The Keepers of the Library (14 page)

“Are you safe?” Luke asked her tenderly. He was still touching her shoulder. He had never let go.

“You came for me,” she whispered.

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

It was no longer the Hall of the Writers.

It was a place of gruesome death.

The only living soul was Sister Sabeline, whose shoes were soaked with blood. She aimlessly walked among a sea of bodies, draped on the tables and cots, crumpled in piles on the ground, a mass of lifelessness and quivering involuntary twitching.

She had a glassy expression, and could only mutter, “My God, my God, my God, my God,” over and over, in the cadence of a chant.

The whole chamber was slowly filling with the blood that was spurting from the quill-pierced eyes of scores of ginger-haired men and boys.

All of them dead or dying, and at the center of the carnage was the ancient scribe Titus, with his quill buried so deeply it looked like a feather was growing from his eye.

Luke led Elizabeth by her hand through the carnage where he had the presence of mind to glance at the parchments that lay on the writing tables, some of them soaking up puddles of blood. How could he know that, many years hence, the small act of grabbing one of the parchments would come to save Elizabeth from ruin and destitution long after his own demise?

They ran up the winding stairs, through the chapel, and out into the mist and rain. They kept running until they were far from the abbey gate. Only then did they stop to catch their breaths and listen to the cathedral bells pealing out an alarm.

In the distance, the ferry boat was coming back to the isle from its first run of the day. People were milling by the pier waiting for passage. Luke felt in his robe for the few coins he had kept when first he had journeyed to Vectis as a young man seeking the cloth. He and Elizabeth would join the queue and leave the horror of the morning behind.

T
he hem of the Abbot Baldwin’s white robe was soaked with blood. Each time he stooped to touch a cold forehead or make the sign of the cross over a supine body, his garment got bloodier.

Prior Felix, a burly Breton with a black, bristling beard, was at Baldwin’s side, supporting him by the arm so the abbot wouldn’t tumble on the blood-slicked stones. They made their rounds through the carnage, pausing over each ginger-haired writer to check for signs of life, but there were none. The
only other beating heart in the Hall of the Writers belonged to old Brother Bartholomew, the keeper of the underground Library, who was making his own grim inspection at the opposite end of the chamber. Baldwin had sent Sister Sabeline away because her hysterical crying was unnerving and preventing him from collecting his thoughts.

“They are dead,” Baldwin said. “All dead. Why in God’s name has this happened?”

Bartholomew was systematically going from row to row, stepping carefully over and around bodies, trying to keep his footing. For an old man, he was moving briskly from one station to another, plucking manuscript pages off the table and making a stack of them in his hand.

He made his way to Baldwin, clutching a ream of parchments.

“Look,” the old man said. “Look!” He laid the pages down.

Baldwin picked up one and read it.

Then the next, and the next. He fanned the pages out on the table to see more of them quickly.

Each page carried the date 9 February 2027, with the identical inscription.

“
Finis Dierum
,” Baldwin said, “End of Days.”

Felix trembled. “So this is when the end will come.”

Bartholomew half smiled at the revelation. “Their work was done.”

Baldwin gathered up the pages and held them to his breast. “Our work is not yet done, Brothers. They must be laid to rest in the crypt. Then I will say a mass in their honor. The Library must be sealed, and the chapel must be burned. The world is not ready to know what has happened here.”

Felix and Bartholomew quickly nodded in agreement as the abbot turned to leave.

“The Year 2027 is far in the future,” Baldwin said wearily. “At least, mankind has a very long time to prepare for the End of Days.”

P
rior Felix began his lamentable chores.

He oversaw the placement of the slain writers into their crypts and walked through the vastness of the Library amidst endless shelves of sacred books.

With a heavy heart, he climbed the stone stairs into the chapel for the last time, clutching the pages upon which were writ
Finis Dierum
. He would use these as holy tinder.

At his direction, bales of hay were carted to the chapel and placed around its perimeter.

When the job was done, he called for a torch and glumly lowered his head, awaiting its arrival.

He lifted his eyes at the sound of Sister Sabeline calling his name. She was coming from the special dormitory, with Sister Hazel in tow.

The two nuns were wide-eyed and puffing at their exertions.

“Tell him!” Sister Sabeline demanded. “Tell him what has happened.”

Sister Hazel wheezed and sputtered until she was able to form the words. “One of the girls, Clarissa by name, heavy with child, she was. She’s gone!”

“What do you mean, gone?” Felix asked with the weariness of a man who had just lived through a cataclysm.

“She must have stolen a key and run away after last night’s supper,” Sister Hazel said.

“That’s not all she stole!” Sister Sabeline added.

