Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper

by Glenn Cooper

  “I’ll light the candles then,” she offered, “as long as you’re careful to blow them out before you turn in.”

  As they munched, Louise used a disposable plastic lighter to light a dozen candles throughout the room. With the wind whistling outside, the fireplace hissing, and the ancient room in its windowless gloom, the candles seemed reassuring points of light. Will and Isabelle watched Louise as she ignited the last candlestick and retreated from the room.

  Suddenly, they looked at each other, and simultaneously exclaimed, “Candlesticks!”

  Lord Cantwell asked if they’d gone mad, but Isabelle answered him with an urgent question. “Which of our candlesticks are sixteenth-century or earlier?”

  He scratched at his fringe of hair and pointed toward the center of the room, “The pair of silver-gilt ones on the table, I should think. Believe they’re Venetian, fourteenth-century. Tell your father that if I pop off, they’re worth a few quid.”

  They rushed to the candlesticks, blew them out, and removed the thick, waxy candles, placing them on a silver tray. They were pricket style, with big spikes on bowls spearing enormous five-inch-diameter candles. Each candlestick had an elaborately tooled, six-petaled base of gold-coated silver. From each base rose a central column that progressively widened out into a Romanesque tower resembling the peak-windowed spire of a church, each of the six windows rendered in blue enamel. Above each spire, the column extended into the cup and pricket of the candleholder.

  “They’re light enough, they could be hollow,” Will said, “but the bases are solid.”

  He closely inspected the joined segments of the complicated column. She urged him on, “Go ahead, give it a twist,” she whispered. “Turn your back to Granddad. I don’t want to give him a heart attack.”

  Will wrapped his left hand around the windowed spire and tried to turn the base with his right hand, gently at first, then with more force, until his face reddened. He shook his head and put it down. “No joy.” Then he tried hers with the same maneuver. It held firm as if it were forged from a single piece of metal. He relaxed his shoulder and arm muscles when a spasm of frustration made him try one more furious twist.

  The column turned.

  Half a rotation, but it turned.

  She whispered, “Go on!”

  He kept up the pressure until the column was spinning freely and the nongilded sleeve of a tube within a tube became visible. Finally, the base gave way completely. He had one half of a candlestick in each hand.

  “What are you two up to?” Cantwell called out. “Can’t hear a thing.”

  “Just a minute, Granddad!” Isabelle shouted. “Hang on!”

  Will put the base down and peered into the hollow-tubed spire. “I need a light.” He followed her over to one of the standing lamps, stuck his index finger inside the tube, and felt a firm, circular edge. “There’s something in there!” He pulled his finger out and tried to have a look, but the incandescent bulb didn’t help. “My finger’s too big to get it. You try.”

  Hers was thin, and she slid in all the way and closed her eyes to heighten the tactile impressions. “It’s something rolled, like paper or parchment. I’m in the middle of it. There! I’ve got it turning.”

  She slowly twisted the candlestick around her finger, applying firm, gentle pressure with the pulp of her fingertip.

  A yellowed scroll began to emerge.

  It was cylindrical, about eight inches long, multiple sheets of parchment tightly rolled. In shocked excitement, she started to hand it to him, but he said, “No, you.”

  She slowly unrolled the cylinder. The parchment was dry but not brittle, and it unspooled easily enough. She flattened the sheets with both hands and Will tilted the lamp shade for more light. “It’s in Latin,” she said.

  “That makes me especially glad you’re here.”

  She read the heading on the first page and translated it aloud: An Epistle from Felix, Abbot of Vectis Abbey, written in the year of our Lord, 1334.

  He felt light-headed. “Jesus.”

  “What is it, Will?”

  “Vectis.”

  “You know the place?”

  “Yeah, I know it. I think we hit the mother lode.”

