The Book of Shadows (45 page)

I ordered a second beer.

I tried to tell myself that I ought not to worry about the Blood when there is nothing I can do about it. All I can do is hope that it'll be many long years before I find out for myself exactly what the coming of the Blood is like. (“Such an end,” writes Sebastiana, quoting Téotocchi, “though admittedly gruesome, is nothing compared to the life that might precede it, a long and magical life, an
uncommon
life.”)

I opened Sebastiana's Book to the recorded efforts of that Scandinavian sister. I'd determined to proceed with greater care this time. I could not
kill
Madeleine, no; but neither did I care to achieve anything other than the desired end: the cessation of her blood flow. I sat practicing the spell I'd cast, whispering the words, committing them to memory. I envisioned myself, a witch at work. I also procured a third beer.

So distracted, so excited, so eager was I for the appointed hour to arrive that I was stunned when a man—a hugely muscled man, whose ropey forearms I'd been admiring as he read of recent events in
Le cornet d'Anjou
—stood and exclaimed.
Shouted
. For blood was flowing fast from his nostrils. Soon it slickened his shirtfront, and the tiny circular table over which spread the red-streaked newspaper. He raised his clenched hands to his face, but to no effect: blood burst from his fists.

I, several tables away, rose. I went to him. And I apologized, profusely, till finally the barman, who stood before us now as that great hulking château stands before the city, demanded, “What has this to do with you, my man?” Both men looked at me, one panicked and the other puzzled.

“I…I was just sitting over there, and I cast…I accidentally…”

“Get him flat on his back,” called the barkeep's wife, reaching down rags from a distant cupboard.

“You think all problems are best solved by getting a man flat on his back,” jested a bearded man seated where the bar curved around; men flanking him laughed, but only till the bleeding man turned toward them, fainted, and fell to the floor.

I drew a bill from my waistcoat pocket. I left it on my table, though Michel had told me that three such bills could buy a horse not too far past its prime. I left La Grosse Poule, unremarked, uttering the same spell in reverse, for I could think of nothing else to do. I headed out onto the dark, dark streets of the city. I found that I still had a beer in hand. I downed it fast, set the pewter tankard on a sill, and walked on, fast, scared, and none too steadily.

I returned to my room. The elementals were already there; to judge by the chill, they'd only recently come.

“But it isn't midnight,” I said, too quickly—I know now that I expected punishment. I'd done wrong at the tavern, and now I'd hear about it.

“We are well aware of the hour,” said the priest. “We are early, what of it?”

We are eager to hear of this idea of yours. I've known this blood for centuries; hopefully, with your help, I'll know it but a few days more. Still,
said the succubus,
we are eager for you to prove yourself. Quite eager,
she added, turning to the priest.

“So eager,” said he, “we nearly came to you in that squalid tavern, but you seemed to be so enjoying your Bible and your beer.” The priest warned that, dressed as a man or no, I'd soon find trouble if I continued to carry and show as much money as I had that night. Did they not know of my little accident? Did they not care? I dared not ask. And I dared not deny them by excusing myself from any practice of the Craft. I'd a promise to keep. But how I regretted having convoked them that afternoon.

I sat on the edge of the bed. A small fireplace sat opposite; in it someone—the innkeeper, the near-idiot boy in her employ, the elementals?—had set a fire. Before the fire, on two cane-backed chairs, sat the elementals, the fire showing through them though they held strong shapes.

The elementals sat, staring. I said nothing. I listened to the crackling fire; and I heard too a boat passing on the river below: the rhythmic slap of oars. At the window, I saw a blunted triangle of boat trailing a silver line of moonlight. Two passengers sat lovingly entwined on its bow. As I was cold—autumn was already in the air—I took in hand the curves of the iron window-pulls; but then I heard the succubus say, in her garbled and grotesque way,
No. Leave the window open…. Far easier for us
.

