The Poisoned Pilgrim: A Hangman's Daughter Tale (10 page)

“Can you be a bit quieter when you smack your lips, or do you want to wake the dead?” Magdalena rubbed her eyes and stared at Simon angrily.

“Well, at least when you grouse like that it seems you’re on
the road to recovery.” Simon grinned and pointed at the second bowl of porridge. “Want some breakfast?”

Magdalena nodded, then stood up and dished out some porridge. She did in fact seem to have recovered and ate with an appetite that reminded Simon of a hungry wolf.

“I’ll deliver my report to the abbot this morning,” he said, wiping his mouth. “First, I’ll stop by to see this watchmaker Virgilius. From some of the things he said, I’m guessing he knows more about Brother Johannes than he wanted to tell me yesterday.”

“Do you think perhaps that Johannes killed his own apprentice?” she asked, taking another serving of porridge. “I wouldn’t put anything past that ugly toad. I can feel he’s covering up something.”

“Actually, it’s no business of ours,” Simon sighed. “If only I’d kept my big mouth shut when I was talking with the abbot. But now one more visit won’t make any difference. In any case, I’d like to take you along to have a look at that bizarre automaton,” he said, getting up from the table. “What do you say? Do you want to come?”

“To admire my rival? Why not?” Magdalena laughed. “Watch out—if I don’t like her, I’ll yank out a few screws, and after that your nutty companion Virgilius won’t be able to use his doll for anything but an expensive scarecrow.”

Shortly thereafter they strolled through the village, up the hill toward the monastery, then took the little trail branching off to the right to the watchmaker’s house. The sun had already risen above the treetops and shone brightly and warmly now on the freshly painted stone building with the little garden in front. Simon walked past the daisies and poppies and up to the door. He was about to knock when he noticed it was already ajar.

“Brother Virgilius?” he called into the room. “Are you there? I brought someone along whom I’d like you to…”

Noticing the stench of sulfur and gunpowder, he stopped short. He also sensed another odor, which at another time and place he might have experienced as pleasant.

The odor of grilled meat.

“What’s going on?” Magdalena asked, amused. “Did you catch the monk in bed with his doll?”

“Evidently Brother Virgilius has been experimenting again,” Simon murmured. “Let’s hope nobody got hurt this time.”

As he pushed against the door, he met with resistance, as if something heavy was right behind it. Groaning, he pushed harder, and the odor became stronger. Heavy clouds of smoke issued through the crack; then suddenly something sprang out of it like a snake.

A pale, bloated arm.

With a loud cry, Simon jumped back, stumbling and landing on his back in the middle of the daisies. Magdalena, too, stepped back, trembling and pointing to the arm that hung lifeless in the doorway at knee-height, its fingers pointing accusingly at the shocked couple.

“Someone… someone must be lying behind the door,” Simon stuttered, as he slowly rose to his feet.

“And whoever that is, is likely dead as a doornail.” Magdalena gathered her courage, struggled to open the door, and in the gradually dispersing smoke, gazed on a scene of horror. The room looked as if a demon had been unleashed in it.

Directly in front of them lay the corpse of the young assistant, Vitalis. The novitiate’s head was angled oddly, as if some superhuman force had broken his neck; his shirt and parts of his trousers were burned, and beneath the clothing, burned flesh was visible on his back and legs. His arm was extended toward the door as if in a last desperate attempt to flee, and his face, seared by the flames, grimaced in fear, his mouth wide-open and eyeballs turned upward.

“My God,” Simon panted. “What happened here?”

In the room itself, tables and chairs had been overturned, the valuable pendulum clock lay in pieces on the floor, and the two halves of the copper sphere had rolled into a corner. Only the crocodile dangled from the ceiling as before, staring with lifeless eyes on the chaos below.

“If Virgilius was really experimenting with gunpowder, he’s blown himself up, along with everything else here, and has dissolved in a cloud of smoke.” Magdalena stepped into the room and looked around warily. “In any case, he’s not here.”

Simon stooped down to pick up the head of a doll that had rolled in front of him, its forehead shattered and eyes smashed in. Perplexed, he was turning the porcelain head over in his hands when something crossed his mind.

