by James Reese
The executioner slipped from the square into the Church of St. Pierre to pray. The Prosecutor, the Surgeon, and Monsieur Adam remained in the square, cowering beneath the grandstand. Within the year they would all be dead: Monsieur Adam would choke on a potion taken against impotence; the Surgeon was waylaid on the Marseilles Road and stabbed thirteen times by thieves; as for the Prosecutor, he would start to hear voices that very night and, on the first anniversary of the burning, he would do as they bade him and climb up the bell tower of St. Pierre to hang himself.
Of course, none of these deaths were quite what they appeared to be. No poisoning. No robbery. No suicidal urges. Father Louis and Madeleine returned to haunt these men, kill them each and every one in turn; and each man, at the moment of his death, knew it. Saw the faces of the priest and girl and knew, knew their fates to be in the hands of devils.
As for Father Louis, he burned down to ash.
The smoke eventually cleared, the scent lifted. The silver and white birds stopped circling, though for days they could be seen ringing the square, in the trees, in eaves, and on statues. Indeed, in Q——, for long years to come, those present at the burning swore they could see the birds, swore they could smell the violets.
The curé’s ashes were never scattered, at least not in the manner set forth in the sentence. Rather, late that night, when the flames had died, a few of the faithful and many tourists returned to sift through the warm, unguarded ashes. They hunted the warm dust for pieces of charred flesh, bones, or still-hot teeth. Some searched for relics. Some for souvenirs. Still others sought simple charms that might bring luck or compel love.
What no one knew that day was this: that as the flames and white smoke rose up, as the executioner broke the neck of the curé and the birds and floral stench descended, a thief, under cover of the ceremony in the square, broke into the home of Monsieur Capeau, knowing only that it was the finest on the square. What the thief found, in addition to silver and money enough to sail fast from Marseilles, lest he be implicated in his bloody discovery, was this: the bodies of two young women.
For Madeleine had beaten Sabine to death. Had gone up the back stairs slowly from the kitchen, in her hand an iron of cast steel. With the iron she crushed the skull of the sleeping Sabine. She then descended to the library, the same library in which she’d been coached by Canon Mignon, and there she passed dark hours in a state resembling prayer, suffering extraordinary pains she did not understand. She had her letters. She untied the ribbons that held all the letters she’d never sent to her lover and unborn child. She fanned the letters out around her. She lit a fire and consigned the letters, slowly, one at a time, to the flames. (The ever-increasing pain!) She listened to the commotion in the square that night, heard the hammering together of the second scaffold. The night passed; dawn came. So too did the child, poisoned and abused to an early birth; and death. Madeleine waited. And just as the crowd’s cheers told her that the Question was about to begin, she took up the small forked tool used to take coals from the brazier and with what strength remained to her she raked its three blackened tines down the length of her throat. She tore out her tongue. Wrested it from her neck. She choked fast on the upwelling blood.
The thief entered the library last. He’d moved fast through the upper rooms, and had seen only Sabine’s stunted left leg, for in her death throes she’d slid from her bed and lay between it and the wall. Still, it was evident a crime had been committed. Blood on the pillows, blood splattered across the silk moiré wallpaper. Then, discovering a second body in the library, one in so gruesome a state, and with the stillborn child blue in the cradle of her legs…seeing this, and realizing too that he already had more than he could carry in the way of wares, the thief left the house as he’d entered it, quickly, and through a kitchen window.
That night Monsieur Capeau returned to Q——, and a burgled and bloodied house from which he’d long been absent. Within the month he’d sell it at considerable profit.
Sabine, one bright morning in mid-October, was buried in sacred ground. It was a grand funeral. Only tourists and the truly curious were in attendance.
The child, a girl, was cut from its mother and burned in the ovens of the Foundling Hospital. Madeleine, as a suicide, was interred at a crossroads well beyond the city walls. Scant rites were read.
14
Escape
NOT LONG after the tale was told, Father Louis, seated at the window, broke the silence with, “She’s come,” and I watched as he waved to one below.
