The Poisoned Pilgrim

by Oliver Pötzsch

  “Don’t you want to go down to the tavern with your master?” Magdalena ventured, just to have something to say. “It was a tough day, and no doubt your throat is dry.”

  The silent helper shook his head, and a gurgling sound came from his throat. He was pointing at Magdalena’s cup of wine.

  “Ahh dahh ring…” he stammered.

  “You don’t drink?” she replied.

  Matthias beamed, seeing he was understood.

  “And why not?”

  The handsome fellow seemed to think a bit; then his face turned into a threatening grimace as he spread his fingers out like claws.

  Instinctively, Magdalena moved off to one side. “Ah, it makes you sick?” she asked hesitantly.

  Matthias sighed and rolled his eyes as if he were drunk. Finally, he reached for a pitcher of water and drank it in one long gulp.

  “Aaah.” he exclaimed, rubbing his stomach like after a good meal. “Aach eer… ush eer.”

  “You’re right,” Magdalena murmured. “Alcohol sometimes changes men into beasts, lustful beasts, or snoring bears.” She laughed self-consciously, and the good-looking assistant stared back at her unambiguously. Suddenly she felt the heat and closeness of the room closing in around her and stood up, blushing.

  “Say,” she began somewhat awkwardly, “do you think you could keep an eye on the two sleeping kids for a little while? I’d like to get out for some fresh air, and since you’re not going to the tavern…” She smiled at him, and for a moment Matthias seemed befuddled, trying to sort things out in his mind, reaffirming Magdalena’s impressions that the knacker’s assistant was not only handsome but unfortunately a bit dense. He didn’t seem especially enthused at Magdalena’s suggestion, but finally he nodded.

  “Then… until later,” she said softly. “And thank you very much.”

  She quickly tossed on a scarf, stood up, and left. Outside, in the cool night air, she almost had to laugh at herself. What in the world was wrong with her? Evidently, events of the last few days had rattled her so much that now even a mute knacker’s boy could throw her off her stride. The children, too, had upset her more than she’d expected while their father was busy with more important things.

  Magdalena took a deep breath, then decided to go up to the monastery and search for her husband. It annoyed her that Simon was gone again in the evening, leaving her to care for the children. He really should have returned some time ago; perhaps she’d even meet up with him on the way.

  The distant singing of drunken men wafted through the cool night air, and in the fields around the village little fires were burning. Many of the pilgrims spent the night outside, and by now several hundred people had set up camp at the foot of the Holy Mountain.

  Steering clear of the fires and the warm and inviting lights of the tavern, Magdalena climbed up the steep pathway toward the monastery, and was soon enveloped in silence. The stone wall around the monastery where she and Simon had sat in the warm sun yesterday noon had now become a black strip silhouetted against an even darker background. There was a cracking of branches in the bushes on either side of the path, and once Magdalena even thought she heard footsteps. She hurried along the path, finally passing through a gate and entering the monastery grounds. Here too, in contrast with the loud activity during the day, quiet prevailed. Somewhere she heard a single bell sound. Two drunks coming from the monastery tavern approached her, but they, too, stumbled silently past.

  Finally she reached the square in front of the church and started looking for Simon. Just where could he be? He was only going to pay a quick visit to the abbot with her father, but that was at least three hours ago. Had the two of them paid a visit to the ugly Nepomuk in the dungeon?

  Magdalena’s mind wandered as she stared at the piles of stone and sacks of lime lying all around the square. Workers had put up scaffolding on the walls and front of the church to make repairs to the roof. A wailing tomcat scurried across the boards in search of his mate, and Magdalena looked up, smiling, to see the animal disappear through a crack in the wall of the belfry.

  It suddenly occurred to her that she still didn’t know what the strange device was up in the belfry. Should she have another look now? Perhaps she could find out if her fall from the belfry was really just a foolish accident.

  Magdalena resolutely opened the church portal a crack and slipped inside. The church was empty. She reached for one of the dozens of flickering candles on a side altar and carefully climbed the steps to the balcony. From there, a rickety, partially repaired winding stairway led up into the tower.

