Candle in the Attic Window(22)

Richard focused his eyes on the vague lump of his coat on the wall, trying to pull his mind away from its hallucinations. The coat hovered in blackness. The wall and the crucifix where it hung were lost in the dark of the room.

Then the coat started to flutter from the wall and drift toward the bed. As it did, the scratching and the hissing stopped.

The coat turned inside out and a black lining flowed out into the shape of a tall woman in robes woven from midnight.

Richard tried to back through the wall. And, suddenly, he succeeded. The wall pushed away, the bed vanished ... he dropped through space.

Above him was a bridge, a huge span of bleak stones. Daggers of icy water jabbed into his back. The air was punched from his lungs and when he drew breath, the freezing water flooded in. Choking, he flailed out his arms.





His hands hit the stucco wall; he fell onto the mattress. The water and the bridge were gone. The woman was still there, a sliver of midnight at the foot of the bed.

“Who – who are you?” He felt as if he were spitting water from his lungs to say it.

A hand slipped from the night that shrouded her. Her skin was the colour of moonlight bleeding through swamp vapours. Yet, it was a relief from the Stygian cloak of the rest of her ... and he had not even dared to try to look her in the face.

Her finger pointed toward the door.

“You – let me – in.”

It was a hissing voice and Richard could not tell what language she spoke, except that he could understand it.

“You – will – break – the charm.”

Unwillingly, his eyes were drawn to her face ....

He did not remember what it looked like, because the memory drowned as he started falling again ... tumbling from the bridge. He could see the statue of a child on the span above him, a hand covering its eyes as if it could not bear to watch him plunge to a watery death ... to plunge from the bridge that the Devil himself could not break.

The Regensburg Bridge, he knew. And with that, he was back on the bed, cowering against the wall.

One more hissed word came from the woman: Help.

The sickly moon glow peeking from the shadows vanished. The midnight shape turned back into a coat hanging from a crucifix.

But the scratching at the door started again. The spectre of the woman was still there, in the shape of the beast clawing to get inside.

Other sounds now exploded through the monastery. Feet pounded up the stairs, and voices called in a hurly-burly of German and English. Then came shouts of Latin, phrases that Richard could recall from murky schoolboy days:

“Et ne inducas nos in temptationem, sed libera nos a malo!”

The beast shrieked and needles of fur prickled across Richard’s skin. More voices shouted in unison, “Libera nos a malo!” Abbot Fletcher’s call followed in a righteous thunderclap: “Maleficas non patieris vivere!”

Abruptly, the scratching stopped. The fur uncurled from around Richard Davey and he crumpled forward onto the floor.

A mundane rapping struck the door. The abbot called, “Mr. Davey! Mr. Davey, are you all right?”

Hearing the voice of a living man, one with whom he had drunk wine only hours before, should have comforted him. But Richard suddenly had no wish to see the abbot of this blighted place.

He had no choice. There was no lock on the door and the abbot pushed it open and raised up a candle.

In the first flicker of light, Richard saw the deep furrows of claw marks down the front of the door. He wondered that he did not faint and spend the rest of the night in peaceful oblivion.

The abbot stared at him, offering no aid. Richard staggered to his feet on his own. Other faces peered from behind the abbot, a mixture of elders and novices. They clucked to each other, mostly in German. None of them crossed the threshold.

“Wh – what was that?” Richard breathed.

“It is gone.” The abbot squinted. “And you must be gone in the morning.”

“I don’t understand. What happened?”

The abbot’s eyes were lead shots. Looking into them was worse than staring down a highwayman’s pistol.

“You let her in.”

Richard was not supposed to have heard those words. They were spoken in German, as if Abbot Fletcher had forgotten that his visitor knew the language.

Then, in English: “Nothing happened. You will not be bothered again tonight. But be prepared to leave at dawn. I will lay out food for you in the banquet room.”

He turned to the others and grumbled at them in German to return to the dormitory. He took one look back into the room, noticed the coat hung rudely over the crucifix, and slammed the door.

Richard groped in the dark to reach the candle. He found matches beside it, struck one, and lit the wick.

The first thing he noticed was his coat. It hung inside out over the crucifix, and he knew he had not done that. He picked it up to turn it back around, and felt a heaviness in one of the pockets. He reached in and pulled out a three-pronged iron key he had never seen before. He dropped it back into the pocket – he needed to take this one mystery at a time.

He turned toward the door. He was frightened to see for certain what he thought he had spotted when the abbot opened the door, but the curiosity of a man who explores curiosities pushed him on. He drew the door open and looked at the marks that ran from the height of the latch down to floorboards.

But he had glimpsed more than that in the abbot’s candlelight. He slanted the door and squinted at the marks from a different angle.