The Book of Blood and Shadow

by Robin Wasserman

  I know your time is precious, my most loving brother, and so I will trouble you no longer with my small concerns. As always, prayers for your good health are on my lips and in my heart.

  15 November 1598 Prague.

  “She’s never mentioned this Thomas guy before,” I said. “But then, there are a lot of missing letters. I don’t understand what she’s talking about half the time.”

  “But she ends up with the other guy?” Max said.

  I nodded. She’d married Johannes in 1603 and had seven children with him, dying as the last was on its way out. Any danger posed by the mysterious “dangerous ally” was apparently nothing compared to chasing happily ever after in an era without epidurals, antibiotics, and, more to the point, birth control.

  “She did say reason was her best weapon,” Max pointed out.

  “I know.” It was my favorite part. She spent so much time in these letters obsessing about her weakness, but you could tell that, deep down, she knew she was strong.

  “Wouldn’t be very rational to ditch the wealthy lawyer for the dung beetle,” he said.

  “I know that, too, but …”

  He nodded. “But you think it’s sad.”

  Something about the way he said it—not quite patronizing, but just a little too understanding—made me feel like some cheesy-soap-opera fan craving a Thomas-Elizabeth mash-up. (Thozabeth? Elizamas?) “I get that romantic love is a modern concept and all that, and marriage back then was just a contractual agreement, so obviously it would make sense that she got together with the guy so she wouldn’t end up on the street. All I’m saying is that—” I swallowed the rest of it.

  “What?”

  “Forget it. I’ll stop now.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Ranting like a total freak about the love life of some girl who’s been dead for four hundred years.”

  Max offered up a cautious smile. “You’re here to satisfy some kind of school requirement, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And I’m here voluntarily,” he said. “On a Friday night, no less. So which of us is the freak?”

  “I guess that would be you?”

  “You calling me a freak?”

  It took me a second to be sure he was joking. And another to decide that I was actually starting to like him. Not in the Adriane kind of way. The speckled green eyes were admittedly nice, and unlike Adriane, I preferred them behind the glasses, which sharpened his blurry features. The hair, brownish blond, and nearly long enough to sweep over his eyes when he lowered his head to avoid attention, was, as she put it, acceptable. But it was also somehow beside the point.

  “What were you going to say?” he asked.

  “When?”

  He tapped the letters. “About Elizabeth.”

  He said her name like she was someone we knew who’d just stepped out for a slice of pizza but would be back in ten. “It’s just strange to read someone’s private letters,” I said. “It’s not like history, like Lincoln or Hitler or something. She’s …” I couldn’t find the words.

  “Real?”

  “I know, that sounds stupid obvious.”

  “It’s not stupid,” he said, with uncharacteristic intensity. “She is real. They all are.”

  We were quiet. Max rose and opened a window—one of the few that actually opened, as the majority were sealed stained glass, good for a flickering rainbow on a sunny day, less helpful when the ancient, clanking heaters went mad and turned the room into an oven—letting a welcome blast of air into the room. After all this time, it felt almost normal to be working in a church, maybe because the Hoff had so successfully colonized the sacred with the mundane. Giant cardboard boxes filled the empty altar, and leaning shelves crammed with books blocked several of the stained-glass panes, transforming the familiar scenes. Goliath stood tall without a David; Daniel never entered the lion’s den. The head of John the Baptist still stared up from its platter, but Salome’s pride in her offering was hidden by a shelf of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 1987 through 1991.

  Max sat down again, straightening his already neat stack of translations.

  “You guys having any luck?” I asked. “You know, with the ‘real’ work?”

  “It’s all real work.”

  “Right.”

  “No luck at all, if it makes you feel better,” he said. “Kelley’s always talking about the Book, but he’s vague. The Hoff’s convinced we’re onto something. He thinks Kelley’s about to lead us to the missing pages—you know there are twelve missing from the Book, right?”

  “He may have mentioned that about a thousand times.”

  Max smiled. I liked the way his eyebrows curled up at the edges whenever his lips did. “And we keep finding these references to something called the Lumen Dei. See anything like that from Elizabeth?”

  I shook my head, though the phrase sounded oddly familiar. “Lumen Dei. The light of God?” I said. “What is it?”

  He shrugged. “Could be anything. Kelley was a weird guy. Thought he could raise the dead, turn people into animals. Alchemy. Black magic. Good stuff.”

  He told me more—how Kelley had tramped around Europe for decades duping people into buying his magic act, how he’d teamed up with the more reputable scholar John Dee and seemingly driven the man insane, how it was said his ears had been chopped off for some long-forgotten trespass, how some believe he was imprisoned only because the Emperor wanted him to yield the secret of the philosopher’s stone, and when he refused one too many times, the Emperor had punished his loyal court alchemist with death. At this, Max took off on a tangent about the eccentric emperor and the coterie of artists, philosophers, and mystics he’d assembled in his imperial court—but then broke off abruptly, cheeks pink, perhaps suddenly realizing he’d been monologuing for a good ten minutes. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s interesting.” Listening to him was oddly comforting, like the way my father’s lectures about Roman aqueducts had once lulled me to sleep in place of bedtime stories.

