by Tanith Lee
“Poor young girl,” said the priest after a few moments. “What a loss to you, the daughter, then the husband. Where are they buried?”
“And the house,” interjected the woman brutishly. Then she said, “On the land. The Desbouchamps bury their dead close. Now what shall I do? The land’s no longer mine.”
“Their graves must be moved, madame,” said the priest.
“I’ll show you,” she said. And again there was the flash of malign conspiracy. As if she knew what he was at, liked it, although that could hardly be.
It was a little mausoleum, like a Roman tomb, not unusual among wealthy country families. Through the grille he glimpsed the shape of coffins. He would need a pick to smash the lock, but the place was up the hill, hidden by trees and deserted. They chained the three last dogs by night, and there were only a pair of old men now on the estate.
So, at two in the morning, he duly returned, with his pickax and his lantern.
The incongruity of what he did had ceased to irk him. He was beyond that. The letter burning through the safe had gradually seared out his ethics. He struck the lock and broke it with four blows, each of which echoed away along the valley, but no light fluttered up in the manor house, no one rushed from the buildings, not even the owls hooted.
The stench and awfulness of the mausoleum did not check him either, for he had been expecting them, and once or twice he had stood over an opened grave, the stink of it worse than excrement or sewers in its omen of mortality.
Her box, the coffin of Marie-Mai, he located without difficulty, knowing what to look for. He dredged up the cobwebs and saw the tracks of a squirrel over the lid – it must have come in at the broken grille. What had attracted it to this one case alone? For it had ignored the others. Shuddering, the priest levered up the planks. He saw what he had reckoned to see, the bones of a young girl whose young girl’s skin had gone to mummy and fallen away, some strands and traces of hair, the crumbled wedding garments in which she had been buried, the marriage ring rattling on the thinnest of thin fingers.
“God strengthen me. God forgive me,” said the priest. And then he tore down the powdery bridal clothes. And so he saw, without any shadow of doubt, for indeed he held the lamp over the coffin, he spared himself nothing. Roland Coville had not lied.
Then, going outside, the priest threw up, tried to throw up it seemed his heart and soul. And when he was done, trembling, he went back in and shut up the coffin fast with a hammer and nails, closed it more tightly than before. This work finished, he left the place and went down the hill, and back to the village inn, where they were too respectful of a City priest to ask any questions.
The priest paced the length of three weeks, in his church on the slanting street, in his rooms, under the architraves of Paradys. There was no help for Roland, who by now was as near to dust as the thing he had killed and died for. What, then, to do with the truth, that terrible naked sword? At length, the priest made his decision, and it resembled Roland’s own, for neither would he, the priest of God, tamper with the revealed face of the Devil.
He sat with papers and ink and candles, and through the night he wrote, and rewrote, what he had been privy to. And in the end, near dawn, he burned his experiments, and had it down alone on paper in a manner that at least was not hysterical, nor crude, nor yet of course entirely believable, but how could he help that? He added to it a line of Latin, by way of protection, and folded up the paper, and sealed it, and stored it, together with the letter of Roland Coville, in a new deposit that should not be opened until his death.
That, then, was how the priest dealt with what he had learned and seen. And so truth lay in the dark for another sixty years.
During that time, everything changed. The great Revolution came and went, the Days of Liberty, the Years of Blood. The paper lay in its vault, and Marie-Mai in her coffin, undisturbed, like shells of a lost sea deep in the soil, that all the turning wheels and veering scythes of the world cannot dislodge. Only the hand that knows their places, only that can find them out. Or some wild accident.
“There is a rat,” said the landowner. “I tell you, I hear it, you fool.”
“No rats, sir. I keep them away.”
“Damn you, I tell you I hear them. I walk by this horrible spot, and I hear them, gnawing and gnashing in the vault. Look at this thing! A gargoyle of a tomb. Pull it down, I say. Scatter the bones. What were they, that family of no-goods? Rich men feeding off the poor of this region. I fought on the barricades against their sort.”
