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Display a printable version Purgatory
I suppose that is lucky. There are others ? my brothers and sisters, further out, further up ? who have to rely on the wind and the rain, on God's own hand, to weather them, to wipe away their faces and their personalities, to close their stone eyes, to wear their wings and their claws down to nubs and their petrified snarls into memories of anger and pain. I am the first one on your left as you emerge from the door, out into the tower. People reach out to touch me, with hands of instinct ? and they do not know that every touch is a prayer of salvation, every touch laced with the salt and sweat and occasionally blood (while I still had sharper edges), has been taken in, absorbed, allowed to eat away at the rock into which I have been made. I don't think there are many left who remember what my original face looked like ? or at least none who can make the climb up here any more. And so I wait for the end, my features already blurred, the claws on my wings moulded into rounded remnants, waiting for that dawn which will be the last. I am the first gargoyle on your left as you come out of the Cathedral's tower stair. I used to be a man. *** There has been so much said about the nature of the relationship between God and man. Some of it is true. Most of it is not. There are things that I have learned through the years that I have brooded here, on a House of God ? the humans within do not always interpret God's word right, but they occasionally get glimpses of the truth. Heaven and Hell would be places which you might well recognise, but they would not be what you expected them to be. Not ever. And as for Purgatory ? there has been much discussion about that, about whether it exists at all or is just a figment of some medieval monk's fevered imagination. And even those who swear it exists cannot seem to put a finger on what precisely it is, or what function it is supposed to serve. But I am in Purgatory. I can tell you the truth. Come closer, and open your mind as you look out over the roofs of the city from the tower of the Cathedral, and I will whisper straight into your soul, if only you will listen to me. I am in Purgatory. Perhaps you are too, on some level, if you are standing next to me. But for you, this has been a climb up a hundred old stone stairs, steep and worn, until you pushed open the old door and stepped out here on the small round balcony with its stone balustrade and me crouching there on your left. You look out, and you see the sunshine spilling over the roofs of the old city, and glimpses of cobbled streets winding narrow between stone houses with small windows, and perhaps pigeons or ? if the season is right ? migrating storks or geese in the sky. You may hear the distant hum of traffic, from out where the wider and more modern roads harbour trucks and cars, or you may hear the whine of the wind as it swirls around the tower, keening. You can sometimes smell the sea up here, if the wind is from the right quarter. Years before, you could smell other things ? horse dung from the nags dragging the carts and carriages, the odour of unwashed humanity or of perfumes used to cover up that particular aroma, the odd nose-tickling feather smell of poultry. I remember all that, you see. I was here back then. Younger, sharper, angrier, newer, barely turned to stone yet. My own humanity still clung to me, despite the gargoyle's claws and wings and horned brow. I was a man. A proud and wealthy man. A heedless, selfish, ruthless man. I killed, back then. Several times. There were occasions when the killings were accidental, and as much as I could I regretted them ? but it was a dispassionate regret, born of distance, rooted in a manner of thinking which rued the waste of those lives. But not because of the lives themselves. Because their usefulness, to people like me, had been cut short ? and I had been the agency of that, however inadvertently. It was a regret of a whiny sort, the '"We'll never have a driver like that again'" sort, where the death of another human being was measured by the depth of the inconvenience that death caused to me. I killed deliberately, too. I wore a sword, back then, and I knew how to use it. And I used it. My steel tasted human gut and human heart, because I aimed it there, because I wanted a life to end ? not because of inconvenience, but because of revenge, or fear, or greed. Yes, I killed, and God saw that if I cared it was for entirely the wrong reasons. I went to confessions, as the Church demanded. I told only the bare essentials ? the bones of the truth. I repented the killings, and received a sort of absolution for that ? but I never confessed the emotions behind those deaths and I never repented of any of those. And so no real absolution was given ? none could be given, not by human hand. And the darkness washed over my soul like a tide. But I was not an evil man, and I know that this sounds odd coming after the things that I just said. I was? who I was. Moulded by my class, my race, my time, born into the place I was born and speaking the language I spoke, a man who had the right to wear a sword and who had been taught how to use it by professionals whose job it was to teach that task to the children of the nobler classes. I went about my life clueless, blind, following the paths that had been laid down for me from before I was born, hoping they would lead to salvation somewhere along the line ? oh yes, we all strove for that, believed in that, whatever our daily lives might have been. And people like me were not black-hearted enough to be cast into the kind of Hell you might imagine ? cast away, forgotten, put into darkness behind God's back and never brought out into the light again. I was ignorant, thoughtless, unkind, and yes, arrogant and proud ? and my sins were those which those attributes brought upon me. But I also gave alms to beggars, and not because I thought I was obliged to ? because sometimes they would look up at me and I would get lost in those eyes and