Blood Brotherhood

by Robert Barnard

  The room was lighted by the same sort of little bedside-lamp as was in his room. Father Anselm having swirled into the room, the Bishop stood in the doorway, blinking to accustom his eyes to the lurking shadows. After a few seconds he got his bearings and saw.

  ‘Goodness me,’ said the Bishop of Peckham.

  It was one of his favourite expressions, but it could not be considered adequate to this occasion. On the bed lay Brother Dominic, clad in a rough white bed-robe. At least, it had been white. Now the whole of the middle part of it was savagely cut to ribbons, and heavy with thick red blood, which had spurted over the walls and dripped in sticky pools on to the floor. It looked as if a manic gorilla had been at him with a knife and ripped his bowels out.

  There was, needless to say, no sign of life. Brother Dominic was presumably, at this very moment, freezing his Lord.

  The Bishop, having seen much, much more than he wanted to, turned aside from the sight, leaned his head against the door-post and retched. Nothing much came up, but he heaved and heaved and heaved again, like a dog who has eaten something he had better have left alone (though dinner had, in fact, been good). Before long he felt a hand on his shoulder, and let himself be led along the corridor to Father Anselm’s study.

  The very closing of the door brought relief to the Bishop’s mind. The Thing was shut out. The Sight was not before his eyes. The Bishop sank into a chair, wishing his stomach was not still suggesting he was on the North Sea. The voice of Father Anselm seemed to come from a great distance.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘the point is, what are we to do?’

  The Bishop, trying desperately to concentrate on what was going on, asked him to repeat what he had said.

  ‘The question is,’ repeated Anselm carefully, looking straight at the Bishop, ‘what we are to do.’

  The Bishop shook his head violently, as if ridding himself of the last vestiges of sleep and nausea.

  ‘You’ve called the police?’ he said at last.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Father Anselm quietly. ‘I thought I should have your authorization.’ The Bishop seemed about to say something, and Father Anselm added: ‘Because this thing will inevitably come back to one of the members of your symposium.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘How is that?’ asked the Bishop finally.

  ‘The other members of the Community, the Brothers, sleep in the East Wing. The door between it and the main building is locked every night. We have some valuable silver in the main hall and some priceless things in the chapel. Since it would be child’s play for a thief to get over the outer walls, it is necessary to minimize the number of possible means of entry. In practice, the only way into the Great Hall is through the door you came in when you arrived. The chapel has no entrance to the outside world — you remember it is reached by a small passage, the door to which is at the end of this corridor. This central block is entirely shut off from the rest of the Community’s buildings at night.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Bishop faintly.

  ‘The main door is, of course, locked and bolted from the inside at night,’ pursued Father Anselm remorselessly. ‘Brother Dominic is — was — my assistant and personal servant. Only he and I sleep in this part of the building as a general rule. And then, of course, there are the guest-rooms . . .’

  There was silence for a moment.

  ‘I see,’ said the Bishop. ‘So he must have been killed either by you, or by one of us.’

  ‘As far as the police are concerned, that is so,’ said Father Anselm austerely. ‘As far as I am concerned, he must have been killed by one of you.’

  ‘Quite, quite,’ said the Bishop feebly. He made a heroic effort to collect his thoughts. ‘But of course you must in any case ring the police,’ he said finally, gesturing in the direction of the discreet telephone in the murkiest corner of the room.

  Father Anselm’s mouth tightened. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Now I have your permission.’ He rose, and was proceeding in the direction of the telephone when both men were arrested by a sound.

  The Bishop sat bolt upright and felt a tingling in his scalp which made him wonder if his hair was about to stand on end. It had been, to be sure, a very slight sound, and it seemed to have come from a long way off, penetrating the substantial door of Father Anselm’s study. But it was a sound which unmistakably suggested a human being, and presumably one somewhere in the central block. The Bishop’s look showed what he undeniably felt — that he had already had as much as, or more than, a human being could take. He was to feel that several times more in the course of the night.

