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

  I squeezed through the narrow alleyway between numbers 26 and 27, where the damp clung like grease to the cobbles, and entered Miller’s Court. But when I knocked on number 13, there was no answer. Mary wasn’t there. She was out walking the streets. Working.

  I had no hope of finding her out in that rat maze so I pressed myself back into the shadows where I could watch Miller’s Court – and wait. The minutes and hours dragged slowly by, and fog rolled into the court like the icy waves of a bottomless sea. Before long I was cold to the bone and fearing that I was too late – that he’d found her out there somewhere and, even now, she was already lying dead on the streets.

  But then I saw her. All of a sudden she was there, squeezing through the gap and going straight up the path to her front door. I felt so relieved to see her alive and well, but it was a short-lived feeling because he had followed her here.

  Even shrouded by the fog, I would have recognised him anywhere. He knew I was there. I could tell because he raised his hand in a wave, without so much as glancing at me – a mocking gesture to let me know that my presence here meant nothing to him. He went straight up to Mary’s door and disappeared inside.

  I hurried after him but the door was locked so I banged on it with my fist and called Mary’s name through the wood, thinking I would break it down if I had to, if that’s what it took.

  But Mary opened it herself a moment later, smiling widely when she saw me. ‘’Ello again, Father,’ she said. ‘Back so soon?

  I pushed her aside and rushed into her room, fully expecting to see him there, already sharpening his knife, but there was no one. No one at all.

  Black magician . . .

  ‘She’s laughing at you, you know.’

  I spun on the spot because it was his voice, and I was sure he would be behind me, but he must have made himself invisible again because it was only Mary standing there, already undoing the buttons of her dress.

  *

  Someone was knocking on the door. I wished they would stop. The noise was making it hard to concentrate. Or sleep. Or eat. Or whatever it was I was trying to do. For some reason I couldn’t seem to remember.

  Then there was the crash of a door being forced open and, when I turned around, I was shocked to see Father Paul and Charles falling over themselves in the doorway.

  ‘What are you—’ I began, but that was as far as I got before Father Paul doubled over on the spot and was violently sick upon the floor.

  ‘No!’ Charles said, and it was almost a cry, an awful sound of anguish that made the hair at the back of my neck stand on end. ‘Oh God, James, no, no!’

  ‘What is it?’ I said, beginning to feel quite alarmed. ‘What’s happened?’

  Then my eyes focused on something over Charles’ shoulder and horror caught in my throat, lodged itself there like a stone.

  He was there. So covered in blood that he looked like he’d been bathing in it. And not just blood but gore, too, and viscera, and all the other tissues and internal fluids of carnage. The knife was still dripping in his hand and there behind him – lying on the bed – lay some pulpy mashed up mess of a thing. I could not for the life of me work out what it was.

  ‘He’s there, Charles!’ I pointed over my brother’s shoulder, trying to warn him. ‘There by the bed! Watch out, he’s got a knife!’

  Charles glanced over his shoulder before turning back to me, his skin a shocking shade of grey. ‘That’s a mirror, James,’ he said – his voice was quiet but it shook with an emotion I couldn’t identify. ‘You’re the one standing by the bed.’

  Behind him, Father Paul was still vomiting as if he would never stop.

  ‘Did you pass him as you came in?’ I asked, peering past him to the door. ‘He must have just been here. He must have . . . he must have slipped past me.’ A dizzy feeling swept over me and I blinked my eyes hard against it. ‘What’s going on here? Where’s Mary? Why am I . . . ? Have I been attacked?’

  Was that why I felt so strange? Was that why I was covered in blood? Was that why there was a strange metallic taste in my mouth and a coating of grease on my tongue?

  Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to remember what had happened after I’d walked in. He must have struck me from behind. That could be the only possible explanation.

  How long ago had I entered this room?

  Father Paul had finally stopped vomiting and now had his eyes firmly fixed on my brother.

  ‘He’s mad,’ the priest said hoarsely. ‘Completely mad.’

