Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk

by Boris Akunin

  And so I had the idea of taking him with me under the guise of a nighttime promenade for the sake of the digestion. First, I thought that if I had company I would not be so frightened, and second, if Basilisk was a hallucination, the barrister would not see him. And third, if it was some kind of circus trick, a prosaic man like him would never fall for it. I deliberately did not warn my companion in advance, in order to maintain the purity of the experiment.

  And that was clearly a mistake, for which I now feel guilty.

  Everything happened exactly as it had the previous time. I deliberately seated Kubovsky with his face toward Outskirts Island and sat down with my own eyes glued to the same place. There was nobody there, nobody and nothing—there is absolutely no doubt about that. But no sooner did the moon break through the thin clouds than the familiar phantom appeared on the water and was almost immediately shrouded in a blinding radiance.

  I didn't hear any voice this time because my cynic—who was just about to dispatch a chocolate bonbon into his mouth—began yelling loudly in a wild voice and went dashing away from the spot with the most surprising agility. I could not keep up with him (oh, yes, the very instant that repulsive, deathlike chill crept across my skin, all of my determination evaporated) and I probably would not have caught up with him before the outskirts of the town if halfway there Kubovsky had not suddenly fallen flat on his face. I squatted down beside him and saw that he was wheezing and rolling his eyes, showing no desire to leap up and run on …

  He died. Not there on the road, but in the morning, in the monastery's infirmary. A cerebral hemorrhage. In other words, the Grim Reaper that the violet-eyed Faust warned him about had come calling after all.

  What do you think, Your Reverence: Who was it that killed the poor glutton—I or the Black Monk? Even if it was the monk, I am still an accomplice.

  When the infirmary monks (all wearing beards, with white coats over their black cassocks) had taken the dead man away to the ice room, I set out straightaway for Dr. Korovin's clinic and, although it was still early in the morning, I demanded an immediate meeting with this leading light of neuropsychological medicine. At first they absolutely refused to let me through without a recommendation from anyone, but you know me: if necessary, I will creep through the eye of a needle. I had two questions for the medical luminary. The first was, Is a group visual and auditory hallucination possible? The second was, Had I lost my mind?

  Korovin dealt with the second question first, and it was an hour later before he answered it. He asked me questions about my daddy and mummy and various ancestors going all the way back to my great-grandfather Pantaleimon Lentochkin, who died of alcohol poisoning. Then he shone a light into my eyes, tapped on my joints with a little hammer, and made me draw geometrical shapes. Finally he declared, “You are perfectly well, only in a state of severe, almost hysteroid fright. Well then, now I can listen to what you have to say about the hallucination.” I told him. He listened to everything very closely, nodding, and then propounded the following explanation, which at the time I found entirely satisfactory.

  “During the autumn nights here on the islands,” said Korovin, “the exceptionally high level of ozone in the air and the effect of light reflected from the surface of the water frequently give rise to various kinds of optical illusion. Sometimes, especially when the moon is shining, a black pillar can be seen moving across the lake, and a poetically or religiously inclined sensibility might well be reminded of a monk in hermit's dress. In actual fact it is merely a small waterspout.” “What?” I asked incredulously. “A waterspout, a small one, that is. It can be very localized: still air all around, but at one spot some whimsical trick of atmospheric pressure suddenly produces a flow of air, and a rather rapid one too. It can pick up fallen leaves and fine litter from the shore of the lake, swirl them around, twist them into a cone—and there you have your Black Monk. Especially if you were already expecting to see him.”

  I left the doctor feeling completely reassured, apart from my regret for the ill-fated Kubovsky but the farther I moved away from the clinic, the louder the voice of inner doubt became. What about the unearthly light? And the words that I had heard so clearly? And it couldn't possibly have been a waterspout—it had moved slowly, no more than a few paces, and its outlines had really been very distinct.

  Subsequent events confirmed that waterspouts and the ozone level in the air had nothing at all to do with the business.

