Library of the Dead

by Glenn Cooper

  It would have been better if it were a warm summer morning or a crisp autumn one, but it was utterly fantastic to all of them to be here in any season, in any conditions. Only yesterday, it seemed, they were in the thick of war, dreaming about how blissful it would be to do a bit of archaeology on a peaceful island. So the instant Atwood received a PS300 grant from the British Museum to resume his excavations at Vectis, he hastily organized a dig, winter be damned.

  Reggie was the pit boss. He checked his watch, stood up, and with his best sergeant major voice shouted, "All right, lads, let's get a move on! We've got a lot of dirt to shift today."

  Timothy pointed at Beatrice in an exaggerated way and mouthed the question, Lads?

  "You're right," Reggie said, gathering his gear, "I apologize. She's too bloody old for me to be calling her a lad."

  "Sod off, you pathetic wanker," she said.

  Atwood's dig was in a corner of the abbey grounds far from the main complex of buildings. The lord abbot, Dom William Scott Lawlor, a soft-spoken cleric with a passion for history, was kind enough to let the Cambridge party camp within the complex. In return, Atwood invited him to stroll by for progress reports, and on the previous Saturday, Lawlor had even appeared in blue jeans and anorak to spend an hour scraping a square meter with a trowel.

  The diggers marched across the field from the campground while the cathedral bells chimed for 9:00 A.M. mass and Terce. Seagulls swooped and complained overhead, and in the distance the steel-blue waves of the Solent churned. To the east the cathedral spire looked magnificent against the bright sky. Across the fields, tiny figures, monks in dark robes, filed from their dorms to the church. Atwood watched them, squinting into the sunshine, marveling at their timelessness. If he had been standing on the same spot a thousand years earlier, would the scene have looked much different?

  The excavation site was neatly laid out with pegs and twine. It covered an area of forty by thirty meters, rich brown earth with grass and topsoil peeled away. From a distance it was clear that the entire site was in a depression, about a meter lower than the surrounding field. It was this hollow that attracted Atwood's interest before the war when he surveyed the abbey grounds. Surely there had been an activity of some sort on this spot. But why so remote from the main abbey complex?

  In two brief excavations in 1938 and 1939, Atwood had dug test trenches and found evidence of a stone foundation and bits of twelfth but mainly thirteenth century pottery. As the war raged on his thoughts often returned to Vectis. Why the blazes had a thirteenth century structure been built there, isolated as it was from the heart of the abbey? Was its purpose clerical or secular? The abbey library had no mention of the building in its archives. He was resigned to the fact that Hitler had to be defeated before he could tackle the mystery.

  On the south side of the site, facing seaward, Atwood was digging his main trench, a cutting thirty meters long, four wide, and now three meters deep. Reggie, a good man with heavy machinery, had started the trench with a mechanical digger, and now the whole team was down in the deep cutting doing spade and bucket work. They were following what was left of the southern wall of the structure down to the foundation to see if they could find an occupation level.

  Atwood and Ernest Murray were in the southwest corner of the cutting, cleaning the wall with trowels to take photographs of the section.

  "This level here," Atwood said, pointing to an irregular band of black soil running across the section, "see how it follows the top of the wall? There was a fire."

  "Accidental or deliberate?" Ernest asked.

  Atwood sucked on his pipe. "Always difficult to say. It's possible it was set deliberately as part of a ritual."

  Ernest furrowed his brow. "For what purpose? This wasn't exactly a pagan site. It was contemporaneous with the abbey within the abbey perimeter!"

  "Excellent point, Ernest. Are you sure you don't want to pursue a career in archaeology after all?"

  The younger man shrugged. "I dunno."

  "Well, while you're pondering your fate, let's snap these pictures and begin excavating down another half meter or so. We can't be far off the floor."

  Atwood assigned the three undergraduates to the southwest corner to take the trench deeper. Beatrice sat at a portable table near the cutting, cataloguing pottery shards, and Atwood took Ernest and Reggie to the northwest corner of the site to start a small trench in an attempt to find the other end of the foundation wall. As the morning progressed it became noticeably warmer and the diggers started peeling off layers until they were down to their shirts.

