The Book of Blood and Shadow (8 page)

“That was my foot.”

“Oh. Sorry.” I stepped back.

“That’s my other foot.”

“Right.”

We inched forward through rows of pews toward the light switch. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out the stone columns rising into shadow, and the massive cross that loomed over the altar.

We finally made it to the opposite wall. I flicked the switch, but the church stayed dark. “Okay, that’s weird.”

“Think the power’s out?”

“Just here?” At the other end of the tunnel, the office light glowed.

“Maybe a fuse blew.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

The church was silent. If there had been a janitor or a stray cat or anything else, it was gone. We were alone. The ceilings receded into the darkness, making it seem almost as if we were standing beneath a starless sky. Dim moonlight filtered in through the stained glass, but all it lit was shadows.

“This is ridiculous,” I whispered. Then, through force of will, louder: “We’re being ridiculous.” I half expected an echo. But my words didn’t come back to me. And nothing lunged out of the darkness. It was just an empty church with a blown fuse and, worst-case scenario, a bat’s nest in the apse.

“I never figured I’d be spending this much time in a church,” I added, just to kill the silence.

“I used to want to be a priest,” he said.

“What?”
It was almost enough to make me forget the dark.

“I said used to,” he said. I couldn’t see his expression. “They always seemed to have the answers.”

“To what?”

He paused. “I don’t know. Everything, I guess.”

“So … you went to church a lot?” Not that there was anything wrong with that, I reminded myself. It just wasn’t something I ran into very often. My parents were half-Jewish, half-Methodist, half-Catholic, a few parts Unitarian, and all atheist—though less militant on the subject than their friends, back when they used to have friends, who would occasionally come for dinner and stay for several bottles of wine and drunken discourses on the excesses of evangelical America.

“My parents are …” He hesitated. “Believers, let’s say. So yeah, we spent a lot of time in a lot of churches.”

“
Churches
plural? Are you really supposed to shop around like that?”

“Not shopping,” he said. “Moving. Once a year, sometimes twice. Every year a new town, new people, new school—but there was always a church, and it was always pretty much the same, you know?”

“Sometimes you need a constant.”

“Yeah.”

I did know. “Why’d you move so much?”

“My parents would say it was because of their jobs—but I think they just liked it better that way. They were always so sure that the next city, the next life, that’s where they would find what they were looking for.”

“What
were
they looking for?”

He shrugged. “What’s anyone looking for? Anyway, whatever it is, I’m starting to think it doesn’t exist.”

I didn’t know what to say, and I waited too long to figure it out.

“Let’s just check the locks and the front entrance and make sure everything looks okay,” he said stiffly. “Then I should get out of here. It’s late.”

Maybe saying the wrong thing would have been better than saying nothing, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could apologize for. I inched behind him through the darkness, feeling my way toward the large wooden door at the far end of the nave and doing my best not to brush against him. Once, briefly, something feathered across the back of my hand, but if it was his finger, it was clearly an accident, and it didn’t happen again.

“Door’s still locked,” he said, jiggling the knob. “Dead bolt’s dropped, too. Maybe we were just imagining things.”

“I don’t think so.” I flipped open my phone to cast a beam of light at the broken pane alongside the door. The glass had given way to a jagged hole just large enough for someone’s hand to reach through, raise the dead bolt, and turn the lock. “Someone was here.”

I shivered.

“Could have been the wind,” Max said.

“Why do people always say that? It’s
wind
. How is wind supposed to break glass?”

“Maybe it blew a stick against the window. Or someone threw a rock. I don’t know.” He was starting to sound irritated.

“It wasn’t the wind.” I brought the phone closer, shining its light on what I wished I hadn’t seen.

The shards of glass were glazed with blood.

15

Someone had been in the church; someone had broken in.

