The Book of Skulls (11 page)

The building appeared to be U-shaped, with two long subordinate wings sprouting behind the main section. I saw no doors. Perhaps fifteen yards in front of the facade, though, the entrance to a stone-lined vault could be seen at the center of the clearing: it yawned, dark and mysterious, like the gateway to the underworld. Immediately I realized that this must be a passage leading into the House of Skulls. I walked toward it and peered in. Darkness within. Do we dare enter? Should we not wait for someone to emerge and summon us? But no one emerged; and the heat was brutal. I felt the skin over my nose and cheeks already stiffening and swelling, going red and glossy from sunburn, winter’s paleness exposed to this desert sun for half a day. We stared at each other. The Ninth Mystery was hot in my mind and probably in theirs. We may go in, but we shall not all come forth. Who to live, who to die? I found myself unwillingly contemplating candidates for destruction, weighing my friends in the balance, quickly surrendering Timothy and Oliver to death and then pulling back, reconsidering that too ready judgment, substituting Ned for Oliver, Oliver for Timothy, Timothy for Ned, myself for Timothy, Ned for myself, Oliver for Ned, around and around, inconclusively, indecisively. My faith in the truth of the Book of Skulls had never been stronger. My sense of standing at the brink of infinity had never been greater or more terrifying. “Let’s go,” I said hoarsely, my voice splitting, and took a few uneasy steps forward. A stone staircase led steeply down into the vault. Five, six, seven feet underground, and I found myself in a dark tunnel, wide but low-roofed, at best five feet high. The air was cool. By dim strands of light I caught glimpses of embellishment on the walls: skulls, skulls, skulls. Not a shred of Christian imagery visible anywhere so far at this so-called monastery, but the symbolism of death was ubiquitous. From above Ned called: “What do you see?” I described the tunnel and told them to follow me. Down they came, shuffling, uncertain: Ned, Timothy, Oliver. Crouching, I went forward. The air grew much cooler. We could no longer see anything, other than the dim purplish glow at the entranceway. I tried to keep count of my paces. Ten, twelve, fifteen. Surely we should be under the building now. Abruptly there was a polished stone barrier in front of me, a single slab, completely filling the tunnel. I realized only at the last moment that it was there, catching an icy glint in the faint light, and halted before I crashed into it. A dead end? Yes, of course, and in another moment we would hear the clang behind us as a twenty-ton stone slab was lowered into place over the mouth of the tunnel, and then we would be trapped, left here to starve or asphyxiate, while peals of monstrous laughter rang in our ears. But nothing so melodramatic occurred. Tentatively I pressed my palm against the cold stone slab that blocked our way, and—the effect was pure Disneyland, wonderful hokum—the slab yielded, swinging smoothly away from me. It was perfectly counterbalanced; the lightest touch was enough to open it. Exactly right, I felt, that we should enter into the House of Skulls in this operatic manner. I expected melancholy trombones and basset horns and a chorus of basses intoning the Requiem in reverse:
Pietatis fons, me salva, gratis salvas salvandos qui, majestatis tremendae rex.
An opening above. Knees bent, we crept toward it. Stairs, again. Up. Emerging, one by one, into a huge square room whose walls were of some gritty pale sandstone. There was no roof, only a dozen or so black, thick beams spaced at intervals of three or four feet, admitting the sunlight and the choking heat. The floor of the chamber was of purple-green slate, somewhat oily and glossy of texture. In the middle of the room was a tub-sized fountain of green jade, with a human figure about three feet high rising from it; the figure’s head was a skull, and a steady trickle of water dribbled from its jaws, splashing into the basin below. In the four corners of the room stood tall stone statuettes, Mayan or Aztec in style, depicting men with curved, angular noses, thin cruel lips, and immense ear-ornaments. There was a doorway at the side of the room opposite the exit from the subterranean vault, and a man stood framed in it, so motionless that I thought at first he was a statue, too. When all four of us were in the room, he said, in a deep, resonant voice, “Good afternoon. I am Frater Antony.”

He was a short, stocky man, no more than five-feet-five, who wore only a pair of faded blue denims cut to midthigh. His skin was deeply tanned, almost to a mahogany color, and appeared to have the texture of very fine leather. His broad, high-domed skull was utterly bald, lacking even a fringe of hair behind the ears. His neck was short and thick, his shoulders wide and powerful, his chest deep, his arms and legs heavily muscled; he gave an impression of overwhelming strength and vitality. His general appearance and his vibrations of competence and power reminded me in an extraordinary way of Picasso: a small, solid, timeless man, capable of enduring anything. I had no idea how old he might be. Not young, certainly, but far from decrepit. Fifty? Sixty? A well-preserved seventy? His agelessness was the most disconcerting thing about him. He seemed untouched by time, wholly uncorroded: this, I thought, is what an immortal ought to look like.

