Rampton (Chapter 1)

 

 

Clarke meandered through the church, ignoring the tour guides, and surreptitiously taking photographs with his small digital camera though the signage deemed this forbidden.

Today he was attending the city’s Doors Open Day, when all the historical and mostly closed buildings were open to the public of Aberdeen.

He was an enthusiast of the works of Augustus Rampton, the famous architect and designer of all things ecclesiastical; stained glass windows, altar pieces and reredos, someone whose work bore similarity to that of the great Ninian Comper, but which reflected his own leanings towards the darker aspects of life.

Where Comper’s hallmark in his work was a strawberry, Rampton’s was a human skull.

Rampton was contemporary with Comper, but his work was nowhere near as well known, due to its dark nature, its lacking in religiosity and downright pessimism.

It came as no surprise that John Betjeman had omitted Rampton’s work from his books on church architecture, but then maybe that was because Sir John was very much in thrall to the work of the said Comper, and what Clarke himself had dubbed  ‘Anglicana’, which meant basically all things Anglican.

Rampton was someone who rumours had circulated about for years; evidently he had abandoned Christianity for the occult, he was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, it was said that he was actually a woman named Augusta, and that anyone who had owned his book on church architecture,  ‘Kirks O’The North’ , (apparently, there were only four copies in existence),were known to meet their demise as a result of unleashing its secrets upon the world.

These were just some of the rumours Clarke was familiar with, which he had gleaned from Internet searches, and just added to the intrigue of it all.

Clarke was what someone less intellectual might have called a ‘geek’ or an ‘anorak’ but he knew what he was about, he collected Ramptonia, as he called it, in the same way as hillwalkers went about bagging Munros.

He laughed inwardly at his thoughts depicted his imagined self appeared on an antiques programme on TV telling the raptly interested audience, and the viewers at home, that he had started his collection of Ramptonia, when searching in his grandmother’s attic, he had found his first Rampton candlestick, among a collection of religious artefacts belonging to his late grandfather, an Anglican priest.

‘I started collecting these at the age of ten, along with my collection of clay pipes from every corner of the world’, his imagined self said.

Clarke was not what one would call a young man, his first flush of youth was a distant memory, and he would not see the right side of fifty again. His grey hair was thinning and pulled back in a paltry ponytail which gave him the appearance of an ageing hippy. His faded frayed denims and worn tweed jacket did nothing to dispel this impression.

He had been searching online for Rampton’s book, ‘Kirks’ O’ The North’and this had failed to bear any fruit so far.  Some of the online vendors charged ridiculous prices, even more than auctions or antiquarian book fairs, what the hell was that all about?

Maybe he would have to revert to going to an actual bookshop or charity outlet to rake through crates and boxes in search of such a tome. 

Clarke didn’t have a problem with that, he was very much ‘old school’ in his outlook, in many ways in fact, he was a real classical music fan,  with Allegri, Vivaldi and Arvo Part as his favourites, never a dedicated follower of current fashion, to be honest he was totally against the herd mentality.

As a younger man, he had poured scorn on the rock music of his day which his friends loved, he decried heavy metal fans as ‘a soulless bunch crying their nonsense out into the darkness’. He had yet to enter the world of the i-Phone, Smartphone, or any other kind of phone for that matter, this was what killed the spirit of community in the world, he often said. People sitting opposite one another in restaurants, bars or at home texting one another rather than exercising the art of conversation.

After his jaunt around a few of the churches in Aberdeen, he would have a reconnoitre round the charity shops for the Rampton tome, there were certainly a lot of charity shops to choose from in the centre of the city, which had given itself up to Vape shops, bookmakers, and fast food outlets, the fabled days of the ‘High Street’ being the  cities’ hub of commerce had long gone. Ok, it was perhaps unlikely that he would turn up a copy of ‘Kirks O’  The North’ in a charity shop , but he held on the hope that if a famous London based author ( who I will not name) could find a First Edition of Dracula in a charity shop then maybe it was possible.

Clarke was a civil servant by occupation , not something he often told people, he was not someone with  ‘letters after his name’ , and again this was not something he often told people, as he liked to give off the impression that he was an academic, a learned person, someone who knew a lot about his chosen field of the amateur antiquarian.

After leaving his first church of the day,  made his way along the city’s main thoroughfare, Union Street, and soon found himself in a shop he’d never come across in all his Saturday morning strolls into town, next to the Oxfam Shop, was a red painted shop front, evidently an Antiquarian bookshop, he pushed the door open, and a bell rang, very old school, he thought.

The shelves were full of books on the Supernatural and the Occult, Folklore, Music, Art and Christianity, and yes , there was a section devoted to Church Architecture, the Rampton tome had to be there, he would ask the bespectacled young man who was sitting behind the counter, browsing through an Irvine Welsh novel.

