The Book of Shadows (14 page)

And I thought, Let it come! Let dawn come. Let
them
come!

The second
presence
, the…the
thing
in the shadows watched us, described tighter and tighter circles around us. Still I could not see into the dark corners of the room, and it was to these that the thing retreated time and again. Its voice came more often, warning, commanding, pleasing, teasing. I understood it, though its words came as a rattling breath, an exhalation somehow strung through with meaning. It seemed sometimes I understood its voice before I'd even heard it speak. It—that voice—seemed to enter me directly. Was more
felt
than heard; like a vibration, the “sound” that issues from struck iron. It said:
My most beautiful rose…. My most beautiful rose
.

“Ah,” breathed the priest, “see how my words return to
haunt
me?” He laughed and came closer to me, ever closer.

He stood between my bent legs, holding high my heels. I lay back on the table. His sex stood rigid over my abdomen. He placed his hand onto my extended, engorged sex. And he tugged—almost too hard, not quite—at my lips, so slick and eager.
“This,”
he said, “is the most beautiful rose.
My
most beautiful rose.”

…Ah, what
words
to use? How to tell the truth?

…
Alors,
this
was
the truth. Like I had never known it. The beginning of the end of my mysteries.

He spread me wide. Opened me. He fisted his rigid sex, so thick and ugly; beautiful too. He teased me. Wouldn't take me. Not at first. And so how I thrilled when that icy crown of his spread my slickened lips, so slightly. How I thrilled as he started to push, slowly, steadily, and my muscles constricted around him, at once stretching to accommodate him and recoiling from his cold, cold flesh. To even call it “flesh” seems…Ah, but then, as had happened with his fingers and tongue, I went warm,
hot
where he touched me. Heat now. Inside me. Flooding me with that sweet fever.

How heavy he suddenly was! Full-bodied as he had not been before. Yes, he was somehow fuller now, his flesh colder. A wonder that I remarked any of this as he leaned down to kiss me on the mouth, to tease my nipples with his teeth. All the while smiling.

The priest stood. Father Louis stood. The incubus stood….
Enfin, he
stood and took me then. Thrusted, slowly at first and then faster. Faster. He rocked into me, rhythmically. Deeply. Pain; pleasure. And the purest delight I had ever known.

Trust and learn.

The first-time kiss. The rending of flesh. The whispering rip of entry.

Sublime!

…Father Louis withdrew. I felt the ache of his absence. I saw him lift his bloodstained fingers to his mouth. Lick them. Savor the blood. “The most beautiful—”

Louis,
came the voice,
stop, now!
This was the loudest and clearest I'd heard that voice.
Stop it. Be done with it, Louis! What heart I have is beyond all this now
.

Her words spurred the priest. His kisses now were quick; and, roughly, he turned me over onto my stomach. He pulled me down fast to the table's end. I held to either side of the thick oak, laid my face in the pillow of bunched pink silk.

The dawn! And the others are coming
. Who was coming, my accusers? Was
she
coming forward? Was that her pale, opalescent face there in the dark?

…It was then the priest repeated his ritual:

He poured more wine onto my back, spread it down into the cleft of my buttocks and beyond, licking and sucking, with his touch turning the wine to a gel. It was exquisite, and I heard sounds issue from my mouth as though it were a stranger's.

The priest went down onto his knees. Again and again the Devil's Kiss. How I wriggled, writhed against his mouth, into that kiss! Shamelessly. More.
More!
Fingers, his cold fingers prying, prodding, pushing. And I opened to it. Took it into me. Felt it rend me wide, deep.

“Hold yourself,” he said. “
Here,
like this.” Reaching around me to the front, he took my hand in his and…and he led my hand to my own sex. Ah, the fast movement of my hand in his! I had never done this, for self-satisfaction was a sin, no? I had never even known that I could bring myself to…Only in those night dreams…the salt, the milk of the dream…I'd no idea…

Enfin
, the priest withdrew the candle, slowly. And then he entered me. I took him to the hilt and…

Oh! the tastes, the textures, the strange acrobatics of it all!…
Enfin
, the
truth
of it all!

