by Lazlo Ferran
“Take it out! Take it out!” it screamed. “I’m not ready. It’s burning me.”
“I hope it finishes you!” I shouted through gritted teeth. My hand was bleeding profusely, and my arm felt broken. I was in agony.
“No! Take it out!” A white incandescence burned in its eyes. “Even if you could kill me, I would let all that is in this room, fall into the Cathedral below. The whole roof would collapse, killing all who are praying there. Think of that!” it said, half choking.
Not knowing what to do any more and not having much strength left, I simply said, “God help me!” The great beast suddenly thrust its head towards me, and I stepped back. I crawled behind the sarcophagus, and around behind the Serpent, trying not to get trapped between the beast and the back wall. It turned to face me, and I could see part of the tip of the Sword protruding through its flank. I had hoped that swallowing it would finish the beast, but it seemed that its plan all along had been to swallow it anyway. Perhaps it had some strong stomach lining that could consume holy metal. In any case, the blade was burning it now. Perhaps it would die after a while. Then I had an idea. Grasping my wounded arm, I made my way to the hoist. Perhaps if somehow I could kill the Serpent, and send it to its doom on the altar 150 feet below, it would not have time to bring the whole Cathedral roof down. I could hear the scraping sound of the Serpent dragging its body down the aisle towards me, the red cloth being pushed aside now as it struggled for grip in the slick blood and entrails that strung out behind it, some of its own and some of others.
As I sat wearily beside my coat, I knew just how hopeless my situation had become. I didn’t even have a weapon now. How was I to lure the beast onto the platform, which after all, was barely wide enough to hold it, and probably not strong enough? I felt very small and helpless. The end was near for me if my idea didn’t work. Trying to open a way for the beast onto the platform, rather than make a weapon for myself, I wrenched one of the stanchions at the corner of the platform, this way and that, until it came free. Two long twisted nails protruded from the split base. If I could just cut the cord at the top I would have some crude form of weapon. A builder’s toolbox lay beside the hoist and I flicked it open with my good hand. I saw a knife and quickly cut the chord with it. I pulled the club I had created towards me and the chord slipped out through the eyelets. Sweat was pouring off of me. I could hardly see through my stinging eyes. The air seemed so dense and dusty, in that roof space, that it was hard to find breath to draw.
Then there was no time left. The Serpent was close.
“You little fool! I see you think that somehow you can be good again? Think again. It is too late for you. The girl you left behind in the Cathedral below? She is dead. Your wife will soon be dead. Pastor Michel will see to it. Pull this hot blade from my mouth and live, or else die!”
I lashed out with the club and caught the Serpent a glancing blow on the side of its jaw. But the beast pulled away and the club flew out of my hand. I fell back on my jacket and onto something hard underneath it. In a haze of pain, sweat and terror, I felt to see what it was. It was the little statue in my pocket which had been there all the time. I fumbled for it while the Serpent eyed me, waiting for an answer. Finally, I pulled the statue free and held it behind my back.
“Answer me!” screamed the demon in that unearthly voice. It thrust its foul head close to my face, and I thrust the upstretched arm of the statue into its left eye. For a moment, as its eye burst into a thousand exploding shades of red, it was stunned, and in that moment I withdrew the statue, and thrust it deep into the other eye. This too exploded into a myriad of colours. Blood poured from the socket.
The beast roared and then pulled back its great head. The blood and flesh-soaked statue was wrenched from my hand. I cowered, waiting for the final thrust. It came a moment later but blinded, the Serpent was using smell alone, and raked my sweat-stained jacket instead of me, with its huge fangs. For just a fraction of a moment, the hilt of the sword was right next to my face. I grabbed it with my one good hand. I heaved but it wouldn’t come out.
“No!” The Serpent screamed in frustration, realising its mistake at striking the coat and heaved its head up for another strike. Only the beast’s own strength could have pulled the sword free. Suddenly I was holding it again. I scrambled to my knees and forced the long blade into the body of the bewildered beast; in where I hoped the heart was. The snake gave a hideous roar and shuddered.
