by James Reese
It was midway through the evening before I learned all the witches’ names; and, as I was suffering a rush of emotions and they spoke so fast, interrupting one another, casting off asides…What I mean to say is this: it doesn’t much matter if the Record errs, attributes to one witch the words of another, for, though the night would be of consequence—owing to that one careless, careless act!—none of the witches would be. Not to me. I would never see any of them again. Téotocchi would soon be surprised by the Blood as she sat taking tea in the Riva degli Schiavoni. As for Luchina, I’d know of her only through gossip and untruths told in the journals…. No, the coven of the esbat of 1788 would never reconvene, and for good reason: we’d done damage enough.
That said, the excerpt from the Record has introduced, by name, seven of the witches present that evening. In addition to Téotocchi, we know of yellow-clad Cléofide, she of the rowan berry necklace; the squat sister from the South, Zelie; the elegant pair from Paris, Hermance and Marithé, the former speaking of the Witches’ Calendar, the latter of colored candles; that dreadful Sofia, she of the Hand of Glory, who I would learn was Basque; and Luchina.
The crone who lived hidden deep in the Bois de Boulogne was named Inez. Others in attendance were Giuliana and Renata, who’d come from somewhere in northern Italy; Mariette of Paris, a nun who scared me, scared me terribly; and, finally, Léocadie, come from some faraway part of France. (Léocadie, for reasons all her own, had earlier given her name as Yzabeau; indeed, that night she’d use three names, but here I will fix her as Léocadie…. Indeed, as I did not like her—she too readily took every opportunity to laugh at my gross misunderstanding of the esbat’s nature—I will further fix her as the widow of one J.-F. de Bonnegens, Presiding Judge of the Civil Court of X——de M——, dead of an excess of cantharides, used “to secure his love.”)
That makes eleven. Thirteen, counting Téotocchi and myself; and only with Luchina did I sense any affinity. The Parisians, Hermance and Marithé—the latter having access to the Queen through medical channels; indeed, she offered for sale vials of the Queen’s “blue” blood; and the former reputed to be the mother of six—were refined, friendly, but no…. True to say I liked few of these women.
I should say that none of the sisters seemed enamored of me, either. The intimacy borne of our sex charade proved false, and short-lived. A few of the witches were openly contemptuous, and comments were made regarding my high style of living. Others thought I courted fame, that I risked discovery, thus endangering them all. What did I care? A few hours more, I told myself, and I will close my door on these women forever. The night would distill itself down to little more than a cautionary tale in my Book of Shadows. What came to matter was not that this was my esbat, my chance to meet my sisters and learn and…No. What came to matter was the clock on the mantel. I willed the hours on. I wanted the night to simply end.
Would that the night had ended simply, that the sisters had slipped from my house out into that Hallowed Night unseen, fast to be forgotten. Instead, what happened later that evening would change…everything. Everything! No amount of prevision, practiced by the most senior, the most adept among us, could have told us what waited in store. And even if we had seen it, we would not have believed it, could not have believed the magnitude of…of all that would happen in the days, the weeks, the months to come…. I wonder, if one among us had seen just what that simple dance was to draw down on our city, on all France, would we have done it? Certainly, if I’d seen as much, I would have stopped the esbat then and there, thrown the witches from my home no matter the repercussions…. Hélas, none of us had such a vision that night, and so…
How, how could this ragtag assemblage of sisters, no two of them very sisterly…how could this coven effect such long-ranging change? The answer, in a word, is this: accidentally.
…I will explain, yes.
According to the Record—I have it here before me—Zelie finished speaking of the Mass of St. Secaire and the twin Italians, Giuliana and Renata, presented me with rings. Giuliana’s was of jasper, that greenish-black stone that warriors and witches have long worn to stanch their blood flow. It was set in gold, with chips of diamond around its rim. Renata’s gift was a much larger ring of quirin, a stone harvested from the nests of lapwings; this ring, if placed beneath the pillow of a sleeper, will cause him or her to speak the truth, steadily, intelligibly, when a question is put to them. I have these rings still. The quirin, I must say, has done its duty well on occasion. The jasper, happily, has never been tested.
