The Quest for Cleo Malfoy

2 - The uses of a ghost, of a puppet theatre, and of a priest

The backbone of Italy is hard rock, one long rib of mountains running across the country from end to end, carved by deep valleys, spreading outward into softer and softer hills until they abruptly sink beneath the sea. March inland, and the ground will rise under your feet, even as the sun still shines and the sky still is cloudless; the great single star will watch you move, tiny against the titan mountains, up and up and up; its eye will never leave you for long, until it sinks in the west and closes in sleep.

Moaning Myrtle had already been shushed several times by both her companions, but without much effect. She would shut up for a few minutes, and then start whining again. After no more than a couple of hours' walking, both Biagio and Eloise knew all the details of her complaints by heart; how much more comfortable she was in her nice cold damp and lightless toilet, how uncomfortable it was up here in the mountain in the horrible hot bright sun; how Eloise had tricked her by getting her to say how much she missed Cleo and what she would do to bring her back, and then nagged her till she accepted to come with them; and how it wasn't fair.

After the first half-hour, Eloise had ceased to join Biagio in shushing her. She just trudged ahead, her head bent, her face covered in sweat (one thing she had not thought to take was a sweatband), her clothes soaked. As an English girl, a summer day in Italy was in any case a burden; but the truth is that she was quite unfit, and this walk through open country was wearing her out fast. She had miniaturized her backpack and carried it in her pocket, but that did not make things much easier. Biagio kept walking with an easy lope, as if on a short walk to the nearest shop; two hours' jog-trot in open countryside, to him, were nothing - he could easily have kept up all day. She saw this, and she was obstinate; and it was killing her. After two hours, Biagio noticed.

"All right, let's stop a bit and take some rest," he said; and, to his disbelief, Eloise started complaining. Although she could hardly stand on her feet, she did not want to stop. Her very weariness was making her irrational; she did not want to feel that she was holding up the quest, did not want to sound like a whiner or a quitter - did not want to sound like Moaning Myrtle.

Now Biagio had a lot of good points, but he was barely eighteen. A man with some experience would have recognized Eloise's exhaustion for what it was, and calmed it down with a few friendly words; Biagio was merely irritated by the obvious irrationality of it all.

"You're falling apart, Eloise. If you can't see yourself, I can. We're stopping for your own good."

Then he found that she was not too exhausted to start shouting at him - in a cracked, horribly wheezing old woman's voice, ragged with exhaustion. She told him he was not her boss, not to tell her what to do; and he pulled rank on her. "This is my quest. I know where I am going, you don't. If you want to come along with me, you play by my rules!"

Myrtle, invisible and forgotten, looked on in disbelief. Now don't get her wrong: Myrtle enjoyed a good moan - it was almost the only pleasure left her. That is why she had been indulging it so freely on the way. But it had never occurred to her that the quest would end anywhere short of finding Cleo and setting her free; and this stupid, disastrous row bid fair to make it end a good deal earlier.

So Myrtle took action. As a ghost, there was only one thing she could do; but, done at the right time, it was effective. She flew right through Biagio as he shouted; and his shout was broken off as if the amp had died, as the crashing inhuman cold of the ghost made him feel as if he had been dumped in freezing cold water. Myrtle then reached Eloise; only, instead of just flying through her, she actually stood within her, something a ghost never does except in the direst of emergencies. Eloise screamed and then collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

Ooops, thought Myrtle. Perhaps I don't quite understand the power of this cold business.

