Candle in the Attic Window(24)

Richard took the oil lamp from the table, lit it with a burning sprig of wood from the fire, and moved toward the hanging. He pulled back the chair, which made a loud squeak across the floor. Richard waited, but no one came running to investigate. He pushed back the chair further until he could see what it had covered up.

It was the section of the tapestry showing the haloed Scots Monastery. Richard lifted the lantern; the light seeped over three straight rips down the cloth. A single swipe from the paw of a cat ... a paw large enough to slash open a bear’s throat.

The lantern shivered in his grip, but he was meant to find this. It was clear as any signpost at a crossroads. He reached toward the rips and pushed his finger through one of them. Then his hand. Then his whole arm. Where a wall should have been was a damp void.

He lifted up the bottom of the tapestry. A fusty cloud met his nose, tinged with the unmistakable smell of fermentation. The question of where the monastery hid its empty wine cellar was answered. Richard ducked under the edge of the tapestry and pulled the lantern in after him.

A tight, circular staircase wound down out of sight. Niter seeped through the stones and the dampness wafting from below explained why the vault at the end of the spiral could no longer keep wine. Either underground water had risen, or something else had contaminated the foundations with liquid stenches. Richard started downward, careful not to slip. He imagined rolling down miles of stairway into an infernal undercavern – or worse, never stopping at all.

The stairway wound around twice and stopped at an iron door. Richard didn’t need to think about what to do next; he took the mystery key from his pocket and fit it into the lock. It turned easily, without the expected protest of rust.

The thick air that oozed out was one of willing oblivion. Whatever slept inside did not want anyone to know of its existence, outside of its sworn protectors.

No sooner did the sepulchral miasma hit him, but Richard felt the prickle of fur around his legs and the whisper of sound from inside. It was a woman’s laugh, small but victorious.

The lantern flame showed a room smaller than the collection of smells might have indicated. The walls had granite shelves with half-circular depressions to hold wine barrels.

Instead of oak casks, the shelves held vials and beakers filled with murky liquids. Scattered among them were scalpels, knives and tall glass alembics. Richard had seen enough rooms of professed alchemists to recognize the tools of their trade. The walls above the elixirs were scribbled with Enochian letters and less-welcome alphabets.

In the middle of the vault, mortared to the floor, stood an oblong stone vat for the smashing and mixing of grapes. But now it was an open sarcophagus. Inside lay a body draped in cardinal red. The arms were crossed over the chest, skeletal palms pressed against the shoulders. A cross of a wicked design lay across the breast.

But the greatest horror was the feeling that the man was not dead.

Richard approached the robed body. Cat whiskers scraped against his ankles – a feeling almost soothing in the mephitic pit. The lantern lit the man’s face, which was like parchment that had been soaked and crumpled, then laid out to dry in an Egyptian sun. But in those sunken cheeks was a flush of life and the lips had a touch of red no undertaker could imitate.

“Brother Skene,” said the woman of midnight.

Richard did not jump. He had already seen her necrose glow across the withered face.

“Is he – alive?”

“Barely. Infernally.”

“The alchemist’s art.” Richard looked around at the vials and alembics. He remembered what he had once heard from a practitioner in Avignon: “Eternal life in this world is impossible ... but life can be stretched and tautened.”

The woman: “He is their charm. While he lives, I cannot touch any of them.”

The green hand dropped down into Richard’s sight, pressing toward the chest of the thing named Brother Skene. The hand stopped an inch above him and wavered, as if pressed against a glass so polished it could not be seen.

“So weak the charm,” she said. “But enough.”

Richard pulled against the weight on his eyes and managed to look at her. She was as before: made of night silk. The light from the lantern he had set beside the pit never touched her. Her face, which must have been lovely at one time, flitted between corpse light and Stygian dark.

Richard asked: “What do you want with him?”

The spectral hand turned, seeming to float without a limb attached to it. As the fingers pointed upward, Richard felt the icy river around him again, stinging his eyes and filling his lungs.

“Go back ... to the beginning ....”

As the fingers curved upward, Richard’s body followed. The ice water released him and spume hurled him into the air. He spun toward the bridge above, a woman’s dress with stains of blood flapping at the edge of his sight. The stone child hiding its eyes came closer.

Then he was on the bridge ... moving through Regensburg, as if he were running backwards ... passing through alleys of a city he had never seen ... through winter markets and past the unfinished Cathedral ... through iron doors into an abbey.

The hand pressed down; he followed the memory. Her memory.

Down he ran, into a cell with no windows. Brother Skene stood there. Young now, with mad lust in his eyes and a flail in his hand.

The hand brushed away the vision. “You do not wish to know more.”

Richard shook his head to answer the question and to push away the savage crime he almost had to witness.