Glenn Cooper - The Tenth Chamber

The Perigord Region, France, 1899

The two men were breathing hard, scrambling over slippery terrain, struggling to make sense of what they had just seen.

A sudden late-summer rain burst had caught them by surprise. The fast-moving squall moved in while they were exploring the cave, drenching the limestone cliffs, darkening the vertical rock faces and shrouding the Vezere River valley in a veil of low clouds.

Only an hour earlier, from their high perch on the cliffs, the schoolmaster, Edouard Lefevre, had been pointing out landmarks to his younger cousin, Pascal. Church spires far in the distance stood out crisply against a regal sky. Sunbeams glanced the surface of the river. Wholesome barley fields stretched across the flat plain.

But when they emerged blinking from the cave, their last wooden match spent, it was almost as if a painter had decided to start again and had brushed over his bright landscape with a grey wash.

The outbound hike had been casual and leisurely but their return journey took on an element of drama as torrents of water cascaded onto the undercliffs, turning their trail muddy and treacherous. Both men were adequate hikers and both had decent shoes but neither was so experienced they would have chosen to be high on a slick ledge in pelting rain. Still, they never considered returning to the cave for shelter.

‘We’ve got to tell the authorities!’ Edouard insisted, wiping his forehead and holding back a branch so Pascal could safely pass. ‘If we hurry we can be at the hotel before nightfall.’

Time and again, they had to grab on to tree limbs to steady themselves and in one heart-stopping instance Edouard seized Pascal’s collar when he thought his cousin had lost footing and was about to plunge.

When they arrived at their car they were soaked through. It was Pascal’s vehicle, actually his father’s, since only someone like a wealthy banker could afford an automobile as novel and sumptuous as a Type 16 Peugeot. Although the car had a roof, the rain had thoroughly drenched the open cabin. There was a blanket under the seat that was relatively dry but at the cruising speed of twelve miles per hour, both men were soon shivering and the decision to stop at the first cafe they came to for a warming drink was easily taken.

The tiny village of Ruac had a single cafe which at this time of day was hosting a dozen drinkers at small wooden tables. They were rough stock, coarse-looking peasants, and all of them, to a man, stopped talking when the strangers entered. Some had been hunting birds, their rifles propped up against the back wall. One old fellow pointed through the window at the motor car, whispered something to the bartender and startled cackling.

Edouard and Pascal sat at an empty table, looking like drowned rats. ‘Two large brandies!’ Edouard ordered the bartender. ‘The quicker the better, monsieur, or we’ll be dead of pneumonia!’

The bartender reached for a bottle and twisted out the cork. He was a middle-aged man with jet-black hair, long sideburns and calloused hands. ‘Is that yours?’ he asked Edouard, gesturing out the window.

‘Mine,’ Pascal answered. ‘Ever seen one before?’

The bartender shook his head and looked like he was inclined to spit on the floor. Instead he asked another question. ‘Where’ve you come from?’

The patrons in the cafe hung on the conversation. It was their evening’s entertainment.

‘We’re on holiday,’ Edouard answered. ‘We’re staying in Sarlat.’

‘Who comes to Ruac on holiday?’ the bartender smirked, laying down the brandies.

‘A lot of people will come soon enough,’ Pascal said, offended by the man’s tone.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘When word spreads of our discovery, people will come from as far as Paris,’ Pascal boasted. ‘Even London.’

‘Discovery? What discovery?’

Edouard sought to quiet his cousin, but the strong-willed young man was not going to be hushed. ‘We were on a naturalist walk along the cliffs. We were looking for birds. We found a cave.’

‘Where?’

As he described their route, Edouard downed his drink and gestured for another.

The bartender scrunched his forehead. ‘There’s lots of caves around here. What’s so special about this one?’

When Pascal started talking, Edouard sensed that every man was staring at his cousin’s lips, watching each word fall off his tongue. As a teacher, Edouard had always admired Pascal’s powers of description, and now, listening to him waxing away, he marvelled again at the miracle they had stumbled on.

He closed his eyes for a moment to recall the images illuminated by their flickering match lights and missed the bartender’s quick nod to the men seated behind them.

A metallic clunk made him look up. The bartender’s lip was curled.

Was he smiling?

When Pascal’s blond head started spraying blood, Edouard only had time to say, ‘Oh!’ before a bullet ripped through his brain too.

The cafe smelled of gunpowder.

There was a long silence until the man with the hunting rifle finally said, ‘What shall we do with them?’

The bartender started issuing orders. ‘Take them to Duval’s farm. Chop them up and feed them to the pigs. When it gets dark, take a horse and drag that machine of theirs far away.’

‘So there is a cave,’ one old man said quietly.

‘Did you ever doubt it?’ the bartender hissed. ‘I always knew it would be found one day.’

He could spit now without soiling his own floor. Edouard was lying at his feet.

A gob of phlegm landed on the man’s bloody cheek.

It began with a spark from a mouse-chewed electrical wire deep within a thick plaster wall.

The spark caught a chestnut beam and set it smouldering. When the old dry wood broke out in full combustion the north wall of the church kitchen started spewing smoke.

If this had happened during the day, the cook or one of the nuns, or even Abbot Menaud himself, stopping for a glass of hot lemon water, would have sounded the alarm or at least grabbed the fire extinguisher under the sink, but it happened at night.

The abbey library shared a common wall with the kitchen. With a single exception, the library did not house a particularly grand or valuable collection, but it was a part of the tangible history of the place, just as much as the tombs in the crypt or the markers in the cemetery.

Alongside five centuries of standard ecclesiastical texts and Bibles were chronicles of more secular and mundane aspects of abbey life: births, deaths, census records, medical and herbal books, trading accounts, even recipes for ale and certain cheeses. The one valuable text was a thirteenth-century edition of the Rule of St Benedict, the so-called Dijon version, one of the first translations from the Latin to Old French. For a rural Cistercian abbey in the heart of the Perigord, an early French copy of their patron saint’s tome was special indeed, and the book had pride of place in the centre of the bookcase that stood against the burning wall.

The library was a generously sized room with tall leaded windows and a grouted stone floor of squares and rectangles which was far from level. The central reading table required shims to prevent it from wobbling and monks and nuns who pulled up to the table had to avoid shifting their weight lest they bother their neighbours with clopping chair legs.

The bookcases which lined the walls and touched the ceiling were centuries old, walnut, chocolatey in colour and polished with time. Billows of smoke poured over the top of the cases on the afflicted wall. Had it not been for Brother Marcel’s enlarged prostate the outcome that night might have been different. In the brothers’ dormitory, across the courtyard from the library, the elderly monk awoke for one of his usual nocturnal visits to the water closet and smelled smoke. He arthritically shuffled up and down the halls shouting ‘Fire!’ and before all that long, the SPV, the volunteer fire brigade, was rumbling up the gravel drive to the Trappist Abbey of Ruac in their venerable Renault pumper.