Dead Silent

by Ivan Blake

  “No Ark of the Covenant, no Minora from the Temple of Solomon?”

  “They were peasants. They wouldn’t have known a minora or an ark if they’d tripped over it. One object they did recognize, however. An ornate stone sarcophagus. All forty-six were needed to move it, but move it they did. And when the job was done, they were given an opportunity to glimpse the remains inside, because the remains belonged to the one person most highly revered among Cathars. Then, as the sarcophagus was shifted into its new hiding place, one man, unbeknownst to the others, reached through a crack in the lid and stole a bone from the index finger.”

  “And you think the sarcophagus contained the remains of Mary Magdalene.”

  “Right.”

  “And the finger bone has been in the possession of the descendants of the Monsegur Cathars ever since.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “So the story and the bone have been passed down among Cathars since 1244, and now you believe you have a piece of the bone and it might protect me from Mallory.”

  Rose shrugged.

  Chris had no idea how to react. Call Rose a nutcase and leave? Humor her? Ask for proof? Sure, proof she had a two-thousand-year-old bone. What would proof even look like? “Okay, so what am I supposed to do? Say some magic words or something?”

  “No. Just wear it.”

  “But, Rose, I’ve got to ask. Why are you giving this to me? If there’s any truth to your story, then this relic would be priceless.”

  “I’m giving it to you because my brother believes you’ll do what is necessary to return the remains of my friends to their graves. And to do that, you need to be well. And to be well, you need protection from your demon.”

  “Your brother believes I’m a Mortsafeman.”

  “He should know.”

  “How could he possibly know? And how in God’s name does he have a book about Mortsafemen from the fifteenth century inscribed to Bernard Monsegur?”

  Rose said nothing.

  “I can think of only three possible explanations. First, the inscription is a fake. Second, you have some great, great, great, great uncle named Bernard Monsegur. Or third, the author gave the book...to your brother...in 1453, which would be totally nuts.”

  “No member of our family was ever named Bernard Monsegur, not before my brother,” Rose said.

  “Okay, then what about the picture in the Civil War book, the one of a guy named Bernard Monsegur inspecting the Sailor’s Creek Battlefield?”

  Rose sat in silence staring at her hands. She shook her head, and muttered, “I warned Bernard. You got into trouble in Maine because you were always poking your nose where it didn’t belong.”

  “I’m sorry, Rose, I’m just trying to understand what the hell’s going on here. I absolutely will help get back the bones of your ancestors, I swear. I feel terrible they were stolen in the first place. But I’d like to understand why they’re so important to you and what’s up with the house and the village and all this Cathar stuff, and these pictures and that book. And now this bone. Nothing makes any sense.”

  “Because, they’re not the bones of my ancestors,” she said softly. “They’re the bones of my family and friends.”

  Chris felt a chill, like someone had just walked across his grave. “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean we were the forty-six, the forty-six who moved the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene from Monsegur.”

  “A thousand years ago, you’re saying you were one of them.”

  Rose said nothing.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Rose stared at her hands clasped in her lap. Then softly, she told her story.

  “That night, after we’d finished moving the treasure and returned to our cottages, it seemed like nothing had changed. The following day the siege ended. Our Perfecti were burned and we were rounded up to meet with the Inquisition. Before the priests, we renounced our Cathar faith and were allowed to return to our families. Except we didn’t age. Our children did. Our neighbors did. But we, the forty-six, we didn’t. We got sick, we got hurt in accidents, but we always got better. Of course, we tried to share our good fortune—as we believed it to be at the time—with our family members as they aged or became ill, but they always slipped away from us. We hunted for the sarcophagus, hoping it might confer the same gift on them, but we couldn’t find it. We tried sharing our blood, our food, making poultices of our fluids, breathing on their wounds, wrapping them in our cast-off clothing. God, I remember we even tried biting our loved ones on the neck, like the stories we heard from Wallachia. Nothing worked. Everyone else aged and died, but we didn’t.

