The Nightcharmer and Other Tales

by Claude Seignolle

  And so I learned that the bird mentioned by Mr. Tibaldière existed. Better still, the bird’s favourite place was the marsh of Gobble-Ox, right here, five or six gunshots from us and at an equal distance from the village. Its appearance was not at first frightening, and it could look like any common bird, but shifted continuously from one species to the next to fool its victims. In its call, an additional note rang out… a bit strident. It was the Ghoulbird’s curse…To listen to it was to lose one’s will to the bird and forever be the creature’s slave. Obedient, the victims rose from the beds, left the security of their homes and went out in nightclothes, like sleepwalkers, heading toward that bird of Hell, which rejoiced in any new prey. The victims went to the bird, oblivious of the mud that squelched under their feet, not realising they were padding through the marsh. And the creature would draw back, retreating further to lure its prey into the slimy depths that captured and swallowed its victims without mercy. Pessaut, Guérin, the woman called Marguerite, and so many others had died in this way. Their bodies were never found, only the footprints in the hardened banks of the Gobble-Ox, which, without doubt, had shared the meat with the Ghoulbird.

  But the creature betrayed its presence in one tell-tale way: most other birds do not sing or whistle at night. So when you heard it, you had to move quickly and bolt your door, barricade up all the openings, clasp your hands over your ears, bury yourself deep under the blankets and, above everything else, be in the company of at least another person so that one could prevent the other from responding to the evil call…

  Having unburdened himself of this awkward secret, Sylvain departed in great haste, taking the lamp and leaving me in a pitch-black room. I heard him double lock the door, probably out of habit, and step down the stairway, stumbling in his haste.

  The silver needle of the moon, taking advantage of the open window, slanted into the darkened garret without disturbing the heavy silence, which then engulfed me. I undressed and lay down on the bed, my fatigue dulling the stressful images put into my head by the superstitious servant.

  The heat prevented me from falling asleep immediately. I tossed and turned, feeling oppressed, until I decided to get up and open the door of the tower. After some blind groping, I found it. The fresh air that blew through the doorway joined the draft that entered through the window, bringing me relief. I went back to bed, and this time I slept right away.

  I dreamt a dream agreeable at first but, little by little, it filled me with a vague uneasiness… I found myself in a vast ballroom, in old-fashioned garb, relaxed and content, sitting in an armchair…A beautiful young woman asked me to dance, favouring me with the most charming smile… But I declined rudely and remained seated instead of rising to my feet, eager to grant her the dance she’d requested… She, without seeming to be in the least shocked by my attitude, laughed in a strange way, with three high-pitched notes balanced by pauses, creating a peculiar rhythm… Then, taking me by the hand, she pulled me into her arms… I felt myself become heavier and heavier. But her gentle strength gradually managed to lift me… Standing, I felt a sensation of nakedness and a sudden embarrassment forced me to flee…I ran into a wall or a closed door, I did not know which… I fell, and people came to pick me up, pitying me… Their hands supported me and pulled me away into a park smelling of freshly cut grass… They led me to a well and, once there, either for fun or malice, they pushed me forward, to make me step over the edge…

  I resisted the motion, letting myself fall to the ground, where, seized with a sudden terror, I hunkered down, refusing to participate in this stupid act… And again I heard the shrill laughter of the young woman, who had become invisible. All my attention was riveted on the unseen woman, as I was filled with a belated regret for not having accepted her company…

  The chill of dawn woke me. I was on the terrace of the tower, lying on the ground and shivering. A gray mist covered Guernipin, which the rising sun gilded progressively. After the first moment of astonishment, it wasn’t difficult to understand the reason why I was lying there. Surely, I had wanted to escape the sweltering garret room and, seeking fresh air, I had risen, half-conscious, to spend the rest of the night up here. Leaning out from the parapet, I discovered the impressive drop, and, upset, I realized that I had been on the point of falling from that height!

