The Triforium Page 3

  “And then there was that Puritan rabble during the Civil War. Cromwell’s thugs attacked and badly damaged the Abbey. Unfortunately Oliver Cromwell was buried here. But then there was the Restoration of the Monarchy, and the corpse of this repugnant regicide was exhumed. His body taken to Tyburn tree where he was executed — posthumously — and hanged along with a couple of his confederates, who were also, at the time, buried here. Their heads were placed on a spike.”

  The Reverend pantomimed sticking an invisible head on an invisible spike, and then added, “He is no longer buried here, is he Bradshaw?”

  This was the first time there was any indication that Mr. Bradshaw might be listening into their conversation from back within his office. The Reverend’s voice had an edge to it now that Butterfield hadn’t heard before. Perhaps he didn’t like eavesdropping.

  “No, Reverend, he is definitely not buried here,” came an almost apologetic response from beyond the door that led into Mr. Bradshaw’s office.

  “No he’s definitely not,” the Reverend went on with a chuckle. “Besides all of these indignities, the Abbey has endured hundreds of years of souvenir hunters who have stripped the place almost to the degree old Harry the Eighth did. The armor and silver head of Henry V … gone. The silver cradle of Edward IV’s daughter … stolen. Six gilded brass images of the children of Edward III … pilfered by tourists. Queen Phillipa’s gilt angels … scarpered off with. Worst of all, a schoolboy ran off with the jaw of King Richard II, as though the old monarch hadn’t suffered enough indignities. You see it is time to start putting things right. Prince Charles is very keen on this project, very keen indeed. You, of course, know that he has made a pursuit out of advocating urban renovation — restoring and upgrading architecture that upholds London’s traditional ideals.”

  He lingered here and stared at Butterfield for a second or two; then another big smile blossomed across his face. He got up and walked across the room to where Butterfield was seated.

  “Come, my boy, look out this window. I want you to take in the place. This is your grand canvas. “

  Butterfield turned to face the double-arched window behind him. The Reverend clasped Butterfield by his shoulder and made a sweeping motion toward the view with his free right arm.

  “Wallace, look there.” He pointed. “There is the High Altar.”

  Butterfield stared down into the Abbey. He felt like a pigeon in the rafters, looking down through the window at the scene below: the large golden choir screen, an altar with large golden candlesticks, and a large golden cross.

  “On the other side of the screen is the Chapel of King Edward, Edward the Confessor, who built the Abbey. His tomb is there.”

  Butterfield nodded.

  Reverend Poda-Pirudi continued. “When Henry VIII took to looting the place, the monks took Edward out of his tomb and secretly buried him. I guess they felt that his body might be despoiled because he had been canonized by the Church of Rome as a saint: Saint Edward the Confessor. Henry was on the outs with the Catholic Church at the time. Eventually they put Edward back. Well, of course, Henry the Eighth isn’t buried here.”

  Yet again Butterfield felt obliged to nod.

  “Oh yes, as per Edward’s wish, the high altar is built upon soil brought back from Jerusalem.” The Reverend chuckled. “You know some scientists with ground-penetrating radar recently found a slew of old crypts under there. Did you read about the ground-penetrating gizmo Wallace?”

  “Yes, I think I did read about that a while back.”

  “I’m glad to see you keeping up on current events. Bodies are always turning up around here. When they went looking for the body of James the First, they discovered that he was shacking up with Henry VII. Now, why doesn’t that surprise me? And when they opened the crypt of Mary Queen of Scots they found her there with her great grandson, a niece, Elizabeth of Bohemia, as well as Arbella Stuart, and a couple babes of James II, and Queen Anne. Over-active maternal instinct, I’d say.”

  The Reverend held a hand to his chest to stifle a laugh. Then he got serious. “But you know the most wonderful feature of this entire Abbey is right below us. There,” he pointed. “In front of the high altar. There. You see? The Cosmati Pavement.”

  Butterfield looked down and saw in the foreground a large swirling mosaic of geometric patterns made from brightly colored stone.

