Fanatics (14 page)

I looked at the rain beating against the window. “Thanks, Mrs. Stoppini. That sounds like a good idea.”

“Aperitifs will be served in exactly forty-four minutes.”

A
FTER A DINNER
of grilled lamb chops with roast potato, carrot, and fennel I went back to the shop under an umbrella hammered by rain and sat down at a bench with a carpenter’s pencil, ruler, and graph paper. I scribbled calculations and drafted plans for about twenty minutes. Then I turned on the band saw.

Two hours later I wheeled my invention into the library. It was a chest-high stand, like a flat-topped lectern, on wheels. I placed my laptop on it, powered it up, pushed the lectern to the reference section behind the escritoire, and launched Raphaella’s database. As a trial run I noted a few book titles and authors—mostly editors of reference books—then shut down the computer again. The lectern would be handy for cataloguing books when I was on my own. I could work right next to the shelves.

I dropped into the chair by the library windows and phoned Raphaella.

“It’s your lover,” I said.

“No way. My lover left the house five minutes ago.”

“Hah.”

“So you’ve been delving.”

“Yup.” I described my research, pausing after I had connected the medal and the antique book. She was silent.

“You didn’t say, ‘Hmm,’ ” I pointed out.

“Curious. The man who wrote the book is the man whose face is on the medal is the man who is tortured in your nightmare. Why are you dreaming about him? What does he want from you?”

“I wish I knew. I’ll bet he’s mentioned in Professor Corbizzi’s manuscript.”

“We need to read it.”

“And we’ll have to learn more about this Friar Savonarola guy.”

“Want to flip a coin?” Raphaella asked.

“No,” I replied, my eyes trained on the alcove. “I want the whole story. You take the manuscript.”

“Good.”

“Are you coming out tomorrow?”

“I can probably make it for a few hours in the morning. I’ll call you.”

I
LEFT THE LIBRARY
and returned to the shop to collect my duffle bag of clothes and toiletries, my phone charger, and my book. I locked up the coach house and secured the deadbolt on the kitchen door, then made my way up the staircase, which always reminded me of a suspense movie. On my way to my room, I heard Mrs. Stoppini calling me. I turned on my heel and approached her open door and knocked on the frame.

“Do come in, Mr. Havelock.”

Mrs. Stoppini’s suite consisted of a good-sized bedroom, which I glimpsed through an open door, and a small sitting room with two upholstered chairs arranged in front of a fireplace. One wall of the sitting room was a large open bookshelf bursting at the seams. There was also a small desk and a cabinet. Mrs. Stoppini occupied one of the chairs, and a wine bottle with two glasses sat on the table beside her. She wore a silk dressing gown—not black, but almost—and dark slippers. It was the first time I had seen her in anything but her black outfit. She held a thick book in one hand, a finger between the pages.

“I hoped you would join me in a glass of sherry before you retire,” she said.

I reminded myself that she appreciated company, although she seldom said as much. “Sure,” I replied.

“If you’d care to pour.”

I followed her suggestion, then sat down. The windows were open, and the cool evening air freshened the homey little room.

“
A votre santé
,” said Mrs. Stoppini, offering her glass to be clinked.

“Cheers.”

“The late professor used to say,” Mrs. Stoppini mused, “that properly prepared food and things like caffè macchiato and sherry make us civilized.”

“You must miss him a lot.”

She looked down into her glass and said nothing.

“Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

“Not at all, Mr. Havelock. You are quite right, of course.”

“He certainly was a scholar,” I said lamely. “I’ve had a
chance to take a closer look at parts of his collection.”

“He was indeed,” Mrs. Stoppini said wistfully. “A true scholar is a rare thing in today’s world. One sees …” She didn’t complete her thought.

“I was wondering if it would be all right if I—and Raphaella—read a few of the books in the library. Especially the ones the professor wrote.”

“Provided nothing is removed from the library, I cannot think of an objection.”

I wished my mother was there. I was dying—wrong word—
eager
to dig more information about the prof from Mrs. Stoppini, but I was no good at wording questions that would tease out facts the way Mom could. So far, Mrs. Stoppini had volunteered almost nothing about the prof, but I knew there was something strange about the circumstances surrounding his death. All she had said was that he had become more private—almost paranoid it seemed—especially about his work, which he kept from her. I had concluded that the manuscript titled
Fanatic
was what had occupied him.

But why be secretive about it? He was a professor of Italian Renaissance studies. In the library there were lots of books on the period. He had written a few.
Fanatic
was probably one more. What was there about
that
book that demanded secrecy?

Raphaella and I now had permission to try and find out.

“Interesting book?” I asked, nodding at the volume Mrs. Stoppini had been reading when I came into the sitting room.

“Enough to pass the time, that is all.”

She didn’t mention the title. Why was I not surprised?

I
HAD BROUGHT
a novel with me, but with all the drama of the last couple of days I had forgotten that I was almost finished it, and not long after I had settled into the chair by the guest-room window on the second floor I closed
Captain Alatriste
and set it down. It was eleven o’clock, but I wasn’t sleepy. I looked out the window across the yard. The rain had stopped and the clouds had broken up, revealing a few stars and allowing moonlight to form patterns on the lawn.

Mrs. Stoppini’s door was still ajar and her light was on when I slipped along the corridor to the stairs, barefoot, wearing only pajama bottoms. The downstairs hall was shadowy, but enough moonlight came through the windows of the front foyer that I made my way easily along the hall to the library without turning on the light. I found myself thinking about Mrs. Stoppini’s irrational attitude to the place. She had respected the professor’s wish for privacy while he was working—and even that seemed a little extreme, but what did I know?—but with him gone, what difference did it make if she left the doors open and went in and out as she pleased? She was a reader—the bookshelves in her sitting room made that clear. Why avoid the library? Her behaviour when I showed her the secret cupboard was extreme. She was afraid of the place.

