Lion and skull hybrid pencil sketch

The old abbot, Ruthven, kept a bronze lion in the wall of his cell, and he fed it bread from his own table. When the monks of Saint Cuthbert's came to take the abbey's silver in the hungry winter, they melted the lion down for pennies. The lion did not forgive them. Every man who had a hand in that melting lost his voice by Lent, and the bell-ringer swore he heard a growl under the floorboards whenever the tide came up the Wear.

So Ruthven did the only sensible thing and went down to the charnel house. He lifted a skull from the pile of the dead, and he scratched the lion's face back onto the bone with a chisel and a hot nail. Some say he sang while he worked. Some say the bone cracked of its own accord, the way ice cracks on a pond. By morning the skull had a mane of grey hair and a lion's whiskers, and it was turning, very slowly, toward the abbey gate.

Ruthven's successor was a practical man who wanted the thing out of the cloister, so he had it carried to the cellar and the door bolted. Next morning it was back on the shelf, facing the gate, and the bolt lay on the flagstones with a trail of wet pawprints leading away from it, pawprints no beast in Durham had ever made. Now the candles are guttering and Compline is calling. Off to bed with you, and mind you keep your eyes on the door.