The Ghost Manuscript Read online

  “What’s happening?” Gyles asked.

  “There’s a problem,” he said. He could feel the bruises on his hands from wrecking the Harper mansion. He wouldn’t have known the monk’s manuscript if it bit him, so he’d focused on finding the translation, which at least he could have read. He hadn’t found anything.

  “A problem,” said Gyles. “Of what nature?”

  “I went to the mansion to try to get the maid to give me the manuscript, and there was an accident,” he said, glancing in the rear-view mirror. His collar was soaked with sweat, and there was dirt on his lapels. That explained the neighbor’s reaction. Should have looked in the mirror before he went to the door.

  “An accident?” said Gyles.

  “I shot her.”

  “Jesus, man,” Gyles hissed.

  “She lunged at me. The goddamn gun Plourde gave me had a hair trigger,” he said. It was true. He had not intended to shoot anyone, not on this trip anyway.

  “She dead?” said Gyles.

  “I don’t know. Ambulance took her away. I tossed the mansion after the cops left this morning. I scoured the place. Came up empty.”

  “So just follow the Jones woman,” said Gyles.

  “That’s the other thing,” he said, steeling himself for what would come next. “I lost her.”

  “What do you mean you’ve lost her?” said Gyles. His voice went up an octave. “How could you—”

  “I found her at the hospital, but then she got on the subway, and it left before I could get on.”

  “Fuck! Did you go back to her house?”

  “I’m here now. She told her neighbors last night she was leaving town. What do you want me to do?”

  “She’s probably got the manuscript and translation,” said Gyles. “Goddammit!”

  Gyles was silent for a few moments, then his voice returned, calm, low, and malevolent. “She’s gotta come up for air at some point. When she does, we’ll find her.”

  Frank often wondered if this silky, malignant voice was the last thing that Gyles’s big brother, James Brian, heard before Gyles snapped his neck.

  The twelve-year-old Gyles had sworn it was an accident, and the authorities agreed, but his parents knew better. They’d promptly shipped Gyles off to a notoriously horrific boarding school because they couldn’t stand to look at him anymore. “They had no idea what that place did to me,” Gyles had told Frank in a rare emotional moment between them, years back. But Frank knew. That place did nothing that some twist of nature hadn’t already done. Gyles came out exactly as evil as he had gone in.

  “We’ll find her,” said Gyles. “Don’t worry.”

  For a moment, Frank couldn’t help but feel bad for Carys Jones.

  PART 2

  Wales

  1

  Sunday, June 17

  Each step Carys took was leaden. The ground was soft and wet and strewn with strangely shaped rocks. Her feet were black with mud. The smell of something like raw meat clung to the inside of her nose. She stumbled and landed on an object, soft yet oddly unyielding.

  A human leg. Not attached to anything.

  She screamed, but there was no sound. She tried to jump up but felt as though she were underwater. Slowly, she stood and backed away from the severed limb.

  Ahead of her, on a small rise in the vast hillside before her, a man…Lestinus…was down on one knee looking at something on the ground. Farther on, beyond where he knelt, there were clusters of men moving down the hillside in groups of twos and threes. Some were limping; others supported them. All were covered with the same dark mud that covered her feet, knees, and hands.

  Lestinus was sobbing. Before him lay a man dressed in a white tunic bearing the image of an ancient Christian cross. It was spattered with blood. Lestinus crossed himself and then clasped his hands together at his chest in prayer.

  “Suscitate viveque,” he said.

  Wake and live.

  Carys woke with a jolt. Her heart was pounding, and her eyes were blurry. A high-pitched whining filled her ears, and her brain creaked into motion trying to figure out where she was. She inhaled deeply to slow her heart. They were around her, the men in cloaks and the dead. She could feel them.

  The bag on her lap started to slide off. She grabbed it just before it hit the floor. Standing next to her was a pretty, tall woman in a red suit and a crisp white shirt.

  “Tea and scones, Ms. Roberts?” the woman asked.

  Right. Airplane. I’m on an airplane, she thought.

  “Yes, thank you,” Carys said. She wiped some drool from her chin and tucked the bag containing the manuscript and translation into the space between her hip and the armrest.

  An hour and a half later, she stood in the immigration line, her palms sweating furiously.

  “Destination?” asked the immigration agent.

  “Wales,” said Carys.

  “Purpose of visit?”

  “Pleasure.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  She didn’t know. She’d forgotten to look at the return ticket Annie bought.

  “Two weeks, but I may extend it by a week if the sun comes out,” she said with a forced smile.

  “Good luck with that,” said the agent, smiling slightly back. He turned to his monitor and studied the passport picture that appeared on it.

  “Where will you be staying?” he asked.

  “With family near Cardiff,” she lied. He stamped her passport and handed it back to her.

  “Enjoy your visit.”

