by Michael Rowe
I felt, rather than saw, Father de Céligny die. His—or its spirit surely passed me in the blackness, leaving a trail of hate in its wake. And as if the trail of hate were a signal to the wolves, they sprang as one, it seemed, and surged up the hill to where Askuwheteau, the de facto murderer of their master, stood.
In the face of my Savage friend I saw bafflement, and then, wonder of wonders, I saw terror. At that, my heart sank, for I knew that if brave Askuwheteau was in terror of his life, we were doomed. He backed away slowly from the deadly advance of the wolves.
He reached out with his arm as though to touch me, but I realized he was not seeking out my camaraderie. He was not seeking to die with me. He was seeking, even then, to save my worthless life.
Wordlessly, lest he hasten the inevitable coming assault from the wolves, he was frantically trying to communicate to me that I should run, that I should save myself.
And to my eternal shame, run I did, back to the mouth of the cave where I crouched behind the stinking, smouldering ashes of the monster whose power to ordain our bloody murder seemed to survive even its own apparent death. I knew somehow that the wolves would not dare approach the remains of their master.
My saviour Askuwheteau stood proud before the advancing horde of wolves. Even as he recognized the inevitability of his own horrible, coming death, his face was impassive.
And then he began to sing.
After a short time, the only sound was the ripping of flesh and gristle, and the terrible crunching of Askuwheteau’s bones in the gore-clotted maws of the wolves. They peeled the skin off his face with their teeth and tore his limbs from their sockets the way kitchen dogs might fight over a soup bone. When they had finished their awful work, there was nothing identifiably human in Askuwheteau’s remains.
They licked the bits of flesh still clinging to his bones with a horrible delicateness, as though it were a special treat being passed to them under the table by an indulgent master.
By then, night had fallen to such a degree that Askuwheteau’s blood soaking the ground was black in the rising moonlight, and the wolves themselves looked like ghouls squatting over an open grave devouring a freshly dead corpse.
They raised their heads then, and looked at me, growling low in their throats.
I closed my eyes and fell to my knees, hands clasped in front of me. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin that my death would be pleasing in God’s sight, and that it would be over quickly, and with as little pain as possible. Or, if that were not God’s will, that I be granted as much strength to endure it as He had granted Askuwheteau.
But the wolves did not attack. Instead, they loped over to where the arrow-pierced skeleton of Father de Céligny lay on a bed of rocky soil and fallen leaves. They circled it, tentatively sniffing the pile of smoking bones, but giving it a wide enough berth to suggest they feared that the ossified remains might yet be something alive, something hellishly vivid that could hurt them as no bullet or arrow could.
Then, as though it had burned them, they leaped back from the pile of bones, cowering like mangy curs before a master’s whip. As one, they threw back their heads and howled. My poor words here cannot do justice to the effect of that unearthly, haunting sound as it rose into the night and fell down upon the tableau in which I knelt. Then the wolves turned and bounded into the forest without looking back, not aimlessly, but as if they were being pursued by a hunter and were in search of safety.
Again, I was alone—truly and utterly alone. I mourned my Indian friend Askuwheteau, this man whom I had dismissed as a Judas and a Savage, but who had shown the courage and faithfulness to come back to a place he feared in order to secure my safety. In all truth, he had saved my life, and he had died in my place. The tears I wept that night for Askuwheteau were the bitterest of my life, and none I’ve shed in the long years since that night have been harsher or more absinthial.
I drew the sign of the cross over what remained of his poor mauled face, and bowed my head. “Eternal rest grant unto thy servant Askuwheteau, O Lord,” I prayed. “And let perpetual light shine upon him. Grant him absolution, O Lord. May he rest in peace. Amen.”
Feeling my way through the darkness, I walked back to the village. I knew that there were perhaps more of these demons hiding in the forest watching me, but I cared little of it, so heavy was I with the weight of grief and guilt. If the Devil and his minions had been so able to use a priest as a vessel to serve his will as he had with Father de Céligny, then my life, and my immortal soul, were in God’s hands, as they always had been. But my work that night was far from over.