She made herself visible and stood between them, and then gave them the benefit of her exact opinion. Gave it with both barrels. A ghostly, stubby forefinger wagged at Biagio, as she asked what on earth he thought he was about. She could not believe the irresponsibility of them both, she said. Had they all gone out for their health? Biagio, as mission leader, ought to have a little more sense and make allowances for others; and Eloise - what the Hell did she think she was, Superwoman? Even if she wanted to die for Cleo as she had said, there were better ways to do it than to collapse from dehydration on the first day out. And now - she concluded with a flourish - I want you both to sit down and SHUT UP! Oh, and eat something, as long as you can. If you both want to make a mess of this expedition, she said (correcting herself at the last second, and blushing all over her face at the thought of the expression she had nearly used), then I want out. Getting killed, even for Cleo, is no fun - I should know - and if you choose to do it in this dumb way, Eloise, I will personally make sure you cannot come back to Hogwarts and haunt it.

Myrtle had died at sixteen, and had pretty much refused to grow up since, preferring to cradle herself in her ancient resentments and her old teenage hatreds. She was sincerely surprised at this outburst of rationality from herself; and, not knowing exactly how to stop, she started stuttering and vanished. Biagio and Eloise just looked at each other; then Biagio spread his arms out expressively, with a befuddled and rather amused expression. Eloise managed half a smile.

By the time Biagio had transfigured some rocks into sandwiches and a couple of tall glasses of beer, she had fallen asleep; so sound asleep, that she would not wake even when he spoke to her. Biagio ate his sandwiches (looked over enviously by Myrtle), drank his beer, and was about to transfigure the rest back into rocks, when an inspiration struck him. He drew his wand, pointed it to Myrtle - to let it get the "feel" of Myrtle's ectoplasm - and then pointed it to the leftover food and drink, transfiguring it into ectoplasm. Myrtle's eyes shone. "Are you...?" she asked hopefully.

"Call it an experiment," he replied with a smile. "Some of the Hogwarts ghosts have told me how depressing they find it to watch us eat, and I was wondering whether it was possible..."

Myrtle picked up one of the ectoplasmic sandwiches, gave it an experimental bite, and smiled blissfully. She ate it slowly, savouring each bite; then served its fellow likewise; then drank the beer. Tears sprang in her eyes.

"Thank you, Blaise. Thank you so much... I'd forgotten how good it felt to eat.... to be alive."

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Eloise had fallen asleep in mid-afternoon, and, even after a couple of hours, she still showed no sign of waking. Biagio suspected that she might have dropped off for the night; physically alert and full of energy, he found himself chafing at the idea of standing over her for the rest of the day.

"Myrtle, can you do me a favour?"

"I suppose so."

"I think Eloise is probably going to sleep for the rest of the day. I would like to take a walk by myself, perhaps go over to Vidanza over there" - and he pointed to a distant village. "Can I trust you to watch over Eloise while I am away?"

The girl ghost assented without any demur. Biagio placed a few defensive wards and an Anti-Sunburn Spell on the girl's plump and defenceless body, and, feeling that he had done as much as he could for her, he turned to himself, making sure that he had all the appearance and dress of a young local Muggle. Then he set off whistling.

The sun was slowly going down. For a while, its rays were reaching him through a dense growth of maize plants nearly ripe for harvesting; while, from a distance, he occasionally heard the lowing of cattle in a shed. Though born in England, Biagio knew and understood this country, and his parents had been careful to teach him - along with the magic arts and the special skills that every heir of the House of Zabini handed down, father to son and mother to daughter - farming and the ways of the countryside. Their wealth, like that of many wizarding families, was and had always been in land, and they had to know how to care for it. He stopped at a crossways to cross himself quickly before a statue of the Madonna, and then made his way with a jaunty step towards the village of Vidanza, which stretched along the shoreline of an ancient, drained lake.