  His shrug was nearly a shudder. “I highly doubt that.”

  “It really is. I swear. Substantially more interesting than property liens and marriage proposals.” I found myself irritated all over again that I’d been assigned such a total girl job.

  “It’s all important,” he insisted.

  “Just because I’m in high school doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

  “Okay, maybe none of it’s important,” he allowed. “I’ve asked around, and most people think the Hoff is a nutcase. You know he used to be the world expert on the post-Hussite era and early Czech Protestantism?”

  I decided not to admit I had no idea what he was talking about. “Really? Huh.”

  “Got obsessed with the Book right after he got here, and hasn’t worked on anything else since.”

  “It doesn’t seem like he’s working on much at all these days.”

  “Yeah, he hasn’t published for years, not even in the fringe journals. It’s like he’s just going through the motions now. I think he might have finally given up on ever finding anything. It’s sad.”

  “If you think that, what are you doing here?”

  “Well …” Max shifted in his seat. “I told him it was because I really admired his work on religious sectarianism in Rudolfine Prague and wanted to learn from the best.”

  “But really?”

  “Really, it’s almost impossible to get a good research-assistant position when you’re a freshman. So it’s either picking a professor no one else would waste their time on … or serving slop in the dining hall. And, well … want to know a secret?”

  “Always.”

  We leaned across the table, our heads nearly meeting.

  “I hate hairnets,” he whispered. Then he laughed.

  “Am I hallucinating, or did you actually just make a joke?”

  “What?” He looked wounded. “I’m funny.”

  Funny-looking, I might have shot back, if we were actually friends
. “Prove it,” I challenged him instead.

  “Uh …”

  I tapped a pencil against the table. “Tick tock.”

  “Don’t rush me! Okay. Okay, um. What did the fish do on Friday night?”

  “I don’t know, what?”

  “He went to a movie.”

  I waited for the punch line, but he just looked at me expectantly. “Well?”

  “He went to a movie,” he said again.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “See, he—wait, no, that’s it, he went to see a movie. Like s-e-a a movie. He’s a fish. Get it now?”

  The snort sputtered out of me before I could stop it.

  “See?” he said. “Funny.”

  “I think maybe that word doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

  “So … not funny?”

  “Not funny.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Let’s just say I have other skills to compensate.”

  The pause was, I suspected, more awkward than either of us had intended.

  In the silence, we heard a noise. A rustling sound, just beyond the entryway. Then a soft patter. Footsteps.

  “Chris?” I said, but quietly. “Professor Hoffpauer?”

  We both watched the dark tunnel that led into the nave, but nothing emerged from it. And its shadows were impenetrable.

  “You heard that, right?” I asked in a near whisper. “There shouldn’t be anyone in here at night.”

  Max nodded. “Maybe a janitor? Or some kind of animal?”

  We sat very still, waiting for something to confirm or deny his guess. There was nothing.

  “We should check it out,” I said.

  “Probably.”

  We didn’t move.

  “Could be those shadowy forces the Hoff is always worrying about,” Max teased, “come to steal the archive and silence the witnesses.”

  My laugh rang hollow.

  “I know,” he said. “Not funny. But like I said, I have other skills.” He stood. “This is me being brave.”

  I stood, too. “Yes, let’s bravely go catch ourselves a scary janitor. Watch out for evil mops.”

  Max gave me an appraising look. “You know, you’re not very funny, either.”

  This time, my laughter was sincere. But it didn’t make me any more eager to step into the black.

  14

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered. The nave was dark, though I was sure I’d turned on the lights when I came in. “What was that?”

  “That was my foot.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I stepped back.

  “That’s my other foot.”

  “Right.”

  We inched forward through rows of pews toward the light switch. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out the stone columns rising into shadow, and the massive cross that loomed over the altar.

  We finally made it to the opposite wall. I flicked the switch, but the church stayed dark. “Okay, that’s weird.”

  “Think the power’s out?”

  “Just here?” At the other end of the tunnel, the office light glowed.

  “Maybe a fuse blew.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  The church was silent. If there had been a janitor or a stray cat or anything else, it was gone. We were alone. The ceilings receded into the darkness, making it seem almost as if we were standing beneath a starless sky. Dim moonlight filtered in through the stained glass, but all it lit was shadows.

  “This is ridiculous,” I whispered. Then, through force of will, louder: “We’re being ridiculous.” I half expected an echo. But my words didn’t come back to me. And nothing lunged out of the darkness. It was just an empty church with a blown fuse and, worst-case scenario, a bat’s nest in the apse.

  “I never figured I’d be spending this much time in a church,” I added, just to kill the silence.

  “I used to want to be a priest,” he said.

  “What?” It was almost enough to make me forget the dark.

