A Demon Summer (24 page)

He came upon a side altar containing a statue of St. Lucy, the nuns' patroness. The legend, as Max recalled it, was that St. Lucy, a young woman from a wealthy Italian family, had begun her career as a miracle worker around the year 1200 by curing a blind man, a talent for which she would forever after be famous. It was the age of unshakeable belief in God and miracles and wonder. The order must at some point have been renamed in her honor.

Hard now to separate myth from wishful thinking from fact.

Max paused before the statue: Lucy was holding a cloth that she used to cover a man's eyes. He was a bad guy, according to legend, but he was cured anyway. Beside the altar was another carved effigy of the saint, but there was no case or casket displaying relics of her body, as would have been common in the Middle Ages. Max during his time in Italy had been brought up short more than once to realize what he had been staring at was some ghastly relict—some bit of saint's bone or tooth—still venerated by the faithful.

Dame Olive had said the convent had been a popular site of pilgrimage; at one time there probably had been lots of bones and things credited with healing powers. Churches claiming to have relicts associated with the life of Christ were of course at the top of the list of most-visited spots—on the medieval pilgrim's list of “places to see before you die.”

His steps took him again to the stunning choir, divided into individual stalls for the nuns. Now he noticed that the head of each stall was carved with scenes from the life of St. Lucy, a bit like a cartoon strip.

Max looked closer at the carvings. From these charming illustrations he came to understand that St. Lucy had categorically rejected the lover chosen for her by her parents or guardians. No doubt he had been a man of pagan beliefs or perhaps he had been a man given to only sporadic personal grooming, and lacking in compensating charms. One scene showed Lucy with both hands held out before her, in a classic silent-movie gesture of repulsion. In another illustration, a winged angel appeared in a vision to a sleeping Lucy. And here some sort of soldier, a man at any rate dressed for warfare, held a knife to her throat. What a life. Although the carvings were necessarily worn with age, Max looked in vain for a depiction of the legend most closely associated with Lucy—that she had sacrificed her eyesight rather than her honor. That gruesome bit may have been a later embellishment to her life story. At least, Max hoped so.

He thought of the anchoress the abbess had told him about over dinner. Perhaps her existence was just hearsay, recorded in some dusty old tome now guarded by Dame Olive. Or perhaps it had been the poor woman's job to guard some ghastly token of St. Lucy's brief life, a life she had strived to make into a perfect offering to God.

Max, now standing at the main altar, found that a train of thought about offerings led him to Leonard Cohen, one of Dame Olive's favorites. He'd written that we should forget about perfect offerings, for there can be no such thing. The lyrics, sung in Cohen's raspy voice, began to sound inside Max's head.

“Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering.”

Max turned from the altar and walked purposefully down the nave toward the back of the church. In the porch, he opened a door leading up the wooden stairs of the belfry. He walked up, scarcely seeing the fine old masonry, the careful layering of stone on stone, meant to last forever. At the top, among the four bells, he took in a commanding 360-degree view of the countryside from each of eight windows: of the river that ran nearby, and of cows and sheep in distant pastures, of farmland and hills in the great distance. One of the bells had a crack in it, as Dame Olive had said. That would need to be seen to. Surely with the sort of money donated by the Goreys and through fund-raising activities there was no shortage of cash, although he knew from experience that would be a costly repair.

But nothing else revealed itself, so after a few minutes, feeling a bit like Quasimodo, he lumbered back down the narrow stairs. Although the steps had been kept in good-ish repair, they were designed for smaller feet than his, forcing him into a rolling gait as he descended, alternating with a sideways tiptoe move. He was opening the door to leave the stairwell when he noticed a trapdoor, its old slabs of wood thick and splintering with age. Light showed faintly through the cracks. It had to be an entry into the old crypt. But why would there be a light in there? Even as he watched, the light changed, moving and flickering. Candlelight, or a torch.

