The Midnight Man

by Paul Doherty

  Stephen, holding a sponge soaked in vinegar against his nose, went and sat on one of the battered benches. This was a truly evil place. The atmosphere oppressed him. Cries, despairing and pleading, pestered his ears. A feathery shadow crept across the floor, spilling over him, creating a wave of deep fear and panic. A haggard face came shooting out of the murk, its bone-white features twisted in an angry snarl, bloodshot eyes full of some nameless fury.

  ‘Stephen, Stephen?’

  The novice shook his head. Anselm stood, beckoning him. The cell door was now flung back. The turnkey had dragged out a shambling figure loaded with iron fetters, barefooted and dressed in the long black gown of the condemned. He was virtually unrecognizable, his head and face being hidden by a mass of tangled hair, moustache and beard. The turnkey pushed the prisoner down a passageway. Beauchamp told Holyinnocent to stay while he and the two Carmelites followed the turnkey along the slime-covered passageway, up a short flight of steps into a surprisingly clean, neat chamber. The walls were painted a brilliant white and a crucifix hung beneath the barred windows high in the wall. There was a sturdy table with benches on all four sides. The turnkey lit the fat tallow candle in the centre of the table and left. Beauchamp made sure the entrance was free of eavesdropping, slammed the door shut and, going across, pushed the prisoner down on a stool.

  ‘This is the chaplain’s room,’ Anselm explained. ‘I insisted it be fashioned like this. I used to come here to shrive the condemned. Are you condemned?’ Anselm sat down close to the prisoner. All Stephen could glimpse were the man’s bright, smiling eyes.

  ‘This is another kind of shriving,’ Beauchamp murmured. ‘Everything will be in a whisper. Brothers, may I introduce Roger Bolingbrok, former Dominican friar, also known as William Chattle, Peter Waltham and so on and so on. One of my most redoubtable spies or Judas men. Isn’t that right, Roger?’

  The prisoner smiled in a flash of white teeth, lifting his manacled hands to clear the hair from his face.

  ‘I cannot show you any mercy.’ Beauchamp’s voice was barely above a whisper. ‘At least not now.’

  ‘Will he hang?’ Stephen asked.

  The prisoner grinned and winked at the novice.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Beauchamp replied. ‘Tomorrow a writ will arrive which confirms Master Bolingbrok’s claim to be a cleric. He will be handed over to the Church, tried before an ecclesiastical tribunal at Lambeth and exiled to some monastery in the wilds of Northumberland. He will be shaved, bathed and given fresh clothes for the journey. He will travel no further north than Saint Albans, where Master Bolingbrok will escape to reappear in London under another guise. Now,’ Beauchamp became brisk. ‘Brother Anselm, Brother Stephen, I have made reference to the Midnight Man’s exploits in the cemetery of Saint Michael’s. How his black Mass and dark rites went so wrong he had to flee.’

  ‘Were you there?’ Anselm asked the prisoner.

  ‘No, but Rishanger was.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘As I told Sir Miles when I was first taken up,’ Bolingbrok explained, voice all cultured, ‘I was condemned and thrown into the common hold before being moved,’ Bolingbrok grinned, ‘to a more comfortable chamber. People regard a condemned man as already dead so they chatter as if you are. The villains of Newgate know all about Rishanger. He was a thief, a receiver of stolen property. He also had a nasty reputation as a warlock. He tried to buy safe passage abroad without a licence. He told a Gascon sailor what had happened at Saint Michael’s – how he had been a spectator of something which had gone horribly wrong.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He didn’t say, except that a notorious warlock had tried to raise the spirit of a dead man but instead summoned up all the powers of hell.’

  ‘Why should Rishanger tell that to a Gascon sailor?’ Stephen queried.

  ‘Oh, that is easy enough, isn’t it, Sir Miles?’ Anselm replied. ‘To leave England without proper licence, especially for a goldsmith, is very dangerous and just as much for the captain of any ship.’

  ‘Rishanger daren’t lie.’ Bolingbrok moved in a clatter of chains, his rags exuding an odious smell. ‘He couldn’t point to some petty misdemeanour to explain his flight so he told the truth, as far as he could. Not that he was a member of a coven – merely an observer.’

  ‘Which is why,’ Anselm broke in, ‘when Rishanger was attacked at Queenhithe, the captain of the cog refused to help any further.’