  At lunchtime Atwood wandered over to the deep trench and remarked, "What's this? Is that another wall there?"

  "I think so," Dennis said eagerly. "We were going to fetch you."

  They had exposed the top of a thinner stone wall running parallel and about two meters from the main foundation.

  "See? There's a gap in it, Professor," Timothy offered. "Could a door have been there?"

  "Well, perhaps. Possibly so," Atwood said, climbing down a ladder. "I wonder, could you take this area down a bit," he said, pointing to some dirt. "If the interior wall extends to the outer wall in a perpendicular fashion, I would say we've got a small room. Wouldn't that be nice?"

  The three young men got on their knees to start troweling. Dennis worked near the outer wall, Martin near the interior wall, Timothy in the middle. Within a few minutes they had all made clinking contact with stone.

  "You were right, Professor!" Martin said.

  "Well, I have been at this for a few years. You get a feel for this type of thing." He was pleased with himself and lit his pipe in celebration. "After lunch let's dig down to the level of the floor and see if we can find what this little room was for?"

  The young men rushed their lunch, eager to find the floor. They wolfed down cheese sandwiches and lemon squash and hopped back into the pit.

  "You're not impressing anyone, ya bloody brown-nosers!" Reggie shouted after them as he reclined on a mound of dirt and lit a roll-up.

  "Shut your gob, Reg," Beatrice said. "Leave 'em be. And roll us a fag too."

  An hour later the young men called to the others. The three undergrads were standing around the boundaries of the small room, looking impressed with themselves.

  "We've found the floor, everyone!" Dennis exclaimed.

  Exposed for view was a surface of smooth dark stones, expertly shaped to join to one another in a continuous surface. But Atwood's eye was drawn to another feature. "What's this?" he asked, and climbed down to take a closer look.

  In the southwest corner of the small room was a larger stone, which appeared to be out of place. The floor stones were bluestone. This larger one was a large limestone block, about two meters by a meter and a half and quite thick. It protruded almost a foot higher than the level of the floor and had irregular edges.

  "Any thoughts?" Atwood asked his people as he scraped around its edges with his trowel.

  "Doesn't look like it belongs, does it?" Beatrice said.

  Ernest took some pictures. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to haul that in."

  "We should try to shift it," Atwood said. "Reg, who would you say has the strongest back?"

  "That would be Beatrice," Reggie replied.

  "Fuck off, Reg," the woman said. "Let's see some of that famous muscle power."

  Reggie got a crowbar and tried to get an edge under a lip of limestone. He used a rock as a fulcrum but the block still wouldn't budge. Sweating, he declared, "Right! I'm getting the bloody digger."

  It took an hour for Reggie to use the mechanical digger to make its own ramp to get down low enough to safely reach the block.

  When he was in position, close enough to reach the rock with the bucket and far enough from the edge of the cutting to avoid a cave-in, he called out from the cab to say he was ready. Over the sputter of the diesel engine, the bells were pealing for the None service.

  Reggie nudged the teeth of the bucket against an edge of limestone
and caught hold on his first pass. He curled the bucket toward its arm and the stone block lifted.

  "Hang on!" Atwood shouted. Reggie froze the action. "Get a crowbar in there!"

  Martin jumped in and slid the iron bar into the gap between the limestone and the flooring stones. He leaned into the bar but couldn't lever it an inch. "Too heavy!" he shouted.

  With Martin applying steady pressure, Reggie moved the bucket again and the stone slid a foot, then another. Martin guided it with the crowbar and when it shifted enough to be stable waved his arms like a crazy man. "Stop! Stop! Come here! Come here!"

  Reggie killed the engine and all of them scrambled into the pit.

  Dennis saw it first. "Bloody hell!"

  Timothy shook his head. "Would you look at that!"

  While the rest of them stared, agog, Reggie relit a dog end he had saved in his shirt pocket and took a deep drag of tobacco. "Fuck me. Is that supposed to be there, Prof?"