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The village did not have an exact beginning. As he closed in on it, it started closing in on him: pieces of land were enclosed, not by hedges or low stone fences, but by high brick walls with gates and iron-grilled windows, showing large patrician farmhouses. Then came a patch of mostly small workshops, car repairmen, furniture makers, scrap metal dealers and the like, facing dusty walls covered with peeling posters, the detritus of ancient elections, ancient festivals and circus visits, faded announcements of past deaths, and commercial advertisements, whose garishness had been reduced by the implacable sun to a ghostly, yet still tasteless clash of degraded dyes, barely enduring enough to mock the promises they once had made. Even in the early evening, the sun was still powerful, picking out with ruthless clarity the dust and the debris, the motor-oil stains and the patches where the whitewash had fallen off, exposing the cheap brickwork beneath. Finally, the village itself; buildings several storeys high on each side, their stout stone fronts pierced by deep windows covered (on the ground floor) by iron grids, and jutting balconies, both balconies and windows often thick with flowerpots; narrow streets, clogged with parked cars and the occasional motorino; and shops.

The sun had by now gone down, and the consistency of the light was changing. Some of the shops were closing; even the bars seemed only half-full. Biagio looked around himself with a growing shadow of surprise. As a native of the country, this lack of animation in mid-evening seemed strange. He knew by habit, by instinct, that this was the time when the people, having finished their day's work, sought the cool of the evening and each other. The streets should have been fuller, the bars noisier.

The strong and delightful smell of a salumeria reminded him that he was hungry; he went in and negotiated the building of a hefty, shapely sandwich of thick and very crusty bread, prosciutto and Russian salad - a good-sized slab of calories to be sure, but Biagio was a strong young man who had had a day's walk. Chat flowed easily between him and the salumiere as they discussed such vital matters as the kind of prosciutto to go in the sandwich; it was Biagio's luck to have found a cheerful, talkative individual with whom it was not hard to get on friendly terms. He had no problem asking what was on his mind.

"Is it only me, or are there rather less people on the streets than you'd expect at this time of day? I don't know Vidanza all that well..."

"Tourist?"

"Well, yes and no... I'm from Ormagno, down the valley... I'm on a break."

"Oh, I understand... Well, we're having a summer festival of the arts, so most of the people will be in the big square. Today there is a Sicilian pupi theatre, I believe."

Biagio's curiosity was immediately stimulated. He had heard of, but never seen, that naïve, yet sophisticated minor artform, half-way between a puppet show and a proper theatre play, in which large, elaborately painted and armoured wooden doll, manipulated with surprising precision by expert hands, enacted ancient stories of war and romance. Sure enough, as he instinctively followed the village streets to the central square, he started falling in with more and more people, heading in the same direction.

The main square was lit by hundreds of lights like multi-coloured stars, arranged in concentric circles around the central Monument to the Fallen, some of them hidden by trees or invisible behind others, until they vanished in the dark of the evening. Above the artificial lighting, Biagio could see the natural dark sky and the occasional natural light of a star: it was a cloudless evening. On the other side of the square from Biagio stood the village church, massive and poorly lit, looming out of the darkness like a half-forgotten stone giant over the scene of festivity; yet the impression it left was not one of alienness or hostility. Biagio sought for words in his mind; it was the presence of a mystery, a darkness - but not a darkness like Lord Volemort's, hidden and inimical. This darkness rose from the ground, one with the homely and welcoming houses that surrounded it, bearing the image of things that men could imagine, but not see - yet opening itself to them, till it vanished into a darkness rich with suggestion and a little fear.

Biagio turned his attention to the theatre. He was surprised to see that the puppeteers had chosen to show, not one of the traditional stories of Orlando (Roland) or King Roger, but an older tale - the tale of Aeneas in Latium. Amusingly, the puppets used to tell the story wore plate armour such as the native imagination had bestowed on Roland and his fellow Paladins; indeed, Biagio had no doubt, they served as Paladins in other performances. But he knew what he was seeing: he had read the Aeneid only a couple of years ago, and knew the story by heart. He sat as the hero was shown mourning expressively for his fallen trumpeter Misenus, against a painted background of weeping heroes, and built a funeral pyre for him. Then two doves appeared before him, and led him through a gruesomely dark and frightening forest - in which Biagio thought he recognized influences from Walt Disney's Snow-White - and artistically flew back and forth, back and forth, encouraging the hero on, until suddenly the Golden Bough shone, very visible among the painted gloom, and the puppet's hand reached out and snatched at it with one fluid motion. (Biagio was impressed at the skill of the puppeteers.)

