The Sixth Key

by Adriana Koulias

  ‘You idiots! I told you!’ the old woman wailed.

  Rahn tried to open the iron-framed door but it was jammed. Glass was falling all around them and the entire conservatory was rattling now as if the wind’s hands were about to shake it loose and take it away. He eventually managed to rattle the door open and, leaving the wreckage of the glasshouse behind them they ventured out into the gale. The wind was an animal, roaring over the trees and loosening their limbs. Dust flew into their eyes and Rahn could hardly see to take the old woman down the precarious steps to the garden. Eva went ahead to fetch the priest and Rahn toiled to get the old madame over the debris, while leaves and dead twigs fell over them, littering their path and making every step dangerous. The old woman’s dress flapped and caught around her legs and she stumbled on a twig but Rahn managed to catch her before she fell.

  Up ahead the priest was gesturing with his hat and shouting something he couldn’t hear, his cassock fluttering and ballooning. He pointed to the villa.

  By the time they reached the house the woman was exhausted to the point of being limp, and Rahn and the priest had to half carry her through an annex that looked like it had been converted into a chapel and down a corridor to a sitting room.

  Together they sat her in a large chair. She was shivering and the priest directed Eva to a flight of stairs.

  ‘There are bedrooms up there,’ he told her. ‘I’m sure you’ll find a blanket for the madame in one of the cupboards. I’ll go and fetch her some water.’

  Rahn could smell sewage, old pipes and damp. The shutters knocked at the windows and the wind whistled through cracks. He took in the room; there was a crucifix on the wall; a good reproduction of the Shepherds of Arcadia; a cold hearth; expensive carpets on the floor; and floral wallpaper. The décor was opulent for a small town like Rennes-le-Château and he thought that the house must have caused quite a stir among the citizens of the town when it was built.

  The old woman sat forward and grabbed at his arm so suddenly he jumped. She looked furtively to the door; her eyes were as sharp as nails. ‘Quickly! Before he comes back. You are German, are you sent by Hitler?’

  ‘I—’ Rahn began but she didn’t let him finish.

  ‘Watch out for that raven!’ she said, and paused, listening. Rahn could hear the sound of footsteps in the hallway. ‘Penitence, penitence – remember that!’ she said, in a quick whisper. She lay back in the chair then and closed her eyes one moment before the priest returned.

  The room had fallen into a gloom. The abbé put down the glass of water and tried the light switch. The lights came on, shivered a moment and died away. He looked a sight: cassock dishevelled and his thin hair, uncovered now, matted with sticks and dirt and leaves. He said, ‘It looks like tonight we are in darkness!’

  They placed a lit candle by the old woman and the priest promised to send someone to light a fire and to look in on her, and they left. Once in the hallway Rahn asked if there was a phone in the town. ‘Of course, we are not so old-fashioned, you know! I have one in the presbytery that you can use, if the lines aren’t down.’ And with these words he led them out into the awful afternoon.

  27

  A Friend in Need

  ‘Hell is paved with priests’ skulls’

  Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

  ‘La Dame, it’s me! I don’t have much time and I can’t talk openly,’ Rahn whispered into the phone in the hall of the presbytery while Eva kept the young priest distracted in conversation in the sitting room.

  ‘Rahn!’ La Dame sounded excited. ‘Burn my beard! Listen, you won’t believe what I’ve found out about Jean-Louis Verger! Simply the most incredulous and odd things!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Apparently he was an interdicted priest. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was under investigation by the Inquisition. That was back in 1856, but here’s the clincher: a year later he murdered the Archbishop of Paris, one Marie Auguste Dominique Sibur, in broad daylight!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes indeed! According to reports it was the only murder of its kind. It looks like Verger was an opponent of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and also wanted to put an end to celibacy for the clergy – a cause any man in his right mind can understand. But as you might guess it did not go down too well with his peers. The story goes that on the first afternoon of the novena of Saint Genevieve in January 1857, he entered a church while it was full of worshippers, and boldly walked up to the archbishop to thrust a rather long knife into his gut, crying out “Down with the goddesses!” He was found guilty, of course, but here’s the important point – the verdict was pronounced on the seventeenth of January.’

