Monk's Maze

Chapter 3-3

She threw her head back to scream but the moment her mouth was open the flames roared inside her.

Charring, crisping the flesh until only blackened charcoal remained.

Crumbling. Falling to her knees.

Not onto hard rock.

On wet grass.

The next breath she heaved into her lungs was cool and mild, a damp morning in the Scottish Isles. A wracking cough shook her in a convulsive effort to clear her lungs of the char left by fire and flame. There was nothing but a sharp sound. She fell to her side and lay there until her breathing was normal and she dared open her eyes.

She was looking down at Iona as if from the clouds themselves. The abbey was a tiny jewel of brown and pink stone set upon a tray of spring green growth. A quick glance revealed she was not in a home among the clouds, nor were angel’s wings sticking from her back, but rather she rested atop Dun I, the highest point of Iona, a bare hundred meters above the sea. The channel was shining where the sun reached down through the tattered clouds and the mist had cleared away and passed to the east over Mull and Oban. Even her house glittered as if new washed on the jagged rock that was Eileen nam Ban.

It was a dream. That was it. It had all been a dream. A madness of Iona.

She’d simply imagined a light. Gone to visit the island to check on it. And somehow wandered here to the top of Dun I. That was it.

There had been no intruders across the electronic boundaries. No one had crossed from sea to land or entered any of the buildings or the magic of the alarm lights would have told her. She should merely be thankful that she had not become lost in her madness. Lost as Mad Erin. The Iona Watcher who’d spent her last years locked in a padded chamber until she had died from swallowing her own clothes and choking.

All Meghan had to do was go down the hill, a walk she’d taken a dozen times since coming here, stroll along the shore giving the abbey the widest berth possible, always good advice, and row herself home. A cup of tea sounded nice. Sounded normal.

The first part of her plan was easy enough and she reached the shore. But by the time she drew even with the abbey, doubts had crawled into her mind. She was a vivid dreamer, but never that vivid. And she rarely dreamed in color, yet Colin’s coat had been the brown of fresh-turned earth, his hair a soft wave of the lightest brown, and his eyes the blue of a summer day. These details didn’t seem possible. But if they were true it meant she had stood before the crosses and survived. She could see the pattern of mosses and lichens painting their beautiful patterns across the face.

Despite already having passed the abbey safely, her footsteps turned and she climbed over the driftwood. Up the berm and across the meadow. Climbed the low rock wall that she had barely been able to drag Colin down the day before. She leaned her back against the south wall of the abbey and sidled forward. Peering around the corner of the South transept, she spied on the crosses. They must not have noticed her for the wind of their evil did not blow against her.

There was no sign of Colin. No sign that she had been there. No man still trapped below the Earth. It had been a dream. Colin was just a manifestation of how much she missed Toby. Four days. Four days and she could leave for Edinburgh and put this whole year behind her.

On the verge of withdrawing from the crosses’ gaze, Meghan spotted something that shouldn’t have been there. Her staff. Her polished and carved staff of oak rested lightly against St. Martin’s cross. Perhaps she had left it there in her madness. That was it.

She backed away. Best to just leave it be rather than risk again the cross’ malevolence. But she and Toby had found the branch of oak while hiking in the hills above Dundee on their third summer together as lovers. She had spent the dark winter months of Iona carving it with her long knife. She hated to leave it to a cross which she had only feared in a nightmare.

Pulling herself upright she walked around the corner. Nothing had changed. In a sudden race, her legs pumped beneath her and she tore past the transept wall, and along the nave. Just as she grabbed the staff, no heat beat upon her though she felt the pressure of the cross hard against her heart, a loud creak sounded behind her. A creak of the ages. Of rusted metal made to move against its will.

The earth was opening once again to rip her back into the fires of hell. She held her staff high and turned to face her fate. If she could have shot lightning from the tip, she would have.

Colin stepped from the abbey door. It cried again as he pulled it closed.

“A bit of a mess. Easy enough to clean up if anyone ever cares.” He crossed to her. She was frozen, as rooted to the ground as she had been to the floor of the impossible chamber.

“Where did you go? Are you okay?”

Unable to form the words, she pointed her staff at the top of Dun I where it was etched tall against the clearing sky.

“Why did you go up there?”

She worked her throat several times before she managed to croak forth, “Fire.”

“Fire? What are you talking about?”

It was one thing too many. Her knees went out from under her and she collapsed to the soil of Iona and fell back against the cross of St. Martin.

She would really have preferred that it was all merely a dream.

