The Book of Shadows (12 page)

I watched, waiting for my waking eyes to overtake the dark. Were they
moving
, the shadows? Yes; but only as settling shadows do, in imitation of their source. They were simple shadows, I told myself. Ordinary. Not that species of shadow I'd seen in the shuttered gallery.
Those
shadows, I'd been certain, had harbored the
presence
. These shadows were not
alive
, as those others had seemed. I dismissed it all, told myself it was but some trick of the moon's.

The moon. I could see it, a perfect, prized pearl set in the indigo night, dim now behind a scrim of cloud. Staring at the moon, I thought not only of that stranger species of shadow but of the sourceless blood and the blue-smoking taper and the rich red wine. All the strangeness came back to me then. I shoved it from my mind, rudely; a bad dream.

I fumbled over the table for the candleholder. The matches should be…yes, there they were. I struck one against the table leg and it sparked to life.

Where was I? This was not the library as I'd left it, as it'd been when I'd surrendered to the darkness. Yes, there were the four walls, certainly, and the doors, the shelves, and the open window. But the table—what had happened to the table? Before there'd been the tipped and empty jug, the chipped goblet, the leathery bread, and the stub of candle.

Someone had crept into the room and left a plate at the center of which sat two stuffed and roasted squab, still warm and redolent of…yes, of a thyme and cherry glaze! Herbed potatoes ringed the huge platter! And asparagus spears. Miraculous, yes; though infinitely more tasty than manna and baskets full of fish.

Even as the strangeness of the discovery struck me, I set to eating. I was hungry, and there it sat.

I ate greedily. Silver had been set before me. The fork was heavy as stone; in its flattened end was carved something ornate, an insignia of some kind.

Well into my meal, as I cut into the fleshy breast of the second squab (sausage in the stuffing, was it?) I thought, absently—so absently I cannot explain it—how sweet it would be to have a glass of the wine I'd found in Peronette's trunk. That wine; yes, if only I could slip into some drunken state, any state other than the state of
self
. But there was no wine. No water, even, now that I'd wasted it. But when I took up that ugly jug—righted now and within easy reach—it was heavy: full. The goblet was overturned; beside it sat a larger, finer one, glistening in the candlelight. I poured…not water; wine!

Still I was not
thinking,
not really, so busy was I with the satisfaction of my urges. Surprise had ceded fast to satisfaction; and satisfaction to…to
appreciation
as I took in all that someone, or some
thing
had spread before me.

Gracelessly, I picked the meat from the bones. The potatoes went one after another, as did the well-crisped asparagus spears. Only when I'd cleared its surface of food did I see that the platter was painted. With the same design that was carved into the fork's end. Yes, at the platter's center was a large, exquisite blue
S,
and in the lower curve of the
S
sat a fat and contented toad. Strange, I thought. But what was strangeness now?

Finally, my rational mind set to work. As for the food, I reminded myself of the custom of granting the condemned a last meal, if rarely a feast the likes of which I'd discovered. Perhaps it all made sense. Indeed, I might have expected it. I wondered if Marie-Edith had returned, for she alone at C——was capable of such delicacies. If so, surely she'd alert someone beyond C——to my plight and…But even as I thought this,
hoped
it, I knew it to be fantastical, and untrue.

I sat contemplating all the strangeness, the shadows, the sudden and silent appearance of everything—when I saw that, at the table's end, beyond the candle's brightest band of light, there were piled…
books
. Tens of books. They'd not been there earlier. Or had they? I was not sure of anything. Perhaps they had been brought down from the shelves by the same kind jailer who'd brought the meal?

I noticed too that the candle that had been in the candleholder, stunted and half-burned, had been replaced. A taller one rose up in its stead, its flame constant and high. It was by this light that I
saw
again the shadows in the library's dark corner. I waited for them to take on that life, that animate quality I'd seen earlier in the company of the cat. Nothing. Then: a rustling in the dark, down low. Movement. Nails or claws scratching over the stone floor.

I convinced myself it was a rat; we were at times overrun with rats—no girl ever walked alone at night without a candle and a stick of considerable heft—and my attention returned to the books.

They were piled too far away: I could not read their spines, a few of which faced me. And so I looked to the strictly ordered shelves to see where they'd been drawn down from. Please, I thought,
please
let them not be from the shelves of the Order's history. I cannot pass this night with nothing but sheaves of death certificates and the brittle, eczematous lists of the forgotten dead. No;
that
shelf seemed intact. I looked hopefully to the lowest shelf, where certain novels were secreted, their pages well-thumbed by many a girl and nun. Neither had that shelf been disturbed. All the shelves, in fact, showed their shimmering, thick skins of dust unbroken. I could not find a single space from which a book had been removed, but this inventory was taken by the light of one candle, and the shelves sat far across a dark room.