  ‘He’s not mad!’ I said, glaring at Father Paul. ‘He’s absolutely sane. I already tried to tell you that once!’

  ‘It’s all right, James,’ Charles said, moving to put himself between Father Paul and me, his voice breaking slightly on my name. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘Of course it’s going to be all right,’ I replied. ‘As soon as we find him and stop him.’

  To my surprise, and in spite of the bloody mess all over my coat, Charles reached out and pulled me into an embrace, as if I were a child once again. For some moments, he held me so tightly against him that I realised his entire body was trembling. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, whispering the words so quietly in my ear that I almost didn’t hear them. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Sorry? Sorry for what?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Father Paul has already agreed to arrange everything for us. To keep everything quiet. I won’t allow anyone to hurt you, James. I give you my word. Just . . . please give me the knife.’

  ‘I don’t have a—’

  The knife I hadn’t even realised I was holding fell from my hand.

  Suddenly, I knew I had to see what was behind me so I twisted free of my brother’s grip and turned around.

  But I was wrong-footed.

  He had out-witted me somehow.

  The bed – that bed – was beside me, after all.

  ‘What . . . what is that?’ I said, staring at the mess upon the sheets – and not just upon the sheets but smeared all over the walls, spotted upon the ceiling, splattered on the floor and sticky all over my hands. ‘Charles, what is that?’

  No one said anything but, finally, I realised what was on the bed.

  The naked body had been human once but it was hard to tell now. A jagged slash cut the throat right down to the spine, the neck tissue was severed to the bone, great chunks of thigh had been sliced away, both breasts had been cut off, and the intestines and spleen lay in wet, glistening piles beside the body on the bed. As for the face, it had been almost entirely hacked away. A mess of shining red flaps of flesh were all that remained.

  There was a deafening ringing in my ears. It felt like it would split my head in two. Surely none of this could be real . . .

  ‘Charles,’ I said, suddenly afraid in a way I couldn’t remember ever having been before. I tried to turn back to him, reaching out blindly with my hand, searching for something in the room to hold on to. ‘Charles, please . . .’

  But it was no good. There was nothing there. Only the choking darkness of the Ripper’s velvety voice as he whispered his evil thoughts into my ear so loudly that I couldn’t think through the nightmare of it.

  For the first time in my life, I think I must have fainted. And when I came back to my senses I was far away from Miller’s Court, in a strange and frightening place, with bars upon the windows and lunatics laughing in the halls.

  I tried, again and again, to explain about the Whitechapel Murderer – that fiendish black magician who had somehow managed to get away with it yet again. But I couldn’t make them hear me. I couldn’t make them listen. They thought that I was the mad one.

  Charles visits me from time to time, but he can barely look at me, and I can tell he doesn’t believe that I saw the Whitechapel Killer that night, or that I’ve seen him since, lurking in the mirrors, sneaking into my nightmares, poking at the back of my eyeballs from the inside of my head with those confounded claws of his. No one in this place believes me but it is the truth ne
vertheless – and one day the truth will out.

  And I will tell the world who Jack the Ripper really is.

  Ω

  The facts of the case appear to be correct so far as dates and places are concerned. They are also correct in their mention of the mutilations suffered by the victims. Some were missing organs such as the kidney and uterus, but only the final victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was missing her heart. Her body was found on the morning of 9 November 1888.

  The Roman Catholic Church of St Mary and St Michael still stands today on Commercial Road in the East End of London. It is located just a short distance from 13 Millers Court where Mary Jane Kelly was killed. The second victim, Annie Chapman, was also last seen alive in this vicinity.

  However, we can find no record of a Father James being incumbent at the church at that time and so have been unable to corroborate any of the statements made in this quite disturbing account.

  1920s

  One box file found in the Vatican vaults was labelled ‘Fr Bérenger Saunière’. The main document appears to have been written in the 1920s by a senior church dignitary and academic from Saint-Sulpice in Paris. He had evidently known Saunière well, and had delved into the priest’s enigmatic life in some depth.

