William H. Hallahan - (29 page)

Throughout the long session Brendan watched the three monks. When
he went to bed at lights-out, his resentment grew. He hadn't seen
even one word pass among the three of them the whole evening.

In the morning he saw them again in the chapel. Nothing had
happened. After breakfast the monks dispersed to their morning tasks.
Brendan found Vincent in the library, doing the glass panes once
again. He passed him by. Down the corridor he found Brother Zen,
sleeves rolled up, cassock skirts tucked up in his waist belt,
mopping the tile floor. He tried to keep working with his mop until
Brendan took it from him.

"You came here looking for God," he said to Zen. "And
you didn't find him. So you went looking for a demon. And you found
one. Isn't that true?"

Zen said nothing. He stared fixedly at Brendan with his hands at
his sides.

"If you found a demon, does that mean hell exists? And if
hell exists, does that mean heaven exists? And if heaven and hell
exist, does that mean punishment and rewards exist? What do you think
the punishment will be for bringing a demon on earth, then shunning
your responsibility, leaving it to destroy the whole planet? If a
demon exists, Brother Zen, accountability exists. For you. And for
Vincent. And for Beaupré." Brendan handed him his mop back.

He watched them for the rest of the day and evening. Before
lights-out he saw them talking in the hallway. Beaupré was rocking
from side to side and wringing his hands. Zen was shaking a fat
Oriental finger under the stubborn nose of Brother Vincent.

The weather had changed again. And during the evening rain had
begun to fall. It drummed on the slate roofing under a variable wind.
By lights-out the wind had hardened from the northwest and the rain
changed to snow. They were back in the deep freeze again.

Brendan left his cubicle door ajar and lay in his bed wideawake.
It was nearly 1 a.m. before his vigil paid off. He heard them in the
corridor, moving slowly in their cassocks and sandals. Down the hall
the outside door latch clicked.

It was barely discernible a few minutes later, a faint light in
the greenhouse. They must have lit a candle. Brendan left his
cubicle, went down the corridor through the kitchen to the food
storage room. There he went to the window closest to the greenhouse
and stood in the dark, watching through the snowfall. One end of the
greenhouse glowed like a large lantern and he could see their
silhouettes moving to and fro in front of the candle. The three of
them were there. Brother Zen seemed to be drawing the pentacle while
Vincent held the book open. Brother Beaupré held the candle.

At last, Brother Zen straightened up. The three of them stood in a
semicircle, Vincent and Zen holding the book, Beaupré holding the
candle, and they read a passage in unison. When they finished the
incantation, they looked around the greenhouse expectantly.

Nothing happened. They read the incantation again. And again
nothing happened.

They discussed the situation briefly. Then Zen took the book and
Beaupré held the candle. Zen held his head up and spoke the words
through a rounded mouth. Brendan could see his neck cords stand out.
Vincent kept his eye on the glass door of the greenhouse.

It came without warning. The creature simply sailed over the wall
and landed near the hotbeds. It moved with astonishing speed: The
three monks barely had a chance to adjust their eyes when it was upon
them. The candle went out and in the dark Brendan heard glass
breaking.

He hurried to the greenhouse and turned the light switch. Beaupré
lay still upon the floor. Vincent was rolling in pain and Zen was
nowhere in sight. Shattered glass was everywhere. The creature itself
was gone.

Brendan knelt beside Beaupré. His head had been twisted and his
neck had been broken. He lay on his belly with his head facing the
roof. He'd been killed instantly. Brendan next located Brother Zen.
He had been thrown through the wall of the glasshouse and lay out on
the snow. Dazed and disoriented, he was trying to get up. In a moment
he stood and walked about, rubbing his rump.

"It's gotten too strong for us," Brother Vincent said.
"I think it's here to stay."
 
 

There were reporters from all over, and television cameras. And
hordes of curious. Brother Paul later said that the wall saved the
monastery, that and a sudden onset of warm weather that turned the
lake ice to a slush. It was too dangerous to walk on, and too thick
for boating. The monastery became unreachable for ten days. And by
then the crowds were gone, hooting after something else, somewhere
else.

