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

  By this time I was known well enough that the shout of my voice drew attention. Whether this time it was the attention of the Optio or fellow members of university staff I may never know, but De Wil was just as safe hidden beneath the mattress of my hospital bed for a few nights. I was grateful for any form of security I could find until I reached my ultimate goal.

  *

  I will not mislead you and say that no strings were pulled on my behalf to afford me the position in the middle staff of the Vatican archives some years later, when the dust of war finally began to settle in Italy. But the calling of a faithful man is to live in the service and footsteps of the Lord. Is that not what I have done? If it were not meant to be, then De Wil would have spoken against it, and it has not.

  I was sent by my university to research the Great Schism with the support of my church. My diligence and commitment to my research was noticed over a period of time and I was asked to collaborate with the staff on internal archive projects. This opportunity thrilled me, and led to my placement on the staff several years later.

  I have earned my position, and, to be honest, few others know the truth behind who I am, save for the Vatican Archivist. That was another fortunate turn of events.

  For my entire duration at the Vatican, De Wil has remained a hidden secret, an ancient, blank tome to all who view it without the calling to. It has been considered a harmless, empty piece of history.

  Finally, I slept soundly at night.

  But times, once again, are changing quickly, and we are welcoming an age of free information. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is that the wall of separation between our wisdom and God’s people is being torn down.

  God has nothing to hide from His people. That is exactly the reason the Optio are sent out to the world and De Wil is kept by a single man – to educate people without overwhelming them. Some say knowledge is power, and they are correct enough, but too much knowledge is panic, my friend. If everyone could read De Wil at their leisure, they would not believe that their lives were theirs to live as they choose. That is unfair to them.

  This is why De Wil must be held in the hands of only one person. To most it would be an uninteresting blank book, but to those who can read its contents it is a prize, and potentially a weapon. The book must be moved once again.

  And that is why it summoned you here today.

  I know you have felt it, so I will not bore you with redundant talk of destiny. You have lived the proof you need, every time you have followed a gut instinct to help someone. Perhaps you were never told just how this knowledge came to you, but now you have, my friend, and it is time to act.

  I pass the responsibility for the book on to you, as De Wil has instructed me to do.

  I know you have questions, and there will be help. I would promise my help to you, but I feel that will not be an option for much longer.

  You see, I have seen the words of my predecessor. The same words he saw so many years ago when he passed the legacy to me.

  The same words that comforted our Saviour have now come for me: It is finished.

  Please, protect this book. It will guide you because it is God’s plan, and He never abandons His people.

  It was put in this box because you were meant to be the one to find it. It is small, and the Archivist will not stop you from taking it. He knows what it is and who you are.

  Go on. Take it. Others have come for it too – can you feel them? Please, take it. Continue your work. You have done well so far.

  As a French soldier once said to me at the dawn of my life: Thank you. God bless you.

  May God bless you.

  Ω

  This account was found in the Vaults, but no book, blank or otherwise, was found with it. It would seem either that Jansen changed his mind about placing the book in the Archive to be found, or that at some time, perhaps in the 1960s, someone allowed into the Vaults by the Archivist found the book, and removed it, and for some reason left this document behind.

  If the latter is the case, then the book is out in the world again, and if we accept Jansen’s narrative, it may be called The Will, or De Wil, or La Volonté, or some other equivalent title.

  As for Jansen himself, he appears as enigmatic as his book. No one of that name is recorded as having worked on the staff of the Vatican Library, or has been attached to it as a visiting scholar, in the last half century. He could of course have worked there under an assumed name; or, perhaps more likely, ‘Jansen’ itself is a pseudonym to protect his identity.

  1930s

  From the notes by the Abbess at the beginning and end of this very personal account, we learn that it was written by an elderly, sick and somewhat disturbed nun in a convent in North Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her troubled upbringing – a Jewish child escaping persecution in central Europe – appears to have had a permanent effect on her, making her what would have been called a ‘difficult’ adolescent and young adult. And yet, possibly because of rather than despite her problems, Sister Anna seems to have been a gifted, self-taught scientist and linguist.

  In light of her psychological and social problems it is difficult to know how much reliance can be placed on this text. But we are including it here because of the quite startling document that was attached to this account.

  Gardening

  Stephanie Potter

  Sister Anna has been allowed this written exercise to increase our understanding of her condition. She does not speak. She screams in her sleep at night. During the day she carries out her tasks with a blank obedience. She comes to Mass, but remains silent. This is a major improvement on her condition when she first arrived.

  She writes about herself in the third person, as if she no longer exists, but is merely watched.

  Since starting to write, her nights are calmer, and we are experimenting with letting her sleep in a cubicle.

  *

  An Extract from Sister Anna’s Writings

  Silence.

  There is no such thing, of course, not even here, in the Abbey. Service is over. The day has ended. A candle flickers. The wind has subsided. The tawny owl is calling to her mate. The stars are hidden by the clouds. The waves tap gently on the shore. Badgers frolic in the woods.