Then the hero returned briefly to his companions, to give a proper burial to the burned remains of Misenus; and by a brilliant trick - folded paper unfolding itself to take the shape of a funeral shrine - the puppeteers showed the cenotaph rise as it were by magic before the audience, who gasped and applauded gratifyingly. Aeneas was shown to weep heart-rendingly as he raised the horn and the oar of the hero over the stones. The audience saw him turn, move towards the woods again, and - the light died. Then they saw the puppet again, going down a deep cave (Biagio observed that the repeated sacrifices described in the poem had been deleted), as flashes of unearthly coloured light shone on it and vanished. Biagio was sophisticated enough to understand that they came from a set of dance-hall flashing coloured lights, but the effect was none the less unearthly against the backdrop of cave and mystery. He realized that all the artificial lighting of the square had been turned off, probably by agreement with the town council - to get an effect; and was impressed. All the eyes were on the stage and the puppets.

Aeneas' journey was long and strange. Beasts of all kinds, half-seen creatures, angels and demons, mythical animals of many shapes, seemed to crowd around his path, only to vanish as soon as he reached out or spoke to them (Biagio had to admire the split-second timing of the puppeteers); and all the while the shrouded female figure who led him went ahead, turning neither right nor left. Finally, they reached a crowd of ghosts, and the giant figure of Charon appeared in a boat that covered the entire stage. Ignoring the miserable ghosts (Biagio, who knew what ghosts were really like, had at first had to suppress a laugh at the laughably unrealistic puppets, but he soon came to feel pity for the pathetic figures aching to cross over and unable to), Charon reacted with astonishment at the sight of the Golden Bough, not seen for so many years. The boat rocked, visibly sinking under the weight of the living Aeneas, as the landscape behind was seen to move away and change, till the boat stopped in front of a great gate, drawn from below in extreme perspective. Before the door stood an enormous dog - not three-headed; evidently that was too severe a challenge for the puppeteers - who made the most alarming demonstration of hostility, barking as no real dog can possibly bark; but the female puppet who led Aeneas on made a gesture as if to throw something at the creature - and suddenly it was yawning, staggering, going around in a circle, and finally falling sonorously asleep, with snores that shook the little theatre. (The gates of the Underworld could now be seen; and Biagio nearly burst out laughing when he saw that they bore Dante's famous six lines, which Aeneas should not have known about - probably reused from a previous production.) For a second, he and the other spectators were blinded by a sudden blast of white light from the inside, which gave the puppeteers time to shift the scenery.

Biagio had already noticed that the story, while generally faithful to Virgil's mighty original, had suffered a number of changes; but at this point, he realized that the story was being altered altogether. For when the light died down, he saw that he was looking at a strange, highly unrealistic, yet infinitely suggestive picture of the sky, in which the stars were golden five-pointed designs - some of them with eyes that opened and closed - and the moon wore a face in the hollow of its bow, while the sun, in the centre of the picture, bore a severe countenance and stylised flames radiating from its central circle. Then the sky began to move, and Biagio realized that the design was built into several concentric and interlocking circles, which moved around with remarkable precision: a visible picture of the ancient pagan idea of the Celestial Spheres, lacking nothing except the sublime music - but then, Biagio smiled inwardly, mortals are supposed to be deaf to its beauty. Pictures flashed alongside the whirling stars and planets, showing in allegorical fashion the destiny of mortals - this man rising only to be defeated at last, that woman being betrayed by a lover, that man working all his life till he is too tired to enjoy the reward in his old age, and so on. This staging used no puppets at all, except for that of Aeneas, who just stood and watched the whirling of the Spheres (that is, the puppeteer did not have to do anything with him at all). It was all done with whirling painted discs, projected pictures, and lights. But at the climax, a strange thing happened: the puppet of Aeneas was seen to rise, walk right up to the painted sun, and then - this was an illusion that Biagio, wizard though he was, simply could not fathom - the spheres seemed to open and surround him. Then the lights faded, until only one stage light remained, pointing at Aeneas against a black background: and as it grew stronger and brighter, it became clear that the hero had changed. On his head was a crown of gold with a design of sun, moon and stars; in his hand, a sceptre; on his shoulders, a purple mantle. He had become a king, by the power of the Celestial Spheres.

