The Book of Shadows (50 page)

“Oh, pitiable creature! Presume not to show me the face of my accusers, for I was accused by none but the likes of thee, and so it is to thee I have returned!”

“‘For what purpose hast thou returned?'” intoned the incubus.

“You denied me a Christian burial. It is that I seek. By your rites you condemned me to roam the earth in discarnate form.”

Father Louis pranced on, beneath and around Madeleine. “‘I adjure thee, most vile spirit, the very embodiment of Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who, after his baptism in Jordan, was led into the wilderness and overcame thee in thine own habitations, that thou stop assaulting this creature whom He hath formed from the dust of the earth to the honor of His glory….'”

They each of them rose to fever pitch. The windows blew open. The flames threatened to leap from the hearth. I worried that the fire, feeding on the swirling wind, might spill from its place, set first the rug and then the whole room aflame!

“‘…Therefore, yield to God, who by his servant Moses drowned thee and thy malice, who pitched Pharaoh and his army into the Abyss. Yield to God, who made thee flee when expelled from King Saul with spiritual songs sung through his most faithful servant, David. Yield to God, who condemned thee in Judas Iscariot, the traitor, who—'” and the exorcism went on.

Madeleine's spinning finally slowed, then stopped. Father Louis, not seeming to notice, capered on, reciting the rite from memory.

Madeleine descended to stand before the fire. Her descent seemed to tame the flames. She came at mortal speed to sit beside me, and by the din of the continuing exorcism, and the dying wind, she told me the end of the tale, fairly whispering it in my ear.

Spinning and spinning there, strong in the wet winter air, I…I did a dreadful thing.

I took…I took a short-handled scythe from someone in the crowd, snatched it up as they all scurried about like bugs, and I set to hacking at the stiffening corpse of the Mother Superior, at my bodily host.
Madeleine mimed the actions she described.
I held the scythe in my left hand and with it severed the three lower fingers of the right hand. The fingers fell upon the screaming priest. I hacked at the chest, the neck—I would have severed the head but for the spinal cord, and the too dull blade. Spinning all the while, I loosed the nun's cold blood to spray the assembled, to spray the
cowering priest…. Witch, I did dreadful damage to that body.

“But why,” I asked, “why would you do such a thing?”

Anger, perhaps; anger at my seemingly inescapable lot. Vengeance, vengeance for what had been done to the Mother Superior, and to countless others falsely accused. Perhaps I hoped to break the faith of those who were witness to the rite…. Perhaps it is the suicide's abiding impulse.

“What did they do, those who were witness to—?” I led.

It was a scene straight from the brush of Bosch,
said the succubus.
Pan-demonium.

“And Father François? What became of the impure priest?”

He was sanctioned, in absentia, by the Parliament of Dijon for having read the rite of exorcism without the bishop present. It was a sham verdict, for he'd had the bishop's permission, but the people of A——demanded the verdict. Of course, by the time the Parliament concluded its inquiry, Father François was long gone, chased from A——for having brought such devilry down upon the place.

“The priest…did you…? You said earlier that you did Sister St. Colombe's bidding…”

Oh yes, I found and visited Father François some days later. And by the time I was done with him he'd determined to lay himself down in a deep mountain stream, his pockets full of rocks, his mouth open to the flow.

“The nuns?”

Dispersed. The convent was closed, and eventually razed. The townsmen fled, nearly to a one, and the town is not marked now on any map. Nothing remains but the shell of that church, the roof of which fell in long ago beneath the weight of a winter snow; the steeple sits now inside the church, as though retracted from God's sight.

“So, it ends there?” As I spoke those words, only then did I notice that Father Louis had slipped away, silently. He was gone.

Mais non, said Madeleine.
It begins there, with the rites of Bell, Book, and Candle, and exorcism. Just where it ends, well…we'll see shortly, won't we?

Sleep now,
said she; and, too fast to follow, she quit the room: so said the sputtering fire.

