At last, he came back to the events of the evening: "These woods have become treacherous. It must have been a large animal to have scared you so."

"Well, perhaps I was nervous after being robbed. I might have imagined it."

"Ah."

The utterance told Richard that the abbot firmly believed that he had not imagined it.

The abbot finished his wine and pointed to the half-full goblet beside Richard's plate. "I do not blame you for not finishing it. It's a watery vintage from Kelheim. We have a wine cellar, but it ages only cobwebs now. There's no need to keep a store for so few and the vineyards shrivelled years ago."

There was something disquieting in the man's tone that flamed Richard's curiosity. But the night already held too many mysteries and exhaustion started to douse his inquisitiveness. Daylight would sweep the mysteries away, and Richard would find nothing more intriguing than a dying abbey and an empty road.

Richard finished his bread and then followed his host to his bed for the night. Abbot Fletcher explained that the upstairs room had once belonged to the Protestant deacon, that properly, the abbot should have it. But he preferred the company of his brothers in the dormitory. The room was a spartan place at the peak of the roof and the triangular shape gave Richard the comfortable feeling of sleeping in an old barn. There was a narrow bed and a writing desk, with an empty bottle of ink and an unlit candle. On the wall hung a garish crucifix, with Christ in more pain than Richard preferred to see.

"I'd be grateful if you could spare a horse tomorrow," Richard said. "I'll leave it at Kelheim and hire someone to return it."

"We have no horses," the abbot said brusquely. "Wild animals have killed them all."

Richard knew not to ask questions. He had been eager for bed, but now he felt even more eager to wake up and be on his way.

The abbot bid him goodnight and shut the door. Richard covered the gruesome crucifix with his coat, feeling a pang of Anglican revulsion at the papist decor. He pulled off his boots and was asleep as soon as his head touched the musty mattress.

The wheezing breath woke him. Heavy curtains covered the only window, so he could not tell from the moon shadows how much time had pa.s.sed. He shut his eyes, but the wheezing came again. It was slow, like a child's hand pressing down a bellows. He remembered the sound in the nettles and the shape on the road, and his chest turned cold and his muscles rigid.

The sound crept just outside the door. Richard listened for it, hoping it was only the noise of his body against the sheets. But he was more still than he could ever remember holding himself in his life.

The sound now turned shrill, like a Yorkshire wind whistling through rocks. Then the shrilling changed into a hiss. The hiss of a cat.

Richard recalled the black fiend on the road. Eyes of yellow ichor, fur made from iron spikes gating a cemetery. But ... that had been his imagination ....

He stared into the dark around the doorway. The floorboards outside creaked. A creature was striding back and forth before the door, like a witch laying down a hex. Padded feet stretched the aged wood.

Richard wanted to pull the sheets over his head, but when he reached out, he found the mattress was bare. A childhood fear seized him: the tiny boy who felt that, if he could bury himself far enough under downy blankets, no night evil could touch him. Now, there was nothing between him and the night.

The boards stopped groaning. But then the door started. The wood shrieked from a great weight pushing from the other side. Bared claws scratched down it, mixing the infernal hiss with the peeling of slivers.

Richard backed into the corner of the bed and felt the stucco wall at his back. He tried to pull his eyes away from the door, but he could feel the black monster bristling right outside it.

The thing at the door hissed. But, although the scratching still raked down the wood, the breathing of the thing now seemed to move inside the cramped room. Richard again felt the sc.r.a.pe of fur over his skin. Now it moved across his arms, wending around his torso, tapering off with a sinuous tail. Whiskers like needles stabbed his cheek.

Richard focused his eyes on the vague lump of his coat on the wall, trying to pull his mind away from its hallucinations. The coat hovered in blackness. The wall and the crucifix where it hung were lost in the dark of the room.

Then the coat started to flutter from the wall and drift toward the bed. As it did, the scratching and the hissing stopped.

The coat turned inside out and a black lining flowed out into the shape of a tall woman in robes woven from midnight.

Richard tried to back through the wall. And, suddenly, he succeeded. The wall pushed away, the bed vanished ... he dropped through s.p.a.ce.

