“Come, spirit,” she whispered. “Why do you trouble us?”
For thirty seconds the pendant moved only with the twitchings of her hands, swinging in smaller and smaller circles.
Then it started, and though she had never felt it before, she understood instantly what it was. A mild thrill, an almost pleasurable current, tugged the chain gently. She was so startled she almost dropped it, and had to nerve herself to begin again.
This time the sensation began immediately. Melusine stared as the pendant twitched this way and that, with sharp unmistakable tugs to indicate different letters. When it stopped, her shoulders sagged a little, as if she had been suddenly cut off from a life-giving drug. With trembling fingers, she quickly copied the letters onto a pad: P-E-C-C-A-T-A-P-A-T-R-U-M. She gazed blankly; they meant nothing.
But then a distant pull of memory took her back decades, to endless gray afternoons with pleated skirts and knee stockings and white-coiffed nuns who rapped one’s knuckles with rulers. Of its own accord, Melusine’s hand made a quick, firm slash on the pad, separating the letters to: PECCATA PATRUM.
Sins of the fathers.
By what process she had resurrected that long-forgotten biblical phrase, she could not imagine. But this was not the time to wonder. The tension hovered around her, waiting; the flow must not be broken. Again she gripped the chain.
“What do you want?” she said hoarsely.
Again the current and tugs; again she scrawled a dozen unconnected letters: S-A-N-G-U-I-S-F-L-O-R-I-S. Her hand made a slash:
Blood of a flower.
The sense of presence was growing quickly, and now it was no longer thrilling and benign, but sinister, menacing. Sick with fear, she poised the chain the third time.
“Who are you?”
The jolt was instant, wrenching her with a painless but awful electricity. She watched, eyes and mouth stretched wide, unable to let go, as if she were holding a live wire. At last it ebbed, hovering, waiting. She dropped the chain like a hot coal, clapped down the lid of the cask, and fled. Visions of the door swinging shut in her face crowded her mind; what kind of fool was she to toy with such a thing in such a place? The journey through the looming shrouded furniture was endless: the thump-thump of her feet, the cobwebs brushing her face, the menace hovering behind her—whispering wordlessly but obscenely, threatening, sneering. She reached the ground floor on the verge of shrieking. Staying inside was unbearable, going back to the yard out of the question. She scooped up her purse from the hall table and rushed out into the street.
There had been nothing cryptic about the final message, in French: L-E-N-O-Y-E.
The drowned man.
A quick look behind told her she was not being followed, at least by anything visible. She walked as fast as she could toward the center of town, wishing for nearly the first time in her life that she were a man, just so she could step into a bar alone and sit unquestioned and safe, surrounded by other humans, while she drank herself into oblivion.
** ** **
A tap at the study door made McTell react with violent swiftness, sweeping papers over the book on his desk, tearing the sheet out of the typewriter. The door was opening as he tossed it with seeming carelessness, but face down, on top of the others.
“It’s almost six, lover,” Linden said. “Time to become a social animal again.” She handed him a drink. “I hate to interrupt, it sounds like you’re typing up a storm.”
He shook his head to clear it, jolted by the too-abrupt transition from the world where he had spent the past hours. “My muse descended and wouldn’t leave,” he said.
“Well, give her a big tip to make sure she comes back.” She bent to kiss the top of his head, then leaned closer to the desk. “What’s with the Latin?” She nodded at the still-open dictionary.
“Oh, I was translating an epigraph a while ago.”
“Let me know when you’re ready for me to do some typing. See you in a bit.” She left the door half-open. When the sound of her footsteps faded, he rose and quietly closed it. Then he took the glass of Scotch to the window and rested his hip on the sill, gazing up at the ruin. For the first time, the full flood of marvel at what he had discovered swept through him. There was absolutely no doubt: The book was the legendary but authentic grimoire of Guilhem de Courdeval.
