Dead Silent

by Ivan Blake

  “Nuh uh.”

  “Nothing at all? Do you perhaps remember a bright light before your attack?”

  Whoa, what did this woman know? He said nothing.

  “All right then. Mr. Dahlman, I’m also trying to get in touch with Chris Chandler. Would you have any idea how to reach him?”

  “Nuh uh.”

  “Okay. Well, I’m going to call Gillian Willard next. I believe she and Chandler were close?”

  “Uh huh.” Of course, Willard and Chandler! If anyone knew where Chandler was hiding, it would be Willard.

  What a great idea. And if Willard doesn’t know where Chandler is, then she’ll be looking!

  So all Rudy had to do was watch Willard. In fact, he now had two leads, Cormier and Willard; one of them was bound to find Chandler, and lead him right to the bastard.

  How exciting! This calls for a celebration.

  “Well...thank you, Mr. Dahlman.”

  “Mmmm,” he said, and hung up.

  * * * *

  An hour each way, that’s what Chris had figured the walk between town and the cottage should take him. At first he’d been appalled at the idea of walking or riding everywhere, but now he had to admit, the idea wasn’t awful. The walk into town that morning had been great, invigorating even. And now, heading back to Marymount, he realized most of his aches and pains were gone. The afternoon felt damp and cold but the weather over the next few weeks was forecast to get better, and if he hiked or bicycled to town, he might actually reduce his limp and even straighten his back.

  At the imposing Monsegur Gate, Chris turned off North Kingdom Road and started down the mile-long lane to Marymount, making sure to lock the gate behind him. He hadn’t noticed before, but the lane was lined with towering elms where the rest of the surrounding forest was composed largely of scrub black spruce and cedars. Someone—Bernard Monsegur’s father, or grandfather, or even the great grandfather—had gone to enormous expense in building and landscaping the family estate. And now the whole place stood empty.

  Even without leaves, the huge elms bathed the long lane in deep shadow and slowed the melting of its rutted crust of crystalline snow. Chris trudged along enjoying the stillness of the forest. The only sounds were the crunch of his boots on the icy snow and the occasional mournful cry from a crow as it turned in the gray sky. At the minimart, Chris had filled his backpack with foods he enjoyed, chips and barbecue peanuts, frosted flakes and pop tarts, a bottle of some wine he’d never heard of, and a six-pack of beer. The beer and the wine were the first alcohol he’d ever purchased legally, and he planned to spend the rest of the afternoon getting back into the course books, eating chips, and enjoying a first beer as an adult.

  Suddenly, the air around Chris filled with the crackles and hisses of an electrical disturbance, then a pale blue light, and next a thin mist smelling of sulphur. Instinctively, he spun around trying to see his adversary, even though there was little point. Chris knew too well what was coming.

  When the wave of heat struck him, Chris was knocked flat. His face was ground into the melting snow, the ice crystals tearing into skin like coarse grit. He was kicked repeatedly toward the edge of the lane and then hauled into the air by his broken wrist and dangled several feet above the muddy water filling the ditches on both sides of the lane. And then he fell. As he struck the water, the icy cold and excruciating pain took his breath away. Gasping, he swallowed several mouthfuls of muddy water and chunks of ice. As Chris struggled to find his footing, he was yanked out of the water by the hair, and then shoved back under.

  Under the water, he flailed about, swallowed slime, and gagged as his face was shoved into the mud at the bottom of the ditch. At some point, Chris stopped fighting, and let his limbs go limp. After a second or two, the grip on his head loosened. Chris waited several more seconds before bursting to the surface. Gasping and gagging, he coughed up mouthfuls of filthy water, and sucked in as much air as his lungs would hold. Finding a footing, he struggled to the side of the ditch, hauled himself onto the bank and lay there gagging and retching. As he tugged off the sodden backpack, Chris muttered, “So much for the pop tarts. God, Mallory, have you no respect?” then chuckled, and shouted, “But you didn’t get the beer.”

  Chris got up, retched several times, and struggled to control his breathing. Standing there, dripping wet, with the late-afternoon sun now touching the distant hills and a chill wind beginning to rise, he began to shiver. He had to get back to the house and soon, or he was going to die right there in the lane.