I stood; and, suffering the bite of the cuff—and fearing for a moment that the rat had set to on my ankle—I reached for the nearest book.

The Cheats and Illusions of Romish Priests and Exorcists Discovered in the History of the Devils of Loudun and Louviers.
I had never noticed this book before. Certainly not typical fare at C——, though it
would
deal with the Ursulines, and so qualify as part of the Order's long history. But I
knew
the libraries at C——, each one, including that of the Mother Superior, the
former
Mother Superior, and this particular volume was in none of them. Odd enough. Odder still was the book itself. Its cover was of red morocco—much too fine, too extravagant for the nuns. I opened it and there, as the frontispiece, was the same illustration as appeared on the silver and platter. The large
S
, and its accompanying toad. Who would mark their volumes with so strange an
ex libris
? And further, who—and here I tilted the page into the light—who has the means to paint, by hand, such a symbol in each of what I presumed to be many volumes? This was fine work, like that of some monk-adorned medieval manuscript.

Another volume.
Malleus Maleficarum
. I knew this book: its authors had been Dominicans and for two centuries theirs had been the text of choice of all witch hunters, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic. The pages were old, the corners ragged and worn. Again, the red morocco cover. Again, the ornate
S
.

Supplanting one mystery with another, I shoved aside what little remained of my meal and gathered the books to me. Each elegant volume bore the
S
and its recumbent toad. In several languages, they were titled thusly:

The Apprehension and Confession of Three Notorious Witches Arraigned and by Justice Condemned in the County of Essex. Histoire du couvent de Saint-Louis de Louviers. The Trial of Master Darrell, or a Collection of Defenses Against Allegations Not Yet Suffered to Receive Convenient Answers. Procès verbal fait pour délivrer une fille possédée par le malin esprit à Louviers. De Divinatione et Magicis Praestigis. A True Narration of the Strange and Grievous Vexation by the Devil of Seven Persons in Lancashire and William Summers of Nottingham. Ritualis Romani Documenta de Exorcizandis Obsessis a Daemonio
.

There were others, all studies of the Burning Days, when supposed witches had been sent to the stake by the thousands, by the
tens
of thousands.

I pulled the candle nearer. I made free with the wine. Taking up a book, I settled as comfortably as I could into that chair and I began to read. (Books in German I had set off to one side; after all, this
was
the last night of my life.)

Here
was the drunkenness, the escape I'd sought.

A
S I TOOK
up the books in no order of which I was conscious, I struggled still to explain the things I'd recently seen.
Inexplicable
things. The mysterious
S
-marked books, I told myself, had simply come from some library I had not visited, perhaps in the village; and as for…Ah, but I did not dwell on those mysteries, preferring the explicable,
clinging
to it. Still.

The books, the very
real
books. I fingered their identical covers and the golden lettering on their chests and spines. I
knew
them, it seemed, even before I'd opened a single one.

These books were different from any I'd ever seen. They lay before me,
communicating
in a way I cannot describe. Somehow, I
knew
what I was supposed to read, where I was to skim, and where I ought to slow and settle into an understanding of the words. I was conscious of learning
beyond
the page, beyond the written word. It was as though there were two sets of words—the words I read off the page, and the words I came to know as the truth. And so I'd read the writings of X and
know
that he'd been a conniver and a cheat though certainly his autobiography said no such thing. I'd read testimony from trials and I'd
know
who lied and who spoke the truth. It was so
clear
: it was as though the truth were written in red ink.

This
knowing,
eerily, progressed to hearing and feeling. Yes, it seemed I could
hear
the accused witches' testimony in their own voices. These voices rose within me, echoes of the words I read. This did not frighten me. Indeed, I welcomed the voices, welcomed them from the moment I first heard them. Odder still, I
understood
languages I'd never studied, never even heard spoken. Portuguese, for example. And Provençal. I was
alive
in the books. And learning all the while.

I read of Benedict Carpzov, “the Lawgiver of Saxony,” the seventeenth-century signatory to twenty-five thousand death warrants.

I read of Marie-Catherine Cadiere, tried as a witch in Toulon in 1731—less than a hundred years ago! She would be remembered by certain townsmen of C——. Doubtless they believed the stories they'd been told as children seated at someone's knee, doubtless they told those stories in their turn.