“There’s silver gone missing from Abbot Baldwin’s house. This wicked girl’s planned her escape well. I
sent a brother to the ferry. The girl sailed at dawn though the ferryman wouldn’t say how she paid.”

“If this is so, she’s not the only one who’s left,” Felix said, blinking at the revelation. “Her unborn child has also left, the child of Titus the Venerable. In the long history of the Library, a scribe has never left, born or unborn. And now it has happened!”

Felix looked at the bundle of parchments in his fist, and muttered, “Why did they take their lives as they did? Was it because they had in their travails recorded the last day of life on this earth and had no more to write? Or was it because they sensed a great rift caused by one of their number being snatched from their midst? Was it
their
End of Days?”

Sister Sabeline covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

“I think we shall never know,” Felix said.

Felix lit the parchment pages with the torch and used them to set the hay alight. He watched as the timbers were consumed by fire and saw the building collapse upon itself.

But he did not, as Abbot Baldwin had instructed, throw a torch down into the vaults.

He told himself that he could not bear witness to the destruction of the Library. He told himself that this decision should rest solely in the hands of God Almighty.

He stayed on the spot for the rest of the day, gazing at the smoldering ground, uncertain whether the great Library had been destroyed by the conflagration. Only when the bells chimed for Vespers did he leave the patch of hot earth to quench his soul in prayer in the winter cold of the cathedral.

W
alking through the shrouded fields, Will could
only sense the foreboding presence of the undulating fells looming over them. Haven was quick and surefooted so he had to use his long legs to keep up with the beam of her flashlight.

He hated being unarmed. His Glock retired when he did, stashed away, clean and oiled in a small safe he kept in the engine room of his boat. He didn’t even have a penknife on him. The only things in his pockets were car keys.

In his younger days he’d been highly rated in hand-to-hand combat, not because he was the quickest guy on the mats but because he was so damned big. When he would get his fists and feet in motion he was a buzz saw. But now was under doctor’s orders to keep his heart rate under 130. Like it or not, his best weapon was going to be his brain.

“Are we close?” he asked.

“Not far.”

With that, Haven clicked off her flashlight and slowed so Will could follow in the blackness.

In the distance, there was a glowing window.

“Is that Lightburn Farm?” he asked.

“Yeah. Quiet now.”

They’d been walking parallel to the road, but now the girl steered them away upland at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. The tall grass was heavy with frost and Will had to high-step to avoid tripping on a clump.

A shape materialized, a few shades darker than the night. Closing on it, Will saw that it was some kind of barn or storage building. The farmhouse was a good two hundred meters down the slope.

It was a small, open-sided barn, a hangar, with a sloping slate roof made of the same stone as everything else in the valley. Haven entered one of the bays, and Will cautiously followed.

There was little to be seen, just a few bales of hay and some long-poled farm implements. He scanned the interior for a weapon—a hammer, a scythe, an axe—but there was nothing suitable. Should he grab a rake? He thought not.

“What’s the deal?” he asked the girl.

“Th’ deal?”

“What is this place? Where’s Phillip.”

“Help me shift th’ hay,” was her answer.

They pushed the heavy bales to the side and Haven shined her beam onto the floor. An iron ring lay in a circular recess. She stooped and tugged at it, grunting, “It’s heavy.”

Will intervened and took hold of the ring. The hatch creaked on its hinges and yielded. He laid it down flat. Without light, there was only a dimensionless void; with the benefit of the flashlight, there were stairs. Rough wooden stairs, a long straight run of them pitched at a steep angle.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Mind your step.”

“No electricity?” he asked.

“When we get down, there’s light. Swing th’ hatch back after yourself.”

He counted stairs and tried to keep track of the depths to which they were descending. At the last step, he decided they were about ten meters below the surface.

They were in an anteroom of sorts, a limestone box hewn from the natural bedrock, the pickax swipes left rough. There was an old door. This one was locked. He watched Haven press on a section of wood above the keyhole until she found the right spot. A small panel swiveled open; there was a key in its hollow.

Very clever, he thought. Hidden in plain sight.

The lock yielded with a clunk, and she slowly swung the door open and switched on a light. They were in a much larger room, also low-ceilinged, but this one was a storage area lined with cheap metal bookcases stocked with all manner of goods. In the yellow glow of old-fashioned incandescent bulbs Will saw a trove of tinned and dried foods, jerry cans marked “water,” and rolls of toilet paper. It looked for all the world like a survivalist’s bomb shelter.

He was about to ask her if that’s what it was when he noticed another set of shelves. These were packed with reams of printer paper and boxes of Papermate Black Biro pens.