  Atwood stroked his thinning head of hair in wonder and simply said, "We're going to need some light."

  They were staring into a deep black hole, and the oblique rays of the afternoon sun were revealing what appeared to be stone stairs descending into the earth.

  Dennis ran back to the camp to retrieve every battery-powered flashlight he could find. He returned, red-faced and huffing, and passed them around.

  Reggie was feeling protective of his old boss so he insisted on going first. He'd cleared a few of Rommel's underground bunkers in his day and knew his way around a tight space. The rest of them followed the big man in single file, with Beatrice, stripped of her usual bravado, timidly taking up the rear.

  When they had all successfully navigated the tightly spiraled stairway that plunged, by Atwood's estimate, an incredible forty to fifty feet straight into the earth, they found themselves huddled in a room not much larger than two London taxicabs. The air was stagnant, and Martin, who was prone to claustrophobia, immediately felt desperate. "It's a bit close down here," he whimpered.

  They were all moving their flashlights around and the beams intersected like searchlights during the blitz.

  Reggie was the first to realize there was a door. "Hallo! What're you doing here?" He studied the worm-holed surface with his flashlight. A huge iron key protruded from a gaping key hole.

  Atwood set his light on it and said, "In for a penny, in for a pound. You game?"

  Young Dennis crept up close. "Absolutely!"

  "All right then," Atwood said. "Your honor, Reggie."

  From her squashed position in the rear, Beatrice couldn't see what was happening. "What? What are we doing?" Her voice was strained.

  "We're opening a ruddy big door," Timothy explained.

  "Well, hurry up," Martin insisted, "or I'm going back up. I can't breathe."

  Reggie turned the key and they heard the clunk of a mechanism. He pressed his palm against the cool wooden surface but the door wouldn't move. It resisted his efforts until he put the full weight of his shoulder into it.

  It slowly creaked open.

  They shuffled through as if they were on a chain gang, and all of them started sweeping the new space with their beams.

  This room was larger than the first, much larger.

  Their minds assembled the scrambled stroboscopic images into something cohesive, but seeing wasn't tantamount to believing, at least at first.

  No one dared to speak.

  They were in a high-domed chamber the size of a conference hall or a small theater. The air was cool, dry and stale. The floor and walls were fashioned from large blocks of stones. Atwood took note of these structural features, but it was a long wooden table and bench that jolted him. He moved his light over it from left to right and estimated that the table was over twenty feet long. He moved closer until his thighs touched it. He shone his light on its surface. There was an earthenware pot, the size of a teacup, with a black residue. Further down the bench there was a second pot, a third, a fourth.

  Could it be?

  It occurred to Atwood to cast his beam beyond the table.

  There was another table. And behind it another. And another. And another.

  His mind reeled. "I believe I know what this is."

  "I'm all ears, Prof," Reggie said in a low voice. "What the bloody hell is it?"

  "It's a scriptorium. An underground scriptorium. Simply amazing."

  "If I knew what that meant," Reggie said, sounding irritated, "I'd know what this is, wouldn't I."

  Beatrice explained with awe, "It's where monks copied manuscripts. If I'm not mistaken, it's the first subterranean one ever discovered."

  "You are not mistaken," Atwood said.

  Dennis was reaching for an ink pot but Atwood stopped him. "Don't touch. Everything must be photographed in situ, exactly as we find it."

  "Sorry," Dennis said. "Do you think we'll find any manuscripts down here?"

  "Wouldn't that be marvelous," Atwood said, his voice trailing off. "But I wouldn't count on it."

  They decided to split into two parties to explore the boundaries of the chamber. Ernest took the three undergraduates to the right, and Atwood led Reggie and Beatrice to the left. "Careful as you go," Atwood warned.

  He counted each row of tables as he passed, and when he'd counted fifteen, saw that Reggie was casting his light on another large door at the rear of the room. "Fancy going through there?" Reggie asked.

  "Why not?" Atwood answered. "However, nothing can top this."