  “Our children grew scared of us, our neighbors grew suspicious, and eventually we had to flee. Some of our number went their own way, east to the lands of the Mussulmen or south among the lost tribes of Israel. Most of us remained together, however, and my brother Bernard, who’d organized our assistance to the Perfecti, was selected to lead us in our wanderings. He took the name Monsegur, so we would always be able to find him if ever we became separated. Every few decades we assumed new identities as we wandered from place to place. We were Protestants fleeing Catholics, Jews fleeing Spaniards, Dutch fleeing Austrians. Eventually we boarded ships for New France and tried to settle far from prying French eyes in Huronia in the village of Saint Louis. Fifteen years later, however, when the Iroquois laid waste to Huronia, we started south. We spent more than a century shifting and dodging among the warring armies of natives and Europeans before we settled here in Vermont.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Chris said. “If you can’t die then why are all the people you call your friends out there in the cemetery...dead?”

  “Oh, we can die, just not from illness or old age. We can only die by committing an entirely spontaneous act of self-sacrifice. Believe me, as the decades turned into centuries, as everyone and everything we’d ever loved slipped away from us, as even our memories of our own children and dearest friends faded away, we realized what we’d thought was a gift was anything but. Life without end is not a gift but a curse, an unending punishment for some unidentified transgression. We longed for death. In our Cathar faith, we’d been schooled to believe that life is like a soiled garment to be shed at the first opportunity, but for us the opportunity never came. We tried to die, many times. Some of us rushed headlong into pointless battles, committed acts of great folly, others took absurd risks, on the seas, in far-off jungles, in the air, trying to fabricate opportunities for fraudulent heroism. Nothing worked. If we were injured, we got better. If we died, we were suicides and suffered the fate of every suicide, to be shackled to the place of our death forever.

  “Only acts of selfless courage earn us release. That’s why every story you read on the stones in our cemetery is so heartrending. Each act of genuine heroism earned the occupant of the grave a place in Paradise after centuries of private suffering here on earth. But now my friends have been torn from Paradise once again.” She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.

  “How many are you now?” Chris asked.

  “Forty-six left the Occitan in 1265. Four chose not to stay with the rest and I’ve no idea where they are now. By the time we sailed from Saint Malo for New France in 1632, there were thirty-three of us. I’d lost my youngest son in the Battle of White Mountain, near Prague, on the 8th of November, 1620, and was glad to leave the old world behind. Three more of our number died before we settled in Lewis in 1764. One of them, my sister, died in Huronia trying to save a native child from starvation. I carried her remains with me in a chest for more than a century before I was able to bury her here in Lewis. Nineteen more have died since we settled in Lewis and all are buried out there. Six others have either gone missing, died elsewhere and their whereabouts are unknown, or their bodies could not be recovered, including my oldest son who died on the Piave Front against Austrian troops in World War One, and my husband who died aboard an oil tanker in a collision with another ship in New York Harbor
in 1966. Even so, there is a place for them in our cemetery. I expect all our disappeared will want to have their remains sent back here when their time comes because Lewis is the only home we’ve known for longer than a century since leaving the Occitan. Five of us remain.”

  Chris hardly knew how to respond. His head was spinning at the total craziness of what Rose was saying. “So...in the picture book, that really is you in Paris in 1889, and your brother at the Sailor’s Creek Memorial in 1881.”

  “And Emansus really did give the book about Mortsafemen to my brother, yes.”

  “I...I guess you’ve seen a lot.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Chris felt like a complete idiot. What an utterly ridiculous thing to say to someone who’s just told you they’re eight hundred years old, but in that moment, he couldn’t come up with anything better. He was either sitting across the table from a mad woman...or from the most amazing creature on the planet, and he had no idea which.

  “Look, Chris, you’re the only person I’ve ever told about my past, and I really don’t like talking about it. Besides, whether I’m fifty or five thousand has no relevance to the problem at hand. Getting back the remains of my friends is all that matters.”

