Brotherhood of the Tomb

by Daniel Easterman

  “But I venture they fancy themselves Hermeticists, or Adepts of the Cabala, followers of Paracelsus, or Illuminati of the Rosy Cross; or, indeed, that they be Deists all, and have imported their foul Mysteries from France, where all such Abominations have their Source. I have heard it asserted that there are among them hieratick ranks, such as Priests, Deacons, and Bishops, and that certain among them dedicate themselves as Monks or Nuns in perpetuity. And these, I understand, their Fellowes call The Dead, inasmuch as they are departed this World before ever their bodies are bereft of Life. I am told they take such as are dedicated to this existence to their Graves, albeit in a representation, and that there are living among us even now persons whose Tombs we pass daily in our common Churches.”’

  Patrick turned pale. He glanced at Assefa in horror. It was as though a fist of ice had taken his stomach and was tightening its inexorable grip.

  “I have even heard it whispered - I will not say by whom - that they emulate the Jewes in this that, on occasion, they will steal a Christian Childe or purchase a Babe from Romanies, to take from it the Heart, that they may make of it a sacrifice. Though I pray this latter report but idle gossip.” ‘

  Assefa paused. He noticed how pale Patrick had become.

  ‘Are you all right, Patrick?’

  Patrick closed his eyes, trying to blot out the image that had formed in his mind, of a naked child, his heart ripped out, lying on a table in an Irish holiday cottage, while black crows hopped sightlessly through the sullen room. When he opened his eyes again, he saw Assefa watching him, concerned.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Please, go on.’

  Assefa began to read again.

  “It is said - though I cannot vouch for it - that on occasion the Illuminati among them repair to an Island in the Lagoon, where a ruined Church is made a sort of Oratory for their Mass. But where this Island lies, or which among so many Churches now abandoned may be their Temple, I am unable to relate, having heard this by report only. Yet one that claimed to have certain knowledge of these matters, albeit he would divulge little enough of them, admonished me

  to look to the Word of God for sure counsel, and furnished me with Verses that he said would reveal all to the discerning eye.

  “Yet these seven years have I made nothing of them, though I own that the first of them is taken from the prophet Ezekiel: ‘Qui oculos habent ad videndum et non vident: which have eyes to see, and see not’. Yet, for the delectation of your Lordships and maybe the Profit of any that have sharper eyes than mine, I set them down here as a Curiosity:

  ‘ “Abscondita est ab oculis omnium viventium (Job 28:31); Ad inferna descendunt (Job 21:13); Atque abysso subjacente (Deut. 33:13); Sumentes igitur lapidem, posuerunt subter eum (Ex. 17:12); En lapis iste erit vobis in testimonium (Josh. 24:27); Quis revolvet nobis lapidem ab ostio monumenti? (Marc. 16:3); Super lapidem unum septem oculi sunt (Zech. 3:9).”’

  Assefa sighed and looked up.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure? There’s nothing more?’ Patrick felt as though all his strength had drained away.

  The priest shook his head.

  ‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘It’s the end of the section.’

  He closed the book and set it on one side. Outside, a factory hooter tore rasp-like through the oily slumber of early evening. Assefa and Patrick were sleepers, awakened suddenly to the harshness of day, yet not quite able to dispel the morbid fancies they have just been witnesses to in sleep.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  They went out that night to find somewhere to eat other than the pensione. A cab took them into the centre of Mestre, and they spent the best part of an hour wandering the rain-dulled streets in search of somewhere that did not sell hamburgers or French fries. All around them, grey apartment blocks glowered behind a constant, niggling drizzle. Patrick had never felt more miserable in his life.

  They settled on a place at last, a cramped trattoria caught helplessly between a budget furniture store and a video games arcade. As they ate, the constant sound of bleeps and roars and staccato firing rushed through the thin partition wall. The cheese on Patrick’s pizza was rubbery. Most of Assefa’s antipasti came out of a tin.

