“What are you trying to tell me? That what you saw – ?”
“The grey madonna,” said Jan De Keyser. “If you offend her, you must surely pay the price.”
“Thanks, pal,” he told him. “I love you, too. I flew all the way from New Milford, Connecticut, to hear that my wife was killed by a statue. Thank you. Drink hearty.”
But Jan De Keyser clutched hold of his sleeve. “You don’t understand, do you? Everybody else has told you lies. I am trying to tell you the truth.”
“What does the truth matter to you?”
“You don’t have to insult me, sir. The truth has always mattered to me; just like it matters to all Belgians. What would I gain from lying to you? A few hundred francs, so what?”
Dean looked up at the grey madonna in her niche in the wall. Then he looked back at Jan De Keyser. “I don’t know,” he said, flatly.
“Well, just give me the money, and maybe we can talk about morals and philosophy later.”
Dean couldn’t help smiling. He handed Jan De Keyser his money; and then stood and watched him as he hurried away, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders swinging from side to side. Jesus, he thought, I’m getting old. Either that, or Jan De Keyser had deliberately been playing me along.
All the same, he stood across the street, cater-corner from the grey madonna, and watched her for a long, long time, until the chill began to get to his sinuses, and his nose started to drip. The grey madonna stared back at him with her blind stone eyes, calm and beautiful, with all the sadness of a mother who knows that her child must grow up, and that her child will be betrayed, and that for centuries to come men and women will take His name in vain.
Dean walked back along Hoogstraat to the marketplace, and went into one of the cafés beside the entrance to the Belfry. He sat in the corner, underneath a carved wooden statue of a louche-looking medieval musician. He ordered a small espresso and an Asbach brandy to warm him up. A dark-looking girl on the other side of the café smiled at him briefly, and then looked away. The jukebox was playing Guantanamera.
He was almost ready to leave when he thought he saw a grey nun-like figure passing the steamed-up window.
He hesitated, then he got up from his table and went to the door, and opened it. He was sure that he had seen a nun. Even if it wasn’t the same nun that Karen had been talking to, on the day when she was strangled and thrown into the canal, this nun had worn a light grey habit, too. Maybe she came from the same order, and could help him locate the original nun, and find out what Karen had said to her.
A party of schoolchildren were crossing the grey fan-patterned cobbles of the market, followed by six or seven teachers. Behind the teachers, Dean was sure that he could glimpse a grey-robed figure, making its way swiftly toward the arched entrance to the Belfry. He started to walk quickly across the marketplace, just as the carillon of bells began to ring, and starlings rose from the rooftops all around the square. He saw the figure disappear into the foggy, shadowy archway, and he broke into a jog.
He had almost reached the archway when a hand snatched at his sleeve, and almost pulled him off balance. He swung around. It was the waiter from the café, palefaced and panting.
“You have to pay, sir,” he said.
Dean said, “Sure, sorry, I forgot,” and hurriedly took out his wallet. “There – keep the change. I’m in a hurry, okay?”
He left the bewildered waiter standing in the middle of the square and ran into the archway. Inside, there was a large, deserted courtyard. On the right-hand side, a flight of stone steps led to the interior of the Belfry tower itself. There was nowhere else that the nun could have gone.
He vaulted up the steps, pushed open the huge oak door, and went inside. A young woman with upswept glasses and a tight braid on top of her head was sitting behind a ticket window, painting her nails.
“Did you see a nun come through here?”
“A nun? I don’t know.”
“Give me a ticket anyway.”
He waited impatiently while she handed him a ticket and leaflet describing the history of the Belfry. Then he pulled open the narrow door which led to the spiral stairs, and began to climb up them in leaps and bounds.
The steps were extravagantly steep, and it wasn’t long before he had to slow down. He trudged around and around until he reached a small gallery, about a third of the way up the tower, where he stopped and listened. If there were a nun climbing the steps up ahead of him, he would easily be able to hear her.
