Fragments...

This was a story I started to write for a competition by the English Heritage People--basically, you had to write a story that involved Whitby Abbey. However, since the story was due a week before my dissertation and could only be 2,500 words, it was never completed. Enjoy!

I saw him the first time was I was eight. My father was a religious historian and was writing a paper on the collection of myth and memory at significant sites throughout Britain. He did his best to schedule the trips in the summer so that I could join him—he said it was because he enjoyed the company. I knew that it was because, even then, I was the one who would type up his notes and keep our itineraries in order. He said it was because I always found points of interests that he missed. I knew it was because, even then, his eyes were failing him and I was the only person he would allow to guide his feet up the steps and over the hidden folds in the ground without being ashamed.

We arrived, perhaps appropriately, in the middle of a fog so heavy that I knew the sea only from its sound. We slept in an inn overlooking the Bay where my father made us tea with too much milk. Otherwise, he said, I’d be up all night and wouldn’t be able to see all the spirits that still lived in the Abbey. The tea had no effect on me one way or the other, but I was still up most of the night, my face pressed to the window, willing away the mist and the chill with childish savagery. My mood did not improve when, awaking (having been mysteriously transported to my bed in the night), I saw that the mist had congealed into fat, fuming rain clouds that spit and hissed against the windows and the walls of our tiny room.

I don’t remember much else about that morning, beside my Father’s weary chuckle at my impatience.

“It’s stood there for seven hundred years, Cait. I promise you, it won’t have changed much by the time the sun comes out.”

By noon, the clouds apparently grew tired of their games and began lagging behind each other, leaving patches of sunlight that stretched across the grass of the nave and made the steps shimmer. We went up, hand in hand, my little mary-janes sliding into the ancient footprints worn into the weary stone.

“You go on ahead,” my Father whispered, moving his hand to the railing so he could hold something still and steady. Thrilled to at last to be moving, I dashed up the rest of the stairs, losing count before 199, but in far too much of a hurry to mind. There was wind making my hair thrash around like a living thing and surf twinkling at my feet and for a few breathless moments, I felt like I could fly.

He saw me before I was even aware of his presence. He stood amongst the graves, as still and ageless as the stones that surrounded him. I had an image of black clothes and black hair and a face that was turned with intense, silent vigilance to the sea. Then my Father was behind me, his hand on the base of my neck, guiding me into the standing shadows of the Abbey.

As we walked up the path, the man turned his head, following our movements with something almost wary in his gaze. I met his eyes for a moment, and to this day, despite everything, I still see those eyes in my dreams. They were wide and nearly white, as if he had been staring to the sea so long that his eyes were now nothing more than a reflection of the sea foam and the sky.

“Who was that?” I asked, trying to turn my head back, but I was too slow for grown-up strides and merely ended up stumbling.

“Who do you mean, Darling?”

“That man there in the graveyard.”

“I’ve no idea, Cait. Come on—it looks as if it might rain again.”

It did. But not before we’d walked every path, studied the nave from every angle, and watched the starlings dance with the sunbeams through the holes in the masonry. My father would have been content simply to stare, to absorb the history and the atmosphere and distill from it some kind of truth, but I made him tell me again about the sacking by the Vikings, the German bombs that wrecked the nave, and the warriors who lay beneath the stones. At last, he sat on a broken wall and took his little notebook from his breast pocket, and I knew he would be writing his impressions for sometime and that I was free to wander. Eager to see the sea, I slipped through the walls of St. Mary’s once again—and found myself not three feet from the man with the moon-bright eyes.

“Are you waiting for someone?” He was leaning toward the wall around the Abbey, far less for support than if he were keeping it company. He turned lazily to me, as if we had already been introduced.

“You could say that.” His voice was calm and solemn and I suddenly felt very grown-up.

“Who is she?”

“How did you know it was a she?”

“You look too lonely. It must be a she.”

He smiled at that, and I saw that the skin around his eyes folded oddly, as if unused to the movement.

“Have you visited the Abbey before?”

“Nope. But my Dad told me all about it. He writes books.”

“I see.” We stood together in silence, while I watched him watch a gull ride a gust of wind over the cliff, before swooping down toward the shore.

“Can you hear it?” He asked presently.

“Hear what?” In answer, he nodded to the hulking skeleton of stone and shadow before us. The sky was rapidly darkening, and a few heavy raindrops splattered into the ground around us.

“Of course not.”

“Then you’re not listening hard enough.”

“Fine then. What do you hear?” I pouted. If he noticed, he gave no indication, far too busy staring into the dimness of the Abbey.

“It’s waiting,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “Just like all of us.”

It was more than twelve years before I returned to Whitby. But that time, the sun shone for the entirety of my visit, as if trying to apologize for being too cowardly all those years ago. I was engaged. I was published. And I was alone...

To be continued...

Perhaps....