Symmetrical tribal skull design

You will not believe what the lord's men dragged up from the lower cellar on Tuesday. Master Holloway had us brush the silt off it with goose feathers because he said a chisel would crack it like an egg. It is a panel of black slate, no wider than a door, carved all down its face with faces. A crowned skull sits at the top with three eyes, below it two grinning heads with brows drawn down like angry dogs, then the same again turned sideways, and at the bottom a long tongue of stone that runs off the edge as if it means to keep going.

Holloway says it was cut to hang over the sealed well in the keep, so that whatever climbed up would see its own face before it saw the water. I asked him how a man could cut a face that cheats the eye like that, every line answering the one opposite, and he only laughed and said the trick is to stop looking for the mouth.

I stopped looking for it on Thursday, and that was when I found the tendrils. They were not carved at all. They are the shadows of the carving, cut so thin that the lamp throws them through the slate onto the wall, and they shift when the wind comes under the door. Last night I counted them three times and got three different numbers.

I will not go back down there after dark. Tell Father the wages are fair and I am well fed, and do not let him read this aloud at supper.

Your brother, Tom