The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  My head fell audibly back onto the oak table. With his fingertips, the priest closed my wide-open eyes, as one does with the dead.

  The wine went thick, viscid, and cold at the touch of his tongue. It became a balm, an unguent; and he took to it hungrily. From the ankle he followed the flow of the wine…down, down, up over my body…. And when he kissed my face, ranged his tongue over my cuts, I knew he was healing me. The faintest of bruises would show in the days to come, a dingy gray-green where blood pooled beneath the skin; there would be no scarring at all.

  I opened my eyes. My body was red from the wine, as though I bled from wounds I’d not sustained. And there he was, moving over me in the uneven flickering light of that blue-burning candle.

  Finally, with his hands on my hips, and my legs hanging slack, the priest went down onto bended knee before me—a prayerful stance. He lifted my legs and placed them over his shoulders. His smile widened as he spread my legs and…

  “My, my,” said he. “What have we here?”

  The priest’s cold hands rested on my inner thighs. He pushed my legs apart. Farther. I felt then the icy tip of his tongue.

  We will show you what you are. Words sounding so like a promise.

  …Then, from the far dark corner of the library, beyond the meager light cast by the moon and the strange candle flame…there, deep in the shadows from which Father Louis had come, I saw something. Movement. A dark writhing…shape. What was it?

  “Stay,” said Father Louis, sternly. He wasn’t speaking to me, not then. But he was when, a moment later, he whispered:

  “We will show you what you are.”

  We?…I sensed that same presence, had the same feeling I’d had before Father Louis had stepped from the shadows. I stared into the dark. Perhaps the moon slipped then from behind a cloud, perhaps the candle flame flared up suddenly…whatever it was, I saw a face take shape in the shadows. Beneath it the vague outline of a figure. Male or female, real or revenant…I couldn’t tell.

  Then it spoke. Though, in truth, to call it speech is too generous. Its words were unintelligible. Animal sounds, it seemed. The rasping grunt of something caught in a trap. It repeated itself, again and again, till finally I heard the words it whispered, madly. The most beautiful rose. It must have known I’d finally understood, for it stopped speaking. Still, I could sense it, could almost see it standing there in the dark. How long had Father Louis and I, lying on that oak table, been watched by this…this shadowed thing?

  Just then Father Louis did something to me with the longest finger of his right hand and I forgot all about the shadows. For a moment…. I wonder, was I still reluctant to see what he was showing me? Was it the mystery of the shadows I wanted to solve, rather than my own mysteries?

  “We know what you are. We will show you what you are.”

  His words might have seemed a threat, had I not been looking into his face…. So beautiful, he was! All strength and sinew, sex and shadow…. I believe I returned his smile then.

  Stop it. That death rattle coming from the dark. That voice. Stop your games!

  “Be still, ma mariée,” said the priest. “This one is alive, and she likes my games.”

  Hurry, Louis! The others…

  “D’accord, tais-toi!”

  But while you play your…your games, the others arrive and—

  “Oh, all right. Damn you!”

  Too late for that, mon prêtre.

  “Then damn them!”

  Oui. Tous et tout, came the reply.

  Father Louis took the candle from its holder. It was thick in his fist. Thick as his wrist. The light in the library suddenly shifted, and I saw something in the shadows. It was still there, whatever it was; and it spoke again:

  Vite, Louis! Hurry. Make it known!

  Father Louis lowered the candle, held it so near my face I felt the heat of the steady flame on the softness of my eye, blinding me, burning me. Please, no…

  “I won’t hurt you,” he breathed, and, smiling wide, added, “Not like that anyway.”

  He stood over me. Leaned into me. His weight, so cold…. He had form but no density, no mass; rather he felt like the figure of a man made from papier-mâché, yet supple. Something held me to him. I could not move, not even if I’d wanted to. I was as bound by him—by his will, by his strange alchemy—as I’d been by the chains.

  Father Louis kissed me. He licked my lips; I felt him spreading them, prying them apart with his tongue, working his way into my mouth. Again, the ice and the fire of his entry. He was filling me. My mouth went wide to receive him. My eyes were tightly shut; first in fear, soon in stupefaction and ecstasy…. His hands, no less cold than his tongue, settled on either side of my neck; he held me as a strangler would; he pulled me up toward him, into him. His tongue went deep into my throat. Impossibly deep. Was it growing? It seemed to be expanding within me. My mouth and throat were verily clogged with his tongue and I couldn’t breathe and as I started to choke he…

  He withdrew and…

  Laughter in his bright eyes, so near mine.