This was the end of the show; and, after a slightly dazed instant, the crowd started to applaud, first in a rather subdued manner, then with increasing power and conviction, till the puppeteers - two of them, who emerged smiling from behind their travelling stage - were receiving a genuine ovation.

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Time had gone by and night had fallen; and Blaise still wasn't back - thought Myrtle with a shade of her old whining manner. She felt unhappy, and she wished she did not have to stay there. Myrtle was not going to break her promise to look over the helpless Eloise; yet she felt a nag of dissatisfaction in her mind. It was not so much the kind of restlessness that would seize a mortal person who had been in one place too long; ghosts are much more patient than mortals, and Myrtle herself was so used to her toilet that the nuisance to her was to move, not to stay put. No: there was the pull of something tugging at her mind, asking to be investigated - something that was going on in the neighbourhood. She had been too long at the centre of British magic, in the middle of great sorcerers and budding young heroes, not to miss magic of some sort - but what it was, how it was, was beyond her.

Suddenly she had an idea. Making herself invisible, she rose vertically over Eloise's sleeping form, never losing her from sight; but as she rose, a larger and larger area became visible before her. The mountains, she saw, formed a ring around the old lake, long since drained, whose outline was still clearly visible. Many things showed where it had been: the shape of the village of Vidanza, sprawled along the ancient shore; the main road that skirted what had once been the waterline; the different shape of the fields, those outside the old lake being irregular and uneven, those inside being rectangular and equal in size; and the fact that outside the lake different crops were grown (mostly maize), inside mostly wheat. The river, she saw, had been channelled through the centre of the old basin...

Suddenly she knew where her feelings had been coming from. In one of the lake fields there was a strange, deep, black hole, looking exactly as if someone had been digging a well or a tunnel. But surely nobody needed a well where there was a nice fresh surface river available... and who would dig in the middle of a ploughed field, anyway? Unlike Biagio, Myrtle was a city girl, and did not know much about the ways of the country; but it did not need his acquaintance with farming and forest to tell her that this was something out of place.

And it smelled wrong, too. Those weird ghostly senses that had told her that something was out of place, also told her that the sense of unsettlement and unease centred on that strange hole.

As she looked, she suddenly realized that the dislodged earth around the hole was becoming unstable. Before she could do anything - and at any rate, what could she do? - she saw it crumble, collapse, and fall back into the hole. If anything was in there, it was now buried several feet deep - alive or dead, it was beyond her ability to investigate it. And she thought, with guilt and alarm, of Eloise, still asleep and alone; in need of protection, perhaps more now than before, if it was the case that something supernatural and dangerous was around that night. She dived down to her charge, and found her, luckily, untouched and unharmed - tossing and turning in her sleep, struck by strange uncouth dreams that she was not able, when she awoke, to remember.

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This is what she told Blaise when the young man finally came back, tired and sleepy, from Vidanza. He heard her with concern and, for a minute, was silent.

"I guess," he said at length, "that I should not be surprised at this sort of thing. We have set out on a magical quest, and from everything I have heard at Hogwarts, it is natural to meet with mysterious dangers and mysterious help. And yet..."

"What?" asked Myrtle, alarmed

"No... It's not anything disturbing, don't be afraid. It's just that... How can I put it? For a while now, I have had the sense of being... I mean, that there is more involved in our quest, and more things interested in it... We've got to find the Dark Elves and we've got to find Cleo. But perhaps..."