  The pain in his wrist hit him full force. Like a vicious blow to the chest, it staggered him, stopped his breath, and robbed him of all reason. Chris dropped to the ground and screamed. Raising his arm, he looked at the hand, dangling uselessly. If he’d had a knife at that moment, he might have hacked the hand off to stop the pain. The urgency to get to the cottage before dark, before the temperature dropped below freezing, hit hard. The choice was clear, press on or die. Cradling the injured wrist to his chest, he forced one foot in front of the other and moved forward.

  After what seemed like an eternity, and shivering uncontrollably, Chris stumbled into the mudroom at the back of the house. With his good hand and with several very loud cries of pain and well-chosen expletives, he managed to strip off his wet clothes and stumble upstairs to the bathroom. After a long hot soak in the huge claw-foot tub, he felt well enough to at least call for help.

  Rose DuCalice answered on the second ring. Through swollen lips and a raw throat, Chris managed to croak, “I...I need help, Rose.”

  “Chris? What’s happened? Mallory again?”

  “Help, please,” he whispered.

  “All right, I’ll come.” She sounded irritated. “But this was not our arrangement. You were supposed to be helping me, not the other way around.” She slammed the phone down.

  Chris curled up on the bathroom floor and whimpered.

  An hour later, Rose had Chris seated in the kitchen, wrist bound in an enormous splint and a bowl of beans and wieners in front of him. “There’s nothing broken,” she said, “but your girlfriend’s torn so many tendons I don’t know whether you’ll ever regain the use of your hand, not without surgery anyway. But let’s give the wrist a chance to heal for a bit, then have it checked out. Meantime, the salve should help to reduce the swelling.”

  “Rose, thanks so much,” Chris mumbled through misshapen lips. His face was swollen, scarlet, crisscrossed with a hundred fine bloody lines, and hot to the touch.

  “Your girlfriend really did a number on your face. You look like one of those blow-up clowns with a round red face. What did she do? Take sandpaper to it?”

  “Ice,” Chris replied.

  “There’s not much I can do other than put my salve on your cheeks.” She pulled a small jar out of a shopping bag, and began gently dabbing its contents on Chris’s face.

  “Feels good,” he said.

  “Look, Chris, it’s been centuries since I nursed anyone like this, and I don’t intend to do much more. Unless we, and by we, I mean you, can stop your girlfriend attacking, I’m going to tell my brother our arrangement is over. I had my doubts about it from the start, and since you’ve arrived, I’ve had to come out here time and again. You were supposed to help me protect the graveyard, and instead I’m spending all my time patching you up. That’s not acceptable.”

  “So sorry. Don’t know what to do,” he mumbled as she smeared salve on his lips. “Tastes like strawberries.”

  Her tone softened. “Part of the secret,” she said with a small smile. “I’m working on something which may help, but in the meantime, get your act together.” She patted his good hand.

  “Learned something today, at the theater,” Chris said.

  “Oh?”

  “Burgoyne is funding his theater with some kind of mail order business, but they’re low on stock, whatever their stock is. Geraldine is trying to find out what they’re selling. If it’s something illegal, like drugs or pornography, then we m
ay be able to shut them down quickly.”

  “That would be good. Meantime, you eat your beans and get to bed.”

  “I’ve got work to do,” Chris mumbled through his battered mouth. “Must start a paper for history class.”

  “Eat and go to bed, that’s an order, or I’ll give you one of my powders. It’ll knock you out for a week.” She bent over him and stirred his beans. A strangely-shaped silver cross on a chain around Rose’s neck fell out of her blouse.

  “Rose, is that the Cathar cross?”

  “No, the Occitan Cross,” she said as she slipped the pendant back into her blouse.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The Occitan Cross was a symbol of Cathar resistance. The Cathar Cross was a yellow cross that Catholics made every repentant Cathar wear until they died. The Cathar cross was a symbol of our humiliation.”

  “So that’s the Occitan Cross on every headstone in your cemetery?”