But it was a marvel with a very forbidding edge. There was no doubt either that both priest and sacristan had been right about this much: If a tenth of what McTell had already translated was true, then Courdeval belonged in the front ranks of history’s terrible men.
The book appeared to be a combination journal, autobiography, and recipe manual for magical incantations and rituals. While it was highly unusual for a warrior of those times to have been so well-lettered, Courdeval had obviously been a most unusual man: an uneducated northern knight, he had realized upon joining the Templars and being introduced to the luxuries and sophistication of warmer lands that he was a barbarian, and that the way to power was not through force, but knowledge. This he had set out to acquire with the same ferocious tenacity he displayed on the battlefield, keeping company with monks and scholars while his brothers-in-arms roistered about; and in not too long a time, he came to regard his fellow soldiers as little better than animals, as he himself had once been. His contempt soon extended to other magicians of the time. Most, he declared, were nothing but frauds and cowards, playing games with charms and spells, trying to cheat the devil of his due.
But just as Courdeval had demonstrated an almost superhuman arrogance and pride, he had possessed a will to match it, and he had marched consciously and without wavering into the service of evil. His practice of the black arts had begun in Asia Minor, at the court of a Saracen prince with whom the Templars were friendly. Here the arcane knowledge of the Arab world was available; and here, Courdeval stated, he had first learned of the possibility of making the hazardous pilgrimage to the unnamed city—a place, McTell had gathered by now, that was not on any map, but that Courdeval, at least, had considered very real. Nor did the journey resemble any melodramatic medieval scenario of signing a pact in a graveyard some midnight in return for seven years’ power to perform tricks. Courdeval stressed that it was an unimaginably dangerous undertaking, requiring years of study to learn the pitfalls that must be avoided, the proper ways of appeasing certain beings the traveler would encounter; and some of the preparations he listed had made McTell’s mouth go dry.
But the Templar had persevered and triumphed, or so he claimed, and been found worthy of acceptance into the service of mankind’s enemy. In return, he was granted the power to command spirits—including the muffled familiar the peasants had called celui—and the secret, as he had written, of cheating death.
This last intrigued McTell particularly. The immortality in question was apparently not the sort of unchanging aspect given to, say, the Wandering Jew, but rather some form of renewal of the flesh. It seemed to involve a specific ritual that had not yet been described. But Courdeval stated with authority that there was no longer any more need for him to be burdened with an infirm body than with a shabby tunic. Obviously, this did not jibe with his fate, and the apparent answer was that the book was the elaborate fantasy of a madman. But if so, the insanity had not affected his powers of communication; the tone was measured, dear, and above all, authoritative.
McTell had read only this far, some half-dozen pages of the text. He thought distantly of his own book, the work he had come to this place to do. It seemed the most frivolous, ridiculous thing he had ever heard of. There was no question that he would spend the next days translating the grimoire in its entirety. He was becoming familiar with the hand, and his Latin was beginning to flow. He picked up the book to count its pages and estimate how long the task might take.
There were perhaps a hundred written pages. Many of the margins contained arcane symbols, jottings, comments. Another two dozen leaves at the end were blank. McTell was about to close the book when his gaze was caught by a few l
ines of writing on one of these. At the top of the page, there seemed to be a heading or title: Liber Viatoris, Book of the Pilgrim. A little below that was a sentence, written in Courdeval’s unmistakable hand: Incommodum venejicae viatori lilium tribuit. He had encountered the word venejica in other contexts, but he checked the dictionary. It meant witch or sorceress. “The witch’s misfortune brings the lily to the pilgrim,” he said.
There was no telling what Courdeval might have had on his mind, writing such a cryptic statement nearly seven hundred years before—who could the “pilgrim” have been?—but of this McTell was certain: he would have done anything humanly possible to have avoided any “misfortune” stemming from Guilhem Seul Oeil.
