"Chico Kidd - The printer's devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kidd Chico)

low ringers.
On the walls of the little ringing-chamber hung peal-boards black as ebony, the writing upon them illegi-
ble from where he stood. Newer boards commemorated the coronation of Elizabeth II and the Festival of
Britain, but he could see nothing more recent. It was, however, the old ones which fascinated him.
Alan was a writer by trade and an antiquarian by inclination. Like a jackdaw, he collected old things:
papers, books, paintings; letters, documents, photographs. When he could, he wrote about these things for
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magazines: they were his centre and his core, a passion like music was to Kim. Most of the time, though, he
wrote copy for advertisements, this being a more lucrative pursuit.
When the touch was over he stood his bell, tied the rope in that particular knot which novice ringers find
so tricky to master, and crossed to examine the ancient boards. To his considerable disappointment, he found
them largely indecipherable: what writing remained had faded to the state of blind-embossing: raised bumps
of black on black. With some difficulty, he made out a few names - ones whose very shapes were old:
Bartholomew, Tyler, Southwell.
Southwell.
The name snagged at his memory. Behind him, the next relay of ringers pulled off for their own grab, and
the bells’ sound rose once more. Carefully, so as not to knock any elbows, Alan sidled along the wall and out
through the tower door into the churchyard.
It was not as overgrown as he had expected, although the trees crowded in like Tolkien’s Old Forest. Grey
gravestones, encroached by yellow powdery lichens, told the parish story to the early sixties. Alan’s eye was
caught by a fenced area outside the graveyard, and he leaned over the stone wall to see it.
Barred round by rusty rails, and almost obscured by tall grass and cow-parsley, there squatted a massive
tomb. Reminded of E F Benson’s creepy story The Room in the Tower, with its grave outside the churchyard
‘in evil memory of Julia Stone’, Alan, naturally, had to go and look.
Once inside the railings, Alan saw that the monolithic slab atop the tomb was blank save for patches of
khaki lichen and olive-green liverwort and bird droppings. The sides, however, were a different matter.
His heart thumped and his breath came quickly as he saw the carvings. Excitedly he fumbled for his little
fixed-focus camera, but found himself too close to see very much through the viewfinder. He wished Kim, a
professional photographer, were there with her Leica and a wide-angle lens; in her absence, he had to do the
best he could on his own.
At one end of the tomb was a simple inscription:
‘ROGER SOUTHWELL. DY•D 1697 A.D.’
Southwell again. Where had he heard that name before? Clockwise from this, seven panels told a story:
three on each side and one at the far end. All were surrounded by illustrations and motifs in smaller panels
forming friezes and borders. There was too much to assimilate quickly.
Alan stood up too fast, his head suddenly spinning. The sound of the bells still crowded the air, not allow-
ing any other sound in; looking at his watch he saw that some twenty minutes remained of their hour at All
Saints. He squatted down again.
The carvings were both intricate and surprisingly well-preserved considering they had been braving wind,
rain and snow since 1697. Alan ran his fingers over the first panel, finding the stone was strangely smooth to
his touch. Then he examined the picture it presented.
The protagonist - Roger Southwell, presumably - appeared to be a scholar, or perhaps a magician, since
the surrounding carvings were of cabalistic-looking symbols.
In this first picture Southwell, if it was he, was lifting a book inscribed LIBER ARCANI from a hiding-
place. Alan copied the Latin words into his notebook, followed by ‘Man finding book’. He knew that liber
meant book, but his Latin O-level lay too far in the past for much more than that.
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 The second picture showed the same man studying the book which he had found. That he was reading of
treasure was implied by a frieze of crowns and coins, but strange creatures crawled among them - beasts of
fearsome aspect. Alan wrote ‘Man reading about treasure(?)’ after copying the inscription, and this impres-