The Fraternity of the Stone

by David Morrell

  Then why now was he so desperate to avoid whoever was hunting him? Why did he feel compelled to stop them from doing what he’d almost done to himself? If the assassins killed him, it wouldn’t be suicide, after all. He wouldn’t be damning himself.

  Wrong. It was one thing to be martyred, quite another to invite being martyred. Presumption was as damning a sin as despair. He couldn’t dare count on God to save him merely because he’d been killed for his sins. He had to fight for salvation. He had to use every device in his power, every trick he could think of, to avoid his executioners.

  I want to be punished. Yes. For my former life. For the monks who died because of me.

  But…

  Yes?

  I’m also under an obligation.

  Oh? To do what?

  To punish others, those who killed them.

  But you didn’t even know those monks. They were hermits like yourself. Personally, they meant nothing to you.

  It doesn’t matter. They were human beings, and they were cheated. They deserved the chance to pursue their holiness.

  Maybe they’re in Heaven now.

  There’s no guarantee. That’s presumption again.

  So in its place, you prefer revenge? Is that a proper Carthusian motive? An eye for an eye as opposed to turning one’s cheek?

  He didn’t have an answer. Unfamiliar disturbing emotions, dormant for six years, welled up in him. The world had intruded, corrupting him.

  21

  The next night, late, it stormed again. Lightning flashed, dimly visible through the slots in the air vents. Thunder shook the roof. He decided to take advantage of the weather and crawled toward the trapdoor, shifting it as silently as possible, easing down to the darkness that hid the sink. As the storm raged outside, he crept to his murky sleeping quarters, pausing, sensing. An assassin would have to be terribly determined, not to mention patient, to wait here two nights in a row on the slim chance that Drew was hiding in the attic. More likely, the team would have sent someone up there after him or at least have used tear gas to force Drew down. Besides, once the team had suspected that Drew was out of the building, they’d have felt compromised, afraid that if he escaped he’d alert the police. When their harried search had failed to reveal him, they’d have been forced to pull out.

  Or so Drew hoped. Nothing was sure. But here in the night he had an advantage. One of his principal skills, the result of concentrated special training, was hand-to-hand combat in total darkness. Even after six years of inactivity, he hadn’t forgotten how it was done. For an instant, he felt transported back to that oppressive black room in the abandoned airplane hangar in Colorado. Now motionless, breathing slowly, listening intently, he neither smelled nor heard a lurking assailant.

  Of course the drumming of the rain would obscure other sounds. At a certain point, he had to act on faith, crossing his sleeping quarters, on guard against a brush of cloth, a sudden rush in his direction. It didn’t occur. He glanced back. As rain lashed his window, lightning streaked beyond it, illuminating the room, giving him a hurried chance to reassure himself that no one was there.

  Darkness returned as thunder rumbled, and he realized that staring at the lightning had been a mistake. His pupils had contracted to protect themselves against the sudden brilliance; now in the dark they were slow to dilate again. His night vision had been impaired. He had to wait, unsettled, temporarily blind. With agonizing slowness, he began to see murky outlines in the dark. He bit his lip. All right, he’d made a mistake. He admitted it. But the mistake had been a useful one. He’d learned from it. His skills were returning. Already he was calculating a way to turn the lightning to his advantage.

  Keeping his back to the window, he left his sleeping quarters, then passed through the deeper blackness of the study and the oratory, again still feeling and ignoring the tug of habit to stop there and pray. On the stairs that led down to his workroom, he saw his open door, the light that glowed from the hall. He smelled a too-familiar, stomach-turning stench. When he reached the bottom, he cautiously surveyed the room. His cup and bowl remained on the workbench. Stuart Little was in the same position on the floor. But as he’d anticipated, the mouse was now bloated, filled with gas.

  Drew swallowed, not in disgust but pity. Because he needed the body, he lovingly picked up the corpse by the tail and gently wrapped it in a handkerchief that he’d left on his woodpile. He tied the handkerchief to his skipping rope and tied the rope around the waist of his habit.

