The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  Somehow she broke from the clerk and the executioner’s son, whose grip was slick with blood, and ran to Louis. She fell to her knees and kissed his broken hands. The clerk tore her away, controlled her: her arms were breaking behind her. Only then did the Prosecutor train his eyes on his daughter; and he strode to the barely conscious curé and with one quick twist turned the screws himself. Blood. Clots of it falling onto the curé’s forearms. Father Louis screamed. Again the exorcist ordered Madeleine cast from the court; but first, slowly, he bent to retrieve the noose from where it had fallen in the fray; solemnly, ceremoniously, he slipped it over Madeleine’s head, and with his thick thumb he forged a cross on her forehead.

  Madeleine landed in the alley on her back. A sharp slipping pain stabbed her abdomen. Rats scattered over the crooked cobbles. Rain fell, gathered in pitch-black pools. She was ashen; bloodless. Drained by rage. As she lay in the alley her screams devolved to crying. An instant or an eternity; it might have been either. The rats grew brave and crept ever closer. Then the door to the courthouse opened and she saw a man in silhouette. Louis! It was Louis! She scrambled onto her knees (the slipping, the ripping pain!) and began to beg his forgiveness, swear her love and vow that they three would—

  Then the silhouette turned, just so, and she saw the man in profile. That horrible hook of a nose. Not Louis. Her father, who raised the small lantern Madeleine had carried with her from the Capeaus’. Madeleine hadn’t time to think, let alone speak or act before she saw the lantern coming at her end over end through the darkness to burst at her knee. Glass flew up into her face. The scurrying rats were a gray-black wave breaking over the stones. Hundreds of them, it seemed. Moving in a rippling motion away from the explosion, the fire…. The flame had caught the hem of the cloak she wore. It was on fire. She was on fire. Still she sat, as the flames twisted deeper into the cloak. She felt fire on her hands, fire on her arms and shoulders, fire on the drum-tight skin of her belly….

  She stood up hurriedly, stripped herself of the burning cloak and cast it like a red net over the stones. The burning oil was smothered; it expired with a hiss.

  Madeleine, newly purposed, walked calmly from the alley in her shift, the rough, wet fabric of which clung to her every curve. Still she wore the noose. Blood at her knees, blood pooling with rain in the heels of her slippers, she walked back to the house that had been her prison, the house where a drunken Sabine lay sleeping. A quarter-moon shone through wisps of blue cloud. Shadows fell thickly at the feet of the stone-and-timber homes that leaned over the streets. In the square, people peered out from under their tarps and men called to her. Sums of money were mentioned. Two men approached her directly; upon seeing her state and her vacant stare, they let her pass. Whores danced in dark corners, staring out over the hunched shoulders of the men who bucked against them. A carriage nearly ran her over, the horses rearing wildly at the last moment and the driver cursing down, brandishing his crop. Madeleine was oblivious to everything but her purpose. The world as it was fell away.

  The next morning, dawn showed the square of Q——already crowded. Every window had been let. Spectators sat on the peaks of slate roofs. Boys straddled the gargoyles that jutted out from the high corners of the church. A grandstand had been set up for the cabal, the magistrates, and their guests, but the rabble had taken every seat and had to be dislodged by guards at the point of pike and halberd. Blood was shed. Two tourists and one guard were killed.

  With the sun not yet high in the sky, the condemned was sent for.

  In their excitement, the cabal forgot to force the curé to make his amends, to beg forgiveness of God, the king and Justice. Instead the Prosecutor ordered Father Louis led directly to the Question.

  A second platform had been hammered together hurriedly in the night. It stood across from the grandstand. Set before the church doors, it resembled those stages wheeled from village to village by traveling players; its boards were pitched so as to afford the assembled a better view. The crowd would riot for certain if they could not see the executioner at work.

  Across the square stood the high stake, sticks and loose straw piled at its base.

  The bells of St. Pierre struck nine.

  The privileged took their seats. An uncommon quiet settled over the crowd. The executioner and his assistant, clad in black from head to toe, hidden—though many present knew the men by name—climbed atop the platform to a chorus of cheers. There followed the Prosecutor, the Canon, the exorcist, and the condemned.

