The Nightcharmer and Other Tales

by Claude Seignolle

  The linen that covered the baby is quickly removed as Roc lays him down naked on the anvil. The cold of the steel instantly penetrates his back and suffocates him. Despite the infant's shrill cries of protest, all eyes are now fixed upon the blacksmith as he undergoes a strange metamorphosis. His face changes into an alien glower. His features harden while Iris eyes take on the menacing stare of a hawk. Terrorized, the child remains transfixed by this ghastly mask, which fascinates him and strangles his tears. The young mother rushes to the anvil to retrieve her son, but the blacksmith turns around, and when their eyes meet she stops as if she had collided with a glass wall.

  "Hold your son down by his shoulders," snarls Roc at the father. The infant struggles both against the chilling cold of the anvil and the sweltering heat of the hearth. But deep inside him, the pains are slowly disappearing. Soon he can only feel the scratching of his father's trembling fingernails. His sobbing has stopped and an unknown peace now flows through his senses. At the very moment the child has reached an almost serene quietness, Roc starts to roar like a feline leaping onto a patiently awaited prey. In a single move he tears off his shirt, and the ripping of the cloth reveals the brutish might of Iris bronze-like chest. His hands grab Iris heaviest sledgehammer. He raises it so high that for an instant he stands on his toes before bringing it down on the baby, howling so forcefully that he freezes the heart of every onlooker.

  Instinctively the father has almost drawn back his son, whose body shrivels up like a threatened porcupine, but he manages to collect himself just long enough to allow this enactment to take place. He knows that it is only a part of a ritual that has been carefully described to him before he came to the village. But at the sight of her son about to be crushed to death, the mother faints and collapses face down on the rust-covered floor. The steel mass is about to smash the baby's head when Roc suddenly stops the course of the sledgehammer with an abrupt constriction of his muscles, ending the seemingly deadly blow in a light brushing of the tool against the skin of his young patient.

  The child bursts into tears, and his cries of deliverance are as many piercing blades into the flesh of the horrified villagers, hidden behind the walls. The father hurriedly dresses the baby while his wife struggles to her feet. Now that their son is cured, they only want to run away. They stagger outside, blinking at the sun, and rush to the tilbury. With one crack of the whip, the carriage rattles away in a trail of mud and rust.

  His back against the wall, Roc remains still, with his eyes closed and his arms folded. Suddenly he shivers: a slow and soft caress is running up his arm, while a light breath brushes against his skin. Looking down, he sees Isabelle's face. And Roc, the man-beast, the savage executioner, feels his lassitude leaving him as his face creases into a smile. He tries to pull himself together, but he is subdued once more by that satin cheek gently stroking his chest.

  " You... fire... fire and light," whispers Isabelle, while she presses her lips where the blacksmith's heart is pounding wildly.

  Ensconced in the surrounding obscurity, Roc has fallen asleep on the bare floor. His body is so completely motionless that he looks like a mannorean statue. A quiet lapping has now replaced the familiar sounds of the forge, but its faint echo gradually breaks the silence and reaches into the blacksmith's consciousness. He remains still as he awakes, and barely parting his eyelids, his piercing gaze cuts through the darkness. Facing the dormant redness of the hearth, Isabelle is kneeling down before a huge water pail adorned with a stiff cluster of pincers and tongs. Drawing the grayish water in the hollow of her hand, she bathes her face. Pretending to be sound asleep, Roc closely watches the girl, and as he pores over her an unfamiliar and vibrant emotion starts to arouse him.

