Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

  ‘A noble experiment?’ Melchior’s eyes were arched in smiling disbelief. ‘You will excuse me from your experiments, I beg. For though I am immortal and will regenerate within the cosmic day, still I feel pain unendurable and would avoid it if I could. And humanity has only a brief youth, a briefer maturity and a short old age.’ He toasted Cain and swept a slow hand across the terrible future. ‘This is no sunny strand to be wasting fled time on, inevitability of error or not. Were I a man, I would rather tend my own garden, be charitable on my terms but look after my own family first and drink with my own neighbours across our mutual boundary than sacrifice these small gains to another man’s dream of paradise.’

  The scene changed once more and we were returned to that place where night and day resided in the same place, between the desert and the sown, between the tempest and the turquoise lagoon. There before us was the candle on the barrel, burning low on its fuse so that sparks already touched about the bung hole; and so your humble servant watched as Pio Nono came to make up his mind. Which was Angel? Which was Demon? For upon this intelligence, his decision must rest. The Blue Lancer Cain held out his broken dreams, while Melchior, the Silver Ensign, offered only bleak, parochial daily struggle with hope extending no further than the end of his own path and the end of his own estate. Both forms of men were objects of great beauty, such that Michelangelo, Leonardo or Raphael would sculpt them from cream-veined Carrara marble at their own expense; both carried wisdom, age and foreknowledge about them, as lightly as a scabbard or a sabretache. How could Pio Nono choose? For myself, I, Niccolo Parvatti, hoped that he would choose the advice of the Lancer, for how can great men be sustained without dreams? How can men progress without vision? How can the vicissitudes of the world be overcome without lifting our hearts to the heaven of an ideal? But I am only a humble servant without education and have never seen much further than my daily bread nor desired the knowledge either; yet still I have the freedom to hope and to dream.

  And so Pio Nono began to pace again. To and fro as the fuse fizzed and spat fat sparks at the thin walls of the powder keg. From time to time he took off his poor parish priest’s black round hat and turned it this way and that and ran it through his fingers, as though the answer to his question might be concealed in the lining. He would kick at a stone and shoot a glance at the candle, and then to Melchior drinking and Cain grooming, hoping to gain some clue, instinct or insight that might open the answer like a flower in the sudden sun. He sniffed a little at the fumes from the candle and your humble servant remembered that he had shown signs of a fever or a chill and made a note to bank up the fires a little higher in the household.

  Presently, with the wick no more than a twist in a puddle of wax, Pio Nono made his choice. He touched his thumb and forefinger to his tongue, snuffed out the candle with them and, holding his breath for a moment, turned to Cain and Melchior.

  ‘I thank you for your deliberations. Be you Angel or Demon you have served your masters well in sharpening my bluntness to the point of decision.’ He held out a hand to Cain the Lancer, who was fastening the chinstrap on his cap, ready to fly. ‘If you are Demon, then I offer to shake your gauntlet with the hand of forgiveness and the hope of God’s mercy. If you are Angel, then I beg you forgive my presumption and go well to the Light Eternal. I shall not take your advice though; and I must change my mind as to the wisdom of revolution; take to distrusting my own dreams as well as those of other dreamers.’

  Cain held out his hand, shook that of Pio Nono, then mounted his steed and saluted. ‘You are sure I am the Demon, then?’

  Pio Nono nodded.

  ‘What turned your mind?’ said Melchior rising, replacing his flask in its pouch and fixing his bayonet to the socket of his musket in readiness for war.

  ‘The fragrance of your cordial,’ answered Pio Nono. ‘For the foul enemy would never choose something so wholesome for his repast. It is the small things that make men great, not the piled-on fantasies of their theory. You are right; if we tend our own gardens in accord with our neighbours, we need no grand plans of threadbare visionaries.’

  Melchior’s mouth opened and shut in amazement. His musket fell to the turf as he put his hand to his canteen and then to his head.

