Decatur (28 page)

The wind stirred through the open lower windows in the Map Room and Max thought he saw the light change, shadows deepen and the corners of the room seem to recede. He felt like he and his subject, Isabella speaking through Marilyn, were on some precipice. The young girl seated at the table nodded regally and began to speak again.

“It is said in my town that the second daughter is the happy daughter but the first one is God’s. When I was but five or six I was dressed in white and taken through the stone-cobbled streets to participate in my first procession of eldest-born daughters. We were being brought up to fulfill a tradition, a tradition some said sprang from practices of a thousand years of protecting Ischia from invaders. First born girls from Ischia Porto and the surrounding hills were pledged to the nunnery on Castello Aragonese, the castle on the wicked rock. In the convent crypt of Our Lady of Consolation novices rendered their dead sisters service in an unnatural way that served to bring about their own swift deaths one after the other, but our Island was insatiable. In return for the first born daughter each family was awarded great honors. Ischia needed what our virgins produced.

“What did these sisters’ deaths produce that the town needed?” Max asked as he felt the room’s air begin to thicken.

“Soul’s tears. The properties were said to protect warriors, stimulate the elderly, and imbue all who imbibed with an unholy strength. When one of our convent’s sisters died she was stripped naked and placed on a stone burial throne with a hole carved in the seat so her virgin essences seeped out into the basin below that was collected into vials and sold or bartered for great sums and deeds. It was said it was their soul’s tears in the stone basins.

My mother tried to protect me. She had no second daughter and she loved me. Outwardly we were obedient and pious whenever the mention of my coming sacred duty was discussed, whether with the priest or my father and brother, but inwardly my mother was breeding me to rebel.

When I was nine she took me to see a hermit who lived in a house carved out of rock hidden in the hills on the land of the Castello Argonese. A goat’s carcass lay drying in the sun outside along with bunches of herbs tied into wands. The hermit seemed ageless, with skin the color of the greenish volcanic rock that covered our island, a long broken nose, and claw-like hands. Empty stoppered vials lined the walls of his rock house with a jagged double line drawn on the floor in white.” Marilyn stopped speaking for a moment; her eyes, while still closed, fluttered and Max could only guess that she was overcome with the memories of Isabella’s life.

Her mother gasped when she saw the empty vials, “So many spent soul’s tears,” she whispered. Then her sharp eyes scanned the room, taking in the skeletons of insects and small animals, bloodied knife, pile of salt, stink of sulfur and bunches of black roses. “The hermit augurs,” her mother said and pointed to the white double jagged lines drawn upon the floor. The old man pulled his lips back into a smile.

“I need your help to save my daughter. As sorrow would have it she’s my only and the eldest.” She pulled the gold coins from her leather pouch and placed them in the sinewy greenish-tinged hand that he held outstretched.

“Your daughter’s a source then and as you can see she’s needed.” He gestured to the empty vials lining the walls.

“She’s different and not meant for the cursed nunnery,” her mother shot back in a low voice full of emotion. Isabella felt her nine year old form shrinking back as the hermit approached her, sniffing at the base of her throat.

“It’s all right, you’re safe here. What you’re saying is important and I want to listen,” Max said, his voice sonorous and reassuring as Marilyn recoiled. She paused a moment and then her head sagged and she began speaking again.

“He took my mother’s gold and then traced the lines in my palm and put his sinewy hands over my eyes and face. He inhaled for a long moment near the base of my throat and I felt something prick up inside me and my mother gasped and pulled me away. A look of venom crossed over his face and then he backed away, muttering, “She is special, this one. As it was foretold.” The hermit pulled on his pipe and quickly drew a charcoal map on parchment of the landmarks of the Castello. “Warriors come for the solution but miss the secret. Search the middle grounds when the time comes. Your hope for escape lies in the middle grounds. There is an ancient temple that has an ancient ceremony waiting to be performed. If you bring the purest solution along with a hungry warrior to what you find there, you hopes may be rewarded.” His voice sounded like stones being tumbled by the incoming tide. Then he rolled up the map and we watched as it turned blue and then flamed up in his stone fireplace.”

