20171017

Day 1,137

The tour guides always warn their groups not to stare at the gargoyles. On sunny days they make the obvious joke about the sun, the other 363 days a year they claim there are hawks nesting there and that staring too much will bring them down in a fury of feathers and talons.

This is, of course, untrue.

My uncle used to be a mason in charge of checking in on the cathedral, what with the rapid increase in rain acidity it became a full time job. That and when the sun is dim, the smaller gargoyles like to go for a wander, mostly in search of pigeons to eat but anything warm will do in a pinch.

He's lost three fingers to the little wanderers and a good chunk of his left calf to their bigger brethren. It made the news briefly as one lucky tourist captured the statue moving while they were taking a video of the stained glass window just below it. All of five minutes later it was claimed to be a hoax for a new horror flick coming out in the next three years and all was forgotten.

He still goes up there to this day, only weekly instead of daily. He's not exactly in running shape, not since he mistimed a kick to the face of the one the cathedral has nicknamed "Gwaedlif" or blood-hunger in English. The little bastard has been out for it since lightning first struck the cathedral in 1396. That's when they all began to move about.

Over the past 600 or so years they've become clever, it took three "incidents" before they realised the gargoyles were memorising schedules, patrol patterns and moving in when they knew there would be no trouble. Apparently there's nothing quite as worrying as seeing a 4 foot statue hobble towards you and being unsure if the pipe in its mouth is rusty or if your coworker was just a second too slow.

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