The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  The Tourangeaux were everywhere at work. The white caps of the women spotted the fields like mushrooms. Time and again we’d pass a group of women walking roadside, or standing atop the dikes that defined one side of the road—always women; where were the men, I wondered?—and they would gape at the berlin. Their vacant faces, their wide-open eyes, gave them the appearance of dumbness, and this was in no way relieved by their simple dress and clumsy sabots; those shoes made it seem as though their feet—if not their bodies entire—had been cut from petrified wood. Feebly, I’d wave to these women; often—overawed, not naturally rude—they would not respond. My spirits would sink—for if I knew anyone in the world it was these working women—and I’d sit back newly resolved to rid myself of the berlin and hire a lighter, faster, and far less ostentatious trap.

  Along this leg of the journey the road was well made and wide, and we were always in sight of the river, often running alongside it. The travel was easy and quick as we made our way through the Touraine.

  Tours sits not far from Angers, and we gained it by midafternoon of that third day. We might have arrived earlier, but I’d had Michel stop here and there—to take in this vista, to marvel at the wares in that market; and he, unwell from the aftereffects of drink, had stopped once or twice for reasons of his own.

  Rolling into the city, I was instantly charmed by the quay, which—blessedly, unlike vile Nantes—was devoid of any sign of commerce: no stacked barrels or bales, no dark masts rising to the powder-blue sky, no riverine types bounding up onto the berlin to beg; a few barges, yes, but these slow-moving ships seemed imbued with the indolence that characterizes all middays in late summer.

  The place, on the whole, seemed to me a fair mix of man’s work and nature’s. There were gardens and vineyards, and villas here and there, their walls slick with moss, or the scarlet scrawl of woodbine, or five-leaved ivy. Among the simple homes of the Tourangeaux, there rose the gabled and turreted affairs of the affluent. And there was, of course, a cathedral.

  As I strolled through the city that afternoon, not quite fearful of the place, and trying to make of myself a proper tourist, I saw the decorative towers of the cathedral rising up from the Place de l’Archevêché. Having taken a narrow lane embowered by flying buttresses and overhanging gargoyles, coolly shadowed by the church itself, I found myself standing before the middle of the cathedral’s three tall, recessed doors, atop which softly-hued pigeons nestled and cooed. Old habits will have their way, and so it was that time alone in the church seemed to me just the thing; prescriptive, and familiar. Already I could smell the heavy and still air, dense with incense and flowers past their prime; feel the wooden pews smoothed by generations of the faithful; see the pied light from stained glass, thick with the dust of ages, the fiery glow of a bank of votives, and the cold but oddly commiserative faces of the statues.

  A survey of the cathedral’s exterior had shown it to be drab, dark with age, and weighted with ghoulish sculpture and ungainly buttresses, supremely Gothic if not downright grotesque: I loved it. I learned from an inlaid plaque that work on the cathedral was begun in 1170 and completed some four hundred years later, despite which dates there seemed to me a homely harmony in the architecture.

  Inside, I found the place—dedicated, I remember, to one St. Gatianus, the first Christian missionary to Gaul—empty; there was not even an old sacristan, as one usually finds in such a place, offering for a coin a tour of every cobwebbed corner.

  I sat. The silence and the solitude were luxuries; only then did I realize that what I’d sought was a place to hide. Hide from the elementals; their presence reminded me of all I’d left behind: the unfulfilled promise of a life at Ravndal. Hide too from the wide and prying eyes of the paysans. I didn’t want to be seen by anyone, for I could not help but wonder what it was they saw when they saw me. You are a woman. You are a man. You are a witch.

  Yes, that’s all I wanted: to sit in silence, hide and not have to think. To still my mind, give over to the burnished wood and bright glass and smooth stone all those questions about who I was, what I was, how I’d live and die, and what it was I’d do across the sea. And I did succeed in stilling my mind, for a while; perhaps I did it with prayer, I cannot say. Old habits.

