by Ivan Blake
“In fact I did...sort of. I told Bernard that Chris believed himself to be the victim of a ghost, only I didn’t really believe it...not until last night.”
“Well Bernard never told me, and I’m the one who has to patch him up. That’s not helping me solve my own problem, is it?”
“Please, Mrs. DuCalice, give Chris another chance,” Gillian pleaded. “I know he’ll do whatever he can to help you when he’s back on his feet. It’s what he does, he does the right thing.”
The hard look on Rose’s face softened. “All right, we’ll see how he is tomorrow. But I’m still going to talk to my brother.” She started for the door but then turned back and said, “Besides, I did tell Chris that I might have a way to protect him from his demon.”
“Rose!” Chris cried out.
They looked at one another and then galloped upstairs to Chris’s bedside.
“You stupid boy,” Rose scolded, “don’t ever call out like that. You’ll make your rib far worse.”
“I had to tell you...” He winced with pain.
“My sleeping draft should have knocked you out for several more hours.”
“But, Rose, they saw each other.”
“Who?”
“Mallory and Braida.”
Rose shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. It’s not possible.”
“But they did. They acknowledged each other.”
“No. Shades aren’t aware of anything. They’re just echoes.”
“But they looked right at each other.”
“No, you’re wrong. You have to be.”
Nigel Harrow’s car disappeared into the gloom of the late afternoon. Gillian had begged to extend their visit by another night to make certain Chris was okay, but when Chris had awoken well after noon, it had been obvious to everyone Rose’s medications were working wonders. The swelling around his eyes was almost gone, the open wounds had scabbed over, and the many fearsome purple bruises were already turning yellow.
Chris and Gillian spent an intense afternoon answering Nigel’s seemingly endless questions about Mallory and Torajan rituals for walking the dead and cleansing troubled spirits, and he’d apologised so often for having not believed Chris earlier that Chris eventually ordered him to stop. By the end of the grilling, they’d all been exhausted and well past their scheduled departure time.
“Oh dear,” Nigel had said, “I promised your mother I’d have you home by Sunday evening. We’re not going to make it before midnight. And you have homework to finish.”
“Oh right. School…,” Gillian had muttered. “The nightmare resumes.”
“Why’d you say that?” Chris had asked. “I thought school was okay.”
“It’s nothing, I’ll tell you next time.”
Long after they’d gone, Chris remained in the lane, letting his mind wander back to Gillian’s lacy pink bra, and to the sight of her beautiful breasts through the filmy fabric. His face flushed. Was he not the luckiest guy on the planet, to have somehow won the affection of such an exquisite creature? And at the same time, was he not the unluckiest idiot imaginable to have a crazy ex-girlfriend determined to keep them apart—even from beyond the grave? What had he done to deserve such a wondrous treasure and such a nightmarish curse? He shook his head and turned back to the house. He’d drive himself mad if he tried to work out the yin and yang of his totally ridiculous situation. Besides, he had a job to do. He owed it to Rose.
Rose had actually been great, her grumpy demeanor aside, not just last night but for days now: the number of times she’d patched him up; her promise of something to help lessen the damage from Mallory’s attacks; the many times she’d turned up just to make sure he was all right; the wonderful breakfast she’d brought for Gillian and Nigel when she’d returned at dawn to check on Chris. Okay, so she was genuinely concerned for her ancestors out there in the tiny graveyard, whatever their story was. Chris wasn’t going to let her down, not again. If Rose wanted her dead friends safeguarded then safeguard them he would.
As he limped back into the house, he tried to imagine how he might clamber down the hill and around the pond to the graveyard before dark to scout out ways to protect the place. Perhaps he might rig up some sort of wire barrier or trap or primitive alarm system, or maybe he’d clear enough scrub to be able to watch the cemetery with binoculars or a telescope from the cottage.
The phone rang.
“I hear you had a falling out with my sister last night,” Bernard Monsegur said.
