by Glenn Cooper
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.” She wasn’t crying anymore. It was too cold for that.
“You are freezing,” he said.
“Am I?” She held out her arm. When he felt her alabaster wrist, he encircled it with his hand and would not let go.
“Yes. You are.”
“Will you kiss me, Luke?”
“I cannot!”
“Please.”
The young monk looked distressed. “Why do you torture me? You know I cannot. I have taken my vows! Besides, I came to hear your plight. When last we met, you spoke of crypts.” He let go and pulled away.
“Please do not be angry at me. I am to be taken to the crypts tomorrow.”
“For what purpose?”
“They want me to lie with a man, something I have never done,” she cried. “Other girls have suffered this fate. I have met them. They have birthed babies that are taken from them when they are suckled. Some girls are used as birth mothers again and again until they lose their minds. Please do not let this happen to me!”
“This cannot be true!” Luke exclaimed. “This is a place of God!”
“It is the truth. There are secrets at Vectis. Have you not heard the stories?”
“I have heard many things, but I have seen nothing with my own eyes. I believe what I see.”
“But you believe in God,” she said. “And you have not seen Him.”
“That is different!” he protested. “I do not need to see Him. I feel His presence.”
She was growing desperate. She composed herself and reached for his hand, which, in an unguarded moment, he allowed her to grasp. “Please, Luke, lie down with me, here in the straw.”
She carried his hand to her bosom and pressed it there. He felt the firm flesh through her cloak, and his ears filled with rushing blood. He looked like he wanted to close his palm around the sweet globe, and for a moment, he almost did. Then he regained his senses and recoiled, banging into the side of the stall.
Her eyes were wild. “Please, Luke, don’t go! If you lie with me, they will not take me to the crypts. I’ll be of no use to them.”
“And what would happen to me!” he hissed. “I would be cast out! I will not do this. I am a man of God! Please, I must leave you now!”
As he ran from the stables, Elizabeth’s soft wails mixed discordantly with the neighing of disturbed horses.
Clarissa was sure she was on the right path because the sound of the sea grew ever louder in her ears. At the water’s edge, the ferry boat was tied up against a wooden pier for the night. Bedside the pier was a small cottage, its windows black. The ferryman was asleep, she reckoned, but when he woke at dawn, she would be there to make him an offer.
In the morning, storm clouds lay low and heavy over the island. Luke had lain awake through the night, fitful and troubled. At Lauds, it was almost impossible to concentrate on his hymns and psalms and, in the brief interval before he was obliged to return to the cathedral for the Prime Office, he rushed through his chores.
Finally, he could bear it no more. He quietly approached his superior, Brother Martin, clutching his stomach and asking for permission to forgo Prime and attend the infirmary.
Permission granted, he put up his hood and chose a circuitous route to the forbidden buildings. He picked a large maple tree on a nearby knoll, close enough to watch but far enough to conceal himself. From that vantage point, he stood guard in the raw, gray mist.
He heard the bells ring for Prime.
No one came or left the chapel-sized building.
He heard the bells ring again to signify the end of the office.
All was quiet. He wondered how long he could pass unnoticed and what the consequence of his subterfuge would be. He would accept his punishment, but he was hopeful that God would treat him with a small measure of love and understanding for his pitiful frailties.
The bark was rough on his cheek. Consumed with fatigue, he dozed briefly but awoke with a start when his skin chafed on the jagged surface.
He saw her coming down the path, led by Sister Sabeline as if towed by a rope. Even from a distance, he could tell she was crying.
At least this part of her tale was true.
The two women disappeared through the front door of the chapel.
His pulse quickened. He clenched his fists and softly beat them against the tree trunk. He prayed for guidance.
Crouching behind a bush, Clarissa watched as the dawn sky seemed to touch the sea and bring it to life. The wind picked up, and the waves rolled higher and stronger. She feared the ferry might not embark into the peril of a storm.
The thin wisps of smoke from the ferryman’s chimney turned heavy. He was stirring. The effluent of a chamber pot was flung from a window, and, before long, the ferryman emerged, his eyes on his ship and the heaving waters.
She stood and approached with a tacked-on expression of cheer to belie her fugitive status.
“Good sir. I would like passage this morning,” she said.
“And who might you be?” the hoary seaman asked.
“Just a lass from Newport who must reunite with her husband.”
“You been here all night?”
“Nay, sir, I’ve just arrived after spending a night with a relation in Fishbourne.”
“You don’t sound like you’re from Newport,” the man said.
She thought quickly. “I was born up north.”
The ferryman tugged at his beard. “It’s rough this morning, and I see no other passengers. It’s hardly worth my while to risk my boat on one lass.”
She looked at the brightening sky. Sister Hazel would soon be coming by with morning victuals, and she’d be found out. She lost the pretense of good humor. “I must go now! I cannot wait. I can pay. I can pay handsomely.”
The seaman arched one brow skeptically and asked to see evidence of her claim.
She knelt and unrolled her blanket just enough to produce one of the candlesticks. “I can give you this,” she said.
