The Shrine

To forget it all now, the ways I turned from so many years ago, my
name, the ghosts that pursue me in my sleep, that haunting, guiding
spectral will that has kept me here. To reach down and pluck away every
thought and desire and fear that make up my being and discard them with
the rest of the rubbish, let them rot and decay and die in muted
denial. To shed the weight of the guilt and leave, away from this city
of tiny minds and its endlessly chattering old women, away from this
pursuing angst that is the knowledge of ignorance, away from this
driving gnawing fervour that has torn through my soul and claws now at
my mind. That is what I wish for, since you ask.

Know now that if I relate the story you ask for you listen of your own
free will. Do not mock or scoff at that which you do not believe, for
there is much that is hard to believe, that defies belief by its very
nature. Leave if you wish, depart and hear no more, I will not suffer
to have to convince you of a word, but since you ask and I have a
little time before the boat departs I shall tell, nothing more.

Fifty years ago I came to this place that you call home and I, in my
own way have called it also. It was a kind of listless meandering that
brought me here, nudged along by some stealthy hand of fate maybe, who
is to say. At the time I had no knowledge that my ancestry was tied to
the place. I only arrived seeking for a way to make my fortune, as so
many of us did then and as I am certain many do now, though times have
changed for sure. I was not from these shores, had come from a small
bastioned corner of America, a sparkling beacon of fierce Christian
morality that seems so far away now and, even then, would have rejected
me like bad meat, retched me up and spewed me out unable to stomach
what I had done and what I had become since I had left.

I had joined the war, fresh stock then, a virgin slate for circumstance
to scribe my fate upon, a kind and sober and decent young man. I fought
in Europe with the rest of my brethren and saw there hatred unleashed
unfettered upon itself. Saw man turn upon man with spite and fury, saw
evil done and did evil myself. Learned on those fields that the nature
of evil was not in a man or even of a man but of the deeds of a man,
and as such its seed resides in all of us without exception. This I saw
and this I learned.

So I wandered the world afterwards, with the aim I think to determine
what it was I had saved and whether, as I strongly suspected it had
not, it had been saved at all. I travelled east across burning deserts
and into seething squalid quagmires of humanity gathered around fetid
oceans, cities of shameless sin. It was there, destitute and near
starvation, that I finally left aside for good my morals and my
God.

Eventually, an older and wiser man than before, I arrived here, where I
was to find not that for which I searched for, my future, but my past,
my lineage.

My name aroused suspicion and talk from the very moment I stepped
ashore. I had money then and tried to take a lodging near the port
where I had arrived but at the sound of my name the landlord quaked
visibly and but for my hasty protestations of innocence and ignorance
would have refused my custom. I earnestly quizzed all who would talk to
me why my name had elicited such a reaction, none would say but one
eventually suggested that I visit the graveyard and find my family's
history there.

The following morning I made my way through the rain and cold that was
unfamiliar and dourly uncomfortable to me then, having recently arrived
from the tropics, and found the church and graveyard of which my
companion had spoken. There was little to remark it and it is gone now,
torn down thirty years ago and its grim cargo relocated. I searched the
tombstones one by one but found no mention of my family name that had
caused such strange reactions the night before. Then I saw it, spelled
differently but unmistakable, carved deep in austere letters over the
entrance to a crypt. I had been raised poor and pious and never
imagined that my family would have been one to own a crypt private for
their own kin, let alone one of such grandiose and menacing
countenance.

The crypt was stoppered with a heavy and locked iron door. I pushed at
it for a moment, attempting to force my way in like a burglar, before
approaching the church and searching for someone who might allow me
ingress. I found him in the form of the vicar, he gave no reaction to
my name and I was later to find that few would outside of certain
districts. The city was on the verge of changing then, it along with
the rest of the world caught up in a storm of revolution that sprang
from the debris of war. It would transform beyond recognition in the
next few years and soon forget all that it had been and all the secrets
it had guarded, my name and the fate of my forebears along with it. The
vicar was agreeable to my demands and enthusiastic with curiosity
explaining that he had only recently come into custodianship of the
church and its grounds. His predecessor, I was informed, could probably
have told me everything there was to know of the local history but
unfortunately shared a bed beneath the turf we trod with the subjects
of his expert knowledge.