Above him was a bridge, a huge span of bleak stones. Daggers of icy water jabbed into his back. The air was punched from his lungs and when he drew breath, the freezing water flooded in. Choking, he flailed out his arms.

His hands. .h.i.t the stucco wall; he fell onto the mattress. The water and the bridge were gone. The woman was still there, a sliver of midnight at the foot of the bed.

"Who who are you?" He felt as if he were spitting water from his lungs to say it.

A hand slipped from the night that shrouded her. Her skin was the colour of moonlight bleeding through swamp vapours. Yet, it was a relief from the Stygian cloak of the rest of her ... and he had not even dared to try to look her in the face.

Her finger pointed toward the door.

"You let me in."

It was a hissing voice and Richard could not tell what language she spoke, except that he could understand it.

"You will break the charm."

Unwillingly, his eyes were drawn to her face ....

He did not remember what it looked like, because the memory drowned as he started falling again ... tumbling from the bridge. He could see the statue of a child on the span above him, a hand covering its eyes as if it could not bear to watch him plunge to a watery death ... to plunge from the bridge that the Devil himself could not break.

The Regensburg Bridge, he knew. And with that, he was back on the bed, cowering against the wall.

One more hissed word came from the woman: Help.

The sickly moon glow peeking from the shadows vanished. The midnight shape turned back into a coat hanging from a crucifix.

But the scratching at the door started again. The spectre of the woman was still there, in the shape of the beast clawing to get inside.

Other sounds now exploded through the monastery. Feet pounded up the stairs, and voices called in a hurly-burly of German and English. Then came shouts of Latin, phrases that Richard could recall from murky schoolboy days: "Et ne inducas nos in temptationem, sed libera nos a malo!"

The beast shrieked and needles of fur p.r.i.c.kled across Richard's skin. More voices shouted in unison, "Libera nos a malo!" Abbot Fletcher's call followed in a righteous thunderclap: "Maleficas non patieris vivere!"

Abruptly, the scratching stopped. The fur uncurled from around Richard Davey and he crumpled forward onto the floor.

A mundane rapping struck the door. The abbot called, "Mr. Davey! Mr. Davey, are you all right?"

Hearing the voice of a living man, one with whom he had drunk wine only hours before, should have comforted him. But Richard suddenly had no wish to see the abbot of this blighted place.

He had no choice. There was no lock on the door and the abbot pushed it open and raised up a candle.

In the first flicker of light, Richard saw the deep furrows of claw marks down the front of the door. He wondered that he did not faint and spend the rest of the night in peaceful oblivion.

The abbot stared at him, offering no aid. Richard staggered to his feet on his own. Other faces peered from behind the abbot, a mixture of elders and novices. They clucked to each other, mostly in German. None of them crossed the threshold.

"Wh what was that?" Richard breathed.

"It is gone." The abbot squinted. "And you must be gone in the morning."

"I don't understand. What happened?"

The abbot's eyes were lead shots. Looking into them was worse than staring down a highwayman's pistol.

"You let her in."

Richard was not supposed to have heard those words. They were spoken in German, as if Abbot Fletcher had forgotten that his visitor knew the language.

Then, in English: "Nothing happened. You will not be bothered again tonight. But be prepared to leave at dawn. I will lay out food for you in the banquet room."

He turned to the others and grumbled at them in German to return to the dormitory. He took one look back into the room, noticed the coat hung rudely over the crucifix, and slammed the door.

Richard groped in the dark to reach the candle. He found matches beside it, struck one, and lit the wick.

The first thing he noticed was his coat. It hung inside out over the crucifix, and he knew he had not done that. He picked it up to turn it back around, and felt a heaviness in one of the pockets. He reached in and pulled out a three-p.r.o.nged iron key he had never seen before. He dropped it back into the pocket he needed to take this one mystery at a time.

He turned toward the door. He was frightened to see for certain what he thought he had spotted when the abbot opened the door, but the curiosity of a man who explores curiosities pushed him on. He drew the door open and looked at the marks that ran from the height of the latch down to floorboards.

