Next, After Lucifer

by Daniel Rhodes

  This, to be sure, was in accordance with a world view evolved during a youth in the brutal orphanages of Marseille, a young adulthood at war, and a lifetime since of dealing with human vice in its most mundane forms. But McTell had raised a good point. Such things as spirits and demons may not have been exactly fashionable in the Church anymore, but officially, at least, they still existed. Boudrie knew men who had performed exorcisms. It was not a joking matter. And there was certainly nothing amusing about the way the Church had dealt with such as Courdeval and his knights.

  How heady it must have been to delve into the occult, he thought; how pale the everyday world must have seemed in comparison to the pursuit of the ultimate mysteries—not through the saint’s patient forbearance, but through grim, impassioned struggle with the forces of darkness, imaginary or not. Small wonder so many people in superstitious times had turned to the worship of powers they believed could aid them on earth. When their lives were little but misery, how much worse could hell be? Such circumstances could lead to desperate acts, Boudrie knew well. The peasant crying out for relief from his oppressors had received no help from heaven.

  Restless, he rose and prowled the room, examining familiar objects as if seeing them for the first time: the rather lurid portrait of his namesake, Saint Etienne, kneeling beneath a savage volley of stones, face aglow with the holy light of forgiveness; a more restrained Madonna and child; a rosary blessed by His Holiness John XXIII many years before on one of Boudrie’s few journeys to Rome; and setting it all off, an entirely secular calendar with photos of the Cote d’Azur, most of which exposed a scandalous amount of female flesh. There was also his single keepsake from the war, a German officer’s stiletto; but though Boudrie refused the frequent urge to put it out of his sight, it was not something he cared to let his gaze dwell on. Keeping it there was a form of penance, but not to be overdone. Grumpily, he turned to the bookshelf. Most of the tomes were devotional, unbearably ponderous texts of the sort read during mealtimes at monasteries.

  But at last he admitted the truth, that he was looking for a particular volume wedged among them, a slender folder bound in cracked ancient leather. With a grunt, he stretched and pulled it down. His fingers came away thick with dust. Inside was a tantalizing fragment of an old Register of the Inquisition, which dealt with the trial of Courdeval’s knights at Nimes. It had come to Saint-Bertrand through the agency of a seventeenth-century canon named Somaize, who had apparently discovered it in a chapter house somewhere and purloined it as more properly belonging to the parish where the events had actually taken place; he had eventually become interested enough in the whole affair to add his own account of the legends he had been able to collect—including the predations on the villagers after Courdeval’s death.

  As Boudrie paged through the handwritten Latin text, he remembered his almost physical sickness at the fanatic idiocy of the Dominican Inquisitors, their gloating concern for the spiritual welfare of their agonized victims. Although some part of him had been aware that such things had taken place, to be faced with the firsthand accounts had brought them home with terrifying force. Nothing else in his life had so tested his allegiance to his faith.

  The pattern of the trials quickly became repetitious, almost to the point of dulling their horror. For each prisoner, interrogation followed by torture, even if he confessed outright; a day or two of rest; the process repeated, often through one or more recantings. For those who stood by their confessions, sentence might be as light as wearing the yellow cross of the heretic. For those who recanted and remained firm, the stake was certain. For those few strong enough to maintain their innocence, death on the strappado or some other device was common. Failing that, they could expect to say good-bye to the sun, and lie broken on the cold, wet floor of some gloomy cachot until sickness or old age took them.

  What must have gone through the minds of those lost souls, Boudrie thought, as they lay chained to stone walls in cellars where the time was eternal night, where background music was the clank of iron and the shrieks of the tormented, where every effect was calculated to raise terror to its extreme pitch—where, as in Dante’s hell, hope could not exist? They must have known that nothing, even innocence, could protect them from the hooded monks, with their flickering torches and solicitous questions. Even suicide was forbidden, by the Church’s decree that it was the one certain path to hell. What better way to control men’s actions on earth than to convince them that if they did not obey, they would burn forever in a lake of fire?

