The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps. Michel Faber
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She ought to dismiss his ignorance with the lofty condescension it deserved, but instead she said, ‘Come up and I’ll show you.’
‘What?’ he said, but she was already quickening her pace. ‘Wait!’
She stumped ahead, leading him past Saint Mary’s churchyard, past the cliffside trail to Caedmon’s Trod – the alternative path back to the town below, along which he’d meant to run with Hadrian. Teeth clenched with effort, she stumped up another flight of steps leading to the abbey.
‘It’s all right, I believe you!’ Magnus protested as he dawdled in her wake, hoping she’d come round, but she led him straight on to the admission gate. He baulked at the doorway, only to see his cheerfully disloyal dog trotting across the threshold.
‘Bastard,’ he muttered as he followed.
Inside, there was a sign warning visitors that all pets must be on a leash, and there was a man at the admissions counter waiting to be handed £1.70. Siân, so used to wandering freely in and out of the abbey grounds that she’d forgotten there was a charge for non-archaeologists, paused to take stock. Mack’s running shorts, whatever else they might contain, clearly had no provision for a wallet.
‘He’s with me,’ she declared, and led the hapless Magnus past the snack foods and pamphlets, through the portal to antiquity. It all happened so fast, Hadrian was dashing across the turf, already half-way to the 12th century, before the English Heritage man could say a word.
Siân stood in the grassy emptiness of what had once been the abbey’s nave. The wind flapped at her skirt. She pointed up at the towering stone arches, stark and skeletal against the sky. The thought of anyone – well, specifically this man at her side – being immune to the primitive grandeur and the tragic devastation of this place, provoked her to a righteous lecture.
‘Those three arches there,’ she said, making sure he was looking where her finger pointed (he was – and so was his dog), ‘those arches are originally from the south wall, yes, and when they were reconstructed in the 1920s, they were propped up against the northern boundary wall, yes. Rather odd, I admit. But it’s all the original masonry, you know. And at least those arches are safe now. We’d love to restore them to their original position, but they’re better off where they are than in a pile of rubble – or don’t you think so?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ he pleaded facetiously. ‘I didn’t know I was treading on your toes …’
‘I have some books and brochures that explain everything, the whole history,’ she said. ‘You can read those – I’ll give them to you. A nice parcel. Loggerhead’s Yard, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, but no, really,’ he grimaced, flushing with embarrassment. ‘I should buy them myself.’
‘Nonsense. You’re welcome to them.’
‘But … but they’re yours. You’ve spent money …’
‘Nonsense, I’ve got what I needed from them; they’re not doing me any good now.’ Seeing him squirm, she was secretly enjoying her modest subversion of 21st-century capitalism, her feeble imitation of the noble Benedictine principle of common ownership. ‘Besides, I can smell cynicism on you, Mr Magnus. I’d like to get rid of that, if I can.’
He laughed uneasily, and lifted one elbow to call attention to his sweat-soaked armpits.
‘Are you sure it’s not the smell of B.O.?’
‘Quite sure,’ she said, noting that two of her colleagues were, at last, straggling into view. ‘Now, I think it’s about time I started work. It was lovely to meet you. And Hadrian, of course.’
She shook his hand, and allowed herself one more ruffle of the dog’s mane. Nonplussed, Magnus backed away.
A few seconds later, when she was already far away from him, he called after her:
‘Happy digging!’
That night, Siân fell asleep with unusual ease. Instead of spending hours looking at the cast-iron fireplace and the wooden clothes rack growing gradually more distinct in the moonlight, she slept in profound darkness.
I’m sleeping, she thought as she slept. How divine.
‘Oh, flesh of my flesh,’ whispered a voice in her ear. ‘Forgive me …’ And the cold, slightly serrated edge of a large knife pressed into her windpipe. With a yelp, she leapt into wakefulness, but not before the flesh of her throat had yawned open and released a welter of blood.
Upright in bed, she clutched her neck, to keep her life clamped safely inside. The skin was unbroken, a little damp with perspiration. She let go, groaning irritably.
It wasn’t even morning: it was pitch-dark, and the seagulls were silent – still fast asleep, wherever it is that seagulls sleep. Siân peered at her watch, but it was the old-fashioned kind (she didn’t like digital watches) and she couldn’t see a thing.
Ten minutes later she was dressed and ready for going out. Packed in a shoulder bag were the books and pamphlets for Magnus: ‘Saint Hilda and her Abbey at Whitby’, A History of Whitby, the Pitkin guide to ‘Life in a Monastery’, and several others. She slung the bag behind her hip and shrugged experimentally to confirm it stayed put; she didn’t want it swinging forward and tripping her up. Getting your neck slashed in a dream was one thing; breaking your neck while trying to get down a steep flight of stairs in the dead of night was quite another.
In the event, she managed without any problem, and was soon standing in the cold breeze of the White Horse and Griffin’s side lane, cobbles underfoot. The town was so quiet she could hear her own breathing, and Church Street was closed to traffic in any case, yet still she ventured forward from the alley very, very carefully – a legacy of her accident in Bosnia. Even in a pedestrianised cul-de-sac in a small Yorkshire town at four in the morning, you never knew what might come ripping around the corner.
In the dark, Whitby looked strange to Siân – neither modern nor medieval, which were the only two ways she was accustomed to perceiving it. In the daylight hours, she was either working in the shadow of the abbey ruins, coaxing the remains of stunted Northumbrians out of the antique clay, or she was weaving through crowds of shoppers and tourists, that vulgar throng of pilgrims with mobile phones clutched to their cheeks or pop groups advertised on their chests. Now, in the unpeopled stillness of night, Whitby looked, to Siân, distinctly Victorian. She didn’t know why – the buildings and streets were much older than that, mostly. But it wasn’t a matter of architecture; it was a matter of atmosphere. The glow of the streetlamps could almost be gaslight; the obscure buildings and darkened doorways scowled with menace, like a movie backdrop for yet another version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Any alleyway, it seemed to Siân, could disgorge at any moment the caped figure of the Count, or a somnambulistic young woman of unnatural pallor, her white nightgown stained with blood.
Gothic. That’s what the word ‘Gothic’ meant to most people nowadays. Nothing to do with the original Germanic tribe, or even the pre-Renaissance architectural style. The realities of history had been swept aside by Hollywood vampires and narcissistic rock singers with too much mascara on. And here she was, as big a sucker as anyone: walking down Church Street at four in the morning, imagining the whole town to be crawling with Victorianesque undead. Even the Funtasia joke shop, which during the day sold plastic vampire fangs and whoopee cushions, seemed at this godforsaken hour to be a genuinely creepy establishment, the sort of place inside which rats and madmen might be lurking.
The house in Loggerhead’s Yard was easy to find; when she’d asked about it in the hotel, half a dozen people jostled to give her directions. Magnus’s father had been well known in the town and all the locals took a keen interest whenever a death freed up a hunk of prime real estate. Only when Siân approached the front door did she have her first doubts about what she’d come here to do. An action which, in daylight with people strolling round about, would look like a casual errand, seemed anything but casual now – the eerie stillness and the ill-lit, empty streets made her feel as