Glenn Cooper - Library of the Dead aka Secret of the Seventh Son

He slid from the booth and weaved toward the men’s room. By the time he returned, Nancy had paid the bill and was waiting for him beside the table. She decided he wasn’t too wasted to hear the news. “Helen Swisher just got David’s client list from his bank. He had a Las Vegas connection after all.”

“Yeah?”

“In 2003 he did a financing for a Nevada company called Desert Life Insurance. His client was the CEO, a man named Nelson Elder.”

He had the appearance of a man trying to steady himself on the deck of a storm-tossed boat. He swayed unsteadily and loudly pronounced, “Okay then. I’m gonna go out there, I’m gonna talk to Nelson Elder and I’m gonna find the goddamned killer. How’s that for a plan?”

“Give me the car keys,” she demanded. Her anger pierced his inebriation.

“Don’t be sore at me,” he implored. “I’m your partner!”

Out in the parking lot their senses were clobbered by warm gusts of salty wind and the pungent bouquet of low tide. Ordinarily, this one-two punch might have made Nancy dreamy and carefree but she looked like she was in a dark place as she listened to Will shuffling behind her like Fran-kenstein’s monster, drunkenly mumbling.

“Going to Vegas, baby, going to Vegas.”

It was harvest time, perhaps Josephus’s favorite season, when the days were pleasantly warm, the nights cool and comfortable, and the air was filled with the earthy smells of newly scythed wheat and barley and fresh apples. He gave thanks for the bountiful proceeds from the fields surrounding the abbey walls. The brothers would be able to restock the dwindling stores in the granary and fill their oaken barrels with fresh ale. While he abhorred gluttony, he begrudged the rationing of beer that inevitably occurred by midsummer.

The conversion of the church from wood to stone was three years complete. The square, tapering tower rose up high enough for boats and ships approaching the island to use as a navigational aide. The squared-off chancel at the eastern end had low, triangular windows that beautifully illuminated the sanctuary during the Offices of the day. The nave was long enough not only for the present community, but the monastery would be able to accommodate a greater number of Christ’s servants in the future. Josephus often sought forgiveness and did penance for the pride that bubbled up in his chest for the role he played in its construction. True, his knowledge of the world was limited, but he imagined the church at Vectis to be among the great cathedrals of Christendom.

Of late, the masons had been hard at work finishing the new Chapter House. Josephus and Oswyn had decided the Scriptorium would be next and that the structure would have to be greatly expanded. The Bibles and rules books they produced, and the illustrated Epistles of St. Peter written in golden ink, were highly regarded and Josephus had heard that copies made their way across the waters to Eire, Italia, and Francia.

It was mid-morning, approaching the third hour, and he was on his way from the lavatorium to the refectory for a chunk of brown bread, a joint of mutton, some salt, and a flagon of ale. His stomach was rumbling in eager anticipation, as Oswyn had imposed a restriction of only one meal a day to strengthen the spirit of his congregation by weakening the desires of their flesh. After a prolonged period of meditation and personal fasting, which the frail abbot himself could scarcely afford, Oswyn shared his revelation with the entire community which had dutifully assembled in the Chapter House. “We must fast daily as we must feed daily,” he declared. “We must gratify the body more poorly and sparingly.”

So they all became thinner.

Josephus heard his name called. Guthlac, a huge rough man who had been a soldier before joining the monastery, caught up with him at a run, his sandals slapping on the path.

“Prior,” he said. “Ubertus the stonecutter is at the gate. He wishes to speak with you at once.”

“I am on my way to the refectory for supper,” Josephus objected. “Do you not feel he can wait?”

“He said it is urgent,” Guthlac said, hurrying off.

“And where are you going?” Josephus called after him.

“To the refectory, Prior. For my supper.”

Ubertus was inside the gate near the entrance to the Hospicium, the guest house for visitors and travelers, a low timber building with rows of simple cots. He was rooted to a spot on the ground, his feet unmoving. From a distance Josephus thought he was alone, but as he approached he saw a child behind the mason, two small legs visible between his tree-trunk legs.

“How may I help you, Ubertus?” Josephus asked.

“I have brought the child.”

Josephus didn’t understand.

Ubertus reached behind and pulled the boy into sight. He was a barefoot, tiny lad, thin as a twig with bright ginger hair. His shirt was dirty and in tatters, exposing a ladder of ribs and a pigeon chest. His trousers were too long, hand-me-downs that he had not yet grown to fit. His fine skin was parchment white, his staring eyes green like precious stones, and his delicate face as immobile as one of his father’s blocks of stone. He was tightly pressing his blanched pink lips together, and the effort to do so tensed and puckered his chin.

Josephus had heard about the boy but never laid eyes on him. He found him an unsettling sight. There was a cold madness about him, a sense that his small raw life had not been blessed by the warmth of God. His name, Octavus, the eighth, had been bestowed on him by Ubertus the night of his birth. Unlike his twin, an abomination who was better destroyed, his life would be blissfully ordinary, would it not? After all, the eighth son of a seventh son is but another son even if born on the seventh day of the seventh month of the 777th year after the birth of the Lord. Ubertus prayed he would become strong and productive, a stonecutter like his father and his brothers.

“Why have you brought him?” Josephus asked.

“I want you to take him.”

“Why would I take your son?”

“I cannot keep him any longer.”

“But you have daughters to care for him. You have food for your table.”

“He needs Christ. Christ is here.”

“But Christ is everywhere.”

“Nowhere stronger than here, Prior.”

The boy dropped to his knees and stuck his bony finger into the dirt. He began moving it around in little circles, carving a pattern in the soil, but his father reached down and yanked him by his hair to stand him up. The boy flinched but did not make a sound, despite the ferocity of the tug.

“The boy needs Christ,” his father insisted. “I wish to dedicate him to religious life.”

Josephus had heard talk of the boy being a strange one, mute, seemingly absorbed in his own world, completely without interest in his brothers and sisters or other village children. He had been wet-nursed, although he’d fed poorly, and even now at five years of age he ate sparingly and without gusto. In his heart, Josephus was not surprised at how the boy had turned out. After all, he had witnessed this child’s remarkable entrance into the world with his own eyes.

The abbey had taken in children with regularity, though it was not an actively encouraged practice since it strained resources and drew the sisters away from other tasks. Villagers were particularly keen to deposit mentally and physically deformed children at their gates. If Sister Magdalena had her way, they would all have been denied, but Josephus had a soft spot for the most unfortunate of God’s creatures.

Still, this one was disquieting.

“Boy, can you speak?” he asked.

Octavus ignored him and only looked toward the ground at the pattern he had made.