  He shook his head angrily and paged on. The section he wanted was at the end; it contained part of the preliminary accusations in the trials of the Montsevrain Templars. The rest of the account had been removed—deliberately, Boudrie was sure, but by whom or when he would never know.

  The recorder, a monk who signed himself only as Johannes, began with the usual accusations of crimes against God. But the allegations became more specific—and intriguing.

  “Item, that this Courdeval had entered into a knowing pact with the Enemy of Mankind, to be his servant and do his bidding, and was granted in return the power to command the spirits that ride the air;

  “Item, that this Courdeval possessed a book said to be the agent of his evil powers, and that in this book he kept a record of his abominations against mankind;

  “Item, that he consumed the blood of humans, to propitiate the powers he worshipped and to strengthen him and prolong his life;

  “Item, that he subscribed to the pagan belief of Hermes Trismegistus that the spirit of the mage need not die, but could move from shape to shape at will; and that furthermore, if the accident of death should overtake his body, his spirit could gain another by means of a secret ritual. Such was the wickedness of this man, he was heard to declare that by causing some mortal to slay that which he loved most, the mage could then have that mortal in his power forever.”

  Which would have been yet another reason to account for Courdeval’s carelessness, Boudrie thought. Why should one worry overmuch about death if he believed he could change bodies like suits of clothes—and further, that his spirit could do so even after the death of the body it then occupied? It was a most sinister notion, one Boudrie had never encountered before: like demonic possession, but by a human spirit, a ghost; disturbing both in itself and through the implication that, in some unexplained fashion, it required a living human to slay a loved one.

  But unfortunately for you, my evil friend, Boudrie thought, something went wrong. He smiled grimly. At McTell’s, he had glossed over the account of the interment of Courdeval’s bones. But according to the information Canon Somaize had gathered, the procedure had been highly unorthodox—perhaps a reason for its subsequent suppression by Church authorities.

  The party of soldiers and clerics sent from Avignon had first consulted a noted Cabalist there—no doubt offering to pull his teeth if he did not cooperate, Boudrie thought. This Rabbi Eleazar had pointed out to them something they had certainly not wanted to hear, but could not deny: that the supposedly unbreachable sanctuary of the cathedral had not prevailed. They were dealing with a force much older than Christianity, he said, and they must resort to an accordingly more ancient belief: that a spirit could be rendered powerless by water. The best thing would be to take the bones to the sea, weight them down, and throw them in; but such a journey could not possibly be accomplished without dusk overtaking them in the skeleton’s vicinity—and that of the companion it was purportedly able to summon. The next best thing would be to find a stream or spring, immerse the bones, and dam the water so it would forever surround them.

  The party planned their journey carefully to arrive at Montsevrain at dawn. The spring they chose was the source of the fortress’s water, somewhere on the mountainside below. Working frantically, they had dug back in to discover a natural vault. And it spoke volumes that the labor was done by noble knights, who under ordinary circumstances would have died before touching a shovel or pick. The bones were chained with silver to
the floor of the vault, the water was blessed in perpetuity and sealed in with a great stone, and the party returned hastily to the village to pass a sleepless night, praying unceasingly that their remedy had been effective.

  And so, seemingly, it had. A little more leisurely, the men devoted the next days to carving a warning into the stone in case it should ever be discovered, and then concealing it to prevent that from happening. The warning was in the form of a curious misquote from the Vulgate: HE MAKETH ME TO LIE DOWN IN RUNNING WATERS; and a more pointed QUIESCENTEM NE MOVETO: Disturb not that which rests.

  Well, they had apparently done a good job of the concealment, Boudrie thought. No sign had ever been reported of either tomb or spring, although it was not as if anyone had ever gone looking. That part of the story was known to few except the village cures. In all likelihood, the entire business of spring and tomb had been fabricated long after the fact, to bolster the supernatural element of the story.

