Unholy Relics and Other Uncanny Tales

A NUN’S TRAGEDY

“Of course, it’s a very moot point, Alan,” I wound up my side of an argument my colleague and I had been having on church architecture, “but I think you ought to concede that the Chapter House of Bledburn Abbey, Rutland, is the finest example we have of Gothic foliage-sculpture in this country. You would be convinced, if only you’d come and have a look at it again. I have to visit Bledburn some time next week to see those ecclesiastical records, so why not come with me then?”

Thus it was, mainly as the result of this technical dispute, that my fellow research-worker Granville and I found ourselves in that study in contrasts, Bledburn Abbey; and I am pleased to put it on record that Alan finally admitted I was right. For my part, I had a very satisfactory day with the records, while Alan, poking about the dim corners of the vast Norman nave, collected quite a lot of data on one of his pet subjects; the individualism of the masons, their miscalculations, and so forth.

He even pointed out to me one spot where he would have proved to the most sceptical gathering of the Society of Antiquaries that the craftsman had broken his tool while carving. Had I not known my friend’s unerring accuracy so well, I should have been constrained to ask him facetiously if he could show me the spot on the parapet where the medieval plumber fell off his ladder while going back to fetch some forgotten tools for work on the lead roof!

It was one of those delightful late summer afternoons which are a compensation of the English climate, a symphony of every shade in green, when you feel it is good to be alive and cycling inconsequentially along the leaf-shaded lanes, far from the maddening stream of main-road motors, and dropping at will into the doze of antique villages. That was our own mode of progress on this particular day, for our car was suffering from some internal complaint or other, and our home is not so far from the Rutland border.

The day was the more delightful because there was as yet no hint of sad September and her dying leaves: it was August 28, to be precise, a date I shall always remember, if only by reason of the contrast between all this peace and beauty, and the grim tragedy of centuries ago with which we were so soon to be acquainted.

Well, after a tea which fully supported the substantial appearance of that fine old hostelry the Turk’s Head, opposite the Abbey, we decided to cycle back in the cool of the evening, it being then only five o’clock. For more reasons than one, every inch of our road will live in my memory, and I do not think Alan Granville will forget it, either. Even to this day—and the incident I am about to relate took place some years ago—I notice that whenever the subject of “sweet evening shadows” comes up, his eyes bear a flicker of horror, and he mutters something inaudible.

We set off at a leisurely pace, with frequent stoppages, occasioned sometimes by Alan’s desire to inspect a battered stone by the roadside, at others by my own predilection for disappearing into ditches and cornfields in quest of flints, so that when we had been on the road half an hour or so, our pockets resembled a miniature mason’s yard.

This long-formed habit of keeping our eyes open was soon to occasion a diversion from the highway, for all at once, I caught a glimpse through the trees of a solid-looking tower on the right; and in that glance, I saw sufficient to arouse at once a keen interest.

“Look there, Alan!” I exclaimed. “See anything peculiar about that church tower?”

“Yes,” he answered at once, dismounting. “If you hadn’t noticed it, I was about to draw your attention myself—it’s the only example I have ever seen with what looks like an exterior triforium gallery round the outside of the tower. What is the place, anyway? I’m not well up in the villages hereabouts.”

For the benefit of the layman (who is too often at the mercy of us specialists and gets left most inconsiderately in the air) I had better explain that a triforium is a gallery often found in large churches, particularly of Norman date, running in the thickness of the wall above the nave arches and round the transepts where such exist, but stopping at the west end of the building inside, and itself being pierced with arches. Bledburn itself has a fine example.

We got out the map on the grass, and found that we had fetched up at a place by the name of Merringby, indicated by a few scattered houses and honoured, against the church-symbol, with the legend “Priory (site of)” in that antique black-letter beloved of the Ordnance Survey to denote almost any relic.

Until that moment, we had never heard of the place, much less studied anything of its history; we did not even know to what order belonged the vanished monastery, of which the church seemed by the map to be the only vestige—kept as a parish church at the Dissolution, as so often happened.

So while I struggled to get the map back into its pristine folds Granville, who is a bit of a madman on place-names, unfeelingly exercised his speculations on the derivation of this, a new one to us.

A few yards further on to the right, there materialised a lane, actually possessing that rarity in this part of the Midlands, a signpost, which alleged that the lane led to Merringby.

“Hm! Decayed sort of village for a church that size,” remarked Alan as we followed this lane for half a mile or so past scattered farms, the church coming and going in increasing glimpses between the trees.