Biagio's mind went back to an hour before, in the main square of Vidanza. The crowd had clapped to its heart's content and rewarded the puppeteers as they thought right; and then, one by one, showmen and spectators had all vanished off. The great square had remained silent, the street lighting and the circles of star-like festival lights dead and invisible in the night. Overhead, the great stars of heaven were visibly, walking their everlasting paths; and before him, behind the theatre and the Monument to the Fallen, stood the great baroque village church, a giant statement of mystery, its varied planes, reliefs and statues casting shadow upon shadow.

Not yet feeling quite like going back, Biagio decided to take a look at it. It was not really as gigantic as it seemed, but its lordly proportions made it stand out among its small neighbours like a pyramid. He walked to the small side gate into which the congregation would normally enter, and it was locked; but, to his surprise, the great monumental central gate - whose wooden frame supported bronze reliefs of scenes from the Old and New Testament - was open. Biagio was concerned: this church looked as if it might hold some valuable works of art, and it was all too common for sacred buildings - the repositories of the faith and self-respect of ancient communities for centuries - to be robbed by professional art thieves. Ever the knight errant, Biagio did not even stop to think of calling the police: he went in with his wand drawn, ready for trouble.

He found none. The great building was deserted and lightless, but his magics could not detect any intruders; and a special, tricky little spell he had once learned from Draco Malfoy showed him that nothing was there that should not have been, nor missing that should be there. There had been no theft.

Suddenly he noticed that a red light shone in the gloom. Coming closer, he found that it was a confessional, with the light showing that a priest was present and ready to hear confession.

Biagio could not account for his impulse. He had not taken confession for nine years, nor gone to Church for a long time - four years? Five? But he had been brought up a nominal Catholic, and he knew the forms and rituals well enough. And perhaps there was something in him that needed some sort of confession - a sense of something wrong. Superficial enough things, perhaps - he had been selfish to leave Eloise alone with Myrtle, an unavailing sentinel who could not have defended her against any determined enemy. He had been, perhaps, wasting his time in the ordinary, workaday evening of Vidanza, a Muggle settlement with no magic and no potential either to help or to hinder, when he should have been seeking for magical sites nearby. And there was something about entering this sacred building, heavy with mystery, that also felt wrong: even though he knew that he was there to help, he felt as if he had been sneaking in. He entered the confessional and said: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

He began with the lesser things; love affairs at school; mischief and cruel jokes in Slytherin; the constant game of one-upmanship with Draco and other would-be leaders in their House; the bouts of anger with his family; his violent way of defending weak or defenceless; the very long time since he had last taken confession. All the while, he felt the keen eye of the priest on the other side of the grille, and was certain that this man of the cloth was neither slumbering nor inattentive. His every word was being measured and weighed by an alert, silent intelligence, with the experience of years in assessing the state of souls and prescribing penance and absolution. The grille is meant to make priest and penitent unrecognisable to each other, but it does not altogether obscure the view; and Biagio was well aware of being in the presence of a large, red-faced, elderly, but vigorous figure, who saw out of only one eye - a presence that somehow, even without speaking a word, instilled respect. Or was it simply the atmosphere, the darkness of the confessional, the awesome silence of the great vaulted building?

Biagio went on to the more serious matters: his lack of faith, or serious doubts; his enduring violence of character. He had begun on this almost in the spirit of a game; but it came to him that he would be lying to himself - whether or not he believed in God - if he did not, on this solemn and secretive occasion, admit at least to himself the worst that he knew about himself.

"Father, a year ago I killed a man. I did it deliberately, and I took pleasure in watching him die."

After a slight silence, the priest replied: "You know, my son, that no absolution can validly be given unless you not only repent of your crimes - I mean, of those of your sins which are also crimes according to the law - but also pay the appropriate penance for them?"