I
WOKE SHIVERING
from a fitful sleep; dreams had plagued me, but upon waking I could not recall them. I'd no idea how long I'd slept. Neither did I know where I was.

I sat up and felt the ermine wrap slip from my shoulders. And the
Chambre de Parade
was cold, terribly cold; and colder still when I heard behind me, in a familiar whisper,
“Bonjour.”
At that a fire, born of charred and cooled logs, rose sudden and strong; and I scuttled back from its flames into the arms of a kneeling…

“Mais ce n'est pas possible!”
I breathed, my heart snared like a rabbit in a trap. I drew the snow-pure ermine up to my throat. To protect myself. Perhaps to stopper my throat, for already the word was rising up in it, the word I spoke though I knew it to be a lie. The word was a name and the name was Roméo.

I said it twice more as my waking eyes focused on that familiar figure, standing above me now. He did not speak. He simply smiled down. I cannot say what it was he wore, for suddenly he began to…to undress, and I took no note of the fabric as it fell. Only when I saw through tears his nakedness, only when I reached out to touch his cold bare calf, only as my hand neared the lifeless flesh…Only then did I know, and my hand, my arm, my heart, my…my very self and the whole of my soul drew back, disgusted.

“Bâtard!”
said I, equally shamed and angry. “How
could
you?”…But the incubus was beyond insult.

“You are happy to see me,
non
?” he asked in the appropriated voice. To hear Roméo's voice pained me, even though it was not Roméo who spoke, not
my
Roméo; worse was the pain of
seeing
him, being subjected to the stygian illusion.

“You are happy,” said the incubus again, coming closer, planting a bare foot on my trousered hip. Through the fabric I could feel that foot's weight! And the icy crawl of the toes as he worked them onto my inner thigh, and toward my….

“No,” said I, scurrying back. “I am
not
happy.” I stared up at the creation: it was as though Michelangelo himself had set to work with pick and chisel on a block of ice…. Ah, but it
was
but a block of animate ice!

“But I've only come to thank you,” said the priest in his own voice. “This is what you wanted, no?” With his hands he indicated the whole of the naked body, and with one particular gesture—so lewd, pure Father Louis—he indicated a certain
part
of that body, and asked again, “
This
is what you wanted, no?”

“You would
thank
me?” I asked, scampering crab-like toward the hearth, away from the cold temptation. “You would thank me with this…this
glamour
?”

“I would thank you, yes,” he said—he seemed, unaccountably, sincere—and he went on, “for what you have done, for what you will do in the coming days—your Craft, your witch's work.”

“But you…you are not him! And
that
…”—my turn now to envelop the exquisite body with a gesture—“
that
is not Roméo!”

“No,” observed the priest, rather matter-of-factly, “it is not.” Already the conjured Roméo was losing strength; what had seemed the densest of flesh began to dissolve in the light of the flames. “But, my dear,
this
is the closest you're likely to get.” And lest I confuse his meaning, the incubus worked the body's member to rigidity, so grotesquely, so lasciviously…

I turned from him. “Go away,” I said. (I would
not
cry.) “Please, go away.”

The incubus did not,
would
not understand. He stepped around, into my sight, to proffer the icy member a second time. His appeals, though obscene, were…were pathetic as well, for yes, he was, in his way, sincere. I heard again his words of the night before: one cannot fault a being for doing what it is in his nature to do. My anger was lessening, for Father Louis retained in death the considerable charms he'd had in life. He'd heed no command or plea. Understand no reason…. I would need to manipulate the incubus more subtly than that. When he renewed his campaign a final time, I interrupted:

“Louis,” said I, dryly, addressing him as Madeleine did, “go get the berlin ready…. Go now.” And I waved a lazy hand in the direction of the door.

It worked, this superciliousness. It angered the incubus to distraction. Flames rose to scratch at the red marble of the mantel. Before the incubus could litter the air with invective, I spoke again: “If that…if
that
is your way of ‘thanking' me, I say no thank you, and I tell you again:
Go!
Ready the berlin.”

