After what seemed like an eternity, she came to the branch in the tunnel where they’d previously decided to turn right. She closed her eyes and tried to listen for the soft sound of the music and the crying children, but was distressed now to find she could hear nothing.
All around her, the silence was almost palpable, interrupted only by drops of water falling from the ceiling.
She swallowed hard, then decided to throw all caution to the wind and call out. “Peter? Paul? Are you here somewhere? Can you hear me?”
At first the only response was the soft sound of dripping water, but all of a sudden she heard something in the second passageway that she didn’t recognize at first. It sounded like the distant growling of a bear; it was a while before she realized it was someone moaning. A moment later she heard a voice that brought tears to her eyes.
“Mama? Mama? Where are you?”
“My God, Peter!” She raced frantically down the passageway while she could hear footsteps receding in the darkness in front of her. She thought she could see a few shadowy figures far off, but they’d soon vanished.
“Peter!” she shouted. “Is it you?”
“Mama, over here! Here I am!”
The voice of her older son didn’t come from where she’d seen the shadowy figures but from somewhere behind the wall. As she rounded another turn, she saw a round entrance on her left framed by large blocks of stone. The moaning was now close at hand, interrupted only by the wailing of her child. She stumbled through the portal to enter a low vault filled with a splendid four-poster canopy bed, a chest decorated with roses and ornaments, and a dressing table-all furniture like that owned by noble ladies in Augsburg and Munich. The cavelike room, covered with dirt and the soot from the torches, looked like a perverse parody of a ladies’ boudoir.
What in heaven’s name have I stumbled across here? she thought. Is this the automaton’s bedroom? Virgilius must have loved this automaton more than anyone could imagine.
Frantically she looked around. On the other side of the vault, a second passageway led to another room from which the crying and moaning were coming.
“Peter! Simon, Paul! Where are you?”
Her heart pounding, she entered the second vault-and let out a loud shriek.
The room looked as if it had been vandalized by an angry devil.
Shelves had been knocked down and the floor was strewn with curious apparatuses, broken horns, stones, and bits of bone. Some traces of greenish phosphorus glimmered in the torchlight, and in some places, there were even large piles of it. On a kind of black altar stood a tiny stump of a flickering candle that cast bizarre, dancing shadows on the wall behind.
But all this was only of passing interest to Magdalena. In the far right corner of the room, her husband lay on the floor, his once so fashionable tailored jacket torn to shreds and his face deathly pale and contorted. Alongside him stood Peter, who came running to his mother now with open arms. His clothes were filthy, but otherwise he appeared unharmed.
“Oh God, Peter,” Magdalena exclaimed, taking her boy in her arms. “I… I was so worried about you. Where is your brother? And what has this crazy man done to your father?”
She set the boy down and turned to Simon, who lay in a strangely contorted position on the bare stone floor, his whole body twitching. He turned his head toward her and struggled to speak, but Magdalena couldn’t understand a word that came out of his mouth.
“Annal,” he mumbled again and again. “Annal…”
As she bent down to him and stroked his sweaty brow, his eyes rolled wildly and his fingers splayed out like cat’s claws. The entire rest of his body seemed paralyzed.
As she looked at Simon, she couldn’t help thinking of a young Schongau farm lad whom her father had tried to cure many years ago. The strapping young man, who had scratched himself on a rusty nail, was overcome by a strange paralysis-just like Simon now-and shortly later suffered a seizure and died. Magdalena’s father had been unable to help him. Did the same fate await her husband?
“My God, Simon,” she cried, “what did this madman do to you? And where is Paul? Please say something. I don’t know what to do.”
“Annal, annal,” was all he could say. Still Magdalena had no idea what that might mean. In her despair, she finally turned to her three-year-old son.
“Peter, can you tell me what happened to Paul?”
The boy nodded eagerly. “Paul is playing with Matthias,” he said cheerfully.
“With… Matthias?” Magdalena gasped in horror. “But… but does that mean…”
“Matthias and Paul left with the bad man,” he exclaimed. “The man said I had to stay here and keep an eye on Papa.”
“That’s… that’s very good,” she stammered. “You’re a good boy, a really good boy.”
Magdalena’s mind was racing. She still couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. Was it possible that the good-natured Matthias, the man she’d so often entrusted with her children, was conspiring with Virgilius? That he was Virgilius’s helper?
“Do you know where Paul went with… with Matthias?” she asked in a soft voice.
“The bad man said he would show them both the garden,” Peter announced cheerfully. Since Magdalena’s arrival, his fear seemed to have vanished. “I want to go back to the garden, too. I want to play with the doll.”
“We… we’ll go to the garden, I promise. But first we must get out of here, do you understand?”
Magdalena tried to smile, but she could feel big tears rolling down her cheeks. Her younger son had disappeared, abducted by Virgilius and a man she’d trusted blindly, and her husband seemed to have swallowed a deadly poison. She felt sadder and more forlorn than ever before in her life.
“Annal…”
Startled out of her feeling of depression and helplessness, Magdalena turned to her husband again. She was relieved to see he was now able to raise his right hand; the paralysis seemed to not be so serious after all. Then she realized he was struggling to point to something specific: the little altar where the tiny stump of a candle was swimming in a pool of wax. The wick was leaning precariously to one side. Clearly it would fall onto the altar soon and the candle would go out.
“Annal,” Simon gasped, and Magdalena cringed. Candle.
Beside the pool of wax, she saw granules forming a trail from the altar to the ground and, from there, to some larger mounds of glowing greenish powder.
My God, she realized in a flash. The phosphorus. We’ll all be blown up.
Annal… annal.
The flame flickered, caught in a slight draft and, for a moment, it seemed it might go out.
Then the burning wick touched the powder strewn on the altar.
19
LATE THE NIGHT OF SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 1666 AD
Outside the monastery gates, the worst thunderstorm Jakob Kuisl had seen in many years was raging. He could remember being caught in a similar storm as a child. Back then, the wind had carried away entire trees, and lightning had flashed like musket fire across the countryside. This time as well the heavens were ablaze with countless bolts of lightning. Black and violet clouds swirled across a sky that looked as if Judgment Day were at hand.
The thunder overhead was so loud that Kuisl imagined God himself was pounding against the monastery walls with a hammer. In the next instant there was a brilliant flash, another clap of thunder, and hail as large as quail eggs came pounding down on the roofs. The thunderstorm had to be directly over the Holy Mountain now.
For a while the hangman remained indecisively under the archway of the monastery, looking out at the impenetrable wall of rain. From the buried chamber under the keep, Kuisl had first made his way into the monastery beer cellar with the count. The entrance to the catacombs beneath the castle had been concealed hurriedly behind some barrels; the counterfeiters had made little effort to hide the hole in the wall. Since Brother Eckhart was the cellarer, he also was responsible for the monastery’s beer supply, and rarely did anyone else enter this cellar.