The Sixth Key (40 page)

‘I was scared . . . I was confused. Think
about it, Rahn, I could have just gone back to Geneva and let them kill you,
but I didn’t. Don’t forget, they killed that man in my room to show me they
meant business.’

‘So it wasn’t a case of mistaken identity?’

‘No.’

‘Liar!’

‘For God’s sake, don’t be like that, Rahn!’

‘Will the two of you shut up!’ Deodat said, at
the peak of irritation. ‘Rahn, try to leverage off the step to stand up.’

Rahn tried to get onto his knees by bringing
his tied feet under him and leaning his side on the step, but he was fettered
by their collective weight working as an opposing force. It was no use. Rahn
could hardly see now for the smoke and he was completely exhausted; the events
of the last days had caught up with him.

He gave up, defeated. ‘What about all that
talk about liking your boring life?’

‘It was all rubbish. I hate my life!’ La Dame
coughed. ‘Dull routine. Endless days. But this . . . I could have done without this
. . . Come on, Rahn, let’s not die with this coming between us.’

Rahn’s eyes were watering. ‘You mean, like the
gun you were pointing at my head?’

‘It wasn’t even loaded! I didn’t know they
were waiting—’

‘You didn’t theorise that it might be in the realm
of probability?’

The house upstairs erupted in a conflagration.
They tried one last time to squirm out of the ropes but they were too tight and
the knot would have made a sailor proud. There was nothing sharp they could try
to cut the rope with. They were trapped.

‘I don’t want to die with this on my
conscience, Rahn,’ La Dame said, emphatic for a dying man. ‘Say you forgive
me!’

Rahn’s lungs were burning from irritation, his
lips were dry and he was sweating. ‘For God’s sake, La Dame!’

‘Say it!’

‘Alright! I forgive you!’

Deodat said, wheezing, ‘It’s over!’

Rahn knew it was true. He held his breath and
closed his eyes. He saw himself in a cemetery, pointing to a gravestone on
which stood the Leoncetophaline of the Countess P’s pendulum clock. He sank then,
for the third time in so many days, into a black mine, into a womb of darkness,
into that tomb . . . He was going to die – perhaps he was already dead?
But something made his eyes open briefly. There was a figure in the smoke and
flames. It was coming towards him. He heard the sound of a bee . . . but it
wasn’t a bee at all. It was Esclarmonde de Foix! She had returned from the land
of Prester John! Her hair flowed white about her face, she wore a crown of
stars, and in her belly there was an effulgence like the sun. She stood on a
crescent moon, whose body crushed a great red dragon with seven heads. She
would take him out of this momentary terror and together . . .

‘You certainly make it hard for me to keep you
out of trouble, Otto Rahn!’ she said.

THE ISLAND OF THE DEAD

There was a knock on the door. I looked at my watch –
twenty to midnight. A voice came from the other side. It was the Irish monk. I
was to get dressed and to go to the library.

I found the Writer of Letters waiting for me
with a coat and scarf in his hands.

‘You’ll need these; come, I have something to
show you.’

He led me out into the fog-laden cemetery by
the light of a lamp, without so much as an apology for the late hour. I asked
him what we were doing and he was effusive in his reply.

‘It’s time to solve the puzzle,’ he said. ‘I
hope you’re up to it?’

I wasn’t about to have him think otherwise.
‘Of course.’

It was deathly cold. I blew into my hands to
warm them. There were no sounds except for the hooting of an owl in a nearby
tree and the gentle lapping of the lagoon. My drowsiness had by now completely
deserted me and I kept a sharp eye out in case this man was planning to kill me
– as a macabre solution to the puzzle of death that I had come here to
solve. I didn’t want to die but I knew that if I were to despoil the Writer of
Letters of his dramatic end I would equally despoil myself of the final
conclusion, the master work.

‘This is all very dramatic,’ I managed to say
without sounding too nervous.