  “I said used to,” he said. I couldn’t see his expression. “They always seemed to have the answers.”

  “To what?”

  He paused. “I don’t know. Everything, I guess.”

  “So … you went to church a lot?” Not that there was anything wrong with that, I reminded myself. It just wasn’t something I ran into very often. My parents were half-Jewish, half-Methodist, half-Catholic, a few parts Unitarian, and all atheist—though less militant on the subject than their friends, back when they used to have friends, who would occasionally come for dinner and stay for several bottles of wine and drunken discourses on the excesses of evangelical America.

  “My parents are …” He hesitated. “Believers, let’s say. So yeah, we spent a lot of time in a lot of churches.”

  “Churches plural? Are you really supposed to shop around like that?”

  “Not shopping,” he said. “Moving. Once a year, sometimes twice. Every year a new town, new people, new school—but there was always a church, and it was always pretty much the same, you know?”

  “Sometimes you need a constant.”

  “Yeah.”

  I did know. “Why’d you move so much?”

  “My parents would say it was because of their jobs—but I think they just liked it better that way. They were always so sure that the next city, the next life, that’s where they would find what they were looking for.”

  “What were they looking for?”

  He shrugged. “What’s anyone looking for? Anyway, whatever it is, I’m starting to think it doesn’t exist.”

  I didn’t know what to say, and I waited too long to figure it out.

  “Let’s just check the locks and the front entrance and make sure everything looks okay,” he said stiffly. “Then I should get out of here. It’s late.”

  Maybe saying the wrong thing would have been better than saying nothing, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could apologize for. I inched behind him through the darkness, feeling my way toward the large wooden door at the far end of the nave and doing my best not to brush against him. Once, briefly, something feathered across the back of my hand, but if it was his finger, it was clearly an accident, and it didn’t happen again.

  “Door’s still locked,” he said, jiggling the knob. “Dead bolt’s dropped, too. Maybe we were just imagining things.”

  “I don’t think so.” I flipped open my phone to cast a beam of light at the broken pane alongside the door. The glass had given way to a jagged hole just large enough for someone’s hand to reach through, raise the dead bolt, and turn the lock. “Someone was here.”

  I shivered.

  “Could have been the wind,” Max said.

  “Why do people always say that? It’s wind. How is wind supposed to break glass?”

  “Maybe it blew a stick against the window. Or someone threw a rock. I don’t know.” He was starting to sound irritated.

  “It wasn’t the wind.” I brought the phone closer, shining its light on what I wished I hadn’t seen.

  The shards of glass were glazed with blood.

  15

  Someone had been in the church; someone had broken in.

  A homeless guy, Max suggested. An idiot bird, Chris guessed later. Adriane concluded it was someone getting an early start in the War on Christmas. The Hoff didn’t get a vote, because the Hoff never knew. We were afraid—by which I mean Chris and Max were afraid, and for whatever reason, I let them be—that the spectre of bleeding trespassers would nudge the professor into full-blown paranoia. I think about it, sometimes, what might have happened if we hadn’t kept our mouths shut.

  But we did.

  16

  Lumen Dei. Though Max didn’t ask about it again, the words stuck in my head. I associated them with that night, with noises in the dark, and bloody glass. But I knew I’d seen them before. Google turned up nothing but a few random references in Renaissance texts I’d never heard of, by people whose names hadn’t even made it into Wikipedia, much less my AP Euro textbook.
So I went back to the letters, unsure whether I wanted the answer for purposes of impressing Max or beating him.

  It was a cloudy afternoon, the kind of late-fall New England day when heavy gray skies made you start scanning the horizon for winter. Chris and Max were hunched over a copy of The Renaissance Concordia, arguing over the provenance of a reference to Machiavelli. The Hoff had actually shown up, but judging from the snores issuing from behind the latest volume of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, his presence was a technicality.

  I paged carefully through the ancient letters, not even sure what I was looking for until I found it, near the bottom of the stack.

  E. I. Westonia, Ioanni Francisco Westonio, fratri suo germano S.P.D.

  Forsitan hoc dicere blasphemia est, sed Lumen Dei non est donum divinum.

  My eye must have skimmed over the line when I was indexing the letters. By the time I translated the rest, the gray sky had purpled, and the Hoff had long since retreated to the threadbare couch. “As you were,” he’d mumbled, eyes half-closed as he traversed the distance between one napping spot and the next. “Work to be done.”

  E. J. Weston, to her brother John Francis Weston, greetings.

  It may well be blasphemy to say, but the Lumen Dei is no divine gift. The promise of untold powers, of sacred answers, of godlike abilities and ultimate truth, these are powerful temptations. But surely there is such a thing as too much sacrifice. Those who threw away their lives to stop us, who foresaw the end of the world, now have the cold satisfaction of vindication beyond the grave. For the Lumen Dei can indeed end the world. It is a gift, but like the gift of the Greeks, it disguised the enemy within.