The Custodians

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Ghost; Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Science Fiction

Synopsis

The Custodians tells of a visitor to a French monastery, and of one specially built tiny room which is constructed precisely on the intersection of mysterious force fields, so that anyone who enters is able to foresee the future. Paradise Beach is the story of a wall-screen whose image of the sea attunes itself to the individual perceptions of the onlooker. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is set towards the end of the next millennium when the stories about the coming of the mysterious white bird of kinship become associated with the travels of an old story-teller and his young nephew, whose pipe seems to have a magical quality. Finally, The Hertford Manuscript tells of the remarkable discovery of a seventeenth-century book with some pages purporting to be the journals of a nineteenth-century time traveller.

Release date: October 2, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 130

Sample

Although the monastery of Hautaire has dominated the Ix valley for more than twelve hundred years, compared with the Jurassic limestone to which it clings it might have been erected yesterday. Even the megaliths which dot the surrounding hillside predate the Abbey by several millennia. But if, geologically speaking, Hautaire is still a newcomer, as a human monument it is already impressively ancient. For the first two centuries following its foundation it served the faithful as a pilgrims’ sanctuary, then, less happily, as a staging post for the crusaders. By the 13th Century it had already known both fat years and lean ones and it was during one of the latter that, on a cool September afternoon in the year 1272, a grey-bearded, sunburnt man came striding up the white road which wound beside the brawling Ix, and hammered on the Abbey doors with the butt of his staff.

There were rumours abroad that plague had broken out again in the southern ports and the eye which scrutinized the lone traveller through the grille was alert with apprehension. In response to a shouted request the man snorted, flung off his cloak, discarded his tattered leather jerkin, and raised his bare arms. Twisting his torso from side to side he displayed his armpits. There followed a whispered consultation within then, with a rattle of chains and a protest of iron bolts, the oak wicket gate edged inwards grudgingly and the man stepped through.

The monk who had admitted him made haste to secure the door. ‘We hear there is plague abroad, brother,’ he muttered by way of explanation.

The man shrugged on his jerkin, looping up the leather toggles with deft fingers. ‘The only plague in these parts is ignorance,’ he observed sardonically.

‘You have come far, brother?’

‘Far enough,’ grunted the traveller.

‘From the south?’

The man slipped his arm through the strap of his satchel, eased it up on to his shoulder and then picked up his staff. He watched as the heavy iron chain was hooked back on to its staple. ‘From the east,’ he said.

The door-keeper preceded his guest across the flagged courtyard and into a small room which was bare except for a heavy wooden trestle table. Lying upon it was a huge, leather-bound registrum, a stone ink pot and a quill pen. The monk frowned, licked his lips, picked up the quill and prodded it gingerly at the ink.

The man smiled faintly. ‘By your leave, brother,’ he murmured and taking the dipped quill he wrote in rapid, flowing script: ‘Meister Sternwärts—Seher—ex-Cathay’.

The monk peered down at the ledger, his lips moving silently as he spelt his way laboriously through the entry. By the time he was halfway through the second word a dark flush had crept up his neck and suffused his whole face. ‘Mea culpa, Magister,’ he muttered.

‘So you’ve heard of Meister Sternwärts, have you, brother? And what have you heard, I wonder?’

In a rapid reflex action the simple monk sketched a flickering finger-cross in the air.

The man laughed. ‘Come, holy fool!’ he cried, whacking the door-keeper across the buttocks with his stick. ‘Conduct me to Abbé Paulus lest I conjure you into a salamander!’

In the seven hundred years which had passed since Meister Sternwärts strode up the long white road and requested audience with the Abbé Paulus the scene from the southern windows of the monastery had changed surprisingly little. Over the seaward slopes of the distant hills, purple-ripe clouds were still lowering their showers of rain like filmy nets, and high above the Ix valley the brown and white eagles spiralled lazily upwards in an invisible funnel of warm air that had risen there like a fountain every sunny day since the hills were first folded millions of years before. Even the road which Sternwärts had trodden, though better surfaced, still followed much the same path, and if a few of the riverside fields had expanded and swallowed up their immediate neighbours the pattern of the stone walls was still recognizably what it had been for centuries. Only the file of high-tension cable carriers striding diagonally down across the valley on a stage of their march from the hydro-electric barrage in the high mountains thirty miles to the north proclaimed that this was the 20th Century.