  Having destroyed one life, Basilisk seemed suddenly to cast off his shackles and break free of the bounds of Lenten Spit.

  The following night he appeared to Brother Kleopa, the boatman who is the only person in New Ararat allowed to visit Basilisk's Hermitage: once a day he ferries necessities to the hermits and collects the rosary beads that they have made. That night, when Kleopa was making his way back to the monastery from some friend's house, Basilisk appeared before him just beside the monks’ graveyard. He gave the boatman a mighty shove in the chest that sent him tumbling to the ground and forbade him in a thunderous voice to take his boat to Outskirts Island, because “the place is cursed.”

  The impact of this sensational news was lessened somewhat by the general knowledge of Brother Kleopa's intemperance with regard to wine—he had been walking back to his cell tipsy on that night too. Even the eyewitness himself could not swear that he had not imagined seeing the saint. But nonetheless the rumor immediately spread throughout the whole of Canaan.

  And then, two nights after that, an event occurred that could not be doubted, one that had very grave, even tragic, consequences.

  The specter had failed to frighten Brother Kleopa, since he sailed to the hermitage by the light of day, and by the time the night came and the Black Monk appeared, he was usually already intoxicated and not afraid of anything. But there is another person who often visited the strait separating Canaan from Outskirts Island—a buoy keeper whose duties include setting out the spar buoys in the channel, which were frequently shifted by the current and the wind. This buoy keeper is not a monk, but a layman. He lives in a small log hut on the north side of Canaan, which is almost uninhabited, with his heavily pregnant young wife. Or rather, they used to live there, since now the hut stands empty.

  The day before yesterday the buoy keeper and his wife were woken by a loud knocking on the window. In the moonlight they saw a black cowl, and immediately realized who was there. Their midnight visitor shook a threatening finger at the husband and wife, who were frozen in terror, and then he drew something on the glass with that selfsame finger, making a horrible scraping sound (it turned out later that it was a cross—the old kind, with two extra crosspieces set at an angle).

  Then the specter disappeared, but the woman suffered a miscarriage because of the shock, and while her husband went running to fetch help, she bled to death. The buoy keeper told the monastery authorities about the nocturnal vision and set about making two coffins: one for his wife and the other for himself, for he said quite definitely that he did not wish to go on living. That evening he got into his boat, rowed out into open water, tied a stone around his neck, and threw himself overboard—many people on the shore saw it. They searched for the drowned man, but failed to find him, and so the second coffin remained unused.

  The town has changed beyond recognition now. That is to say, during the day it is still as populous as ever—none of the pilgrims is in any hurry to leave the island, since people's curiosity and fascination with things mystical are stronger than their prudence and fear—but by night the streets are completely deserted. Bad things are said about Basilisk's Hermitage. They say there is no place worse than one that used to be blessed, but has turned bad—whether it is an abandoned church or a defiled graveyard, and especially a hermitage intended for salvation through repentance. The opinion is gaining ground among the holy brothers and the local population that they should heed these warnings from the monastery's patron and remove the hermits from Outskirts Island—for fear of angering the Black Monk even more. />
  The archimandrite led a procession bearing icons right across Canaan and sprinkled the buoy keeper's hut with holy water, but even so, no one goes to that place now. I, by the way, have visited it (but in the morning, when the sun was shining). I have seen the notorious cross scraped on the windowpane, and even touched it with my finger.

  Please do not believe, great sorcerer Merlin, that your knight's courage has failed completely. I am ready to concede the possibility that the universe does not consist exclusively of physical matter, but this signifies not so much capitulation as a change of methodology. Apparently I shall have to doff one suit of armor and don another. But I do not intend to surrender and I am not yet asking for your help.

  Your Lancelot of the Lake

  This letter, so remarkable in every respect, produced different impressions on the three individuals consulting on it.