  I settled into a pew not far from the altar, richly lit by the sun streaming through the stained glass. I moved, ever so slightly, with the sun, in an orbit all my own. I slid first into a shaft of red light, and then farther down the pew into a golden glow. In the coolness of the church that buttery light seemed wonderfully warm. I let it play on my face. I fairly bathed in it! I lifted my hands, turned them this way and that, played at catching first the gold, then the green, then finally the violet light.

  Time passed; no more than an hour, I’d say.

  I sat considering the tomb of the two children of Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany, nestled in a corner of the cathedral not far from where I sat. Its white marble was carved with dolphins, which are said to guide the dead, and the fox-like, emblematic ermine that everywhere marks the influence of Anne; too, it bore vines festooned with flowers, foliage, and fruit. The boy and girl—dead young, and of natural cause—lay side by side, pairs of angels at their heads and feet. I sat, engaged in the elegance of that tomb, wondering was my melancholy gone, or was it refining itself? Sharpening itself, grinding itself blade-like on the carved marble?

  An answer to that question came in the shape of a woman.

  I hadn’t heard the great doors open behind me; neither had the darkness of the cathedral been diluted by any rush of daylight. Still, I heard something. Someone. Turning, I saw her coming down the center aisle. She wore a long black veil that, in company with the shadows, obscured her whole person. She walked at a bride’s pace, and with a bride’s stiffened gait. She did not slide into a pew of her own, as I expected she would. No; she continued on, toward me.

  She stopped at the end of the pew, my pew. She turned and—without genuflection—entered the pew, slowly making her way toward me. Did she not see me? I cleared my throat. I slid a bit farther from her, but she came on, with an uncommon grace, as if afloat, not at all awkward in so narrow a space. She sat beside me.

  She kept her long black veil lowered, but when she turned just so, and the colored light shifted across the black tulle of the veil, I could discern her profile. She was young, and beautiful, and a mass of unbound red hair fell over her shoulders. She wore a voluminous skirt of a powdery blue that fell neatly into its pleats and billowed out around her as she sat. I glimpsed her black boot, ankle-high, with three buttons of pearl up its outer side.

  Clouds passed over the late-day sun, muting the cathedral’s light. A moment later the sun burned its way through the clouds and the shafts of red, yellow, green, et cetera, were as bright as before. Blue light hung in the air like smoke. Shadows of birds passed over the stained glass; fixed there, trapped, were the pilgrims, the saints, and martyrs unaffected by the changeable light and the shadow-birds, unaffected too by the witch gazing up at their piebald shapes. I envied them their stillness, their perpetuity—the fixedness of their lives, long ended. It was then I discovered that my eyes were brimming with tears. It was then too that the woman beside me spoke:

  “Don’t cry,” said she. Her voice was warm, mellifluous, and deep. But the wonder of her words soon ceded to this: How did she know I was crying? She’d not turned toward me. And I, from long years of practice, am expert at stifling my tears—no wracking sobs, no heaving shoulders.

  “Don’t cry,” she repeated; and with that she knelt. At first it seemed she was falling, and I nearly reached to steady her. She moved as would a marionette with tangled strings, or an unsteady hand above her. But then I sat back and watched as she…as it, that body, was made to kneel…. Imagine a face rising up from underwater: I know of no better way to describe what it was like as that woman, as the arms of that borrowed body raised themselves jerkily up to lift that veil and show to me, there, like a mask, atop that deathly still and un
familiar face, the quite familiar face of Madeleine de la Mettrie.

  I’d seen what I’d seen, yes; but only when Madeleine caused the cold hand of the corpse to settle unsteadily over mine, only at that icy touch and the garbled, liquescent voice, her voice, to which she reverted, telling me again I ought not to cry—only then did I know it was Madeleine beside me, resident in a dead body.

