The Bell Tower

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘Tragedy?’ I said. ‘Is that what you believe the music causes? Is it why you were afraid your mother might not be dead?’

  She dodged the question again. ‘I needed to be sure,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you were there that night, Andrew. I’m glad I know she was all right.’

  I thought: but there’s something you don’t know, my poor trusting love. You don’t know that her hand was raised as if she had tried to beat her way out of the coffin before they buried her. You don’t know that I’ve had sleepless nights wondering when she really died – whether she died when the doctors said, or whether she died later, alone and terrified, trapped inside her coffin in the church. And all those other nights when I’ve wondered whether she beat on the lid of her coffin from within the grave – whether she might still do so, even now …

  Absurd and fanciful, all of it. I said, ‘Tell me about the music, Theodora.’

  ‘It’s called “Thaisa’s Song”. I don’t know if that was its original name. It was my mother’s name, though – I think it’s a family name. I played it for her before she died. She asked me not to – she was afraid of it – but I played it anyway.’

  She appeared to wait for a response, and with the idea of dispelling her own nightmares, I said, ‘It’s a piece of music, that’s all. It can’t do any actual harm. Prove it tonight, Theodora. Play it for me.’

  ‘No. I shan’t play it for you,’ said Theodora. ‘Not ever, Andrew. I don’t dare.’

  There was a silence – a silence that I am not sure I can ever forget. The firelight fell across her face, creating little pinpoints of red in her eyes. In that moment it was as if a different person was looking out of her eyes – and it was a person I did not recognize and whom I was not sure I trusted.

  Then a log broke apart in the hearth and the light changed back to the comfortable warm glow. The moment passed; Theodora was Theodora again.

  She said, very softly, ‘I won’t play it for you, but I’ll play it for Adolphus Glaum.’ Then she turned back to the piano, and began to play and to sing. As she did so, the same repulsion and fascination I had felt earlier stole over me. And then … I am not sure how this came about and I am not sure how far my memory can be trusted, but incredibly and chillingly a second voice joined in. It was blurred, as if the singer was a very long way off, and the sounds were not absolutely in time – they were like an echo, a half-note behind. The distortion was unnerving; I began to feel slightly sick, as if, deep within my mind, something had been wrenched out of its socket.

  But after the first few bars I began to discern some of the meanings of the strange language of the lyrics. I have no idea how I was able to do that – perhaps Theodora and I had forged some sort of link – but it’s what happened. There was something about an unknown person asking for admittance to a tomb – something about the tomb’s occupant, blind and deaf, trying to call out to know who was there.

  As she played, I wanted to watch her and listen to her and be as close as this to her for the rest of my life. I tried to think it was weak of me to be unable to fight my feelings, and then I thought it was an irony to use the word weakness, because my feelings were not weak – they were making me strong in that very part of a monk’s body where he is not supposed to be strong at all …

  When she finally took her hands from the keys and turned to smile at me, I knew, once and for all, that I must either do something about my feelings, or find a way to walk away from them.

  Except I knew I could never walk away from Theodora. Whatever she was.

  ELEVEN

  I copied out the music and the words that night from the battered, foxed score that had been propped on Theodora’s music stand. I still do not know why, unless I wanted to preserve them in case ‘Thaisa’s Song’ became lost again.

  As I walked back to the monastery, I was uneasily aware of the carefully folded copy tucked into the sleeve of my robe. The deep sleeves of the Benedictine robe make a good pocket for papers and even small books, so the three sheets of music notation ought not to have felt strange. But they did. They felt as if they were scraping my skin, as if there was a burr in there, or as if the song was tugging at my mind, wanting attention.

  The soft light chimes of the church clock came faintly to me. Ten o’clock. Not a late hour when applied to my old life, but very late indeed for a monk. I went quickly past the graveyard – graveyards are eerie places at night; through the iron gates I saw that the graves were wreathed in swirling grey and indigo shadows. Beyond them the Glaum mausoleum stood out blackly. I paused to look across at it, remembering how Adolphus Glaum’s coffin had been carried in there only that morning. It was a squat, ugly place, and by night it was downright sinister. There was a sliver of half-window near the door, like a single slitted eye. The moon cast a thin radiance over it, and I was just thinking it was a bit unusual to have a window of any kind in such a building, when a jab of fear thrust itself into my ribs.

  There was a light inside the mausoleum.

  All the half-remembered, never-believed legends rushed into my mind. Ghost candles and tomb lights. The will o’ the wisp, the ghost-child bearing the ignis fatuus, the ‘foolish light’ of the legends, kindled to trap unwary travellers …

  Then I remembered that candles had been lit in the mausoleum that morning, and logic returned, because quite clearly one of them had not been properly snuffed. Or perhaps the two Glaum daughters had left one burning, intending to return and hold a candlelit vigil at their father’s coffin. I thought that improbable, though. It was more likely that several people had simply assumed someone else would snuff the candles upon leaving.

  A single candle flame could not do any harm; it would simply burn itself down and die. And if anyone was going to commit the supreme madness of entering an old charnel house in pitch darkness, it was not going to be me. In any case, the place would be locked and I had no idea who kept the key. (I’m slightly ashamed to admit I seized on this fact with considerable alacrity.)

