YOUR ONLY BONES - PART THREE

Sharp.


That was the sound that accompanied the braking of their cars as they pulled up just far enough away from the site. The developer emerged from the bowels, blinking against the light as though he had just been born. He waited but they didn't come any closer so he walked up the road to meet them. Four well dressed men with hands in their pockets and after-shave and silk ties. They recoiled at the sight of him. He looked as though he had been rolling around in the dirt (which he had) and he smelt like…the earth, dirty, damp and offensively organic.

Cowards he thought. Fool they thought in unison as their well trained minds tended to do. It was brief. They handed him some papers, which he signed without reading, without a thought for tomorrow. And then they went away, quickly, wiping sweat off their brow. He knew what would happen now. His assets would be frozen, his car taken away, his house and all his things sold. Very soon, demolition experts would be brought in and the building would be knocked down entirely, not just slowly gutted, which was maybe kinder anyway. And for years, vacant it would sit. Would the voice keep singing? Would they find its home then and sell it off to the highest bidder?
If there is no moment but this, then surely there can be no ramifications for this moment in the next. He didn't have to sign the papers but they would have done it anyway he thought as he climbed up through the rubble and the half decimated, slowly dying interior of this temple. Religious leaders all over the city had condemned the building as a trick of Lucifer, as their paritioners abandoned services and came to this unquestioning, unsuggesting temple. He climbed the bare stairs floor by floor, moving in and out of view behind broken pillars and crumbling walls, until he reached the top. There is no moment but this he thought as he came to the edge of the highest floor looking down upon the punters - he should've sold tickets, he should've organised tours, charged a fortune for every apartment. He was always looking for an angle, why hadn't he made the most of it? Why had he failed himself? Why had he found himself?

Then he was there, at the top, squatting serenly on the ledge, a grown man perched like a bird on the lip of the fragile structure. He savoured the sight of the cool blackness as he looked down into the gaping wound at the heart of the building. His back was to the ever growing crowd. He straightened. He was ready, now, to give his life to that voice that stung his ears with its truth. But it was the building that finally took its action, stubborn for so long. A rumbling tore through the remains of the gutted building. It shook him to his feet. He grabbed clumsily at the decaying wall behind him. Rubble came away in his hand. The aria grew louder, more urgent, assaulting. Had his sacrifice come too late? He felt her anger as the ground began to give way beneath his feet.

Too late, he whispered, as he fell through the floor. His gift now nothing more than a hapless accident,  his final hope filled act consumed by a plume of dust and loss. And the building came crashing to the ground. The crowd stood still, silent, as it unleashed itself on their ears and their minds and moved up through the earth into their veins.

The singing stopped. The crown went wild with raptarous applause.