The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral Read online

  ROBERT WESTALL

  The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral

  Two Stories of the Supernatural

  with a new introduction by

  ORRIN GREY

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Dedication: For my good friend Jessica Yates

  The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral by Robert Westall

  Originally published in Great Britain by Viking in 1991

  First U.S. edition published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1993

  First Valancourt Books edition 2016

  Copyright © Robert Westall, 1991

  Introduction copyright © Orrin Grey, 2015

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Cover by M. S. Corley

  INTRODUCTION

  Though he is perhaps best known as a writer of books for children and young adults, Robert Westall (1929-1993) is also, quite simply, one of my favorite authors of ghostly tales. In his substantial body of spectral stories, Westall follows in the footsteps laid down by the great M. R. James, but adds his own unique and indelible touch.

  Like James, Westall’s supernatural tales are concerned heavily with a past that is not past but very much present, making itself felt perhaps even more keenly now than when it was happening. And like James, Westall’s ghosts are rarely the ethereal but ultimately human spectres with which we typically associate the term. Rather they are the remains of old angers and hatreds and lusts and hungers, often given an altogether too tangible form.

  In my previous introduction to Antique Dust – the only one of Westall’s more than 40 credited books of fiction ever to be marketed to adults – I wrote about how it was his fascination with the ‘infinite strangeness of the supernatural’ that first drew me to Robert Westall, and nowhere is that fascination more abundant than in the novella ‘The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral’, which might just be my favorite of Westall’s many ghostly tales.

  I’ll refrain from giving away too much of the story, since you’ll have the pleasure of reading it for yourself as soon as I get out of the way, but it’s a perfect place to enter into Westall’s spectral oeuvre, or a crowning touch if you’re already a fan. In the tale of a steeplejack who comes to repair one sinister tower of the titular cathedral, Westall builds a slow and creeping dread which culminates in a revelation that shows the strength of his grip not only on atmosphere, but also on gruesome detail.

  Throughout his body of work, Westall returns again and again to locations and objects that are the focuses of dark emotions, and nowhere does he turn his hand more masterfully toward freighting the literally inert with malice than in ‘Muncaster Cathedral’. While it’s easy enough to spin a scary story about a killer doll or a statue that comes to life, it takes a surer hand to invest a truly inanimate object with menace. And yet that’s exactly what Westall does here, in layers that skilfully mimic the layers of masonry – and of cathedral history – that come into play in the story.

  One place where Westall’s ghostly stories distinguish themselves from Jamesian tradition is in the voices of their protagonists. Where James’ stories are almost always about antiquarians, there is almost always a certain working-class quality among the protagonists of Robert Westall’s tales. These are men who served at one time in the Royal Air Force, or who work in jobs that, in one way or another, get their hands dirty. Even at his most antiquarian, Westall’s tales are often narrated by antique dealers who buy and sell, who repair and refurbish. Not scholars who read about the past, but men who handle its detritus.

  Joe Clarke, the steeplejack narrator of ‘Muncaster Cathe­dral’, is a fine example of these blue collar narrators, and his working-class voice is as much a part of the atmosphere of the story as the cathedral or its history. Though he has taken a job repairing the cathedral, to him it is just a job. He has a working man’s distrust for organized religion, albeit one that becomes substantially more complicated by the story’s­ end. It is this distrust which leads him to opine, ‘When I look at our Kevin laughing, or at our cat playing with its tail, I wonder if there is a God, because they’re both grand things, and somebody must have made them. On the other hand, I read all the terrible things in the papers and I think that if there is a God, he must have lost interest and pushed off to mend some different universe.’

  This same line of existential reasoning both undercuts and strengthens the final, grisly discovery of the secret of the tower, with an observation about the origins of cathedrals that at first seems to drain the moment of some of its supernatural potency, but then instead grants it a resonance that spreads far beyond this one instance of ancient malice.

  Along with ‘The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral’, the book you hold in your hands also contains another tale, ‘Brangwyn Gardens’. Though they were bundled together like this in the UK on their initial publication in 1991, ‘Brangwyn Gardens’ has never before been published in the United States. It would be tempting to say that the story was considered ‘too shocking’ for American audiences, but in fact ‘Brangwyn Gardens’ is by far the less shocking of these two tales, trading in the inescapable dread and grisly history of ‘Muncaster Cathedral’ for a melancholy tale of what appears to be a haunting from the time of the Blitz.

  While not as chilling as ‘Muncaster Cathedral’, ‘Brangwyn Gardens’ aptly showcases Westall’s gift for transforming the past into a living thing, with one heavy hand always upon the shoulder of the present. Together, the two stories present a tour de force of Westall at his ghostly best. So pull up a comfortable chair, get a cat on your lap, and turn down the lights; you’re in for an uneasy night.

  Orrin Grey

  October 2015

  Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. He shares Westall’s fascination with the ‘infinite strangeness of the supernatural’, and is the author of two collections of strange stories, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, recently published by Word Horde. Visit him online at orringrey.com.