“Don’t forget,” I reminded him, “that the place, like Peterborough and other examples, probably just grew up around the priory; you can see at a glance this isn’t a mere village church.”

We were now approaching the building directly from the south, in a line with the tower, but instead of finding the usual path through a graveyard which we were seeking to indicate the entrance, we emerged rather suddenly upon a drive with a lodge at the corner, such as might have led up to the usual country manor-house; and close to the lodge gates, trimming the neat drive, was a benevolent-looking old rustic who might have stepped straight from the pages of Thomas Hardy.

“Good-day, surs,” said he civilly as we dismounted to inquire if we could get to the church that way “Aye, you can coom through ’ere, for this be the church-way. Naw, it b’aint locked, ye can get in alreet.”

With the authority of the ancient, then, we went forward, noting that the drive branched to lead to a large residence which could be seen immediately on our right through the avenue of fine elms we were skirting. A mournful building it looked, partly of brick and part stone, half-strangled in ivy and exuding an air of rank neglect and decay.

Our very cursory examination in passing showed the house to be built in the typical polite-looking style of the mid-Georgian country mansion.

Then the trees ended and we came rather abruptly on the tower that had so excited our curiosity from the main road.

“Oh, I’ve got it!” declared Alan, “we’ve been coming up from the south, and evidently this house on the south side was built in the eighteenth century on the exact site of at least one wing of the priory—probably the cloister-plan. Now for that tower of yours.”

Putting our cycles against the last of the elms, we stepped back to get a clearer view; and sure enough, there confronted us the most remarkable eccentricity of Gothic work I am ever likely to see, a feature of which even to-day I can find no mention in the most up-to-date textbooks on church architecture; for we beheld the external arches of a graceful triforium gallery running right round the tower.

“What a mess!” I exclaimed. “Either your idea of a decayed village is correct, or else a wave of heathenism has supervened here, for I’ve never seen a church so ill-kept, in spite of the army of clerics a stone’s throw away at Bledburn!”

Having finished our inspection of the west end, we had now arrived at the north door. It stood partly ajar, thanks to the difficulty of either shutting it or opening it further, for the paving was all heaving in mouldering heaps, like the turf in Gray’s Elegy, and could hardly be seen for rank weeds, even inside the threshold. The hinges of the door were rusted up, and the top was fast in the loving embrace of a thick root of accursed ivy, which was performing its usual damnable double function of “beautifying” and destroying the whole of the north wall.

“I—I don’t reckon to be imaginative, Gregs,” said Alan almost in a whisper, “but somehow the whole place seems to reek of decay and evil putrefaction. Ugh!—a toad! I never could stand those horrid things since one fell on me when I was exploring a Roman well in Germany.”

The toad blinked, opened its hideous mouth in a bored yawn, and waddled obligingly out of our way, as we crossed the threshold and nearly fell into the church down two steps covered with slimy moss. For a moment, my amazement that a fane in Christian England should be so neglected and desolate, was overshadowed by naturalistic instincts.

“Good Lord!” I said, “fancy finding Agaricus campestris on a church floor!”

“What is that, when it’s at home?” inquired Alan absently, his eyes glued on a fine piece of detail-carving opposite the door.

“It is the common or field mushroom,” I enlightened him. The church was certainly in use: as evidence there were the candlesticks and (very dirty) altar-cloths in the chancel, an open bible on the lectern, and the other usual fittings; but despite that, there was in this house of worship a peculiar atmosphere I have never felt in any other church. I cannot define it less vaguely than as a feeling of being uncomfortable, and the consciousness, equally vague, of a brooding, eerie presence.

I felt it strongly, no doubt, through being as a rule so thoroughly happy and at home in the churches of our forefathers. I am sure my companion experienced the same sensation, for, though he made no comment, his eyes met mine and he gave a short, nervous cough, which I know from long experience indicates that all is not serene in his mind.

For some ten minutes, the interior arcade of the triforium gallery engrossed our attention, but we failed to find the steps leading up to it, and as the light in the place was not too good, I suggested that we should get along and examine some of the other features while it was yet possible.

“Right you are, Gregs. Then I suggest we begin by investigating that little wooden door in the south wall of the far aisle,” Alan decided. He went on to hazard a guess that it ought, by its position, to lead into the mansion on the site of the priory, “though I doubt if we shall get anywhere,” he added glumly. “You rarely can in these places.”

To tell the truth, that door had been exercising my curiosity ever since I set eyes on it a few minutes before, and I had noticed my friend’s glance stray to it several times. Somehow, it seemed to beckon us.

