The Sixth Key(89)

‘What are you waiting for?’ Eva shivered next to him.

Rahn took her arm and the two of them made their way out of the church and into the awful night, frozen to the bone, toiling through the wind and rain back to the house. Rahn helped her up the stairs, got the fire going in the little hearth and gently helped her out of her soaking clothes and into the bed. He took off his own wet things and found a spare blanket, which he swung over his shoulders, moving the chair closer to the fire for warmth.

‘Please, get on the bed, won’t you?’ Eva said, surprising him. She held out her hand, long and slender like the rest of her.

He hesitated. She isn’t in her right mind and might regret this in the morning.

‘I’m afraid I—’

‘Please!’ she said. ‘I’m so cold!’

Falteringly, he lay on the bed over the covers. He lay there rather stiffly, not knowing what to do. Arousal was the furthest thing from his mind; after all, she was under a score of blankets and besides, Rahn’s body had taken a battering these last few hours and he doubted that it would obey him, even if he could stop thinking for a moment to sense the stirring of desire. Also, he felt enormously guilty for having dragged her and Deodat into this mess and he was not about to compound it by taking advantage of her when she wasn’t in her right mind.

‘Do you believe in the Devil?’ Eva said to him.

‘The Devil . . . you mean Lucifer, the one that was cast out of Heaven? Well . . . yes, I do believe in him.’

‘Lucifer,’ she said sleepily. ‘Isn’t he the one who absconded with Isis, the keeper of God’s wisdom?’

‘Yes, you see it in fables and fairy tales – the damsel in distress who is eventually rescued from the dragon by a hero; the damsel is a symbol, she represents a man’s soul.’

‘Really? And the dragon?’

‘The Cathars told a story to their children – would you like to hear it?’

‘Mmm.’ She drew near to him, he could feel her warm breath on his cheek.

‘It went like this,’ he said, softly. ‘The good gods of light created human beings and sent them to Earth, where lived the dark dragon of matter. When the dragon swallowed mankind whole, a seed was planted in it for its redemption because inside it now there was not merely darkness, but light as well.’

‘I see, so, to redeem the dragon you have to get inside it, you have to enter into its belly . . . is that what the story means?’ She yawned.

‘Yes, before you can find Heaven you have to go through Hell, because Hell tests the nature of a man.’

Eva said, almost inaudibly, drifting off, ‘And if you were to save me from the dragon, you’d be saving yourself, because I am really your soul . . .’

‘I would be saving all that was holy and beautiful and virginal in me, do you see?’

But no answer came, Eva was asleep.

He waited for her breathing to become regular and more rhythmic before allowing fatigue to overtake him. Soon he was dreaming that Etienne was in his arms, thin and angular and beautiful. It was once more their last night together. She moved away from him and lit a Russian cigarette and looked at him through the velvet darkness and her face melted away a moment, revealing the deformed grimace of a devil whose mouth opened wide in a terrible screech – Viva Angelina!

Rahn woke with a start. Eva was not in the bed but he had no time to think on this particular strangeness because there was a clanging of the church bells that tore through the birthing day like a cataclysm. With his nerves still raw and on alert from his dream, he jumped out of bed and changed into his only dry clothes. Soon he was out in the streets meeting the confused faces of others, who, like him, had come to see what the noise was about. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. Where was Eva? He pushed his way to the church just in time to see the young priest stepping out, looking pale and out of sorts.

The sun was rising now and a faint light came through the windblown trees.

‘What is it?’ Rahn said to the stunned abbé.

‘In the church,’ he managed to say. ‘It is horrible!’

Rahn hurried through the door, past the devil’s stoup and, with the confessional and the grand relief of the Sermon on the Mount behind him, he paused to look down the central nave. Breathless, cold, anxious, exhausted, he tried to see but it took a moment to adjust his eyes. His fear of churches momentarily forgotten, he hurried over the chequered tiles to the enclosure, seeing a little more and then a little more, until he paused.

What he saw made the old woman’s words return to his mind.

Beware of that raven!





33


Blood on the Altar