  “It was ordered to be built by Henry III in the thirteenth century. Some say it is a prayer to God; some say it depicts the end of the universe, Judgment Day. The mosaic is about seven and a half meters square. The stone for it was acquired by special dispensation from the pope. They chopped up ancient Roman and Egyptian antiquities to make this. It’s comprised of semi-precious stones like green serpentine, purple porphyry, and red- and blue-colored glass on Purbeck marble. Do you see that central roundel?”

  Butterfield pointed to it.

  “Yes, that one. Well, it is onyx, and it is also the very spot where Edward the Confessor’s throne is placed for the royal coronation. You know, the throne that is encased in glass and on display downstairs?”

  Wallace had seen and nodded.

  “Well, almost every monarch who has been crowned in England has been crowned in that chair over that roundel. Funny thing is that for almost two centuries the pavement had been covered over by a dirty oriental rug. Nobody paid much attention to it. Well, the Abbey Foundation has recently thrown that old rug out and restored the pavement. We do good work you know.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Odd thing. There are brass letters around the border of the paving. Some are missing, but we know it’s a formula for the end. The medieval end of the world based on the multiple life spans of men and dogs and hedges and sea serpents, some sort of Ptolemaic system for prognosticating such a cataclysm. Well, I’m sure you want to know. The magic year for when the apocalypse is to take place is 19,683 years from the time the pavement was built. So Wallace, don’t sweat it. We have more than 18,000 years left to go.

  “Wallace, I can’t wait to see your drawing — just don’t mess with my paving. “

  Butterfield knew that he was supposed to say something, but what? It wasn’t a dream come true because he wouldn’t have ever dreamt it. The silence was awkward. Finally, he spoke. “With all due respect, Jae, I’m not your man. Shouldn’t you put this out for some kind of architectural design competition? Get some really qualified people who know all about the Gothic architecture in here?”

  “Well, perhaps at some point. Let’s see what you can come up with first. My money is on you for now. I’ve cut you a check as a retainer.” He handed an envelope to Butterfield. “Give it try, won’t you?”

  Butterfield opened the envelope and glanced at the sum on the check. He stumbled on his first few words in response. “I … I … w-w-w-will get right to work. Clear my desk. I’ll give my best shot. I assure you.”

  “Of course you will. We’ll be in touch. How I envy you. This is such an historic moment for the Abbey. Go home and get a good night’s rest and then have at it.”

  The Reverend escorted Butterfield to the door of his office and waved farewell to him as Butterfield began to work his way back around the packing crates piled about the triforium.

  Reverend Poda-Pirudi shut and locked his office door and then walked over to the open door of Mr. Bradshaw’s office. He leaned in. “I’m going to need a couple of first class noggins. Get me the ghosts of Newton and Darwin.”

  Chapter Four

  During the Night

  When Wallace got back to his bedsit above his office, he was walking on Cloud 9. Sure, he knew that he was totally unprepared for the job he had been given, but for the first time in his life he felt that he was significant. He liked the feeling. It made him strangely calm. With all the excitement of the evening, you might think that he would be up all night, his mind racing.
But no, he was sleepy. He told himself he would advertise for a secretary with Jobcentre Plus in the morning. His office would be a proper office now. Then Butterfield fell asleep, confident that he was going to have good dreams. And he did because deep down inside him behind his pyloric valve, curled up like a hedgehog, was Wallace’s unborn ghost. Who was quite content to forgo any playing in Wallace’s brain this night.

  Butterfield’s ghost came into being when Butterfield was born … though strictly speaking his ghost hadn’t been born yet. Ghosts hatch out upon the death of their host. In the interim, they matured by soaking up the life experience of the living. It is a parasitic relationship. Incubating this way, the unborn soul strengthens, absorbing the abilities and personality of the mortal rind.

  However, at the time of Wallace’s birth, the center of his spectral pupa’s being was way down in his stomach. The stomach acts as sort of a yolk for the development of a proto-ghost. As an unborn ghost grows older it rises upward and upward, till eventually they are crammed into that incessantly chattering hunk of meat, the frontal lobe.