  My soul shuddered as my eyes went wide, wider.

  That voice, again, from the dark: Slowly, Louis. The uninitiated…

  Then, slackening the muscles of my body’s chilled throat, I rose; striking like a cobra, I took the priest’s tongue deeply down.

  He tried to pull his trick-of-a-tongue from my mouth. (I’d surprised us both with my avidity.) I held as best I could to the icy root. But then I felt its thickness dissolve in our mouths, devolve to a mere man’s tongue, which still I worked with mine. When finally he wrested his tongue free of my mouth, Father Louis said, “Know it or not, these are the tricks you want.”

  Was that possible? Had I the will to want, the presence of mind to…. Indeed, I was mindless though my senses were heightened now to the point of pain; the pain, and the accompanying pleasure…. My resistance grew weaker and weaker; through all that followed I did not, could not resist the priest. “Yes,” he said again, “these are the tricks…”

  And with that he dipped the candle flame into the wine. It sizzled and hissed, but the blue flame did not die; it simply lit the cut crystal of the goblet. The priest’s hands were aglow; it seemed I could see through his lit flesh. Yes, I could! No bones. His flesh as plain, as supple as gloves of kid. He twisted the candle, nearly as round as the goblet, and it seemed to take shape. Turn from a taper into…into a member, a member to mock the priest’s own, which rose full and hard.

  He drew the wax phallus from the goblet. He kissed me, there;…the icy tip of his tongue and its trail of fire…

  My lips. There. Curved and pink and wet as a shell freshly drawn from the sea, or so he said…. How he teased me!

  Up, up a bit farther and he swallowed me, swallowed my sex as I had his tongue. I was in his mouth. Growing. The bloodrush! I felt the tug of his lips on my…flesh. His tongue tripping over the tip.

  “Never,” he said. “Never before.” He spoke admiringly. Appreciatively.

  They are coming! Be done with it!

  Louis lifted my legs higher. He flicked a kiss at my wine-wet anus, laughed, and said, “The Osculum Obscenum! They call this the Devil’s Kiss.”…How he worked upon me! My nether mouths. My flesh, my sex. With his fingers, icicles all…

  I writhed in pleasure and pain. The two were one, fused.

  He teased both my lower mouths with the warm, thick, wine-red candle.

  He stood. He held the candle…he brought its waxen head up to my mouth. I opened my mouth to take it, but the priest deprived me. I could not help but smile.

  He worked against my reluctant flesh. Prying. He dipped his fingers in the wine, sucked them and slipped them, one by one, inside me. I opened. Slowly. He pushed and I opened wider. I opened to him and to the candle. I opened to the pain and to the pleasure.

  The sun was rising. Dawn. The indigo deep of the night grew ever more shallow, and soon the sun would fade it full away. The mullioned panes of the open window dre
w the day’s earliest light; I watched the glass—glistening, glinting, set with small gems—from where I lay I watched the glass give back the light.

  And I thought, Let it come! Let dawn come. Let them come!

  The second presence, the…the thing in the shadows watched us, described tighter and tighter circles around us. Still I could not see into the dark corners of the room, and it was to these that the thing retreated time and again. Its voice came more often, warning, commanding, pleasing, teasing. I understood it, though its words came as a rattling breath, an exhalation somehow strung through with meaning. It seemed sometimes I understood its voice before I’d even heard it speak. It—that voice—seemed to enter me directly. Was more felt than heard; like a vibration, the “sound” that issues from struck iron. It said: My most beautiful rose…. My most beautiful rose.

  “Ah,” breathed the priest, “see how my words return to haunt me?” He laughed and came closer to me, ever closer.

  He stood between my bent legs, holding high my heels. I lay back on the table. His sex stood rigid over my abdomen. He placed his hand onto my extended, engorged sex. And he tugged—almost too hard, not quite—at my lips, so slick and eager. “This,” he said, “is the most beautiful rose. My most beautiful rose.”

