“Atroce?” I murmured to her. “Beloved. Remember your promise to me?
“Et plus tard un Ange, entr’ouvrant les portes,
Viendra ranimer, fidèle et joyeux,
Les miroir ternis et les flammes mortes.”
It was from a poem by Charles Baudelaire. From a section called ‘Death’ in his famous collection, THE FLOWERS OF EVIL. A few lines, the final ones, from “The Death Of Lovers”. Translated, it went,
“And later on an angel will unclose
The door and entering joyously relight
The tarnished mirrors and the flames blown to the night.”
I didn’t translate it for her, of course. For French was her native language—as it had once been mine.
If she recalled her promise, she gave no sign of it.
She was the seventh Atroce I’d found again that year. Red hair like fire, blood sweet as water, breath like the wind full of summer blossoms. And the grounding sanity of the earth itself, always healing me after the event, making it possible for me to say, “Yes, I live in this moment now. I am in this body, however strange it seems because it’s new. My name is Louise, not Crainte as it was when Atroce and I knew one another, in the time of plague.”
And what had it meant, that in those days we were named Terrible and Fear?
««—»»
My love was a nun at the convent called Coucher Auprès du Ciel. Sleep Near Heaven, which was just outside the village of Larmes. I hadn’t known her while she was of the order. It was common knowledge that the plague as it came to contaminate our town arrived first at the convent, when some Abbess or other visited from Nantes, fleas abundant in her luggage.
“They’ve walled them up,” whispered the butcher to my mother. He was sweating, his normally greasy clothes squirming from the rivulets of it running underneath.
“Walled who up?” my mother inquired.
“The nuns! Blocked in all the windows and doors so they can’t escape…” He crossed himself and shook his head. “So the sickness won’t creep out and get the rest of us. I could hear them pleading with us and praying to heaven.”
By us we could only assume the butcher had taken part in this ghastly quarantining, even if he’d first said they’ve walled them up. Not wanting to admit to having sealed these innocent women in, without a chance, to perish of either plague or starvation.
He continued, “I went back after dark and could hear them trying to scratch through the brick. Except for the screams, it sounded just like rats.”
“You mustn’t blame yourself,” my mother assured him, although she grew pale and also genuflected. “It is Satan’s doing. The devil is after us all and he just reached the sisters first.”
They saw me standing in the doorway. I was picking at a scab on my knee. They gave each other knowing looks.
“Soon that is how every one of us will be,” admitted the butcher. He mimicked my expression but it wasn’t intended as humor.
“Don’t watch us. Face the wall lest your curse be passed on,” my mother demanded, glaring at me.
“I have my mask on,” I protested. It was a dirty hood, two eyeholes cut so I could see where I was going. I ate by sticking the food up under it. I breathed stale air through it. I slept in it. I thought of myself as a shadow of a girl.
It wasn’t so bad. There was a lot of shadows in the streets and countryside these days.
“But fear pours out through your eyes. People may begin to think the terror abroad is your fault,” she snapped at me. “No one can look at you. And you cannot look at them either!”
I faced the wall, bowing my head. When my nose ran I wiped it with the part of the hood which hung across my nose to absorb the moisture. When there was more drool than I could suck back and swallow, I let the hood soak this up, too. Was this any worse than the butcher with his sweat stains?
Face the wall…
I thought I was as penned up alive as those unfortunate nuns.
Weeks passed. A month. Two. Word spread about what had been done to the convent. I was there when the priests from the monastery near Laval came to dig them back out. It was raining slowly, threatening to do worse with balled-up black clouds on the horizon like bubos about to split. The stench that gusted out from the opening they made to breach the south wall of the chapel wrapped itself about my face, tangible as gray spoilage.
Bodies lay everywhere. Dozens of them. I recalled seeing the bloated yet skinless cheeks of a nun who’d tried to eat the illuminated pages of a holy book, gilt trickling from the corners of her mouth. The others were all on their backs, staring up, faces too shiny, too red. Bits and pieces had been chewed from their soft bellies where the habits had been pulled up to expose this delicate flesh. And the only survivor staggered around—no—danced, gore spilling down her naked breasts, wild red hair tangled with clicking rosaries.
“What is that on her face?” asked one of the gentle fathers, clutching his crucifix with one hand and his unruly stomach with the other.
A second priest boldly climbed over the rubble of the wall and thrust a torch closer to see.
“It’s another face,” he replied, then searched with the firelight until he discovered a pile of little masks, some still wet, others desiccated.
“I am one with all my sisters,” sang this remaining member of Sleep Near Heaven. “They helped me to live, and they live on a little, through me.”
“Atroce!” shouted the first priest, one hand still grasping his cross and the other on his belly, perhaps trying to deliver a blessing of calm. Had he healing powers? Could he heal himself? “Terrible!”
Amazing, I thought, how she’d eaten the flesh of women who had died from plague but hadn’t caught the disease herself. (Perhaps none of them had the plague, after all.) She was robust, even a little plump. Beautiful as a bloody madonna.
(Then what had they died of? Depression. Terror. Starvation. And only one of them willing to take advantage of certain survival skills.)