Of course: the cold night air, the moisture it held. But why the fire then? Why the fire if the elementals were so dependent on water? I cannot say. Clearly, they had some need of fire too. I've yet to figure just how they made use of
all
the elements.

“Your idea, then?”

Yes,
echoed Madeleine.
Your idea
.

“I think I can stop your bleeding,” said I, flatly, boldy, though now, having stricken that innocent man, I was certain of no such thing. The elementals said nothing at first. Then:

Go ahead,
said Madeleine.
Do it
. Was this a dare?
Do it,
said she, rather more emphatic the second time.

“I will,” said I, like a child challenged.

I took up both books, the Bible and Sebastiana's. Madeleine watched my hands with eagerness.
And which of your books holds so great a secret?

Did I toy with the succubus then? Perhaps. I passed my hands over this book, then that. I saw it was the Bible she hoped I would not open. When finally I set the Bible aside and opened Sebastiana's Book, Madeleine sat back in her chair and her shape, which had grown fuller, faded to what it had been; once again, she and the priest seemed a pair.

“Did Sebastiana warn you?” asked Father Louis. “Did she tell you that a new witch is quite strong, sometimes
too
strong; and that the Craft of such a one cannot always be controlled?…You've read of the calamitous cold of '88, I presume?”

“I've read of it, yes,” I said.

“Do you
understand
the danger implicit in the Craft?…Do you understand what…what a
failure
to understand might result in?”

Madeleine asked,
Did Sebastiana warn you?

I lied when I said she had. In truth, all Sebastiana had said was that I had powers in direct proportion to my witchly youth, and that the elementals had waited a long, long time for a new witch to appear, one who might lay Madeleine down, finally and for all time. Yes, I'd read the cautionary tale in her Book, but—I quite recall thinking this then, and convincing myself of it—it's a
mere
imprecation, a
simple
spell. What can go wrong? For the succubus was, I reasoned, already dead.

“You found this…this
trick
in Sebastiana's Book?” asked the priest.

I said I had. Giving voice to what it was we all thought, Madeleine asked:
Why then didn't
she
ever try it on me?
She turned to Father Louis.
Has she known all these years
…

“This witch cannot speak for the other,” answered Father Louis. Already Madeleine's anger had begun to show: the blood at her neck began to pump, to quicken like water on the boil. “Besides, Madeleine—” began the priest.

Besides,
took up Madeleine,
the other, as you call her, has hated me all these years, has never truly tried to free me from
—

Father Louis stopped her with a whispered word, one I could not hear; and just in time, for by a quick calculation I deduced that the blood she was spilling, spraying here and there in her agitation, her excitement, would not fade until morning, either delaying our departure or giving rise to all sorts of questions that I did not care to answer. How would I dismiss the red web Madeleine wove? The floor before the fireplace was already puddled, and the sill was slick with blood; and the chairs, would I need to burn the ruined chairs?

“What's done is done,” said the priest to Madeleine. “Paris is passed,” said he, referring to the unspoken something between Sebastiana and the succubus. “Now,” he went on, to Madeleine, “listen to
this
witch; we've waited for her.”

Witch,
pled Madeleine,
if you are only experimenting, only teasing me with your
—

“Stop it now,” said the priest, soothingly; he then turned to me to add: “Herculine—or is it Hercule, in this new casting?—if you've given us false hope and—”

“Pison,” I began, “Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Frath. Do you know what those are?”

“I do,” said the priest. “The waters of the world. What of them?”

I read aloud the short entry from Sebastiana's Book, and together, the three of us, over the next quarter hour, worked out the spell I'd cast. And an odd litany it was: I had the elementals recite, repeatedly, the names of those waters while I said them widdershins—this I had
not
done in the tavern, thus causing that unfortunate man's blood to flow forth, not stop, as Madeleine's would; or so I hoped. And all the while I mixed in some simple witches' words, innocuous, as common to the blasting of crops as to the baking of cakes. I was confident I'd rectified the spell.