Max stepped back, thinking, mapping what must be the layout of the old church in his mind, assuming it ran true to type.

“How the light gets in”—the words ended the Cohen stanza. He recalled it was the title of a recent popular book.

Max saw there was dust coating the top of the trapdoor and then he noticed a padlock, rusting. He knew there must be another way in; if the crypt ran under the nave, as this one seemed to do, it might even stretch as far as the choir and transept. Another entrance might be outside somewhere, although it seemed unlikely. There would, however, be an entrance near the passageway to the chapter house, possibly as a continuation of the night stairs, used by the nuns for direct access to the church.

He was faced with a choice. There was no way that old trapdoor was going to open without a protesting creak, alerting whoever it was to his presence, even if he
could
open it. Apart from the padlock, it was probably frozen shut with age.

And some instinct told him it might be best not to let on. Someone might be down there on some perfectly legitimate business, but still … it was the only unexplained happening during his time at the abbey, and he didn't want the chance of its meaning something to the case to slip through his fingers.

He returned to the church proper, closing the double doors behind him loudly, to announce he was leaving.

 

Chapter 20

DARKNESS FALLS

It is in the dark of night that we can best hear the beating of our souls. So on leaving Compline, there is to be no speech except in extraordinary conditions or as needed to attend to the needs of guests.

—The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

Dinner that night was a quiet affair, in keeping with the traditions of Monkbury Abbey. The visitors ate in the refectory with the community, but at their own table, off to one side.

The Gorey family was there, Xanda looking distraught and preoccupied, like someone being held hostage. She would have faded entirely into the darkness but for the candlelight that occasionally glinted off the sparkles in her hair. Paloma Green, likewise making no concession to the austerity of her surroundings, wore a bright chartreuse gown that draped over one shoulder Roman-style and was gathered at the waist by a diamante belt. Her companion Piers Montague sat across from her, also looking out of place and absurdly louche, like a man posing for the cover of a Harlequin romance. Dr. Barnard, who had been attending Dame Meredith, had long departed the premises, or so Max assumed.

And of course, clearly chafing at the imposed restriction on speech, Lord Lislelivet was there. He sat across the table from Max, who thus had full opportunity to witness the shifting in his seat and the eye rolling as one of the nuns read a chapter from the life of St. Lucy. The nuns communicated with hand signals for water or for different items of food they might require. Indeed they seemed able to read one another's minds. Only Mary Benton, the postulant, forgot herself, asking someone to please pass the bread and being silenced by horrified looks from her companions.

The food was plain, as locally sourced as the nearest garden, and delicious. Dessert was a selection of cheeses and homemade bread.

A final prayer of thanks and they were released to attend Vespers. Max opted for a walk around the grounds while it was still light and stepped off in the direction of the ridge overlooking the river. The heat of the day now rose from the grounds in a fine mist; soon the nuns' voices reached him as they warbled the notes of their age-old chant. He imagined he could single out Dame Fruitcake's voice, soaring above the rest. It was a beautiful sound, of mystery and of longing and of giving thanks to a Creator whose existence was never in doubt. He let the beauty of their disembodied voices wash over him and fill him with peace.

Then silence fell. A flash of light, perhaps from the dying rays of the sun, came flickering from the windows of the nun's dormitory. The church service had ended and the nuns had returned to their cloister.

By the time Max returned to the guesthouse, the nearly full moon had nestled like an opal into a deep indigo sky. The summer solstice approached, a holy day in Awena's book. He could imagine the cooking and preparation in anticipation, for Awena's gift was her awareness that everything was sacred, every great and small moment of the days and passing of the seasons worth marking and observing.

No less than the Handmaids of St. Lucy, he supposed, did Awena hallow the sanctity of days.