He had not actually fought, he had been a clerk, but scum generally rises to the top. Now he had his farm here, and did well from it. His memories altered to fit present circumstances, and he despised the dead Desbouchamps whose land he had acquired, bloodsuckers, with their silly, half-aristocratic name –
“I watched all night. Saw not one rat.”
“But did you hear the sound of their rat jaws biting together?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir. You’re not a serf any more. Address me as brother. And stop arguing with me. I gave you an order.”
“Yes, brother?”
“We’ll have this rotting tomb pulled down. We’ll turn them out.”
The mausoleum of the Desbouchamps was duly ripped apart, its Roman columns flung over, its piteous insides rolled forth into the blistering sunlight of that summer when the rain would fail and the crops die, and new plagues of want stalk the land, as if mere blood had not been enough. But he did not know that yet, the clerk from Paradys. Nor did he know anything of the priest’s paper, which, that very year, too, had been read by a few august eyes, which had escaped the battery. A few clever eyes, that would take the paper and the letter for a symbol of the monstrous times, like the bleeding of a loaf or a frog with a tail, a portent, immaterial as to truth or lie.
The risen clerk from Paradys kicked the Desbouchamps coffins. A couple burst open and the inhabitants sprawled on the grass. He laughed at those.
“Here’s one nicely nailed. More solid. Something to hide. Perhaps there are jewels in here.” And thrusting off his brother workmen, to whom, to his wife, he referred as walking rubbish, the clerk prized up the lid and threw it off. “Pough! What an effluvia!” (He liked occasional long words.) He held his nose and attempted not to retch. Then he called one of the fellows to rummage in the bones.
There were no gems, no earrings, necklaces, only an old tarnished ring, perhaps silver, which he had away from the workman at once.
It must have been a woman. Her long hair had fallen off, her dress had been torn.
He peered at her to be sure he had missed nothing.
Then the workman gave a hoarse cry.
“What is it, you damned fool?”
The man drew away, potently terrified. He ran to one of his mates, clasped him, gabbled, and rushed off between the trees.
“Well, he’ll be whipped.”
The clerk laughed again, then he looked. And at long last he saw.
The woman was all bones, discolored as if charred, and in her skull the teeth, once young and white, had loosened and dropped out. But lower, where the dress was torn wide, he could see in at the tilted bones of her pelvis, and there, between her legs, she had another set, and these were perfect, still white and very sharp. They lay in the nest of her skeleton like a little wreath of snowy flowers. In life they would not have been visible, for plainly they had been tucked neatly away behind the smooth lips and taut maidenhead, secure in the second mouth of her vagina. There they had waited, as if any man had dared. What a bite they could have given him!
The clerk leaned back and laughed heartily. Then he got up, gray and shaking, and told his men to close the coffin. He did not want a sideshow on his property. It must go to the City. Perhaps a grave could be found for it there, in some corner of the overflowing cemeteries of Paradys.
It was about this time, that day or another, that the august and clever eyes of the priesthood also turned from the paper
they had been reading. And it was then, while the one decided on a sideshow, a joke, that the others decided on a portent, the apocalypse.
Dominus illuminatio mea, et salus mea, quem timebo? said the Latin, put there on his paper by the priest.
While the clerk was telling his drunken cronies, and his drunken wife, at dinner, what he had seen, and the rafters of the old Desbouchamps manor rocked with the laughter of the jest, the wise men who had also looked on the face of the Devil crept to their hiding places, courageously repeating their affirmation, The Lord is my light and my safety, whom shall I fear?
* * *
So the years of Revolution swept over Paradys and her landscape, in a primordial sea.
The mysterious poet André St. Jean, who saw their beginning, apparently barely mentions anything of them, being taken up with his own affairs of the heart.
Enough is known of the bloodshed. The graveyard here bears its witness.
One anecdote is perhaps worth repeating, the curious tale of Monsieur Raccoon.