  ‘The seventeenth of January?’

  ‘Odd, isn’t it? That’s the same day as the feast day of Saint Sulpice.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at, La Dame.’

  ‘Well isn’t that the same date that’s on the notebook of that Monti fellow?’

  ‘Of course! Yes!’ Rahn remembered.

  ‘Well, at any rate he was sentenced to death but right to the end he was convinced that Napoleon was going to pardon him. I guess he was convinced that the sun rises in the west too. Now, here’s another interesting thing: have you heard of Éliphas Lévi; they called him the Magus?’

  ‘Yes, I know of him.’

  Deodat had hidden Cros’s list of priests in a book written by Éliphas Lévi.

  ‘Well, Verger met with him a year before he killed the Archbishop of Paris.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, he went to see Lévi looking for – wait for it, Rahn, are you ready? A grimoire. Yes! He wanted to conduct a magic ritual apparently, and needed one.’

  ‘Don’t tell me . . .’

  ‘I think you’ve guessed it. He was looking for The Grimoire of Pope Honorius III – Le Serpent Rouge!’

  Rahn was speechless.

  ‘Lévi couldn’t help him but Verger didn’t give up. He must have continued asking around because he found one at a bookseller in Paris.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Well, Lévi wrote a book called The Key of the Mysteries, in which the entire affair is discussed. In that book he says he discovered, long after Verger was executed, that the man had found and obtained a copy of the grimoire from an antiquarian bookseller that Lévi knew. Interestingly, the grimoire was never seen after Verger was executed, it simply disappeared. Lévi assumed that Verger must have used the grimoire to conjure demons of protection so that he could do the dastardly deed of killing the archbishop. But there’s another possibility. He may have been afraid for his life. At his trial, Verger stated that the Inquisition was out to destroy him because of something that he had in his possession and that certain people, whom he could name, were responsible for the machinations against him. Could the Church have been after that grimoire, Rahn?’

  ‘Oh, this is astounding, La Dame!’

  ‘And it gets more astounding. You know that society you asked about, the Society for the Reparation of Souls? Well, apparently Verger belonged to them . . . some refer to them as the penitents.’

  ‘What?’ Rahn caught his breath. ‘This is just too fantastic to be true!’

  ‘Yes. They were a nasty lot, dabbled in the cult of the dead – you know, graveyard services, masses for the dead, that sort of thing. Their cry was “Penitence, Penitence!” It was an order founded by a man called Joseph-Antoine Boullan, apparently a brilliant theologian. I don’t know many details except to say that Boullan began to experiment with new methods of exorcising demons. He prepared concoctions out of Eucharistic wafers mixed with excrement and urine.’

  Rahn paused: The consecrated wafers in the tabernacle . . . the Sign of the Lamb . . . so Cros had been protecting the wafers from black magic!

  ‘It’s also rumoured that Boullan made a nun pregnant and that she subsequently gave birth to a child in secret, a child Boullan is said to have summaril
y sacrificed on the high altar.’

  Rahn gasped. ‘A priest! Sacrificing his own child on an altar!’

  ‘Yes, diabolical, isn’t it? Anyway, the child was never found, nor was any incriminating evidence, but the black masses continued. To cut a long story short, Boullan was publicly disavowed during an ecclesiastical trial but His Holiness Pope Pius eventually pardoned him – after which he simply started a new order and continued as before.’

  Rahn thought this through, touching the lumps on his head as if a little delicate prodding might make his thinking clearer. ‘Saunière was involved with this order of penitents.’

  ‘Who is Saunière?’

  ‘Never mind. It looks like Monti, Crowley, the Church, the Freemasons, Lévi – everyone was after this grimoire.’

  ‘Perhaps it would be easier, Rahn, if you just told me who wasn’t after it!’

  ‘Good work, La Dame. Listen, why don’t you take a room in a little hotel outside Paris and lay low; the bill’s on me – and keep your head down.’