And – yes – he could distinctly make out the chip – chip – chip sound of somebody’s feet on worn stone steps. The sound echoed down the staircase like fragments of granite dropping down a well. Dean seized the thick, slippery rope that acted as a handrail, and renewed his climbing with even more determination, even though he was soaked in chilly sweat, and he was badly out of breath.
As it rose higher and higher within the Belfry tower, the spiral staircase grew progressively tighter and narrower, and the stone steps were replaced with wood. All that Dean could see up ahead of him was the triangular treads of the steps above; and all he could see when he looked down was the triangular treads of the steps below. For more than a dozen turns of the spiral, there were no windows, only dressed-stone walls, and even though he was so high above the street, he began to feel trapped and claustrophobic. There were still hundreds of steps to climb to reach the top of the Belfry, and hundreds of steps to negotiate if he wanted to go back down again.
He paused for a rest. He was tempted to give it up. But then he made the effort to climb up six more steps and found that he had reached the high-ceilinged gallery which housed the clock’s carillon and chiming mechanism – a gigantic medieval musical box. A huge drum was turned by clockwork, and a complicated pattern of metal spigots activated the bells.
The gallery was silent, except for the soft, weary ticking of a mechanism that had been counting out the hours without interruption for nearly five hundred years. Columbus’s father could have climbed these same steps, and looked at this same machinery.
Dean was going to rest a moment or two longer, but he heard a quick, furtive rustling sound on the other side of the gallery, and caught sight of a light grey triangle of skirt just before it disappeared up the next flight of stairs.
“Wait!” he shouted. He hurried across the gallery and started to climb. This time he could not only hear the sound of footsteps, he could hear the swishing of well-starched cotton, and once or twice he actually saw it.
“Wait!” he called. “I don’t mean to frighten you – just want to talk to you!”
But the footsteps continued upward at the same brisk pace, and with each turn in the spiral the figure in the light grey habit stayed tantalizingly out of sight.
At last the air began to grow colder and fresher, and Dean realized that they were almost at the top. There was nowhere the nun could go, and she would have to talk to him now.
He came out onto the Belfry’s viewing gallery, and looked around. Barely visible through the fog he could distinguish the orange rooftops of Bruges, and the dull gleam of its canals. On a clear day the view stretched for miles across the flat Flanders countryside, toward Ghent and Kortrijk and Ypres. But today Bruges was secretive and closed in; and looked more like a painting by Brueghel than a real town. The air smelled of fog and sewers.
To begin with, he couldn’t see the nun. She must be here, though: unless she had jumped off the parapet. Then he stepped around a pillar, and there she was, standing with her back to him, staring out toward the Basilica of the Holy Blood.
Dean approached her. She didn’t turn around, or give any indication that she knew that he was here. He stood a few paces behind her and waited, watching the faint breeze stirring the light grey cloth of her habit.
“Listen, I’m sorry if I alarmed you,” he said. “I didn’t mean to give you the impression that I was chasing you or anything like that. But three years ago my wife died here in Bruges, and just before she died she was
seen talking to a nun. A nun in a light grey habit, like yours.”
He stopped and waited. The nun remained where she was, not moving, not speaking.
“Do you speak English?” Dean asked her, cautiously. “If you don’t speak English, I can find somebody to translate for us.”
Still the nun remained where she was. Dean began to feel unnerved. He didn’t like to touch her, or to make any physical attempt to turn her around. All the same, he wished she would speak, or look at him, so that he could see her face. Maybe she belonged to a silent order. Maybe she was deaf. Maybe she just didn’t want to talk to him, and that was that.
He thought of the grey madonna, and of what Jan De Keyser had told him: “They are not just stone; not just carving. They have all of people’s hopes inside them; whether these hopes are good hopes, or whether these hopes are wicked.”
For some reason that he couldn’t quite understand, he shivered, and it wasn’t only the cold that made him shiver. It was the feeling that he was standing in the presence of something really terrible.
