Tell My Sorrows to the Stones (collection) by Christopher Golden

Author:Christopher Golden [Golden, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories (single author), Fiction
ISBN: 9781771481540
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2013-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

MECHANISMS

(WITH MIKE MIGNOLA)

On that particular October morning—a lovely fall day, a Wednesday—the autumn light fell across the rooftops of Oxford with a hint of gold sufficient to transform the view from mundane to wondrous. Colin Radford, a young man of serious scholarship, found himself so taken by the panorama visible from the classroom window that he had difficulty following the threads of Professor Sidgwick’s lecture on Suetonius. This was especially troubling when Colin considered that the biographies which comprised the Roman historian’s De Vita Caesarum had been amongst the most compelling reading that the young man had encountered in his time at Oxford, second only to the comedic plays of Aristophanes.

Colin Radford adored university—all of the thinking, the constant discourse over questions of philosophy, scholarship, and theology. At times he felt as though he had been waiting all of his life to escape dreary Norwich, with its forbidding cathedral and the chill wind that swept across the Channel all the way from the Russian Steppes. He had found in Oxford a truer home, where men put their minds to work upon the mechanisms of intellect. There were kindred spirits here, competitive though they might be.

So for Colin to allow his mind to wander required a vista of unparallelled beauty. And yet on certain mornings, Oxford glistened in such a way as to have earned the lyrical nickname that romantics had bestowed upon it.

The City of Dreaming Spires, they called it.

Had he known on that morning that he would never see it again, Colin would have been filled with such grief as to make him weep. And yet there was much more grief to come.

A Mods student named Chisholm hurried into the room the mo-ment the lecture concluded, earning a disapproving glare from Professor Sidgwick, even as he handed a folded sheet of cream parchment to the bespectacled old man. Colin watched Sidgwick dismiss the lad with a sniff and then glance at the note, which could only have come from the Headmaster’s office. Somehow, even before it happened, he knew what would come next. Sidgwick lifted his gaze, glanced around the room, and they locked eyes.

“Mr. Radford, come here, if you please.”

Colin felt a strange heat prickle his face. He did not fear Sidgwick the way he knew some others did, though if he thought the professor had caught him drifting during the lecture he might have done well to be afraid of his wrath. Yet the look on the old man’s face, the way he stroked his pointed beard, and the almost militaristic manner in which he held that crisp letter still half-raised in his right hand, made the young scholar cringe.

“Yes, sir,” Colin said, and as the other students departed, he made for the lectern.

Sidgwick looked at him over the tops of his spectacles. “You’re from Norwich, lad? I’d never have thought it.”

The significance of this—whether it contained compliment or insult—escaped Colin, so he did not reply.

“Instructions from the Headmaster,” Sidgwick said, proffering the note in his right hand, fingers bent as if in a claw, half-crushing the parchment.

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