  The second day with M. de la Tibaldière was as fascinating as the day before. The man knew so much – the mystery of the onager, the cyclical migration of the warthog, and provided anecdotes and biological digressions as arguments. We lunched in the park, in the temperate shade of a cedar tree as the wind, blowing gently, failed to ruffle its leaves. The table was a long tombstone taken from the floor of a deserted abbey nearby; we ate heartily on the belly of an austere priest stiffly engraved in the granite.

  In the evening, we had yet to explore the second floor where, according to Mr. Tibaldière, suddenly excited by his own words, rested the jewels of his collection: coelacanths, large saurians from Borneo, and other survivors of antediluvian times. Therefore, I dined again at Guernipin, but I managed to escape the lecture after the meal. By now the place was familiar to me so I went to bed alone, this time keeping the lamp. And, fearing a new awakening on the roof terrace, I left the door to the corridor open but firmly shut the door leading to the tower, to avoid renewing the misadventure of the night before. I went to bed and began reading a book, but hardly had I reached the third page than it slipped from my hands. I blew out the light and let sleep come. This time the heat did not torment me, on the contrary! Again, I was involved in a dream that seemed light-hearted in the beginning… I visited Guernipin on my own, only to discover new rooms of an amazing variety… I could finally handle birds, touch soft plumage… Mysterious birds of unknown shapes, which came alive and quivered under my hands… Soon they were so numerous they crowded me, pushing me, guiding me to the freedom of the park, where they remained around me, driven by a silent determination… Mr. Tibaldière appeared on the front steps and indignantly shouted to come back before his most precious avian specimens escaped forever… Anger choked his cries, to the point they resembled a bullfrog’s call… But, not listening, I suddenly ran away, now at the heart of the cluster of freed birds, whose wishes I obeyed, and which led me so fast I was out of breath… I ran on until I felt a terrible tightness to my heart… Choking, I felt myself gradually hindered in my race by viscid forces, which woke me suddenly.

  Today, I find it impossible to describe the violent revulsion I felt while I was victim to that cold thickness. Brusquely, I returned to reality, and found my feet in gluey mud up to my thighs. Hadn’t I been sleeping? Where was my bed? And Guernipin? Where was I? Prisoner to a monstrous vacuum that was slowly sucking me in, I was trapped within a stinking, nauseous swamp. My hands, my arms, in vain sought purchase: a root, a branch, my life… Sudden bellows, reminiscent of an angry bull, broke my struggle. From the marsh where I was sinking, they tore at the night. Despite my terror, I identified a heron’s call. But instead of being regular in their three consecutive notes, these cries came with no pattern, no rhythm.

  Then I saw it… thrashing next to me. And Sylvain’s comments came back to me: the Ghoulbird. Did it exist? Yes, it did, for this could only be the mythic bird, shaking with justified laughter at its gullible and ridiculous prey. And here I was, in the middle of the Gobble-Ox Marsh.

  Nevertheless, I saw the bird hop around as if under the same threat from the swallowing slough. Seeing my redoubled efforts to break free from the mud that was gradually gaining on me, the bird cried louder. I would have thought it wanted to coax me into escaping the quagmire. I finally managed to reach the nearest stretch of grass and, extricating myself from the greedy mud, I crawled to safety. The heron, which had come closer, supported me by flapping his wings, helping me to reach the firm soil of a pebbly path. If I did not collapse into a heap, I owed it to the angelic bird that nudged me with its beak, and forced me to rise and head for Guernipin, a solid and reassuring sight within reach
of hope.

  Then I felt an invisible, hostile force that knotted my spirit with terror. I felt the terrifying sensation of a huge but impalpable single wing flapping around me, as nimble as a ray of nothingness in the ocean of night, an immaterial reality that pushed me with relentless perseverance to bring me back into the swamp. Without the frantic cries of the heron, which was engaged in a frenzied dance to come to my rescue, inciting me to flee, I confess that I wouldn’t have resisted the Thing that held me enthralled.

  And I understood at last! I realized that the Ghoulbird – be it owl, crow, heron or any bird that happened to be there and sensed the threat – was neither a legend nor an enemy of man, but a protector… that it warned of the unspeakable danger it perceived… That its cries, far from being cursed calls, were a warning: terrified, the bird screamed against fear, not to elicit fear!… The Marsh of Gobble-Ox, foul lair still preserved after thousands of years, harboured an invisible ravenous monster, survivor of the times when dark powers ruled under the subtlest forms!