  In the midst of the twentieth century, assaulted on every side by its sights and sounds and rancid smells, they huddled over a checked tablecloth trying to solve a mystery at least seven centuries old. Patrick was certain now that Francesca was alive, that he had seen her the night before, and that she was out there even now, watching from the shadows. He had thought once that the shadow in which she dwelt was death, but now he knew that to have been a lie. The dead do not return. Whatever came back from those other, crueller shadows, it would not be Francesca.

  They ate slowly and talked of this and that, like lovers who have grown intimate yet jaded. Tragedy had brought them close, and a sense of mutual danger made elaborate what might have been a simple friendship. And yet, in reality, neither man understood much of the other or the world to which he belonged. Patrick’s scholarship was, in small measure, a link; but his Catholicism, with its frequent lapses and furious rejections, was less a bond than a barrier set between them.

  ‘Those Latin verses,’ Patrick asked. ‘Did they make any sense to you?’

  Assefa shook his head wearily.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. He did not want to talk about them, nor even think of them. ‘I suppose,’ he went on, ‘they contain some sort of eighteenth-century play on words.’

  Patrick nodded. He thought the same.

  ‘Can you translate them?’

  ‘Yes, of course. The first two are from the Book of Job: “It is hid from the eyes of all living” and “they shall go down to the grave”. The next is Deuteronomy: “and the deep that crouches beneath”. Then there was one from Exodus: “and they took a stone and put it under him”. Then Joshua: “Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto you”. The next from Mark is the only one from the New Testament: “Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?” And the last is from Zechariah: “Upon one stone are set seven eyes”.’

  Patrick slipped a wrinkled olive into his mouth and chewed on it morosely.

  ‘You’re right. None of it makes any sense.’

  Assefa took a sip of wine.

  ‘I thought this sort of thing would have been just up your street.’

  Patrick shook his head.

  ‘I worked in the field. I gathered intelligence, others made sense of it. I know almost nothing about cryptanalysis.’

  ‘Maybe it’s some sort of acrostic, using the first letters of the verses. Let’s see, that would give us AAASEQS. I don’t think that’s much use.’

  What about the first letters of the words in a single verse?’

  Well the first one from Job would read AEAOOV. That’s no help. The second reads AID. At least it means something in English. Then we’ve got AAS - that corresponds to three of the letters in the first group we came up with. The one from Exodus gives us SILPSE, which means nothing. Then ELIEVIT, which looks like Latin but isn’t. Maybe the first part refers to the prophet Elias. The one from Mark reads QRNLAOM, and Zechariah gives SLUSOS. Frankly, it’s all gibberish.’

  From next door came a round of frantic bleeping as someone’s video game reached a crescendo.

  Patrick sighed.

  ‘I think you’re right. But we’ll give it a more careful look when we get back to the pensione. At least we know it wasn’t done with the help of a computer, so in theory we don’t need one to help us unravel it.’

  ‘There is one thing, Patrick.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you noticed that, if we take the first letters of the verses we come up with seven? And the last verse refers to “seven eyes”.’

  Patrick shook his head.

  ‘Not if you include the very first one from Ezekiel.’ He put down his fork and took a sip of Pinot Nero. ‘You’re just starting to clutch at straws.’

  ‘If yo
u say so. But with Claudio and Siniscalchi dead, where do we go from here, Patrick? You say the police are looking for us. What about giving ourselves up? Maybe someone will listen to our story, start an investigation. This sort of thing would have sounded outrageous not all that many years ago; but since the P2 scandal, people in Italy are ready to believe almost anything.’

  ‘Almost anything, Assefa - but not this. Not on our say-so, not without hard evidence. And the fact that the police are interested in us shows that someone in the force is already working for these people.’

  ‘So, what do you suggest?’

  What was there to suggest? Why even bother to suggest anything? Events would take their course, whether they did anything or not. The result would be the same - death: for them, for anyone who got too close to this thing.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t know.’

  He ordered another bottle of wine. Tonight he wanted to drink as much as possible, to wipe out the bleak images that tormented him. The wine was cheap and acidic, but potent. Assefa watched detachedly as he got drunk. He himself wanted to remain sober. He feared the loss of self, however temporary, the vertigo of spirit that drunkenness entailed. Abandoning his priestly identity had not come easily to him, and in everything that happened now he found a further disjunction between reality and a growing sense of madness. He drank bottled water and listened to the machines next door acting out their own computerized fantasies.

