That Is Not Dead

by Неизвестный

  Upon that sublime cloud, Fray Murrietta saw the face of Quetzalcoatl smiling down upon him. The smile radiated a warmth greater than his memories of his mother.

  Then, as he smiled back, the face transformed into that of a great blue-green serpent with feathers for scales and eyes like blood that was somehow burning. When he saw that, the enthralled friar thought immediately of the blood of Christ.

  The blood-red orbs bored down at him. The serpent’s maw opened, yawning to its fullest, fanged extent It sucked in the unresisting soul of Fray Murrietta from his helpless, prostrate body.

  Not knowing what was transpiring, the stunned friar felt himself being drawn down the snaky gullet, and so he vanished from dimensional space.

  His mind screamed a single word: Why?

  And a cold voice replied, “You seek souls for your god. I seek souls for myself.”

  On the ground, Yahuahqui went to the body and saw that life had departed it. To make sure, he cut the dead friar’s white throat with a wicked blade of chipped obsidian.

  Then he sat down to pray to Quetzalcoatl.

  “Oh, Lord Plumed Serpent,” he began. “I offer you the souls of these Christian interlopers in the hope that they replace the souls lost to the hated followers of Christ. Let the crosses and the churches and the missions be struck down by your holy lightning. Let the temples be rebuilt. Let the hearts of the true worshippers be torn from their living bodes and held up so that you may drink of their penitent blood.”

  His prayers were heard. But not by Quetzalcoatl.

  For the intensely hot orbs of the true Feathered Serpent, Yig, who preceded and would outlast both Jesus and Quetzalcoatl, fell upon him next. The reptilian mouth yawned again, fangs gleaming.

  Yahuahqui began to feel strange. It was as if all moisture, all life, were being drawn from his body. He had felt exactly like this during a difficult desert crossing once, and he had barely survived the ordeal.

  Yahuahqui did not survive this ordeal.

  “Why?” he asked in his mind, as his soul was sucked into the red maw like a fly into a frog. “I worship you.”

  A mighty voice responded with the compassion of a jaguar snarling. “You worship a false god. Did you think your Quetzalcoatl was mightier than Jesus? Not mightier. Not less mighty. Not real. Only an illusion. Yig was before.

  Yig will be after. Thank you for your soul.”

  Yahuahqui’s mouth vented a final scream of rage and disbelief. Then his upper body fell over onto the grass, dead.

  Hurtling down the endless undimensioned gullet of Yig, his soul screamed too.

  It blended with other cries—ones of despair and betrayal. The soul-screams of Yahuahqui and Fray Murrietta and the poor peasants who had been drowned in the name of the nonexistent Quetzalcoatl became one unending wail, reverberating in a place beyond earthly time, and so would never truly die.

  France, 1762:

  Incident at Ferney

  S. T. Joshi

  Voltaire got up slowly from his bed. Approaching seventy and having lived the equivalent of several lifetimes, if his involvement in the political and intellectual ferment of the age was any guide, he was no longer as agile as he had been in his younger days, when he could venture to England to meet David Hume or be the court philosopher of Frederick the Great in Prussia. Now, although he was hardly quiescent, he was content to reside here in his immense estate outside the small French town of Ferney. Louis XV, still peeved with him for deserting France for Prussia, had forbidden him from returning to his native country, but this southern village, near the border with Switzerland, was sufficiently far from Paris that Louis could not be troubled to take further action against him.

  He looked down at the naked, recumbent form next to him. Marie Louise Mignot was his sister’s daughter, and she was getting on in years. In this Year of Our Lord 1762, she would be fifty, but he could still remember the first time he took her to his bed, when she was a tempting and shapely thirty-two. She was well rid of her tiresome and officious husband, who had done nothing but give her a noblewoman’s name, Madame du Denis. Although she had refused to follow Voltaire to Prussia, she was happy to be the mistress of Ferney when he settled here four years before. They were not married and would never marry, but everyone knew they were as close to husband and wife as any couple could be.