  THE STONES OF MUNCASTER CATHEDRAL

  I never had any fear of heights.

  I climbed my first factory chimney when I was four years old. My granda took me up. We were out for a ride, and we came to this site where my dad was working, and my granda said did I want to climb up to him, so I went. Granda was right behind me, wi’ an arm on the ladder each side o’ me, but he needn’t ha’ bothered. To me it was just a grand game. When I got to my dad up top, I felt like a bird, like a king.

  We took my own lad, Kevin, up top, when he was four. He thought nowt to it either. None of our family ever has. Steeplejacks for five generations; Josiah Clarke and Sons.

  I can still ladder-up a chimney in three hours, including hammering in our own wedges to hold the ladders. Over the years you can tell a wedge is going to hold, by the ring­ing of the brick as you drive the wedge in. Then we check the chimney top for cracks, the iron bands for rust, the lightning conductor for corrosion. Cost you two hundred quid. I’ll do you a cooling tower, a town hall . . .

  But no more cathedrals. Not after Muncaster.

  Mind you, I was chuffed when we first got Muncaster. A cathedral job is to a steeplejack what a canon’s stall is to a vicar
. I’m not a religious man, but it’s the status, you see.

  I mind the day I first heard about the Muncaster job. I’d just felled a chimney at the old brickworks. There’s nowt to felling a chimney – it’s a day’s work, and it’ll cost you four hundred and a hell of a lot for insurance. But I can fell a hundred-foot chimney into a twenty-two-foot gap, no sweat. The hardest part is agreeing with the chimney’s owner exactly where he wants it to fall. Then you get your mate to stand there, and line you up, while you draw your chalk marks on the chimney base. Then you cut two holes in the base – the pneumatic drill cuts the old brick like cheese – and leave a brick pillar in between to hold the chimney up.

  Then you drill the pillar to take the gelignite, and tamp it in wi’ balls of clay. That’s the weird thing, the jelly kicks against the hardness of the stack, not the softness of the clay. You mask the place wi’ old railway sleepers against the odd flying brick, wire up the charge . . . and bingo. There isn’t much of a bang.

  Funny, a standing chimney’s like a man, upright and hard and rigid. But a falling chimney lies down like a woman, supple as a whip. Just gives a little hop off her base, then starts to fall, segmenting as she comes, then down wi’ a thud and a smoke and there’s no more harm in her. But if she should hit some overhead wires on the way down, say, it’d be enough to make her change direction and leap at you like a tiger. It’s easy enough to forget overhead wires, if you’re not careful.

  Anyway, that day me and my mate Billy had laid the stack between a working brick factory and a transformer that had cost the electric board a cool hundred thousand, and done it sweet as a nut, not a broken window.

  Then my wife phoned the brickworks with the news about Muncaster. I couldn’t believe my ears.

  ‘What about Barrass Brothers?’ I yelped. ‘They always do the cathedral.’

  ‘Busy at Gloucester all summer. Big job,’ she says.

  ‘What about Munday and Lewis?’ I couldn’t believe my luck. Cathedrals were for the big boys.

  ‘They say Jack Munday’s hurt his back on the town hall job.’

  I believed her; I believed Jack Munday and the Barrass Brothers, the lying sods. I never dreamt they might know something I didn’t.

  ‘What’s the job?’

  ‘South-west tower. Rotten stone and the weathercock needs seeing to.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ We do gilding an’ brazing, as well as masonry. Jacks of all trades, steeplejacks. And masters of them, too.

  The next Monday morning, I went round to the cathedral masons’ yard, to see Taffy Evans, the foreman. Got a lot in common, steeplejacks and masons. Understand the stone, and the tools. But masons like to keep their feet on something solid. When it comes to lowering yourself down from the top of a steeple in a rope-cradle, masons aren’t that interested. You can make a living as a mason, if you’ve got no head for heights at all.

  ‘Got the key to the north-west tower, Taff?’

  ‘South-west you want, boy. Nothing wrong with the north-west.’

  ‘Just want to go and look,’ I said, showing him the binoculars in my bag. ‘There’s things you can see from a distance you don’t always spot close-to.’

  He gave me some kind of old-fashioned look, though I couldn’t make out what sort, cos he was wearing a face-mask against the stone-dust. I swear he was going to say something to me; but at that moment one of his apprentices started using the stone-saw, and it was impossible for him to say anything at all. I just took the key, and got away from the devil’s racket of the stone-carving shop, and went off up the narrow dark winding stairs of the north-west tower. It was quiet and soothing; just the distant noise of the cathedral organist practising a voluntary. There was never anything wrong with the north-west tower.

  Through the binoculars, which brought everything up closer than life, there didn’t seem a lot wrong with the south-west tower either. Some rotten blocks in the stone steeple that would need cutting out and replacing. And the gilding on the weathercock was dull and thin, where the weather had been at it. And the cock turned poorly and stiffly on its vane. Much longer, and it would be seized up solid. Nothing we couldn’t handle.

  I was just lowering the binoculars when a stone face swam up, peering back at me, and something made me focus again.