  “Mon Dieu!” I cried, standing up fast. “What are you—”

  Sit, she commanded. Apologetically, she added: It’s so much easier, witch. Would you have me walk through the streets of Tours as I am?

  “Why walk at all?” I asked. “I thought you moved…willfully, without need of—”

  Sometimes it’s fun. Now sit!

  I was to accept this and ask no further questions. So be it. I’d sit in church and converse with a cadaver.

  “Who is that, anyway?” I had to ask it.

  Newly dead, said the succubus, but she’s stiffening terribly…She caused to flex the fingers of the left hand, then the right; she turned the head toward me. Dismissively, she added, It’s no concern of yours, witch, who she is.

  “Will she be missed?” Specifically, my thought was this: has she a daughter, or a son, who will be sent away?

  She’ll not be missed until she’s found, answered the succubus, adding to that riddle, after a pause: And I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re wondering. I found her not far from here, dressed but fallen beside her bed. Her heart was young, yes, but faulty: it gave out not long after dawn. Let her loved ones find her here, nearer her God.

  That was exactly what I was wondering—if Madeleine had killed her witless host; and, though I thought to commend her on what seemed a kindness, I said nothing else. Nor did Madeleine speak, with either voice. There the two of us sat, shoulder to shoulder in the cathedral of St. Gatianus in Tours. To any worshiper who might come we’d appear to be two souls deep in prayer.

  Finally, Madeleine spoke. She used the…the other’s voice. “Kneel with me,” she said. “I cannot see you…. This neck…it’s already rigid and…”

  I knelt beside her. “Please,” said I, “don’t use that voice. I’m finally used to yours, and I cannot bear to be reminded that I’m here with—”

  All right then!…Now listen, witch. I’ve come…I’ve come to thank you.

  Anyone near us would have heard Madeleine’s voice as a rush of air, something like the beating wings of the lone pigeon I spied high up in the nave. Her voice was a bit different, drier perhaps. Still there was a watery quality to it, akin to an overrunning gutter; perhaps her voice had changed when I’d worked the Craft to stop her blood flow…. And it was that for which I thought she’d come to thank me.

  “It worked then, the spell?” I knew it had. “The blood—”

  Yes. Let us hope your Craft is as strong at the crossroads.

  “You understand,” I said, “I’ve no idea how…. I don’t know if I—”

  That’s why I’ve come. That’s why I followed you here, holding to this cold shape.

  “Why?”

  To thank you, and to tell you more about this mission of ours, as your Sebastiana calls it.

  I said nothing. Could it be that someone was going to offer information, that finally I’d not have to pry, deduce, guess, worry, or wonder?

  You know, of course, that for two centuries now I have been trying to die, trying to escape my fate. I have tried in so many ways…. Her voice trailed off. I watched as she awkwardly slapped the corpse’s hands together and held visetight to that prayerful pose.

  “I’ve heard you and Father Louis speak of that, yes; but I don’t really know what you mean.”

  No, you don’t, witch, said she. You’ve no idea.

  “So tell me!” I said, surprising myself. “Tell me all you know of death.”

  That said, we sat staring forward a long while, both of us—enfin, all three of us—in the otherwise empty church.

  Her words, when finally she spoke, were these:

  In the years since my death I have traveled widely, and with one intent: to find an avenue back into life.

  …What I sought, failing always, was some small portion of a life’s span. I didn’t care if the body I gained was that of a baby or a beggar woman, a fool or a nun; I wanted only to return to mortality, to live again so that I might finally, truly die. To quit this…this infinite suspension…or this suspension within the Infinite that some rite or ritual of the Church has condemned me to.

  “You believe the Church has done this to you?” I asked.

  I know she has. It was an act of the Church; not an act of any god…. But just how it was done, I’ve no idea. It was Madeleine’s face I saw then beneath the veil, risen above the other, divorced from it and turned to me. And if I’ve no idea how it was done, how then do I undo it? How might anyone, anything undo it?