Soon—my breath caught, my heart having slipped from its place—I found my hand full of a whiteness like liquescent pearl. I had worked it from myself.

It was then the priest whispered the truth I had never wanted to know:

“You are a woman. You are a man.”

And at this, she stepped from the shadows ragged and blue, and was made known to me by name: Madeleine de la Mettrie.

I stood bent over the table, my hands clamped to either side. What had he said? Did I dare
hear
his words again, repeat them to myself till their true meaning came? No; I dared not. Thankfully, there was the sudden distraction of…of
her
.

She came out of the shadows, the demon-girl. She seemed
made
of shadows, as had the priest. As she neared she passed from black through gray to blue; the darkness seemed to cling to her, weighting her as water weights the drowned.

That hideous voice was hers, and I heard it again as she neared.
Yes
, she said, in that guttural rasp,
You are a woman. You are a man
. Still the sense of the words did not come.

“Closer,” said Father Louis. “Show yourself.”

Were those rags she wore? Cerements? And what was that scent? It was neither good nor bad; it was like soil newly turned. A natural smell. Redolent of a forest or woodland; redolent too of rain and salted air. Another step—she moved effortlessly, as though borne on the air—and I saw her long black hair, tangled and filthy, falling to frame her pale and perfect face. Wide-set brown eyes, the high bones of her cheeks, a thin nose and full red mouth. That mouth…

…It is difficult to describe what it was I saw then.

Never had I seen such a sight. Nothing could have prepared me for it, for
her
. Nothing. Surely she was in pain. Real or not, revenant, specter or succubus, how could she suffer such wounds?

Yes, her very throat was torn away! From chin to chest she was nothing but caked gore, over which trickled a stream of blood that seeped from the black cavity. Blood all over her. The flesh was torn, split wide. The lips of the wound were red and fresh, quivering like the gills of a landed fish.

Don't be afraid,
said Madeleine, and I saw that the death rattle came not from her mouth—indeed, her mouth did not open; the lips did not move—but from her throat. She spoke through her throat!

Still, I wasn't afraid. Despite the blood and gore and torn-open throat, Madeleine was
still
beautiful. Her voice too, horrible as it was, assuaged me, calmed me. I could understand her.

We've come for you
, said she.

“Yes,” echoed the priest, “to educate and save you; and to ask a favor of you.”

Not now, Louis!…
Mon Dieu,
how graceless you are
.

“Graceless? Indeed I am; it's true.”

Now is not the time
, said Madeleine.
You know what we must do. We must do it quickly, too. The dawn
…She raised a long thin arm toward the window. The sleeve of her simple, coarse shift was dirty. It fell back to her elbow as she lifted her arm and revealed her wrist and forearm white and smooth and thin. Her long fingers seemed fleshless. They tapered to cracked nails caked with dirt. Had she dug her way up out of the earth?

No questions,
said she.
We haven't much time
.

Louis stood behind me still. He pulled me closer. I stood tall and naked in his arms, in his cold arms, which he twined around my waist.

“I've done my part,” said he, cupping my breasts. “And quite well, I think. Education by seduction, one might say.” He turned his back to the succubus, saying, dismissively, “The floor is yours, demoness,” and asking, “Will you tell our story true?”

P
ROSPERING
?
REPEATED MADELEINE
.
Far from it. The village of Q——was walled and airless, stifling
.

“…Filthy, offal-choked streets,” adjoined the priest. “And wood smoke, wood smoke forever swirling in bitter blue plumes…. Excrement running in thick rivulets, bearing the feeding maggots that would burst forth as flies…. Geese and other living things at slaughter let go a vaguely tidal gas, and…”

Louis, please,
said Madeleine.
The floor is mine, or so you say
. And she went on, describing the place of her birth in apologetic tones:
We tried burning incense against all this, but to slight effect
.