  ‘What for? What’s going on?’

  ‘Look, I didn’t want to tell you – something terrible has happened. Deodat was kidnapped early this morning, I think . . . at least I hope, because he has just disappeared, his house was ransacked and a man tried to kill me but someone killed him before he could finish the job. This is becoming dangerous and I would feel better if I knew you were somewhere out of the way.’

  ‘What? Are you joking? Someone tried to kill you? This isn’t funny, Rahn!’

  ‘I wish I were joking, La Dame, but to put it mildly, I’m deadly serious.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In a strange little backwater called Rennes-le-Château.’

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘This is Saunière’s village and I believe I’ll get to the bottom of this tiresome thing soon. At least I hope so – for Deodat’s sake, not to mention my own.’

  The voice at the other end of the line was nervous. ‘All right, I’ll take a room at the university, you know the number . . . call me there in a couple of hours, by then I should have an answer for you about that sign. You know what, Rahn? Seems like Cervantes was right after all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Hell must be paved with priests’ skulls!’

  28

  Another to Add to the List

  ‘What the devil’s the matter now?’

  Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Premature Burial’

  They made their way back to Madame Corfu’s house, with the wind beating its fists into their faces, both of them grateful to have a place to stay for the night. Rahn indulged in an overdue wash, a shave and a change of clothes. Afterwards, he met Eva at Madame Corfu’s table and he had to admit that she looked rather more than fetching.

  For her part, Madame Corfu was dressed in her best blue dress and fake pearls, and presided over the table, opposite her sour-faced, unshaven and scruffily clad husband. The mood was sombre and they ate in silence – a surprisingly tasty plate of mushrooms à la Languedocienne followed by a cassoulet washed down with a bottle of Carignan. Afterwards the madame served a dessert cake made of wine and they savoured it, while outside the wind whipped up a frenzy, thrashing the limbs of the trees whose woody fingernails scratched at the shuttered windows.

  The madame broke the silence. ‘This is the way it is. Some days before it blows, it is calm just like you saw today. The air is clear, dry as a stick, a dryness that makes the palms itch, and then from nowhere – it comes! And you know, it stays for days. The noise of it is so incessant it drives people mad, that’s why some call it Les Vent des Fous. Around these parts, they call it the Devil’s Wind, but I call it the Wind of Death because there is a legend that when the wind blows, someone will die,’ she said this, as if it pleased her immensely. ‘And if it storms . . . well.’ She left the rest open to their interpretation.

  Monsieur Corfu grunted. The old woman who sat opposite Rahn chewed her food with her gums, making the occasional sucking sound and drooling over her chin.

  ‘I hear that you saw Madame Dénarnaud, Saunière’s old housekeeper, this afternoon?’ the mistress broached. ‘Did she tell you anything of interest?’

  ‘Not very much, I’m afraid,’ Rahn answered evasively, rubbing a stain from his knife with a serviette.

  ‘That cagey old bird!’ She could hardly contain the malice in her voice. ‘I thought as much.’

  ‘What does she have to be cagey about?’ Eva asked, open faced, sweet.

  She is good at this, Rahn observed.

  ‘Oh! There is much! Isn’t there, Marcel?’

  ‘Just gossip!’ Monsieur Corfu dismissed, between spooning food into his mouth and chewing.

  Madame Corfu ignored him and considered her guests. There was a raised brow. ‘Did she tell you that she was the priest’s lover? Of course she didn’t . . . but it’s true. She lived with him for years. Everybody knows what they got up to, the two of them in that presbytery – together!’

  ‘In the presbytery – didn’t he live in the villa?’ Eva asked.

  ‘What? No, the villa was meant to be a home for retired priests – his circle of friends.’

  ‘Who in particular?’ Rahn asked.

  Madame Corfu regarded Rahn with a pregnant smile, full of teeth and gossip. ‘Did the old woman mention the renovations to the church?’

  ‘A little,’ Rahn said.

