Friar Benedict’s arm was in a sling fashioned of the finest black silk, a luxurious and extravagant fabric for the poor brethren to possess. Nobody had ever seen it before, so the monks assumed it was a remnant of the holy man’s previous life and, therefore, better not mentioned. The smell of mothballs it emitted helped the brothers to focus strictly on the present.
Since his blasphemous and painful meeting with the pumpkin-like Woebegot, the staunch old man had changed his view on the nature of what he had considered exotic animals. He had put aside his rampant compiling of the community’s consuetudinary and now collected stories and eyewitness accounts of these new and worrying creatures that were infesting his neighborhood. Benedict had even ventured outside the monastery to investigate reported sightings. On one such expedition, he had stopped at the humpbacked bridge on the other side of town. There he had heard chanting coming from the muddy waters. It had sounded like one nonsensical word repeated over and over again by a group of small voices. Uroobsh was a new word for his journal and the only word he had ever entered there that he did not understand.
Friar Benedict rarely shared an opinion with the peasants, but since his ordeal, he had started to listen to fragments of their gossip and folktales. Some of the occupants of the Lowlands believed that these new creatures must have come out of the mountain, that their origins were somewhere in its labyrinthine tunnels and fallen passages. This reasoning fit with certain legends passed down by the old families of the region for centuries.
The keepers of those memories told impossible tales of the building of the mountain that rose from sea level to the heavens. They told of its vast library of books in all known languages—a physical manifestation of the knowledge of the beings and the peoples of those distant times. Their wisdom and communications were housed in a ziggurat, a pyramid, a tower whose hubris had offended God so much that it was crushed and broken into a Cyclopean cone of silence. Collapsed into a mountain, the integrity of its thousands of careful tiers was destroyed. Superstitions about its interior whispered of endless corridors and fallen bookshelves, stairways and halls swallowed by rubble.
It was a perfect place for those abnormal creatures to grow, but exactly how their conception and evolution occurred had never been explained. Benedict wanted to tease out all the possibilities, so he asked for an audience with Abbot Clementine to share his concerns about the reality of these creatures. The Father Superior had already banned his research into the origin and history of the Gland of Mercy, making it very clear that he must conduct his studies in another subject. Benedict did not receive this edict well; however, he had taken a vow of obedience. Still, he could allow only so much academic control. He would obtain his “superior’s” blessing on this investigation at any cost. He would seek the abbot’s scholastic opinion on how new breeds of animals found their way into this world—a complex but honest inquiry. He would even pretend to find the abbot’s words interesting and of value.
Five days after his request, Benedict was informed by Friar Cecil that the abbot was ready to see him and could spare this last quarter of the hour of three.
“He has much to prepare before Shrovetide; his time is sparse.”
Idiot, thought Benedict.
So they made their way to the abbot’s chambers, then waited. Twenty minutes later, Clementine arrived and offered the old monk a seat. While the abbot prowled around the room, Benedict presented his observations and questions about the genesis of natural and unnatural beings and how such beings might now dwell in their domain.
He was quoting Empedocles of Akragas about the variation of lost species when the abbot interrupted.
“But Empedocles also thought that the application of love had an effect on water. The most popular ideas about the origins of some exotic animals are centered on a version of spontaneous generation, which uses the evidence of fossils to prove its validity. According to this theory, some of God’s creatures, presumably arriving after Genesis, were halted in the act of becoming. Locked in the core of the earth, they waited to be pushed gradually toward the surface and life. Once exposed to the sun and the outer living world, they broke away from the surrounding inanimate rock that had contained them and scurried off into their newly achieved vivification. Those that did not quite have the energy remained fixed and ended up as fully formed creatures, but atrophied in untransmuted stone: thus explaining fossils.”
Benedict was stroking his bristling chin and murmuring approval, and then he added, “This is not unlike what some common people use today to explain all kinds of natural phenomena, like the generation of mice. Many know that if you wrap bits of cheese in old rags and hide them in a corner of the house, they will spark and give birth to mice in their stinking folds.”
“The same miraculous conception also occurs in meat, with flies,” said the abbot, smirking.
