Chapter 5: Day 5

Day 5,

Making a habit of writing down something short before I head out in the morning.  When you look out to sea from the Village, it’s not just open ocean that you’re looking at.  The horizon is dotted with small islands.  Small compared to this one anyway.  The closest is to the south and east, not quite directly across from us.  The side facing the Village is a high cliff, and atop that cliff is a thick forest, much like the one that surrounds the Village itself.  And above those trees rises what appears to be the towers and maybe walls of an old castle or fort.  I wonder if anyone’s living over there?  I imagine the view from one of those towers must be spectacular.  Maybe I should try going up there sometime.  It’d be nice to get a proper view of the Village from afar.

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Taking a break from library work.  I swear if there’s any kind of system at all to how the books here are arranged it’s the idiosyncratic sort that only makes sense to the one who came up with it.  Doesn’t help that it sounds like Pat and Theo (still haven’t met him, but Pat says he’s a grump) were just reshelving books wherever and going off memory for those particular books afterward.  Speaking (writing?) of Pat, when I got in today he gave me the key to the archive, not the whole building - because there isn’t one, just a latch on the inside of the front door – but to the room where all the books are.  Said that he was formally ending his term as interim archivist and putting me in charge.

Wait… I’m in charge.  I’m not working with anyone else.  There’s no reason I need to be beholden to the current “organization” of these books.  I can arrange them however I want.  I could even label the shelves.  Put together a card catalog so I don’t have to memorize everything.  I assume that’s how card catalogs work?  I know that’s a thing libraries had for organization in wherever I was before this but I’m not sure what they actually are.

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Well, I’m spooked now.  In my power tripping flurry of reorganizing, I accidentally stayed at the library later than I had been the previous days so it was already getting dark when I left to make my way back to the house.  I’m actually a little surprised about how unafraid I was of making the trip through the woods by myself racing the sundown.  Then again, I had a lantern crystal and I’d been assured that the wildlife is almost never dangerous on this part of the island, this close to the Village.  And besides, this whole place has such an air of peace about it that it’s hard to get too worried about much of anything (which is its own sort of disconcerting now that I put it that way).  But then I found the ruined cathedral.

Not too long after I got on the main road it started raining.  That hard, tropical, rain that comes down in sheets, comes back up as mist when it hits the ground, and flows in rivulets off the broad leaves of the trees.  Between this weather and the impending dark, it’s little wonder that I took a wrong turn off the road.  Instead of going out of the woods to traverse the border between forest and farms, this one took me deeper into the jungle.

By the time the freshly muddy path started sloping uphill I’d realized my mistake, but at that point the rain had only increased in intensity and my indecision on whether to turn back or keep going was tipped by the sight of the path going back to cobblestone just a little further ahead.  At this point just wanting out of the storm as soon as possible – for it was indeed fast becoming a storm and not another one of the common showers of the past few days – I chose to gamble on the chance of there being a closer shelter here than backtracking all the way back to the main road and then even further to my own home.

And, in a sense, my gamble paid off.  At the top of the hill was what could only be called a cathedral, half devoured by vines and roots and moss.  But as I made my way through the partially unhinged doors I soon felt a chill entirely unrelated to my sodden state.  Still, it was protected from the growing wind and apart from the spots where the roof had long since fallen in it was relatively dry.  After taking a moment to wring what water I could from my clothes and hair I picked my lantern back up to take a look around.

Apart from the drop in temperature that I was increasingly sure wasn’t just me being cold and wet, the first thing that struck me was the sheer scale of the space.  It wasn’t so obvious from the outside with the overgrowth, but the central nave alone could have easily held any two or three buildings from the Village.  The light of my lantern barely reached across from one side aisle to the other, much less to the far end where, if this were indeed a church, I expected to find an altar.  Of the ceiling, it may as well have been a black void, which made the intruding columns of rain all the more eerie in the lamplight.

As I made my way down to the far end from the entrance and passed the rotten and overgrown lumps of what may have once been pews it occurred to me that since my arrival I’d not heard a single reference nor seen the smallest sign of organized religion or faith until now.  While the Village had a few larger buildings in a basilica style, I’d gotten the impression that they were for civic rather than religious use, and again while larger than their neighbors were but a pale shade of the crumbling majesty I now found myself surrounded by.  My curiosity piqued even further, I hastened my step, now practically oblivious to the pounding of the rain high above, caught up as I was in this new wonder.

I quickly found myself not at an altar or pulpit but at the base of a statue of a figure (man or woman I couldn’t quite tell) seated on a pedestal reading from a book whose spine was longer than my own.  Moss had settled into the cracks and folds of their robes, accentuating the underlit shadows from my lantern.  Wings sprouted from the figure’s shoulders; not a great hawk-like affair one would find on a depiction of an angel, but small malformed (or perhaps newly formed) things barely the length of the reader’s arms.  They seemed rough and sharp compared to the rest of the statue, and if they truly were wings they were either plucked or yet to plume, the only suggestion of feathers being a few jagged points along the underside.

It was as I circled this sculpture, taking it in from all sides and catching a glimpse of a further chamber beyond that I noticed the sound of rain had softened from a torrent to a murmur.  And with this lessening of the background noise I could now hear the chanting.

It was soft, but undeniably there.  And once I became aware of it, the more I focused the more clearly I could make out the words.  Not that it helped me understand what was being said, for the tongue was utterly foreign to me.  Yet, while definitely present I could not for the life of me pinpoint where it was coming from.  It wasn’t moving, it was just there.  Ambient.  Everywhere and nowhere at once.

While I can remember precious little about myself or the history of where I came from, I can still remember stories.  And I knew enough stories of ghosts and horror to know when to take the rain over the unknown.  And so I fled, back out the crooked doors and into the now soft, warm rain at the tail end of storm that had run its course.  Down the hill, back to the cobblestones of the main road and successfully this time onto the road and path that leads to my home.

I’m pretty much dry now and, I think, calm enough to sleep.  Still, I can’t quite get that place out of my head.  I’ll need to go back there at some point.  Preferably in the daytime and in better weather.

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