  From a drawer in his workroom bench, he removed four photographs, the only items he’d brought with him from his former life. Six years ago, he’d shown these photographs to Father Hafer after the priest, gasping, had heard his confession. The photographs had verified what Drew had said, convincing the priest to relent, to recommend Drew’s acceptance by the Carthusians. The photographs showed a man and woman consumed by flames, a young boy screaming in horror. In the monastery, Drew had studied these images every day, reminding himself of what he’d been, of his need for penance. He couldn’t bring himself to leave now without them.

  Shoving them into a pocket in his robe, he glanced around. What else? He needed a weapon. The ax from his woodpile.

  The storm became more violent. Even with his back to the window, he saw another blaze of lightning fill the room. He approached his open door, peered both ways along the empty corridor, glanced back with longing toward the place that had been his home for the past six years, then hefted his ax and crept down the hall toward the rear of the monastery.

  He made one stop—to examine another cell. The sharp, nauseating stench as he budged the door open told him everything. But he pushed the door farther and stared at the grotesquely misshapen body of a monk.

  So the team had left the monastery as they’d found it, closing each door on the ultimate secret, not bothering to dispose of the dead—no time to do so—but at least perversely respectful of their victims.

  That too didn’t matter. Regardless of their peculiar ethics—Drew himself had once been faithful to such ethics—there would be hell to pay.

  22

  At the rear of the monastery, he faced the exit that led to the vegetable garden. Thunder shuddered through the thick wooden door.

  He reconsidered his decisions. The obvious way to leave the monastery was out the front of the lodge, then down the dirt road through the forest to the paved country road at the bottom of this hill. Granted, he’d seen the approach to the monastery only for a brief time six years ago when he’d been driven here. But he remembered that country road and the town—what had its name been? Quentin?—ten miles or so to the south. Still, if leaving through the front toward the road was the obvious route, precisely for that reason he had to take a different direction. Because, although the team had apparently fled from the area, there was a chance—a strong one—that a man had been left behind to watch the monastery from a distance, in case Drew was still on the premises. Their suspicion would be that Drew had escaped and alerted the police. But what if the police didn’t arrive? The death team would have to conclude that Drew had not escaped. They’d risk returning for one more search. All the more reason for Drew to get out of here.

  But not out the front, not by a route that a spotter would pay close attention to. Okay, out the back. Even so, given the quality of the team’s professional conduct, Drew had to make other assumptions.

  First, the spotter would not ignore the other exits from the cloister. He’d stay a careful distance away, choosing a location that gave him a confident view of the entire complex. Only one location allowed for such a vantage point: in back of the cloister, on the wooded hill that rose above this one.

  Second assumption. The spotter would be equipped for night surveillance, using either an infrared scope, which projected an invisible beam, or a Starlight scope, which magnified whatever minuscule light was available. Because this storm would obscure the stars, an infrared scope was the better choice.

  Drew studied his robe. Usually
white, it was now a dingy gray from the cobwebs, dust, and insulation in the attic. But even if the robe were caked with coal dust, he knew that it could still be seen through a night scope. Unless, Drew thought, and remembered the lightning.

  He glanced above him, toward the bulb that glowed in the corridor’s ceiling. The moment he opened the door, the spotter would be attracted by the new illumination. There wasn’t any light switch in the hallway—Drew assumed that the switch was on a master panel in a custodial room he’d never been shown—so he reached up, tall enough to wrap his scapular around the bulb and unscrew it. As an added precaution, he went farther along the corridor and unscrewed two other bulbs, surrounding himself in darkness. Because the hallway had no windows, a spotter couldn’t know what had happened.

  He returned to the door, took a long breath, exhaled, and twisted the latch. He pulled the door open slowly, trying to avoid an obvious change in this section of the cloister. As he pulled, he stood out of sight behind it.