  Afterwards, they could not find a taxi anywhere. The drizzle continued, soft and chilling, pale against the street-lamps. Patrick walked unsteadily, helped along by Assefa. They followed signs to Porto Marghera, but in reality were lost. This was the real Venice now, the future stamped in glass and ferro-concrete, blunt, sterile, unlovely, devoid of either spiritual or earthly grace. Beyond the street-lights, the drab waters of the Adriatic stood waiting for their final incursion.

  ‘Assefa,’ mumbled Patrick as they turned into yet another stretch of featureless apartment buildings,

  “what was the common element in those verses?’

  ‘Forget the verses, Patrick. They don’t mean anything.’

  Patrick staggered and caught Assefa’s arm.

  “You’re wrong. They must mean something. What’s the common element in most of them?’

  ‘I don’t know, Patrick. You tell me.’

  ‘The stone, for God’s sake. “They took a stone and put it under him”, “This stone shall be a witness for you”, “Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?”, “Upon one stone are set seven eyes”. Don’t you see, there must be some connection.’

  “You’re drunk, Patrick. It doesn’t mean a thing. Or if it does, it’s too late to find out now. Corradini had the verses for seven years and made nothing of them. Let’s try to get back to the main road. It’s not too late to get a taxi.’

  What’s the Italian for stone?’

  ‘Pietra.’

  ‘And what else?’

  Assefa shrugged.

  ‘Roccia?

  ‘No, not roccia. The name “Pietro”. Peter. And Peter in the Bible is the “rock” or the “stone”.’

  ‘I don’t see how that helps us, Patrick.’

  Patrick stopped and took Assefa hard by the shoulder.

  ‘It does. Don’t you see, it helps us all the way.’

  He said nothing more. They found a main road and waited in silence for a taxi to appear. One came past fifteen minutes later and took them back to the pensione. The fare was at least double the going rate.

  Upstairs, Patrick headed straight for the copy of Corradini, which Assefa had left on the room’s rickety table. He handed it to Assefa.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘look up the chapter on the

  Contarinis. See if there’s anything there about Pietro Contarini. He died somewhere around 870.’

  ‘Patrick, I...’

  ‘Just look it up, for God’s sake!’

  Five minutes later, Assefa had found the reference.

  ‘ “Pietro Contarini. This noble-spirited Man was the true Founder of his family’s fortune, and the Fountain-head of their prosperity. Born of noble Parents, he was trained up from youth to take his rightful place among the nobili of his Generation. It is related that, at the age of fourteen, he...’

  ‘Get to where he dies,’ Patrick interrupted impatiently.

  Assefa read on silently, scanning the lines.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘It says a bit about his final illness. Shall I read that?’

  ‘No, it’s his funeral I want.’

  ‘All right, I think that’s here. “He died at last on the thirteenth day of September in the year 869, and was accepted to the bosom of a bountiful and loving Saviour, requiescat in pace. And on the day following, his mortal Shell was taken by boat, with hundreds accompanying, to the monastery Church of San Giacomo, that in those days flourished on the island of San Vitale in Palude, which lies in the Paluda Maggiore, and is today in ruins. When, in the twelfth Century, the Church was rebuilt, Pietro’s Tomb was much enlarged by his descendants, at the same time being gilded and faced with marble. I have seen it myself, and deem it a thing of much beauty, though marvellous decayed.”’

  That night, Patrick dreamed the last of his dreams, a long and harrowing vision that seemed to have neither beginning nor end. He was alone again, in a square-shaped room draped from end to end in heavy black curtains. All round the room tall candles burned in silver sticks held on heavy tripods. That he was in the house to which the gondola had brought him, he was certain. There was a smell of damp in the air, as though the room was low down, near the level of the canal. And another smell, subtler, unidentifiable, yet somehow disturbing.

