Episode 10 - Of Gargoyles and Boilers

Music: Majestic Nature by Craig Stuart Garfinkle Artwork by Steve English Episode 10 - Of Gargoyles and Boilers. The noise of hooves on slate was deafening. No one knew why the Manor had gargoyles or how many there were. None of the original plans for the Manor showed any gargoyles and, now they’d arrived, they moved around so often no one could count them. The Baron had sent Thornton out a few times in an attempt to do so but, as soon as he’d totted up one side of the Manor and moved to another, the ones he’d already counted had got distracted and gone elsewhere. So, after a few attempts, he’d given up. The increased noise on the roof and all over the Manor since the removal of the old water boiler from the attic, however, indicated that there were far more gargoyles that anyone had imagined. Quite why moving the old boiler from the attic should have this effect, no one knew. As the Baron lugged the heavy old piece of equipment into the boot room to give it a jolly good clean before passing it on to Roseberry (he didn't like the idea of boiling water in a space where a stuffed ferret had lived), the noise slowly died down to usual levels, with only the occasional clattering of hooves. In a similar way to the shadows, the gargoyles hadn't ever been dangerous, so the Baron wasn't too worried about them. But, while it could be disconcerting to have lots of unattached shadows suddenly appearing and looking over your shoulder, they were silent. In contrast, the gargoyles were not! While the Baron scrubbed at the inside of the boiler with various shadows pausing to look at what he was doing, he thought about how the gargoyles had changed over the last few months. Before, they had been relatively quiet and hadn’t seemed to move around too much and, when they had, it had tended to be reasonably silent. But, about six weeks ago, that had started to change and they’d all noticed the increased noise of hooves on the roof. In fact, Thornton had got so fed up with it that he’d gone through all the effort of moving his bedroom down a floor so he couldn’t hear them on the roof at night. That was an indication that the Baron should have taken more notice. For Thornton to voluntarily do any manual labour proved beyond a doubt that this was a serious problem. Thornton didn’t actually say a great deal, being a man who kept his own counsel, except when he spoke to himself and his hearing aid batteries were running low. When that happened, he tended to speak rather too loudly and, the lower the batteries got, the louder he ‘whispered’ and ‘muttered’. Listening to him could be anything from amusing to embarrassing and occasionally downright distressing. But, at the slightest mention of gargoyles, he tended to walk off, turn off his hearing aids and start muttering… loudly. He muttered to himself even more these days as it seemed that, no sooner had he relocated his bedroom, than the gargoyles had started exploring the whole exterior of the Manor. While no one actually said anything, the worry was that they might one day venture inside the Manor. In fact, once or twice, they had been spotted very close to both the back and front doors. The back door was the biggest concern as it was the main door everyone used and so got left ajar or open. Only the other week, Roseberry had seen one sitting on the wall right above the back door. Being Roseberry, she'd questioned its motives, loudly, to the Baron - for several days! The front door was less of a worry as it hardly ever got used and, as Roseberry had found out to her cost, it swelled in damp weather. It was getting to the point where it might not open at all - so an invasion into the front of the Manor was pretty low risk. Horatio didn't have an opinion on the gargoyle issue. When he heard them on the roof, he sometimes gave a muted 'woof' but, overall, he tended to ignore them. And, when they were foolish enough to get to ground level, you could be absolutely sure that Horatio... Support this podcast