The Book of the Beast Read Online Free Page A

bones and the nails of the saint, and kissed them.
    And in bed he recalled that to go with a whore was a sin and if he died tonight, the Devil would get him.
    So at length he slept and had nightmares, but nothing else of the quick or the dead approached.
    In the morning came summer sunlight, and the now familiar sounds and stenches of the summer city. Birds chimed past the window. Raoulin lay in the warm brightness of the reborn earth and called himself a dunce.
    Too timid to go to the tower by night. Well, he would go there presently and smash in the door if he must.
    It was even a Holy Day, God watchful.
    In the kitchen, where he broke his fast, the hag pottered about. An evil grey cat, thin as a string and kept for the mice, hissed at him from the hearth like an adder.
    “Well, puss,” said Raoulin to the cat, “I’m off to watch the priests and processions. Is it a fact, granny,” he added for the hag’s full benefit, “they carry a Christ out of the Sacrifice made all of alabaster and silver, with wounds of malachite?”
    “Go see,” said the hag.
    He promised he would, but instead of course made straight for the yard stair and the rooms of the hinder house.
    Again, he had difficulty locating the exact spot. Then on the proper steps, up in the correct passage, confronting the solitary door, in the dark, doubt wormed under his skin, his flesh crawled . Until, turning, he saw—as if he had reinvented it—the slit of window above the garden stair, and day and daytime Paradys (in which reverential bells were ringing, to encourage him). He went and drank in the vista, like a draught of medicine. Then returned up into the passageway. Here he tried the door again, courteously.
    As before, it was immovable. It was a formidable bastion, too, looked at with an eye to damage. The timbers were heavy, and thewed with iron.
    Dunce again. He had brought no implement to help him.
    But then there was the adjacent garden, some handy bough or up-levered stone would do the job.
    He was on the garden stair, descending, past the window and into shadow, when he heard a noise above.
    Raoulin clamped himself against the wall. His lips formed a prayer. He thrust it off angrily. This was broad day. No non-existent fiend had power now—
    What he had heard was the sigh of a woman’s skirt, sweeping along the corridor. Then his heart roared loudly enough he could scarcely hear anything else—until the rasp of a turning key somehow reached him.
    The big obdurate door was being breached, and Raoulin could no longer cower there in ignorance. He went back up the stair, crouching like a toad, and peered above the top step.
    The doorway gaped. It was a gap of paleness, not dark, a chamber lit by a window. That was, from this quirky vantage, all he could see.
    And then, out of the door walked the hag.
    Over one arm she bore some bed-linen, and in her other hand a platter on which there balanced a costly goblet of glass. There were some dregs of murky fluid in it, some brackish wine.
    Not looking about, the hag proceeded along the corridor, and as she did this the door swung suddenly shut, and again he heard the note of a key turning in a lock.
    Raoulin sat himself on the stair. He was grinning, bemused, disturbed, but no longer afraid. Did a ghost require wine and food and fresh linen? Did a ghost lock itself in by hand?
    A voluntary prisoner lurked within the tower. The lady of d’Uscaret was a recluse. They had said no one lived here, to confound the lodger. But, by the Mass, it was his own father’s coin went to feed her now.
    He had some say in her doings.
    He half resolved at once to burst upon her. The hag must have a secret knock. He would have to batter in the door, explain the act as a notion of rescue in ignorance. After all, she could not have reported or complained of his previous attempts.
    In a moment he thought better of this idiocy. There were other ways to come at her. Whoever she was, she was not Helise, the dead bride. He