The woman doll! Where in the world
…

Simon groped about for a while in the dimly lit room, but the automaton had disappeared. In the middle of the room, however, he discovered Brother Virgilius’s black robe in a large pool of blood, as well as a scorched screwdriver.

“It doesn’t look like Virgilius made it out of this room alive,” he murmured. A horrible thought passed through his head, so absurd that he cast it at once into the furthest corner of his mind.

Could the doll have killed its master and dragged him away? Was that even possible?

Suddenly he could feel something crunch beneath his feet. Stooping down, he picked up a broken lens inside a small, blood-stained brass ring. It took him a moment to realize what it was.

Brother Johannes’s eyepiece—the one the monk had worn yesterday in the apothecary’s house.

Simon was about to turn around to Magdalena when he saw two black-robed Benedictine monks in the doorway. Their faces, white as sheets, stared down in horror at the dead Vitalis at their feet.

“For the love of the Holy Virgin, what happened here?” one of them groaned, while the younger one stared at Magdalena and crossed himself.

“A witch!” he wailed, falling to his knees. “A witch has killed our dear Brother Virgilius and Vitalis. Lord in heaven, help us!”

“Uh, that’s not exactly what happened,” Simon replied hesitantly from out of the darkness, which made both monks scream in terror.

“A witch, the Grim Reaper, and the stench of sulfur,” the older one cried out. “It’s the end of the world!”

Wailing and screaming, they ran up the mountain to the monastery, where the bells had just started to ring. Simon nervously turned the destroyed eyepiece in his hand. It appeared he would have to rewrite his report.

Far below in his hideout, the man read the news his assistant had just brought him. A faint smile passed over his face. They’d found the dead assistant amid the chaos, and the watchmaker had disappeared. Now everything else would take its course.

The only thing troubling him was that sneaky bathhouse surgeon and his damned woman. Why did they have to poke their noses into everything? Had she noticed anything in the tower? And why had her husband gone to the pond yesterday to nose around? Those two were like boils that itched and ached—not really dangerous but a distraction nevertheless. The man decided he’d have to keep a better eye on them, and he knew from experience what to do with painful boils.

You cut them out.

Full of a newly regained composure, he rose and crossed to a heavy oaken table covered with books and parchments. Some of these that were from distant lands would have been unfamiliar to most people; some were written with flourishes and in runes; one even in blood. All sought answers to a secret so ancient that
it went back to the very beginnings of human life and human faith—when a first fur-clothed cave dweller held in his hands a shiny stone, a little bone, or a skull and kneeled down to kiss it.

It was faith alone that breathed life into that dead thing.

The man hunched over the books, closed his eyes, and ran his fingers over the lines written in blood. The solution was hidden somewhere in these books. And he suspected even more blood would flow before it was found.

An hour later, Simon stood in front of the monastery council in what they called the Prince’s Quarters on the third floor. Abbot Maurus Rambeck sat at the head of a long table, and to his right sat his deputy, the Prior Brother Jeremias, as well as the cellarer, the novitiate master, and the cantor, who was responsible for the care of the library, among other things. They all stared at Simon with dark and reproachful looks that conveyed their certainty he had something to do with the horrible murder.

Simon swallowed hard. For a moment he thought he could already feel the fire at his feet as he was being burned at the stake. At this moment he envied Magdalena, who, as a woman, was not allowed in the monastery wing. The monks had arrested her and taken her to an adjacent building, pending the outcome of his interrogation. Simon himself had had only a few minutes to speak privately with the abbot before the other members of the council appeared.

“Dear Brothers in Christ,” the abbot began with a trembling voice. Simon noticed that Brother Maurus, in contrast to the last visit, now appeared extremely anxious, even confused. Nervously he passed his tongue over his bulging lips. “I’ve called you together here because a murder has been committed in our ranks, one so horrible and mysterious that it’s difficult for me to find the right words…”

“The devil,” interrupted the cellarer, a fat monk whose tonsure was encircled by only a few thin hairs he’d artfully combed
back over his bald head. “The devil came to fetch this effeminate Vitalis, along with his master, the warlock Virgilius. I’ve warned him many times to stop his accursed experiments, and now he’s fallen into Satan’s hands.”

