The Poisoned Pilgrim: A Hangman's Daughter Tale (58 page)

Suffocated to death on the wrong side of a door leading into a blooming garden.

“Mama, when can we leave?”

Magdalena awakened with a start from her dark musings and smiled wearily at her son. “We… we can’t go, unfortunately, Peter. Father is sick and I don’t know how to open this door.”

“But all you have to do is press on the stone.”

“What?”

She jumped up—she’d almost forgotten that Peter had been here before. It was possible the boy had observed how the door was opened.

“Which stone, Peter?” She took him up in her arms and looked him directly in the eye. “Listen now. This is very important. Which stone do I have to push?”

Silently Peter pointed to a square stone about as large as a fist, which protruded a finger’s breadth from the wall. Magdalena hadn’t noticed it before among all the other irregular stonework, but now it really stood out. The image of a laughing face, etched into its surface, seemed to jeer at her.

“
This
stone?” she asked cautiously.

Peter nodded, and Magdalena pressed the square button. Silently the stone slid back into the space behind it, and there was a click as the heavy wooden door opened a crack. Heavy rain could be heard now on the other side, accompanied by thunder and lightning that lit up the passageway for a moment.

“You… you are wonderful, Peter,” Magdalena laughed. “For this, you can have honey cakes, as many as you can eat. But first I have to get your father out of here. Come, the fresh air will surely do him some good.”

When they turned around, Magdalena was relieved to see Simon had already gotten onto his knees. He swayed like a reed in the wind, but he didn’t fall. Breathing heavily, he reached out to his wife.

“I ccccaaaan… wallllk all by myyyself,” he croaked. “By myyyself…”

Magdalena ran to help him before he could fall. “That’s what you think,” she replied, pulling him up and guiding him carefully to the door.

When the door opened all the way, they found themselves staring into another cave.

Magdalena uttered a brief cry of disappointment. She was sure they’d just entered another underground passageway, but then she felt the wind on her face, heard the rain coming down, and smelled the flowers in the garden. She realized they’d entered the artificial grotto the abbot had shown her just two days before. In the middle was the basin with the statuettes of the Greek gods. The door through which they’d entered the grotto was covered with gray plaster so as to blend in perfectly with the rock.

Peter had already run into the garden and was climbing jubilantly onto one of the little walls as the rain drummed down on him, washing the soot from his face. He waved to his mother cheerfully, seeming to have survived the recent terror unscathed.

Magdalena felt a lump in her throat when she thought of her younger son. Where had Matthias taken little Paul? Was he even still alive?

She was startled by something pressing against her shoulder. Simon was propping himself up against her. “I ccccaaaan… wallllk all by myyyself,” he stammered again.

Simon let go of her and tottered like an automaton into the garden.

The medicus had walked only a few yards when they heard a mighty rumbling. At first Magdalena thought it was thunder, but then the earth beneath their feet began to shake and large rocks came rolling down the hill into the garden. An especially heavy boulder crashed directly in front of her, burying the basin with the Greek statuettes.

Behind Magdalena, a rumbling could be heard in the passageways
below, sounding as if hell had in fact opened its gates. Instinctively the hangman’s daughter threw herself down onto the damp lawn and watched as the little grotto behind her finally collapsed.

Hic est porta ad loca inferna
…

The green fire had finally reached the cesspit below.

Jakob Kuisl and Virgilius held their breath as the footsteps on the creaking staircase approached the belfry. The steps were slow and calm; whoever was groping his way up evidently had time on his hands. Or was he too tired and old to move any faster?

Finally a black hood appeared in the opening. The figure continued climbing until he’d arrived at the landing, his torch bathing the belfry in flickering glow. At last his thin, arthritic fingers pulled back a scarf that had been obscuring his face.

Virgilius shouted out with surprise.

Before them stood the Andechs abbot. His face was as deeply furrowed as parched earth, and his thin tonsure as white as snow. Maurus Rambeck seemed to have aged years in the last few weeks.

“Maurus,” Virgilius said. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to prevent you from causing any more harm,” the abbot replied firmly. “If that’s still possible. Let the child go.” Pointing to the small crying boy, he walked slowly toward the watchmaker.