They sat across from one another at the kitchen table and compared their experiences. Colin hadn’t seen the walls except as the thinnest of traceries in the air. Could see and hear her easily. Had felt no pressure, no heat, no fear. Had never been rooted to the floor. The only experiences they had in common were the missing fourth wall and his entrapment within four thick walls that he couldn’t see.

His expression had shifted from doubt to disbelief, though he did his best to hide it.

“Say it,” she wanted to cry. “Iona has made me mad. They’ll lock me into the same cell where Erin was sealed away until she died.”

But she felt sane. He’d given up and bedded down on the floor of the bedroom wrapped deep in layers of blankets. Sitting at the table in the dark Watch of the night, she felt sane. Her mind seemed clear, but maybe that is what happened to those who were mad.

She could easily recall growing up in Edinburgh, playing with Toby along the banks of the Firth of Forth as children. Promises made that they’d always be together, childhood promises impossibly still true. The death of their parents when they were ten. A boring dinner party. She and Toby playing tag in the rose garden. Stopped at the top of the garden to inspect a scratch. A roof beam failed and the house collapsed upon their parents. Maggie had nearly starved to death rather than face a meal that might make a building fall on her. For three years, rain or shine, she’d only eat out of doors. Her memories were far too clear of that awful moment.

She remembered the smell of Toby’s skin, and ultimately the heat of his body as they grew up together, parted for a few years at university. They’d now lived together for six years. Well, five years plus her year spent on Iona.

The moment of being torn from their bed and the senseless trial were as clear as could be. The horror of arriving at Iona and meeting the remains of the Watcher before her, unable or unwilling to speak, her clothing a shambles, her eyes darting and nervous, a wreck of a woman.

She felt sane. She was sure of it. Meghan had not fallen into that pit of despair. Yet Colin had experienced none of same things in the labyrinth. That fire in the stone room was as real as this table beneath her hand, rough enough to make an incautiously placed water glass tilt and spill, yet smooth with the wear of two hundred years of Watchers’ meals.

Colin had pulled out his sheet of paper once and consulted it briefly.

“I took a wrong turn after the ‘second crest of the forest’, before the ‘crossing of the ways’.” As if that explained everything. As if that explained the pulse she could still feel along every nerve from having contained such a great quantity of heat. Her nerves felt…opened for the first time, widened like a spilling river that surges from canyon to lazy flatlands only to discover it can carry a dozen times as much water.

Had it occurred or not? They’d been a dozen paces apart yet not seen, felt, or heard the same things. He’d talked of the gentle tolling of bells at irregular intervals. She had heard nothing but their own breathing and his footsteps. She’d never even heard the staff strike the floor. Now she didn’t know which to trust, his experience or the impossible madness she had barely survived.

Colin’s quiet snores were the only sound in the darkness of the hut. The first sound not made by herself or the wind in a year. It was eerie and made her wonder if the house was haunted, perhaps by Mad Erin herself returned to the shores of Iona.

Meghan lit a lamp by feel and turned the wick down low so that it wouldn’t disturb him. There were only the two rooms with no door between. It was not meant for two people

His jacket hung beside the door next to hers. She glanced into the bedroom. The pile of blankets and Colin was unmoving upon the floor and his soft snores continued. Feeling like a thief in her own house, she took down his jacket and inspected the bright lines again. It only took a few tries to get the trick of opening the pockets, but even when she held the lantern high, she couldn’t see to their depths. Perhaps they were indeed magical doors to somewhere, she wasn’t about to risk her hand to find out.

The third pocket she tried had the piece of paper. By turning the pocket upside down and holding it wide, the sheet slid out and fluttered to the floor. She set the coat over the other chair and spread the paper the table and pulled the lantern close.

But it wasn’t paper. White with dark marks, and as thin as the pre-collapse paper in books. But it was smooth like glass, though it bent easily. The page was covered with lines crossed by little hash marks. The patterns weren’t the same on each line, it was like a secret code. She’d never been very good at those. She touched one with her finger and they faded. She jerked her hands into her lap but couldn’t look away as they were replaced by lines of English text.

Upon the soil of Iona, 563 A.D.

From the heathen Druidess Mehowen,

As she lay upon her deathbed,

Did I receive the hidden key to their power.

She scanned down many verses to the bottom of the page.

Only the faithful may use this without fear.

Colum Cille, Columba the Dove

Words from seventeen hundred years before. A chill ran up her spine until her whole body shook for an instant. A voice from the grave indeed. The voice of the cursed Christian saint who had started the chain of events that led to the founding the cursed Order.

Almost unwillingly, her fingertip caressed the smooth surface again to once more contemplate the magic of the strange markings upon the paper. They faded again, but to be replaced with a series of squares. Each contained a single word: Origin, Folios, Translation, Interpretation.