Fanatics by William Bell

Author:William Bell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction:Young Adult
ISBN: 9780385670272
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Four

I

WE STROLLED SLOWLY back to the house, our energy drained by the soft summer afternoon, the drone of bees in the flower beds and the gloom that followed in the wake of our reading. We had been dragged into an otherworldly conflict, like swimmers in a riptide, and we knew our only defence was to go with the current until it lost some of its strength, then strike off in another direction. Not a cheerful thought on a beautiful summer’s day far removed from the world of Professor Eduardo Corbizzi—and that of the cranky Italian friar who had been linked to him by events or forces Raphaella and I could so far only vaguely understand.

As we turned the corner of the mansion, I stopped. And groaned. Something had flickered behind the library window.

“Not again,” I muttered.

Raphaella looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

“What? Where?”

“In the library. Something moved.”

At that time of day, with sunlight slanting across the yard, throwing shadows over the lawn, the window glass was a pattern of reflected sky and treetops so deceiving that birds might fly directly into the glass thinking they were winging through the trees. But I could have sworn I had caught sight of someone moving inside the library.

“I can feel something, but I didn’t see anything,” Raphaella whispered. “Are you sure?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

“Well, I feel better now that you’ve cleared that up. And why am I whispering again?” she added, annoyed with herself.

“We’re both on edge.”

“The edge of sanity, I’d say. Let’s go in.”

Any doubts I had held about my vision disappeared as soon as we closed the library doors behind us. The acrid odour of smoke was so strong it stung my nostrils. Raphaella stood still beside me, sniffing the air. A cold fingernail of dread scratched the back of my neck.

“Where there’s smoke there’s—”

“A ghost,” Raphaella cut in, drawing air through her nose like a professional wine taster, analyzing the ingredients of the invisible smoke the way I had seen her nasally exploring the medicines in the Demeter. Dealing with herbal remedies required a finely tuned olfactory organ, she had often told me.

“This is what you’ve been telling me about?”

“It’s him again,” I said. “But the smell is stronger this time.”

“I see—smell—what you mean.” Raphaella wrinkled her nose. “Burnt wood, cloth,” she murmured, as if taking inventory, “leather, hot iron, paper. And—ugh—underneath it all, something fetid. But why smoke?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why would this presence leave behind the smell of burning?”

“I assume because he caused the fire that led to the professor’s …”

“Maybe,” Raphaella mused. “But you’d think—”

“Look,” I exclaimed, leading the way across the room. “Something’s disturbed the manuscript.”

“I left it in two neat stacks.”

The bitter stink was more pronounced here. The books I had been using lay open where I had left them, but the manuscript had been tampered with. Several pages were askew. I checked the window. It was closed and locked as it always was when I left the library, so no breeze had moved the pages.

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