  There was also the point that if I raised an alarm, everyone – by which I mean Father Abbot in particular – would discover I had been out of the monastery at a forbidden time of the night. And Theodora’s reputation, already in tatters, would be even further shredded. So I continued on my way, slipped back in through the garden door, and made a stealthy way to my own cell. But once there, I found it impossible to sleep. I suppose sleep did come in snatches, but as the hours slid by, the conviction that there was something wrong increased. I cannot supply any real logic for that feeling, unless my mind was linking two things: Theodora’s mother might have been alive in her coffin. And earlier tonight, there had been a light inside the mausoleum, where no light should have burned.

  The monastery chimes had not yet sounded for Lauds, our Dawn Prayer, when the memory of the mausoleum being locked after the service came more clearly to me. The key had been placed in a small stone niche on the left-hand side of the door. You see, said my mind. You could get in there without anyone knowing.

  There were faint streaks of grey across the sky when I finally got up. I sluiced my face with cold water, wrapped a thick cloak around my shoulders, and went quietly out.

  The graveyard, when I reached it, was grey and somehow insubstantial. I thought: if ever ghosts do walk here, they’ll do so in this blurred half-world, not at dead of night, not at the traditional witching hour when churchyards yawn and hell breathes out its contagion …

  And why is it that such lines are so readily to hand! I would much prefer not to have remembered that particular one at that moment!

  Beyond the graves I could see Cliff House. In my mind I touched the thought of Theodora, and at once I felt as if something had laid a warm and comforting hand over my heart.

  The candle flame was still burning beyond the small window – it was pallid in the thin morning light, but it was visible. I walked up to the door, which was laced with lead strips and edged with ornate iron scrollwork. And there, on the left-hand side, was the niche in the s
tones, worn away by time or scooped out by the hand of man, I could not tell which. But when I slid my hand into it, my fingers closed around the key.

  I suppose most people would feel a qualm at entering a charnel house alone, although probably very few people have actually been called to do so. I was not being called to do so now, but I did not want to ignore that tiny flame any longer, and risk hearing later that the entire charnel house had burned to a cinder, along with the score or so mummified bodies inside it.

  I hesitated, though. How far was this a desecration? And yet they were all dead, those Glaums, and all forgotten. All entombed in the urns and the sepulchres of mortality. Who was it who had said that? Someone mourning the lost noble Houses of England centuries earlier, I thought. Well, the Glaums, as far as I knew, had not been especially noble, and remembering Adolphus Glaum’s attack on Theodora, I should not have shed any tears if the family had been lost. And yet, and yet …

  When I slid the key into the door and turned it, the lock gave way unprotestingly. I pushed the door inwards, but it resisted – not as if the frame was warped or the door swollen from damp or age, but as if something was blocking it from within. My heart gave a bump of apprehension, but I tried again. This time something on the other side slithered as if it had been jammed there, and as if the door’s weight was now forcing it back. There could not be anything there, though. I tried once more, and at the third attempt the door opened properly. I pushed it all the way back against the wall and stood in the doorway, looking in. The remembered stench of age and dust came at me.

  There was not just one candle burning, there were several – all of them set close to the window. Near to them was the tinderbox used during the service to light the candles. The small flames flickered uneasily across the stacked coffins and the cobwebbed stones, and I knew my earlier instinct had been right. Something was wrong. Something I was seeing was dreadfully wrong. But what? I waited for my brain to understand what my eyes had already seen, and then I understood. I wish to God I had not. I wish I had locked the place up, and left it to its nightmares.

  Adolphus Glaum’s coffin had fallen from its shelf, and lay on the ground. The lid was splintered and the narrow section at the foot had broken away. Smashed outwards from inside, said something in my mind. The music brings tragedy, remember, and Theodora played it last night, and she played it for him.

  I pushed the thought away, and on legs that felt like cotton threads I went forward. I think I prayed aloud at that point, wanting to see Glaum in his coffin, wanting him to be lying as peacefully as when he was placed in it, wanting reassurance that the coffin had simply slid off the shelf through some natural cause.

  With shaking hands I picked up one of the candles and shone its glow on to the coffin’s interior. It was empty. Oh, God, the man interred here yesterday was no longer in there. I forced myself to kneel down to examine the coffin’s interior more closely. What I saw will stay with me for ever, I think. The satin and silk lining of the coffin was torn to tatters, and when I tipped the lid back, there were long scratches on the underside – deep gouges in the wood. A cold sickness began to creep over me, and the shadowy charnel house tilted and spun.

  Behind me the heavy old door creaked, then began to swing inwards. I spun round, seeing the light from outside starting to vanish. If it closed completely, I would be trapped in here. The music brings tragedy …

  I bounded forward, seizing the door by its edge; as I did so, a white-clad figure that had been pressed back against the wall behind the door toppled forward.

  He fell straight on to me. His heavy cold arms dropped on to my shoulders and his head fell forward, the forehead thudding sickeningly against mine. A dry, foetid stench gusted into my face as the dead eyes of Adolphus Glaum – fixed and terror-filled – stared into my face.

