Fanatics

by William Bell

  Professor Corbizzi must have been a religious man as well as a secretive one, I thought, pushing the thick manuscript into the file case. I wound the string around the paper button, then replaced each object where I had found it and rolled down the door. I locked the cupboard and swung the bookcase door into position, hearing the solid but faint click of the catch. I placed the knot back in its spot and locked the outside cupboard, then slipped the keys under the rosary in the tobacco tin I had found in the escritoire. Carrying the damaged drawer, I left the library with relief, sliding the door shut and thinking about the strange cupboard’s contents and wondering if Mrs. Stoppini knew about them.

  II

  I STOOD IN THE KITCHEN DOORWAY, the drawer in my hand, watching her crank the handle of a pasta-making machine. She hadn’t heard me come into the kitchen. Whatever contrast there was between the two of us, we both liked to cook. There she was, making fresh linguine noodles for her supper, which she would eat alone.

  She was a strange woman, with her outdated clothing-which I had assumed was a mourning outfit but now wasn’t so sure about-her formal speaking style, her old-fashioned manners which didn’t quite succeed in glossing over a stern, unyielding personality. She was lost in concentration, humming a sad tune I didn’t recognize.

  I cleared my throat, startling her.

  “Sorry. I’m just going to reset this drawer and then head off home.”

  She eyed the drawer, then looked at me.

  “It sticks,” I explained. “I can fix it in no time.”

  Her stare didn’t waver.

  “It’s what I do,” I added lamely.

  Brushing flour from her hands, she said, “That’s most kind of you, Mr. Havelock. Perhaps you’d care for a beverage before you leave.”

  I didn’t, but it would have been rude to refuse. Besides, the thought of her drudging away at her pasta machine, alone in a huge house, got to me.

  “That would be great,” I replied. “I’ll just slop a little glue on this. Won’t take ten minutes.”

  An almost-smile moved those strange red lips. “Splendid. What would you like to drink?”

  “A cappuccino would be good.”

  She frowned as if I had tracked cow flop across her kitchen floor. “In civilized countries, cappuccino is never served after twelve o’clock.”

  Well, pardon me, I thought. What a boor you must think me. Instead I said, “One of your delicious macchiatos?”

  “Very well.”

  When I returned from the shop, the sideboard had been cleared, the pasta hung on a drying rack, and the green light glowed on the espresso machine. Mrs. Stoppini drew a tiny cup of coffee, added a drop of frothed milk, and placed it on the table in front of me along with a half-dozen squares of dark chocolate on a china plate.

  She sat down with a glass of red wine.

  “Chianti?” I asked.

  “Indeed.”

  “I’m hoping Raphaella will be able to come tomorrow,” I told her.

  “I shall look forward to it.”

  “Um, Mrs. Stoppini, I want to ask you something.”

  She put down her glass, her thick dark eyebrows lifting slightly. She fixed her fish-eyes on me expectantly, her bizarrely made-up lips in a straight line.

  “I… I hope you won’t think I’m prying, or that I’m overstepping the terms of my contract…”

  The eyebrows dropped into a frown.

  “I’m aware that you made a big deal… er, point about confidentiality-”

  “Excuse my interruption, Mr. Havelock, but what-?”

  “But you stressed that you wanted a complete inventory.”

  “Do feel free to speak, Mr. Havelock,” she said impatiently.

  “Well, am I right in assuming the inventory is to include the little cupboard behind the secret door?”

  “The… I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

  “Come with me,” I said.

  Before she could object, I left the kitchen. When I pulled back the library doors she was right behind me. She stood rooted in the hallway, watching me like a puzzled crow, as if I was a demented stranger teetering on the edge of a fullblown fit. I got the keys from the escritoire, crossed the room, and stopped by the alcove.

  “You can’t see it from there,” I said. “You’ll have to come in.”

  “Very well. If you insist.”

  She drew herself up and stepped in, like a non-swimmer testing the water.

  “Farther,” I advised.

  Mrs. Stoppini advanced stiffly, craning her neck.

  I went through the elaborate process of releasing the lock. “Now watch,” I said, a little dramatically.

  The section of bookcase swung smoothly open. Behind me I heard her catch her breath. I rolled up the secret inner door. I hadn’t thought her eyes could get any bigger or protrude any farther, but they did.

  “Good gracious!” she exclaimed.

  “Take a look at what I found in here,” I said, holding back my excitement.

  Mrs. Stoppini had gone pale. She looked like she was about to dash off. “I think not, just at the moment,” she said uneasily. “Please add whatever it is to the inventory.”

  “Well, the thing is, it looks like pretty valuable stuff. Maybe you should hang on to this.”

  I tried to hand her the key. She shrank back, eyes bulging, as if the key carried a curse.

  “No, no, Mr. Havelock, if you please!”

  She fled the room as if it was on fire.

  Two

  I

  “HMM. FANATICS, EH? Catchy title. What’s the book about?”

  “I don’t know. Someone with too much zeal and too little common sense, I suppose.”

  “You didn’t read any of it.”

  “No,” I replied sheepishly.