Luckily (as we then thought) the door was unlocked; so, passing through it and ascending a circular stone newel staircase, we found ourselves in a long gallery running the whole length of the church south aisle up to the transept, and from the windows we could see that here the domestic buildings also turned south, parallel to the transept; then continued to form a complete quadrangle, and were thus exactly on the site of the ancient cloisters south of the church. Evidently, then, the little newel-stair up which we had gained access was the original night-stair of the cloisters at their western end, from the monastic dormitories.

The floor of the gallery showed a bare white central strip, indicating that a carpeting had been quite recently taken up from it, and Alan soon found further evidence that the house had been fairly recently inhabited. It was a damp-stained notice which he picked up from the floor, announcing that Messrs. Hammer and Hammer would sell by auction “That very desirable residence known as Merringby Priory” on Friday the 28th day of May, on a date over two years previous to our intrusion upon its desolation. Evidently nobody had found it sufficiently “desirable” to live there.

“Judging by the way the Georgian builders followed the original plan of the priory,” I reflected as I gazed on the pathetic mass of rank garden in the centre of the quadrangle, representing the ancient cloister garth, “we ought to find some traces of the medieval work.”

“Yes, if the ivy didn’t make it so damned dark,” growled Alan, with justice, for the ivy, now rattling in a rising evening breeze, nearly obscured the windows, letting only a dim religious light into the gallery, and beat an eerie tattoo on the panes. It was only when we got to the far south-west corner, in fact, that we could properly see what we were doing, thanks to the declining sun coming through a large and pleasant casement there.

Here we turned to the left, and looked along a similar passage, the one on the far south side and thus parallel to the church; but we were destined not to explore it, for in the angle, we found to our joy another ancient circular stone staircase, leading down into the gloom of the nether regions.

“Down we go!” said Alan gaily, “this at any rate is a relic of the vanished monastery or nunnery—whichever it was.”

So round and round, down and down, we went, in that dizzying and interminable way these stairs have, making facetious comments on the problem of getting any modern furniture into the upper storey.

It seemed to me that we had descended far more than was warranted by the view from the upper windows, but I must have been wrong, for it was on the ground floor that we did at last emerge, to find it liberally covered with decaying limestone, plaster, filth and cobwebs. “Ugh! This place reeks of fungus-mould, Gregs. What a damp hole to live in. I think I’ll get a pipe going now we’re clear of the church. Got any matches, old man? I used my last on the road.”

I had, in fact, two boxes—we are both heavy on matches—and lit up my own pipe at the same time after handing over one box to Alan.

An idea suddenly struck me—I suppose by the subconscious association between striking a match and hunting for something.

“I say, Alan, as these steps are preserved aboveground, which is must unusual, surely we should find some traces of the Norman crypt, or undercroft, below ground?”

“Yes,” he agreed readily, “and we will probably find its entrance in the erstwhile kitchen premises, as these country-gentry blighters usually desecrated cloister undercrofts by using them as wine-cellars. Otherwise, they would probably have razed the whole place to build their tasteless mansions.”

I made no comment, this being one of Granville’s bêtes-noires; he does forget, when he gets on this subject, that the monks and nuns of old were not to be despised for their wine-store, and that they too, had a habit of keeping it in the nice cool crypt! So I followed in silence along the ground-floor passage.

We had not far to seek. Through a half-open door we saw the pump-handle of a kitchen well, and a sink of moderately antique mould, which had probably figured in Messrs. Hammer & Hammer’s seductive sale catalogue as “every modern convenience.”

“This, my dear Watson,” said Alan with a facetiousness which I strongly suspected was forced to cover up a state of mental depression as acute as my own in this mournful decay of a noble home, “is the kitchen.”

It was, and on the far side of it an ample oak portal invited attention. It looked as though it had better acquaintance with the stone steps then the inane Georgian windows. We crossed over and tugged it open with difficulty, for the paralysis of age and neglect had affected the door like the rest of the premises.

Dimly we saw, leading straight down, a flight of stone steps up which there came, on the opening of the door, a most putrid draught to assail our nostrils; it was worse than the usual church mossiness; it was of the earth, earthy, the exhalation of the charnel-house.

Again came that nervous cough from Alan.

“Er—I don’t envy the butler, if this is where they did keep their wine,” he whispered.

Clank, clank, down those damp and slimy steps we went—a dozen, I am almost sure there were—and at the bottom we were confronted by another door, opening inwards this time.