It was difficult to not look upon that beauty, illusory though it was. But I did not turn back to the incubus. I stared instead into the flames; and in their action I read it plainly: the incubus had surrendered, and gone.

I wanted only to quit that room, quit the château—how
silly
it seemed to me now, in its ostentation, its callous and arrogant scale—and retake the road. I took to the cold, dark halls, walked from the
Chambre de Parade
caring not a whit who'd slept there. I descended that famed staircase, and I heard with disdain the echo of all the jeweled heels, the swish of all the embroidered trains that had taken those steps over the centuries, and the conjured sounds left me unaccountably cold…. I hastened my own, less ghostly step; but I stopped when my thoughts turned to a practical matter: I had no driver. Father Louis had led us to the château, had dismissed Michel. What to do now? I'd never even guided a wheelbarrow, let alone a monstrously large coach led by a team!

I walked from the château, out into the courtyard. I stood surrounded by the smothering stone towers, aglint with dew. I judged the hour by the sun's height: perhaps six, seven o'clock. There sat the berlin. The horses were hitched and eager. I was not; for instantly, I understood: the rebuffed Father Louis would take a perverse joy in seeing
me
atop the box!

As I approached the berlin, which loomed larger, more
ludicrous
with every step, the gates through which we'd entered the courtyard opened, creakily, inexplicably. “No,” said I. “There's simply no way…” and I stood with hands on my hips, shaking my head. “I will
not
mount the box.”

The sole response came from the horses: they switched their tails, turned their heads this way and that, blew steaming breath from their flared nostrils…
“No!”
I insisted; it was the horses I addressed.

I heard then the priest's taunting voice on the air: “It's a thing a
man
would do,” said he. I cursed him soundly, though he was nowhere in sight. And then I clambered up onto the box and took the reins. What else was I to do?

The horses tensed. There sat the gates: wide-open and straight ahead. “This will be easy.” Whether I spoke to assuage myself or the horses I do not know. I made a vague motion with my wrists, wriggling the leather of the reins, and the horses lurched forward a step or two. With this, I was content:
slow
progress was still progress, no? But then my diabolical friend, unseen, somehow caused the reins to come alive in my hands! They were as snakes, snapping and biting at the horses! He issued a fast command in tones understood by equine ears, and that contraption, the candied coach atop which I sat flew forward, and we were off at a clip. I fell back against the short-backed drivers' bench. I looked down to the rushing ground—too high to jump, too far to fall; and so I held on as best I could, closing my eyes and bracing myself when it seemed certain we'd crash against the gates, shearing off the berlin's left side in the process.

Somehow we slipped through; and I felt almost triumphant. The priest's laughter grew faint as faraway birdsong. And then there came
true
birdsong as we roused the residents of the parkland. I listened to it, and to the gravel being ground by the carriage wheels. Perhaps the horses had a memory of the way we'd come, or perhaps the priest guided them. What I mean to say is this: though I held tightly to the reins, it was no achievement of mine that we eventually regained the Coast Road.

We returned to the river. Suffice to say that I never quite took to the role of driver; I did, however, do it, for, as the incubus had said,
It's a thing a man would do.

As I drove that early morning from Chambord, listening to the murmuring river and the great grinding wheels of the coach, marveling at the muscular motion of the horses, I watched the sun rise higher and higher. Its light fired the undersides of the thin clouds, and nature's palette shone acutely. Violet and palest pink, recalling the smooth insides of seashells, ceded to nacre and bister and honey as the sun stood taller, stretched and surrendered its somnolent stoop. The dimmer twin of every shade swam atop the river. And light played in the trees too, tangled itself in branches still dressed with late-season leaves. I grew calm. I gave myself over to the light, and I recall it more vividly than many of the seemingly more extraordinary things I'd already witnessed, and would witness still.