It's hard to say who among us was most relieved to see the succubus's blood flow cease; for yes, we succeeded. Rather,
I
succeeded. But not before there came a terrible, terrible mess; for the spell caused in Madeleine a great, spasmodic
voiding
. And so I sat, far across the room, with my new boots bloodied; and blood-flecked, too, were my face and hands, my clothes, ruined.

I had thought the blood flow would cease, or hoped it would; never did it dawn on me that it, as changeable as any liquid, could only disappear through a change of state. And thus it did: Madeleine's blood, freed of her body, would evaporate, rise as a fetid, ferric gas and disappear—from plaster as from cloth, from leather as from glass—in the seven hours to come. In the meanwhile, Father Louis and I scrambled about the room, plugging the warped floorboards with the bedclothes lest other tenants find them themselves red-showered, and wondering.

As the exsanguination wore on and on, I went to throw wider the window, thinking—I don't know why—that it might help; too, it might relieve the stench. But as I pushed the window open, it blew back at me and slammed against the casement so suddenly, so sharply, that I marveled that the panes did not shatter in their frames. This sudden wind, how strange. Strange too was the action of the river, which had been still not a half-hour earlier. Whitecaps wove along its middle now, and it splashed over its stony banks. That same boat I'd seen now lay at anchor, its two lovers in a clutch of a different sort.

“What is this?” I asked of the priest. “Is this—”

“It is to be expected,” was all he said. “It will all settle in time.”

Having controlled the red flow in the room as best we could—“Do not bother wiping the walls,” said the priest; “time will work just as well.”—we sat, Father Louis and I, staring at the succubus's slit throat. Madeleine sat immobile, her head back, her eyes closed, her delicate but dirt-caked hands hanging limp at her sides. As the last of the blood burst from her in time with my living pulse, I wondered, fearfully, if I'd accidentally—For the succubus seemed
gone
. If it was not her “death” I'd caused, certainly it was her…her dissolution.

Worried, I willed her to return to us, and she did. She came again to full-form and set immediately to crying; the last of her bitter blood flowed from her eyes as tears. When she spoke—her voice unchanged, regrettably—it was to curse Sebastiana. Sebastiana, who, all those years, had not bothered to try to stop the blood flow, even when begged, even when—

“Good work, witch!” exclaimed Father Louis, interrupting the succubus, who fell silent beside him. I watched as he pulled two fingers from Madeleine's open throat to show them bloodless and dry. “You did it!”…But as fast as he spoke, his smile fell away, and he sat staring at the succubus. I had succeeded, yes. Would I do the same at the crossroads? If so, the elementals, who'd come to believe they were bound each to the other for all time, would, presumably, part. This we all knew—though no one spoke it—and it greatly tempered what joy there was, or what joy there might have been.

The elementals took their leave. Vanished. Wordlessly. It seemed neither of them knew what to say; certainly, neither of them spoke. I knew too, before she quit that tiny room tucked beneath the eaves, that Madeleine felt no differently: she still wanted to go to the crossroads, still wanted to “die.” So it was I wondered: what had I achieved besides a bit of the Craft? The only answer I could arrive at—“Nothing”—rendered me unaccountably sad.

The next morning, when the blood had nearly faded away, I sent word to Michel. I'd meet him at nine, not ten as we'd agreed. After a simple breakfast, I quit the inn to wander a long hour through the still-waking city.