  He raised the sheet, playfully whacked Marie’s bare bottom—eliciting a squeal of pain and outrage—and headed to the salle de bain. For today, instead of intellectuals and dignitaries from around Europe coming to his home to pay their respects to the chief intellect of the age, Voltaire would venture out into the world for a mission whose outcome he could not guess.

  True, that mission involved only going into Ferney to investigate what might be nothing more than a sordid crime, but, like the protagonist of his little novel Zadig, Voltaire had always wished for an opportunity to play detective.

  The preceding evening, the mayor of Ferney—an elderly, rotund, somewhat pompous, and ineffectual person named Jean-Claude Rigaud—had made the trek to Voltaire’s mansion and pleaded with him to help solve a hideous crime that had occurred in one of the town’s poorer districts. A little girl, no more than eight years old, had been killed in some appalling manner that the mayor refused to specify. He had wished Voltaire to come to the crime scene then and there, but Voltaire’s advanced age—and, in all honesty, his lack of intrinsic interest in the matter, for all his devotion to social justice—had impelled him to send the mayor away with a grudging promise that he would come out the next morning, when the bright April sun might allow the investigation to proceed more satisfactorily in any case.

  Exactly why Voltaire was being summoned in this unorthodox fashion remained a mystery to him. He was no authority in forensics, and he could not get a straight answer out of Rigaud as to why his services—as opposed to those of the resident gendarmerie—were needed at all. The mayor had muttered something about the unusual, even unprecedented, nature of the crime—one that therefore required scientific attainments far beyond those his barely literate police force could muster. Voltaire was usually able to resist such obvious flattery. If he jumped through hoops at every request for assistance in matters political, social, religious, scientific, and philosophical, he would never have time for his own pressing work. But something in the man’s tone of urgency, even of latent fear, had impelled him to agree to assist in the matter, but only after a sound night’s sleep.

  The carriage that would convey the elderly philosopher to the crime scene was already waiting, its pair of horses stamping the ground and tossing their heads in impatience, when Voltaire sauntered into his breakfast room. There was no way he would step outdoors without his customary croissants and chocolat, and he deliberately tarried over them before finally making his way to the carriage and entering it.

  The long journey through the town bypassed the moderately impressive homes of the wealthy burghers and made its way, by roads and paths increasingly unnavigable, to a section of crude huts, shanties, and farmhouses that seemed like relics from a prehistoric past. Amidst the listless playing of dirty children and the bent, crooked figures of prematurely aged housewives hanging up laundry or chopping wood while their equally decrepit husbands toiled cheerlessly in the fields, Voltaire got a glimpse of a France far different from the cultivated salons of Paris or the flamboyant luxuries of a Prussian philosopher-king.

  In a nearly dry ditch by the side of the road, the mayor and a group of gendarmes—one of whom, Voltaire learned, had been there all night to protect against desecration and the tampering of evidence—were hovering nervously around a small figure covered in a rough cloth sheet or blanket. As Voltaire stepped gingerly from the carriage, he glanced alternately at the sheet and the mayor, who with a curt nod instructed one of the gendarmes to lift the sheet and reveal what lay beneath.

  The figure was almost unrecognizable as a little girl—or even a human being. The mauling had been terrific. The head had been entirely severed, th
e spinal column protruding obscenely from the neck, dripping with purple gore. The body itself had seemingly been torn to ribbons with such ferocity that the poor child’s clothing in some instances melded bizarrely with the mangled flesh and the copious blood in a confused farrago of organic matter. Most hideous of all was that the eyes of the dead girl lay wide open in an ecstasy of terror—as the mouth probably would have done, if there had been a mouth and not merely a yawning, bloody cavern where the jawbone should have been. To cap the horror, the girl’s heart had been torn out from its chest, the severed arteries hanging ragged in the cavity. The heart itself was nowhere to be found.

  Voltaire clutched the side of the carriage and struggled to maintain composure. He later thought he might even have fainted for a few seconds. Suddenly fired with a determination to do what he could to bring the perpetrator of this vile act to justice, he stalked forward and spoke sharply to the mayor.