  ‘Did she say what the bell-ringer found?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, he hated the renovations and fussed like an old woman, tidying up after the workmen and telling them to be careful. Anyway, apparently one night he was descending the stairs from the bell room and found that one of the wooden pillars that held up the pulpit had been moved a little and that he could see inside it. There was something hidden there.’

  ‘Madame Dénarnaud told us that Saunière found something in a stone pillar under the altar,’ Rahn countered.

  ‘Oh yes, but that comes after,’ she said with relish. ‘The bell-ringer found something in one of the wooden balusters, which he handed over to Abbé Saunière. In any event, whatever it was it must have made Saunière curious because he asked the bell-ringer to help him look around the rest of the church – something about removing the altar and, as the story goes, upon doing so they found bones and other things, perhaps coins glinting in the hollow beneath the stones. Treasure? Who could say?’

  ‘But doesn’t the bell-ringer know what they found?’ Rahn asked.

  She leant forward. ‘He was immediately sent away and told to lock the church doors behind him.’ She gave a significant nod as if to say, you see?

  ‘All he found were Lourdes medallions, completely worthless, woman!’ her husband pointed out, wiping his dripping chin with his wrist. ‘You’re making a temple out of an outhouse!’

  She straightened her back, smoothing down her ample décolletage. ‘Well, Saunière may have said that what he found was worthless . . . But if so why did he continue to dig?’ She looked down at her nails. ‘Night after night.’ She stretched out her hand. ‘Knee-deep in the graveyard, digging up graves, moving the headstones, grave robbing.’ She looked at Rahn. ‘And it didn’t end until the mayor finally demanded that the Bishop of Carcassonne do something to put a stop to him and that diabolical madame.’

  ‘Madame Dénarnaud was digging in the graveyard?’ Eva asked.

  Madame Corfu drank down her wine imperiously and dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. She held their eyes, a master of suspense. Rahn had to prevent himself from smiling.

  ‘She did everything with him, if you know what I mean! Except that she didn’t go with him when he travelled – and he did a lot of travelling too! The word is, he didn’t understand what he had found and took it to some trusted friends, men of learning: Abbé Gélis of Coustassa; and Abbé Boudet of Rennes-les-Bains.’

  Rahn sat up. If he was not mistaken, these were both on Abbé Cros’s list!

  The husband glared at his
wife, and waving a piece of bread at her, said, ‘Don’t go talking nonsense!’

  Defiance shone in her eyes and she raised her double chin and pursed her lips. ‘Shut up! I’ll speak as I please!’ She turned now to her guests with a pleasant smile.‘Do you want to know what happened to Abbé Antoine Gélis?’

  Rahn felt a shiver at what her tone implied and, just like in a horror film, at that very moment, the wind howled and shook the shuttered windows, making the fire flap its arms in the hearth like a dying man.

  ‘They found him on the Day of the Dead – tomorrow it marks forty-one years. It happened in 1897.’ She leant her corpulence over her plate and looked at her audience. ‘He never left the door of the presbytery open and he only let people he knew into the house. So, whoever it was that did it, knew him.’

  The mother-in-law with no teeth burst into silent tears and reached for a napkin to dry her eyes but this only made Madame Corfu perversely determined to finish the story.

  ‘Whoever it was that did what?’ Eva asked, those dark eyes staring from beneath that fringe. It was amazing to Rahn how easily she moved from detached to vulnerable, from disinterested to full of awe.

  ‘Whoever it was that killed him of course, my dear! I know, because my aunt lives in Coustassa. She was a young woman when it happened. Apparently, he was frightened by something and took to being a hermit, refusing to leave his presbytery and barring the door to all.’

  ‘What was he afraid of?’ Rahn pushed aside his plate.

  ‘For a long time,’ she continued, ‘he was obsessed by something, he didn’t tell his family what it was but when they found his diary they saw that he had written over and over in it about having discovered something valuable. At any rate, on that fateful night someone broke into the presbytery – it was somewhere around midnight, on the cusp between All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. There was not a thing stolen, there was even money in the house left undisturbed.’ She crossed her arms. ‘The police said it was a mystery.’