Grandma's Attic

Chapter Twenty-Six

The penultimate chapter in Thredwyl's adventures...

Daisy read the notice fixed to the south porch. "The church doesn't open until nine-thirty. That's a while to wait, what do you want to do?"

Thredwyl would have been happy to idle in the stone garden, it was welcoming. But the streets that surrounded the church, on two sides squeezing it tight, were now busying up.

"Start of the working day," Daisy said when he remarked.

"Aye, but we'll be safe here," he said. "Look, no one looks this way." It was like everyone passing were blinkered.

"But that's not going to last, though, true, once they start work this street will go quiet for a while—at least till the shoppers start shopping. Oh, and the tourists—we need to be out of the way before they arrive. They'll come with cameras and eyes that pry into everything—but I suppose by then we'll be inside the church. Yea, maybe you're right and we don't need to move too far away. What about over by the trees—by those old vaults? Old bones don't scare you, do they? And no one will see you there—they just won't think to look. And if any should, they'll just see a schoolkid waiting to complete my project."

He glanced at her bag, deposited beside him behind the stone. He nodded towards it. "I could sit in there – so long as you don't close it. I do need some air."

She agreed, and they settled behind the Victorian-Gothic above-ground burial vault.

"That looks like the chest in your attic," Thredwyl remarked.

"Oh yea," she said as if her memory was suddenly jogged. "How exactly did you get into our attic?"

Thredwyl chuckled – which considering what he soon must do was exceptionally cavalier of him. "That, my friend, is a very long story."

"But we've plenty of time—at least until nine-thirty."

And so, while Thredwyl waited for the church to open so he could complete his adventure and truly qualify as a Hero, he told Daisy his tale – with special emphasis on the Great Grandma's Act of Creation.

At nine-thirty, or thereabouts, with the church doors now thrown open, Daisy entered, Thredwyl carried in her part-opened backpack.

It was a long climb up the church tower. Thredwyl couldn't see much through the gap in her bag – it was too dark – but he could see how narrow the steps. How could an adult, say someone Jason's size, squeeze their body up here? And he could tell by the way the bag threw him and jiggled him that the steps were steep. Daisy had to go slowly, her hands out to feel the way. Not that that stopped her from talking.

"I've always said I'm to be famous," she said – indeed, he remembered her saying when they first met. "I just didn't know what I'd be famous for." He remembered that too. "But now it's all become clear. I'm to be a...but, jiggly-pig, what am I to be? Not a prophet since prophets prophesize—even irreligious me knows that. A missionary? Yeah, that's what I'll be, a missionary, carrying the word. They might even make a saint out of me. Oh, but likely not – saints are more churchy things. I shall tell the story: And in the beginning was the Mother and—"

"The Great Grandma," Thredwyl corrected her from inside the bag.

"The Great Grandma and her consort, the Father—"

Thredwyl corrected her again, "There was no consort, Grandma did it all on her own."

"And the Great Grandma—is that right?—drew from her mighty being three strands, Fire, Stone and Water—"

"Rock, Water and Fire," Thredwyl corrected.

"And from these strands she created the Kupies, the Nixies and the...the Fiery-Men—"