  ‘True,’ Bolingbrok agreed. ‘Safe, quiet, illegal passage is one thing, sword and dagger play on one of London’s wharfs is another. Rishanger paid heavily for that passage in more ways than one.’

  ‘And since then,’ Beauchamp asked, ‘what else have you discovered mingling amongst the dead men?’

  ‘The assassins who attacked Rishanger, who may have killed his mistress, though Rishanger himself could have done that, must be members of the Midnight Man’s coven. No one knows anything.’ Bolingbrok licked dry, cracked lips. ‘You will be out of here soon enough,’ Beauchamp soothed, ‘eating and drinking merrily.’

  ‘Rishanger,’ Bolingbrok explained, ‘was attacked at Queenhithe. He fled along the river to be murdered in the King’s own abbey. Rumours abound of a great treasure being found with him. Such news runs like flame amongst the stubble. Usually people know those responsible for such an attack but, on this occasion, nothing! No one, and I mean no one, knows anything about what happened in the abbey.’ The prisoner shook his chains. Stephen became aware of the appalling cries from above.

  ‘The crying, screeching, swearing, roaring, bawling and shaking of chains,’ Bolingbrok whispered to him, ‘are the plain chant of Newgate, but they hide the true business of London’s Hades, the real chatter. Who does what to whom, where, when, how and why? But not on this business.’ He pushed back his matted hair.

  ‘Sir Miles, I assure you, I am done here.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Stephen spoke up, ‘is there chatter amongst all this chaffing, swearing and shaking of chains about young women disappearing?’

  Bolingbrok looked at Beauchamp, who nodded. ‘Why is a young Carmelite interested in that?’

  ‘Because I am,’ Anselm retorted. ‘Is there?’

  ‘There is,’ Bolingbrok whispered. ‘Some of the pimps are full of it. Young women disappear, but they also reappear in one form or another. This doesn’t happen here. Whispers crackle. They say a blood-drinker is on the loose.’

  ‘Blood-drinker?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Brother Anselm, Sir Miles.’ Bolingbrok rubbed his brow on the back of his hand. ‘You, like me, have served in the King’s armies in France. You, Sir Miles, also read the reports of sheriffs and justices from every shire. You know who the blood-drinkers are.’

  ‘Blood-drinkers,’ Beauchamp’s face was sombre, ‘are usually men who have served in the array – lunatics, dangerous ones. They like to take a woman and kill her. Oh, yes, Stephen, for them that is the only way their seed can burst out. They lie with a woman whom they terrify; this excites them, even more so because they know this woman is going to die. Abroad in enemy towns and villages, these men hide behind the mask of a soldier. They can do what they wish. They return home but they cannot stop hunting. They regard women as quarry as hunters would a deer.’

  ‘Any names?’ Anselm asked.

  ‘No one knows,’ Bolingbrok replied, ‘but they say there may be more than one.’

  ‘And the Midnight Man?’

  ‘Why, Brother Anselm? Rumour abounds – they say he could be a priest.’ Bolingbrok grinned. ‘Even a Carmelite.’ Bolingbrok’s smile faded. ‘Or someone powerful.’ Bolingbrok sounded not so confident. ‘Someone who likes whores but not in the way I do. This blood-drinker likes hunting and killing them. Sir Miles, I can tell you no more.’

  ‘We should go.’ Anselm rose and sketched a blessing over the prisoner. He walked to the door and turned. ‘You were once a friar, Bolingbrok?’

  ‘Will you always be one, Brother?’ the prisoner retorted. Anselm smiled,
shrugged and opened the door. Once free of the prison, Beauchamp and Anselm stood in one of the shadowy recesses of the gatehouse, heads together, murmuring. ‘Stephen,’ Anselm called out, ‘we will visit Rishanger’s house.’

  ‘Cutwolf!’ Sir Miles stepped from the enclave and whispered into the ear of his henchman. Cutwolf nodded, winked at Stephen and sauntered off. Stephen wished he could question his master but Anselm seemed in a hurry. They crossed the blood-soaked cobbles of the Shambles. The exorcist grasped Stephen’s shoulder and whispered how time was passing, the graves at St Michael’s were about to be opened and they had to be there when it happened. Anselm moved on to walk with Beauchamp. Stephen felt a deep, cloying fear, an agitation of the heart. He stared around, not interested in the slaughter stalls, the hacked flesh or the bizarre characters who thronged the noisy crowds. The reek from the tanner sheds and tallow shops faded, as did the strident noise. Stephen felt as if something was going to happen; he had experienced this before. His father called it a form of the falling sickness, a deep foreboding which seizes all the senses.

