Free Broken Voices (Kindle Single) by Andrew Taylor Page A

west tower
had nearly three hundred of them. But I lost my concentration somewhere in the
forties. Then it was just us with no distractions: our footsteps, our breathing
and the light from our lantern sliding ahead into the darkness.
    Faraday’s
breathing became irregular. He sniffed. Once or twice he gave an audible sob
which he tried to disguise with a cough. He was crying. I pretended to ignore
it.
    I felt dizzy. I
kept staggering against the outer wall of the staircase. It felt increasingly
unnatural to be turning only in one direction and my body was making futile
attempts to correct the situation.
    We came at last
to a small landing with a door set in the wall. There was no lock, only a
latch. I lifted it and pulled the door open. I felt a current of air on my face.
    ‘What’s that?’
Faraday said suddenly.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I thought I
saw something. Over there.’ He pointed over my shoulder, through the archway.
‘A — sort of shadow.’
    ‘That’s just
what it was,’ I said. ‘Stop being so jumpy.’
    I stepped
through the archway. We were on the walkway that ran behind the arcade across
the west wall. Faraday held up the lantern. The arcading stretched away from us
to the right; a miniature, almost domesticated version of the great pillars and
arches that marched up either side of the nave.
    Automatically
my hand felt for the iron railing that ran between the pillars of the arcade.
There was no other barrier between us and a drop of ninety-odd feet to the
floor of the tower. It was a thin iron rod, cold and rough to the touch.
    ‘It’s too
narrow,’ Faraday wailed. ‘We can’t go side by side.’
    ‘Give me the
lantern. Hold on to the belt of my coat.’
    In the daytime,
when we had been taken up the tower, this passage had been exciting, with its
views into the tower and the body of the church right up to the huge east
window beyond the choir. We had laughed at the squashed figures moving below
and made jokes about dropping things on them.
    By night the
passage was terrifying. I was standing on the edge of the world and the
slightest misstep could send me tumbling away into the darkness.
    I made myself
let go of the rail. I focused my eyes on the light on the floor of the walkway,
on the line on the left where it met the tower wall. I marched forward at a
slow but steady pace, towing Faraday behind me.
    On the far
side, there was an archway. I passed beneath it and slumped against the wall. I
felt the cold, rough stone against my cheek. I was trembling. I felt sick. I
felt triumphant.
    We were at the
foot of another flight of steps, narrower than the first.
    ‘Nearly there,’
I said. My voice sounded like a stranger’s.
    We began to
climb. Faraday stayed behind me, holding my belt. I reassured myself with the
thought of all the people who must have climbed the stairs and walked across
the arcade above the tower — the bell-ringers, the workmen, the tourists:
hundreds of them, at least, if not thousands over the eight centuries this
tower had stood here. It hadn’t harmed them, and they had all come safely back
to the ground. So why should it harm us?
    But something
had harmed Mr Goldsworthy.
    This staircase
was much shorter than the first, for the arcade was not far below the tower’s
painted ceiling. We came to another little landing, this one with a door. There
was also a third, even narrower spiral staircase that continued the ascent of
the tower. But we were going no higher.
    I opened the
door. As I did so, something touched my ankles. I glanced down but nothing was
there. I thought I would have heard a rat on these hard surfaces. And would a
rat climb this high without the lure of food? The touch had been so light it
could have been a draught of air.
    ‘Is this it?’
Faraday said. ‘Are we here?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘This is what you wanted, the place where they used to ring the bells.’
    ‘Where Mr
Goldsworthy fell from.’
    ‘I tell you one
thing, Rabbit: I’m not going any