  “Right, well,” he stammered, “I suppose...I’ll...go to the theater tomorrow first thing...and volunteer to help. They’ve been asking me to.”

  “All right. And when you’re inside, you’ll be able to speak to Geraldine, ask if she’s okay, and then find our bones.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  * * * *

  Jackie got back to Bangor after ten. Martin Koyman was sipping his third coffee and eating his second plate of eggs and fried potato in the all-night diner across the street from the Daily Courier Building. Jackie walked up behind Martin, put her hand on his shoulder, and said, “Thanks so much for waiting.”

  “Tough drive?” Martin asked without looking up from his plate.

  “The worst.”

  “So why didn’t you want to talk at the office?” he asked as he shovelled a forkful of ketchup-covered cottage fries into his mouth.

  “Because,” Jackie replied, sliding into the bench opposite Koyman, “I didn’t want you to freak out in front of everyone.”

  Bits of egg and potato flew across the table as Koyman bellowed, “What the hell happened to your face?” Heads all over the coffee shop pivoted in their direction.

  “See. That’s why. I didn’t want you shouting in the newsroom,” Jackie said as she wiped up food from the table top. “It’s nothing, I swear.”

  “Nothing? Were you mugged?”

  “No. And I’m getting better, and the face doesn’t hurt at all. And my back’s almost healed.”

  “Your back as well? Who did this, Chandler? I’ll kill him! I never believed he was the Goody Two-shoes some people said he was.”

  “Chris Chandler didn’t do this, and yes, he is one of the good guys.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I...I can’t tell you quite yet, but believe me, I’ve found such a story, the greatest story you could ever imagine.”

  “You’re on a new story?” Martin frowned and shook his head. “No. That’s not how it works, Jackie. The editor wants you on the Bemishstock story. He doesn’t want you freelancing. You can’t go changing assignments when it suits you.”

  “I’m not changing the assignment, not really, but my research has taken a totally amazing turn.”

  “Jackie, no! Do the job you were given.” He’d taken her hand and was practically pleading. “You’ve got a great opportunity here. I don’t want you screwing it up.”

  “Okay, okay, I do have an article I can write tonight, and I think the boss will like it. It’s about Chandler’s girlfriend, the one he was with the night they confronted Meath, and what’s been happening to her ever since. It’s human interest stuff, a real tearjerker. I think he’ll like it.”

  “Okay, sounds interesting.”

  “But, Martin, you must let me stay on the other story. I swear it will blow you away.”

  “Okay, as long as it doesn’t blow up your career in the process.”

  * * * *

  Because of the late hour, Rose insisted on driving Chris home, but then he insisted on getting out at the gate and walking the rest of the way to the cottage. He needed the exercise, he said. In truth, he wanted to clear his head, figure out what sort of a nutcase he’d allied himself with, and decide whether he should simply cut and run. If he’d been thinking straight, perhaps he’d have noticed the fairly new Chevy concealed in the wooded pull-off opposite the gate, but he didn’t.

  The night was as black as soot and as silent as the grave. Chris could make out nothing at all in the forest around him or on the trail ahead. A penlight on his keychain was all the illumination he had for the walk, expecting it would be sufficient to keep him on the trail and out of the largest puddles. He pulled his tuque down over his ears, buttoned his coat collar tight around his neck, and set off.

  From out of the dark on either side of the lane, he sometimes heard the crack of a branch or the rustle of leaves. Once, a pheasant shrieked and flapped away frantically as some predator on its scent missed its chance for fresh meat. Chris’s heart almost stopped at the bloodcurdling cry. His gaze was fixed on the ground immediately in front of him, watching for every ice-filled rut and frozen block of mud which might trip him up, so he didn’t see the tiny point of light appear in the lane ahead. He only noticed the light when it was less than a hundred yards away.

  Someone with a flashlight was coming toward him.

  Chris stopped. “Hello,” he called out.

  No reply. The person was coming on fast now.