  Isabelle slowly continues to wet her face, which reflects the reddish- brown shadows of the embers, as though she were trying to cool down the oppressive heat of an unknown fever. Her silky tresses stick to the mist of her cheeks. She patiently gathers her hair and twists it into a bun with a strand of hemp that she finds lying on the floor. Roc can see her long neck upon which her hand lets the water trickle down. He holds his breath, as if he fears that it could shatter this moment this image pressing against the unyielding power of his will. Unaware of his presence, Isabelle starts to unbutton her frayed blouse and bares one of her shoulders, caressing it with her cheek. Roc looks at her naked arm. He sees a slender hand come to rest upon her other shoulder. He follows her long fingers as they leisurely return to stroke her neck. Overwhelmed by a sensual delight that she cannot control, Isabelle sighs and moans. Her mouth opens, as if she could scream the wildness of her excitement but she can only whisper the blacksmith's name, and this ecstatic murmur becomes a throbbing quarrel that pierces Roc's impregnable heart

  How could Isabelle ever fathom the measure of silent torture that she is unwittingly inflicting upon him? Both the jailer and the captive of her unbridled sensuality, she slowly continues to remove her clothes. Chiselled against the shadowy light of the hearth, the outline of her naked body thrashes the blacksmith's senses with repeated lashing strokes.

  Roc knows he should have closed his eyes a long time ago, but by his own device he is also subordinated to his human disguise. His veil is that of a sturdy and vigorous man, a body in which every fibre is gradually drawn toward the girl. He is now so tempted to have a taste of human passion and lust that a sough of desire escapes from his mouth. Startled, Isabelle turns around, and through the slit of his eyelids she immediately sees the phosphorescent fleck of his pupils. Her only defence is to cover her breasts with her hands. Roc remains as motionless as a bird of prey ready to swoop down upon its victim. Isabelle falls full-length on the floor, as if she could hide her head in the dust, but she is already ensnared by the frightening object of her desire as she starts to crawl toward the blacksmith.

  She looks up at him.

  The dust of the forge has daubed her face with a mask of iron scales, and this sight arouses Roc even more, as his mind starts to reel under the intensity of his first carnal hunger. Isabelle's hair comes undone and spreads upon her naked shoulders. She stands up, revealing her dust-covered breasts, firm and provocative... Now that she is close to the blacksmith, her tears give way to a passionate yearning. She is still frightened, but her fear is also interlaced with an irresistible attraction. When her hand finally touches his face, Roc smiles as he closes his eyes. Her quivering and lithe body falls into his arms, which immediately girth the young animal who has come to be consumed in his desire.

  Now that he has succumbed to man's most powerful instinct, Roc struggles to pull himself together. He knows that his invulnerability has been violated for a brief moment, as if he had been stripped of his powers. He jumps to his feet and quickly walks to the hearth. Violently awakening the embers, he throws a handful of scrap iron upon them. When the tongs remove the reddish, contorted mass, he hurls it onto the anvil and starts to flatten it with lightning blows, as if his sledgehammer could forge a seal over the wedge that the girl has driven into him.

  The clamour of Roc's anger abruptly brings Isabelle back to the reality of the forge. Within her, embers and pains, strength and gentleness are slowly abating. The shock of the blacksmith's embrace has been so great that her quiet madness starts to falter. Soon she stands amidst the infinite ramifications of a thousand things that unveil themselves before her eyes for the very first time, streaking her dormant intellect with knowledge, awakening her mind. First, she notices the flames of the hearth. Before Roc possessed her they were nothing but a cluster of warm colours, but now she sees the eeriness of their raging beauty. She finds herself at the centre of this immense forge she had always found so empty. Today the room is populated by a crowd of objects and tools, all coming alive amidst the wild dancing of impish shadows. In the instant that Isabelle asks herself the reason for such a strange metamorphosis, a flood of words surges into her head: thousands of words now readily familiar to her, even though she has never learned a single one of them. Her mind discovers
how she could weave them into endless sentences.. .how she could describe what she now understands... how she could tell Roc the way she feels...

  Her eyes caress the figure of the blacksmith, and where others see only brute force and cruel features she discerns strength and weakness, power and tenderness. She stands up and wants to run to him, but she fells in the dust, overwhelmed with joy and delight. As the blacksmith gently lifts her up in his arms she whispers, "Thank you, Roc... Thank you!" Standing alone with her in the forge. Roc discovers that he has drawn her out of her chaos, that he, of all people, has given her back her mind a thousandfold, as if a spark of righteousness had escaped him, through the flaw that Isabelle had found in his armour of fire and ice. For the first time ever he bows his head, as he feels rushing within him the discordant streams of his greatest joy poisoned by the wrath of envenomed bitterness.

