by J. F. Penn
“True, true. The Capuchin monastery outgrew its original cemetery in the sixteenth century. The monks started bringing bodies down here and found that mysterious natural chemicals helped mummify them. It became popular with local aristocrats to have your body placed down here after death, dressed up for the occasion. People would visit the bodies and even change their clothes. If the families continued to pay, the body would stay in these upright galleries. If they stopped paying, they would be lain in the racks.” He pointed to a series of wooden racks, macabre bunk-beds with bodies stacked in them. Morgan noticed one with a rusty crown lying on an embroidered pillow, a hint of scarlet still in the robes he wore.
The Abbot led them on through more corridors and Morgan sneezed as the dust of old corpses swirled around them.
“How many bodies are down here?” Jake asked.
“Around eight thousand. We have separated them into galleries for men, women, children, virgins, priests, monks and professors. We even have the great painter Velasquez.”
“You have children here too?” Morgan said. “That must be so sad.”
“You can see for yourself,” the Abbot replied as they turned a corner into a hall with alcoves on the wall and caskets on the floor. Jake walked ahead into the room. She saw him cross himself as he walked to an open casket and looked down at a tiny skeleton still dressed in a christening robe. He bent to look more closely at the tiny body, its skeletal head turned to one side, bony thumb angled towards where the baby mouth would have been. A familiar sadness welled up inside Morgan as she thought of Elian, and of her parents. Elian had been snatched away too soon and thoughts of the children they might have had together glimmered in her mind. Death wasn’t a stranger to her. She had fought against him before and although she would keep fighting, she knew that he would eventually win, but not just yet. She turned back to the Abbot.
“Do any of the bodies have books or possessions with them?” she asked.
Jake looked around expectantly.
“There are some.” The abbot shrugged. “But not so many. Why? Is that what you’re looking for?”
“We just have some fact checking to do,” Jake said, dodging the question. “Thank you for your help. We’ll need a few hours down here if that’s OK?”
“Si figuri, don’t mention it.” The Abbot turned to leave. “You can stay down here as long as you want. I find it a peaceful place. After all, we don’t have to be afraid of the dead for they are in glory. Buonanotte. Goodnight.”
He walked away down the corridor and was soon lost in the gloom, his brown habit blending with the deep shadows.
“Are you alright?” Morgan asked Jake. His eyes were sepia in this half-light, the spark she usually saw dulled with memory. She reached out to touch his arm gently.
“These bodies. These babies.” He turned away from her. “I was in Rwanda.”
The word was enough for her to understand his emotion. It conjured images of mass graves, almost one million people massacred, even children hacked to pieces.
“I can cope with the death of grown men and women, but not children. But these little ones are so peaceful, I don’t even know why it sparked the memory. It’s such a different place to that desperate time.”
“Perhaps this proximity to death allows you to feel and express what’s usually buried,” Morgan questioned. “Perhaps it’s cathartic.”
“OK, that’s quite enough deep and meaningful discussion,” Jake said. “Let’s find this diabolical book and get out of here. This atmosphere is just a little too intense for the middle of the night. So where do we start?” He looked at Morgan. “You’re the psychologist. Where would you put the Devil’s Bible if you were trying to hide it from evil Vatican Nazi spies?”
She laughed at his hyperbole, the serious atmosphere broken.
“I’d want to hide it but I’d also want to protect it somehow. Maybe behind some kind of altar, in the hope that prayer and faith would somehow negate its energy? There are also a number of closed caskets here according to the files. We would need to check the dates on those as the Devil’s Bible was moved in the 1940s and the last mummy was put down here in 1920.”
Together they walked back along the arm of the corridor towards the main entrance hall, ready to begin the search. Their footsteps echoed through the halls, muted by the cadaverous army hanging alongside them. Thin fluorescent tubes flickered overhead as if the old electric circuits were about to give out.
“Do you believe that the curses in the Devil’s Bible could work?” Jake asked. “I’ve never seen Marietti look so scared but it just seems crazy to think mere words could turn someone into a demonic mass murderer.”
