by F. G. Cottam
They were the Most Holy Order of St. John’s Gospel. They were The Sacred Keepers of the Gate. They had been established by the first pontiff only months before Peter the Fisherman was tried and crucified by the Romans. Their formation had been his direct response on first hearing the Lazarus prophecy from the mouth of Lazarus himself.
Their power had been formidable and their mission secret until a meddler from Rome in the purple of a cardinal had dispatched a papal edict eight weeks earlier. It had ordered them to stop performing rituals considered blasphemous by a revisionist Church skeptical about the reality of hell. The message Philip was decoding from Morse was, he believed, spelling out to him the consequences of that.
Philip switched off the transmitter with a sigh. He gathered his jottings from the table. He descended to the cellar and switched off the generator. The cellar was spacious with a vaulted ceiling, lit by candles feeble and guttering this late in the evening. They were not profligate, the brothers, in the burning of wax. It was almost silent down there with the thump of the generator stilled. He could hear the candle flames tear at their wicks for life, dying furiously. It was cold enough to see his breaths plume in front of his face.
There were two cellar doors. There was the plain one through which he had entered and there was another set in the opposite wall, altogether more substantial. It was eight feet high and its oak planks were iron bound and inscriptions in Latin had been carved precisely into the wood by a craftsman using a hand chisel at the time of the Great Plague that had witnessed half the world perish.
Philip sighed again. He climbed the steps wearily and walked stone corridors until he reached the room in which they had hosted an imperious priest days earlier he didn’t yet know was dead. He opened the door to the spiral of stairs leading to the library. He trudged upward and opened the unlocked library door and joined Stephen and Dominic at the table at the centre of the room.
There were three chairs. They had taken two away to highlight to their recent visitor the urgency of occupying the remaining chair. The ploy hadn’t worked. He had been anxious only to get away. Courtesy had not been a priority. Neither had reading the proof with which they had provided him. Philip didn’t think it mattered very much anymore. There were three chairs now and he sat on his and said, ‘It is exactly as we feared.’
Stephen and Dominic crossed themselves. Dominic said, ‘Where?’
‘London,’ Philip said.
‘We’ll have to make sure,’ Stephen said.
‘It’s him,’ Philip said. ‘All the hallmarks are there, the butchery, the boasting.’
‘The blasphemy,’ Dominic said.
‘The elusiveness, too,’ Stephen said, ‘if it’s him. But we have to be certain.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Dominic said.
‘No, brother,’ Stephen said. ‘The last time you went down he came very close to tricking you. I’ll go and God deliver me from peril.’
‘Amen,’ his brothers said. And his chair legs scraped on the floor as he pushed himself to his feet for the task.
He paused at the cellar door marked by the Latin inscriptions. He wore a silver crucifix and a vial of holy water from the spring at Lourdes. On a thin chain around his neck there was a glass cylinder containing a tiny sliver of wood. The provenance was assured. It was as likely an authentic relic of the True Cross as any in the world.
Brother Stephen had felt the strength of his calling at the age of eight. It had been overwhelming in its force and he had never endured a moment of doubt to weaken the conviction of his faith. But he felt as well-protected by the holy artifacts he carried as he thought he might by charms won at a fair and blessed with gypsy luck. Only the rituals could really protect them, only the strength of the vigil. And they had abandoned those on Rome’s orders eight weeks earlier.
There were ten flights of stone steps leading down to his destination. They had been cut for the purpose from the rock on which their refuge stood. Everything beyond the carved door had been tunneled and shaped and smoothed from mountain granite.
Their home had been variously described down the centuries. To the ignorant it was a monastery or a keep. They themselves always referred to it as the priory. Really it was nothing more than a prison. If they were The Sacred Keepers of the Gate, it was an exalted title because they were essentially God’s jailers. It would have been a humble calling, were it not for the singular nature of those prisoners their order had been established to confine.
