No Dawn for Men: A Novel of Ian Fleming, JRR Tolkien, and Nazi Germany by James LePore & Carlos Davis

Author:James LePore & Carlos Davis [LePore, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Action & Adventure, Thriller
Amazon: B00Y5SRVEG
Publisher: Fiction Studio Books
Published: 2015-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

34.

Metten Abbey

October 8, 1938, 5:00 p.m.

“I lied to the lieutenant.”

“Absolvo te.”

“There is no tunnel here, but there is one just a hundred meters away, just south of our orchard, near the Roman wall.”

“I see. What are they looking for, Father?”

“The tunnel leads to a small meadow, with sheer rock walls on all sides.”

Father Wilfrid and Father William were sitting across from each other on rough-hewn but sturdy ladder-back chairs in Father William’s cell located on the top floor front of Metten Abbey. The room’s single twenty-four-inch by twenty-four-inch leaded glass window was a square blaze of bright yellow sunshine, a portal to heaven just above their heads as it were, that they might, if they only could, slip through, leaving Nazi Germany and the woes it had brought on their tonsured heads behind forever.

“How do you know this?” Father Wilfrid, the younger man by thirty years, asked.

“One of our monks took me there. Father Adelbert.”

“When?”

“Soon after I arrived.”

“In 1872?”

“Yes. I was seventeen.”

“Why?”

“He told me he had been working in the archives, researching manuscripts over a thousand years old. He came upon a canto that, that . . .”

“Yes, that what?”

“That called upon Satan.”

“Called upon Satan?”

“Yes, and that he had found an amulet in the forest, a black stone beast with ruby eyes that was spoken of in other manuscripts. That with the canto and the amulet he could . . .”

“He could what?”

“He could raise the dead.”

The abbot realized deep in his soul, and with a sick feeling in his stomach that went far beyond mere nausea, that the tingling of the hair at the back of his neck and the sudden sweat on his brow were signs from God that the old priest sitting across from him was telling the simple, but horrific, truth. Despite this message from his soul, Father Wilfrid took a moment to look carefully into Father William’s eyes. It cannot be, dear Lord, he murmured, please take this from us. Raising the dead? Only Christ, or Satan, could do that. But the old man’s blue eyes were clear and calm, tinged only with the sadness of this burden he had been carrying for three quarters of a century. He was the sanest, the most even tempered of all the monks in the abbey. I am sorry I doubted you, Lord, the abbot said to himself.

“What happened to him?” Father Wilfrid asked. “Father Adelbert.”

“No one knows. A few weeks after he showed me the walled meadow he disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“He was seen in the kitchen yard one morning playing with Bridget, the yard dog, and then he was never seen or heard from again.”

“Was there a search? His family?”

“He had no family. There was a search. He was never heard from again.”

“Did you tell the abbot about the tunnel?”

“No. We were forbidden to leave the grounds. I was afraid I would be expelled. I wanted to serve God. I sinned.”

“So this walled meadow was never searched.”

“No.”

“You have not sinned, Father.”

“I would like you to hear my confession,” said Father William.

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