  I then glimpsed two greenish and fleeting glows… An illusion, a reflection of my fear? No… those glowing spots were eyes! Screaming in revulsion, I wrenched myself free from the horror that had chosen me and had already failed to lure me in my sleep, out of my bed at Guernipin.

  At sunrise, Mr. Tibaldière, eager to show me around the floor of prehistoric ancestors, surely gave Sylvain the order to wake me up. But all the servant could find of me, apart from traces of mud left everywhere, was this note, doubtless destined to remain a mystery:

  Never, ever, kill the Ghoulbird.

  A Dog Story

  It was October, 1939. The French army was scrambling and burrowing, trenching and sapping, following the example of the last Great War. We fought by ruse - ruse for food, ruse for sleep, ruse for hope. To us this was no Phony War; we had sunk our feet in it. Khaki foxes, we faced an invisible lumbering pack of green wolves who, squatting only a few kilometres away, took the war in deadly earnest.

  Each day it rained more unbearably. The sky, dying of an early autumn, was wretched and depressing. Though the end of the world seemed near, we voraciously devoured these wasted years under the patronage of a benevolent field-kitchen. Sheltered beneath a humble awning, it was the heart of the detachment, the High Altar of the Holy Feeding.

  And as in the distant past when the faithful erected their miserable and parasitic abodes on the hillsides of sacred shrines, and as swallows fix their wart-like nests to the fronts of houses, the detachment had erected its tents and parked its trucks in the orbit of the field-kitchen so that at any given moment we might become drunken with the nourishing scents of beef stew, fried potatoes, rice and gravy... or the ritual coffee. These were precious consolations artfully cooked by Léon, my accomplice. I was at the time his food-supply clerk.

  I must say something more about the field-kitchen. Looking like a great toad, it had two plump bellies that were the front lockers for meats and vegetables, and a bladder, the sacred little coffee tank in the rear, at the bottom of which one would inevitably find, during the monthly scouring, the skins and tiny bones of overcooked rats who had inexpertly fallen in, coffee filchers having left the lid ajar.

  The hearths were huge and solid, and fortunately so, since to light the wet, green wood we were forced to douse it with gasoline, ten or twenty gallons lighted by the toss of a torch from a sate distance. Without fail the fire would ignite and rage, each time projecting out from the hearth a comet's tail, which threatened to kick back like an old siege cannon. The dumping area, the open wound of any field-kitchen, lay a little to one side. In a week's time we would pour a half dozen drums of gas on its rottenness, purifying it of the worms that swarmed there in millions and overflowed onto the surrounding mud, in close columns wandering aimlessly; disoriented larvae, the strongest of which pushed back the weakest, reserving for themselves the best places on the tiers of repeatedly renewed garbage. We would empty three or four cans, strike a match, and as it burned we could hear the hideous sizzling and popping of bursting worms.

  Afterwards, it seemed as many remained. It was an unimaginable sight: a putrid, swarming mass, a good ten inches thick, undulating and swelling like a breathing chest

  And there were dogs - errant and hungry. Miserable German shepherds that had lost both their kennels and their masters, who themselves had lost their farms and their property when summoned to leave immediately for the frontier zone of the Maginot Line. And there we were with all these strays scratching around our feet.

  They were the lost dogs of the lost villages, wandering about our camp, some frightened, some vicious, all emaciated. One among them, with neither god nor devil to follow - man will always be a god or a devil to his dog according to the tenor of his stroking - used to come each day, sniffing the heap of trash, and having made his selection, would abruptly snatch away a bone on which remained some putrifying flesh.

  He was a chilling sight with his crusty sores, his coat eaten away by mange, and his skin oozing a continuous infection that drew black blood and over which mud daubed its fragile armour of earth. What remained of his withered ear dangled half-eaten away by the same disease that was stripping the flesh from his chops. And worse, he dragged along a generously gangrened leg, snapped no doubt under the wheel of a truck. Though he was little more than a disgusting thing, a bag of pus procreated by a charnel house more contaminated than our dumping area, he moved our hearts to pity, this rotting dog, and did so with a pleading glance that could move the most hardened of us, truck drivers for the most part, who had each run down a half-dozen dogs and cats, not counting a string of hens and perhaps even an occasional reckless pedestrian. His eyes were the only purity that survived in this animal horror.