  Denys is the first one to witness Isabelle's transformation. That afternoon, when he sees her leaning over the coping of the well, he fears that she might fall in. Rushing toward the girl, he seizes her around the waist and brings her back to the ground. She was drawing a bucket of water for the forge. As Denys gets it for her, he feels compelled to lecture the young girl with the kind of language everyone uses with hen very short sentences made of simple words, a sort of patter perfectly suited for toddlers and animals. But as he looks at her, Denys suddenly stops his gesticulating speech. He cannot continue because Isabelle's eyes, stripped of their usual emptiness, are as alive as his. He stands there for a minute, gaping in amazement at the laughing and mischievous look of what used to be the dull stare of the village idiot. Her eyes no longer reflect the dizziness that used to force the villagers to look away while talking to her. Her blue eyes are now steady and expressive, and when she speaks to him, it is with a clear and unlabored voice, with words that sound light and transparent.

  "Thank you, Denys, thank you. But I could have drawn the water myself. I am quite used to it by now," she says, punctuating each word with a charming and beautiful smile.

  Denys lets her walk back toward the forge. He remains standing by the well, as astounded as if one of the statues of the nearby church had suddenly decided to climb down from its niche, just to warm up its stiff legs.

  Soon it is the turn of Courli, the baker, to be dumbfounded. After distinctly hearing Isabelle ordering a loaf of bread, he watches her in disbelief as she carefully counts the change that his wife hands back to her. She is so mystified that she does not even dare to short-change the girl, as she has always done in the past.

  The news quickly spreads among the villagers, but when everyone has heard that Isabelle has been miraculously cured, they immediately brand this extraordinary transformation as yet another malefaction from their sinister blacksmith.

  Ever since she has been a widow, because of Roc's refusal to heal her husband, Mrs. Graubois harbours such hatred toward the blacksmith that nothing can restrain her whenever she has the chance to malign him. Today's event is the kind of opportunity she's been waiting for. Like a bluebottle buzzing against a windowpane, she starts to tattle from door to door. She has no difficulty finding a receptive audience because she has an uncanny ability to spell out loud what everyone thinks, but is too afraid to say. At first it looks as if she will succeed only in enlisting the begrudging support of a few villagers, but by the end of the day she has managed to assemble a swarm of hatred: thirty men, who are now following her back to the inn. Facing her audience, Mrs. Graubois climbs on top of a table.

  "We don't want this wretched blacksmith among us any more!" she holds forth. "Everyone can see that he doesn't belong in this village, that he has never wanted to! Ever since he settled down here, we've had more ill winds and calamities than we would ever get in a year of Sundays. First there was my husband's death - rest his soul - then came all these sick babies, and you all know by now with what strange ritual he heals them, while your own children are dying next door to his house. And today that retarded bitch parades among us as if she had more brains than you and me put together. But has any one of you ever noticed that Roc works day and night and that we've never seen a single piece of iron coming out of his forge? I'm telling you, there's something more in this arrogant monster than just his powers to heal babies, there's something else!"

  "Damn it, she's right!" whisper a few men, stirred up by her words.

  "You, Vairon," she continues, lowering her voice, "and you, Denys, you'd better wake up. If he has the power to cure Isabelle's madness, he could very well do the opposite and turn all of you into a bunch of dribbling morons! Sabeur, Gomart, Courli, how would you like to be the next village idiot?" Mrs. Graubois pauses and grins. She knows that such an insinuation is bound to shake them. They all remember how cruel they had been with Didier, the retarded veteran who used to limp his way around the village like a wandering and famished old dog, and who finally died of exposure a few weeks before Isabelle came to take his place.

  Feeling that she will never have another opportunity, the innkeeper's widow urges the men to run the blacksmith out of town this very day, even if they have to use force. Intoxicated by her anger, the group of villagers soon turns into an angry mob, shaking their fists in agreement. Mrs. Graubois steps off the table, and walking to the far end of the dining room, she takes down from the wall the shotgun of her late husband. "There, you take it," she tells Courli, out of breath. In front of the other men the baker dares not refuse, and he grabs the weapon as the widow slips a handful of shells into his pocket. When the villagers see the determined look on his face, they all run home to get their rifles. Half an hour later, Mrs. Graubois has become the leader of a band of armed mercenaries making their way to the forge.

