Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  In spite of this, the first ten days passed fairly easily; then the weather broke. I can remember it exactly. It was eleven fifteen at night according to my watch, and I was reading in bed by candlelight when suddenly there was a low roaring sound. I started violently. The rain had begun—a downpour in fact. I took my candle and went downstairs. Through the long windows in the hall I could see beyond the glass a vast, darkly glistening curtain of rain. There was a flash and the château’s park was leprously illumined for a moment by a thunderbolt, like a great crack of light in a black wall. I counted slowly up to three before the thunder rumbled.

  The innards of the building were still noiseless, but we were now encased in sound, the rustle of rain, the groan of thunder. I began to walk upstairs to my bedroom. As I reached the first floor I did think I heard something else—something from inside but far off. It was such a tiny noise that I might have imagined it, but it was very distinct. It sounded like the cry of a baby, the senseless, angry yell of a newborn child pitched unwillingly into the world. It might have lasted a second, if that, then it was gone. I stood still for a long time waiting for the noise to repeat itself, but it didn’t.

  When I was in bed again I put my candle on the bedside table, but I did not blow it out. I let it burn down into its socket while I lay awake listening, but all I heard was rain and thunder.

  For a few nights after that I kept a candle or a night-light on in my bedroom until at last I was ready to tell myself not to be a fool. The weather was getting colder. As well as the rain there was wind, which sometimes penetrated into the château, catching you unawares with cold blasts and occasionally slamming doors shut. There was a great fireplace in the main salon of the castle with a huge hooded overmantel in the French style, on which was carved a heraldic escutcheon, presumably of the Bressac family. I lit a fire in this and ate my supper in front of it every night. It was the crackling of the fire as much as its heat and light that comforted me.

  One night, about a week after the thunderstorm, I had sat long in front of the fire, finishing a bottle of the local wine. I was drinking a lot more wine these days because it was plentiful and cheap. I hoped vaguely I was not becoming an alcoholic, but, to be honest, I did not much care if I was. It was nearly midnight, the bottle was empty, and I had no more excuses for not going to bed, so I took my candle and stumbled upstairs. I managed to undress and put on a nightshirt, but when I accidentally knocked over my candle and it went out, I was drunk enough not to care. I got into bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

  Some time later—how long I don’t know—I was awake, or half-awake, or at least somehow aware of myself and my surroundings. I found that my cheek was rested against something rounded and firm and soft. It was not like my pillow: it yielded, but yielded less and it was very cold. Then the thing that touched me began to move restlessly as if alive. I pulled myself violently away from it and sat up in bed, letting out a stupid, involuntary, childish yelp.

  I tried to find an explanation for my experience, but none came to me. I did not know what it was, but I knew exactly what it had felt like: a baby’s belly, a baby’s bottom perhaps, but a dead baby.

  I felt around in the dark for the candle until I remembered that in my drunken carelessness I had left the matches downstairs.

  On the nights following, I once more kept a light on in the bedroom and barely slept. When I did, I sometimes felt again that touch of soft, cold flesh against me, but more distantly and through the veil of dreams. I tried vainly to remember what the dreams were, because I thought they might be telling me something, but they never did. In the evenings before going upstairs I sometimes got through more than one bottle of wine.

  One night I had gone to bed particularly drunk and, after a few hours of drugged sleep, I found myself suddenly, horribly awake. I had a headache from the wine, and the blood was thumping in my temples, but that was not what was making me sweat. It was the thing that was touching me again.

  This time it felt like a hand, soft and cold. It was small—a baby’s hand, it must have been. For a moment it played with my chin and then began to reach towards my mouth. Then tiny but perfectly formed little fingers were trying to force their way between my lips. The silky little digits were inexorable, insistent. I wanted to pull them away but my arms wouldn’t move from my sides. I was both awake and somehow paralyzed. I might have prevented the thing from reaching farther if I had bitten down on it, but that idea revolted me beyond words. The hand had reached inside my mouth, now numb with the cold, and was stretching out towards my throat. I could feel the fingers flickering inside me, tickling the roof of my mouth and the soft palate. They reached the back of my tongue. Then I began to choke. That convulsive movement jerked me up and into full consciousness. I was awake, alive, gasping for air in a cold black room.

  I held my breath, waiting for something to break the silence, but nothing did. It was a windless night. I was entombed in silence and alone. Now, once more, I had to find something to explain what I had experienced. Of course it had been a dream, but what had caused such a vivid one? Had I unconsciously put my own hand into my mouth? Was that it? I tried it out, but I wasn’t convinced. My fingers were far too big, and they were warm, comparatively speaking. Had it been some sort of animal? But what?

  The following morning I decided I must do something about all this. It was time to see if there was any explanation to be found in the history of the château. Of course, if there wasn’t, that would be something of a relief—or would it? I couldn’t decide.

  I drove into Beynac and represented myself at the municipal library in the Maine as a scholar wishing to study the history of the district. I was shown to a rather dingy little room full of books that looked as if they had been haphazardly gathered together. There were large official-looking tomes full of maps and facsimile documents, huddled against town guides, biographies of local worthies, manuals on wine making, boat building, and other local trades.

