The Book of Shadows (20 page)

A small iron seat had been nailed to the stake, just above the straw and stacked wood. Father Louis was lifted from the cart and placed on this seat. The rope at his waist was used to tie him to the stake; it was wound once around his waist and once around his neck to keep him upright; a second rope was used to bind his hands behind him.

Father Tranquille exorcised the stake and sprinkled holy water on the wood, the straw, the executioner, the crowd, and the condemned. He prayed against those demons waiting to deny justice, who would somehow prevent the priest from the suffering that was his due.

The Prosecutor and the Canon approached Father Louis, confession and quill in hand. More salts and a mouthful of lime juice forced on him from a wooden cup. “I have nothing to confess,” managed Father Louis. “Give me the Kiss of Peace and let me die.” The Canon refused him. Those spectators at the fore of the crowd who knew what the condemned man had requested chanted against the Canon and so un-Christian an act as his refusal of the Kiss. And so the Canon kissed the curé's cheek. The crowd jeered. A woman, safe in the anonymity of the mob, shouted that the Canon owed the curé the Devil's Kiss, and a new chant was taken up, one that shamed and angered the Canon.

Strangulation at the stake was customary, but the Prosecutor had seen that this was left from the curé's sentence. He was to be burned alive. The crowd, very few of whom had bothered to read the verdict against the curé, posted all over Q——the previous night, did not know this. And so, when the Prosecutor and Canon Mignon gathered fistfuls of flaming straw, lit at the lantern swinging stake-side for this purpose, the crowd stopped chanting of the Devil's Kiss and took up a new, one-word cry:
Strangle! Strangle! Strangle!

The Prosecutor set the straw aflame and, quick as the flames took hold, the crowd fell silent. The Canon lit the sulfured hem of the curé's nightshirt.

And Father Louis began to burn.

Silence. Soon the sound of sizzling flesh. The stench. The priest's screams—no, it was not a scream; he hadn't the strength to scream. It was an even more pitiable sound, high-pitched and hurried, like that of a rabbit caught in a trap.

A radiant pulsing among the assembled. A rush like lust. And the twigs and straw and chunks of wood catching fast, crackling, snapping.

Smoke. Swirling white smoke. Pure white. Obscuring sight.

And then from the center of the white smoke came the sound of coughing, choking.

“No!” cried the Prosecutor.

“It cannot be!” said the exorcist. The condemned, aided by his devils, would
indeed
deprive Justice. He would choke on the smoke, suffocate before the pure tongue of flame had licked him clean. Someone, over-eager, had set the straw and kindling and wood out too early; it was wet from the last night's rain; and so it smoked to excess.

The exorcist and Canon Mignon cast holy water on the flames, inveighed against the unseen devils that circled the stake.
Exorciso te, creatura ignis
…And more prayer:
Ecce crucem Domini, fugite partes adversae, vicit leo de tribu Juda, radis David…in nomine Dei patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu Christi filii ejus Domini nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti
…They ran around the stake, the trains of their black robes tracing the circle of flame. They swung crucifixes and thurifers of frankincense. The executioner fell back, staring at the two old men who danced around the stake looking more demonic than anyone or anything he'd ever seen.

Father Louis slipped from light to darkness, from screams to silence.

Conscious, he felt the flames lick at his crushed feet. Rising up the torn, tattered flesh of his legs. He could not move his legs. He was stuck like meat on a spit. Roasting. The sulfur of his nightshirt caught the flames and spread them over his back, chest, and arms. The flames on the flanks of his back and buttocks were the worst. He looked down through the choking smoke to see the skin of his feet burning away from the bone. He could not feel it. His eyes fell shut. Darkness.

Light.

He heard strange rites being read. He fell again into the pain, descended. Darkness. Light…. Finally, he had the answer to a prayer: he knew that neither heaven nor hell would open for him.

The executioner, seized by something, a spirit of sorts, stepped into the flames. He reached around the screaming curé's head from behind and snapped his neck. One quick twist.

And Father Louis died. The living Father Louis died.