  “What is the meaning of this? How could this have happened?”

  The mayor, seemingly mortified that such a loathsome crime could have occurred under his jurisdiction, shrugged eloquently and said, “My dear Voltaire, that is what we hope you can help us with.”

  “Who is this child? Where is her family?” Voltaire said, the outrage still strong in his voice.

  “The dead girl is Marceline Bedard. Her family lives in the cottage across the way,” said Rigaud, gesturing vaguely to a hut, even more dismal than many of its neighbors, on the other side of the dirt road. “We have not let them see the body; it would be too horrible for them. But we have notified them that their child is dead—murdered.

  “What we want to know, Voltaire”—with an almost fiercely urgent gesture, Rigaud asked the philosopher to examine the grisly form more closely—”is how this poor child met her death. What possible weapon or implement could have been used to cause these incredible wounds? Was she even killed by a human being? Or by an animal? If the latter, what beast could have dealt these injuries?”

  Voltaire, recognizing that a mystery well beyond the level of a common crime was being presented to him, knelt carefully next to the corpse and gazed at it.

  “Rigaud,” he said slowly, “these injuries are not the work of any human implement I know of. And look here”—he pointed to a row of deep scratches over what used to be the belly of the little girl—”This must have been the work of an animal. They are unmistakably claw marks.“

  Rigaud looked at Voltaire with a kind of sad incomprehension.

  “But what animal could have caused them? They are so…large. It cannot possibly be the work of a wolf or wild dog or even a bear. The creature that inflicted these wounds must be…must be”—he looked around desperately—”the size of that carriage!”

  Voltaire shuddered, knowing Rigaud was right.

  “But,” he countered, “note that there are only four rows of claw marks—not five. You ask what creature could have made them. Well, I may have something to offer on that…”

  Rising stiffly to his feet, Voltaire reflected on something he had been told a year or two before. His erstwhile secretary, Cosimo Alessandro Collini, had been undertaking curious investigations in some limestone deposits in Bavaria, maintaining that he had found fossil evidence of some incredibly immense prehistoric bird or winged reptile that he wished to identify by the outlandish term pterodactyl (wing-finger). According to Collini, this creature had a wingspan of up to one and a half meters—and in the midst of those wings it had a hand or claw with four digits.

  But the pterodactyl—if, indeed, such an animal ever existed—must have been long extinct. Collini had said it had flourished up to 150 million years ago but had disappeared long before the advent of man. But then, other creatures had also been thought to be extinct, until further research uncovered specimens in unexpected places. Voltaire remembered that freedom of thought and inquiry were the hallmarks of the Enlightenment, of which he was the leading figurehead, and he was adamant in believing that no fact must be accepted on faith or tradition, without personal investigation and confirmation.

  And yet, the possibility of such an archaic entity existing undetected in the most civilized country in the world seemed incredible.

  Voltaire did not explain to Rigaud the entirety of his speculations regarding the pterodactyl; he merely said that it was possible that some creature previously unknown to science might be responsible for the horrible death of the little girl. The task remained to identify it—and its owner, if it had a human owner—and bring them both to justice.

  “Tell me the circumstances of the crime, if they are known. Surely someone saw something?”

  “You would think so,” the mayor said ruefully, “but people are saying nothing. Maybe they are afraid. All we know is that this little girl was playing by the side of the road not long after dusk. Why her parents let her out after sunset is beyond my understanding, but she was a headstrong little girl and had never gotten in trouble before, so her parents, exhausted after a long day, let her go. Soon afterwards, there was a sharp scream, quickly cut off. The girl seemed to have disappeared, but it was not long before a neighbor found her.”

  “Is that all?” Voltaire said incredulously. “Nothing more?”

  “Well,” Rigaud said with anomalous reluctance, “there is something more…”

  Getting up stiffly himself—he had been kneeling near the corpse, striving valiantly not to look at it—Rigaud trudged up the slight acclivity from the ditch to the road. Then he proceeded in the direction opposite from which Voltaire had come, further into the poorer part of the village. Without warning, he stopped on the road and pointed down to the ground.