U
PON ARRIVING
in Angers the day prior, I'd had Michel hay the horses and hide the carriage on a backstreet; too, I'd asked rather guiltily if he'd mind spending the night in the berlin. Such had been his intention, said he, much to my relief. Still I gave him some coin—it seemed to me a lot—and this, in what seems a rather common act of transubstantiation, he managed to turn to drink in the night. That next morning, at our rendezvous, he was rank and apologetic. I was surprised—docile Michel, innocent Michel—and sympathetic, for indeed I'd a certain
mal à la tête
myself, owing to the several beers of the night before. Regardless, when Michel asked me to stay on in Angers another day, I denied him, and found I was proud of having done so. What's more, I dispatched him to La Grosse Poule—knowing full well he'd take a hair from the dog that had bitten him—and directed him—in couched terms, obviously—to ask after the bloodied man I'd abandoned. He took with him coin enough to rouse the barkeep and his wife; but he returned with no news, reporting only that the place was “shut up tight as a frog's ass, sir, and that's water-tight.”

It was late morning when finally we left Angers.

The elementals were elsewhere, as they typically were during daylight; and so I raised the shades of the berlin and the on-rolling cab flooded with light, just as the Touraine is often flooded by the waters of the Loire. Indeed, those very waters were already full, though not yet at flood height; the power of the river was evident as it ran steadily in long, slow curves.

Gazing out over the landscape, I never had to wait but a short while for a château to appear on the horizon; indeed, the orchards and vineyards, in which cultivation was evidently easy, were spotted with châteaux, some fantastic, others simpler though still grand in their way.

The Tourangeaux were everywhere at work. The white caps of the women spotted the fields like mushrooms. Time and again we'd pass a group of women walking roadside, or standing atop the dikes that defined one side of the road—always women; where were the men, I wondered?—and they would gape at the berlin. Their vacant faces, their wide-open eyes, gave them the appearance of dumbness, and this was in no way relieved by their simple dress and clumsy sabots; those shoes made it seem as though their feet—if not their bodies entire—had been cut from petrified wood. Feebly, I'd wave to these women; often—overawed, not
naturally
rude—they would not respond. My spirits would sink—for if I
knew
anyone in the world it was these working women—and I'd sit back newly resolved to rid myself of the berlin and hire a lighter, faster, and far less ostentatious trap.

Along this leg of the journey the road was well made and wide, and we were always in sight of the river, often running alongside it. The travel was easy and quick as we made our way through the Touraine.

Tours sits not far from Angers, and we gained it by midafternoon of that third day. We might have arrived earlier, but I'd had Michel stop here and there—to take in this vista, to marvel at the wares in that market; and he, unwell from the aftereffects of drink, had stopped once or twice for reasons of his own.

Rolling into the city, I was instantly charmed by the quay, which—blessedly, unlike vile Nantes—was devoid of any sign of commerce: no stacked barrels or bales, no dark masts rising to the powder-blue sky, no riverine types bounding up onto the berlin to beg; a few barges, yes, but these slow-moving ships seemed imbued with the indolence that characterizes all middays in late summer.

The place, on the whole, seemed to me a fair mix of man's work and nature's. There were gardens and vineyards, and villas here and there, their walls slick with moss, or the scarlet scrawl of woodbine, or five-leaved ivy. Among the simple homes of the Tourangeaux, there rose the gabled and turreted affairs of the affluent. And there was, of course, a cathedral.

As I strolled through the city that afternoon, not
quite
fearful of the place, and trying to make of myself a proper tourist, I saw the decorative towers of the cathedral rising up from the Place de l'Archevêché. Having taken a narrow lane embowered by flying buttresses and overhanging gargoyles, coolly shadowed by the church itself, I found myself standing before the middle of the cathedral's three tall, recessed doors, atop which softly-hued pigeons nestled and cooed. Old habits will have their way, and so it was that time alone in the church seemed to me just the thing; prescriptive, and familiar. Already I could smell the heavy and still air, dense with incense and flowers past their prime; feel the wooden pews smoothed by generations of the faithful; see the pied light from stained glass, thick with the dust of ages, the fiery glow of a bank of votives, and the cold but oddly commiserative faces of the statues.