  ‘You broke the Law,’ sneered Cain revealed, from a mouth of steel, rending teeth and the fetid stench of the beast. ‘You fell for my stratagem from the outset. Rest and refresh yourself while you can.’

  ‘What is this?’ cried Pio Nono, puzzled, afraid, looking from one to the other, his hat in his hand like a discus. ‘What Law has been broken?’

  ‘No Angel or Demon may reveal himself in the contest of Peter’s Gift; neither through word, deed or object. It is the Law,’ said Melchior miserably. ‘And by these terms I have failed. You knew me by my cordial, my object. I have been deceived.’

  ‘The consequence? The consequence?’ cried Pio Nono in a voice of urgent anguish.

  ‘Tell him,’ said cruel Cain, tugging at his sweating, hissing horse, and couching his lance.

  ‘The cost of this broken Law is that what you have seen will come to pass, though you resist it ninety-nine times out of a hundred,’ said Melchior, his head bowed like a mendicant schoolboy.

  ‘I would run you through,’ cried Cain, his lance levelled, his grin triumphant. ‘But it would only lessen your pain, fool.’

  ‘Away with you,’ said Pio Nono. The Demon snapped a salute from the peak of his cap that cracked like a jailor’s whip, put bloody spurs to striped flanks and shot up through the mists of rock before the landscape turned back to empty cavern.

  ‘Must it be like this?’ said Pio Nono to the miserable, weeping boy Angel.

  ‘Ninety-nine times out of a hundred,’ said Melchior.

  Pio Nono closed his eyes and drew himself up to his full height.

  ‘Then I will take my chances,’ he said. ‘I reject the path of least resistance and I reject the religion of revolution. I choose the Calvary of defiance in the hope that one day the Church will triumph over Marx, Prophet of Kolyma, and the hotheads of 1848 both. Come Melchior, back to your regiment; none know the whole future.’

  And saying no more, Pio Nono left the cavern, taking me by the hand from my hiding place, leading me back up to the living and to the terrible future, weeping all the way, and becoming Pope Pius IX once more, but anew and more determined than ever.

  ‘Kolyma?’ he muttered at each upward stage. ‘Not if there is one slippery chance on a hundred slopes against it.’

  Nor did the Holy Father rest when we at last returned to the Papal apartments, just as the red dawn was breaking.

  ‘Call for my scribes,’ he ordered, pacing up and down the room. ‘We must dictate an Allocution. And prepare letters for the Emperor of Austria, the Kings and Princes of Germany. And a warning for the Tsar.’

  I did as I was bid, called his secretaries and when they arrived, flapping and flustered like crows before bird-shot, assumed my position by the curtain waiting for his request. The humble priest of Spoleto saw me there, and catching my yawn, took my hand and led me to a couch.

  ‘Niccolo,’ he said, as sleep closed my eyes. ‘Forgive me. You have served me well and now you must take your just rest. But I beg you – remember your oath.’

  *

  I, your humble servant, Niccolo Parvatti, saw these things and so help me, I attest them to be true and though I made no oath I have kept this secret until this, my death bed, in accordance with the wishes of the poor priest of Spoleto, Pio Nono, and of the Pontiff, Pius IX.

  Ω

  Composed on his deathbed by Pope Pius IX’s chamberlain, this account of Pius’s encounter with Angels and the visions of the future they gave him, if it can be believed, offers an astonishing yet strangely believable explanation of why Pius became such an entrenched opponent of revolutionary doctrines for the remainder of his long papacy.

  1889

  On 28 January 1899 the Illustrated Police News published a report from a Church of England
clergyman who claimed to know the true identity of Jack the Ripper. He said he had received this information from a fellow clergyman, to whom the notorious murderer had made a full and complete confession. He claimed he was asked to publish the facts, after a period of ten years, in such a way as to preserve the identity of the killer, so as not to violate the secrecy of the confessional. He wrote: ‘The murderer was a man of good position and otherwise unblemished character, who suffered from epileptic mania, and is long deceased.’