It was quite cold now in the library—the open window had been pushed wider, and so perhaps there
was
a breeze? It was cold within the library, yes; but I was not cold. I breathed in the moist salted air. I thirsted for the warming wine, the wine that somehow led me back to the books.

It was some time later, as I read, or
heard,
the transcript of a trial held in Scotland—the year was 1704 and the accused, Beatrix Laing, the Pittenweem Witch, would be convicted and crushed beneath planks over which a weighted sleigh was driven five times—yes, intent on the testimony of Mrs. Laing's ten-year-old accuser, I heard a voice that was no echo off the page. This—I
knew
it as soon as I heard it—this was the
presence
. What it said, in whispered Latin, was this:

Trust and learn. Trust and learn
.

I did. And I would. I had a mission:
to learn
. I was studying to save my life. This I knew.

At that urging on from the
presence,
I dove deeper into the works before me and gave no due to the real and fast-receding world.

The book nearest to hand was by an Ambrosian monk, Francesco Maria Guazzo.
Compendium Maleficarum
. Its title page bore the date 1608, as well as the
S
-mark.

From chapter 7, “By Their Terrible Deeds and Imprecations Witches Produce Rain and Hail, et cetera”:

So it was that
I
was supposed to have brought a storm down upon C——. Interesting.

And I read this from chapter 4, “Witches Effect Their Marvels with the Help of the Devil”:

And this, from chapter 13, “Whether Witches Can Transmute Bodies from One Form to Another”:

From the Guazzo I turned to a pamphlet folded into the
Malleus Maleficarum
. It was a contemporaneous account of how, in the summer of 1644, after a violent and destructive hailstorm, the inhabitants of several villages near Beaune banded together to hunt the incarnate fiends who'd thus blasted their crops. Sixteen women were sentenced to be beaten with red-hot shovels. Their broken bodies were shoved into kilns. Oiled toads were stuffed into the mouths of those few who'd survived the beating so as to muffle their screams and prevent their summoning their devils. Only one woman was acquitted—mother of the lead witness, a boy of seventeen, said to be able to spot a witch at one hundred paces—and even she, on the night of the sentencing, was stolen from her home; bound hand and foot, weights pendant from her neck, she was pushed from the height of a castle tower, let to fall headfirst to the earth.

It was here I began to empathize,
bodily,
with those whose stories I discovered. I recall too well the writhing, slick weight of the toads on
my
tongue. I
taste
still the scorching ascent of vomit, upwelling vomit.

Yes, it was with labored breath that I read of Giles Cory of Salem, who, in the winter of 1692, at the age of eighty, was pressed to death beneath iron weights. The man lay naked beneath the weights for two days, suffocating.
“In the pressing his tongue swelled and bloated from his mouth and the sheriff, with his cane, forced it back in again and again…”

I read of the Newbury Witch. The English Civil War—1643. Men of Cromwell's army, under the command of the Earl of Essex, while passing through Newbury, saw an old peasant woman walk on water. So they averred. They caught and had their way with this “witch.” Sated, they set her up on a barge and took turns firing at her from the shore.
“With deriding and loud laughter she caught their bullets in her hand and chewed them; until such time as the smallest man of the lot, gaining the barge by raft, slashed her forehead and discharged his pistol underneath her ear, at which the Devil's Whore fell straight down and died.”
…And with this there came a pain to my forehead like that I'd suffered earlier when cut beneath the nose by the witch's whip; and, too, I knew a thudding ache beneath my right ear, as though I'd been hammer-struck.

Could I go on?
Should
I go on, and to what end?…
Trust and learn
. Yes; but I was horrified. Sick at the stomach. And scared: would I share the fate of these witches at sunrise?

I looked out the window. Were the tips of the distant trees afire with the first light of dawn? How I
refused
then all thoughts of dawn! Regardless, the dawn would come. And then—

What was that?
I searched the shadowed floor, certain I'd seen a rat scamper by. Movement, low in a shadowed corner. Scratching. And then a terrible squeal, as though the rat had met a bad and sudden end at the claws of a cat. (My Maluenda? No, it could not be! Still, nine lives, et cetera.) I sat listening. I heard nothing more. But there, at the height of a man's head, hung the jellied white eyes of…No, no, no. I was imagining this, surely; for fast as those eyes had appeared, they were gone.

The candle flame burned a bright violet-blue, then. I reached past it to the wine.

