Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (13 page)

He pursed his lips at the irony of the prayer.

World without end.

Once, his beard had been as thick and black as a boar’s cheek. He had been muscular and robust, able to handle the rigors of monastic life tirelessly, the meager rations, the cold sea winds that frosted the bones, the manual labors that broke the body but sustained the community, the brief periods of sleep between the canonical hours that punctuated night and day with communal prayer. Now his beard was patchy, the dirty white of a seagull’s breast, and his cheeks were sunken. His fine muscles had withered and sagged, and his skin, drained of suppleness, was as dry as parchment and so itchy and scabbed it distracted him from prayer and meditation.

But the most alarming physical change affected his right eye, which had progressively begun to bulge and stare. It was a slow, creeping process. At first he only noticed a pink dryness, like a mote of grit that could not be lavaged. Then the mild throb behind the orbit became worse, and his vision became troublesome. Initially, there was some blurring, then blinding flashes of light, now a distressing doubling of images that made it difficult to read and write with both eyes open. In recent weeks, every man and woman within the abbey walls had anxiously noticed the bulging prominence of his eyeball. They whispered among themselves while they milked cows or tended crops, and at prayer they beseeched God to show their brother mercy.

Brother Girardus, the abbey infirmarer and a dear friend, visited with him every day and repeatedly offered to sleep on the floor of his great room should Felix need his assistance during the night. Girardus could only guess at the nature of the malady but supposed there was a growth within the fine man’s head, pushing against his eye and causing his pain. If this were a boil under the skin, he could open it with a lance, but none but God could cure a growth within the skull. He plied his friend with bark teas and herbal poultices to ease pain and swelling, but mostly he prayed.

Felix spent several minutes in meditation, then shuffled to the rosewood chest that sat between his bed and his table. Bending at the hips caused too much eye pain, so he lowered himself to his knees to open the large wardrobe box. It was filled with vestments, old habits and sandals, a spare bed cloth. Underneath the cloth and softness was something hard and solid. It took a good bit of his small strength to drag it out and carry it to his writing table.

It was a heavy book, ancient, the color of dark honey, a labor of distant centuries. It was the last of its kind, he supposed, the lone survivor of a conflagration that he himself had ignited. And the reason he had hid it so carefully over these many years was that it bore a date almost two hundred years in the future—1527.

Who alive today would understand? Who among his brethren would see it for what it was and adore its divinity? Or would they mistake it for a specter of blasphemy and malevolence? All who were with him that icy January day in 1297, when hell visited earth, were dead and buried. He was the last to bear witness, and it had been a weight on his soul.

Felix lit smaller candles illuminating his desk in an arc of straw-colored dancing light. He opened the book and removed a sheaf of loose vellum pages that had been cut for him in the abbey Scriptorium to fit neatly inside the covers. He had been feverishly working on his manuscript, rushing against time, fearful his malady would claim him before he was done.

It was painstakingly difficult work to overcome double vision and splitting headaches to pour out his recollections. He was forced to keep his right eye closed to fix a single image on the page and to keep the movements of his quill on a straight line. He wrote at night, when all was quiet and no one would intrude on his secret. When he exhausted himself, he would return the book to its hiding place and fall onto his pallet for a sliver of sleep before the abbey bells rang for the next call to cathedral prayer.

He gently lifted the first of his pages and, with one eye closed, held it close to his face. It began,
An Epistle from Felix, Abbot of Vectis Abbey, written in the year of our Lord, 1334.

