The Nightcharmer and Other Tales

by Claude Seignolle

  "I am a blacksmith," he replies, cutting her short.

  "In that case," the innkeeper says, "you're out of luck. There's no need for a blacksmith around here . .. We already have one, and he sure has no desire to leave the village."

  A brief smile flies over the stranger's mouth, but caught up in their chatter, the Graubois do not notice it.

  "If you were to set up shop against him, you would only get half of what you could make," adds Mrs. Graubois. "Here, there's just enough work for one."

  "Yes," her husband continues, "if you were a bricklayer or a carpenter, you could easily find work around here. They're always building something."

  The newcomer remains silent for a moment. He then calmly repeats, "I am a blacksmith, and nothing else..."

  "It's a pity," replies the innkeeper, as if he wanted to comfort him. For a brief moment the man seems to turn into granite as he declares, "I will be a blacksmith in Sologne, and I will forge wherever I please."

  Mrs. Graubois nods her head. "You'll have a long way to walk," she adds. "The Sologne is filled with blacksmiths, and everywhere sons are lying in wait for their fathers' retirements."

  "I have walked enough," retorts the stranger. "I will stay here."

  The Graubois decide that with such a stubborn man they had better talk about something else. Right now they go out of their way to squeeze out of him a little more gold. "You will eat something, won't you?" she asks slyly. "And why not rent one of our rooms for the night?"

  The stranger looks at the sausage and the sauerkraut placed on the innkeepers' table. He breathes in their rich scents, and sensing them teasing his stomach, he starts eating the rest of his bread. "I guess I will," he answers between his teeth.

  As she comes to wait on his table, Mrs. Graubois wants to try again to read in his eyes who he really is. She has quite a reputation in the village, since no one has ever been able to evade her scrutinizing glance. She's had that gift since birth, and she terrorizes the villagers with it. Therefore she starts to study the stranger, while he indifferently allows her to look him over. Pretending to prepare his dinner, she slowly stirs the sauerkraut as if to better spread its smell, while she ventures into his eyes. She immediately backs off: the man's glance is as steady and strong as two steel beads. All that she can briefly read in them is a warning that she had better not insist, as if talons would suddenly leap from these eyes and make sure she would never be able to use her gift again. Frightened and disoriented, she drops her fork, ft hits the side of his plate and chips away a piece of porcelain. She would like to apologize, but the words strangle in her throat. Sheepishly, she goes back to her table and sits down in front of her husband.

  The Graubois are now quite worried, as if this man were the visible member of a crowd of strangers silently invading the dining room. Suddenly they are startled by a raucous clamour coming from outside their house, as though a cartload of animals had just overturned against the door. This illusion is short-lived, for the door flies open and a crowd of dismayed faces comes sprawling into the room. Sentil, the ploughman, is among them, along with Vairon, the carpenter, Gomart, the miller, Laurent; Monge; and many others. All are gesticulating and shouting at the same time.

  "But... what... what’s happening?" squeals Mrs. Graubois, as if the stranger had just jumped on her. The men retreat to the threshold of the inn.

  "You haven't heard?" asks Vairon. "Christophe is dead!" add the others, whose voices are like the links of a heavy, clanging chain that they've been dragging throughout the village. "He hanged himself" whispers Gomart. Vairon has already left. Its not every day that he can run around, hawking such news. By now he must have reached the house of Courli, the baker. He must have opened the door and thrown in his "You haven't heard?"

  Now, sharing the same desire to spread the news to every house in the village, the men turn around and leave. Despite her astonishment, Mrs. Graubois has managed to grab the arm of one of the men as he is hurrying out. She takes him aside and questions him, while hiding from the stranger’s eyes.

  "Gomart, could it be that someone hanged him?" she whispers.

  "Who could have hanged our blacksmith?" answers the miller. "Can you imagine anyone strong enough to do that?"

