Candle in the Attic Window

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Her finger pointed toward the door.

  “You – let me – in.”

  It was a hissing voice and Richard could not tell what language she spoke, except that he could understand it.

  “You – will – break – the charm.”

  Unwillingly, his eyes were drawn to her face ....

  He did not remember what it looked like, because the memory drowned as he started falling again ... tumbling from the bridge. He could see the statue of a child on the span above him, a hand covering its eyes as if it could not bear to watch him plunge to a watery death ... to plunge from the bridge that the Devil himself could not break.

  The Regensburg Bridge, he knew. And with that, he was back on the bed, cowering against the wall.

  One more hissed word came from the woman: Help.

  The sickly moon glow peeking from the shadows vanished. The midnight shape turned back into a coat hanging from a crucifix.

  But the scratching at the door started again. The spectre of the woman was still there, in the shape of the beast clawing to get inside.

  Other sounds now exploded through the monastery. Feet pounded up the stairs, and voices called in a hurly-burly of German and English. Then came shouts of Latin, phrases that Richard could recall from murky schoolboy days:

  “Et ne inducas nos in temptationem, sed libera nos a malo!”

  The beast shrieked and needles of fur prickled across Richard’s skin. More voices shouted in unison, “Libera nos a malo!” Abbot Fletcher’s call followed in a righteous thunderclap: “Maleficas non patieris vivere!”

  Abruptly, the scratching stopped. The fur uncurled from around Richard Davey and he crumpled forward onto the floor.

  A mundane rapping struck the door. The abbot called, “Mr. Davey! Mr. Davey, are you all right?”

  Hearing the voice of a living man, one with whom he had drunk wine only hours before, should have comforted him. But Richard suddenly had no wish to see the abbot of this blighted place.

  He had no choice. There was no lock on the door and the abbot pushed it open and raised up a candle.

  In the first flicker of light, Richard saw the deep furrows of claw marks down the front of the door. He wondered that he did not faint and spend the rest of the night in peaceful oblivion.

  The abbot stared at him, offering no aid. Richard staggered to his feet on his own. Other faces peered from behind the abbot, a mixture of elders and novices. They clucked to each other, mostly in German. None of them crossed the threshold.

  “Wh – what was that?” Richard breathed.

  “It is gone.” The abbot squinted. “And you must be gone in the morning.”

  “I don’t understand. What happened?”

  The abbot’s eyes were lead shots. Looking into them was worse than staring down a highwayman’s pistol.

  “You let her in.”

  Richard was not supposed to have heard those words. They were spoken in German, as if Abbot Fletcher had forgotten that his visitor knew the language.

  Then, in English: “Nothing happened. You will not be bothered again tonight. But be prepared to leave at dawn. I will lay out food for you in the banquet room.”

  He turned to the others and grumbled at them in German to return to the dormitory. He took one look back into the room, noticed the coat hung rudely over the crucifix, and slammed the door.

  Richard groped in the dark to reach the candle. He found matches beside it, struck one, and lit the wick.

  The first thing he noticed was his coat. It hung inside out over the crucifix, and he knew he had not done that. He picked it up to turn it back around, and felt a heaviness in one of the pockets. He reached in and pulled out a three-pronged iron key he had never seen before. He dropped it back into the pocket – he needed to take this one mystery at a time.

  He turned toward the door. He was frightened to see for certain what he thought he had spotted when the abbot opened the door, but the curiosity of a man who explores curiosities pushed him on. He drew the door open and looked at the marks that ran from the height of the latch down to floorboards.

  But he had glimpsed more than that in the abbot’s candlelight. He slanted the door and squinted at the marks from a different angle.

  No illusion. The beast on the other side of the door was not scratching to get in. It was leaving a message. Four shaky letters: HELP.

  •

  A taciturn Abbot Fletcher hustled Richard from the room in the morning. The man now spoke only in German, casting aside any brotherhood he might have felt for someone else from the isles. Richard knew better than to ask questions about the nighttime disturbances. He would receive no answers.

  The other members of the Abbey of St. James in Exile stood around the staircase as Richard walked down. Some muttered blessings; others gave him stares that he might have classed as “diabolic”, if he thought such a thing could be used to describe a monk. He tried to tell which of them were German and which Scottish, so perhaps he might get a last friendly word in his own language before leaving, but their faces were shadowed with fear.

  “There is food for you,” Abbot Fletcher grumbled, and indicated a burlap sack on the table of the banquet room.

  Richard picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. As he did, he thought he felt something different about the banquet room. Something more than the changed air of day. But the abbot hurried him out through the chapel. In all his rush to get Richard out of the abbey, it was surprising he had not conjured a horse to carry him off as fast as possible. Even when Richard tried to offer thanks, the man had no interest in hearing it: “You should never have come here and you should forget that you did.” Abbot Fletcher waved him through the front doors that had welcomed him last night.

  Richard walked under the tympanum into the unfriendly morning cold. He expected to hear the creak of hinges and the slam of a wooden beam behind him, but there was only monastic silence. He walked down the path, through the opening in the iron posts around the churchyard. He looked over his shoulder. The maw of the church was open, but the abbot was no longer standing there.

