The Dark Monk

by Oliver Pötzsch

  “And where now, Madame Smarty Pants?” the hangman’s daughter whispered.

  Benedikta held up her book, which had burned down about halfway. The flame guttered to the left with a thin trail of smoke.

  “The passageway to the right seems to lead out,” she said. “At least that’s where the draft is coming from, so we should—”

  She was interrupted by that shuffling, gasping sound. Now it was quite close, coming from a niche nearby. Or was it farther away? A clatter of little stones, then silence again.

  Benedikta aimed her pistol into the darkness.

  “Whoever or whatever you are, come out!” she cried. “I have a nice surprise for you here. Come and get it.”

  Someone giggled.

  Simon and the two women held their breath. The giggling echoed through the corridors, making it impossible to tell exactly where it was coming from.

  Now came the sound of shoes shuffling over stone.

  “Damn it, show your face!” Benedikta shouted. “You damn bastard, I’ll cut your balls off! Je te coupe les couilles, fils de pute!”

  Despite his fear, Simon was astonished that Benedikta could curse like a longshoreman. Where had she learned to talk that way? His thoughts were interrupted by a rasping, cracking voice coming from somewhere down the corridor.

  “The demons, Magdalena. The demons. They have taken possession of me. They…are eating…consuming me…from inside…Can you see the demons, Magdalena?”

  “Oh my God, it’s Brother Jakobus!” Magdalena whispered. “He isn’t dead yet!”

  “Or perhaps he is,” Benedikta replied. “This voice doesn’t sound like it comes from…the living.”

  Simon could smell something now, at first just a faint odor, but then growing stronger and stronger. It was the pungent smell of burning tar, an acrid stench. It came from up ahead, riding on the draft of air. Now heavy, black, billowing clouds of smoke were drifting past them like thunderheads driven by a storm, and the voice was much louder, a rush of wind descending upon them.

  “The demons, Magdalena. They…are consuming…me…Can you see them? Can you see them?”

  As he spoke the last words, a small, flickering ball appeared on their right. It was rolling toward them, faster and faster, growing larger until it finally filled the entire passageway.

  “Can you see them, Hangman’s Daughter?”

  Magdalena and the others were so terrified they couldn’t move. Too late, they noticed that the fiery ball was the blazing monk’s robe. The fire was consuming his habit, eating its way through to his body, a living torch racing toward them.

  Then, like a fiery nightmare, Brother Jakobus threw himself upon them.

  Like gravediggers, the monks pounded away with pickaxes on the chapel floor. Sweat poured down their faces as they hacked away at the floor slabs, smashing them to pieces, then digging them out with their shovels. Weathered memorial slabs, tiles decorated with crosses, inlaid mosaics—everything was pounded to rubble and tossed outside in a pile next to the church. Beneath the slabs they found nothing but dirt.

  “Keep digging!” the abbot shouted. “Perhaps it’s hidden somewhere in the ground! It has to be here!”

  Breathing heavily, the monks went to work on the hard ground. The soil was full of little stones that made digging especially difficult. Despite the icy temperature, sweat stains formed on the monks’ tunics, which were turning brown with dirt. The Premonstratensian monks groaned and moaned; they weren’t accustomed to such hard work.

  Brother Nathanael had assisted with the digging at first, but now he was standing alongside the abbot. The Dominican pointed to the pit in the ground, which got stonier as the monks continued to dig. “The medicus must have been mistaken. The cross isn’t here!”

  Frantically, Bonenmayr looked around the chapel, which appeared more and more like a pile of rubble. Where had they not yet dug? What had they forgotten? His gaze wandered to the only object not yet hacked to pieces.

  The altar.

  Brother Johannes noticed the abbot’s gaze. “Your Eminence, not the altar!” he groaned. “It’s sacred and—”

  “Stop talking and give us a hand.” Augustin Bonenmayr strode toward the large white block of stone, which was emblazoned with the relief of a simple cross. He yanked aside a dirty red velvet cloth covering the altar; then they all pushed against the stone block. The abbot gave orders in a loud voice. “One, two, three—now!”

