Fear Itself

by Jeff Gelb

  After a long pause, he heard somebody coming downstairs, and then coughing, and then the front door was opened about two inches. A thin, soapy-looking face peered out at him.

  “I’m looking for Jan De Keyser.”

  “That’s me. What do you want?”

  Dean took out the newspaper cutting and held it up. “You were the last person to see my wife alive.”

  The young man frowned at the cutting for nearly half-a-minute, as if he needed glasses. Then he said, “That was a long time ago, mister. I’ve been sick since then.”

  “All the same, can I talk to you?”

  “What for? It’s all in the paper, everything I said.”

  “I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

  Jan De Keyser gave a high, rattling cough. “I saw your wife talking to this nun, that’s all, and she was gone. I turned around in my seat, and saw the nun walk into Minderbroeder-straat, into the sunshine, and then she was gone, too, and that was all.”

  “You ever see a nun dressed in gray like that before?” Jan De Keyser shook his head.

  “You don’t know where she might have come from? What order? You know, Dominican or Franciscan or whatever?”

  “I don’t know about nuns. But maybe she wasn’t a nun.”

  “What do you mean? You told the police that she was a nun.”

  “What do you think I was going to say? That she was a statue? I have two narcotics offenses already. They would have locked me up, or sent me to that bloody stupid hospital in Kortrijk.”

  Dean said, “What are you talking about, statue?”

  Jan De Keyser coughed again, and started to close the door. “This is Brugge, what do you expect?”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  The door hovered on the point of closing. Dean took out his wallet again, and ostentatiously took out three 100 Bf notes, and held them up. “I’ve come a long way for this, Jan. I need to know everything.”

  “Wait,” said Jan De Keyser; and closed the door. Dean waited. He looked down the foggy length of Oostmeers, and he could see a young girl standing on the comer of Zonnekemeers, her hands in her pockets. He couldn’t tell if she were watching him or not.

  After two or three minutes, Jan De Keyser opened the door again and stepped out into the street, wearing a brown leather jacket and a checkered scarf. He smelled of cigarettes and liniment. “I’ve been very sick, ever since that time. My chest. Maybe it was nothing to do with the nun; maybe it was. But you know what they say: once a plague, always a plague.”

  He led Dean back the way he had come, past the canals, past the Gruuthuuse Museum, along Dijver to the Vismarkt. He walked very quickly, with his narrow shoulders hunched. Horses and carriages rattled through the streets like tumbrils; and bells chimed from the belfry. They had that high, strange musical ring about them that you only hear from European bells. They reminded Dean of Christmasses and wars; and maybe that was what Europe was really all about.

  They reached the corner of Hoogstraat and Minderbroeder-straat; by the bridge. Jan De Keyser jabbed his finger one way, and then the other. “I am carrying Germans; five-or six-member German family. I am going slow because my horse is tired, yes? I see this woman in tight white shorts, and a blue T-shirt, and I look at her because she is pretty. That was your wife, yes? She has a good figure. Anyway, I turn and watch because she is not only pretty, she is talking to a nun. A nun in gray, quite sure of that. And they are talking as if they are arguing strongly. You know what I mean? Like, arguing, very fierce. Your wife is lifting her arms, like this, again and again, as if to say, ‘what have I done? what have I done?’ And the nun is shaking her head.”

  Dean looked around, frustrated and confused. “You said something about statues; and the plague.”

  “Look up,” said Jan De Keyser. “You see on the corner of almost every building, a stone madonna. Here is one of the largest, life-size.”

  Dean raised his eyes, and for the first time he saw the arched niche that had been let into the corner of the building above him. In this niche stood a Virgin Mary, with the baby Jesus in her arms, looking sadly down at the street below.

  “You see?” said Jan De Keyser. “There is so much to see in Brugge, if you lift your head. There is another world on the second story. Statues and gargoyles and flags. Look at that building there. It has the faces of thirteen devils on it. They were put there to keep Satan away; and to protect the people who lived in this building from the Black Death.”

