The abbey, p.3
The Abbey, page 3
They walked in silence, the students taking in the meaning of the tunnel, following its twists and turns downward, stepping over puddles of water and mud. A light began to grow brighter as they moved further and further. When they reached the end of the tunnel, they found the rusted remains of an old metal door hanging off a hinge. Barb and Matt worked to throw the door open, and they were greeted by the day's sunlight as seen through a tangle of briars and branches. They could hear the sound of seagulls and smell the water of the Puget Sound.
Barb stepped back so Lasha could have a better look. She leaned through the bushes, trying to push them apart with her arms. She lost her footing, and almost fell out of the door, but Barb snagged the back of her shirt with one arm, and pulled her back in.
"Careful, Lasha. It's quite a tumble to the water."
"What is this?" Matt asked.
Barb laughed. "You're looking at Everson Harting's personal tunnel to the sea. This tunnel is the key to Harting's fortune. Through this, he would smuggle alcohol, opium, even people. Obviously, he wasn't the upstanding Christian citizen that everyone makes him out to be. He abandoned it when he had made enough money and decided to become a good citizen, as far as we know, although, I would like to do some investigating at the Harting Mansion."
"Does anyone else know about this?" Lasha asked.
"Not anyone alive. We're the only ones."
Matt stepped away from the tunnel. "I don't understand. Surely, someone should have found this tunnel. It's not like it's exactly hidden, at least on this end."
Barb smiled at Matt. "You're forgetting something, Matt. In order to find something, you have to know what you're looking for."
"And do you know what you're looking for, Barb?"
Lasha's bluntness was not one of her best attributes, but it had its place. "Oh, yes. I know exactly what I'm looking for. Why do you think I sent you up to Inchorgrath Abbey?"
"What do you know?" Matt asked.
"I know that if my research is correct, we'll never have to work again."
They covered their tracks upon exiting, smearing their footprints out of the dust and out of the historical record. When they left, the room was exactly as it had been left decades ago, the door locked, the passage hidden. When they were back in Barb's office, she turned to Matt and asked again, "Now, what do you know about the history of Skryger Island?"
Matt looked confidently at Barb and said, "I know nothing."
Barb smiled. "A-plus, Mr. Callingway. A-plus. The archaeologist who knows that they don't know shit is the best type of archaeologist."
Lasha eyed Barb. "But you know something, or else we wouldn't be here. What is it?"
Barb lived for this. It was the sole reason to be a professor, tweaking the kids' minds, turning their whole world upside down with knowledge... well, that and the money. "I know the true history of Skryger Island. Not the trumped up, bland, forgettable history that's in the textbooks, but the real history. The secret of the island."
Chapter 3: The Tale of Keir
Keir Strudwick huddled in the crypts of Inchorgrath Abbey. Dust still drifted down from the ceiling, and on the other side of stone walls, he could hear banging and hammering. He crossed himself, though he was sure that he was damned for eternity. He thanked the Lord for not trapping him on the other side of that wall, in the dark and underneath a mountain of stone.
He was the youngest of Denman's men, little more than a stable boy from Inverness who had yearned for something more than a life full of shoveling shit and being cuffed behind the ear by the stabler for not shoveling it fast enough.
The boy, peach fuzz still clinging to his soft jawline, still remembered the moment fondly as Denman and his gang of ruffians clopped their way down the cobbled lanes of Inverness, covered in mud, their noses crooked and busted, scars criss-crossing their faces. Old Hal had knocked him upside the head for staring... and taking a break... and being stupid, and any number of reasons that Keir had heard a thousand times before.
"Old man," Denman had said, dropping from his horse, the glint of mischief in his eyes. "What business have ye of such a tender thing?"
Keir could see that Old Hal was taken aback. He relished the moment. While it was true that Hal had taken him in when his parents had died, his life had become a never-ending series of abuses since then. The others in the town thought nothing of the treatment that Keir received at Old Hal's hands. "He's giving him a place to stay," they would say. "So what if the price is a few bruises?"
