Short story · 3 min read ·
The Stone That Was a Door
A stonemason restoring a parish wall finds one block that opens inward, and the village has been using it as a way to bury its quarrels for three hundred years.
Piers Ancell was hired to repoint the boundary wall of Pinfold Lane churchyard, and he expected nothing stranger than frost damage and bird-nests. The wall is old dry-stone, laid without mortar in the way they built them on the Marches before the enclosure acts, and it has settled in places into a long low hump like the back of a sleeping animal. He spent his first week pulling loose stones and setting them back in their courses, lifting each one in both hands and listening to the sound it made as it settled.
On the eighth day he lifted a block near the north gate and it did not settle. It swung. It moved on a hidden pivot, not outward, which is what a stone does when a man pushes it, but inward, toward the churchyard, as smoothly as a door on oiled hinges. Behind it was a hollow the width of a child's shoulders, dark and dry, and at the back of the hollow lay a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth.
Piers did not open the bundle. He called the vicar, Canon Ostler, who came out in his cassock and looked into the gap and went very still.
"Ah," he said. "So it's still here."
It was not the first time, Ostler explained, sitting on the grass with his back to the headstones. The village had a custom, very old, which nobody talked about in the parish magazine. When two families fell out past mending, one of them would come to the north wall at night and tell the stone what had been done to them. Then the stone would be opened by someone of the other family, and the grievance put inside, wrapped and sealed, and the stone closed on it. By the morning the quarrel would be over. Neither family would remember the cause. They would simply stop speaking, and then, after a generation, start again.
"Does it work?" Piers asked.
"It works," Ostler said. "That's rather the trouble."
He had found three bundles in the wall during his own incumbency. None had been opened. He had never had the courage. He said the bundles grew heavier with time, as if the grievances inside them were not quite dead, and that the families who had sealed them were now mostly gone, their children and grandchildren living on the far side of the lane and passing in the lych-way with polite nods.
Piers asked what was in the bundle he had found. Ostler looked at the oilcloth, pale and cracked, and said that he suspected it was a letter. Probably from a man who had lent money to his brother-in-law and been paid in silence. Nobody had ever been able to say for certain.
They put the stone back. Ostler asked Piers not to tell anyone in the village what he had found, and Piers agreed, because it was not his business and because the hollow felt, under his hand, like the inside of something that had been breathing carefully for a long time.
He finished the wall. It was a fine job. The new courses sat tight and the north gate swung clean. The village came to see it on the Sunday, and an old woman from the Ellis farm stood by the north wall for a long while, looking at the stones, and then she said, quite clearly, to nobody, "You can't have it back, you know," and walked away up the lane.
Piers did not understand the remark until he went back that evening to collect his tools. The north block had moved. It sat a finger's width proud of its neighbours, and when he touched it, it swung in again, quietly, and he heard from inside a small, precise sound like a letter being folded and set down.
The Ellis family and the Harcourts have not spoken since the spring. Ostler says it is a great pity. The wall, he says, has never looked better.