“Yes, and all these ‘facts’ might also describe the perverted use of a talented man’s imagination. Pictures that slither out of the minds of men who conjure them in their own corruption,” said Benedict.
Clementine looked confused, not realizing that the old man had suddenly changed subjects and was now hobbling down a completely different track of baffling contradiction.
During his studies, Benedict had unearthed reports of portraits, paintings, and pictorial inventions of unnatural creatures. These accounts had sparked a whole new set of ideas he was now trying to unravel….But without seeing the paintings or meeting the artist, it was all conjecture, and that was dangerous ground on which to build a theory. This lack of evidence was the curse he had to solve.
“Are you talking about witchcraft and the raising of familiars?” asked the abbot.
Benedict looked horrified and crossed himself. “Certainly not; who would dare discuss such things these days? No, I was talking about artists, painters—a painter who, it is said, has chronicled all the variations of creatures that God never imagined. One man who quietly started the most enormous bestiary of blasphemy the world has ever known.”
“But carvings of demons and church paintings of Hell exist everywhere,” said the abbot.
“Not like that man in ’s-Hertogenbosch made.”
“Ah! That man. I, too, have heard tell of him. Do you believe it’s true, what they say?”
“Impossible to know without seeing the paintings and meeting the man.”
“You are thirty years too late. Jerome of ’s-Hertogenbosch, or Jheronimus van Aken—or, as he is now more slovenly called, Hieronymus Bosch—is long since dead.”
Benedict looked shocked and defeated.
The abbot continued, enjoying his little revelation, “It is difficult to imagine one man in a cramped attic, in an insignificant town not unlike the one outside our walls, inventing such an obscene zoo. Creating new beings in encyclopedic detail of variation and contrivance. Imagine the influence of such a gibbering plague and the momentum of its unnatural consequence.”
“It might attract others to copy him?” offered Benedict.
“Yes, and in much more dangerous realms than fictional representation. This is why I must advise you to be restrained in your work and in what you say about it. You, too, might gather a controversial momentum with conjectures that I do not want inside this house of God.”
Something about the abbot changed as he made this pronouncement, a sliver of anxiety peeking out from under his mantle of perfect superiority. Benedict flushed under the growing weight of the insults and was attempting to answer when Abbott Clementine began again.
“Have you heard of Friar Livin Wuursberg?”
“Of course, I have heard terrible things about Wuursberg’s crimes, but I don’t understand why he should be cited against me.”
“Then I will explain. The lunatic crimes of that man and his heretical followers nearly destroyed the solidity of Tertius Ordo Regularis S. Francisci, and it all started with an empirical conjecture about the primacy of sight. Do I make myself clear?”
“Do you mean because I have actually seen one of these creatures myself?” Benedict asked. His blood began to boil as Clementine continued to preach and suggest similarities between his research and the heretical order of the Fraticelli Wuursberg.
The abbot, refusing to acknowledge the old man’s distress, continued, “Wuursberg had a maniacal contempt for the debasing of ‘God’s natural children.’ In ten years, he managed to convert the gentle sermons of our patron saint of birds into a furious rant against any invention or elaboration to the ‘natural’ forms of men and beasts. This tangent eventually led to a declaration of physical denial of all human visual representation. Wuursberg believed that the insemination and dispersal of all blasphemous acts and imagery were literally carried in the eyes of those who had seen them, and that one style of painting was more virulent than any other. He called for those artists and patrons—they who transmitted the contamination farther into Europe—to be severely chastised. More and more burghers and dignitaries wanted paintings made in the style of this Jerome of ’s-Hertogenbosch of whom you speak, either for their mansions, their secret societies, or their churches; and more and more copies were made of his ungodly deceits.”
“And then God struck Wuursberg blind,” snarled Benedict.
“No, God did not! Wuursberg’s dogma ultimately led to his own enucleation and the development of the Blind Brethren of the Ardennes. They all removed their own eyes to save their souls from visual contamination.”
Benedict was much shaken by this disclosure and placed one hand over his heart as if to offer it some protection.