  At last it was fully open. He waited, flexing his shoulders. Timing was everything now, because both infrared and Starlight scopes had a common weakness: sudden illumination blinded the observer. The temporary sightlessness that Drew had experienced in his sleeping quarters when he used the lightning to help him scan the room would be drastically intensified through a night scope. The normal instinct would have been for Drew to run from the cloister during the intervals of blackness between glaring flashes of lightning. Drew realized, however, that his only chance to get out unseen was to do the opposite—to prime himself, to alert every reflex, to race outside for cover as soon as a new fork of lightning blazed.

  In darkness, he shifted from behind the door, studying the garden. With breath-held caution, he peered toward the rain-enshrouded night. He closed his eyes and glanced away as lightning struck a tree beyond the garden. A branch crashed. Night resumed abruptly. But he knew where he had to go now. Thunder. Soon the streaks of lightning came closer together. Drew imagined the agony that a spotter would be enduring.

  Well, what are you waiting for? he asked himself. You want to hang around, go to Mass?

  The instant the next bolt flashed, Drew charged from the open doorway. At once rain lashed his face. Keeping his ax away from him, he dove to the oozing mud behind a sculpted cedar bush. The frigid rain drenched his robe, soaking through to his skin. Almost instantaneous thunder shook the sodden earth beneath him. Despite the assault on his senses, a portion of his consciousness registered the unfamiliar sweetness of the air, the forgotten sting of the wind—feelings formerly ordinary to him, now powerfully sensual after long seclusion. But he didn’t have time to savor them or to realize how much he’d missed them. He pawed at his mud-splattered eyes, studying his next destination. When lightning flashed once more, he’d already braced himself, skittering through slippery puddles, thudding behind a compost heap. Its fetid odor made him gag, yet it too was unexpectedly welcome.

  Though the rain was cold, he started to sweat. Where next? His ultimate destination was the brooding forest beyond the garden, but he had to approach it in a zigzag fashion—to a narrow equipment shed, then a watery furrow between rows of harvested corn, their wilted stubble helping to shield him. His heart pounded sickeningly. But he couldn’t sprint more than ten feet during any blaze of lightning. He didn’t dare remain in motion when the spotter was able to see through the night scope again. Another flash. He darted from the corn rows, sprawling in mud behind a straw-covered mound where potatoes had been grown. He quickly scrunched his eyes shut, protecting them against a fierce new blaze of lightning. When thunder roared, he opened them again. The interval between lightning and thunder was lessening, only two seconds apart, the center of the storm coming closer. Good. He needed all the distraction that it could possibly give to the spotter.

  He studied the dark. Blinking through the cold heavy rain, he chose his next cover, a waist-high stretch of raspberry bushes. Lightning gleamed, and he lunged, but slipped on ooze and lost his balance, landing on his face, water spewing up his nostrils, cramming his mouth. He coughed, unable to breathe, rolling toward the raspberry bushes. Darkness enveloped him. He snorted, desperate to clear his nose and mouth.

  Had he reached the bushes in time? Had the spotter seen him? Adrenaline spurted into his stomach; his lungs heaved. He shook, exhausted, as if he’d been sprinting for several miles. With his face to the sky, he let the rain wash his eyes, his nose, his lips. He swirled water around in his mouth, released it, then let the rain fill his mouth again and swallowed, tasting its sweetness, luxuriating in the relief to his swollen throat.

  He had to keep moving! First to a row of grapevines along a wooden frame.

  And after that…

  At last he burst through the undergrowth, gaining the protection of the forest. Gobs of mud sagged from his scalp, his face, and his robe. Chunks slid down his arms, collecting on his fingers, plopping onto the dead leaves at his feet.

  But he’d been successful. He hadn’t been seen by the spotter.

  By definition. If the spotter had seen him, he’d be dead by now.

  He struggled to catch his breath. I’m out. I’m free. Now all that remained was to push through the forest, to use its cover and get away.

  Where to? For a moment, the question stunned him. In his former life, he’d have automatically sought refuge with his network, Scalpel. But Scalpel in the end had become his enemy. To survive, he’d made Scalpel believe he was dead.