  He turned his head back and stepped onto the road that wound toward Kelheim, and then beyond to the bridge and its child protector that crossed the Danube to Regensburg.

  Richard Davey was not an extraordinarily brave man. He had the common courage needed to travel across the continent alone, but he would never have survived life as a soldier or in any profession more dangerous than a “seeker of curiosities”.

  “Seeker of curiosities”: That was how he introduced himself whenever he had to explain to lesser nobility why a young man wanted to look through their libraries. Behind him was a curiosity greater than any he had encountered, perhaps greater than the automaton chess player rumoured to be in the treasuries of Prague.

  The letters “HELP” scratched in mouldy oak. The hissing of an apparition made of shadow hovering over him. A dream of plunging from a bridge to drown. A key in his pocket that did not belong there. The posture of the abbot, the unease that shrouded monastery.

  The daylight could sweep these oddities from most minds, but not from Richard Davey’s. They left a blot of ink on his soul, and it was from ink that great tales were written. In him was an urgency, even importance, which was strange to him but stronger than the dark beers of Munich.

  He walked only as far along the road as he needed before finding the shelter of a wall of hawthorn. He leaned against an accommodating beech, ate the squishy apple and dry loaf in his pack, and waited until nightfall.

  He walked back along the road, staying in the shadow of the trees. The waning moon only peeked out from the clouds in bursts, so Richard had an easy time turning into a shadow himself.

  Lights burned in the outbuilding of the monastery. The closer that Richard came, the more he could pick out from the crickets the sound of men’s voices chanting evensong. He had heard many evensongs during his sojourn through Bavaria, but this one had an air of fear, not celebration. But if the b
rothers of St. James were awake, it were better they were enrapt in chanting Latin so that they would pay no attention to an outsider slipping into their church.

  The front doors still gaped wide. For a moment, Richard stared in bewilderment; in a countryside filthy with bandits, this was a bizarre sight, making the church a naked man in the middle of a raging battle.

  Then he remembered the words of the abbot that he was not supposed to hear: “You let her in.”

  The brothers were now trying to send her out, like housewives who flung open their doors to shoo out an uninvited spider or rat. The brothers had no fear of what was outside but what had gotten inside.

  No one guarded the vestibule. The voices floated from behind the interior doors to the chapel. Richard spied through the gap between them. He saw the backs of some of the monks. They wore red topcoats over their simple brown robes and had gathered in a circle in the apse, where Abbot Fletcher led the song from the center. The simmering Latin reeked of diablerie; there were no simple “pater noster”s or “saeculo saeculorum”s.

  Richard pushed through the doors, making no noise, and crawled on his hands and knees behind the pews, through the nave, past the transept. He managed to move the length of the chapel unseen. The monks were so deep in their ritual that Richard wondered if he could have stomped through the choir shouting “Hosanna!” without distracting them.

  It was a relief reaching the banquet hall just to place a wall between him and the unholy chanting. A fire was burning itself out in the hearth, casting enough light for Richard to search for what had seemed different in the room that morning.

  He picked it out immediately: The tall chair at the end of the table had been pushed against the middle of the tapestry.

  Richard took the oil lamp from the table, lit it with a burning sprig of wood from the fire, and moved toward the hanging. He pulled back the chair, which made a loud squeak across the floor. Richard waited, but no one came running to investigate. He pushed back the chair further until he could see what it had covered up.

  It was the section of the tapestry showing the haloed Scots Monastery. Richard lifted the lantern; the light seeped over three straight rips down the cloth. A single swipe from the paw of a cat ... a paw large enough to slash open a bear’s throat.

  The lantern shivered in his grip, but he was meant to find this. It was clear as any signpost at a crossroads. He reached toward the rips and pushed his finger through one of them. Then his hand. Then his whole arm. Where a wall should have been was a damp void.

  He lifted up the bottom of the tapestry. A fusty cloud met his nose, tinged with the unmistakable smell of fermentation. The question of where the monastery hid its empty wine cellar was answered. Richard ducked under the edge of the tapestry and pulled the lantern in after him.

  A tight, circular staircase wound down out of sight. Niter seeped through the stones and the dampness wafting from below explained why the vault at the end of the spiral could no longer keep wine. Either underground water had risen, or something else had contaminated the foundations with liquid stenches. Richard started downward, careful not to slip. He imagined rolling down miles of stairway into an infernal undercavern – or worse, never stopping at all.

  The stairway wound around twice and stopped at an iron door. Richard didn’t need to think about what to do next; he took the mystery key from his pocket and fit it into the lock. It turned easily, without the expected protest of rust.

  The thick air that oozed out was one of willing oblivion. Whatever slept inside did not want anyone to know of its existence, outside of its sworn protectors.

  No sooner did the sepulchral miasma hit him, but Richard felt the prickle of fur around his legs and the whisper of sound from inside. It was a woman’s laugh, small but victorious.

  The lantern flame showed a room smaller than the collection of smells might have indicated. The walls had granite shelves with half-circular depressions to hold wine barrels.