…Looking over the Record now, I am reminded of Mariette, the nun, who spoke of demons. She was wide-eyed, with thin and colorless pursed lips; her hands were frozen into fists, like those of a paralytic. She sat stoop-shouldered, her chin drawn to her chest, as the others spoke. Time and again she’d raise her head and her dark eyes would dart about the room like bats, as if an unseen Tormentor had returned.
No one spoke when Mariette did; all the sisters seemed fearful, as though the horrors the nun knew were somehow communicable. To hear this witch required a great effort, for her whispered words fell down into her lap, like drool from the lips of a fool. When finally she spoke it was of devilish pacts, and the summoning of demons. (Her words are in the Record, but I will not copy them here: having met this Mariette, I will not encourage you to attempt her Craft.)
As Mariette spoke, I wondered if she weren’t summoning a demon to my salon just then, for her head set to swaying, rolling atop her bone-thin neck. She snapped her head forward and back, faster, and faster still. A child’s barrette flew from her hair. Tears slid from her wide-open eyes. She raised her hands to her head. She pulled at her hair. She tried to stop her head—vainly; still it snapped forward and back, forward and back, till it seemed her neck might break! And then, as if the sight of Mariette in this state weren’t enough to chill the blood, she let go a howl the likes of which…It was…diabolical! And when next she spoke—my handwriting in the Record is rather shaky at this point—it was to tell how best to protect oneself from “the demons who come unbidden.” Calmly, she took up the barrette and fixed it back in her lank hair. She smoothed her forest green skirt and, never raising her head, went on:
“The agnus dei,” said she in a whisper, flecks of spittle on her pale lips. “It’s the agnus dei will best protect you against such demons.” According to Mariette, this small cake made from the wax of paschal candles and shaped to resemble a lamb would protect one from demonic possession, but only if it were blessed by the Pope. (She said this as though to secure the Pope’s blessing were no achievement at all.) Then, Mariette—the weirdest of all the witches—drew from a deep pocket of her skirt an agnus dei. I thought she would simply show it to the circle, perhaps pass it around; but she stood, came over to me, and presented it, wordlessly. I took it with a trembling hand. I thanked her. (Weeks after the esbat I discovered this agnus dei on a windowsill, where I had left it, consciously or not, to melt into a sorry, misshapen thing.)
Mariette (the nun, now, not the witch) concluded by coming center-circle to stutter, say that should the agnus dei fail, one could of course resort to the Church’s sanctioned nine-day regimen of holy water and wafers, “accompanied, bien sûr, by the hourly recitation of three Paternosters and three Aves in honor of the Trinity and St. Herbert.” This said, Mariette made the Stations of the Cross and—having taken care to add that the Church’s regimen also protected one from rabid dogs and rashes—she started again to snap her head to and fro. She fell into her seat, and sank into a trance from which no one could rouse her…. In truth, no one tried.
Mariette done, we had gone round the circle twice. Another recess was granted; and it was at the resumption of the sharing that the end began.
During that final, brief recess I saw Zelie come from my cellar with five bottles of red wine, all of which were decanted without my being consulted. At first I was resentful of this, not wanting to waste good wine on these witches; but as it became clear Zelie would
somehow render the vinum sabbati…well, perhaps the bewitched wine, if heavily poured, would hasten the night’s end. And indeed it did. It also rendered us sloppy, careless, and overconfident, which in turn contributed to the trouble of which I’ll speak.
…Yes, the trouble. On to that now, with this as necessary preface:
Cléofide rose to speak of spiders and ants; and it was the mentioning of ants’ eggs that prompted old Inez to stand and, swaying from drink, stumble through a horrific, ant-related story of her own. And that in turn led to foul Sofia’s leading us all outside to dance and…
Wait. I must return to Inez, and the tale she discovered in the first Book of Shadows she’d ever read, a Book written by a witch named Grethe, a coven-sister to Inez’s own Soror Mystica.
This Grethe, according to Inez (who added that it had been years since she’d read the story; she’d tell it as best she could)…this Grethe lived a long and quiet life in the Massif Central, subsisting on coins given her in exchange for medicines, powders, and potions. As her witchcraft was more white than black, she was known among her neighbors as a healer; indeed, she’d delivered several generations of villagers. It was said she’d cursed a few as well, and blasted the crop of a man who’d abused her; but Grethe, said Inez, had struck the perfect balance: feared, suspected, and sometimes needed, she was let to live peaceably among the villagers.