The monks didn't tell the police about the Tipperary pentacle or
the provenance of the creature. No one asked them. No one could think
of asking them, for no one knew what the creature was, except the
three monks and Brendan.

Beaupré's death had a crushing effect on Brendan. He blamed
himself for it. He had chided the three of them for hiding from a
demon. Yet that's what he was doing. He had pressured them to fight
the demon. Yet that was exactly what he feared to do. And now Beaupré
was dead. And the monster still loose.

For the first time Brendan took a look at himself and told himself
an unpleasant truth. He was a coward. And a hypocrite.

For a while his deep shame caused him to avoid Vincent and Zen. It
was difficult to look them in the eyes. But they were grieving,
frightened and guilt-ridden and they never noticed him.

Worst of all for Brendan, he didn't know what to do next.
 
 

The sun grew noticeably stronger during the next week, and in the
greenhouse Brendan could feel its warmth on his back even on the hazy
days when the sunlight was weak. Winter was waning rapidly.

One day he was mixing peat moss with earth as he sat on a
three-legged stool. His trowel scraped away the dirt from the floor
and exposed faint traces of chalk from the infamous pentacle.

He looked at it with dismay. This is where the creature had leaped
into the world. Paxton's
Book of Demons
had done that. What a
tragedy that volume had caused. Vincent had said, "I curse the
day we opened it." And he would go on cursing that day until he
died.

Staring at the faint chalk lines, Brendan had an arresting
thought. If Paxton's
Book of Demons
could teach Beaupré and
Zen and Vincent how to raise a fiend from hell, could it teach him
how to battle Satan? He turned his head and looked through the
greenhouse panes to the window of the library. Brother Luke's head
was just visible where he sat over his lettering.

Could it? Was there a page in Paxton on how to fight Satan?
Brendan jammed the trowel into the peat moss and stood up. He stared
at the library window. The hairs on his neck prickled.
 
 

Brendan waited until late in the afternoon before going inside the
library. Brother Luke was still bending over his lettering, his huge
back turned to the door, working in complete silence by the fading
sunlight of the winter day.

Neither spoke as Brendan took down Paxton's
Book of Demons
.
He sat doubtfully with it in his lap, remembering Vincent's words
vividly. "I curse the day we opened it." But if it could
teach him how to battle Satan, he would never curse that day, would
he?

He flipped some of the pages. The book was written in Middle
English, filled with long-dead words. He got down a Middle English
lexicon to help him. Then he began with the title page. It said:
 
 

The Book of Demons. Being an Inquiry into the Ways and
Means that Demons, Witches, Warlocks and their Surrogates Intrude in
Our Lives, with Especial Attention to the Incubus, Succubus and Their
Familiars and Consorts, and also Containing the Best and Most Useful
Recipes, Nostrums, Prayers, Imprecations, Interdictions, Curses, and
Spells, to Control Them; and Describing Various and Sundry Devices
for Warding off Their Attacks, and Containing a Learned Disquisition
on Benevolent Creatures of the Supernatural World and Their Uses,
Titles, and Functions, with Instructions for Summoning Their Aid in
Dealing with These Noisome, Loathesome Creatures from Hell and
Including a Separate Passage Dealing with Methods for Foiling the
Arch Fiend Himself, the Devil Who is Called Satan, Compiled from the
Most Celebrated Authors both Ancient and Modern.

Brendan looked up at Brother Luke's back, then at the failing day
outside. He was almost afraid to open the book further. If the title
page was correct, inside would be a recipe for coping with Satan
himself.

He sat with the book in his lap for a few minutes, fearing to let
his hopes rise. Then he reopened the cover and started to read. On
the margins and interspersed throughout the text were drawings of
fearsome creatures, witches, warlocks, Satanic ceremonies, devils
tormenting humans, churches burning, piles of skulls, and angels
confronting specters.

There were prayers and spells, curses and recipes for coping with
multitudinous mischiefs by demons: How to cure a demon-infested cow
of curdled milk. How to prevent evil spirits from replacing a baby
with a changeling. How to exorcise demons that infest a barn. How to
drown a witch.