  Only a few hours had passed since I discovered Professor Corbizzi’s secret hoard of mysteries. Raphaella and I were lounging in the living room of my house, lazy and sluggish after a big dinner with my parents, who had gone out to the bridge club.

  “And you only took, quote, ‘a quick gander’ at that thing under the glass dome on the gold cross, and you can’t say what it was.”

  “Right.”

  “And the title of the big old leather book published around five hundred years ago was in a language kind of like English but not English.”

  “Right again.”

  “Which was sort of like the language on the medal, but you’re not sure.”

  “Go to the head of the class.”

  “And the word ‘Hieronymvs’ appears on both the book and the medal, but you don’t know what it means.”

  I nodded.

  “Remind me never to hire you as a detective,” Raphaella said, lying back lazily with her head propped on the arm of the sofa and her feet in my lap.

  “I detected all kinds of stuff. I detected so many things that I almost fainted from detection exhaustion.”

  She smirked. “Poor boy. But you didn’t delve, did you?”

  “I already told you. The place gives me the shivers. And there’s more.”

  Raphaella sat up. “I knew it.”

  Beginning slowly so as not to leave out any details-I couldn’t forget them even if I wanted to-I told her the dream I had had during the thunderstorm at the Corbizzi place. The dark chamber, the black rat, the terrifying silent men at the table, the horrific torture of the man whose face I couldn’t make out in the gloom, his heart-ripping shrieks. Her face blanched when I described how they let him drop from the ceiling and how his shoulders made that sickening crack when they were dislocated.

  Raphaella had an interesting theory about dreams. She believed that most were a sort of inner conversation in sounds and images and actions. You were telling yourself something, one part of the mind explaining itself to another, without words. If you paid attention to your dream, analyzed it without expecting it to be logical or “realistic,” you could eventually understand what it was about.

  Both of us also believed th
at some dreams weren’t like these inner conversations. They originated outside the dreamer and came from another realm, as if two different realities intersected momentarily, like the past briefly overlapping the present. When Raphaella had one of her premonitions, she believed they came from outside her in the same way. We knew without saying anything that the dream I had described was this second kind.

  “Wow,” she said when I had finished my story. “Hmm.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said.

  “The bedroom was-”

  “Directly above the library alcove.”

  II

  THAT NIGHT MY ROOM was like a sauna but with nicer furniture. I had both windows open but not even a breath of air stirred the branches of the maples along the street. I read for a while, sitting up in bed, legs splayed. Eventually I gave in and threw down my novel. I cast my eye to the balcony, thinking.

  Why not? I asked myself. I had slept out there before on nights like this. It wasn’t very comfortable but it was a few degrees cooler. I swung my feet to the floor just as a car cruised slowly down Brant Street, its tuned exhausts thundering in the spaces between window-rattling thumps of a sub-woofer. I fell back onto the mattress and rolled over, giving in to a few hours of tossing and turning.

  Sometime during the night, a cool draft made sleep possible and I drifted off. I heard rusted door hinges groan in protest, the tread of heavy boots echoing off stone walls. I saw the candle on the trestle table wavering in the draft, dimly outlining the six characters in the grim drama I had witnessed in my first nightmare-the hooded men, the two jailers, the torture victim. A seventh man, this one wearing a long coat and a shapeless cap, tentatively entered the chamber, pushed the door closed, and bowed to the figures seated behind the table. He turned toward the collapsed human form on the floor.

  The prisoner’s anguished cries had ebbed to continuous sobbing. The newcomer knelt next to him, pitilessly gripped his mangled upper arm, made a small adjustment, locked his elbows, and then, deaf to the shrieks of the prisoner, threw the weight of his body behind the thrust, relocating the shoulder. He rolled the victim over and repeated the gruesome procedure on the opposite shoulder, drawing more howls of torment. Rising, he brushed dust off his knees and hands, then turned on his heel and left the cell.

  The jailers moved in and trussed up the prisoner the same way they had before. The pulley began its grisly song, halting after the prisoner’s bare feet had cleared the floor. One of the jailers left the chamber, returning immediately with a smoking bucket of red-hot coals, which he placed under the victim’s filthy, dangling feet. He knelt, took hold of the prisoner’s legs, and nodded to his partner, who gripped the rope and leaned backwards against the prisoner’s weight. Gradually, he eased off on the rope. The hanging man slowly descended. His feet went down into the bucket. Skin and fat sizzled and smoked.

  The pitiful screams and wails, the squeak of the pulley, the thrum of the rope abruptly halting the body’s fall, the sickening crack of the dislocating of shoulder joints-all amid the nauseous stench of burned flesh-mingled to form a new definition of hell.

  III

  DISEMBODIED SCREECHES coming from somewhere above drew me away from my nightmare. I lay in my bed, wincing with each sharp cry. I stared at the ceiling, focused on the cracks in the plaster, willing myself to take hold of reality.

  I looked out the window into a blue sky. Seagulls wheeled past, shrieking.