  The mob pressed forward.

  The Prosecutor spoke to the curé. His words were heard by those nearest the platform, who turned and whispered behind them, and so on and so on, a sibilance snaking its way through the entire square.

  “You are a magician,” said the Prosecutor, “and have had commerce with the Devil! Answer!”

  The curé responded, “I have been a man, and have loved as a man must.” His words spread through the square. Random cheers rose up.

  The Canon: “You admit it then, demon! You have broken every vow!”

  “A promise to perform the impossible is not binding.” Those words would appear on many a souvenir. The crowd grew frenzied. As it was some time before they fell quiet again, no one heard the curé say, as he stared across the square at the stake, “Such vows are as straw to the fire in the blood.” But many people saw him summon his remaining strength and spit into the face of the Canon.

  The crowd was verily crazed. Men and women nearest the platform spat upon it.

  Father Tranquille stepped forward to exorcise the ropes, boards, wedges, and mallets of the Question. He sprinkled these tools with holy water, lest the Devil work some infernal art and render them useless. Then he heard a quick confession from the executioner and his son, who set to work in haste.

  They tied the curé to a thick board, twice as wide as himself, and tilted it toward the crowd. They enclosed his legs, from knee to foot, between four oak boards; the outer pair were fixed, and the two inner movable. The son readied the wedges, which the father would drive between the two movable boards, crushing the curé’s legs against the outer boards. This was the ordinary Question; the extraordinary involved wider wedges and would come later.

  The Prosecutor, against all custom, came forward and took for himself the task of placing the first wedge. Between the knees of the priest. The executioner raised the mallet high, higher, both hands on the long worn handle…

  The wedge drove the boards beside the priest’s knees a finger’s-width closer, just enough to split the sturdy bone of the kneecaps.

  The crowd cheered and ordered more, more!

  Father Louis, tied to the board and tilted forward, saw through his tears the thousands who mocked his murder. He tried to pray, but could not. What god, he wondered, would leave him alone beneath a blue and cloudless sky to die? To be tortured. Burned. He was guilty of love, perhaps an excess of its practice. But he’d had faith, and had served his god well. Now this.

  Father Louis tried to hide his pain, tried to deprive his torturers of the joy of his pain. Something quick and hot shot up his legs from the burst bones of his knees to settle in the small of his back. Do not show them, he thought. Do not let them see. Do not fear the falling mallet. He began counting backward from one thousand. He closed his eyes and recalled the faces and bodies of his lovers. None more readily than Madeleine’s. Madeleine. Hadn’t he heard her yesterday, between turns of those screws that had wrenched the nails from his fingers and ruined his hands till they now hung like tattered pennants? Hadn’t he heard her confess her failed plan, and say she loved him? Say she’d only come to save him? He thought so, yes.

  A cry rose from the crowd as the second wedge was shown them. Father Louis felt the hot breath—scented with ginger beer—of the executioner’s son, standing so close beside him, watching his lips, waiting for them to twist into the shape of a confession. They would not. The boy held the written confession. Five times the priest let the quill fall to the boards. He
would not sign. Never. No pain could make him. No pain…

  Father Louis realized that within the hour, when the mallets’ work was done, he would be trundled across the square, tied to the stake, and set afire. He would burn. Die.

  Count! Count against the coming flames! But here was the Canon, standing over him, the rubies and hammered gold of his cross glistening in the sun. Father Louis refused to sign a sixth and final time.

  The second wedge then. At the feet, snapping and smashing the small bones like so many twigs. And the third, placed near the first: the bones of the knee broke the skin; marrow oozed.

  The curé’s world was alternately lit and extinguished, loud and silenced as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Always those damnable salts brought him back to life, only to die again.

  He damned his torturers, but the crowd was crazed now, with the mallet falling fast, and no one but young Jacques, the executioner’s son and assistant, heard his words.

  A fourth, very wide wedge broke the curé’s ankles. They gave with a pop that resounded in the square.

