Bristol House by Beverly Swerling Read Free Book Online Page A

with something that could hurl me into total darkness, where I should forget even the memory of light. I resisted with all my might, clinging to the thought of Jesus Christ crucified for my sins, and in the flash of an eye I had escaped the most terrible of judgments, and the thing lifted itself up again into the heavens and disappeared.
    In the place where the tip of the funnel-shaped wind had struck, the cobbles were shattered into dust, which two of the brothers who live with us priest-monks immediately swept into a neat pile. Yet, wondrous to report, despite that evidence of the wind’s immense power, no one of us was in any way harmed, and the monastery church was untouched.
    It is only among the silent monks of the Charterhouse that such an event could remain a secret for all history, but I tell it here, and my testimony from this Waiting Place is true.
    The great funnel wind was a sign from heaven of the trials to come. In the illusion of passing time with which men live before each faces judgment, it occurred in the year of Our Lord 1535, in the twenty-third year of the reign of Henry VIII, the second Tudor king of England, in the twenty-seventh year of his marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon, and the fourth year of his illicit liaison—though Henry and most of his ministers insisted it was a true and heaven-blessed union—with Anne Boleyn.
    Many then believed we had come to the end of what was called the King’s Great Matter, his annulment and remarriage. We had, however, only begun the greatest matter of all: whether king or pope should be head of the Christian church in England. As for me, the monk known in the Charterhouse as Dom Justin, the day of the visible wind began a passage of many months during which love and lust would entwine to endanger my soul and the souls of others then unborn.
    •
    Annie opened her eyes. She was lying on the floor, but she was unhurt. The room seemed undisturbed. The Bible was exactly where she’d put it originally. The candle, however, had been extinguished, and the brass bell was shattered into tiny bits. They formed a neat pile on the desk, as if someone had been tidying up after the tumult and swept them all together.
    She used the side of the bed to pull herself upright. Her sketchbook was where she’d left it as well. Annie took it with her when she left the room, pulling the door shut behind her.
    She put the sketchbook in the dining room and went across the hall into the bathroom and turned on the shower, stripping off her running clothes while she waited for the water to get hot, struggling to believe that what she’d experienced had really happened.
    It wasn’t until she was standing under the comforting spray, feeling the heat begin to revive her, that she noticed the scrapes. They occurred only on the left side of her body, a series of consecutive scratches that went from her rib cage to just above her knee, as if someone had drawn an oversize fork across her flesh, pressing just hard enough to break the skin but not tear it.
    ***
    Annie spent the rest of the day at her laptop, so intent she forgot to eat. She was looking for information about the old London Charterhouse, because the symbol Richard Scranton had drawn on his sixteenth-century map, identifying the monks with opposition to Henry’s plans, was the only link she had to what was occurring in number eight Bristol House. The fact that she’d been shown Scranton’s map while doing her job, trying to find out about the Jew of Holborn and his ancient treasures, was one more indication that there was nothing coincidental about this haunting. Somehow the two mysteries were related.
    A little before six her phone rang. It lay beside her on the dining room table, and Annie picked it up without looking at it. “Annie Kendall here.” She remained intent on the laptop screen and a nineteenth-century out-of-print history of the monks of the London Charterhouse she’d found among the millions scanned by