Bread

by Stephen Brown

TAKEN FROM THE RIGHT AND ORDERLY NOTEBOOK OF SADFAEL THE MONK

  For several days I remained in the catacombs of Canterbury, being attended to by nuns, undeservedly receiving the treatment of a Prince from a foreign land. During this time Slush was finalising my plan of attack with me, as Father Bwop completed the finishing touches to the transportation device I would be using.

  And then the hour had arrived. ‘Zero Hour’ Geoffrey kept calling it, but refrained from elaborating why. We had planned all we could plan. I had prayed all I could pray - well, obviously not all, but I’d prayed a lot, I can assure you. The machine, and my preparation, was finally finished. I was ushered quickly into the room I had first met Father Bwop and there he was again in his immaculate white smock. Placing the device upon my wrist like a bracelet, he spoke most gravely.

  “Sadfael, it is possible for you to be taken at any time, so I want to wish you luck now while I still have chance.” A more dramatic greeting I have never received!

  “But surely there will be some warning,” I put to him, my already nervous sensibilities intensified beyond belief.

  “I’m afraid not brother. The next time our foe makes a move, you will follow, so you must be ready at any moment to confront him. Not long ago, the device you now wear picked up his movements in the æther. The demon travelled a long, long way back into prehistory. Fortunately it had not been activated otherwise I would have gone instead of you.”

  “Heaven forefend!” I ejaculated. Not long ago, it is true, I would have been quite vocal in my insistence that anybody here would have been far more able than I could ever hope to be, even one of the young nuns! However, since my arrival at the Cathedral my learned hosts have persuaded me that, seeing as it was I who was hand-picked by God Himself to complete this mission, it is indeed only I, Sadfael, who can rid the world of this Luciferian menace. This being the case, had Father Bwop been sent for the final confrontation I shudder to think what might have been the outcome.

  Turning my wrist he pointed to a flashing green light emitting from the device clamped around my arm.

  “It’s alright brother,” he assured me, sensing my disquiet, “it is perfectly safe. That light means that it is switched on, that’s all. The very next time the fiend travels through the ages you will disappear from us here and be sent after him, hot on his heels. Geoffrey has been through all the contingencies we can think of with you? You will know what to do?” I nodded. “Then all we can do now is wait.”

  Time passed by. The bracelet, which not only bestowed upon the wearer the ability to move as freely as they wished between the aeons, but also worked as a miraculously small sundial (despite the absence, here underground, of even a single shaft of sunlight) told me that I waited approximately two hours, and was just about to bite into a leg of chicken brought to me by Sister Berriman when - Zapo-Kapow!!

  My fortitude must have been bolstered more than I knew by my stay in the caves of Canterbury, as this time I did not faint dead away. Instead, the confines of the room I stood in vanished in a mesmeric swirl of colours and I then found myself standing only slightly dazed before a small keep, in delicately landscaped grounds.

  My surroundings felt strangely familiar, yet did not look so. However, I soon learned where (and indeed, roughly when) I was. Listening to the sounds around me for a moment - the birdsong and a distant lowing of cattle - my head soon stopped spinning and I cautiously approached the building through its finely manicured lawns and flowerbeds.

  No flag flew from any of the turrets and all seemed disturbingly quiet. The door yielded to my touch, so I stepped inside the carpeted hallway, lit by the sunlight which streamed in through the lead lined windows to my left. Then without warning a tall, transparent figure lurched towards me, having just emerged straight through the wall!

  I cried aloud and held out my trusty cross to ward the demon off, but he seemed not to be troubled by this - though troubled by something he evidently was. Stopping but a few feet away from me, he rattled the huge chain he carried upon his person before letting out a hideously mournful wail.

  Quite abruptly he ceased the gnashing of his teeth as he stared carefully up and down my figure. Finally, he spoke:

  “It is you!” He turned his gaze towards the Heavens. “Oh Lord, can it be true? Hast thou seen fit to save me at last, to free me from all of my sins of the past? To release me after so long from these terrible bonds!

  “Great indeed is Your mercy, that Thou hast sent Your finest of champions to quash this scurrilous demon, who hath cursed me so by residing here! Perchance in Your wisdom Thou hast forgiven my sorry soul at last and are allowing me one more chance to gain entrance into Thine glorious Kingdom?”

  He went on for several minutes in this vein and then it was that I finally realised that I recognised the man - it was none other than Duke Duster of Nine Feathers Castle, the nobleman upon whose land I had had my first battle with the Prince of Darkness! I tried to give him my halloos, but had not the chance, as he continued to wail his sorrowful monologue.

