Lycanthropos (23 page)

Young Michel de Notre Dame had counted himself fortunate, blessed, protected by God's Holy Angel, because he had survived that night. Many of the others present did not live to see the dawn, for the outraged werewolves feasted hungrily on them in the eerie, flickering light which came from the would-be execution flames. Boin escaped also, and he ordered the records of the trial expurgated so as to delete all reference to the two demons who had escaped the justice of the Church. From that day forth, the official account of the trial of the werewolves of Poligny
would contain not one word about Janus Chaldian and the
woman Claudia. But Michel de Notre Dame remembered them. He remembered them in his waking moments, and in his dreams,
and in his nightmares...

...and now it was forty-five years later, now it was the
spring of 1566, and Michel de Notre Dame was an old man, and
he was wearing silk and gold upon his body and the king's own ring upon his long, bony finger, and he was standing in the midst of a busy Paris street, staring into the faces of
damnation itself.

He had done much over the past forty-five years. He had earned a reputation as a prophet and a seer, and his cryptic prophecies had come true often enough to make his name known to educated men all over
Europe
. When Michel de Notre Dame sat down in the privacy of his chambers and gazed into the candle flame, his trances afforded him visions of the future which he structured into the strange, confusing quatrains whose evocative lines were studied and argued about and interpreted in every corner of Christendom.

But his success and his fame and his self-confidence did
not afford him the strength not to tremble when he found
himself face to face with the demons.

"You are the seer Nostradamus?" Janus Chaldian asked. The old man nodded slowly.

"We have heard of your wisdom and your powers," the
woman Claudia said. "We need your help."

Nostradamus swallowed hard. "I... I know you," he said,
his aged voice trembling. "I was...I was at Poligny, in
1521. I was there that night... that night when Jean Boin
consigned you to the flames... I remember you... I remember
you both..."

Chaldian and Claudia exchanged relieved looks and the man said, "I am pleased, lord Astrologer, for I will not now need to tell you my tale nor attempt to convince you of its truthfulness."

"Wh...what do you want from me?" the old man asked.

"We want to
die,"
the woman replied simply.

Nostradamus nodded nervously. "I can try..." he said. "I
cannot say that I will succeed, but I will try..."

But he did not try to kill them, for he knew that they could not be killed. He took them to his private chambers and had them busy themselves with Casper Peucer's recent book about the werewolves of
Livonia
,
Commentarius de Praecipibus Divinationum Generibus,
telling them that some clue to their affliction might be found in the text. Janus could not read Latin, but, much to her surprise, Claudia seemed to be able to, so she read aloud and translated it
into French for her companion as Nostradamus excused himself
on the pretext of an errand for the King, promising that he would return quickly.

He did indeed return quickly, with a contingent of
soldiers from the Palace. The old astrologer knew that these
two demons could be managed while they were in their human guises, and he knew that the next full moon would be in three days time. He had a scant seventy-two hours in which to prepare a prison for the demons, and he set about the
task with all of the enthusiasm and dedication of an old man
who saw an opportunity to render one last service to God
before his departure from this world.

Nostradamus was known, respected, and feared by everyone connected to the government, and it did not take him long to learn that in the nether reaches of the dungeons of the Bastille, that massive one-time castle, now prison in the center of Paris, there existed a treasury stronghold unused since the days of Philip Augustus; a stronghold designed as an impregnable repository for gold and silver and, if need be, the king himself; a room surrounded by stone walls four feet thick; a room whose only window was a narrow slit in the stone no more than ten inches wide and four inches high, a slit which did not even look out at the world but rather connected the stronghold to another cell in the bowels of the prison,
through which neither sunlight nor, more significantly,
moonlight would ever pass; a room which did not even have a door, but merely a narrow hole in its ceiling, wide enough for a human being to be passed through and lowered the thirty feet to the floor of the stronghold, a hole which could be easily secured by more stone and iron and massive,
immovable weight.

A room into which the demons would be cast.

Janus Chaldian allowed himself to be confined without protest or resistance, but the woman Claudia fought like an angry cat against the soldiers who forced her through the hole in the ceiling, allowing her to fall the thirty feet to the stone floor below. They did not know, but Nostradamus knew, that she had broken no bones, sustained no injuries,
shed no blood.

The old seer waited nervously that first night of the
full moon, wondering if sheltering the two demons from the
moonlight would keep them from the change, wondering if the moon were the harbinger of their curse or the creator of
their curse or merely its distant companion, wondering if he
were that night to die the death that he had escaped
forty-five years before. He sat in his chambers, reading and waiting. Night fell, and no demon came to his door. Midnight
came, and still he was alone in his chambers. At last, when
the clock struck two, he could restrain his curiosity no
longer and he went to the Bastille.

He walked alone down the long, dark flights of stairs which led lower and lower into the depths of the prison. The
guards, their faces white and their hands trembling, would not accompany him as he went down to the stronghold. As he
stood silently upon what was the ceiling of the subterranean room, he reflected that the sheets of rock and the blocks of
iron which he had ordered placed upon the narrow entrance hole should have blocked any sounds coming from below. He reflected that the thick stone walls and the thick ceiling should have provided a soundless barrier between the world
without and the perdition within.