*   *   *

Some time later, the bells for Compline rang out over Monkbury Abbey, and the place fell into even deeper stillness than before, like an enchanted castle in a fairy tale. It was soon the time of the Great Silence, and Max, reading in bed, had drifted toward a dreaming sleep. He dreamt he saw the nuns walking down the church nave in a candlelight procession, their faces shrouded by their cowls, each of them carrying a small jeweled casket. The sleeping Max, sitting in a pew in the middle of the church, counted them as they passed.
Counting sheep
, thought his dream self. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one.

Thirty-two.

Wait. There should only be thirty-one.

The last figure to pass turned back to him and smiled. Max saw through a shock of icy fear it was not the gentle face of any of the Monkbury nuns he had come to know, but the hideously decayed face that haunted his nightmares. The face of the man who had killed his friend, his MI5 colleague Paul, although this face was unrecognizable as anything human. It was, the dreaming Max realized, a stone gargoyle come to life, blood dripping from its mouth. And now in the way of dreams he noticed that the face beneath the cowl wore the ridiculous sunglasses with their white frames and blue lenses, the sunglasses Max had seen the killer wear the day Paul died.

Lights from an automobile flashed briefly into Max's room, startling him awake. At first he thought it was part of his dream, or a flash of lightning, for in the distance he could now hear the thunder of a summer storm.

It was a late arrival. Very late by monastery standards. Dame Hephzibah would be inconvenienced. The light interrupted Max's sleep but momentarily, for he had walked a long time that day in the rarified air of the abbey grounds, and was tired. He started to drift back to sleep, but the anxious, edgy feeling prompted by the nightmare clung to him. It was as if he had walked into a cobweb. Max rubbed at his face.

And then a heart-rending scream jolted him fully awake. The book Max had fallen asleep reading flew from his hands and landed with a great thud on the floor.

And at that moment the monastery's generator gave out, and the small light in Max's room was extinguished.

That doesn't sound like any Great Silence to me, thought Max, jumping from the bed. Looking for his clothing by the moonlight streaming into his room, he finally found his jacket and threw it on over his pajama bottoms. He pulled his phone from the jacket pocket and located the torch app. The thing might be useless out here as a phone, but the app helped him navigate the room and find the larger electric torch.

Max set off in the direction of the cloister, for his senses told him the sound had come from that open area. The light now was better; votive lights had been set on small stone projections jutting at precise intervals along the hallway, probably in anticipation of the routine unreliability of the generator. The effect was rather like a landing strip. It was the sort of setting designed for ripples of ghoulish, maniacal laughter echoing down the corridor rather than for the drifting notes of religious chant.

He started toward the kitchen where there was a door into the cloister, then remembered that there was no entry to the cloister directly from the guesthouse, particularly at this time of night. He went to the gatehouse, where Dame Hephzibah was stirring, bewildered, clearly startled awake and wondering whether it was safe to leave her post.

“You heard it, too?” he asked. “Could you tell where the cry came from?”

Shaking her head, Dame Hephzibah pressed both her hands against her mouth in a monkey-speak-no-evil gesture. She pulled a pen and paper from her pocket and wrote down her dilemma. Max read the page she turned to him. Her crabbed handwriting was nearly illegible, but after a bit of thought he managed to translate what looked like, “I need persimmons to spark with you during the Solstice” to its more likely cousin: “I need permission to speak with you during the Silence.”

Max nodded in understanding. Had ever, he thought, an investigation been more hampered from the outset than this one, by witnesses who were not even
allowed
to speak except at certain times?

But right now, the immediate problem was that otherworldly scream.

“Dame Hephzibah,” he said. “I will square it with the abbess. It's all right for you to talk with me. Just this once. A human life may be at stake.”

She nodded, eyes wide and dark with confusion. She was trained to obey, and clearly an ordained Anglican priest trumped an abbess in the pecking order of her small, enclosed little world.

“It came from the cloister,” she said. “Near the center—the well, I think.” Struggling with a mass of old iron keys, she unlocked the door leading into the cloistered part of the nunnery.

“You go,” she said. “I'll fetch the doctor.”

Max turned at that.

“Doctor?”