“No!” It screamed again, but this time it was the scream of defeat.
I was exhausted and all I wanted was for the beast to die, and for me to lie here still forever, but I knew there was something I had to do. What was it? I had to force my weary mind to work through the fog of exhaustion and finally I had it. To the left of my hand, only a foot away was the end of the hoist rope. It might have been a thousand miles away. I didn’t think I had the strength, or the time to reach it. I looked to where the Serpent was coiled, half on and half off the hoist. I couldn’t tell if it would be able to hold onto something if the hoist fell, or not. It seemed in the last stages of its death rattle. Then I heard its bitter voice, uttering something so foul that it must have been some kind of curse. I kicked with all my might against its flanks on the floor beside me, and at the same time pulled the end of the rope as hard as I could. For a moment I thought the knot would hold, but then I saw daylight around the edge of the platform as it tilted precariously. The Serpent didn’t stop uttering its curse. Then dust stung my face as the loops of rope on the floor were whipped around my legs. The knot had come undone, and the platform started its swift journey to the Cathedral floor below. A few seconds later I heard screams, and a great crash, as the wooden platform, with the Serpent upon it, hit the main altar of Beauvais Cathedral.
Epilogue
1787, 1330, 1092, 1203, 1204
It was some time before anybody found me in the Secret Crypt. At first I lay half-conscious. Troubled thoughts visited me. I seemed to be floating in a half-light world and many voices whispered around me. Then from the gloom I heard a familiar voice. Like a whisper on the faintest breath of cold winter air, came Georgina’s voice. “Don’t forget me.” I felt my heart being clasped as if by two cold, clammy hands and then I could feel no more. I must have been asleep for a while, and my dreams were troubled before voices called my name and I found myself being lifted up by brawny arms. One of the voices was strangely familiar and then I remembered a girl called Ayshea. Could she be the one talking to me? But she was dead, surely. I opened my eyes and at first I couldn’t see anything clearly. Somebody wiped dirt and sweat from my eyes.
“He is waking!”
“Hello. Hello. It’s me. Ayshea. Are you alright?”
“No. No. I’m not alright.” I smiled. “I’m not alright but I’m alive. I thought you were dead! Are you alright?”
“Oh, I am fine. Apart from having a strange demon fall onto the Cathedral altar, it has been quite boring really.” She smiled back at me. I found that she was holding my hand and she squeezed it.
The journey on the stretcher down the secret stairway, was pretty unpleasant, and I was somehow surprised to see the bright afternoon sun when we crossed the open space to the waiting ambulance outside the great Cathedral. I felt as if I had been in there for many hours. Looking up at the blue sky, my vision was framed by the bold towers at the end of the ancient Gothic Cathedral. I watched with affection as the towers bobbed up and down, until they were out of sight. Both Parcaud and Ayshea accompanied me to the Beauvais Hospital.
“You are quite a hero-er now!” said Parcaud. “I was never quite convinced you were a murderer-er.”
I gritted my teeth against the urge to laugh bitterly.
Ayshea squeezed my hand again and leaned over to whisper in my ear. “Your first.”
There was silence during the rest of the journey. It seemed a strange thing to say to me, and I thought about it. I remembered the two processions on the altar cloth in the Secret Crypt and I remembered the
female helpers next to the wolf-angels.
