by James Reese
The books, the very real books. I fingered their identical covers and the golden lettering on their chests and spines. I knew them, it seemed, even before I’d opened a single one.
These books were different from any I’d ever seen. They lay before me, communicating in a way I cannot describe. Somehow, I knew what I was supposed to read, where I was to skim, and where I ought to slow and settle into an understanding of the words. I was conscious of learning beyond the page, beyond the written word. It was as though there were two sets of words—the words I read off the page, and the words I came to know as the truth. And so I’d read the writings of X and know that he’d been a conniver and a cheat though certainly his autobiography said no such thing. I’d read testimony from trials and I’d know who lied and who spoke the truth. It was so clear: it was as though the truth were written in red ink.
This knowing, eerily, progressed to hearing and feeling. Yes, it seemed I could hear the accused witches’ testimony in their own voices. These voices rose within me, echoes of the words I read. This did not frighten me. Indeed, I welcomed the voices, welcomed them from the moment I first heard them. Odder still, I understood languages I’d never studied, never even heard spoken. Portuguese, for example. And Provençal. I was alive in the books. And learning all the while.
I read of Benedict Carpzov, “the Lawgiver of Saxony,” the seventeenth-century signatory to twenty-five thousand death warrants.
I read of Marie-Catherine Cadiere, tried as a witch in Toulon in 1731—less than a hundred years ago! She would be remembered by certain townsmen of C——. Doubtless they believed the stories they’d been told as children seated at someone’s knee, doubtless they told those stories in their turn.
It was quite cold now in the library—the open window had been pushed wider, and so perhaps there was a breeze? It was cold within the library, yes; but I was not cold. I breathed in the moist salted air. I thirsted for the warming wine, the wine that somehow led me back to the books.
It was some time later, as I read, or heard, the transcript of a trial held in Scotland—the year was 1704 and the accused, Beatrix Laing, the Pittenweem Witch, would be convicted and crushed beneath planks over which a weighted sleigh was driven five times—yes, intent on the testimony of Mrs. Laing’s ten-year-old accuser, I heard a voice that was no echo off the page. This—I knew it as soon as I heard it—this was the presence. What it said, in whispered Latin, was this:
Trust and learn. Trust and learn.
I did. And I would. I had a mission: to learn. I was studying to save my life. This I knew.
At that urging on from the presence, I dove deeper into the works before me and gave no due to the real and fast-receding world.
The book nearest to hand was by an Ambrosian monk, Francesco Maria Guazzo. Compendium Maleficarum. Its title page bore the date 1608, as well as the S-mark.
From chapter 7, “By Their Terrible Deeds and Imprecations Witches Produce Rain and Hail, et cetera”:
It is most clearly proved by experience that witches can control not only the rain and the hail and the wind, but even the lightning. They can evoke darkness, cause it when and where they will…. They can cause rivers to stop flowing, and springs to dry up; they can make the waters of a river flow backwards to its source, a thing which Pliny says happened in his time…
So it was that I was supposed to have brought a storm down upon C——. Interesting.
And I read this from chapter 4, “Witches Effect Their Marvels with the Help of the Devil”:
Let it be known that the devil deceives us in many different ways…. The demon can effect the most rapid local movement of bodies, so that he can withdraw an object from sight and substitute another so quickly that he deludes the eyes and understanding of an onlooker, who believes that the first object has been changed into the second…. Likewise can the demon seem to raise the dead; in such there is always some glamour and deception.