A homeless guy, Max suggested. An idiot bird, Chris guessed later. Adriane concluded it was someone getting an early start in the War on Christmas. The Hoff didn’t get a vote, because the Hoff never knew. We were afraid—by which I mean Chris and Max were afraid, and for whatever reason, I let them be—that the spectre of bleeding trespassers would nudge the professor into full-blown paranoia. I think about it, sometimes, what might have happened if we hadn’t kept our mouths shut.

But we did.

16

Lumen Dei
. Though Max didn’t ask about it again, the words stuck in my head. I associated them with that night, with noises in the dark, and bloody glass. But I knew I’d seen them before. Google turned up nothing but a few random references in Renaissance texts I’d never heard of, by people whose names hadn’t even made it into Wikipedia, much less my AP Euro textbook. So
I went back to the letters, unsure whether I wanted the answer for purposes of impressing Max or beating him.

It was a cloudy afternoon, the kind of late-fall New England day when heavy gray skies made you start scanning the horizon for winter. Chris and Max were hunched over a copy of
The Renaissance Concordia
, arguing over the provenance of a reference to Machiavelli. The Hoff had actually shown up, but judging from the snores issuing from behind the latest volume of
The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
, his presence was a technicality.

I paged carefully through the ancient letters, not even sure what I was looking for until I found it, near the bottom of the stack.

E. I. Westonia, Ioanni Francisco Westonio, fratri suo germano S.P.D
.

Forsitan hoc dicere blasphemia est, sed
Lumen Dei
non est donum divinum
.

My eye must have skimmed over the line when I was indexing the letters. By the time I translated the rest, the gray sky had purpled, and the Hoff had long since retreated to the threadbare couch. “As you were,” he’d mumbled, eyes half-closed as he traversed the distance between one napping spot and the next. “Work to be done.”

E. J. Weston, to her brother John Francis Weston, greetings
.

It may well be blasphemy to say, but the
Lumen Dei
is no divine gift. The promise of untold powers, of sacred answers, of godlike abilities and ultimate truth, these are powerful temptations. But surely there is such a thing as too much sacrifice. Those who threw away their lives to stop us, who
foresaw the end of the world, now have the cold satisfaction of vindication beyond the grave. For the
Lumen Dei
can indeed end the world. It is a gift, but like the gift of the Greeks, it disguised the enemy within
.

I hate him. Words I never thought I would say I now long to scream into the night. I hate our Father. I hate him for devising it, as I hate the Emperor for stealing him away, as I hate the
Lumen Dei
for stealing everything else. Forgive me, brother! My words are true as they are evil, and yet they are incomplete. For I hate no one more than myself
.

The deed is done, the world is broken, and I see no way forward. I cannot, must not, reunite the pages with the book from which they were torn asunder. The mind of God should remain forever beyond the reach of man. Of this, if nothing else, I am now certain. And yet the
Lumen Dei
calls to me. The machine is a promise, a devil’s pact to divine ends, and I fear my strength is not equal to the temptation
.

This is all that remains of our Father: the machine his genius devised, and the words with which he guided my hands from beyond the grave. I study them often, thinking of him splayed on the floor of his cell, quill flying as he translated the words of God. The angels gave him their names, and he gave them to me, this one meaning water, that one air, this danger, that transgression. Do you ever envy him, dearest brother, and wish that you could hear the angels with such clarity? Envy is weakness, our Father taught us, and yet I know he envied Bacon, though he would never admit it. Our Father spoke to angels, but Bacon spoke to God
.

Even in our Father’s absence, those pages seem still to
belong to him. All but one. That one details the task assigned to Thomas, and for a time, he carried it with him wherever he went. It still holds the familiar scent of his laboratory, acrid smoke, burnt metals, bitter vapors. This page, Thomas’s page, is mine. It is all that remains of a lost future, and will make its home with Petrarch, the one who taught me to know love resting forever with the one who taught me to speak it
.