He took it and felt its heft in his hand then scratched at it with a thumbnail. “It’s a fine piece of silver, it is. Did you steal it?”
“I did not! It was a gift from my relations.”
His smirk was evidence enough of his nonbelief, but he pressed her no further. “Is there more treasure in that blanket of yours?”
“No more for you, sir. That is more than enough for a ferry ride I reckon. I have a long journey to the north country, and I will meet other men who will want to be paid for their services.”
He shifted the candlestick from hand to hand while considering his decision, then said, “Right then. Prepare yourself for rough passage. If you’ve eaten, you’ll lose it, that’s for certain.”
She nodded and silently thanked God.
Come my baby, we’re going to sail away from this place.
“I’d like to keep more of that treasure of yours in my family,” the ferryman said. “On the other side, I’ll bring you to my brother, who has a horse and a cart. If I know him, for silver like this he’ll take you where you want to go.”
Sister Sabeline pulled a terrified Elizabeth through the chapel door and led her down a stairway that plunged into a netherworld.
Like a lamb to the slaughter, Elizabeth was shepherded through the Hall of the Writers, where one puny, spindly youth raised his ginger head and grunted, and from there she was led into the sickening void that was the catacombs.
Inside, candlelight flared against grotesque skulls, and the old nun had to use both arms to keep the fair-haired girl upright.
They were not alone. Someone was beside the girl. Elizabeth whirled around to see the dumb blank face and green eyes of the young writer blocking the passageway. Sister Sabeline withdrew. Her sleeve brushed the leg bones of a corpse, and they clattered musically. The nun held the candle high and watched from a short distance. Elizabeth was panting in fear. The ginger-haired man stood inches away, his arms limp by his sides. Seconds
passed. Sister Sabeline called to him in frustration, “I have brought this girl for you!” Nothing happened. More time passed, and the nun demanded, “Touch her!”
Elizabeth closed her eyes, bracing for the touch of a living skeleton.
Suddenly, she felt a hand on her shoulder, but it was not cold and bony, it was warm and reassuring.
Elizabeth heard Sister Sabeline shrieking, “What are you doing here! What are you doing!”
She opened her eyes, and, magically, the face she saw was Luke’s. The ginger-haired man was on the ground where Luke had roughly shoved him.
“Brother Luke, leave us!” Sabeline screamed. “You have violated a sacred place!”
“I will not leave without this girl,” Luke said defiantly. “How can this be sacred? All I see is evil.”
“You do not understand!” the nun screamed.
From the hall, they heard a sudden pandemonium.
Heavy thuds and crashes followed by flopping and thrashing sounds as if great fish had been hauled onto land.
Elizabeth’s ginger-haired youth turned away and walked toward the noise.
“What is happening?” Luke asked.
Sister Sabeline did not answer. She took her candle and rushed toward the hall, leaving them alone in the dark.
“Are you safe?” Luke asked her tenderly. He was still touching her shoulder. He had never let go.
“You came for me,” she whispered.
He helped her find her way from the darkness into the light, into the hall.
It was no longer the Hall of the Writers.
It was a place of gruesome death.
The only living soul was Sister Sabeline, whose shoes were soaked with blood. She aimlessly walked among a sea of bodies, draped on the tables and cots, crumpled in piles on the ground, a mass of lifelessness and quivering involuntary twitching.
She had a glassy expression, and could only mutter, “My God, my God, my God, my God,” over and over, in the cadence of a chant.
The whole chamber was slowly filling with the blood that was spurting from the quill-pierced eyes of scores of ginger-haired men and boys.
All of them dead or dying, and at the center of the carnage was the ancient scribe Titus, with his quill buried so deeply it looked like a feather was growing from his eye.
Luke led Elizabeth by her hand through the carnage where he had the presence of mind to glance at the parchments that lay on the writing tables, some of them soaking up puddles of blood. How could he know that, many years hence, the small act of grabbing one of the parchments would come to save Elizabeth from ruin and destitution long after his own demise?
They ran up the winding stairs, through the chapel, and out into the mist and rain. They kept running until they were far from the abbey gate. Only then did they stop to catch their breaths and listen to the cathedral bells pealing out an alarm.
In the distance, the ferry boat was coming back to the isle from its first run of the day. People were milling by the pier waiting for passage. Luke felt in his robe for the few coins he had kept when first he had journeyed to Vectis as a young man seeking the cloth. He and Elizabeth would join the queue and leave the horror of the morning behind.
The hem of the Abbot Baldwin’s white robe was soaked with blood. Each time he stooped to touch a cold forehead or make the sign of the cross over a supine body, his garment got bloodier.
Prior Felix, a burly Breton with a black, bristling beard, was at Baldwin’s side, supporting him by the arm so the abbot wouldn’t tumble on the blood-slicked stones. They made their rounds through the carnage, pausing over each ginger-haired writer to check for signs of life, but there were none. The only other beating heart in the Hall of the Writers belonged to old Brother Bartholomew, the keeper of the underground Library, who was making his own grim inspection at the opposite end of the chamber. Baldwin had sent Sister Sabeline away because her hysterical crying was unnerving and preventing him from collecting his thoughts.
