Free The Pierced Heart: A Novel by Lynn Shepherd

placing him in the care of professional attendants. Have a carriage made ready for an immediate departure to Melk.”
    The librarian bows and turns to go, but his master’s voice calls him calmly back. “I have had a message from the coachman enquiring as to my own intentions. Pray tell him my own plans are unchanged. I will depart for England, as arranged, at first light tomorrow.”
    Bremmer bows low. “I will inform him so,
Freiherr
. And request that a carriage be made available to transport Herr Maddox to the hospital at Melk.”
    “Not the hospital,” says the Baron quietly, without looking up. “The asylum.”

     
    … I have never seen so forbidding an entrance, nor one so deserving of that terrifying inscription Dante places at the gates of Hell, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Above me the blank walls towered, pierced only by windows too narrow for a human hand. As I was drawn towards the crumbling doorway I saw surmounting it the stony figure of Death, bending to place a skeleton’s kiss on aswooning maiden’s dewy brow. And when the huge door swung closed behind us, I heard the key rasp in the lock, and then nothing but the sound of slow dripping, and the wind in the desolate turrets above. After what seemed many moments, the man ahead of me lit a candle and I was told to follow. A long dark passage opened in the guttering flame, and as our faltering steps progressed, I began to hear the cries of the imprisoned, the pitiful howlings of the mad, and the desperate lamentations of those kept always from the light. And then, as my heart misgave me and I turned, frantic to be gone, I felt myself impelled forwards and a second door opened before us, as if by its own volition, and we descended, down, and down, and down again, to a crypt rank with the stench of death, and lit only by the sickly blue glow of a single lamp.
    There was the sound of thunder now, and I could see the ranks of mouldering graves, and the walls lined with the dried and mummified remains of the dead of that horrific place, their heads bowed, bound to stand upright for all eternity in the ghastly windings of the tomb, denied even that rest the Lord allows the wicked and the lost. And then the lamp was extinguished and we were plunged into darkness. A strange and eerie music began now, one moment seeming close, the next high above my head, yearning like the very anguish of the soul. I seemed to feel the soft flutter of something against my cheek, and there was a rush of air so cold as to chill the very blood. As mist began to seep through the icy vault, a woman’s spectral voice began to intone in some ancient tongue, and I saw hovering above me in a sudden blaze of light the ghostly figure of a nun, clad from head to foot in robes of glowing white. She came floating slowly forwards, her hooded head bowed, until she was scarce a yard away, whereupon she lifted her face and I saw the blood streaming in torrents from her empty black-socketed eyes. I cried out, and heard others about me do the same, holding up their hands as if to fend the wraith away, and then the nun was gone as swiftly as she had come, her place taken by a hornèd laughing devil, its teeth glinting, and a horde of demons feeding on the flesh of the livingdamned, who rolled their eyes and tore their hair, and pointed their cadaverous fingers at the hapless audience huddled in terror below. Vision succeeded vision, each more terrifying than the last, and then there was an image I had seen before—that painting so notorious and reviled, of the woman flung on her virgin bed in the throes of
cauchemar
. Only this was no painted canvas—she writhed and moaned before our horrified gaze, as the monsters of her dreams loomed in the darkness above her, and the kneeling demon pressed his scaly hands to her breast, grinning in a hideous mockery of delight. I saw women faint at this, and men reduced to sobbing wretches, begging for relief.
    And then there was the clap of a