The Sixth Key(42)

Eva looked at Rahn enquiringly. ‘You don’t look well, Monsieur Rahn.’

‘I don’t like churches,’ he said, rather sharply.

Deodat took Eva’s arm and confided, ‘Our friend can walk into a cave without fear of crevices or lakes. He has no concern for bats, snakes or spiders and even rats are nothing to him, but put him in a church and he turns pale like this and looks like he’s seen a ghost!’ He laughed a small clipped laugh. ‘Imagine!’

‘That’s very interesting,’ she said to Rahn. ‘Have you seen a psychiatrist?’

‘Freud would say,’ Deodat continued, in his element, ‘that a fear such as this displays the psychodynamic conflict between desire for and repulsion of the mother on the one hand, represented by the mother church, and the idealisation and fear of the father – who is really God on the other.’

Rahn mustered his sarcasm and said, ‘Oedipus, of course! Nothing new in that.’

Deodat, having had his fun, now appointed himself Rahn’s defence counsel. ‘The truth is, my dear, when one knows history, one cannot walk into a church unperturbed. In the final analysis, thousands were killed in a church not far from here at Béziers during the Cathar wars.

Rahn continued Deodat’s line. ‘Roman churches are not places of asylum, nor are they holy. They are nothing more than prisons and execution chambers; traps for the unwary.’ He paused then, realising to his concern that he had unwittingly walked through the iron enclosures to the altar. But before his fear could take hold he noticed two plaques that seized his attention: one to the left of the crucifix, the other to the right. Both showed the Book of the Seven Seals.

‘Ah! You’ve found the chief reason I brought you here, Rahn,’ Deodat said at his shoulder. ‘It isn’t often one sees the Book of the Seven Seals so well depicted on plaques.’ Deodat then pointed to a third plaque over a door on the right, leading to what might be the sacristy.

Rahn smiled, despite himself. ‘For Heaven’s sake, it’s the Grail!’

‘There’s another one over there, too,’ Deodat said, pointing to a fourth plaque over an identical door on the left wall. ‘So you see, this may not be a Roman church after all.’

‘This is very significant,’ Rahn said, to himself. ‘The Book of the Seven Seals and the Holy Grail together in the same church implies some knowledge of the Cathar treasure.’

‘That’s right,’ Deodat said.

‘What do you mean?’ Eva came over to see, suddenly interested.

‘The treasure is purported to include both,’ Rahn explained. ‘Apparently they were brought here to the South of France for safekeeping, and the Cathars are thought to have been their guardians.’

‘What’s this statue, my dear?’ Deodat asked Eva.

‘That’s Saint Roch, patron of those afflicted by plagues. Apparently, he was saved from starvation in the wilderness by a hunting dog with a loaf of bread in its mouth, and so he is mostly portrayed with a dog.’

Rahn turned to see. ‘Cerberus?’

‘Look at him,’ Deodat said, nodding towards Rahn. ‘See how he comes to life as soon as there is an allusion to the myths!’

Eva smiled. ‘Myths?’

Rahn went to the badly cast statue and looked it over. ‘The dog Cerberus is the guardian of the world of the dead. It was Hercules’ last labour to fetch the dog and to return it to the Underworld. Some say it’s a symbol for a guarded secret. There is an effigy of Cerberus as large as a house in the caves of Lombrives.’

‘Really?’ Eva didn’t seem suitably impressed.

‘I can attest to that,’ Deodat said. ‘Now as far as this one’s concerned, the bread in its mouth is likely to be an allusion to the manna that kept the Jews alive in the wilderness. And manna is also the same as the substance contained in the Grail, which fed the inhabitants of Montsalvache, the panem supersubstanialem, otherwise known as the bread of life. Now, look at this, Rahn!’ Deodat took himself to a side chapel. Above a little altar, there was a stained-glass window depicting two men turning a wheel in the sky, in which sat a crescent moon illuminating an ocean and a boat sailing away from a rising sun.

‘The symbol of destiny,’ Rahn said, wiping his brow. ‘The wheel of fortune in the tarot deck – this is quite extraordinary.’

‘Symbols are interesting.’ Eva came to take a look. ‘My uncle’s stroke has affected the speech centre in his brain, which not only disturbs his speech . . .’

But Rahn wasn’t listening, he was thinking.