Lord I am your servant. Praise to you glory to you. Vast are you, Lord, and vast should be your praise. My faith in you is your gift to me, which you have breathed into me by the humanity your Son assumed.
I am determined to bring back into memory the things I know and the things I saw and the things I did.
I am humbled by the memory of all who have come before me, but there is none as precious and exalted as Saint Josephus patron saint of Vectis whose sacred bones are buried in the Cathedral. For it was Josephus who in his true and complete love of God did establish the Order of the Names to exalt the Lord and sanctify his divinity. I am the last member of the Order, all others gone to dust. Were I not to make record of past deeds and occurrences, then mankind would be bereft of the knowledge that I your mortal sinner alone do possess. It is not for me to decide if this knowledge is fit for mankind. It is for you, Lord, in your infinite wisdom, to render judgment. I will humbly write this epistle, and you, Lord, will decide its fate.

Felix put down the page and rested his good eye for a moment. When he felt ready to continue, he thumbed through the pages and began to read again.

The knowledge of that day has been passed from the lips of brothers and sisters through the mists of time. Josephus, then Prior of Vectis, attended a birth on that portentous seventh day of the seventh month of the Year of Our Lord 777. The period was marked by the presence of Cometes Luctus, a red and fiery comet that to this day has never returned. The wife of a laborer was with child, and if that child was male, he would be the seventh son of a seventh son. A male child was born, and in fear and lamentation, his father smote him dead. To the wonder of Josephus, the woman then delivered an eighth son, and this twin was called Octavus.

Felix easily conjured a mental image of Octavus, for he had seen many infants like him over the years, pale, uncrying, with emerald green eyes and fine ginger-colored hair sprouting from pink scalps. Would Josephus have suspected, amidst the blood and amnion-soaked birthing bed and the terrified murmurs of the women attending the labor that Octavus was the true seventh son?

Believing that the child Octavus required the presence of the Lord, his father took him to Vectis Abbey at a young age. The child would not speak and would not make company with men, and Josephus took mercy on him and accepted him into the care of the abbey. It was then that Josephus made a miraculous discovery. Absent any tutelage, the boy was able to write letters and numbers. And, Lord God, not any letters and numbers but the names of Your mortal children and their days of birth and death into the future. Such foretelling infused Josephus with wonder and fear. Was this a dark power born of evil or a shaft of heavenly light? Josephus in his wisdom convened a council of members of his ministry to consider the child and thus was founded the Order of the Names. These wise ministers did conclude that there was no evil hand at work, for if this were so, why would the child have been delivered into their protective bosom? Surely it was providence at work and a sign embodied by the confluence of the holy number seven that the Lord had chosen this humble creature Octavus to be His true voice of divine revelation. And so the boy was protected and cloistered in the Scriptorium, where he was given quill and ink and parchment and allowed to spend his hours doing his true vocation.

His headache was unabating, so Felix rose from his table to prepare himself a vessel of bark tea. In the great room, he poked at the embers in the fireplace and added a fistful of twigs. Soon, the iron pot of water hanging from an arm began to hiss. He shuffled back to his bedchamber to continue his reading.

As the years passed the boy Octavus grew into a man whose singular purpose did not alter. Night and day he toiled, and there was produced a small but growing library of his books, which did all contain names and foretold of births and deaths. Throughout Octavus had no discourse or commerce with his fellowman, and all his bodily needs were attended by the Order of the Names, which protected his person and his vocation. One fateful day, Octavus was consumed with animal lust and did violate a poor novice girl, and the girl did carry and bear his child. It was a boy with the same strange countenance as its father. The boy was called Primus, and he had green eyes and ginger hair and, like Octavus, was as mute as the stump of a tree and in time he revealed himself to have the same powers as his father. Where there was one were now two sitting side by side, writing out the names of the living and the dead.

The bitter tea was easing his pain, allowing him to read faster and finish the passage he had written the previous night.

