Prophecy. An ARKANE thriller. (Book 2) (13 page)

“So where is it?” asked Jake. “We’ll go at once.”
 

Marietti paused. The weight of long years of silence pressed down upon him. To speak the location now would mean that the Devil’s Bible would be out in the open again, a danger to all, but he had no choice. Finally he spoke.
 

“It’s at the Capuchin monastery in Palermo, a fitting place to consider the death that awaits us all.”

“Why? What’s there?” Jake asked.
 

“You need to go and see for yourself,” Marietti replied. “I’ve told the Abbot you’re coming for research purposes. He doesn’t know about the book, none of them do, although many rumors have surfaced over the years. I don’t know where it is within the crypt. You’ll need to figure that out.” He looked at Morgan. “I’m concerned for what could be done with this book. It was never fully studied, never investigated further because of that incident.”

“Why wasn’t it destroyed?” she asked, “if it was that dangerous?”
 

Marietti shook his head, recalling the mistakes of his own past.
 

“The fatal flaw of those that seek spiritual truth is that they cannot destroy even that which is truly evil,” he said. “The book still contains the holy word of God as well as curses, so it could not be burnt. But I’m afraid of what could happen if the knowledge of what it can do was known by others. If Thanatos find it first it could be the trigger for an escalation of their plans.”

“We’ll go as soon as we can get the team together,” Jake said as he stood to leave.
 

“No team, just you two. Get in and out quickly and quietly. Keep this low profile and top secret.” Marietti swiped at the screen, tapping with his fingertip.
 

“There, I’ve opened the Devil’s Bible file for you in the archives. You won’t be able to read the inscriptions, they were all scrubbed from the images in case someone accessed it by mistake. But it should give you somewhere to start, and something to read on your journey.”

Marietti waved them out and turned back to the Dali painting. The lake below Christ was deceptively calm but there was a storm brewing in the distance, bringing chaos and destruction in its wake.
 

Catacombe dei Cappucini, Palermo, Sicily. 9.07pm
 

“So you’re saying that the monastery crypt is full of dead bodies?” asked Jake as their taxi sped from the airport towards the Capuchin monastery. “That’s normal though, right?”
 

“Yes, but these are clothed and more like mummies than skeletons. They still look like people,” Morgan replied.

“That just seems weird. Shame we have to go in after dark.”

Morgan laughed.
 

“You big baby. It wasn’t so long ago we were creeping round Venice after midnight.”

“Yes, but there weren’t any zombie looking bodies there. I prefer my dead people completely dead.”
 

Jake returned to studying the Devil’s Bible file as if he could solve the puzzle of its location by looking harder at it. Morgan gazed out of the window at the city speeding by as memories of that night in Venice replayed in her mind. They had spoken of faith and God in the darkness of the ancient Basilica before the revelation of the Pentecost mural. She had surprised herself that night by sharing stories of her own spiritual experience, but then it had been a magical place and thing were different now. Then she was fighting to save her sister and niece, now she was Jake’s partner at ARKANE, although how well their partnership would work still remained to be seen.
 

Glimpses of Palermo’s architecture reminded Morgan that this ancient city had been founded by the Phoenicians nearly three thousand years ago and had been influenced by every major civilization since then. Even today it was an important port in southern Italy, famous for its gastronomy and architecture as much as for the Sicilian mafia.
 

The taxi pulled up outside the Capuchin catacombs. Jake paid the driver and went to talk to the lone security guard at the entrance.
 
After a moment, he waved them through nonchalantly, clearly settling in for a quiet night listening to sport on the radio.
 

“He says the abbot is in the crypt and will give us the tour before he leaves for the night,” Jake said, as Morgan joined him. They headed down into the crypt in an elevator, then walked down a long corridor at the lowest level which finally opened up into a large room.
 

Morgan looked around in fascination. The bodies exhibited here were fully dressed, some just skulls and others with brown skin stretched around screaming heads like mummified horrors. The bodies were stacked two levels high, hung on hooks to keep them stable in a minstrel’s gallery of mortality. Their clothes were mainly in tatters now, but Morgan could see that they had once been fine fabrics with trimmings of lace and fur. She looked more closely at one of the mummies. His teeth were bared in a grimace, lips shrunken back, eyelashes still lay upon leathery cheeks. He had been posed as if at prayer, in a tribute to the God he expected to meet in the hereafter.
 