  As soon as they reached the entrance to Hagbut Lane the warnings swept in. Rishanger’s house, narrow and tall, stood forlornly on the corner of an alleyway. The place reeked of evil. Beauchamp tore at the seals along the rim of the door and kicked it open, leading both the Carmelites into a long, ill-lit passageway. Stephen entered cautiously. This was no longer a house but a gloomy valley. On one side savage fires roared while on the other a storm of white hail and sleet pelted down. At the far end a pit glared with hell’s dark fires. A figure was walking towards Stephen. It reminded the novice of a painting he had glimpsed of the hideous, legendary Medea, who stalked lonely crossroads leading a legion of suicides, their very passing making the fiercest dog howl and shiver.

  ‘Stephen, Stephen!’ He opened his eyes. There was no valley, only that stinking, dark passageway. Anselm was peering at him. Beauchamp stood further along, cloaked in darkness.

  They entered what must have been Rishanger’s chancery chamber; the room was stripped of everything. Beauchamp, protesting at the dank air and gloom, unlocked and threw back the shutters. Columns of light pierced the oiled linen panes. Stephen started as a mouse, jet black, shot across the floor. Anselm, also alerted to the gathering evil, had drawn his Ave beads and wrapped these around his fingers. They moved from chamber to chamber. Stephen was sure that Beauchamp, although blind and deaf to the visions he and Anselm were experiencing, was still sensitive to the oppressive evil which followed them around this soulless house. The longer they stayed, the closer the sheer wickedness perpetrated here wrapped itself around them, a heavy pall of unnamed terrors. A quickening of the breath. A lurching of the heart. A pitching of the stomach as their skin crawled. There was nothing tangible to explain this. The King’s surveyors had stripped the house. The place was relatively clean, yet a cold darkness hung like an arras around them, so much so that Stephen wildly wondered if he would ever be allowed to leave.

  ‘Magister, what are we searching for?’

  ‘Anything.’ Beauchamp drew his sword and drove its point into the plastered wall of the clean, swept buttery they had entered. ‘A secret compartment, a hidden casket.’ The clerk walked over to the staircase built into the corner of the entrance hall. They climbed the steps. Stephen blinked at the flashes of light, the leaping sparks which swam before him. Small bursts of red fire, each containing a face which came and swiftly went. Voices cried, including that of a child. Screams and yells echoed. A voice, low and sombre, quoted that dreadful verse from the Apocalypse: ‘I saw a pale rider and his name was Death and all hell followed in his wake.’ Another voice answered, ‘Hell-born souls drift like columns of blackness. This is the night of the weighing of souls. Doom-laden they are, born of hell, fit for hell. Eternal punishment will be theirs.’

  ‘Ignore them, Stephen,’ Anselm hissed. ‘Dismiss them as shadow dreams, nothing more.’

  ‘Chilling!’ Beauchamp declared as he led the way into the upper gallery. ‘Even I can feel it.’ He grinned at the two Carmelites. ‘I never did last time I was here. You must attract the spirits.’

  ‘Our enemies,’ Anselm retorted.

  They entered the bedchamber: the outer wall was wet, the liquid gleaming like some evil sweat. The broad, linen-filled window provided some light but the shadow of brooding evil hung even heavier here. The sense of doom thickened. Voices echoed through Stephen’s mind. ‘Miserere, miserere – have mercy, have mercy.’

  ‘Oh, be quiet!’ a voice growled.

  Stephen started as a door downstairs opened and banged shut. Heavy footsteps on the stairs sent Beauchamp hurrying from the room sword out, his left hand clawing for the dagger in its scabbard on the back of his belt. Shapes, faint wisps of mist, trailed across the room. A harsh, barking cough made Stephen whirl around but there was nothing. Cold fingers caressed the side of his face. Anselm was shivering, moving away, flicking his hand to drive off whatever confronted him.

  ‘Priest!’ The coughing bark was like that of a dog. ‘You shit-ridden priest! How dare you come here?’

  ‘In Christ’s name,’ Anselm bellowed back. ‘Begone, begone . . . !’