Old Hal gripped his pitchfork and cast his eyes to the ground. Keir knew that he would pay for Old Hal's embarrassment later. Despite his advanced age, his bony knuckles were more than capable of leaving their mark on Keir. "I don't see as how it's any business of yours," he said.
Denman smiled. Such white teeth, Keir thought, before Denman socked Old Hal across the jaw. Denman's men laughed, but Keir dared not. "How do ya like bein' treated like an animal, granddad?"
Old Hal kept his eyes on the ground and said nothing. "Boy, take care of the horses," Denman said as he reached into his pocket and threw a handful of coins on the ground at Old Hal's feet. Blood dripped from the old man's mouth, but he wasn't too proud to bend down and pick the coins out of the mud.
Keir did as he was told, leading the men's horses to the stables, unsaddling them, rubbing them down, and making sure they were fed and watered. He liked horses, loved them actually. If it hadn't been for the patient whinnying of the horses around him, Keir would have run away long ago. In his heart, he harbored dreams of owning his own horse one day. He knew it was nothing but a dream, but it made the days pass by. When he was done with the last horse, he left the yard, as he had seen Old Hal returning with a bottle of Shaky's Scotch, a homemade brew that had been known to leave its partakers blind. Keir was not that lucky. All it did to Old Hal was make him even meaner and more abrasive.
Keir had sat in the Inverness Inn, listening to the conversations of the rough men as they ate, drank, and chased the cold away by the heat of the fire. The locals had disappeared as soon as Denman's men had appeared. The cold look in their eyes matched the cold steel in their scabbards, and no one wanted to see these men in their cups.
Keir sat in the shadows, absorbing all of their words, living in their tales of wild women and fights to the death. They mentioned things that made his mind run wild. There was talk of a quest and a treasure. This talk was followed by talk about what they were going to do with their "cut," and talk about how much further they had to go.
At the end of the evening, after his men had enjoyed their fill of food and ale, Denman had walked over to the innkeeper, reached into his purse, and laid down enough money to cover their expenses. As the other men walked up to their rooms, stumbling and laughing, Denman turned to him and called him over with a crooked finger. Keir walked over to him, trembling, just as the innkeeper, a pale, fat man who had diseased veins crawling across his cheeks and no love for Keir, placed a foaming mug of ale on the ancient scarred bar.
"You've been spying on us," Denman said, pulling the mug up to his lips, foam collecting in his brown mustache.
"No, sir, I wasn't spying. I..."
Denman cut him off. "Don't tell me what ye were and weren't doing. I know spying when I see it." Keir closed his mouth, and they stood in silence.
"You want me to get rid of the whelp?" the innkeeper asked.
Denman took a sip from his beer and then looked at the innkeeper, his words slightly slurred, "I want ya to get rid of yerself. Me and the boy are talking." Denman clapped a meaty paw on Keir's shoulder, as if they were old lost friends.
The innkeeper bowed his head and scuttled backwards into the kitchen, never taking his eyes off Denman. Then the giant man turned to him, his brown leather jacket creaking underneath the crackling of the fire. "Is that old man your father, boy?"
Keir shook his head.
Denman nodded and took another sip of beer. "Good. I would hate to think I made a father shy about disciplining his son. That's how I became the man I am today... because my father was a right bastard. Beat me until I couldn't see out of my eyes. But, bless his heart, if anyone else ever laid so much as a finger on me, then God help that man."
Keir had no idea what to do, so he just stood there, letting the man ramble on. This was the type of man you listened to, even if he was slurring his words and getting worse by the minute.
"My father was a gravedigger." Denman choked out a laugh, as if he couldn't believe he had said the words. "He spent his life burying the rich, the poor. He had hands like blocks of oak covered in sandpaper and biceps that looked like skulls wrapped in leather. But he was invisible... like you. He wanted me to be a gravedigger as well. But I didn't want to be a gravedigger, so he beat me, with those hands and those arms."
Denman smiled at the boy. "And I thank him for making me the man I am today." Denman belched and ran a hand through the brown tangle of hair on his head. "What do ya think, boy? Do you want to be a man?"
