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the hairs stood up on the back of his neck. He wished he was still young enough to reach out and hold Granny’s hand, because the silence was pressing down on him in a way that almost hurt. Everybody was waiting, the air almost crackling with it.
    Then, out of the darkness, a single voice rose, high and sweet and unearthly.
    Callum shivered, and then took a breath as a single candle flared into light. It was a long way away, and he could see how far back in the cathedral they must be sitting.
    A second flame and a second voice, and he watched with his fists clenched as the choristers’ faces began to show, voice after voice and light after light. As their candles lit, they began to move, processing along with that uncanny music rising out of them as if they weren’t even singing on purpose, just breathing it out. He couldn’t understand the words, which definitely weren’t in English, but that didn’t matter.
    When they stopped singing, he sighed in disappointment and slumped back, only then realizing that he had been sitting bolt upright.
    The next bit was just some bloke talking about religion, and Callum stopped listening. Instead he watched as two men in cassocks moved through the cathedral, lighting candle after candle. Slowly, the cathedral itself emerged out of the shadows, and it took Callum’s breath away again. He’d never been in a building that soared before.
    He wanted to draw the pillars and arches and vaults in big bold sweeping lines. More than that, he wanted to fly up and put his hands on them, to feel the shape of the stone under his fingertips. He wanted to press his palms against the cheeks of every carved face that marked the meeting point of the roof arches, and squeeze his fingers against the carved tops of every pillar.
    Then the singing started again, and he closed his eyes and saw nothing but the shapes it made in his mind, the narrow bright twists of melody blurring into the same lines that underlay the cathedral, everything, song and stone and silence, reaching up and up in search of something he couldn’t understand.
    At the end, he was so full up with light and music that he couldn’t speak. He let Granny steer him out, and didn’t get why she was smiling.
    They were halfway home before he could get words out of his mouth again, and he said, “I want to draw it.” Then he rethought that, and corrected himself. “I want to make it.”
    “Make what?” Granny asked him.
    “A cathedral,” he said.
    She didn’t laugh, which instantly made her much cooler than he’d ever realized before. “Do you like making things?”
    “I like art,” he explained. “It’s my best subject. And I like it best when we have clay.”
    “Hmm,” she said, and then quietly, in a way that didn’t seem like it was addressed quite to him, “Well, finally one of you inherited it.”
    A week later, after the Christmas market had started, he tried to explain to Jonah what had happened next. “And then she told Mum that she’d have me round for the weekend, and we never go round to her house. She always comes to us. So I went, and Granddad Jack was there. He doesn’t go out much, because his breathing’s bad. Except he has a workshop, full of wood and tools and stuff he’s built, and he showed me how it all worked, and taught me how to whittle, and I made this.” He dug into his pocket and produced the scarred bit of wood he’d managed to produce by the end of the afternoon.
    “It’s a bird,” Jonah said, his face lighting up.
    Callum grinned at him. They were sitting cross-legged on the floor of Jonah’s dorm, waiting for the girls to get back from morning service, with the rain pounding on the windows. “You’re the first person to get that. Without being told, I mean.”
    “It’s obvious,” Jonah said and then offered Callum a shy grin. “It’s cool.”
    “It’s not very good,” Callum said, to be fair, “not yet, but Grandad says I’ll get better with