  He paged on through the manuscript, gleaning bits of the Latin, remembering passages from more careful readings he had given it. Near the end, a loose sheaf came away in his hands. He looked at it blankly before recalling what it was. Decades before, on a visit to his alma mater, the Grand Seminaire in Marseille, he had been rummaging through the library and had come across some old texts on exorcism and demonology. One of these had contained a section of a book of magic purportedly written by the biblical King Solomon. Boudrie’s eyes scanned the page: a description he had taken from the Key of Solomon’s commentaries on all the mightiest of the fallen angels, along with their attributes, emblems, and the sorts of services they were prepared to perform for men. The demon Belial, it said, had been created next, after Lucifer. He gave excellent familiars, and must have sacrifices made to him. Belial’s emblem was reproduced beneath: a curious design of looping lines, something like a boat seen broadside, with antennae.

  Excellent familiars. A muffled figure neither man nor beast, seen only doing the work of gruesome death. Preposterous, of course. But like the blood-drinking, the belief in the possibility of bargaining with supernatural powers was as ancient as time. Boudrie was forced to admit that, given such an element of credulity, the pieces all fit together—to form a most unpleasant picture.

  Had the same thought occurred to his curious predecessor, Canon Somaize? He had ended his account with a cryptic quote: SOME SPIRITS THERE BE THAT ARE CREATED FOR VENGEANCE, AND IN THEIR FURY LAY ON SORE STROKES.

  Boudrie tossed the manuscript on the desk and filled his glass once more. It was past midnight, and he was suddenly aware of his fatigue. As he stood, an odd line of thought flitted through his mind. If it were true—if a spirit could be held in check by running water, or by anything else, for that matter—then rules for some sort of bizarre cosmic contest were implied; which, in turn, implied that something more powerful had made those rules.

  Canon Boudrie’s contribution to theology, he thought, and smiled: a proof sinister of the existence of God.

  But his amusement died as he walked wearily down the dim hallway to his bedroom. Such stories might be for old women, but men burned alive were another matter. He thought again of the stiletto hanging on his study wall, and began to undress, mumbling a prayer.

  McTell switched off his typewriter and slumped back in his chair, wondering if the sentences he had just written were really as flat, the ideas as pretentiously mundane, as they seemed. In spite of his successes, there were times when in his heart of hearts he was certain his books were destined to fall into that immense body of work gathering dust on the shelves of libraries throughout the world, perused only by students with metaphorical guns to their heads. He had wasted the morning, his best time, driving to Grasse to buy a case of gin for his hard-drinking brother-in-law, and his mood was not now improved by post-lunch drowsiness and midday heat.

  But none of that was the problem, not really. He stood and walked to the window. The sky had changed overnight, with a first portent of autumn. Though the air was still hot and muggy, a haze had entered it. Thin restless clouds moved over the mountaintops, over the hidden Mediterranean, perhaps all the way to Africa and long-dead Carthage. The world felt swollen, ready to burst. His gaze lingered on the ruin. The haze had drawn the sparkle from its stones and darkened its outline.

  CHAPTER 6

  The problem was that here he sat, planning a dull academic book about events he had never witnessed—for an audience that for the most part could not have cared less—while the only real mystery that had ever touched his life hovered in the forefront of his mind, unsolved. The dream of the gauntleted fist had pervaded his sleep so insistently that the last time, he had lain awake for seconds before he fully understood that it was not his own hand scraping through the soil.

  His restless gaze moved to the decanter of Scotch. He hesitated, but then poured two fingers into a glass. He had always disliked beginning projects in the afternoon anyway. Drink in hand, he walked again to the window. Last night, another hike to the ruin had seemed sensible, almost obligatory. But in the clear light of day, the absurdity of the whole business had reasserted itself.

  Footsteps moved briskly past the study door—Linden, preparing for the guests, carrying sheets and towels from here to there, planning meals, organizing excursions. He marveled at her contentment, at how her life seemed like a lake whose surface was often rippled but whose depths remained forever calm.