  Dean leaned over the railings, and stared down into the water. It was so foggy and gelid that he couldn’t even see his own face; only a blur, as if somebody had taken a black-and-white photograph of him, and jogged the camera.

  Jan De Keyser said, “In the fourteenth century, when the plague came, it was thought that the people of Brugge were full of sin, yes? and that they were being given a punishment from God. So they made statues of the Holy Mary at every corner, to keep away the evil; and they promised the Holy Mary that they would always obey her, and worship her, if she protected them from plague. You understand this, yes? They made a binding agreement.”

  “And what would happen if they didn’t stick to this binding agreement?”

  “The Holy Virgin would forgive; because the Holy Virgin always forgives. But the statue of the Holy Virgin would give punish.”

  “The statue? How could the statue punish anybody?”

  Jan De Keyser shrugged. “They made it, in the false belief. They made it with false hopes. Statues that are made with false hopes will always be dangerous; because they will turn on the people who made them; and they will expect the payment for their making.”

  Dean couldn’t grasp this at all. He was beginning to suspect that Jan De Keyser was not only physically sick but mentally unbalanced, too; and he was beginning to wish that he hadn’t brought him here.

  But Jan De Keyser pointed up to the statue of the Virgin Mary; and then at the bridge; and then at the river, and said, “They are not just stone; not just carving. They have all of people’s hopes inside them, whether these hopes are good hopes; or whether these hopes are wicked. They are not just stone.”

  “What are you trying to tell me? That what you saw—?”

  “The gray madonna,” said Jan De Keyser. “If you offend her, you must surely pay the price.”

  Dean took out three more hundred Bf bills, folded them, and stuffed them into Jan De Keyser’s jacket pocket. “Thanks, pal,” he told him. “I love you, too. I flew all the way from New Milford, Connecticut, to hear that my wife was killed by a statue. Thank you. Drink hearty.”

  But Jan De Keyser clutched hold of his sleeve. “You don’t understand, do you? Everybody else has told you lies. I am trying to tell you the truth.”

  “What does the truth matter to you?”

  “You don’t have to insult me, sir. The truth has always mattered to me; just like it matters to all Belgians. What would I gain, from lying to you? A few hundred francs, so what?”

  Dean looked up at the gray madonna in her niche in the wall. Then he looked back at Jan De Keyser. “I don’t know,” he said, flatly.

  “Well, just give me the money, and maybe we can talk about morals and philosophy later.”

  Dean couldn’t help smiling. He handed Jan De Keyser his money; and then stood and watched him as he hurried away, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders swinging from side to side. Jesus, he thought, I’m getting old. Either that, or Jan De Keyser has deliberately been playing me along.

  All the same, he stood across the street, eater-corner from the gray madonna, and watched her for a long, long time, until the chill began to get to his sinuses, and his nose started to drip. The gray madonna stared back at him with her blind stone eyes, calm and beautiful, with all the sadness of a mother who knows that her child must grow up, and that her child will be betrayed, and that for centuries to come men and women will take His name in vain.

  Dean walked back along Hoogstraat to the market-place, and
he went into one of the cafes beside the entrance to the Belfry. He sat in the corner, underneath a carved wooden statue of a louche-looking medieval musician. He ordered a small espresso and an Asbach brandy to warm him up. A dark-looking girl on the other side of the cafe smiled at him briefly, and then looked away. The jukebox was playing 44Guantanamera.”

  He was almost ready to leave when he thought he saw a gray nun-like figure passing the steamed-up window.

  He hesitated, then he got up from his table and went to the door, and opened it. He was sure that he had seen a nun. Even if it wasn’t the same nun that Karen had been talking to on the day when she was strangled and thrown into the canal, this nun had worn a light gray habit, too. Maybe she came from the same order, and could help him locate the original nun, and find out what Karen had said to her.

