Fanatics (28 page)

“Or not,” the ghost’s malign glare seemed to say.

Then the wind gusted and his form broke up like oily smoke and drifted off along the shore.

I gulped. The vision had lasted a few seconds at most, but the impact was like someone had cracked me on the head with a plank. I took a deep breath, pulled myself together, and went to the kitchen door.

R
APHAELLA ARRIVED IN TIME
for minestrone soup and panini stuffed with egg salad salty with chopped olives. The three of us ate in silence. Mrs. Stoppini seemed preoccupied—and sad. Raphaella’s face showed the tension I felt. The moment she saw me she knew that I had seen the apparition.

After lunch Raphaella and I lugged the new packing crate from the shop to the library and set it onto a blanket we’d spread on the alcove table. The pleasant odours of glue and freshly cut spruce were swamped by the acrid stink of smoke hanging in the room. I returned to the shop for the power drill, screws, a jar of adhesive, and the strips of felt I had cut earlier for the surfaces where the braces would be in contact with the cross. Through the window I noticed whitecaps forming on the lake. Wind-thrown rain began to patter against the glass.

Raphaella was setting up in her usual spot, turning on her laptop and pulling pens and pads from her backpack.
She placed the computer on the movable lectern I had made. We planned to retrieve the
PIE
from under the cabin deck at Geneva Park once the police presence there had died down. She didn’t seem to miss it much.

“I can feel his presence,” she said.

No need to mention who “he” was.

For what I hoped was the last time, I went through the familiar procedure. Put the first brass key in the lock and open the alcove cupboard. Reach inside, press the knot, wait for the click as the catch on the hinged bookshelf section released. Pull open the heavy door. Insert the second key and open the secret cupboard.

I peered inside. Each object—the cross, wooden box,
Compendium Revelationem
, manuscript file, and felt-wrapped cross—was just as we had left it. I turned toward Raphaella. She nodded encouragement. I lifted out the antique reliquary, laid it on the table by the crate, and pushed the cupboard door closed, leaving the key in the lock.

I had never experienced an earthquake, but the tremor that seemed to rise through the floorboards under my feet must have been similar. Raphaella stopped typing for a moment and gripped the edges of the lectern. The shudder beneath us subsided. I unwrapped the cross and carefully slid it inside the crate, snug against the braces securing the base and the horizontal beam. The fit was perfect. Inside the box the glass dome glowed as if lit from within.

The floor under me trembled again.

I removed the reliquary and stood it beside the crate, then began to paint quick-dry glue on the felt strips, using the brush attached to the inside of the jar’s lid.

Whack!

The door of the secret cupboard flew up and the file folder tumbled to the floor beside me. I concentrated on applying the strips of cloth to the braces in the crate, pressing hard with shaking hands. Raphaella went back to tapping keys. The rain beat harder against the window. I glued the last piece of felt, then picked up the file folder from the floor and placed it on Raphaella’s table.

Above my head a book sprang straight off the shelf, fluttered like a confused bird, and crashed to the ground. A second one followed. Then, volume by volume, the entire row of books streamed into the air and plummeted into a heap at my feet.

Raphaella shrieked, pointing to the fireplace. Behind the safety screen the pyramid of scrap wood I had set there the day before burst into a fierce blaze.

Forcing myself to work methodically, not to give in to fear, I tested the crate, finding that the glue had set. I gritted my teeth, clamped my jaws shut, muttered, “Here goes,” and gently but with as much determination as I could scrape together seated the gold cross in place. I slid the lid on and, glancing around, picked up the drill and a couple of brass screws.

“Garnet.”

The forced calm of Raphaella’s warning tore at my nerves. I whirled around to see her staring wide-eyed toward the other side of the room. The spectre stood by the escritoire, radiating hatred, his hood covering all but his blistered, ruined face. The air was thick with a miasma of burned cloth and wood and broiled, putrid meat. Savonarola raised his arm under the singed and rotted cape, pointing.

The folder on Raphaella’s table quivered. The string slowly unwound itself from the paper button. The folder suddenly sprang toward the ceiling, spinning end over end,
spilling pages like feathers from a burst pillow. Sheets filled the air, a blizzard of paper streaming toward the fireplace, where every single page slipped behind the screen, flared for a split second in a tiny soundless explosion, then expired in a puff of black ash. In minutes the manuscript was gone.