“Brother Eckhart, I forbid you from talking that way about our fellow Brother,” the abbot shouted at him. “Brother Virgilius has disappeared, and that’s all we know. The blood in his shop leads us to believe there has been an accident. My God, perhaps he is just as dead as Vitalis…” Maurus Rambeck stopped and pressed his lips together, visibly moved.

“We must expect the worst, Maurus,” murmured the cantor and librarian sitting at the far end of the table. His hair was snow-white, and deep folds in his face made him look like a withered plum cake. “The destruction suggests a deadly battle took place. But why?” Distrustfully he looked at the medicus.

“I think it’s time for the bathhouse surgeon to tell us what he saw,” said the scrawny prior whose hooked nose and piercing eyes reminded Simon of an eagle.

An eagle just before it plunges downward toward a terrified little mouse in the wheat field,
thought Simon.
I’m lucky this Jeremias is only the abbot’s deputy.

“Who can tell us that this man from Schongau doesn’t have anything to do with it?” the prior continued. “After all, Brother Martin and Brother Jakobus came upon him and that woman at the scene. And other monks have disclosed to me that the bathhouse surgeon went to visit Virgilius—and Brother Johannes—yesterday,” he added ominously.

Now all five monks eyed Simon suspiciously. Their gazes seemed to pass right through him. Once more the medicus felt as if his feet were being held to the fire.

“Allow me please to explain what happened,” he began hesitantly. “I… can explain everything.”

The abbot nodded sympathetically, and Simon began his report,
starting with his visit the previous day with Brother Johannes. He mentioned the latter’s argument with Virgilius, and finally pulled out the blood-encrusted eyepiece he’d found on the floor in the watchmaker’s workshop, which Abbot Rambeck reached for and showed to the other monks.

“This clearly belongs to Brother Johannes,” he said pensively. “The Schongau bathhouse surgeon told me before our meeting about his suspicion, and I then summoned Johannes.”

“And?” the old librarian asked.

Rambeck sighed. “He disappeared.”

“Is it possible he’s just in the forest collecting herbs?” the novitiate master interjected. He was a younger man with pleasant features and alert eyes, which were slightly red now. Simon wondered whether he’d been crying.

“Collecting herbs this early in the morning? Brother Johannes?” The cellarer Eckhart laughed derisively. “That would be the first time our dear Brother had been up that early. He usually prefers to go out in the light of the full moon and, after that, down a few pitchers of beer.”

“In any case, I’ve sent a few men out from the village to search for him and bring him back,” said Rambeck. “I’m reluctant to disturb the judge with the case until I’ve spoken with him. You know what that would mean.”

The monks nodded silently, and Simon, too, could imagine the consequences of a visit by the local judge. A few years ago, the elector’s deputy had appeared in Schongau at a witch trial, along with a large retinue and noisy soldiers. The city was still paying the bill for that months later.

“What we have here is a murder, Maurus,” the prior scolded, shaking his head. “Probably even a double murder, if we can’t find Virgilius.” He shrugged, and Simon thought he saw quiet satisfaction in his eyes. “I’m afraid we can’t avoid calling the district judge from Weilheim.”

The medicus took a step forward and cleared his throat. “Excuse me, but perhaps Brother Johannes is even responsible for three deaths.”

The prior frowned. “What do you mean?”

Hesitantly, Simon removed his report from his pocket and presented it to the council. He briefly explained his suspicions concerning the death of the novitiate Coelestin.

For a while, no one said a word.

Finally, the abbot spoke, his face now ashen. “Do you mean that Brother Johannes may have first killed his assistant Coelestin, then Vitalis, and possibly Virgilius as well? But… why?”

“We know that all too well,” Brother Eckhart snapped. His bald head turned red, and little veins stood out. “Haven’t the two always carried out sacrilegious experiments? Johannes
and
Virgilius? Didn’t we just two weeks ago forbid Brother Johannes from studying things that only God should be concerned with? And yet he persisted.” He stood up from his chair, panting heavily, and pounded the table so hard with his fist that the monks stared back at him in shock. “I’ll tell you what happened: the good novitiate Coelestin wanted to prevent his master from experimenting any further with this devil’s work. So Johannes simply killed him. Finally there was an argument between the two sorcerers Johannes and Virgilius; they fought with balls of fire and sulfur, until Virgilius went up in smoke at the end and went to hell, and his assistant was struck down by his enemy’s magic spells.”