She comes! said Madeleine. It was as though her sad fate, so recently recounted, was that of another. Sebastiana comes! She said it thrice more. Excited, the red-black lips of her wound verily pulsed; clotted blood fell from its edges, and from its center blood spurted as though from an opened vein. Her speech—what else to call it?—loosed a torrent of blood to run down the sides of her split-open throat.
Gently, but with preternatural strength and speed, Father Louis came to lift me from atop the table, where I’d remained all through the tale. He was laughing, and smiling at the succubus. As though he stood before a misbehaving and well-loved child whom he could not scold and must indulge. “I must apologize for my companion,” said he. “She is excited: she has waited centuries for this day.”
Madeleine had made her way to the windowsill. I heard her say again that name that was new to me. I looked to Father Louis.
“She says Sebastiana has come. Sebastiana d’Azur.” And then, suddenly, he returned to the window, signaling to someone out there in the late dark, in the early dawn.
Blood betrayed Madeleine’s fast path from the table to the sill. And now blood formed a red ring, a spreading nimbus around her feet, slick on the stony floor.
“Sebastiana comes,” repeated Father Louis.
As does the dawn. This from Madeleine. We must hurry if we are to—I didn’t understand the rest of her words. I was, it is fair to say, stunned; exhausted and awestruck. And I was sore, terribly sore where the incubus had had his way. “What…” I began, “what is happening here?”
“Hush,” said Father Louis. He came so quickly toward me that I stepped back and stumbled, nearly fell. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, steadying me. “And don’t ask for explanations. Now is not the time. Indeed, we’ve not much time at all.” There exists the inexplicable; this I told myself.
The priest placed his cold, vise-like hands atop my shoulders. “The soreness,” he said, pride in his tone, “that soreness will be with you awhile. But you enjoyed yourself, no?” I didn’t respond. Or perhaps I smiled. It was then I realized that the soreness I was regretting was not the soreness the incubus had caused; rather, it was the soreness that Sister Claire had inflicted.
Sister Claire de Sazilly. I’d nearly forgotten her, for I had not felt the effects of that beating all through the tale of Q——; and afterward, I’d been fast overwhelmed by…Alors, here it came again: the blue skin, no longer broken but still tender to the touch, and the blood crusted in the angles of my ear, and the swollen lip still aching where it had been split. With this slight pain—it was slight, yes—there came again the anger, the wild red anger. As for that other soreness, Father Louis’s, it was easily suffered. “Ah, yes,” said he. “Savor it. Savor that soreness while it lasts.”
Look! said Madeleine then; and I moved to join her and the incubus at the library window, the mullioned panes of which were coated with the slightest rime, like the shavings of diamonds. I saw no one, nothing beneath the pale and cloudless sky. Yes, I saw only the first of the sun, and spoke the dreaded word: “Dawn.”
A rustling in the gallery beyond the lesser library’s back door, or was it in the corridor? Had the others heard it? I looked to Father Louis, who said, with a sigh, “Yes, I know. They’re all about, already; like mice in the night.” And then he sat cross-legged on the table’s edge, his arms folded across his broad chest. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, Sorry, and said, “Tell me while we wait: do you know who we a
re?”
“While we wait for what?” I asked. I was all atremble. I was naked and cold and certain I’d die within the hour. I considered trying the doors. I was ready to run.
Madeleine and Louis looked me up and down, appraisingly. I felt no shame; I didn’t recoil from their sight. This surprised me. It surprises me still.
Madeleine came to me from the window—again, she moved as fast as light; she had the torn pink dress in hand and though it was horribly, grossly red-stained, I welcomed its warmth on my shoulders. An instant later I saw the succubus sitting atop the table beside the priest, who asked again: “Do you know who we are?”
“I know who you were.” I whispered it: my throat was sore from ill-use.
“Ah, very good,” said Father Louis. “But do you know who, or what we are now?”
I could only nod in weak assent. What words might I have offered then to explain what I’d learned? Trust and learn.
“All right,” said the priest, “we’ll get to that later. Tell me, do you know who you are?”
I said my name in full.
“Of course,” said Father Louis lightly. He looked at Madeleine. “What I mean is, well…can you tell us what you are?”