  With a loud grinding sound, the block tipped, then fell over. A cloud of dust formed, and after it settled, Bonenmayr looked down intently.

  Bare earth.

  So exhausted that they nearly fainted, the monks collapsed on the floor.

  The abbot took a deep breath and sat down on the overturned altar. Sweat poured down over his eyeglasses so that he could only vaguely see. He removed the pince-nez and polished them.

  He had forgotten something. What?

  The solution to the riddle was correct—of that he was certain. If the solution was correct and he still couldn’t find anything at the location, it could mean only one thing:

  The place had changed.

  His gaze wandered along the vaulted ceiling. All the way at the top, in the middle, he noticed the keystone had a number inscribed on it. Putting his glasses back on, he squinted to read what it said.

  MDXI

  Augustin Bonenmayr let out a little cry and clenched his fists. How could he be so stupid? The St. John’s Chapel they were in was only built in 1511. This couldn’t be the right place. The abbot knew from studying the centuries-old monastery records that there had been a St. John’s Chapel in Steingaden before that.

  But where…?

  Bonenmayr closed his eyes and concentrated. After a while it all started coming back to him. Was it possible? Had the answer always been so close at hand?

  A smile spread across his face.

  “Put down the pickaxes!” he ordered. “We’re going to look somewhere else!” He stomped out into the darkness. “And this time we’ll find this damned cross, even if I have to burn this whole monastery to the ground!”

  Immobilized with terror, Magdalena felt Brother Jakobus throw his whole weight against her and smelled the fire that had turned his robe into a gigantic torch. Desperately, she tried to push away his burning body, but his hands held her in a tight grip down on the ground. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see how long strings of a sticky, viscous substance were dripping down on her. Brother Jakobus must have taken pitch from the buckets in the corridor and rubbed it all over his body. The crackling heat from his tunic almost caused her to faint. The monk was looking directly into her face now. Fire had burned off his hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes, and all that was left were two deranged, glowing white eyes and a black hole that had once been his mouth from which a high-pitched, almost childlike cry emanated.

  “Come back, Magdalena…!”

  Frantically, Magdalena turned her head to one side and could see Benedikta waving her pistol toward the burning monk, trying to shoot without striking Magdalena, who was still pinned beneath him. The monk’s robe had ripped apart and, in some places, was sticking to him, burning into his skin. Magdalena could feel the flames lick at her own clothing.

  A shot echoed through the corridor. The bullet ricocheted off a rock right next to Magdalena, but Jakobus didn’t let go and Magdalena could hear Benedikta cursing. The shot had missed.

  The hangman’s daughter was losing consciousness. The acrid smoke burned her lungs, and like an army of ants, a sharp pain ran down her leg where her dress had caught fire.

  Once again the black hole in his scorched face opened up. “Maria Magdalena, do not leave me! Stay with—”

  Augustine’s Confessions struck Brother Jakobus on the side of the head like a brick. Simon delivered the heavy blow with both hands, then raised the heavy book again and again, pounding the charred body, flailing away even as the book caught fire.

  A sooty, trembling hand reached up, seizing Simon’s w
rist and pulling him relentlessly to the ground. Simon stumbled, and in a flash, the burning monk had fallen upon him as well. With horror, Simon stared into the monk’s face, which had congealed into a black lump, with only the whites of his eyes still ablaze. Charred fingers gripped Simon’s neck, choking him.

  My God, how can he still be alive?

  The monk’s face came closer and closer, his hands gripping him like glowing iron bars, cutting off his breath. His eyes bulged.

  He’s killing me…A dead man is killing me…Oh my—

  Suddenly, a violent twitching ran through the monk’s body, he stared off into space and, with a last soft hissing sound like a flame being extinguished, slowly tipped over, his mouth wide open in a muted cry. Then all went silent.

  Behind the monk Magdalena stood holding in her right hand a shining silver object that dripped with blood. She looked at it with bewilderment, as if realizing only now she had stabbed the monk with it.