  “Yes.”

  “What I don’t understand is why the Cathar descendants suddenly had to leave Europe in the seventeenth century if they’d managed to conceal their faith so successfully for so long.”

  “Probably because they wanted to worship openly and find a better life. That’s why most people came to the New World, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but most newcomers settle near towns where they can buy supplies and sell their harvest, and they build barns and silos. They don’t normally settle in the middle of nowhere and construct a huge stone tower like some kind of medieval keep. It’s as though the people who came to Lewis had some sort of secret they needed to protect.” Chris looked Rose right in the eyes. “Maybe a secret they couldn’t protect any longer back in Europe?”

  Rose touched the pendant through her blouse and stared right back at Chris, all hint of warmth in her face now gone. “Why are you wasting your time on this? You were asked to guard our graveyard, not make up fanciful stories. Enough now or...or I’ll give you another sleeping draft.”

  After Rose left, Chris choked down a few mouthfuls of cold beans, and drank a can of beer. This was not how he’d imagined his first legal lager. He scraped his bowl into the garbage pail, rinsed it, and headed for the library. The notion of another cognac crossed his mind, but then he thought the better of it. His head hadn’t fully recovered from his last encounter with cognac. Even before Mallory’s attack, he’d had the headache to end all headaches. Now his head felt like it might explode. He was also feeling achy and shivery, and a little woozy, likely from all the mud he’d swallowed. Rose had put out two aspirin for him; this was one time when he might have preferred one of her sleeping drafts.

  For some weird reason, Rose didn’t seem comfortable with him checking out the Cathars, but her brother Bernard had said he could, and why shouldn’t he delve into the subject a little deeper if it helped take his mind off his headache?

  Later, with an armful of books on the destruction of the Cathars, Chris turned out the lights downstairs. Before heading up to bed however, he decided to have a last look out the library window, across Cathy’s Pond toward the Cathars’ cemetery. “Why are you here?” he muttered.

  The night outside was bitterly cold, and without a trace of moonlight. Chris could see nothing beyond the edge of the porch. Even the line where the hills met the sky was lost in inky darkness. The house creaked and groaned as it cooled around him. He shuddered, and started upstairs.

  Tucking himself into the king-sized bed again in the enormous front room, he spread his haul of books across the coverlet and began picking his way through the final days of the Cathars.

  Catholic patience with the Cathar heresy ended in 1208 when Rome dispatched a papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau to meet with the ruler of the largest Cathar region in France, Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse. At their first and only meeting, the two got into a fierce argument during which Raymond threatened the legate with violence and the legate excommunicated the Count. The legate then departed for Rome but was murdered on route. Raymond’s responsibility for the legate’s death was widely suspected but never proved.

  When the Pope learned of his legate’s death, he immediately ordered papal representatives across Christendom to preach a crusade against the Cathars. He also appealed to the King of France to lead the crusade. The King was only too pleased to oblige because the crusade afforded him an opportunity to end once and for all the longstanding independence of the Languedoc. The Pope also fuelled enthusiasm for the crusade by decreeing that Cathar lands would be forfeited to the crusaders.

  The war against the Cathars—known as the Albigensian Crusade—raged for twenty years and resulted in the wholesale slaughter of Cathars and an end to Languedoc independence. The crusade did not, however, extinguish the Cathar Faith.

  In 1234, the Pope tasked the Inquisition with rooting out the last vestiges of Catharism in the Languedoc. For the balance of the thirteenth century, Cathars who refused to recant were hunted and hanged and burnt at the stake. The greatest single blow to the Cathar Faith came in March of 1244, however, when the Cathar citadel of Monsegur fell and so many faithful died in a single fiery massacre.

  The citadel of Monsegur south of Carcassonne stood atop a rocky outcropping called Mount Pog. Monsegur had been the principal seat of Catharism since 1233 when the Faith’s most revered theologian, Guilhabert de Castres, fled there in the face of advancing Catholic armies.