"I wondered about that, Father. There are a few problems... first, the man had committed a crime that was beyond the reach of law, any law. He had abused and humiliated in the most vicious way possible a young girl whom I had taken on myself to protect. Second, Father, I am a sorcerer... as I told you... and the way I killed him cannot possibly be either proved or punished in a normal court. Even if I went there with a signed confession, they could never convict me. And no, Father, I am not mad."

"I never said you were, my son. Suppose you tell me what you intend to do to make up for this killing, then. For surely, if you are as powerful a sorcerer as you say, you should have been able to bind this man and have him suitably punished without taking his blood on your hands."

"I do not know, Father... honestly. I do not know."

"The woman whom he outraged: do you love her?"

"With all my soul, Father. Mentally, I am married to her already; nobody else even matters."

"Ah. So, all the sins of lust you have just confessed...?"

"They are in the past, Father. Upon my word of honour, I would not want to commit any of them again if I had it handed to me with chips on the side."

The large priest guffawed, then returned to seriousness. "In which case, they certainly ought not to be forgotten in penance. That it has become easy to confess a sin, does not mean that it was not serious when it was committed." He went on: "You should not marry this woman until you have made amends for the blood you shed for her; otherwise, marrying her would be like rewarding you for your murder. Even if you cannot be legally punished for it, I want you to go to the family of the man you killed, confess, and submit to any penance they might think fit."

"I will, Father... but I cannot. Not right now. It may be months before I am even able to find them."

"Why?"

"Because I am on a sort of... well, a quest... the woman I love, the same woman I mean, has been taken away by a group of supernatural beings, and I have made a vow before God not to return to my home until I have found her and freed her. And by the way, Father" he added almost in a gasp "she has no part of anything that happened and is totally innocent of the blood I shed." Those words had rushed to him; but it seemed important, somehow, to specify that Cleo had never been his accomplice in anything.

"I see." The one-eyed priest thought briefly. "Then I lay this penance on you: that you continue your quest until you have found and freed your beloved. Every time in your quest that you come across a church or chapel, I want you to go in and recite a prayer - the Pater or Ave or Credo, not one of your own. If you find a Mass or function going on, sit in; but do not dare take the Blessed Body and Blood until your quest is done and all your penance has been completed. Half of all disbelief is a habit of mind, and the more you are familiar with the inside of churches, the less hard you will find to believe. When you have found and freed your beloved, and I have no doubt that you will, I want you to find the family of the man you killed and make what reparation they may ask. When you have done that, you will have fulfilled your penance, and you will be able to come to Communion and marry your beloved as you want. Laudetur Jesus Christus."

"Semper laudetur. Thank you, Father."

Biagio rose, feeling strangely high in spirits, and walked swiftly out of the snug, shadowy wooden box. Half-way to the church door, however, he had a feeling that something was changed; and, when he turned, he saw no red light - and the confessional, so far as it could be seen was empty. Yet, he had not heard the large, red-faced priest go.

Biagio shook his head. That's the sort of thing that happens on quests - he thought - I suppose.

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Now he had half a mind to tell Myrtle the whole story. But he could not: there were a number of things involved which he did not want to bring up - at least, not now, not here, not yet. So he just concluded his stuttering speech: "Perhaps, I mean... I have a feeling that we are being watched on this quest of ours; and that there may be more involved than we know... perhaps, than we can know." Then, after a pause: "But I think that we would do well, any time we meet a church or chapel, to go in and say a prayer."

"That sounds reasonable," said Myrtle to his surprise. "The Bloody Baron told me that that's what the ancient knights used to do on their quests, and they often found great danger or great help in chapels. They say that even the Grail would appear to them sometimes."

"All right... so that's what we'll do. Good night, Myrtle."

"Good night, Sir Knight," said the ghost with half a smile. But the last thing that Blaise thought of before he fell asleep was the strange one-eyed priest behind the grille.