by James Reese
I woke with a start some time later, my left hand at rest on the Bible. My right hand shot like a dart to my side: yes, it was there: Sebastiana’s Book.
A hand on each book, I surrendered again to sleep.
I woke later that night not knowing what time it was. More pointedly: how many hours remained till midnight?
I pulled on my boots and scrambled down the dark stairs, through the inn’s common rooms, empty but thick with smoke and the scent of stewing meat, and out onto the narrow street. I’d gathered up both books off the bed, Sebastiana’s and…well, God’s. I stood in the dark street, a book tucked under each arm. A chill rose up off the cobblestones, and the air bore the scents of the river and the smoke rising from the city’s innumerable chimneys. Looking up at the darkly timbered houses, which seemed to lean into the streets to stare down at me, I wondered which way to walk. I had maps and books that purported to inform, to guide, but I’d left them all in the berlin. I knew nothing of Angers. Finally, I walked off, down the sloping street, away from the inn and the fortified château that dominated all.
It was not long before I came upon a clock that said I’d two hours till midnight; a second clock—hung in the window of a charcuterie, amid pallid pig heads and crusted logs of pâté—confirmed the hour. Only then did I decide to seek out a café; and I must say I reveled, reveled in the freedom I now had to do so. (Had I ever gone here or there, this way or that, of my own volition, not driven by the clock of the convent, or even the wishes of my saviors?)
I found a café with the improbable name of La Grosse Poule down along the river. Of its few, well-salted patrons, certainly I was the only one settled in a dark corner with a beer and a Bible. I read by the light of a single white candle, which was greasy and burned too quickly down. I felt the heat not of that thin candle but of the Angevins’ stares; thankfully, they soon resigned themselves to the stranger among them.
It was in the second chapter of the first Book of Moses that I read of the Rivers of Paradise: Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Frath. I confess it: I consulted too a few more familiar passages, which had comforted me in times past. I’d not yet downed half my beer.
So, I had my spell with hours to spare. I might have sat quite contentedly in that café, had my mind not then taken a dark turn, directed by some Old Testament tale. I fell to the contemplation of yet another thing I’d not considered since leaving Ravndal: the Blood. At Ravndal I’d learned how I would die. I learned that the blood of every witch betrays, bubbles over like an untended kettle. And the accounts I’d read of the coming of the Blood in Sebastiana’s Book were horrific: witches overtaken with little warning by the rush of red, pouring forth from every orifice. Most witches, it was written, see the Blood coming, literally. It’s as though they are looking out a window up which a blood tide rises, and their worlds go red from bottom to top. Their very eyes turn crimson! First, blood seeps from the pores, a pinkish-red perspiration. Purer blood drips down from the nostrils and trails down the neck from each ear. Upwelling blood swells the soft flesh under the nails till finally they slip from the fingers and toes. Blood gushes from the nether mouths. And finally, violently, the Blood spews from the mouth. Every orifice then is an outlet for the Blood, and the witch dies her red death. For every witch the end is the same.
I ordered a second beer.
I tried to tell myself that I ought not to worry about the Blood when there is nothing I can do about it. All I can do is hope that it’ll be many long years before I find out for myself exactly what the coming of the Blood is like. (“Such an end,” writes Sebastiana, quoting Téotocchi, “though admittedly gruesome, is nothing compared to the life that might precede it, a long and magical life, an uncommon life.”)
I opened Sebastiana’s Book to the recorded efforts of that Scandinavian sister. I’d determined to proceed with greater care this time. I could not kill Madeleine, no; but neither did I care to achieve anything other than the desired end: the cessation of her blood flow. I sat practicing the spell I’d cast, whispering the words, committing them to memory. I envisioned myself, a witch at work. I also procured a third beer.
