Candle in the Attic Window(23)
No illusion. The beast on the other side of the door was not scratching to get in. It was leaving a message. Four shaky letters: HELP.
A taciturn Abbot Fletcher hustled Richard from the room in the morning. The man now spoke only in German, casting aside any brotherhood he might have felt for someone else from the isles. Richard knew better than to ask questions about the nighttime disturbances. He would receive no answers.
The other members of the Abbey of St. James in Exile stood around the staircase as Richard walked down. Some muttered blessings; others gave him stares that he might have classed as “diabolic”, if he thought such a thing could be used to describe a monk. He tried to tell which of them were German and which Scottish, so perhaps he might get a last friendly word in his own language before leaving, but their faces were shadowed with fear.
“There is food for you,” Abbot Fletcher grumbled, and indicated a burlap sack on the table of the banquet room.
Richard picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. As he did, he thought he felt something different about the banquet room. Something more than the changed air of day. But the abbot hurried him out through the chapel. In all his rush to get Richard out of the abbey, it was surprising he had not conjured a horse to carry him off as fast as possible. Even when Richard tried to offer thanks, the man had no interest in hearing it: “You should never have come here and you should forget that you did.” Abbot Fletcher waved him through the front doors that had welcomed him last night.
Richard walked under the tympanum into the unfriendly morning cold. He expected to hear the creak of hinges and the slam of a wooden beam behind him, but there was only monastic silence. He walked down the path, through the opening in the iron posts around the churchyard. He looked over his shoulder. The maw of the church was open, but the abbot was no longer standing there.
He turned his head back and stepped onto the road that wound toward Kelheim, and then beyond to the bridge and its child protector that crossed the Danube to Regensburg.
Richard Davey was not an extraordinarily brave man. He had the common courage needed to travel across the continent alone, but he would never have survived life as a soldier or in any profession more dangerous than a “seeker of curiosities”.
“Seeker of curiosities”: That was how he introduced himself whenever he had to explain to lesser nobility why a young man wanted to look through their libraries. Behind him was a curiosity greater than any he had encountered, perhaps greater than the automaton chess player rumoured to be in the treasuries of Prague.
The letters “HELP” scratched in mouldy oak. The hissing of an apparition made of shadow hovering over him. A dream of plunging from a bridge to drown. A key in his pocket that did not belong there. The posture of the abbot, the unease that shrouded monastery.
The daylight could sweep these oddities from most minds, but not from Richard Davey’s. They left a blot of ink on his soul, and it was from ink that great tales were written. In him was an urgency, even importance, which was strange to him but stronger than the dark beers of Munich.
He walked only as far along the road as he needed before finding the shelter of a wall of hawthorn. He leaned against an accommodating beech, ate the squishy apple and dry loaf in his pack, and waited until nightfall.
He walked back along the road, staying in the shadow of the trees. The waning moon only peeked out from the clouds in bursts, so Richard had an easy time turning into a shadow himself.
Lights burned in the outbuilding of the monastery. The closer that Richard came, the more he could pick out from the crickets the sound of men’s voices chanting evensong. He had heard many evensongs during his sojourn through Bavaria, but this one had an air of fear, not celebration. But if the brothers of St. James were awake, it were better they were enrapt in chanting Latin so that they would pay no attention to an outsider slipping into their church.
The front doors still gaped wide. For a moment, Richard stared in bewilderment; in a countryside filthy with bandits, this was a bizarre sight, making the church a naked man in the middle of a raging battle.
Then he remembered the words of the abbot that he was not supposed to hear: “You let her in.”
The brothers were now trying to send her out, like housewives who flung open their doors to shoo out an uninvited spider or rat. The brothers had no fear of what was outside but what had gotten inside.
No one guarded the vestibule. The voices floated from behind the interior doors to the chapel. Richard spied through the gap between them. He saw the backs of some of the monks. They wore red topcoats over their simple brown robes and had gathered in a circle in the apse, where Abbot Fletcher led the song from the center. The simmering Latin reeked of diablerie; there were no simple “pater noster”s or “saeculo saeculorum”s.
Richard pushed through the doors, making no noise, and crawled on his hands and knees behind the pews, through the nave, past the transept. He managed to move the length of the chapel unseen. The monks were so deep in their ritual that Richard wondered if he could have stomped through the choir shouting “Hosanna!” without distracting them.
It was a relief reaching the banquet hall just to place a wall between him and the unholy chanting. A fire was burning itself out in the hearth, casting enough light for Richard to search for what had seemed different in the room that morning.
He picked it out immediately: The tall chair at the end of the table had been pushed against the middle of the tapestry.