Page 17 of Preaching to the Choir

It was out with the phone and on with their torches, watching the battery percentage dropping slowly—though amazing how much power the little things had, when they were denied the constant back and forth of communion with the wider world. Elena wanted to ask what they were actually looking for, but she didn’t think Ross knew. His answer would be something like he’d know it when he saw it. She considered how that would come over: a little laugh at his own vagueness, a shrug, an uncertainty. Then she tried to hear the words in the voice of his father, of Uncle Jas, Jeffrey, Neera, old Godfrey. They would know it when they saw it. The declaration would leave no doubt. It would have their subordinates bringing them all the treasures of the earth because there was an it, and they would know it.

And Will’s voice, too.

After an hour, going through the fourth trunk that was filled with ancient, musty-smelling formal clothes stowed away against some eventuality that had plainly become extinct around the same time as the dodo, she glanced back to see Melissa’s fickle torch like a distant campfire one way, Ross’s the other. Each of them panning through five hundred years of family detritus in the hopes of finding gold. The sheer, frustrating scale of the task, and the lack of any guarantee that there was even anything to find, made her shake with directionless anger. She could hear Ross getting more and more slipshod, slinging things around, spilling the contents of boxes, breaking some priceless vase that nobody had laid eyes on for a century, cursing in his weirdly repressed, genteel way. He would break soon, she knew. He’d come looking for the others, apologetic, awkward. I thought it would just… be there. As though up in the attic there was a shrine explicitly dedicated to the Weirdness of Enderby, waiting to warn and educate the younger generation.

She could have given up, then. She knew Ross well enough to see that moment of admission on the horizon like a fishing boat pulling dejectedly for shore with empty nets. They’d go downstairs, shower away the dust, change clothes, be there in time for dinner. And maybe their absence had been noted in the interim and Jeffrey and company were charging about the grounds on horseback going spare, and maybe she could take some satisfaction from that thought.

She hauled aside a crate almost as tall as she was with a grunt of effort, feeling it scrape furrows in the boards, and found the shrine. She screamed a little, in fact, because what her torch fell on was a ghastly gargoyle visage, a human face distorted and distended, with a hunched, winged thing emerging from the hideously stretched mouth. A piece of stone, weathered and flecked with ancient lichen, that had perhaps stood over some Enderby portal before being replaced when the building was added to or repaired. Now it was wedged in place up amongst the eaves, and below it was a little trio of pictures and a big, stuffed scrapbook.

The words Fidelitatis Et Perseverantiae were engraved beneath the hideous head. Screwing her courage to the sticking point, she turned her torch upwards again. The thing forcing its way from the mouth had angel wings still half-trapped, was clutching at the lips with too many little clawed hands. Its own face was gaping open, split wide below a caricature of a nose, and a smaller winged figure struggled to be free of it even as its own maw stretched around a miniature prisoner. For a moment Elena was frozen with vertigo, unable to tell if this was a succession of escapes, or if each figure was devouring even as it was devoured. Bile rose and she fought it down. By then, Ross and Melissa had joined her.

The three images below were not stylistically matched, but followed a theme. One had the weird side-on stylisation of a medieval manuscript, showing a monastic figure kneeling before a winged figure that recalled the Enderby Angel she’d seen on her way in. And probably the one had copied the other or vice versa, but seeing the same weirdnesses reproduced with remarkable faithfulness—fidelitatis—made her shiver. The beaked, bulging-eyed face that radiated a kind of idiot beneficence for all its horror. The thin arms crooked into prayer in the shadow of wings that seemed more of the moth than the avian, painted with fierce and vigilant eyes so that the whole figure, at a blink, became an awful, divine countenance, the oval end of its trailing robe became the very beard of God, the V of its beak a celestial frown. The right hand image, balancing this, was a photograph, faded sepia, two white men in immaculate shirts and shorts and pith helmets, a black man in shorts, all standing before a rock face on which was carved… The style was very different, huge-headed, angular-bodied, and yet the thing itself was immediately recognisable, the same terrible angel as was preserved in expensive pigments on the vellum page. A different culture’s attempt at articulating the same inexpressible thing.

Between the two was probably the oldest thing that Elena had ever seen. It was in a glass-fronted case, resting on faded green velvet. A piece of what she guessed was ivory or horn, yellowed with age, rounded by time. The work was simultaneously far simpler than either of the other depictions, and yet more vital, more expressive. The face, just great round eyes and a sharp V of a nose. A double row of zigzag markings on each side of the notional torso to indicate arms folded inwards. The hunch of its back, grotesque, worked deliberately from the natural curve of the medium. And, faint at the lowest edge where wear had almost erased it, a stream of tiny stick figures dancing or running or…

The scrapbook was a baffling melange of clippings and photos. They leafed through the ragged, heavy pages, fielding the occasional escapee where old glue had dried to dust. Elena expected just more of the same, but there were only a handful of pictures that might have been of the same subject: some weird piece of French surrealism. A photo of a Mayan icon inscrutable in its stylisation, torn from some book on history or art. A sketch of what was apparently a stained glass window from some church somewhere, the scribbled pencil notation starting St… but illegible beyond that. The pastel-coloured fragments came together to make something oval, the face and limbs weirdly tiny and inward, the wings of tessellated glass shards radiating outwards as figures of shepherds and Roman soldiers knelt or threw up their hands in fear and awe. The rest of the scraps were news articles, some perhaps chronicling events where the Enderboughs had put a finger on the scales, others relating to archaeological sites, still more about advances in the biological sciences. Elena stared at a photo of Watson, Crick and Rosalind Franklin, nervous, awkward. The big man behind them would have fit right in at the top table at dinner. Same broad chest and shoulders, same Enderbough face.

