Book of Souls

Chapter 15

1334

Isle of Wight

Felix led the congregation in the Prime prayers. Mercifully, it was the shortest office of the day because he was desperately fatigued, and his head was pounding again. The cathedral was filled with his brothers and sisters, dutifully responding, lifting their voices in prayer song that was surely as sweet as the songbirds perched on the rooftops of the church calling to their number in the nearby oaks. It was the rarest time of year, when the atmosphere within the cathedral was, in a word, heavenly-neither too cold nor too warm. It would be a shame, he thought, to depart this earth in the glory of summertime.

Through his good eye, he saw the monks sneaking furtive glances from the pews. He was their father, and they were worried about him and, indeed, worried about themselves. The death of an abbot was always a time of worldly concern. A new abbot inevitably changed things and altered the rhythms of abbey life. After all these years, they were used to him. Perhaps, he thought, they even loved him. Adding to the uncertainty, the chain of succession was cloudy. His prior, Paul, was far too young for the bishop to elevate, and there was no other candidate within their walls. That meant an outsider. For their sakes, he would try to live as long as he could, but he knew better than most that God’s plan was set and inalterable.

From the high, carved pulpit, he searched the length of the cathedral for his visitor, but Luke was not to be found. He was not terribly surprised.

As Psalm 116, a Prime standard, was drawing to a close, he was suffused with a sudden joyful realization: that at the moment he had completed his confessional letter, Luke had arrived. Surely, this was providential. The Lord had heard his prayers and was providing an answer. In praise, he decided to insert one of his favorite old Prime hymns into the service, the ancient Iam Lucis Orto Sidere, Star of Light Now Having Risen, a poem dating back centuries, as far back as the lifetime of the blessed spiritual founder of their Order, Benedict of Nursia.

Iam lucis orto sidere,

Deum precemur supplices, ut in diurnis actibus nos servet a nocentibus.

Now in the sun’s new dawning ray, lowly of heart, our God we pray that He from harm may keep us free in all the deeds this day shall see.

The congregation seemed uplifted by the hymn. The high, soprano voices of the young nuns sounded lovely within the hollow, echo chamber of the great cathedral.

Ut cum dies abscesserit, noctemque sors reduxerit, mundi per abstinentiam ipsi canamus gloriam.

That when the light of day is gone, and night in course shall follow on, we, free from cares the world affords, may chant the praises that is our Lord’s.

At the conclusion of the service, Felix felt rejuvenated, and if his vision was doubled and his eye was painful, he hardly noticed it. As he left the church, he motioned to Brother Victor and asked the hostillar to bring the night visitor to his rooms.

Sister Maria was waiting for him at the abbot house and immediately began to ply him with tea and coarse oatmeal drizzled with honey. He took a few mouthfuls to assuage her but gestured to have it cleared away when Brother Victor came knocking.

When he saw Luke enter, he instantly remembered the day some forty years earlier when he had first laid eyes on him. Felix had been prior when the strapping young man, who more resembled a soldier than a bootmaker’s apprentice, arrived at the gate seeking entrance into the brotherhood. He had traveled from London, seeking out the island refuge because he had heard of the piety of the community and the simple majestic beauty of the monastery. Felix was quick to warm to the sincerity and intelligence of the lad and let him enter as an oblate. And Luke had repaid him by earnestly throwing himself into study, prayer, and work with a gleeful intensity and warmth of spirit that gladdened the hearts of all the members of the order.

Now he was looking at an old soul in his fifties, still tall and sturdy but thick around the middle. His face, which had been taut and beautiful, had been tugged at by time and was sagging and deeply inscribed. The glowing childlike smile was gone, replaced by the downward droop of scabbed lips. He was dressed in the simple, worn clothes of a tradesman, his streaked hair pulled tightly back into a knot.

“Come in, my son, and sit by me,” Felix said. “I can see that it is you, dear Luke, disguised as an old man.”

“I can see that it is also you, Father,” Luke replied, staring at the abbot’s bulging eye and the familiar but aged face.

“You notice my malady,” Felix observed. “It is well you came to visit today. Perhaps tomorrow you would have been visiting my tomb. Sit. Sit.”

Luke rested himself on a soft, horsehair chair. “I am sorry to hear this news, Father.”

“I am in God’s hands, as is every man. Have you been fed?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Tell me, why did you not come to the cathedral for Prime? I sought you out.”

Luke glanced uncomfortably at the finery of the abbot’s great room, and said simply, “I could not.”

Felix gently and sadly nodded. He understood, of course, and he was grateful the man had returned after all these years to close the long arc of two lives that had crossed for a while, then diverged on one terrible day.