A survey of the cathedral's exterior had shown it to be drab, dark with age, and weighted with ghoulish sculpture and ungainly buttresses, supremely Gothic if not downright grotesque: I
loved
it. I learned from an inlaid plaque that work on the cathedral was begun in 1170 and completed some four hundred years later, despite which dates there seemed to me a homely harmony in the architecture.

Inside, I found the place—dedicated, I remember, to one St. Gatianus, the first Christian missionary to Gaul—empty; there was not even an old sacristan, as one usually finds in such a place, offering for a coin a tour of every cobwebbed corner.

I sat. The silence and the solitude were luxuries; only then did I realize that what I'd sought was a place to hide. Hide from the elementals; their presence reminded me of all I'd left behind: the unfulfilled promise of a life at Ravndal. Hide too from the wide and prying eyes of the
paysans
. I didn't want to be seen by anyone, for I could not help but wonder what it was they saw when they saw me.
You are a woman. You are a man. You are a witch
.

Yes, that's all I wanted: to sit in silence, hide and not have to think. To still my mind, give over to the burnished wood and bright glass and smooth stone all those questions about who I was, what I was, how I'd live and die, and what it was I'd do across the sea. And I did succeed in stilling my mind, for a while; perhaps I did it with prayer, I cannot say. Old habits.

I settled into a pew not far from the altar, richly lit by the sun streaming through the stained glass. I moved, ever so slightly, with the sun, in an orbit all my own. I slid first into a shaft of red light, and then farther down the pew into a golden glow. In the coolness of the church that buttery light seemed wonderfully warm. I let it play on my face. I fairly bathed in it! I lifted my hands, turned them this way and that, played at catching first the gold, then the green, then finally the violet light.

Time passed; no more than an hour, I'd say.

I sat considering the tomb of the two children of Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany, nestled in a corner of the cathedral not far from where I sat. Its white marble was carved with dolphins, which are said to guide the dead, and the fox-like, emblematic ermine that everywhere marks the influence of Anne; too, it bore vines festooned with flowers, foliage, and fruit. The boy and girl—dead young, and of natural cause—lay side by side, pairs of angels at their heads and feet. I sat, engaged in the elegance of that tomb, wondering was my melancholy gone, or was it refining itself? Sharpening itself, grinding itself blade-like on the carved marble?

An answer to that question came in the shape of a woman.

I hadn't heard the great doors open behind me; neither had the darkness of the cathedral been diluted by any rush of daylight. Still, I heard something. Someone. Turning, I saw her coming down the center aisle. She wore a long black veil that, in company with the shadows, obscured her whole person. She walked at a bride's pace, and with a bride's stiffened gait. She did not slide into a pew of her own, as I expected she would. No; she continued on, toward me.

She stopped at the end of the pew,
my
pew. She turned and—without genuflection—entered the pew, slowly making her way toward me. Did she not see me? I cleared my throat. I slid a bit farther from her, but she came on, with an uncommon grace, as if afloat, not at all awkward in so narrow a space. She sat beside me.

She kept her long black veil lowered, but when she turned just so, and the colored light shifted across the black tulle of the veil, I could discern her profile. She was young, and beautiful, and a mass of unbound red hair fell over her shoulders. She wore a voluminous skirt of a powdery blue that fell neatly into its pleats and billowed out around her as she sat. I glimpsed her black boot, ankle-high, with three buttons of pearl up its outer side.

Clouds passed over the late-day sun, muting the cathedral's light. A moment later the sun burned its way through the clouds and the shafts of red, yellow, green, et cetera, were as bright as before. Blue light hung in the air like smoke. Shadows of birds passed over the stained glass; fixed there, trapped, were the pilgrims, the saints, and martyrs unaffected by the changeable light and the shadow-birds, unaffected too by the witch gazing up at their piebald shapes. I envied them their stillness, their perpetuity—the fixedness of their lives, long ended. It was then I discovered that my eyes were brimming with tears. It was then too that the woman beside me spoke:

“Don't cry,” said she. Her voice was warm, mellifluous, and deep. But the wonder of her words soon ceded to this: How did she know I was crying? She'd not turned toward me. And I, from long years of practice, am expert at stifling my tears—no wracking sobs, no heaving shoulders.

