Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
Angry with myself, I ate quickly, knowing I’d have to come back the next day and start over again.
I paid, leaving a large tip to apologise for being so rude as to take such a short time over my meal, and had set off back to my hotel when, in a narrow street that ran down the side of the Palais des Papes, I saw both men walking straight towards me. Instinctively I turned into the doorway of a tourist shop, still open despite the hour, and saw I was in a bookshop.
I grabbed a book from a narrow shelf inside the door, pretending I was fascinated by it. From the corner of my eye, I saw them pass the shop entrance and stop. I set the book back on the shelf, and ducked further inside.
They didn’t seem to have seen me, but were smoking and talking; the shop was at a small junction and I guessed they were about to separate.
‘
Vous voulez quelque chose?
’ asked a voice. I turned to see a young woman behind the counter, eyeing me suspiciously.
‘No, thank you,’ I said in English, without thinking. I went blank and couldn’t think how to say I was only browsing.
‘
Je vais fermer le magasin maintenant.
’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, and began to make for the door but saw that Jean was still outside. I had to stall in some way or I would walk right into them. I grabbed the first book that came to hand. The shop was a mixture of new books and second-hand, and seemed to have lots of a religious nature, aimed at tourists to the cathedral, I assumed. In my hand was a volume called
My Servant, Catherine
. I handed it to the girl, and said I wanted to buy it.
She took my money and was again making to shoo me out, but the two were still outside.
‘
C’est un cadeau,
’ I said, hurriedly. I made a dumbshow of wrapping the book. She frowned at me and then understood.
‘
Non. C’est pas possible.
’
I hesitated, and she must have thought I was arguing with her.
‘
C’est pas possible. Bonsoir, monsieur.
’
She indicated the door, and with relief I saw the two men walking together, as it turned out, along the street that led away from the shop.
‘
Merci. Bonsoir,
’ I said, and as she held the door open for me, as Jean’s had earlier that day her sleeve dropped back to reveal a strong, fresh tattoo of a pelican, pecking its breast. A drop of tattoo-blue blood fell from its beak.
I stared.
‘Where did you get that?’ I asked, again, stupidly, in English.
But she must have understood, because she hesitated for a moment before saying, ‘
C’était une blague.
’
It took me a while to remember the word, by which time I found myself on the street once more.
Une blague
. A joke.
The tattoo didn’t look like any sort of joke to me, but I put that from my mind as I realised that Jean and his friend were out of sight. I hurried away down the street after them, shoving the book I’d bought in one jacket pocket, and checking the camera in my other.
As I made the corner, I saw them again, and followed them round two corners, and a third, and found myself at the
place
, where they walked straight back into their café.
‘Damn it all,’ I said under my breath, and knowing I couldn’t very well take up a place in the neighbouring restaurant again, looked about for an answer.
I couldn’t just sit out on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville for hours; the square was emptying of tourists, and I would easily be seen from the café.
The answer turned out to be a hotel with rooms that looked down on to the
place
, but also, on one side at least, the café.
I took a deep breath, and pulled out my wallet. I was already spending way too much money on this trip, but I had come too far now to back down. The main thing was that I had my passport; for security I had decided to keep it on me and not leave it in the crummy hotel across the river.
This place was a different beast altogether. One night would probably cost me as much as the five I’d spent in Villeneuve. The carpet was thick, chandeliers twinkled, a piano played in the bar across the hall, and all in all I decided I liked it.
At the reception desk they looked at me a little strangely when I asked if they had a room on the south side. I explained it was because of the bells from the cathedral. They took my passport with the usual promise to return it the following morning, and checked me in. They asked after my luggage and I explained it had been lost and would follow later in the week.
I made my way up to the room with the porter, tipped him, ordered a coffee from room service, and checked on my view.
It was perfect.
From my window I could not only see the terrace of the café: I was on the side of the building and could see their kitchen door, a little way down the darkened street.
When my coffee came, I pulled a chair to the window, set my camera on the ledge by the window, which I opened a fraction, and switched off the light.
Then, I sat down to wait.
Chapter 10
I began to doze.
Despite the coffee, with the room comfortable and warm, the chair soft, my eyes grew tired. Needing something to keep me awake, I pulled the book I’d bought from my pocket and opened it at random.
Many of her thoughts have the beauty of the wild flowers we admire without asking whence they came or wondering why they bloom in this field of corn, or that meadow . . .
I turned at random to another page.
Her enthusiasm was warlike; she demanded a struggle to the death against the infidel, and a generous spilling of blood.
I wondered what it was I had bought and turned to the beginning, and as I read the title page I saw that it was a biography of Saint Catherine of Siena. The book was a recent reprint, only a few years old, of a book that had been written long before that. Centuries before that, in fact.
I read on, all the while keeping half an eye on the street below me, and whenever I was content that Jean was still busy serving, I relaxed again.
I found the book strange, and shocking.
She began by whipping herself with a little cord; then she persuaded some other little girls to join her, and they used to meet in the most hidden corners of the house to pray and to discipline themselves. She directed the little group. She scourged herself, ate less, prostrated herself and prayed very much – and, in an impulsive outburst, said to Christ, ‘My Lord Jesus Christ, I promise thee and give thee my virginity, that it may ever be thine alone.’