  If you asked Wallace Butterfield in what part of his body his consciousness was located, he would point to the middle of his forehead just above his eyes. So would most people. So would his maturing ghost. But his ghost would do so with less enthusiasm. It was a place he hated to visit, unless it was to give Butterfield a nightmare; it was always buzzing, always changing, never the same, neurons discharging willy-nilly like the randomness of fireflies pulsating in the dark.

  But there was a time when Wallace’s consciousness wasn’t located there, in the frontal lobes. When the ghost and Butterfield first started out, they hung about together in a lower region of the brain, an older section, the amygdala, a nice cozy spot that humans had inherited from some reptilian ancestors. Butterfield’s ghost had been fond of this place; little chatter there except perhaps on Christmas morning … or later on in Wallace’s adolescent life when a pubescent girl drew near. Then his neurons did do a lot of chattering then, sparking and discharging all sorts of mental images, conjuring up hopes, possibilities, and anxieties. But nothing much happened beyond that. And adolescent girls so rarely came close to Butterfield that it was hardly a problem.

  It was when the larval ghost moved with Wallace into those frontal lobes, that area just over Wallace’s eyes, that things got rough. This was about the time that Butterfield’s head started to get stuffed with facts, definitions, treatises, opinions, values, encyclopedic articles, and textbook piffle … nonsense layered upon nonsense. And worse, this nonsense fed Wallace’s insecurity, inhibitions, phobias, and all those other things that make human beings such pathetic creatures.

  Butterfield’s ghost hated it there and hated being forced to stay there. So, one night he chose to rebel. He had long ago discovered that whenever Wallace slept, his thoughts would become diffuse and sink down into another region of the brain, the hippocampus. The hippocampus told him stories while he rested. On the evening of the rebellion, as things started to calm down in Wallace’s head, his ghost pounced, seizing the moment, he forced his way into the hippocampus and hijacked a dream. He filled the hippocampus with his ghostly thoughts, frightening things, bizarre horrors, cruelty, and death; and that’s when the miracle occurred. Just as Wallace Butterfield was losing his balance and about to fall into a pit full of gigantic tarantulas, Butterfield’s brain forcibly expelled the ghost. Rising upward, the ghost’s head, so to speak, suddenly surfaced, coming to rest just above Wallace’s head. What a delightful it was up there! No annoying thoughts; Wallace Butterfield’s consciousness was well below. The silence was wonderful!

  His ghost wished he had discovered this phenomenon earlier. He began to utilize this technique every evening. Every day Butterfield’s ghost spent Butterfield’s waking hours searching for a new idea that would scare the crap out of Wallace while he tried to get some sleep. What he concocted during the day he would parade about Butterfield’s hippocampus at night. The result was always the same. The ghost would be kicked out of the brain and surface a good ten inches above Wallace’s head.

  Up there he would survey the outside world without any of the lame distractions that came from his host. Butterfield’s ghost did find it to be strange that none of the other ghosts seemed to know how to do this. As he surveyed the outside world from his lofty perch, he could see their eyes peering through the eyes of their hosts … how tortured they looked trapped within those brains, their existence confined to a human straight jacket, all of them anxiously awaiting the liberation of death.

  But tonight was the ghost’s night to be scared. There would be no repeat performance of a tentacled rhinoceros giving Wallace a proctologic examination with a Gregorian chant thrown in for extra measure. Butterfield’s ghost lay hidden in the small intestines just on the other side of the pyloric valve shivering in fear, as he tried to make sense of what he had just seen.

  ***

  While Wallace Butterfield was experiencing one of the best night’s rests he had had in a decade, miles away a voice could be heard booming throughout the dimly lit Abbey. And though there were no lights on in the triforium, the voice was coming from there.

  “What do you mean, you won’t do it? What are your excuses now? Crohn’s disease? Lupus? Migraines? Allergies? Athlete’s foot? Oh no, not chronic fatigue syndrome? You’re spirits! You get plenty of rest, besides you can’t get ill anymore! Why are the intellectual types always such babies?”

