“Which is why we’re here, Ms. Sykes,” I sip my tea, “because of one particular pack. ‘The Anchorites of the Chapel of the Dusk of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Order of Sidelhorn Pass.”
“Too long for business cards.” Arkady interlaces his fingers, inverts his hands, and lifts his arms. “Just ‘Anchorites,’ to friends.”
“The Sidelhorn’s a mountain,” says Holly. “In Switzerland.”
“Quite a climb it is, too,” I remark. “Sidelhorn also lends its name to a pass in northern Italy, a road that was old even when Roman legions used it. A Thomasite monastery served as a hostelry on the pass, on the Swiss Valais side, from the ninth century to the last year of the eighteenth. There, in the 1210s, a figure known as the Blind Cathar ontologized into being a conduit into the Dusk.”
Holly scans this blast of history. “The Dusk that lies between …”
“Life and death,” says Arkady. “Good, you’re listening.”
Holly asks, “What’s a Cathar?”
“The Cathars were twelfth- and thirteenth-century heretics,” I say, “in Languedoc. They preached that the world was created not by God but the devil, that matter was evil, that Jesus, as a man, was therefore not the Son of God. The papacy did not approve. In 1198 Pope Innocent III proposed a landgrab that became known as the Albigensian Crusade. The King of France was otherwise engaged, but he gave barons from the north of France his blessing to ride south, kill Cathars, confiscate their lands, and subdue a disloyal region for the French Crown. Heresy is fissiparous, however. What was smashed, splintered. Our Blind Cathar had settled at a Thomasite monastery in distant Valais by, we guess, 1205, 1206. Why he chose the Sidelhorn, we do not know. His name, we do not know. His impetuses for delving into matter, noumena, logos, mind, the soul, the Dusk, we do not know. He appears in only one historical source. Mecthild of Magdeburg’s history of the Episcopal Inquisition dates from the 1270s and describes how, in 1215, the Inquisition sentenced the ‘Blind Cathar’ of Sidelhorn monastery to death for witchcraft. The night before his execution, he was locked in a cell in the monastery. By dawn,” I think of Oscar Gomez, “he had vanished. Mecthild arrived at the conclusion that the heretic’s liege lord Satan had looked after his own.”
“Don’t worry,” says Arkady. “We don’t do Satan.”
“The history lesson’s almost over,” I promise. “Earth spun on its axis, despite the Inquisition’s insistence to the contrary, until the year 1799.” I rest my fingertips on the iron teapot. “A stroke of Napoleon’s pen merged the proud Swiss cantons into a single Helvetican Republic. Not all the Swiss approved of being a client state of France, however, and when promises of religious freedom were reneged upon, many began burning churches and turning on their Paris-appointed masters. Napoleon’s enemies fanned the flames, and in early April a company of Austrian artillery came over the Sidelhorn Pass from Piedmont. Two hundred kegs of gunpowder were stored in the monastery’s cowshed and, by carelessness or sabotage, exploded. Much of the monastery was destroyed, and a rock-fall swept away a bridge crossing the chasm below. Which is only a footnote in the Revolutionary Wars, but that explosion, in our War, equates to the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Shock waves from it ricocheted up to the Chapel of the Dusk, you see, and the Blind Cathar’s long slumber ended.”
The mantelpiece clock measures out eight delicate chimes.
“The Thomasite Order was by then a ghost of its pre-Reformation self, and lacked the money, means, and the will to rebuild its Alpine redoubt. The Helvetican government in Zürich, however, voted to repair the Sidelhorn bridge and position a barracks to guard the strategically vital pass. One Baptiste Pfenninger, an engineer from Martigny, was dispatched to the site to oversee the work, and on a night in late summer, as Pfenninger lay in his room at the barracks trying to sleep, he heard a voice calling his name. The voice sounded both miles away and inches away. His door was bolted on the inside, but Pfenninger saw a strip of air swaying at the foot of his bed. The engineer touched it. He found that the strip of air parted, like a curtain, and through it he saw a round floor and a person-high candle of the type one still finds before Catholic or Orthodox altars. Beyond were slabs of stone, climbing up into darkness. Baptiste Pfenninger was a pragmatic man, not drunk, and of sound mind. His room was on the second floor of a two-story building. Yet he passed through the impossible curtain in the air, known, by the way, as the Aperture, and climbed up the impossible steps. How are you holding up so far, Ms. Sykes?”
Holly’s thumb sits in her clavicle. “I don’t know.”
Arkady is stroking his zits, content to let me talk.
“Baptiste Pfenninger became the first visitor to the Chapel of the Dusk. He found a portrait, or an icon of the Blind Cathar. It had no eyes, yet as Pfenninger stood there, and gazed at it, or was gazed at by it, he saw a dot appear in the icon’s forehead and grow into the black pupil of a lidless eye and …”
“I saw that! Where’s it from?”
I look at Arkady, who shrugs slightly in reply. “It’s what the icon of the Blind Cathar does, shortly before it decants a soul.”
Holly addresses me with a fresh urgency. “Listen. The weekend Jacko went missing. That dot-to-eye on a forehead thing. I–I—I had a — a daymare in an underpass, near Rochester. I left it out of The Radio People, it just read like a bad description of an acid trip. But it happened.”
Arkady subasks me, What if Xi Lo was cording images to her during the First Mission?
Why keep that from us? I hunt for a better idea. What if Jacko and Holly were already corded, as two psychosoteric siblings?
Arkady’s biting his thumb knuckle, a habit from his last life. Possibly. The cord’s remnants may have led Esther to Holly as you fled the Chapel. Like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.
“ ’Scuse me,” Holly’s saying, “but I am still here. What’s Jacko got to do with this medieval monk and a Napoleonic engineer?”
The candle flame in its stained-glass jar is tall and still.
“The Blind Cathar and the engineer talked,” I say, “and agreed upon a covenant, a pact of mutual assistance. We can’t be sure—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. This monk had been in his Chapel of the Dusk for, what, six hundred years? Now he’s inviting up visitors and making deals. What’s he been eating since the Middle Ages?”
“Naturally, the Blind Cathar had transubstantiated,” I explain.
Holly leans back. “Is transwhateveritis even a word?”
“The Blind Cathar’s body had died,” says Arkady, “but his mind and soul — which, for the purposes of our chat, are the same — had entered into the fabric of the Chapel. The Blind Cathar interfaced with Pfenninger via the icon.”
Holly considers this. “So the builder became the building?”
“After a fashion,” Arkady replies. “You could say so.”
“The bridge and the garrison at the Sidelhorn Pass were finished ahead of winter,” I pick up the thread, “and Baptiste Pfenninger returned to his family in Martigny. But the following spring he went on a fishing trip up to Lake d’Emosson, where, one evening, he took a boat onto the water. The boat was found, the body never was.”
“I get it,” Holly says. “The same as Hugo Lamb.”
Rain is softly muttering at 119A’s windows. “Jump forward six years to 1805. A new orphanage opened its doors in the Marais district of Paris. Its founder and director was a sturdy Frenchman called Martin Leclerc, whose father had amassed a colonial fortune in Africa, and who now wished to give sustenance, shelter, and scripture to the capital’s war orphans. 1805 was a bad time to be a foreigner in Paris, and Leclerc’s French had a Germanic slant, but his friends attributed his foreignness to a Prussian mother and a Hamburg education. These same friends, many of whom were the cream of imperial society, did not know that Martin Leclerc’s real name was Baptiste Pfenninger. One imagines the accusations of insanity that would have greeted the idea that Leclerc had set up his orphanage to source and groom Engifted children. That is, children who showed evidence of psychosoteric voltage or an active chakra-eye.”