‘Dramatic? Yes, metatheatre is dramatic,’ was
his cold reply. ‘But you have always tried to keep reality at bay, isn’t that
so? Living your life as if it were a work of fiction. No, my desire is not to
create drama but to unveil your life. Now, where did we leave Rahn last night?’

‘He was dying in the fire and dreaming he was
in a cemetery . . .’ I looked at him, and it occurred to me – the
Leoncetophaline! ‘Surely you’re not about to tell me he was dreaming of this
cemetery, are you?’ I asked him, unable to prevent a chuckle at this new
absurdity.

‘I don’t know, was he? Why don’t you tell me
how the story ends?’

‘Me?’ I said, surprised.

‘Yes; just write the end. If there is anyone
capable of judging your abilities it’s me. Perhaps this is the test you spoke
of? Could you see yourself replacing me on this island, in this library of
galleries?’

I looked at him. He wasn’t joking. I realised
I was being cheated of my ending. Perhaps that had been his intention all
along, to drag me like a laboratory mouse, through his labyrinthine galleries,
only to deny me my hard-earned cheese at the end.

‘Think of it as an exercise in reasoning,’ he
said. ‘What is the most likely thing to happen next?’

I was so annoyed I could say nothing in reply.

He paused and lifted the lamp to look at my
face. I returned the look with a wild stare. I was angry, resentful.

‘You’re upset. You thought I was going to make
it easy for you, didn’t you? Every story gets the end it deserves, don’t you
agree? Now, what is the end this one deserves?’

‘I have no idea!’

‘Perhaps it would help you to see another
gallery, then? I can tell it to you as we walk. It is the gallery called
Penitence.’

‘ .
. . and, as the saying goes,
the dead to the grave and the living to the loaf.’

Miguel de Cervantes, Don
Quixote

The snow fell over the mountains in icy
sheets, making the promenade dangerously glassy. Even so, Madame Dénarnaud
insisted on wheeling the body of the Abbé Saunière to the greenhouse herself,
so as to be alone with him one last time.

She was dressed in black silk. It had cost a
fine fortune but it was the latest fashion in funerary wear from Paris. After
all, people expected it. They would soon be arriving from every place to see
the body and they would leave after taking a tassel from his gown, as was the
custom – as if those old clothes had been impregnated with power. She
smiled at the thought of it now – if only they knew.

She could hear the bell-ringer’s son digging
the grave in the cemetery, cursing the frozen ground. Yesterday, before the
abbé had taken his last torturous breath, Abbé Rivière of Espéraza had come to
hear Saunière’s confession, but upon hearing it his face had paled and he had
refused to give the abbé the prepared wafers and wine. It had delighted her to
see the villagers’ faces when they heard of it. They believed that Saunière had
whispered something diabolical to the priest, but she knew Saunière had said
nothing into that hairy ear – because he knew nothing. Yes, that greedy
priest from Espéraza had been hoping to hear, in Saunière’s confession, how he
had come by his fortune. When the confession was not forthcoming he decided to
take his revenge on Saunière by withholding the sacrament. In the end, Madame
Dénarnaud had given it to him herself, in secret.

Well, she thought, let them all imagine that
Saunière was the mastermind of everything: the refurbishment of the church; the
building of the villa and the tower, the greenhouse and the gardens. As long as
this was what they believed, she could continue with her work unnoticed.

In truth, her life had been filled with
predestined events: at birth, she had been accepted into that section of the
Grand Orient created especially for women; at the age of seven, her mother,
also a member of the Lodge, had taken her to Toulouse to be initiated; and as a
young woman, she was schooled to be the next Madame Blavatsky, the celebrated
Russian theosophist. But she did not allow herself to become like that woman,
who had been used by various groups for their own ends. She had decided long
ago that she would do as she pleased; she would owe allegiance to no group!