  Father Anselm, too, had been riveted to the floor by the sound. His deep, unfathomable eyes stared into the distance. Then he said: ‘There’s someone out there. It sounded like the main door. But that’s impossible.’

  Noiselessly he turned towards the door of his room.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said to the Bishop.

  ‘But don’t you think — ’ the Bishop began. But Father Anselm had swirled out of the room, and a second’s meditation convinced the Bishop that the prospect of staying there alone, even with a door between him and whatever it was, was infinitely more terrifying than the prospect of following. He showed remarkable nimbleness in pattering out after his masterful host, whose undulating outline he perceived at the end of the dark corridor leading to the Great Hall. He started after it, but then he saw it stop suddenly. Involuntarily he stopped too, then, slowly and reluctantly, he made his way towards him, and finally stood shoulder to shoulder with him at the point where the corridor opened out into the Great Hall.

  The sight that met their eyes was a horrifying one.

  The main door had been swung open, and framed in the wash of moonlight stood the Bishop of Mitabezi. He too was wearing a white robe — though his was of African cut and style, and of richer material. He too was terrifyingly stained with red, one long splurge reaching from waist to toe.

  He was standing there, in heaven’s spotlight, gazing crazily ahead of him. The whites of his eyes seemed to pierce across the expanse of the Great Hall towards them, though his eyes were rolling. His bearing was that of a powerful man, but slouching, and with his hands outspread in a generous gesture, like a tenor finishing an aria with a sob and soliciting applause. But the tenor’s hands would not be red. His were, both of them, very red indeed. They had stained the door-handle, and even as Father Anselm and the Bishop looked, their sticky coating began to drip down to the floor of the hall.

  And then, to crown the ghastly horror of the scene, the Bishop of Mitabezi opened his mouth and began to croon a strange, low, atonal chant, which whispered its way round the Romanesque expanse of the Great Hall, and sent a fresh chill straight to the hearts of the two hearers, watching in the shadows at the far end.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE DAWN COMES UP LIKE THUNDER

  IT WAS FATHER Anselm, inevitably, who took charge of the situation. Showing a degree of nerve surprising even for him, he tore his feet from the spot to which they seemed to have become rooted the moment the sight had come upon him and went across the great expanse of hall floor towards the hideous chanting figure.

  The Bishop of Mitabezi continuing to advance into the Great Hall, showed no awareness of any other person in the vicinity. His eyes continued to roll alarmingly, his mouth, barely open and barely moving, continued to emit weird sounds, and from its corners began to dribble two little streams of saliva. Father Anselm was tense with anticipation — a fact that could be felt by the Bishop of Peckham yards away, even though his body was concealed by his billowing robe. He took a step towards the chanting figure, stretched out his arm, and touched his. As he did so, the Bishop of Peckham’s heart leapt into his mouth, and the thought of some fearsome affray, with murderous figures in clerical robes struggling for their lives on the floor, and him expected to intervene — and would he dare to intervene? — came upon him with all the welcomeness of a thunderclap on a picnic party.

  But no such affray succeede
d. The Bishop of Mitabezi, still chanting, allowed himself to be led, still seeming quite unconscious of any other presence, across the Great Hall towards the corridor and stairs which led to the guest bedrooms. As the two figures merged into the gloom, the Bishop of Mitabezi’s chant was beginning to fade into silence. The other bishop, watching in the shadows, had a sinking feeling that he ought to follow. Every brotherly feeling prompted him to give what help he could to Father Anselm in his difficult and highly unpleasant task. But he stayed where he was. Brotherly feelings were all very well, but they tended to evaporate with the remembrance of that body on the bed, and the gashes through the white robe, and the great splashes of red disfiguring it.

  After what seemed like an eternity — and his experiences at St Botolph’s were giving him a new and more vivid conception of the meaning of the word — he heard from the distance the shuffle of a foot, the creak of a stair, sounds of human movement. The horrible thought flashed through his brain that the moving human might be the Bishop of Mitabezi — that he had slaughtered Father Anselm, and was now athirst for more clerical blood. But when the figure finally appeared at the other side of the hall, its robes were dark. In his ecstasy of relief, the Bishop felt that some tribute was called for.

