The Demon under the Altar Stone
As a boy in a ruff and a surplice, gown,
I sang in the choir of a country town,
Under the eye of the Reverend Burr
In a church that had stood for a thousand years.
A church so old that it reeked of damp
From the days of an Anglo-Saxon camp,
They'd built their Church on a Druid site
To banish the wailing ghosts at night!
The Romans had slaughtered the Druid priests
In a river of blood at a Druid Feast,
And still their cries could be heard on nights
When the moon gleamed red by the altar lights.
The beams streamed in through the leadlight glass
With an eerie glow that was overcast,
Illumined the ancient altar stone
That covered the Bishop of Cædmon's bones.
The slab that lay on the floor was lipp'd
As it covered the age-old church's crypt,
And there was a crack, an inch around
Through to the crypt there, under the ground.
From where I sat in the old oak pew
I could see the back of the altar, too,
And through a gap where the floor was bare
Were moving shadows that shouldn't be there!
The crypt had been sealed, eight hundred years
Since the Normans had taken the Saxon Reeves,
Imprisoned them down in the crypt for good
Then walled them in - (so I understood!)
And there they suffered and there they died
The Shire Reeves of the countryside,
And no-one had ever been down there since,
Or disturbed their bones... for the merest glimpse.
The Reverend Burr was hellfire bent,
His sermons called to the sinners, 'Repent! '
He ranted and raved of a jealous God,
And asked why nobody reck'd his rod.
The smell of sulphur hung in the air
After a sermon by Reverend Burr,
And brimstone caught in my nostrils so
That I almost gagged at the horror below.
One Sunday, kneeling at evensong
I stared at the ancient altar stone,
And there I saw, and to my surprise,
A glow that appeared to be two red eyes!
They glowed bright red, and they stared at me
As if I were alone in the gallery,
My mind was full of the vicar's gall,
And I felt that a demon had pawned my soul.
The eyes dropped down in the crypt instead
And shadows moved, to my mounting dread,
So after the service I hurried on home,
As far as I could from that altar stone!
A week went by, and I thought of things,
Convinced they must be imaginings,
So off I went to the choir again,
But just to be safe, I whispered, 'Ben! '
'You see the crack in the altar stone,
Just tell me if I'm the only one,
I saw two eyes in that crack last week,
They scared me so much that I couldn't speak! '
The vicar stood by the altar there
With his bulging eyes and his crazy hair
And he roared and he pounded his fist on down
'Til it shook and it rattled the altar stone.
He spoke of torment and endless grief,
For the sin of pride, and the skulking thief,
For the lover of all material things,
The women who covered their hands with rings!
Adulterers were the scourge of God
And would fall in the cracks of the earth, he said,
While those who harboured an impure thought,
Their hopes of heaven were set at naught.
(But all the while it was widely known
That the vicar had been with the widow Rowan,
She'd visited him at the rectory,
And breakfasted in the Refectory) .
His voice rose up and the altar stone
Began to rumble and then to groan,
I felt Ben tense at the side of me
As the eyes rose up, as red as could be!
The eyes rose up and peered from the gloom
Of the crypt, long cursed by a Druid Moon,
The more the vicar harangued and roared,
The more that it rumbled under the floor.
The doors blew open, the wind blew in
Like a storm raised up from the depths of sin,
The people ran for the path outside,
'You've raised the devil, ' the people cried.
And then the floor it had opened up
Where the vicar stood, he had said enough!
Just for a moment we caught a glimpse
Of the thing in the crypt that we've not seen since!
An evil demon with blood-red eyes,
With hands like hooks of a monstrous size,
And teeth that grinned in the fading gloom,
The vicar fell into that terrible room.
We heard him scream just once down there
The sound of a sinner beyond despair,
And then the demon went down with a drone,
Covered the hole with the altar stone!
That church stood empty, unused for years,
They said that it carried a Druid curse,
But who would go down to the crypt alone,
Or think to disturb the altar stone?
29 June 2009
poem by David Lewis Paget
Added by Poetry Lover
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