“Slight, indeed,” said the priest. “…horseflesh, burnt bread, swilling swine…And the one unmistakable stench that permeated everything: the acrid, soil-like smell of massed, unwashed humanity.”

You speak as though you came to us from the Vatican, or some other gilded place
.

The priest walked silently to the windowsill; sitting, he added, ruefully, “Would that I had never gone to that place at all.” Only then did he turn the tale over to Madeleine, promising silence save for commentary “as appropriate.”

Father Louis, I learned, first came to Q——to serve as parish priest. Curé of the Church of St. Pierre, by title.

The scion of a respected bourgeois family, he'd hoped for a chaplaincy to a nobleman, perhaps a position as tutor to a future marshal or cardinal. If only he'd been born noble, was his frequent lament: surely then he'd have been able to secure a bishopric, an office to gild and gladden his days. But he was not noble, neither by birth nor disposition. And, as competition among priests was fierce, he resigned himself to the role of curé at the Church of St. Pierre in Q——. Not Paris. Not Marseilles. Not even Avignon. Q——.

Early in his third decade, standing tall and strong, Father Louis was remarkably handsome, with large dark eyes, fine features, and an abundance of black curls spilling out from under his black biretta. He wore his beard groomed in the Van Dyck style. He possessed uncommon confidence, carried himself with a swagger; he was—this was Madeleine's word—cocksure.

The priest's arrival did not go unnoticed, for his predecessor, recently deceased, had been bloodless and devout; unpopular, that is. And so Louis was welcomed to Q——. His affability, his learning, his looks—suffice to say he was soon the dinner guest of choice among the privileged of Q——. And as easily as he'd accessed the finest dining rooms of Q——, so too did he win his way into the finest boudoirs. Thus did his troubles begin.

For the priest was a man of appetites and particular tastes. A man “proud to have the courage of his own perversions,” as he was wont to say. True, he'd taken a vow of celibacy, but what of it? No self-respecting cleric gave the vow a second thought once uttered. As Louis said to a mistress on the eve of his ordination, “a promise to perform the impossible is not binding.” Besides, didn't the Church have troubles enough—the Huguenot rebels, ever-increasing corruption, et cetera? Louis had no fear of the zealots of the Society of Jesus and the Congregation of the Oratory, for he knew much of their own depredations. Why, he reasoned, would the Church bother to delve into the doings, into the metaphorical breaches—or britches—of a simple parish priest? And hadn't he gotten
this
far without depriving himself?

At the age of fourteen he'd been sent off to the Jesuit College of B——. The brothers—famous disciplinarians—taught an elegant Latin, and the latest in optics, geography, mathematics, dramatics, and manners. There, Louis had been caught engaging in “private entertainment.” Threatened that a second offense would lead to expulsion, Louis tried to behave. For a period spanning the four great feasts of the Church, he did not indulge himself. Not
overly
so. Unreasonable, thought he, for God or man to expect more of him.

His seventeenth summer was passed at the shore in the company of a bachelor uncle, whose maid, for a halfpenny per lesson, continued the boy's “education.” With the discovery of women, Louis happily saw the number of his suitors double.

Sexually, no need of the boy's went unmet. Spiritually, he believed in his god; less so in the Church proper. Self-satisfaction was his sole creed.

His contentment, his charms, and his successes bred in the boy a measure of arrogance and he heeded not at all those who warned that such conceit would one day pose a problem. Said he, in later years: “What finer tribute might a man know than to be mistrusted by the stupid for being clever, envied by the inept for making good, loathed by the dull for his wit, by the boors for his breeding, and by the ugly for his successes?”

…As word spread of the new confessor, the women of Q——discovered sins heretofore unheard of. They grew
desperate
for pardon. Had he not arrived, these women (and some men, too) would have one day clogged the very Gates of Hell if they'd in fact done
half
of what they confessed to. Within weeks of his arrival, Father Louis was overworked, satisfied, and very tired.