Ten flights meant nine returns and each flight was of nine steps and the numbers were significant. The poet Dante might have smiled, flattered, Stephen thought, who though that actually Dante would have more likely screamed and fled.
Stephen began his descent. He did so with nothing more than a lit taper to illuminate his way. He had descended no more than four or five steps, had not even achieved the first flight, when dread began its crepuscular, defeating spread over his body and through his spirit. Gooseflesh erupted on his arms and back and his mouth dried as though he had swallowed brittle straw. He felt his eyeballs strain as the skin around them shrank with ungovernable fear.
The way to take the descent was incrementally. You ignored the watery weakening of your limbs. The jitter in the legs did not mean they would betray your weight, it only felt as though they might. Man was designed to walk. Walking down steps was a motor skill. Gravity assisted you. It was not difficult. Infant children mastered and accomplished it with ease.
Five flights, halfway down, ‘Jesus, give me strength,’ Brother Stephen said. And he listened for something from below, for some scornful retort or stir of movement antic and alert to his approach. But there was nothing, only silence and stillness as tense in the darkness below him as the springs of a baited mantrap.
He was sweating and shivering simultaneously. The sweat was an excretion of terror, sour and simple. It chilled instantly inside his dampened habit. The brothers were inured to cold generally but the cold here was specific to the place and was extreme. A shudder cavorted through his old bones and the teeth still remaining in his skull chattered. He didn’t feel at all the master of himself.
He reached the final flight. There was always the thought that it really might be final, that this visit was a provocation too far, that a single trivial act of carelessness might finally prove your undoing.
And there was the smell. The odour was subtle and all the more disturbing for its delicacy. A reek of corruption would have been more fitting, the stink of sulphur or potash, the singe of hair or smelt of hot iron on flesh. But there was none of that. This was sly and insinuating. It was old fashioned and genteel. It was but the merest hint only of camphor oil and lavender water.
He was there. The door facing him was massive. It was iron and eight feet high and six across. It sat in a wall hewn roughly from the rock, but its lintel was smooth and it fitted its frame so snugly that no chink of light or darkness from beyond the door escaped its edges. At its centre an elaborate bronze relief extended outwards.
Stephen stood and waited and listened. The only sounds he could hear were his own breathing and the faint crackle of the burning taper wick. He closed his eyes. His ears strained. He could feel the hairs erect on his arms and at the nape of his neck as the sixth sense he couldn’t deny screamed dumb warnings about how dangerous a place he had chosen to come to.
He waited for several endless minutes. His taper had started long but had burned down to only about five inches. It was never silent down here. He was never silent, was he? Philip sighed. He reached for the key attached to the rope worn about his waist. He fumbled it into the lock on the second attempt and it ground through the plates of a mechanism stiff with lack of use as he babbled a wordless prayer.
The door swung inwards on balanced hinges. It moved with a gentle prod despite its enormous weight. There was darkness beyond. Stephen extended his taper and the tremor in his hand made light caper across the interior detail of the cell. The dread he felt was almost overwhelming now. He waited
for the deep, mirthless chuckle that would signal the trap sprung. It didn’t come.
There was a heap of clothing on the floor. He couldn’t bring himself to touch it. He kicked the pile and a bowler hat skittered and wheeled across the floor. He glimpsed a buttoned boot and grey spats still spotted and streaked with old stains. There was a brocade waistcoat and a caped mackintosh of the type he remembered was called an ulster. The ulster, like the spats, was spotted with stains. The stains appeared black in the limited light. They had endured a long time.
He could hear something inside the cell. It was insistent and naggingly familiar and quite faint. He raised the taper and noticed that something hung and glimmered from a hook on the wall. When he approached the object he saw that it was a gold pocket watch suspended from a gold fob chain. He reached out with his free hand and cradled the polished weight of the watch in his palm.