  …Ah, what words to use? How to tell the truth?

  …Alors, this was the truth. Like I had never known it. The beginning of the end of my mysteries.

  He spread me wide. Opened me. He fisted his rigid sex, so thick and ugly; beautiful too. He teased me. Wouldn’t take me. Not at first. And so how I thrilled when that icy crown of his spread my slickened lips, so slightly. How I thrilled as he started to push, slowly, steadily, and my muscles constricted around him, at once stretching to accommodate him and recoiling from his cold, cold flesh. To even call it “flesh” seems…Ah, but then, as had happened with his fingers and tongue, I went warm, hot where he touched me. Heat now. Inside me. Flooding me with that sweet fever.

  How heavy he suddenly was! Full-bodied as he had not been before. Yes, he was somehow fuller now, his flesh colder. A wonder that I remarked any of this as he leaned down to kiss me on the mouth, to tease my nipples with his teeth. All the while smiling.

  The priest stood. Father Louis stood. The incubus stood…. Enfin, he stood and took me then. Thrusted, slowly at first and then faster. Faster. He rocked into me, rhythmically. Deeply. Pain; pleasure. And the purest delight I had ever known.

  Trust and learn.

  The first-time kiss. The rending of flesh. The whispering rip of entry.

  Sublime!

  …Father Louis withdrew. I felt the ache of his absence. I saw him lift his bloodstained fingers to his mouth. Lick them. Savor the blood. “The most beautiful—”

  Louis, came the voice, stop, now! This was the loudest and clearest I’d heard that voice. Stop it. Be done with it, Louis! What heart I have is beyond all this now.

  Her words spurred the priest. His kisses now were quick; and, roughly, he turned me over onto my stomach. He pulled me down fast to the table’s end. I held to either side of the thick oak, laid my face in the pillow of bunched pink silk.

  The dawn! And the others are coming. Who was coming, my accusers? Was she coming forward? Was that her pale, opalescent face there in the dark?

  …It was then the priest repeated his ritual:

  He poured more wine onto my back, spread it down into the cleft of my buttocks and beyond, licking and sucking, with his touch turning the wine to a gel. It was exquisite, and I heard sounds issue from my mouth as though it were a stranger’s.

  The priest went down onto his knees. Again and again the Devil’s Kiss. How I wriggled, writhed against his mouth, into that kiss! Shamelessly. More. More! Fingers, his cold fingers prying, prodding, pushing. And I opened to it. Took it into me. Felt it rend me wide, deep.

  “Hold yourself,” he said. “Here, like this.” Reaching around me to the front, he took my hand in his and…and he led my hand to my own sex. Ah, the fast movement of my hand in his! I had never done this, for self-satisfaction was a sin, no? I had never even known that I could bring myself to…Only in those night dreams…the salt, the milk of the dream…I’d no idea…

  Enfin, the priest withdrew the candle, slowly. And then he entered me. I took him to the hilt and…

  Oh! the tastes, the textures, the strange acrobatics of it all!…Enfin, the truth of it all!

  Soon—my breath caught, my heart having slipped from its place—I found my hand full of a whiteness like liquescent pearl. I had worked it from myself.

  It was then the priest whispered the truth I had never wanted to know:

  “You are a woman. You are a man.”

  And at this, she stepped from the shadows ragged and blue, and was made known to me by name: Madeleine de la Mettrie.

  I stood bent over the table, my hands clamped to either side. What had he said? Did I dare hear his words again, repeat them to myself till their true meaning came? No; I dared not. Thankfully, there was the sudden distraction of…of her.

  She came out of the shadows, the demon-girl. She seemed made of shadows, as had the priest. As she neared she passed from black through gray to blue; the darkness seemed to cling to her, weighting her as water weights the drowned.

  That hideous voice was hers, and I heard it again as she neared. Yes, she said, in that guttural rasp, You are a woman. You are a man. Still the sense of the words did not come.

  “Closer,” said Father Louis. “Show yourself.”

  Were those rags she wore? Cerements? And what was that scent? It was neither good nor bad; it was like soil newly turned. A natural smell. Redolent of a forest or woodland; redolent too of rain and salted air. Another step—she moved effortlessly, as though borne on the air—and I saw her long black hair, tangled and filthy, falling to frame her pale and perfect face. Wide-set brown eyes, the high bones of her cheeks, a thin nose and full red mouth. That mouth…

  …It is difficult to describe what it was I saw then.