When we reached our first village the hour was early still; and, as old men wake before younger men, it was to an assembly of such, fishing from two benches beside the river, just outside the village proper, that I made my appeal: did they know where I might hire a driver to go to Bourges and perhaps beyond?

None responded to my very direct question. Instead, abandoning their flimsy fishing canes to the bank, they came to circle the berlin, to marvel at and test its every surface. They stared as if it harbored the headless ghost of its intended inhabitant, dead now these thirty-odd years.

“Are the fish not about this morning?” I asked. The four men took up their poles again, my question still unanswered.

“They are not,” I was told by the younger man. “Spooked by something, scared away.” After a pause of some heft, he went on: “Seems the river overrode its banks last night. Not here, but farther back. Nearer the château. Fickle as a woman, she is.” He turned now to address his peers, saying, in a charged tone, “Témoigner told me it was wild in the night, that the fish rose up to beg for hooks!”

“Surprising, that,” said the ill-married man. “It is early for the river to rise.”

“It rose last night, perhaps,” said he whose beret concealed a hairless pate that shone smooth and bright, and which he now bared; he ran a broad and roughened palm over it as he spoke on: “But see—is she not calm now? Higher than her summer low,
oui;
but we've some weeks before she truly rises, flexes like…like…” and he pushed high his sleeve to show his hale and withered left biceps, on which an anchor, festooned with chain, wavered. I'd see more tattooed men—in direct proportion to our proximity to the sea, it seemed—but then, I was struck by the bright patch of flesh and asked with outreaching finger if…I asked, regrettably, if I might touch it—at which the sleeve fell fast, as fast as those eight eyebrows arched.

“You might try the blacksmith's boy.” This reprieve came fast from the tattooed man. Then, having stared at me a bit too long, he added as afterthought, “I hear he is itching to get away from his father's fires.”

“He is gone already, cousin. Off to Nantes. Day before last.”

“I need a driver.” I said it plainly. (Still I was terribly embarrassed.) “I will pay fairly for a driver to take me to Bourges, perhaps beyond.” I showed my purse, retrieved from the cab; indeed, I held it open in my palms like an overripened, split fruit. Money, I would learn, concentrates the attentions of men, and certain women, too. “My driver has deserted me and…”

And shortly, with money spent, I had what it was I needed: the name of one Étienne B——. I forget who it was gave the name, but all four men then set to scratching directions in the dirt with the blunt ends of their fishing canes, such that I marvel that I ever found my way.

But indeed, I'd soon contracted with my new driver, whom I'd found sitting before a squat and squalid home, his chair tipped back against a sill. He was whittling—to no end, no purpose I could figure—the handle of a broom. I made a quite generous offer. He asked for more money, and, flummoxed, knowing only that I did not wish to drive myself, I agreed. (I did not yet know that one is supposed to start low in negotiations of this kind.) This Étienne went into his hovel. Not long after, he came around the distant corner to which I'd directed him, rucksack over his shoulder, saw the berlin and stopped. I feared he'd turn and leave me. “It's nothing really,” I urged, “just a trap, larger and fancier than some, I suppose.” He smiled, threw his bag up onto the box, and climbed up after it.

Étienne—who would prove an able and devout driver, and would indeed drive me beyond Bourges, all the way to Avignon—was perhaps three times my age, unclean and ugly, broad-shouldered…but appealing. I knew him by his eyes, which were clear and bright. He had about him the air of one who will do anything for money, owing not to necessity but rather to the simple appeal of coin; and, as the chief characteristic of such a man is silence, the seeming absence of curiosity—Étienne would ask no questions; he made that plain—I was pleased with my new hire.

We drove toward Bourges, a stretch of some distance. I decided we'd drive directly; that is, we'd abandon the Loire. We'd not waste time seeking out rivers or streams or canals that would sustain the elementals. In truth, after recent events, I wanted time without them, time alone. What's more, we had but three days before the new moon rose, at which time we'd need to be significantly farther south. If the priest took exception to my decision, he did not come to say so.