Book of Souls

He gently lifted the first of his pages and, with one eye closed, held it close to his face. It began, An Epistle from Felix, Abbot of Vectis Abbey, written in the year of our Lord, 1334.

Lord I am your servant. Praise to you glory to you. Vast are you, Lord, and vast should be your praise. My faith in you is your gift to me, which you have breathed into me by the humanity your Son assumed.

I am determined to bring back into memory the things I know and the things I saw and the things I did.

I am humbled by the memory of all who have come before me, but there is none as precious and exalted as Saint Josephus patron saint of Vectis whose sacred bones are buried in the Cathedral. For it was Josephus who in his true and complete love of God did establish the Order of the Names to exalt the Lord and sanctify his divinity. I am the last member of the Order, all others gone to dust. Were I not to make record of past deeds and occurrences, then mankind would be bereft of the knowledge that I your mortal sinner alone do possess. It is not for me to decide if this knowledge is fit for mankind. It is for you, Lord, in your infinite wisdom, to render judgment. I will humbly write this epistle, and you, Lord, will decide its fate.

Felix put down the page and rested his good eye for a moment. When he felt ready to continue, he thumbed through the pages and began to read again.

The knowledge of that day has been passed from the lips of brothers and sisters through the mists of time. Josephus, then Prior of Vectis, attended a birth on that portentous seventh day of the seventh month of the Year of Our Lord 777. The period was marked by the presence of Cometes Luctus, a red and fiery comet that to this day has never returned. The wife of a laborer was with child, and if that child was male, he would be the seventh son of a seventh son. A male child was born, and in fear and lamentation, his father smote him dead. To the wonder of Josephus, the woman then delivered an eighth son, and this twin was called Octavus.

Felix easily conjured a mental image of Octavus, for he had seen many infants like him over the years, pale, uncrying, with emerald green eyes and fine ginger-colored hair sprouting from pink scalps. Would Josephus have suspected, amidst the blood and amnion-soaked birthing bed and the terrified murmurs of the women attending the labor that Octavus was the true seventh son?