  As they draw nearer to the blacksmith's lair the villagers feel their angry outburst wavering, but the widow has anticipated that. She hurries to the back of the group and plants in everyone's ears the seeds of a renewed outrage. They reach the linden trees, and by now they can see the door of the outlander's shop. That was the name they had finally given to Christophe's successor, to the man who tent lies them, to this blacksmith who seems to have no past, no friends, and no family. But once again an insidious tear seems to hinder their steps. They slow down. Half the villagers take up positions behind the huge trees of the main square, while the other half retreat to the safety of the church. Even those who have hidden behind the lindens have to put on a bragging air, in order to better hide their growing apprehension and cowardice.

  However, unbeknownst to the others, Gomart has drunk half a bottle of gin to give himself some courage. As if he were carrying the anger of the entire village, the miller continues to walk and arrives alone in front of the forge. Brandishing his shotgun, he starts screaming in the silence, "We all want you to leave, Roc... we want you to get out of our village, now!" He shouts so vehemently that the vapours of alcohol come together in his head, bursting like firecrackers. Thinking that all the others are still behind him, he takes a few more steps toward the door. The villagers are now quite worried by the sudden boldness of the miller. Mrs. Graubois stands still between Vairon and Courli, who are hidden behind a stone bench. The two men cannot bring themselves to show their fears in the presence of the widow. They suddenly understand the driving force of the miller's surprising temerity, and they are terrified at the thought of becoming the target of the blacksmith's wrath, as if it were going to ascend through the chimney of his house and swoop down on them. Had they but known the consequences of their acts, they would have stood up and run back home without the loss of another moment.

  Already the door of the smithy opens, revealing Isabelle's frail silhouette. Gomart immediately takes his anger out on her.

  "Get the hell out of my way, you 1 i tile freak!" The young girl is not in the least intimidated, as she looks at the miller and answers him with a soft, crystalline voice.

  "Why are you shouting at Roc? What has he done to you? Please tell me. If I can help you, I'll be glad to... Roc always listens to me."

/>   The miller is frantically pointing his shotgun in every direction, as if he wanted to shoot down the entire building. Trying to appease him, Isabelle puts her hand on his aim. "Do be careful," she continues. "It could go off accidentally and hurt somebody."

  Gomart is no longer in control of himself. "That's the idea!" he screams at her. "I'm gonna kill this Roc of yours, and I'll blow your brains out if you don't step aside!" Carried away by a raging outburst of defiance, he shoves her aside with a vicious slap in the face. Before he can do anything else, the huge panes of the door suddenly fly open and Roc appears, his bare chest suffused with a fiery light. He stands there, formidable, towering over the miller, and his immobility is far more frightening than any threatening gestures he could make.

  Gomart is so stupefied that his drunkenness disappears in an instant leaving him disarmed before the man he has so recklessly provoked. The miller turns around, looking for his friends, but he cannot see them. Finding himself at the centre of such a deadly void, Gomart is stricken with panic. Something in the darker comer of his soul has just made him realize that he has haphazardly set foot in hell. Dropping his gun, the miller runs away from the forge. However, two apparently ordinary objects seem to suddenly materialize in his path: an old rake full of leaves, and a few steps ahead, a piece of broken bottle resting on its bottom. In his haste, Gomart does not notice them. His feet stumble over the rake handle, and as he falls full length on the ground, the sharp glass teeth slit his throat open as if a razor blade had just been driven across his neck. Hidden near the church, everyone witnesses the miller’s abrupt fall, but no one is aware that he could be hurt. Only when Gomart gets back on his feet and desperately tries to close the gaping wound with his hands do the villagers see his blood squirting through his fingers, staining his white shirt with a widening crimson ruffle. The miller staggers for a moment and then collapses like an ox felled by a hammer. A few jolts continue to wrench his body, like so many useless blows against the hastening reaper.