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.