This was a weird thing, he had not noticed the shop before, and the bespectacled guy was smoking a home rolled cigarettes, wasn’t the smoking ban introduced years ago, probably before the guy had been born?

Maybe he had entered the shop and gone through a time tunnel or something.

Maybe he had just imagined it.

Clarke had a real passion for old books, he loved the musty smell of them, as much as he did that of a fine malt whisky. He raked among the shelves for a quarter of an hour or so, and when he was just at the point of giving up, the young guy looked up from his copy of ‘Trainspotting’, can I help you at all, were you looking for anything specific, or just browsing?, he said.

The guy would never have heard of Rampton, but Clarke asked anyway.

The gut seemed well versed in the bookselling game for someone so young.

‘Kirks O’ The North’, that’s a real rarity, it goes for £500 or more on Amazon alone, apparently there are only four copies in the world , and it has a somewhat sinister, if incredible story attached to it, which you may have heard’, said the guy.

‘Someone came in asking for a copy just the other day, a weird individual, all dressed in black, like Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing ‘

‘So, you do not have a copy here then?’ said Clarke, surprised the guy had even heard of the book.

‘No, but I know someone who does’, said the guy, as if reciting his lines from a playscript.

He jotted down an e-mail address and phone number, the seller was based in Cauld Village, near to Birse, a few miles from Aberdeen, and handed Clarke a scrap of paper.

 

Clarke recalled Cauld Village from his childhood, didn’t one of his mates from school disappear mysteriously from that place back in the 1970s?

David Harvey, he recalled after a while, a guy in school who was always in trouble back then but was a good guy if you really got to know him.

It was a small village tucked away in the backwoods of the Forest of Birse, so said Google, when Clarke consulted the favoured ‘authority’ on all things.

He e-mailed the address, which belonged to a Mr A .Mitchell, who was evidently a  bookdealer living in the village, who had recently acquired a copy of the book, and was wanting rid of it quickly, £500 was his price.

Sunday passed in a blur of whisky hangover after his internet searching and reading from the ‘Rumours of Rampton’ website and Clarke surfaced to find that he had received an e-mail from Mitchell.

He indicated that he would gladly sell the book and he would be available on Monday in ‘The Wee Shoppie’ in the middle of the village. Another Google search revealed that ‘The Wee Shoppie’ was the name of a second-hand bookshop in Cauld Village.

Clarke e-mailed back, he would be sober enough to drive tomorrow, so would set off then.

He would be out to Cauld Village and back in no time, and providing there were no hitches, he would be able to find out from the book where the last item of Ramptonia was located,

Well within travelling distance, Clarke did not have to worry about work, he had a week of annual leave to take and this week proved suitable to ‘the office’, and to Clarke, which was more to the point.

Monday came and he was driving along the country road, en route for Cauld Village, with the thought of actually possessing this legendary book, Kirks O’The North, almost becoming a reality, he had the cheque written out and signed, all old school stuff, none of your ‘Chip and Pin’, or ‘Contactless’ nonsense in Clarke’s world. Being prepared, that is what Life was all about, wasn’t it, being ready for what Life throws at you?

There was no official sign saying ‘Cauld Village’, save for a hand painted one, which looked like it had been done for a primary school project, assuming there was a school or even children here.

He drove into the village square, or what passed for one here.

Several folks watched from windows, as he parked, twitching the curtains in curiosity at the stranger in town, the curtain twitchers of Cauld asking who was the driver of this car and what did he want?

He drove around a bit and could find no shops, let along one called ‘The Wee Shoppie’, what was going on here? If he could find any of the villagers, he would enquire.

This place looked a bit old fashioned, as if time had stopped around about the 1970s; there was still a telephone box, a telephone box which still took 10p pieces  in what appeared to be the main street, in fact , the only street in the place.

Clarke drew the car up to the phone box, there was even a telephone directory inside. He parked the car , and walked up to the phone box, the door opened with a creak, as one might expect from something so old and neglected , and what was more , it didn’t smell like someone had urinated inside. He looked up the number of ‘A. Mitchell’, and the ‘Wee Shoppie’, no listing existed for either, would the phone allow him to phone what was once 8081, and ask for Directory Enquiries?

Someone was playing him for a fool, one of the curtain twitchers of Cauld Village, maybe they would appear wearing animal masks, like in the Wicker Man, perhaps not, this was reality not a movie, he thought.

He opened the rucksack stashed in the back seat of the car,  and took out his laptop, on Googling ‘The Wee Shoppie’, the entry and address details were no longer in evidence, and a cursory look at his received e-mails revealed that there was no e-mail from ‘A. Mitchell’, had he imagined this whole episode?

Why had he been lured here, someone must want him here, maybe a relation of Rampton was still living, and living in this sinister, seemingly empty village, now that would be something, thought Clarke.