  After I had stopped yelling and fighting to get free of the nightmare embrace, I managed to make sure that he really was dead.

  It was clear what had happened. He had been behind the door when I pushed it – he must have been standing there, beating his fists against it until his heart gave out, then fallen against the door and remained there, still in a standing position. When I opened the door and pushed it back, it had pushed Glaum’s body back too, trapping it between the door and the wall.

  But although he was dead now, terribly and obviously he had not been dead when he was put in his coffin. After the mourners left, he must have come out of whatever stupor or catalepsy that had held him, and broken his way out of the coffin. How long had that taken him? I glanced with pity at his hands, seeing that the fingernails were broken and the fingertips crusted with blood.

  Once out of the coffin, Glaum must have felt huge relief, but then had come the second and perhaps even deadlier realization. He was trapped inside the mausoleum – inside a place that was remote and seldom visited. His lips were stretched wide in a final silent scream, blood-specked froth staining the corners, but he could have screamed until his throat burst and no one would have heard him. Then what had he done? The lighted candles, of course. Lighted candles might be seen from outside, causing someone to investigate. I visualized him fumbling his way through the darkness, striking the tinder, firing the candles, and setting them as close to the tiny window as possible.

  And someone had seen those lights. I had seen them on my way back to the monastery. Had Glaum been dead by then? If I had got in here last night would I have saved him? It was a torturous thought, but I should never know the answer.

  And whatever the medical cause – heart attack? apoplexy? – the real cause of death was terror: terror that had initially been induced at being inside the coffin. Terror that must then have spiralled into stark, blazing panic as he realized he could not break out of the mausoleum.

  To all intents and purposes, Adolphus Glaum had been buried alive.

  Buried alive. Theodora’s nightmare for her mother.

  But even though Glaum had been buried alive, there was no proof to indicate that the same thing had happened to Thaisa Eynon.

  Nell saw there were only a few more pages remaining of Andrew’s journal, and although the writing was unquestionably still his, it had altered. It was hurried, the letters badly or hastily formed, as if this final section had been written under extreme stress.

  ‘I think this will be my last entry in this journal,’ Andrew wrote.

  It has helped me through such difficult times, so I want to set down as much of what is happening as I can – as I have time to set down. Then I shall leave it in my room here at St Benedict’s, perhaps concealed behind a loose stone or under a cupboard floor. Knowing it’s there will help me believe I shall return. Perhaps, too, it will calm my mind and even clarify my thoughts to set everything down.

  Theodora is with us here in the monastery – she is in the common room as I write this.

  After I found Glaum’s body, the two Glaum ladies gathered together almost the entire village and whipped up the already-existing suspicion and dislike for Theodora and her mother. Feelings ran so high that Father Abbot, appealed to by Brother Ranulf, Brother Wilfrid and myself, agreed that Theodora must be brought to the monastery for her safety.

  ‘At least until the inquest is over and a proper official verdict is pronounced,’ he said, and reminded us all, very solemnly, that it was not so long since all religious houses had been regarded as places of sanctuary.

  ‘By then the Misses Glaum will see that their feelings are the result of their own grief and shock,’ he said. ‘And until that time, the village people will not dare come to our doors to get to Miss Eynon.’

  He was wrong. Gertrude and Margaretta Glaum did not recover from their hatred of Theodora. The inquest is tomorrow, and an hour earlier, just as we were finishing supper, there were angry shouts from outside, and torchlight flares showed through the darkness.

  Brother Ranulf and I went warily to one of the upper windows, and below us we saw at least a dozen local people – people whose faces we knew, but whose ex
pressions, tonight, we did not recognize. At the head were Gertrude and Margaretta Glaum, their faces twisted and ugly with hatred, their voices raised above the shouting people.

  ‘Theodora Eynon! Bring her out to justice! She killed our father!’

  The cries of the villagers, whipped up to a dreadful exultant anger by those two, joined in.

  ‘Bring her out to justice! Bring her out!’

  And now I am writing this in the common room. We are all here, and even through the thick walls, we can hear the shouting still going on. Some of the terms they are using about Theodora are ugly and gross, and several have caused Brother Egbert to clap shocked hands over his ears.

  I suppose it was not to be expected that the discovery of Glaum’s body, alive inside the tomb, could be kept secret. The news crackled through this village and the outlying communities like a forest fire, sparking a vicious torrent of hatred against Theodora – and against the monks for harbouring her. So fierce is the emotion that I could almost believe it to be strong enough to burn through the walls and reach us.

  Father Abbot says – and Brother Egbert agrees – that the people cannot maintain this anger. We have only to wait, he says, and they will go back to their homes. In the meantime, he is leading us in a series of prayers. I am joining in, but it is difficult to summon any degree of humility and devotion. I keep remembering other angry crowds throughout history, when people have taken the law into their own hands. The Black Death persecution of Jews in the 1300s. The ransacking of Rome in the 1500s. The storming of the Bastille in 1789. The Gordon Riots in this century, described so eloquently by Charles Dickens in Barnaby Rudge, and the rebellions of the Luddites.