So distracted, so excited, so eager was I for the appointed hour to arrive that I was stunned when a man—a hugely muscled man, whose ropey forearms I’d been admiring as he read of recent events in Le cornet d’Anjou—stood and exclaimed. Shouted. For blood was flowing fast from his nostrils. Soon it slickened his shirtfront, and the tiny circular table over which spread the red-streaked newspaper. He raised his clenched hands to his face, but to no effect: blood burst from his fists.
I, several tables away, rose. I went to him. And I apologized, profusely, till finally the barman, who stood before us now as that great hulking château stands before the city, demanded, “What has this to do with you, my man?” Both men looked at me, one panicked and the other puzzled.
“I…I was just sitting over there, and I cast…I accidentally…”
“Get him flat on his back,” called the barkeep’s wife, reaching down rags from a distant cupboard.
“You think all problems are best solved by getting a man flat on his back,” jested a bearded man seated where the bar curved around; men flanking him laughed, but only till the bleeding man turned toward them, fainted, and fell to the floor.
I drew a bill from my waistcoat pocket. I left it on my table, though Michel had told me that three such bills could buy a horse not too far past its prime. I left La Grosse Poule, unremarked, uttering the same spell in reverse, for I could think of nothing else to do. I headed out onto the dark, dark streets of the city. I found that I still had a beer in hand. I downed it fast, set the pewter tankard on a sill, and walked on, fast, scared, and none too steadily.
I returned to my room. The elementals were already there; to judge by the chill, they’d only recently come.
“But it isn’t midnight,” I said, too quickly—I know now that I expected punishment. I’d done wrong at the tavern, and now I’d hear about it.
“We are well aware of the hour,” said the priest. “We are early, what of it?”
We are eager to hear of this idea of yours. I’ve known this blood for centuries; hopefully, with your help, I’ll know it but a few days more. Still, said the succubus, we are eager for you to prove yourself. Quite eager, she added, turning to the priest.
“So eager,” said he, “we nearly came to you in that squalid tavern, but you seemed to be so enjoying your Bible and your beer.” The priest warned that, dressed as a man or no, I’d soon find trouble if I continued to carry and show as much money as I had that night. Did they not know of my little accident? Did they not care? I dared not ask. And I dared not deny them by excusing myself from any practice of the Craft. I’d a promise to keep. But how I regretted having convoked them that afternoon.
I sat on the edge of the bed. A small fireplace sat opposite; in it someone—the innkeeper, the near-idiot boy in her employ, the elementals?—had set a fire. Before the fire, on two cane-backed chairs, sat the elementals, the fire showing through them though they held strong shapes.
The elementals sat, staring. I said nothing. I listened to the crackling fire; and I heard too a boat passing on the river below: the rhythmic slap of oars. At the window, I saw a blunted triangle of boat trailing a silver line of moonlight. Two passengers sat lovingly entwined on its bow. As I was cold—autumn was already in the air—I took in hand the curves of the iron window-pulls; but then I heard the succubus say, in her garbled and grotesque way, No. Leave the window open…. Far easier for us.
Of course: the cold night air, the moisture it held. But why the fire then? Why the fire if the elementals were so dependent on water? I cannot say. Clearly, they had some need of fire too. I’ve yet to figure just how they made use of all the elements.
“Your idea, then?”
Yes, echoed Madeleine. Your idea.
“I think I can stop your bleeding,” said I, flatly, boldy, though now, having stricken that innocent man, I was certain of
no such thing. The elementals said nothing at first. Then:
Go ahead, said Madeleine. Do it. Was this a dare? Do it, said she, rather more emphatic the second time.
“I will,” said I, like a child challenged.
I took up both books, the Bible and Sebastiana’s. Madeleine watched my hands with eagerness. And which of your books holds so great a secret?
Did I toy with the succubus then? Perhaps. I passed my hands over this book, then that. I saw it was the Bible she hoped I would not open. When finally I set the Bible aside and opened Sebastiana’s Book, Madeleine sat back in her chair and her shape, which had grown fuller, faded to what it had been; once again, she and the priest seemed a pair.
