A Darkness More Than Night

worked side by side with da Vinci or Michelangelo, what could have happened if he had used his skill and imagination in celebration rather than damnation of the world.”
    She looked down at the book and then back up at him.
    “But that is the beauty of art and why we study and celebrate it. Each painting is a window to the artist’s soul and imagination. No matter how dark and disturbing, his vision is what sets him apart and makes his paintings unique. What happens to me with Bosch is that the paintings serve to carry me into the artist’s soul and I sense the torment.”
    He nodded and she looked down and opened the book.

    ***

    The world of Hieronymus Bosch was as striking to McCaleb as it was disturbing. The landscapes of misery that unfolded in the pages Penelope Fitzgerald turned were not unlike some of the most horrible crime scenes he had witnessed, but in these painted scenes the players were still alive and in pain. The gnashing of teeth and the ripping of flesh were active and real. His canvases were crowded with the damned, humans being tormented for their sins by visible demons and creatures given image by the hand of a horrible imagination.
    At first he studied the color reproductions of the paintings in silence, taking it all in the way he would first observe a crime scene photograph. But then a page was turned and he looked at a painting that depicted three people gathered around a sitting man. One of those standing used what looked like a primitive scalpel to probe a wound on the crown of the sitting man’s head. The image was depicted in a circle. There were words painted above and below the circle.
    “What is this one?” he asked.
    “It’s called The Stone Operation,” Fitzgerald said. “It was a common belief at the time that stupidity and deceit could be cured by the removal of a stone from the head of the one suffering the malady.”
    McCaleb leaned over her shoulder and looked closely at the painting, specifically at the location of the surgery wound. It was in a location comparable to the wound on Edward Gunn’s head.
    “Okay, you can go on.”
    Owls were everywhere. Fitzgerald did not have to point them out most of the time, their positions were that obvious. She did explain some of the attendant imagery. Most often in the paintings when the owl was depicted in a tree, the branch upon which the symbol of evil perched was leafless and gray – dead.
    She turned the page to a three-panel painting.
    “This is called The Last Judgment, with the left panel subtitled The Fall of Mankind and the right panel simply and obviously called Hell.”
    “He liked painting hell.”
    But Nep Fitzgerald didn’t smile. Her eyes studied the book.
    The left panel of the painting was a Garden of Eden scene with Adam and Eve at center taking the fruit from the serpent in the apple tree. On a dead branch of a nearby tree an owl watched the transaction. On the opposite panel Hell was depicted as a dark place where birdlike creatures disemboweled the damned, cut their bodies up and placed them in frying pans to be slid into fiery ovens.
    “All of this came from this guy’s head,” McCaleb said. “I don’t…”
    He didn’t finish because he was unsure what he was trying to say.
    “A tormented soul,” Fitzgerald said and turned the page.
    The next painting was another circular image with seven separate scenes depicted along the outer rim and a portrait of God at center. In a circle of gold surrounding the portrait of God and separating him from the other scenes were four Latin words McCaleb immediately recognized.
    “Beware, beware, God sees.”
    Fitzgerald looked up at him.
    “You obviously have seen this before. Or you just happen to know fifteenth-century Latin. This must be one strange case you are working on.”
    “It’s getting that way. But I only know the words, not the painting. What is it?”
    “It’s actually a tabletop, probably created for a church rectory or a holy person’s house. It’s the eye of God. He is at center and what he sees as he looks down are these images, the seven deadly sins.”
    McCaleb nodded. By looking at the distinct scenes he could pick out some of the more obvious of the sins: gluttony, lust and pride.
    “And now his masterpiece,” his tour guide said as she turned the page.
    She came to the same triptych she had pinned to the wall of the pod. The Garden of Earthly Delights. McCaleb studied it closely now. The left panel was a bucolic scene of