“I, er – I wish you’d say something,” he said, loudly, although his voice sounded off balance.
There was a very long silence. Then suddenly the carillon of bells started to ring, so loudly that Dean was deafened, and could literally feel his eyeballs vibrating in their sockets. The nun swivelled around – didn’t turn, but smoothly swivelled, as if she were standing on a turntable. She stared at him, and Dean stared back, and the fear rose up inside him like ice-cold sick.
Her face was a face of stone. Her eyes were carved out of granite, and she couldn’t speak because her lips were stone, too. She stared at him blind and sad and accusing, and he couldn’t even find the breath to scream.
He took one step backward, then another. The grey madonna came gliding after him, blocking his way to the staircase. She reached beneath her habit and lifted out a thin braided ligature, made of human hair, the kind of ligature that depressed and hysterical nuns used to plait out of their own hair, and then use to hang themselves. Better to meet your Christ in Heaven than to live in fear and self-loathing.
Dean said, “Keep away from me. I don’t know what you are, or how you are, but keep away from me.”
He was sure that she smiled, very faintly. He was sure that she whispered something.
“What?” he asked. “What?”
She came closer and closer. She was stone, and yet she breathed, and she smiled, and she whispered, “Charley, this is for Charley.”
Again, he screamed at her, “What?”
But she caught hold of his left arm in a devastatingly strong grip, and she stepped up onto the platform that ran around the parapet, and with one irresistible turn of her back she rolled herself over the parapet and slid down the orange-tiled roof.
Dean shouted, “No!” and tried to tug himself free from her; but she wasn’t an ordinary woman. She gripped him so tight and she weighed so much that he was dragged over the parapet after her. He found himself sliding and bumping over the fog-moist tiles, and at the end of the tiles was a lead gutter and then a sheer drop down to the cobbles of the Market, one hundred and seventy feet below.
With his right hand, he scrabbled to get a grip on the tiles. But the grey madonna was far too heavy for him. She was solid granite. Her hand was solid granite; no longer pliable, but still holding him fast.
She tumbled over the edge of the roof. Dean caught hold of the guttering, and for one moment of supreme effort he swung from it, with the grey madonna revolving around him, her face as calm as only the face of the Virgin Mary could be. But the guttering was medieval lead, soft and rotten, and slowly it bent forward under the weight, and then gave way.
Dean looked down and saw the market square. He saw horse-drawn carriages and cars and people walking in every direction. He heard the air whistling in his ears.
He clung to the grey madonna because that was the only solid thing he had to cling to. He embraced her as he fell. Hardly anybody saw him falling, but those who did lifted up their hands in horror in the same way that serious burns victims lift up their hands.
He dropped and dropped the whole height of Bruges’s Belfry, two dark figures falling through the fog, holding each other tight, like lovers. Dean thought for one illogical instant that everything was going to be all right, that he was going to fall for ever and never hit the ground. But then suddenly he saw the rooftops much closer and the cobbles expanded faster and faster. He hit the courtyard with the grey madonna on top of him. She weighed over half a ton, and she exploded on impact, and so did he. Together, they were like a bomb bursting. Their heads flew apart. Stone arms and flesh arms jumped up into the air.
Then there was nothing but the muffled sound of traffic, and the echoing flap of starlings’ wings as they resettled on the rooftops, and the jangling of bicycle bells.
Inspector Ben De Buy stood amongst the wreckage of man and madonna and looked up at the Belfry, cigarette smoke and fog vapour fuming from his nose.
“He fell from the very top,” he told his assistant, Sergeant Van Peper.
“Yes, sir. The girl who collects the tickets can identify him.”
“And was he carrying the statue with him, when he bought his ticket?”
“No, sir, of course not. He couldn’t even have lifted it. It was far too heavy.”
