Here’s a little story for you. I hope you enjoy it.
Wishing you a Merry Christmas
Christmas Tidings
by Cath Barton
‘Holy smoke and Hell fire!’ Canon Barabbas Pylon was not having a good morning. Only a week till Christmas and he was struggling to get the festive parish newsletter out. The broadband connection in Little Snittersford was unreliable at the best of times and now his computer had crashed.
Canon Pylon peered out of the window of his study in the vicarage and up at the bulk of the Church of The Holy Innocents. There was something amiss, but he couldn’t understand for a moment what it was. It did seem to be a very gloomy morning. Ah, he realised, the star on the top of the church tower which was supposed to be illuminated was not. Neither were the fairy lights adorning the trees bringing light into the midwinter darkness as they should be.
‘Holy Mother of God!’
He immediately felt remorse for his blasphemous utterance, and impelled to go across to the church and make recompense through prayer. While he was there he would investigate and find out if a switch had been, unaccountably, tripped. As he stepped out of the front door of the vicarage he saw a man ahead of him on the path to the west door. The man was dressed in tight-fitting black garments and had crampons on his shoes. This did not surprise Barabbas Pylon, who had encountered stranger people by far during his travails in the service of the Lord.
‘May I be of assistance?’ he enquired of the man as he drew level with him, inclining his head obsequiously to the left as was his habit. The man gave him a blank stare. The Canon immediately wondered whether the man was on drugs. The churchyard, with its concealing yews, was a Mecca for such people. He stood watching as the man continued walking, arrived at the west end of the church and began to ascend the tower.
‘I say–’ he called to the man. ‘I say, you really can’t –’
But it was clear that the man could, and that he was climbing the vertical face of the twelfth-century tower with ease, thanks to the crampons. Canon Pylon hurried over and stood below the man, ineffectually waving his arms and calling out. But his reedy warble was drowned by the caws of the crows which encircled the tower of the church, the more so as they saw the man moving towards their nests.
The man quickly reached the first gargoyles. It pleased Canon Pylon not a little to see that the beasts had woken and that their spectres were spitting on the intruder, who was ducking in a futile attempt to avoid the bile of ages issuing from their ghastly gaping mouths.
‘Go boys!’ cried the excited Canon, though Bill and Ben – as he affectionately thought of them – needed no encouragement.
It was clearly a pleasure to them to have this large and relatively slow-moving target; generally they had only the crows to spit upon, which evaded their venom with ease and shat upon them copiously in revenge while they were asleep.
However the man, although somewhat splattered with the gargoyles’ vile-smelling and vivid poison, was apparently undeterred. He had climbed on so that he was now level with the second course of gargoyles which, although smaller, were renowned as being even more vicious than Bill and Ben. This gang of medieval ruffians had been known – or so it was rumoured in the parish – to descend at night and roam through the churchyard, issuing hideous alarums which entered into the hallucinations of the druggies injecting on the tombstones of the innocent dead.
These gargoyles were of course, in the same way as all so-called mythical beasts, able to fly about as they wished, although they generally refrained from doing so in the daytime. Now, though, they rose as one and flapped their great wings in the face of the man who had, uninvited, entered their kingdom.
To Canon Pylon, way below, the sight was no less than revelatory. He was in daily expectation of the Second Coming and here it was, in the shape of a blank-faced crampon-wearing drug addict arousing the beasts of the apocalypse. Would the sky now be rent asunder and God appear before him in a bolt from the blue? Would he be judged there and then and his sins broadcast from on high to the parish?
The Canon waited. No lightning bolt came. The flapping ceased. The gargoyles above settled back into their customary solid slothful attitudes.
The man disappeared from sight. Ascended into heaven, then, thought Canon Pylon. He returned to the vicarage for lunch and took with it a small glass of sherry, in celebration of the momentous event. He fell asleep in his chair and dreamed, for once, of angels rather than his habitual demons. When he woke and looked out of the window he saw that the star on the church tower was once more illuminated, indeed was rather brighter than before.
The Canon found, when he turned his computer back on later that day, that his broadband speed had, after months of fruitless attempts to contact the authorities, suddenly increased dramatically, and the sending out of his newsletter took only moments. Feeling at peace with technology and his Lord, he opened a new document and began to draft his sermon for Christmas morning.
‘It has long been known,’ he began, ‘that there would be miracles associated with the Second Coming of Christ. Let me share with you now the miraculous events which have taken place –’
He paused, hearing a sound on the stairs of the vicarage. It was a scraping sound, such as would be made by someone wearing crampons on their shoes. The sound was coming closer, and now the handle of the door was turning. Barabbas Pylon rose from his chair. He was ready.
Photo by Cath Barton
Cath Barton 