  The morning sunlight washed away some of the dread in the wake of the dream. Think about it, I told myself. Don’t run away from it this time. But what could I conclude-besides that I had seen a man tortured a second time, and that the dream told me, the way dreams do, it was the same man? I had not seen his face, but I knew. Who was he? Who were the shadowed men behind the table presiding over the atrocity? Who were the jailers who had administered the torture with the detachment of clerks stocking grocery shelves? I had no answers.

  All right, then. If not who, when and where? There were no clues as to location other than the stone construction of the damp cell. There was the smoky candle, the table’s rough-hewn planks, the men’s clothing, barely discernible in the three-quarter darkness. I recalled images of the men. Leather jerkins on the jailers, a long coat and soft hat on the man who reset the victim’s shoulders, hooded robes on the silent three. Whatever I had seen, it had happened long ago.

  And there was the method of torture.

  It was a place to start.

  But did I want to start? If I began to investigate the dream, where would it lead? Nowhere good, I was sure. But I was-morbidly, it was true-curious. I felt like a kid sticking his head into a darkened cave just to see how big the dragon is.

  MY STOMACH, still knotted by the nightmare, rebelled at the idea of breakfast, but I forced down a piece of toast and took a second cup of tea to my room and powered up my laptop. Before long my tour of online encyclopedias led me into a house of horrors offering lots of gruesomely illustrated techniques human beings have used over the centuries to inflict degradation and pain on each other.

  There seemed to be two main reasons for torture-to force a confession or to extract information. “I confess to being a witch-or unbeliever, or terrorist, or heretic” was almost always followed with “Tell us the names of other witches-or unbelievers, or terrorists, or heretics.” Politics, war, and religion were the main theatres of torture. I had assumed that torture was a thing of the past, but it was still performed. Everywhere. And, I was shocked to learn, by everyone. Even the good guys. I didn’t want to think about where the churches and prisons and army camps recruited their torturers.

  There was a grimly realistic pencil drawing of the grisly technique I had seen in my dream. It was called the strappado-Italian for “tear” or “rip.” The picture showed a woman accused of witchcraft hanging from the ceiling like a damaged moth, her arms up and behind, her feet weighed down by a heavy chain wrapped around her ankles. The strappado had been busy for centuries-in the Roman Catholic Inquisition, the Puritan Salem witch trials, the North Vietnamese prison camps in the 1970s, and today in the hunt for terrorists. The references said that the strappado was almost as “effective” as waterboarding, where the victim is tied to an inclined plank, head down, and water is poured into his mouth and nostrils, making him think he is drowning.

  I logged off in disgust before I lost what faith in humanity I had left, and called Raphaella. Her voice was like spring water on a dry throat.

  “I’ll pick you up in five,” I said. “Bring a smile with you.”

  IV

  WHEN I TURNED THE CORNER of her street, Raphaella was standing on the curb outside her house. Dressed in a mauve T-shirt and sky blue jeans, she was a bright splash of colour in a depressing morning. She climbed into the van and dumped her backpack on the floor. As I pulled away, I felt her eyes on me.

  “No good-morning kiss today?” I asked.

  “What’s happened?” was her reply. “You’re giving off vibes like a radar tower.”

  “I’m fine. Hey, you look great.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Mrs. Indeed will be impressed.”

  She continued to fix me in her gaze. “You’ve had another dream,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She nodded. “Okay,” she added, as if we had come to some kind of decision. “Anything different this time?”

  “A few more details. About the torture.”

  “Let’s stop here for a bit.”

  I slipped the van into one of the shaded parking spaces near the Champlain monument in the park. We got out and strolled to a bench on a grassy patch by the lake. Across the water to the north, Wicklow Point, densely cloaked in maples and willows, hooked into the bay like a claw.

  I told Raphaella the dream and described the research I had done.

  “So what do we know?” she began. “To me, the most significant fact is that you can’t see anyone’s face clearly, especially the four most important
characters in the story.”

  “The prisoner and the three people supervising the torture.”

  “Men,” Raphaella corrected. “They’re men. Women don’t torture.”

  I nodded. “I think the victim’s male, too, judging by his voice. And the clues point to the past. The strappado is still used, but the candle and the clothing go back centuries. Besides, in a dream you just know things, without needing a reason.”

  “Strappado. Sounds Italian. That’s what this kind of torture is called?”

  “Right. It means ripping and tearing-in this case, the shoulders.”

  “Since nobody says anything, we can’t figure out the reason for the torture,” Raphaella went on.

  “Wait! The victim does say something, but it’s like words all mixed up with cries and groans. Not in English, though. And it sounds like…” I jumped to my feet. “A prayer! I think he was praying.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Raphaella said. “But that’s good. It’s not much, but every clue helps.”

  I sat down again, shaken. “When I feel ready, I’ll go over the nightmare again. Maybe a few details will come to the surface, but I’m pretty sure there’s much more to remember.”

  Raphaella put her arm around me and laid her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelled of flowers and soap-fresh, like spring. There was a time I would have rejected the conversation we were having. What’s around us, I would have argued-the lake, the sky, those kids on the playground over there-is real. Dreams aren’t. Now I knew different.

  “I guess I’ll just have to wait,” I said, “for the third dream.”

  “You think you’ll have another?”

  “I know I will.”

  Three

  I