Then one day late in her life a spell went horribly wrong. Just what Grethe had been trying to achieve, none can say. Her Book made no mention of her motive, showed no record of a fee received or a favor granted…. What she did was this:
She somehow cast a spell over the whole of the Sologne, that part of France covered, then as now, with unarable land—boggy, badly drained, and horribly humid in summer, iced-over in winter. If famine threatened any part of France, it was said, surely the peasants of the Sologne had already starved. It was there that Grethe went—for reasons white or black—riding along the region’s borders, imprecating all the way.
These spells, said Inez, were written in Grethe’s Book. They were simple, the rites accompanying them simpler still—all one needed were hayseed and powdered bone. Inez refused to recite them for the Record. They were, she said, too strong. They had, she said, brought down death. For within two months of Grethe’s spell the Sologne had lost all its crops, sparse to start with, and its rye harvest had been horribly blighted. Still, the hungry peasants had to reap and eat what they could, even the diseased rye, spotted with fungus and crawling with vermin. Apparently, it was the fungus borne on the rye that brought on the dreams. The terrible, terrible dreams.
All the Sologne was dreaming, and yet no one slept. Doctors and other experts in fields ranging from agriculture to mesmerism traveled to the Sologne from all over France. Each quickly left. The Paris newspapers reported that peasants, seemingly sane, swore they were covered with ants, ants that were eating them alive. Red ants, large as a man’s hand. None of the afflicted peasants could see anyone’s ants but their own; but not only did they see their own ants, they felt them tearing into their flesh, thousands of them, devouring first digits then limbs then…(Drunken Inez mimicked the ants; with cracked and blackened teeth she “gnawed” the flesh of her upper arms.)
The situation in the Sologne went from bad to worse. Neighbors turned on neighbors. Fights within families ended in murder. Not only the imagined ants ate flesh: there were acts of cannibalistic excess. The peasantry was both famished and, at least temporarily, insane; packs of children gone savage chased down livestock—ten of them, aged two to six, were said to have brought down a bull; women ate the newly born.
In the Sologne that terrible season it was a human crop that was harvested. Corpses of the mad dead were pitched into pits and quickly covered with lime, lest the equally mad and ravenous mourners leap down among them to feast. Families wandered the roadside in search of carrion; they might set upon a traveler, a pet, or a person they’d known all their lives; they might set upon one another, all the while scratching at their ants till their skin was raw, till they bled and their suppurating wounds went dark with infection.
Hundreds died horribly. The fortunate never regained their sanity, for who among the formerly afflicted could live with an understanding of what they’d done?…Yes, it was a curse upon the land, a plague of the mind. And it was all the dark work of one witch.
Inez did not know what had become of Grethe. Her Book of Shadows, as Inez recalled, ended with the account of events in the Sologne—rather more horribly detailed, Inez assured us, than her retelling, which in turn has been tempered by me.
That night we all listened raptly to Inez. I wrote furiously…. But not a one of us heard the tale. We listened, but we did not learn. For, by night’s end, with much of the vinum sabbati drunk, at the urging of Sofia, all thirteen of us—coven-sisters, Soror Mystica, Maiden, and Summoner—took to my gardens and danced and…
The night was fair and bright. The autumn air bore a wintry chill, and a crescent moon hung overhead like a blade. (How much worse might things have been had the moon been full?)
There was no music—forgotten was my gilded lyre!—but the sisters sang. And Inez, Sofia, and Hermance all went suddenly “sky-clad,” letting their dresses fall to the ground—“far better,” said they, “to meet the moon this way.” Several others dropped their dresses down to bare their breasts. (I opted to not.) Fortunately, the tall walls bordering my property precluded our being spied by my neighbors, but still I feared our singing would rouse them: I had Téotocchi reduce the singing sisters to a whisper. In time, I’d care not a whit who heard. Need I tell you that Inez, drunk as she was, could not keep the words of Grethe’s spell to herself? Once outside, having slipped quite naturally into a circle, we listened as Inez—having been asked but twice—shared the spell as well as the accompanying rites. Renata had on her a bit of hayseed, but none of the sisters had powdered bone. Each contributed something—a pinch of this or that drawn from a pocket or purse and tossed center-circle—as well as a lock of hair. My contribution was involuntary: it was Zelie who slipped up behind me with long-handled shears; she dropped a lock of my hair into the first of two holes dug in the garden, and each sister followed suit.