With a sweep of his skeletal arm Savonarola pointed toward the alcove. An avalanche of books poured from the shelves, battering the heavy crate, sending it crashing to the ground, knocking the lid off. The cross broke free and tumbled among the fallen books. The table shook violently, rose from the floor, hung suspended for a second, then shot toward me, ramming my shoulder and knocking me to the ground, pinning my legs. A heavy book whacked against my head and I collapsed in a daze, craning my neck to keep my eyes on Raphaella.

She cringed by her table, mercilessly pummelled by flying books, struck repeatedly on her shoulders and head. She held up her arms to protect herself but the torrent knocked her to the floor, where she lay on her back, paralyzed with terror, her chest heaving. I heard a rumbling and a clatter, turned to see the chairs by the hearth tip and tumble across the floor, coming to a thumping stop against the doors.

The spectre began to float toward Raphaella, slowly, relentlessly, as if savouring what he was about to do. “Don’t!” I shouted, but he continued to glide toward her. Raphaella stirred, raised herself onto her elbows, crab-walked backwards, her eyes on Savonarola’s black form, until she bumped against the east wall.

Thin rivulets of flame, capillaries of fire, seeped from under the frayed black robe of the ghost and streamed toward her. She stared, wide-eyed, as the fire encircled her.

“Garnet!”

I struggled to free myself from the weight of the table and books, fighting to catch my breath. Something crashed into my shoulder. The crate lid spun toward me in a vicious arc. I ducked just in time and it smashed into the wall beside the window.

Savonarola stopped in front of Raphaella. He raised his arms. The robe fell back to reveal bones poking through burnt flesh. His piercing gaze bored into her.

“Don’t!” I pleaded again. “Take me! I’m the one you want!”

The spectre didn’t so much as turn my way. I remembered again how Savonarola had despised women—creatures to be lectured or scorned, originators of sin, agents of Satan. I hauled myself to my knees and tried to crawl over piles of books toward Raphaella. The flames around her crackled and smoked.

She cringed in the shadow cast by the dark spectre looming bat-like above her. Then, as quick as a thought, the terror suddenly left her face. She seemed—unbelievably—calm. She stared at Savonarola’s destroyed face. Her voice came, firm and strong.

“You can’t.”

The wraith seemed to shrink back a little.

“You know you can’t,” Raphaella said.

As if suddenly starved of oxygen, the flames around her shrank, flickered, and died, leaving no marks on the floor.

Raphaella looked my way.

So did Savonarola.

I knew what I had to do, but he was way ahead of me. I scrambled among the jumble of volumes on the floor, hurling them this way and that, glimpsed the sparkle of a
red jewel against a gold background, and hauled the heavy cross out of the pile. Fumbling in my pocket, I yanked out my knife and opened it, my hands trembling violently.

“Garnet, look out!”

Savonarola flowed toward me as fire veined from his robes and across the floor, like lava seeping from a volcano. I jabbed at the clips holding the glass dome to the base of the cross. In my frenzy, I broke two of them. Pried up the others. Thumbed the dome free. It clattered across the floor. With fire searing the bottom of my feet, I snatched the atlas from its cavity in the base of the cross.

I clawed my way toward the fireplace, the stench of the spectre in my nostrils, the searing fire around me, the five-centuries-old bone clutched in my hand. I heard Raphaella scream a warning, felt myself snatched into the air and hurled forward. I slammed against the mantel and fell to the hearth, knocking the screen aside. The fire scorched my face, singing my eyebrows. I thrust my hand over the flames and dropped the bone into the heart of the fire.

A prolonged, ear-splitting howl of rage and despair battered the room.

From behind, something grabbed me, pinning my arms, and hauled me away from the fire. I fought back with the little strength I had left.

“Garnet!”

It was Raphaella, holding me in her arms. We stared into the fire, at the bone resting on the coals in the centre of a forest of flame, afraid that if we took our eyes off it, the atlas would disappear. It smoked, glowed reddish orange for a few seconds, turned white hot, seemed to quiver. Then it flared and died and crumbled to a powdery ash and was lost among the coals.