When my sweet mother died I became more valuable as a potential source than loved as a daughter. At fifteen, as was the custom, my father and brother signed me over to the Convent of Our Lady of Consolation in the Castello Aragonese and as a novice I was assigned burial tending at the nunnery. Shall I tell you what services I rendered the dead sisters? ”

A strange, almost feral expression crossed Marilyn’s face when she spoke those words, one of anger and despair with some measure of animal cunning. This was the face of someone in extremis, Max realized.

“I was led into the burial chamber by the abbess, a grey faced woman whose soul was long absent, traded for her living silence, and a convent guard to make sure that I wouldn’t try to throw myself over the ramparts before my duty. They locked the door and I was left with my two dead sisters, one a woman of twenty-two who I recognized as the daughter of a neighbor, she was rank and her flesh was sagging off her bones all the way around her, from her arms and hips, and folds on her neck, and I could hear the drip, drip, drip of her body fluids draining into the stone basin underneath the burial throne. She sat rigid and upright but my duty was to keep the armies of flies and maggots from crawling in all of her openings, her mouth, her nose, the ears, and even her most womanly parts. I was given a small brush and a fan made of black feathers and my fingers curled so tightly around the bone handle that I dug bloody half moons into my own palm. The next of my charges was nearly a skeleton, a nun they said who had managed to live until the ripe old age of thirty-five in Our Lady of Consolation by eating wild herbs before she was carried off by lack of sleep after too many times in the crypt. I preferred standing next to her because the pests had mostly done their work and very little remained. Only occasionally on that long night could I hear a drip from her stone throne into the basin. In the morning they let me out and keeping us under close guard in the cloister feeding us little, intent on our own weakening. But some girls just lay down in fright and simply died after their first nights in the crypt.”

Max had heard of rituals in some South American tribes so gruesome that the celebrants died of fear, but in his experience the rituals of the convent of our Lady of Consolation were unparalleled for their sheer cruelty.

“The spring of the year of our Lord 1640 that I was made an unwilling novice, a charming stranger Alligherio came on foot to Ischia Porto and the Castello. He said he had come for the secret liquid of our dark convent and was willing to work for it. He had everyone call him Gherio and he had such animal grace, strength, and a fearless manner that the metal guilds gave him additional armor beyond his sword and through his feats of strength he won a horse from the Baron of the Castello
.
”

Gherio rode the beautiful beast its hooves clattering on the stones through carved tunnel that lead up to the Castello. Just looking at him through the narrow arched windows made her heart leap. Invisibly drawn by her gaze he lifted his face and as their eyes met the world broke apart, falling away into the sea like an empty husk. They were the kernels left in the center, their souls alone meant for each other in one dazzling moment. He raised his hand to his lips and then threw the kiss up to her in her cloister prison giving her a hope more precious than life. Then other thoughts began to consume her; how would his mouth taste? Salty. Sweet. Banned.

“Finally in him the Island had found the warrior they had been seeking for decades. They pledged to supply Gherio with the elixir in return for his loyalty and protection. And from his first sip he began to crave it.”

Max felt his skin crawling even as he recognized the mythic proportions of Isabella’s story. Ischia seemed intent on creating with the liquid from the nuns its own Golem in Gherio. Just as the story went in the Jewish ghetto of Prague, the people made a monster to protect them, but a monster. And the name Gherio needed no translation for Max, ‘Gar” was the twentieth century version of the name.

“While my heart ached to be with Gherio my newest charge in the burial crypts at night was a sister novice, Sophia and she I had trouble gazing upon. She was a girl like myself and newly dead, less than a day old. While wisp thin, she was perfect, her eyes still open, her breasts high and firm, and her waist comely. As the night wore on I began to pray with poor Sophia and kept the flies off as her as the candles placed on the stone arms of the burial thrones threw strange and hideous shadows on the wall. She became like a friend to me. I reached out and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see all the terribleness around her. In all the darkness our thoughts became entangled.”

A thin film of perspiration covered Marilyn’s face as Isabella spoke in the high clear voice. The bell in the chapel rang across campus. Noon, but ordinary time had lost all meaning in the Map Room.