"Me?" Keir asked.
Denman smiled. "Yes, you. I have need of a groom, someone to wash the dishes, someone to shoe the horses if needed. My men, lowly lot of backstabbers that they are, are above many of the menial tasks required during a long trip."
"Where are we going?"
"Does it matter?"
Keir smiled. "No, I suppose it doesn't."
"Good," Denman said, "but I want you to understand one thing, boy. I am not yer savior. I'm not yer dead da-da rotting in the grave. You do what I say and ya do it well, and you'll make out just fine. You mess up, and I'll hit ya harder than that old man ever could, even were he to turn back time thirty years. Are we clear?"
Keir had shaken his head emphatically, and on the following day, he had gathered his belongings, saddled up the horses and never looked back.
****
Life with the mercenaries was hard. Denman wasn't cruel, but he wasn't soft either. The first time he had spilled a ladleful of stew upon the ground, Denman had cuffed him so hard, that for fifteen minutes, he didn't know where he was. The other men were worse, and they called him all sorts of names, names that he had never even heard before. But every time Keir began to fear for his life, Denman was there, reigning the men in and preventing any of the men from actually harming him or worse.
They rode for so long that Keir couldn't even remember how to get back to Inverness even if he had wanted to leave. Sometimes Keir rode behind Radan, ignoring the steady stream of insults that Radan hurled at him throughout the day. Most of the time, Keir trotted along behind the horses as they crossed Scotland on a mission that Keir was gradually beginning to put together through bits and pieces of conversation that he overheard over the fire or while he was tending to the horses. They were after something, something important and worth a lot of money.
He never stopped to wonder if what they were doing was right. He never questioned what would happen when they got to the abbey. All he knew was that Denman needed him, and at the end of the night, when he made his bed on the cold ground of the highlands, he didn't smell like horse manure.
****
Now he regretted ever coming. In the crypts, Keir quaked, fearing that he would never find his way out of the tunnels. In his mind, he pictured the dead rising out of their stone sarcophagi, hands of bone and rotten flesh reaching out to him, looking to claw the life out of him.
Keir's progress through the crypt had been slow. It had taken every ounce of his bravery to even enter the crypt. The darkness had yawned up at him, and set his heart fluttering with fear. The other men had been quick to enter, whooping and hollering as they chased the last monk into the tangle of tunnels. Their cries quickly faded, and he was left alone, his mind cobbling shadows into specters of death.
With trembling legs, Keir stepped slowly, unable to shake the sensation that the walls were looming closer and closer. His breathing was ragged, strained, and his body had broken out in a cold sweat. He imagined the dead monks above coming to life and sealing him inside the tunnels where he would die a slow death in the dark. He supposed it would only be fitting. Had Keir known that their quest would result in ten dead monks, he would have stayed back with Old Hal. Better to be suffer like Job than to take part in the killing of God's servants. They were all damned, treasure or not.
The only thing that drove him on were the lessons of Denman. Should they track down the monk and find that he wasn't there, he would never hear the end of it, and Denman would have some choice words for him... and some choice fists as well.
So he had walked on and on, his breath rasping in his throat, his hair plastered to his head with sweat. When he heard the bang, as if a piece of the mountain had broken off and crashed to the ground, he had dropped his torch on the ground and fallen to his knees. He had knelt there, his hands clasped before him, asking for forgiveness from God in as earnest a manner as he could manage. He should have never left Old Hal. Old Hal never made him crawl through tunnels after murdering an entire abbey.
When he realized he wasn't going to be crushed alive by the mountain above, he picked up his torch and continued searching for Denman and the others. Now he stood on the other side of a thick stone wall. A butterfly was etched into the stone. The symbol was rough, almost primordial. As he traced his fingers across the shape of the butterfly, he heard the first noise since the stone had come crashing down, the sound of metal on stone. Someone was on the other side.