  There were a number of other documents and press cuttings in the file, and some of these are interleaved in the scholar’s account, as noted herein. In a few places we have summarised the Saint-Sulpice scholar’s text, but for the most part what follows is taken directly from his document.

  Saunière’s Secret

  Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe

  Bérenger Saunière was born on 11 April 1852 at Couiza Montazels in south-western France, close to the mountainous Spanish border. The Montazels part of the village name is associated with the hazel plant and its use in witchcraft. Couiza overlooks the mysterious village of Rennes-le-Château where Saunière became the parish priest in 1885, and where he died on 22 January 1917, a few weeks short of his sixty-fifth birthday.

  Rennes-le-Château was not a lucrative living: the stipend was only a few francs a month, and the impoverished young Saunière depended on the generosity of his parishioners in order to eat regularly. A few years later, however, he was the most prolific spender in the Languedoc in south-western France. His appreciation of his parishioners’ earlier generosity was expressed in the frequent luxurious meals to which he invited them. Part of the Saunière mystery is the source of his enormous, unaccountable wealth, but there is far more to it than that, as I shall record later.

  First, there is the mystery of the man himself. Bérenger Saunière was no traditional nineteenth-century French village priest. One clue to his true identity is the way that his parishioners obeyed and revered him. They treated him like royalty – and he behaved like royalty: but of the wild, Bohemian kind. Beautiful eighteen-year-old Marie Dénarnaud – listed officially as his ‘housekeeper’ – was his nubile young partner at home in Rennes, and his romantic forays further afield included the beautiful and sensual Emma Calvé, the brilliant opera singer and courtesan.

  Bérenger was no harmless village priest. He was powerful, ruthless and well able to defend himself and the breathtaking secrets that he guarded.

  *

  Among the other papers in the box, along with the lengthy, detailed account from the scholar at Saint-Sulpice, was a newspaper cutting which had been added to the Saunière file in the 1960s. It bore out the Saint-Sulpice scholar’s opinion that Saunière was powerful and ruthless. According to the cutting, an archaeological expedition had dug three young men’s bodies from shallow graves in the lawn beside his presbytery. Each had been shot.

  The journalist responsible for the story apparently believed that part of the mystery of Saunière’s amazing wealth was his secret connection with the Royal Bank of Austria and the Habsburg family; he conjectured that the corpses in the presbytery lawn were those of three sinister agents employed by the Austrian Secret Service. In his opinion, they had been sent to assassinate Bérenger, but had fatally underestimated their intended victim. Saunière, it was imaginatively suggested, had glimpsed them passing his bedroom window, quietly eased his arm from under his beloved Marie and drawn his Colt 0.44 Magnum from under their pillow. He had fired three quick shots . . . The journalist asked if that was how the assassins had died.

  *

  The file also contained Bérenger Saunière’s signed confession, as well as several other documents, and that confession alone solves the relatively minor mystery of the corpses in the lawn. The speculative journalist was right, but the solution to the real mystery of Rennes goes a long way further back, as the Saint-Sulpice scholar explained in his background notes.

  He wrote that during the third Christian century, a religious teacher named Mani had enjoyed enormous power and prestige. His theology was a form of dualism and was based on the Gnostic teachings of Zoroaster. This mixture of theology and philosophy passed over the centuries via a cult known as the Paulicians, and another group called the Bogomils, until – in the region around Rennes-le-Château – it became the centre of Cathar teachings.

  When the Cathar fortress of Montségur fell in 1244, a small group of its defenders managed to escape down the precipitous mountain carrying with them what were intriguingly described as ‘the treasures of their faith’. Their enemies never caught them so the exact nature of their mysterious treasure remained unknown.

  What seems at first glance to be the simple enigma of where an impoverished village priest obtained his vast wealth, wrote the scholar, becomes an awesome, complex mystery stretching back into the mists of prehistory. It even raises wild possibilities of sinister extraterrestrials, survivors of Atlantis, and traumatic magical weaponry that makes gunpowder seem relatively minor by comparison.

