Fanatics

by William Bell

  Was she being obscure on purpose? I wondered. I flipped a glance at Raphaella, whose eyebrows lifted almost unnoticeably. She didn’t get it either. Not yet, anyway.

  Mrs. Stoppini got up and glided out of the kitchen in her creepy way, returning almost immediately with a bulky manila envelope, which she laid on the table beside my plate. The envelope had foreign stamps on it, along with a few post office imprints and stickers.

  Taking her seat, our hostess went on, “I wish to ship one of the, er, objects in the library to Italy-the university-as soon as possible.”

  “The cross,” I guessed.

  She nodded toward the envelope. “There are strict but simple procedures regarding the shipping container required, along with suggestions for insurance, method of shipping, and so on. These latter issues I will handle myself.”

  She paused.

  “I see,” I said.

  “I should be most grateful, Mr. Havelock, if you would consent to construct a suitable container for the object in question. Of course, I shall pay for the required materials and for your services.”

  Her decision didn’t surprise me. Raphaella and I weren’t the only ones who would be happy to see the cross off the premises, although we were the only ones in that kitchen who knew it was a reliquary. Or that it was, as well as a valuable artifact, a bundle of trouble.

  “I’ll agree,” I said, “if you’ll let me name my price.”

  “Very well,” she replied with obvious relief. “That is acceptable. And what is your fee?”

  “Another piece of zuccotto.”

  “HMM,” Raphaella mused.

  “Hmm, indeed,” I replied.

  We were sitting before the fireplace as the gusty wind outside fitfully grumbled in the chimney. Behind us, beyond the window, legions of clouds marched across a sombre sky. I felt as if we were being shoved toward an inevitable confrontation with the spectre-a feeling I had been almost successful in ignoring for the past week or so. Mrs. Stoppini’s decision had brought Raphaella and me back to our main problem.

  “What do we do?” I asked, throwing myself into a chair before the hearth.

  Raphaella lowered herself into the other club chair. “We don’t have many options, do we? Comply with Mrs. Stoppini’s wishes, crate the cross up, and wash our hands clean of the whole issue. Or tell her it’s a reliquary with a resident ghost-”

  “A murderous ghost.”

  “And let her take responsibility. The way I see it, because we know what the cross really is and what its dangers are, we’re responsible if anything bad happens when it’s sent away.”

  “I agree. There’s no way we can sidestep this one.”

  We stared silently at the coals for a while.

  “On the other hand, if the haunting is connected to the professor’s manuscript, as we believe… I don’t know where I was going with that thought.”

  Raphaella got to her feet. “Well, I know where I’m going,” she said. “Back to work.”

  “Unless…” I continued.

  “Unless what?”

  “I’ve thought of this before, but I pushed the idea away. It’s too… frightening.”

  Raphaella nodded. “I know what you’re thinking. Go ahead and say it. Get it out in the open.”

  I nodded in the direction of the fireplace. “We could take the atlas from the reliquary and burn it.”

  Raphaella sat back down. My statement lay between us like a sleeping dragon, too horrible to examine closely because we were afraid of what it might mean.

  It would be like killing Savonarola all over again, I thought.

  Raphaella shook her head, as if I’d spoken aloud. “He’s been dead since fourteen ninety-what was it?”

  “Eight.”

  “Right. He isn’t alive. Therefore we can’t kill him.”

  “But it would be sacrilegious, like desecrating a grave.”

  “How much respect is owed him? He probably killed Professor Corbizzi. Or contributed to his death. He wants to destroy the professor’s book. And look at his record.”

  “I still don’t think I could bring myself to do it.”

  “Me either.”

  “But you said-”

  “I was just playing devil’s advocate.”

  “Good choice of words,” I said.

  III

  ON THE WAY TO THE SHOP the next morning, under skies that showed no sign of allowing the sun to peek through, I stopped off at the lumber store and bought a sheet of thick plywood and some spruce planks to make a frame for a shipping container. The packing foam would be delivered in a few hours.