Morgan considered for a moment, then spoke with hesitation.
“The spoken word has always been considered powerful in religion. God said ‘let there be light’ and there was light. He spoke again and created the world and humanity. Then of course the Bible says that the Word of God became flesh, perhaps the ultimate example of power. In occult practices and witchcraft, the spoken word in the form of curses is what actually brings forth demonic power. To speak something into the world with intent is somehow to create it, to make it real. That’s why prayer is often spoken aloud, why converting to a faith must be professed with speech and not just in the mind.”
“Which all sounds reasonable, but turning a monk into a crazed killer with one recitation of some kind of curse. Is that even possible?”
Morgan nodded. “There are documented cases where people have died because they believed they were cursed. Such is the power of words combined with belief.”
“You’re avoiding the question, but personally, I won’t be reading anything from any book we find.” Jake grinned at her. “OK, you search down that wing and I’ll take this one. I want to get out of here as soon as possible.”
“Likewise,” Morgan said.
She turned down the corridor towards the women’s section, the white vaulted ceiling arching above her. The mummies here wore dresses with bonnets and ribbons, although the material sagged around missing torsos padded with straw. Some mummies wore gloves as if they were about to take tea and two skeletons bent their heads together as if gossiping. Virgins were distinguished with metal bands around their heads, sainted with haloes in death. Morgan looked around carefully. Each mummy stood in an alcove in the wall. There wasn’t space to hide a book there. Equally the wooden stacks of bodies weren’t deep enough to conceal the huge Codas Gigas. Morgan had read that the monastery had been bombed during the Second World War, after the book had been hidden here. There had also been a fire in 1966. Somehow the book must have escaped notice all that time so it must be well hidden. She scanned the caskets stacked on shelves above the bodies but all were too slim to contain the volume.
At the end of the corridor she spotted a simple altar. It was a long rectangle, certainly deep enough for a book to be hidden inside. With anticipation, Morgan walked over and lifted the altarpiece. Dust rose into the air and she coughed, horribly aware of what she was breathing. Pulling the drapes back gingerly, Morgan could see that the altar was just a rough wooden box set on the stone floor. It didn’t seem to be attached in any way. She knelt down and crawled around it looking for any way through the wood or for a chink to see inside. She could feel the cold, hard flagstones through her jeans and she shivered, and not just with the temperature. This place was beginning to get to her, for there were echoes of the past hiding here in dark corners, nightmares of little children locked below, their flesh decomposing over centuries. Perhaps it was unnatural, the way the physical bodies had remained so long after the soul had departed. It felt like Death’s trophy case, with bodies stolen from a world of light and life above.
Morgan shook her head. Enough morbid contemplation, she thought. She continued to feel her way around the edge of the wood until she found a little door behind the altar. It had a plaque with an inscription dated 1947. Morgan’s heart leapt. Perhaps this was the right place. The door was too sma
ll to push the Codas Gigas through but it could have been kept under here. She pulled at the tiny door. No movement. She slipped off her pack, dug out her penknife and levered the door, rattling it. The old lock broke and the door popped open. Morgan shone her torch into the space beyond. All she could see were piles of dusty prayer books, none of which could be the Codas Gigas as they were too small. It definitely wasn’t here.
Suddenly a gunshot sounded in the dark hallway behind her, echoing off the high vaulted ceilings. Instinctively, Morgan crouched low behind the altar but the sound was further away and she realized quickly that she wasn’t in immediate danger. Jake, she thought, her heart racing. Pulling her weapon from the shoulder holster, Morgan ran on light feet towards the sound, as silent mummies looked down on her with vacant eyes.
