***
As the last days of August passed and the evenings had already begun to close in, Benjamin had made other arrangements for his lunch hour outside the office, so disconcerting had he found his last visit. But he never stopped thinking about the eerie place and the statues and sought out information about them throughout the town.
By September, he'd found a few poor quality photos of Headley View and his sense of disquiet was only increased by what he saw. The shelter in the centre of the grassy area was, unsurprisingly, in far better condition decades earlier when tourists would often make the hard climb up the steps. The benches were shown full of Victorian-era tourists, the women resplendent with long dresses, parasols and frilly hats, the men in formal suits, all looking out to sea and enjoying the bracing sea air. And the statues were naturally always present in these pictures. What disturbed Benjamin so were the small differences in the statues from year to year. The changes from photo to photo were not obvious if you weren't looking for them and evidently nobody in Scarborough had ever noticed anything awry.
In the four photos in total that Benjamin found, either the bridge builder or his wife was looking out to sea: they never faced each other though.
At this point, Benjamin decided to seek out Wilbur Overton. He had to know about Wilbur's father, the man who had commissioned the statues.
Finding Wilbur was not hard. Marie was good friends with the butcher in Hope Street, who seemed to know everyone in Scarborough. A simple enquiry by Marie one morning produced an address. Wilbur Overton lived three streets from Benjamin in an equally poky two-bedroom house.
"I will visit him on Sunday, Marie," Benjamin told her that night. Though he had not told her everything about the statues for fear of being called insane, he had explained the fascination he had for them. "I want to ask him why his father commissioned those statues. I want to know who the bridge builder was."
On Sunday morning, Benjamin walked to Wilbur Overton's house and explained what he wished to talk about in very general terms. With a glance back over his shoulder, Wilbur grabbed a coat from just inside the door.
"House is in no state for guests, Mr. McAuley. Let's go to the tea room."
They walked to an elegant café that was found at the end of Wilbur's road, near the front. With most of the bustle of out-of-town visitors fading for another year, there was plenty of room inside. They picked a table in the far corner and ordered a tea each.
"I know this might seem unusual to you, Mr. Overton - "
"Please. Wilbur."
"Alright. Wilbur. As I told you before, it's your father's commissioning of a pair of statues that interests me."
"Up on Headley View, right?"
"Yes," said Benjamin. "I presume you know them well."
"I turned eighteen the day there were unveiled in 1879. Eighteen! My father asked for the ceremony to take place on June 2nd especially for me."
The teas arrived and both men dug with gusto into the sugar bowl that sat between them. Benjamin was desperate to ask the thousand questions he had, but was keen not to be rude so they chatted for a few minutes about Wilbur and his life in Scarborough. He'd run a coal delivery business until his retirement two years ago. After what he considered a polite interval, Benjamin broached the subject of the statues.
"You don't go up to Headley View to see the statues anymore, is that right?"
"No, I don't. I haven't been up there in, oh, fifteen years. Actually, not since my father died."
"What can you tell me about the commission? It doesn't seem the typical sort of statue to see in a place like Scarborough. Who was the bridge builder of Arta?"
"Well, I can tell you the story my father told me. He spent many of his younger years travelling around Europe and that's how he came across the body of the bridge builder."
"The body? You mean to tell me your father saw the actual body of this bridge builder?"
"He did more than that," Wilbur said. "He bought the bloody thing! Purchased it in Greece for twenty pounds and a keg of beer. It was all done up like one of those mummies, you know, just like that Tutankhamun they found a couple of years ago out in Egypt. I saw it. Most horrible thing I've ever seen. I was only a young lad too."
"What did your father do with the body, Wilbur?"
"What do you think he did with it? He sold it. Made an absolute fortune, he did! Some fancy bloody museum down in London."
Benjamin continued to sip from his tea as Wilbur talked on.
"That's why he commissioned those statues ten years later. He told us it was giving something back, you know, to the town."
"Tell me about the bridge builder then."
"My father said that Arta was the prettiest little town he'd ever seen on his travels. It's in the north of Greece, you know? The bridge builder was working with a large team of builders and apprentices. Hundreds of them! Anyway, the story goes that it was a difficult central span over the river, this was in the 14th or 15th century, mind you. Every night, they left the site, only to find the bridge's span had collapsed in the morning."
"So what did they do?"
"Well, according to the legend, a bird appeared to the head builder and spoke with a human voice. He said that a beautiful woman of character pure should be buried alive in the central support and the bridge would be finished successfully."
Benjamin thought about the statue of the wife up on Headley View, with her legs disappearing into stone. The thought made him quite sick.
"Why would he choose his own wife though, Wilbur?"
"Ah, that's the real twist in the tale. The bridge builder promised the bird that the first of the builders' wives to turn up the next day would be walled up in the bridge."