I wondered at it all. I had been brought up in the Church of England, though not with any great devotion. I knew little about Catholicism, and less about the saints, and as I read about her life, I read the story of a young woman who at a very young age devoted herself to Christ, and who, from the earliest age, seemed to have an obsession with blood.
From drawing blood by scourging herself as a young girl, to receiving the head, and the blood, of a executed man literally in her lap, to her deathbed, where it was said she cried out ‘Blood, blood!’ as her last words, her whole life was sprinkled with the thought of it, the worship of it. I read how she had had a vision in which, after many years of starving and punishing herself, Christ appeared to her and married her.
He offered her his wound from the lance, the Holy Lance, the Spear of Destiny, and gave her the blood to drink from his side, and she drank.
‘I desire blood,’ she said. ‘And in blood I slake, and shall slake, my soul.’
I thought about Marian.
I thought about the woman in the hole, and the man with her. Had I really seen him drinking from her wound, drinking her blood? Was it possible that such people existed outside the pages of Stoker or Lefanu, or had I just imagined it, in my horror of the scene?
I turned back to the life of Saint Catherine, but everything I read only disturbed me more.
It was as I read about this strange and obsessive individual that I saw the last customers leave the café, that I watched Jean and his friend close up and leave by the kitchen door, and that I, with nothing more than a camera for protection, made up my mind to follow.
Chapter 11
What is it that we fear the most?
I didn’t think I could witness anything more unsettling than what I’d seen during the war, but I was wrong to think that. That night in Avignon, I began to see a whole new world of awful profanity, and yet, could I call what I saw profane? Because what I witnessed appeared in the guise of deep religion, albeit a religion of horror.
It was easy enough to follow the two men through the twisting alleys of Avignon. It was close to two in the morning, and no one else was around. I let them out of my sight, and followed only by listening for their footsteps ahead of me, loud on the cobbles, while I trod softly behind them. At each corner I would stop and poke my head around cautiously, and so it was, as the narrow streets suddenly closed right in, that I saw them enter a door in a wall.
I held my breath, counted to thirty, and then followed, creeping right up to the door, a large and old thing that I suddenly realised was the entrance to a church, tucked right in among the jumble of buildings. The passageway I was standing in was no more than a few feet wide, and it was all I could do to step back a way and see the high windows, from which a soft light flickered.
I licked my lips, and noticed my mouth had run dry. I couldn’t just enter by the same door, but I risked peering through a large and ancient keyhole, and saw figures moving inside. Just inside.
I threw myself back against the wall and waited again.
Still nothing, still no one. Growing more and more certain that I had found something that should not have been found, I crept along the passage to where the end of the building suddenly dropped away and I saw an iron gate leading into a courtyard. The gate was locked, but I was still young enough in those days to climb over it, and moments later was kneeling in a small porch at the back of the building. Again I peered through the keyhole, and this time saw not into the church, but a small vestibule of some kind.
I tried the handle. It moved. I put my weight against the door and opened it as slowly as I could and quietly crept inside, leaving the door slightly ajar in case I wanted to leave in a hurry.
It took a short while for my eyes to adjust to the near darkness in the hall, and when they had, I saw a thick curtain hanging across another door, and knew it led into the church. I had no way of knowing who was on the other side, or if anyone was looking in my direction. There was nothing for it but to move the curtain a fraction, and see if there was any reaction.
I lifted the foot of it to one side, and waited, and still there was nothing. I slipped inside the church, and keeping low, moved to the side of the nave, pressing myself into the shadows and taking one tiny step at a time.
I suppose that all this had taken me longer than I’d thought because when the first people came into view, they were already in the middle of their activities.
I saw a group, maybe a dozen, lined up in front of the altar.
Candles lined the altar and cast a strong light on their faces, and I felt a little safer in the shadows. The people were dressed in nothing special; I saw Jean and the other waiter had changed into looser clothes, but otherwise I saw nothing unusual. I moved another fraction along the side of the nave, all the while keeping the pews and pillars between me and the group, but I need not have worried, for they were all looking towards the front, towards the altar, though I couldn’t see what they were looking at.
I moved again, and I saw.
It was him. He had his back to me, but I knew it was him, from his height, from his stance. He wore some kind of robe, the robe of a priest, long and black, loosely tumbling to his ankles. His back was towards me, and then he turned, and I saw his face for the first time in ten years. He had aged a little, it was true, but it was him.
He held something in his hands, held it aloft for the others to see.
Something lurched inside me then, and I was almost sick, because I recognised what it was. It was a tiny thing, so tiny, and yet even as far away as I was, I knew it. It was the figure from the musée. Not the Venus of Bastennes, but the one with the red slit between its legs.
As he held it, his followers, or disciples, for I suppose that is what they were, stared open-mouthed and in wonder, and then at some unseen signal they each came forward in turn and kissed the figure, between her legs, where I remembered that smear of reddish-brown pigment lay.
I watched, dumbstruck, and even in that moment it was not lost on me to wonder what else the margrave had stolen from the museum in Saint-Germain. What other things had gone missing? Golden things perhaps, valuable things, with which one could, with but a little trouble, easily amass an untraceable fortune.
I watched, my head thumping, and I counted the people. A dozen. Twelve. Surely no accident, that.