by Michael Rowe
Though I would be hard pressed to explain how I knew, he appeared to take some private amusement from my discomfiture, but hiding it with the sort of slyness I would expect from the Savages, but not a white man, let alone a priest. But in his face, there was nothing to raise an alarum.
His voice was grave when he spoke. “Father Nyon, you must remove your crucifix. Hang it here,” he said pointing to a spot over the window adjacent to the doorway. “I will reveal all to you once we are inside. But you must leave the crucifix outside, for your protection and mine. There are forces afoot tonight that are beyond our power to fight, but which may be kept at bay through the agency of the Blessed Virgin and her Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. The cross will protect us.” Again, he pointed at the spot, looking away from it as he pointed. “Hang it there. It will secure our safety from what is afoot in this village.”
Of course I obeyed immediately, for who was I to doubt the older priest?
I was a very young man, and it seemed clear that Father de Céligny had some greater knowledge of what had brought the mission to doom, and he had obviously survived the onslaught of those forces, whatever they might be. I very much feared I might not survive them without his help, guidance, and protection, for I was lost in an ocean of unanswered questions and half-formed terrors.
Too, I was so enthralled by the notion of being no longer alone in this devilish place, where day and night held equal menace, I would have done anything to keep him close. I removed the crucifix and hung it where he indicated.
Father de Céligny smiled, but it was a vulpine smile, not a reverent one as might befit a gesture involving a holy object. Again I felt the vertigo, and this time a prickle of fear accompanied it, a primal instinct impelling flight, as one might feel upon discovering a snake. And then he slipped like smoke across the threshold into the house.
The building was cold and the fire had almost burned out. I shivered. I took a stick from the small pile I had assembled and stirred the embers. I placed the stick on the small heap of smouldering ash and watched the flickering tongues of flame shoot up from the ash to consume it. I added a few more dry sticks. The fire bloomed, beckoning shadows from all corners.
Across the room, Father de Céligny made no move to step towards the fire; rather, he stood against the farthest wall of the room, save for the whiteness of his face and hair, indistinct from the darkness of the room that wrapped him like a cloak. Again, I felt that haunting sense of dislocation and vertigo.
“Father,” I said, for I could no longer abide my frenzy of terror and ignorance, “please tell me what has happened here. Where are the Indians? Why was the settlement abandoned? I was taught to look for Satan’s work only after every other possibility had been exhausted, but I confess that all possibilities have been exhausted. I am at sea.”
From the shadows, his voice came softly, more akin to a serpent’s sibilant hiss than a sequence of words spoken by a human tongue, and it appeared to issue from nowhere, yet everywhere. My senses swam, and I staggered, righting myself in time not to fall. Again, he made no move towards me to come to my aid.
“Are you cold, Father Nyon?” he said gently. “This country is very cold, is it not? Very cold indeed. Cold and wild, and very dark in the winter. Do you not find it so? Winter approaches, even now, and the hours of daylight have grown so short. Do you see how dark it has become? Can you feel the night enter?”
And indeed I did see how dark it was becoming. The room itself was growing darker. The fire seemed very far away, and the only light in the room seemed to come from his voice. I cannot better describe it than to say that his words themselves seemed to me to shimmer in the growing dark. It was as though I had stared too long at the sun and had gone blind, and the sun had grown black, searing its image behind my eyes, blotting out all else except that burning shower of falling black stars. And yet, there was no sun. There was no light.
My knees buckled, and I fell to the dirt floor.
Father de Céligny’s mocking laughter came as though from a great distance. “Poor little priest,” he said. He sounded almost regretful. “You should never have come to St. Barthélemy. You should have believed the stories you were told about what happened in this place.” I heard the rustle of his robes and the sound of his feet as he walked slowly to where I lay.
Even as I write these memories tonight, I am struck anew at how they appear to be the ravings of a madman, even to me. And yet: I write the truth of the events as they occurred; I swear it upon my soul.
