The final words awakened the monk from his panicked stiffness. He pulled himself together, the trembling stopped, and with a loud cry he charged at Magdalena, who was running to help Simon. The hangman’s daughter was accustomed to giving an impudent workman a good slap in the face, but Brother Lothar was something else. He was almost six feet tall, with the muscular arms, broad shoulders, and the huge hands of an Augsburg raftsman. When he charged toward her, she ducked behind one of the shelves. She had no plan; she just knew she had to get away from the monk at all costs. Perhaps she would think of something as she ran from him.
Magdalena dodged again, but Brother Lothar was right at her heels. She dived under shelves, jumped over metal contraptions whose purpose she couldn’t guess, and climbed over stone sarcophagi and piles of rubble.
Suddenly, she came to a huge cabinet of costumes. She slipped inside, hoping the clumsy monk would run past. The dusty garments inside had the mildewed smell of fabric stored in a damp place too long.
The hangman’s daughter sensed she was not alone. She smelled the sweaty odor of a stranger breathing heavily beside her.
Pushing aside a silver angel costume, she saw Benedikta crouched in front of her. Benedikta put her finger to her lips, motioning for her to remain silent. Only a few inches separated the two women. Magdalena had never been so close to her rival. Benedikta, too, had a terrified expression on her face, and all the refined French mannerisms had vanished. Sweat poured down her face, her hair was in tangles, and the expensive lacework of her precious clothing was smudged and torn. But behind all that, Magdalena saw something else, something she had never seen until then-a wild fire burning in the eyes of the merchant woman from Landsberg, a readiness to fight, an unbending will, and an inner strength that would put many men to shame. Magdalena had seen eyes like that before.
In the mirror.
The two women stared at each other for a few seconds, until a grating sound pulled them out of their thoughts. Looking to one side, Magdalena was shocked to see that the closet was tipping over.
“Benedikta, watch out!”
Through the back of the closet, Magdalena could hear Brother Lothar panting as he pushed against the closet, finally toppling it and burying the women under it, along with the moldy costumes. Something was burning nearby; evidently, the costumes around them had caught fire.
Frantic, Magdalena pushed against the door of the wardrobe, but something was blocking it. The smoke was thickening, and alongside her, Benedikta was coughing. As Magdalena flailed her arms around wildly in all directions, she noticed light coming through a crack near the top of the cabinet. She pushed against the top and it popped off, crashing to the ground and letting in air and light. The two women crawled out, coughing, just in time to see the Steingaden abbot and the cross ascending on the lift toward the auditorium above. In the crypt, Brother Lothar was furiously turning the crank.
“The cross! I’ve saved it!” Bonenmayr screamed, staring up at the opening from the platform. “It’s ascending into heaven while the heretics are burning in hell! It’s such a pity that this play will never be performed. It really deserves an audience.”
With these words, the abbot disappeared into a black cloud while the stage flooring began raining down on those trapped below.
Just before reaching the main portal, Jakob Kuisl turned around again to see a figure in a bloodstained white robe emerge onstage from below. The figure held a cross at about shoulder height and shouted something Kuisl couldn’t quite make out over the ever-louder crackling of the flames. He thought he heard the words heaven and hell. Though the hangman was not an especially religious man, for a brief moment, he thought he was witnessing the Savior’s return to earth to judge mankind with blood and fire.
Was Judgment Day at hand?
Jakob Kuisl blinked and only now realized that the white form staggering across the burning stage was the Steingaden abbot, who was evidently wounded. Bonenmayr was looking for a route down into the auditorium, but the stairway was already in flames. The hangman hesitated. What in the name of the Holy Trinity had happened down there under the stage? Just a moment ago, Kuisl had heard a shot; there must have been some sort of fight. But with whom?
In the meantime, Augustin Bonenmayr had recognized the hangman through the clouds of smoke. He screamed, pointing his clawlike fingers at Kuisl. “You will not stop me, either!” he shouted. “The devil sent you, Kuisl! But God is on my side!”
Holding the cross in one hand, Bonenmayr ran to the left side of the stage, where a narrow spiral staircase led to the upper balcony. The top third of the stairway was already a charred, glowing skeleton, but that didn’t stop the abbot. Taking a huge leap, he managed to get one foot on the balustrade. With the cross still tucked under his right arm, he clung by one hand to the railing above the auditorium.
“For God’s sake, just throw the damned cross away,” Kuisl shouted. “Or you’ll meet God face-to-face in a minute!”
In the inferno, though, the abbot couldn’t hear him. He was trapped in a world of fire, hatred, madness. In vain, he tried to pull the wooden cross up with him over the balcony railing. Instead, he hung there like a huge pendulum, kicking in all directions, trying to get a foothold on the balcony. But then the burning railing gave way, breaking into pieces in a spray of sparks, and with a scream, Bonenmayr plunged headfirst into the flames that were eating through the rows of seats beneath him.
The cross seemed suspended in air for a moment before finally crashing down on the Steingaden abbot and shattering into pieces.
For a brief moment, Kuisl thought he saw a hand appear from beneath the seats, fingers desperately reaching for something, but then a mass of glowing debris showered down, and all that was left of Bonenmayr was a memory.
From the open doorway, the hangman watched the fire consume the theater. The entire auditorium had become one huge funeral pyre.
Glowing pieces of wood and burning scraps of curtain rained down on Simon and the two women. As the fire burned slowly through the stage floor and cellar ceiling, the air became so hot that it was harder and harder to breathe, and the smoke burned their eyes and lungs.
After he’d hauled the abbot up on the lift, Brother Lothar tried to crank the platform down into the cellar again, but the rope caught fire and the lift crashed to the floor, breaking into pieces. Now the monk looked around in panic. He was imprisoned with the same people he’d just tried to kill. Would they attack him? Why had the abbot abandoned him?
Simon struggled to his feet again. His head ached and blood spurted out of his nose and from a wound on his temple, but at least he could walk again. “We’ve got to leave through the underground passage,” he croaked, “through the locked door in the monastery where we were before. Quick! Go before everything crashes down on us!”
Ignoring the monk, the three ducked and ran toward the low doorway as burning pieces of the ceiling continued to rain down around them. Brother Lothar stood in the middle of the room, petrified and undecided. Finally, he tore himself away from the spot and hurried after the others, but the smoke had now become so thick he couldn’t see where they’d gone. The huge man groped through the smoke, coughing, bumping into shelves, and knocking over statues of saints.
“Wait for me!” he gasped. “Where are you? Where-”
At that moment, an especially large chunk of the ceiling directly above the monk broke loose and came crashing to the ground. Brother Lothar could only watch in horror as he was buried in burning timbers. After a few moments, his plaintive cries ceased.