Days turned to years and years to decades and decades to centuries. Scribes were born and scribes died and their keepers from the Order of the Names did also come into the world and depart to the next world, all the while providing womanly vessels for their procreation. The library grew to a size beyond imagination and the Order did provide for the keeping of the holy books by excavating vast caverns to keep the library hidden and safe and the bones of dead scribes entombed in sacred catacombs.
For many years, Dear Lord, I was the humble Prior of Vectis and a loyal servant to the great Abbot Baldwin and a faithful member of the Order of the Names. I confess, Dear Lord, that it did not give me pleasure to deliver young sisters to be used for purposes as were required, but I fulfilled my mission with love for You and certainty that Your library must endure and Your future children should have their chronicle.
I have long lost count of all the mute infants brought into the world who would grow to assume their places in the Hall of the Writers with quill in hand, shoulder by shoulder with their brethren. But I cannot forget the one happenstance when as a young monk I witnessed one of the chosen sisters issue not a boy but a girl. I had heard of such a rare occurrence happening in the past but had never seen a girl-child born in my lifetime. I watched this mute green-eyed girl with ginger hair grow, but, unlike her kin, she failed to develop the gift of writing. At the age of twelve years, she was cast out and given to the grain merchant, Gassonet the Jew, who took her away from the island and did with her I know not what.

Satisfied, Felix was now ready to complete his memoir. He dipped his quill and took up the tale in his florid script and wrote the final pages as quickly as he was able until his work was completely done.

He put down his quill and allowed himself to listen to the crickets and the seagulls while the last few lines of ink dried. Through the windows, he saw the blackness of night giving way to a creep of gray. The cathedral bell would ring soon, and he would have to muster his strength to lead the congregation in Prime prayer. Perhaps he should lie down a moment. Despite his discomfort, he felt lighter, unburdened, and welcomed a chance to close his eyes and have a brief, dreamless respite.

As he stood, the bells began pealing. He sighed. His writing had taken longer than he imagined. He would prepare himself for mass.

There was a firm tapping at his door, and he called out, “Come!”

It was Brother Victor, the hostillar, a young man who rarely came to the abbot house. “Father, I beg your pardon. I waited for the bells.”

“What is it, my son?”

“A traveler came to the gate during the night.”

“And you gave him shelter?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Then why should I be informed?”

“His name is Luke. He implored me to bring this to you.” Victor held out a rolled sheet of parchment tied with a ribbon. Felix took it, undid the bow, and flattened the sheet.

The blood drained from his face. Victor had to hold the old monk under the armpit to keep him upright.

The page had a single written line and the date: 9 February 2027.

IT WAS LATE, and the Great Hall was quiet. Lord Cantwell had struggled to keep up with his granddaughter’s methodical readings, but he finally succumbed to his hearing problems, his age, and his snifter of brandy, and he trundled off to bed with a request for an accounting in the morning, when he was fresh.

Late into the night, accompanied by the background music of the crackling and popping fire, Isabelle slowly translated the abbot’s letter. Will listened impassively as missing pieces of the Library’s story fell into place. Despite the fantastic content of the letter, he wasn’t shocked. He knew that the Library existed—that much was a fact, and its very existence implied a fantastic explanation. Now he had one that was no more fanciful than any he’d contemplated since the day Mark Shackleton dropped the bomb on him.

As Isabelle spoke, he tried to form a mental image of Octavus and his spawn, pale, spindly savants who lived their lives hunched over parchments in a chamber hardly more illuminated than this Great Hall. He wondered, did they have any inkling what they were creating? Or why? He studied Isabelle’s face as she read, imagining what she was thinking and what he would tell her when she was done. He steeled himself for the punch line: was he about to learn the significance of 2027?

She read the last sentence:
At the age of twelve years she was cast out and given to the grain merchant, Gassonet the Jew who took her away from the island and did with her I know not what.
She looked up at him, blinking her dry eyes.

“What?” he asked. “Why are you stopping?”

“That’s it.”

“What do you mean, that’s it?”

She answered in frustration. “There is no more!”

He swore. “The other clues. They’re making us work for it.”

Then she said simply, “Our book. It’s from that Library, isn’t it?”

He thought about stonewalling her but what was the point? For better or worse she’d become an insider. So he answered by nodding.