My arm was broken in two places, and I had lost quite a lot of blood from deep wounds on my hand. In the three days that I was kept in hospital, I had plenty of time to tell Ayshea everything that had happened in the Crypt, and get her to repeat the story of what happened to the Serpent when it fell. Later, I regretted telling Ayshea much of what had happened in the Crypt and swore her to secrecy before she began her tale:
“We were all cornered by the Gendarmes at the other end of the Cathedral,” she said. “They had formed a ring around us. I think they had called in all The Gendarmes in Beauvais. A lot of people were screaming that this was the Apocalypse. Several times the Cathedral shook, and we thought it would collapse. Eventually the Gendarmes themselves took cover in the aisles, and most of us hid under the benches, or in alcoves. I wanted to come and find you but I remembered what you said, and I waited next to the little door. Then somebody near the front of the benches shouted, ‘Look! The roof is coming down!’”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“I was, a little, at this point. I believed the Cathedral was about to collapse. Many have said it would, for a long time. I peeped out from behind one of the columns and I could see a square of the ceiling had separated. I hadn’t seen a door there before so I too, thought that the roof was falling in. Then slowly the square of ceiling detached, and came crashing down, right on top of the altar. We all screamed. On it was what looked like a giant snake. I saw it with my own eyes. I ran towards it, thinking that you must be there too. I was so scared for you. Within a minute there was a big crowd of us around the thing. Gendarmes too. It was not moving and then slowly, as if it was dissolving, its flesh turned to a liquid mess. It was as if it was putrefied already. The flesh ran out over the floor and seemed to burn everything it touched. There was a moan from the crowd. Nobody could believe what they were seeing. And the smell! It was terrible. I couldn’t see you but I just couldn’t take my eyes of the snake. It was like something from Hell. From the Bible. Finally it was just a mess on the floor and the Gendarmes had to bring carts in with spades to scoop it up and take it away. They took a sample to analyse and then took statements from all of us. They forbid us to talk to the press, who were eager for any information about the Secret Crypt, and the silver Sword, and the Serpent.”
“What happened to Pastor Michel?”
“Oh he has been arrested for the murder of the Head Verger.”
Newspapers and esoteric journals, as well as some of the scientific journals, were full of theories about the events for months afterwards.
“That sword must be worth many millions. Especially given the theories about its provenance,” Ayshea pointed out to me.
“Yes and I suppose it must stay with The Crypt which is no longer secret.”
“Yes. I suppose so.”
The press were camped outside the hospital for the duration of my stay, but I left secretly in a car hired by Parcaud, and was taken to a secret location. Ayshea was waiting there. The first evening away from the hospital, we had dinner together, this time brought from a restaurant to our secret hideaway, in an unmarked police car. Over the main course, we talked about my battle, some of the questions that were still left unanswered and I told her I had decided to tear up the divorce papers and try again with Rose. I thought she would be surprised but she wasn’t. She seemed more interested in talking about Ordo Lupus.
“I cannot figure out why there are so many Wolf-angel statues everywhere, especially in the crypt. Were they worshipped?”
“Ah well. I have been doing some research there. Gillaume de Grez had the idea of furthering the influence of Ordo Lupus to one of the few fertile areas for Religious indoctrination in Europe; the Balkans. There was a cult there, based on a wolf-god that many worshipped. He started the idea of presenting the wolf-angel as a minor deity, or prophet, within the Catholic Church. It was enough to recruit many more adherents to the Church and in fact, secretly, to The Brotherhood. Simon de Kleves merely came up with the idea of manufacturing these statues in very large numbers, in France, and exporting them.”
“Ah.”
It soon became apparent that The Gendarmes were starting to cover up what had actually happened in Beauvais Cathedral. They liked the story of a giant snake dying on the altar but they didn’t like the story of a demon serpent who devoured bodies and souls. They published an official account in Le Monde, stating that the snake had caught light on the altar’s candles and that the flesh had burned until it could only be scooped up with spades. Of course there were mutterings in the press about a cover-up and several eye-witnesses tried to sell their stories but they suffered from inexplicable accidents like fires at their homes or burnt-out cars.
At first I received friendly letters from fellow historians and academics seeking information but soon these turned to spiteful mail accusing me of publicity-seeking or worse, being a witch-hunter. I learned to keep silent and started to fear for my life from the public as well as for my life and soul from the Serpents and their followers.