  “He's putting a brave face on things, but he's really scared to death,” said the bishop. “I know from my own experience how terrifying it is when the whole world is turned upside down. Only for me it was all the other way around: ever since I was a child I had believed that the world was ruled by the spirit, and when I suspected for the first time that there was no God, and nothing but matter existed, I became depressed, I had a feeling of homelessness. That was when I became a monk, in order to turn everything the right way up again.”

  “What?” said Berdichevsky, amazed. “You mean that you once had doubts like that? And I thought that …” He stopped in confusion.

  “That you were the only one?” said Mitrofanii, completing Berdichevsky's thought with a wry laugh. “And that I am full of nothing but holy certainty? No, Matvei, only the dull of intellect have nothing but holy certainty inside them; a thinking man is visited with grievous temptations and trials. It is not he who is not tempted that is blessed, but he who overcomes. The soul of a man who never doubts anything is dead.”

  “Then do you believe in all these wonders, Father?” asked Pelagia, looking up from her knitting. “In the ghost, the walking on water, and all the rest of it? That's not what you said before.”

  “What does the boy mean by changing his armor?” His Grace mused pensively as if he had not heard her. “It's not clear … Ah, how fascinating and multifarious in meaning are the ways of the Lord!”

  But Pelagia chose to express an opinion of a psychological nature: “I had assumed from the previous letter that your emissary had become infatuated with that seductive lady and forgotten about the task you set him, and that was the reason for the gap in the correspondence. But this time she is only mentioned once, in passing. I don't know if what Alexei Stepanovich writes about the specter is true, but it is absolutely clear that the young man really has suffered some extremely powerful shock. Otherwise he would never have forgotten such an attractive individual.”

  “Women always have only one thing on their minds,” the prelate said with a frown of annoyance. “You always exaggerate the extent of your influence on men. There are more mysterious riddles in the world than romantic strangers wearing veils. Oh, the boy needs to be rescued. He needs help, even if says he doesn't want it.”

  At this point Matvei Bentsionovich, who had listened to the reasoning of the bishop and his spiritual daughter with his eyebrows raised in astonishment, could hold back no longer. “Are you serious? Really, Father, I am surprised at you! Have you really taken this cock-and-bull nonsense at face value? Why, Lentochkin is pulling the wool over your eyes, making fools of you in the most shameful manner possible! Of course he has spent all these days trailing around after his ‘princess,’ and now he is inventing fairy tales to amuse himself at our expense. It's perfectly obvious! There's just one thing I can't understand—how could you, with your knowledge of people, have sent a dissolute raw youth on such a responsible mission?”

  The logic and common sense of what the assistant public prosecutor said was so clear that Mitrofanii was actually embarrassed, and although Pelagia shook her head, she made no attempt to argue.

  That was how they parted, without having made any decision, and so precious time was lost, as became clear two days later when a third letter arrived. The autumn rains had turned the roads to quagmires and the post coach was seriously delayed, so that the envelope was only delivered to the bishop as night was approaching. In spite of this, His Grace immediately sent for Berdichevsky and Pelagia.

  Alexei Stepanovich's Third Letter

  Eureka! The method has been found!

  The most difficult thing was to abandon the materialistic system of coordinates, the three-dimensionality of which is erroneous. It ignores the fourth dimension, which I shall provisionally call mystical—I am sure that in time some other, less emotional term will be found for it. But first I need to devise a system for conducting research and techniques of measurement. Modern science does not concern itself with this area at all, being completely in agreement with your adored Ecclesiastes, who said, “The crooked cannot be made straight and the nonexistent cannot be counted.” But then Galileo, the founding father of scientific progress, took a different view. He formulated the scientist's primary article of faith as follows: “Measure everything that is subject to measurement and render measurable that which is not.”

  So what is needed is to render the mystical measurable.

  Materialistic science may not acknowledge this goal, but before the Age of Reason began, there was another, magical science that attempted for centuries to quantify that which is usually called supernatural. And as far I am aware, it achieved some progress in this field of endeavor!