*****
Jake had dived behind a huge casket a moment before the shot came, alerted by a slight stumbling step. The bullet thunked into the hard wood of the ancient coffin, splintering it but not passing through. He pulled his gun and returned fire, a double-tap in the direction the bullet had come from. It might keep them back for a few moments, he thought, willing Morgan to return as backup. Then he saw the grenade rolling across the floor towards him. No time to stop it. There was a stone sarcophagus on the other side of the room. Jake commando-rolled over and threw himself behind it as the grenade exploded and the world went black.
*****
Morgan tried to stay silent as she ran towards the gunfire but with the explosion she gave up and just ran as fast as she could, weapon drawn. If Jake was pinned down, she had to get to him. She reached the entrance to the children’s corridor where Jake had been searching. It had seemed a small explosion but the bodies were shredded from the walls and smoke billowed from the inner crypt. Tatters of cloth fluttered down in the carnage and ravaged skeletons lay broken on the stone paving. It was a massacre of the already dead, their bodies submitted to a final reckoning, but there was no sign of the living. Where was Jake?
She was too late to catch who had done this. The perpetrators must have left immediately and her thoughts flew to the Abbot and the security guard. Would they come running at the noise? Had the Thanatos team found them already? She had to find Jake.
The smoke cleared a little as it was sucked out by the ventilation system towards the main stairwell. Morgan held her sleeve over her mouth and nose and ducked down, crawling into the crypt. Her eyes pricked with tears from the smoke but there were no billowing flames. Clearly the grenade had been a mechanism to stun rather than aimed to kill, but she still couldn’t see Jake and there was no human body amongst the mess of broken bones and ripped cloth on the floor. Then she spotted the sarcophagus, an ideal shield against the blast. It was where she would have hidden. She crawled below the smoke and saw Jake, his body wedged into the space between the wall and the stone.
“Jake, are you OK?” She shook his shoulder anxiously.
He groaned, eyelids flickering. There was a nasty slash wound on his head, a bruised bump swelling around it. It looked like some masonry had been dislodged and hit him in the blast. Blood trickled from the wound, highlighting his corkscrew scar. She pulled a sterile dressing from her pack and pressed it against his face, fingers lingering briefly on the puckered flesh as she added surgical tape to hold it in place. It would do for now. Jake was covered in slivers of bone and rags from the tattered clothing as well as fine masonry dust. Morgan almost gagged to think that they were now breathing in the bodies of these long dead children, powdered by the attack.
“I think you’re concussed. I need to get you out of here,” she said. With the smoke clearing, she was able to stand and assess how to move him. The rest of his body looked intact but with concussion he would be nauseous and dizzy. A big man, Jake was over six foot of muscle now crammed behind a stone mausoleum.
“I’m going to need your help partner,” she said.
Jake groaned again, his eyes fluttering open. He put his hand against the wall, as if to anchor himself in the physical world.
“Did you get them?” he whispered, the effort causing him to wince with pain.
“No, by the time I arrived, there was no one else here. Now we need to get you out of here. You’re going to have to shuffle back this way.”
Jake pulled himself up.
“Lean forward,” Morgan helped him around the end of the sarcophagus, appreciating the brief moment of being close to him. He coughed, a racking sound that echoed in the chamber. She passed him some water from her backpack. “How are you feeling now?”
Jake smiled with half-shut eyes.
“Like they blew me up, what do you think?”
His mocking tone reassured her. He wasn’t too badly injured if he could still be so cocky, but he looked pale and ready to vomit at any point. Concussion could have other side effects and he needed to rest.
“We still need to find that book,” Jake said. ”Did you find anything?”
“Nothing and I don’t even know where we should be looking,” Morgan glanced around the ruined room. “We’d better get out of here soon because the explosion will have attracted attention. Perhaps the Abbot is hurt as well.”
“It wasn’t a professional attempt to kill me,” Jake replied. “Perhaps more to dissuade us from our search. The shot was clumsy, and the grenade was old. I think we need to keep looking. Maybe we’re closer than we think.”