  With the directions from the university in Florence-translated by Mrs. Stoppini-laid out before me on my workbench, I started to work. The guidelines were straightforward and pretty simple. I needed to build what was essentially a wooden box with interior braces capable of holding the cross upright and immobilized so as to withstand rough handling and vibration. The space around the antique would be stuffed with synthetic packing. I didn’t tell Mrs. Stoppini that there would be a stowaway in the crate.

  By working full tilt I had the crate ready by lunchtime. I brushed it clean of shavings and sawdust, hung my apron by the door, and left the shop, taking a deep breath of the soggy air to clear calculations from my head.

  I had just stepped onto the patio when I saw him on the shore of the lake, by the willows, just as I had weeks before.

  The setting suited him-the backdrop of grey waves and greyer sky was a perfect frame for his black robe and dark, disfigured features. He stood motionless, if “stood” is the right word for a spectre that seemed to hover just above the ground like an evil thought, his cape undisturbed by a wind that lifted the willow branches nearby. His ravaged face was trained in my direction, the swollen eyes dark in their sockets, as if he were reminding me of something. I held his stare, fighting to control my breathing. He glowered at me, fuming, radiating anger and hatred.

  “So I guess today’s the day,” I said to myself as an icy shiver crawled up and down my spine. The reckoning. The showdown. Today the atlas bone would be sealed up and sent back to Florence.

  “Or not,” the ghost’s malign glare seemed to say.

  Then the wind gusted and his form broke up like oily smoke and drifted off along the shore.

  I gulped. The vision had lasted a few seconds at most, but the impact was like someone had cracked me on the head with a plank. I took a deep breath, pulled myself together, and went to the kitchen door.

  Three

  I

  RAPHAELLA ARRIVED IN TIME for minestrone soup and panini stuffed with egg salad salty with chopped olives. The three of us ate in silence. Mrs. Stoppini seemed preoccupied-and sad. Raphaella’s face showed the tension I felt. The moment she saw me she knew that I had seen the apparition.

  After lunch Raphaella and I lugged the new packing crate from the shop to the library and set it onto a blanket we’d spread on the alcove table. The pleasant odours of glue and freshly cut spruce were swamped by the acrid stink of smoke hanging in the room. I returned to the shop for the power drill, screws, a jar of adhesive, and the strips of felt I had cut earlier for the surfaces where the braces would be in contact with the cross. Through the window I noticed whitecaps forming on the lake. Wind-thrown rain began to patter against the glass.

  Raphaella was setting up in her usual spot, turning on her laptop and pulling pens and pads from her backpack. She placed the computer on the movable lectern I had made. We planned to retrieve the PIE from under the cabin deck at Geneva Park once the police presence there had died down. She didn’t seem to miss it much.

  “I can feel his presence,” she said.

  No need to mention who “he” was.

  For what I hoped was the last time, I went through the familiar procedure. Put the first brass key in the lock and open the alcove cupboard. Reach inside, press the knot, wait for the click as the catch on the hinged bookshelf section released. Pull open the heavy door. Insert the second key
and open the secret cupboard.

  I peered inside. Each object-the cross, wooden box, Compendium Revelationem, manuscript file, and felt-wrapped cross-was just as we had left it. I turned toward Raphaella. She nodded encouragement. I lifted out the antique reliquary, laid it on the table by the crate, and pushed the cupboard door closed, leaving the key in the lock.

  I had never experienced an earthquake, but the tremor that seemed to rise through the floorboards under my feet must have been similar. Raphaella stopped typing for a moment and gripped the edges of the lectern. The shudder beneath us subsided. I unwrapped the cross and carefully slid it inside the crate, snug against the braces securing the base and the horizontal beam. The fit was perfect. Inside the box the glass dome glowed as if lit from within.

  The floor under me trembled again.

  I removed the reliquary and stood it beside the crate, then began to paint quick-dry glue on the felt strips, using the brush attached to the inside of the jar’s lid.

  Whack!