There was no need for Luke to remind the abbot of the particulars of that day. Felix remembered them as if the events had unfolded minutes ago, not decades.

“Where did you go when you left us?” the abbot suddenly asked.

“London. We went to London.”

“We?”

“The girl, Elizabeth, came with me.”

“I see. And what became of her?”

“She is my wife.”

The news shook Felix, but he chose not to pass judgment. “Have you children?”

“No, Father, she was barren.”

In the mist and rain of a long-past October morning, Luke watched in horror as Elizabeth, a frightened, young novice, was dragged by Sister Sabeline inside the small chapel that stood in isolation in a far corner of the abbey grounds. During his four years at Vectis, he had heard whispered stories about the crypts, a subterranean world, strange beings underground, and strange doings. The other novices spoke of rituals, perversions. A secret society, the Order of the Names. He believed none of this-idle rumors emanating from simple minds. Yes, there was a secret chapel, but it was not for him to know all the inner workings of the abbey. He had a vocation to concentrate upon: loving and serving God.

Elizabeth became a test of his faith and commitment. From the first day he saw her close by, behind the Sisters’ dormitory, where he helped her retrieve a shirt blown from a clothesline, her face began to crowd out prayer and contemplation in his thoughts. Her long sweet hair, not yet shorn for Sisterhood, her perfect chin, high cheeks, green-blue eyes, moist lips, and gracile body drove him to a fiery madness. But he knew that if he conquered his urges and refused to stray from his path, then he would be stronger for it and a better servant of God.

He could not know at the time that his last night as a monk would be spent in a stable. Elizabeth had begged him to come. She was distraught. In the morning, she was to be taken to the crypts beneath the secret chapel. She told Luke she would be forced to lie with a man. She spun a tale of birth mothers, suffering and insanity. She begged Luke to take her virginity, then and there in the hay, to spare her from her fate. Instead, he fled, the sound of her soft wailing mixing with the restless neighing of the horses.

The next morning he hid behind a tree and kept watch over the path to the secret chapel. The sea was spraying, and the briny air braced him. Then, at dawn, he saw the desiccated, old nun, Sister Sabeline, dragging the sobbing young girl inside the wooden building. He fought with himself for several minutes before taking the step that would forever change the path of his life.

He entered the chapel.

What he saw was an empty room with a bluestone floor, adorned only with a simple gilded wooden cross on one wall. There was a heavy oak door. When he pushed it open he could see a tight spiral of stone stairs plunging into the earth. Hesitantly, he descended torchlit stones until he reached the bottom, a small, cool chamber where an ancient door with a large key in its iron lock stood ajar. The door swung heavily on its hinges, and he was inside the Hall of the Writers.

It took Luke a few seconds for his eyes to accommodate to the sparse candlelight of the hall. He had no comprehension of what he saw: dozens of pale-skinned, ginger-haired men and boys, seated shoulder by shoulder at rows of long tables, each one grasping a quill, dipping into inkpots, and writing furiously on sheets of parchment. Some were old, some were mere boys, but despite their ages, they all looked remarkably similar to one another. Every face was as blank as the next. Their only animation came from their green eyes, which seemed to drill into their sheets of white parchment with intensity.

The chamber had a domed ceiling that was plastered and whitewashed, the better to reflect the candlelight. There were up to ten writers at each of fifteen tables stretching to the rear of the chamber. The circumference of the chamber was lined with cotlike beds, some of which were occupied by sleeping ginger-haired men.

The writers paid Luke no attention; he felt he had entered a magical realm where, perhaps, he was invisible. But before he had time to try to make sense of the sights before him, he heard a plaintive cry, the voice of Elizabeth.

The cries were coming from his right, from a void at the side of the chamber. Protectively, he ran toward the black archway and promptly smelled the suffocating odors of death. He was in a catacomb. He fumbled in the dark through one room, brushing against yellow skeletons with rotting flesh, which piled like cords of wood in the recesses of the walls.

Her cries grew louder and in a second room he saw Sister Sabeline holding a candle. He crept closer. The candle illuminated the colorless skin of one of the ginger-haired men. He was naked, and Luke could see the caved-in cheeks of his emaciated buttocks, his spindly arms hanging limp by his side. Sabeline was goading him, calling in frustration, “I have brought this girl for you!” When nothing happened, the nun demanded, “Touch her!”

Then he spotted Elizabeth, cowering on the floor, covering her eyes, bracing herself for the touch of a living skeleton.

Luke acted automatically, without the fear of consequences. He leapt forward and grabbed the man by the bony shoulders and threw him to the ground. It was easy to do, like tossing a child. He heard Sister Sabeline shrieking, “What are you doing here? What are you doing?” He ignored her and reached out for Elizabeth, who seemed to recognize she was being touched not by evil but by the hand of deliverance. She opened her eyes and stared gratefully at his face. The pale man was on the ground, trying to pick himself up from the spot where Luke had roughly shoved him. “Brother Luke, leave us!” Sabeline screamed. “You have violated a sacred place!”