Brendan knocked a knuckle on the arm of his wooden chair and
opened the section on Satan. Paxton saved his greatest eloquence for
this section. He ran out of words, synonyms and expletives as his
rage spluttered across the pages.

Most of the mischief done on this earth was not done by Satan,
Paxton said, but by his subjects and lesserlings. Satan intruded in
the affairs of man only on momentous occasions. Many of his
depredations were really done by one of his lieutenants, particularly
Beelzebub.

Satan presided over such affairs as the seduction of a pope, the
stealing of a saint's soul, causing wars among nations, breeding
internecine strife within the Church most holy. His greatest
mischief--after Eden, of course--was the temptation of Christ.

Most men can cope with a fiend, given the right methods, for all
fiends have their vulnerabilities. But few men have ever coped with
Satan. The Bishop of Clontarf did--he defeated Satan roundly. So did
several ascetic monks, a few original apostles and one or two others.
No woman ever did.

The only way to cope with Satan was to summon the Magus. The Magus
would teach the victim the correct way to confront Satan. And even
then, with the help of the Magus, men did not always win.

The drawings showed the Magus teaching the Bishop of Clontarf, and
the Bishop then pummeling Satan with a ò crucifix.

There were inconsistencies and missing facts in Paxton's
description of the Magus. He had included at least a dozen drawings
of the Magus with his large white dog. One caption said: "With
heer redde on his heed and eyed in bleue. The dogge is hight
Repentaunce." His hair red on his head and eyed in blue. His dog
is called Repentance.

Brendan decided that his mother really must have seen the Magus in
Ireland the day before Brendan was born: a red-haired priest, she
said, with blue eyes and an enormous white dog. Already the Magus
seemed closer to him.

Brendan studied the dog. It was a huge mastiff, and in one drawing
he was baring his teeth at a hawk.

The Magus was attired just like a monk, in a white cassock. Sewn
on the front of the cassock was a full-length cross made of dark
fabric and stretching from shoulder to shoulder and from throat to
toe. In one drawing he was menacing demons. At his feet was a
pentacle. Several demons were falling through the cracks in the
earth. "Get thee to Hell!" the caption said. And the Magus
was sternly pointing in that direction. Repentance was biting one of
the demons on his forked tail.

The Magus, Paxton said, was an eternal wanderer of the earth, who
had fallen out of heaven and was seeking the pathway back. He was the
biggest foe on earth of Satan and of his tribe. Hundreds were his
acts, all bent on thwarting the work of the fiends of hell. The Magus
was to be called upon whenever Satan's presence was suspected. He
then gave a list of the Magus's many titles. When Brendan read it, he
sat in stunned silence. For on the list--which included Patron Angel
of Farm Animals, Protector of Dogs, Keeper of the Seal of Pym,
Protector of Lost Travelers, Benefactor of Monks and Mendicants,
Lover of Mankind--was the most stunning title of all: Champion of the
Purple Aura.

Brendan stared at the words. Champion of the Purple Aura. Paxton
didn't explain the title. Below it was a "Recipe for Summoning
the Magus."

Brendan could sit no longer. He got up, pulled on his coat and
went out into the bitingly cold air of sunset to pace up and down in
the footpaths worn in the snow. Several monks, bent against the cold
in their cowls, walked ahead of him.

It was beautiful there. A long flight of crows flew by on the
other side of the frozen lake, cawing to each other, heading for
their nightly roost. The whole western sector of the sky was a
deep-rose color as the sun set Brendan watched his frosty breath hang
in the still air.

He'd come to love the monastery. The warmth and peace inside, set
in the midst of a terrible northern winter, filled his heart with
great affection for the other monks. But he yearned to be with Anne.
She was never out of his mind. And now he felt a faint stirring of
hope. Might he see her again? Paxton had shown how to raise a demon.
Could he help Brendan? He had to find out.

Brendan was thoroughly chilled when he went back into the
monastery. He was afraid to reopen Paxton for fear of disappointment.
Maybe he'd misread it. Maybe he'd made a bad translation.

He went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee and
watched the sun drop behind the distant mountains. Darkness came
abruptly. At last he stood up and returned to the library. Brother
Luke was gone. His desk was put away and the room seemed colder.
Hostile almost.