  There were a cluster of gargoyles on both the west towers, where the towers ended, and the stone steeples began. Funny things gargoyles; carved in the shape of devils and monkeys and men with toothache. The men who carved them centuries ago made them look as evil as they could, evil enough to frighten real devils away. And sometimes the wear and tear of wind and rain has made them look more evil today than when they were carved. They never worried me; just honest stone and the work of men’s hands, and the work of wind and frost and rain.

  But this one; it really looked as if it was watching me. I spent ten minutes with the binoculars watching it back. Then I told myself it was just stone, and the work of men’s hands and the wind and the frost, and not to be so bloody stupid.

  Anyway, that’s what I told myself at the time.

  There were just two of us on the job, me and Billy Simpson. Billy was my special mate – I didn’t feel so sure of my other fellers. But Billy fixed my sling, and I fixed his, and we trusted each other. A new chap, you never trust him for about two years – till you know by heart what he’s going to do next. Death isn’t in the stone, however treacherous, or the height; death’s inside the head of some bloke whose mind’s not on his job. Stone is just stone . . .

  Except, well, the moment we got on to the spiral stair of the south-west tower, I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel the same as the north-west tower. The stair seemed narrower, as we lugged the ropes and pulley up; the lancet windows seemed to let in less light. The stone seemed darker, with a bloom of damp on it.

  Bloody hell, I told myself, snap out of it. These two towers is exactly the same, identical twins. It’s the Froggies who build their two west towers different. Snap out of it, Joe Clarke, admit you had one too many lagers watching the telly last night. Don’t go on like a wet girl . . .

  And yet I couldn’t seem to focus my eyes properly; the darkness seemed to lift off the surface of the stone and float in the air like smoke, so that I shook my head to clear it.

  I didn’t like it. Steeplejacking and emotions just don’t go together. I employ steady fellers who are happily married with nice kids. Up there, a feller with another woman, or a debt, or maintenance payments on his mind, is a killer.

  We got the hoist rigged up over the parapet, and waited for Tommy Small the apprentice to turn up with the main gear in the pick-up. It was a lovely morning, blue from horizon to horizon, but with a nice little breeze, not too hot. We leaned on the parapet and had a smoke and watched the town. Towns look a lot different from up top; you see a lot more. You see a lot that people don’t expect you to see; you can give them some surprises. Like the time we were doing St Stephen’s at Wallchurch, which is right next to the church school. And this young teacher was marching the kids in from the playground, class by class. Only he picked on this little lad, he was about eight, just our Kevin’s age. Kept him behind when the rest had marched in, and went on at him till he cried. Then he clouted him for crying.

  Me and Billy went down and had a few words wi’ the headmaster, an’ he had the young teacher in, and faced him with it. He was fair amazed, hadn’t even realized we’d been up there watching him; though all the kids knew we were there. He got the sack soon after, I’m glad to say.

  But height can play funny tricks. When we were doing the clock tower at Middleham, there was this bird sitting reading a book in the town square. Billy reckoned she was a right stunner; I reckoned not. We argued so much, we went all the way down to see. She was about sixty-five, though Billy said I couldn’t prove it cos I didn’t actually ask her. Well, you couldn’t, could you? But I had the laugh on him, cos I invited him to chat her up, and you’ve never seen anyone get back to scaffolding so quick.

  That m
orning, there was already a little half-circle of people watching us. Sometimes, when you’re doing something spectacular, the circle gets really thick; people with cameras and binoculars even. Other times, only a few. But there’s always somebody there. Height seems to fascinate people. A surprising number want to come right up to the top with you, just for the kicks. Architects, clergy, pretty girls. You can’t take the pretty girls, because of the insurance, more’s the pity.

  But once they’re up there, they all want to hold on to something with one hand. They would never make steeple­jacks. Steeplejacks have to stand up there and let go wi’ both hands. You can’t do your work holding on wi’ one all the time.

  Anyway, we’re standing there smoking, when Billy catches sight o’ that gargoyle.

  ‘Just look at that,’ he says. I thought it a bit odd it should affect him that way as well. I mean, gargoyles are no more to us than a water tap is to you.

  ‘Ugly sod, isn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘It’s not that. Look at that flippin’ stone.’

  I turned to look with him. ‘Good as the day it was carved,’ I said. ‘And five hundred years old, if it’s a day.’ You can tell: no Victorian or modern mason could carve a real lively gargoyle, they always look wooden somehow. I suppose you can only carve a decent gargoyle if you believe in real devils, and we don’t now.

  ‘Not the gargoyle, the stone around it. It’s as rotten as mouldy cheese.’

  The life of stone varies, you see. It doesn’t last for ever just because it’s stone. If it’s the wrong stone, or wrongly laid, it can be up the spout in twenty years.

  We got two kinds of sandstone round here, Bunter and Keuper. The old masons loved the rose-red Bunter, cos it carved so easily an’ well. Trouble is, over the years, it dissolves like sugar-cubes. Pity the parish church council whose church is made of Bunter: their hands is never out of their pockets.