Suspicions rose, giving rise in turn to rumors. The seeds of enmity were sown.

Still, Father Louis carried on. Every Sunday the aisles of St. Pierre were crowded with the desirous and newly devout. And there, in the center of the first pew, sat the Prosecutor of Q——with his wife and child, a girl of fourteen named Madeleine.

In Q——the seasons turned. It was six, nearly seven months after his arrival in Q——that Father Louis first heard the confession of the Prosecutor's wife. The Prosecutor had denied his wife at first. Warned by men of his acquaintance, he forbore; finally, in proportion too direct to withstand, his wife withdrew from him. Went cold. The Prosecutor relented: his wife was scheduled for Wednesdays, in the early afternoon.

One such afternoon, as the confessor came from the Prosecutor's parlor, closing the double doors behind him while tackling too the brass buttons of his waistcoat, he literally stumbled upon young Madeleine.

The picture of grace. Long and lithe, with a plait of black hair, pale skin, and warm brown eyes. “Marriageable,” as is said; ripe.

Louis struck with every weapon in his arsenal. He worked upon Madeleine's mother, who finally agreed to speak to her husband. Father Louis was right, said she: the girl needed a tutor. Yet again, the Prosecutor relented, and Father Louis began to tutor Madeleine.

Madeleine de la Mettrie—for that was the girl's full name, the noble
particule, de
, purchased long ago, by her father's father—fell in love. Deeply, as a girl will but once or twice. She lost all sense of self. In her mind, she was one with her lover. Yes, Father Louis became her lover. (Madeleine confessed this as the priest sat silently on the sill.)

But first there'd been that strange courtship, those first few Friday afternoons sitting side by side in the Prosecutor's study. It had taken some time, but Louis succeeded in convincing Madame that a chaperone was unnecessary.

And at first, they did study.

How Madeleine thrilled at Louis's threats! He balanced a small riding crop across his knees, slapped it against his thigh each time the girl stumbled over her Ovid. They each of them reveled in the tension. Finally, one day, after Madeleine willfully translated “to stick” as “to prick,” Louis told her to stand and raise high her skirts. She cried. He insisted. She begged, and did as she was told. He slapped the crop, once, crisply, against the upper, inner part of her thigh. Though she'd been wearing stockings (a mistake she'd not make twice), the welt lasted three days. Madeleine cherished it. After that, her Ovid only got worse.

Their Fridays became Saturdays too, then Mondays, and so on. The Prosecutor protested. His wife began to wonder. Madeleine, for her part, learned Latin and much, much more.

Soon there was a secret in Q——. A secret that would be nine months in the keeping.

Madeleine was no longer seen in the streets. Louis, with the cooperation of the family's cook, passed letters to Madeleine, tiny missives she'd find beneath her morning bowl of porridge or tucked among a basket of plums. He wrote not of love but of need; and he promised to win her release. The priest had to pick through the family's refuse for Madeleine's responses, for the cook dared not pass them on more directly than that. Madeleine's letters told how her father beat her, how he'd made her soak for hours in a bath that was two parts water and one part mustard, a concoction reputed to loose a man's seed from the womb. Worse was suffered by her mother, whom the Prosecutor accused of the most vile complicity and faithlessness. The letters told how each woman was confined to her room, the windows of which—shuttered from the outside—were chained within. They told how Madeleine's body was changing, and spoke of her undeniable delight in the growing manifestation of their love. Too, she begged for rescue.

Publicly, the Prosecutor denied everything. His wife and child had gone to care for a sick relation, said he; he denied their very presence in his house. One night, not long into her captivity, Madeleine's mother fled, fearing her husband and hating her daughter.

Then one morning there appeared tacked to the Prosecutor's door, as to the doors of many shops on the square, and even the church, an “Ode to the Public Prosecutor's Bastard Grandchild,” to be sung (as it was in all the less reputable pubs) to the tune of
“J'ai rencontré un allemend.”

Something had to be done, and something was.