  Relief washing through her, she passed into the aimless, anxious mobs in the international terminal. Normally, she’d lose her mind in spaces like this, with the crush and noise and the smell of unwashed, jet-lagged humans all around her. Instead, all she could think of was that she was finally safe. No one could have followed her. She changed dollars for pounds at an exchange kiosk and paid cash for a prepaid phone card in an electronics shop before hopping the shuttle to the rental car office.

  She realized, too late, that even though she could pay cash for the rental car, they’d need to put a hold on a credit card for the deposit, and the only one she had was her own. There was no alternative. As the customer-service rep swiped it through the machine, dread seeped through the jet lag.

  She walked to her car, a red Vauxhall, and started to get in it on the wrong side. She’d forgotten that she was going to have to drive on the left. While jet-lagged. She walked around the front of the car and got in behind the right-hand steering wheel, pulled out of the lot, and concentrated as hard as she could on simply following the car in front of her, around an endless series of confusing roundabouts, nearly colliding twice with oncoming traffic.

  Half an hour later, as Carys drove west on the M4 through the English mist, she finally relaxed a bit. The highway was easier. Her shoulders moved away from her ears, and she started to see the countryside through which she was passing.

  She was seven years old the last time she saw the British Isles. Her parents were still together but would not be for long. She remembered that trip so vividly, which surprised her, because she remembered so little about the rest of her childhood.

  The intense, uniform emerald of the British landscape had mesmerized her when she was a child—and it mesmerized her again now. All those decades ago, she’d thought the entire island was covered with the fluorescent green from her finger-painting set. She always wondered if that last trip was the reason her father had bolted. Maybe he’d remembered he loved this land more than he loved them.

  They’d visited her father’s hometown, a place named Mumbles, a tiny town on the Welsh coast that flowed like a gray mudslide down the seaside hills into Swansea Bay. There were endless beaches there, especially the one stretching for miles at Three Cliffs Bay. Wormshead, a rock formation off the coast of the Gower Peninsula, looked like
a great sea monster rearing out of the ocean. Fog clung to the ruins of medieval castles perched on the cliffs high above the sea. It was a place out of myth and fairy tales, like a cloud city drifting above the rest of the world. When they got back to America, her father left them and returned to Wales, and nothing was good again. From that day forward, the sound of a Welsh accent nauseated her.

  Now she was driving toward that country as fast as her underpowered Vauxhall would go. It had just become obvious where she should hide.

  Two hours later, Carys was at a dead stop in a massive traffic jam. The M4 was closed in Bath due to a car crash. Sometime in midafternoon, she finally crossed the toll bridge over the Severn River, the water separating Wales and England. As she passed over it, Lestinus formed in the seat next to her.

  This time, as the monk solidified into existence, Carys was neither half asleep nor completely panicked. As he took his full form, she was calm and, though jet-lagged and exhausted, completely awake. This time there was nothing on which she could blame the vision, except insanity. What else could it be? A ghost? Even entertaining that possibility was another kind of insanity.

  Still, whatever it was, it had helped her save the manuscript. And it didn’t seem like it was going to go away.

  “We’re here,” said the monk in Latin.

  “We’re where?” she asked.

  “We buried him here,” he said. He gazed out the window down at the wide, flat Severn River below.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “This river. We traveled it in a boat. A wave pushed us that way,” he said as he pointed upriver. “It drove us north. Toward the Usurper.”

  “It’s called the tidal bore,” Carys said. She reached for her phone and called Annie.

  “I’m here. I’m safe.”

  “Where are you going?” Annie asked.

  “It’s probably best that I not tell you. The less you know, the better. How is Nicola?”

  “She’s stable. But the doctors aren’t sure which way it’s going to go,” said Annie. “Has anyone been following you?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t imagine how they could have.”

  “Do you want me to contact Harper for you and tell him you’re there?” asked Annie.

  She thought on this a moment.

  Lestinus turned to her. “He will be fine,” he said. She looked at him for half a beat. His weight, his breath, his smell—old wool and a tinge of sweat—were palpable.

  “Don’t bother calling Harper. I’ll call him when I have something to report.”

  “Be safe. Call me every day,” Annie said.

  “I will.” She hung up.

  Lestinus looked at her blankly.

  “Find a safe place to read,” he said.

  Lestinus was visible for longer this time than any time before. She found his presence strangely calming. Then she’d snap back to the realization that she was most likely going nuts.

  The car tires hummed soothingly as they sped down the M4 toward Swansea.

  “What are you?” she asked him.

  “A monk,” he said. “In the service of my master, rest his soul.”

  Psychotic hallucinations don’t tell you they’re hallucinations, she thought.

  “Where did you die?” she asked.

  “Saint Catherine’s,” he said. “I longed for the green hills of home. The smell of rain. But there was no returning. It was too dangerous to come back.”

  “Western Wales wasn’t that dangerous after you left. It was one of the only safe places in Britain,” she said.