  1334

  ISLE OF WIGHT

  IN THE STILLNESS of the night, an hour after Lauds and two hours before Prime, Felix, Abbot of Vectis Abbey, awoke with one of his terrible headaches. There was cricket song outside his window and the faint pulse of waves from the Solent cresting against the nearby shore. The sounds were soothing but gave him only a moment’s pleasure before a spasm of nausea made him sit bolt upright. He fumbled in the dark for the chamber pot and dry-heaved.

  He was sixty-nine years old and fiercely doubted he would see his next decade.

  There was little food in his stomach. His last meal was beef broth prepared specially by the sisters, greasy with marrow and flecked with carrots. He had left the bowl half-uneaten on his writing table.

  He threw off his covers, pushed himself from his straw mattress, and managed to stand with some swaying. The rhythmic pounding in his head felt like a blacksmith striking repeated blows on an anvil, each one threatening to upend him, but he was steady enough to retrieve his heavy fur-lined robe, draped over a high-backed chair. He slipped it on over his night smock and immediately felt its comforting warmth. Then he shakily lit a thick yellow candle and slumped on the chair to massage his temples. The candlelight played against the uneven polished stones of his bedchamber floor and reflected off the gaily colored glass of the courtyard windows.

  The richness of the abbot house had always disquieted him. When he entered Vectis as a novice, so very long ago, his head lowered in humility, his coarse habit bound with cord, his feet cold and bare, he felt close to God, and thus, close to bliss. His predecessor, Baldwin, a flinty cleric who took as much pleasure poring over granary accounts as conducting mass, had commissioned a fine timbered house to rival those he had seen at abbeys in London and Dorchester. Adjoining the bedchamber was a magnificent great room with an ornate fireplace, carved settle, horsehair chairs, and stained glass. On the walls were cloth hangings, finely woven tapestries of hunts and acts of the Apostles, from Flanders and Bruges. Above the hearth was an artisan-tooled silver cross, the length of a man’s arm.

  Upon Baldwin’s death many years earlier, the Bishop of Dorchester had chosen Felix, the abbey’s prior to ascend to be Abbot of Vectis. Felix prayed hard for guidance. Perhaps he should eschew the finery of the position and opt for a modest reign, sleep in a monk’s cell with the brothers, continue to wear his simple habit, take his meals communally. But would that not besmirch the memory of his mentor, his confessor? Would it not brand Baldwin a profligate? He bowed to the power of Baldwin’s memory, the way he had bowed to the power of the man during his life. Ever the faithful servant, he never failed to do Baldwin’s bidding, even when he had misgivings. What would have happened if he had questioned Baldwin’s decision to abolish the Order of the Names? Would things be different today had he not, with his own hand, lit the hay that consumed the Library almost forty years ago?

  He felt too ill to kneel, so he lowered his throbbing head and softly prayed out loud, his Breton accent as coarse and pebbly as when he was a boy. The choice of prayer, from Psalm 42, came to him with spontaneity, almost taking him by surprise:

  Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meatum.

  I will go to the altar of God. To God, the joy of my youth.

  Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

  Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen

  He pursed his lips at the irony of the prayer.

  World without end.

  Once, his beard had been as thick and black as a boar’s cheek. He had been muscular and robust, able to handle the rigors of monastic life tirelessl
y, the meager rations, the cold sea winds that frosted the bones, the manual labors that broke the body but sustained the community, the brief periods of sleep between the canonical hours that punctuated night and day with communal prayer. Now his beard was patchy, the dirty white of a seagull’s breast, and his cheeks were sunken. His fine muscles had withered and sagged, and his skin, drained of suppleness, was as dry as parchment and so itchy and scabbed it distracted him from prayer and meditation.

  But the most alarming physical change affected his right eye, which had progressively begun to bulge and stare. It was a slow, creeping process. At first he only noticed a pink dryness, like a mote of grit that could not be lavaged. Then the mild throb behind the orbit became worse, and his vision became troublesome. Initially, there was some blurring, then blinding flashes of light, now a distressing doubling of images that made it difficult to read and write with both eyes open. In recent weeks, every man and woman within the abbey walls had anxiously noticed the bulging prominence of his eyeball. They whispered among themselves while they milked cows or tended crops, and at prayer they beseeched God to show their brother mercy.