The mechanism was ticking strongly and its hands showed the correct time. The maker’s name was scrolled across the lower section of the face. The words there were daintily picked out in black against white enamel. They read; Bravingtons of London. He imagined they were a once distinguished jewelers. They could not, however skilled, have crafted a watch capable of ticking on eternally. Yet he suspected this one might.
The missive from the Scholar wasn’t notice of another killing for them to discover and investigate and clean up after and alert distraught nearest and dearest to. And Jane Sullivan felt quite grateful for that. Neither was it some obscure biblical reference couched in an ancient tongue for Professor Carter to translate and for Jacob Prior to subsequently puzzle over.
Jane knew what it was without the assistance of experts. It was the first verse of a once popular song from a West End musical. It dated not from the Whitechapel killer’s short season of butchery, but from the 1930s. He’d sent it, though. It was the Scholar’s handiwork. They hadn’t shared with the press his predilection for cutting and pasting the notes he delivered them by hand.
She read it again:
Lambeth you’ve never seen,
The sky ain’t blue, the grass ain’t green,
It hasn’t got the Mayfair touch,
But that don’t matter very much.
We play the Lambeth Way,
Not like you but a bit more gay
And when we have a bit of fun
Oh, Boy.
He’d had his bit of fun in Lambeth with Julie Longmuir, but she didn’t think that was what he meant. The Mayfair touch was of course a reference to his first two victims, the high-class call girls he’d killed there at the start, well before the notoriety newly given him by the Longmuir murder. The title of the musical from which the song was taken was ‘Me and My Girl’. The significance of that reference was as obvious as it was tasteless.
Jane lived in Lambeth. She lived in Brooke Drive, off Kennington Road and neighbouring at its southern end the grounds of the Imperial War Museum. He was telling her he knew this. The claim that she’d never seen Lambeth was a puzzle, but she took that to mean that she had never seen it in the particular way he had. This was certainly true. The Scholar’s perspective was very different from that of the average person. He interpreted things quite uniquely.
It was a threat. But it was a playful threat. He hadn’t made it in anger and he wouldn’t attempt to act upon it, she didn’t think, for a while, at least. She’d been recently instrumental in publicizing his accomplishments. That was how he’d become aware of her. And if he wouldn’t be grateful for her part in making him famous, he’d certainly see the value in allowing her to continue to do so.
She thought that was true at least for the present. The situation could change. But for now he probably had other more high profile targets to concentrate on. She just wished she had some way to predict them. Jane was painfully aware that in a city of 9 million people, a killer as clever and careful as the Scholar was proving to be was horribly spoiled for choice. And there was his enthusiasm to take into account, the gleeful way he went about his business. He hadn’t come close to completing the task he’d set himself. He’d told them in so many biblical phrases that his work had only just begun.
And when we have a bit of fun,
Oh, Boy.
Chapter Four
‘There will be a note,’ Brother Philip said. ‘It would be uncharacteristic for him to have left without leaving us something to remember him by.’
‘He could have killed us,’ Stephen said.
‘It’s inexplicable that he didn’t,’ Dominic said.
‘He will have explained his motives for having left us alive in the note,’ Philip said. ‘He likes always to have the last word.’
‘He’s won,’ Dominic said.
‘He’s escaped us, for now,’ Philip said. ‘He has won nothing of significance yet.’
‘We’re but three elderly men,’ Stephen said.
‘With allies,’ Philip said, who was thinking of the vain priest whose cardinal had denuded them of power. ‘We have acolytes. We have influence. We have agents in the most important cities in the world. God’s soldiers serve us with loyalty and discretion in those places. London is no exception.’
Dominic said, ‘What did the London agent tell you?’
‘Beyond the fact of the killings there, he told me that a mountain guide was found dead just over seven weeks ago in our locality. He’d been mapping a route for his high summer holiday clients. He left a wife and four young children. He was discovered naked and eviscerated.’
‘Our charge left here naked,’ Stephen said.
