The Poisoned Pilgrim: A Hangman's Daughter Tale (19 page)

“And that accursed automaton?” Kuisl added. “My daughter thinks she heard it somewhere down below the monastery. Do you know anything about that?”

Nepomuk shrugged. “I know only that this automaton was Virgilius’s favorite toy. If someone stole it, he’d first have to kill the builder—Virgilius would never part willingly with his Aurora.” He wrung his hands in despair. “Someone is out to get me, Jakob. You must help me. I’m more afraid than ever before in my life. You know yourself what I might be facing if I’m convicted of sorcery. First they’ll hang me, then disembowel and quarter me, and finally throw my bloody remains into the fire.” He looked at the hangman hopefully. “Before it gets to that, can you at least promise me quick, clean death? Promise?”

“Nobody’s going to die here if I don’t approve,” Kuisl growled. “My son-in-law told me they want to wait until after the Festival of the Three Hosts in order not to terrify the pilgrims, so we have a few days to find the real culprit. And as sure as my name is Jakob Kuisl, I’ll find him.” He stooped down again and looked his friend straight in the eye. “The only thing that’s
important is that you don’t keep anything from me. Can I really trust you, Nepomuk?”

The Brother crossed himself, held up his hand, and swore. “By all the saints and the Virgin Mary, I promise to tell you the truth.”

“Then continue praying in a loud voice.” Kuisl stood up, pulled the cowl down over his head and turned to leave. “After all, we want our two bumpkins out there to think you’re on your way into the purifying fires of purgatory.”

“Isicia omentata. Pulpam concisam teres cum medulla siliginei in vino infusi…”

As the hangman continued mumbling Latin recipes, he pounded energetically on the door. In a moment the chubby watchman appeared to shove the bolt aside and let him out.

“Well, did he confess?” the fat man asked. “Did he stab the two youngsters to death, carry off the watchmaker, and copulate with the automaton?”

Kuisl stopped for a moment and stared back at the man from the darkness of his cowl. Suddenly the two watchmen had the terrifying feeling they were not talking to a father confessor, but the Grim Reaper in person.

“The devil tempts men in many ways,” said the gruff hangman. “But often he comes in a simple garb. He has no need of sulfur, horns, or a cloven foot, and he doesn’t have to make love to an automaton, you idiots. How stupid are you, anyway?”

Without another word, Kuisl shuffled out into the starry night.

In the meantime, Simon was on his way to the underworld.

The medicus had briefly looked in on the sick in the monastery annex who were still being cared for by Jakob Schreevogl. The young patrician had handled his task astonishingly well, enlisting
a few of the Schongau group to help. Now a deceptive quiet prevailed in the provisional hospital, broken only by occasional coughs and moans. Two older women had died from the fever, and the medicus still couldn’t say what the origin of the illness was. It began with exhaustion and headaches, then fever and diarrhea followed. It affected everyone equally—strong adults as well as the elderly and children.

Simon couldn’t help but think of his own two boys. He tried to shake off the thought and concentrate completely on the task before him. On the spur of the moment, he decided to take a closer look at the two murder victims. He could take care of the living in the morning.

Anxiously, he climbed down the steep stairway into the monastery’s beer cellar, which could be reached through an annex directly next to the brewery. It was chilly in the narrow passageway through the rock, allowing one to forget that summer had already begun outside. For almost two hundred years, supplies had been stored here deep in the stone bowels of the mountain, since beer couldn’t be brewed during the hot summer months. Though Simon had turned up his coat collar, he shivered slightly.

The coolness in the corridors and cellars of Andechs was not just suited for the storage of beer barrels and brewing equipment; the dead often found their temporary resting place here before burial in the monastery’s cemetery. The corpses of the two novitiates were handled in the same way—primarily to avoid any unrest prior to the festival. The burial of two victims of an alleged sorcerer and mass murderer certainly would have set off the wildest rumors. On entering the storage cellar, however, Simon could tell that burial couldn’t be delayed much longer.

His nose led him past huge six-foot-high barrels standing in niches in the rock. Water dripped from the ceiling, forming puddles on the hard-packed soil. Simon’s steps echoed from the rock walls as he moved down the small corridor, holding a torch in front of him. Somewhere he could hear rats squealing.

