Candle in the Attic Window(21)
“The old Scots monastery?” Richard asked. “Are all of you Scotsmen, then?”
“At one time. But we are dwindling and the initiates who join now are more often German.” The abbot sat down in the tall-backed chair at the head of the table and motioned for Richard to sit near him.
“Why did you leave Regensburg? I know that the city converted, but I did not hear of them hurling out all the Catholics.”
The abbot sipped his wine. “All does not mean none. It’s a pitiful tale, not fit for an autumn night after the fright you’ve had. The summary of it is that one of our brethren fell prey to the Devil’s temptation and committed an ... indiscretion ... of which the city had little tolerance.”
When the abbot said the word indiscretion, Richard felt a prickle around his legs, like touching a brass doorknob in crisp winter. He remembered the strange sensation, as he entered the door, and the imagined feline thing on the road.
“That was before the lifetime of anyone here. We’ve gone forward in our brotherhood, quietly carrying on God’s work.” The way Abbot Fletcher swallowed his wine placed a period on the story and Richard asked no further. The abbot moved on to other topics and, at last, seemed to enjoy using his native language with a new listener. He listed the names of his brethren, of whom there were now only 12, and who were asleep in the dormitory attached to the old chapel.
At last, he came back to the events of the evening: “These woods have become treacherous. It must have been a large animal to have scared you so.”
“Well, perhaps I was nervous after being robbed. I might have imagined it.”
“Ah.”
The utterance told Richard that the abbot firmly believed that he had not imagined it.
The abbot finished his wine and pointed to the half-full goblet beside Richard’s plate. “I do not blame you for not finishing it. It’s a watery vintage from Kelheim. We have a wine cellar, but it ages only cobwebs now. There’s no need to keep a store for so few and the vineyards shrivelled years ago.”
There was something disquieting in the man’s tone that flamed Richard’s curiosity. But the night already held too many mysteries and exhaustion started to douse his inquisitiveness. Daylight would sweep the mysteries away, and Richard would find nothing more intriguing than a dying abbey and an empty road.
Richard finished his bread and then followed his host to his bed for the night. Abbot Fletcher explained that the upstairs room had once belonged to the Protestant deacon, that properly, the abbot should have it. But he preferred the company of his brothers in the dormitory. The room was a spartan place at the peak of the roof and the triangular shape gave Richard the comfortable feeling of sleeping in an old barn. There was a narrow bed and a writing desk, with an empty bottle of ink and an unlit candle. On the wall hung a garish crucifix, with Christ in more pain than Richard preferred to see.
“I’d be grateful if you could spare a horse tomorrow,” Richard said. “I’ll leave it at Kelheim and hire someone to return it.”
“We have no horses,” the abbot said brusquely. “Wild animals have killed them all.”
Richard knew not to ask questions. He had been eager for bed, but now he felt even more eager to wake up and be on his way.
The abbot bid him goodnight and shut the door. Richard covered the gruesome crucifix with his coat, feeling a pang of Anglican revulsion at the papist decor. He pulled off his boots and was asleep as soon as his head touched the musty mattress.
The wheezing breath woke him. Heavy curtains covered the only window, so he could not tell from the moon shadows how much time had passed. He shut his eyes, but the wheezing came again. It was slow, like a child’s hand pressing down a bellows. He remembered the sound in the nettles and the shape on the road, and his chest turned cold and his muscles rigid.
The sound crept just outside the door. Richard listened for it, hoping it was only the noise of his body against the sheets. But he was more still than he could ever remember holding himself in his life.
The sound now turned shrill, like a Yorkshire wind whistling through rocks. Then the shrilling changed into a hiss. The hiss of a cat.
Richard recalled the black fiend on the road. Eyes of yellow ichor, fur made from iron spikes gating a cemetery. But ... that had been his imagination ....
He stared into the dark around the doorway. The floorboards outside creaked. A creature was striding back and forth before the door, like a witch laying down a hex. Padded feet stretched the aged wood.
Richard wanted to pull the sheets over his head, but when he reached out, he found the mattress was bare. A childhood fear seized him: the tiny boy who felt that, if he could bury himself far enough under downy blankets, no night evil could touch him. Now, there was nothing between him and the night.
The boards stopped groaning. But then the door started. The wood shrieked from a great weight pushing from the other side. Bared claws scratched down it, mixing the infernal hiss with the peeling of slivers.
Richard backed into the corner of the bed and felt the stucco wall at his back. He tried to pull his eyes away from the door, but he could feel the black monster bristling right outside it.
The thing at the door hissed. But, although the scratching still raked down the wood, the breathing of the thing now seemed to move inside the cramped room. Richard again felt the scrape of fur over his skin. Now it moved across his arms, wending around his torso, tapering off with a sinuous tail. Whiskers like needles stabbed his cheek.