I have a fetish. A peculiar fetish. An undeniable, unabashed, unwavering fetish for one thing, and one thing only: the Cathedral. Strange, perhaps, that this is the first time I am making such a confession to anyone, considering my expertise in confessional design requires me to spend more time with them than sins I have. But I know a fetish when I feel one, and this confession makes me feel nothing but the purest of joys – there is no shame here.
When I see a Cathedral, something about it elevates my spirit to the heights of those arches, those domes, those skylit clerestories and triforiums. I quake when I see a Carolingian, and am beyond myself in the presence of a Byzantine. Baroque be always in style with me, and I am always eager for an Eclectic. Oh, how many shapes, how many forms, how many feelings do these ancient structures hold? I am no Christian, though I appreciate the unnecessary idolization of their temples. My love for these stony sanctuaries is as close as I’ve gotten to religion, in fact. But it is a true love, a reasonable love – for who could resist admiring the majesty of such noble art? And, if admiring it be so common, then how exceptional those few must be who fetishize them.
When I was young, I would steal away from church services just to explore the plain nooks and crannies our church offered. As a child I found it preferable to the sermons, but, as I aged, I became learned to just what a meager imitation it was of edificio del Padre. It was a boring, trite little thing, constructed from wood for the sole purpose of keeping out drafts and keeping Christians in. Smelling of mulch outside from the dying gardens, and of the must rising from the decaying husks of the congregation inside, trapped under the beams of a breaking roof. Where there is pure utility, there is no art.
My family, my friends, so-called though they were, are to me a bore and waste of time. There is no elevation to their conversation, no art to their small talk, no beauty in their sloppily crafted personas, no no no no no! Not only do they offer paltry interactions that are hardly comparable to the divine connection between myself and my sanctuaries, but they also fail to understand how and why and what is the idol of my devotion. Not one single person knows one fact about Cathedrals. They could at least act like they cared! But they do not, so I do not, and would rather spend my time beneath marble arches not my own than under the shingled roof that is.
There is no cathedral, in my humble obsessive opinion, more artistic than St. Paul’s – so there is naturally no other roof I’d rather be under at this moment. I can hardly remember any place in this damp miserable Londontown that I’ve been, outside of St. Paul’s, so uninspired and uninspiring were they. I know its every nook and cranny, its every crowded catacomb and vault and side chapel. I could tell you the name of every jamb figure, blind, by tracing my fingers along their stony beards and crowns. I can draw a blueprint up in no time, and tell you where every secret portal is located, its style and the importance of its users. I have walked back and forth under the porticoes, learning St. Paul’s façade until it is no more complex to my eye than the back of my hand. These intricate parapets, those mighty pendentives, the splendid simplicity of bosses in between the creative complexity of buttresses – there is no place I’d rather be.
I remind myself now of the importance in my love for cathedrals, my intimate mappings of their structures, because there must be some concealed explanation that love can uncover; one to tell me why I’m here, now, staring over the bannister encircling St. Paul’s triple-shelled dome, at this late, late hour. Two o’ clock…a very early and very strange hour. A very empty, a very echoey, a very unhinged hour. The only hour, I’m slowly discovering, in which I’d rather not be at the place I’d most rather be at during any other waking hour. Two o’clock is not a waking hour – I’m therefore quite terrified. I regret having sneaked inside for a moment alone from those religious invaders.
There is something else I must confess, though I am embarrassed to do so. As I scaled the winding stairs upwards to the Whispering Gallery, I discovered a new part of the cathedral that had, to this day, eluded my loving gaze. A hole, not intentional, a fault in the construction, that I never noticed before. Had I been averting my eyes, refusing to acknowledge the obvious cracks beneath my beloved St. Paul’s skin? But I did not mind the hole, so much as I minded my lack of knowledge about it. Surely there was some reason for the darkness beyond, some reason to justify or beautify the absence of material and the extension of space? The breeze crawling out was cool, drawing me in, promising that to crawl inside would be to open my eyes to some deeper secret about these objects of my affection. First my head, then my chest, my stomach, my legs finally passed through, and I had passed through.
At first glance, I had seen a room beyond this hole, but it must have been some trick of the light since I was sliding downwards, along a steep slope. Slate buried itself under my fingernails as I instinctively tried to dig in, prevent myself from being pulled into some inescapable recess, but my efforts were futile. Like a rat in a pit trap, I slid with fear towards what I was sure was my doom, gathering so much dust and cobwebs that I wouldn’t be able to see even if it wasn’t pitch black. The air grew colder, and colder, and stuffier, and ancient, until I hit a floor and launched forward into open space until I sprawled against a railing.