He escaped from the zoological gardens before the hungry and threatening mob could make a meal of him, and thereafter devoted himself to the rescue of forlorn innocents from the gallows. The flaunting banner of his striped tail was a fearful sight to the executioner and his assistants. From the rope he whisked away countless numbers, swooning pale maidens and paler gentlemen, in his capable paws. At length, Monsieur Raccoon was captured, and imprisoned in one of the most notorious of the prisons. But here he charmed them all so well that eventually he made his own escape, leaping high above the heads of the jailers and vanishing, swinging through the beams, with a whisk of his cream-and-charcoal tail.
He was whispered of among the forests of the gallows, among the stone cages of the prisons, for months after. The aristocrat upon the scaffold had only to mention, “Ah, for the Raccoon,” to cause his assailant to blanch. In the zoo you will see a commemorative plaque concerning him. But here in the long grass where an angel’s broken hand has fallen, here there is another marker.
This too owes its dead-life to the Revolution, although in a roundabout way. The name reveals perhaps a sidelong descendant of André St. Jean, or perhaps not, for the name is not uncommon in Paradys. The fate, more so …
The story was told me one evening in a café by the river, near to the ruined bridge. The dusk was blurred by fog, and somewhere below, where the bank ended and the water began, the vague torched eyes of barges were creeping up and down, slow and fearful, with now and then the mournful warning of a gong. In the café, the fog had entered too, and, with the primal oil lamps and the smoke of cigarettes, gave us the atmosphere of Venus. An old man was brought over suddenly under the ominous announcement, “Here is a fellow can tell you a few histories.”
They sat him before me and there he was, creaking in his overcoat. I filled him a glass, and idly invited him to begin. He started to talk of the Revolution. He looked ancient enough to have known the participants, when a boy. Not until he was well into his third glass, did he squint at me slyly and say, “But the strangest stories come after the Revolution ended. When they washed the City clean of blood, and put the axes away. It was then.”
After which he launched into a narrative that had something in it of a Shakespearian drama, and something of the nature of a myth. I did not know if I, or he, believed it. Punctuated by the eerie flickers from the river, dispersed through the lamplit fog, it clung inside my head. False or real, it had its own truth. I set it down; now you must judge for yourself.
The Nightmare’s Tale
The Devil beats his drum,
Casting out his spell,
Dragging all his own
Down into Hell.
– David Sylvian
1
Of the many thousands who had died in the murderous blood tides of Revolutionary times, there had been a young poet and his innocent wife. Their names and lives may be found elsewhere, he a dark and clamorous man, she pale as a swan, following her husband to the scaffold in the white dress of a bride. They left behind a child, then only two years old. This offspring was brought up by a surviving sister of the mother’s – although in those days, it was not unusual, when one member of the family was confiscated for the gallows, for the rest soon enough to be dragged in tow.
The woman, who shall be called Andromede, raised the little boy in the best fashion she could, and at the proper age saw to it that he was educated to the highest and nicest degree she could afford. Along with the nourishment of his body, clothing of his person, and tutoring of his mind, she also saw to it that her sister’s son was fed, garbed, and schooled in most incredible amounts of pure bitterness. It may have been that she herself was once in love with Jean de St. Jean’s father, the poet, or that she had loved her sister excessively. Or it may have been simply the fact of the terrible shock she had undergone when all her familial world was swept away in the space of two or three horrible months: Something made of Andromede a powerful and insidious instructor in the lessons of enduring hate.
How she did it can only be guessed. One half imagines that instead of grace before a meal, some other words were spoken, rather in the way of the antique toast “Death to my enemies.” Or that over the beds were hung samplers that read “You shall seek out the wicked and destroy them.” And “An eye for an eye.”
Probably, when she knelt down like gray marble in the church at the end of the street, and the child asked what she prayed, Andromede may well have replied, “For justice!” And probably also she indoctrinated the little Jean with anecdotes of his parents, their vivid talents and virtues, their fairy-tale love, and their death.
