by Michael Rowe
Pain sang through every joint and fibre of my being, and the bow secured around my shoulder cut into my back like a knife blade.
I barely had time to raise myself on one elbow when the beast launched itself at me again. But I was ready for it this time. I raised my leg at the same moment it leaped and kicked the filthy animal as hard as I could. I heard the sickening sound of the wolf’s ribs cracking against my boot and its own scream of agony. It landed in a heap a short distance away and lay there, writhing in pain.
Scrambling to my feet, I ran for a thick pine tree with low-hanging branches and began to climb it. Like a madman, I strove crazily to remember if a wolf could climb a tree or not. Normal wolves could do no such thing, of course, but in that moment, my imagination was flooded with images of werewolves and sorcery, unsure as I was of the limits of the powers of the creatures that commanded the wolves. Or even whether what had attacked me was a wolf, or merely something in the shape of a wolf.
From the vantage point of the higher branches of the trees, I watched the wolf struggle to raise itself to its feet and limp over to the trunk of the tree. In any other circumstance, I would have felt pity, for it has always distressed me to see an animal in pain. But this creature wanted—nay, needed—my death. It glared upwards balefully, then threw back its head and howled.
The cry was clearly a summons, for another of its kind soon joined the beast. The second wolf was larger and obviously older, though no less powerful for its age. Its muzzle was white, and its coat was flecked with the same. But if anything, its age had merely added layers of strength and cunning and malignity, for it circled the tree with a hellish determination, its jaws snapping when it looked up to where I was perched.
I reached around for the bow tied to my back. It was not broken, thank God. I could only guess my distance in relation to the creature on the ground, no longer pacing, but standing stock-still, waiting for me to fall out of the tree.
Carefully I fitted an arrow into the bow and took aim, remembering Askuwheteau’s lessons from what seemed like an eternity ago. I squinted my eyes and willed the death of my prey. Then I pulled the string back as steadily as I could, and let the arrow fly.
The arrow struck the second wolf in the flank. It fell, lurching to the ground in stunned shock, yelped once, and kicked its legs as though it were running. Then there was silence as the wolf lay on its side, tongue lolling out of its maw.
The first wolf, the injured one, whined pitifully and licked its fellow as though trying to wake it. Ruthlessly, I forced down my pity. Climbing partway down, I took aim at the first wolf with my bow and the one remaining arrow. Snarling defiantly in spite of its broken ribs, it began to back away from the body of the second wolf as though to take shelter, its hate-filled yellow eyes not leaving mine for an instant. In the same moment it turned to run, I pulled back on the string and sent the arrow home.
The arrow transfixed the wolf through the thick of its neck. Its body went rigid and from its throat came a wet, choking sound, as though it were trying to bark, or scream, but could not. Blood gushed from its mouth. Its eyes rolled to one side and it collapsed on the ground near the body of the second wolf.
I exhaled audibly, surprising myself with the sound. I did not even realize I had been holding my breath. What I felt in that moment was more than the sin of pride or vanity, though it encompassed both of those things. I felt as though God Himself was guiding my hand, moving me ever closer to my goal. My robe was soaked with sweat, and it felt cold and damp against my back and chest in the chilling afternoon light.
I cast one last glance at the bodies of the two dead wolves, as though to assure myself that they were truly dead. There was no time to tarry. Squinting, my eyes explored the rock face, searching desperately for some clue.
And then, my heart suddenly felt as though it had ceased beating, and my breath caught again. My eye had been drawn to a patch of recessed shadow between two jutting promontories of rock a short distance above where I now stood. It appeared, even from the distance at which I stood, to be a sort of opening, or cave mouth.
Upon reaching it, I used the tinderbox to light the candle I had brought with me. Shielding the flame with my hand I squeezed myself through the portal of natural rock outcropping and found myself inside a space tall enough for me to stand without encumbrance.
By candlelight, the cavern seemed enormous, though that might have merely been an illusion caused by the twisting shadows. I felt along the cave walls, walking carefully in the near-darkness, for I knew that if I fell here, or was otherwise injured, one of two things would happen: I would either die of some combination of hunger, thirst, or my wounds, or worse still, I would become helpless to defend myself against the devils’ depredations.
And then I made the discovery that has haunted both my nightmares and my waking hours for nearly twenty years. Even writing it now, tonight, I am overcome with the horror of my memory of it.
I cannot have gone any great distance into the cave, though it seemed like I must have, so smothering was the blackness, when I felt something move in the darkness. I say felt rather than heard, for there was no sound, but rather some displacement of the air above me. I raised the candle and looked up.
Hanging upside down, toes bent slightly for impossible purchase on the rock ledge, were the brother and sister I had met in the forest on the last night before my arrival at St. Barthélemy. Their arms folded against their bodies like wings.
The little boy was still naked. His legs wrapped around his sister’s middle-section in a grotesque parody of vile, incestuous carnality. Hers were likewise entwined around his middle-section. Her dress had fallen downwards, and her maidenhead was plainly visible through her brother’s spindly bronze legs.
And then I lowered the candle and looked down.