Coughing and patting the dust from my clothes, peeling the cobwebs from my eyebrows, I was met with the echo of my own voice. An echo whose timbre was very familiar to me, and I could soon see why as well as hear: I was at the Whispering Wall, a circular balcony three stories up in the dome of St. Paul’s, overlooking the plummet to the tiles below. Pushing myself back, it dawned on me just how impossible it was – I had descended for what seemed like a full minute at a gut-dropping pace, to end up on the same level at which I began? By no accounts did that make sense. Even less so as I turned to observe my exit, only to discover that there was none to be found. Whatever hole I stumbled out of, the end to that tunnel – gone. Only the two doors I knew to be the only entrances and exits were visible, and they were too far for me to suppose the mysterious hole spat me through a bit of unexpected renovation. So how did I end up here?
I feel a shiver delicately stroke my spine, for I see now that I am not completely alone. On the other side of the gaping hole is another man. He stares at me blankly. Or, perhaps that is a blank stare? I have trouble discerning his expression from this distance – and without my glasses, which I seem to have misplaced. He is more fuzz than man at this distance. But, perhaps, there is no reason to fear? Since he is up here with me, surely he must know where I was deposited from, and why.
It is not customary for me to approach others in this place, though it be erected for fellowship and group-worship. I have no use for those purposes. I exist to laud the glory of the building itself, none of the extraneous attachments that have leeched themselves to it. Still, I cannot deny that the emptiness at such an hour unnerves me, and this mysterious figure across the way is a welcoming sight.
They do not seem inclined to greet me, so I take the first step clockwise to close the gap. No sooner do I take that step, do they take one clockwise as well.
“No, don’t worry! Wait right there, I’ll come to you,” I chuckle good-naturedly.
They do not reply. But they do move in the same direction as I try to get closer. No matter how fast I walk around the dome, I always end up equidistant to this mysterious figure as before.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you want to be alone? Were you praying?”
There, I can see his mouth moving…but…
“I’m sorry, I can’t…I can’t hear you! Can you speak up?”
His mouth is clearly forming words, but I don’t know what they are. He is pointing at me, jabbing his finger in my direction almost desperately. Is he mocking me, pretending to speak but instead taking advantage of the fact that we are alone to act out some sort of selfish frustration upon me?
But I have forgotten for a moment where we are: The famed Whispering Gallery, where echoes travel round about and can be heard from the other side of the dome. Talk about the perfect merger of utility and art! If he means to say something, that would certainly get the message across.
I point to the stone and gesture as if speaking into it. They get the gist, and slink over to their side of the wall, bend over, and speak into it.
Even pressing my ear almost to the wall, I cannot make out the words – his mouth is clearly moving, from what I can see, strained into an horrified gaping hole snapping open and shut like a fish. And echoing through the wall is some unnerving squishy sound, like bubbles popping in wet clay being pressed between two powerful hands. The squishing and squelching stirred something in me, like a song that resonates with your heart. But not a good one – a herald that something terrible is near, and you are the only one alone for miles and miles who can hear it. And, worse than that, the songmaker knows just how alone you are.
“Okay,” I shouted, my patience exasperated, “I’ll leave you alone if you’re just going to-“
Turning from the wall, I see the figure plainly for a split second. Standing rigid on the edge of the precipice with his head lifted high, and, in the second split of that second, disappearing over the lip. A few seconds more, and a muddy thud is felt throughout St. Paul’s, resonating its way up to me. I did not fully register what just happened at first. It is early, after all, and I am still floundering about in my own headspace from that trip earlier through the hole in the wall. But I peer over the edge of the hole, slowly, cautiously – sure enough, three stories below, lies the man’s motionless body. Faintly twitching, crumpled in a spread heap like an insect crushed underfoot.
“Help! Someone help! A man just fell,” I shouted downwards, leaning over the lip, at the top of my lungs. “Can’t anyone hear me?” But no one could, for the Cathedral was empty – I had made sure of that before I entered. The salivary sucking of the man’s breaths echoed louder, from all around the Whispering Wall, and from beneath me, filling the entire enormity of the main chamber.
I stumble backwards and through one of the two true doors to the Whispering Gallery. My flight down the winding stairs was a dangerous descent, every step weak from the shock, until I burst out into the main chamber on the breath of the wind.