  Brother Girardus, the abbey infirmarer and a dear friend, visited with him every day and repeatedly offered to sleep on the floor of his great room should Felix need his assistance during the night. Girardus could only guess at the nature of the malady but supposed there was a growth within the fine man’s head, pushing against his eye and causing his pain. If this were a boil under the skin, he could open it with a lance, but none but God could cure a growth within the skull. He plied his friend with bark teas and herbal poultices to ease pain and swelling, but mostly he prayed.

  Felix spent several minutes in meditation, then shuffled to the rosewood chest that sat between his bed and his table. Bending at the hips caused too much eye pain, so he lowered himself to his knees to open the large wardrobe box. It was filled with vestments, old habits and sandals, a spare bed cloth. Underneath the cloth and softness was something hard and solid. It took a good bit of his small strength to drag it out and carry it to his writing table.

  It was a heavy book, ancient, the color of dark honey, a labor of distant centuries. It was the last of its kind, he supposed, the lone survivor of a conflagration that he himself had ignited. And the reason he had hid it so carefully over these many years was that it bore a date almost two hundred years in the future—1527.

  Who alive today would understand? Who among his brethren would see it for what it was and adore its divinity? Or would they mistake it for a specter of blasphemy and malevolence? All who were with him that icy January day in 1297, when hell visited earth, were dead and buried. He was the last to bear witness, and it had been a weight on his soul.

  Felix lit smaller candles illuminating his desk in an arc of straw-colored dancing light. He opened the book and removed a sheaf of loose vellum pages that had been cut for him in the abbey Scriptorium to fit neatly inside the covers. He had been feverishly working on his manuscript, rushing against time, fearful his malady would claim him before he was done.

  It was painstakingly difficult work to overcome double vision and splitting headaches to pour out his recollections. He was forced to keep his right eye closed to fix a single image on the page and to keep the movements of his quill on a straight line. He wrote at night, when all was quiet and no one would intrude on his secret. When he exhausted himself, he would return the book to its hiding place and fall onto his pallet for a sliver of sleep before the abbey bells rang for the next call to cathedral prayer.

  He gently lifted the first of his pages and, with one eye closed, held it close to his face. It began, An Epistle from Felix, Abbot of Vectis Abbey, written in the year of our Lord, 1334.

  Lord I am your servant. Praise to you glory to you. Vast are you, Lord, and vast should be your praise. My faith in you is your gift to me, which you have breathed into me by the humanity your Son assumed.

  I am determined to bring back into memory the things I know and the things I saw and the things I did.

  I am humbled by the memory of all who have come before me, but there is none as precious and exalted as Saint Josephus patron saint of Vectis whose sacred bones are buried in the Cathedral. For it was Josephus who in his true and complete love of God did establish the Order of the Names to exalt the Lord and sanctify his divinity. I am the last member of the Order, all others gone to dust. Were I not to make record of past deeds and occurrences, then mankind would be bereft of the knowledge that I your mortal sinner alone do possess. It is not for me to decide if this knowledge is fit for mankind. It is for you, Lord, in your infinite wisdom, to render judgment. I will humbly write this epistle, and you, Lord, will decide its fate.

  Felix put down the page and rested his good eye for a moment. When he felt ready to continue, he thumbed through the pages and began to read again.

  The knowledge of that day has been passed from the lips of brothers and sisters through the mists of time. Josephus, then Prior of Vectis, attended a birth on that portentous seventh day of the seventh month of the Year of Our Lord 777. The period was marked by the presence of Cometes Luctus, a red and fiery comet that to this day has never returned. The wife of a laborer was with child, and if that child was male, he would be the seventh son of a seventh son. A male child was born, and in fear and lamentation, his father smote him dead. To the wonder of Josephus, the woman then delivered an eighth son, and this twin was called Octavus.