  ‘Oh, don’t be a killjoy!’ The voice changed to that of a wheedling, pampered child. Anselm held up his Ave beads to bless the air. The door to the bedchamber opened and shut with a crash. Silence descended.

  Beauchamp kicked the door open and walked in, mouthing curses. ‘Don’t,’ Anselm warned. ‘No curse, no foul language. Evil feeds on evil, like a dog on its vomit.’ Again he blessed the air, breathing out noisily, dramatically, as if using his own life force to drive away the malignancy. The tension disappeared; the chamber just looked forlorn, gaunt and empty.

  ‘This,’ Anselm declared, ‘was certainly the abode of a malevolent, stagnant soul, immersed deeply in wickedness against the innocent. Yet the source is not here, Beauchamp. We must find it.’

  ‘The royal surveyors,’ Beauchamp replied, ‘were most thorough.’

  ‘Not thorough enough!’ Anselm led them out, clattering down the stairs and along the hollow stone passageway. Anselm opened the door and went out into the overgrown garden, nothing more than rambling bramble and briar, grass and sprouting weeds which had burst out of the soil, covering the herb borders, paths, small carp pond and bird house. The garden was enclosed by a high wall on all three sides with no wicket gate or garden door. The small orchard at the far end, a deep cluster of greenery, was completely unpruned and untended. Stephen followed Anselm. Beauchamp, rather reluctantly, hung back.

  ‘There is nothing here,’ the royal clerk called out. Anselm ignored him. He found a rusty scythe under a clump of bramble and began to hack away. Stephen stood on the rim of the broken fountain. Anselm was searching for something. Stephen stared around. The garden was overgrown but the paving stones just beneath him were covered in branches and other decaying refuse which had been cut. He climbed down and kicked away this thick, matted cluster to reveal a paving stone with an iron ring carefully inserted into a niche.

  ‘Magister!’ Anselm and Beauchamp hurried over. They lifted the stone, which came up as easily as an oiled trapdoor. They slid it to one side and stared at the neatly cut steps leading down into the darkness. Stephen went first. He put his hand out and felt the walls. Finding a fully primed-sconced torch, he used Anselm’s tinder to light this. He continued down, lighting some more, Anselm and Beauchamp close on his heels. The chamber at the bottom of the steps was circular. Oil lamps and lantern horns stood in carefully carved wall niches. Stephen lit these. He fought back the horrors clinging with icy fingers to his back. The hair on the nape of his neck curled; his stomach twisted. He found it difficult to breathe. He turned, resting his back against the wall. Anselm and Beauchamp, torches lifted high, were inspecting the chamber, especially the grille in the ceiling, cleverly constructed and concealed by the undergrowth above, yet sufficient enough to allow in some light and air.

  Stephen sensed the change in
the air around him. He braced himself against what was to come. Two shapes raced out of the murk – square-faced gnomes garbed in leather jackets and blood-spattered butcher aprons. Stephen closed his eyes and turned away. When he looked again there was nothing. Anselm and Beauchamp crouched in the centre of the chamber, examining a canvas mattress above which hung a chain fixed to the ceiling. Beside the mattress lay a great black iron dish containing tongs, pincers and fleshing hooks with points as sharp as dragon’s teeth. Stephen crossed to join them. The mattress was soaked in blood. A deep dread seized Stephen, chilling him to the very marrow. Anselm was right: horrid murder had been committed here.

  ‘Who?’ Beauchamp spoke for them all. ‘Why?’

  ‘Some devilish practice,’ Anselm replied, rubbing his arms. ‘It’s cold,’ he breathed. ‘This place reeks of evil. We should not stay here long.’

  Stephen heard a sound and turned. Shapes, swift and darting, furry shadows like those of a nimble monkey or scurrying squirrel, crossed the wall just below the ceiling.

  ‘Let us leave here!’ Stephen hissed. He hurried up the steps, gulping the fresh air, turning his face to the sun. Anselm and Beauchamp followed. The exorcist sat on the rim of the broken fountain. ‘You say this was once Puddlicot’s house?’ Anselm asked.

  ‘Yes, our crypt robber set up household here with his leman Joanne Picard.’ Beauchamp, rubbing his hands, sat down next to the Carmelite, his face pale and drawn.

  ‘This is what I think,’ Anselm declared. He gestured round the garden. ‘The corpse of Rishanger’s mistress was found here?’