The Book: Chapter 43

The Young Mistress in the Shadows.

New words had appeared in the book overnight.

‘The girl in the etching? Is that who you mean? Please, tell me about her.’

The book stayed stubbornly quiet.

After breakfast, Alice and Mick were surrounded by scattered notes and research material. Mick’s work schedule was still cleared, and they were gleaning what they could about the book—past, present, and as it wrote the future—it had become an obsession. ‘We should have taken up skydiving as a hobby. It’d be a damned sight safer than this,’ Mick said.

The book, as always, sat between them. ‘There are three of us in this relationship,’ Mick joked. ‘It’s a smug bastard, watching our struggle and laughing at us. Do we have to finish its game, or can we ground it until further notice?’

Alice set a fresh coffee in front of him, hoping it would soothe his troubled brow.

‘There’s more to this than a bunch of creepy monks and until we get all the pieces, we aren’t going to solve this.’ Mick smiled at her to show he was mad with the book, not her.

‘Why are there so few documents relating to this bloody priory?’ Alice asked. ‘I think maybe it became isolated by more than the geographical elements. What if people were scared to go near it?’

‘That doesn’t make sense. It was a major source for trading in the area.’

‘No, the mother site at Furness Abbey was. We’ve read this—it was a working priory, yes, but it was also a place where monks went for a rest.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘Read between the lines, darling. This place is conveniently surrounded by vast empty spaces, and they have no neighbours. Think about it, the diocese wouldn’t want to be smeared by scandal, so it wouldn’t be appropriate to have any mental health problems dealt with in a proper facility. What do they do? They cart their tired monks off to the priory where they can’t cause any embarrassment. Mad monks are much easier to stuff in a broom cupboard than King George.’

‘I like it. I think the book is just cursed. That this abbot was psychotic and put a hex on it.’

‘That makes sense. But I think it was more horrific than that. The rest of the tribe saw him becoming dangerous and locked him in the book with that ritual you were on about.’

‘But there are no specific details—names, incidents, or historical facts—in any of the books. There’s nothing to grab onto. And the book keeps mentioning a woman—not as a victim, but as something else. I don’t think it means the girl. It’s dropping deliberate, calculated crumbs.’

Alice frowned. ‘I swear, this book is like the kid who texts back “k” in response to a life crisis. You know how it likes to play. Perhaps it was a lover of the monk? Maybe she was tied to him willingly—or unwillingly.’

‘I know what I’d like to do to that bloody book. We haven’t even been told what we’re supposed to do in this stupid game yet .’

‘Never mind that. Focus, and we’ll take a break soon.’

Before Mick could respond, the room plunged into the cold stillness they had come to know. The book’s pages trembled. Something inside it had been disturbed.

Mick jolted forward.

He gasped, clawing at his chest, his body convulsing as if invisible hands were crushing his ribs. Alice jumped up, knocking over the chair. ‘Mick.’

A deep, rasping voice echoed from the book. He belongs to me.

Alice grabbed the wretched thing and hurled it across the room. The moment it hit the wall, Mick collapsed onto the table, gulping in shuddering breaths.

He coughed, wincing. ‘It was inside me. It was showing me something.’

Alice felt a stab of jealousy. Why wasn’t it showing her? She knelt beside him, gripping his hand and looking at the cushion on the armchair. She wouldn’t be strong enough to smother him. It was her book, not his. She battled the bad thoughts and pushed them out of her head. ‘What did you see?’

Mick’s face was as pale as death. His voice was a whisper. ‘A name.’

Alice’s breath caught. ‘Whose name?’

‘It was kind enough to write it down for me,’ he said. Alice caught the bitter tone in his voice as Mick lifted his shirt to reveal bloody welts that had burst through his skin from the inside of his chest. It took them a second to realise that they were crude letters that read TRISTAN.

‘I’ll get the first aid kit,’ Alice said.

‘No, leave it. It’s fine. I’m branded like a discount cowboy, but this is more important. What the hell does it mean?’

‘The monk’s name, do you think?’

‘Odd name for a twelfth-century monk.’

Mick jumped up and swore as he pointed to the book. It was moving, its pages flipping violently, turned by an unseen force. Alice’s heart pounded as she saw it.

The Girl in the Dark.

Mick winced, still horribly pale. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘I’m getting you sorted out.’ She cleaned and dressed his wounds and, although they were nasty, she decided he didn’t need any further treatment. Mick was with her most of the time but he had to go home to get some clean clothes. Alice was left wondering how much Mick’s business was suffering with all the time he was taking off. The book was systematically taking over their lives.

 Alice sat alone with the book, demanding answers.

‘Tell me what you’re hiding. Who is the girl in the dark?’

The pages fluttered. She is the Original Sin.

‘What do you mean?’

Be sure of what you ask. For once it is written, the words cannot be erased. People have perished for the knowledge.

It didn’t give her time to answer. As if indulging her, the ink bled across the page, forming words before her eyes.

In the twelfth century, a monk named Brother Edric de Clere was exiled from Furness Abbey to St Eustace’s Priory. He was thus forced into seclusion for what was referred to as his inappropriate tendencies. He was a predator, a man whose unnatural appetites had grown too glaring for his fellow brothers to ignore.