  It is this original premise, which I hit upon only two days ago, that has led me to the solution of the problem. I believe I have already mentioned in a letter that the monastery has a library with a collection of numerous books, old and new, on religious matters. I had been there before, passing the time for lack of anything else to do by leafing through some Spiritual Alphabet by Ioann Lestvichkin and Efrem Sirin, or the Lives of the Holy Fathers of New Ararat, but now I set about searching with a specific purpose in mind.

  And what do you think? On the second day, that is, yesterday, I found a book published in 1747, a translation from the Latin: On the Propitiation of Good Spirits and the Overcoming of Evil Spirits. When I started reading it, I was thrilled! It was exactly what I needed! The precise thing! (This coincidence, by the way, is another proof of the reality of the mystical dimension.)

  In this old book it is written in black on white: “And should an incorporeal spirit leave behind it anywhere a corporeal (that is, in modern terms, material) reminder of itself, then this sign is like a tail, by seizing which the spirit can be caught and pulled out of the incorporeal realm into this world.” I shall not relate the verbose and naïve reasoning about the fallibility of Satan—who, unlike the omnipresent Lord, sometimes makes errors, and therefore can be and should be defeated—but go straight to the heart of the matter.

  And so, if a certain essential being belonging to the mystical dimension has in its rashness left behind some substantial mark of its presence in our material world, then this physical trace can be used by someone to draw the phantom into the corporeal world perceived by our sense organs. That is the most important point!

  A little further on, several pages of the treatise are devoted to a detailed description of how to go about doing this.

  At exactly midnight, when the fourth dimension coincides with the first three, which is obviously why time is transformed at that point (that is, in the earthly sense it, as it were, stands still), you have to stand facing the sign and pronounce the words of the magical formula: “Come unholy spirit”—or “blessed spirit,” as the case requires—“to the trace that you have left, according to the agreement between Gabriel and the Evil One.” As he says this, the person summoning the spirit must be completely naked and not be wearing any rings or a cross around his neck or any other extraneous items, for at the moment of transformation even the very smallest of these becomes heavy and impedes the mo
vements of the body.

  The formula not only compels the imprudent spirit to appear immediately before his summoner, it also preserves the latter from danger. And if the spirit should, even so, attempt to take its revenge (of course, this only happens with evil spirits, and to judge from all that we know, Basilisk belongs to the category of good spirits), then it is possible to defend yourself against an attack with the simple exclamation “Credo, credo, Domine!” (I assume that the Russian “I believe, I believe, Oh Lord!” will serve as well—after all, it is not the sounds that matter, but the meaning.)

  I have a material sign—the cross drawn on the window of the buoy keeper's hut. At night there is not a soul anywhere near the place, so I shall not shock anyone with my nakedness (and anyway, I can go inside first and then get undressed). I have committed the magical formula to memory, and the prayer is not hard to remember, either.

  So let us try it—after all, nothing ventured, nothing gained. In the very worst case, I shall make myself appear a stupid blockhead, but it does not matter—I am not afraid of that.

  If it does not work, I shall carry on searching for a way to render measurable what cannot be measured.

  I shall go tonight. Think of me kindly, Father. And if anything should happen, let me be remembered occasionally in your prayers.

  Yours with love and respect,

  Alyosha Lentochkin

  Someone must go to New Ararat, and immediately—the bishop announced that that was his decision, which he had already made after careful consideration, without even giving his advisers a chance to comment. However, Berdichevsky and Pelagia seemed so perplexed that they were not really sure what to say.

  While he was waiting for them to arrive, Mitrofanii had already resolved everything for himself.

  “The boy has completely lost his way in the fog,” he said. “I repent; it is my fault. I wanted to open his spiritual eyes, but the sudden flash of light has proved too bright for him—it has blinded him completely. Alyosha must be brought back from there, forcibly if necessary—that is the first thing. And then we can get to the bottom of the miraculous happenings at New Ararat. What's required is a man with a military cast of mind: a man of determination, with no fancy ideas or superfluous imagination. You, Matvei, are not suited.”