Broken Voices

12

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.’

I couldn’t see what he was doing because his body was in the way. ‘Rabbit! For God’s sake, come back! You must be near that trapdoor if you’re not on it already.’

I had a sickening vision of the trapdoor breaking free, Faraday falling, just like Goldsworthy, to the floor of the tower below.

At that moment, the lantern went out.