I tried to rise to my feet but my limbs refused to obey the commands of my brain. I was powerless to move. Were it witchcraft or some other dark art, I was trapped in its spell, unable to move, as though I had found myself at the bottom of a vast dark sea, holding my breath and struggling desperately to swim to the surface before my chest exploded and I took in all that cold, black water.
“Can you hear me, little priest?” de Céligny said, leaning close to my face.
I tried to answer, but found that, though my wits were still my own, I could not even speak—though I knew that if he commanded me to speak, the words would come, even if they were not my own words, but his. But I was able to move my eyes. I saw his face with a hellish clarity that had heretofore eluded me, and with that awful sight came another surety: that I had, God help me, found the author of the malefaction that had proved the undoing of the settlement.
O, how can I describe what I saw as I gazed upon the visage of Father de Céligny, the murderer of St. Barthélemy?
Shall I say that his eyes glared with a reddened light unlike any fire of God’s earth, the same burning crimson that I had seen in the eyes of the Savage children two nights ago? That they stood out like beacons in the waxen pallor of his face?
Where I thought I had seen aristocracy I now saw the visage of a devil—a degenerate, ravenous archfiend wearing a well-tailored mask of human flesh. His foul mouth was open, and I could see the dull gleam where his teeth lay against his lower lip, and the smell of rotted meat, and worse, issued from his mouth.
“Do you see?” the beast said. “Do you understand?”
“Monster,” I whispered, my voice suddenly my own again. “Monster. Monster. Monster. What have you wrought here?”
“I carried the seed inside me,” he said. “The gift was in my blood, as it was in the blood of my ancestors. It is my inheritance, an inheritance I have brought with me to this new, unspoiled world. I have shared its light generously with these poor, lost people, to whom I have given a new catechism: mine. And now, they will have two priests. You will stay here with me and we will minister to our new congregation.” He cocked his head mockingly. “Does that please you, little Jesuit?” he said. “That we bring the true light of our darkness to this unspoiled place?”
“I will stop you,” I said. “I will save these people. And I will kill you, and I will do it in God’s name, and to His glory, devil.”
“No,” Father de Céligny said. His voice sounded almost pitying. “You will not.”
Then, by the grace of God, three things happened in quick succession. A slumbering log on the fire exploded behind us, sending up a shower of sparks, the retort as sharp as the crack of a cannon. Father de Céligny hissed, startled by the noise of the fire. And in the moment he turned away from me, the spell was broken. I found I could again move my limbs.
I pushed my body away from where I lay, leaping to my feet. My hands instinctively went to my chest, where the crucifix usually lay. With horror, I remembered that devious creature had tricked me into hanging it outside the hut. I was defenceless, as I had always been intended to be.
De Céligny turned slowly towards me. His smile was one of pure, hellish triumph, for we both knew it was my time to die. I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross in the air in front of me.
There was a terrible snap, like a lightning strike, and de Céligny screamed. I opened my eyes to see him flinching away, as though from a terrible, searing heat.
I made the sign of the cross again, and again he screamed. As I stared, he fell forward as though to collapse on the ground.
But before his hands even struck the ground, yet another wonderment occurred, though this one was as malign as the other was divine. In the first second, I had beheld the falling human form of Father de Céligny, but what landed on the ground instead was the shape of a colossal, towering black wolf with blazing red eyes and the jagged teeth of a stone-carved gargoyle.
I cried out in shock and stumbled backwards away from this new incarnation of the monster. From its gullet came a roar of rage such as I have never heard from any animal. The wolf crouched before me, as though poised to strike, but instead it turned and leaped easily over my prone body and ran out through the doorway into the night.
I reached for the remaining pile of sticks by the fire, and seized two slender ones. These I crossed, one over the other, in the shape of a makeshift crucifix. Thus armed, I held it in front of me and pursued the creature through the doorway.