“But it was up there with him, wasn’t it? How did he manage to take a life-size granite statue of the Virgin Mary all the way up those stairs? It’s impossible. And even if it was possible, why would he do it? You might need to weight yourself down to drown yourself, but to jump from the top of a belfry?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“No, well, neither do I, and I don’t think I really want to know.”
He was still standing amongst the blood and the broken stone when one of his youngest detectives appeared, carrying something greyish-white in his arms. As he came closer, Inspector De Buy realized that it was a baby, made of stone.
“What’s this?” he demanded.
“The infant Jesus,” said the officer, blushing. “We found it on the corner of Hoogstraat, up in the niche where the stone madonna used to stand.”
Inspector De Buy stared at the granite baby for a while, then held out his arms. “Here,” he said, and the officer handed it over to him. He lifted it over his head, and then he smashed it onto the cobbles as hard as he could. It shattered into half a dozen lumps.
“Sir?” asked his sergeant, in puzzlement.
Inspector De Buy patted him on the shoulder. “Thou shalt worship no graven image, Sergeant Van Peper. And now you know why.”
He walked out of the Belfry courtyard. Out in the market square, an ambulance was waiting, its sapphire lights flashing in the fog. He walked back to Simon Stevin Plein, where he had left his car. The bronze statue of Simon Stevin loomed over him, black and menacing in his doublet and hat. Inspector De Buy took out his car keys and hesitated for a moment. He was sure that he had seen Simon Stevin move slightly.
He stood quite still, right next to his Citröen, his key lifted, not breathing, listening, waiting. Anybody who saw him then would have believed that he was a statue.
DOUGLAS E. WINTER
Loop
DOUGLAS E. WINTER IS the leading critic of horror fiction and film, and he has been called “the conscience of horror and dark fantasy”. A winner of the World Fantasy Award and a Hugo and Stoker nominee, he has written more than 200 published articles, reviews and short stories which have appeared in such diverse periodicals as the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Harper’s Bazaar, Gallery, Twilight Zone Magazine, Cemetery Dance and Worlds of Fantasy & Horror. Winter is also the music and soundtrack columnist for the excellent Video Watchdog and the author or editor of a number of books which include Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, Faces of Fear, Prime Evil, American Zombie and the apocalyptic anthology Millennium. His critical biography of Clive Barker is still forthcoming.
For David J. Schow
/> You’d better hope and pray
That you’ll wake one day
In your own world . . .
– Shakespear’s Sister
YOU KNOW THIS dream. It takes you by the hand and leads you out of the wilderness of your office, away from the paper-patterned desk and ever-ringing telephone and into the first of the many hallways. Your secretary is smiling, not at you, but at the air somewhere to the left of you; her telephone receiver is balanced between shoulder and ear, and you hear her talk of dates and times and places. The weekend, always planning for the weekend: a dental appointment, a son’s soccer practice, a tryst in a darkened motel room. You wish for a new lie to tell her, but your wrist pokes the Rolex President from beneath the embroidered initials of your starched white cuff and you give the timepiece that practiced impatient stare. The bank, actually a savings and loan, will close at four, and you tell your secretary what you usually tell her. She nods without losing her smile and talks on.
You know these hallways, too. A flurry of birds swoops from the canvas at the first corner. The open doors, although there are few of them, offer glimpses of the other offices, identical furniture and file cabinets, the same giltframed trophies on display: subdued photographs of wives or husbands, diplomas from the finer law schools, certificates of admission to the proper courts. This hallway leads to another, and then another, and at last you are wandering the lobby, nodding back to the receptionist before ducking into the men’s room.
You relieve yourself of the afternoon’s cups of coffee, knowing that more will be needed if you are to finish writing the brief that even now, with luck, the word processing department is retyping. But you are thinking far ahead; never a good sign.
You must not forget the Kleenex. You pull five, six, sheets from the dispenser, fold them neatly into a square, and tuck them into the inner pocket of your Paul Stuart suitcoat.
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