Benjamin noticed that the couple at the next table, tablecloth equally tartan, equally inappropriate, were listening intently as Wilbur continued his story.
"The master builder spoke with the other men, the apprentices, you know, and they all went along with this plan. The wives used to come to the construction site every day with the men's lunch packs, so it was just a case of waiting to see who turned up first the following day."
"And, by chance, the wife of the bridge builder himself was the first to come the next day?"
"Yes," Wilbur replied. "but not by chance. They all agreed not to say anything to their wives, but it seems only the bridge builder kept his word and said nothing. The others warned their wives. The following morning, his wife arrived with her husband's lunch and was taken out on a boat to the central support, where she was sealed inside. It's said she neither cried nor screamed for help, simply looking at her husband. He apparently couldn't look her in the face as the final stones were cemented into place over her face."
"Good God! I've never heard of anything so absurd, so wantonly cruel."
"It's all folklore and nonsense. I mean, that's the story I heard from my dad and that's the story I'm telling you today. But, let's be honest, there's not a word of it that's the honest truth."
Benjamin watched Wilbur as he put his teacup down and ran the yellowed fingers of a smoker through the few oily strands of white hair that he still had.
"Didn't it worry you as a child, your father taking a body from its resting place like that. You know what they say about Carter's expedition to find Tutankhamun."
"They're saying it's cursed," Wilbur replied. "They'll say anything to fill the newspapers though. Look at me. I can't get the coal dust out of my nails, my ears, my lungs after forty years working with the stuff, but apart from that, I'm as sound as a tin of pins. My father was eighty-six when he died. He wasn't cursed, was he?"
Benjamin leaned in towards Wilbur and lowered his voice.
"What about the statues, Wilbur? What about them? You've never heard odd stories about those two statues up on Headley View?"
"The statues?"
"Yes."
"There was a story at the time, amongst us kids. Ah - "
Wilbur scoffed at what he was about to say.
> "Go on," said Benjamin, inviting him with an open hand.
"Well, they say my father asked the sculptor to incorporate parts of the body into the statues."
Benjamin choked on his tea.
"Parts of the body? I thought you said he'd sold the body to a museum years before?"
"He did, but he kept two fingers and we never found them, even when we went through my father's personal things after his death. I suppose there's a chance they were in the statues, but what difference would it make? You don't believe in fairy tales, do you?"
"No, I don't."
"You know why nobody goes up there anymore and it's not because of those two miserable statues."
"I guessed because there's so much to do now in town for the visitors in the summer. Nobody wants to go and sit on a bench and stare at the sea anymore, do they?"
"That's part of it, of course," Wilbur said. "The fact of the matter is, quite a few youngsters killed themselves by jumping from Headley View, in the period before the Great War."
"I can't believe that! Such a tranquil place."
"Oh, it's true alright. Six or seven youngsters disappeared after visiting the headland and their bodies were never found."
"Never found? Didn't the police find that odd?"
Wilbur laughed. A laugh that became a cough which in turn became a wheezing tirade, belying a working life spent with coal dust and a home life with tobacco. He regained his composure.
"I can tell you're not from around these parts, young man. Once those currents get you, you're never going to be found. They'll all be out there in the sand banks," he said, waving a hand vaguely in the air to his right. "I've heard stories of ships being swallowed whole by the sands out there."
Benjamin and Wilbur spoke more about the old Scarborough that the older man had grown up in, how it had been transformed from a quiet spa town to the raucous resort it was now in the summer months. Benjamin listened, rapt, as Wilbur told him of the notorious raid during the Great War when several of the Kaiser's battleships rained shells down on the town, leaving more than fifty dead.
"You'll recall the recruitment posters during the Great War: Remember Scarborough! Well, I lived through that raid. One shell came into our road, almost horizontal, skipped along by the shops and took a leg off Harris the plumber, poor sod. He still hobbles around town to this day."
Benjamin eventually made his excuses, telling Wilbur he had to get back to Marie and the children. They shook hands and Benjamin walked home with a determination to once again climb the steps to Headley View.
On Monday morning, he spoke to Matthias and recounted what Wilbur had told him about his father and the legend of Arta's old bridge.
"There was quite a tradition in the Balkan region at the time for this type of thing, you know?" Matthias replied. "That's something I do remember from college. Half the bridges in Romania and Bulgaria have skeletons in them!"
Benjamin had enjoyed his summer lunches atop with the benches, the magnificent view and, of course, the statues. He missed the tranquillity. Eating in his office or joining one of the other apprentices for a pub lunch didn't appeal to him nearly as much.