  Then the fifth, sixth, and seventh wedges. The shins and thighs. More for the ankles and feet. Bone shattered, splintering the red and gray flesh. The trays that held the legs in place were sluiceways; blood, marrow, and splintered bone ran from them at the curé’s heels. (The executioner’s son gathered the red stew in buckets; later the family would join the tourist trade, selling vials of it, cut with two parts river water, as relics.)

  Father Louis wanted to die. Tried to die; willed it. But neither the cabal nor the crowd would be deprived.

  A chant began: Burn him! Burn the holy devil!

  The Canon summoned the Surgeon, who ascended the platform. Did he think the curé could survive another wedge, perhaps two? Mannoury opined that yes, the priest might survive several wedges more; but, he said, it was best not to risk it. The crowd would not look kindly upon a burning corpse. Keep the curé alive. Stop the Question and start the burning. The Prosecutor wanted to drive more wedges, though the executioner said the Question was already well past the extraordinary stage; if they were to keep on, his boy would have to run home for wider wedges. The exorcist convinced the Prosecutor to stop. It was clear, said he, that the curé had invoked his Dark God, that Satan had rendered the priest insensible to pain. They might drive wedge after wedge, even work the arms, but all to no avail, for Satan had surely interceded.

  The Prosecutor ordered the Question dismantled. The crowd clapped in a ritualized rhythm.

  The curé received the strongest of the salts and was made to swallow vinegar and oil from a deerskin bladder. Lime juice was rubbed into his cracked lips. Then the executioners stripped the priest (careful to save the stained shift for resale) and slipped a nightshirt, stinking of sulfur, over his head. A rope was wound twice around his waist and tied off. They then carried him down to a cart that stood at the ready, harnessed to two mules. He was hoisted up and set on a bench. His legs hung shapeless before him. The executioner’s son knelt at the priest’s side, balancing him, salting him to consciousness time and again. Young Jacques must have been thankful then for his thick hood and half-mask, for the crowd rained stones, sticks, and overripe fruit upon the slow-moving cart.

  The driver whipped the confused beasts till their hides split. Finally, preceded by a company of archers who divided the crowd, the cabal, the thirteen magistrates, the exorcist, and assorted cardinalists all made their way across the square to the stake. The cart came behind them.

  The crowd closed in on the cart. Rocked it side to side. At one point the priest fell from the bench and, having no knees left to break his fall, fell flat onto his chest and face. The boy quickly lifted the now-conscious curé up by the rope tied round his waist and set the much larger man on his lap, like a doll sewn of rags. He held tightly to him, showed him, for his safety depended on it.

  The curé spoke. A ragged, stertorous whisper. “Searcher of Hearts, know that I am not guilty of these crimes imputed to me, and that the fire in which I will die is but punishment for my concupiscence.” He looked at the boy who held him, at the wide-set pale blue eyes peering out through the half-mask. “Redeemer of Man, do not forgive my enemies. Punish them, as I cannot.” Tears, fearful tears slid from the boy’s eyes, ran down over the cracked hide of the mask. Just then the cart halted at the stake and his father relieved young Jacques of his charge.

  A small iron seat had been nailed to the stake, just above the straw and stacked wood. Father Louis was lifted from the cart and placed on this seat. The rope at his waist was used to tie him to the stake; it was wound once around his waist and once around his neck to keep him upright; a second rope was used to bind his hands behind him.

  Father Tranquille exorcised the stake and sprinkled holy water on the wood, the straw, the executioner, the crowd, and the condemned. He prayed against those demons waiting to deny justice, who would somehow prevent the priest from the suffering that was his due.

  The Prosecutor and the Canon approached Father Louis, confession and quill in hand. More salts and a mouthful of lime juice forced on him from a wooden cup. “I have nothing to confess,” managed Father Louis. “Give me the Kiss of Peace and let me die.” The Canon refused him. Those spectators at the fore of the crowd who knew what the condemned man had requested chanted against the Canon and so un-Christian an act as his refusal of the Kiss. And so the Canon kissed the curé’s cheek. The crowd jeered. A woman, safe in the anonymity of the mob, shouted that the Canon owed the curé the Devil’s Kiss, and a new chant was taken up, one that shamed and angered the Canon.