He smiled warmly, revealing large flawless teeth, and said, “I alone am here to greet you. We get so few visitors, and we expect none. The other fraters are now in the fields and will not return until afternoon devotions.” He spoke in perfect English of a peculiarly bloodless, unaccented kind: an IBM accent, so to speak. His voice was steady and musical, his phrasing was unhurried, self-assured. “Please consider yourselves welcome for as long as you wish to stay. We have facilities for guests, and we invite you to share our retreat. Shall you be with us longer than a single afternoon?”

Oliver stared at me. Timothy. Ned. I was to be spokesman, then. The taste of copper was in my throat. The absurdity, the sheer preposterousness, of what I had to say, rose up and sealed my lips. I felt my sunburned cheeks blazing with shame.
Turn and flee, turn and flee,
a voice cried between my ears.
Down the rabbit hole. Run. Run. Run while you can.
I forced out a single rusty syllable:

“Yes.”

“In that case you will require accommodations. Will you come with me, please?”

He began to leave the room. Oliver shot me a furious glance. “Tell him!” he whispered sharply.

Tell him. Tell him. Tell him. Go on, Eli, say it. What can happen to you? At worst you’ll be laughed at. That’s nothing new, is it? So tell him. It all converges on this moment, all the rhetoric, all the self-hyping hyperbole, all the intense philosophical debates, all the doubt and the counterdoubt, all the driving. You’re here. You think it’s the right place. So tell him what you’re looking for here. Tell him. Tell him. Tell him.

Frater Antony, overhearing Oliver’s whisper, halted and looked back at us. “Yes?” he said mildly.

I struggled dizzily for words and found the right ones at last. “Frater Antony, you ought to know—that we’ve all read the Book of Skulls—”

There.

The frater’s mask of unshakable equanimity slipped for just a moment. I saw a brief flash of—surprise? puzzlement? confusion?—in his dark, enigmatic eyes. But he recovered quickly. “Indeed?” he said, voice as firm as before. “The Book of Skulls? What a strange name that is! What, I wonder, is the Book of Skulls?” The question was meant as a rhetorical one. He turned on me a brilliant, short-lived smile, like a lighthouse beam cutting momentarily through dense fog. But, after the fashion of jesting Pilate, he would not stay for an answer. Calmly he went out, indicating with a casual flip of his fingers that we were to follow him.

23. Ned

We have something to stew about, now, but at least they’re letting us do our stewing in style. A private room for each of us, austere but handsome, quite comfortable. The skullhouse is much bigger than it seemed from outside: the two rear wings are extremely long, and there may be as many as fifty or sixty rooms in the entire complex, excluding the possibility of more subterranean vaults. No room that I’ve seen has a window. The central chambers, what I think of as “the public rooms,” are open-roofed, but the side units in which the fraters live are completely enclosed. If there’s an air-conditioning system, I’m unaware of it, having seen no vents or pipes, but when you pass from one of the roofless rooms to an enclosed one you are conscious of a sharp and definite drop in temperature, from desert-hot to motel room–comfortable. The architecture is simple: bare rectangular rooms, the walls and ceilings made of rough, unplastered tawny sandstone, uninterrupted by moldings or visible beams or other decorative contrivances. All the floors are of dark slate; there are no carpets or rugs. There seems to be little in the way of furniture; my room offers only a low cot made of logs and thick rope and a short squat storage chest, I suppose for my belongings, fashioned quite superbly from a hard black wood. What does break up the prevailing starkness is a fantastic collection of bizarre pre-Columbian (I guess) masks and statuettes, mounted on walls, standing in corners, set into recessed niches—terrifying faces, all angles and harsh planes, gorgeous in their monstrosity. The imagery of the skull is ubiquitous. I have no idea what led that newspaper reporter to think that this place was occupied by “monks” practicing Christianity; the clipping Eli has speaks of the decor as “a combination of medieval Christian style and what seems to be Aztec motifs,” but, though the Aztec influence is obvious enough, where is the Christian? I see no crosses, no stained glass windows, no images of the saints or the Holy Family, none of the proper paraphernalia. The whole texture of the place is pagan, primitive, prehistoric; this could be a temple to some ancient Mexican god, even to a Neanderthal deity, but Jesus simply isn’t on the premises, or I’m not Boston Irish. Perhaps the clean cold austere refinement of the place gave the newspaperman the feel of a medieval monastery—the echoes, the hint of Gregorian chant in the silent hallways—but without the symbolism of Christianity there can’t be Christianity, and such symbols as are on display here are alien ones. The total effect of the place is one of strange luxury combined with immense stylistic restraint: they have understated everything, but a sense of power and grandeur bursts from the walls, the floors, the endlessly receding corridors, the bare rooms, the sparse and lean furnishings.

