Elsie pointed her camera lens across the yard. "What are those?"
She took pictures of a row of earthy mounds surrounded by rings of stones, arranged from the chapel to the edge of the yard.
Burns said, "Archaeologists in the 1910s unearthed a few. They're graves."
"They're so small. Were children buried here?"
"No. Adult women were buried in sitting positions. It was some find, actually -- fine examples of Bronze Age bog bodies."
"Right ... Bog bodies?"
"This used to be bog land. Acidic water in soil can preserve tissues and internal organs."
"You're not going to start digging up mummies, are you?"
"I'm not an archaeologist. The closest I'll get to digging earth is dust on book covers. And properties in the soil preserve bog bodies, they're not intentionally embalmed. Russian and German soldiers who died in Polish bog lands during the First World War were found preserved, too."
"No mummy's curse, then?"
"Well ... they aren't mummies, but you were almost right when you asked if children were buried here. The excavated bodies were almost mums."
"They were buried pregnant? That's horrible. Why would anyone do that?"
"It’s very unusual. Sacrifices weren't always about appeasing gods. Sometimes, offering another soul proved a person's commitment, or their worth." Elsie still looked offended. Burns added, "That's history for you. A lot of it isn't very pleasant."
Grotesques.
At first, the interior of the chapel disappointed Burns. It was an undecorated space glummer and less impressive than the lobby of their hotel. It could have been any place of worship, with a long, low stone altar at the back. If it ever had pews, they were gone. Nothing larger than a rat moved when Burns crossed the threshold, though he couldn't tell if the shadows at the corners were rodents -- forms darted into the murk, stitched into the brickwork.
Considering the size of the building, it had more alcoves than he expected. In a typical church, various sacred figures would occupy those bays, but he found grotesques on a much grander scale than the diminutive gazers above the neighbourhoods of Rodenje. The sculpture of a woman waited in one alcove, her attractiveness diminished by the hardness and precision of the rock. She looked at Burns. The rock below her neck was loose and wavy, a long frock covering her body. He instantly thought of her as a lady. She struck him as regal; she might be the Lady he'd hoped to find. He wondered if she could fit somehow into the region's Christian faith, despite her almost fierce womanhood.
After hesitating over her beauty, Burns realised there was more to her than physicality and wildness -- or rather, the almost mundane sculpture helped disguise what was wrong with her. His following impression, still vague, was that she was of mixed race. One feature subtly infringed another, as if bordering on restlessness. Her eyes were round, but their edges hinted at different contours. Her long and thin lips were flat and determined -- yet Burns was sure they smiled just a little, either to welcome, or with scorn. She stood on carved, exposed tree roots. One finger on her right hand, Burns saw, had too many joints.
The structure underneath her features -- the suggested bones, the muscles -- didn't conform to the features of the region's people. She came, Burns thought with a flare of insight, from older ideas.
-- she's pre-Christian, he thought; she's from the same period as the artificial island.
Something alien to him burst in his chest and held him. It was an emotion, but it was also older, instinctive; it took him a moment to realise it was reverence. When he heard the mechanical scratch of Elsie's camera snatch another photograph, and then another, he tensed, as if the disturbance and Elsie's disregard combined to create a profane act.
Then his senses returned. He registered the lady's ancient yet youthful, sensual yet threatening features as vaguely disturbing; she was the subtlest grotesque he'd seen.
He hadn't felt reverence, he told himself. He'd felt dawning astonishment toward this remarkable sculpture, he'd felt the thrill of discovery. If he'd looked closely from the start, he would have noticed the odd bulges under the frock, the misshapen hips, the odd curl of one thigh that had less in common with a natural pose and more in common with the intertwined roots beneath her. Maybe, Burns thought, the roots were her limbs.
He was about to tell Elsie to get several shots of the statue, but the request petered from his lips when he saw he was still alone. He heard her snapping a few more pictures -- of what? The valley? The chapel's plain exterior? The wild field? The important details were in here ... He reminded himself the sculptures were going nowhere, and checked the next alcove -- another empty space.
A monstrous form of damaged and soured flesh cozied into the corner beside the stone altar. It took Burns longer than usual to trace its complicated form, the claws, the raging eyes, how the lips folded back from massive teeth in a permanent grimace. Its bloated stomach drooped over the floor like a fleshy egg; it had three hands, two of which it raised above its misshapen head to pull indefinable organs from a rift above its hideously glaring eyes (thick worming tubes kept the organs connected to the inside of the skull). The lips were partly shredded by its teeth. Its third hand hung near -- tentacles, or legs? -- tubular appendages folded underneath the bloated stomach, where it gripped the carcass of another malformed creature, a human infant's body with withered, spidery limbs. This massive grotesque was a creature of hunger and agony.
Sounds from behind him -- claws ticking over aged rock, the soft shifting whisper of a frock across misshaped limbs -- had his heart constrict to something hard as stone, a painful foreign thing in his chest, before Elsie stepped beside him.
She regarded the grotesque. "It's like a totem pole, isn't it?"
She had seen right away what Burns' seized senses were only now beginning to absorb, the various layers and seemingly incompatible forms that created the chapel's fiercest grotesque.