Finally he reached the end of the corridor, where he found not another barrel but a worn wooden table and two bundles wrapped in white cloth. He took a deep breath, then placed the torch in a crack in the wall and removed the first sheet.

The stench was so strong he had to turn away for a moment to keep from vomiting. Finally, he turned back to the body.

It was Coelestin, the apothecary’s helper whom he’d examined closely two days earlier. By now rigor mortis had passed and the corpse was marked with black and blue spots wherever the outer layer of skin had collapsed and the blood had run off. Nevertheless, the wound to the back of his head was still clearly visible; Simon was certain the victim had been bludgeoned by an unknown attacker and then held under water.

After checking and not finding anything else important, he pulled the second sheet to the side. By now, Simon had gotten somewhat used to the stench, but the sight of the dead watchmaker’s assistant still made him shudder. Vitalis, at one time so handsome, looked as if the hounds of hell themselves had clutched him in their claws. His head was wrenched to one side, the skin on his back and legs almost completely charred, and his right hand was so badly burned that some of the fingers had already fallen off. The corpse still gave off a caustic burnt smell.

Simon wondered what was powerful enough to set off a fire like that. Ten years ago, he’d seen a corpse after a burning at the stake, but by then, the body had shrunk to the size of a child and was burned evenly all over. Vitalis had suffered burns only on his back, buttocks, and the rear of the thigh. Simon bent down to examine the burn spots carefully, and tapped his finger against the hard, blackened flesh.

Suddenly he stopped short. In some of the cracks in the skin he noticed traces of a white powder whose origin he could not explain. He scratched it with his fingernail and studied the little specks up close. He turned up his nose in disgust—the powder smelled of old garlic.

Was witchcraft indeed somehow involved in this?

As the medicus reexamined the head of the charred corpse, he discovered a dent in the skull at almost the same point as on Coelestin’s. He stopped to think. Was the watchmaker possibly killed in the same way? Or had he suffered the wound in a fall? Had Vitalis perhaps been killed by a blow
before
being consumed by the demonic fire?

Just as Simon prepared to examine the wound again, the torch fell out of the crack in the rock face and onto the wet ground where it hissed and sputtered before going out, leaving the cellar in total darkness.

“Damn.”

Simon groped blindly for the table so as not to lose his sense of direction. When his hand touched the cold body of the apothecary’s assistant, he instinctively recoiled, lost his balance, and hit his head against a beer keg. His fall echoed through the silence, then it again became as quiet as the bottom of the sea.

Simon could feel his heart pounding. Surely he could find his way back to the surface without the torch, but the very thought that he was alone with two corpses in a pitch-black cellar caused his stomach to quiver. Carefully he stood up and was about to grope his way along the barrels toward the exit when he stopped in amazement.

One of the two corpses was glowing in the dark.

A strange greenish glimmer came from the body of young Vitalis, as faint as the glow from a firefly, and it gave the corpse an eerie sheen that made Simon’s hair stand on end.

Torn between panic and fascination, the medicus was eyeing the shimmering corpse when suddenly he heard a loud rumble from the other side of the table. It sounded as if somewhere in the mountain a stone golem had come to life.

That was too much for Simon. He staggered back a few steps, then turning around in horror, ran through the darkness toward the exit. Again there was a rumbling. He stumbled,
caught himself again, but hit his forehead on the cellar door. Ignoring the pain, he groped for the door handle and, finding it, rushed up the stairway beyond. Once he could see pale moonlight above, he turned around one last time and could still see the glimmer back in the beer cellar. Then he rushed up the stairs, not stopping until he was standing under the starry sky in front of the brewery.

He was back again among the living.

It took Simon a while to calm down enough to think rationally about what had just happened. What he’d seen down below—was it actually witchcraft? His reason tried mightily to reject this thought, but the sight of a shining green corpse was a hard thing to swallow, even for a student of medicine. And what was the rumbling down below? Had the two corpses come back to life to seek revenge on their murderer?