The monk prospered in the good air and rose through the ranks of the priory to a position of good standing amongst the friars. He was a scholar and undertook the management of the libraries and printing press. Soon, under the pretence of needing assistants for his transcription duties, he took in apprentices—boys and girls alike—who were too poor to refuse.

For years, the priory turned a blind eye to his hunger and the abuse of the young people under his tutelage.

Among these apprentices was a young woman named Aldreda from the town of Linsted. She was sharp, quick-witted, and clever with ink. But she was also unfortunate because Aldreda was favoured among the young scribes. She became Edric’s servant and tended his every need. And so it continued for several years. Until Aldreda fell pregnant.

It was not the first time Edric had fathered a child to her within those walls, but it would be the last. Where before, the pregnancies had been dealt with swiftly with the help of an old woman of the village conversant in such things. Aldreda hid this one.

For months, she bound her belly, wore looser robes, and avoided his suspicious gaze. The child was born in the dead of winter, beneath the stone vaults of the priory. A girl, frozen, but determined.

Aldreda barely had time to whisper her name—Isolde—before Edric found out about the child. His fury was swift and merciless. He killed Aldreda that night as the bairn suckled at her breast. He intended to kill the child too, but it turned its milky blue eyes on him with such knowing that he was taken with her.

One of the village women, recently bereaved of her infant, was taken to serve as Isolde’s wet nurse. She and the baby were locked in a crate at the far end of the crypt. Out of sight.

The monks knew. But to acknowledge the crime meant atoning for their complicity.

Some were kind in small ways, slipping food to the wet nurse and whispering quiet words of comfort through the bars. But nobody dared to challenge Edric’s will. The nurse stayed in the crate with the child for the next five years, until she had served her purpose to the child.  Edric degreed that Isolde would come off the tit.

When Isolde was five, the kindness ended. Edric slit the wet nurse’s throat in a sacrificial ritual and took the girl for himself.

She was chained by the throat at the back of the crypt, growing like a feral wolf in the shadows, her small world encompassed darkness and stone.

Sometimes she was led outside and walked like a dog through the priory grounds to prevent scurvy and rickets, but always she was dragged back into the blackness. She learned to obey.

She also learned to write.

By candlelight, under the sharp bite of Edric’s rod, she became a master scribe. Her hands bled over the parchment, her fingers calloused from ink and quill. She transcribed prayers she would never hear spoken aloud, and wrote letters to nobles she would never meet. She wrote history, while her life was erased.

A pitying monk—one of the few who saw her as human—gifted her a green book. And one day, she wrote her story. In secret, she scribbled her thoughts and fears.  The pencil darkened with the added pressure of her hand when she scribed her rage.

She wrote of the shadows she saw at night—the spirits whispering in the dark corners of the crypt and the unseen presence that responded when she called. Her mind stretched beyond the physical world.

She discovered she could move things. Just pebbles. Then, the quill. Then, the candle.

By the time she was thirteen, Isolde’s power had grown. She could leave her body at will, her spirit slipping free of its prison. She danced with the wolves in the forest and chased starlight through the trees. She was free, if only in part.

Edric became afraid of his daughter’s gift. He decided she had to die.

Every year, St. Eustace’s Priory held an unholy gathering. Their order had long since fallen to darkness, their rituals were no longer in service of God. This year, they needed a sacrifice. A goat was not enough. They needed human blood.

The abbot was given a sign and saw the perfect offering in Isolde. The Black Mass fell on her fourteenth birthday and was the sign he’d been waiting for. The time was right.

She predicted it. And she had warned them. She warned them if they killed her, she would return. Isolde would destroy them and bring the priory to ruin.

And they believed her.

They needed something to bind her soul. It required a vessel belonging to the sacrificial offering. The monks ransacked her meagre belongings, searching for an item suitable enough to hold her spirit—but she had no item strong and lidded.

But there, beneath her thin blanket, they found the green book.

It was hers, written in her words, describing her life. And so, that night of the gathering, by the light of sconced torches, they sacrificed Isolde and bound her soul inside it.

She screamed curses at them as they dragged her to the pyre. The flames licked at her skin as the ritual was completed, her body burning as the final incantations were spoken.

And then there was nothing but—me—your book.

Alice dropped the book.

The floor beneath her seemed to quiver. ‘My God,’ she whispered. She couldn’t comprehend what she’d read. It was too horrible.

They had assumed the book was the monk’s creation. Alice thought he was the one haunting its pages. The guttural voice. The flirtation. The pure evil. It all pointed towards it being a man.

I like men. I like girls, too. I like you, sexy Alice, it taunted.

But it wasn’t him. It had never been the monk.

It was her. The girl in the dark, trapped forever at fourteen and a day.

Isolde.

And she had been playing this game. For centuries.

I write under the pen name Katherine Black and I have 17 books published. All on Kindle Unlimited. I’d love it if you’d try one.

Here is my Amazon page with links to all of my books.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Katherine-Black/author/B071JW51FW?