Gazing down the valley from the library window of Hautaire, Spindrift saw the tiny distant figure trudging up the long slope; saw the sunlight glittering from blond hair as though from a fleck of gold dust; and found himself recalling the teams of men with their white helmets and their clattering machines who had come to erect those giant pylons. He remembered how the brothers had discussed the brash invasion of their privacy and had all agreed that things would never be the same again. Yet the fact remained that within a few short months they had grown accustomed to the novelty and now Spindrift was no longer sure that he could remember exactly what the valley had looked like before the coming of the pylons. Which was odd, he reflected, because he recalled very clearly the first time he had set eyes upon Hautaire and there had certainly been no pylons then.

May 1923, it had been. He had bicycled up from the coast with his scanty possessions stuffed into a pair of basket-work panniers slung from his carrier. For the previous six months he had been gathering scraps of material for a projected doctoral thesis on the life and works of the shadowy ‘Meister Sternwärts’ and had written to the Abbot of Hautaire on the remote off-chance that some record of a possible visit by the Meister might still survive in the monastery archives. He explained that he had some reason to believe that Sternwärts might have visited Hautaire but that his evidence for this was, admittedly, of the slenderest, being based as it was on a single cryptic reference in a letter dated 1274, sent by the Meister to a friend in Basle.

Spindrift’s enquiry had eventually been answered by a certain Fr. Roderigo who explained that, since he was custodian of the monastery library, the Abbé Ferrand had accordingly passed M. Spindrift’s letter on to him. He was, he continued, profoundly intrigued by M. Spindrift’s enquiry because in all the years he had been in charge of the Abbey library no one had ever expressed the remotest interest in Meister Sternwärts; in fact, to the best of his knowledge, he, Fr. Roderigo, and the Abbé Ferrand were the only two men now alive who knew that the Meister had spent his last years as an honoured guest of the 13th-century Abbot and had, in all probability, worked in that very library in which his letter was now being written. He concluded with the warm assurance that any such information concerning the Meister as he himself had acquired over the years was at M. Spindrift’s disposal.

Spindrift had hardly been able to believe his good fortune. Only the most fantastic chance had led to his turning up that letter in Basle in the first place—the lone survivor of a correspondence which had ended in the incinerators of the Inquisition. Now there seemed to be a real chance that the slender corpus of the Meister’s surviving works might be expanded beyond the gnomic apophthegms of the Illuminatum! He had written back by return of post suggesting diffidently that he might perhaps be permitted to visit the monastery in person and give himself the inestimable pleasure of conversing with Fr. Roderigo. An invitation had come winging back, urging him to spend as long as he wished as a lay guest of the Order.

If, in those far-off days, you had asked Marcus Spindrift what he believed in, the one concept he would certainly never have offered you would have been pre-destination. He had survived the war to emerge as a Junior Lieutenant in the Supply Corps and, on demobilization, had lost no time in returning to his first love, Mediaeval Philosophy. The mindless carnage which he had witnessed from the sidelines had done much to reinforce his interest in the works of the early Christian Mystics with particular reference to the bons hommes of the Albigensian Heresy. His stumbling across an ancient handwritten transcript of Sternwärt’s Illuminatum in the shell-shattered ruins of a presbytery in Armentières in April 1918 had, for Spindrift, all the impact of a genuine spiritual revelation. Some tantalizing quality in the Meister’s thought had called out to him across the gulf of the centuries and there and then he had determined that if he were fortunate enough to emerge intact from the holocaust he would make it his life’s work to give form and substance to the shadowy presence which he sensed lurking behind the Illuminatum like the smile on the lips of the Gioconda.

Nevertheless, prior to his receiving Fr. Roderigo’s letter, Spindrift would have been the first to admit that his quest for some irrefutable evidence that the Meister had ever really existed had reaped but one tiny grain of putative ‘fact’ amid untold bushels of frustration. Apparently, not only had no one ever heard of Sternwärts, they expressed not the slightest interest in whether he had ever existed at all. Indeed, as door after door closed in his face, Spindrift found himself coming to the depressing conclusion that the Weimar Republic had more than a little in common with the Dark Ages.

Yet, paradoxically, as one faint lead after another petered out or dissolved in the misty backwaters of Mediaeval hearsay, Spindrift had found himself becoming more and more convinced, not only that Sternwärts had existed, but that he himself had, in some mysterious fashion, been selected to prove it. The night before he set out on the last lap of his journey to Hautaire he had lain awake in his ex-army sleeping sack and had found himself reviewing in his mind the odd chain of coincidences that had brought him to that particular place at that particular time: the initial stumbling upon the Illuminatum; the discovery of the cryptic reference coupling Sternwärts with Johannes of Basle; and, most fantastic of all, his happening to alight in Basle upon that one vital letter to Johannes which had been included as a cover-stiffener to a bound-up collection of addresses by the arch-heretic Michael Servetus. At every critical point it was as though he had received the precise nudge which alone could put him back on the trail again. ‘Old Meister,’ he murmured aloud, ‘am I seeking you, or are you seeking me?’ High overhead a plummeting meteor scratched a diamond line down the star-frosted window of the sky. Spindrift smiled wryly and settled down to sleep.