  Mrs. Graubois turns to the stranger. She sizes up the build, the strength, and the enigmatic composure of her customer, as so many suspicions directed toward him. It suddenly dawns

  on her that from the moment the door opened, the man has not displayed even a hint of surprise. Mrs. Graubois is on the verge of making a few insinuations about him when Gomart escapes her and runs out to join the others.

  She closes the door and looks at the stranger, who continues to eat heartily, oblivious of anything else. "Maybe you don't know who Christophe was?" she asks angrily.

  "I don't have the faintest idea," the man replies impassively.

  The innkeeper interrupts his wife and tries to contain his indignation as he sharply addresses the stranger. "Maybe you'll pay a bit more attention when I tell you that Christophe was our blacksmith and that he had no children or apprentice to succeed him?" The newcomer slowly wipes his plate clean with a piece of bread. When at last he condescends to look at the Graubois, they do not read in his face the interest they expect to find.

  "I see," he answers in a neutral tone of voice, as he gets up from his chair.

  Mrs. Graubois tries again to elicit a reaction from him. "You're a lucky man," she says cautiously.

  "Maybe," replies the stranger, as he yawns and looks at the stairwell leading to the rooms. The innkeepers are so eager to see him leave that they quickly bring him a lamp, which he takes without thanking them.

  "You'll find your room on the second floor; it's right in front of you as you reach the landing," says Mrs. Graubois, who does not dare look at him. He walks across the room and starts up the stairs. Each step creaks under his wooden clogs.

  "By the way, what's your name?" the innkeeper calls out, now encouraged by the distance.

  The stranger stops and hesitates for a moment, as if his mind were trying to return from very far away. "My name is .. . Roc," he finally answers.

  "Roc who?" questions Mrs. Graubois, suddenly emboldened by her curiosity.

  "Just call me Roc," retorts the stranger as he reaches the second floor and slams the bedroom door behind him.

  They hear the wooden floor creak and the bed moan under his body. In a second the stranger has fallen asleep without taking off his clothes. Alone in the dining room, the Graubois now feel the weight of his presence hanging heavily upon their house.

  Sabeur, the old park ranger, now looks pale and distraught. He pauses before entering Christophe's forge. All the men who followed him up there, talking and shouting at one another, suddenly become silent. Their voices fade away, stifled by the presence of death. Christophe has been hanging for over an hour, but no one has dared to take him down, so the villagers have gone to Sabeur's house and convinced him that cutting the rope is part of his responsibilities. After all, the park ranger is the only one for miles around empowered with a semblance of authority.

  Sabeur finally comes in. The others follow with their lamps. Craning their necks through the frame of the door, they all look like a cluster of faded sunflowers. The lights from their lamps now bathe Christophe's body in a shimmering halo. His big hands are open, his fingers stretched out like threatening claws, as if they were waiting for the first one who would dare approach them. The forge feels like a mortuary chamber.

  Finally, in this harrowing atmosphere, Sabeur goes to the anvil. He tries his best not to think about the dead man, but it is useless: the stiff feet of Christophe are hanging right before his eyes! Behind him, chiselled against the darkness, the villagers' faces are now completely still, as if they had turned to wood. The blacksmith's body is hanging much too high for Sabeur to reach il. and pulling on Christophe's feet will not break the rope. So he motions to one of the villagers to come and help him: pointing his finger at the rope, Sa
beur shows him the exact place where it should be cut. Then it will only be a matter of easing the body down until Sabeur catches it. The man climbs on top of the anvil, and despite his queasiness he is forced to hold on to Christophe's clothes to keep his balance. He clings to the dead man while he opens his knife.

  All eyes are now fixed upon him and in everybody's mind dances the same inconceivable but tenacious fear that the cadaver might break off at the neck, only to leave his head caught up in the slipknot.

  "Cut the rope!" shouts Sabeur, who braces himself under the body, gritting his teeth as if he expected to receive the whole ceiling on his back.