In the beginning her powers had been crude and
unsophisticated. Occasionally she would lapse into a trance in which
disembodied spirits spoke through her; sometimes she saw visions of future
events; and at other times she would write long sentences, pages and pages of
them, automatically. But these childhood aptitudes had graduated, under expert
instruction, into powers that were polished and chillingly exact. Moreover, she
was a handsome woman, possessed of the dark good looks of her heretic
ancestors, and intelligent enough to use them to enhance her talents. These,
combined with her knowledge of the lesser magic of perfume-blending had taken
her far.

Yes, she had been much admired by various
suitors, and there had been many marriage proposals, but she had ignored them
with a cold disdain. The ignorant, miscreant villagers of Rennes-le-Château had
thought her a strange girl to pass up such advantages, choosing instead to
remain a poor shepherdess, who wanted nothing more than to tend her family’s
little herd of goats or to work occasionally in the hat factory at Espéraza.
They did not know that she was waiting for her time to come.

The day she and her mother had spied the
disaffected Saunière toiling over the road to their village with his bags in
his hands, dressed in his black cassock and hat, looking like a man who has
been deprived of his birthright, they knew they had found their priest.
Immediately Abbé Boudet, a member of their order, was informed and the entire
affair was set into motion.

Saunière’s arrogance had made him a willing
servant, but they could not have known the extent of his incautious nature, or
how obsessed he would become with finding the missing treasure for himself. His
task had been merely to find the parchment and leave clues in his church for
those who would follow, but his tongue was loose.

She bent down to look at the corpse’s face. It
still bore some resemblance to Saunière: the dimpled chin, the shock of dark
hair, the brooding mouth. He never knew the true goal of the secret and yet he
had been so full of his own importance! She wiped away some fluid from his
shrivelled lips. And to think he had imagined himself an initiate! His journey
to England had made him powerful, but it had been on her behalf and for another
purpose entirely.

No, it had been a preparation for her task.
For she had met the chosen initiate only two years before in Vienna, where at
the time he had been undergoing instruction by members of the Thule Gesellschaft.
They had seen in the young man called Adolf Hitler the perfect combination of
stupidity and fervour, an empty vessel for the future impregnation of the seed
of Sorat. Oh, it was exciting and difficult and frustrating to anticipate, to
wait. But in the cards she had seen the one who would come to unlock the secret
whereabouts of the key, the one destined to be tenet – and nothing could
be accomplished without him. She would know him by his willingness to enter
Hell. A question put to all true initiates.

She adjusted the gown on Saunière’s shoulders,
smoothing her hands over it and picking off some stray lint. She wondered what
the villagers would say when they found out that their illustrious priest had
died a pauper, his only income his priestly stipend. That the Villa Bethany,
the Tour Magdala; everything had always belonged to her? Even now his spirit
had joined the circle of those whose spirits would be used by the initiate
– the circle of those who had willingly chosen to die and even those who
were murdered to cleanse the world of riffraff. It had not taken much to
convince Saunière to sell his soul and to join that circle in return for
eternal life. They had enacted the ritual of excarnation, of suicide, in the
crypt of the dames using the secret of sator, arepo, tenet, opera, rotas. It
had been accomplished! The stroke had hit him in a matter of days. They always
suffered strokes – so that way the spirit left the body gradually . . .
excruciatingly. She didn’t know how many had partaken of the bread and wine
blessed by Satan to join the circle of the undead but she knew they were
countless. Saunière was only one among many! How many masses for the dead had
he conducted himself, using those wafers, trapping the unwary in that realm of
midday, between life and death? She could feel his agonised presence nearby.
Immortality has its price. Penitence!

People were arriving. She could see them in
their finery, in their silks and furs and top hats, threading through the
snow-covered garden. She looked down at her wrist, the snake entwining the
anchor was showing slightly and she adjusted her lace-edged sleeve over it and
donned the mask of the grieving housekeeper. With her heart full of an imminent
thrill, she left the conservatory to greet them.