Elena leafed back through the book. Edward Gorey cartoons of monstrous hunched figures with tiny heads and crooked stick limbs. A couple of staves of music, perhaps trying to recreate the unearthly singing. Photocopies of some bizarre old manuscript, heavy with alchemical symbols. A frontispiece in faded print: On the Infiltrationne of the Soul by one Doctor Iohannes Enderbye.

On the inside back cover of the scrapbook someone had written, in beautiful copperplate, I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t, on and on, until the entire beige expanse was covered with ink that had turned a pale brownish-red with age.

“Someone was here before us,” Ross said, and for a moment it seemed the most banal of comments, but he meant, Someone was researching the family. Trying to work out what was going on. “Someone who didn’t want anything to do with it either. Maybe they found a way.” He was running through the pages of the book, backwards, forwards, as though there was some final secret hidden in the interstices between them. “Maybe they escaped it. Whatever it was.”

“They didn’t,” said a deep, hollow voice from behind them. “But eventually they were shown why it was necessary. As we all were. As you will be.”

It was Great-Uncle Godfrey. Nobody had heard him ascend the steps. None of them had any idea how long he’d been there.

Given his words, Elena might have looked for sympathy, but his gaunt, scarred face was devoid of it, and of most things except a degree of contempt. “It is the great tragedy of our family,” he said, “that we are born weak, and must have strength thrust upon us, before we are fit to make our way in the world.”

“Like Will?” Ross challenged him. “Is he strong, now? After what you did to him?”

“Yes,” Godfrey said simply. He loomed. There was no other word for it. And presumably he was supposed to be a hundred years old or something like Patrick had been, but when Ross moved to just push past him angrily, the boy bounced off him.

“You’ll understand soon enough, both of you,” he told them. Not even harshly, though not gently. Just a statement of fact. “Did you think you could just suckle at the teat of Enderby and not take part in what we do here? In what we are?”

“So tell us what we are,” Ross said, rubbing his shoulder where he’d run into the rock that was Godfrey. “Because I’ve got what Melissa and Elena say they’ve seen, and I’ve got what Will and Melissa said they saw. Something hurt Will. Something happened to Patrick and Barty and the others, because I’ve not seen any of them around recently except you. Something is out in the woods. And there’s this—” A dismissive hand indicating the scrapbook and the display. “And it’s just… nonsense. Conspiracy theory ravings. So why don’t you actually just tell us? Given we’re going to find out anyway.”

“You are.” Godfrey rolled his shoulders. In the shadows, in the fickle light of phone torches, he seemed to be growing. As though the darkness all around was a part of him, as it was a part of the family. “But she isn’t.”

He moved far too fast for an old man. Even for a man forty years younger than he was supposed to be. The bony knot of his hand was digging into Elena’s shoulder on the instant, fingers like hungry roots, and then he had her, hauling her effortlessly into darkness, scattering the other two with her flailing limbs.

“You never bring outsiders to the feast,” Godfrey spat. He was just a shadow in the dark, now, a shape grown monstrous in the imagination, and an anchoring grip she couldn’t dislodge. She felt the bones in her shoulder grind. And the attic was vast, extending on all sides into night, cluttered with a junk topography, the wan lights already just limning about the edges of all the intervening family history they’d hidden up here. She heard Ross and Melissa shouting, banging, trying to find her, scouring the uncooperative dark.

She got one shout out, or possibly a scream, before he had her by the throat. The ficklest glimmer from one of the slanted skylights pasted Godfrey’s face with a ghastly slug-silver sheen. He hoisted her off her feet, and he was gigantic, the angular bulk of him pressing on all sides. She saw the top button of his shirt flit past her face as his exertions tore it loose. Her breath was a hoarse wheeze, but she kicked her heels at the crates and old furniture around her, even as she pried impotently at his grip.

“I said,” he ground out, “we should have just vanished you. We should have taken you into the trees with the others. But they’re still soft, Gil and the children. Soft and young. They don’t know how to make the hard decisions.” He coughed suddenly, disgustingly, right in her face. Her ears shook from the sound. It filled the whole attic, like a discharged gun.

That was how they found her, probably. Ross was suddenly wrenching at Godfrey’s arms, unable to move them, like the man was a statue, a machine. Elena could feel her whole head pounding by then, no breath in, no breath out, a dreadful pressure building within her. And Godfrey seemed almost to be suffering the same thing, his eyes protruding, his jaw wide as though he was about to tear her face off with his teeth. He said something, but none of it was words, just mad snippets of babble escaping from the corners of his mouth.

Melissa let out a scream and hit him with something. An old umbrella, in fact, snatched from an elephant’s foot bin. It shattered into splinters, but they all heard the heavy snap from within Godfrey.

His eyes stopped seeing Elena, or anything. His mouth relaxed momentarily and she heard a long exhalation of breath, as though it was all a grand relief.

His grip loosened. He sat down heavily one way, and Elena fell the other, gasping for breath, hands to her bruised throat. Ross had his torch up, checking her over with the determined focus of a medical student who wished he’d studied harder.

Melissa was standing at the edge of the light, a hand to her mouth, staring at what she’d done. When Godfrey let out another long breath, she actually squeaked, fear and relief combined.

He continued to release that last breath, until there surely had never been so much air ever inside one person. His arms and legs flapped, fishlike, undirected. His head tilted slowly backwards, mouth yawning wide.