Candle in the Attic Window(25)

He rubbed his eyes, and the woman was no longer standing over the body. But Richard felt that she was behind him, taking on her other form that he was afraid to look on. Something scraped on a shelf. Metal scratched against stone and then the object clattered to the floor. It landed at his feet; light glinted off a dagger’s blade.

He picked it up. It was then that Richard Davey, a curiosity seeker but also a man of modest bravery, understood what the letters on the door had asked him to do.

He spoke to the shadows. “I can’t. I have never harmed anyone in my life.”

No answer came except a sibilant hissing.

He held the dagger hilt with both hands. In the blade, he saw his face. It seemed so childish, young and foolish, the way he had felt when he stood alone on the road with his hands up in the air.

“I cannot do it,” he repeated.

The corpse-lit hand unfolded from the dark and gripped the back of his hand. The shock of fur touched his neck.

“He is their charm.” The voice was in his ears, a purring that formed words. “They make him live ... so I cannot have them. When the Devil has him ... then I may repay them all.”

The hand bent Richard’s wrist, pointing the tip of the dagger toward Brother Skene’s breast. The spectral hand could go no further than a finger’s width above the monk’s body – but it would be enough, more than enough, to drive the knife into flesh and whatever blood remained in the untimely thing.

“No, no!” His body shook, but he could not move his limbs. A horrible, smothering fur twisted around him, wrapping his body like a tomb shroud.

“Shall I tell you all of what he did to me?”

The dagger lowered. Richard’s muscles fought, but only his arm seemed able to obey – and it was not strong enough.

“They still call it ... an indiscretion.”

The dagger point pressed over the ugly cross ... brushed across a button ... nicked at the red fabric at the collar ... Brother Skene’s throat lay bare, a ruffle of breath moving it.

Suddenly, three hands were clasped onto the dagger. Richard’s grip on the hilt was pressed between the moon glow of the woman and a withered claw that had struck from inside the pit like an adder.

Richard screamed. He couldn’t help himself. The hand of the near-dead thing in the sarcophagus was a touch of maggots. The eyes of Brother Skene, filling the sockets with black, stared at him. They opened onto a soul that had hovered a hands-breath above Hell for over two hundred years.

The force of the two hands pressing against the dagger was so strong that Richard feared his wrist would snap. Smothered from one side, pressed toward a living corpse, he prayed that he might simply go mad and be free.

“Maleficas non patieris vivere!”

Another light burst into the room, coming from a single candle. The ghost hand vanished, and Richard was almost thrown into the wall from the force of Brother Skene’s arm.

He had a second to see Abbot Fletcher in the doorway of the vault – a candle in one hand and a garish cross in the other, his mouth twisted with cries of exorcism – before all light in the room was choked.

The last image left on Richard’s eyes was of claws reaching toward the abbot. The darkness of the cat had filled the room. She bristled her midnight fur and consumed the chamber with her fury.

The abbot was somewhere in the folds of the avenging creature, but it still could not touch him. The abbot’s voice shouted protections, snatches of rituals both white and black, and the screeching of the cat as it tried to reach him was a chorus of frustration and fury.

The abbot shouted in German, “You are powerless against us! Go back! Go back to Hell!”

Richard’s wrist was burning, but the dagger was still in his fingers. He tried to stand, wondering if he could grope toward the door through the cat’s shadow and flee the abbey. His curiosity was finished for the night.

Suddenly, hands like a torturer’s iron clamps snapped around Richard’s neck and pushed him into the shelf, shattering vials. Brother Skene did not need light to guide him.

The cat hissed throughout the vault, “Now will you kill him?”

Richard felt life squeezed from him and was thankful that he did not have to look into the oily pools of Brother Skene’s eyes as he was throttled to death. All he could see were glowing spots as he lost consciousness and dropped into endless night.




They must have tossed him into a pauper’s grave. No coffin, not even a pine box. He felt the weight of bare earth on his chest. But then his eyelids fluttered and opened. It was still dark, but his body felt room to move. He tried to roll and the weight slid off him. As it dropped away, light reached his eyes.

The lantern glowed from the edge of the vat where he had left it. Beside him was a body in red robes. A dagger stuck up from where the heart should be. The falling weight of Brother Skene had driven in the knifepoint as he had strangled Richard. All that remained of the monk was a dust outline and a few bones rising through the gaps in the robes. He had finally dropped the last hand’s-breadth to Hell.

But Brother Skene looked more pleasant than the remains of Abbot Fletcher. The cat’s claws left nothing behind that even the most hardened undertaker would wish to bury. Once the charm of the undying man on the floor was gone, the rage of his victim was worse than anything that Richard, an imaginative man, would have imagined.

He snatched up the lantern and climbed the stairs. He followed the clawed prints stamped in blood. He did not need to lift the tapestry; it was ripped from the wall and crumpled on the ground.