In the unearthly brightness of the full moon, I beheld the entire village. But tonight, the village was not empty, not deserted.
Twenty, perhaps thirty Savages, men, women, children, young and old, stood ranked in a motionless perimeter like statues, eyes fixed upon me, fixed upon the makeshift cross I held in front of me, neither moving towards me nor backing away.
In the centre of the crowd stood Father de Céligny. Our eyes met. He stared at me with deep hatred. When finally he spoke, his words echoed only in my mind, for his lips did not move.
We will come for you tomorrow night, little priest, when the sun is down. We will come for you then, and nothing—neither your crosses, nor your prayers—will keep us from you.
A cutting wind sprang up suddenly from the north, carrying with it the knife-edge of winter. One by one, the shapes of the Savages and Father de Céligny shimmered, becoming misty and indistinct, then vanishing entirely as though carried away into the darkness beyond the trees and the rock cliffs by the sudden blast of frigid air.
I stood there till the first fingers of dawn coaxed the tentative morning from the night’s entombment. Some vestiges of my courage returned with the daylight. I let my aching body fall stiffly to my knees in a prayer of thanks, and an invocation for the strength I would need for what would—what must—come next.
I ate the remainder of the dried meat and corn mush that had been left to me by Askuwheteau’s band before deserting me, and I drank some of the water I had drawn the previous day, for my thirst was fierce. Had it only been two days ago that I arrived at the godforsaken ruins of St. Barthélemy? It seemed as though I had been there for an eternity, for time had begun to turn inwards on itself with the progression of this waking nightmare.
Despite my febrile, sleepless state, I remembered as a boy growing up in Beauce, I had heard the legends and tales of these revenant creatures, the morts-vivants who slumbered in their coffins beneath the earth in churchyards and sepulchres and rose from their graves at sundown to nourish themselves on the blood of the living. In the legends I recalled, these creatures would never die unless a shaft of wood was driven through their heart and, afterwards, the head stricken from the body. Even as a child, I had dismissed these stories as peasant folk-tales or, at worst, the blasphemous heresy that the Lord would allow the dead to leave their tombs in order to walk about among the living before the great Day of Judgement. And yet, here was that very abomination in the flesh, and I had seen it with my own eyes.
I knew then as I had not known before what my true, God-ordained mission was to be. I would have to kill this creature that had devilishly disguised itself as a priest, and consign it to whatever Hell its soul was destined.
As well, I was duty-bound to free the souls of the Savages who had died to slake this monster’s unholy thirst. I owed it not only to these poor people, but also to the honour of the Society of Jesus, for we were the ones that provided its blasphemous disguise.
If the stories were true, and if Father de Céligny had brought his plague with him from the Old World to the New, then he and the Savages would have had to find a place to rest during the daylight hours. There were no obvious graves (nor would there have been, in light of the Savages animosity towards the interment of their dead, preferring, as I understood the custom, to raise the departed one’s body on a sort of platform above ground).
A thought came to me then, as a blessing from God. I remembered the diabolical wolves that had stalked me without attacking when I came too close to the cliffs outside the village yesterday morning. The very same wolves that had proved such ruthlessly efficient jailers, which had kept me inside the house until sunset when these creatures would once again walk unencumbered through the night. If control of the wolves through supernatural agency was within de Céligny’s power, than it could only mean that they were protecting him while he slept.
Which meant, simply, that the place where he—where they—slept could only be the place where the cliffs rose up. Perhaps there were caves. Dark places where the light would not reach, wild places where they could sleep undisturbed.
I searched the huts in the village and was in despair of finding what I needed until I came to the last one, which seemed to be a storehouse of some sort. In that hut, beneath a pungent heap of dried animal hides, I found a bundle wrapped tightly beneath the skins. Eagerly, I pulled it open and found a smallish bow and two crude arrows. Even to my untrained eye it seemed old and warped, and more like a child’s toy than an actual weapon. But I took it gladly, adding it to my poor arsenal, along with a candle, and a tinderbox.