  A party of schoolchildren were crossing the gray fan-patterned cobbles of the Markt, followed by six or seven teachers. Beyond the teachers, Dean was sure that he could glimpse a gray-robed figure, making its way swiftly toward the arched entrance to the Belfry. He started to walk quickly across the market-place, just as the carillon of bells began to ring, and starlings rose from the rooftops all around the square. He saw the figure disappear into the foggy, shadowy archway, and he broke into a jog.

  He had almost reached the archway when a hand snatched at his sleeve, and almost pulled him off-balance. He swung around. It was the waiter from the cafe, pale-faced and panting.

  “You have to pay, sir,” he said.

  Dean said, “Sure, sorry, I forgot,” and hurriedly took out his wallet. “There—keep the change. I’m in a hurry, okay?”

  He left the bewildered waiter standing in the middle of the square and ran into the archway. Inside, there was a large deserted courtyard. On the right-hand side, a flight of stone steps led to the interior of the Belfry tower itself. There was nowhere else that the nun could have gone.

  He vaulted up the steps, pushed open the huge oak door, and went inside. A young woman with upswept glasses and a tight braid on top of her head was sitting behind a ticket-window, painting her nails.

  “Did you see a nun come through here?”

  “A nun? I don’t know.”

  “Give me a ticket anyway.”

  He waited impatiently while she handed him a ticket and a leaflet describing the history of the Belfry. Then he pulled open the narrow door which led to the spiral stairs, and began to climb up them in leaps and bounds.

  The steps were extravagantly steep, and it wasn’t long before he had to slow down. He trudged around and around until he reached a small gallery, about a third of the way up the tower, where he stopped and listened. If there were a nun climbing the steps up ahead of him, he would easily be able to hear her.

  And—yes—he could distinctly make out the chip—chip—chip sound of somebody’s feet on worn stone steps. The sound echoed down the staircase like fragments of granite dropping down a well. Dean seized the thick, slippery rope handrail, and renewed his climbing with even more determination, even though he was soaked in chilly sweat, and he was badly out of breath.

  As it rose higher and higher within the Belfry tower, the spiral staircase grew progressively tighter and narrower, and the stone steps were replaced with wood. All that Dean could see up ahead of him was the triangular treads of the steps above; and all he could see when he looked down was the triangular treads of the steps below. For more than a dozen turns of the spiral, there were no windows, only dressed stone walls, and even though he was so high above the street, he began to feel trapped and claustrophobic. There were still hundreds of steps to climb to reach the top of the Belfry, and hundreds of steps to negotiate if he wanted to go back down again.

  He paused for a rest. He was tempted to give it up. But then he made the effort to climb up six more steps and found that he had reached the high-ceilinged gallery which housed the clock’s carillon and chiming mechanism—a gigantic medieval musical-box. A huge drum was turned by clockwork, and a complicated pattern of metal spigots activated the bells.

  The gallery was silent, except for the soft, weary ticking of a mechanism that had been counting out the hours without interruption for nearly five hundred years. Columbus’s father could have climbed these same steps, and looked at this same machinery.

  Dean was going to rest a moment or two longer, but he heard a quick, furtive rustling sound on the other side of the gallery, and caught sight of a light gray triangle of skirt just before it disappeared up the next flight of stairs.

  “Wait!” he shouted. He hurried across the gallery and started to climb. This time he could not only hear the sound of footsteps, he could hear the swishing of well-starched cotton, and once or twice he actually saw it.

  “Wait!” he called. “I don’t mean to frighten you—I just want to talk to you!”

  But the footsteps continued upward at the same brisk pace, and with each turn in the spiral the figure in the light gray habit stayed tantalizingly out of sight.

  At last the air began to grow colder and fresher, and Dean realized that they were almost at the top. There was nowhere the nun could go, and she would have to talk to him now.

  He came out onto the Belfry’s viewing gallery, and looked around. Barely visible through the fog he could distinguish the orange rooftops of Bruges, and the dull gleam of its canals. On a clear day the view stretched for miles across the flat Flanders countryside, toward Ghent and Kortrijk and Ypres. But today Bruges was secretive and closed-in; and looked more like a painting by Brueghel than a real town. The air smelled of fog and sewers.