And this, from chapter 13, “Whether Witches Can Transmute Bodies from One Form to Another”:
No one can doubt but that all the arts and metamorphoses by which witches change the shape of men are deceptive illusions, opposed to all nature…. William of Paris tells how a certain Holy Man could surround a witch with an aerial effigy, the likeness of another being, each part of which fit to the correspondent part of the witch, or vice versa; head to head, mouth to mouth, belly to belly, foot to foot, and arm to arm; but this could only be effected with the use of ointments and words, the proper combination of which the Holy Man, it is said, took to his grave…
From the Guazzo I turned to a pamphlet folded into the Malleus Maleficarum. It was a contemporaneous account of how, in the summer of 1644, after a violent and destructive hailstorm, the inhabitants of several villages near Beaune banded together to hunt the incarnate fiends who’d thus blasted their crops. Sixteen women were sentenced to be beaten with red-hot shovels. Their broken bodies were shoved into kilns. Oiled toads were stuffed into the mouths of those few who’d survived the beating so as to muffle their screams and prevent their summoning their devils. Only one woman was acquitted—mother of the lead witness, a boy of seventeen, said to be able to spot a witch at one hundred paces—and even she, on the night of the sentencing, was stolen from her home; bound hand and foot, weights pendant from her neck, she was pushed from the height of a castle tower, let to fall headfirst to the earth.
It was here I began to empathize, bodily, with those whose stories I discovered. I recall too well the writhing, slick weight of the toads on my tongue. I taste still the scorching ascent of vomit, upwelling vomit.
Yes, it was with labored breath that I read of Giles Cory of Salem, who, in the winter of 1692, at the age of eighty, was pressed to death beneath iron weights. The man lay naked beneath the weights for two days, suffocating. “In the pressing his tongue swelled and bloated from his mouth and the sheriff, with his cane, forced it back in again and again…”
I read of the Newbury Witch. The English Civil War—1643. Men of Cromwell’s army, under the command of the Earl of Essex, while passing through Newbury, saw an old peasant woman walk on water. So they averred. They caught and had their way with this “witch.” Sated, they set her up on a barge and took turns firing at her from the shore. “With deriding and loud laughter she caught their bullets in her hand and chewed them; until such time as the smallest man of the lot, gaining the barge by raft, slashed her forehead and discharged his pistol underneath her ear, at which the Devil’s Whore fell straight down and died.”…And with this there came a pain to my forehead like that I’d suffered earlier when cut beneath the nose by the witch’s whip; and, too, I knew a thudding ache beneath my right ear, as though I’d been hammer-struck.
Could I go on? Should I go on, and to what end?…Trust and learn. Yes; but I was horrified. Sick at the stomach. And scared: would I share the fate of these witches at sunrise?
I looked out the window. Were the tips of the distant trees afire with the first light of dawn? How I refused then all thoughts of dawn! Regardless, the dawn would come. And then—
What was that? I searched the shadowed floor, certain I’d seen a rat scamper by. Movement, low in a shadowed corner. Scratching. And then a terrible squeal, as though the rat had met a bad and sudden end at the claws of a cat. (My Maluenda? No, it could not be! Still, nine lives, et cetera.) I sat listening. I heard nothing more. But there, at the height of a man’s head, hung the jellied white eyes of…No, no, no. I was imagining this, surely; for fast as those eyes had appeared, they were gone.
The candle flame burned a bright violet-blue, then. I reached past it to the wine.
Trust and learn. That voice again. Male or female? I couldn’t tell. Such urgency in it. The presence urging me on. To what? Did I actually hear its voice? Did it speak? Were its words audible, or merely known?…I cannot say. I did not allow myself to consider these or other questions, not then. I knew I was not alone, but again, and wisely, I did not allow myself to consider that truth.
More wine. And more books.
Silence, stillness; and the candle burning blue, its light steady, true.
Trust and learn.
It was then I came across a broadside folded into eight panels. Its parchment was yellowed, chitinous, its type smudged and replete with setting errors: an amateur’s hurried work. The thin cover promised L’histoire illustrée du diable de la ville de Q——. It fit into my right hand as would another’s, proffered in greeting. Unfolding the single sheet, broad as a map when I smoothed it over the table, I began to read:
“There came to the prospering city of Q——, in the Lord’s Year 16—, a devil in the guise of Priest, a fiend hell-bent on the ruination of Faith and females. This devil, name of…”
And as I read the devil-priest’s name, I heard from the shadows a derisive sound, an anguished laugh. Prospering, was it? came the rhetorical question. I think not, the reply.