"That it does," Burns said, aware of how ineffective his voice sounded.
Alien reverence filled him again, a confusing blend of instinct and emotion. It frightened him; it crawled like a fever and ignored the confines of his body; he felt it drift in the air around him.
If he was feeling emotion, he tried to convince himself, it was excitement for the book; it was wonder at the obvious skill inherent in the shaped rock -- and above these, it was unadorned relief.
The overexcitement he'd confused for reverence thankfully dissipated. He wondered at the surface of the final grotesque -- how fortunate for the sculptor to find rock with the porous appearance of skin. Moss clung in clumps like hard bristles, and lined the borders of its features. The skill of the carving worried him. It was too developed, too realistic despite the flagrant fiction of the subject, to have survived from an ancient culture, and too elaborate and savage to have come from Christian medievalism.
Elsie asked, "Is it? A totem pole?"
It wasn't so much a totemic statue, Burns thought, as it was a remarkable depiction of a god whose form was unstable, a being without a single identity. This was the mythical form he'd feared existed as mythological and folkloric splinters so decayed by history that its origins were unprovable.
"This isn't just a statue," he thought aloud. "People worshipped it."
"How can you tell?"
"You don't get a sense of it?"
Elsie raised a brow. "A sense? That doesn't sound like you, Burns. Where's the sources, the data, all that sexy academic stuff?"
"A sense of the building, what it used to stand for," he said to cover his embarrassment.
"Uh-huh. So, what other names did your Miss Proto go by?"
"I've connected her with over three dozen other gods and devils, as well as characters in folk stories."
"A god and a devil?"
"Christians often reinterpreted pagan deities as devils."
Elsie was quiet for a few moments, before she said, "Look at this."
Elsie pointed to the floor, where an erratic litter of dry
dirt and dying blades of grass lay like rejected seeds. "Do you think someone brought this old thing in from outside? It doesn't even look like it belongs in here. Just look at the rest of those statues."
"Now who's the sleuth?"
She smiled, pleased, and said, "None of these are gargoyles, though."
"Gargoyles -- and grotesques -- were just devices, utilities or decorations. The statues here are very different beasts."
Elsie leant closer to the statue. "What is something like this doing in a chapel?" She leant so near the statue that Burns thought she meant to touch it. She grimaced at the infant-spider. "Hey, Burns, is there something I should know about your mysterious past? This baby is the head of you!"
"It is not," he said. He ignored the infant and squinted at a crown carved around the grotesque's head. He couldn't make sense of it, and blamed his viewing angle. He took account of the wall on either side, where dusty and aged wax thickened on narrow outcrops in the brickwork.
He raised a hand to test the grotesque's balance, and set the tip of a shoe to an outcrop.
Elsie asked, "You're not going to climb that thing?"
"I'm going to give it a go."
"Burns! What if you topple and break it? "
She had a point, but Burns wanted to see that crown, or whatever it was. Besides, the grotesque seemed sturdy.
He said, "I'll be careful."
The wax over the rock was old enough to crumble, but the stone persisted against a few cautious tests of his weight. He reached upward to the highest candle ledge, near the grotesque's temple. With the other hand, he grabbed the gargoyle around an upper arm, the same arm that tugged those odd organs from the sockets above its pained, unforgiving eyes. He pushed upward and tucked underneath the grotesque's raised arm, which got him eye-level with its sternum.
"It's taller than I thought," he said.
His hand on the muscular arm felt cold, colder than the hand gripping the wall, but he was closer to the carved face. The air was thicker, with that peppery wild scent. It was as if the thing breathed through its porous rock.
Burns looked down the wall's outcrops to gauge how high he could climb. He could manage another ten inches. That would get him above the grotesque's shoulders, where he might be able to lean nearer the strange crown. Perhaps he would find inscriptions around it, or symbols, or clues to its confusing array of forms.
He misjudged the height again -- the ledges only got his eyes level with one broad shoulder. He wouldn't reach over the gnarled head unless he resorted to climbing the grotesque's shoulders like a piggybacking child.
He was unwilling to trust the balance of the statue with his full weight, and resigned himself to the letdown. Then he noticed another outcrop from the wall above. He pinched the ledge, a meagre grip. The angle was awkward, but he pulled his body upward and tilted to see down the back of the grotesque, where he hadn't considered looking. It had what looked like enfeebled wings, or flaps of loose tissue, or a tattered cloak. Innumerable smaller details along the spine suggested this was intended for viewing from all angles, that its position against the wall must be temporary.
His only way of rising the last few inches was to tip further into the grotesque's dank aura, and clasp the rim of the crown. His fingers curling over the rim pressed on a damp surface that was somehow gummy -- it sent a wave of revulsion through him.
The crown was not what he'd expected. There were no symbols and no message inscribed around it. It might not even be a crown, Burns thought, trying to read sense into the vertical scar-like striations. They were meaningless and too cluttered for runes. He leant more of his body against the sculpture.