Chris recounted what he could of the incident, but since he’d been in and out of consciousness when Rose and Nigel had quarreled, he wasn’t clear on the details. All he knew for sure was that Rose resented Chris making so many demands on her time.
“Nigel had warned me...sort of,” Bernard said. “He told me you were repeatedly being injured, and he thought you might be hurting yourself, but I thought there might be another explanation.”
“Why would you think that?” Chris said.
“Because you’re a Mortsafeman...and vengeful shades come with the job.”
“But that’s crazy,” Chris replied. “I’m not a Mortsafeman, I’ve told you that.”
“Ah, but you are, in spirit at least. I’ve looked very closely into your Bemishstock conflict, and I can assure you, you’re a Mortsafeman.”
“Okay, so let’s say I am, but then how would you know vengeful spirits are a hazard of the Mortsafemen’s job?”
“Because I know more about Mortsafemen than you can imagine.”
“So you’ve studied them?”
“Are you on the phone in the library?” Monsegur asked.
“No, the kitchen.”
“Okay, so go into the library, pick up that phone, then face the bay window.”
Chris did as he was told.
“Now, turn forty-five degrees and walk to the bookshelves against the south wall.”
Again, Chris did as instructed.
“Look up,” Monsegur said. “Do you see a long line of old books, both large and small but all very old, leather-bound and such, with Latin titles?”
“Okay.”
“Now, the last book on the far left end.”
“Sure, a small book with a black binding...and some sort of gold figure on the spine.”
“Read the title page.”
“It’s in Latin but I’ll try. De Sanctitate Sepulchro et protectione mortuis, Emansus de Geisteborg, 1453.”
“Familiar?”
“Is this…?”
“So you do know it.”
“I’ve read about it. It’s by that professor the Mortsafemen paid to write about them.”
Bernard translated. “On the Sanctity of the Grave and the Protection of the Dead.”
“Is this an original?” Chris said.
“Open the book to the last page. Be careful. There’s a loose piece of parchment inside the back cover.”
“It’s handwritten.”
“Can you read it?”
Chris picked his way slowly through the Latin script. “Bernardo. Tibi gratias ago pro alius laboret in sapientia et consilio. Sine tuo ductu atque notitiam celebriorem mortuus potuissent parvo volumine. Sancta Maria Magdalene ora pro me. Ego humillimus servus. Emansus. Is it some sort of thank-you note?”
“Yes.”
“From the guy who actually wrote the Mortsafemen book to someone named Bernardo?”
“Yes.”
“And Emansus is thanking him because Bernardo knew so much about the dead?”
“Right again.”
“So this Bernardo? Was he a relation of yours?”
“You might say that.”
“Then your family was mixed up with the Mortsafemen.”
“Not really, but we knew a lot about death and dying and graveyards. We’d made studies of the dead, and Emansus was grateful for our work.”
“This is actually cool, but I’m not sure what it has to do with me.”
“Because like Emansus, you believe the dead have ea
rned the right to rest undisturbed in the earth. You believe disturbing the peace of the dead causes them great pain, and defiling their graves tears their spirits from Paradise. You know from experience the spirits of the dead who are returned to us may be sorrowful or sadistic, devastated or deceitful, but whatever they are, they do not deserve to be denied the eternal reward our Creator intended for them. And you believe like Emansus their defilers deserve to suffer.”
“Okay, you know a lot about Mortsafemen, but bottom line, are you saying I’m not fired? I can stay at Marymount?”
“Yes, you can stay at Marymount,” Bernard said, “and Rose will help you with your Mallory problem, provided of course...you help us with ours.”
After the call, Chris remained by the phone for some time, turning the small book over in his hands, leafing through its velum pages. His attention returned to the small note. Sancta Maria Magdalene ora pro me. Mary Magdalene again.
Was this fellow Emansus a Cathar as well? Was all this stuff about protecting the dead really a Cathar thing?
Chris selected several more books about Cathars from the shelves and headed up to bed. Had he not been so engrossed in Cathar lore, he might have noticed the lights across the lake.