And, as though summoned by the snap of the spine, there descended into the square a flock of bright birds. Flying noiselessly down from every tree, turret, and spire off the square. Pigeons and doves. Whirling silver and white wings like blades. Hundreds. Thousands. Cutting through the bright white smoke, which itself took on the scent of violets, the deeply sweet scent of violets. Dipping, diving, wheeling down around the stake and through the flames, singeing their wings.

The exorcist stood as the birds circled low. His lips moved in mumbled prayer. He gagged against the sweet perfume, knew it to be the Odor of Sanctity. His thoughts were of the Apocalyptic Moment. Henceforth, he'd speak only nonsense.

Canon Mignon fell prayerfully to his knees. Here was the miracle of evil he had waited a lifetime to see! Demons! Come to carry the curé home! He rose to stand in the flames and begged deliverance of Satan. Canon Mignon never uttered another word save prayers to Satan. The burns on his feet, legs, and hands, and their resultant infections, would be recorded as the cause of his death, which came one month to the day.

Panic ensued in the square. Some in the crowd fell to the ground beneath the birds. Hundreds ran choking from the square. Fifteen people were trampled to death, their names to be published in a memorial broadside bearing the title, “The Innocent Dead.”

The executioner slipped from the square into the Church of St. Pierre to pray. The Prosecutor, the Surgeon, and Monsieur Adam remained in the square, cowering beneath the grandstand. Within the year they would all be dead: Monsieur Adam would choke on a potion taken against impotence; the Surgeon was waylaid on the Marseilles Road and stabbed thirteen times by thieves; as for the Prosecutor, he would start to hear voices that very night and, on the first anniversary of the burning, he would do as they bade him and climb up the bell tower of St. Pierre to hang himself.

Of course, none of these deaths were quite what they appeared to be. No poisoning. No robbery. No suicidal urges. Father Louis and Madeleine returned to haunt these men, kill them each and every one in turn; and each man, at the moment of his death, knew it. Saw the faces of the priest and girl and knew,
knew
their fates to be in the hands of devils.

As for Father Louis, he burned down to ash.

The smoke eventually cleared, the scent lifted. The silver and white birds stopped circling, though for days they could be seen ringing the square, in the trees, in eaves, and on statues. Indeed, in Q——, for long years to come, those present at the burning swore they could see the birds, swore they could smell the violets.

The curé's ashes were never scattered, at least not in the manner set forth in the sentence. Rather, late that night, when the flames had died, a few of the faithful and many tourists returned to sift through the warm, unguarded ashes. They hunted the warm dust for pieces of charred flesh, bones, or still-hot teeth. Some searched for relics. Some for souvenirs. Still others sought simple charms that might bring luck or compel love.

What no one knew that day was this: that as the flames and white smoke rose up, as the executioner broke the neck of the curé and the birds and floral stench descended, a thief, under cover of the ceremony in the square, broke into the home of Monsieur Capeau, knowing only that it was the finest on the square. What the thief found, in addition to silver and money enough to sail fast from Marseilles, lest he be implicated in his bloody discovery, was this: the bodies of two young women.

For Madeleine had beaten Sabine to death. Had gone up the back stairs slowly from the kitchen, in her hand an iron of cast steel. With the iron she crushed the skull of the sleeping Sabine. She then descended to the library, the same library in which she'd been coached by Canon Mignon, and there she passed dark hours in a state resembling prayer, suffering extraordinary pains she did not understand. She had her letters. She untied the ribbons that held all the letters she'd never sent to her lover and unborn child. She fanned the letters out around her. She lit a fire and consigned the letters, slowly, one at a time, to the flames. (The ever-increasing pain!) She listened to the commotion in the square that night, heard the hammering together of the second scaffold. The night passed; dawn came. So too did the child, poisoned and abused to an early birth; and death. Madeleine waited. And just as the crowd's cheers told her that the Question was about to begin, she took up the small forked tool used to take coals from the brazier and with what strength remained to her she raked its three blackened tines down the length of her throat. She tore out her tongue. Wrested it from her neck. She choked fast on the upwelling blood.

The thief entered the library last. He'd moved fast through the upper rooms, and had seen only Sabine's stunted left leg, for in her death throes she'd slid from her bed and lay between it and the wall. Still, it was evident a crime had been committed. Blood on the pillows, blood splattered across the silk moiré wallpaper. Then, discovering a second body in the library, one in so gruesome a state, and with the stillborn child blue in the cradle of her legs…seeing this, and realizing too that he already had more than he could carry in the way of wares, the thief left the house as he'd entered it, quickly, and through a kitchen window.