He blanched and Morgan could almost see the wave of pain rocket through him. He rubbed his head, fingers gently exploring the plastered wound. She turned away from his vulnerability, knowing she would want that courtesy from him and looked around the room. The little coffins were devastating in their size, many of them open caskets where tiny bodies now lay broken. One stood out as a newer addition to the vault and the explosion had ripped a large crack through the middle of it. It had a plaque on it, ‘Rosalia Lombardo, 1920’ and the glass top was covered in dust and debris.
Morgan used her forearm to swipe the fragments off the coffin and then gasped at the face within. For a moment she saw Gemma, her little niece, perfect face frozen in death. But then the vision cleared. It was a little girl, her skin a waxy orange-brown but still real skin. Her hair was caught back in a ponytail with an orange ribbon tied in a bow and curls were tangled on her forehead. Eyelashes lay upon perfect cheeks and a cupids’ bow mouth gave the image of a sleeping beauty, innocence captured in a glass cage. She was wrapped in sienna silk, tucked in by the loving hands of a parent.
“Jake, come and look at this. She was laid to rest in 1920. That’s the most recent burial and perhaps the one people would least notice changes to back in the 1940s.”
Jake lurched over, using the remaining coffins as support. He looked down at the little girl.
“She seems to have beaten death at least in the physical sense,” he said. “But it just doesn’t make sense to me how these bodies can look so real. There’s no life spark here, just a treated bag of skin and bones.”
Morgan was startled by his vehemence and she realized that she didn’t actually know that much about his past or what drove him in this work. There would be time for that later, she thought.
“The glass has been cracked by the explosion.” Her fingers probed a fracture in the smooth surface. “The air will destroy her perfect looks now. She’ll soon be a ghoul like the rest of them.”
Morgan followed the crack down the side of the coffin and into the base. It sat upon a dais of sorts and the explosion had dislodged it. She knelt for a better look.
“Give me a hand moving this,” she said, the body of the little girl forgotten now, collateral damage in the hunt for something far more dangerous. Jake braced himself and groaned with the pain, but he helped her to lift the coffin from the top of the raised platform and place it gently on the floor. In a hollowed out compartment beneath lay a huge rectangular shape wrapped in sackcloth.
“That’s got to be it,” Morgan said, barely suppressed excitement in her voice. “Help me get it out of there.�
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Again they lifted together, Jake grimacing as he heaved. Blood dripped down the side of his face from under the dressing. The book weighed seventy five kilos and Morgan could see the strain was increasing the pain in his head as they dropped the huge parcel on the floor with a thump. Jake leant on the wall as Morgan knelt and pulled back the sackcloth to reveal the book. Its front cover was decorated in an ornate pattern that hadn’t been clear on the images Marietti had shown them. Morgan stretched out her hand to open a clasp.
“Don’t,” Jake said, his words a sharp rebuke. She looked up at him.
“You seriously think there’s something to these curses?” she asked.
Jake was silent. Morgan could see that he was wrestling with rationality that fought hard against his spiritual side but she felt an almost palpable energy emanating from the book. It wanted her to open it and she didn’t want to resist. Taking Jake’s silence as a kind of permission, she flicked open the clasps one by one and opened the book, hefting the large wooden cover so it lay on the floor.
Hi curiosity piqued now, Jake came to kneel unsteadily next to her and together they gazed at the intricate colors of the richly illuminated pages. The initials of the first word on every page were decorated with medieval images of saints and Biblical figures. Angels and demons roamed the margins, hunting each other through the forest of pages.
“It’s beautiful,” Morgan said.
“But deadly,” Jake whispered, his voice lowered in the close air of the crypt.
“Marietti said the curses were at the back,” Morgan turned the pages over carefully in larger chunks to get to the back of the book faster. She spoke the names of the books with familiarity, “Isaiah, Zephaniah, Romans, Hebrews. Here it is…Revelation. Oh, it’s amazing.”
The chapter began with the glorious vision of Christ coming on a cloud with the whole cosmos arrayed before him. The seven lamp-stands were illuminated in real gold leaf, the seven stars of heaven in silver and a sword stood from his mouth in judgment.