Book of Souls

“Nostradamus!” she shouted. “Our prophet! Soars o’er the prophet’s name! Nostradamus’s name was Michel de Nostredame! Will, you’re a genius.”

“Or married to one,” he muttered.

She grabbed him by the hand and almost pulled him up the path to the chapel.

“Can we get up there?” he asked.

“Yes! I spent a lot of my childhood in that tower.”

There was a heavy wooden door at the base of the tower facade, which Isabelle pushed open with a shoulder shove, the swollen wood harshly scraping the stone threshold. She dashed toward the pulpit and pointed at the small Alice-in-Wonderland door off to the corner. “Up here!”

She squeezed through almost as easily as she had done as a child. It was more of a labor for Will. His large shoulders got hung up, and he had to throw off his jacket so it wouldn’t be ripped. He followed her up a claustrophobic wooden staircase that was little more than a glorified ladder up to the bell landing, a wooden scaffolding that surrounded the weathered hanging bell.

“Are you scared of bats?” she said, too late.

Hanging above their heads was a colony of white-bellied Natterer’s bats. A few took to flight, soaring through the arches, and darted crazily around the tower.

“I don’t love them.”

“I do,” she cried. “They’re adorable creatures!”

Inside the tower, he could barely stand without hitting his head. There was a view through the stone arches to neatly plowed fields and, farther away, the village church. Will hardly noticed the landscape. He was searching for something, anything, a hiding place. There was wood and masonry, nothing else.

He pushed at mortared blocks of stone with the heel of his hand, but everything within reach was solid and firm. Isabelle was already on the floor, on hands and knees, doing an inspection of the guano-covered planks. Suddenly, she stood up and started scraping at a spot with the heel of her boot, kicking up a small cloud of dried droppings. “I think there’s a carving on this plank, Will, look!”

He dropped down and had to agree there appeared to be a small, curved etching of sorts on one of the planks. He reached for his wallet and plucked out his VISA card, which he used like a trowel to scrape the plank clean. Clear as day, there was a round, five-petaled carving, an inch in length, inscribed into the wood.

“It’s a Tudor rose!” she said. “I can’t believe I never noticed it before.”

He gestured over his head. “It’s their fault.” He stomped hard on the plank, but it didn’t budge.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I’ll get the toolbox.” In a flash, she was down the stairs and he was alone with a few hundred bats. He warily looked up at them, hanging like Christmas ornaments, and prayed no one rang the bell.

When she returned with the toolbox, he hammered a thin, long screwdriver into the space between two boards and repeated the maneuver up and down the length of the inscribed plank, each time gazing upward to see if he was bothering the dormant mammals.

When he created enough separation, he drove the screwdriver all the way through and used it as a pry bar to jerkily raise the board a quarter inch. He slid a second, thicker screwdriver into the space and pushed down hard with his full weight. The plank creaked and popped up, coming away clean in his hand.

There was a space underneath, a foot deep, between the floor and the ceiling planking. He hated sticking his hand into a black space, especially with all the bats around, but he grimaced and plunged it in.

Right away, he felt glass against his fingertips.

He grabbed on to something smooth and cold and brought it into the light.

An old bottle.

The vessel was handblown into an onion shape, made of thick, dark green glass with a flat bottom and a rolled string lip. The mouth was sealed with wax. He held the glass up to the sun, but it was too opaque. He shook it. There was a faint knocking sound.

“There’s something inside it.”

“Go on,” she urged.

He sat down and wedged the bottle between his shoes and began lightly chipping away at the wax with one of the screwdrivers until he saw the top of a cork. He switched to a Phillips head and gently tapped the cork into the bottle with the hammer. It plopped to the bottom.

He turned the bottle over and shook it hard.

A roll of parchment, two sheets thick, fell onto his lap. The sheets were crisp and pristine.

“Here we go again,” he said, shaking his head. “This is where you come in.”

She unrolled the pages with trembling fingers and scanned the pages. One was handwritten, the other printed.

“It’s another letter to Edgar Cantwell,” she whispered. “And the title page from a very old and very famous book.”

“Which one?”

“The Prophecies of Nostradamus!”

1532 PARIS