Inside the Jesuit house, I found a torch of cedar and pitch. I lit the torch, then put a second torch in my bag. There was a shovel leaning against one wall. The heft of it gave me comfort, for I believed I could make a decent weapon of it if it came to that.
The path back to the caves through the trees was easier this time because of the light of the torch. Easier in one sense, for the path was well-lit and I made good progress. Harder in another, for I now knew, beyond any measure of a doubt, what monsters, earthly and unearthly, could hide outside that ring of torch-light.
Upon arriving at the caves, I saw that the two piles of bones were as I had left them. The first pile, the remains of my poor Askuwheteau, I would bury. Though it was against the customs of his people to lay them beneath the earth, Askuwheteau had fought and died as bravely as any Christian, and it was only natural that he be buried as one. I lamented the fact that I had not had the chance to baptize him before he died so horribly. After I had completed my most pressing task, I swore to him that I would attend to his burial with due reverence.
The second pile of bones, the bones of de Céligny, I approached with dread. I pushed the torch close to the charred skeleton. At first I doubted the proof of my own eyes, for it surely seemed as though the creature whose body I had watched crumble and dissolve once pierced by the arrow would have found some way to render itself vivid once again.
And yet, as I said, it was where I’d left it, and as I left it. I wedged the base of the torch between two boulders and, by its guttering light, I surveyed the grotesque thing.
I raised the shovel over my head and brought it down squarely across the neck, severing the skull from the body with a single blow.
In my hubris and vanity, I half-expected to hear a sound, perhaps a scream from beyond the shadow of the Valley, or the trumpets of angels and the beating of their wings as they celebrated my triumph over the forces of Darkness. But there was nothing save the sound of the wind high in the trees that danced in the moonlight.
Using the shovel, I scooped the dreadful mix of bones and ash into my bag. I lit the second torch by the fire of the one wedged between the boulders and by its light I made my way to the mouth of that abhorrent place, carrying my ghastly burden in my other hand. To say that the blackness of the cave was forbidding by daylight is to render the description of it at night, by torchlight, almost beyond possibility.
Deeper and deeper into the cavern’s depths I went, the aureole of torchlight illuminating only the area immediately around it. The silence was the silence of the grave. No sound broke that silence; no sounds save for that of my feet on the rock and, from far away in its recesses, the steady drip of water on stone. The weight of the bag seemed to grow heavier with every step I took into that obsidian blackness.
And then, suddenly, there was a sound. I stopped in my tracks, straining to identify what I heard, or what I only thought I’d heard. My torch sputtered and for one terrible moment, the fire burned low as though some wind had blown it out.
In that moment, as the darkness swam towards me, I heard the sound again. It was the sound of breathing—not my own, but coming from somewhere in the lightless recesses of the cave. And then I felt the horrible dead heft of the bag twitch against my leg as though there were something inside it, trapped, but still alive.
I screamed and dropped the bag on the floor of the cavern. Wildly I
swung the dying torch in front of me. The low-burning flame revealed only the walls of the cave, appearing and vanishing like a chimera with every sweep of the torch. And the sound of breathing was no more, if indeed it had ever been.
I brought the torch, which again blazed to life, close to the bag containing the bones of Father de Céligny and bent down to examine it. The sweat soaked my hair and ran down into my eyes, but when I wiped it away with the back of my hand, and squinted to see, the bag was where I had dropped it, and it was still, unmoving.
Had I imagined it? Had the nightmare sensation of carrying a trapped animal that had been merely stunned, but was waking, been nothing more than a phantasm born of my terror? I had no answer but this: that the bag was not moving and my torch would not burn forever. I had to do what I had to do; I had to hide the remains of this monster where they would never be found, where no human hands would soil themselves with the contagion it represented. I crossed myself and pushed farther into the cave.