At noon precisely the next day he pedalled wearily round the bend in the lower road and was rewarded with his first glimpse of the distant Abbey. With a thankful sigh he dismounted, leant, panting, over his handlebars and peered up the valley. What he saw was destined to remain just as sharp and clear in his mind’s eye until the day he died.

Starkly shadowed by the midday sun, its once-red tiled roofs long since bleached to a pale biscuit and rippling in the heat haze, Hautaire, despite its formidable mass, seemed oddly insubstantial. Behind it, tier upon tier, the mountains rose up faint and blue into the cloudless northern sky. As he gazed up at the Abbey, Spindrift conceived the peculiar notion that the structure was simply tethered to the rocks like some strange airship built of stone. It was twisted oddly askew and some of the buttresses supporting the Romanesque cupola seemed to have been stuck on almost as afterthoughts. He blinked his eyes and the quirk of vision passed. The massive pile re-emerged as solid and unified as any edifice which has successfully stood four-square on to the elements for over a thousand years. Fumbling a handkerchief from his pocket, Spindrift mopped the sweat from his forehead, then, remounting his bicycle, he pushed off on the last lap of his journey.

Fifteen minutes later, as he wheeled his machine up the final steep incline, a little birdlike monk clad in a faded brown habit fluttered out from the shadows of the portico and scurried with arms outstretched in welcome to the perspiring cyclist. ‘Welcome, Señor Spindrift!’ he cried. ‘I have been expecting you this half hour past.’

Spindrift was still somewhat dizzy from his hot and dusty ride but he was perfectly well aware that he had not specified any particular day for his arrival if only because he had no means of knowing how long the journey from Switzerland would take him. He smiled and shook the proffered hand. ‘Brother Roderigo?’

‘Of course, of course,’ chuckled the little monk and, glancing down at Spindrift’s bicycle, he observed: ‘So they managed to repair your wheel.’

Spindrift blinked. ‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘But how on earth…?’

‘Ah, but you must be so hot and tired, Senor! Come into Hautaire where it is cool.’ Seizing hold of Spindrift’s machine he trundled it briskly across the courtyard, through an archway, down a stone-flagged passage, and propped it finally against a cloister wall.

Spindrift, following a pace or two behind, gazed about him curiously. In the past six months he had visited many ecclesiastical establishments but none which had given him the overwhelming sense of timeless serenity that he recognized here. In the centre of the cloister yard clear water was bubbling up into a shallow limestone saucer. As it brimmed over, thin wavering streams tinkled musically into the deep basin beneath. Spindrift walked slowly forward into the fierce sunlight and stared down into the rippled reflection of his dusty, sweat-streaked face. A moment later his image was joined by that of the smiling Fr. Roderigo. ‘That water comes down from a spring in the hillside,’ the little monk informed him. ‘It flows through the very same stone pipes which the Romans first laid. It has never been known to run dry.’

A metal cup was standing on the shadowed inner rim of the basin. The monk picked it up, dipped it, and handed it to Spindrift. Spindrift smiled his thanks, raised the vessel to his lips and drank. It seemed to him that he had never tasted anything so delicious in his life. He drained the cup and handed it back, aware as he did so that his companion was nodding his head as though in affirmation. Spindrift smiled quizzically. ‘Yes,’ sighed Fr. Roderigo, ‘you have come. Just as he said you would.’

The sense of acute disorientation which Spindrift had experienced since setting foot in Hautaire persisted throughout the whole of the first week of his stay. For this Fr. Roderigo was chiefly responsible. In some manner not easy to define the little monk had succeeded in inducing in his guest the growing conviction that his quest for the elusive Meister Sternwärts had reached its ordained end; that what Spindrift was seeking was hidden here at Hautaire, buried somewhere among the musty manuscripts and incunabula that filled the oak shelves and stone recesses of the Abbey library.

True to his promise the librarian had laid before Spindrift such documentary evidence as he himself had amassed over the years, commencing with that faded entry in the 13th-century registrum. Together they had peered down at the ghostly script. ‘Out of . . .