This afternoon, I sat in a thousand-year old church, trying to feel my toes.

The temperatures here are such that toes can become strangers to us all. But I didn’t mind. We were there with children who were seeing it all for the first time: the thousand-year old squat pillars, the richly draped altars, the windows endowed with lavish stained glass scenes, the trappings of a thousand years, some used, some abandoned.

The gravestones paved the ground beneath our feet, and I helped a little boy decipher its inscription: it marked a ship’s captain, who died at only 32 years of age, and who was buried there with his wife of similar age.

We think nothing of walking over these people, who bought immortality within the cruciform walls of the stocky mediaeval structure.

We were hosted by the parish priest, who explained much an eight year old might find it hard to understand: bread and wine, parish registers, hymn books and abandoned organs.

Right at the end – just before we were about to leave – she motioned us to look to a place we had not yet considered.

Up.

And there, at the top of those stout round pillars, were worn stone faces.

They were the faces of men of God who dominated our past and yet are forgotten now, faces staring down from a height a mediaeval serf might have found impossible and awe-inspiring. We are used to the gothic being used in so many contexts: but those eyes, watching from a great vantage: one could not help but feel they were unsettling.

We left. I was at the back of the straggling line, heading out of the arched stone vaulted doorway, and long before I had made my escape with two little charges, someone turned the lights out. And all at once I became acutely aware of ten sets of stone eyes, observing my exit with more than disinterest.

It was good to reach daylight again.

One of the great masters of liturgical horror is that consummate teller of tales, MR James.

He had his feet planted squarely in the first part of the twentieth century, and his head in mediaeval clouds.

He tells tales of manuscripts which attain a life of their own: of long dead debauched clergymen arranging immortality through supernatural means; of academics whose curiosity proves far, far too much for them.

The tale which tugged at the vestments of my subconscious, this afternoon, was a tale of another liturgical statue.

The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral is a short story by MR James. It is told, as befits James’s academic background, in a series of old papers and pieces of research, done by a librarian who is cataloguing old papers. We learn immediately of the death of  the Archdeacon of Sowerbridge, and subsequently gain access to the venerable man’s diaries and letters.

Archdeacon Haynes is a high flyer, it seems, until he comes upon a wooden carving in the stalls of the cathedral.

The description of the figure, which represents Death, is chilling as only James can be.

It reads: “This might at first sight be mistaken for a monk or “friar of orders gray”, for the head is cowled and a knotted cord depends from somewhere about the waist.

“A slight inspection, however, will lead to a very different conclusion. The knotted cord is quickly seen to be a halter, held by a hand all but concealed within the draperies; while the sunken features and, horrid to relate, the rent flesh upon the cheek-bones, proclaim the King of Terrors.”

The figure and its companions are woven into a masterly tapestry of unease and unexplained happenings. James steps so subtly over the boundary between the ghost story and horror: one night as the Archdeacon sits listening to the choir his hand rests upon the statue, and he has the distinct feeling it has become real.

He is no longer touching wood, but something altogether more animate.

It is hokum, of course, but hokum of the most excellent and absorbing kind, perfect for these nights when firelight is our constant friend.

Gargoyle was the title for a book I read a short while ago. Written by a man called Andrew Davidson, it used the double edges of the word rather well.

One edge is the grotesque ugliness. The central character has been maimed in a car crash. But we are never sure whether it is his physical appearance, or his former incarnation , which gives him his persona: he was a fast living porn star, vacuous, damaged and unable to correct a life which seemed destined for squandering.

The other edge is the parallel times in which the novel is written. Our gargoyle lives in the present day, but soon a story comes weaving around him, rooted far back in Europe in brutal mediaeval times. One day, lying in a hospital bed submerged in self-disgust, he is visited by a woman from the psychiatric ward. It appears she knows him very well indeed, and has done for hundreds of years.

When I began to read this book I hated it. It was rude and obscene.The central character is brutish.

But as the pages wore on – and I found I could not put it down –  it led me into ways of thinking I have not visited before. Everyone carries some scars, but some we cannot see. The brutal and terrifying need not remain so, it seemed to say. Life can get as bad as it gets and, with the compassion and love of others, we can still triumph.

It is still hokum, just like MR James. But it is compassionate,beautifully written hokum, without a happy ending, but with a firm conclusion about redemption, and the power of humans to redeem and be redeemed.

For a thousand years and more, our stonemasons and wordsmiths  have been chiseling out representations of what horror is: of the worst life can be; of the nth degree.

Even as recently as 2008, when The Gargoyle was published, we used this little mediaeval device as a symbol of horror.

But Davidson finds a new function for our ugly little friend, looking beneath the stone exterior towards triumph over some of the greatest adversities life can throw at us.

What towering heights the gargoyle peers down from next, only time will tell.