The atrium was vast, gleaming, empty. The squelching still rebounded in echoes off the walls, growing fainter and fainter until it faded away completely – and yet, he was already gone. Vanished! But to where? There is no way anyone could survive a fall from such a height, onto this solid surface, or break through it to the catacombs and gift shop below. I know because I smacked the ground with my open palm, just to make sure. There was no hole, no indentation, no blood spatter to indicate anyone had fallen at all, and my hand hurt now so I knew I must be awake.
But that, too, I began to doubt, as Portland stone and gold, wood and limestone, all together began to slide off the wall in one goopeous glob of heavy mush, pulling priceless artifacts from the wall as they poured ever so slowly, a cascading waterfall of dull colors, seeping over the pulpit and the pews and the spot where the strange man had fallen. Or not fallen…At this point, I don’t know what’s real anymore.
Dizzy, I stepped one heel after the other, backwards, towards the front door – never taking my eyes off the center, never looking away, ever watching. What was the cause of these hallucinations tonight? The door, the man, the walls, all indicated that I was losing my mind to images that were trying their hardest to make my absolute favorite place in the whole world the last place I want to be right now. Then my back bumped against the door, and the relief I felt told me that they had succeeded. I fumbled for the handle, and fled down the steppes into the greenish-orange lamplight of the streets.
“Help! Someone! Anyone,” I called, no longer for the invisible man, but for myself. For I was now suddenly gripped with the terror of being alone in the world, and I needed more than the living shadow of St. Paul’s overhead. I needed the shadow of something that was supposed to be living, and so I tripped over the steps and against the door of the first lodging I could find. Hammering at the door, shouting my usual entreaties for this particular night, “Help! Someone! Anyone!”
A light suddenly went on in the window! I could hear laughing, see the shadows of people making merry. But they were oblivious to my pounding, my begging, my cursing – in their joy I had no part, and they would not allow me to make a case otherwise.
I stepped back down the steps, seething, to discover one of them was watching. This one was different: a silhouette, sitting still and undisturbed in the window up and to my left, exiled from those in the lighted room. I could tell from their profile that they were staring at me, like the Statue of Queen Anne, regal and accusatory, but I could not make out any features. I felt an invisible force in my heart, bidding me to press my ear back to the door; what would they tell me?
…squish…squeech…squEESHSQUNCHSQUASHSQUELCH-”
I shoved my body from that cursed door and fled once again. Down the long rows of terrace houses seeming to stretch on ad infinitum, I was pushing my lungs to their limit. I tried to stay focused, straight ahead, forcing my mind to ignore the fact that there were silhouettes in every window, staring without a sliver of compassion down on me in my mad dash towards some unseen exit. No more shadows in the throes of partying, only the one lone figure in the upper window, my only witness. And that infernal squelching, like a finger in a cup of goo, or wax melting down its frame – following me from behind, below, all around, closing in on me from that endless stretching wind of two-story houses.
And then, a sign: “NO THROUGH ROAD.” The mark of dead ends. And what a dead end it was – an architectural marvel in simplest form. A sheer, blemishless concrete wall, straight up into the night, connecting the two opposite rows of terrace houses. There was no way around it or over it, no way to escape the SQUELCHSQUELCH seeping fast on my heels. There was, however, a small brick protruding out on the edge of the wall. I pulled at the brick; it fell easily out. So did the next. And the next. One by one until a hole large enough for me to crawl through opened up. Without a second thought, ears clogged with that goopy dredge at work on my nerves, I plunged into the opening.
I tumbled, over and over, nose and eyes overwhelmed by the most ancient dust that had ever clouded my senses. I felt my joints bent out of shape, my head bruised, unable to tell which way was up or down or even able to try reaching out for a stable surface. Eventually, I let it take me – down, down, down into whatever pit I was to be deposited in.
I felt a blast of open, cool air and skidded face-first over a series of wooden steps. Rolling over onto my back, the familiar tingles of joy from peering into the beauty of thethe virtuous voussoirs of the dome, with its one little porthole providing me with a front-row seat to the light of dawn. Joy, turned to confusion, turned to horror: I was back at the Whispering Wall in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Pulling myself up by the railing, I felt a little groan wheeze from between my cracked and dusted lips. How could this be? I ran all through the streets of London, to end up here again, three stories up, over a mile from where I had entered that hole in the wall? This must be a dream…No, a terrible nightmare. Not even the frescoes above could improve my outlook on the situation.