  ‘Superb,’ he whispered to the approaching figure, his gratitude giving his voice real sincerity. ‘Quite incredibly brave.’

  The muscles around Father Anselm’s mouth tightened — could it be with contempt? — and he led the way back down the corridor into his own office. Once inside, with the door shut, the Bishop felt once more that feeling of welcome security gained, that sense of discovering at last a firm foothold after a long walk over ice. In spite of what he suspected to be Father Anselm’s attitude towards his recent behaviour he felt he had to give voice once again to his appreciation. By emphasizing Father Anselm’s quite exceptional bravery, he felt he established himself as a man of normal courage, rather than the abject coward he might otherwise seem.

  ‘You have nerves of steel, my word you have!’ he said.

  ‘He gave no trouble,’ murmured Father Anselm. ‘He got straight into bed like a child, and went to sleep.’

  A very nasty thought occurred to the Bishop.

  ‘But there are no locks on his door,’ he said in consternation. ‘He could — ’

  ‘I tied him in bed,’ said Father Anselm levelly. ‘With the sheets.’

  ‘Good gracious,’ said the Bishop. ‘What a clever plan.’

  Father Anselm, however, seemed oblivious of his flatteries, and his mind had gone back to the subject of what the Bishop of Mitabezi had already done, rather than what he might be feared to be about to do.

  ‘A most extraordinary reversion,’ he said, sitting down as stiffly as ever in the chair behind his desk. ‘I suppose the early Church had experience of that kind of thing.’

  ‘Certainly, certainly,’ said the Bishop, allowing his thoughts to graze on the larger historical pastures, instead of centring on the hideously restricted grounds of the last half-hour or so. ‘A common enough phenomenon, as the records show, not just here, but throughout Europe. Quite understandable, of course.’

  ‘One wishes, in that case, that the Church authorities had shown themselves a little more aware of the dangers,’ said Father Anselm with more than a touch of asperity. ‘I have lost my most capable assistant and my probable successor!’

  Again the memory of the body in the next room flooded over the Bishop, and he could only murmur, ‘Quite, quite.’

  ‘The consequences of all this are frightening to contemplate,’ continued Father Anselm. ‘But that, of course, will be your department rather than mine.’

  ‘Consequences?’ said the Bishop, nervous again.

  ‘Clearly there will be publicity of the most damaging kind.’ The Bishop flinched. ‘And the effects in the Third World are anybody’s guess.’

  The words had a magic effect on the Bishop.

  ‘The Third World! Oh, my goodness, yes! What do you think they’ll say?’

  ‘No doubt that this is all some capitalist-imperialist plot to discredit the black races,’ said Father Anselm. ‘I expect you know the sort of thing better than I. And then of course the diplomatic repercussions will be endless.’

  ‘My goodness,’ said the Bishop, ‘you alarm me. Church House will be livid. They were particularly insistent that I should keep him happy.’

  ‘I doubt whether they intended you should go so far as to provide him with human sacrifices,’ said Father Anselm.

  ‘No, no, naturally,’ said the Bishop. ‘Nevertheless, they will be most upset. The one thing they are anxious to avoid at the moment is upsetting the Third World.’ He paused for a moment. ‘If only there were something that could be done . . .’

  His voice faded into thoughtful silence.

  Father Anselm looked at him hard. ‘Are you suggesting that the whole thing be concealed?’ he asked, in a soft voice which had no note of disapproval in it.

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ said the Bishop, but rather feebly. ‘I’m merely going through the possibilities in my mind, naturally. In any case, the young man will have had relatives . . .’

  ‘He had none,’ said Father Anselm, in that same soft voice. ‘He was quite alone when he came here. He told me so many times.’

