by Michael Rowe
I closed my eyes and said a prayer for my safety in the face of this wickedness and for strength to drive whatever evil had destroyed the village back to the Hell from whence it sprang. And I prayed for courage, for I fear I had none at that moment. I thought of the brave martyrs who had gone to their deaths praying for the souls of the Savages who were cutting their bodies and forcing them to eat their own flesh. If I was to meet my own death at more unearthly, numinous hands, I would strive to die with as much courage as they had shown, and with as blithe and open a heart.
“Come, demons!” I shouted, brandishing my crucifix aloft. “Do your worst! I have no fear of you, for the power of Christ makes my arm a hammer! You are powerless against His holy name, which commands you to be gone from this place!”
I swept the cross in front of me like a scythe. I imagined I felt the shadows leaping back in its advance, but again that could have been in my mind, for what I had seen before I did not see now—the blackness had become impenetrable.
And then, out of that same blackness, came the sound of slow and measured footsteps. My heart leaped in my chest, for the cadence of those footsteps was human. I squinted to see. Again, that flicker of firelike crimson in the gloom, but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. As I stared, a figure materialized from the shadows. It was a man wearing a black cassock tied with a cincture. And—O! The joy! I saw that his head was crowned with the flat black hat of our Jesuit priests.
I called out, “Father de Céligny, is that you?” The figure stood motionless in the shadows, not speaking. I called out again, “Father, show yourself. It is I, Father Nyon. You are safe, I mean you no harm!” They were odd phrases to have come to me, for why would Father de Céligny ever have reason to fear me? And yet the figure held back with an aspect that I can only describe as fearful. Again, I called out softly,
“Father?”
And then, he stepped towards me, and I saw that it was indeed the white-haired man I had seen the previous night, not a dream, not a revenant, but real as I was, made of flesh and blood. The joy I felt at that moment was the first joy I had felt in many, many months and the loneliness I felt in that desolate place left me at once. Finally, I thought, whatever fate I was to meet in that Land, I would not have to face it alone. And perhaps we would indeed escape together, Father de Céligny and I! Where yesterday there had been no possible hope for the future, there was now at the very least a glimmer of it.
In his face I saw the aristocratic lineage to which Father de Varennes had alluded in Trois-Rivières. It was the face of a descendant of nobility, the face of a refined man who belonged in the library of a fine country chateau, or presiding over Mass in one of the grand cathedrals of Europe. It was the face of a grand seigneur from an oil portrait of ancient riches. The nose was high-bridged and aquiline, the lips thin and red. His face held the pallor of long illness, and yet it was the face of a virile and healthy man. I opened my arms to embrace him with all the joy in my heart, but his voice stopped me where I stood.
“Father Nyon,” he said. “Come no closer. There is no time to spare! We must quickly seek shelter. There is prodigious danger abroad tonight; we are not safe here in this village. Follow me.”
With that, he began walking away towards the Jesuit house, beckoning me to follow him without turning back. I did follow him, struggling to keep up with him, for his own progress through the village was swift and sure, though the darkness was, to me, impenetrable.
As I think of it now, though I know Your Reverence will doubtless believe the fever guides my pen, he moved like smoke along the ground, appearing even to float. Which is to say, in one instant be appeared to be directly in front of me, then in another he was to the left of the path, then again, to the right of the path. I recalled the movements of the apparitions I had beheld earlier, flickering like wraiths throughout the village, but vanishing when my eyes strained to follow them. While Father de Céligny was plainly visible, the trajectory of his movements seemed likewise variable.
He stopped at the entrance to the Jesuit house and turned slowly towards me. Again, I was assailed by a sense of being on the edge of a precipice and looking abruptly down, for the tableau itself, Father de Céligny, the house, even the moonlight, seemed to sway before my eyes. I reached out by instinct to right myself, but my hands found no purchase and I stumbled and fell. He made no move to help me.
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 wo
rds 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 itsel
f 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.