He realized that a quarter of an hour had passed since Linden’s visit. Hastily tucking his typewritten sheets into the grimoire, he hid it in the bottom drawer, then hurried down the hall to wash. He had not quite gotten over his queasiness at handling the book’s cover. In the bathroom he again noticed the strange mark on his left palm. Although it was not tender, he decided that it must be a bruise.
As he walked down the stairs, Linden was crossing the dining room. “I forgot to mention,” she said, “we have a little surprise. Mademoiselle Perrin has come down with some kind of a bug. Apparently it happened very suddenly, just an hour or two ago. She sent her niece to take over; a sweet girl, but I doubt she’s the cook her aunt is. Wouldn’t you know it, when company comes.” She turned to the kitchen and called, “Alysse!”
The girl came to the doorway. She was shy, coltish, her eyes downcast, and she seemed to be trying to shield herself behind the silver soup tureen she held.
‘‘This is my husband, Monsieur McTell,” Linden said in French. The girl dropped her knee in an awkward curtsy.
McTell’s hand found the banister and gripped it tightly. From a great distance, he heard his own voice say, “Enchante, mademoiselle.”
PART TWO
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
CHAPTER 8
Etien Boudrie closed his breviary and made the sign of the cross as the first clods of dirt hit the coffin. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” he murmured. In the vague, absurd hope that just once he might escape the inevitable, he turned from the grave; but the sound was already there, a long low moan of grief that threatened to rise into a wail. He closed his eyes briefly, sought strength from his leaden spirit. Then he turned to the group of raven-clad women clinging in support to Therese Taillou—the widow Taillou now. Her husband, Henri, who for two decades had monopolized the business of providing Saint-Bertrand with its water, lay in the coffin beneath those clods of earth.
For a moment Boudrie stood still, the scene imprinting itself upon his mind as funerals never failed to do: the cluster of gray-haired women in mourning; the two dozen other visitants moving, with a silence that seemed furtive, away from the gaping hole in the earth; the sexton and his assistant in coarse black suits, berets tucked politely under their arms, waiting for the widow to leave before finishing their work of filling the grave. The heavy, restless sky sent gusts of wind through the grass of the little hilltop cemetery, bringing a twilight that had lasted all through the afternoon. If only it would rain, Boudrie thought. He stepped forward, opening his arms to the new widow. Her face was twisted with shock.
He patted her shoulder, murmuring sympathy, promising his prayers, urging her to be strong in the faith that Christ had called her husband to his eternal reward. Privately, he was not so sure, and he knew she was not either. Henri Taillou had been a man short of intelligence and mean of spirit. Suspicious of all he did not understand—which included nearly everything beyond the confines of his nineteenth-century life-style—and envious of those he considered better off than himself, he had also been possessed of a rapacity that had mushroomed beyond control during this summer’s drought, earning him the deadly enmity of those neighbors forced to pay his exorbitant fees for the water upon which their lives depended. It was common knowledge that he beat his wife and son—a trading Philippe would be likely to pass on—and that the chances of finding him sober at any given time had dwindled in direct proportion to the passing of his years. Something in Boudrie marveled that the woman was capable of grief for such a man, but he knew that it was real. The one thing people could not bear was loneliness, and if their only companionship was hateful, they learned to thrive on that hate.
The death had come as a shock. Old Taillou possessed the constitution of a bull and, despite his drinking, had shown no signs of giving out. Boudrie, called to the deathbed, had seen the corpse’s face unaltered by the mortician. It had been contorted in rage or fear—no doubt the former, knowing Taillou, a man who would have faced even his own end with indignation. But it had clearly not been a pleasant death.
Well, Boudrie thought, see what good your new money will do you now, poor man.
At last he managed to disengage himself. He could not help feeling that mixed with the outward sympathy of Mme. Taillou’s companions was a certain grim satisfaction. Many were widows themselves, and the image of vultures welcoming a new member to their flock lodged itself disturbingly in his mind. Although he had seen and felt the gamut of human emotions through the years, funerals, especially those that left women bereaved, never failed to penetrate his armor of numbness.