  The door of the secret cupboard flew up and the file folder tumbled to the floor beside me. I concentrated on applying the strips of cloth to the braces in the crate, pressing hard with shaking hands. Raphaella went back to tapping keys. The rain beat harder against the window. I glued the last piece of felt, then picked up the file folder from the floor and placed it on Raphaella’s table.

  Above my head a book sprang straight off the shelf, fluttered like a confused bird, and crashed to the ground. A second one followed. Then, volume by volume, the entire row of books streamed into the air and plummeted into a heap at my feet.

  Raphaella shrieked, pointing to the fireplace. Behind the safety screen the pyramid of scrap wood I had set there the day before burst into a fierce blaze.

  Forcing myself to work methodically, not to give in to fear, I tested the crate, finding that the glue had set. I gritted my teeth, clamped my jaws shut, muttered, “Here goes,” and gently but with as much determination as I could scrape together seated the gold cross in place. I slid the lid on and, glancing around, picked up the drill and a couple of brass screws.

  “Garnet.”

  The forced calm of Raphaella’s warning tore at my nerves. I whirled around to see her staring wide-eyed toward the other side of the room. The spectre stood by the escritoire, radiating hatred, his hood covering all but his blistered, ruined face. The air was thick with a miasma of burned cloth and wood and broiled, putrid meat. Savonarola raised his arm under the singed and rotted cape, pointing.

  The folder on Raphaella’s table quivered. The string slowly unwound itself from the paper button. The folder suddenly sprang toward the ceiling, spinning end over end, spilling pages like feathers from a burst pillow. Sheets filled the air, a blizzard of paper streaming toward the fireplace, where every single page slipped behind the screen, flared for a split second in a tiny soundless explosion, then expired in a puff of black ash. In minutes the manuscript was gone.

  With a sweep of his skeletal arm Savonarola pointed toward the alcove. An avalanche of books poured from the shelves, battering the heavy crate, sending it crashing to the ground, knocking the lid off. The cross broke free and tumbled among the fallen books. The table shook violently, rose from the floor, hung suspended for a second, then shot toward me, ramming my shoulder and knocking me to the ground, pinning my legs. A heavy book whacked against my head and I collapsed in a daze, craning my neck to keep my eyes on Raphaella.

  She cringed by her table, mercilessly pummelled by flying books, struck repeatedly on her shoulders and head. She held up her arms to protect herself but the torrent knocked her to the floor, where she lay on her back, paralyzed with terror, her chest heaving. I heard a rumbling and a clatter, turned to see the chairs by the hearth tip and tumble across the floor, coming to a thumping stop against the doors.

  The spectre began to float toward Raphaella, slowly, relentlessly, as if savouring what he was about to do. “Don’t!” I shouted, but he continued to glide toward her. Raphaella stirred, raised herself onto her elbows, crab-walked backwards, her eyes on Savonarola’s black form, until she bumped against the east wall.

  Thin rivulets of flame, capillaries of fire, seeped from under the frayed black robe of the ghost and streamed toward her. She stared, wide-eyed, as the fire encircled her.

  “Garnet!”

  I struggled to free myself from the weight of the table and books, fighting to catch my breath. Something crashed into my shoulder. The crate lid spun toward me in a vicious arc. I ducked just in time and it smashed into the wall beside the window.

  Savonarola stopped in front of Raphaella. He raised his arms. The robe fell back to reveal bones poking through burnt flesh. His piercing gaze bored into her.

  “Don’t!” I pleaded again. “Take me! I’m the one you want!”

  The spectre didn’t so much as turn my way. I remembered again how Savonarola had despised women-creatures to be lectured or scorned, originators of sin, agents of Satan. I hauled myself to my knees and tried to crawl over piles of books toward Raphaella. The flames around her crackled and smoked.

  She cringed in the shadow cast by the dark spectre looming bat-like above her. Then, as quick as a thought, the terror suddenly left her face. She seemed-unbelievably-calm. She stared at Savonarola’s destroyed face. Her voice came, firm and strong.