  The rope is cut and the body falls, immediately caught by the man who has just set it free. He holds it for a moment; then slowly brings it down on Sabeur's back who staggers under the weight. Everybody rushes to help, and they all feel as if they are lifting a huge sack of oats in which some prankster has hidden a few oak-tree branches. They carefully lay Christophe on the floor. Even lying down, the tall blacksmith seems to tower over them. Few men dare look at his face - a frightful image is too quickly absorbed and retained by the mind, only to become later the tool of torturous nightmares. Sabeur's hands are struggling with the knots. The first one has slipped along the rope and is stuck under the others, right up against Christophe's Adam's apple. The old ranger tries in vain to roll back the thick cartilage that, only a few hours ago, was still the blacksmith's voice. The knot stubbornly tightens, relentlessly strangling Christophe, even beyond his death.

  Sabeur takes every precaution to keep his fingers out of reach of the cadaver's mouth, which remains open. The bites of the dead are sometimes poisonous. For everyone knows that as soon as the departed have passed beyond the gate of this life, they always change sides and start hating the living. (It might sound like an old wives' tale, but there must be some truth in it. After all, one wonders why we always dig each grave six feet deep, before packing down a ton of earth upon the coffin and encasing it under a heavy concrete slab... if s just a precaution whose meaning has now been lost.) The old park ranger is still struggling against the knots and becomes bolder. His nails scratch the skin as he slips his fingers between the rope and the neck. Christophe's head motions as if to say no. His lacklustre eyes are now sprinkled with the fine reddish dust that covers the forge's floor like a ceremonial carpeting. From a distance it looks as if the two men have had a fierce struggle and that the outcome of the fight is totally unexpected, for Sabeur, the winner, is old and scrawny, while his defeated opponent is half his age and three times his weight. The knots finally come undone.

  Sabeur takes the rope and buries it in his pocket, while his eyes silently speak to the men around him, as if to say, "Later, later... I'll give a piece of it to those who want a good-luck charm."

  Suddenly, between the kitchen and the forge, the blacksmith's wife appears on the threshold. She asks that her husband be carried out to the bedroom, but her voice is much too loud and steady to be a widow's lament. Startled, the men turn around to look at her, as if she had nothing to do with the man who is lying on the dusty floor. Nobody has ever liked her very much, and she has always despised the villagers. She has never sowed any love and never gathered much kindness. No one in the room feels like comforting her. She shows no pain at all; she's only annoyed to find so many people where her husband used to work alone.

  Four men grab hold of Christophe, and the strongest man in the village now looks like a rolled-up piece of tarpaulin. The blacksmith's wife precedes the procession into the bedroom. She's only worried about the untidiness that this whole affair brings into her house. As they walk over the threshold, one of the bearers stumbles against the steps. A convulsive jolt seems to run through the blacksmith's body, as if he were brought back home by force, dead drunk and retching. In the room his widow quickly removes an expensive bedspread made of green silk "Wait a minute!" she orders, as though the men were delivering some sort of carnival dummy. "Would you wait just a minute?" She carefully folds the bedspread and places it on a chair. She walks to Christophe and rapidly dusts his back with her hands. She fears that all that rust might very well ruin her white sheets, but she does not dare remove them in front of the villagers. "Now then, go ahead!" she commands the men, while wiping her hands on her blue apron.

  When the blacksmith is finally resting on the bed, everyone passes in front of his spouse and briefly touches her hand, for tradition's sake. They do it only in memory and respect of Christophe, for in their hearts they feel more sorrow for him than for his insensitive widow.

  Once they have all left, two old neighbours come into lay out the corpse. They dress him up in his Sunday clothes. Their voices are so sad that they sound as if they were praying, while they are only gossiping between their teeth, upbraiding Christophe's wife for hesitating to use new candles at the top of the bed.

  "We ought to shave him now," squawks one of the neighbours. "If we wait until tomorrow his skin will come off with his hair."

  At first, the widow hesitates, but she takes one look at Christophe and sternly replies, "No, don't. He never wanted me to shave him anyway!"

  That night, throughout the village of Brandes, everyone lies oppressed with the memory of Christophe. In their minds the same picture constantly returns. Whether it is so blurry an image that they can hardly believe it, or so real a figure that it could almost be spoken to, they all struggle against the frightful and awe-inspiring face of their strangled blacksmith. Those who did not see his mask of death imagine it as even more horrendous, an evocation that slowly turns into a morbid vision they cannot repel from their sleep.