  The creatures have no voice. Just vocalisations. She can no longer even do that. She thinks she has forgotten how. Her head is full of voices, loud, shouting for attention.

  She sighs. She needs to follow the Rule, to turn to her bed, to sleep just so. This Rule that brings silence, and with it, according to her voice, disaster. ‘What have they done to my garden?’ it shouts at her over and over again. A litany that leaves no room in her head for anything other than the morass of night terrors, which also have grown in their haunting.

  From the start she has been silenced. To survive the fighting, her cries were stifled, and her nightmares of a sheet covering her face still make sleep something she would rather avoid.

  There are other dreams. To avoid eviction, she was silenced: no babies allowed in these tenements. Eating food instead of speaking out. Such food as there was. Sucking a stone if necessary.

  Just on the cusp of awareness, she was there when her baby brother was silenced; ill and puny, she felt the cold take him away. Then they took him away, and told her he had gone away. Ever since, she could not bear parting. In case they never came back. As, one day, her parents never came back. Adopted, she changed everything: culture, religion, and took on the mantle of her Polish protectors kept safe from the pogroms which haunted the times, she survived.

  And when they moved west, she went also. Some places had schools where she learned to be silent: no prattling about the wonders she had seen as her family travelled. Talk about outside was frowned on. Not to mention that she knew how to sound out her letters. Aleph, Beth, Gimel. So she learned to look and listen. She listened to the other children, telling of the everyday marvels: the caterpillar on the tree, the mushroom in the lane. She played their games, learned their skipping rhymes,
and later, their love songs, which meant nothing to her. She stumbled with the languages: Polish, Danish, English.

  The nuns took her in, when it became impossible for the adoptive family to carry on, to train her for domestic service. She seemed so backward, so awkward. At twelve she was found a placement as a maid, and moved to England, but was returned to a nunnery, saying she was unsuitable. So by fourteen she was in a boarding school in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The nuns said she was a good girl, biddable but clumsy. They looked after her indifferently when polio struck. Her survival was seen as a sign and she was directed towards becoming a postulant.

  She belatedly followed the secondary curriculum, where, in the biology lab, she found a world where language was not so important, and which found connections with most of the world she had passed through. It seemed here she was safe enough for her clumsiness to subside, and she enjoyed preparing slides, cleaning petri dishes and measuring tiny drops from the pipette. Her hands were calm enough; it was her feet that stumbled. The lab became her haven.

  By the time everyone was satisfied that she could take her vows, it was suggested that she take up nursing. By doing so she would follow her only obvious talent, and in any case, the nunnery wanted a never-ending supply of nurses to heal the sick, to replace the nurses who died from sickness. The discipline added to her own self-loathing. She learned to mouth rather than sing, so her vowels wouldn’t spoil the purity of the music. Denouncing her sins with a voice that was hardly used, she would rather spend time lying on the floor without explaining. The ants were more interesting than the ritual around her. What others found in chapel, she found in the laboratory. She settled for this compromise, and when they realised she couldn’t walk quietly around the wards, without kicking the beds, it was suggested she take up gardening, which suited her.

  She continued to visit the lab, and brought soil samples. They let her take time off in the fields to collect samples from uncultivated land. Sometimes she became so lost in the beauty of the wild landscape, she lost her sense of time, and was late. Being late brought punishment: for her this was to scrub floors, as her clumsiness meant ineffectiveness in the kitchen. Small creatures scuttling away from the cold soapy water proved diverting. It was during one of these cleaning episodes that she spotted the tiny baby two-headed snake, and noted where it lived.

  The floors eventually led her to the library, deserted, neglected. One nun was hand-copying the Abbey’s own, unique Bible. A row of empty desks was testament to this dying art. Ink was spilled, had to be remade; she was shown how to do this, and to rewrite the spoiled letters. It appeared that she could. So the copying of texts became another part of her life. The Latin soothed her; it reminded her of something long ago. She started to absorb the meaning, the grammar. The Greek also, with semi-familiar letters, had a cadence, a rhythm, a music that she had heard back in infancy.

  It appears she has a gift for the dead languages, despite her very limited English, a report said, briefly. We will allow her the Hebrew as well. She doesn’t need the English to be a copyist. So the old nun taught the younger one, and a second desk in the library was sometimes occupied, as they copied the Abbey Bible.

  In the lab she met a visiting lecturer, one Father Gregory, who eventually asked and got permission for her to study soil fauna. The report mentioned that she might turn into a scientist of considerable ability, and that this was to be encouraged. Time passed, and she stopped growing. Her fingers, at least, steadied, and she became an expert on the microscope. She also was allowed to start dissecting animals found dead around the Abbey. Many adders were brought to her, and her notes ask, over and over again: What is this strangeness I find in the adders?Why do they congregate in places of bounty? Why, when many are killed, do the fields begin to fail? She looked at the cell structure, and she began to breed them. It should be that a yellow stripe mated with a green stripe should produce one of each, and two mixed up. But they don’t. She wrote to Father Gregory, who continued to encourage her, so much that she began to take pride in her work.