To her, the library was taboo. But why? Was it because her companion had died there? Or was there more? I couldn’t fully understand her reaction to the room any more than I could make sense of my own.

I rolled the doors aside and stepped in, reaching for the light switch—and froze.

The acrid stink of stale smoke, burnt paper, and singed cloth and rotten wood hung in the air. Maybe Mrs. Stoppini had lit a small fire in her bedroom for comfort, and the smoke had curled over the roof, pushed into the library by the night breeze. No, her windows had been open, the fireplace cold. Besides, I had closed and locked the casements in the library earlier, hadn’t I?

On the other side of the room something stirred. In the far corner, the table and chair by the window, as well as a section of books and a patch of floor, were brushed with moonlight.

Thoughts flitted across my mind like bats. Whatever had caught my eye could have drifted past the window on the outside of the house. Or it could be with me, here in the room. I took a breath and slapped at the switch, flooding the room with light and dissolving the shadows.

There was no one there. I saw no trace of smoke, but the smell remained. Curbing my uneasiness, I walked quickly to the window. It
was
closed and locked. So much for my theory about the source of the smoke. I looked out, but the brightness behind me made it difficult to see anything in the yard except shadows cast by tree branches shifting randomly with the wind. Probably a moving shadow was what I had seen. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing my heart to slow down.

I went over to the fireplace. The hearth was cold, its tiles swept clean, just as I had left it. I made a slow circuit of the room, sniffing like a spaniel as I went, and detected nothing that could have produced the odour of smoke.

“Smarten up, Garnet,” I said out loud. “It’s your imagination again.”

When I got to the section of shelves that held the professor’s fiction collection, I stopped and forced myself not to rush, to scan the titles slowly. I selected
The Name of the Rose
only because I had heard of it somewhere.

Before I left the library, I turned out the light and walked back to the window. I stood for a few minutes, looking out across the yard. The gardens, the trees, the patio furniture were all silvered by the moon, and bright lines rippled on the surface of the lake. At the shore the willows stood in pools of darkness cast by their drooping branches. Between two willows, visible against the lighter backdrop of the lake, stood a human figure wearing an ankle-length hooded cape.

A figure that cast no shadow.

Only his outline was visible. A silhouette the size and shape of a smaller-than-average man standing as still as the earth, facing the window where I stood.

I knew who it was.

I dashed out of the library and through the kitchen and into the yard. The patio stones were cold and damp on my bare feet, the grass cool and dewy. I made my way along the edge of the flower garden and stopped at the corner of the house, my irrational burst of courage pouring away like water through a grate. I saw nothing on the shore. I craned my neck around the house, my cheek brushing the cold stone. Shades streaked the moonlit ground, criss-crossed by the shadows of branches. A light wind whispered. The lake murmured. There was a faint smell of smoke.

I stood in Mrs. Stoppini’s flower bed, the damp earth pushing between my toes, the novel still in my hand.

I
RINSED MY FEET
in the kitchen sink, feeling foolish and terror-struck at the same time. After checking the deadbolt for the fourth time, I crept back upstairs. Mrs. Stoppini’s door was closed, the corridor a tunnel of darkness. I went into my room and shut the door behind me without turning on the light. I pulled on a T-shirt, then padded over to the window, keeping to one side, and peered around the curtain.

He was there.

He stood on the shore in full view, motionless, looking up at my room. He knew I was there. An icy chill inched up my spine and through my limbs.

Focused intently on my window, the man in the hooded cape floated slowly toward me, an otherworldly motion, like lava flowing across the grass. My heart battered against my ribs. My breathing was so ragged I felt I was suffocating.

He stopped by the broad skirts of the spruce tree below my window, his head tilted sharply upward, a pool of dark where his face should be. I could feel his malign hostility fixated on me, his will as strong as the granite wall between us.

The strain was unbearable. I couldn’t take anymore. I threw open the window, shrieked, “Why are you here? What do you want from me?”

The shadow didn’t react. My pulse pounded in my ears. Then, almost unaware of what I was saying, I spoke again. “
De profundis clamavi ad te domine, domine esuadi vocem meam
.”

Still no response. There was only the night breeze, the reek of smoke.

But gradually, the high-voltage hostility that pulsed against the window began to recede. The spectre stood a moment longer, then withdrew in that same slow flowing
movement until he reached the shore, where he faded, a shadow into shadow.

I slammed down the sash, locked it, jerked the curtains closed, then collapsed into the chair. I got up and stumbled to the night table, switched on the lamp, and snatched up my cell, falling to my knees and leaning crookedly back against the bed.

“Raphaella,” I gasped as soon as she picked up, “it’s a haunting. It’s happening again.”

I
SAT ALONE
at the table in the Corbizzi kitchen, watching grey pre-dawn light flow into the landscape, giving definition to trees and gardens, the dew-pearled furniture on the patio, the glass-flat water beyond the indistinct shoreline. I was still shaking from the disorientation that comes when an experience shatters your version of reality like a rock smashes a window.

After the spirit’s visitation I had spent the rest of the night in the chair by the guest-room window, startling at every sound, unable to prevent myself from leaping up every few minutes and stealing a glance through the crack between the curtains. Every light in the room was on. I had been caught in the classic dilemma of a haunt’s victim. The bedroom, with door locked, window secured, curtains closed, was a sanctuary, a cave. At the same time it was a trap that cocooned me from sight and sound but made me vulnerable to stealth.