“What the hell?” he said.

Haven hushed him. “We’ve got t’ be quiet now. Really quiet. We’re going through th’ next door. You’re going t’ see another room, but we’re not going t’ turn on th’ lights. I’ll use th’ torch again. It’s quite a big room, but it should be empty.”

“Should be?”

“Should be,” she repeated. “ ’Cept for Phillip.”

Will felt prickly with anticipation. “Then let’s go.”

She switched off the lights in the storage room and opened the other door at its far end. She held her
hand over the business end of the flashlight, torch restricting the beam to the space between her fingers.

This new room was warmer than the other though not by much and just as dark. As they walked down the middle of the room, Will made out what was lining the walls: beds. Low camp beds with pillows and blankets in heaps. All of them empty.

At the far end of the room, Will saw a rectangle of orange on the ceiling. Drawing closer, he realized there was a partition, a pen made of walls that didn’t reach the full height of the room.

There was a humming sound. The orange glow was coming from a space heater, he thought. Someone was being kept warm.

Phillip.

He tried to prepare himself.

He’d have to postpone his normal impulses to greet him loudly and volubly, to give him a great hug, to transition at speed to a scorching scolding.

This was going to be a snatch and run. He’d save the father-son thing for later.

They’d leave the way they came in. Hopefully, Phillip was in good shape and could make it on his own steam. If not, Will was prepared to put his healing heart to the test and do a fireman’s carry. Once outside, he’d take Haven’s flashlight and send her on her way and get to the car as fast as they could.

He’d leave it to the police to figure out what the hell was going on underneath Lightburn Farm.

Drawing closer, he heard a low, guttural rasp. Snoring. Phillip asleep.

Will picked up the pace to cut in front of Haven and in a few long strides he was at the flimsy door to the partitioned space. He pulled it open. There were several camp beds inside, one occupied.

He dropped to a knee, felt for a shoulder under a
rough blanket, turned the sleeper from his side to his back and peeled the blanket back from his face.

He heard Haven say, “Oh God!”

In the orange light he saw a face, but not Phillip’s.

It was the face of another young man, who awoke with springing eyelids revealing bright green eyes.

At that instant, Will felt a blinding pain on the crown of his head and he went down very hard and very fast.

W
hen he awoke, he thought he was back in the hospital. There was the same disorientation as after his heart attack. He knew who he was but he didn’t have the foggiest idea where he was or what had happened to him. Had he had another coronary? Or was he awakening from his first? Had everything he thought had transpired merely been a dream?

But the ache was in his head, not in his chest. He tried to touch the spot with his right hand but he couldn’t get to it. Something was keeping his hand from reaching higher than his shoulder. In the low light he tried to figure out why and found himself staring curiously at an iron manacle around his wrist. It was then that he realized he was lying on his back, and recent memories began to flood back.

“Dad?”

He turned his head and there, sitting on a second bed inside the partition was Phillip.

“Phillip,” Will said weakly.

“You okay?” the boy asked with a concerned look.

“I’m not sure. How the heck are you?”

“Reasonably shitty,” the boy said. “This wasn’t supposed to work out like this.”

Will tugged at his manacle. “You think?”

“Kheelan saw you and Haven in the fields.”

“Her uncle, right?”

“He’s big, and he doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

“Is he the one who nailed me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You sure the girl wasn’t in on this?”

“I’m sure,” Phillip insisted. “She’s not like that. She’s in big trouble now. I hope they don’t punish her too bad.”

Will swung his feet over the low bunk and discovered that his left hand was free. He used it to rub at the painful area on his head and discovered a sticky patch of coagulating blood. “Are you chained up?”

Phillip showed him his manacle. “It sucks. They let you go to the bathroom, if you want to call it a bathroom, but that’s pretty much it. It’s really boring.”

The boy didn’t look bored. He looked scared.

“Did they hurt you?” Will asked.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I said no.”

“I got your emergency beacon,” Will said.

Phillip pursed his lips, and Will could see he was struggling to keep himself from losing it. “Thanks for finding me.”

Will remembered the storage room chock-full of provisions and the blank-faced young man who had been lying on the bunk that Phillip occupied. He waved his hand at the rows of empty beds in the dimly lit chamber. “What goes on here?”

“You don’t know?” Phillip asked.

“Phillip,” he said testily, “I don’t know a damned thing. I don’t know why you ran away. I don’t know why we’re being held. I don’t know what the hell is going on in this goddamned farm in the middle of goddamned nowhere. So if you’d care to enlighten me, I’d be much obliged.”

Phillip shrugged. “I just thought you were further along.”