  This document found in the Vatican Vaults pre-dates that account by several years. It appears to have been written two months after the last Ripper murder took place, and in some way corroborates the theory that Jack the Ripper confessed his crimes to a clergyman.

  The Confession

  Alex Bell

  9 January 1889

  It began with the confession.

  It was a Sunday – the 30th September – and I was almost falling asleep in the confessional. I’d been by myself in the dark for some time, what felt like an age, waiting for the next penitent, trying to keep my eyes open, although they itched to close and felt bloodshot and raw. The hard wooden bench made my back ache – a throb that ran all the way up my spine and settled into a dull niggling twinge at the nape of my neck. I’d been feeling quite peculiar all morning – the thumping headache that had kept me awake last night hadn’t gone away, in fact it had worsened. And the queasy feeling I’d put down to last night’s dinner now felt like a cold ball of grease in the pit of my stomach. I felt hot too, although it was as cold in the church as ever. I hoped I wasn’t coming down with something. I didn’t have time to be unwell.

  Suddenly the curtain moved aside and a man came into the booth and sat down. The movement let in a waft of candle smoke and even that scent, normally so pleasant to me, made me feel quite nauseous.

  ‘Forgive me, father,’ a low voice said through the grate, ‘for I have sinned.’

  At once, I was wide awake on my hard wooden bench, all drowsiness instantly forgotten. It was a well-spoken voice – and that alone was unusual here in London’s East End – this was an educated man, a gentleman, and there was a deep velvetiness to his tone that should have been pleasant – was pleasant – and yet, underneath, there was something else that seemed to reach through the wall of the booth to me, reach through with curled and crooked claws. I knew him. Although I couldn’t see him properly through the grate, I knew who was with me in the booth. I had never suffered from claustrophobia in the confessional before but now it felt as if there was not enough air in this dark little space for the both of us.

  I swallowed hard, tried to push the feeling away, tugged at my collar to loosen it, told myself that I wasn’t getting enough sleep and was probably coming down with something besides.

  ‘How long . . . ?’ I began hoarsely, then stopped – cleared my throat. ‘How long has it been since your last confession?’

  Instead of the standard answer, he simply said, ‘Too long.’ Then: ‘Father, I have been told that you should begin by confessing the sin you find most difficult to speak of, so I will tell you, first, of what I did three weeks ago.’

  He paused then, for such a long time that I finally felt compelled to say, ‘Whatever your sins may be, my son, if you are truly sorry for them and sincere in your repentance then God will have mercy on you.’

  ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘in that case . . . I am troubled by the intestines. Just the thought of them . . . it keeps me awake at night. There was nowhere for them to go. Once I’d pulled them all out I couldn’t get them back inside so I arranged them beside her, along the ground, but the mess . . . the mess she made was obscene. Have you ever seen human intestines, Father? You would be appalled, quite appalled, I am sure. Disgusting, slimy tubes that go on and on and on like engorged purple worms – gigantic maggots full of faecal matter and half-digested food – it’s a filthy mess to be inside any human being, a wonder we’re not all rotting from the inside out. But that’s whores for you. Rotten in, rotten out and rotten everywhere in between, I say.’

  The sick feeling that had been with me all day rose up at his words, threatening to overwhelm me completely. I had to clench both sweat-slicked hands in my lap to stop them from shaking. ‘Are you saying . . .’ I said, trying to speak each word delicately through the nausea that was filling my mouth, ‘. . . that you have killed a woman?’

  ‘Killed her, sliced her, disembowelled her – all with such a small, sweet little knife, such a perfect thing of exquisite beauty. I slashed the throat first, right through to the neck, severing the vocal chords so that she wouldn’t spoil it by screaming out – women will do these things – and then I cut through the abdomen. I made sure the knife was sharp beforehand but I still had to hack quite frightfully at that flabby white stomach in order to slit it open – such soft rolls of fat, and yet so tough, more like the hide of a pig than the skin of a woman.’