“Never!” Virgilius shouted. He drew back and held the struggling child over the stormy void. “Stay where you are, Maurus. Even you won’t stop me from bringing back my Aurora.”

“You’re sick, Virgilius,” Father Maurus said softly. “Very sick, and this is the end. Accept that; put yourself in God’s hands. Don’t bring any more sins down on yourself or this monastery.”

“But… but you helped me,” Virgilius pleaded. “You yourself wanted Aurora to come back to me.”

“I never wanted that,” replied the abbot, his voice rising. “I wanted all this madness to end. Yes, to save you, but also to save the monastery. I see now that was an error.”

When Kuisl stepped out of the darkness, the abbot noticed him for the first time. Brother Maurus raised his slim eyebrows in astonishment, and his tired but intelligent eyes flashed with emotion.

“You’re here, too?” he asked. Then the monk regained his composure and a faint smile appeared on his weathered face. “I should have expected as much. Your burgomaster is right; you really are an annoying snoop. But what does it matter? It’s all over now.”

“You knew all along, didn’t you?” the hangman retorted. “You knew your brother was behind all this.”

Maurus Rambeck shook his head wearily. “Not at first, though I’ll admit I had my suspicions. Virgilius had been pestering me for weeks about the hosts. He wanted me to get them for him, just for a while, and he would give them back. Naturally I didn’t go along with that.”

“Curses on you, Maurus,” the watchmaker snarled. He’d moved a few steps closer to his brother, the crying child still in his arms. “All these… these problems wouldn’t have come up if you’d just given me the hosts. I could have switched them with other ones. No one would have noticed, and Elisabeth would be back with me again.”

“Forget about your Elisabeth,” Maurus shouted. “Don’t you realize that you can’t bring her back, Virgilius? She’s been dead now for more than thirty years.” The old man drew closer to his younger brother, his eyes flashing with anger. “Elisabeth’s remains are rotting in some cemetery in Augsburg. Her flesh, her red lips, her tender breasts that you longed for so much have all turned to dust long ago. Only her spirit lives on, but you can’t bring that back, either. Only God can do that.”

“No! That… that can’t be! She… she must come back to
me; she just has to.” Virgilius stamped his feet on the ground like an angry child, shaking Paul so violently the boy started screaming. When the hangman advanced, Virgilius ran back to the opening and held the struggling child over the void.

“Get back! Everyone get back!” he screamed. “We’re going to wait for the lightning to come from heaven and bring my woman back to me.” He held his head out to the sky, opened his mouth as if to drink from the falling drops, and closed his eyes to let the water stream down his face.

“Elisabeth was Virgilius’s great love,” Father Maurus tried to explain, looking sadly at his mad brother. “Back then, his name was Markus. He was smart, well-read, and extremely sensitive, and when Elisabeth died, it broke his heart. Our parents thought it would pass, and so did I, but instead things became worse and worse until my brother would no longer even get out of bed or eat or drink. A doctor finally concluded that sending him abroad would help him forget.” He sighed. “So my wealthy father gave him money, and my brother embarked on long voyages. In fact, he seemed to be getting better; he sent us optimistic news from Africa and the West Indies. We should have suspected the madness was still simmering beneath the surface.”

Virgilius started humming a soft melody, the same one his automaton played, but the sound clashed with the crying of the child like a poorly tuned instrument. Kuisl wondered again how he might overpower the watchmaker, but the child was still dangling over the void.

“When my brother came to Andechs and started work here as a watchmaker, I thought he was cured,” Rambeck continued, shaking his head. “But then he built this… this monster.” Disgusted, he pointed at the grinning automaton. “He dressed it like Elisabeth; he even gave it her nickname. It must have been that damned book about golems that sent him over the edge. From that point on there was nothing I or anyone could say to him. He didn’t respond to my letters, so not until I returned from Salzburg
and assumed the position of abbot did I see how bad the situation was. But then it was too late. All he ever wanted was the sacred hosts.”

“And when he didn’t get them, he simply staged an abduction and extorted you,” the hangman replied harshly. “Admit it, you knew he was behind it.”

“I… suspected so. When I found the book in our library about golems, it slowly dawned on me what Virgilius was up to.” The abbot shook his head regretfully. “I knew I could no longer stop him, but I also didn’t want to turn him over to the bailiffs. After all, he’s my brother. They would have tortured him and burned him alive.”