  Magdalena walked as best she could on the interior side of the steps, carefully placing one foot in front of the other. At least the darkness offered her the advantage of not knowing what was just a few yards ahead of the flickering candles and spared her the dizzying sight of what lay below. With heart pounding, she climbed step by step until she finally reached the upper platform with the three bells. Carefully she raised the candle and looked around.

  “What in God’s name…?” She held her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.

  The stretcher with the metal clamps, as well as the iron stakes, had disappeared.

  To be sure, she walked around the entire platform, but the strange construction had indeed vanished into thin air. All that remained was a piece of wire protruding from the ceiling, dangling in the wind.

  Magdalena cursed softly. Someone must have removed the stretcher in the last two days. Now she would probably never find out what the apparatus was. Grumbling, she kicked one of the heavy church bells, but the heavy iron bell hardly moved a fraction of an inch. Then she climbed down and quietly left the church, but not without bowing one last time before the main altar and the two statues of Mary.

  Please excuse the lateness of my visit, Holy Mother of God, she prayed to herself. But you, too, probably want to know what’s going on up in your tower. Or have you known about all this for a long time?

  As Magdalena stepped under the scaffolding in front of the main entrance, she could sense something moving. At that moment a large, heavy object fell toward her. Instinctively, she jumped aside in time for a shapeless object to graze her right shoulder. There was a whoosh as a waist-high sack of lime landed next to her on the ground, bursting open and pouring its contents across the pavement.

  Everything happened so fast that Magdalena scarcely had time to catch her breath. Her heart pounding, she leaned against one of the uprights of the scaffold, staring down at the sack from which a cloud of dust rose now into the bright, moonlit night.

  Was that just another accident? Softly she cursed herself for sneaking through the church in the darkness. Good Lord, she had two little children who needed her, and here she was poking her nose around, looking for some madman.

  “Is everything all right?”

  The voice came from the right, by the church entrance. A monk approached, but not until he was standing almost in front of her did she recognize the novitiate master Brother Laurentius.

  “I heard a noise,” he said, “and do hope nothing has happened. For God’s sake, you’re pale as a ghost.”

  “Pale as lime would be the right expression,” Magdalena groaned, pointing to the burst sack at her feet. “That huge thing almost killed me.”

  The Brother looked up anxiously. “It must have fallen from the scaffold. I said just this morning that this area had to be roped off. As if enough hadn’t already happened in the last few days.” He sighed, then looked at Magdalena severely. “But you really shouldn’t be hanging around the church square at this hour. What in heaven’s name are you doing here?”

  Just as she had the evening before in the church, Magdalena noticed Laurentius’s finely wrought facial features. His fingers were long, with clean nails that glimmered faintly in the darkness.

  “I’m… looking for my husband,” she stammered. “He’s the bathhouse surgeon from Schongau who’s taking care of the sick people here. Have you seen him, by chance?”


  At once the monk’s expression brightened. “Ah, the bathhouse surgeon who is taking care of the sick pilgrims free of charge?” he asked. “A true Christian. You can be sure he has earned his place in the Heavenly Kingdom.”

  “Thank you, but I think he’d prefer to spend the next few years here on earth,” she replied, pulling her shawl tight around her shoulders. “And in your monastery, that’s not so easily done at present.”

  The Brother cringed. “You’re right,” he murmured haltingly. “This is a dreadful time—first the young Coelestin and then…” His voice broke and he turned aside.

  “Were you very close to the watchmaker’s assistant, Vitalis?” Magdalena asked, concerned.

  Brother Laurentius nodded, his lips tightly pressed together. Only after a while did he answer. “I’m the novitiate master here. All my charges are dear to me, as I’m responsible for the education of each individual.” He sighed. “But with Vitalis it was something else. He was very… sensitive. He often visited me in the evening and poured out his heart.” The priest’s long eyelashes began to flutter, and Magdalena saw a tear run down his face.

  “Did Vitalis have difficulties with his master?” she asked, curiously.