Time grows short, and I have a decision to make. I urge you, as I so often do, not to worry for me, but this time I point not to my strength or my courage but to the mere fact that one can have no cares when one has nothing left to lose. It seems all I have left is you, my loving brother, and so you must save your worries for yourself
.

27 April 1599 Prague
.

None of it made much sense. There was the reference to “the gift of the Greeks,” which I recognized, from years of translating, as the Trojan Horse. The
Lumen Dei
, whatever it was, whatever untold riches had apparently been promised, had brought the opposite. Chaos and disaster, a world in ruins.

I couldn’t begin to imagine the nature of a machine that promised “sacred answers” and “ultimate truth”—or rather, when I tried, I couldn’t help picturing one of those Guess Your Fortune carnival machines—but I understood all too well what had been left in its wake: grief. That delectable combo of confusion, guilt, self-doubt, what-ifs, regrets about the unchangeable past and paralysis in the face of an unpromising future. She had lost, badly—and in losing, had lost her father all over again. I knew how that worked, too. It was simple physics: Loss attracted loss.

Enough, I told myself, sounding like
her
. The letter wasn’t a
distress call across the ages from a sixteenth-century maiden in search of a twenty-first-century shrink. It was a clue.

I pulled the Petrarch collection out of the pouch that the archives were stored in, and rifled gently through the yellowed pages. The text was faint, nearly illegible. There were a few poems underlined or circled, with no notes in the margin to indicate why they might have mattered. I didn’t speak Italian so couldn’t even begin to guess.

        
Trovommi Amor del tutto disarmato

        
et aperta la via per gli occhi al core
,

        
che di lagrime son fatti uscio et varco
.

Maybe less a clue than a dead end. Feeling vaguely stupid, I closed the book again. As I did, I felt something. The leather binding was incredibly soft, rubbed smooth by age. But my thumb had bumped over a rough spot on the inside front cover. No, not a spot, I realized, taking a closer look. A seam. A slightly discolored square patch of light tan stood out against the dark, with a thin seam running along the edges, an impressive but imperfect repair job, as if to disguise a hole in the binding. Or something else.

There was a bottle opener on my key chain, and on the bottle opener, a sharp enough edge to rip a fraying sixteenth-century stitch. The Hoff was still snoring; Chris and Max were still absorbed in their battle of wits and pedantry. No one was watching.

Not that I would think of defacing a four-hundred-year-old book. That would be insane. Probably not the kind of thing they could arrest you for, but I had no doubt the Hoff would try his best. Obviously the smart thing would be to bring him the book, show him the stitches in the binding and the slightly raised area beneath them, as if something had been slipped inside. But:

This page, Thomas’s page, is mine
.

The stitches split neatly and swiftly, and the thin leather patch
dropped away. I nearly gasped. A tightly folded piece of paper was nestled into the binding. I nudged it gently with one finger, half afraid it would turn to dust if I moved it, much less tried to unfold it. Elizabeth had folded this up and sewn it into a beloved book, where it had rested unseen and untouched for four centuries. She was the last person to hold this, I thought, and now her secret was mine.

Carefully, so carefully, I unfolded the page. It turned out to be two pages, one nested inside the other—and then I really did gasp as I realized what I was looking at. One sheet was crammed with dense Latin, terms I’d never seen before,
acqua fortis, sal ammoniac
, names that sounded like chemicals alongside measurements, some kind of elaborate formula. Beside it was a rough sketch of an odd-looking plant, six pointed leaves framing a seventh rounded one, with a spiraling stalk. But it wasn’t the formula or the drawing that caught my eye. It was the other page, which wasn’t Latin at all, or any language. It was a page of symbols, incomprehensible but
familiar
, because hadn’t I been staring at those symbols every time I passed the massive facsimile of a Voynich manuscript page hanging over the Hoff’s desk?

The grouping of the text was the same on both pages, as was the strange drawing. “You guys?” I swallowed hard, trying to knock the frog out of my voice. “I think I may have found something.”