The Seminary

by Peter Gifford

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

Oh God, why hast though forsaken me?

Breathing. In, and out. Darkness. Pressed against me.

In … and out. How loud my breath sounds. How slowly I take the breaths. In. And out.

“Father, bonjour, bonjour” says Malachias, shuffling backwards, his feet sweeping the terracotta tiles, two ragged brooms. Bent, his head nearly level with my waist, looking up at me with a practiced idiot’s grin. “Bonjour, padre! It has been too long.”

“Not long enough you old rascal” I reply. My hands go out to support his bony body. He sighs. Veined hand resting on mine.

“You return to us in times of trouble Father” he says, “always trouble. The holy spirit follows you like a black dog, nipping at all our poor heels …”

“Not you, my old one, not you. And not our superiors. Only those with evil in their hearts.”

“Oui, oui.” Looks up at me again, his eyes wet, pauses. “And yet now you come.”

I walk, listening but not hearing, head lifted to the sun that flickers on my face. Walking through buttresses of light that support the high narrow windows. The tiles alternate shadow and bright sunlight, each concealing detail. The sunlight aswarm with disturbed dust motes.

“He awaits you padre.” With surprising quickness he is in front of me to push the door open. “I will prepare your room.” And moves away.

The long chamber beyond, the rich chiarascuro of velvet shadow and blinding sunlight. Small windows, some open to the garden beyond. A cough from a shadow wrapped in robes heaped at the far end of a long table. The clatter of eating utensils thrown on a metal plate.

“Enter my son. How quickly you come from the lands of the heretic!”

A poor choice of words. But then the Cardinal rarely chose his words carelessly, I remember.

“Your Grace. I come always at your command, by the fastest roads, God willing.” I bow. My hand clutches the wooden cross that hangs at my side as I rise from my genuflection. To watch the Cardinal drink deeply from a goblet of wine.

“Indeed Father Canis, indeed. And it is well that you are with us at this time. For we have need of the wisdom only you, it seems, can provide.”

Cardinal St Alban stares out at the garden. He is yet to look in my direction. His face like a painting in a boarded-up room. Lips stained red with wine.

One does not say no to the Cardinal. One does God’s will and his. That night, I sit in my small, bare room. I read the Lord’s word by the light of a single candle. But my mind wanders, as I have wandered, these last seven years. The old skull that squats on the table staares at me. I think of the things I have seen. In my mind’s eye I see the fleeting looks received in the corridors of the seminary this day. Seeing again the fear, the distrust, and the hatred in the eyes of those I call my brothers.

I know that tonight, like so many other nights, I will not sleep at peace. But I am unable to imagine what could await me here, in this place always thought of as safe harbour.

“Padre.’ A whisper in my sleep. “Padre, wake up!” Not in my sleep. There is a hand on my shoulder, shaking me. My eyes open from blackness to blackness. “Padre!”

It is Malachias. I see his eyes glint in the dark as blue shadows fill with the table, the chair.

“You must waken Father!” he whispers hoarsely.

“I am here old brother” I say. Still some hours before the rising of the sun. “No need to shake me further, I am awake.”

“Father, you must come with me. Now. As I have known you for your whole life, ask nothing and come with me now.”

I stifle my questions, cast off the thin blanket that covers me, rise. My head still full of dark shapes and grinning demons. The night is still. Malachias’s hunched form fills the tiny room like a black cliff in a dark ocean.

We move almost silently along the empty corridors. For the hundredth time I marvel at the old man’s dexterity as he flits ahead. “Come” he whispers, and in the still night it is like a shout.

Beyond a small door we move down a narrow stone staircase. Ahead the glow of torchlight. Who lights these brands to burn through the long night, I wonder. We pass the first torch, though another low door, and I am moving behind Malachias into parts of the seminary I have never been, even as a boy. The walls drip with nicre and the cracks are filled with moss. I bend low. Malachias has removed a torch from the wall and carries it before him, its flame hissing as it meets the damp ceiling.

“Malachias” I whisper. But my voice rises as I think how far below the seminary we have come. “Old one, where do you lead me? It is dark night and nothing stirs but us!”

The black shape with its edges outlined in fire does not pause. “You must trust me young one. It is not far. Trust me, for I do the Cardinal’s will.”

There is sadness in his voice. But I have not time to think upon it, for we leave the narrow corridor and come out into a long cellar. The ceiling is a low arch of brickwork two handsbreadths above my head. The mud and brick walls are riddled with long, low niches crammed with ancient bones. The left half of the room is a ledge waist high, and on this ledge are more disturbed bones, and stone sepulcures, some open with their heavy lids cast aside. Black mouths in the far wall yawn open to further rooms, or corridors. From them, in silence, file cowled monks. Though their hoods are low I recognise some of the faces.

Malachias moves to stand before them, next to a figure, bulkier than the others, dressed in rich, heavy robes like blood.

“Have you awoken from your sleep brother?” It is the Cardinal. His hands reach up to pull back his cowl. Silver hair orange in the insane flickering of torchlight. The lines on his face like black crevasses.

“Of what do you dream at night brother? he asks. “Do you see things that we do not see? Talk to those with no speech? In what lands of nightmare do you travel?”

“I travel only where your Eminence wills” I reply, but my voice sounds like the rattle of bones.

“Is this true?” he says, but it seems he speaks to the shrouded figures around him. “Or do you your night journeys take you where we would never follow? I have letters, brother, letters in your own hand. Letters that speak of places from which no one returns unsoiled.”

“Only in the service of God, your Eminence.”

He turns to me, and for the first time since I arrived looks me full in the face. “Whose God brother? Our God or anothers?”

They move towards me now, the others. There is nowhere to run. And they are my brothers, after all.

The scrape of a stone lid.

The air is stale and smells of dirt. All light is gone, all sound is silenced. All sound but that of my breath. In … and out.