  "It’s a spaniel," said Léon when he first saw it.

  "Was," I corrected him.

  We tolerated him around us until one day it became too much. Having wallowed in the heap, he fell asleep on it and very nearly killed what remained of our precious appetites.

  And so Léon and I decided we would do him in, though it was not at all easy; we lost courage when, having cornered him in a grassy hole, we began to club him with blows as violent as they were clumsy; the wretched animal cried out like a child punished for mischief he hadn't made. It was as if we were killing something human; and yet it was for him, so that he would no longer suffer and his agony could finally come to an end. Of course we could have poisoned him, but after having swallowed such foul waste in such great quantities, what poisons were there against which he wouldn't be immune? Or we could have shot him, but the order was strict and categorical, and disobeying it might have brought upon us the same fate: not a shot to be fired. Save bullets. Damn it all! We were at war: war against the mud, war against the worms, war against the dogs.

  The poor animal was wriggling and howling beyond madness in that hole where we tortured him like cowards with our bludgeoning; each time we hit him we jumped aside in fear that his pus- swollen body might burst and drown us in a great gush of bacteria.

  "We've got to crush his head," raged Léon.

  But that was the hardest place to hit, not because the dog in his struggling was able to dodge our blows, but because all we saw of him were his imploring eyes, begging for mercy, eyes that could neither believe nor comprehend that it was we who were his torturers. Then, looking away, with blind strikes we broke his skull and the animal moved no more, dead at last; throwing our contaminated bludgeons far away, we covered the hole with heavy stones.

  That night, as I lay under the truck on the thick straw under which rats moved freely, I was still nauseated. Drowsy as I was, I knew only too well that I could not soon fall asleep. Léon was snoring. He had drunk himself to sleep, trying to forget.

  It was then that I heard it: it came as an odd crackling of leaves, and a little later, after a bit of fitful sleep, I noticed a lapping sound from a short distance; a foetid odour floated around me. I sat up, my hand grabbed the flashlight and I flicked it on.r />
  My God! There before me stood that decaying dog. And now, among his old sores, he bore fresh ones where drying blood had mixed with black dirt: the very wounds opened by our bludgeons. His pink tongue, the only bit of pure flesh that remained to him, dangled and panted; he sniffed around, found a dab of rice in the bottom of a can, and made a meal of it.

  A mute terror drove me to my knees as I retreated toward the hollow where Léon slept. I shook him. He awoke in a fury, ready to kick out at me. "Look!... for God's sake, look! " I shouted, with sickly spasms in my voice. Then, like two madmen, we grabbed our rifles and fired all our forbidden bullets into this monstrous spectre from beyond a dog's grave.

  And at last, for a second time and forever, he passed away, the rotting dog from some obscure place, a beast whom hunger had revived.

  The Healer

  Claude Michel, a gardener from the town of Coulondelles, had all the plumpness and gentleness that some women look for in a husband. He was a man with whom a peaceful and happy married life could be confidently shared. With his big round face gleaming with generosity and his paunchy fifty-year-old looks, Claude was kindness itself offered to anyone who wanted it.

  Glaude was also a sort of countryside conjurer. But he was quite different from those common faith healers, those quacks with their easy tricks who could be found most anywhere in every village, like so many bone-setters, medicine men, and other assorted charlatans. No, from birth he had inherited from his ancestors a most uncommon gift: he was endowed with the power of putting ailments to "sleep." So, if your chest had absorbed an icy cold, caught at nightfall by the river, if a chill was pressing its big thumbs against your lungs, so strongly that you would feel them with each breath, what could you do? There were only two possible choices: you could either bury yourself under three layers of blankets after drinking a quart of hot sugared wine, or you could go and see Glaude, bent over his flowers, and ask for his help.