I turned my eyes towards the sky. Though it was still morning, there was a silver-grey quality to the light that hinted of shortening days and early dusk. I struck out across the village towards the cliffs with the bow and my faith. My fate was now entirely in God’s hands. If I were to fail in my mission this time, it would be into His hands that I would consign my martyrdom.
By the position of the sun, I reckoned that I had spent three hours, perhaps four, exploring the cliffs that ringed St. Barthélemy. The upward climb had been difficult, but the rock face was dry enough that my feet could find purchase.
It seems strange to think of it tonight, but as I remember the early hours of that bloody day so many years ago, the immediate recollection I have of that long walk to the caves is not only a memory of terror, but also of great beauty.
They say that in the hours before his execution, a condemned man experiences a fatal sort of calmness, one that allows for deep meditation, prayer, and reflection. Since my arrival in New France, I had not allowed myself to see anything but the perilous danger of the unknown, be it the inclemency of the seasons, the barbarous inhospitality of the Savages, and the dangers that seemed to lurk behind every distant, jutting island in every impossible lake. While I had grown accustomed to the foul smells and the casual barbarism that infected even the most mundane interaction in New France, from the crudeness of the filthy voyageurs who came to resemble the Indians in appearance and bearing, to the awful customs of the Savages themselves, I had never been able to see any beauty anywhere, except in my memories of home.
Today, facing certain death, I saw beauty. Wild, cruel, implacable beauty, to be sure, but beauty nonetheless. The world was gold and blue, the trees aflame with fiery colours the likes of which I had never seen. Against them, the sky was an indescribably exquisite lapis. All around me was a sense of silent vastness, as though this land was its own world, a world whose borders were so distant as to be irrelevant. I could easily picture the sun rising on one end of this country whilst simultaneously setting on the other.
And then, I felt yet another chill, this one coming from my soul. For I remembered that to all this beauty had come Father de Céligny, carrying his secret like a plague bacillus from the old world into the new. Did the monster wonder at his good fortune at finding such an exquisite expanse of unspoiled innocence upon which to stake his claim? Had this been hi
s plan, perhaps? Had he intuited that, in France and elsewhere in Europe, there would be those who knew what he was, and, ignorant peasants though they would most likely be, they would also know the means of dispatching him?
Here in New France, the creature would find only innocence upon which to prey. He would only find the childlike, trusting Savages whose own superstitions did not encompass European superstitions that might correctly show him for what he was.
Did de Céligny dream of outwardly spiralling concentric circles of cannibalistic creation—of feeding on these people and making them like him, then sending them to prey on other Savages, first ten, then a hundred, then a thousand, then a million, until the entirety of New France was his personal Tartarus, with de Céligny crowned its Lord of Chaos?
Did this demon delight in mocking by his very existence our sworn mission, as Jesuits sworn to bring the light of Christ to the Savages by bringing them darkness? By taking from these poor people their lives and eternal souls instead of saving them? By disguising himself as one of us, turning our priest’s robes into the cerements of the grave, wreaking fiendish machinations while calling himself a holy Father?
The very thought filled me with revulsion and outrage. Ahead, through the trees, loomed the cliffs. I was awed yet again at the uncanny silence all around me, as I had on the first day I’d arrived at St. Barthélemy. No birds sang, nor even wind in the treetops. The only noise was the sound of my feet on the leaves and the fallen twigs on the ground.
The wolf attacked without warning. There was no stalking, nor growling, no herding this time. It was almost as though they had read my mind and understood that my intentions this time were not exploratory, but rather carried a purpose that was deadly to their master. Into the silence came a sudden sound, like thunder or galloping horses. I felt it before I heard it, and then the daylight was momentarily blotted out by a massive, hurtling form that appeared to spring at me from everywhere and nowhere all at once. I was knocked into the air. I fell backwards, my body smashing to the earth.