What I did not know at the time was that Sofia had taken the occasion of our final recess to slip outside and…and urinate in the holes; and now she, setting a large rock between them, produced a dark rag, which she stuffed down into the “lock-blessed” hole and withdrew to smack on the stone, imprecating thusly:
“I knock this rag upon this rock
to tease the seasons from their clock;
We raise a wind in this new witch’s name;
Let it not settle till she calls for same.”
Soon we’d crafted Grethe’s spell into a song, and we sang it as we danced Sofia’s dance. It was a simple dance, which many sisters did while untying three knots from leather cords of varying length, thereby freeing “the wildest of winds.” All the while Sofia swore that she’d never effected more than a storm cloud or two, perhaps a few drops of rain…. (The Record reads simply: “We dance and dance and dance. We dance and sing.” I wonder, was I simply drunk or otherwise enchanted? As Summoner, at this point, I failed miserably; but who could be expected to dance and sing and keep the Record all at once? And I assure you, I did dance and sing.)
My esbat ended as Hallowe’en ceded to the Day of All Souls. The sun was rising as the witches slipped from my house as stealthily as they’d come. None save Luchina and Téotocchi, who were the last to leave, in Nicolo’s dazed company, offered a proper good-bye.
T. stood silently by as Luchina blessed me, all the while detailing said blessing—clearly she’d only recently learned it from T. “Pluck a lemon at midnight,” said the Soprano, drawing a plump piece of citrus from the deep pockets of her dress, “and stick it with colored pins.” This she’d already done. “‘Arise ye to action, forces of the Moon Divine!’” T. shushed her. We stood now at my open door. Luchina repeated the
spell thrice more: in Latin, in her own Italian, and finally, my French. Thusly were we, supposedly, mutually blessed and somehow wed.
“Très bien,” said Téotocchi, who bowed to me, snapped her fingers—driving Nico, who now sported blue-lensed, concealing spectacles, to some unseen action—and draped her arm over the Soprano’s shoulder; it was then they all three walked from my door.
Finally, I was alone. I drew on a shawl and went back out into the gardens. I sat down on that stone bench, drained the magical dregs from two bottles of wine that I found, and I cried. Cried until I could cry no more, until the muscles of my face and heaving shoulders ached. Even now, these many years later, I’d be hard-pressed to say just why I cried.
Then, among my roses dew-wet and bright, with the gray moon dissolving and the rising sun casting the walls of my home in palest gold, I rose from that stone bench and I danced, danced like a dervish! (That damnable wine!) I declared aloud that I would not be defeated, reduced to tears by disappointment! Yes, I sang and danced as I had with my sisters; but I sang louder now, and I danced at double-speed, spinning with my eyes shut and my arms open wide, casting off that simple shawl as well as the smothering mantle of sadness that had settled over me…. Mon Dieu, what a show I must have made, lost as I’d been when I’d watched the Maiden and Nicolo! What a witch I was! Singing the spell and dancing the dance that would bring down death, yet again.
I woke later that day—All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1788—and wondered what I’d done. In time I’d know; but it would be too late.
Within days of the esbat and that dance we did, the weather turned. Paris, in the months to come, would suffer her worst winter in three generations.
The bridges spanning the Seine were oddly beautiful; coruscant, coated with snow and bearing icicles that hung to the still surface, they looked like diamond necklaces. But beauty, then, was illusory. Wrapped in layers of wool and fur, I sometimes walked the city. The gutters were piled high with filth, for the carters could not navigate the snow-clogged, icy streets. Rats scampered about at eye level as one walked, for the mounded offal was that high. Excrement froze wherever it was flung. Bodies curled fetus-like in the crevices of buildings, lay deathly still in doorways. Everywhere one turned the blind, the lame, the poor held out battered copper bowls, begging. The only sound in the streets was that of this ragged corps tapping their walking sticks over ice-slick cobblestones or against the sides of shuttered buildings; this sound seemed to mock the grinding ice of the river. Occasionally, the last of the street peddlers could be heard, hawking old boots or ribbon or “New Songs for One Sou,” but there was no one about to buy. No one but me; and I, wracked with guilt, bought all I could carry. I’d buy boots on one corner and give them away on the next. What more could I do?