And yet through the thick stone and the thick iron and the high space between the floor and the ceiling of the stronghold he was still able to hear, soft and muted but distinct, the screaming, shrieking, furious howls of the captive werewolves, the creatures whose internal demons were so powerful that even the absence of moonlight did not blunt their hellish rage. But they were unable to
escape, for even their prodigious strength was not adequate
to the task of moving tons of solid rock.

Nostradamus returned the next night, and it was the same. He had succeeded where Jean Boin had failed. The world was safe from the power of the murdering demons.

In June of 1566, Michel de Notre Dame,
called Nostradamus, seer and prophet, alchemist and astrologer, felt his own life ebbing to an end. Two days
before his death, Nostradamus did three things.

First, of course, he made out his will.

Second, he left secret private orders for the commander of the Bastille, orders prohibiting him from ever, for any reason, opening the stronghold or releasing its prisoners,
orders which were designed to be transmitted to his successor and his successor's successor and so on down
through the ages.

And third, the aged astrologer sat down and stared into
the candle flame as he had so often over the past thirty
years, seeking one final trance, one final vision of the
future; and once again he saw that all human effort fades to
insignificance when faced with the inexorable march of the
centuries. He saw the year 1789. He saw the angry Parisian
mob attack the Bastille in their revolutionary fervor. He saw them tear down the hated symbol of royal authority. He saw Janus Chaldian and the woman Claudia stumble out into
the world, dazed, mute, blinded by the light after centuries
of darkness, their tortured minds shattered and mad. And he
saw the distant night sky of two centuries hence illuminated
by the cold, full moon.

Nostradamus died on June 18, 1566. His last vision, his
last quatrain, was found beside his bed and later inserted
at random into his Book of Centuries:

Mis tresor
temple
citadins
hesperiques

Dans icelui retiré en secret lieu.

Le
temple
ouvrir
les liens fameliques.

Reprens ravis proie horrible au milieu.

Western citizens place a treasure in a temple, put back there in a secret place. The chains of famine open the
temple. Recaptured and ravished, a horrible prey is in their
midst.

As the old seer lay upon his deathbed, he wondered if
he should have abandoned the habit of decades. He wondered if his final quatrain should have been a bit less cryptic.

 

Weyrauch removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow. Louisa had once been so
carried away by Kaldy's soft and flowing voice, so
enraptured by the memories which were being awakened in him,
that she had again long since stopped taking notes. "Two
hundred years?" she whispered.

"Two hundred and twenty-three years, I suppose," Kaldy
replied. "I knew that it had been quite a long time."

"What happened when you were released?" Weyrauch asked.

Kaldy shrugged. "What always happens. We changed, we killed, we wandered, we wondered. We went to
England
for a while, and to
India
, to
Russia
and to
Hungary
. Always the same." He sighed. "Always the same."

"But two hundred years!" Louisa repeated. "Locked away
in the darkness for two hundred years!"

Kaldy nodded. "It was not pleasant. When Claudia and I
were released, we were like mad people for a long while. But slowly, some memory returned. We knew our names. We knew what we were. What we are."

"Your name seems to have changed," Weyrauch observed,
"but hers did not. Why is that?"

"Who knows?" Kaldy replied, his soft voice betraying a
hint of irritation. "What difference does it make? For all I
know my name is neither Janus Chaldian nor Janos Kaldy, and her name may not really be Claudia."

"Do you remember back farther now, Herr Kaldy?" Louisa
asked. "Now that you remember your imprisonment..."

"No, Madam, I am sorry. It was not merely imprisonment
which blunted my memory. It was the weight of time."

Louisa shook her head. "Such a horrible thing to do.
Such a horrible thing, to lock people up and just...just
leave them there to rot...
"

Kaldy sat up upon the pallet and stretched his arms with a
delicate, feline motion. "Nostradamus was only doing what he thought was right, Madam. I cannot condemn him for that." He paused. "And let us face the facts. For two hundred and
twenty-three years, Claudia and I did not kill, so perhaps the old seer was doing mankind a great service."

Louisa allowed a long, tense breath to escape from between her lips. "You are a forgiving man, Herr Kaldy."

"I am a murderer, Madam. I am a werewolf. How can I bear ill will toward anyone who seeks to keep me from killing?
The only resentment I feel toward Nostradamus is that he did not make an attempt to destroy me." Kaldy closed his eyes and rubbed them tiredly. "He would have failed, of course."

"And before your imprisonment," Weyrauch asked. "No
other memories? Nothing before that experience at Poligny?"

"Nothing."

Weyrauch nodded. "Then we must try again, go back farther. We must know the how and the why of this."

Kaldy smiled a Weyrauch with amusement. "Why must we
know?" he asked. "So that I can be released from this hell
in which I exist? Or so that your friend Colonel Schlacht
can figure a way of using my curse to further his own evil ambitions?"

Weyrauch flushed slightly. "Please, Herr Kaldy. I think that you know me better than that."

Kaldy lay back down, turning his eyes away from
Weyrauch. "I know you better than you think, Herr Doctor. I have known people like you for centuries, and please do not think that I am unsympathetic. But I have a very difficult time appreciating so profound a dedication to one's own survival, when all I want to do is end my existence."

Weyrauch bristled. "Herr Kaldy, that is a very easy
thing for you to say, but allow me to suggest that there must have been a time when living meant more to you than dying!"