  Chris turned off his own penlight and was about to jump across the water-filled ditch to hide in the woods when the beam of the flashlight fell directly upon him.

  “Don’t move,” a voice said—a high, nasally voice. Chris had a hard time understanding the words, as if the speaker had a mouthful of marbles.

  “Who are you?”

  The figure closed on him. “See this?” the person said, and shone the flashlight toward the gun in his hand.

  “What do you need a gun for?” Chris was ready to bolt, but hesitated as his curiosity got the better of him.

  The figure stopped no more than twenty feet away. The beam dipped momentarily as the figure put something down on the ground.

  “It’s a toy gun,” Chris sneered.

  In the unearthly silence, the gunshot sounded like a bolt of lightning exploding directly overhead. Chris dropped to the ground. Birds took to the sky in terror.

  “Not a toy,” the figure said.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” Chris shouted as he got back to his feet.

  “Turn your light on and find out.”

  Chris shone his tiny penlight as far forward as its beam could reach. The figure was too far away. “Let me help you,” he said, and walked forward into the penlight’s pale illumination.

  “Rudy Dahlman,” Chris muttered.

  Chris hadn’t seen Rudy since the night of Mallory’s funeral. He knew from Rudy’s many hate-filled letters that Mallory’s assault had been so devastating he’d spent several months in the hospital, but Chris could never have imagined, not in his most appalling nightmares, what an utter wreck Mallory had made of her brother. There were two gaping holes where his nose should have been. One eye was gone, and instead of an empty socket, wrinkled flesh was pulled taut across the space. Rudy’s jaw had been shattered into pieces and twisted to one side, so his chin was now pushed to the left side of his face like a large growth. His mouth was the most horrifying distortion, however. It had been ripped open from one ear all the way to the other, and he looked like a crazed clown with an insanely wide smile.

  “You did this,” Rudy said, waving his hand across his face.

  “No. Mallory did it.”

  “Because of you.” Drool rolled from Rudy’s mouth down into the mud.

  “Look, Rudy
, I had no idea how badly she’d hurt you,” and he started toward the boy.

  “Get back. I’m not letting you anywhere near me. Not again. But I am going to have my revenge. Turn around and kneel.”

  Chris tried to stall, to argue. Rudy screamed, “Shut up and kneel, I said!”

  As Chris knelt in the mud, he heard Rudy come up behind him.

  Rudy’s babble was barely comprehensible. Spittle flew in all directions. Even so, he seemed determined to tell his story. “What I’ve had to do to get to this moment. I followed the woman from the Bangor paper all over Maine. I saw her come here, then I slept in my car till she was gone. I walked all the way to that house of yours, and practically blew my own brains out when I discovered you weren’t there. But now...here you are, the perfect spot. It’s like this was meant to be.”

  The beam of the flashlight dropped to the ground. Chris heard something slosh about, then suddenly he was doused in freezing cold liquid.

  God, the smell! Gasoline!

  Rudy had poured gasoline all over him.

  “Now get up,” Rudy screamed. “I want to see your face as you burn.”

  Chris got to his feet slowly and turned, watching Rudy like a hawk for any opportunity to run or fight. With the gun in his left hand, Rudy drew a box of wooden matches from his pants pocket with his right and tried to open the box.

  “Goddamn,” he muttered as he fumbled with the box, dropping several matches in the mud as he did so, but never taking his eyes off Chris. Then he tried holding the box between his fingers and tipping the matches into his palm. At last, he managed to grab two matches as the rest fell into the mud, but then dropped the box as well. “Shit,” he screamed in frustration.

  “Take your time,” Chris said.

  Rudy tried to light the match with his thumbnail and then on his belt buckle. “Safety matches. Fuck!” He glanced down at the matchbox at his feet. In that instant, Chris took off like a rocket straight at Rudy. As Chris barrelled into Rudy, the gun went off, grazing Chris’s arm, but there was no way in hell he was going to let go of the boy until he’d delivered the coup de grace—a kiss on Rudy’s mangled cheek.