Candle in the Attic Window(65)

I fought a war within myself. I stopped looking at her. And that is when I saw the warning on the walls.

I did not recognize the Hebrew script. I could not translate the words. But I did well at deciphering the pictures.

I saw the light of heaven and the Holy Ark firing rays over armies of black demons. I saw winged beasts in the sky fighting angels – I cannot describe the beasts to you, for they had, as it were, the heads of stars and the bodies of squid and the wings of torn dragons. They were like nothing I had seen or read about anywhere.

I was slowing. The Lady de Siverey berated me. So, I tried not to look upon these painted mysteries. I clung to both lamp and edged weapon, my hands filled so that when, running behind de Siverey, I slipped upon a sandy slope. I dropped straight through the hole in the ground that I did not see.

The lamp shattered before I could cry out in pain. The oil spread and caught fire. So that, for a brief time, there was plenty of light to behold this sunken place.

I was in a vaulted room with a doorway in each of three corners, each aperture easily fit for Goliath or – as I now know – something much larger.

Above me, I could hear de Siverey’s enchanting laughter, a musical chuckle, pleasure. I never saw the Lady again.

I called for her. In whispers at first, then louder, and then in whispers again as my eyes watered before frescoes depicting the most horrible scenes.

On the wall, I saw men who were not men worshiping at the Mediterranean’s edge. I saw a nightmare larger than the moon, black and indistinct now that the paints and tiles had faded so. It was a form of art unlike any made by man, but it was so old now. There was something Egyptian about the wings that filled all the sky from the South to the North, as if saying that Heaven was this: only darkness, a night with every star blackened out.

And then I remembered, in my quivering state, how the Earth was without form and void in the beginning. How, after the waters were separated from the waters and the land appeared, there was a time theologians and doctors, to my memory, never bothered to portray. I felt that I understood: This time was too terrible for man to recall, even after it was revealed to him in the Garden eastward in Eden. For after, there was a sea and there was dry land; the sun and the moon and the stars had not yet been created. Oh, there was light! Yes, there was light – I could see on the walls that there was light. And there was grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit of the tree yielding fruit after its kind. But, as my training confirmed to my memory, the sun and the moon and the stars were created as signs and for seasons and for days and for years and set into the firmament “to rule over the day and over the night” ... but not until the Fourth Day.

I had risen, one ankle throbbing with pain that I dismissed before all my fear. I fell again. I was looking upon the Third Day, upon details unspecified in the Bible, and felt that this Day, this period of creation, must have lasted for aeons.

And who were these nightmares infesting the Earth before Man was placed in the Garden?

I had heard of dragons. These were not dragons. There were fiends cast from Heaven along with the Devil – I imagined the angels depicted in the Hebrew halls now far above me, and the words of John the Revelator, who described Michael and his angels fighting with the Dragon and his angels. Was this what I saw? Were these entities those beings who had been cast down from on high?

It was too simplistic. This place and its horrible secrets ran deeper. I did not want to know more. But the fire, which had spread and grown bright in the oil, was eating through it quickly and would soon be gone.

At the thought of being left alone here, deep underground in the ancient darkness, my heart pounded as if expending all of my life now before giving up the breath that had started it.

I found, in the rubbish of bodies heretofore unrecognized, the cloth and bones necessary to construct a crude torch. The bones were human. Why did I find solace in that? As I righted my traveling flame, my eyes took note of Templar red-on-white scattered among heaps of skulls with hair and flaking skin. I turned away from what must have once been a mountain of desiccated soldiers, swept aside as if by a great foot away from one portal. In each brick about the frame, I saw the faces of screaming men and women carefully etched and carved, like trophies of memory from bygone wars.

The fire on the floor died at last, though I managed one small torch from it. I pondered fearfully which way to go.

The hole above me was dark. I could not imagine the Lady de Siverey alone up there in those endlessly black passageways, forced after her laughter of insanity to travel alone. But I also could not comprehend how easily she met these horrors and keenly knew the way to this pit. I could not reach the top of that domed ceiling if I wanted to. And the artwork staring down at me brought a whimper of childish panic from my tongue; I would not look up there anymore.

One thing was certain. The Lady de Siverey knew what I would find. Others knew. How many? Who else? The Grand Master? The Pope?

I thought at that time about the Bible, about the wisdom of the Church Fathers, about a library in the Vatican of which I had heard respectably rumoured whispers. Surely, the Pope at least had an idea of this ancient knowledge upon which I had stumbled. I reminisced about my enthusiasm and how my former teachers looked down upon it. I suspected that I was a fishhook, used by a fleeing Roman bishop to snag a fish of mystery or simply die in cold waters. I wondered, in that moment, if anyone on Earth cared about me at all. For I had also heard that often, crusaders were little more than troublesome sword owners, that the Church nudged them toward death in the Holy Land to free Europe for more peaceful living.