Simon wasn’t quite ready to go back to Magdalena and the children. He needed at least a halfway clear head. How he would have loved a cup of his beloved coffee now, but unfortunately the Oriental brew was still unknown in the Andechs Monastery tavern. In any case, Simon had no desire to bump into the Schongau burgomaster or his son there. Kuisl was no doubt still with his friend Nepomuk in the old cheese-making room. So where could he go?

As his gaze passed over the partially lighted windows of the monastery, only one place seemed to offer him some security and enlightenment.

The library.

Since his earliest youth, Simon had loved books. They were lodestars for him, dividing the world into dark and light sides. Perhaps this time books would lead him back to the bright side again; in books he could find explanations for almost anything, perhaps even for a shimmering green corpse. Simon nodded with determination. If anybody spoke to him in the library, he would simply say he was still working on the report for the abbot.

He returned to the main portal, which was still open, and climbed the wide steps to the south wing, where a corridor led to a high, two-winged door.

Reverently he opened it and looked into paradise.

The walls were almost twenty feet high and covered floor to ceiling with walnut shelves filled with books. There were huge, dusty parchment books as thick as an arm, newer folios made of paper, and thin folders tied together with red ribbons. Simon could see golden letters on the backs of some of the books, while others were labeled with delicate scribbles. Some had simple leather bindings. The entire room smelled of fine wood, dust, and that undefinable fragrance that emanates from ancient parchment and ink.

Simon swallowed hard. He had not seen so many books since he was in the Premonstratensian monastery in Steingaden, and that was a long while ago. There was probably more knowledge stored here in Andechs than in the entire rest of the Priests’ Corner.

Slowly the medicus walked down an aisle of books, glancing at individual titles. He discovered Paracelsus’s
Große Wundartzney
and, alongside it, a complete five-volume edition of Dioscurides’s
Materia Medica.
Simon began leafing through them randomly, but when he realized he wouldn’t find anything this way, he laid the heavy volumes aside and began wandering through the aisles again.

He was delighted when he came to the end of a row and found a rather nondescript little book at eye-level that evidently dealt with the history of the Andechs Monastery. While he was sure he would find nothing in it about glowing corpses, the events of recent days had made clear to him that this monastery kept more than one secret. Perhaps the key to all these strange events was to be found in the past.

After some hesitation, Simon took the leather-bound book from the shelf and settled down in an upholstered armchair next
to a well-polished cherry-wood table. He couldn’t say himself why he picked out this book. It was written in ancient, somewhat overly dramatic, Latin, so it took a while for the medicus to feel comfortable with it. But he’d learned enough from his incomplete study at Ingolstadt University to read the book at least halfway fluently after a while.

Strangely, the chronicle began not as one would expect, with the founding of the monastery, but much earlier than that. Simon learned that at first there was a castle on the Holy Mountain belonging to the Counts of Andechs, a mighty family that ruled large parts of Bavaria and even southern Tyrol. At some point, however, the Wittelsbachs seized power in Bavaria and destroyed the castle.

The chronicle spoke in this connection of a “vile, cowardly betrayal” but had nothing more to say about it. Simon couldn’t help thinking of Count von Wartenberg, who had been sitting in the tavern the day before with the two Semers. Wartenberg was one of the Wittelsbachs—and hadn’t the fat cellarer said the count had the third key? Simon sighed. The more he dug into this, the more complicated it seemed.

A scraping sound startled him. The tall door had opened and the old librarian with the crooked back entered. When Brother Benedikt first caught sight of Simon, he seemed disconcerted, but then he settled back into his usual arrogance.

“What are you doing in here?” he snarled. “The library is for the exclusive use of the monks.”

“I know,” Simon replied in an apologetic tone. “But you do have an outstanding collection of medical works, and the abbot thought perhaps I might find a clue here. He permitted me to come here to write my report about the strange deaths.” That was clearly untrue, but the medicus guessed that Maurus Rambeck had other problems at the moment than to correct his little white lie.

And in fact the librarian seemed satisfied with Simon’s excuse. “The medical knowledge of the Benedictines is indeed unequaled,” the monk replied proudly. “It goes back to the ancient knowledge of the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks. We were the ones who preserved the knowledge about poisonous and healing plants and kept alive the knowledge of procedures and diagnoses for all these centuries. Surely you’ve seen the
Naturalis historia
of Pliny the Elder?”