  “I had heard these things, but it was too much risk,” he said. “If they’d caught me, I fear what I would have told them. I saw many men betray all they held sacred rather than face their tortures. I did not trust myself to keep the secret.”

  “It must have been unbearable. During the invasions.”

  “It would have been if we had had no hope.”

  “And this warrior, Arcturus, he gave you hope.”

  “Hope and life,” said Lestinus. He made the sign of the cross.

  She took the exit into Swansea and drove along the road next to the bay for several miles until they hit the main street of Mumbles.

  Jammed up against the hills, Mumbles was a former fishing village composed of three- and four-story white stucco and stone shops, restaurants, pubs, and homes pushed right down against the edge of the narrow main road. The street was so tight against the buildings that the people walking on the sidewalk looked as though they were in constant danger of being mowed down.

  Carys had no idea where she could stay. Just as she was about to pull over into a parking spot and start walking the town, she saw a sign on the right for a B&B called the Farmer’s Arms. She pulled into a parking lot next to it.

  When she turned off the car, Lestinus was gone.

  She walked into what she thought was the inn but found herself inside a partially filled pub instead. The men at the bar turned toward her, then back to their drinks. She stepped back out the door and inspected the front of the building while holding the door open.

  “You looking for the inn?” asked the bartender, a gray-haired man with a craggy face and bright blue eyes.

  “Yes, I am. How do I get into it?”

  “You’re here. Do you have a reservation?” he asked.

  “No. No, I don’t. Do you have a room?”

  “Sure.” The man reached behind the bar and grabbed a thick leather-bound book.

  “How long do you want to stay?” he asked.

  “Can we start out with a week and see how we go?”

  “Sure thing. Name?”

  She paused for a moment trying to remember her fake name.

  “Jane Roberts,” she finally said.

  “Hi, Jane. I’m Peter.” He reached across the bar and shook her hand. “May I see your passport?” he asked.

  Carys handed it over. Peter scribbled her name and passport number in the leather book.

  Her room was on the floor above the pub. It was small, with light-blue flowered wallpaper, dark wooden flooring, and a single casement window with cast-iron mullions and wavy ancient glass. Through it she could see down into the pub’s courtyard, which served as a beer garden. The room had a small bed without a headboard, and a bureau, desk, and chair. The bathroom was indescribably small, and she couldn’t imagine how she was going to be able to wash her hair inside the tiny glass cocoon of a shower.

  “This is fine,” she said. Peter handed her the keys and let himself out. Carys put her bags on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Though she had slept soundly on the plane, a blanket of exhaustion fell over her. But it wasn’t just jet lag. It was something else—a feeling like she was too weak to lift her arms. She rubbed her eyes, stumbled to the bathroom, and splashed water on her face.

  When she stood up, Lestinus was behind her, staring back in the mirror. She jumped and almost yelled at him for startling her, then remembered there was no point.

  “Read,” he said.

  She dried her face and retrieved the manuscript and translation from her bag. She sat at the small desk and opened the manuscript. She stuck her nose in it, inhaled, and swooned. Opening the translation, she went straight to the poem. She turned toward Lestinus and began to read out loud.

  Head toward the setting sun from Aquae Sulis up the great Sabrina Flumen

  The bear unto whom is all the glory save our Lord

  Protector, whose bravery is known to all,

  Is struck down in battle with the Usurper

  They both fed the ravens along the mountain stream, running red with their blood

  The sword pierced his heart

  The great Duke of War is dead

  We and the river carried him down the four falls to a field of flowersr />
  Adorned with drops of his blood

  They bloom at our arrival then die and fall as we pass

  All nature and man mourn in unison

  Then across the ebullition of the sea

  We land on the island of the apples

  There is a castle of defense under the ocean waves

  Between the mother tree and the last light of the fat sun lies the watery nest where we laid him

  With the sword of Ambrosius—King Saint Protector

  Caledfwlch

  And his belt and ring bestowed

  And the wealth of his people, awaiting his return

  What castles that can never be

  The sea guards better

  And now he is the tree of our faith

  From here his fruit will fall and the land will be fertile.

  “This is completely impenetrable,” she said.

  “I didn’t write the poem,” said Lestinus.

  His eyes seemed to shine more brightly than before. He was so real. She could see his chest move in and out as he breathed.

  “Who wrote it?” she asked.

  “Taliesin,” he said.

  She balked. Then she laughed.

  “Taliesin? Really. Taliesin wrote this. Not you?”

  “He dictated it. He didn’t know how to write,” said the monk.

  Her mind snapped back to a memory. Harper had been looking for Taliesin’s works a few years earlier. She’d helped him locate several of the first transcriptions of the poet’s epic works, which he had composed and delivered orally in the mid-sixth century. Taliesin never wrote a word. There was great controversy in the book world over whether any of the Taliesin transcriptions contained his actual poems, since they were written centuries after the poet lived. Harper still bought everything she’d found. But now, maybe, here was Taliesin, in this manuscript.