I blinked my popped eyes, drooled past the twist of my lips, wiping a dirty sleeve the hood it in shame. Watched as the priests tied her up, then dug a pit for the dead nuns. Many places were burning the dead in pyres, so we’d heard. And one of the monks did suggest it.
“We cannot incinerate God’s faithful, else they won’t rise when Judgement comes,” the father with the torch said.
The sisters were carried to the edge and prayed over. But before they put the bodies into it for burial, they threw the scavenger sister in first, alive.
“Be fixed, unclean spirit,” they ordered.
Oh, there was one poor priest designated to pick up the scattered death masks for the hole. He was hilarious. Trying to do this act as if it didn’t repel him. I heard him muttering to himself, “There is nothing to be disgusted at. These were the faces of the brides of Christ. This was the skin of our holy sisters. Soft as altar cloths.”
And then he’d shudder, twitching at the two fingers he’d used to gingerly lift the meat.
There, beside the narrow river with the soil eternally damp as the water shushed past the reeds. She clawed her way out again. Threading her way through the braided jellied limbs, snapping sodden-wrapped spines, pushing through the loosening pulp of abdominal organs. Touching with fond remembrance the thigh of this former friend, the breast of that sister confessor. Days later, nights later. While an emphatic moon hung in a subtle sky, a shadow being the only element sustaining definitions of each. She was still lovely but no longer plump. Her once smooth linen complexion was streaked from the pile of rotting bodies in the mass grave, or from the faces she’d worn leaving a haunting trail of gray across her own.
I had been coming to the site of this burial since the evening they’d done it. Putting my ear to the earth, touching the turned soil. And then her fingers came through, linking with mine. She rose up, stood beside me. She tilted her head to one side quizzically, then gently pulled the hood from my head.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said, s
eeing my expression.
“I’m not,” I replied honestly. “I suffered a stroke as a child that, although I recovered fully my ability to walk and speak, has left my features permanently twisted. It makes me seem terrified even when I’m quite calm. The rest of the people in Larmes have nicknamed me Fear.”
“The people in Larmes are frightened themselves,” she said, tracing the canyons of dread in my face with the soil-clotted tips of her fingers. There was a substance under her nails which was the wrong color to be earth. It was too black. It was too red. “They think salvation is not negotiable. They believe the devil in the form of a black dog wants to fuck them.”
“Wouldn’t you know what salvation is and what the devil wants?” I asked. “You were a sister in the Church.”
She laughed. “The Church teaches fear, thrives off it, fattens from it. There is terror in every communion wafer, in each sip of wine at Mass. It is the shape Salvation takes, just as the passage beyond suffering takes on the visage of a corpse.”
“You said when the priests took you that the dead nuns lived on in you.”
She nodded.
“Want to feel them?” she offered, baring her slick breasts to me.
I found them hiding behind her nipples. They peeked out from her navel. They were at the bottom of the humid crevice between her legs. She was like the power of many women joined together, the flavor of her mouth deep with multiplied cherry. When she breathed down my throat, I heard their combined sighs—replete with the shrieks from all the suffering mobs they had spoken words of gospel to.
I knew she was no devil for she was never a black dog, although she was sometimes a wolf. Her tongue traveled everywhere on my body, a pilgrim’s journey. She made me feel as if I was exquisite.
“I love your face,” she told me. “It is the supreme rendering of all I was taught to desire.”
I didn’t wear the hood—ever—when I was with Atroce. I didn’t need to. I wasn’t required to.
“I have found an injured cleric,” I explained to each priest, one by one. The same holy fathers who had buried her alive. Different nights, different confessors, I told the same story. “He claims to be on an important mission from the Pope sent with a message for you. I can take you to him.”
It was so easy, having them bustle out, black robes fluttering. Not that they would have come out to hear some confession from a dying peasant. Nor even from a noble. No, for that might mean getting too close to someone who could have the plague (which they had been lucky enough to miss at the convent!).
But for a messenger from the Vatican?
Well, one of them might be about to be elevated to the status of bishop. They didn’t tarry. They followed me to where Atroce waited, white arms strong as fifty. Her thirst was a storm wind which could strip the stones from a castle’s ramparts. She always let me watch, then afterward lay in my arms, fat as if heavy with child.
So much to remember for someone who, before, wasn’t at all sure how previous lives might have been lived. Perhaps this was the door the angel had unclosed.
I recalled even more. Of being raped by a ragged band of beggars. They had plucked off my clothes and even my hood. They were unimpressed by my look of terror, believing it was because of them. I have a vivid sense memory of the stench of their unwashed faces thrust into mine—or pressed to the back of my neck when they rolled me over. Of pus running from their noses and the texture of their rotten teeth as they thrust tongues deep into my mouth.
I could still close my eyes and recollect that medieval girl months later giving stillbirth. Atroce rubbed her cool fingers across my forehead, down my cheeks, in an effort to smooth away the look of horror. I fed her the milk from my breasts. There was blood between her lips. Always, there was a smear of red across her sharp, flawless teeth. She’d been but a novice nun and her hair was unshorn, even if she’d worn it stuffed under the wimple while at the convent. When we made love, it coiled around me, alive on its own and hot.