The first Monday in October was a spectacular autumn day and Benjamin watched the sun shimmering off the wet sands as he strolled to work that morning. The summer crowds were gone, back in the mills and factories of the towns they'd come from. As he walked past the steps that led up to the statues, he decided he would climb them with his lunch pack that very day.
After a difficult morning in the office, he fairly sprung up the first thirty or forty steps, before the stairway became clogged with overgrown weeds and grass and he was having to force his way up.
"How long has it been?" he said, exasperated.
Sweeping aside the final long stalks of nettles, he finally emerged onto Headley View for the first time in many weeks. Again, the light astounded him. It felt like it was dawn, such was the soft golden glow that bathed the space. He looked instantly at the statues and saw that they were as he'd left them. The bridge builder had his head turned half towards his wife, who looked out to sea. Perhaps it was all his imagination. He smiled from cheek to cheek as he walked across the thick grass. Photos can be taken from different angles, he thought. The mind can play such silly tricks.
He walked up to the plinth of the bridge builder and read the plaque once again.
The Bridge Builder of Arta
He looked closely at the plans for his infamous bridge, nestled snugly into the delicately sculpted fingers of his right hand. Having heard the story of the bridge from Wilbur, the plans carried so much more meaning for him. There on the plans was the sketch of the central arch that had caused him so many problems.
By now, Benjamin was leaning over the lip of the plinth, running his fingers along the edge of the plans and now turning his head to inspect the contents of the box of food in the bridge builder's other hand: the fateful lunch brought to the bridge site by his wife. After so many visits to Headley View, he'd never really scrutinized the fine stonework that had gone into the statue. As an architect, there was no excuse for this.
The first thing Benjamin felt was the rough graze of stone on the back of his neck, strange and cold. He jumped back in fear, but found he couldn't move. Looking up, he saw the bridge builder looking directly down at him, his face still as lifeless as ever.
"Well. I - "
Benjamin struggled, attempting even to fall to his knees but saw that the two arms of the statue were enveloping him, one at his neck, the other at his waist. He was captured, pinned like a butterfly. The statue was on his knees and the architectural plans and stony lunch had been set down at his feet.
"Why - but..."
Benjamin couldn't begin to comprehend what was happening in front of him. He felt removed from the scene, removed from reality. He was dreaming and had realized it. Surely.
Benjamin kicked hard against the brick plinth and began to scream out, though his knew his voice would never carry down to either street level or the long empty beaches. The slender legs of the statue, previously covered by a long robe, were beginning to part.
The limestone arms around him were unyielding and dead. However much he pushed against their force, grabbed onto them, pounded at them with broken bloody hands, they continued to force him against the flat surface of the plinth. Was he going to be crushed there against the bricks? Benjamin looked around in desperation - for somebody, something. There was nobody here to help him. His determination that this wasn't actually happening to him was beginning to fade, vanish into the sea breezes like the great belches of steam from the fairground rides.
He then felt his feet leave the ground and his legs scraped against the plinth as he was dragged up onto the top of it. The robe of the bridge builder was beginning to envelop Benjamin's head and shoulders: he was being taken bodily into the very statue itself.
Benjamin thrashed around uselessly, glancing to his left. The wife was looking directly at him. Benjamin saw for the first time that it was sorrow on her face, something he'd never recognized until now. It was his last view of Headley View for his head then turned to where he was heading, beneath the robe worn by the bridge builder. For a second or two, the odd dawn-like light illuminated all in front of Benjamin like the solstice sun lighting an Egyptian burial chamber. There was room for him, yes, but the other skeletons in there, six or seven of them, would certainly make it a tight fit.
In a final throe, Benjamin turned himself around. It was too late, the robe of the bridge builder was closing over, two stone doors that were closing off the light, shutting out the world. He fell back into the dank space that would be his resting place, now in total darkness, clattering wildly into other bones that were there. He thrashed his arms and legs against the walls of his stone prison, his cell, impotent. When his sobs subsided, he heard the sound that had started it all, the sound of stone against stone as the bridge builder stood up again.
***
Albert Stubbins
couldn't believe his luck and neither could his young wife. Albert had landed a prime apprentice position with the best architects on the east coast, a position made available only through the suicidal tendencies of his predecessor. And now, as spring began to thaw winter's chill in Scarborough, he'd come across this quite magical place to have his lunch in. He sat on a bench and took in the glorious view as an endless line of waves came into throw themselves upon the beaches in the never-ending battle between sea and shore. Then he noticed the statues.
###
About the author:
Neil Coghlan is currently living in Buenos Aires where he divides his time between writing, web design and walking around the city. He has several stories published in anthologies and magazines. He hopes you enjoyed this story as much as he enjoyed writing it.
Connect:
You can find Neil's author blog here: https://esllou.blogspot.com
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