  “A…letter opener,” she said finally. “I took it from the library, thinking I might sometime be able to…use it.” She threw it to the ground and ran her hands down her soot-stained dress.

  Coughing, Simon stood up and eyed her. The hem of her skirt was torn, holes were burned into her bodice, and her thick black hair was singed in places. Her whole body trembled as she stared off into space. But then she seemed to pull herself together. Simon was proud to be in love with this girl.

  She’s a real Kuisl, he thought, and nobody’s ever going to intimidate her.

  Magdalena kicked aside the charred mass that had once been Brother Jakobus. “He had some illness that slowly made him lose his mind,” she whispered. “What a horrible way to die…”

  “Not any worse than what your father will do to me and the medicus when he burns us at the stake for desecration of holy relics,” Benedikta said. “Now let’s move along.”

  They were still standing at the intersection of the tunnels. Simon looked around in every direction. “Where shall we go?” he asked.

  Benedikta looked to the right, thinking it over. “This monk brought Magdalena something to eat and drink from the monastery every day. Certainly, he was trying to flee there now as well, but changed his mind. So let’s turn right.”

  They followed her through the narrow passageway. This led gradually upward, and they were soon standing before a huge wooden door.

  Benedikta grinned and bowed slightly. “Voilà, the entrance to the monastery!” Then she pressed the door handle down.

  It was locked.

  She shook it a few times and finally pushed against it with all her weight. The door creaked and shook, but it wouldn’t open.

  “Are you crazy?” Simon hissed. “You’ll wake up everyone in the monastery!”

  Benedikta looked at him angrily. “Is that so? Do you have better idea of how to get out of here?”

  “Let’s first have a look at the other passageway,” Magdalena interjected. “We can always come back here and try to beat the door down.”

  Benedikta nodded. “Not a bad suggestion, Little Hangman’s Girl. Let’s go!”

  They ran back down the corridor to the intersection and took the other tunnel. In contrast to the first, this one had a low ceiling and seemed to go on and on through the darkness. Simon still could not bring himself to set fire to any of these books. Destroying the Confessions was his limit. And so he followed the two women, who lit the way with the burning parchment pages. If he’d looked closer, he would have seen that Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas had just gone up in flames, but he really didn’t want to know about that.

  Finally, the corridor ended at a low door with rusty metal fittings. It looked much older than the door at the end of the other corridor. The door handle and lock were tarnished, and it seemed they hadn’t been used in years.

  “Well?” Benedikta asked, with a gesture inviting Simon to have a look for himself. “Would you like to try your luck this time?”

  That was when they heard voices and the sound of someone approaching from the other side of the door.

  The theater stood directly on the eastern wall surrounding the monastery complex. It was not yet complete, but it was easy to imagine how it would look some day. At the corners of the second story, gargoyles with demonic faces looked down from tower-like oriel windows. Above the main entrance was the monastery’s coat of arms along with a relief of the comic and tragic masks.

  Augustin Bonenmayr walked with such long, quick strides toward the building that the monks had difficulty keeping up. The theater was one of his most ambitious projects, one he had worked on a long time in order to gain the acceptance of his colleagues. Just like the Jesuits, the Steingaden abbot wanted to win converts to the true belief with light, music, and colorful scenery. The theater was a divine weapon in the struggle against the austere reformation, which was hostile to sensual feelings. It took a lot of imagination to realize Bonenmayr’s dream of the divine theater.

  Without slowing his pace, the abbot pushed open the double doors to the playhouse. The torches that the monks carried bathed the auditorium in a dim light; shadows danced over the bare walls and balconies. In front was a stage, almost ten feet high and constructed from spruce, and in front of that a deep orchestra pit opened up. In place of scenery, bundles of cloth and piles of boards lay around, and ropes and pulleys dangled from the unfinished ceiling.

  Augustin Bonenmayr turned to his cohorts as he hurried up the narrow steps to the stage. “Faster! Good Lord, faster! We’re almost there.”