  "It's probably the bloody water closet," Beatrice joked nervously.

  They were practically pressing against Reggie as he lifted the weighty latch and pulled the door open.

  All at once they shone their flashlights in.

  Atwood gasped.

  He felt faint and literally had to sit down on the stone floor. His eyes began to well up.

  Reggie and Beatrice held onto each other for support, two opposites attracting for the first time.

  From a distant corner they heard the others urgently shouting, "Professor, come here. We've found a catacombs!"

  "There's hundreds of skeletons, maybe thousands!"

  "Goes on forever!"

  Atwood couldn't answer. Reggie took a few steps back to make sure his boss was all right. He leaned over, helped the older man to his feet and boomed out in his loudest military baritone, "Sod the skeletons, you lot! You'd all better come over here 'cause you're not going to believe what we've got ourselves into."

  Atwood's first thought was that he was dead, that he had inhaled some toxic vapors and died. He wasn't a religious man but this had to be some sort of otherworldly experience.

  No, this was real. If the first chamber was the size of a theater, the second was the size of an airline hangar. To his left, a mere ten feet from the door, was a vast wooden case, filled with enormous leather-bound volumes. To his right was an identical stack, and in between the two was a corridor just wide enough for a man to pass. Atwood recovered his senses and traced one stack with his flashlight to understand its dimensions. It was about fifty feet long, some thirty feet high, and consisted of twenty shelves. He did a rapid count of the number of books on just one shelf: about 150.

  All of his nerve endings tingled as he wandered into the central corridor. To both sides were huge bookcases, identical to the first pair, and they seemed to go on and on into the darkness.

  "Shitload of books in here," Reggie said.

  Somehow, Atwood had hoped that the first words spoken on the occasion of one of the great discoveries in the history of archaeology might have been more profound. Had Carter, at the mouth of Tutankhamen's tomb heard, "Shitload of stuff in here, mate?" Nevertheless, he had to agree.

  "I should say so."

  He violated his own no-touch rule and put his pointer finger softly against the spine of one book on an eye-level shelf at the end of the third stack. The leather was firm and in excellent preservation. He carefully wiggled it out.

  It was heavy, at least the heft of a five-po
und bag of flour, about eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide, five inches thick. The leather was cool, shiny, unadorned by any markings on the covers but in the spine he saw a large, clear number deeply tooled into the leather: 833. The parchments were rough-cut, slightly uneven. There had to be two thousand pages.

  Reggie and Beatrice were by his side. Both aimed their lights on the book he cradled in the crook of his arm. He gently opened it to a random page.

  It was a list. Names, by the look of the three columns across a page, some sixty names per column. In front of each name was a date, all of them 231833. Following each name was the word Mors or Natus. "It's some kind of registry," Atwood whispered. He turned the page-more of the same. An endless list. "Have you any thoughts on this, Bea?" he asked.

  "Looks like it's a record of births and deaths, like any medieval parish church might keep," she replied.

  "Rather a lot of them, wouldn't you say?" Atwood said, sending his beam down the long central corridor.

  The others had caught up and were murmuring at the library entrance. Atwood called back to them to stay put for the moment. He failed to notice that Reggie had started down the corridor, deeper into the chamber.

  "How old would you say this vault is?" Atwood asked Beatrice.

  "Well, judging from the stone work, the door construction, and the lock hardware, I'd have to say eleventh, maybe twelfth century. I'd hazard a guess we're the first living souls to breathe this air in about eight hundred years."

  From a hundred feet away Reggie's voice echoed out to them. "If bossy-boots is so bloody smart then how come I've got a book here what got dates in it for the sixth of May 1467?"

  They needed a generator. Despite their fevered excitement, Atwood decided it was too hazardous to do further exploration in the dark. They retraced their steps and emerged into the late afternoon glare, then hurriedly covered the opening to the spiral stairs with planks and a tarp, then an inch of dirt so the casual observer like Abbot Lawlor would notice nothing. Atwood admonished them. "No one is to speak a word of this to anyone. Anyone!"