Strewn all around me lay the bodies of the Indians of St. Barthélemy in similar positions of repose, or death. Their eyes were closed, their arms crossed against their bodies as though for warmth, or comfort. Their chests neither rose nor fell, nor did any sound of breathing issue from their mouths. I put the candle very near the face of one, a woman. Her face was calm, and oddly beautiful. The candle’s light sculpted her high cheekbones with shadow. Her lips were full and voluptuous, and yet there protruded from those lips the sharp points of two white teeth, human in shape but somehow resembling the fangs of an animal.
I counted five, ten, fifteen of them in the immediate vicinity where I stood. There were doubtless more of them beyond the circle of my candlelight.
Holding my crucifix tightly in my hand, I nudged the woman’s body with the tip of my boot. I braced for her to awaken, but again there was nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing to indicate that I was anywhere other than an ordinary tomb, surrounded by the natural dead.
Without thinking, I placed my hands under the woman’s armpits, and tugged. Her body seemed very nearly weightless, certainly unlike any human body I had ever touched. It was as though, along with their souls, the curse that had been visited upon them had taken their physical heft. I glanced upwards at the two obscene children hanging by their toes from the ledge and wondered if this condition was what enabled them to suspend themselves in that manner.
The woman did not stir as I dragged her towards the opening of the cave. I was not sure what I would do with her once I brought her outside, but I had some vague memory of stories about these monsters’ abomination of sunlight and was hoping that there might be some truth to it.
As I approached the entrance with my burden, the darkness of the cavern brightened until I could see the actual rock opening. I felt a shudder move through the woman’s body, though she retained her sleeping posture and made no sound.
And then, as I stepped through the entrance to the cave, into the light, she awoke.
Her eyes flew open and she shrieked as though prodded with redhot iron tongs. Her mouth yawned open, exposing her full arsenal of sharp white teeth. The woman pulled away fr
om me and began clawing at the ground as though to bury herself in the stone. Her screams rent the afternoon air, recalling to me the stories of the terrible witch burnings, and how the condemned women shrieked in the flames to which they had been sentenced.
For indeed, this Savage woman appeared to be burning alive in the sunlight.
In one second, her skin was clear and unblemished; in the next, it was festooned with enormous blisters that blossomed all over her body, seemingly all at once. The air was suddenly full of the smell of burning meat and something darker and fouler. White smoke poured from her body, rising from her limbs, her face, her hair, from any part of her that was exposed to the light. Still screaming, she looked at me with pleading, tortured eyes, and reached for me as though to beg my help, or at least my pity. In the instant our eyes met, I believe I saw her human soul, trapped in that terrible state between life and death and I knew that these creatures were not beyond the grace of God after all.
I crossed myself and gave her absolution, speaking the words “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.” Then I stepped back, for the air around her suddenly shimmered and began to burn. And in the next instant, her body exploded into flame. Boiling blood poured from her nose and throat, thick steam rising from it, the stench beyond foul.
The heat of fire that consumed the Savage woman’s earthly flesh was not of this earth. In less than a minute, the flames had reduced the woman’s body to ash, leaving no fragment of bone unconsumed, and the charnel house stink was everywhere.
This gruesome exercise I repeated twenty times or more, dragging each of these creatures to meet their second death, the final death, in the waning sunlight outside the cave. I blessed each one in its final moments as a soul to be saved and sent to its eternal rest in the arms of God. I absolved each one, for whatever their sins in life, this terrible end to which they came was not of their own choosing.
The two children, the brother and sister, I took last.
I carried them into the sunlight together, and they died together there. In their last moments, they seemed to again become children, innocent and trusting and terrified, and something in my soul died as they lay screaming in agony as the sun reduced their small, frail bodies to dust. It was children I saw being burned alive before my eyes, not monsters. The memory of it seared itself into my soul forever. Was I now a murderer of children? Was this the final curse that had been laid upon my head by the monster still inside the caves? Would God forgive me for this, even if I could never forgive myself?
All around me were smoking heaps of ash. My clothing was nearly white with it, and I knew it was in my hair and it burned in my eyes as well. I was grateful not to be able to see myself in a mirror at that moment, for I fear I would have seen a monster in my shape staring back at me through the glass.
The sun was dangerously low in the sky, and a cold wind had sprung up, scattering the smoking ash across the rock face and into the forest in spiralling whirlwinds. Around me, the shadows were beginning to lengthen in the forest, and I still had not found the author of all this grief. Resolutely, I turned back towards the cave, praying it would be for the last time.
I found the monster much farther back from the place where I’d found his flock, in a natural anteroom of sorts formed where the walls of the cave split off from the main section of the cavern. He lay upon a natural rising of rock, his arms folded across his chest in an aspect not unlike that of a stone-carved knight atop a sepulchre. His own noble ancestors in France, centuries dead, might have been buried inside a sarcophagus of that exact kind.
His face, by the light of the guttering candle, was beautiful. I cannot claim otherwise. It was the face of a handsome man in the latter prime of his life, with high cheekbones and well-formed features: a proud brow, and strong nose. It was the face of an aristocrat. Pale as death, he was, save for the redness of his lips. His mouth was half open and I shuddered at the length and sharpness of his terrible teeth.