I have only a blind man’s reckoning of how much farther and deeper into the cave, and then underground, I went before I found what I was looking for—a natural recession in the rock, oblong and shaped like an sarcophagus, surely carved by centuries of natural erosion, a natural coffin for my most unnatural and unwholesome freight. Surely here, in the wildest, darkest part of this wild, dark wilderness, the bones of this monster would remain unmolested till the end of time.
I placed the bag into the recession and covered it with the weight of some of the large stones and boulders I found scattered about. The work was arduous and the rocks were heavy, and by the time I placed the last one on top of the makeshift grave, my hands were bleeding with my exertion. I wiped my hands on the robe, leaving the traces of my stigmata on the coarse fabric.
Then, taking up the torch again, I turned and began to retrace my steps through the blackness. After an eternity, I came to the mouth of the cave. I wept joy when I saw the glimmer of the first torch, the one I’d left outside the cave, wedged between the rocks.
From the position of the moon in the sky, I ascertained that I had been about my mission for the better part of the night, though dawn was still a few hours away. I took up the shovel and began to dig. By the time I had dug a grave deep enough to bury Askuwheteau, the sky had begun to lighten in the distance, pale violet streaks, and dark blue lifting from the blackness like celestial foam on a wave.
I laid his body reverently into the grave. I was surprised to find that I still had tears in me left to shed, but I did, and I shed them there as I covered his body with the dark, flinty soil upon which he had so bravely died. I bowed my head and prayed for the progression of his immortal soul on its journey towards the Light of God.
And then, from overhead, came a sound like the flapping of giant sails in a strong wind.
In the light of the torch, the creature dropped from some unknown height. As it landed, crouching like an animal about to spring, I had a brief, vivid impression of giant, unfolded wings, but the wings seemed to melt away, leaving in their place a pair of thick, muscled arms. Its head was bowed, and long dark hair streamed from its scalp like a black halo.
When it stood, I saw that it was of vast height, taller than any Savage I had encountered, but Savage it was—or, rather, Savage it had been in its original, God-ordained life. Now, reborn, its eyes burned with that familiar crimson fire and its teeth were deadly and terrible. From that mouth issued a high, shrill whistle that was human in neither pitch nor form, but somehow communicated a fierce, inhuman hunger that would, I realized, brook no denial.
Instinctively, I lifted my torch in my own defence as it leaped. The effect upon the creature was instantaneous. To my wonder, the thing retreated, as though terrified by the fire. Emboldened, I advanced on it with the torch. It screamed in rage and continued to recoil. I expected any moment for it to shift its shape, as I had seen these things do. I knew that if it did transform itself, it would effect an escape.
The thought filled me with terrible, righteous rage. In that moment, I saw it as the incarnation of all the pain and fear I had encountered since arriving in that Godforsaken spot. Now, worse still, it had even profaned the site of Askuwheteau’s grave. With an oath, I shoved my torch in the creature’s face.
Its hair exploded into flame. Shrieking in agony, the thing clawed at its face and hair attempting to put out the fire. Alas, for the creature, the fire only burned brighter and hotter, spreading to its face and arms by some supernatural providence.
The demon flung out its arms in an aspect of crucifixion, and before my eyes its body appeared to shimmer, dwindling and yet appearing to stretch, but becoming smaller. The arms elongated, becoming as the wings of a bird, or an enormous bat, beating furiously as it rose into the night, still burning, still transforming as it took flight into the darkness like a fireball streaking towards the village of St. Barthélemy. My eyes followed its upward trajectory for a few seconds, and then watched in awe as it crashed to the earth. Its screams as it fell to its death—or what I prayed was its death—were the pitiable lamentations of a damned thing.
But by then, my only emotion was joy, and I delighted in the foul creature’s death, a death I prayed had been agonizing beyond endurance.
And then, like a benediction, the air was full of snow, falling in heavy flakes as pure white as the wings of any angel, and in the red light of dawn’s advance in the east, winter was upon me with a hunter’s killing stealth.
