Glenn Cooper - Book of Souls

Near the house there was a disused kitchen garden, and just beyond that, two generous triangular beds on either side of a central, gravel axis leading to an orchard. The beds were edged with low evergreens, and in their day had brimmed with tall ornamental grasses and sweeping schemes of perennials. Now they looked more like sad jungle thickets. Past the orchard was a large, overgrown and weedy wild-flower meadow that Isabelle used to adore as a freewheeling young girl, especially in the summertime, when the meadow dazzled with a spectacular show of white oxeye daisies.

“Two for joy,” she suddenly said, pointing.

Will looked up confused and squinted at the blue sky.

“There, on the chapel roof, two magpies. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy.”

The grass was wet and soon soaked their shoes. They trudged through an overgrown verge toward the chapel, its spire beckoning them in the sunlight.

Isabelle was well used to the oddity of the stone building, but Will was as taken aback as the first time he had seen it. The closer they got, the more jarring the perspective. “It really looks like someone’s idea of a joke,” he said. It had the identical iconic look of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the Gothic exterior and flying buttresses, the two broad towers topped with open arches, the nave and transept crowned with a filigreed spike of a tower. But it was a miniature version, almost a child’s toy. The great cathedral could comfortably accommodate six thousand worshippers, but the garden chapel held twenty at most. The spire in Paris soared 225 feet into the air, whereas the Cantwell spire was a scant 40 feet.

“I’m not very good at maths,” Isabelle said, “but it’s some precise fractional size of the real thing. Edgar Cantwell was apparently obsessed with it.”

“This is the Edgar Cantwell in the Calvin letter?”

“The same. He returned to England after studying in Paris, and sometime later commissioned the chapel to honor his father. It’s a unique piece of architecture. We sometimes get tourists wandering by from the walking path down the bottom, but we don’t publicize it in the least. It’s strictly word of mouth.”

He held up his hand to block the sun. “Is that a bell in the tower closest to us?”

“I should ring it for you. It’s a bronze miniature of the one that Quasimodo rang in the Hunchback of Notre Dame. ”

“You’re better-looking than him.”

“The flattery of the man!”

They began walking onward toward the meadow. Isabelle was about to say something when she noticed he had stopped and was staring skyward at the bell tower.

“What?”

“Notre Dame,” he said. Then he raised his voice, “Notre Dame. That’s pretty damned close to Nostradamus. Do you think…?”

“Nostradamus!” she shouted. “Our prophet! Soars o’er the prophet’s name! Nostradamus’s name was Michel de Nostredame! Will, you’re a genius.”

“Or married to one,” he muttered.

She grabbed him by the hand and almost pulled him up the path to the chapel.

“Can we get up there?” he asked.

“Yes! I spent a lot of my childhood in that tower.”

There was a heavy wooden door at the base of the tower facade, which Isabelle pushed open with a shoulder shove, the swollen wood harshly scraping the stone threshold. She dashed toward the pulpit and pointed at the small Alice-in-Wonderland door off to the corner. “Up here!”

She squeezed through almost as easily as she had done as a child. It was more of a labor for Will. His large shoulders got hung up, and he had to throw off his jacket so it wouldn’t be ripped. He followed her up a claustrophobic wooden staircase that was little more than a glorified ladder up to the bell landing, a wooden scaffolding that surrounded the weathered hanging bell.

“Are you scared of bats?” she said, too late.

Hanging above their heads was a colony of white-bellied Natterer’s bats. A few took to flight, soaring through the arches, and darted crazily around the tower.

“I don’t love them.”

“I do,” she cried. “They’re adorable creatures!”

Inside the tower, he could barely stand without hitting his head. There was a view through the stone arches to neatly plowed fields and, farther away, the village church. Will hardly noticed the landscape. He was searching for something, anything, a hiding place. There was wood and masonry, nothing else.

He pushed at mortared blocks of stone with the heel of his hand, but everything within reach was solid and firm. Isabelle was already on the floor, on hands and knees, doing an inspection of the guano-covered planks. Suddenly, she stood up and started scraping at a spot with the heel of her boot, kicking up a small cloud of dried droppings. “I think there’s a carving on this plank, Will, look!”

He dropped down and had to agree there appeared to be a small, curved etching of sorts on one of the planks. He reached for his wallet and plucked out his VISA card, which he used like a trowel to scrape the plank clean. Clear as day, there was a round, five-petaled carving, an inch in length, inscribed into the wood.

“It’s a Tudor rose!” she said. “I can’t believe I never noticed it before.”

He gestured over his head. “It’s their fault.” He stomped hard on the plank, but it didn’t budge.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I’ll get the toolbox.” In a flash, she was down the stairs and he was alone with a few hundred bats. He warily looked up at them, hanging like Christmas ornaments, and prayed no one rang the bell.

When she returned with the toolbox, he hammered a thin, long screwdriver into the space between two boards and repeated the maneuver up and down the length of the inscribed plank, each time gazing upward to see if he was bothering the dormant mammals.

When he created enough separation, he drove the screwdriver all the way through and used it as a pry bar to jerkily raise the board a quarter inch. He slid a second, thicker screwdriver into the space and pushed down hard with his full weight. The plank creaked and popped up, coming away clean in his hand.

There was a space underneath, a foot deep, between the floor and the ceiling planking. He hated sticking his hand into a black space, especially with all the bats around, but he grimaced and plunged it in.

Right away, he felt glass against his fingertips.

He grabbed on to something smooth and cold and brought it into the light.

An old bottle.

The vessel was handblown into an onion shape, made of thick, dark green glass with a flat bottom and a rolled string lip. The mouth was sealed with wax. He held the glass up to the sun, but it was too opaque. He shook it. There was a faint knocking sound.

“There’s something inside it.”

“Go on,” she urged.

He sat down and wedged the bottle between his shoes and began lightly chipping away at the wax with one of the screwdrivers until he saw the top of a cork. He switched to a Phillips head and gently tapped the cork into the bottle with the hammer. It plopped to the bottom.

He turned the bottle over and shook it hard.

A roll of parchment, two sheets thick, fell onto his lap. The sheets were crisp and pristine.

“Here we go again,” he said, shaking his head. “This is where you come in.”

She unrolled the pages with trembling fingers and scanned the pages. One was handwritten, the other printed.

“It’s another letter to Edgar Cantwell,” she whispered. “And the title page from a very old and very famous book.”

“Which one?”

“The Prophecies of Nostradamus!”

1532

Paris

Edgar Cantwell began to feel unwell while taking his evening meal at Madame Pucell’s boardinghouse. He had been vaguely aware of a soreness in his groin for a day or two but had thought nothing of it, a strain of the muscle, perhaps. He was eating a lamb chop and a plate of leeks when the chill hit him, flying through his body like a swarm of winged insects. His colleague, Richard Dudley, another English student, noticed the unpleasant look on his friend’s face and remarked on it.