  In January, 1243, 200 Perfecti and 100 knights under the flag of the deposed Count of Toulouse took refuge at Monsegur. In May of that year, a Catholic army of ten thousand, under the command of Hugh of Arcis and in the employ of the Archbishop of Narbonne, arrived in the valley below the citadel and launched an epic siege that was to last nine months. Hugh of Arcis made it known that he’d spare the lives of any Cathars who would renounce their faith and consent to be interviewed by the Inquisition. None of the inhabitants of Monsegur responded.

  By March, 1244, after enduring starvation and unrelenting bombardment, the Cathars of Monsegur at last recognized there would be no escape. They sought and obtained a fifteen-day truce, which permitted them to hold a festival of faith and celebration. On Sunday, March 13, 21 knights in the besieged castle asked for the Consolamentum, virtually assuring their deaths.

  With the expiration of the truce on the morning of the March 16, the 200 Perfecti and 21 knights who, just 3 days before, had taken the Consolamentum, all marched out of the citadel and down the slope to the awaiting Catholic force. There, without any hesitation, they climbed of their own volition onto an enormous awaiting pyre and were set ablaze at a place now called the Field of the Burnt.

  That would have been the end of the story of Monsegur but for the fact that a remarkable secret emerged during the interrogations that followed its surrender. Apparently, in the days immediately before the Perfecti marched to their fiery ends, several had managed to spirit away from the castle cases containing what was loosely described as the Cathar treasure. What the treasure may have been or where it may have been taken was never determined.

  Chris had been dozing off from time to time as he read. He’d rouse, reread a passage, and doze again. Then he read the reference to the Cathar treasure, and he was suddenly wide awake.

  In January of 1244, with Monsegur under siege, all of the gold, silver and money, which had been stored in the fortress had supposedly been taken out and hidden in the forests of the Sabarthes Mountains. And yet, Cathars interviewed by the Inquisitors of Carcassonne told of four Perfecti covered in wool blankets who, on the eve of the castle’s surrender, had descended on ropes from the summit of the promontory to the bottom of the Lasset gorge to hand over to allies in the area a mysterious treasure. Indeed, from the beginning of the crusade against the Cathars in 1209, it had been rumored that Monsegur held a mystical Cathar treasure which far exceeded material wealth. Word that several Perfecti may have indeed spirited away a treasure from Monsegur at the eleventh hour was widely believed and aroused enormous curiosity which endured for centuries
, but what could the Cathar treasure have been if not gold?

  Christ’s burial shroud perhaps? Templar Knights had supposedly found the shroud in Jerusalem and turned it over to the ascetic and highly trustworthy Cathars for safekeeping. Some of Monsegur’s inhabitants told inquisitors in Carcassonne that the Perfecti had attempted unsuccessfully to invoke the shroud’s legendary powers during the final days of the Easter season—the season of its origin—in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the castle’s fall.

  Or could the treasure have been the fabled Ark of the Covenant, the highly ornate chest containing Moses’ two stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments, missing since the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple by the Babylonians in 587 BCE? Again, the Templars were believed to have found the Ark where Josiah, the king of Judah, had hidden it from the Babylonians. The Templars had, for a time, hung onto the Ark, but as their own relations with the Catholic Church became strained, they were said to have placed the Ark in the care of the Cathar Perfecti whom they trusted beyond the avarice of the Catholic priesthood. But whether the treasure was the Shroud or the Ark or Gnostic texts or any other blessed relics from the Holy Land, on the eve of the fall of Monsegur, the Perfecti had apparently felt compelled to spirit away the treasure to honor their commitment to the Templars and to prevent it falling into Catholic hands.

  “Holy crap,” Chris muttered. “Is that what happened?” Had the descendants of the Monsegur Cathars, after centuries of hiding their treasure all over Europe, carried it to the New World and eventually to Lewis, Vermont? The idea was totally crazy! Then again, it would explain why they’d built their strange tower, to keep watch for marauding treasure hunters, and why they’d put up dozens of Occitan crosses, to tell other Cathars where the treasure was being held? For three centuries, the American descendants of the Monsegur Cathars had done everything they could to keep non-Cathars off their land. What possible reason could there have been for their bizarre conduct if not to protect their treasure?