There would be nothing of which to speak now had I been alone, for I
only saw coffins and smelt in the dusty air the imagined stench of
death that is not decay nor any dark otherworldliness but only the
absence of life, my companion the vicar, with a scholar's eye, saw
dates. Dates my friend that went back to the thirteen hundreds, dates
many and varied yet that all had one undeniable and overwhelmingly
peculiar common factor. Not a man or woman who now lay in that tomb had
died less than a hundred years old, at first we put it down to a
mistake, an inability to read the ancient inscriptions correctly but as
we advanced our way along the stacked racks of coffins the knowledge
was undeniable, the entire line had lived unnaturally long lives, one
grand old patriarch as long as three hundred years. Then, at the end of
the line, in eighteen hundred and seventeen over twenty family members
perished on the same day, the oldest one hundred and sixty years and
the youngest only three months of age. There were no more dates,
coffins or waiting dead to feed our thirst for knowledge after that
date and we emerged gratefully into the daylight with its rain and
biting cold to remind us that we still lived genuine, natural, mortal
lives. For my family in America, to the best of my knowledge, had
always lived to wholly unremarkable ages and I concluded that,
misspelling included, I was of a different stock than the bones that
lay in that crypt. The vicar locked the iron door behind us and I
departed, unnerved but not concerned.

And thus it remained for several months, I found employment that suited
my skills and went about my business with only the occasional bad
reaction to my name when I ventured into the harbour quarter. Until one
day I met the vicar again. He had, he explained, continued his studies
into the family whose resting place we disturbed and, though I
professed no interest, he persuaded me to listen to his results.

The family were once wealthy and important in the area, indeed at one
time most of the city belonged to them. The vicar had found no
explanation of their unnaturally long lives apart from sporadic
accusations and denials of witchcraft and devilry, but little more than
what might be expected. What he had found, however, were detailed and
informative accounts of their sudden demise.

The story such as it is relates the tale of a young man named David,
the youngest of three brothers. He was well liked and respected by all
who chose to record their opinion of him, especially the family of the
young girl to whom he was engaged to be married. Many recorded their
complete surprise at what he did and still more guessed at his reasons
but none could claim any true insight, exactly why he did what he did
remains a mystery. Upon the night of the third of October Eighteen
hundred and Seventeen the entire family had congregated at the family
home to celebrate the christening of their newest member, such a
gathering was not unusual, indeed one letter the vicar had unearthed
suggested that the ancient house hosted the entire family two or three
nights a week. That night David returned from town at the head of an
army of masked men, subsequent police work concluded that it was a mob
of local workers though none admitted being part of it and few were
accused. With these men under his command David, the only among them
who showed his face, imprisoned his entire family inside the house with
knives, axes and muskets whilst he burnt it to the ground. In one night
of bloody fury all but he who carried his name were cruelly murdered.
The following morning David and his young fianc?e were nowhere to be
found, it was rumoured they fled to the new world though none knew for
sure.

My friend the vicar showed me the ruins of the house on the crown of a
hill in the west of the city, fragments of rock stuck like dried bones
in the mossy ground and clawed skywards hinting to the informed
observer of the architecture they once supported. The vicar wondered
aloud what could have driven the young David to do what he did and
voiced the idea, echoed often in the surviving contemporary accounts,
that he had discovered something related to the unnaturally long lives
of his family. I who had a far more intimate knowledge of evil that
this man who only fought it in the spirit knew that it takes not any
great revelation or terribly knowledge to drive a man to hatred, hatred
can cling and fester and gnaw at a man from within, can come from the
smallest thing and rise up till it consumes him, can drive him to do
most anything. Yet I did not voice this opinion.