  The waves of the night finally spill forth a whitish foam, which rolls through the light gauze of the morning fog. The dawn awakens, and its bluish darkness is pierced by the rays of a widening and silent pallor, as if daybreak had to labour against its lingering shadows.

  The people of Brandes have always risen with the echoes of one another’s chores. This morning, they feel for the first time how much the forge had become a part of their lives, how much it was necessary to the ordered cadence of the day. As the village awakes, everyone senses the intense silence of the anvil's tune.

  The even rhythm of the villagers' work is now out of time. Diner’s saw is off the beat with Vairon's hammering. The well chain grates on its own, and even the creaking of the carts sounds erratic and odd. It is as if Christophe had been some sort of noise conductor, orchestrating the village's music, forcing everyone to follow the rhythm of his hammer. But Christophe will no longer beat time. He is now lying down, cold from head to toe, wearing around his neck the purple mark where the rope has scraped off his skin. Putting the finishing touch to the blacksmith's coffin, Vairon sends throughout the village the mournful song of dry oak wood. It is a tune made of hollow notes, as hollow as the grave where Christophe will be laid today, offered to the voracious earth, whose appetite has already been whetted by Denys's digging. With each angry blow of his hammer, with each nail driven through the knotted boards, Vairon repeats the song. Though he does not realize it, his hammering pays a last tribute to Christophe, as if he tolled the bell for him, in the name of every noise and clatter of the village.

  Before entering Christophe's house, Roc has to bend down under a doorway that is both too low and too wide. It is a passage made for the barrel-shaped ordinary mortals who inhabit this village, not for a tall and robust fellow like Roc. He walks into the forge and straightens up. Two women are seated in front of him: Catherine, who is Christophe's widow, and Benette, the carpenter's wife. Both are slumped in their chairs, brooding on their boredom. Pulling back the tails of his long cape over his shoulders, the stranger walks straight to the widow - oddly enough, he has never met her and yet he identifies her at once.

  "Well now, here you are, all alone with this useless forge," says Roc. The moment of surprise over, Catherine stands up, and with the composure of being the proud owner of the place, she walks closer to him.

  "Yes, I am," she replies, sl
ightly distrustful, "but who are you? I've never seen you around these parts." Roc tries to smile, but all the woman can see is an eerie, menacing grin. She retreats towards her chair, while her friend hurries out of the forge and returns to the bedroom where Christophe is lying. Staring at Catherine, Roc sizes her up at a glance. He lingers on her lace, on her wrinkles, and knows her age at once, as one would read into the grooves of a sawed-off tree. Catherine's head barely reaches his elbows. Not wishing to have to bend over her, Roc takes a few steps back, in order to have her full stature focused in his eyes.

  "I am a blacksmith," he says harshly, in atone that is more suitable to the kind of character he has just read in her. His voice is too loud to be appropriate in a dead man's house; his eyes are like two reddish brands embedded in his face. By the tone of his voice and the look in his eyes, he forces a blush of embarrassment to appear on the discoloured cheeks of the widow, who is now totally subjugated by the stranger. "I guess that now you're not going to use the hearth and the hammer on your own," continues Roc, with the same icy grin on his lips.

  Catherine briefly looks at the other woman, who has just returned to the forge, driven by an insatiable curiosity. "Of course not," she replies nervously, as if to enlist her support. Vairon's wife tries to encourage her. She emits a shrill laugh, which splutters in the forge like a long string of empty seashells. Irritated, Roc turns around and flings a volley of sharp words at her.

  "Woman, if you have anything to do with the property of the dead man, come over here and participate; if not, you'd better get your laughter out of here before it strangles you for good." The stranger's warning rings out like a curse called upon her. Vairon's wife turns pale and dashes out of the forge.

  Now that they are alone, Roc looks at Catherine while putting his hands in his pockets.