“Did Sebastiana warn you?” asked Father Louis. “Did she tell you that a new witch is quite strong, sometimes too strong; and that the Craft of such a one cannot always be controlled?…You’ve read of the calamitous cold of ’88, I presume?”
“I’ve read of it, yes,” I said.
“Do you understand the danger implicit in the Craft?…Do you understand what…what a failure to understand might result in?”
Madeleine asked, Did Sebastiana warn you?
I lied when I said she had. In truth, all Sebastiana had said was that I had powers in direct proportion to my witchly youth, and that the elementals had waited a long, long time for a new witch to appear, one who might lay Madeleine down, finally and for all time. Yes, I’d read the cautionary tale in her Book, but—I quite recall thinking this then, and convincing myself of it—it’s a mere imprecation, a simple spell. What can go wrong? For the succubus was, I reasoned, already dead.
“You found this…this trick in Sebastiana’s Book?” asked the priest.
I said I had. Giving voice to what it was we all thought, Madeleine asked: Why then didn’t she ever try it on me? She turned to Father Louis. Has she known all these years…
“This witch cannot speak for the other,” answered Father Louis. Already Madeleine’s anger had begun to show: the blood at her neck began to pump, to quicken like water on the boil. “Besides, Madeleine—” began the priest.
Besides, took up Madeleine, the other, as you call her, has hated me all these years, has never truly tried to free me from—
Father Louis stopped her with a whispered word, one I could not hear; and just in time, for by a quick calculation I deduced that the blood she was spilling, spraying here and there in her agitation, her excitement, would not fade until morning, either delaying our departure or giving rise to all sorts of questions that I did not care to answer. How would I dismiss the red web Madeleine wove? The floor before the fireplace was already puddled, and the sill was slick with blood; and the chairs, would I need to burn the ruined chairs?
“What’s done is done,” said the priest to Madeleine. “Paris is passed,” said he, referring to the unspoken something between Sebastiana and the succubus. “Now,” he went on, to Madeleine, “listen to this witch; we’ve waited for her.”
Witch, pled Madeleine, if you are only experimenting, only teasing me with your—
“Stop it now,” said the priest, soothingly; he then turned to me to add: “Herculine—or is it Hercule, in this new casting?—if you’ve given us false hope and—”
“Pison,” I began, “Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Frath. Do you know what those are?”
“I do,” said the priest. “The waters of the world. What of them?”
I read aloud the short entry from Sebastiana’s Book, and together, the three of us, over the next quarter hour, worked out the spell I’d cast. And an odd litany it was: I had the elementals recite, repeatedly, the names of those waters while I said them widdershins—this I had not done in the tavern, thus causing that unfortunate man’s blood to flow forth, not stop, as Madeleine’s would; or so I hoped. And all the while I mixed in some simple witches’ words, innocuous, as common to the blasting of crops as to the baking of cakes. I was confident I’d rectified the spell.
It’s hard to say who among us was most relieved to see the succubus’s blood flow cease; for yes, we succeeded. Rather, I succeeded. But not before there came a terrible, terrible mess; for the spell caused in Madeleine a great, spasmodic voiding. And so I sat, far across the room, with my new boots bloodied; and blood-flecked, too, were my face and hands, my clothes, ruined.
I had thought the blood flow would cease, or hoped it would; never did it dawn on me that it, as changeable as any liquid, could only disappear through a change of state. And thus it did: Madeleine’s blood, freed of her body, would evaporate, rise as a fetid, ferric gas and disappear—from plaster as from cloth, from leather as from glass—in the seven hours to come. In the meanwhile, Father Louis and I scrambled about the room, plugging the warped floorboards with the bedclothes lest other tenants find them themselves red-showered, and wondering.