  “You can’t.”

  The wraith seemed to shrink back a little.

  “You know you can’t,” Raphaella said.

  As if suddenly starved of oxygen, the flames around her shrank, flickered, and died, leaving no marks on the floor.

  Raphaella looked my way.

  So did Savonarola.

  I knew what I had to do, but he was way ahead of me. I scrambled among the jumble of volumes on the floor, hurling them this way and that, glimpsed the sparkle of a red jewel against a gold background, and hauled the heavy cross out of the pile. Fumbling in my pocket, I yanked out my knife and opened it, my hands trembling violently.

  “Garnet, look out!”

  Savonarola flowed toward me as fire veined from his robes and across the floor, like lava seeping from a volcano. I jabbed at the clips holding the glass dome to the base of the cross. In my frenzy, I broke two of them. Pried up the others. Thumbed the dome free. It clattered across the floor. With fire searing the bottom of my feet, I snatched the atlas from its cavity in the base of the cross.

  I clawed my way toward the fireplace, the stench of the spectre in my nostrils, the searing fire around me, the five-centuries-old bone clutched in my hand. I heard Raphaella scream a warning, felt myself snatched into the air and hurled forward. I slammed against the mantel and fell to the hearth, knocking the screen aside. The fire scorched my face, singing my eyebrows. I thrust my hand over the flames and dropped the bone into the heart of the fire.

  A prolonged, ear-splitting howl of rage and despair battered the room.

  From behind, something grabbed me, pinning my arms, and hauled me away from the fire. I fought back with the little strength I had left.

  “Garnet!”

  It was Raphaella, holding me in her arms. We stared into the fire, at the bone resting on the coals in the centre of a forest of flame, afraid that if we took our eyes off it, the atlas would disappear. It smoked, glowed reddish orange for a few seconds, turned white hot, seemed to quiver. Then it flared and died and crumbled to a powdery ash and was lost among the coals.

  Together, we felt the weight of his presence behind us. Still on our knees, we turned. He was in the centre of the room, a black cloud of evil, arms raised, his bony fingers pointing accusingly at us. Books cascaded from the wall behind him and thundered to the floor. The window imploded, showering us with glass. Savonarola glowered at us, his distended eyes wide, his devastated face twisted with frustration and hatred and rage, his ravaged mouth a black oval as he bellowed again. He glided in our direction on a raging sheet of fire. But as he crept forward, the fire’s intensity was already waning. His body began to lose power an
d substance, its colour fading. His physical presence wavered and then he seemed to dissolve like cooling vapour into the air around him, until he was gone.

  Raphaella and I embraced like two shipwrecked sailors clinging to each other for life and warmth, the upended furniture, disintegrated window glass, and Professor Corbizzi’s books strewn like flotsam on a beach. We looked around the room-the evidence of violence everywhere-searching, not quite believing our eyes.

  “He’s gone,” I whispered.

  “Gone for good now, I think.”

  “And he didn’t get the professor’s manuscript.”

  Four

  I

  WIND AND RAIN GUSTED into the room through the damaged window, clearing and freshening the air. The fire in the grate had dropped to embers. A thought struck Raphaella and me at the same time.

  “Mrs. Stoppini!”

  “I’ll go,” I said, jumping to my feet.

  I took the stairs two at a time, ran down the carpeted hall toward her suite. Her door was ajar. Out of habit, without thinking, I slowed to a walk, stopped at her threshold, and put my head through the door. I could see the foot of her bed. Two black-stockinged feet, soles toward me, unmoving.

  She was snoring softly and rhythmically. She had slept through everything. I retraced my steps to the library, slowly and quietly this time, and closed the doors behind me. If she woke up, I didn’t want her to see the room as it was.

  Raphaella had gathered a few rugs from around the library and spread them over the fallen books under the windowsill to protect them from the rain. We brought sheets of plywood from the workshop and nailed them over the destroyed windows. I retrieved a metal bucket, a dustpan, and a brush from the garden shed, and we went into the house again.