  The abbot pushed aside a bundle of cloth and stepped to the middle of the stage, onto a wooden square in the floor, almost invisible from the auditorium. Then he pointed to one of the pulleys on the wall.

  “The lever on the right!” he called out to Brother Johannes. “Pull it and lower the rope slowly.”

  As the others joined him on the square, Brother Johannes let out the rope, and the rattling, creaking platform moved downward.

  “A trapdoor where the devil, the angels, or even the Savior himself can appear, or vanish,” Bonenmayr explained to Brother Nathanael, who looked around approvingly. A dreamy look came over the abbot’s face. “I’ve had pulleys installed everywhere. There will be scenery, curtains that can be rolled up and down, and even a cloud-making machine! Soon people will go out into the world after a performance here with the feeling they’ve met God! Paradise on earth, so to speak! Ecce homo, we are here…”

  With a grinding sound, the platform came to rest on the stone floor of the cellar. The dark room they found themselves in seemed to encompass many niches and corners. Columns set at regular intervals supported the low ceiling, and weathered memorial slabs covered the walls and floor. The actual size of the vault was hard to estimate, as it was filled with moldy boxes, shelves, and trunks. A rotting statue of Mary leaned against the wall next to a pulley, and stone cherubs and gargoyles lay strewn around on the floor, worn by time, weather, and pigeon droppings. In the midst of all this were a few strange apparatuses whose functions were not immediately clear.

  “We found this cellar during the construction on the playhouse,” Bonenmayr said as Brother Lothar handed him a torch. “An old vaulted cellar that probably served as a hiding place during the Great War and was then forgotten. At first I thought about moving the graves to the cemetery and sealing the cellar up, but then I thought I could use it for the stage machinery and as a storeroom for the costumes. And now…” He stepped over to a grave marker. Running his hand over it, he whispered, “I feel we’ve almost reached our goal.”

  “And you think this is the old Saint John’s Chapel?” Brother Nathanael asked skeptically. “How can you be so sure? The Steingaden Monastery is ancient, and this could just as well be any other forgotten crypt.”

  The abbot shook his head and pointed at the grave markers. “Just look at the inscriptions!” he whispered. “These are the graves of abbots and other religious dignitaries connected to the monastery. I’ve already taken a closer look at the dates of de
ath, and the most recent entry is dated 1503. And the Saint John’s Chapel alongside the church was not built until 1511—that’s just eight years later. That can’t be a coincidence! I’m certain we’re standing in the crypt of the former Saint John’s Chapel. In the years that war was raging in this country, it was simply forgotten.” He started tapping on the grave slabs. “Now we must just find the entrance to the hiding place. I suggest—”

  There was a soft creaking sound overhead, and the abbot stopped to listen. Then a thud followed, as if a heavy sack had fallen to the floor.

  “Brother Johannes!” Bonenmayr cried out. “What in the world are you doing up there?”

  The monk up above did not answer.

  “Damn it, Johannes, I asked you a question!”

  Again, silence.

  The abbot turned to Brother Nathanael. “Please go up there and see what’s going on. We have no time for such childish nonsense.”

  Nathanael nodded, clenching his dagger between his teeth, and climbed up the pulley rope to the stage.

  Bonenmayr now inspected the plaques more closely. The reliefs depicted skulls, crossbones, occasionally a monk with his eyes closed and arms crossed, and Roman numerals indicating the year of death in each case.

  Bonenmayr suddenly stopped in front of an especially weathered plaque.

  “It’s strange, but I’ve never seen this inscription before,” he said, tapping his slender fingers against the plaque. “I have never heard of an abbot by this name.” He bent down and examined the name again through his pince-nez. “And the dates can’t be right, either.”

  He wiped the dust from the inscription so that the letters beneath the crossbones were easily legible.

  H. Turris. CCXI.

  “What does that mean?” Bonenmayr murmured. “Perhaps an honorable Horazio Turris, born 211 in the Year of Our Lord? A Roman officer who found his last resting place here?”

  Brother Lothar nodded obsequiously. “It’s just like you said, Your Eminence.”