  The Bishop became lost in reverie. He loved publicity, fuss, people talking about him; he hated ridicule, being in the wrong, being put up against the wall: In his heart of hearts he would have liked to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, though he sometimes doubted whether the Prime Minister was the man to make such an imaginative gesture. So circumspect had he been that he was sure nobody in the world knew of this secret ambition, but in fact one of the stalest jokes of the clerical circuit was that he was preparing himself for the job by being a very arch bishop indeed. Who could imagine an Archbishop of Canterbury who had recently (for the Bishop, being an optimist, always imagined the See of Canterbury being shortly vacant again, by one means or another) been involved in a murder case? It would be disastrous for the image. To put the matter at its lowest, how many television producers would be knocking at the palace door in the near future?

  As the temptations of this unorthodox course of conduct became more pressing, the implications fanned out in his mind: he saw himself and Father Anselm digging a shallow grave on the moors, carrying out the . . . the Thing . . . and burying it, hugger-mugger. Would one of them say the burial service? He thought of all the evasions and concealments that would be necessary afterwards, the sessions of the symposium to be gone through as if nothing had happened. He thought of living with the memory, with the possibility of blackmail. All these considerations, which together might almost be said to add up to the promptings of a moral sense, crowded in on the Bishop. Suddenly he shook his head violently, got a grip on himself, and turned back to Father Anselm.

  ‘Of course, the idea’s absurd,’ he said, ‘quite absurd. You must ring the police at once.’

  Father Anselm looked at him for a moment, then rose and again moved towards the telephone. His silence made the Bishop nervous once more.

  ‘I presume your local police can be discreet,’ he said.

  ‘I have no experience of our local police,’ said Father Anselm. All his former austerity of manner had now returned. He paused a second over the phone, almost as if to give the Bishop one last chance of changing his mind, then he lifted the receiver and dialled.

  ‘Hickley Police Station? Good. I’m speaking from the Community of St Botolph’s. My name is Father Anselm . . . That’s right, I am. Now look, there has been a murder here . . . No, not an intruder, a murder . . . One of the brothers . . . If you would . . . And when you get here, please do not ring the bell. There’s no reason to disturb the Community before it is necessary. I myself will wait for you in the grounds . . . Thank you — yes, if you would.’

  He put the phone down, and came to the middle of the room. ‘They are coming immediately,’ he said coldly. ‘I shall wai
t for them by the gate.’

  ‘I’ll wait with you,’ said the Bishop with transparent eagerness.

  As they walked across the floor of the Great Hall the Bishop averted his eyes from the drops of blood which had fallen from the Bishop of Mitabezi’s hands, and stood aside while Father Anselm pushed open the door (which had swung to) without touching the handle. Once outside the Bishop took a deep breath of fresh air and looked around him. Birds were singing, it was beginning to get light. Another day was dawning for the brothers of the Community of St Botolph’s. Or for all but one of them.

  The before-dawn air was chill, and the Bishop shivered. Father Anselm was not proceeding in the direction of the gate, but was standing quite still. The Bishop, finding that erect, silent figure as awesome as ever, began rather nervously to make conversation.

  ‘There is one blessing to be counted,’ he said. ‘The publicity will be ghastly, of course — quite ghastly — but at least there can be no doubt who did it, so it should all be over in the minimum possible time. That we can be grateful for. Whether we can keep the symposium going is another matter . . .’

  But as he was talking he realized that Father Anselm was not listening. The spiritual leader of St Botolph’s was peering through the half-light at a series of dreadful red patches on the ground. They seemed to come from the barn, and they got smaller and smaller, and less frequent as they came nearer the door into the Great Hall. Through the light of near-day could dimly be discerned a crude daubing of red on the side of the barn. The Bishop did not want to look: it all brought back too vividly the unnerving events of the last two hours. He found it distasteful, in fact, that Father Anselm should seem so interested. Eventually the latter spoke.

  ‘That’s very odd,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They all seem to be coming the one way.’

  The Bishop dragged his head round, and looked again at the trail of blood.