He walked heavily to the old 2CV and wrestled his body into the seat. As he reached for the ignition switch, his glance caught Taillou’s son, Philippe. The young man had skulked at the edge of the crowd in his usual furtive way, but now he was looking at Boudrie strangely—almost imploringly. Boudrie hesitated, but then decided that Philippe knew well enough where to find him. He had had enough of funerals. The engine coughed, missed, reluctantly caught. Gauthier pere had removed the broken spark plug, not disguising his irritation, but typically had replaced only that one. Well, what could you expect when you could pay only a pittance? There was a time when such things were done purely for the love of God, but the need for money had undeniably replaced that. And who could blame the poor lilies of the field? If it was true that Christ cared for them, Boudrie had witnessed precious little of it in his lifetime. The hood bounced and rattled where he had wired the broken hinge.
As he drove the three kilometers back to the village, he wrestled with his conscience. Amalie Perrin had been sick two days now, some sort of fever, and he had not yet visited. The thought of doing so filled him with unease. It was not a house he cared to enter; memories of his three years with Celeste lurked there like ghosts. His craving for a drink was terrific. Too soon, he reached Saint-Bertrand. His watch told him the hour was not as late as the sky made it appear. With a sigh, he yielded to conscience.
But as he made the turn into town, he thought of Roger Devarre, and brightened. The business would be infinitely more bearable if the doctor accompanied him. Though Devarre was an agnostic, Boudrie was anxious to cultivate his acquaintance; there were few people in the village with whom he could converse on a more than mundane level. He swung the car up the Rue du Marechal MacMahon and stopped in front of the building Devarre used as a combination office and studio. .
The waiting room was antiseptically clean, and probably the most modernly furnished place in Saint-Bertrand. Framed diplomas and certificates lined the walls, magazines were scattered on a table. There was no receptionist, and only rarely a patient. Through one door Boudrie could see a surgical table covered with white muslin, stainless steel cabinets and sink, a scale, and other medical paraphernalia. Boudrie tapped on the door across the hall. Ajar, it swung open.
High ceilings, a skylight, and a large bay window filled the room with the Provencal radiance that painters had acclaimed for centuries. Frames and canvase
s lined the walls—models of earnest, painstaking effort unaided by talent. Devarre turned, surprised, palette in hand. He wore a white smock that looked suspiciously like a physician’s rather than a painter’s, smeared with colors like Joseph’s coat. A dab of violet on the end of his nose added a finishing touch to his habitually good-humored expression. Boudrie stepped forward, hands behind his back, and examined the work on the easel, vaguely recognizable as a reproduction of the sloping village street outside. For all he could tell, it was intended to be impressionistic.
“Dreadful, isn’t it?” Devarre said cheerfully.
Boudrie glanced out the window at the actual scene and closed one eye. “Perhaps,” he said diplomatically, “you’re not quite sure yet which style you’re working toward. These things take time to mature.”
Devarre laughed. “The truth is, I haven’t a shred of ability. Let me assure you, Etien, it’s rough to have a great passion for something nature denies you.” He hung up his smock and quickly washed at the sink, then took from a drawer a leather-covered flask and two small glasses. “An ugly day, isn’t it?”
“I have just come from burying Henri Taillou.”
Devarre had written out the death certificate: a stroke, with no mention of liver and kidneys drastically deteriorated from decades of determined alcohol abuse. He shrugged, a gesture Boudrie repeated. They touched glasses and drank.
“Your wife is well?”
Devarre shrugged again. “A touch of the cafard, I think, though she says nothing. It’s hard for her to be so far from the children; the house is very empty. I know Melusine loves the freedom of this place, but she misses Paris too.” He smiled wryly. “I try, but I’m afraid I’m not as much company as I should be. Perhaps she needs a lover.”
Next, After Lucifer Page 12