He finally understood the crest. It wasn’t a crown. It was part of the thing's anatomy -- a second mouth, the lips peeled around the top of the head. He pushed from the wall, gained another few inches. The second mouth had the look of a voracious eel. Dankness rose from inside; the air cooled around Burns as he leant over to see more. When he did, he almost laughed.
Elsie asked, "What is it?"
He glanced down at her. He hadn't realised he'd climbed so high. For a moment, she seemed no more than a child.
-- an orphan, he thought, but of course she wasn’t.
"It's not a grotesque, it's a gargoyle -- it has another mouth up here, with an actual throat carved into it! It has a wider hollow inside. I can put my whole arm inside."
"Ugh, Burns. Why would you want to do that? Just think of all the bugs that must have died inside that thing. Or maybe there's something nesting in there? Do you hear anything from inside?"
He wasn't sure. A low wet clucking echoed in the chapel, and the stone throat swallowed it. He'd thought the mouth eel-like, but it also reminded him of how a young bird waits for its parent to drop food into its beak.
He almost asked Elsie to pass up her camera so he could take shots of the peculiarly placed maw, but he doubted he could spare a grip without losing his unstable perch.
Burns started to shift his weight so he could drop to the floor. When he placed his hand on the stony shoulder again, the surface yielded slightly, as if he'd pressed leathery skin over hidden bone. This time, revulsion overcame him. He withdrew his hand. The waxy outcrops were no use as he pitched from the wall. He plummeted.
Blood.
Burns understood the concern in her voice, but her words were harder to grasp; they seemed to erode before he could understand them. It was just the shock of the fall; it numbed him to her touch as her hands came to his back and shoulders, and made them feel like feeble, fluttering wings, yet he felt fully the aches from the impact wrestle further under his skin.
He was breathing more easily, and the pain down his back became isolated throbs. He got to his feet, patting his hands over his clothes to clean them. He had been too preoccupied while climbing to notice the moulted aged debris of dead spores and dust the gargoyle had left on his clothes.
She asked, "So, this is proto-gargoyle?"
"I really think so."
"What does that make her, then?" She pointed to the sculpture of the frocked woman-thing.
Burns shrugged. He would need to figure that out later. He had come here to seek clues to Rodenje's past, but the statues, while potentially significant, fell short of what he had hoped to find.
Elsie asked, "Why do you look disappointed?"
How often must she ask these questions? Isn't he happy? Has something annoyed him? Something she did? What will make this better? She must think he wilfully rejected satisfaction. He wasn't disappointed, he told himself. He felt the shaped rock was a contradiction -- it depicted shapelessness, a refusal of form, or perhaps an acceptance of all possible forms. He wasn't disappointed, he realised, but he did feel a little uneasy.
*
He spared the grotesques a last look before leaving the chapel, and reread the strangeness of the frocked woman, a beguiling mixture of the repulsive and the enticing that bloomed from her wide, hidden hips. He imprinted her face and her confusing quasi-smile to memory. The lips were fleshy and satisfied, yet craving. They reminded him of Elsie's lips; the smirk had him wonder if the sculptor had borrowed the features of an actual woman.
Outside, he thought about her lips -- or rather, they lingered in his mind -- as he and Elsie left the dry island. He thought the air warmer and clammier than when they had arrived. The sky was an unblemished blue lid over the valley. A coppery taste filled his mouth when he glimpsed something black move in the tall grasses, and saw it was a large crow. It stabbed its beak into the stripped carcass of a much large animal to tug free stringy pink meat.
-- I'm tasting the blood, he thought senselessly.
Burns took the first few steps to the incline. He wanted to be free of the sluggish valley air, and leant into the walk up. At least the mesh of grasses, thorns, and brambles ignored Elsie this time. She kept her eyes almost exclusively on the grasses, looking for suspicious movements, but she was soon metres ahead of Burns. He realised he was glad she had come to Roden
je, that he had company in this odd place.
... for the next six days, he reminded himself. Then he would be alone.
Wonderworking (Pt. 1)
Burns sat back from the folded-down counter in the bedroom. He'd brought two unused ledgers, hardly enough to write the entire draft of a book, but Rodenje must have paper for sale somewhere. So far, he only managed one paragraph, what had started from his rushed notes on the chapel's grotesques:
The sculptures mirrored the lives of the pagans, who occupied a world as a stable and undeviating as the poses and grimaces fixed into the rocks. However, the ancient deities were remarkably elastic, even forcibly chimeric and chaotic, in contrast to the rigid and changeless days and duties of the farmers and hunters who worshipped them.
He knew the proto-gargoyle was chimeric -- his theories depended on its malleability, from pagan god to folkloric character and then possible Christian figure -- but that came from his research into its long history. He couldn’t consider the range of forms he’d seen in the chapel in the woods without wondering if the pagans had also grasped their god’s splintered identities.
Strangely, instead of exciting him, the idea made him tired.
He looked to the narrow speckled mirror exposed by the folded-down counter. An imperfect reflection mottled by old glass looked back at him. The reflection looked tired and, saturated by the sunlight through the bedroom's large window, too pale. It tried to coax some memory from Burns. He took a long breath. The dustiness of the streets filtered into his lungs.
Dead Birds: The Dark Orphans Collection Page 5