  And suddenly he saw his own future spread out before him like an endless not-unpleasant suburb, with long sunny streets named Routine and Productivity and Modest Success, sloping gently down the Parkway of Retirement in Comfort to the darker cul-de-sac of Oblivion. And he would pass from this earth without so much as a taste of the passions that had moved the giants of his imagination, Coeur de Lion, Simon de Montfort, the Black Prince—yes, even the villainous one-eyed Guilhem de Courdeval; men of iron will and tremendous capacities, who had never retreated from life, never waited for circumstances to come to them, but who had acted, changing the course of history—who to satisfy their vanities had not hesitated to burn cities, massacre thousands, savage entire continents—

  Or to strike a bargain with the devil himself.

  McTell raised his eyes to the ruin and admitted it. He wanted it to be true. He wanted a wrench thrown into the well-oiled machine of his life. He wanted there to be some connection between what had happened to him on that mountain and the young woman he had seen in town.

  He wanted there to be magic in that empty hole in the ground.

  It was midafternoon. He looked at the drink in his hand, knowing he should exchange it for coffee, sit down again, and wrestle with his typewriter for another two hours.

  He drank off the liquor in a swallow. Feeling resigned and a little foolish, he went to find his rucksack.

  ** ** **

  The fortress’s empty courtyard was restless and gray, wind tossing the nettles and skittering dry leaves across the paving stones. The sky was a streaked and moving tapestry of clouds. McTell approached the iron grate of the dungeon slowly and stopped a few feet back from its rim. He felt strangely, even frighteningly, alone. Not sure whether he was more nervous about something happening, or nothing, he inhaled and stepped forward.

  His lips twisted wryly. The dungeon was just as he had last left it—rocks and debris. This time he took a good look. The narrow crumbling steps led down to blank walls; whatever chambers might once have held prisoners were long since filled in. It was a flight of stairs to nowhere.

  He raised his eyes to the gray nothing of the sky. There was no motion but the shifting clouds, no sound but the wind. And with a sudden bitter rage of disappointment, of frustration, of feeling that he had somehow been led on and then cheated, he turned away.

  And took three steps before he stopped, stunned. He spun and strode back, gripped the iron grate, leaned close.

  The riser of the bottom step was crusted with hard red soil, and as he stared, his mind supplied the image of the mailed fist scraping patie
ntly at precisely that configuration of rock and earth. A little dizzy, he straightened up, clamped down on his excitement, and began to plan.

  The grate was rectangular, perhaps two and a half feet wide by five long, mortared at several places into the stone—but not so securely that a little work with hammer and bar would not break it free. He had seen the tools he would need in the gardener’s shed. What remained was a pretext to return. He thought, and then carefully hid his camera in a crevice of the great stone walls.

  The heat of the day had fallen off, and he hurried back down the mountain, lost in anticipation. But when he at last looked up, his surroundings struck him with such force that he stopped. Nothing had changed—and yet, the air that filled his lungs was soft and heavy with the fragrance of pines, carried on the gentle breeze. Colors were muted in the waning light. The hillsides swelled, rounded and nude, while trees lifted slender red-tipped branches like fingers in supplication to the sky.

  The mountain slopes drew together in dark secret crevasses, converging to the ancient sea.

  ** ** **

  McTell paused on the patio steps. Inside, the lights were on; the house looked alive with predinner activity. Through the glass door he saw Linden arranging the table. He glanced back at the path leading from the grounds, where he had already hidden the required tools—skulking in and out of the shed, feeling like a schoolboy. Why the secrecy? he thought. Why not just tell her?

  He slid open the door and stepped inside. Brilliant crystalline piano music, a Mozart concerto, blended with the sounds of Mile. Perrin in the kitchen. Linden was wearing a powder blue summer dress. Gold flashed at her ears and neck.