But he had glimpsed more than that in the abbot's candlelight. He slanted the door and squinted at the marks from a different angle.

No illusion. The beast on the other side of the door was not scratching to get in. It was leaving a message. Four shaky letters: HELP.

A taciturn Abbot Fletcher hustled Richard from the room in the morning. The man now spoke only in German, casting aside any brotherhood he might have felt for someone else from the isles. Richard knew better than to ask questions about the nighttime disturbances. He would receive no answers.

The other members of the Abbey of St. James in Exile stood around the staircase as Richard walked down. Some muttered blessings; others gave him stares that he might have cla.s.sed as "diabolic", if he thought such a thing could be used to describe a monk. He tried to tell which of them were German and which Scottish, so perhaps he might get a last friendly word in his own language before leaving, but their faces were shadowed with fear.

"There is food for you," Abbot Fletcher grumbled, and indicated a burlap sack on the table of the banquet room.

Richard picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. As he did, he thought he felt something different about the banquet room. Something more than the changed air of day. But the abbot hurried him out through the chapel. In all his rush to get Richard out of the abbey, it was surprising he had not conjured a horse to carry him off as fast as possible. Even when Richard tried to offer thanks, the man had no interest in hearing it: "You should never have come here and you should forget that you did." Abbot Fletcher waved him through the front doors that had welcomed him last night.

Richard walked under the tympanum into the unfriendly morning cold. He expected to hear the creak of hinges and the slam of a wooden beam behind him, but there was only monastic silence. He walked down the path, through the opening in the iron posts around the churchyard. He looked over his shoulder. The maw of the church was open, but the abbot was no longer standing there.

He turned his head back and stepped onto the road that wound toward Kelheim, and then beyond to the bridge and its child protector that crossed the Danube to Regensburg.

Richard Davey was not an extraordinarily brave man. He had the common courage needed to travel across the continent alone, but he would never have survived life as a soldier or in any profession more dangerous than a "seeker of curiosities".

"Seeker of curiosities": That was how he introduced himself whenever he had to explain to lesser n.o.bility why a young man wanted to look through their libraries. Behind him was a curiosity greater than any he had encountered, perhaps greater than the automaton chess player rumoured to be in the treasuries of Prague.

The letters "HELP" scratched in mouldy oak. The hissing of an apparition made of shadow hovering over him. A dream of plunging from a bridge to drown. A key in his pocket that did not belong there. The posture of the abbot, the unease that shrouded monastery.

The daylight could sweep these oddities from most minds, but not from Richard Davey's. They left a blot of ink on his soul, and it was from ink that great tales were written. In him was an urgency, even importance, which was strange to him but stronger than the dark beers of Munich.

He walked only as far along the road as he needed before finding the shelter of a wall of hawthorn. He leaned against an accommodating beech, ate the squishy apple and dry loaf in his pack, and waited until nightfall.

He walked back along the road, staying in the shadow of the trees. The waning moon only peeked out from the clouds in bursts, so Richard had an easy time turning into a shadow himself.

Lights burned in the outbuilding of the monastery. The closer that Richard came, the more he could pick out from the crickets the sound of men's voices chanting evensong. He had heard many evensongs during his sojourn through Bavaria, but this one had an air of fear, not celebration. But if the brothers of St. James were awake, it were better they were enrapt in chanting Latin so that they would pay no attention to an outsider slipping into their church.

The front doors still gaped wide. For a moment, Richard stared in bewilderment; in a countryside filthy with bandits, this was a bizarre sight, making the church a naked man in the middle of a raging battle.

Then he remembered the words of the abbot that he was not supposed to hear: "You let her in."

The brothers were now trying to send her out, like housewives who flung open their doors to shoo out an uninvited spider or rat. The brothers had no fear of what was outside but what had gotten inside.