Chapter 10
Monday, March 9
Geraldine felt sick as a dog. She checked her watch: after nine in the morning. The others had not appeared yet. Seated on the floor near the lighting booth, she was already dressed and wrapped in a filthy blanket. After their late night in the woods and her meager hours of sleep on the floor, she’d felt so filthy and cold she’d crept to the janitor’s closet at first light for a sponge bath in the utility tub. The hot water hadn’t helped much. Still shivery, she now had a stuffed up head and red raw throat. Worse however was the nauseating shame she felt for the part she’d played in the raid on the Monsegur cemetery.
The previous evening, at Gilbert’s command, they’d hiked through the woods and over Chalice Hill to the cemetery. The trek had been dreadful. There’d been potholes to twist ankles, broken branches to poke faces, brambles to shred flesh, and bogs to suck off boots. And the whole forest had been immersed in a fine, freezing drizzle that drenched one to the bone. Geraldine had made the most ridiculous mistake of wearing her Goth gear, and by the time she’d reached the cemetery, her nylons were shredded and legs a bloody mess. She’d been chilled to the bone with hands as cold as ice. Some, like the twins, had the time of their lives, giggling and shoving each other like school children. Others like Twilight and Wanetta had been in no better shape than Geraldine. Gilbert had been oblivious to their discomfort.
More than once, she’d turned back, but each time Twilight squeezed her hand and whispered, “I’m so glad we get to do this together.” She’d grin and clutch Geraldine’s hand to her chest, and Geraldine, like some pathetic lapdog, would grin back and say, “I’m so excited too.”
At the cemetery, Gilbert had divided them into teams of three and assigned them graves to rob. Because sound carried so well in the chill night air, they had to work in complete silence. If Geraldine had been allowed to whistle or sing or chatter, she might have endured the ordeal more successfully. But imprisoned in her own thoughts, she’d quickly descended into recrimination and self-loathing.
They’d begun ransacking the cemetery by clearing away the headstones and tree stumps. They lifted the stones from the earth and tossed them onto a single pile where most had shattered. Gilbert insisted no time be wasted in keeping their stories intact. Then the teams had hacked and sawed through the tangle of old tree roots that ensnared almost every grave. Finally, they’d used pick axes to break through the frozen ground and chip their way down to the coffins. Each time a coffin was exposed, someone had to jump into the pit and pry up its rotting boards. The twins jumped into each grave with obvious glee, the others less so.
Geraldine’s stomach had roiled at the desecration. She’d tried to hang back, but then realised Gilbert was watching her from across the graveyard. She’d smiled weakly, picked up a small spade, and joined Twilight in stabbing away at the frozen soil.
The first grave she’d helped open was that of a young man killed during the war in Vietnam. What a nightmare! Manfred Arimanes shattered the top of the coffin with his shovel, and as he pried away the last bits of the lid, he had to stand on the corpse’s chest. The ribs collapsed under Manfred’s weight and his boots sank through the bones and flesh and the bottom of the coffin, and into the mud and the slime beneath.
“Oh, he’s so squishy,” Twilight had shrieked with delight.
“Shhh,” everyone said.
The soldier had been buried in his army uniform, now badly discolored, but still recognizable for what it had been. Even the soldier’s insignia were decipherable. The young man’s hands in ceremonial white gloves had been folded across his chest, but the gloves were now almost completely rotted away and the bones of his fingers looked like dead twigs emerging from their crumbling bark. He’d been buried with a framed photo on his chest, but the picture had long since faded away, and the glass and frame both shattered beneath Manfred’s boot.
In one thrust, Manfred had pushed his spade down through the collar of the corpse’s uniform, and through the neck and spinal column. Then he’d flipped the skull up and out of the grave. “That’s one,” he’d whispered. The skull rolled across the ground and came to rest against Geraldine’s shoe. She’d gasped in horror, spun about, and vomited into the wild rose bushes behind her.
“Silly Crimson,” Twilight had said, then climbed down into the pit alongside Manfred and giggled. “This is where the fun really begins!”
Geraldine had wiped her chin and rejoined the work party in the soldier’s grave.