That night Monsieur Capeau returned to Q——, and a burgled and bloodied house from which he'd long been absent. Within the month he'd sell it at considerable profit.

Sabine, one bright morning in mid-October, was buried in sacred ground. It was a grand funeral. Only tourists and the truly curious were in attendance.

The child, a girl, was cut from its mother and burned in the ovens of the Foundling Hospital. Madeleine, as a suicide, was interred at a crossroads well beyond the city walls. Scant rites were read.

N
OT LONG
after the tale was told, Father Louis, seated at the window, broke the silence with, “She's come,” and I watched as he waved to one below.

She comes!
said Madeleine. It was as though her sad fate, so recently recounted, was that of another.
Sebastiana comes!
She said it thrice more. Excited, the red-black lips of her wound verily pulsed; clotted blood fell from its edges, and from its center blood spurted as though from an opened vein. Her
speech
—what else to call it?—loosed a torrent of blood to run down the sides of her split-open throat.

Gently, but with preternatural strength and speed, Father Louis came to lift me from atop the table, where I'd remained all through the tale. He was laughing, and smiling at the succubus. As though he stood before a misbehaving and well-loved child whom he could not scold and must indulge. “I must apologize for my companion,” said he. “She is excited: she has waited centuries for this day.”

Madeleine had made her way to the windowsill. I heard her say again that name that was new to me. I looked to Father Louis.

“She says Sebastiana has come. Sebastiana d'Azur.” And then, suddenly, he returned to the window, signaling to someone out there in the late dark, in the early dawn.

Blood betrayed Madeleine's fast path from the table to the sill. And now blood formed a red ring, a spreading nimbus around her feet, slick on the stony floor.

“Sebastiana comes,” repeated Father Louis.

As does the dawn.
This from Madeleine.
We must hurry if we are to
—I didn't understand the rest of her words. I was, it is fair to say, stunned; exhausted and awestruck. And I was sore, terribly sore where the incubus had had his way. “What…” I began, “what is happening here?”

“Hush,” said Father Louis. He came so quickly toward me that I stepped back and stumbled, nearly fell. “Don't be afraid,” he said, steadying me. “And don't ask for explanations. Now is not the time. Indeed, we've not much time at all.”
There exists the inexplicable;
this I told myself.

The priest placed his cold, vise-like hands atop my shoulders. “The soreness,” he said, pride in his tone, “
that
soreness will be with you awhile. But you enjoyed yourself, no?” I didn't respond. Or perhaps I smiled. It was then I realized that the soreness I was regretting was not the soreness the incubus had caused; rather, it was the soreness that Sister Claire had inflicted.

Sister Claire de Sazilly. I'd nearly forgotten her, for I had not felt the effects of that beating all through the tale of Q——; and afterward, I'd been fast overwhelmed by…
Alors
, here it came again: the blue skin, no longer broken but still tender to the touch, and the blood crusted in the angles of my ear, and the swollen lip still aching where it had been split. With this slight pain—it was slight, yes—there came again the anger, the wild red anger. As for that other soreness, Father Louis's, it was easily suffered. “Ah, yes,” said he. “Savor it. Savor that soreness while it lasts.”

Look!
said Madeleine then; and I moved to join her and the incubus at the library window, the mullioned panes of which were coated with the slightest rime, like the shavings of diamonds. I saw no one, nothing beneath the pale and cloudless sky. Yes, I saw only the first of the sun, and spoke the dreaded word: “Dawn.”

A rustling in the gallery beyond the lesser library's back door, or was it in the corridor? Had the others heard it? I looked to Father Louis, who said, with a sigh, “Yes, I know. They're all about, already; like mice in the night.” And then he sat cross-legged on the table's edge, his arms folded across his broad chest. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say,
Sorry,
and said, “Tell me while we wait: do you know who we are?”

“While we wait for what?” I asked. I was all atremble. I was naked and cold and certain I'd die within the hour. I considered trying the doors. I was ready to run.