“Don't cry,” she repeated; and with that she knelt. At first it seemed she was falling, and I nearly reached to steady her. She moved as would a marionette with tangled strings, or an unsteady hand above her. But then I sat back and watched as she…as
it,
that body, was made to kneel…. Imagine a face rising up from underwater: I know of no better way to describe what it was like as that woman, as the arms of that borrowed body raised themselves jerkily up to lift that veil and show to me,
there,
like a mask, atop that deathly still and unfamiliar face, the quite familiar face of Madeleine de la Mettrie.

I'd seen what I'd seen, yes; but only when Madeleine caused the cold hand of the corpse to settle unsteadily over mine, only at that icy touch and the garbled, liquescent voice,
her
voice, to which she reverted, telling me again I ought not to cry—only then did I know it was Madeleine beside me, resident in a dead body.

“Mon Dieu!”
I cried, standing up fast. “What are you—”

Sit,
she commanded. Apologetically, she added:
It's so much easier, witch. Would you have me walk through the streets of Tours as I am?

“Why walk at all?” I asked. “I thought you moved…willfully, without need of—”

Sometimes it's fun. Now sit!

I was to accept this and ask no further questions. So be it. I'd sit in church and converse with a cadaver.

“Who
is
that, anyway?” I had to ask it.

Newly dead,
said the succubus,
but she's stiffening terribly
…She caused to flex the fingers of the left hand, then the right; she turned the head toward me. Dismissively, she added,
It's no concern of yours, witch, who she is
.

“Will she be missed?” Specifically, my thought was this: has she a daughter, or a son, who will be sent away?

She'll not be missed until she's found,
answered the succubus, adding to that riddle, after a pause:
And I didn't kill her, if that's what you're wondering. I found her not far from here, dressed but fallen beside her bed. Her heart was young, yes, but faulty: it gave out not long after dawn. Let her loved ones find her here, nearer her God.

That was exactly what I was wondering—if Madeleine had killed her witless host; and, though I thought to commend her on what seemed a kindness, I said nothing else. Nor did Madeleine speak, with either voice. There the two of us sat, shoulder to shoulder in the cathedral of St. Gatianus in Tours. To any worshiper who might come we'd appear to be two souls deep in prayer.

Finally, Madeleine spoke. She used the…the
other's
voice. “Kneel with me,” she said. “I cannot see you…. This neck…it's already rigid and…”

I knelt beside her. “Please,” said I, “don't use that voice. I'm finally used to yours, and I cannot bear to be reminded that I'm here with—”

All right then!…Now listen, witch. I've come…I've come to thank you.

Anyone near us would have heard Madeleine's voice as a rush of air, something like the beating wings of the lone pigeon I spied high up in the nave. Her voice was a bit different,
drier
perhaps. Still there was a watery quality to it, akin to an overrunning gutter; perhaps her voice
had
changed when I'd worked the Craft to stop her blood flow…. And it was that for which I thought she'd come to thank me.

“It worked then, the spell?” I knew it had. “The blood—”

Yes. Let us hope your Craft is as strong at the crossroads.

“You understand,” I said, “I've no idea how…. I don't know if I—”

That's why I've come. That's why I followed you here, holding to this cold shape.

“Why?”

To thank you, and to tell you more about this
mission
of ours, as your Sebastiana calls it.

I said nothing. Could it be that someone was going to
offer
information, that finally I'd not have to pry, deduce, guess, worry, or wonder?

You know, of course, that for two centuries now I have been trying to die, trying to escape my fate. I have tried in so many ways
…. Her voice trailed off. I watched as she awkwardly slapped the corpse's hands together and held visetight to that prayerful pose.