Philip said, ‘And he wasted no time, apparently, in finding some practical clothing in which to attire himself.’
‘I shall go back down and look for his note,’ Stephen said.
‘I will save you the journey, brother,’ Dominic said.
‘If it’s there, not seeing it was remiss of me,’ Stephen said. ‘Retrieving it is my task to fulfill.’
‘We should have defied the cardinal,’ Philip said. ‘We could have lied to his priest. Flattery would have blinded such a vain man to our deception.’
‘If we’d defied the edict we’d have paid with our souls,’ Dominic said.
‘A small price,’ Philip said, ‘compared to what our obedience is likely to cost.’
He found it in the hat band of the bowler in the strong flame of a fresh taper that no longer trembled when he held it out before him. Fear had blinded him to it on his earlier visit. It was a piece of shirting folded over and a name had been written neatly on the cloth face of it. Calligraphy had been one of their prisoner’s skills. They had not provided him with the encouragement of ink. The writing had been done in saliva and grime or perhaps in blood which had congealed blackly. Stephen did not know which of those was the more distasteful. The name on the shirting was his.
He heard the thump of their generator as he took the ninth return and ascended the final flight of granite steps. He knew that Philip would be communicating with their London brother, Peter, once again.
He regained the library and placed the fold of shirting on the table top and sat with Dominic for the tense twenty minutes it took for the leader of their pitifully depleted order to return to them for the task of a further inventory of their failure.
‘Father Cantrell is dead,’ Philip said, when he came palely into the room. ‘Brother Peter saw an obituary this morning. Rome has lavished praise on a rising star. The cardinal is said to be distraught at the loss of his protégé.’
‘He was a human peacock,’ Stephen said. ‘A spell in purgatory will give his display of feathers the singeing they deserve.’
‘He should be hell-bound, for what he’s helped undo,’ Dominic said.
‘We should blame only ourselves,’ Philip said. ‘We should despise our cowardice and do all we can to make recompense.’
He reached for the fold of shirt cloth on the table. Stephen reached out and stayed his hand. ‘It’s addressed directly to me,’ he said. ‘I shall read its contents al
oud.’ He cleared his throat. Until eight weeks earlier, his part in the vigil had given his voice the daily exercise of spoken prayer. It had weakened since with neglect. He was still breathless from his double ordeal in the empty cell and the twice endured exertion of the climb back from it. But he would find the strength within him for this recital.
Stephen picked up the fabric note and shook it out. He saw that the words written on one side of it were in Church Latin. It was a language in which the three of them were fluent. It was too a final blasphemous slight from their departed guest.
I knew it would be you, Stephen. Philip the onanist has demurred, doubting his soul is in a state of grace sufficient for the challenge. He is right in fearing this. Neither you nor Philip trusted the dullard Dominic, so it is you, and I wish in a sense I was there still to greet you fittingly in the home your brotherhood so thoughtfully provided for me.
Killing you was a temptation and temptation is almost always most wisely indulged. I decided though that for the time remaining to you, you should be permitted to ponder on the futility of your calling and the utter waste my flight from here makes of your dreary lives.
You have failed in the one task to which you were wholly dedicated. The totality of that failure will soon be proven to you by events I shall orchestrate elsewhere. The Prophecy shall come to pass. My father is impatient and mankind has waited long enough.
During my brief foray into the world as Edmund Caul, I lived without full knowledge of my true nature or purpose. You have gifted me with the time to ponder and mature. I leave everything of Caul behind. The clue his name provided is one I long ago worked out. I know now who and what I am. And you have succeeded only in making me impatient to fulfill myself.
‘Pernicious lies,’ Stephen said, dropping the fabric back onto the table top, where it lay displaying its message, where the finesse with which the words had been written appeared both a taunt and a rebuke.
‘No sin is secret before God,’ Philip said, his head bowed to conceal his shame. ‘I apologize to both of you for my weakness.’