This was the outsize of all; a truly monastic door, this, made, it seemed, of as many tons of English oak as the carpenters could get together in one piece, and well peppered with a cartload of square nails and iron scroll-work.

Over four feet wide, and some four inches thick, as we could see by the light percolating down from the kitchen, this noble portal needed all our strength jointly to push it open; which done, we were greeted with a fresh waft of that appalling atmosphere of decaying mortality. Its unpleasantness, however, was much mitigated by the view we got, dimly through the gloom, of a fine crypt-full of heavy Norman piers, apparently in a perfect state of preservation.

“This herculean entrance wants propping open,” said Alan stopping its homeward swing with his foot and casting an eye round for a suitable door-stopper.

“Ha! I can spot a bit of loose carving over there. Bring it across, there’s a good fellow.”

I tried to lift the mass he indicated, which at a cursory glance looked like part of a fallen pier-capital.

“Can’t,” I gasped, “it’ll take both of us.”

He came across to me, letting go the door, and between us we staggered with the heavy mass of derelict carving till we got it in position and managed to prop the door firmly open with it.

“That gives a little light anyway, but we still want matches to see that vaulting properly,” remarked Alan. “You gave me some, didn’t you?”

“Yes, on the top stairs—if you haven’t used them all on that foul pipe of yours,” I retorted.

He groped in his pocket for the box, cut his fingers on some of the flint-chippings with which he was loaded, and cursed mildly.

Finding the box, he strolled off to about the centre of the crypt, the end of which could be dimly seen about forty feet away from where I stood. Alan struck a match which, after giving fitful illumination to reeking, slimy walls, went out.

“Confound this draught,” he growled. Another match was sacrificed, but went the same way. Meantime I too had struck one, but that also expired, leaving us in the semi-darkness.

“I say, old man,” called Alan, his voice strangely sepulchral in the dank silence down here under the earth, “I don’t know what you think, but it’s my belief there are some bad gases down here, because a light would never—what the devil’s that?” he broke off sharply.

I heard a slight rattle, as of a matchbox being dropped on the floor, and at that moment my own box was sent flying by a vicious blow I got across the wrist.

“Bats!” I tried to tell myself, but a cold numbness ran down my arm—and no bat gives one a punch like a prize-fighter.

“B-b-bats!!” I screamed in a frenzy.

No sooner was the word out, than there came from behind me a deep rumbling.

The great door crashed thunderously into place with a violent bang.

I dared not turn round. Some awful magnetism kept me rooted as I stood, with my eyes glued to the far wall.

I could see nothing; but I could feel a Thing like a loathsome octopus-tentacle round my neck holding me there, forcing me to gaze on what I had no wish to see.

I felt it coming: a flabby mass of warm, stinking flesh, covered with wet hairs, slithered across my face.

By a supreme effort of will, I managed to move one foot. I knew that if I did not, I should die. And as I moved it there came a sickening squelch beneath it, with a mad, gibbering, teetering sound like some half-human creature being trodden upon. A fetid odour wrapped round my mouth.

Then:

“Good God! Gregory? Where are you? Look!”

Alan was speaking in a hoarse whisper that sounded like a hollow voice from the tomb and far off—though I learnt afterwards that the poor fellow was lying only two feet from me and equally unable to move. He had felt the crawling Thing squelch over him, then fainted.

I looked. I had to do so. I stared before me in the pitch-blackness. For the life of me, I could neither shut my eyes nor turn them away.

Again, heralded by the fetid odour, came that near sense of something foul and menacing.

In the deadly stillness there came also a low rustling sound that was certainly not the scurry of rats or the stirring wings of a bat.

The rustling, as of curtains moved by a fitful breeze, grew more intense, and then came a point of bluish luminosity at the far end of the crypt.

The light grew and grew, and it was this that had attracted Alan’s attention just as he was coming to his senses again. It flickered like a Will o’ the Wisp in marsh-land, became a nebulous pillar of smoky blue phosphorescence, and finally, by gradual stages that added to the horror of the thing, assumed a distorted human shape.

Meantime a low moaning issued from the region of the weird illumination.

Wildly through my head passed a review of jumbled theories I had read, of auras, evil elementals, emanations. Clearer and clearer became the unknown travesty of a human form at the end of the crypt.

“If that comes any nearer it’ll kill me!”, Alan shrieked, his voice penetrating the drumming in my ears. “God! It’s coming out of the wall! Stop it! Keep it off!”

I vaguely remember hearing him fall back with a thud and a choking cry, and again the terrible silence supervened.