“Benvenuti,” a voice said. Morgan and Jake both started, snapped out of their fascinated contemplation. “Scusi, scusi, I didn’t meant to make you jump. I’m Abbot Scorienza. Welcome to the crypt.” The abbot stepped towards them, pulling back the cowl that hid his face. He was an eerie extension of the place, skin tight around his face, his bald head reflecting the dim lights. “You must be from ARKANE. You certainly keep some odd hours for research but, for sure, it’s more peaceful down here at night. We have a lot of tourists in the daytime. The face of death has many admirers.”

“This is an amazing place,” Morgan said, a friendly smile on her face. It would be helpful to have the abbot onside. “Please tell us more about it. These people are clearly not all monks.”

“True, true. The Capuchin monastery outgrew its original cemetery in the sixteenth century. The monks started bringing bodies down here and found that mysterious natural chemicals helped mummify them. It became popular with local aristocrats to have your body placed down here after death, dressed up for the occasion. People would visit the bodies and even change their clothes. If the families continued to pay, the body would stay in these upright galleries. If they stopped paying, they would be lain in the racks.” He pointed to a series of wooden racks, macabre bunk-beds with bodies stacked in them. Morgan noticed one with a rusty crown lying on an embroidered pillow, a hint of scarlet still in the robes he wore.
 

The Abbot led them on through more corridors and Morgan sneezed as the dust of old corpses swirled around them.
 

“How many bodies are down here?” Jake asked.
 

“Around eight thousand. We have separated them into galleries for men, women, children, virgins, priests, monks and professors. We even have the great painter Velasquez.”

“You have children here too?” Morgan said. “That must be so sad.”
 

“You can see for yourself,” the Abbot replied as they turned a corner into a hall with alcoves on the wall and caskets on the floor. Jake walked ahead into the room. She saw him cross himself as he walked to an open casket and looked down at a tiny skeleton still dressed in a christening robe. He bent to look more closely at the tiny body, its skeletal head turned to one side, bony thumb angled towards where the baby mouth would have been. A familiar sadness welled up inside Morgan as she thought of Elian, and of her parents. Elian had been snatched away too soon and thoughts of the children they might have had together glimmered in her mind. Death wasn’t a stranger to her. She had fought against him before and although she would keep fighting, she knew that he would eventually win, but not just yet. She turned back to the Abbot.
 

“Do any of the bodies have books or possessions with them?” she asked.
 

Jake looked around expectantly.
 

“There are some.” The abbot shrugged. “But not so many. Why? Is that what you’re looking for?”

“We just have some fact checking to do,” Jake said, dodging the question. “Thank you for your help. We’ll need a few hours down here if that’s OK?”

“Si figuri, don’t mention it.” The Abbot turned to leave. “You can stay down here as long as you want. I find it a peaceful place. After all, we don’t have to be afraid of the dead for they are in glory. Buonanotte. Goodnight.”

He walked away down the corridor and was soon lost in the gloom, his brown habit blending with the deep shadows.
 

“Are you alright?” Morgan asked Jake. His eyes were sepia in this half-light, the spark she usually saw dulled with memory. She reached out to touch his arm gently.
 

“These bodies. These babies.” He turned away from her. “I was in Rwanda.”

The word was enough for her to understand his emotion. It conjured images of mass graves, almost one million people massacred, even children hacked to pieces.
 

“I can cope with the death of grown men and women, but not children. But these little ones are so peaceful, I don’t even know why it sparked the memory. It’s such a different place to that desperate time.”

“Perhaps this proximity to death allows you to feel and express what’s usually buried,” Morgan questioned. “Perhaps it’s cathartic.”

“OK, that’s quite enough deep and meaningful discussion,” Jake said. “Let’s find this diabolical book and get out of here. This atmosphere is just a little too intense for the middle of the night. So where do we start?” He looked at Morgan. “You’re the psychologist. Where would you put the Devil’s Bible if you were trying to hide it from evil Vatican Nazi spies?”
 