  There must have been a reply, but it was not audible to the specters rising up in their crypts down below in the north and south transepts and in the naïve or in Henry VII’s high chapel. But those same specters certainly did hear the indignant first voice continue.

  “It’s beneath you? You said it’s beneath you? You’re dead! Sometimes I think that the ascent of man — Yes, yes, I mean the ascent of spirits — is just a quest to see how stupid we all are. What is it with the two of you? Oh don’t tell me, you are only going to be satisfied when you have analyzed the world into total immobility? All ones and zeros, is that it? Positives and negatives, black and white, everything must have perfect mathematical symmetry, like the latticework of some humongous crystal? You have it all down don’t you? Facts in their succession — one after another in a nice long row — a big chain of interrelated causal events. Of course, what hasn’t yet been discovered will have space allocated within your great continuum. If not, someone will write a new theorem to nudge it into place. You’ve got it all figured out. Well, of course you do because you have simian brains. Well, listen up my fine pair of monkey eggheads. Do you want to end up like Bradshaw’s ghost over there, spending eternity packed in with disposable diapers and kitty litter at the Mucking Marshes Landfill? And it will take more than an army of your fellow scientists with ground imaging radar to locate your bodies!”

  The Reverend Poda-Pirudi gave the threat a little time to sink in so it could be fully appreciated. But just in case the shades of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin had any further doubts, Poda-Pirudi further clarified their situation.

  “Bradshaw come here. Tell the mega-brains how much fun it is down below the Mucking Marshes Landfill with a smell of rot far worse than your own.”

  The response was inaudible, but a new voice began talking excitedly and quickly. It was that of John Bradshaw.

  The Reverend interrupted him.

  “I imagine me Johnny boy, that you are enjoying the fact that I’ve allowed you back here at the Abbey. How does it feel to be home again?”

  A frantic explanation followed. Then the Abbey went silent for a while. You had to be in Reverend Poda-Pirudi’s office in the triforium to make out what was being said.

  “Of course I understand. Just a bit of nerves, that’s all. A bit of a panic attack. It has been a while since you’ve been out and about in London. No, no, I’m not mad at you. Now, chop-chop, off you go, and remember I want daily reports.�
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  Chapter Five

  Tipsy Dolls

  Tipsy Dolls Fine Dining in Mayfair was built near where an 18 th - century gingerbread baker hawked obscene gingerbread men and women to the crowds watching the executions at Tyburn tree. The restaurant was close to the spot where his ovens once stood. It thrived here for four decades, advocating traditional British fare, beef Wellington, tripe and onions, fried smelts, bubble and squeak, lamb’s tongue in raisin sauce, beef collops with pickled walnuts, baked jam roly-poly, and of course gingerbread.

  The restaurant had frontage on Samlesbury Avenue. It was a five-story stone building with a wooden facade on the street level. Countless windowpanes were confined in what was once dark blue sobering woodwork with the name Tipsy Dolls carved across it many times in gold-leaf script. The gold-leaf was long gone, the royal blue paint had chipped off to reveal white primer underneath, and there was no trace of the blue and yellow awnings that once protected the windows. The window boxes, once full of purple lobelia, had crumbled long ago.

  At one time, Tipsy Dolls was so exclusive that you had to have a recommendation to get in.

  You still couldn’t walk in. Though Tipsy Dolls had the look of a foreclosure, it was paid up in full, and, for those who knew its secrets, it still served a purpose.

  A rumpled-looking woman with dull brown hair, exhausted from too many applications of coloring, came to the old musician’s entrance door of what was once the Tipsy Dolls Restaurant. She pulled out some keys from her purse, fumbled around with several, and finally let herself in. A few minutes passed before another woman, wearing pink Crocs and an untucked T-shirt that hung below her brown wool sweater, did the same thing. Then came a jogger in her mid-thirties who dipped into her fanny pack for her key to the old restaurant. Over the next hour several more women went through this same routine. For a while it seemed that anyone who was going to enter had and that those inside were no doubt proceeding with their business.