I gripped cold stone, slick with slugtrails.
Perchance I can help.
Listen to me.
Perchance we might help one another, you and I, Abbot, two men of learning divided only by the thin skein of mortality.
Here, within my protective pentagram, upon the cold hearth of our faith, intoning words and phrases borrowed from the grimoires, rendered safe and wholesome, or so I must needs believe, by Christian prayer.
Not conjuring. I won’t command, in the manner of the old sorcerers. I only request…
‘…humbly, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, if the Trinity doth so consent. Dear God, if it be your will that I might help your servant Abbot Whiting find peace… that I may bear a portion of his burden, in return for some small enlightenment, then let him appear to me now in… in a not unpleasant form.’
A not unpleasant form. Essential, that. Always important in the grimoires to imagine how you would wish to view the spirit.
State it firmly. A not unpleasant form. Say it strongly, then let it go. Imagination, when bound to our human will, can be a powerful tool for altering the course of events but, when left to its own devices, can cause havoc in the mind.
So, do I feel, or do I imagine, the air growing cold around me? Should I, as a scientist, try to still such feelings, separating myself from them to stand aside, become an observer? Or allow these fancies to form around me, creating a numinous cloud into which a spirit, some watery essence of a man, might gradually become manifest?
The conjurer at work.
Dear God.
You think me reckless?
You who watch from behind your window glass. You who were not there that night, cold in the belly of the abbey.
Slowly lifting my face, I placed him there, imprinting him upon my closed eyelids, marking that look of helpless sorrow on his face and his hands raised in formal, weary benediction.
Who’s to say what are visions and what are signs of an oncoming madness?
I must have been close to the edge of a kind of madness when, in a instant of heart-lurch, I knew that I was not alone.
Knew? How did I know? How? Did I hear then movement, a footfall among the riffling of last winter’s crispen leaves, the slow beat of owl wings?
It was none of that. None of anything. Only an absence, a flatness, a deadness, a not-hearing. A void which spoke of the dreadful.
I’m trying, God help me, to explain this. Without diagrams or arcane symbols. To evoke the crawling fear it awoke in me as, with a last, slack-lipped prayer, wildly slashing another pentagram in the air before me, I began moving, open-eyed now, along the moon-washed, rubbled nave towards the chancel.
Towards what was there.
XIX
Beyond Normal
Cowdray came back with me to the abbey.
I’d battered every door in the George Inn until I’d found the chamber where he lay – with one of the kitchen maids, I believe. Now he stood on the edge of the chancel and shivered and looked again at what was there and shivered again. Crossing himself, I noticed, before turning away, almost in anger.
‘I’ll send a boy for Sir Edmund Fyche. And constables. There should be a hue and cry.’
‘No… wait.’
A little light. A single lantern, burning in the vastness.
Dear God, dear God, dear God…
‘Doctor, this is…’ Moonlight deepening the furrows in Cowdray’s face, turning them black. ‘’Tis beyond normal, man.’
‘What’s normal?’ I was barely in control. ‘How are men usually killed here?’
‘In hot blood. And strong drink.’ His voice flat. ‘Never like this.’
The man who lay dead had arms spread wide, like to Our Saviour on his cross. Shadows flucting like the wings of angels on the walls above and to the sides.
‘I must needs consult my colleague,’ I said. ‘Master Roberts.’
‘He’s ill.’
‘Yes, and needs sleep, however-’
‘He doesn’t need this, ’ Cowdray said. ‘God’s word…’
‘No.’
I’ve lived through violent times, seen men executed in divers gruesome ways but nothing, since the burning of Barthlet Green, so heartsick close. I turned again to face it, swallowing bile and self-loathing, the lantern held high.
Like something sanctified, the dead man lay pointing east, towards where the high altar would have stood and the tomb of black marble.
The remains of a candle were wedged in his mouth, his tallowed lips obscenely around its stem. Throwing a hand to my mouth and nose, for now I could smell it: cold fat and shit. The candle must have been lit, its melting making a ruined deathmask of the face. And, on the rim of its fading rays, was also displayed what had been done, dear God, to the chest.
The body raided, organs laid out glistening in a sludge of black blood like a breakfast of sweetmeats among the stones. I bent over and vomited again, and saw, for the first time, what lay in the left hand.
‘Oh Christ, Cowdray…’
Dudley used to say that Martin Lythgoe had been a part of his household since his boyhood. I did not know him well but thought him a fine man. A good man.
‘This town’s starting to stink to hell,’ Cowdray said with venom. ‘Come away, Doctor.’
But I was making myself look again, to confirm that in poor Martin’s left hand lay what even I – no anatomist, a doctor only by title – knew to be his unbeating heart.
Then following Cowdray back to the gatehouse, the abbey rearing around us, like nothing so much, in this sour dawn, as the open-ribbed skeleton of a great ox.
‘You’re right.’ I said. ‘You’d better send for him.’
Lanterns aplenty now. The last of the night alight and the abbey looking, perversely, as if it were made active again. I felt confused and dislocated, the weariness of a sleepless night descending damply around me as I watched Fyche marking the scene from his horse and then dismounting and strolling over, unhurried.
‘This is the corpse of your servant, Dr John?’
He’d ridden in with three constables and the first lines of dawn in the sky. Leather jerkin and riding boots. He picked up a lantern to light my face, as if he might see guilt written upon it. And maybe he would.
‘Interesting that you should be the one to find him, Dr John. Why exactly were you in the abbey, on the wrong side of midnight?’
‘I…’ Christ, I hadn’t even thought to invent a reason. ‘I couldn’t sleep. Seemed like a good, quiet time to inspect the ruins. When there was noone about.’
‘Except the dead. You’re not yourself afeared of the walking dead, then, Doctor?’
‘I have a job to do.’
How unlikely all of this was now sounding.
‘For were you not a servant of the Crown,’ Fyche said, ‘I might have assumed you’d gone there to steal.’
‘Steal what?’
‘Or even to kill,’ Fyche said. ‘ If you were not supposed to be in the Queen’s employ.’