And so it had gone for several more hours. By the end of the night, they’d opened nine graves and collected a gruesome assortment of skulls and hands, backbones and limbs, and by Gilbert’s estimate, they’d acquired enough new stock to pay the theater’s electrical bills through midsummer. They’d then rechecked each grave for missed fragments of bone, made a half-hearted attempt to refill and tidy some of the terrible mess they’d made, and piled their haul into two large boxes. The twins had carried the boxes with a look of such pride, as if they’d been accorded a great honor.
Back in the theater, past four in the morning, they’d stripped off their wet clothes, rinsed the gore from their hands and faces in buckets of hot water, and seated themselves around the stage wrapped in blankets to admire their haul. Gilbert had arranged the skulls in a circle so they could all, as he’d put it, “enjoy the look of peace and gratitude on the face of each liberated soul.”
Geraldine had found the improvised ritual nauseating and the accompanying banter about the dignity of death incredibly banal. After twenty minutes, she’d had her fill. Without a word, she’d slipped away, curled up in the fetal position on her blanket next to the lighting booth, and closed her eyes.
Why in God’s name had she let herself be dragged into that nightmare? Her plan had been to spy for Rose, not help Rose’s enemies ransack the Monsegur cemetery. What kind of a person could do that?
A pathetically weak and sorry child, that’s who; one who’d never had a friend in her life and had been so grateful for the slightest crumb of affection, that she’d agreed to do the unimaginable.
To make matters worse, the person whom she supposedly befriended had turned out to be seriously, seriously sick.
“Oh, Rose,” Geraldine had whispered, “I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”
In her anguish, Geraldine had hatched her plan. At sunrise, she’d slip out of the theater and tell Rose what had happened. She’d confess what she’d done and beg forgiveness, and maybe if she got to Rose early enough, the police might even be able to stop Gilbert before he could send the remains away. If Geraldine was very lucky, the damage might yet be undone and her shame expunged. With that thought, she’d drifted off to sleep.
As nauseated as Geraldine felt, she was still determined to alert
Rose about the cemetery raid and was about to leave the theater when Gilbert bellowed from his apartment. “All right everyone, onstage now! We’ve got so much work to do today, no one leaves, got it? Five minutes!”
“Crimson?” Twilight asked. “What are you doing? Why are you up?”
“I...I wanted to get clean, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“That’s sweet. Come on, we’ll have some breakfast, and after the meeting, practice our lines together.”
* * * *
Jackie was parked on Main Street opposite Gerry’s Diner, eating a Gerry’s Bagel Breakfast Special, when she spotted Chris Chandler crossing the town park. She’d driven to Lewis earlier that morning on the slimmest hunch. The previous day, she’d found a ticket agent at the Montpelier Bus Station who’d recognized Chandler’s picture from the many times he’d appeared on the TV news. The agent vaguely recalled Chris had boarded a northbound bus a week or so earlier. Since Chandler was trying to hide out somewhere, Jackie’s hunch had been that he’d probably stay on the bus as far as it took him, which was Lewis, and goddamn if her hunch hadn’t been correct.
In her excitement, Jackie’s first instinct was to charge after Chandler, catch him off guard, and start firing questions at him before he had a chance to rehearse his answers. But then he entered the library and she realized an ambush in such a public place wouldn’t be advisable. He was probably going to be in there for a while so there was no need to rush; she could relax, finish her bagel and coffee, and think through her line of questioning before cornering him.
Twenty minutes later, he still hadn’t reappeared so she decided to follow him.
The grandeur of the reading room—its towering marble pillars, vast domed ceiling, and enormous expanse of black and white terrazzo flooring—was so unlike any public library Jackie had ever seen. She paused on the steps for a moment to take it all in. A dozen or so patrons were already seated at the reading tables leafing through papers, or in armchairs immersed in books, or in the stacks perusing titles. Chandler wasn’t among them. She was about to inquire at the Reference Desk when she spotted him in conversation in an office doorway on the far side of the room.