“So instead my friend Nepomuk has to die,” Kuisl growled.

Father Maurus shrugged apologetically. “The whole thing was like a little trickle that grows and grows until a river just carries you away. It was driving me crazy. When you caught me in Virgilius’s house, I was on the point of confessing, but I still had hope you might be able to stop him, that I could learn where he was hiding out.”

As Virgilius continued humming the automaton’s melody, Kuisl watched him cautiously, but Paul was still dangling over the void, crying.

“It wasn’t Virgilius who dug up the dead monk in the cemetery; it was you, and you set fire to him and threw him in the well,” Kuisl thundered now at the abbot. “You were afraid we’d catch on to what he was doing. Admit it.”

“That’s true,” Maurus smiled. “It seemed too dangerous to have you turn him in to the judge in Weilheim, so I set fire to the corpse of our dearly departed brother Quirin, who’d been suffering from consumption, and placed one of Virgilius’s walking sticks beside it. I even cut off Quirin’s ring finger so he would look just like Virgilius. After all, a corpse can’t commit a murder, can it?” He winked at the hangman. “Tell me how you figured it out.”

“It was you yourself who raised my suspicion when you found the body in the well so quickly,” Kuisl replied. “Besides, how could a hunchback with a walking stick have dug up a grave? And there were no prints in the ground from a cane. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was this handkerchief.”

The abbot looked bewildered. “What handkerchief?”

“Alongside the grave we found a lace handkerchief with the initial
A
. My superstitious son-in-law thought it belonged to Aurora.”

“Oh, that?” Rambeck laughed softly, shaking his head again. “I must have lost the handkerchief near the grave.
A
stands for
abbot.
Every abbot in this monastery receives such cloths, along with gloves, napkins, and other such frilly things. They all bear this insignia.”

Virgilius’s humming finally stopped. The hunchbacked watchmaker’s eyes were still closed as he held the boy out in the rain like a sacrificial offering.

“I… I understand,” Virgilius murmured suddenly as if in a trance. “I finally understand. There can be no new life until an old one dies. It all makes sense. You here, Maurus, are the messenger of Christ, and the hangman is a messenger from hell—and then this boy. Above all the boy. God sent him to me.”

There was another blinding flash of lightning as Virgilius stepped just a bit closer to the opening. Solemnly, he held the crying child up to the black clouds.

“O, God of vengeance, take this living sacrifice from me and give me back my Aurora,” he pleaded.

Then he dropped the boy over the side.

Like corpses, Magdalena and Simon lay motionless on the ground of the monastery garden, while Peter played atop the ivy-covered walls, undeterred by the steady drumbeat of rain. Behind them, the last section of the grotto had collapsed, sealing the entrance to the underworld off forever.

Simon coughed and spat phlegm and water, but the cool rain had helped relieve his paralysis somewhat. Now he could even talk, though the words came out with a strange drawl. In faltering sentences, he told Magdalena what had happened in the passageways.

“He took Paul with him,” he gasped. “Along with that damned Matthias. I… I knew right away that that fellow wasn’t to be trusted.”

Magdalena shrugged sadly. “You’re right, but that doesn’t bring our son back. Even if he’s alive, he’s out there somewhere in this storm. If I only knew—” Suddenly she jumped up. “Of course. How could I forget?” she laughed. “This damned fear muddles my mind. They’ve surely gone up to the belfry.”

Simon frowned. “The belfry?”

Magdalena nodded vigorously. “Remember, Simon? It must have been Matthias who almost threw me off the tower. I presume I interrupted him setting up everything for his master’s great experiment. This time, they intend to carry it out. The lightning will surely strike the belfry.”

She quickly stood up and called to Peter, who came running. Anxiously she eyed her husband on the ground. “Can you walk or would you rather…?”

“Stay here while my youngest son is in the hands of a madman?” Simon croaked, struggling to get up. “Are you kidding? I’d rather crawl on all fours to that blasted bell tower.”

“Then let’s go.” Magdalena pulled her husband to his feet, took Peter by the hand, and led them both quickly across the fields and meadows toward the monastery. Simon staggered and stumbled but, with Magdalena’s occasional help, was able to walk on his own. So they moved ahead faster than expected.