  Felix easily conjured a mental image of Octavus, for he had seen many infants like him over the years, pale, uncrying, with emerald green eyes and fine ginger-colored hair sprouting from pink scalps. Would Josephus have suspected, amidst the blood and amnion-soaked birthing bed and the terrified murmurs of the women attending the labor that Octavus was the true seventh son?

  Believing that the child Octavus required the presence of the Lord, his father took him to Vectis Abbey at a young age. The child would not speak and would not make company with men, and Josephus took mercy on him and accepted him into the care of the abbey. It was then that Josephus made a miraculous discovery. Absent any tutelage, the boy was able to write letters and numbers. And, Lord God, not any letters and numbers but the names of Your mortal children and their days of birth and death into the future. Such foretelling infused Josephus with wonder and fear. Was this a dark power born of evil or a shaft of heavenly light? Josephus in his wisdom convened a council of members of his ministry to consider the child and thus was founded the Order of the Names. These wise ministers did conclude that there was no evil hand at work, for if this were so, why would the child have been delivered into their protective bosom? Surely it was providence at work and a sign embodied by the confluence of the holy number seven that the Lord had chosen this humble creature Octavus to be His true voice of divine revelation. And so the boy was protected and cloistered in the Scriptorium, where he was given quill and ink and parchment and allowed to spend his hours doing his true vocation.

  His headache was unabating, so Felix rose from his table to prepare himself a vessel of bark tea. In the great room, he poked at the embers in the fireplace and added a fistful of twigs. Soon, the iron pot of water hanging from an arm began to hiss. He shuffled back to his bedchamber to continue his reading.

  As the years passed the boy Octavus grew into a man whose singular purpose did not alter. Night and day he toiled, and there was produced a small but growing library of his books, which did all contain names and foretold of births and deaths. Throughout Octavus had no discourse or commerce with his fellowman, and all his bodily needs were attended by the Order of the Names, which protected his person and his vocation. One fateful day, Octavus was consumed with animal lust and did violate a poor novice girl, and the girl did carry and bear his child. It was a boy with the same strange countenance as its father. The boy was called Primus, and he had green eyes and ginger hair and, like Octavus, was as mute as the stump of a tree and in time he revealed himself to have the same powers as his father. Wher
e there was one were now two sitting side by side, writing out the names of the living and the dead.

  The bitter tea was easing his pain, allowing him to read faster and finish the passage he had written the previous night.

  Days turned to years and years to decades and decades to centuries. Scribes were born and scribes died and their keepers from the Order of the Names did also come into the world and depart to the next world, all the while providing womanly vessels for their procreation. The library grew to a size beyond imagination and the Order did provide for the keeping of the holy books by excavating vast caverns to keep the library hidden and safe and the bones of dead scribes entombed in sacred catacombs.

  For many years, Dear Lord, I was the humble Prior of Vectis and a loyal servant to the great Abbot Baldwin and a faithful member of the Order of the Names. I confess, Dear Lord, that it did not give me pleasure to deliver young sisters to be used for purposes as were required, but I fulfilled my mission with love for You and certainty that Your library must endure and Your future children should have their chronicle.

  I have long lost count of all the mute infants brought into the world who would grow to assume their places in the Hall of the Writers with quill in hand, shoulder by shoulder with their brethren. But I cannot forget the one happenstance when as a young monk I witnessed one of the chosen sisters issue not a boy but a girl. I had heard of such a rare occurrence happening in the past but had never seen a girl-child born in my lifetime. I watched this mute green-eyed girl with ginger hair grow, but, unlike her kin, she failed to develop the gift of writing. At the age of twelve years, she was cast out and given to the grain merchant, Gassonet the Jew, who took her away from the island and did with her I know not what.