  Most of the guidebooks and local histories had little or nothing to say about the Château de Bressac. The most I could find out from a work in English was a passing mention in a book called Rambles in the Dordogne:

  From the river you may see the Château de Bressac, home to the Counts of Bressac until the French Revolution. Since then, this imposing structure has passed through many hands and has never been occupied by one family for any great length of time. It is now believed to be more or less derelict. Permission to view the château and grounds is, to my certain knowledge, never granted.

  Finally, on a dusty shelf behind some bound volumes of old local newspapers, I discovered a work that looked as if it had what I was searching for. Légendes et histoires de Beynac et ses environs by Henri Fauvinard had been published in 1876 and did not appear to have been much consulted since that date. In it there was a chapter entitled “The noble house of Bressac,” which gave the history of the Counts of Bressac who had inhabited the château since the 16th century. Until the mid-18th century, the family seems to have enjoyed a fairly uneventful run of aristocratic prosperity, then things began to get interesting. Here is a rough translation of the relevant passage:

  In the year 1763 Count Etienne de Bressac, then in his sixty-sixth year, married for a second time. He had been married as a young man, but his wife had died early and without issue. Since then, he had pursued a life of reckless and untrammeled libertinage, until it was borne in on him that unless he soon produced a legitimate heir, the great name of Bressac might perish with him. So the count took a young bride of seventeen from the princely Italian house of Bartori. Why he chose this young woman from a foreign land is something of a mystery, but he had traveled much in Italy and had formed (it was said) strange ties with this ancient but ill-famed noble family.

  The Principessa Eleonora Bartori was a young girl of quite exceptional beauty: her skin was white, and her hair, which she did not powder as was then the fashion, was jet-black. Many remarked on the redness of her lips and the purity of her compl
exion. The old count duly married her and she bore him a son, Armand, who was the delight of his old age. But as the count grew older, increasingly his countess seemed to rule over him, demanding that a great suite of rooms in the château be put at her exclusive disposal, and that none should be allowed to enter it, not even the count, except by her permission.

  Her servants there were slaves, bought from the East, mostly blackamoors and all, save for one eunuch who was her personal steward, were dumb, their tongues having been cut out at the roots in the Eastern fashion.

  So the count grew older but still would not die, and she, miraculously it seemed, remained the most beautiful woman for miles around. Her black hair showed not a thread of silver and her skin seemed, if anything, whiter and smoother, and her lips redder. Though many disliked the power she wielded and the strangeness of her personal retinue, no one could find anything against her. With the count in his dotage and she still young and beautiful, it might be thought that she would take some young lover to herself, but she had no favorites, and this in itself was counted against her.

  There were at that time many poor families in the village of Bressac and the surrounding district. When one of their children disappeared without trace, no great notice was taken of it at first, but this began to happen with more frequency. It was observed, moreover, that the children who disappeared were generally young girls who had received their first communion, and were about to reach puberty.

  In 1784 the old count died and Armand, his son, succeeded to the title, but his mother was still countess and her influence was as great as when she had been the count’s consort. There were those in the neighborhood who tried to set Count Armand against the dowager countess in order to destroy her power, but in vain. They began to call her “The Old Countess” as a kind of insult, even though she seemed as young and as fresh as ever.

  Finally a friend of the young count, the Marquis d’Elboef, saw that the only way to depose this woman’s influence was by means of another woman: Count Armand must marry, but he seemed in no hurry to do so. Suitable candidates were sought out and put forward, but each time the Old Countess’s machinations and the young count’s indifference dissipated the scheme. During this time it was noticed that Count Armand would spend many hours in the countess’s apartments.

  A family named Duplessis moved into the district: a husband and wife and their eighteen-year-old daughter, Louise. The father was a baron, and the family of Duplessis was a very wealthy one, having inherited estates from their great great-uncle Cardinal Richelieu.

  Soon after their arrival, the Marquis d’Elboef held a great ball at his château in Montpeyroux and invited all the noble families for miles around, but his true purpose was to bring Louise Duplessis and Count Armand together, so breaking the hold that his mother had on the young man. It is said by some that the Marquis had conceived a great hatred for the dowager countess because of some wrong she had done him, but no one could say what it was.

  Whatever the truth of this was, the Marquis’ plan succeeded and a match was made between Louise Duplessis and the young Count Armand. The moment had come and the countess saw no way of opposing the marriage without prejudice to her own position, so she bowed to the inevitable and even showed enthusiasm for it.

  Nevertheless, she did not travel to Bergerac with Count Armand to see him united to Louise in the cathedral there. She remained in the château, saying that she was preparing it for the arrival of a new countess. During that time two more children, both girls, went missing from the nearby village of Bressac.

