Part 16 (2/2)

I closed my eyes. I counted to three hundred. I opened my eyes.

The good monk was asleep. I blasphemed, softly, but he did not stir, so I swung my legs over the side of the straw bed and made my way across the dirt floor to the heavy door. I rested there a time, in the candleless dark, listening to the howls; then, with Bostonian discretion, raised the bolt. The rusted hinges creaked, but Brother Christophorus was deep in celestial marble: his head drooped low upon his chest.

Panting, weak as a landlocked fish, I stumbled out into the corridor. The screams became impossibly loud. I put my hands to my ears, instinctively, and wondered how anyone could sleep with such a furor going on. It _was_ a furor. In my mind? No. Real. The monastery shook with these shrill cries. You could feel their realness with your teeth.

I pa.s.sed a Brother's cell and listened, then another; then I paused. A thick door, made of oak or pine, was locked before me. Behind it were the screams.

A chill went through me on the edge of those unutterable shrieks of hopeless, helpless anguish, and for a moment I considered turning back--not to my room, not to my bed of straw, but back into the open world. But duty held me. I took a breath and walked up to the narrow bar-crossed window and looked in.

A man was in the cell. On all fours, circling like a beast, his head thrown back, a man. The moonlight showed his face. It cannot be described--not, at least, by me. A man past death might look like this, a victim of the Inquisition rack, the stake, the pincers: not a human in the third decade of thetwentieth century, surely. I had never seen such suffering within two eyes, such lost, mad suffering.

Naked, he crawled about the dirt, cried, leaped up to his feet and clawed the hard stone walls in fury.

Then he saw me.

The screaming ceased. He huddled, blinking, in the corner of his cell. And then, as though unsure of what he saw, he walked right to the door.

In German, hissing: ”Who are you?”

”David Ellington,” I said. ”Are you locked in? Why have they locked you in?”

He shook his head.

”Be still, be still. You are not German?”

”No.”

I told him how I came to be at St. Wulfran's.

”Ah!” Trembling, his h.o.r.n.y fingers closing on the bars, the naked man said: ”Listen to me, we have only moments. They are mad. You hear? All mad. I was in the village, lying with my woman, when their crazy Abbot burst into the house and hit me with his heavy cross. I woke up here. They flogged me.

I asked for food, they would not give it to me. They took my clothes. They threw me in this filthy room.

They locked the door.”

”Why?”

”Why?” He moaned. ”I wish I knew. That's been the worst of it. Five years imprisoned, beaten, tortured, starved, and not a reason given, not a word to guess from--Mr. Ellington! I have sinned, but who has not? With my woman, quietly, alone with my woman, my love. And this G.o.d-drunk lunatic, Jerome, cannot stand it. Help me!”

His breath splashed on my face. I took a backward step and tried to think. I couldn't quite believe that in this century a thing so frightening could happen. Yet, the Abbey was secluded, above the world, timeless. What could not transpire here, secretly?

”I'll speak to the Abbot.”

”No! I tell you, he's the maddest of them all. Say nothing to him.”

”Then how can I help you?”

He pressed his mouth against the bars. ”In one way only. Around Jerome's neck, there is a key.

It fits this lock. If--”

”Mr. Ellington!”

I turned and faced a fierce El Greco painting of a man. White-bearded, prow-nosed, regal as an Emperor beneath the gray peaked robe, he came out of the darkness. ”Mr. Ellington, I did not know that you were well enough to walk. Come with me, please.”

The naked man began to weep hysterically. I felt a grip of steel about my arm. Through corridors, past snore-filled cells, the echoes of the weeping dying, we continued to a room.

”I must ask you to leave St. Wulfran's,” the Abbot said. ”We lack the proper facilities for care of the ill. Arrangements will be made in Schwartzhof--”

”One moment,” I said. ”While it's probably true that Brother Christophorus's ministrations saved my life--and certainly true that I owe you all a debt of grat.i.tude--I've got to ask for an explanation of that man in the cell.”

”What man?” the Abbot said softly.

”The one we just left, the one who's screamed all night long every night.”

”No man has been screaming, Mr. Ellington.”

Feeling suddenly very weak, I sat down and rested a few breaths' worth. Then I said, ”Father Jerome--you are he? I am not necessarily an irreligious person, but neither could I be considered particularly religious. I know nothing of monasteries, what is permitted, what isn't. But I seriously doubt you have the authority to imprison a man against his will.”

”This is quite true. We have no such authority.”

”Then why have you done so?”

The Abbot looked at me steadily. In a firm, inflexible voice, he said: ”No man has been imprisoned at St. Wulfran's.””He claims otherwise.”

”Who claims otherwise?”

”The man in the cell at the end of the corridor.”

”There is no man in the cell at the end of the corridor.”

”I was talking with him!”

”You were talking with no man.”

The conviction in his voice shocked me into momentary silence. I gripped the arms of the chair.

”You are ill, Mr. Ellington,” the bearded holy man said. ”You have suffered from delirium. You have heard and seen things which do not exist.”

”That's true,” I said. ”But the man in the cell--whose voice I can hear now!--is not one of those things.”

The Abbot shrugged. ”Dreams can seem very real, my son.”

I glanced at the leather thong about his turkey-gobbler neck, all but hidden beneath the beard.

”Honest men make unconvincing liars,” I lied convincingly. ”Brother Christophorus has a way of looking at the floor whenever he denies the cries in the night. You look at me, but your voice loses its command.

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