The Wicked Nun-D

The dark mouth of a passageway lay behind it. I wanted to plunge inside, but that archivist held me back.

“Patience, first we have to test whether the air inside is breathable.”

A candle was tied to a stick, lit and held in the passageway. It burned with a wild flame; great drops of melted wax fell into the darkness.

We entered the passage.

Several steps down, then straight, then down a few more steps, and then straight.

“I believe we have found the secret way of the wicked nun,” whispered the archivist.

He simply suspected it. I was certain of it. I was still in a very anxious mood, even though the air was relatively fresh.

“Mary and Joseph,” suddenly exclaimed the worker who had gone on ahead with the candle. He remained standing there. Here the walls sprang back into the darkness, the passage opened into a type of burial vault, in whose middle stood four wooden coffins on a wooden platform. They were very simple, unadorned coffins, whose form and shape went well back several centuries. The archivist lifted off one of the lids; a nun lay inside with a mummified dried out face, her hands crossed over her breasts, her clothing had disintegrated so that her flesh, which had withstood corruption, was visible in several places through the holes.

We took the lids off the remaining coffins as well. In the fourth coffin lay Agathe, the “wicked nun”. I recognized her immediately. She was the woman that had been pursued by the crowd of angry men at night; that had run past my house. It was the original image of the painting in the Sacristy.

Then next to me, the archivist said, “You know that one of these corpses must be that of sister Agathe, the “wicked nun”?

“I know. It is this one here. I recognize her again.  Just look, see how much better she looks than the others. Notice how the others are real corpses, but this one . . .”

Dr. Holzbock seized my hand and said, “We need to look for a way out of this passage. The air down here still could be dangerous. Forward!”

But the passage didn’t go very much further forward. After thirty steps we had to stop. A portion of the roof had collapsed there and filled up the passage. According to my calculations we were just under the street and I saw that the collapse must have happened a short time ago; apparently due to the shaking of the heavily laden dump trucks that were clearing away the debris of the old building. There was a risk and danger that still other portions could collapse; so I gave the order to push a shaft down through from the street, to investigate everything and stop all traffic in order to prevent an accident.

Then we returned back through the tomb. In passing, I became convinced that my observation had been right. She really did look different than the other three. It was almost as if she was alive. Her skin was still firm, had a glow of color, and her smooth forehead shone.  She was still very beautiful and it seemed to me, in the light of the candle, as if her eyes looked out from under her eyelids and followed what we were doing with cunning and sly glances.

When we arrived in the Sacristy I had to sit down. I was out of breath and my legs trembled.

“I must tell you,” said the archivist, “that I have come to the conclusion that one of the mummies down there is sister Agathe. My chronicle relates the story in its history of this cloister. The pestilence, whose priestess sister Agathe was, spread widely, until finally a terrible outrage broke out among the citizenry. They lay in ambush for the nun and wanted to kill her. But it seemed as if even the danger increased her lust for adventure.  She was driven to even wilder things than before, and what is even stranger; she had found an entire crowd of protectors, of young men who loved her, even though they knew that they would be poisoned by her. I have already said that she must have been a fearful woman. Her power over her lovers was unlimited. But one day an armed crowd showed up in front of the cloister and demanded the delivery of sister Agathe.

The rage of the people had risen to an extreme and they threatened to storm the cloister and burn it if the wicked nun was not handed over to them. The abbess was compelled to negotiate with the rebels. She promised to punish Agathe and pleaded for an extension of three days. The more reasonable of the attackers agreed to this, and to follow through on the acceptance of this request. After the three days were up the crowd appeared again before the cloister and were informed by the abbess that sister Agatha had suddenly become sick and died.

The chronicle is not very clear whether it was really a coincidence that came to the help of the abbess, or whether someone committed a murder in order to pacify the citizenry. The times were such that it could have been either way, but the hoped for calm did not appear. Despite the fact that a burial took place, that a coffin had been sunk into the earth; despite the convincing fact that a stone had been erected with the words, “The Wicked Nun” on the grave site; the rumor still arose that sister Agathe still lived.

As so often happens at the death of a very wicked or much loved person, it is hard to believe that they are really dead. That was the way it was with her as well. They wanted the nun to be alive, so they still saw her. They reported raids that she took, in which she fell upon the young men. Finally they were convinced that the abbess had played a joke on them, to avert the threat of danger.