  “So dark have these last, lonely centuries been, and so cold as you couldst ne’er know. Long have I endur’d the life of a prisoner here in this, my castl’d home, with narry but the scuttling vermin to hear my sorry tale.

  “By lonely night and tortur’d day, bereft of sleep and all the comforts known to Man, I watch, as the spiders weave their silken webs, and verily do I long to feel but one more time, their gossamer touch. Nay, to feel anything in this, my pitiful undeath, for since I slipp’d my mortal coil, but a sorry two of mine five senses remain extant!

  “The sensations of smell and taste have been like closed doors unto to me these last seven centuries! Ohhh, wouldst that I were able somehow to feel again that keening draught, which whistles so swiftly through this woe begotten hall! Why, ‘twould bring my face to break a smile, and such a joyous expression this bearded chin has long since forgotten.” His wild eyes swum my way and he stretched his hands imploringly out towards me.

  “Oh redemption! Oh tonsur’d knight, ‘tis not just the habit of mine life that hast been missed, but also your own brown smock, for in thine gather’d robes do I dare detect Salvation’s light! Verily, ‘twixt every strand and fibre I see woven my most heartfelt prayers; only you can open Heaven’s Door for me! Only you can cleanse mine humble abode from the profanities committed in this once so Christian a castle! Ohhh, ‘tis only you who is possessed of the strength that can cast out this foetid daemon, who hath so long bespoilt my keep, and thus can grant my sweet release, and give this tortur’d soul its much crav’d sleep…” The phantom fell silent and remained so for some minutes.

  “Duke?” I asked in scarcely a whisper. “Duke Duster, that… that is you isn’t it?”

  “Aye, ‘tis me for my sins,” he wailed. “‘Tis I brother, if the likes of I have any right to call you that.”

  “The likes of you? But were you not a fine, upstanding man while you yet still lived?”

  The ghost groaned. “Alack! Are mine agonies not sufficient brother, but that you must remind me of what I once was? As upstanding as ever a man could hope to be was I, though little good it did me! I have been forsaken! Forgotten into this void and gone; a mere shadow, existing between Worlds, yet belonging to none!”

  “But what happened? What force could possibly have kept you from the bosom of Our Heavenly Father? Whyfore are you not now reclining in the Glories of the Hereafter, basking in the Light of the Lord?”

  “Well mayst thou ask brother, well mayst thou ask! ‘Tis the very Hellspawn you didst seek to destroy – fools that we were to ever have hop’d you had! ‘Tis he and he alone who is responsible for my sorry plight!

  “That denizen of the Flamed Realm, that Whisperer in the Dark! That leech-headed Mephisto – he hast brought upon this house its ruination! The Duster seed has long since died, just punishment perhaps for giving sanctuary to the Fallen One, though most strenuously do I protest that I never had but a choice in the matter, and had I lock’d and bol
ted the door, ‘twould have made not the slightest difference.”

  “I’m afraid I… I don’t really follow you… Are you saying the demon resides here? In this very castle?”

  The ghost howled a most plaintive moan. “Ohhh, yes Brother Monk! That same Son of Satan you so bravely confronted returned hither soon after, amidst a wild cacophony of banshee howls and sulphurous, ashen smog! He hath befouled my keep ever since, has claim’d it as his own nefarious haven, and returneth here whenever he so chooseth, as to a port in a storm, storing many an ill-gotten gain inside mine own cupboards and closets!” He swung an incorporeal hand about. “Look for yourself brother, please I beseech thee, and I’ll warrant ‘twill not be long before you find evidence of his evil plunderings!

  “I beg that thou wilst go about my castle as you see fit; cleanse my keep with your perfumed step even as you gaze upon his treacheries! To the tarnish of his darkened lies bring the Light of God, both Just and True, for wheresoever thou dost humbly tread will the poison’d ground spring life anew!”

  Sure enough, after only a brief search I found the relics stolen from the Church of Bramfield, and many more riches besides, piled high in a wine cellar reached by the servants’ stairwell in the kitchens. No coinage - strange, I thought, for a treasure trove - but many were the finely crafted artefacts from who knows what exotic places; stolen, each one of them, I was sure.

  The dead Duke pleaded anew with every step to vanquish this monster once and for all and to free his home from the tainted treasures that the devil had dumped there. I informed him reassuringly that it was my express desire and indeed my purpose to do that very thing!

  ***