  The young monk shrugged. “I don’t know. Toward the end he was very reserved—something must have happened. The last time we met he seemed to want to tell me something, but then he decided to remain silent. It was probably Aurora who made him so anxious.”

  “Aurora?”

  “Yes, his master’s automaton,” Laurentius explained. “Vitalis thought the puppet was alive. He often told me that she moved on her own at night, hissing and whispering, almost like a human being, and he felt she was following his every move.”

  Magdalena shook her head. “A dreadful thought.”

  “Indeed. Vitalis thought the puppet was hiding some horrible secret, and on the night before his gruesome end he told me, ‘She will kill him—and all of us.’” Brother Laurentius nodded, lost in thought. “Those were his exact words: ‘kill us.’ Now it seems his prophesies have been fulfilled. God knows what this creature did with poor Vitalis and his master who has vanished.” He hastily crossed himself and bowed. “It’s quite late, only a few hours before morning prayers. Let’s hope and pray this witchery will end soon. God be with you.” With these final words, the novitiate master turned and left.

  Magdalena stared after his dark form as he vanished into the night, then hastily climbed down the steep path toward the village. She fervently hoped that Simon had returned by now. This monastery seemed more and more sinister to her, and for a long time she couldn’t get the automaton’s soft melody out of her mind.

  A shrill, unending glockenspiel.

  Half an hour later, Kuisl, Simon, and Magdalena had returned to the knacker’s house and were sitting around the stove in the main room thinking about the events of the last few days. The hangman had lit his pipe for the third time, and the whole room filled with clouds of smoke from the tobacco and the wet wood burning in the stove. Kuisl’s cousin Michael Graetz still hadn’t returned from his visit to the local tavern, and his silent assistant seemed to have disappeared, even though Magdalena had asked him to stay and watch the children—a good opportunity finally for the three to discuss everything that had happened.

  “Experiments with lightning?” Simon asked, incredulously. “Your friend Nepomuk actually was studying lightning?”

  Nodding, Kuisl took a deep drag on his pipe. He was still wearing the filthy monk’s robe, which clung to him like a wet sack and seemed to itch all over. “He was trying to capture lightning,” he grumbled, after he’d finally finished scratching himself. “Not such a bad idea, when you think of how often it has struck just in our little Schongau. Nepomuk took a wire and ran it down the church steeple to the cemetery, and the lightning actually did strike there. But unfortunately, it also set the whole tower on fire.”

  “Just a moment,” Magdalena spoke up. “The day before yesterday I saw a wire like that there, but also a strange sort of stretcher. When I went back again tonight, it was gone; only the wire was still hanging from the ceiling.”

  She had met Simon on the way home and, until now, hadn’t told him or her father anything about the sack of lime that had fallen next to her. In the meantime, she was no longer sure herself whether her constant fear of attack was her imagination run wild, and now, especially in the warm light of the knacker’s cottage, everything seemed to her like a distant fairy tale.

  “Perhaps the stretcher in the belfry wasn’t Nepomuk’s at all, but belonged to someone trying to copy his ideas,” Simon said.

  Magdalena frowned. “And who would that be?”

  “No idea,” Simon replied, perplexed. “The entire inner council seems very peculiar, above all the abbot himself. Your father and I surprised him reading a book about conjuring up golems.” He waved his hands back and forth vigorously, trying to dispel the smoke. “Whoever it is, we’re too late. The stranger has clearly disposed of all the evidence because things were getting too hot for him. And now—” Simon coughed, then turned angrily to his father-in-law. “Damn, Kuisl!” he shouted. “Can’t you just once stop that awful smoking? How can anyone think straight in all this smoke?”

  “I can, for one,” the hangman growled. “You should try it yourself sometime; it might make things a little clearer for you. I just had a few really interesting ideas.” He grinned and took an especially deep drag on the pipe. “Nepomuk told me, for example, that Virgilius had told him about a stranger—someone who would be interested in the experiments with lightning, he thought.”

  “The abbot,” Magdalena interrupted. “Perhaps he needs a powerful lightning flash to bring his golem to life, and he wanted Virgilius to help him.”

