Melvin Burgess Stuff

I picked this one up around an old church in Oporto.

Apparently there have been persistent rumours of the death of God at this site for nearly two hundred years.

This story was told to me on the steps of the chocolate shop opposite the west wall last Friday evening.

It’s called, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

It took place some time in the early nineteenth C, when two unnamed English travellers visited the site – part of a European tour.

The story goes that the local priest entered one evening to prepare for mass years before and never came back out.

He locked the doors from the inside and hung cloth over the windows. No one could go in, no one could see in.

The bishop came to see. He too, never re-emerged.

Stories circulated – ghosts, demons, devil worship. No one came in or out.

It remained locked for over fifty years.

Neglected, the great building decayed.

Slums grew up around it, stuck to its sides. Trees broke up the pavements around it. Subsidence sank the nave and buckled the buttresses.

Blackened and sunken, no one would ever have guessed this was once a great and powerful centre of worship.

The names of our two explorers have not come down to us. Let’s call them William and Benjamin.

It is a wet and windy day in February. Their boat is held up. Listless, they explore the city.

Then Will spots the spire from a nearby hilltop; they go to investigate.

The foot of the great church stinks of boiled cabbage, urine, faeces and disease; poverty.

Ben holds his handkerchief to his face and gags. This place is hateful.

They walk round three times trying to find a way in; all doors are locked and the windows sealed with wooden shutters inside.

“It’s late, it’s cold, we’ll catch something,” whines Ben. But Will will.

At last he decides that the only way in is through the bell tower and down. The only way up, is to climb.

The huge church, a cathedral almost, is sheer faced, but using the buttresses and windows, it may be possible. But …

“But it could cost you your life,” exclaims Ben.

Covered in moss, weeds and pigeon droppings, rotten with crumbling stone, the church is perilous in the extreme.

It seems to Ben that his friend has lost his reason. Such risk to peer inside an mouldering church?

But Will is fixated. He begins to the great arch at the main door.

He has only just started when a figure bolts from the close slums and begins to harangue him in a language neither of them understand,

When he refuses to listen, the man tries to pull Will down by his feet.

Ben wrestles the man to the ground; Will uses the chance to escape higher.

Now he is committed. The assent begins.

As he get higher, a crowd begins to gather, silent in the gloom, watching, and waiting, scared, curious and fearful.

No one has seen inside the church in their lifetimes.

Will climbs steadily higher. Statuary crumbles under his feet; moss tears out in his hands, but his grip is firm.

At last he attains the church roof and is able to scramble over the slab tiles to the tower.

The assent continues until finally, he puts his hands into the gap before the bell – and climbs in.

The crowd below murmur excitedly. Many cross themselves and pray.

Will’s face seems to light up. “It is God himself in there!” someone cries.

“Just a candle!” exclaims Ben. But atheist though he is, he feels unsure

Will is peering down into the tower. They hear his voice indistinctly. But who is he speaking to?

“What is it?” calls Ben, far, far below. “What do you see?”

Will glances briefly, down, then turns his attention back to the church without replying.

The crowd becomes excited, angry, even. Some begin to shout and curse. One man, a madman surely, starts to throw stones.

“Quiet!” bellows Ben.

In the sudden silence they can hear Will’s voice rise and fall, but from the church itself, they can hear nothing but the softest of murmuring.

At last Will turns briefly to look down. Then, as if on impulse, he begins to climb down - into the church tower.

“No!” screams Ben, full of sudden terror for reasons he cannot describe. But his friend has already disappeared.

The slight flickering light of the candle in the bell tower blows out. The crowd stand in silence.

And wait. And wait and wait and wait.

Darkness falls and spreads down into the narrows streets, and finally to the tower itself.

Someone claps Ben on the shoulder. “A brave man. But you will never see your friend again.”

Ben waits all night as the crowd gets thinner and thinner. Dawn has come and gone by the time he too gives up and goes home.

In the rooms they are renting, he finds that Will’s clothes and books are missing. A clue. But to what?

As predicted, Ben never sees his friend again.

Will simply disappears. His parents, friends and fiance never hear from him again.

But, years later, a letter. Just one, from the south seas.

“I wanted you to know I survived.”

Ben wrote back at once, begging his old friend to tell him what happened in the church.

He was an old man himself, and did not survive long enough to receive the reply. But his son took the letter and opened it.

This is what he read.

“As I climbed, a smell grew. No, not a smell, a stink, a miasma, like nothing on earth. Decay beyond imagining.

“I was met in the tower by a young priest – they’d heard me coming up. He told me they needed help – I was to come down and assist.

“Foolishly, I agreed. No sooner was I down, than they had me, three of them, strong as oxen.

“Hands bound tight, blindfolded, I was led down the ladders.

“As we descended the stench grew and grew. It was beyond me how anything could smell so bad, a vast, unbelievable stink.

“And yet it kept growing.

“At the bottom they took of the blindfold and I saw it.

“A body. The vast body of a man in middle age.

It stretched the entire length of the nave. The ribs and belly reached almost to the tops of the windows.

“It was in a pitiful state of decay, the tongue black, body bloated, eyes black and stinking

“The ribs had burst through the rotting skin. Maggots worked in its eyes and tongue.

“It was monstrous, huge as a whale, huger, filthy with corruption.

“Lord Jesus save me!” I cried.

“No,” said the priest. “Not him. This is God Himself.”

“There He lay, rotting for a thousand years, the Holy Body of our Creator, who at last met the same end He made for us.

“They kept me there; no one who knew could be allowed out. The church would not conceive it.

“I would rather have died than live those years again.

“I would rather have died than live them then, but they did not allow any form of escape.

“Yet after twenty terrible years, I did escape, and ran, and ran, here, to a place even they have been unable to reach.

And I kept their secret safe from that day to this.”