For eighteen years, until the age of twenty, Jean de St. Jean grew to manhood in that shadowy City of aftermath, the wreckage of a revolution, going about between a grim stony school with turrets and cobbled yards, reeking stoves, mealy books, and a maze of crooked, crowded, dirty streets that led up into an apartment with windows that peered across a joiners’ court at a high wall, three rooms that were thick with dust in summer and wet with cold in winter, and whose stove smoldered and reeked worse, and if there was generally sufficient to eat, it came at the cost of something, some gnawing, obscure pride to do with a state pension, a recompense for the unspeakable that could never be enough. And as he grew up, then, forcing his way toward the light like a plant in flinty ground, Jean de St. Jean, the poet’s son, breathed up, with the damp and dust and the church bells from the street’s end and the invisible samplers of hatred, an exquisite yearning for he knew not what. But it was not ambition or carnality or fame or happiness. And one day, one morning, by accident, he discovered its being and what it was. It was revenge. And like a luscious berry, God had put it in his hand.
He rushed home to the mean apartment of his aunt, along the knotted streets, his heart in his mouth, bounded up the stairs, and flung wide the door.
“Anny!” he exclaimed, which was his pet name for Andromede the hateress. “Anny, you won’t credit –”
Andromede came through from her bedroom, where she had been pinning up her hair tightly. For the first time in eighteen years she felt the full spasm of fear. She stared into her nephew’s face and saw him for what he was, as if, until this moment, he had been partly hidden from her. He was a man, with the hair of her sister in a sun-caught cloud around his face, and his eyes dark and clamoring.
“Whatever –” she began.
He held up his hand to silence her.
“I have seen,” said Jean, in a wild cold voice awful to hear, “a thing, a monster, walking in the garden of the Martyr Church.”
“I don’t understand you, Jean,” said Andromede. She did. She shook from head to foot and her bowels had turned to water, exactly as had happened eighteen years ago on the night the Citizen Police hammered at the door.
“It was Dargue,” said Jean. “Dargue,” he repeated.
Then he fell silent and stood looking at her. It would have been difficult to say which of them had gone the whiter.<
br />
Dargue was the man who had been directly responsible for the execution of the poet and his wife. It was he who denounced them, and later, by adding his signature to the warrant, he that ensured there would be no escape. He had supposedly been drinking wine as he wrote his name, and a spot of the drink fell beside it like a drop of thin blood. The document had since been displayed, with others of its kind, and perhaps Jean had even seen it. Of course he knew the six letters that composed the monster D.A.R.G.U.E. And, too, he knew the man by inner sight, having had his appearance and mannerisms described uncountable times over. That Dargue had, as Jean, aged eighteen years, did not prove a deterrent. He had been away all this while, like a fiend in Hell, reveling in the illicit riches the Revolution had given over to him when, in the last days of its madness, he fled.
“He has been living in the Colonies,” said Jean, referring to these far-flung possessions of the City as to another planet. “An island … Black Haïssa. He has a house there. They jokingly say he has three wives. Negré women.”
“I don’t want to hear!” screamed Andromede abruptly, clasping her hands over her ears.
“You must, you must,” pleaded Jean. And going to her, he put his arms around her and held on to her just as he had when a child. For her various reasons, Andromede had never been a caressive or physical woman. Her returns to an embrace, especially an importunate one, were awkward and labored. Now she did nothing at all, but stood there in her gray marble mode, waiting perhaps for all this to end. “Anny,” said Jean, “listen carefully. I’m not a boy now. You know, I’m well educated thanks to you, but have no prospects in this rotten, corrupt City. I’ve had it said to me already, my best chance … would be to try my luck – in the Colonies.” He paused, and when she did not respond, hurried on with, “There are fortunes to be made in the islands.”
“Yes,” she said stupidly, sounding almost asleep. Her hands had fallen back to rest on his arms as he held her.