***
The altar cloth had continued to fascinate me, especially the Garden of Eden scene. Once I went back to the Cathedral to look again, having to climb over red-tape to get to the altar after getting permission from the Bishop, who was now only too pleased to help me. I had always been, in the literal sense, a passionate opponent of the creationists. Being myself a Christian, I did not believe the Bible should be taken literally, but the presence of a wolf in this design, something tending towards esoteric teaching, left me dumbfounded. If wolves really had been ‘man’s friend’ from such an early time, then man could not have tamed them, as evolutionists had taught us. Try as I might, I could not square this image with my own upbringing, which flaunted Darwin’s theory as the ‘truth’.
I would never again see the world in the same way, but then I had changed in other ways too. I no longer saw good and evil as so very far apart, or so opposed to each other. I even, on occasion, felt pity for the Serpent, but then I dismissed this as a sentiment I could ill afford. I had to carry on with my life. When I finally had time to think, I wondered if the battle had really been in the roof of Beauvais Cathedral, or if it had been inside me. I went back once more, a year after that but the Bishop had been replaced and I couldn’t gain access to the Crypt at all. In fact it was now out-of-bounds, and seemed, even to academics, to be considered some kind of abhorrent blemish on the life of the cathedral. The clergy spoke about it only in the most hushed tones.
I still had the little black notebook of Georgina’s. Somehow I hadn’t been able to bring myself to throw away this sad little memento of our time together. Some weeks after the events in this story, in a quiet moment, I opened it again and read it from cover to cover. It made sombre reading. I gathered her father, already wealthy, had been drawn to the cult overseen by the ‘Concilium Putus Visum’ out of greed. In fact greed seemed to be their main motive; they accumulated wealth as servants of the Serpents. Georgina had used the cult for her own ends of course.
On one of the very last pages, I discovered something which astonished me. There was a physical description of the Interfeci. Evidently Georgina had finally located him and seen him. She described him as having white hair, being in his nineties, and having a strange red birthmark underneath his left ear. He also had blue eyes, and a long, slightly hooked nose. At once I recognised my grandfather in the description. He had a red birthmark under his left ear, in the shape of a crab with one claw – as he always joked to me – blue eyes, a slightly hooked nose and would have been the right age at the time. I finally remembered the significance of the date, 14th September 1972. That was the date my grandfather was supposed to have been mugged in Paris and suffered a bad knife-wound to his leg. The wound must have been sustained, after all, in the fight with Georgina’s father. So my grandfather hadn’t been as wheelchair-bound as we’d thought. It seemed that Georgina’s father had been killed by him. A grim but faint smile spread across m
y face, like the faintest winter dawn. So that was why she had initially wanted to kill me. I often wondered where she was but I never told Rose that someone else had been in the Secret Crypt with the Serpent and I.
* * *
Postscript
3066:8,3 3078:66,3 3086:25,5 3165:34,3 123:55,5 3213:19,4 9:5,2 214:12,4 3:1,2 2034:15,8
Author’s note: Shortly after the events related by me in this story, the story-teller vanished without trace before he ever completed the final cassette. His whereabouts is, as yet, unknown.
Finally, years later, another mystery was cleared up. 1985 was the first year DNA analysis entered the courtroom and the Gendarmes had passed on the sample of Serpent ‘flesh’ to a lab for analysis. Rose received a letter via Parcaud which, when you finished reading all the numbers and caveats, showed that some of the DNA that had been extracted, matched exactly a sample taken from some of Annie’s clothes, which the Gendarmes had taken from Rose all those years ago in Nevers.
All historical facts are accurate and authentic except the following, in most cases to conceal the identity of the story-teller:
1. The raid on the Netherlands by a squadron of Bristol Blenheims is fictional. In fact the Blenheim, a two-engined medium bomber, took the brunt of casualties in the early war and there is at least one well documented case of ten aircraft going out and only one returning, so heavily damaged that it had to be scrapped.
1. The name of The Jazz Club Gang is fictional. There were many resistance units in Bulgaria at the end of WWII and they communicated with locals and other gangs using posters; often for concerts by local bands.
2. Although there is speculation that two or monks did escape from Montsegur Castle the night before the defenders surrendered, it is not known for certain what they were carrying.