  He closed his eyes tightly, blotting out the room, telling himself it was all a hallucination brought on by something called focal epilepsy. He only had to ignore it and it would go away. He would wake up and it would have left him. And if it returned, he would have a CT scan and they would give him drugs to make it go for good. But though he sat and thought of other things and told himself he was asleep in a flea-bitten pensione in Mestre, the smell of the canal and the thinner odour it concealed persisted in his nostrils. He opened his eyes at last to see black curtains and candles that had scarcely burned down.

  Suddenly, he heard footsteps approaching. A door opened, a section of curtain was pulled aside, and a man in eighteenth-century dress entered the room. He was followed by a second and a third, then others, until the room was full. Each one, as he entered, bowed slightly towards Patrick, then moved to stand along the wall. At the end, four women came into the room, all veiled in black lace, and joined the men.

  Someone began to speak in a low voice, then others joined in, until the entire assembly spoke in unison. With mounting horror, Patrick realized that he too was speaking, his voice mingling with the others’, rising and falling in a gentle chant. At first he did not recognize the language, then, without surprise, realized it was Aramaic.

  ‘l tsbqnn’ ‘lh’ bhswk’

  ‘I tlsbqnn’ bhswk’ bry’ wbsryqwth

  ‘l t’lnn’ mr’n’ b’tr’ dy I’ bh nwhr’

  Y thsyk ynyn’

  Do not leave us, O God, in darkness.

  Do not abandon us to the outer darkness and its emptiness.

  Do not lead us, O Lord, to the place where there is no light.

  Do not close our eyes with its blackness.

  The chanting continued for about five minutes in similar vein, a long address to the Deity beseeching salvation from the terrors of the grave. And then the mood began to change. Patrick realized with dismay that he had begun to lead the incantation, speaking short verses to which the others responded. He was fully aware of what was happening, yet powerless to stop himself, as though someone else were speaking in his voice.

  Suddenly, the door opened and a man entered, leading a boy of ten or eleven by the hand. The boy was dressed in a white shift. His hair was long and tied back with a red ribbon, and
he seemed bewildered. A second man stepped forward from the congregation and took the boy’s other hand. Together, they turned him to face Patrick. The boy was trembling. Patrick stared into his eyes. He looked as though he had been drugged or hypnotized.

  The men removed the boy’s robe and set it to one side, leaving him naked and shivering. Patrick tried to protest, but all power of movement or speech had been taken from him. It was as though he was present, but in another’s body, without power over it.

  One of the men produced a rope, pulled the boy’s arms roughly behind his back, and tied him firmly by the wrists. The second man took a long silver knife from a leather satchel and handed it to Patrick. Patrick watched as his hands received the knife. For the first time he looked down. In front of him was a high marble slab, a sort of altar.

  The men raised the boy to the altar. In the room, the chanting started again. The men stepped back into the congregation, leaving Patrick at the altar with the boy.

  ‘We offer you this sacrifice,’ he intoned.

  ‘Accept what we offer in Christ’s name,” the congregation responded.

  ‘Take the life that you have given this child, and give us life eternal in return.’

  ‘Grant us eternal life with Jesus, the Everlasting Sacrifice.’

  He watched in horror as his hands raised the knife. Beneath him, the terrified child struggled against his bonds. Why did the boy not cry out? Why did the knife feel so light, so insubstantial in his hands?

  Something happened to the boy. He began to scream, loudly, in the tones of an animal at the slaughterhouse, that has seen its companions dragged to the knife’s edge. Patrick tried to close his eyes, but they would not shut. He tried to drop the knife, but it was as though it had been glued to his hand. He felt his hand move, felt the knife touch the boy’s naked flesh, felt a shiver of erotic pleasure pass through his loins, felt the appalling silence crush him as the screams cut short and blood flooded across his fingers.

  He woke out of blackness into light and looked round for Assefa. But it was still the same room, hung with black curtains, lit with candles that had almost guttered to nothing. He felt sick and dizzy. His hands were sticky. Standing, he caught sight of the altar in front of him, empty now and clean of blood. He could close and open his eyes again, control his