  And so Count Armand returned to the château from his wedding trip with his bride, pleasant enough to look at, with brown curls and blue eyes, but no match for the beauty of the countess. She stood at the gate of the Château to meet the young pair in a dress of scarlet satin, her ebon hair elaborately coifed and held in place by a tortoiseshell comb studded with diamonds and emeralds. She greeted her daughter-in-law effusively, and for some months all seemed well, but during that time Louise began to show the strength of her character. She had none of the charm and skill of her mother-in-law, but she had a kind of resolute stubbornness, and her position as Count Armand’s wife was inviolable. The count, torn this way and that, seemed to have no will of his own. Meanwhile, Louise began to forge firm alliances with the servants and workers on the estate, as well as with her wealthier neighbors.

  The dowager countess, isolated, made as much use as she could of her formidable allure. Whenever she emerged from her apartments all eyes, including those of her son, were upon her.

  That winter a young servant girl at the château called Berthe disappeared. This might not have aroused much interest had it not been for the fact that Countess Louise had taken a great liking to the girl. Being dogged and stubborn by nature, Louise instituted a thorough search of the château, much to the disgust of the countess, who regarded all this fuss over the disappearance of a mere servant as undignified and a waste of time.

  It was when Louise ordered a search to be made in the dowager countess’s apartments that the last battle was joined. The dowager countess seemed to prevail at first and Count Armand ordered that no one should enter her apartments without permission. But Louise was not to be rebuffed. She insisted that where the search was concerned, nobody should be shown favor. Her persistence began to wear the count down.

  Then one day it was Louise who could not be found. Like Berthe she had vanished.

  The scene in the great salon of the château that day was strange indeed. Count Armand sat alone by the fire, silent, gnawing his fingers, servants and retainers at a discreet distance. It was clear that he knew more than anyone there what had become of his wife. The silence intensified, and with it the count’s torment. At last he summoned his steward and four footmen to go with him to the dowager countess’s apartments.

  There was a fierce struggle at the entrance to the rooms. The dumb slaves of the Old Countess fought with their bare hands until the steward pointed his blunderbuss at them. Every room was searched, and then they came to a door behind which a low murmuring could be heard like a chant.

  Here Count Armand hesitated for, although he had been in his mother’s apartments many times, this was the one door that had always been barred to him. A kind of superstitious dread held him back. But the steward— who was my grandfather and I had it from him—turned the handle and opened the door.

  The room was a bathhouse done up in the Turkish style. There was a great tessellated basin set into the floor, and around it stood the Nubian eunuchs in attendance with precious vases of ointment to hand. The chief eunuch in ceremonial robes stood at one end of the bath muttering an incantation. In the bath itself stood the countess, quite naked.

  Never, said my grandfather, had she looked more lovely—at least for one brief moment. Her slender figure seemed rounder and fuller than usual; her pale skin was rosy from the heated water, and her lips were red. Then they noticed the little splashes of scarlet on her body, and that the gently steaming water around her feet was incarnadined. Above her was suspended, by an elaborate system of ropes and steel hoops, the white, drained corpse of Berthe the servant girl, her throat slashed, the wound no longer red but grey. At that moment the countess was enjoying the last drops of her infernal shower bath. And in the corner, the poor naked body of the young Countess Louise—plump and pleasing, but no match for her mother-in-law—was being trussed up to provide a further supply of blood.

  The learned reader may be aware that in some mystery religions of the East, particularly that of Cybele, the Mountain Mother, it was customary to be thus showered in the blood of bulls or goats as a rite of initiation, but it was only the blackest of sects which believed that the blood of virgins and young children would restore youth and preserve beauty. The dowager countess had been initiated into one of these hellish cults in her native Italy and, either through the release of dark power or from more natural causes, her looks had been preserved.

  Countess Louise was at once set fre
e. The dowager countess’s unholy crew were taken away to be handed over to the jurisdiction of the local magistrate. As for the dowager countess herself, even as she was, naked and dabbled with her innocent victim’s blood, she threw herself screaming at Count Armand’s feet and begged for mercy. The speech she made was the most terrible that my grandfather can ever recall hearing, for in it she confessed to the slaughter of many of the district’s missing children. Why she incriminated herself it is hard to say, unless she wanted, pitiless and inhuman as she was, to relieve her conscience. But one phrase, repeated over and over again, remained in the minds of everyone present: “Remember the child! Remember the child!”

  Count Armand ordered that she be given a week’s supply of food and drink and then, even as she was, shut up in that awful bathhouse with one candle, and all entrances to the place sealed. It was a fearful sentence, her agony being prolonged because Count Armand did not want to be immediately or directly responsible for her death.

  Those who were appointed to lock the entrances to her tomb remembered that she never ceased to scream out for her son and to repeat that phrase: “Remember the child!”

  Two weeks went by, at the end of which Count Armand could endure it no longer. He ordered that the bathhouse be broken into. This was done, and there the Old Countess was found, dead—not from starvation, but from choking. The shock of her incarceration had brought on a pregnancy already sufficiently advanced, and she had given birth to a child—whether boy or girl I have been unable to ascertain. In the terrible pangs of her hunger, she had begun to devour the wretched infant. A tiny hand that had she tried to swallow whole had become lodged in her throat, and she had choked herself to death. The baby’s head remained intact, and those who saw its features swore that only her own son Armand could have been the father. Of the countess’s hair not a strand retained its natural blackness—it was all as white as the moon.