Kuisl thought for a moment, then continued: “These are no doubt the old forgotten escape routes from the Andechs castle.” He pointed at a human skull with a bashed-in forehead that grimaced at them from atop a pile of rubbish. “Now at least we know how the castle was stormed. Someone betrayed the defenders and revealed the location of the escape tunnels. With all these bones lying about, it was certainly an ungodly massacre.” The hangman held up the torch and looked into the left-, then the right-hand tunnel. “The sorcerer uses these escape tunnels as a hiding place, no doubt,” he mused. “But to hide what? In any case it’s clear why the unfortunate Laurentius was found with the monstrance in the forest. The sorcerer dragged him here, but the Brother was able to escape and get at least partway back.” Kuisl spat on the ground angrily. “If your husband hadn’t fallen asleep, then perhaps he would have told us and we’d have known much sooner where to look.”
“Your ranting and raving won’t get us anywhere,” Magdalena replied, annoyed. “Tell me instead which corridor to take.”
Her father scowled. “We’ll take the one on the right,” he said finally, “the one with the moldy smell. It seems to go deeper into the mountain, and besides, it heads directly toward the monastery.”
“How can you know down here what direction we’re headed?” Magdalena asked, surprised.
With a grin, the hangman tapped his long, hooked nose. “This here always tells me the right direction. I’m like a blind old dog that always finds its way back home.”
Without another word, Kuisl entered the right-hand corridor, and Magdalena followed, shrugging. She had given up trying to understand her father. In most cases she had to admit reluctantly that his quirky hunches were right.
The moldy odor became stronger as they proceeded, until finally Magdalena thought she could place the smelclass="underline" an old chamber pot that had been standing for a long time unemptied under a bed. The stench was so strong now her throat felt as if it were burning.
Turning up her nose, she hurried along behind her father. Were they somewhere near a huge cesspool? Instinctively she looked up at the ceiling, thinking a load of feces might come falling down on them at any moment. The hangman forged ahead with determination, and a few times Magdalena thought she could see him nodding grimly in the dim light.
“The entrance to hell,” Kuisl growled. “The old woman in Kien Valley was right. It stinks here as if Satan were just around the next corner. At least I think we’re close to solving the first of many riddles.”
“What do you mean when you say…” Magdalena stopped suddenly, spotting a faint light reflecting from the wall on their left, pulsing like a poisonous cloud in the gloom.
“My God, what is that?” she gasped.
“That?” The hangman grinned. “That’s one of our riddles, even if it stinks to high heaven.”
He approached the shining light and suddenly seemed to vanish inside it.
“Father!” Magdalena cried out in horror. “Where are you?”
Her heart pounding, she ran after Kuisl and realized the shimmering was coming through a narrow passageway. Stepping through a low doorway, she found herself in a basin-shaped area glowing in a soft green light. She had to look again before realizing it wasn’t the room itself shining, but just a few objects in it. On the left was a rough-hewn table with an open book on top, and alongside that, some bowls, flasks, and crucibles, all giving off that strange light. More books with heavy leather bindings stood there, and the table was strewn with small glowing chunks.
The strongest light came from the opposite side of the room, where a pile of waste two yards high glowed a ghostly green, as if hundreds of glowworms were crawling over it. The stench was so strong that Magdalena thought she was going to be sick.
“Beautiful,” Kuisl grumbled. “We’ve found the latrine in the old castle.”
Magdalena was so fascinated by the glimmering light that it took her a while to understand what her father had just said. “The what?” she asked, confused.
“The latrine, or rather the cesspool beneath it.” The hangman walked toward the pile and began poking around. Black clumps oozed between his fingers. Looking up, Kuisl saw a round, encrusted hole in the ceiling.
“No doubt there was at one time a secret room up there for Their Excellencies.” Kuisl grinned. “On the toilet, we’re all the same, aren’t we? Nobleman, monk, and knacker.”
Magdalena looked at him, puzzled. “But why is everything glowing here? The table, the bowls, these clumps…?”
“This is where the sorcerer made his hellfire,” Kuisl replied. “Both the assistant Vitalis and Brother Laurentius had phosphorus poured over them. Remember what Simon saw when he went to inspect the corpses in the beer cellar.”
“The glowing!” Magdalena cried. “Of course! You spoke about this phosphorus. It shines in a green light and burns like tinder. But what’s a cesspit got to do with it?”
“Because phosphorus is made from urine vapor.” Disgusted, he dropped the hardened feces he was holding. “It takes lots of urine. This is probably the urine of at least a dozen generations of nobility. The sorcerer must have found this pit and used it for his purposes.”
Magdalena approached curiously with her torch, but her father held her back. “Be careful,” he said. “This stuff catches fire faster than you can say amen. And with this much lying around, you could blow up the whole mountain.”
Kuisl turned to inspect the table. He glanced at the mortars, flasks, crucibles, and finally the books, picking up an especially worn one at random.
“This one here is written in hieroglyphics and appears to be very old,” he mumbled. “Strange, I’ve never seen anything like it…” He put it aside and reached for another, also written in an unfamiliar language. Finally, he turned to a book right in front of him bound in calf’s leather. Leafing through it, he whistled softly through his teeth.
“If I didn’t know this work was written by a murderer and madman, I would bow down to the man. See for yourself.”
Curiously, Magdalena approached and studied the beautiful writing. There were Latin notes in blood-red letters and sweeping initials, illustrations of puppets, individual human limbs, and mysterious apparatuses whose functions were unclear. On other pages, there were strange formulas, calculations, and recipes. It all seemed to Magdalena like Satan’s personal Bible.
“Remarkable,” Kuisl whispered almost reverentially. “This is a collection of all sorts of mysterious knowledge, something like the De occulta philosophia by Agrippa, but much more mysterious. I’ve never seen anything like it, and whoever wrote it…”
He stopped short, pointing excitedly at one of the last pages with illustrations of lightning striking the roof of a house. A sort of rope or wire led along the wall to the figure of a man, and under it were three Latin words: Tornitrua et fulgura.
Lightning and thunder.
“Nepomuk’s idea of a lightning rod,” the hangman exclaimed. “He told me about it in the dungeon, remember? This is just the way he described the rods to me at that time, and these are the same Latin words he used. That can only mean…” Excitedly he rummaged through the pile of books until he finally found another notebook, which he held up triumphantly.
“Ha! As I thought,” he cried out. “Nepomuk’s notebook. I recognize his writing.”
Magdalena frowned. The stinging odor made it hard for her to think. “Nepomuk’s notebook?” she asked. “But Nepomuk is in the dungeon over in Weilheim. How did that little book get here?”
“Good old Nepomuk told me back then that the watchmaker Virgilius was very interested in the lightning rod,” Kuisl replied. “They even argued about it; Nepomuk didn’t want to tell anyone. Virgilius, however, knew someone who wanted to know more about it, and evidently that someone also stole the notebook.”