  The hangman spat into the reeds on the floor. “Nonsense. There’s no such thing as a golem. I believe in hard iron, a well-tied noose, and the evil in men, not a man made of clay. Golems are nothing but horror stories made up by priests to scare people.” He shook his head stubbornly. “It’s too bad Virgilius went up in smoke and we can’t ask him about this stranger anymore.”

  “Ahem… apropos fire.” Simon cleared his throat and paused before continuing. “Please don’t think I’m crazy, but I’ve made a very strange discovery, and slowly I’m starting to wonder whether there’s something to this talk of witchcraft.” Hesitantly, he told the others of his strange experience with the glowing corpse in the Andechs beer cellar and his own hasty retreat.

  “Did you say it was a white powder, and the corpse glowed in a green light?” Kuisl finally asked.

  Simon nodded. “It was a very dim glow, like a glowworm. I just can’t make any sense of it.”

  “But I can,” the hangman replied dryly. “I’ve heard of a phenomenon like that.”

  “Well?” Simon sat up attentively. “What is it?”

  Kuisl grinned at his son-in-law. “Well, what do you know? I’m afraid I’ve not had enough to smoke today to figure that out. My mind isn’t working fast enough, and unfortunately I’m not allowed to smoke any more in here…” Calmly he pulled a louse from under his robe and stuffed it into his glowing pipe, where it burst.

  “Father, stop this nonsense and tell us right away what you know,” Magdalena hissed. “Or I’ll tell Mother that you already had three pipefuls today.”

  “Oh, all right, all right,” the hangman replied, waving her off. “It’s probably phosphorus.”

  “Phosphorus?” Simon looked at his father-in-law incredulously. “What in God’s name is phosphorus?”

  “Phosphorus mirabilis. An element just recently discovered by a apothecary in a city named Hamburg, you worthless scholar,” Kuisl barked. “You should have hung around the Ingolstadt University a little longer.” He leaned back smugly and took a deep draw on his pipe. “Actually, the apothecary, like so many others, was looking for the philosopher’s stone, but what came out was a glowing substance, namely phosphorus. I read about it in one of my books by Athanasiu
s Kircher. It has a faint green glow in the dark, but it also has another extremely dangerous property.”

  “And that would be…” Magdalena prodded.

  The hangman folded his arms in front of his broad chest. “Well, it burns like tinder. You only have to place it out in the sun, and once it catches fire it can’t be put out and inflicts horrible wounds.”

  “Do you think that poor Vitalis was doused with this… this phosphorus?” Simon whispered. “But why?”

  “Maybe because someone is trying to make the priests believe in witchcraft?” Kuisl grumbled. “Didn’t you say yourself that Vitalis’s skull had been smashed in? Perhaps someone bludgeoned him and then spread phosphorus on the corpse to make his death look like witchcraft. Then they quickly found a scapegoat—Nepomuk.”

  “But his eyepiece,” Simon objected. “It was found at the crime scene.”

  “Anyone could have put it there,” Magdalena interrupted. “My father is right. An automaton disappears, a watchmaker seems to have been swallowed up by the earth, and an assistant is horribly burned—all designed to look like the work of the devil, and all to stir up fear? If you ask me, this stranger is stopping at nothing, and now all of Andechs is in turmoil.” She hesitated briefly. “The question is, who would benefit from panic breaking out here among the pilgrims?”

  Simon was staring through the clouds of tobacco smoke at the cross in the devotional corner when he suddenly slammed his hand down on the table. “I have it!” he shouted.

  “Good Lord, Simon,” Magdalena whispered. “Please be quiet. You’ll wake up the children.”

  “It must have something to do with the Festival of the Three Hosts,” said Simon, now in a quieter voice. “Someone wants to interfere with this festival. Already some of the pilgrims are thinking about returning home. They’ve heard of the horrible murders and are afraid of the automaton that is said to be prowling the halls of the monastery. If this continues, the festival may not even take place at all—in any case, it won’t be a happy festival, pleasing to God.”