  And then needed to confess it. She was back to cleaning floors again. They set her to cleaning out some back rooms, needed momentarily for visiting dignitaries. It was there she uncovered boxes of rolled-up archives from the sixteenth century, covered in mould. She took them to the library where, quietly, with the assistance of the older nun, they used dry soap to clean away the grime. The older nun put in a request for strong archival boxes. The Abbess checked their work and, satisfied that it was harmless land enclosure documentation, allowed the diversion, so long as some progress continued on the Bible. The two became a threesome when a young postulant with an artistic bent requested this work.

  At the end of a particularly companionable day, Sister Anna found herself reluctant to go into the torment of the night. A voice was mingling with her nightmares, but she couldn’t make it out.

  The Abbess had seen her troubled sleep, and had given her permission, on occasion, to return to work after the last service, and to burn candles. Better to be occupied than walking the corridors.

  In the shadows, she took the next parchment from the box, and stiffened. Her fingers straight away identified the stuff between them as unlike the rest, unlike any document she had handled. Not the Latin copies, nor the Greek. Perhaps like one piece of original Hebrew, shown for a few seconds, and put carefully away.

  She looked. It appeared to be a wodge of pieces, stuck together. From the front, it looked like the other documents. It would have to go to the lab to be separated.

  Hours later, her tweezers pulled apart three separate sheets. The top two belonged with the sixteenth-century material. In the candlelight she could barely make out the last, heavier piece. It was in Latin; it appeared to be a letter.

  She started working on the last document during the nights. Her voices drove her to it, she later said. What, that still small voice which asked you, ‘What have they done to my garden?’ The Latin letters were broken, as if they were written over wax. She held the document up to the light. Luminous and invisible, there was another set of words underneath.

  On a separate sheet of paper she started to write the second text. The letters might have been familiar, close enough to Hebrew. The words were not.

  When she had enough, she tried vocalising the sounds. She remembered ways to say words which she had heard a very long time ago. DM could be Adam, and surely that’s YHWH, the consonants for Yahweh, otherwise known as Jehovah, Adonai, Deus, or so un-poetically God. This could be a religious document. But what? To be re-used as a letter?

  She read the Latin. It was a letter.

  Dear Fabius

  Many congratulations on your betrothal. I send you this parchment to make a window, in those cold northern climes, a puzzle to enjoy. It was given to me by a dying slave, who held it in some regard. I must say, I can make no sense of it. It reminds me of our schoolboy mischief.

  I don’t know if I shall be able to join you as planned. There is illness in the town, and a meeting has been called tomorrow, to talk about isolating us.

  I raise a glass to you, your betrothed, and wish you many sons.

  Salve

  Marcus

  She then turns to the growing pattern of letters picked out from between the Latin. She holds the parchment up to the light, to see. Ah yes, that must be a Delta type. But which word does it belong to? The puzzle is wonderful. It fills her thoughts, and for once she sleeps with only the small still voice prodding ‘What have they done to my garden?’

  Garden. She sat bolt upright. What was that song? She had learned a baby song, in her first language. It was still around, somewhere in her head. A baby in a garden, listens to the birds . . . Garden, how would that be written? Was this a piece of writing in her first language? Or something like?

  The Hebrew words she had been copying danced, but failed to settle.

  The voice changed. Sleep now, it ordered. She slept for twenty-four hours. So then there was a lot of floor washing
. But her mind was racing, full of words that came from her tiny years. Eat. Sit. Peekaboo. The glory of remembering her mother’s voice. Hush.

  Equally, she started to worry. The story was one she had heard so many times, so often used to justify the lesser role of women: the reason why women could not be trusted. The voice inside her grew. You will do this, because you are the only one here who can. I have been bringing you here to find this and make it known.

  Finally back to her desk, copying. It was easy to ask for permission to work late to catch up. Not so late that you miss sleep entirely, and then take twenty-four hours. She almost missed the admonishment.

  The voice filled her, speaking the words as she wrote them down. God in his garden walked. The snake to Eve an apple gave to taste. Eve her scratch made whole felt. She the snake’s true name heard. Adam, seeing that Eve ill was not, the apple took, the apple devoured. Now Adam from the greenness of the apple in pain was. Snake protested. I offered a taste only, Eve him heard say. This was Adam’s first pain, and filled with anger made him it. Adam Eve hit, Snake looked for to hit. No, Eve cried, so again Adam her hit.

  The voice stopped. The work was tucked away. She staggered to bed.

  *

  Another evening she worried about translation. Which language? Latin? Hebrew? Polish? English? She went for the house style: if Bede wrote in English, so would she. But she worried far more about the difference in the story, the implications. That the snake was good, to be watched for, there to help heal, to make good. Already this diverged from Holy Teaching. Eve was in no way to blame. And, and she found it a bit harder to realise this, it was not sin, but pain which caused the anger. The snake, the apple were there to alleviate pain, to mend sickness, to heal, to make wholeness.

  The voice in her head said, ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s what’s been lost.’