Madeleine and Louis looked me up and down, appraisingly. I felt no shame; I didn't recoil from their sight. This surprised me. It surprises me still.

Madeleine came to me from the window—again, she moved as fast as light; she had the torn pink dress in hand and though it was horribly, grossly red-stained, I welcomed its warmth on my shoulders. An instant later I saw the succubus sitting atop the table beside the priest, who asked again: “Do you know who we are?”

“I know who you
were
.” I whispered it: my throat was sore from ill-use.

“Ah, very good,” said Father Louis. “But do you know who, or
what
we are now?”

I could only nod in weak assent. What words might I have offered then to explain what I'd learned?
Trust and learn
.

“All right,” said the priest, “we'll get to that later. Tell me, do you know who
you
are?”

I said my name in full.

“Of course,” said Father Louis lightly. He looked at Madeleine. “What I mean is, well…can you tell us
what
you are?”

I heard those words again.
You are a woman. You are a man.
But I could not repeat them. How could they be true? Yet didn't I
know
them to be true?
What
, in fact, was I? Am I?

(Yes, yes, there are words to describe what I am, my
state
if you will, my physiology. But I choose not to use such words; for all their Latinate elegance, they are ugly, and
I
am not ugly. I know that now; and so those words do not suffice.)

I said nothing. And when Father Louis started to say again, “You are a—”

He was interrupted. By a voice I'd never heard before. Coming from behind me, near the library's secondary door. “You, dear one,” it said—a woman's voice, smooth, warm, and mellifluous—“you are a witch. And you,
mon prêtre,
ought not to tease.” I
longed
to turn toward that voice—how did I resist?—but something stilled me.

Father Louis offered a baldly insincere apology. To me? To this Sebastiana? (For surely it was she who'd come.) It didn't much matter. Only then did I turn to see her standing there beside the now open gallery door. I hadn't heard the door open, and I knew my jailers had locked it when they'd left: I'd heard the rattling chains. Surely she hadn't been in the library all night, in the same shadows from which the others had stepped. But how then had she entered the library?

“Did you hear me, heart?” she asked. “Did you hear what I said?”

I shook my head. She said it a second time:

“You are a witch.”

I said nothing. Had no reaction at all. I simply stared at this…this
apparition
:

A tall thin beautiful woman. Older. She wore diaphanous robes whose blue rivaled that of her eyes. Such extraordinary eyes! “Azur, dear,” said she. “Sebastiana d'Azur.” Indeed her eyes
were
azure blue. Part sapphire, part sea. Her long black hair fell forward over her shoulder in a thick plait. Her skin was the whitest I'd ever seen. A near death-like pallor. But this woman, I knew, was
alive
. And this—need I say it?—was a great relief!

She—this Sebastiana d'Azur—came toward me. As she moved, slowly, deliberately, she undid the hasp of a huge bloodstone broach at her shoulder, freeing one of the robes she wore. Panels of fabric, they were—silk and satin. She took the pink dress from my shoulders, said something about needing it to “effect the trick.” She then stepped back from my nakedness to look me up and down; she did this without comment. She came closer and wrapped me in that bolt of blue. Her arms around me…Ah, the rush I felt then of her warmth, so different from the deathly touch of the incubus. She stood so close she had only to whisper, and as she dressed me she did so, saying: “Not because you are naked, but because you are cold.” And she knotted the robe at my shoulder.

I asked her who she was.

It was Madeleine who replied in hurried tones.
Know that she is the only one who can save you, and ask no more questions.

Sebastiana looked to Madeleine—not at all kindly, it seemed to me—and said, “I am the only one who can save her, yes. But she is the only one who can save
you
…. So mind your tongue, Madeleine.” These last words were rather cruel, of course. And I'd no idea what Sebastiana meant.
Me
save Madeleine?

My wonderment must have shown on my face, for Sebastiana said, “Ah yes, dear, all in due time.” She moved toward the window. “But time, I'm afraid, is what we've precious little of. For the dawn—”

The dawn,
said Madeleine to me, in a crazed rush,
will see you dead unless you do as you are told!

(I know now that Madeleine was not mad; she was eager, exceedingly so, and scared lest we fail at what we, at what
they
had come to do.)