No one guarded the vestibule. The voices floated from behind the interior doors to the chapel. Richard spied through the gap between them. He saw the backs of some of the monks. They wore red topcoats over their simple brown robes and had gathered in a circle in the apse, where Abbot Fletcher led the song from the center. The simmering Latin reeked of diablerie; there were no simple "pater noster"s or "saeculo saeculorum"s.

Richard pushed through the doors, making no noise, and crawled on his hands and knees behind the pews, through the nave, past the transept. He managed to move the length of the chapel unseen. The monks were so deep in their ritual that Richard wondered if he could have stomped through the choir shouting "Hosanna!" without distracting them.

It was a relief reaching the banquet hall just to place a wall between him and the unholy chanting. A fire was burning itself out in the hearth, casting enough light for Richard to search for what had seemed different in the room that morning.

He picked it out immediately: The tall chair at the end of the table had been pushed against the middle of the tapestry.

Richard took the oil lamp from the table, lit it with a burning sprig of wood from the fire, and moved toward the hanging. He pulled back the chair, which made a loud squeak across the floor. Richard waited, but no one came running to investigate. He pushed back the chair further until he could see what it had covered up.

It was the section of the tapestry showing the haloed Scots Monastery. Richard lifted the lantern; the light seeped over three straight rips down the cloth. A single swipe from the paw of a cat ... a paw large enough to slash open a bear's throat.

The lantern shivered in his grip, but he was meant to find this. It was clear as any signpost at a crossroads. He reached toward the rips and pushed his finger through one of them. Then his hand. Then his whole arm. Where a wall should have been was a damp void.

He lifted up the bottom of the tapestry. A fusty cloud met his nose, tinged with the unmistakable smell of fermentation. The question of where the monastery hid its empty wine cellar was answered. Richard ducked under the edge of the tapestry and pulled the lantern in after him.

A tight, circular staircase wound down out of sight. Niter seeped through the stones and the dampness wafting from below explained why the vault at the end of the spiral could no longer keep wine. Either underground water had risen, or something else had contaminated the foundations with liquid stenches. Richard started downward, careful not to slip. He imagined rolling down miles of stairway into an infernal undercavern or worse, never stopping at all.

The stairway wound around twice and stopped at an iron door. Richard didn't need to think about what to do next; he took the mystery key from his pocket and fit it into the lock. It turned easily, without the expected protest of rust.

The thick air that oozed out was one of willing oblivion. Whatever slept inside did not want anyone to know of its existence, outside of its sworn protectors.

No sooner did the sepulchral miasma hit him, but Richard felt the p.r.i.c.kle of fur around his legs and the whisper of sound from inside. It was a woman's laugh, small but victorious.

The lantern flame showed a room smaller than the collection of smells might have indicated. The walls had granite shelves with half-circular depressions to hold wine barrels.

Instead of oak casks, the shelves held vials and beakers filled with murky liquids. Scattered among them were scalpels, knives and tall gla.s.s alembics. Richard had seen enough rooms of professed alchemists to recognize the tools of their trade. The walls above the elixirs were scribbled with Enochian letters and less-welcome alphabets.

In the middle of the vault, mortared to the floor, stood an oblong stone vat for the smashing and mixing of grapes. But now it was an open sarcophagus. Inside lay a body draped in cardinal red. The arms were crossed over the chest, skeletal palms pressed against the shoulders. A cross of a wicked design lay across the breast.

But the greatest horror was the feeling that the man was not dead.

Richard approached the robed body. Cat whiskers sc.r.a.ped against his ankles a feeling almost soothing in the mephitic pit. The lantern lit the man's face, which was like parchment that had been soaked and crumpled, then laid out to dry in an Egyptian sun. But in those sunken cheeks was a flush of life and the lips had a touch of red no undertaker could imitate.

"Brother Skene," said the woman of midnight.

Richard did not jump. He had already seen her necrose glow across the withered face.

"Is he alive?"

"Barely. Infernally."

"The alchemist's art." Richard looked around at the vials and alembics. He remembered what he had once heard from a pract.i.tioner in Avignon: "Eternal life in this world is impossible ... but life can be stretched and tautened."

The woman: "He is their charm. While he lives, I cannot touch any of them."