  “See that?” he said laconically.

  Voltaire’s eyes were directed to the pointing finger. It did not take him long to see what was being indicated.

  “Blood?”

  Rigaud nodded grimly.

  He continued to march down the road, indicating further bloodstains at intervals of about ten to fifteen feet, until the entire party was brought face to face with the one tolerably well-built structure in this part of town: a wooden edifice of surprisingly large dimensions, rectangular but with no windows at all on any side. It could not possibly be a residence of any sort, and as Voltaire gazed up at a kind of tower or cupola in the exact center of the roof, he saw an iron cross surmounting it. It was not the customary cross of the Catholic Church, but more like the ankh or crux ansata of the sort that had been found in Egypt or in the Eastern Orthodox countries.

  On one of the three stone steps leading to the only door of the edifice was a drop of fresh blood.

  “What is this place?” Voltaire asked sharply. “Is this a church?”

  Rigaud rubbed his grizzled chin in some perplexity. “In all honesty, we’re not sure.”

  “Not sure!” Voltaire cried incredulously. “How can you—”

  The mayor held up his hand, as if pleading for patience. “It’s somewhat of a long story, Voltaire. I scarcely know how to begin…”

  “Perhaps at the beginning,” the philosopher said snidely.

  With an immense sigh seemingly emerging from the depths of his being, Rigaud began his tale.

  This edifice was constructed only a few years ago by a group of immigrants to the village. They had come from across the sea—specifically, the otherwise unknown town of Kingsport in the British colony of the Massachusetts Bay in New England. They were not French, nor did they seem to be British, but they spoke French fluently, albeit a bit academically. There were no more than fifteen or twenty of them, but they all clustered in this seedy part of Ferney and had as little to do with the townspeople as they could.

  They claimed to be Catholic, but the services or rituals they conducted were—if the anomalous sounds emerging from the edifice at all hours of day or night were any indication—highly unorthodox. Had they been living in any century prior to this one of rationalism and sanity, they would have been tried, convicted, and executed as witches. This was especially the case because o
f persistent rumors of the occasional dog, cat, sheep, or even full-grown cow that had mysteriously disappeared in the vicinity of the church. But because the votaries of the sect seemed like harmless eccentrics, and because the principle of religious toleration was spreading through the civilized world—largely through Voltaire’s own influence, as Rigaud was careful to note—the clan was left largely to its own devices.

  “Who is the leader of this cult or sect?” Voltaire queried.

  “It is a man who goes by the rather peculiar name of Malnéant—Pierre Malnéant,” said Rigaud. “He lives in a cottage on the other side of this…this church.”

  “Have you spoken to him?” asked Voltaire, pointing significantly to the bloodstain.

  “Er, no,” the mayor said hesitantly. “I thought…I thought you might wish to do so.”

  “You’re quite right about that!” cried Voltaire with vehemence. “Let’s go.”

  The home of Pierre Malnéant seemed to be as humble—even as decrepit and slovenly—as those of his neighbors, but something in the general ambiance of the place somehow caused both Voltaire and Rigaud to pause before knocking on the ill-fitting wooden door. It was as if the cottage were skulking insidiously like a carnivorous animal stalking its prey, remaining still as death until the time came to pounce unmercifully on its victim and dispatch it with a few well-timed blows. There was a kind of latent hostility to the place—but a hostility that was laced with contempt, as if it knew it had nothing to fear from man or beast.

  Voltaire wished that his rapping on the door had been firmer and more authoritative. But the act, however performed, produced the requisite result. The door opened and the owner of the cottage stood before them.

  Pierre Malnéant was a man of modest figure—thin, of average height, and wearing a long black robe that reached to his feet. The hand that clutched the door was surprisingly refined, even elegant—more fit to grasp one of Madame de Pompadour’s china teacups than the crude door of this ramshackle edifice. But none of this is what caused Voltaire and Rigaud to gasp with surprise and a touch of fear.