← Places in Oakhaven

Private society

The Temple of the Unsleeping Eye

Popplewick Terrace, Plot P4

An Egyptian Revival lodge on a raised plot, two battered pylons flanking a columned portico, a broad stone stair climbing to gold doors.

Egyptian Revival, nineteen twenty-three, and comprehensively the wrong size for the street it stands on. Two battered pylons flank a columned portico; a processional stair climbs to it in three flights; a pair of owl-headed sphinxes sit on the newel pedestals at the bottom and watch the pavement. The terraces on either side are two up, two down.

It belongs to the Order of the Unsleeping Eye, Oakhaven Chapter No. 357, who have met here since the year it was built. Over the doors there is a winged disc, and the wings are an owl’s rather than a falcon’s — the owl is the Order’s guardian, and where another society would carve a beehive for industry, this one carves a lantern. The motto is Oculus non dormit. The eye does not sleep.

The membership is drawn from the sort of Oakhaven that signs things: solicitors, a surveyor, two councillors, the man who used to run the bus depot. They are unfailingly polite about it and will tell you it is a dining club with an unusual amount of architecture. Inside there is an outer court, a refectory and a library, and below ground a small bare room they call the Chamber of Reflection, which is exactly as cheerful as it sounds. Cut over the inner door are the letters V·I·G·I·L·A·T — go within, enter, and hold fast the hidden stone.

Beyond that is the Temple, and the Temple is not shown to visitors. What is said about it is that the room is a double cube, that the floor is chequered black and white, and that somewhere in that floor there is a single tile of crimson. Nobody who has been in there will confirm any of it, which in Radworth counts as confirmation.

They are also, quietly, buyers. If something old comes up out of the ground under this town — and things do — the Order will pay more for it than any shop in Oakhaven, and will not ask where it came from. What they want it for is their own business, and how much of that business you choose to look into is yours. People who leave it alone find the Order generous. People who do not find the doors heavier.

Elsewhere in Oakhaven