Luke screamed back. “I will not leave without this girl. How can this be sacred? All I see is evil.”

He took Elizabeth by the hand and pulled her up.

Sabeline shrieked at him. “You do not understand!”

From the chamber, Luke began to hear sounds of chaos and turmoil-crashing, thuds, thrashing, and wet, flopping noises like large fish being hauled onto a ship’s deck, writhing and suffocating.

The naked ginger-haired man turned away and walked toward the noise.

“What is happening?” Luke asked.

Sabeline took her candle and rushed toward the hall, leaving them alone in the dark.

“Are you safe?” Luke asked her.

“You came for me,” she whispered.

He helped her find her way from the darkness into the light and into the hall.

The memory of what he saw must have been seared onto the back of his eyes because every time he shut them, every day of his long life, he could still see Sister Sabeline, walking numbly through that terrible place muttering, “My God, My God, My God,” over and over, as if she were chanting.

He did not want Elizabeth to suffer what he saw and begged her to close her eyes and let him guide her. As they threaded their way toward the door, he suddenly had an uncontrollable urge to snatch up one of the parchments that lay on the wooden desks, and he chose one that was not soaked in blood.

They ran up the steep, spiral stairs, through the chapel, and out into the mist and rain. He made her keep running until they were far from the abbey gate. The cathedral bells were pealing in alarm. They had to make their way to the shore. He had to get her off the island.

“Tell me why you came back to Vectis?” Felix asked.

“I have been troubled the whole of my life by what I saw that day, and I did not want to go to my grave without seeking understanding. I have long thought of coming back. I was finally able.”

“It is a shame you left the Church. I remember your great piety and generosity of spirit.”

“All gone,” Luke said bitterly. “Taken.”

“I am saddened, my son. You surely have the opinion that Vectis Abbey was a place of sin and evil, but it is not so. Our great enterprise had a holy and sacred purpose.”

“And what was that purpose, Father?”

“We were serving the needs of God by serving the needs of these frail, mute scribes. Through divine intervention, their labors spanned centuries. They were making a record, Luke, a record of the arrivals and passings of all God’s children, then and into the future.”

“How was this possible?”

Felix shrugged. “From the hand of God to the hands of these men. They had a strange, singular purpose. Otherwise, they were like children, completely dependent on us for their care.”

Luke spat out, “Not only that.”

“Yes, they had a need to reproduce. Their task was enormous. It required thousands of them laboring for hundreds of years. We had to give them the means.”

“I am sorry, Father, but that is an abomination. You forced your sisters into whoredom.”

“Not whoredom!” Felix cried. His emotion raised the pressure inside his head and made his eye throb ferociously. “It was service! Service toward a higher purpose! It was beyond outsiders to understand!” He clutched the side of his head in pain.

Luke worried that the old man would die in front of him, so he eased off. “What became of their labors?”

“There was a vast Library, Luke, surely the largest in all of Christendom. You were close to it that day but never saw it. After you fled, Abbot Baldwin, blessed be his memory, had the Library sealed and the chapel razed by fire. It is my belief the Library was consumed.”

“Why was that done, Father?”

“Baldwin believed that man was not ready for the revelations of the Library. And I daresay he feared you, Luke.”

“Me?”

“He feared you would reveal the secrets, that others would come, that outsiders would hold us in judgment, that evil men would exploit the Library for dark purposes. He made a decision, and I carried it out. I lit the fires myself.”

Luke saw his parchment on the abbot’s table, rolled back in its ribbon. “The parchment I took that day, pray tell me its meaning, Father. It has vexed me.”

“Luke, my son, I will tell you all I know. I will be dead soon. I feel a great burden upon me, as I am the last man alive who knows about the Library. I have written an account of my knowledge. Please allow me to unburden myself by giving you that account and also pressing something else upon you.”

He went to his chest and retrieved the massive book. Luke rushed over to take it from him, as it appeared too heavy for him to manage.

“It is the only surviving one,” Felix said. “You and I have another connection, Luke. You knew not why you took that parchment that day, and I know not why I saved one book from the fire. Perhaps, we were both guided by an unseen hand. Will you take back your parchment and also take this book, which has within it a letter I have written? Will you allow this old man to pass the burden to you?”

“When I was young, you were kind to me and took me in, Father. I will.”

“Thank you.”

“What am I to do with them?”

Felix lifted his eyes toward the ceiling of his fine room. “That is for God to decide.”