As the exsanguination wore on and on, I went to throw wider the window, thinking—I don’t know why—that it might help; too, it might relieve the stench. But as I pushed the window open, it blew back at me and slammed against the casement so suddenly, so sharply, that I marveled that the panes did not shatter in their frames. This sudden wind, how strange. Strange too was the action of the river, which had been still not a half-hour earlier. Whitecaps wove along its middle now, and it splashed over its stony banks. That same boat I’d seen now lay at anchor, its two lovers in a clutch of a different sort.
“What is this?” I asked of the priest. “Is this—”
“It is to be expected,” was all he said. “It will all settle in time.”
Having controlled the red flow in the room as best we could—“Do not bother wiping the walls,” said the priest; “time will work just as well.”—we sat, Father Louis and I, staring at the succubus’s slit throat. Madeleine sat immobile, her head back, her eyes closed, her delicate but dirt-caked hands hanging limp at her sides. As the last of the blood burst from her in time with my living pulse, I wondered, fearfully, if I’d accidentally—For the succubus seemed gone. If it was not her “death” I’d caused, certainly it was her…her dissolution.
Worried, I willed her to return to us, and she did. She came again to full-form and set immediately to crying; the last of her bitter blood flowed from her eyes as tears. When she spoke—her voice unchanged, regrettably—it was to curse Sebastiana. Sebastiana, who, all those years, had not bothered to try to stop the blood flow, even when begged, even when—
“Good work, witch!” exclaimed Father Louis, interrupting the succubus, who fell silent beside him. I watched as he pulled two fingers from Madeleine’s open throat to show them bloodless and dry. “You did it!”…But as fast as he spoke, his smile fell away, and he sat staring at the succubus. I had succeeded, yes. Would I do the same at the crossroads? If so, the elementals, who’d come to believe they were bound each to the other for all time, would, presumably, part. This we all knew—though no one spoke it—and it greatly tempered what joy there was, or what joy there might have been.
The elementals took their leave. Vanished. Wordlessly. It seemed neither of them knew what to say; certainly, neither of them spoke. I knew too, before she quit that tiny room tucked beneath the eaves, that Madeleine felt no differently: she still wanted to go to the crossroads, still wanted to “die.” So it was I wondered: what had I achieved besides a bit of the Craft? The only answer I could arrive at—“Nothing”—rendered me unaccountably sad.
The next morning, when the blood had nearly faded away, I sent word to Michel. I’d meet him at nine, not ten as we’d agreed. After a simple breakfast, I quit the inn to wander a long hour through the still-waking city.
32
Bell, Book, and Candle
UPON ARRIVING in Angers the day prior, I’d had Michel hay the horses and hide the carriage on a backstreet; too, I’d asked rather guiltily if he’d mind spending the night in the berlin. Such had been his intention, said he, much to my relief. Still I gave him some coin—it seemed to me a lot—and this, in what seems a rather common a
ct of transubstantiation, he managed to turn to drink in the night. That next morning, at our rendezvous, he was rank and apologetic. I was surprised—docile Michel, innocent Michel—and sympathetic, for indeed I’d a certain mal à la tête myself, owing to the several beers of the night before. Regardless, when Michel asked me to stay on in Angers another day, I denied him, and found I was proud of having done so. What’s more, I dispatched him to La Grosse Poule—knowing full well he’d take a hair from the dog that had bitten him—and directed him—in couched terms, obviously—to ask after the bloodied man I’d abandoned. He took with him coin enough to rouse the barkeep and his wife; but he returned with no news, reporting only that the place was “shut up tight as a frog’s ass, sir, and that’s water-tight.”
It was late morning when finally we left Angers.
The elementals were elsewhere, as they typically were during daylight; and so I raised the shades of the berlin and the on-rolling cab flooded with light, just as the Touraine is often flooded by the waters of the Loire. Indeed, those very waters were already full, though not yet at flood height; the power of the river was evident as it ran steadily in long, slow curves.
Gazing out over the landscape, I never had to wait but a short while for a château to appear on the horizon; indeed, the orchards and vineyards, in which cultivation was evidently easy, were spotted with châteaux, some fantastic, others simpler though still grand in their way.