  *

  The Saint-Sulpice scholar continued:

  Saunière himself came to see me in Saint-Sulpice, and I visited him in Rennes. I also interviewed the verger who served at the Church of St Mary Magdalene while Saunière was their parish priest. He seemed relieved to speak to a priest other than Saunière, whom he did not entirely trust, and he told me of a curious ancient document that he had discovered inside a broken pulpit support and given to Saunière. According to the verger, it was shortly after this incident with the hidden parchment that Bérenger began spending money as if there was no tomorrow. I link what the verger told me about the strange hidden manuscript with Saunière’s visits to Saint-Sulpice to consult me and some of our other scholars and paleographers.

  To be fair to the man, and to give him his due, much of the vast wealth that Saunière controlled was spent on repairing his church, and filling it with paintings and statues.

  Unlike most traditional depictions of the Roman executioners dicing for Christ’s seamless robe, in which the faces of the dice are not shown clearly, Sauniere’s Tenth Station of the Cross contained distinct details of the three dice that the Roman soldiers had used. These dice showed the numbers three, four and five: the sides of a Pythagorean right-angled triangle. But what did that coded triangle have to do with Saunière’s mysterious wealth? Was it a clue to the location of something immensely valuable? As I thought more deeply about those numbers, strange images of an underground labyrinth came into my mind, but it was a very different labyrinth from the one I had visited at Knossos.

  Eventually, I learnt what that strange dice triangle meant and how it also connected with the puzzling document found by Saunière’s verger: but those answers lay far away on a mysterious island off the coast of Nova Scotia.

  Another of the bizarre Rennes mysteries had intrigued me since my first meeting with Saunière. He had dropped some strange clues then about an ancient, shadowy, secret society called The Guardians or The Mentors: otherwise known as The Priory of Sion. According to Saunière, their origins went right back into prehistory and vestigial traces of them were said to be found in Paleolithic cave art from millennia ago. The legends of lost civilisations like Atlantis, Lemuria and the Aroi Sun King
dom of the Pacific all hinted at their strange and powerful influence. What Saunière said led me to do further research into their origins. I found that tangential references to them existed in many ancient religious texts, and all those references focused on their amazing powers. They were sporadically described as magical beings like the djinn. Sometimes they were depicted as amphibian extraterrestrials similar to the statues of the Babylonian gods. Whether they were thought of as divine, or demonic – they were always described as immensely powerful.

  When talking to me about these strange entities, Saunière made special reference to one particularly dominant member of the Guardians: this was Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem during the time of Abraham. Saunière had maintained that the mighty and mysterious Melchizedek was immortal, and that he was the same immensely powerful entity who was also known as Hermes Trismegistus and as Thoth, the Scribe of the Egyptian pantheon.

  Saunière also spoke of the Emerald Tablets associated with Hermes Trismegistus. He believed that much knowledge and power could be drawn from them. I wondered as I listened to him whether those awesome Emerald Tablets had once been guarded by the Cathars, and then by the Templars. I understood that if the Emerald Tablets possessed even a tiny fraction of the power attributed to them in folklore and legend, the Templars would have seen that it was imperative to keep them away from Philip IV, with his avaricious greed and unscrupulous hunger for power.

  Saunière also reminded me of an old Hebrew legend that I already knew well. He was most interested in its strange references to the Emerald Tablets. According to this legend, Abraham’s sister-wife, Sarah, had gone into a cave and discovered the mighty Hermes Trismegistus lying there in a state of suspended animation. Beside him, the Emerald Tablets gleamed, and Sarah was fascinated by their radiant beauty. She picked one up in each hand, and, as she did so, Hermes began to wake. Sarah was terrified and ran from the cave still holding the two Emerald Tablets. She handed them to Abraham, who kept them safe for many years, then passed them to Isaac. According to the legend, they eventually became the sacred stones Urim and Thummim used by the Hebrew high priests to ascertain the will of God. Eventually, however, the secret of how to use them was lost – as were the tablets themselves.