  Strangulation at the stake was customary, but the Prosecutor had seen that this was left from the curé’s sentence. He was to be burned alive. The crowd, very few of whom had bothered to read the verdict against the curé, posted all over Q——the previous night, did not know this. And so, when the Prosecutor and Canon Mignon gathered fistfuls of flaming straw, lit at the lantern swinging stake-side for this purpose, the crowd stopped chanting of the Devil’s Kiss and took up a new, one-word cry: Strangle! Strangle! Strangle!

  The Prosecutor set the straw aflame and, quick as the flames took hold, the crowd fell silent. The Canon lit the sulfured hem of the curé’s nightshirt.

  And Father Louis began to burn.

  Silence. Soon the sound of sizzling flesh. The stench. The priest’s screams—no, it was not a scream; he hadn’t the strength to scream. It was an even more pitiable sound, high-pitched and hurried, like that of a rabbit caught in a trap.

  A radiant pulsing among the assembled. A rush like lust. And the twigs and straw and chunks of wood catching fast, crackling, snapping.

  Smoke. Swirling white smoke. Pure white. Obscuring sight.

  And then from the center of the white smoke came the sound of coughing, choking.

  “No!” cried the Prosecutor.

  “It cannot be!” said the exorcist. The condemned, aided by his devils, would indeed deprive Justice. He would choke on the smoke, suffocate before the pure tongue of flame had licked him clean. Someone, over-eager, had set the straw and kindling and wood out too early; it was wet from the last night’s rain; and so it smoked to excess.

  The exorcist and Canon Mignon cast holy water on the flames, inveighed against the unseen devils that circled the stake. Exorciso te, creatura ignis…And more prayer: Ecce crucem Domini, fugite partes adversae, vicit leo de tribu Juda, radis David…in nomine Dei patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu Christi filii ejus Domini nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti…They ran around the stake, the trains of their black robes tracing the circle of flame. They swung crucifixes and thurifers of frankincense. The executioner fell back, staring at the two old men who danced around the stake looking more demonic than anyone or anything he’d ever seen.

  Father Louis slipped from light to darkness, from screams to silence.

  Conscious, he felt the flames lick at his crushed feet. Rising up the torn, tattered flesh of his legs. He could not move his legs. He was st
uck like meat on a spit. Roasting. The sulfur of his nightshirt caught the flames and spread them over his back, chest, and arms. The flames on the flanks of his back and buttocks were the worst. He looked down through the choking smoke to see the skin of his feet burning away from the bone. He could not feel it. His eyes fell shut. Darkness.

  Light.

  He heard strange rites being read. He fell again into the pain, descended. Darkness. Light…. Finally, he had the answer to a prayer: he knew that neither heaven nor hell would open for him.

  The executioner, seized by something, a spirit of sorts, stepped into the flames. He reached around the screaming curé’s head from behind and snapped his neck. One quick twist.

  And Father Louis died. The living Father Louis died.

  And, as though summoned by the snap of the spine, there descended into the square a flock of bright birds. Flying noiselessly down from every tree, turret, and spire off the square. Pigeons and doves. Whirling silver and white wings like blades. Hundreds. Thousands. Cutting through the bright white smoke, which itself took on the scent of violets, the deeply sweet scent of violets. Dipping, diving, wheeling down around the stake and through the flames, singeing their wings.

  The exorcist stood as the birds circled low. His lips moved in mumbled prayer. He gagged against the sweet perfume, knew it to be the Odor of Sanctity. His thoughts were of the Apocalyptic Moment. Henceforth, he’d speak only nonsense.

  Canon Mignon fell prayerfully to his knees. Here was the miracle of evil he had waited a lifetime to see! Demons! Come to carry the curé home! He rose to stand in the flames and begged deliverance of Satan. Canon Mignon never uttered another word save prayers to Satan. The burns on his feet, legs, and hands, and their resultant infections, would be recorded as the cause of his death, which came one month to the day.

  Panic ensued in the square. Some in the crowd fell to the ground beneath the birds. Hundreds ran choking from the square. Fifteen people were trampled to death, their names to be published in a memorial broadside bearing the title, “The Innocent Dead.”