An outlook that, as I spied the fuzzy man on the other side of the wall, standing behind the railing as he did earlier before he jumped, grew dimmer every passing second. The fuzzy man was just as obscured as he had been – now, not only because his face was all staticized, but because something stood between him and I.
Or, floated, rather.
It was an awful sight – a hovering vision made of clay, silver and gold, not quite spiritual, not quite physical. A Masterwork that had been floating with its hand connected to the man’s left shoulder, at first beholding a humanistic figure not so different from the Saints and angels lining the facades both within and without. Its skin seemed, again paradoxically, both liquid and solid, rippling under the beams of first light. I stared at the beautiful angel, its outstretched motionless wings draping the man in shadows as if about to engulf him, when it slowly turned in midair and looked directly at me.
Its face was my face, and I hated it. I had never seen an expression like that across my features, making it seem alien to me as it drifted towards me. Like it wanted me, but not for anything good – the blank stare of lust, to possess the love I had for its dwelling place and quash it forever.
Running towards the man seemed like my only option; perhaps we could stand a chance against this mutual threat? It seemed to be stalking him as well…But no matter how fast I run, he is always equidistant from where I first began: on the complete opposite side of the void between us.
And still the living statue draws near. I see its skin bubbling up, screaming faces pressing themselves against the stone from within, its muddy unmolded body floating steady and never losing ground in the flight towards me. An abominable Seraphim on tendryllic wings, coming to claim my soul as part of its facade.
I shouted at the man. I tried to wake him up, warn him; he could not hear, or he would not listen, or he willed himself not to listen so he could not hear. And now the clay abomination was upon me, throwing its thick threads of gold and silver onto my face, my body, suctioning my body in with the power of a sinkhole as it tried to make me one of those contorted faces within its parasitic body. And my ears, my ears! Always assaulted with that malodorous squelching. Had it really been after me this whole time?
I would not let the clay spectre take me without resistance. I pushed into that inflexibly soft core, shouting at the top of my lungs. I would be heard! I would not go quietly into obscurity! The more I struggled, like quicksand, the greater its power over me. So long as I feared it, denied it, found reason not to be absorbed into its cool, milky embrace.
Why, though? Why did I resist? Did I not enter the hole in the wall to uncover the secrets of St Paul’s? And here was the secret, about to illuminate the darkest recesses of architecture, while I resist the very unknown thing I sought. So I stopped my struggles, my resistance, and clung tightly to the clay that had enveloped me. Tell me your secrets! Lead me to the truth! Bring me a higher pleasure than any other cathedral has before!
Only then did it recoil. The entire figure melted into a single stream, like oil carried on the wind, and seeped up towards the skylight. I called after it, but the whole body slipped through my fingers. I reached out, as if to grip the tail of a kite that had almost flown out of reach, but my fingers closed over nothing. My feet also teetered over into nothing, shocking me with the realization that I had somehow ended up standing over the railing during the struggle. As I teetered forward, balance lost, I glimpsed the static man. for the last time, turning from the Whispering Wall. He did not see me, but I saw him – the face that was my own, every bit my likeness, coloring and rigifying before my very eyes as the product of the sentient clay Masterwork. And the product was me, formed to witness my own destruction and run towards it nonetheless.
I fell. Three stories, maybe more, watching the glory of all I loved pass by in a blur until the tiled floor rose and met me in the chest. For a brief second, I heard my own voice above me calling for help, and understood that my body would not move, but these observations were drowned out. For it was coming…that dreaded squishing sound, catching up to me from below.
SQEESHSQUNCHSQUASHSQUELCH
I could do nothing. Maybe I just didn’t want to – what was the point? And perhaps, through all the fear and the instinct that this would not be good, this would all lead only to nothing, I found myself too unconcerned with any other outcome than to see where I would be dragged to. The tile floor was like unhardened concrete, yielding to accept me as I sank downwards to where the sound was. All I could see there was the perfectly smooth surface of dark gray stone, shifting and moving and changing direction like it had taken residence behind my eyelids, since my body knew that downwards was the only direction it was headed. I heard my doppelganger pass overhead, shouting so ineptly for help. Ah, he would come to realize the pointlessness soon enough. For I was familiar with the sound now, recognizing it as the sound of Future’s waste, hidden beneath every crowning spire man erected to beautify it.
Whatever it truly was, it had found me long ago. Forever now I go to greet it, deep in the bowels of my beloved cathedral. Not because I want to, no, but…Well, when I think about such a fetish as mine – which was all I ever thought about – what else would I have done?
Morning's Early Dark 