The Thing in the wall, however, did not move. Now distinct and framed against the stonework, which it illuminated for some feet around, I could see it now as the form of a nun, which seemed to hear a heavy weight round which its left arm was crooked.

Then a sound as of a gentle sigh that spoke volumes of misery floated round the echoing pillars, and abruptly the form vanished.

It happened so suddenly that I think the shock and reaction gave me the use of my limbs again. I let out one wild yell that must have been heard in the church itself if there were anyone there. Turning round at last, I wrenched open the great door by summoning every ounce of strength I had left, and fled frantically up the steps to collapse on the floor of the kitchen, crashing my head against the dusty sink.

I suppose not more than five minutes really elapsed before I came round, to pull myself together and recall with horror that I had left Alan down there.

Frankly I confess to my cowardice. Back I went, in fear and trembling, scarcely daring to hope that he was still alive, and groped round for him, for I simply could not bring myself to look for my matchbox. The memory of that unseen hand and the foul tentacle was still too near.

Poor Alan was still unconscious when I nearly fell over his body beside a pillar. I picked him up and carried him up the steps, and was thankful to see him soon come round when his head rested against the cool wall.

He had fallen on his back in the crypt, but across his face was a bar of thick green slime like the track of a monstrous snail.

Hastily I rubbed it off with my handkerchief, lest it should revive the memory of the horror for him—and I quickly threw away the cambric, for it reeked of putrescent flesh.

I had just got his face clean when he opened his eyes and spoke dazedly.

“What happened? Matches gone . . . knocked out of my hand . . . blue thing came for me.”

“You’re all right, old fellow,” I assured him with as steady a voice as I could manage, “you only tripped and fell over something.”

While he was recovering his senses, I descended the steps once more, for the last time. Even to this day I dare not go again into that crypt; and looking back, I wonder how I then forced myself to make that second journey.

I went, however, with a purpose: to fasten the great oak door and keep within whatever things of the tomb it guards, and to see how its ponderous mass could possibly have become shut, seeing that it took two of us to stagger across with the broken carving we used to prop it open.

Fearfully I mustered all my shaken courage to peep inside once again; and there I saw the carved chunk of stone, just visible in the rays down the steps, but at least six feet away from where we had placed it. Certain it is that no human agency could have moved it there, and slammed the portal with such malevolent will.

Quietly I refastened that gateway of secrets, and returned to find Alan now sitting up, but still somewhat dazed. I took his arm, and managed somehow to climb with him the winding stair and regain the one that led down into the church from the house-gallery.

That journey of a few dozen yards was the longest I ever remember. It was almost dark when at last we emerged into the church, and we hurried across its weed-ravaged floor without daring to look at anything save the blessed sky outside.

I tried, but for the life of me I could not make the sign of the cross in that church. Why? They say the masons of the Middle Ages made those hideous gargoyles we see on every church to keep away evil spirits. Here, however, a sympathetic magic had taken the reins, and the spirit of the gargoyles seemed to brood, enjoying for once a rare and hard-earned triumph over the spells of the Church.

Once outside, there came the feeling of safety and freedom once more, and we sank on the grass with our backs to the tower to recuperate. After a few minutes’ silence, Alan said he felt better now, and suggested we make a move, as the wind was getting a little chilly.

Still shaking about the legs, we reached our cycles, but just then we could not muster strength to ride them down the drive. Pushing the machines, we must have looked a sorry couple, for the old gardener, who was just packing up his tools for the night as we reached the lodge gate, looked curiously at us and explained:

“Why, surs, ’ee do look queer! Be youm took bad?”

Briefly and, I fear, jerkily, I outlined the ghastly nightmare we had just experienced. The effect on the old rustic was surprising. He dropped his fork and hoe, and turned the colour of putty under his healthy tan.

“God ha’ mercy on us. Ye’ve seen the Nun!”, he muttered.

“What nun?”, I gasped.

“Whoi, dawn’t ee know? That be one of the convent plaaces, where the nuns lived afore Old Harry’s toime, as Oi’ve ’eerd Parson say. There weren’t no men among ’em—which bain’t nacheral—an’ one o’ they nuns wur walled-up aloive in that theer very crypt for ’aving of a child, in thirteen ‘undred an thirty fower. They put in the mite with ’er, an’ ’twas on an August twenty-eight, which be this very daay as Oi do declare! ’Tis all writ in the records, an’ they do saay the Nun appears on this daay every year—though Oi’ve never seen ’er meself.”

“Oi never did ’old wi they nunnery plaaces, Sur,” he added reflectively, touching his cap in farewell and hobbling away down the drive.