The Doomsday Key (2 page)

A heavy silence pressed down over the place.

As they would discover, most of the dead still lay within their houses, too weak at the end to venture out. But one body sprawled facedown on the green, not far from the manor house’s stone steps. He lay like he might have just fallen, perhaps tripped down the steps and broken his neck. But even from the height of the wagon, Martin noted the gaunt stretch of skin over bone, the hollow eyes sunken into the skull, the thinness of limbs.

It was the same wasting as in the beasts of the field. It was as if the entire village had been under siege and had been starved out.

The clatter of hooves approached. Reginald pulled beside the wagon. “Granaries are all full,” he said, dusting off his palms on his pants. The tall, scarred man had overseen campaigns by King William in the north of France. “Found rats and mice in the bins, too.”

Martin glanced over to him.

“As dead as everything else. Just like that cursed island.”

“But now the wasting has reached our shores,” Martin muttered. “Entered our lands.”

It was the reason they’d all been sent here, why the village road was under guard, and why their group had been sworn to secrecy with binding oaths.

“Girard found you a good body,” Reginald said. “Fresher than most. A boy. He’s set ‘im up in the smithy.” His heavy arm pointed to a wooden barn with a stacked-stone chimney.

Martin nodded and climbed out of the wagon. He had to know for sure, and there was only one way to find out. As royal coroner, this was his duty, to discern the truth from the dead. Though at the moment, he’d leave the bloodiest work to the French butcher.

Martin crossed to the smithy’s open door. Girard stood inside, hunched
before the cold forge. The Frenchman had labored in King William’s army, where he’d sawed off limbs and done his best to keep the soldiers alive.

Girard had cleared a table in the center of the smithy and already had the boy stripped and tied to the table. Martin stared at the pale, emaciated figure. His own son was about the same age, but the manner of this death had aged the poor lad here, made him seem wizened well beyond his eight or nine years.

As Girard prepared his knives, Martin examined the boy more closely. He pinched the skin and noted the lack of fat beneath. He examined the cracked lips, the flaky patches of hair loss, the swollen ankles and feet; but mostly he ran his hands over the protuberant bones, as if trying to read a map with his fingers: ribs, jaw, eye socket, pelvis.

What had happened?

Martin knew any real answers lay much deeper.

Girard crossed to the table with a long silver blade in his hand. “Shall we get to work,
monsieur
?”

Martin nodded.

A quarter hour later, the boy’s corpse lay on the board like a gutted pig. The skin, splayed from groin to gullet, had been pulled and tacked to the wooden table. Intestines lay nestled and curled tight in the bloodied cavity, bloated and pink. From under the ribs, a brownish-yellow liver swelled outward, too large for one so small, for one so wasted to bone and gristle.

Girard reached into the belly of the boy. His hands vanished into the gelid depths.

On the far side, Martin touched his forehead and mouthed a silent prayer of forgiveness for this trespass. But it was too late for absolution from the boy. All the lad’s body could do was confirm their worst fears.

Girard hauled forth the boy’s stomach, rubbery and white, from which hung a swollen purple spleen. With a few slices of his knife, the Frenchman freed the section of gut and dropped it on the table. Another whispery slip of blade and the stomach was laid open. A rich green mix of undigested bread and grain spilled over the board, like some foul horn of plenty.

A fetid smell rolled out, ripe and potent. Martin covered his mouth and nose—not against the stench, but against the horrible certainty.

“Starved to death, that is plain,” Girard said. “But the boy starved with a full belly.”

Martin stepped back, his limbs going cold. Here was his proof. They would have to examine others to be certain. But the deaths here seemed to be the same as those on the island, a place marked in red ink as “wasted” in the Domesday Book.

Martin stared at the gutted boy. Here was the secret reason the survey had been undertaken to begin with. To search for this blight on their homeland, to stamp it out before it spread. The deaths were the same as on that lonely island. The deceased appeared to eat and eat, yet they still starved to death, finding no nourishment, only a continual wasting.

Needing air, Martin turned from the table and stepped out of shadows and into sunshine. He stared across at the rolling hills, green and fertile. A wind swept down and combed through the fields of barley and oats, wheat and rye. He pictured a man adrift in the ocean, dying of thirst, with water all around him but unable to drink.

This was no different.

Martin shivered in the wan sunlight, wanting to be as far away from this valley as possible, but a shout drew his attention to the right, toward the other end of the village green. A figure dressed all in black stood before an open door. For a moment, Martin feared it was Death himself, but then the figure waved, shattering the illusion. It was Abbot Orren, the final member of their group, the head of the Abbey of Kells in Ireland. He stood at the entrance to the village church.

“Come see this!” the abbot shouted.

Martin stumbled toward him. It was more a reflex than a conscious effort. He did not want to return to the smithy. He would leave the boy to the care of the French butcher. Martin crossed the village green, climbed the steps, and joined the Catholic monk.

“What is it, Abbot Orren?”

The man turned and headed into the church. “Blasphemy,” the Irish
abbot spat out, “to defile the place in such a manner. No wonder they were all slain.”

Martin hurried after the abbot. The man was skeletally thin and ghostly in his oversized traveling cloak. Of them all, he was the only one to have visited the island off the coast of Ireland, to have seen the wasting there, too.

“Did you find what you were seeking?” Martin asked.

The abbot did not answer and stepped back into the crude church. Martin had no choice but to follow. The interior was gloomy, a cheerless place with an earthen floor covered in rushes. There were no benches, and the roof was low and heavily raftered. The only light came from a pair of high thin windows at the back of the church. They cast dusty streaks of light upon the altar, which was a single slab of stone. An altar cloth must have once covered the raw stone, but it had been torn away and cast to the floor, most likely by the abbot in his search.