Keir sat on the ground, knowing that he would never be able to lift the stone in front of him. Tears fell from his eyes at the thought of the dead monks above. Remorse wormed its way through his heart, and he cried harder for what he had lost. When his torch began to burn low, he stood up, turned around, and left the faint clanging behind. Even after he was out of earshot, he could still hear the sound of swords and axes clanging off stone.
As he moved through the crypt, he felt like a child who had been unceremoniously dumped into a lake, struggling to get to the surface and the air on the other side. His chest felt like there was a weight sitting on it. He fought to keep control of his fear, striking it down the way Denman struck him down whenever he messed up. Eventually, he could hold the fear back no longer, and he ran through the crypt, taking frantic lefts and rights. He was hopelessly lost by the time he skidded to a halt. As the torch went dark, he fell to the ground, sobbing.
Young Keir struck up a one-sided conversation with God then, begging Him, entreating Him to save him from his fate. Keir offered up everything in the world that he had, if only the Lord would lead him from the crypt and into the world above. His clothes, his satchel, his shoes, his life, his soul... they were the only things he could give, and he offered them all. There was no answer, no deep-voiced affirmation, no shining light appearing to lead him out of the crypt, just a darkness and a stillness. The dead around him offered no comfort, and Keir began to crawl forward, his hands outstretched ahead of him to prevent himself from bashing into the stone walls.
Under the abbey, Keir had no concept of time, and as he crawled forward, his mind was filled with horrors upon horrors. He could feel them around him, the dark spirits of the dead, angry at his sacrilege, at his disturbance of their eternal slumber. They hated him. They hated his life, his breathing, his continued crying and snuffling as he crawled like a rat through the crypt.
He pictured skeletal arms sliding the lids off the sarcophagi, the occupants sitting up to expose skinless skulls, patches of hair clinging stubbornly to their scalps. What was that scrape? Keir stopped moving, certain he had heard something. Time stretched on as the darkness filled his eyes. No, he must be imagining it. His mind was playing tricks on him, that was it. He began to crawl forward again, casting his arms out like a ship sounding in the fog. He heard it again, the faintest sound of scratching. Was it them, the skeletons, come to take their revenge on him for entering their domain? As he pondered the source of the sound, he placed his hand on something alive. There was a squeak, and Keir screamed, sprinting into the darkness. He ran into a wall, face-first.
When he woke, he gingerly probed his face; his hand came away sticky. His head pounded and ached. As he stood up, he stubbed his toe on something. It was a step. He was headed in the right direction, and for the first time that day, something finally went right for him. He moved up the stairs, one at a time, probing for the next step with his foot.
His head swam, conjuring images of life before his parents had died. He clung to the memories of his father, a young court noble. He could still remember sitting on his lap, as his father taught him the alphabet, his mother sitting in the corner of their small room, mending their clothing. The words on the page swam in his mind's eye, and the thoughts of the past brought tears to his eyes.
His parents lay in the ground, rotting. All that remained were his memories. They guided him like a light through the darkness. He floated through the crypts, sorrow and apology on his lips.
When he emerged into the daylight, he fell to his knees, and clasped his hands together in thanks. As blood dripped into his eyes, he made a vow.
One by one, he dragged the bodies of the monks to the abbey's garden. With only a hoe and his hands, he dug into the rocky soil of the mountaintop and buried the monks. The task took several days. When he was done, he paused to say a few words. The words were nothing special, and he had forgotten them by the time he was done saying them, but it was the effort that counted. He was sure of that. When his work was done, his hands were blistered and split. He retreated into the abbey proper.
In the stone building, he found a robe to wear. He placed his clothes, the relics of a past life, in a pile and lit them on fire in the hearth. It was the first step in his plan for redemption.
When the first villagers appeared, he appeared to them as one of the monks and told them the story of how a group of men had set upon them, killing everyone at the abbey. Only he had survived. He showed them the wounds on his face, and then, in front of the villagers, he made a vow of silence. When his vow was over, he dropped to his knees and began to pray without sound. The villagers left, casting their eyes over their shoulders at the solitary monk, and making wards with their hands to keep away evil spirits.