She laughed at his hyperbole, the serious atmosphere broken.
 

“I’d want to hide it but I’d also want to protect it somehow. Maybe behind some kind of altar, in the hope that prayer and faith would somehow negate its energy? There are also a number of closed caskets here according to the files. We would need to check the dates on those as the Devil’s Bible was moved in the 1940s and the last mummy was put down here in 1920.”

Together they walked back along the arm of the corridor towards the main entrance hall, ready to begin the search. Their footsteps echoed through the halls, muted by the cadaverous army hanging alongside them. Thin fluorescent tubes flickered overhead as if the old electric circuits were about to give out.
 

“Do you believe that the curses in the Devil’s Bible could work?” Jake asked. “I’ve never seen Marietti look so scared but it just seems crazy to think mere words could turn someone into a demonic mass murderer.”

Morgan considered for a moment, then spoke with hesitation.
 

“The spoken word has always been considered powerful in religion. God said ‘let there be light’ and there was light. He spoke again and created the world and humanity. Then of course the Bible says that the Word of God became flesh, perhaps the ultimate example of power. In occult practices and witchcraft, the spoken word in the form of curses is what actually brings forth demonic power. To speak something into the world with intent is somehow to create it, to make it real. That’s why prayer is often spoken aloud, why converting to a faith must be professed with speech and not just in the mind.”

“Which all sounds reasonable, but turning a monk into a crazed killer with one recitation of some kind of curse. Is that even possible?”
 

Morgan nodded. “There are documented cases where people have died because they believed they were cursed. Such is the power of words combined with belief.”
 

“You’re avoiding the question, but personally, I won’t be reading anything from any book we find.” Jake grinned at her. “OK, you search down that wing and I’ll take this one. I want to get out of here as soon as possible.”

“Likewise,” Morgan said.
 

She turned down the corridor towards the women’s section, the white vaulted ceiling arching above her. The mummies here wore dresses with bonnets and ribbons, although the material sagged around missing torsos padded with straw. Some mummies wore gloves as if they were about to take tea and two skeletons bent their heads together as if gossiping. Virgins were distinguished with metal bands around their heads, sainted with haloes in death. Morgan looked around carefully. Each mummy stood in an alcove in the wall. There wasn’t space to hide a book there. Equally the wooden stacks of bodies weren’t deep enough to conceal the huge Codas Gigas. Morgan had read that the monastery had been bombed during the Second World War, after the book had been hidden here. There had also been a fire in 1966. Somehow the book must have escaped notice all that time so it must be well hidden. She scanned the caskets stacked on shelves above the bodies but all were too slim to contain the volume.
 

At the end of the corridor she spotted a simple altar. It was a long rectangle, certainly deep enough for a book to be hidden inside. With anticipation, Morgan walked over and lifted the altarpiece. Dust rose into the air and she coughed, horribly aware of what she was breathing. Pulling the drapes back gingerly, Morgan could see that the altar was just a rough wooden box set on the stone floor. It didn’t seem to be attached in any way. She knelt down and crawled around it looking for any way through the wood or for a chink to see inside. She could feel the cold, hard flagstones through her jeans and she shivered, and not just with the temperature. This place was beginning to get to her, for there were echoes of the past hiding here in dark corners, nightmares of little children locked below, their flesh decomposing over centuries. Perhaps it was unnatural, the way the physical bodies had remained so long after the soul had departed. It felt like Death’s trophy case, with bodies stolen from a world of light and life above.
 

Morgan shook her head. Enough morbid contemplation, she thought. She continued to feel her way around the edge of the wood until she found a little door behind the altar. It had a plaque with an inscription dated 1947. Morgan’s heart leapt. Perhaps this was the right place. The door was too small to push the Codas Gigas through but it could have been kept under here. She pulled at the tiny door. No movement. She slipped off her pack, dug out her penknife and levered the door, rattling it. The old lock broke and the door popped open. Morgan shone her torch into the space beyond. All she could see were piles of dusty prayer books, none of which could be the Codas Gigas as they were too small. It definitely wasn’t here.