Abbot Orren crossed to the altar and pointed to the bare stone with a trembling arm. His shoulders shook with his anger. “Blasphemy,” he repeated, “to carve these heathen symbols upon our Lord’s house.”

Martin closed the distance and leaned closer to the altar. The stone had been inscribed with sunbursts and spirals, with circles and strange knotted shapes, all clearly pagan.

“Why would these pious people commit such a sin?”

“I don’t think it was the villagers of Highglen,” Martin said.

He ran his hand over the altar. Under his fingertips, he sensed the age of the markings, the worn nature of the inscribed shapes. These were clearly old. Martin remembered his driver’s assertion that this place was cursed, that it was hallowed ground to the ancient Celtic people, and that their giant stones could be found hidden in the misty highland forests.

Martin straightened. One of those stones must have been hauled to Highglen and used to form the altar of the village church.

“If it’s not the people here who did it, then how do you explain this?” the abbot asked. He moved to the wall behind the altar and waved an arm to encompass the large marking there. It had been painted recently, and
from the brownish-red color, possibly with blood. It depicted a circle with a cross cutting through it.

Martin had seen such markings on burial stones and ancient ruins. It was a sacred symbol of the Celtic priesthood.

“A pagan cross,” Martin said.

“We found the same on the island, marked on all the doors.”

“But what does it mean?”

The abbot fingered the silver cross at his own neck. “It is as the king feared. The snakes who plagued Ireland, who were driven off our island by Saint Patrick, have come to these shores.”

Martin knew the abbot was not referring to true serpents of the field but to the pagan priests who carried staffs curled like snakes, to the Druid leaders of the ancient Celtic people. Saint Patrick had converted or driven off the pagans from Ireland’s shores.

But that had been six centuries ago.

Martin turned to stare out of the church toward the dead village. Girard’s words echoed in his head.
The boy starved with a full belly.

None of it made any sense.

The abbot mumbled behind him. “It must all be burned. The soil sowed with salt.”

Martin nodded, but a worry grew in his breast. Could any flame truly destroy what was wrought here? He did not know for sure, but he was certain about one thing.

This was not over.

Present Day
October 8, 11:55 P.M.
Vatican City

Father Marco Giovanni hid in a dark forest of stone.

The massive marble pillars held up the roof of Saint Peter’s Basilica and sectioned off the floor into chapels, vaults, and niches. Works of the masters filled the hallowed space: Michelangelo’s
Pietà,
Bernini’s Baldacchino, the bronze statue
Saint Peter Enthroned.

Marco knew he wasn’t alone in this stone forest. There was a hunter with him, lying in wait, most likely near the rear of the church.

Three hours ago he had received word from a fellow archaeologist who also served the Church, his former mentor at the Gregorian University in Rome. He’d been told to meet him here at midnight.

However, it had proved to be a trap.

With his back against a pillar, Marco held his right hand clamped under his left arm, stanching the bleeding along his left side. He’d been cut down to the ribs. Hot liquid flowed over his fingers. His left hand clutched the proof he needed, an ancient leather satchel no larger than a coin purse. He held tight to it.

As he shifted to peer down the nave, more blood flowed. It splattered to the marble floor. He could wait no longer, or he’d grow too weak. Saying a silent prayer, he pushed off the pillar and fled down the dark nave toward the papal altar. Each pounding step was a fresh stab in his side. But he hadn’t been cut with any knife. The arrow had imbedded itself in the neighboring pew after slicing open his side. The weapon had been short, stubby, black. A steel crossbow bolt. From his hiding place, Marco had studied it. A small red diode had glowed at its base, like some fiery eye in the dark.

Not knowing what else to do, Marco simply fled, staying low. He knew he would most likely die, but the secret he held was more important than his own life. He had to survive long enough to reach the far exit, find one of the patrolling Swiss Guards, and get word to the Holy See.

Ignoring his pain and terror, he ran.

The papal altar lay directly ahead. The bronze canopy over it, designed by Bernini, rested on twisted columns. Marco flanked to the left of it, aiming for the transept on that side. He spotted the massive Monument to Alexander VII and the doorway sheltered beneath it.

It was the exit out onto Piazza Santa Marta.

If only—

A punch to his belly ended any hope. He fell back a step and glanced down. No fist had struck him. A steel shaft tipped by plastic feathers stuck out of his shirt. Pain came a breath later, shattering outward. Like the first arrow, this crossbow bolt also glowed with a fiery eye. The diode rested atop a square chamber at the base of the shaft.

Marco stumbled backward. A shift of shadows near the door revealed a figure dressed in the motley clothing of a Swiss Guard, surely a disguise. The assassin lowered his crossbow and stepped out from the sheltered doorway where he’d lain in wait.

Marco retreated to the altar and made ready to flee back down the nave. But he spotted another man garbed in a Swiss uniform. The man bent near a pew and yanked the imbedded bolt from the wood.

With terror overwhelming the pain in his belly, Marco turned toward the right transept, but again he was thwarted. A third figure stepped from the shadows of a confessional box, lifting another crossbow.

He was trapped.

The basilica was shaped like a crucifix, and three of its legs were now blocked by assassins. That left only one direction to flee. Toward the apse, the head of the cross. But it was a dead end.

Still, Marco hurried into the apse.

Ahead rose the Altar of the Chair of Peter, a massive gilt monument of saints and angels that housed the wooden seat of Saint Peter. Above it, an oval alabaster window revealed the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove.

But the window was dark and offered no hope.

Marco turned his back on the window and searched around him. To his left sat the tomb of Urban VIII. A statue of the grim reaper in the form
of a skeleton climbed from the pope’s marble crypt, heralding the final fate of all men … and perhaps Marco’s own doom.