The cook was sent away, for the Prosecutor sensed her sympathies; in her stead came an elderly zealot best described as Madeleine's Keeper, or Wrangler, for she tended to the girl as though she were an unruly animal. She communicated corporally, refusing to speak to “the expectant.” She tugged at Madeleine's braid if the girl was slow in responding to a directive, issued tersely or with a pointed finger, and she'd stamp her foot to summon the girl, or rap at the kitchen ceiling with a broom when Madeleine was to descend to her daily meal. Yes, one meal daily: of bitter herbs boiled down to gruel; into which went antimony pellets—these, when passed whole, were retrieved from Madeleine's waste bucket, rinsed, and returned to her gruel in the hope that the resultant purging might loose “the item within” from its hold. Ants' eggs, too, were stirred into the gruel, for it was known to her that ants' eggs, if ingested, would undo a devil pregnancy. And Madeleine was made to soak
twice
daily in her mustard bath.

Madeleine wrote letters; but when a passel was discovered by the Prosecutor and returned to her, whole paragraphs drowned in spills of wine-dark ink, she desisted. (In truth, she kept on: she wrote at night, when it was thought she slept, and slipped the letters to priest and progeny into an envelope glued to the bottom of her bureau.)

As for Father Louis, he'd last seen Madeleine three days before her sudden “disappearance.” Save for the sole time he dared knock at the Prosecutor's door, he'd not tried to contact the girl. And with the cook's dismissal, he'd no avenue. So he went about his life. Yes, he heard his private confessions with less ardor than before; and it was whispered that some wind had gone from the priest's sail, but what was he to do? This he asked of himself and God; receiving no reply, he did nothing.

Then, five Sundays into Madeleine's sequestration, Father Louis was attacked as he entered St. Pierre. The Prosecutor paid a laborer ten sous to strike the cleric with a brass-handled cane as he took the first step leading up to the church. Father Louis, cracked across the back of the neck, fell to his knees. The laborer walked away, unpursued.

This was but the latest and most public offense. There'd been others, quite petty—one involved the dung of the priest's stolen horse, another featured scrolled scripture tied to thrown rocks—but this was the first assault upon the priest's person.

Of course, Father Louis and all of Q——knew the Prosecutor was behind these attacks. What was the priest to do? What would the Prosecutor and his accomplices do next? What were they capable of? Angered by his three-week-long inability to turn his head to the left, the priest struck upon a plan:

Violence against the person of a priest was sacrilege, blasphemy in action! He would go to the Parliament of Paris, the chancellor, to Louis XIII himself if need be! He would demand justice! Demand that his enemies—and weren't they, by association, enemies of the Church?—be sought and dealt with severely.

What's more, he'd not been to Paris in some time. The change would do him good, he reasoned. True, the trip was long. But Paris held the promise of old friends and new acquaintances, distractions; indeed, he'd heard tell of a woman there, a former circus dancer living near the Pont Neuf, who could, with her tongue, tie…

So, Louis, having foolishly stated his intentions to too many people, left for Paris.

The curé's departure for Paris was just what the Prosecutor and his cabal of coconspirators had hoped for. Their initial attacks against the priest were nothing compared to the counterattack they now launched. And so, as the priest left for Paris, the Prosecutor undertook the much shorter trip to P——to see the bishop.

The documentation had been prepared weeks prior. Now, with the priest beginning his own legal proceedings in Paris, the Prosecutor could make his case, or rather the village's case, against the curé. In defense. It was a brilliant plan, and the cabal was proud. Papers were presented to the Promoter of the Officiality, the bishop's legal representative. Father Louis, pleading his case before the Parliament of Paris, would return to Q——to find himself accused of “having debauched innumerable married women, having ruined five young women of Q——, of being profane and impious, of never reading his breviary, and of fornicating within the precincts of the church.” A lesser priest of St. Pierre was prepared to swear to the truth of the last charge, for he'd seen his superior sporting with a woman on the stony floor of the sacristy, not fifteen paces from the blessed sacrament.