Sebastiana turned back from the window. She smiled at me and, moving to where the succubus sat beside the priest, said, looking disdainfully down at the stained table, the stained stone floor, “Madeleine, can't you do something about that…that
damned
blood. It really is so unsightly.”

Father Louis could not help but laugh. As for Madeleine, she turned from Sebastiana, who, loosing her gaze from the chastened succubus, was reminded by Father Louis that Madeleine's blood flow could not be helped; what's more, said he, there was little point in cleaning it up: one had only to wait seven hours for it to fade away.

“Yes, yes, I know,” said Sebastiana. “But I've always found that to be seven hours too long.”

Madeleine slipped from beside the incubus. I nearly succeeded in tracing her movement to the window.

“Well,” said Sebastiana, summarily, “would that we had seven hours to effect an escape from this cell, but we do not,” and I saw that she was looking beyond Madeleine, gauging the brightening sky; already the coming sun had begun to light the shadowed corners of the library. Sebastiana began to pace, and this same faint light showed her to be naked beneath her thin robes. As for the priest, he sat perched on the table. Finally, from Sebastiana: “You, Madeleine. Did you do as planned?”

I did…. Of course, I did.

“Good. Then we have only to wait—”

Just then we all of us turned toward the corridor. From it came the sound of voices. How many voices I could not say. But one voice I knew, heard distinctly: that of Sister Claire de Sazilly.

I stepped back from that door. Retreated. Nearer Sebastiana.

“They come, yes,” said Sebastiana, smiling at me. “Good, good, good.”

“But Sister Claire, she—” I stammered.

“A handful, that one, eh?” And I watched as Sebastiana squared her shoulders, turned to face the main door full on.

“They are coming,” I said, panicked. “Should we not run and—”

“Indeed not, dear.” She dismissed the idea.

I shot quick looks all around the library—at the main door, still locked and bolted no doubt; at Louis and Madeleine, standing in the last of the library's shadows; at the open window, the open gallery door. Where could I hide? Should I run? Why was no one bothered by this, the advent of my accusers, of Sister Claire? So calm, they were! “Shouldn't we at least—”

“You are safe, dearest,” said Sebastiana. She then raised her arm and I stood so near I had only to take a half-step more for her to settle that arm around my shoulder. She turned just so to kiss my forehead. “We haven't much time, it is true, and there remain a great many details…but you are safe.” Sebastiana was warm to the touch:
she
was alive; and this only served to remind me that my other two saviors were not.

I leaned into Sebastiana. I felt the comforting weight of her breast, the curve of her hip. My arms hung slack at my sides; I dared not touch this woman, not directly, but how I reveled in her warmth, sank into the warmth and safety of her embrace.

I looked at her beautiful face: it bore the traces of her age—shallow creases, thread-thin wrinkles—yet the skin was smooth and pale, and the cheeks were rouged. I saw too that she'd painted her lips red. Her lashes were long and black; they were straight, and so gave to her eyes an ease, an indolence…. Those eyes…I noticed too a scent, what was it? Lime water? No.
Roses
. Ah, yes…roses. Unmistakably. She wore one in her hair, tucked into the first strands of that long black braid. Fresh, its petals red. Red too the coral combs in her hair. And red the stones in the silver earrings that hung low, tossing off the rising light of day.

She stepped from me then, left me standing alone. “But, but…” I stammered, pointing toward the library's main door. Sebastiana made no response; instead she moved to the table on which sat the empty platter, not long ago loaded with roasted squab and such. She traced the painted
S
at the platter's center with a long thin finger, its nail red-lacquered; she sucked at her fingertip and asked, “It was good, no?” I nodded that yes, it was.

“
S
for Sebastiana,” I said.

“Indeed,” said she; and she took a seat on the table's edge. The platter was hers. As were all the
S
-marked books I'd read.

With that commotion in the corridor coming ever nearer—it was Sister Claire, certainly, but in whose company?—Sebastiana, nearly as tall as I, tilted her head just slightly. Somehow she drew my eyes to hers. She stood a few steps from me, in the still-dim library, but I was certain I saw her eyes….

Oh, those
eyes
! Yes, that was when she first showed me
l'oeil de crapaud
. The witches' eye. And I saw that those blue eyes of hers, like Maluenda's, had at their center—