Cleanliness is evidently important here. The plumbing arrangements are extraordinary, with bubbling fountains everywhere in the public rooms and the larger halls. My own room has a capacious sunken tub lined with rich green slate, which looks suitable for a maharajah or a Renaissance Pope. As he delivered me to my room, Frater Antony suggested that I might like to take a bath, and his polite statement had the force of an order. Not that I needed much urging, for the hike through the desert had coated me miserably with grime. I treated myself to a long voluptuous soaking, wriggling on the glossy slate, and when I came out I discovered that my filthy, sweaty clothing had disappeared, every scrap, shoes and all. To replace it I found on my cot a pair of worn-looking but clean blue shorts of the sort Frater Antony was wearing. Very well: the philosophy here seems to be that less is more. Good riddance to shirts and sweaters; I’ll settle for shorts over my naked loins. We have come to an interesting place.

The question of the moment is, Does this place have any connection with Eli’s medieval manuscript and with the supposed cult of immortality? I think it does, but I can’t yet be sure of that. It was impossible not to admire the frater’s sense of theatricality, his wondrously ambiguous handling of the moment when Eli sprang the Book of Skulls on him a few hours ago. His delicious, reverberating curtain line;
The Book of Skulls? What, I wonder, is the Book of Skulls?
And a fast exit, allowing him to take possession of all sides of the situation at once. Did he genuinely not know about the Book of Skulls? Why, then, did he seem so jarred, just for an instant, when Eli mentioned it? Can the fondness for skull imagery here be just a coincidence? Has the Book of Skulls been forgotten by its own adherents? Is the frater playing with us, trying to induce uncertainty in us? The esthetics of teasing: how much great art is built on that principle! So we will be teased for a while. I would like to go down the hall and confer with Eli; his mind is quick, he interprets nuances well. I want to know if he was thrown into perplexity by Frater Antony’s response to his statement. But I suppose I’ll have to wait till later to talk to Eli. Just now my door appears to be locked.

24. Timothy

Creepier and creepier. That mile-long hallway. Those skulls all over the place, the Mexican-looking death-masks. Figures who’ve been flayed and still can grin, faces with skewers jabbed through their tongues and cheeks, bodies with flesh below and skulls on top. Lovely. And that weird old man, speaking to us in a voice that could have come out of a machine. I almost think he’s some kind of robot. He can’t be real, with that smooth tight skin of his, that bald head that looks as if it’s never had any hair, those peculiar glossy eyes—sheesh!

At least the bath was good. Although they’ve taken my clothes. My wallet, my credit cards, everything. I don’t like that angle much, though I suppose there isn’t much they can do with my things here. Maybe they just mean to launder them. I don’t mind wearing these shorts instead. A little tight around the ass, maybe—I guess I’m bigger than their usual run of guests—but in this heat it’s all right to cut down on clothes.

What I do mind is being locked in my room. That bit reminds me of too many horror movies out of TV. Now a secret panel opens in the floor, yeah, and the sacred cobra comes slithering up, hissing and spitting. Or the poison gas enters by way of a hidden vent. Well, I don’t mean that seriously. I don’t think any harm’s going to come to us. Still, it’s offensive to be locked up, if you’re a guest. Is this the hour for some very special prayer that they don’t want us to interrupt? Could be. I’ll wait an hour, and then I’ll try to force the door. Looks pretty fucking solid, though, a big burly slab of wood.

No television set in this motel. Nothing much to read, except this booklet they’ve left on the floor next to my cot. And that’s something I’ve read before. The Book of Skulls, no less. Typewritten, in three languages, Latin, Spanish, English. Cheerful decoration on the front cover: skull and crossbones. Hi ho for the Jolly Roger! But I’m really not amused. And inside the booklet, there’s all the stuff Eli read us, that melodramatic crap about the eighteen Mysteries. The phrasing’s different from his translation, but the meaning’s the same. Much talk of eternal life, but much talk of death, too. Too much.

I’d like to get out of this place, if they ever unlock the door. A gag is a gag is a gag, and maybe it seemed a fun idea last month to go tear-assing out west on Eli’s say-so, but now that I’m here I can’t understand what could have led me to get into this. If they’re for real, which I continue to doubt, I don’t want any part of them, and if they’re just a bunch of ritual-happy fanatics, which seems quite likely, I still don’t want any part of them. I’ve had two hours here and I think that’s about enough. All these skulls blow my mind. The locked-door number, too. The weird old man. Okay, boys, that’ll do. Timothy’s ready to go home.