“Wuursberg and his stumbling brothers eventually made their way toward Ghent, after hearing that a congregation of artists were meeting there to erect yet another and, some said, far worse version of The Temptation of St. Anthony. Each monk carried a crucifix with a concealed dagger as they crept up the steps into the new gleaming church. The workmen who were constructing the altarpiece thought nothing of them and mistook their falling and stumbling as the normal inebriated condition of priests in the late afternoon. Some workmen even laughed out loud when the monks unsheathed their daggers. They took the workers’ eyes. Chaos reigned; paint, plaster, blood, and stone flew through the sacred air. The monks, who quickly lost their ‘real’ targets, grabbed anyone they could to sanctify them from the evils of satanic sight. Their victims included a woman and a small altar boy…the act that paved the way to their own pyre.”
Benedict adjusted the sling holding his aching arm and bit his lip in salty silence.
“After the cinders of the good brothers were brushed away, a rumor spread that their eyes, having been removed years earlier, still existed. For some of their now-clandestine followers, this was wondrous news. A few jars of the pickled relics could be used to seed a revised form of their master’s doctrine, preferably in a country that showed more understanding of its wisdom. So a search was conducted by somewhat less-than-scholarly disciples; during the following months, no fewer than thirty-seven individual organs were collected. A fine harvest, considering that the brotherhood had only ever numbered ten, and two of those had not fully committed to its essential requirements. Around this time, a grave misunderstanding emerged in the ranks of the unwashed flock about the holy relics. There is one written testament from those times that might indicate how the problem arose.
“The fourteenth tractate of the thirty-second manifest of the Diocesan Annals of Puth, in the province of Limburg, claims that the eyes carried the very contagion that the monks so detested. Their last offending sight was somehow locked and moldering in the sullen meat of the eyes. If thine eye offends thee…What must be seen here is a strong parallel to the life-forms contained in stone, which we discussed previously, and an echo of Isidore of Seville’s bestiaries. Much quoted by Philippe de Thaon is the belief that certain stones found in the eyes of hyenas give oracular powers if placed under the tongue of the seeker. It is also worthy of note, considering the downfall of the great tower, that Isidore’s most significant work, much praised by Braulio, the bishop of Saragossa, was entitled: Etymologiae.”
The abbot finally stopped speaking and looked down at the old monk, offering a condescending kindness that made his suffering even worse. “Which I am sure you are familiar with?”
Actually, Benedict did know the volumes, having read them before Clementine had placed a restriction on them.
The abbot continued, “Needless to say, these revelations doubting the sanctity of the eyes only helped to divide Wuursberg’s followers into factions. They spent the successive years eradicating each other’s views—until all was erased or debased into squabbles over minor subjects, the origins of which were mostly forgotten. The precious organs themselves were lost, discarded, or stolen.”
Finally, Benedict was allowed to speak.
“All that may be true, Revered Abbot, but these creatures I am researching are actual, and any debate about their origins is secondary to what their purpose and meaning are to us now in this abbey!”
Clementine straightened his back and looked away, so Benedict could not see the guilt and fear in his eyes. But Benedict had already read something of these emotions in the abbot’s demeanor, and he quickly closed on Clementine. “Have you seen any of these beings?”
The abbot could not answer and, in that jagged pause, Benedict asked, “Have you seen one here?”
Both men turned inward in this frozen moment…and both emerged with entirely different versions of the truth and its application.
“I think you miss the point I have been trying to explain,” said Clementine, drawing himself up to his full height.
“Your simplistic trust in empirical evidence will not allow the appropriate depth of philosophical speculation and may cause unnecessary controversial momentum, the kind that might alert investigations from Rome, or worse, from Toledo. It is important that you do not vainly trust in what you see to be a truth. All great philosophers warn against the simplicity and deceit of that manner of explanation. I suggest that you focus your studies on the wisdom of profound scholars, rather than becoming obsessed with the fictions of the ignorant.”
Benedict was speechless. His irregular teeth gnawed at his lip furiously, while his arm ached and his hand clawed in its black-silk sling. He would not tolerate these grievous insults. The abbot’s arguments were wrong, his philosophy was misguided, and he obviously had an agenda that excluded any wisdom Benedict might offer. He would not be bullied by such thuggish and insecure debate. Something was driving Clementine’s blindness. Something relentless that needed to stop all speculation and to lock up all the books. Something impatient and hidden that was tangled up with the approaching Shrovetide.