fountains played water sculptures from misshapen stone.  My real name was Will Rowsley, Companion of Honour and, with my nom de plume, quite a famous writer.  I had gone to the city, notepad in hand, to commence preparations for my new book.  I always had a hankering to give a personal view of the multitudinous churches that, for whatever reason, cluttered the city centre.  Far from being an ignoramus on such subjects, I had already turned out a pretty glossy article for the Foghorn supplement about the heavily-gargoyled churches of the green belt where I actually lived: mentioned in dispatches, too, and as far as the eye of the Architect-General, according to one of the best grapevines.

            I had always wanted to be a Vicar, one with a flock that looked up at me with submissive eyes.  I could teach them a thing or two about the milk of human kindness.  I pictured each church I was to visit in the city as just one more potential soapbox for myself.  I would examine the intricate carving of the pulpits with a particular joy, admiring the heavy-covered bible-like volume lying upon the mighty span of a golden eagle or upon the outstretched wings of an angel.  The angels usually sported inscrutable faces worked from a marble so mottled it looked as if it (or he or she) had virulent skin trouble.

            I had also come to the city to see if the gargoyles were still breeding towards the tops of the spires or whether they had become tired of having their gullets misused as brooding stormswills.  I arrived in the city - via a recent extension of the underground railway system - chuckling to myself.  I imagined the grotesquerie of the outside walls migrating towards the dark pew-areas, only to masquerade as new pulpits.  But who would have let them in?  Church doors were bolted shut, in any event, particularly in the city.

            I began to wish that I had brought a companion, someone whom I could employ as a soundboard for my crackpot theories - my own personal stormswill, as it were.  Of course, Will Rowsley was my real name, not one by which I was regularly known and loved by the literary world.  There was safety in numbers or, rather, in numbers of names.  I had always tried to cover my tracks, wrapping myself in layers of pseudonyms and alter egos, alibis and ghost writers.  I did not want my "flocks" to see into my eyes; all I wanted was a two-way mirror so that I could merely fathom theirs.

            The blank page was my companion, really, my echo-board and confessional.  So, with notepad and sharpened pencil, I strode in from the outskirts of the city where the current underground complex ended - and began an itinerary that I had managed to formulate from ancient texts which were still held in the countryside.  The city squares seemed to run into each other, like fans of playing-cards, so it was difficult to keep cognisance of their names.  No sooner was I in Mitcham Square with its spluttering angel-fish centrepiece, than I stumbled upon the chequered flags of Wishtree Circus, where multi-baroque statues of ancient moneyed man clambered upon each other to reach the pinnacle of competitive water-letting that even any self-respecting urchin had better accomplished in the old days against the corroded playground walls.  It was all very confusing for me and for my spiralled blank pages.

            I somehow noticed the footpad silently following me.  For the sake of consistency, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, granting him a role to play as I reached the inner sanctum of the church squares.  I had ignored the voice for some time, putting it down to false schoes, to misjudged angles, even to my own thoughts staying behind to haunt me.  I often talked to myself, I was told by my friends at home, until I realised I had no friends at all, only readers.

            Then I knew it was the voice of a separate entity, since it said words that I could never have invented in a million years.  Obscure, absurd things, matters that only concerned madness.  So, just before I was to enter the first dark church at the core of the city, I turned round to catch him unawares.  But there was nothing there, only yet another gurgling statue with grey, unseeing eyes.  The red light of sunset made the liquid bubbling from its loins seem like blood.

            The city churches, once breached, did indeed interconnect.  I must have guessed it from the start, even though the ancient reading-room texts had indicated otherwise.  In those pages, the city churches had been depicted singly; like those healthy countryside parish ones which have lofty spires and sun-filled graveyards sown with stone tongues sloping towards meadowy valleys.  But here in the city, they were actually squatter, running into each other as a factory complex would, with smokestacks masquerading as steeples.  Even the odd gargoyle or two were disguised as a warehouse gantry or cranesman's cockpit.

            Before forcing my way into the first gloom-arched doorway, I left my notepad outside on the nearest thing to a gravestone.  With all the purple-draped confessionals inside, my mouth would surely be welcome, flower-pressed to the intricately carved sound-holed partitions (or, maybe, even my own ear as a mock listening-device belonging to a stick-puppet priest).  I would have no need of paper - and, at the optimum, somebody else with the same name as me could find a use for my notepad in the outside world, if I did not eventually make my exit.  Meanwhile, I hoped to find a pulpit inside, big enough to bear the unwritten weight of my arguments and a flock with upturned faces ever eager for my spouting.

            Will Rosely rote all the above werds with his own pensil.