  Then where else could he turn? A sudden spark of long and forcefully subdued affection told him to get to Arlene. She would help him, he knew. They’d once been lovers. Despite the separation of years, he was willing to risk that, because of what they’d shared, he could count on her. And reaching her, he’d also reach Jake, her brother. Jake, his friend.

  Yet reluctantly he had to dismiss them. If in the old days his obligation would have been to contact his network, that obligation still existed, but not to Scalpel; instead, to his present network, the Catholic Church. He had to warn the Church about the hit on the monastery. He had to let the Church decide how to deal with the crisis. The Church would protect him.

  But with a goal now in mind, he still didn’t use the cover of the forest to get away. Instead, he faced the hill behind the monastery, its looming wooded shape made visible by another blaze of lightning. While darkness cloaked him again, he didn’t understand his hesitation. Escape was before him—his chance to get away and warn the Church. Then why did he feel compelled…?

  He stared with greater fierceness toward the hill, realizing what he had to do, a strenuous priority insisting. The spotter. Yes, he had to get his hands on the spotter, to make him talk. The man would logically have chosen a vantage point where the trees would not impede his view. That suggested he’d hide with a clearing before him. But after years of living in its shadow, Drew was quite familiar with the contour of that hill. Even in the darkness and the storm, he could pinpoint the three major clearings at the top of the slope, the three most likely vantage points.

  If indeed there was a spotter. He had no proof; he was still assuming.

  But there was one way to know for sure.

  And one way to learn why the death team had been sent here—to find out who was to blame.

  23

  The storm intensified. Ignoring the stunning impact of the rain, he stalked through the forest, veering past stumps and deadfalls, aiming toward the greater blackness of that hill.

  He clutched his ax so hard that his knuckles ached, reached the base of the hill, and walked in a semicircle around it. At its back, he climbed. Trees thrashed him, their branches bent by the wind. He grabbed at saplings, branches, bushes, anything to pull himself up through the mire.

  At the summit, he didn’t worry about making noise; the din of the storm was louder than any sound he could have made, even an angry scream. He began to creep, using the shelter of bushes and dangling limbs.

  From a careful vantage point, he decided that the trees
behind the first clearing weren’t being used as a hiding place. He stepped back into the woods and approached the second clearing. Below the hill, despite the shroud of rain, specks of light were visible from the monastery. It probably looked the same as on any other night. Except that it wasn’t a monastery any longer. Someone had made it a house of death.

  He studied the cover behind the second clearing, decided that it too wasn’t occupied, and turned to approach the third, when an unnatural ripple among the trees attracted his attention back toward the second clearing. His nerve ends quickened. Squinting from a flash of lightning, he saw a dark nylon sheet supported at head level like a makeshift tent, its sides and back tilted halfway to the ground to prevent rain from slanting under it. Its four ends were tied to the base of trees, the ropes tugged viciously by the wind. A tall upright stick held up its flapping middle. Of course. A spotter wouldn’t have wanted the trouble of carrying even a compact tent up here. But in case of bad weather, a nylon sheet would have taken little room in a knapsack. Not as comfortable as a tent, but comfort wasn’t the point.

  He had to wait for the next bolt of lightning. The effect was like glimpsing sporadic images caught by a strobe light. Under the nylon sheet, through the space between the low sides and the ground, he saw a man’s legs and hips—hiking boots, jeans, a sheathed knife on a belt.

  Darkness. Drew crouched to peer up beneath the back of the sheet at the rest of him.

  Lightning, and he saw the man’s upper torso. Tall and muscular, wearing a knitted watchman’s cap, a padded nylon vest, and a heavy outdoor shirt, the colors dull to blend in with the forest. The man peered down the slope toward the monastery. He used an infrared scope—its long, wide outline easily recognizable—mounted upon a bolt-action sniper’s rifle attached to a swiveling tripod. With the next flash of lightning, the man turned away from the scope, rubbed his eyes, and drank from a Thermos that he’d propped along with a knapsack in the crook of a tree.