  I could feel sweat forming at my hairline in that cold little booth and my headache throbbed fiercer than ever as I tried to work out what I should do. In the brief time since I’d been ordained and started at the Roman Catholic Church of St Mary and St Michael I had never come across anything like this. The only other murder that had been confessed to me – if you could even call it a murder – was from a half-drunk Irish immigrant who’d got into a fight at some gin house and his opponent had died when he accidentally hit his head on the side of the bar. The man had sobbed all the way through the confession and turned himself in to the police soon afterwards.

  This, though, this was something quite different. And I suddenly had the feeling that, being here in the confessional – being right here in this exact place at this precise time and hearing this particular confession – was akin to signing my own death warrant.

  ‘I have improved, Father,’ the man went on. ‘I made a mess of cutting the throat the first time and had to do it twice. It didn’t cut deep enough and the vocal chord must have only partially severed because she started making these . . . well, I suppose you might call it mewling, a sort of wet, squeaking, slobbering cry—’

  ‘My son,’ I said, desperate to stop him. ‘The acts you are confessing to are grievous mortal sins.’ I wiped the sweat from my brow with trembling fingers. ‘For the sake of your immortal soul, I—’

  ‘I took it with me,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her uterus,’ he said in his velvety voice, so low and mellow and pleasant to listen to. ‘The second one. I took it home with me.’

  I pressed the flats of my palms against my aching temples, trying to think clearly, trying to work out what I should do when shut up in the confessional with a monster. No one had told me, in all my training, and I felt utterly unprepared for a situation such as this.

  ‘You’re not saying . . . surely you’re not saying that you are the man the papers are all talking about?’

  ‘The Whitechapel Murderer – or is it the Ripper now? It’s larger than I thought it would be – the uterus, I mean. Last night I did for two of them.’

  Sweat prickled the back of my neck. ‘Last night?’

  I had heard about it, of course. Everyone had. They were calling it the ‘double event’. Two women killed in the space of an hour. This was a madman who couldn’t be stopped, they said. He seemed to disappear like smoke, making fools out of Scotland Yard at every possible turn. Within my own parish, I had heard frightened whispers of a black magician who could melt away into the night, melt away into Hell, and would go on stalking the streets of Whitechapel until there were no fallen women left.

  I tried to tell myself that this was no black magician sitting across from me in the booth; this was a flesh and blood man, the same as any other man, and yet when I thought of the things I knew he had done, out there in the fog, I felt afraid to be so close to such a person, afraid to breathe the same air as him and afraid of the monstrous darkness in his soul that permitted him to perform such vile deeds.

  ‘I have them here with me
now,’ he said – a soft whisper through the grate that separated us. He really did have the most beautiful voice. ‘In my pocket. The left kidney and the uterus. Half the uterus, at least. The rest I ate last night. It was a formidable meal.’

  ‘Please stop,’ I said, tugging at my collar, trying to breathe. ‘I’m going . . . I’m afraid I’m going to be sick. I cannot grant you absolution. I’m sorry, but I cannot.’

  ‘I didn’t come here for that.’

  ‘Well, in God’s name, what did you come here for then?’

  But he didn’t reply. Light swept into the booth for a moment as the curtain was pulled back and then he was gone. I hesitated for a moment of agonising uncertainty, knowing that I was not permitted to leave the confessional booth prematurely and see the person whose confession I had just heard, and yet I felt I could not miss this rare opportunity to confirm the identity of the man who had so terrified Whitechapel over the past few weeks.

  So I pushed back the curtain, staggered out of the sweltering little booth and ran all the way to the exit. The cold air outside was a blissful relief to my fevered skin. I was only just in time. He was there on the street corner, elegantly dressed in a top hat and a long black coat that rippled with the unmistakable sheen of quality and expense that I recognised from another lifetime ago. He must have felt my eyes on him because he turned and our eyes met through the crowd – those burning devil eyes of his. And I knew that I was right – it was him, after all. He who I had hoped never to lay eyes on again. Then he tipped his hat, smiled his ghastly smile, and was gone.