“I know you hunt and take others,” I said one night as we lay on the grave over the decomposing sisters. She’d been singing into my ear, mimicking the music the worms were making down below. “Why have you never taken me?”
“Weak beauty perishes. Only twisted deliberation endures,” she replied. “I will someday share a secret to bind us together forever. This is my promise to you.”
I wanted this. If I could have crawled inside her when we kissed, I would have. If I could have carved out a hollow place for her in my torso where she could sleep—safe inside me, always—I would have. If I could have shared a part of her and she given part back, we could have been connected for eternity. But it was not to be.
People were hungry then, in fourteenth century France. I understood this. Most of the animals perished of the plague. So many farmers died that there were no crops to eat. The rich and the Church stole everything else. Well, they’ve always done that.
The last memory of that particular incarnation was of walking beside the river, traveling to my lover’s resting place. The sun was going to go down soon, taking with it into the darkness below the horizon who knew how many new and screaming souls? I heard small noises, the sort made by a flock of sparrows. I looked behind me and saw a group of children, laughing behind their hands. I was going to meet my lover and wasn’t wearing my hood. I assumed they were giggling at my deformed face.
I roared at them, waving my hands. “I’ll eat you up!”
Give them a good scare, I thought, and they’ll scatter. They’ll squeal with such delighted terror.
But they didn’t go. They ran toward me. I just stood there and tilted my head, as if to change my perspective of them as the reds began to splash the horizon and trickle into the river by way of the sky’s reflection. What, did they want to play?
Too late I saw the weapons in their starving hands: pieces of broken swords they’d found on the many battlefields across our land, sharpened sticks, edged flint stones, bits of glass. I turned to run the other way, sure I would easily outdistance them. But there was another group facing me at the rear. Oh, these were clever ragamuffins! They’d seen some warfare tactics somewhere. I had turned right into them and the others quickly enclosed me.
“She’s ugly,” one doe-eyed little girl cried as she helped drag me down into the moist dirt.
“She’s meat,” a skinny but stalwart boy corrected her. He then stuck his ragged blade into my back and then chopped down with it, pulling down with all his weight. Such as that was, more than I would have guessed.
I didn’t recognize any of them, did I? Were any of these children from Larmes? No, we weren’t yet a community of orphans.
By the swift work they made of me, savagery honed with skill, I knew they’d done this before. I almost admired them, not having to depend upon adults to keep them alive. No grown-ups to tell them “Face the wall!”, “What curse fell upon me to be saddled with you?”, “The Devil must have found me drunk at the fair. Satan is your father.”
Of course, all of their parents were probably dead. I wondered if these tiny, accomplished hunters had eaten any of them. I was tempted to tell them where my mother lived and by what road she always came, alone, in the mornings to pick berries.
They have a chance to survive, I thought, and to be the ones to make the world over. What kind of world will it be?
Why, it will be a wheel sorrows, and they will end up as always—at the beginning.
These things flew out of my head as pain took over. Flesh was gouged out of one of my buttocks. A hole was made in my side and little fingers dug in to scoop out meat. They didn’t bother to see me killed first. I was incapacitated, hamstrung and spine severed which abruptly ended the torment from my neck down. Then they devoured everything they could get their hands on while I was still alive. Cutting out chunks of flesh, bending to the fountains of my blood. Many nutrients there. Fortunately, I didn’t live too long after they began to seek the sweet morsels of the organs.
The last t
hing I saw was my beloved Atroce charging them in the dusk, screaming like a screech owl, every step taking her further into the shape of a wolf. I tried with all my strength to will my opened, goggle eyes to pour out my adoration of her.
“See my love, Atroce? See it? And let me take this image of you wherever I am going now.”
But then I was gone. I assumed she avenged me. Pity. Those poor children. They were just hungry, a pang of need which she struggled through herself just past every twilight. It had been the abomination of gluttony in the first place which had caused her to rise from the dead a vampire. There might be ten commandments but there were seven deadly sins, of which bestial appetite was one.
I stalked her in every subsequent existence. Hoping she would keep her promise. That we would be together always, at last. Bonded in the meat and soul. Blood being the liquid source of our ecstasy.
««—»»
More recollections, yes.
It was just at the end of the same century, creeping into the fifteenth, that the great Turkish Lord Tamerlane sacked Delhi in India. My name in this incarnation was Safiya, and I was the wife of a baker named Manu. I woke to the sounds of shrieking. There were chimes jangling sweetly in strange counterpoint beneath these screams. Gathering a robe about me, I hurried out of the living quarters into the large room where the business of bread was done.
I often heard yelling in the house because my four sons were burly, contentious boys. And Manu often shouted because he liked the booming noise of his own voice. And it was definitely their voices I was hearing. I sighed, expecting to find Manu breaking up another fight among them, using his fists to enforce his will. Pottery was being smashed. Someone had been injured. There were cries of outrage and of threat. My soft exhale turned into a gasp when I found my husband being brutally stuffed into one of his chapati ovens, the walls of it glowing white hot.
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