Later that year I fell on hard times and needing a place to stay,
indeed to hide, I returned to the site of that ruined building and
within its crumbled remains found shelter from the elements, and stayed
there for several weeks. Perhaps I was drawn to the spot, who can say,
in hind sight it is easy to see purposes, strategies and patterns that
did not and could not have existed. Suffice to say that what I felt
when I first saw the place was nothing but a morbidly curious
indifference and later returned to it only because I knew it provide me
refuge. Yet with the staying there I grew fonder of the place and even
when I no longer required its sanctuary returned to it often, keeping
it clean and empty of other vagrants and sometimes using it for my own
purposes.

Years passed and business turned up again, this time with myself in a
far more prominent position, a position that carried with it large
rewards. Nearly forty years ago, when I had been in the city a decade,
I bought the land from the civic body that owned it and employed an
architect to build a house on it, a house that would rival the original
for size and splendour, a gaudy monument to my success. At the time my
name and the old site brought out memories and reports of it's past
events like rats from the woodwork, a few amateur historians tried to
delve into my past to determine if I really was descended from the
unfortunate erstwhile occupiers but I preferred not to have my past so
well known and discouraged them from looking too hard. In time the
whole thing blew over and was forgotten as everything is eventually
forgotten. I took abode in the completed house and have lived there
these forty years.

Yesterday I chanced across the vicar again as I walked out of my front
door, I barely recognised him for he was old and long retired but he
stared at me with such a terrified and astonished expression on his
face that I could not ignore him and soon realised who it was. I had,
he remarked with a cracked voice, not aged a day. He was frail and
clearly infirm and I invited him in to rest. And it was there, as we
talked, that I finally realised what the recorders and investigators of
old had not been able to surmise, why David had done what he had
done.

I led my friend the vicar through the house to the carefully hidden
steps my architect had been instructed to install and down into the
rocky cavern I had discovered the night I had sought refuge in the lee
of the ancient stones. It was not the family David was trying to
destroy so much as the very house, but even he was mistaken for what he
aimed his rage at was hidden safely below in the hill upon which the
house rested. Whether he knew this and did not understand or whether he
turned at the last moment from finishing his task, driven by fear of
the law or other, nameless, powers, I do not know. But what I
discovered had survived the burning, and as I had wormed myself,
terrified, into the slime of the hole under the rock that night and
fell headlong into the unexpected cave it concealed, so too must
countless others have been taken against their will, and as my
frightened surprise drew my pursuers after me so must they have
screamed when they realised their fate, and as I fought for my life in
the damp silence, so they too must have been cruelly murdered. There in
the darkness of that cellar, that sepulchre, that shrine, that womb,
that tomb, that rock crested alter that rain dare not touch. For the
very slime beneath our feet, the very bone and blood of the hill was
the bone and blood of my family. And though the vicar could translate
less than half of the strange twisting inscriptions on the walls he
told me enough to confirm what in my heart I already knew. And as his
blood ran weakly down the ancient stone guttering to merge with the mud
of the hill, with the body of the earth, I understood then that what I
had considered nothing more than a secret place to carry out my
business and bury the bodies was something far worse. I understood for
the first time that the terrible urge that crawled and burned within me
for the blood and death I brought there, that murderous cancer that had
grown steadily in my gut all those years, that desperate animal hunger,
was not an insanity born of a tortured and violent life but something
far worse, something more primal, something evil. And I knew then,
friend, that my unnatural long life was not due to diet, or exercise,
or sheer will, or to any of the thousand rationalisations I had used,
for it was not life from the sun and air but life from the earth, from
the slime and the mud and the rock that I fed so abundantly with the
blood of my victims. This I knew then, this I learned that day.

In the calmness, the rational moment of removed clarity that followed
the act, I realised with appalling lucidity what I had done and what I
had become and resolved then to do what David had failed to do. With a
timed gas explosion I would bring my house down with such force it
would crush the cave and bury beneath the rubble the malevolence that
lurked there. And I will flee, as my ancestor fled, unable to shake the
thought that he, as I, ran not from the law or from the crime he
committed that night but other, fouler crimes, and the fear that as I
leave the city with less than I arrived with, I will be taking part of
that mad evil with me.