  Never had I seen such a sight. Nothing could have prepared me for it, for her. Nothing. Surely she was in pain. Real or not, revenant, specter or succubus, how could she suffer such wounds?

  Yes, her very throat was torn away! From chin to chest she was nothing but caked gore, over which trickled a stream of blood that seeped from the black cavity. Blood all over her. The flesh was torn, split wide. The lips of the wound were red and fresh, quivering like the gills of a landed fish.

  Don’t be afraid, said Madeleine, and I saw that the death rattle came not from her mouth—indeed, her mouth did not open; the lips did not move—but from her throat. She spoke through her throat!

  Still, I wasn’t afraid. Despite the blood and gore and torn-open throat, Madeleine was still beautiful. Her voice too, horrible as it was, assuaged me, calmed me. I could understand her.

  We’ve come for you, said she.

  “Yes,” echoed the priest, “to educate and save you; and to ask a favor of you.”

  Not now, Louis!… Mon Dieu, how graceless you are.

  “Graceless? Indeed I am; it’s true.”

  Now is not the time, said Madeleine. You know what we must do. We must do it quickly, too. The dawn…She raised a long thin arm toward the window. The sleeve of her simple, coarse shift was dirty. It fell back to her elbow as she lifted her arm and revealed her wrist and forearm white and smooth and thin. Her long fingers seemed fleshless. They tapered to cracked nails caked with dirt. Had she dug her way up out of the earth?

  No questions, said she. We haven’t much time.

  Louis stood behind me still. He pulled me closer. I stood tall and naked in his arms, in his cold arms, which he twined around my waist.

  “I’ve done my part,” said he, cupping my breasts. “And quite well, I think. Education by seduction, one might say.” He turned his back to the succubus, saying, dismissively, “The floor is yours, demoness,” and asking, “Will you tell our story true?”

  11

  Cr
eatura Ignis: The Accused

  Daemoni, etiam vera dicenti, non est credendum.

  The Devil must not be believed, even when he speaks the truth. —St. Thomas (Book 22, Question 9, Article 22)

  PROSPERING? REPEATED MADELEINE. Far from it. The village of Q——was walled and airless, stifling.

  “…Filthy, offal-choked streets,” adjoined the priest. “And wood smoke, wood smoke forever swirling in bitter blue plumes…. Excrement running in thick rivulets, bearing the feeding maggots that would burst forth as flies…. Geese and other living things at slaughter let go a vaguely tidal gas, and…”

  Louis, please, said Madeleine. The floor is mine, or so you say. And she went on, describing the place of her birth in apologetic tones: We tried burning incense against all this, but to slight effect.

  “Slight, indeed,” said the priest. “…horseflesh, burnt bread, swilling swine…And the one unmistakable stench that permeated everything: the acrid, soil-like smell of massed, unwashed humanity.”

  You speak as though you came to us from the Vatican, or some other gilded place.

  The priest walked silently to the windowsill; sitting, he added, ruefully, “Would that I had never gone to that place at all.” Only then did he turn the tale over to Madeleine, promising silence save for commentary “as appropriate.”

  Father Louis, I learned, first came to Q——to serve as parish priest. Curé of the Church of St. Pierre, by title.

  The scion of a respected bourgeois family, he’d hoped for a chaplaincy to a nobleman, perhaps a position as tutor to a future marshal or cardinal. If only he’d been born noble, was his frequent lament: surely then he’d have been able to secure a bishopric, an office to gild and gladden his days. But he was not noble, neither by birth nor disposition. And, as competition among priests was fierce, he resigned himself to the role of curé at the Church of St. Pierre in Q——. Not Paris. Not Marseilles. Not even Avignon. Q——.

  Early in his third decade, standing tall and strong, Father Louis was remarkably handsome, with large dark eyes, fine features, and an abundance of black curls spilling out from under his black biretta. He wore his beard groomed in the Van Dyck style. He possessed uncommon confidence, carried himself with a swagger; he was—this was Madeleine’s word—cocksure.