Trust and learn
. That voice again. Male or female? I couldn't tell. Such urgency in it. The
presence
urging me on. To what? Did I actually hear its voice? Did it speak? Were its words audible, or merely
known
?…I cannot say. I did not allow myself to consider these or other questions, not then. I
knew
I was not alone, but again, and wisely, I did not allow myself to
consider
that truth.

More wine. And more books.

Silence, stillness; and the candle burning blue, its light steady, true.

Trust and learn
.

It was then I came across a broadside folded into eight panels. Its parchment was yellowed, chitinous, its type smudged and replete with setting errors: an amateur's hurried work. The thin cover promised
L'histoire illustrée du diable de la ville de Q
——. It fit into my right hand as would another's, proffered in greeting. Unfolding the single sheet, broad as a map when I smoothed it over the table, I began to read:

“
There came to the prospering city of Q——, in the Lord's Year 16—, a devil in the guise of Priest, a fiend hell-bent on the ruination of Faith and females. This devil, name of…”

And as I read the devil-priest's name, I heard from the shadows a derisive sound, an anguished laugh.
Prospering, was it?
came the rhetorical question.
I think not,
the reply.

The
presence
. I looked this way and that: nothing, no one. I read on, and twice more came the seemingly sourceless commentary. I read of the Dark Work done in Q——, of deflowered maidens and devils ascendant. But I had not progressed far when suddenly I felt a near, biting coldness, a coldness not in keeping with the season, the summer night; and I saw my right arm rise—the coldness like a vise gripping my elbow—and I watched as I, guided by a thing unseen, fed to the candle flame a dried corner of the pamphlet. It took; cinders swirled, sputtering in the sea-dank air. Flames raced to nip at my fingertips; and I fell back into that heavy chair to the accompaniment of rattling chains.

Yes, it was by the candle's leaping sapphire light that I first saw him.
It
.

It was there with me in the library, the
presence
. I'd known that. But now the shadows started to shift, seemed to take shape: the dark shape of a man. Coalescing, as though it were of equal parts air, darkness, and dream. Standing table-side, he lifted the candlestick—its flame burst up blazingly blue—and I saw him clearly. “It was not like that at all,” said he, the voice full now. “Not at all.”

It was the devil-priest of Q——, Father Louis M——by name. Dead these two hundred years.

Surely this was impossible! But I could not deny it. Neither can I deny it now, for it is the truth.
This happened!

There he stood in his simple black shift. He smiled, slowly, slyly; it seemed I
drew
his smile, as the moon draws the tide. He moved around behind the chair and slipped his hands over my shoulders and throat, onto my chest. His touch was cold, cold as ice. He stroked my hair, my neck. Then he bent at the waist to whisper in my ear; and I shivered to hear his words:

“We know what you are,” said he.

I stood—the horrible clanking, the restraint of those shackles!—and turned to the priest.

We stood before each other, he in his black robe, me in that ridiculous pink dress, that silken confection I'd stolen. He stood a bit taller than I.

Then he stepped back from me and—did I
will
it?—his mantle slid down from his shoulders to show him naked. It crumbled from his body, fell to his bare feet as though it were made of ash.

Dare I look at him, standing there?

“Yes,” said he. “Look at me.”

Could he hear my thoughts? Did he know my mind? Who,
what
was he?

“Regarde-moi!”
And, smiling, he stepped back farther to show himself.

He raised his long muscular arms over his head, placing his palms together as if in prayer. He started to turn, slowly. Revolve. A sort of dance. A show of such beauty. I saw him full-length from the front; I saw him from behind. He smiled at my awe, my adoration; and my ignorance. He reveled in my straight-on stare.

Tufted black hair in the crooks of his raised arms. His lightly furred chest with its rosebud nipples. The broad, muscled fan of his back. His waist tapering to slender, strong hips and sculpted legs. The full, firm flesh of his buttocks. The supple length of his sex. The curves of his calves. The richly veined arch of his foot…

Here was beauty I had never known, never seen.

Tears stung my eyes. Why was I crying? Was it then I knew the truth? Had the secret of my life been told to me?

…The priest neared my body. With his weightless fingers he took away my tears; they went solid at his touch, solidified from tears to crystals, crystals that he crushed between forefinger and thumb. And then his hands moved, so slowly, over my shoulders to the back of my neck, to the clasp of the dress. He undid it. I stood waiting for the warm breath that never issued from his lips. Slowly, he pushed the dress down from my shoulders, and revealed me naked to the waist.