Others, those that were inclined to believe in the death of sister Agathe, considered it a desecration of the sacred cemetery to have her corpse buried next to the bodies of the honest and pious citizens. The believers and the suspicious were united in their request to have the grave opened, so they could convince themselves that the nun was really inside. It must have been a terrible hatred that followed this woman.

When those in the cloister became aware of the intentions of the angry citizens, they removed the corpse from the grave one night and brought it back into the cloister. The chronicle describes the entire story as a serious uprising that had to be dealt with. When the citizens found the empty grave they drew up once more in a crowd in front of the cloister. The corpse of the nun was shown to them from out of a window. Stones and pieces of wood were thrown at the dead body. A shot was fired into it. The chronicle also adds that the most outraged were the young men who had loved her; those that had thought that she still lived.

Those in the cloister recognized that even the death of sister Agathe could not protect her corpse from the hatred of her persecutors. They kept her corpse and placed it in a tomb, as they always hid the bodies of those nuns, who had been murdered for some reason. Today we found that tomb. She lies on the same path on which she so often went upon her adventures.”

“That is true,” I said.

“And now you must tell me how you came to the conclusion that we had finally found the wicked nun. You had not yet heard the end to my story. How were you able to recognize one of the mummies as sister Agathe right away?  And how did you go straight to the portrait up there for the answer that we needed to continue?”

What could I tell the archivist? Could I tell him about my nighttime experiences? I asked him a counter question to change the subject.

“Haven’t you noticed the similarity between this painting and the dead woman we found down below?”

“No,” said Dr. Holzbock and examined the painting, which was now clearly visible in the bright afternoon sun.

“In any case you would need to look at it very closely. . .”

He took the ladder that had been leaning in a corner and set it up. But he was unable to take the painting down from the wall. I—I—couldn’t bring myself to help him. I called for two workers to assist him with it and left, because I could not rid myself of the superstitious belief that it would be better if the painting remained on the wall.

The apparition of my nights came once more, and in such a way that it overwhelmed me by force, even in the bright of day. I saw myself entangled in a very strange story and I felt with horror; that I could not get free. It lay around me like coils. When I was back in the bright sunshine, standing in the noise and dust of the work outside, I made the decision to not worry anymore about what had happened to me and to call in sick tomorrow and immediately begin my vacation. But first, I wanted to bring my observations to an end that night. I was convinced that some type of conclusion must come.

After a quarter of an hour the archivist came with both workers and declared that it was not in any way possible to bring the painting down from the wall without breaking the frame or cutting through the canvas.

“Don’t shrug your shoulders,” he said. “It seems as if you act and know more about these remarkable and mysterious things than my chronicle. You still need to give me your opinion of these things, which I intend to write about in an article for the publication of the historical society.”

With that he left, leaving the impression of a very honest, educated man of romantic inclinations, not at all very tormented.

The day was endless for me. Every hour gray faces slipped past me, like bored, indolent shadows. When evening came my wife noticed my excitement, and I could only calm her with my promise that the next day I would call in sick. It was eleven o’clock and the light still burned on my wife’s side of the bed. For some reason, today of all days, she was not able to fall asleep and I was beside myself with fear that my plans would be thwarted. Finally, just before midnight, she bent down over me once more and I pretended that I was asleep. She extinguished the candle with the snuffer and two minutes later was in no condition to hear me as I lightly got up and left the room. Just as I came to the front door, the old clock in the tower of the cloister struck midnight. I heard the scream, the sound of running men and then the woman flew past me—it was Agathe; her terrible, smoldering eyes looked at me, and then came the pack of pursuers. I raced after them.

It was again the same dreamlike gliding and floating, in which the houses to the left and right of me appeared like steep walls that determined the course of our run. There were only two things that I was able to see with complete clarity. The group of pursuers in front of me and the night sky above us; which was filled with many white clouds like the individual chunks of ice that cover a river during the time of the spring thaw. From time to time the sickle of the moon appeared between the columns and cracks of the cloud fragments, like a boat upon the dark, abysmal waters of heaven.

Then the chase neared the board fence that surrounded the rubble field, and the figures in front of me disappeared. But it was not the indecisive running back and forth of the pursuers as before. Instead, they appeared to be swallowed up into some type of funnel. It seemed to me as if they whirled together and rose up like a pillar of smoke that was then sucked down into the earth. I stood there right before the shaft which had been dug out during the course of the day at my command.

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