  To begin with, he couldn’t see the nun. She must be here, though: unless she had jumped off the parapet. Then he stepped around a pillar, and there she was, standing with her back to him, staring out toward the Basilica of the Holy Blood.

  Dean approached her. She didn’t turn around, or give any indication that she knew that he was here. He stood a few paces behind her and waited, watching the faint breeze stirring the light gray cloth of her habit.

  “Listen, I’m sorry if I alarmed you,” he said. “I didn’t mean to give you the impression that I was chasing you or anything like that. But three years ago my wife died here in Bruges, and just before she died she was seen talking to a nun. A nun in a light-gray habit, like yours.”

  He stopped and waited. The nun remained where she was, not moving, not speaking.

  “Do you speak English?” Dean asked her, cautiously. “If you don’t speak English, I can find somebody to translate for us.”

  Still the nun remained where she was. Dean began to feel unnerved. He didn’t like to touch her, or to make any physical attempt to turn her around. All the same, he wished she would speak, or look at him, so that he could see her face. Maybe she belonged to a silent order. Maybe she was deaf. Maybe she just didn’t want to talk to him, and that was that.

  He thought of the gray madonna, and of what Jan De Keyser had told him: “They are not just stone; not just carving. They have all of people’s hopes inside them; whether these hopes are good hopes, or whether these hopes are wicked.”

  For some reason that he couldn’t quite understand, he shivered, and it wasn’t only the cold that made him shiver. It was the feeling that he was standing in the presence of something really terrible.

  “I, er—I wish you’d say something,” he said, loudly, although his voice sounded off-balance.

  There was a very long silence. Then suddenly the carillon of bells started to ring, so loudly that Dean was deafened, and could literally feel his eyeballs vibrating in their sockets. The nun swiveled around—didn’t turn, but smoothly swiv-eled, as if she were standing on a turntable. She stared at him, and Dean stared back, and the fear rose up inside him like ice-cold sick.

  Her face was a face of stone. Her eyes were carved out of granite, and she couldn’t speak because her lips were stone, too. She stared at him blind and sad and accusing, and he couldn’t even find the breath to scream.

  He took one step backward
, then another. The gray madonna came gliding after him, blocking his way to the staircase. She reached beneath her habit and lifted out a thin braided ligature, made of human hair, the kind of ligature that depressed and hysterical nuns used to plait out of their own hair, and then use to hang themselves. Better to meet your Christ in Heaven than to live in fear and self-loathing.

  Dean said, “Keep away from me. I don’t know what you are, or how you are, but keep away from me.”

  He was sure that she smiled, very faintly. He was sure that she whispered something.

  “What?” he said. “What?”

  She came closer and closer. She was stone, and yet she breathed, and she smiled, and she whispered, “Charley, this is for Charley.”

  Again, he screamed at her, “What?”

  But she caught hold of his left arm in a devastatingly strong grip, and she stepped up onto the platform that ran around the parapet, and with one irresistible turn of her back she rolled herself over the parapet and slid down the orange-tiled roof.

  Dean shouted, “No!” and tried to tug himself free from her; but she wasn’t an ordinary woman. She gripped him so tight and she weighed so much that he was dragged over the parapet after her. He found himself sliding and bumping over the fog-moist tiles, and at the end of the tiles was a lead gutter and then a sheer drop down to the cobbles of the Markt, one hundred and seventy feet below.

  With his right hand, he scrabbled to get a grip on the tiles. But the gray madonna was far too heavy for him. She was solid granite. Her hand was solid granite; no longer pliable, but still holding him fast.

  She tumbled over the edge of the roof. Dean caught hold of the guttering, and for one moment of supreme effort he swung from it, with the gray madonna revolving around him, her face as calm as only the face of the Virgin Mary could be. But the guttering was medieval lead, soft and rotten, and slowly it bent forward under the weight, and then gave way.