The presence. I looked this way and that: nothing, no one. I read on, and twice more came the seemingly sourceless commentary. I read of the Dark Work done in Q——, of deflowered maidens and devils ascendant. But I had not progressed far when suddenly I felt a near, biting coldness, a coldness not in keeping with the season, the summer night; and I saw my right arm rise—the coldness like a vise gripping my elbow—and I watched as I, guided by a thing unseen, fed to the candle flame a dried corner of the pamphlet. It took; cinders swirled, sputtering in the sea-dank air. Flames raced to nip at my fingertips; and I fell back into that heavy chair to the accompaniment of rattling chains.
Yes, it was by the candle’s leaping sapphire light that I first saw him. It.
It was there with me in the library, the presence. I’d known that. But now the shadows started to shift, seemed to take shape: the dark shape of a man. Coalescing, as though it were of equal parts air, darkness, and dream. Standing table-side, he lifted the candlestick—its flame burst up blazingly blue—and I saw him clearly. “It was not like that at all,” said he, the voice full now. “Not at all.”
It was the devil-priest of Q——, Father Louis M——by name. Dead these two hundred years.
Surely this was impossible! But I could not deny it. Neither can I deny it now, for it is the truth. This happened!
There he stood in his simple black shift. He smiled, slowly, slyly; it seemed I drew his smile, as the moon draws the tide. He moved around behind the chair and slipped his hands over my shoulders and throat, onto my chest. His touch was cold, cold as ice. He stroked my hair, my neck. Then he bent at the waist to whisper in my ear; and I shivered to hear his words:
“We know what you are,” said he.
I stood—the horrible clanking, the restraint of those shackles!—and turned to the priest.
We stood before each other, he in his black robe, me in that ridiculous pink dress, that silken confection I’d stolen. He stood a bit taller than I.
Then he stepped back from me and—did I will it?—his mantle slid down from his shoulders to show him naked. It crumbled from his body, fell to his bare feet as though it were made of ash.
Dare I look at him, standing there?
“Yes,” said he. “Look at me.”
Could he hear my thoughts? Did he know my mind? Who, what was he?
“Regarde-moi!” And, smiling, he stepped back farther to show himself.
He raised his long muscular arms over his head, placing his palms together as if in prayer. He started to turn, slowly. Revolve. A sort of dance. A show of such beauty. I saw him full-length from the front; I saw him from behind. He smiled at my awe, my adoration; and my ignorance. He reveled in my straight-on stare.
Tufted black hair in the crooks of his raised arms. His lightly furred chest with its rosebud nipples. The broad, muscled fan of his back. His waist tapering to slender, strong hips and sculpted legs. The full, firm flesh of his buttocks. The supple length of his sex. The curves of his calves. The richly veined arch of his foot…
Here was beauty I had never known, never seen.
Tears stung my eyes. Why was I crying? Was it then I knew the truth? Had the secret of my life been told to me?
…The priest neared my body. With his weightless fingers he took away my tears; they went solid at his touch, solidified from tears to crystals, crystals that he crushed between forefinger and thumb. And then his hands moved, so slowly, over my shoulders to the back of my neck, to the clasp of the dress. He undid it. I stood waiting for the warm breath that never issued from his lips. Slowly, he pushed the dress down from my shoulders, and revealed me naked to the waist.
We know what you are.
There I stood, half-naked before this…entity. He looked like a mortal man, it’s true, but he’d been dead these two centuries, no? And his touch was…he was cold and—
“I am the incubus of lore, my dear,” said he. “Do not fear.” Those were his exact words, accompanied by the broadest of smiles, the deepest of stares. I shut my eyes against his stare. He placed his hands upon my breasts. My skin contracted. His touch, so terrifically cold, somehow heated my blood. The porcelain white skin of my throat and breasts flushed. He teased my body with his fingers, he teased my soul with his smile.