On the edge of the village, the spectral shapes formed themselves out of the falling snow, moving wraithlike towards me. Exhausted, starving, blind with sweat, drenched in dried blood, I fell to my knees and accepted my death, for I was beyond fighting further, beyond the ability to endure any more of these horrors. When they reached for me, I closed my eyes and commended my spirit into the hands of Almighty God, and waited for the end.
And then I heard the sound of human voices speaking in a language I did not understand. Warm hands touched my face and my own hands. Strong arms lifted me and bore me aloft, carrying me through the deserted village. The snow continued to fall in a heavy sheet of cold, cleansing white. My eyelids fluttered and the light swam.
Before I lost consciousness and yielded to the tide of new darkness rushing towards me, I smelled the awful stink of burning flesh, and something worse. I looked down and saw the smouldering remains of the monster I had burned with my torch.
It had not survived the fire. Perhaps it had died attempting to cast off its shape, attempting to return to its human aspect. Its body was manlike in shape, but where its arms would have been were the webbed wings of a giant bat, ending in human hands with nails that were like the claws of a great Oriental tiger. Its face was a half-human, half-basilisk nightmare.
I turned my head away from the abomination lying on the ground, already beginning to be covered by the falling snow. Around me, I saw that some of the men were setting fire to the village. I heard the crackle of wood and smelled new smoke.
A wave of heat came to me, and my first thought was to stretch towards it. I cannot tell with any certainty as I write this if my impulse was to throw myself on the growing pyre, or merely to warm myself by it. And then, my eyes closed and I yielded to the mercy of complete insensibility.
When I awoke, though I had no bearings, I sensed that I was very far from that haunted place. I was on a sort of sledge, wrapped in furs. Above me the trees were heavy with snow, and we were moving silently through the endless, damnable forest that binds this Godforsaken country like a slave’s chain.
The Indians cared for me with a mercy and a tenderness that put Christian charity to shame. I travelled with them to their winter hunting grounds and lived as their guest and under their protection for the long months of ice and snow. In time, I came to understand that they regarded me as some sort of deliverer, and in exchange for that delivery, they were prepared to extend to me an acceptance that I would, as a Black Robe, never otherwise experience.
I heard the word “Weetigo” many times. It was a word I knew well, though I knew none of the others they spoke. It was the word I had first heard in Trois-Rivières from the drunkard Dumont, and then later from my saviour Askuwheteau, who died that I might live. I understand the word now, as an old man who has spent his life among these people, in a way I could not have understood it as a young man.
To my shame, I believe that the Savages who rescued me believed I had defeated just such a monster in St. Barthélemy, for they saw the remains of the demon creature that had fallen from the sky wreathed in fire. In it, they had seen the incarnation of their most terrifying legend; in a sense, I had made their word flesh.
At that time, I had not the words to explain to them that what they had seen was not what they called a “Weetigo,” but rather something that we ourselves had brought from the Old World to the New. I suspect that the scarcity of those words likely saved my life, for I could not have answered for their rage if they had known the truth of what Father de Céligny, or whatever the monster’s real name was, had wrought there.
That they saw me as a saviour instead of merely an extension of the same corruption that destroyed an entire village of souls—a village of innocent men, women, and children, who died without the blessing of baptism and God’s mercy, suited my cowardly purposes, though I wept with shame and grief and guilt that winter when I was alone.
In my nightmares that winter, I revisited that terrible day when I dragged the sleeping bodies of those poor creatures into the sunlight and listened to their agonized screaming as the sunlight turned them to ash, especially the children. It haunts me that I never discovered if they could have been saved, or returned to their natural state, and if my actions had been a mercy, or merely an extension of the blasphemy.
In the spring, the Indians passed me on to a brigade of voyageurs who, by some miracle, knew of me and my mission to rescue Father de Céligny and return him to Trois-Rivières. Perhaps in anticipation of a reward, or perhaps only out of charity and a sense of fellowship with another white man, the voyageurs returned me to Trois-Rivières and the embrace of our Jesuit headquarters there.