felt absolutely driven to help those people in any way I could so that they could go on searching for the hope which had so clearly left their hearts. I paid my servants well, better than some, and housed them in quarters fit for human occupation, which was more than could be said for some of the houses more noble than mine. When I married I treated my wife kindly, and listened to her opinions, for she was shrewd and despite being lacking in formal education she understood the things that drove human beings and could be trusted to analyse situations with surprising insight. I loved my children; I mourned those who died young, whose lives were not given to me to share. But I was not fit for Heaven, on the strength of those things alone. That's why Purgatory. That's why my soul left my body, when my body finally breathed its last on my deathbed, and came up here ? and God caught it in His hand, and laid me down here, and made me stone, so that I could watch out over the city, and see all the things I could not see as a man, and learn. That was my penance. I was statue, I was stone; and for as long as that which is wrought in stone endures, I was to remain stone. All of us, all the gargoyles, all of us were men once. All of us waiting here for the hand of God to release us as it bound us, by weathering us into shapelessness and dust, making us spend an eternity here, until we learn, until we understand, until we are humbled. What happens when we are released?? Look over to your right. The first gargoyle on your right ? he looks oddly new, no? Like he was just put there recently, or carefully restored? You would be right. There used to be another gargoyle there, one that had been there when I was brought here, already beginning to lose its edges and its sharpness ? an old soul paying its dues. I was here when the angels came for it one day ? when it was a shapeless, formless rock, when nothing remained of what or who it had been any more ? and the light came, the light of God, and played around it. And I could see the stone shimmer, and then crack, and the creature that came out of it at the end ? a creature of light with wings like the dawn over an ocean, bright and shimmering ? and it rose with the others, up into the sky, and they hovered there amongst the clouds for a while, playing tag like children, before they faded into the blue and were gone. Before the sun was down that day, another knot of God's light came, and closed around the broken stone that had been the old statue. When they were done, they vanished ? and there was another gargoyle there, the one you see now. No, it isn't the old one restored by man's hand. It's a new soul, here to begin its cleansing. Its learning. Its understanding. You'd think that they would notice, the caretakers, the humans ? new gargoyles for old, every so often, replaced completely, with apparently no human agency involved at all ? but if you ask those whose task it is to care for this place, they will tell you a tale of scaffolding and careful work by human hand? although no human hand has ever wrought any of the gargoyles on this cathedral. Such is the human mind, the human understanding. All their lives they look up and year for God's grace, God's touch ? but the simple miracles performed before their very eyes by God's own hand, they never see. How long have I been here?? Long enough, my friend. Look at my face ? my snarl a mere memory now. Granted, more on this side, where you are, where countless human hands have run across it and helped to begin to erase it and with it my sins ? there is still a measurable one on the far side of my face, with even some of my teeth still showing. But both my eyes have been worn away. I no longer see the city clearly at all ? and the less I see out there the more clearly I see the things I had so long failed to see within myself. I think I am on the verge of something ? I understand only that I am about to understand something, but not what it is that I am about to know, although I can glimpse it, as if through a veil, blurred and yet already achingly familiar as though I already know it intimately and have only to recognise it. Some day, soon, I will? and then God's Angels will come to me to tell me so. And the stone will crack and I will rise from this prison of stone and of years, and I will fly ? and the light of my repentance will light the heavens, like that other gargoyle did. Some day soon. Yes, touch me. Every touch brings me closer to the angels. Every human hand laid upon me is God's blessing, and the beginning of my release from bondage. I was bone. Then I was stone. At last I shall be light, and air, and love alone. When one thing ends, another begins. Touch me. Release me. Come out and look out upon the iniquities of the world, from here, from this high place, from the place where God placed me to gaze upon them. Know them now ? for, friend, if you do not, when they come for me? it may be you who inherit my place. Bone into stone. An eternity of regret. Touch me. I am the first gargoyle on the left as you come up from the stair. Close my eyes, so that yours may be opened. END
Story by Alma Alexander, Copyright 2010 |
| Last updated on 5/14/2010 10:15:32 PM by Jennifer Brozek |
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| Other documents at this level: 45 - Subway Hunter 46 - The Fairy Cake Bake Shoppe 47 - Self-Possessed 49 - Little Sparrow Girl 50 - Agatha 51 - Skullduggery at the Junction 52 - The Last Call |
I am the only one within reach.
Alma Alexander is a Pacific Northwest novelist who writes for both grown-up audiences ('"The Hidden Queen'", '"Changer of Days'", '"The Secrets of Jin Shei'") and YA audiences (the Worldweavers trilogy, '"Gift of the Unmage'", '"Spellspam'" and '"Cybermage'"). Her work has been translated into fourteen languages worldwide, including Hebrew, Turkish, and Catalan. She is currently at work on a new series of alternate history novels with roots in Eastern Europe. She lives in Bellingham, WA, with her husband, two cats, and assorted visiting wildlife. Visit her website at