When he bent to touch my shackles they sprang open with a rusted pop. Perhaps the old iron teeth of the lock cracked at his touch? Again, I cannot explain; and it matters not at all now.
I stood before the priest and did as he commanded. He did not always speak, yet his directives were clear.
I stepped free of the chains. I let the pink dress fall to the floor; it pooled at my feet and I stepped from it as I had from the chains, left a spill of silk there atop the rusted chains. Father Louis, the flatterer, said, “As Venus stepped from the foam,” naming the strange tableau before him. Was he mocking me? He shook his head to say no, he was not.
With every compliment, with every kind word, every sudden thrill, I was more and more his. Soon the seduction was complete. I would do anything he asked.
He bent and took up the dress. He ripped it, effortlessly, along a seam sewn from neckline to hem and, pushing the books back, spread the pink cloth over the oak of the table. With his hands on my hips, he lifted me and set me down upon the edge of the table, upon the pink silk. His strength was supernatural: he lifted me without effort, and it seemed he barely touched the heavy chair yet it skidded fast across the library floor. What was he? An incubus? Impossible! And then came this tacit question: friend or foe?
“Why, friend, bien sûr,” said he.
I was naked but for Spider’s boots, the too-small pair of scuffed and worn white leather. Then I lay back on the table, for he asked me to. Told me to. He may even have shoved me gently backward, I cannot recall.
Standing between my legs, he reached up over my head—so that I felt his now rigid sex brush against my thigh; it too was cold, and I saw it like a great tusk, or horn; it scared me—and he took up the goblet and the wine.
He braced my head with his left hand so that I might drink; with his right, he held the goblet to my lips. I dared to stare into the ice of his eyes. He tipped the crystal and thin rivulets of red ran from the corners of my mouth; he took them up with his tongue. He lowered his lips to mine; from them I took more of the wine, drop by chilled drop. “Seems a shame to waste it,” said he, “precious as it is.”
I lay back. The priest set the decanter to the side, near my hip.
He took up first my right foot, then my left. He unlaced and removed the white boots, slowly. Everywhere he touched me I turned cold, but soon the icy shock would cede to…to fire; truly, it was as though my skin were being singed, but wonderfully so.
The priest held both ankles in his left hand now, balanced them there. I could not move; neither did I want to. With his right hand he reached for the wine. He poured it slowly over my feet, my ankles. He held my legs higher, poured more wine, and watched in obvious delight as the redness ran down my legs, stained its way over the shins to the calves, the knees, the thighs, and beyond.
Soon I was completely covered, coated like a foal just-slid from the womb. Red-stained, as though my own blood coursed atop my skin. Father Louis knelt at the end of the table as though at an altar. I sat above him, propped back on my elbows, for he bade me watch. “Watch me work,” said he. His head was between my spread legs. He held the red goblet and the white candle, still burning blue. Smiling, his eyes locked on mine, he leaned in to kiss me. I felt the approach of his coldness. His kiss…. There. On the inner thigh. He took a deep draft of the wine, holding the candle flame too near my flesh.
It seemed I might faint. “Relax,” said the priest. “Breathe. Look into my eyes. Feel me.” I heard all this from him, but I don’t know how much of it he actually spoke.
Only then did I realize that I was not in pain. Rather, what pain there was—the candle flame so near my skin, his cold weight and probing fingers, his tongue—what pain there was was delicious, sublime. I surrendered and I suffered it well. Quite well.
What felt like flame steadied to a sufferable fever.
But then, with his lips just slightly parted, their ends twisting in that sly and ever-present smile, I saw his tongue slide from the cage of his mouth. It came and came: it was too long. Impossibly long. It hung from his lip like red meat. He let it hang, let it hang heavily so that I might see it.