“You have to understand, I couldn’t face a life like this. I was only fifteen years old. I wanted to live. I was still undamaged and whole. I was willing to do anything to escape and the warrior Gherio was attracted to me as I to him.”

“I finally got my chance. As the blood orange groves were blooming, their white flowers like stars, there were tours of the nunnery given for the town folk, even the ghastly burial chamber where the candles guttered on the stone thrones. The ancient hermit that my mother took me to appeared then and it was he who made sure I was alone with Gherio as white petals fell all around us.”

It was forbidden and sweet and made her feel deliciously alive right down to her very core. She had never wanted to be a nun, to be interred here, and Gherio he was freedom. He said he lived for love - well, he would live for her.

“I remember standing in an orange grove on the nunnery grounds as novices fluttered past in their coarse robes trying to catch his eye and he let out such a great laugh that even the hermit smiled. It was a wicked knowing smile. But Gherio had golden flecks in his eyes and the sun had left its mark upon his hair. My soul called out to his and he kissed my fingers and we were both in one another’s spell. I reached out and he couldn’t help it, Gherio felt my living essence. His warrior’s soul was wild but he answered to mine in a way that made me feel like I was awaking from my virgin slumber. I whispered in his ear that I knew of a more powerful secret on the rock.”

“What greater secret?” asked Max, feeling his way to the question.

“I spent any time I could examining everything in the Castello grounds to see if there was hope of escape, remembering the map the hermit had drawn in his rock house hidden in the hills. In the middle grounds as the hermit predicted I found what I had been searching for, stumbling across ancient ruins. The sun fell behind the clouds when my slippered feet took me down the circular, cracked and mossy steps. In the stone-paved floor a rusted metal ring was embedded in the middle of a double jagged line, similar to what I had seen in the humble hermitage six years ago with my mother. My breath was sucked out of my body just standing over it. Examining the broken columns that flanked a flat stone table I found the lip was carved in Latin. The hairs on my neck rose as I read, “
The celebrants of the hidden mysteries hunt the soul and find glory in one yet to be born.”

Max felt a rush of discovery along with a chill at Isabella’s description of what must have been a secret Roman temple built around a soul hunting vampire cult. The strange elixir from the dead nuns would be like opium to such creatures.

“So you told Gherio of your discovery, Isabella?” Max asked.

“Yes, it was like the hermit said. Gherio was convinced the secrets of the temple would make him stronger than any ordinary man. I would bring the hungry warrior and the purest solution in a vial freshly collected from the basins to the temple and we would escape.

He came by horseback on the third evening that I was to tend to the novice Sophia just as the sun left a scarlet scrape on the purpling sky. The nunnery guard challenged him at our gates, but when he sliced off the first guard’s arm with his short sword they scattered their way down the rock. A handful of sisters and novices shamelessly leaned out the windows that overlooked the square main courtyard as he rode in, calling out to Gherio to take them, but I alone had what he wanted. I flew down the steps from my cell and he carried me in his arms from the stone prison called Our Lady of Consolation and placed me on the back of the bay stallion and then we galloped out the gates like the hounds of hell were after us, which they may have been. He whipped the horse through the brambles and stones to the middle grounds as I whispered the way in his ear, until we reached the temple. I felt that demons lingered there but I was past being afraid of the dead by this time. The young Sister Sophia, pure and wise, who I had tended for the past two nights in the burial chamber, instructed me on what I must do. At her bidding I smuggled in two small amphorae in the sleeves of my robe on the second night. I collected the liquid from the basins, which was of course forbidden. One vial for Gherio and one vial for myself, as she had told me to in my head. But I had to leave some in the stone basins or I would be discovered when I was released the next morning. The elixir from the bodies of the dead was cloudy, amber, with blood and secretions mixing together. I filled one amphora with her essences but the second amphora I only partially filled with the secret solution, and I used my own blood taken from a cut I made in my arm and my own saliva to fill it full. This was the amphora I would give to the Gherio, so he would have my essence in him as well. The second pure one, which would give anyone who consumed it unearthly strength from the good and wise Sophia, I secretly buried under the altar at the little chapel dedicated to St. Francis, as Sophia had ordered.”