I heard those words again. You are a woman. You are a man. But I could not repeat them. How could they be true? Yet didn’t I know them to be true? What, in fact, was I? Am I?
(Yes, yes, there are words to describe what I am, my state if you will, my physiology. But I choose not to use such words; for all their Latinate elegance, they are ugly, and I am not ugly. I know that now; and so those words do not suffice.)
I said nothing. And when Father Louis started to say again, “You are a—”
He was interrupted. By a voice I’d never heard before. Coming from behind me, near the library’s secondary door. “You, dear one,” it said—a woman’s voice, smooth, warm, and mellifluous—“you are a witch. And you, mon prêtre, ought not to tease.” I longed to turn toward that voice—how did I resist?—but something stilled me.
Father Louis offered a baldly insincere apology. To me? To this Sebastiana? (For surely it was she who’d come.) It didn’t much matter. Only then did I turn to see her standing there beside the now open gallery door. I hadn’t heard the door open, and I knew my jailers had locked it when they’d left: I’d heard the rattling chains. Surely she hadn’t been in the library all night, in the same shadows from which the others had stepped. But how then had she entered the library?
“Did you hear me, heart?” she asked. “Did you hear what I said?”
I shook my head. She said it a second time:
“You are a witch.”
I said nothing. Had no reaction at all. I simply stared at this…this apparition:
A tall thin beautiful woman. Older. She wore diaphanous robes whose blue rivaled that of her eyes. Such extraordinary eyes! “Azur, dear,” said she. “Sebastiana d’Azur.” Indeed her eyes were azure blue. Part sapphire, part sea. Her long black hair fell forward over her shoulder in a thick plait. Her skin was the whitest I’d ever seen. A near death-like pallor. But this woman, I knew, was alive. And this—need I say it?—was a great relief!
She—this Sebastiana d’Azur—came toward me. As she moved, slowly, deliberately, she undid the hasp of a huge bloodstone broach at her shoulder, freeing one of the robes she wore. Panels of fabric, they were—silk and satin. She took the pink dress from my shoulders, said something about needing it to “effect the trick.” She then stepped back from my nakedness to look me up and down; she did this without comment. She came closer and wrapped me in that bolt of blue. Her arms around me…Ah, the rush I felt then of her warmth, so different from the deathly touch of the incubus. She stood so close she had only to whisper, and as she dressed me she did so, saying: “Not because you are naked, but because you are cold.” And she knotted the robe at my shoulder.
I asked her who she was.
It was Madeleine who replied in hurried tones. Know that she is the only one who can save you, and ask no more questions.
Sebastiana looked to Madeleine—not at all kindly, it seemed to me—and said, “I am the only one who can save her, yes. But she is the only one who can save you…. So mind your tongue, Madeleine.” These last words were rather cruel, of course. And I’d no idea what Sebastiana meant. Me save Madeleine?
My wonderment must have shown on my face, for Sebastiana said, “Ah yes, dear, all in due time.” She moved toward the window. “But time, I’m afraid, is what we’ve precious little of. For the dawn—”
The dawn, said Madeleine to me, in a crazed rush, will see you dead unless you do as you are told!
(I know now that Madeleine was not mad; she was eager, exceedingly so, and scared lest we fail at what we, at what they had come to do.)
Sebastiana turned back from the window. She smiled at me and, moving to where the succubus sat beside the priest, said, looking disdainfully down at the stained table, the stained stone floor, “Madeleine, can’t you do something about that…that damned blood. It really is so unsightly.”
Father Louis could not help but laugh. As for Madeleine, she turned from Sebastiana, who, loosing her gaze from the chastened succubus, was reminded by Father Louis that Madeleine’s blood flow could not be helped; what’s more, said he, there was little point in cleaning it up: one had only to wait seven hours for it to fade away.
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Sebastiana. “But I’ve always found that to be seven hours too long.”
Madeleine slipped from beside the incubus. I nearly succeeded in tracing her movement to the window.