“They are dead,” Baldwin said. “All dead. Why in God’s name has this happened?”
Bartholomew was systematically going from row to row, stepping carefully over and around bodies, trying to keep his footing. For an old man, he was moving briskly from one station to another, plucking manuscript pages off the table and making a stack of them in his hand.
He made his way to Baldwin, clutching a ream of parchments.
“Look,” the old man said. “Look!” He laid the pages down.
Baldwin picked up one and read it.
Then the next, and the next. He fanned the pages out on the table to see more of them quickly.
Each page carried the date 9 February 2027, with the identical inscription.
“Finis Dierum,” Baldwin said, “End of Days.”
Felix trembled. “So this is when the end will come.”
Bartholomew half smiled at the revelation. “Their work was done.”
Baldwin gathered up the pages and held them to his breast. “Our work is not yet done, Brothers. They must be laid to rest in the crypt. Then I will say a mass in their honor. The Library must be sealed, and the chapel must be burned. The world is not ready to know what has happened here.”
Felix and Bartholomew quickly nodded in agreement as the abbot turned to leave.
“The Year 2027 is far in the future,” Baldwin said wearily. “At least, mankind has a very long time to prepare for the End of Days.”
Prior Felix began his lamentable chores.
He oversaw the placement of the slain writers into their crypts and walked through the vastness of the Library amidst endless shelves of sacred books.
With a heavy heart, he climbed the stone stairs into the chapel for the last time, clutching the pages upon which were writ Finis Dierum. He would use these as holy tinder.
At his direction, bales of hay were carted to the chapel and placed around its perimeter.
When the job was done, he called for a torch and glumly lowered his head, awaiting its arrival.
He lifted his eyes at the sound of Sister Sabeline calling his name. She was coming from the special dormitory, with Sister Hazel in tow.
The two nuns were wide-eyed and puffing at their exertions.
“Tell him!” Sister Sabeline demanded. “Tell him what has happened.”
Sister Hazel wheezed and sputtered until she was able to form the words. “One of the girls, Clarissa by name, heavy with child, she was. She’s gone!”
“What do you mean, gone?” Felix asked with the weariness of a man who had just lived through a cataclysm.
“She must have stolen a key and run away after last night’s supper,” Sister Hazel said.
“That’s not all she stole!” Sister Sabeline added.
“There’s silver gone missing from Abbot Baldwin’s house. This wicked girl’s planned her escape well. I sent a brother to the ferry. The girl sailed at dawn though the ferryman wouldn’t say how she paid.”
“If this is so, she’s not the only one who’s left,” Felix said, blinking at the revelation. “Her unborn child has also left, the child of Titus the Venerable. In the long history of the Library, a scribe has never left, born or unborn. And now it has happened!”
Felix looked at the bundle of parchments in his fist, and muttered, “Why did they take their lives as they did? Was it because they had in their travails recorded the last day of life on this earth and had no more to write? Or was it because they sensed a great rift caused by one of their number being snatched from their midst? Was it their End of Days?”
Sister Sabeline covered her face with her hands and sobbed.
“I think we shall never know,” Felix said.
Felix lit the parchment pages with the torch and used them to set the hay alight. He watched as the timbers were consumed by fire and saw the building collapse upon itself.
But he did not, as Abbot Baldwin had instructed, throw a torch down into the vaults.
He told himself that he could not bear witness to the des
truction of the Library. He told himself that this decision should rest solely in the hands of God Almighty.
He stayed on the spot for the rest of the day, gazing at the smoldering ground, uncertain whether the great Library had been destroyed by the conflagration. Only when the bells chimed for Vespers did he leave the patch of hot earth to quench his soul in prayer in the winter cold of the cathedral.
Chapter 13
Walking through the shrouded fields, Will could only sense the foreboding presence of the undulating fells looming over them. Haven was quick and sure-footed so he had to use his long legs to keep up with the beam of her flashlight.
He hated being unarmed. His Glock retired when he did, stashed away, clean and oiled in a small safe he kept in the engine room of his boat. He didn’t even have a penknife on him. The only things in his pockets were car keys.
In his younger days he’d been highly rated in hand-to-hand combat, not because he was the quickest guy on the mats but because he was so damned big. When he would get his fists and feet in motion he was a buzz saw. But now was under doctor’s orders to keep his heart rate under 130. Like it or not, his best weapon was going to be his brain.
“Are we close?” he asked.
“Not far.”
With that, Haven clicked off her flashlight and slowed so Will could follow in the blackness.
In the distance, there was a glowing window.
“Is that Lightburn Farm?” he asked.
“Yeah. Quiet now.”
They’d been walking parallel to the road, but now the girl steered them away upland at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. The tall grass was heavy with frost and Will had to high-step to avoid tripping on a clump.
A shape materialized, a few shades darker than the night. Closing on it, Will saw that it was some kind of barn or storage building. The farmhouse was a good two hundred meters down the slope.
It was a small, open-sided barn, a hangar, with a sloping slate roof made of the same stone as everything else in the valley. Haven entered one of the bays, and Will cautiously followed.