  Instead of oak casks, the shelves held vials and beakers filled with murky liquids. Scattered among them were scalpels, knives and tall glass alembics. Richard had seen enough rooms of professed alchemists to recognize the tools of their trade. The walls above the elixirs were scribbled with Enochian letters and less-welcome alphabets.

  In the middle of the vault, mortared to the floor, stood an oblong stone vat for the smashing and mixing of grapes. But now it was an open sarcophagus. Inside lay a body draped in cardinal red. The arms were crossed over the chest, skeletal palms pressed against the shoulders. A cross of a wicked design lay across the breast.

  But the greatest horror was the feeling that the man was not dead.

  Richard approached the robed body. Cat whiskers scraped against his ankles – a feeling almost soothing in the mephitic pit. The lantern lit the man’s face, which was like parchment that had been soaked and crumpled, then laid out to dry in an Egyptian sun. But in those sunken cheeks was a flush of life and the lips had a touch of red no undertaker could imitate.

  “Brother Skene,” said the woman of midnight.

  Richard did not jump. He had already seen her necrose glow across the withered face.

  “Is he – alive?”

  “Barely. Infernally.”

  “The alchemist’s art.” Richard looked around at the vials and alembics. He remembered what he had once heard from a practitioner in Avignon: “Eternal life in this world is impossible ... but life can be stretched and tautened.”

  The woman: “He is their charm. While he lives, I cannot touch any of them.”

  The green hand dropped down into Richard’s sight, pressing toward the chest of the thing named Brother Skene. The hand stopped an inch above him and wavered, as if pressed against a glass so polished it could not be seen.

  “So weak the charm,” she said. “But enough.”

  Richard pulled against the weight on his eyes and managed to look at her. She was as before: made of night silk. The light from the lantern he had set beside the pit never touched her. Her face, which must have been lovely at one time, flitted between corpse light and Stygian dark.

  Richard asked: “What do you want with him?”

  The spectral hand turned, seeming to float without a limb attached to it. As the fingers pointed upward, Richard felt the icy river around him again, stinging his eyes and filling his lungs.

  “Go back ... to the beginning ....”

  As the fingers curved upward, Richard’s body followed. The ice water released him and spume hurled him into the air. He spun toward the bridge above, a woman’s dress with stains of blood flapping at the edge of his sight. The stone child hiding its eyes came closer.

  Then he was on the bridge ... moving through Regensburg, as if he were running backwards ... passing through alleys of a city he had never seen ... through winter markets and past the unfinished Cathedral ... through iron doors into an abbey.

  The hand pressed down; he followed the memory. Her memory.

  Down he ran, into a cell with no windows. Brother Skene stood there. Young now, with mad lust in his eyes and a flail in his hand.

  The hand brushed away the vision. “You do not wish to know more.”

  Richard shook his head to answer the question and to push away the savage crime he almost had to witness.

  He rubbed his eyes, and the woman was no longer standing over the body. But Richard felt that she was behind him, taking on her other form that he was afraid to look on. Something scraped on a shelf. Metal scratched against stone and then the object clattered to the floor. It landed at his feet; light glinted off a dagger’s blade.

  He picked it up. It was then that Richard Davey, a curiosity seeker but also a man of modest bravery, understood what the letters on the door had asked him to do.

  He spoke to the shadows. “I can’t. I have never harmed anyone in my life.”

  No answer came except a sibilant hissing.

  He held the dagger hilt with both hands. In the blade, he saw his face. It seemed so child
ish, young and foolish, the way he had felt when he stood alone on the road with his hands up in the air.

  “I cannot do it,” he repeated.

  The corpse-lit hand unfolded from the dark and gripped the back of his hand. The shock of fur touched his neck.

  “He is their charm.” The voice was in his ears, a purring that formed words. “They make him live ... so I cannot have them. When the Devil has him ... then I may repay them all.”

  The hand bent Richard’s wrist, pointing the tip of the dagger toward Brother Skene’s breast. The spectral hand could go no further than a finger’s width above the monk’s body – but it would be enough, more than enough, to drive the knife into flesh and whatever blood remained in the untimely thing.

  “No, no!” His body shook, but he could not move his limbs. A horrible, smothering fur twisted around him, wrapping his body like a tomb shroud.

  “Shall I tell you all of what he did to me?”

  The dagger lowered. Richard’s muscles fought, but only his arm seemed able to obey – and it was not strong enough.

  “They still call it ... an indiscretion.”

  The dagger point pressed over the ugly cross ... brushed across a button ... nicked at the red fabric at the collar ... Brother Skene’s throat lay bare, a ruffle of breath moving it.

  Suddenly, three hands were clasped onto the dagger. Richard’s grip on the hilt was pressed between the moon glow of the woman and a withered claw that had struck from inside the pit like an adder.

  Richard screamed. He couldn’t help himself. The hand of the near-dead thing in the sarcophagus was a touch of maggots. The eyes of Brother Skene, filling the sockets with black, stared at him. They opened onto a soul that had hovered a hands-breath above Hell for over two hundred years.

  The force of the two hands pressing against the dagger was so strong that Richard feared his wrist would snap. Smothered from one side, pressed toward a living corpse, he prayed that he might simply go mad and be free.

  “Maleficas non patieris vivere!”