“Well,” said Sebastiana, summarily, “would that we had seven hours to effect an escape from this cell, but we do not,” and I saw that she was looking beyond Madeleine, gauging the brightening sky; already the coming sun had begun to light the shadowed corners of the library. Sebastiana began to pace, and this same faint light showed her to be naked beneath her thin robes. As for the priest, he sat perched on the table. Finally, from Sebastiana: “You, Madeleine. Did you do as planned?”
I did…. Of course, I did.
“Good. Then we have only to wait—”
Just then we all of us turned toward the corridor. From it came the sound of voices. How many voices I could not say. But one voice I knew, heard distinctly: that of Sister Claire de Sazilly.
I stepped back from that door. Retreated. Nearer Sebastiana.
“They come, yes,” said Sebastiana, smiling at me. “Good, good, good.”
“But Sister Claire, she—” I stammered.
“A handful, that one, eh?” And I watched as Sebastiana squared her shoulders, turned to face the main door full on.
“They are coming,” I said, panicked. “Should we not run and—”
“Indeed not, dear.” She dismissed the idea.
I shot quick looks all around the library—at the main door, still locked and bolted no doubt; at Louis and Madeleine, standing in the last of the library’s shadows; at the open window, the open gallery door. Where could I hide? Should I run? Why was no one bothered by this, the advent of my accusers, of Sister Claire? So calm, they were! “Shouldn’t we at least—”
“You are safe, dearest,” said Sebastiana. She then raised her arm and I stood so near I had only to take a half-step more for her to settle that arm around my shoulder. She turned just so to kiss my forehead. “We haven’t much time, it is true, and there remain a great many details…but you are safe.” Sebastiana was warm to the touch: she was alive; and this only served to remind me that my other two saviors were not.
I leaned into Sebastiana. I felt the comforting weight of her breast, the curve of her hip. My arms hung slack at my sides; I dared not touch this woman, not directly, but how I reveled in her warmth, sank into the warmth and safety of her embrace.
I looked at her beautiful face: it bore the traces of her age—shallow creases, thread-thin wrinkles—yet the skin was smooth and pale, and the cheeks were rouged. I saw too that she’d painted her
lips red. Her lashes were long and black; they were straight, and so gave to her eyes an ease, an indolence…. Those eyes…I noticed too a scent, what was it? Lime water? No. Roses. Ah, yes…roses. Unmistakably. She wore one in her hair, tucked into the first strands of that long black braid. Fresh, its petals red. Red too the coral combs in her hair. And red the stones in the silver earrings that hung low, tossing off the rising light of day.
She stepped from me then, left me standing alone. “But, but…” I stammered, pointing toward the library’s main door. Sebastiana made no response; instead she moved to the table on which sat the empty platter, not long ago loaded with roasted squab and such. She traced the painted S at the platter’s center with a long thin finger, its nail red-lacquered; she sucked at her fingertip and asked, “It was good, no?” I nodded that yes, it was.
“S for Sebastiana,” I said.
“Indeed,” said she; and she took a seat on the table’s edge. The platter was hers. As were all the S-marked books I’d read.
With that commotion in the corridor coming ever nearer—it was Sister Claire, certainly, but in whose company?—Sebastiana, nearly as tall as I, tilted her head just slightly. Somehow she drew my eyes to hers. She stood a few steps from me, in the still-dim library, but I was certain I saw her eyes….
Oh, those eyes! Yes, that was when she first showed me l’oeil de crapaud. The witches’ eye. And I saw that those blue eyes of hers, like Maluenda’s, had at their center—
Attendons. Wait. I will speak of those eyes—I swear it—but just then, as I stood staring into Sebastiana’s shape-shifting eyes, I heard those voices—mere steps from the door!—or rather that single voice break into a stream of invective and prayer. This I could not conceive; who or what could frighten Sister Claire so? Then, from deep within her cries there rose up two words of Latin:
“Dis Pater,” said she, repeatedly. Father of the Night.
She spoke those words not to, but rather at someone. The nun was not alone. I heard a man’s voice. But whose? I heard the breaking of the chain, the sliding back of the bolt. And the library’s primary door was thrown open to show Sister Claire de Sazilly trapped half-naked in the arms of a man.