“A peaceful day,” William said.
“By the grace of God,” the old man answered.
“Peaceful in the heavens, but grim on earth. Did you know Venantius well?”
“Venantius who?” the old man said. Then a light flashed in his eyes. “Ah, the dead boy. The beast is roaming about the abbey. . . .”
“What beast?”
“The great beast that comes from the sea . . . Seven heads and ten horns and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads three names of blasphemy. The beast like unto a leopard, with the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion . . . I have seen him.”
“Where have you seen him? In the library?”
“Library? Why there? I have not gone to the scriptorium for years and I have never seen the library. No one goes to the library. I knew those who did go up to the library. . . .”
“Who? Malachi? Berengar?”
“Oh, no . . .” the old man said, chuckling. “Before. The librarian who came before Malachi, many years ago . . .”
“Who was that?”
“I do not remember; he died when Malachi was still young. And the one who came before Malachi’s master, and was a young assistant librarian when I was young . . . But I never set foot in the library. Labyrinth . . .”
“The library is a labyrinth?”
“Hunc mundum tipice labyrinthus denotat ille,” the old man recited, absently. “Intranti largus, redeunti sed nimis artus. The library is a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world. You enter and you do not know whether you will come out. You must not transgress the pillars of Hercules. . . .”
“So you don’t know how one enters the library when the Aedificium doors are closed?”
“Oh, yes.” The old man laughed. “Many know. You go by way of the ossarium. You can go through the ossarium, but you do not want to go through the ossarium. The dead monks keep watch.”
“Those dead monks who keep watch—they are not those who move at night through the library with a lamp?”
“With a lamp?” The old man seemed amazed. “I have never heard this story. The dead monks stay in the ossarium, the bones drop gradually from the cemetery and collect there, to guard the passage. Have you never seen the altar of the chapel that leads to the ossarium?”
“It is the third on the left, after the transept, is it not?”
“The third? Perhaps. It is the one whose altar stone is carved with a thousand skeletons. The fourth skull on the right: press the eyes . . . and you are in the ossarium. But do not go there; I have never gone. The abbot does not wish it.”
“And the beast? Where did you see the beast?”
“The beast? Ah, the Antichrist . . . He is about to come, the millennium is past; we await him. . . .”
“But the millennium was three hundred years ago, and he did not come then. . . .”
“The Antichrist does not come after a thousand years have passed. When the thousand years have passed, the reign of the just begins; then comes the Antichrist, to confound the just, and then there will be the final battle. . . .”
“But the just will reign for a thousand years,” William said. “Or else they reigned from the death of Christ to the end of the first millennium, and so the Antichrist should have come then; or else the just have not yet reigned, and the Antichrist is still far off.”
“The millennium is not calculated from the death of Christ but from the donation of Constantine, three centuries later. Now it is a thousand years. . . .”
“So the reign of the just is ending?”
“I do not know. . . . I do not know any more. I am tired. The calculation is difficult. Beatus of Liébana made it; ask Jorge, he is young, he remembers well. . . . But the time is ripe. Did you not hear the seven trumpets?”
“Why the seven trumpets?”
“Did you not hear how the other boy died, the illuminator? The first angel sounded the first trumpet, and hail and fire fell mingled with blood. And the second angel sounded the second trumpet, and the third part of the sea became blood. . . . Did the second boy not die in the sea of blood? Watch out for the third trumpet! The third part of the creatures in the sea will die. God punishes us. The world all around the abbey is rank with heresy; they tell me that on the throne of Rome there is a perverse pope who uses hosts for practices of necromancy, and feeds them to his morays. . . . And in our midst someone has violated the ban, has broken the seals of the labyrinth. . . .”
“Who told you that?”
“I heard it. All were whispering that sin has entered the abbey. Do you have any chickpeas?”
The question, addressed to me, surprised me. “No, I have no chickpeas,” I said, confused.
“Next time, bring me some chickpeas. I hold them in my mouth—you see my poor toothless mouth?—until they are soft. They stimulate saliva, aqua fons vitae. Will you bring me some chickpeas tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow I will bring you some chickpeas,” I said to him. But he had dozed off. We left him and went to the refectory.
COMPLINE
In which the Aedificium is entered, a mysterious visitor is discovered, a secret message with necromantic signs is found, and also a book is found, but then promptly vanishes, to be sought through many subsequent chapters; nor is the theft of William’s precious lenses the last of the vicissitudes.
The supper was joyless and silent. It had been just over twelve hours since the discovery of Venantius’s corpse. All the others stole glimpses at his empty place at table. When it was the hour for compline, the procession that marched into the choir seemed a funeral cortège. We followed the office standing in the nave and keeping an eye on the third chapel. The light was scant, and when we saw Malachi emerge from the darkness to reach his stall, we could not tell exactly where he had come from. We moved into the shadows, hiding in the side nave, so that no one would see us stay behind when the office was over. Under my scapular I had the lamp I had purloined in the kitchen during supper. We would light it later at the great bronze tripod that burned all night. I had procured a new wick and ample oil. We would have light for a long time.
I was too excited about our imminent venture to pay attention to the service, which ended almost without my noticing. The monks lowered their cowls over their faces and slowly filed out, to go to their cells. The church remained deserted, illuminated by the glow of the tripod.
“Now,” William said, “to work.”
We approached the third chapel. The base of the altar was really like an ossarium, a series of skulls with deep hollow eyesockets, which filled those who looked at them with terror, set on a pile of what, in the admirable relief, appeared to be tibias. William repeated in a low voice the words he had heard from Alinardo (fourth skull on the right, press the eyes). He stuck his fingers into the sockets of that fleshless face, and at once we heard a kind of hoarse creak. The altar moved, turning on a hidden pivot, allowing a glimpse of a dark aperture.
As I shed light on it with my raised lamp, we made out some damp steps. We decided to go down them, after debating whether to close off the passage again behind us. Better not, William said; we did not know whether we would be able to reopen it afterward. And as for the risk of being discovered, if anyone came at that hour to operate the same mechanism, that meant he knew how to enter, and a closed passage would not deter him.
We descended perhaps a dozen steps and came into a corridor on whose sides there were some horizontal niches, such as I was later to see in many catacombs. But now I was entering an ossarium for the first time, and I was very much afraid. The monks’ bones had been collected there over the centuries, dug from the earth and piled in the niches with no attempt to recompose the forms of their bodies.
Some niches had only tiny bones, others only skulls, neatly arranged in a kind of pyramid, so that one would not roll over another; and it was a truly terrifying sight, especially in the play of shadows the lamp created as we walked on. In one niche I saw only hands, many hands, now irrevocably interlaced in a tangle of dead fingers. I let out a cry in that place of the dead, for a moment sensing some presence above, a squeaking, a rapid movement in the dark.
“Mice,” William said, to reassure me.
“What are mice doing here?”
“Passing through, like us: because the ossarium leads to the Aedificium, and then to the kitchen. And to the tasty books of the library. And now you understand why Malachi’s face is so austere. His duties oblige him to come through here twice daily, morning and evening. Truly he has nothing to laugh about.”
“But why
