Glenn Cooper - Book of Souls

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.