“Well I’m not!”

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell you what I know, but first tell me one thing. Does Mom know where we are? Is the SWAT team coming?”

Will softened his tone. There was palpable fear in the boy’s voice, and it was time to stop being an irritable jerk and time to be a father. “She doesn’t know. No one knows. There’s no SWAT team, just you and me, kiddo. We’ve got to get ourselves out of this. I don’t know about you, but I think we’ll make a pretty good team. But first I’ve got to know what we’re up against.”

Phillip nodded and was about to speak when the door opened, and two men swept in.

Daniel Lightburn, his arm still in a sling, had a poisonous look on his face. The other man, Kheelan Lightburn, was taller by a head, with the same straight black hair as his brother. His clothes were dirty, and his boots were muddy. Will locked onto the frightening size of Kheelan’s fists and the complete absence of animation in his face. At best, he’s dull-normal, Will thought. At worst, he’s a psychopath.

Will liked to seize the high ground even when the chips were against him, so before one of them could say anything, he said, “Hello, Daniel. Nice to see you again. And this handsome guy must be Kheelan.”

“Shut it,” Daniel said.

“So tell me, Kheelan, did you use a club on me or just one of those hams attached to your wrists?”

“Let me ask
you
something, Mr. Piper,” Daniel said. “Do you want t’ get kilt in front of th’ lad?”

Will had the information he needed: their captors weren’t screwing around. They meant business. He
adjusted himself to the situation. “No, let me tell
you
something, Daniel. The police and MI5 are on the way here. Things will go a lot better for you if you let us go. And if that’s too much for you, let the boy go.”

“I very much doubt it,” Daniel said. “Haven tells me you agreed t’ come on your own. You wouldn’t have risked a cocked-up police operation on account of Phillip here.”

“The MI5 are pros.”

“Are they now?” Daniel said with a harsh laugh. “Maybe down in London, but not up here. Just to be safe, I searched you good for bugs or whatever they’re called. Bashed your mobile phone for good measure.”

Will said, “Look, friend, you can think whatever you want about the authorities, but you tell me, what do you think your move is?”

Kheelan spat back in an accent even thicker than his brother’s, “Our move, marra, is t’ keep you lot in chains till we decide when t’ finish ya.”

“I told you he was a real comedian,” Phillip said, shakily.

The threat didn’t much unsettle Will, but he hated that his son was inside a pressure cooker. Will knew full well that he, Phillip, and Nancy were all BTH. He’d never told Phillip—it wasn’t the kind of thing he ever wanted to talk about with his son—but if he thought the goon’s threats were getting to the kid, he’d tell him the score when they were alone.

“This isn’t the kind of thing you can get away with,” Will said evenly. “You will be found. You will be caught. You’ll go to jail, and whoever in your family is complicit will do time as well. You will lose this farm. Whatever operation you’ve got going on here will be shut down. Trust me. These are facts.”

“Mebbe so,” Daniel said. “But the Horizon’s
coming, in’it? That’s what you’re famous for, Mr. Will Piper. If we do go t’ jail, our sentences’ll end next February, won’t they?”

With that, Daniel and Kheelan started laughing so hard they appeared loose-limbed.

“What’s so damned funny?” It was a woman’s voice, and Cacia came through the door, carrying a tray of food. Trailing behind her, Haven carried another tray of drinks.

Daniel challenged her. “Why’d you let Haven out of her room?”

“She’s been cryin’ her eyes out,” Cacia said. “She feels bad about what happened t’ Mr. Piper. And she wanted to see th’ lad.”

“She should be feeling bad about what she done t’ us!” Kheelan shouted. “She’s brought in offcomers! She’s ruined us! She’s a wicked creature who needs t’ pay!”

“How-ee then!” Daniel shouted back. “She’s my daughter, and I’m th’ one who’ll decide what’s t’ be done.”

Kheelan lowered his voice. “I’m just sayin’”

“Get out now, you two,” Cacia said, shooing her husband and brother-in-law out. “Go and keep watch with Andrew and Douglas. And make sure his car’s well hid. We’ll tend t’ this lot.”

The men silently assented and left.

Will decided to stay quiet and observe mother and daughter for a few moments. He couldn’t tell if Cacia wore the pants in the family, but she was a force to be reckoned with, that was certain. He could see the masseter muscles in her face rippling as she clenched and unclenched her jaw. Was it in anger or frustration? Was her ire aimed at them or her own?

But Will had no doubt about her feelings toward her daughter. She passed instructions to Haven with
tenderness. The girl might have gone rogue, but it seemed as if no transgression would be enough for Cacia to withdraw a mother’s love.