Together, we felt the weight of his presence behind us. Still on our knees, we turned. He was in the centre of the room, a black cloud of evil, arms raised, his bony fingers pointing accusingly at us. Books cascaded from the wall behind him and thundered to the floor. The window imploded, showering us with glass. Savonarola glowered at us, his distended eyes wide, his devastated face twisted with frustration and hatred and rage, his ravaged mouth a black oval as he bellowed again. He glided in our direction on a raging sheet of fire. But as he crept forward, the fire’s intensity was already waning. His body began to lose power and substance, its colour fading. His physical presence wavered and then he seemed to dissolve like cooling vapour into the air around him, until he was gone.

Raphaella and I embraced like two shipwrecked sailors clinging to each other for life and warmth, the upended furniture, disintegrated window glass, and Professor Corbizzi’s books strewn like flotsam on a beach. We looked around the room—the evidence of violence everywhere—searching, not quite believing our eyes.

“He’s gone,” I whispered.

“Gone for good now, I think.”

“And he didn’t get the professor’s manuscript.”

W
IND AND RAIN GUSTED
into the room through the damaged window, clearing and freshening the air. The fire in the grate had dropped to embers. A thought struck Raphaella and me at the same time.

“Mrs. Stoppini!”

“I’ll go,” I said, jumping to my feet.

I took the stairs two at a time, ran down the carpeted hall toward her suite. Her door was ajar. Out of habit, without thinking, I slowed to a walk, stopped at her threshold, and put my head through the door. I could see the foot of her bed. Two black-stockinged feet, soles toward me, unmoving.

She was snoring softly and rhythmically. She had slept through everything. I retraced my steps to the library, slowly and quietly this time, and closed the doors behind me. If she woke up, I didn’t want her to see the room as it was.

Raphaella had gathered a few rugs from around the
library and spread them over the fallen books under the windowsill to protect them from the rain. We brought sheets of plywood from the workshop and nailed them over the destroyed windows. I retrieved a metal bucket, a dustpan, and a brush from the garden shed, and we went into the house again.

“I won’t feel confident that he’s really gone until I do this,” I said, scooping up the embers and ash from the fireplace, brushing up all the dust, and dumping it into the pail.

When Raphaella was satisfied that not a molecule had been left behind, I carried the pail outside and dug a hole behind the shop and dumped in the ashes. I trudged across the sodden lawn to the lake, scooped up some water, lugged the pail back to the hole, swirled the water around the inside of the pail, then poured it into the hole.

“Let there be no remains to tempt the relic hunters,” I murmured as I filled in the hole and tamped down the dirt with a shovel.

Back in the library, Raphaella had begun to pick up books and stack them on the trestle tables. The entire alcove had been stripped, along with a couple of hundred volumes from the south and east wall. I hauled the crate back onto the table, then picked up the cross and reattached the glass dome, bending the unbroken clips into place. I fitted the cross inside, pushed the packing material into place, and screwed on the lid.

“The rain’s let up,” I said. “Maybe we’ll see the sun today after all.”

Raphaella plunked an armful of books on the table and forced a smile. “I think we can put everything back in a couple of hours,” she said. “We already have the columns
labelled, so we can organize the books by topic first, then alphabetically, then reshelve them. I—”

“Stop.” I took hold of her hands. “We’re okay,” I reassured her, seeing the frenetic energy in her eyes, the aftereffects of our ordeal. “We came through it. It’s over.”

Raphaella began to cry—first tears, like the patter of rain that heralds a storm, then a full-on gale of sobbing. I held her tightly, holding back aftershocks of my own, blinking away the image of Raphaella on her back on the floor, encircled by flames.

“I thought I was going to lose you,” she spluttered against my chest, “when you were down and he went after you.”

“It takes more than an ugly little monk with a bad attitude to put me out of commission. Even a firebug like him.”

Raphaella laughed. Sort of. “We ended up burning him after all,” she said, wiping her eyes with the heels of her palms.

A ring sounded.

“What was that?” she exclaimed.

“My stupid cellphone.”