But whereas the eyes of the others had been closed, his were open, fixed and staring into the darkness above his head.
I started in shock, but realized in an instant that he was no less immobilized by the sunlight than the others had been. I passed my hand in front of his eyes. He neither blinked nor gave any other sign that he was aware of my presence. Like the others, his chest neither rose nor fell, nor did breath issue from his mouth.
I yearned to drag him by his white hair along the cruel rocks of the cavern floor, but I feared, doubtless irrationally, that it might somehow wake him. Instead, I wedged the candle in a crevice, then placed my hands under him as I had the others, and half pulled, half carried him. Like the others, he was very nearly weightless.
The cave mouth was darker than it had been even a few minutes before. With a sinking heart, I realized the reason: the sun was setting. If it had not already set, it would set within minutes. I cried out to God and pulled harder, moving even more quickly through the gloom.
And then I felt a bony hand grasp my ankle, and sharp nails digging into the soft flesh there. It was too late, I thought. The sun had set, and the creature was awake.
I screamed and dropped Father de Céligny’s body, backing away from it until my back was parallel with the cave wall next to the entrance. As I watched, he rose to his feet with a dreadful, majestic, malefic grace. For a moment, he stared at me, his eyes full of hate, then he lunged towards me, arms outstretched, his teeth bared like an animal. I ducked through the opening of the cave into the dark red setting sunlight.
“Come and get me, demon!” I shouted, looking into the cave. “I have killed your congregation and undone your work here. Look at the ashes of your children! If it is your plan to punish me for killing them, I am here, you coward! Do not hide in your hole like a snake! If you were once a man, show it now! Night has fallen; come fight me on your own terms!” It was a gamble, for there were still some streaks of redness in the sky, but I counted on the fact that traces of the monster’s human vanity might have survived into its current state of existence.
De Céligny stepped through the entrance of the cave, into what was left of the sunset. There was a flash of light and the familiar abattoir smell of seared flesh. He shrieked and covered his face with his hands, stumbling backwards into the cave. When he removed his hands from his face, I could see that the skin was charred and blackened and smoking, as though he had fallen into an open fire. I held up my cross and stepped towards him. “Tonight you die, monster!” I cried out. “Tonight, one way or another, you will die! And if not tonight, then I will find you tomorrow wherever you hide and burn you in the sunlight like the beast you are!”
As I watched, from inside the shadows of the cave mouth, de Céligny lowered his head and closed his eyes. I saw his lips move, as though he recited a prayer, or an incantation of some sort. The sound of his voice carried across the space between us, though the words he whispered were unclear.
He opened his hands in the aspect of an invocation, extending his arms towards me, encompassing me, the forest behind me, even the night itself in his blessing.
Then he raised his head and began to laugh, a foul, cruel laugh entirely bereft of warmth, or joy, or indeed any human emotion, and stepped out of the cave into the new-fallen night. His eyes shone like rubies in the charred skull of his face, his teeth even longer and sharper than they had seemed mere moments before.
“We are coming for you, little priest,” the creature said. “We are coming for you now.”
Before I could reply, I heard the familiar hiss of an arrow in flight and felt the wind of it pass by my ear. The arrow struck Father de Céligny full in the chest. His eyes flew open in shock and pain. De Céligny grasped the arrow in his hands at the base in a vain attempt to pull it out of his body. He roared in fresh agony as a second arrow sang through the air, striking him just above the place where the first arrow had found purchase. Black blood streamed from the wound, drenching the front of
his robe. His screams had risen in pitch to the point where he sounded more like an animal than something that had once been human.
Behind me I beheld a miracle the likes of which I had never dreamed I would see. It was an angel, or so it seemed, for Askuwheteau stood there in the darkness with his bow and arrow, taking a third from his quiver and aiming it at the monster who writhed in its death throes in front of the cave that had lately been its living grave.
“Askuwheteau!” I cried, running to him. “You came back! My friend, you came back to me! How can I thank you? Praise God!”
I fell into his arms and embraced him, holding more tightly to him than I had ever held to my father, or my brother, or indeed any friend. In that moment, the love I felt for my friend was even more encompassing, I confess, than any other love, including my love of God.
My noble Savage friend gazed at me with something I dared to imagine was pride, and put his arm around my shoulders. He guided me to the place where the creature that had called itself Father de Céligny lay dying. Its body was crumbling before my eyes, passing into some sort of malodorous, smoking foulness.
Askuwheteau drew back his head and spit. The spittle landed on the creature’s face. Askuwheteau said something in Algonquian that sounded like a curse, then averted his face.
But as I stared at the dying creature, a curious thought came to me. Its last words had been, We are coming for you, little priest. We are coming.
And then, all around me, I saw the glimmer of what seemed like hundreds of yellow eyes, and I heard the sound of panting. The wolves were perched on the rocks above us; they circled us at the base of the rock face, and even more of them lay in wait beyond the tree line.