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

“You don’t hit me as the tourist type,” the driver said.

“I like crowds.”

The Hollywood sidewalk was thick with tourists and hawkers. Will stood on the square of cement inscribed, TO SID, MANY HAPPY TRAILS, ROY ROGERS AND TRIGGER, complete with handprints, footprints, and horseshoe prints. He fished the phone out of his pocket and turned it on.

She picked up quickly, as if she’d been holding the phone, waiting for it to ring.

“Jesus, Will, are you okay?”

“I’ve had a heck of a day, Nancy. How are you?”

“Worried sick. Did you find him?”

“Yeah, but I can’t talk. We’re being monitored.”

“Are you safe?”

“I’m covered. I’ll be fine.”

“What can I do?”

“Wait for me, and tell me again that you love me.”

“I love you.”

He hung up and got a number from information. With tenacity, he jawboned his way up the line until he was one step away from speaking to his target. He cut through the officiousness of the staffer. “Yeah, this is Special Agent Will Piper of the FBI. Tell the Secretary of the Navy I’m on the line. Tell him I was with Mark Shackleton earlier today. Tell him I know all about Area 51. And tell him he has one minute to pick up the phone.”

Baldwin, Abbot of Vectis, knelt in troubled prayer at the foot of the holiest tomb in the abbey.

Between the pillars separating the nave from the aisles, the memorial slab was set into the stone floor. The smooth flat stones were freezing cold, and through his vestments, Baldwin’s knees were going numb. Still, he stayed down, concentrating on his plaintive prayers he offered over the corpus of St. Josephus, patron saint of Vectis Abbey.

The tomb of Josephus was a favorite place of prayer and meditation inside Vectis Cathedral, the splendid high-spired edifice that had been erected on the site of the old abbey church. The slab of blue stone that marked his tomb was simply inscribed with the deeply chiseled: Saint Josephus, Anno Domini 800.

In the five hundred years since the death of Josephus, Vectis Abbey had undergone profound changes. The boundaries of the abbey were vastly expanded by the annexation of surrounding fields and meadows. A high stone wall and portcullis now surrounded the site as protection against the French pirates who preyed on the island and the Wessex coast. The cathedral, one of the finest in Britain, pierced the sky with its tapering, graceful tower. Over thirty substantial stone buildings, including dormitories, Chapter House, kitchens, refectory, cellerage, buttery, infirmary, Hospicium, Scriptorium, warming rooms, brewery, abbot house, and stables, were connected to one another with covered walkways and internal passages. The cloisters, yards, and vegetable gardens were ample and well-proportioned. There was a large cemetery. A farm with a grain mill and piggery occupied a far parcel. All told, the abbey supported almost six hundred inhabitants, in essence making it the second largest town on the island. It was a prosperous beacon of Christendom, rivaling Westminster, Canterbury, and Salisbury in prominence.

The island itself had also grown in population and prospered. Following the conquest of Britain by William, Duke of Normandy, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the island came under Norman control and fully slipped its pagan Scandinavian bonds. The archaic Roman name, Vectis, was abandoned, and the Normans began to call it the Isle of Wight. William gifted the island to his friend William fitz Osbern, who became the first Lord of the Isle of Wight. Under the protection of William the Conqueror and future British monarchs, the island became a rich, well-fortified bastion against the French. From the squat, strong Carisbrooke Castle at the center, a succession of Lords of the Isle of Wight exercised feudal rule and forged an ecclesiastical alliance with the monks of Vectis Abbey, their spiritual neighbors.

The last Lord of the Isle of Wight was, in actuality, not a lord but a lady, Countess Isabella de Fortibus, who acquired the lordship when her brother died in 1262. From her land holdings and the maritime taxes she collected, the sour, homely Isabella became the wealthiest woman in Britain. Because she was lonely, rich, and pious, Edgar, the previous Abbot of Vectis-and later, Baldwin, the present abbot-unctuously courted her and bestowed on her their most solicitous prayers and finest illuminated manuscripts. In return, Isabella donated generously to the abbey and became its principal patron.

In 1293, Baldwin was personally summoned to her death bed in Carisbrooke, where in her drafty bedchamber she weakly informed him that she had sold the isle to King Edward for six thousand marks, thus transferring control to the Crown. He would have to seek patronage elsewhere, she told him dismissively. As she took her last breath, he grudgingly blessed her.

The four years since Isabella’s death had been challenging for Baldwin. Decades of dependence on the woman had left the abbey unprepared for the future. The population at Vectis had grown so large that it was no longer self-sufficient and external funds were constantly required. Baldwin was forced to frequently travel off the island, like a beggar, courting earls and lords, bishops and cardinals. He was not a political creature like Edgar, his predecessor, a man with easy approachability, beloved by his ministers, children, even dogs! Baldwin was fishlike, cool and slippery, an efficient administrator with a passion for ledgers as great as his love for God, but with correspondingly little love of his fellow man. His idea of bliss was a peaceful afternoon alone in his rooms with his books. However, happiness and peace were abstract concepts of late.

There was trouble brewing.

Deep underground.

Baldwin said a special prayer to Josephus and arose to seek out his prior for urgent consultation.

Luke, son of Archibald, a boot maker from London, was the youngest monk at Vectis. He was a strapping twenty-year-old with the physique of a soldier more than of a servant of God. His father was mystified and disappointed that his eldest son would choose religion over a brick oven, but he could no sooner stop his strong-willed boy than he could stop bread from rising. Young Luke, when an urchin, had fallen under the kindly sphere of his parish priest and since then never wanted more from life than to devote himself to Christ.

The total immersion of monastic life appealed to him especially. He had long heard tales from the priests of the isolated beauty of Vectis Abbey, and at age seventeen made his way south to the Isle of Wight, using his last coppers to buy a ferryboat passage. During the crossing, he watched the steep, concave cliffs of the island looming large and stared in awe at the cathedral spire on the horizon, a stone finger pointing to Heaven, he reckoned. He prayed with all his might that this would be a journey without return.

Following a long hike through the rich countryside, Luke presented himself at the portcullis and humbly begged admittance. Prior Felix, a burly Breton, as dark as Luke was fair, recognized his earnestness and took him in. After four years of toil as an oblate and then a lay brother, Luke was ordained a minister of God, and every day since then his heart brimmed with jubilation. His perpetually broad smile made his fellow brothers and sisters mirthful, and some would go out of their way to walk past him just for a glimpse of his sweet face.

Within days of Luke’s arrival at Vectis, he began to hear whispered rumors about the crypts from the longer-serving novices. There was a subterranean world at the abbey, it was said. There were strange beings underground and strange doings. Rituals. Perversions. A secret society, the Order of the Names.