  Of course, my thought was this: how am I to undo it? I didn’t ask that question. Instead, I sat listening. And looking. In the cool dark, in the multihued shadows of the cathedral, I marveled at the hands of Madeleine’s…host. Pretty, long and slender fingers tapering down to well-tended nails. Nothing like Madeleine’s cracked and overgrown curling nails—filthy, always, hers were; like those of something…feral.

  Madeleine resumed: All I have learned these long years of searching is that I cannot suffer this fate for all time. I cannot! I need the whole of life, or the whole of death. I cannot suffer this…this stasis any longer!

  As she lapsed into silence, I looked from Madeleine to the bank of glowing red votives before which an old man had come to kneel; his grief—as evinced by his hands, clasped fast in prayer, and his heaving shoulders—was great.

  I have sought a way in all the Church’s rituals, without success. But I’ve a final hope:

  We are traveling to disinter my body, to alter it at the suicides’ unconsecrated crossroads to which it was condemned, banished from the Church’s blessed earth. It’s my hope that this—if done by the darkness of a new moon, and with certain rites read by both Louis and you, a new and strong witch…Well, perhaps I shall rest at last. Perhaps I shall finally die.

  It seemed I’d little say in my own fate, yet here I was with the succubus dependent upon me to decide hers! All I could think to offer was a pathetic, “I’ll try, Madeleine. I will.”

  Yes, you will, said the succubus.

  “But what rites am I to read? You mentioned rites…”

  Yes, yes, the rites. Bell, Book, and Candle, said she. Are you familiar, witch, with the rites of excommunication?

  I said I was not, adding, “But those are for a priest to read, no?”

  At this the succubus issued a derisive laugh. No, thank you, said she. I’ve had my fill of priests. And Sebastiana says you have access to worlds priests and pagans can only pray to.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  New witches are not so easily come by, said Madeleine. I’ve waited—

  “No; I mean why me and not Sebastiana?”

  Back in her day, you mean, when she was new? Well, by the time I met her, during the Terror, her strength had already ebbed, and she was still shy of her powers, having unwittingly rained down such storms as—

  “Yes, yes, I know of the storms,” I said.

  And that witch, your Mystic Sister…well, she tried to help me but once, and only after much persuasion, by myself and Louis as well. The attempt was halfhearted and without effect; without effect on me, I should say.

  I asked what she meant.

  Madeleine hesitated. Well, she began, Sebastiana worked the Craft that day with little confidence and an unsure hand, the result being…well, it was sometime later we learned of the unfortunate effects, the…the hemorrhagic effects her Craft had had on several dogs in the vicinity of Chaillot. Apparently, said the succubus with a mischievous shrug, it was not pleasant. “Explosive,” was the word used by one tearful woman who, with the aid of the authorities, tried to puzzle out the loss of her poodles.

  Resumi
ng her…her graver tone, Madeleine went on: Ah, witch, said she, there are more important things to speak of now. As my priest says, “Paris is passed”…I ask again: what do you know of the rite of Bell, Book, and Candle?

  Before I could answer, she spoke on:

  …It was the springtime of 1670 or ’80; I forget the exact year, but I’d not yet been dead a half-century, that I know. From a traveler in the South, a dealer in champagne, I heard tell of a strangler in the Midi. This traveler had just received word from some man of his family that a suspect had been caught—a mute. I was suspicious; with good reason, as it turned out.

  “But why would you be interested in—?”

  —Because surely there’d be punishment meted out, and that most often meant the taking of life, the loosing of a soul into that same oblivion in which I dwell. And so, as I’d had my fun with that traveler—I was a bit more mischievous then—I set off.

  “Mischievous?” I didn’t ask for details; I didn’t need to.

  Louis was off in Bordeaux somewhere, keeping company with a family of daughters, so I traveled to the Midi alone…. To say I “traveled” to the Midi is inaccurate; discarnate, I had only to will myself there. She asked did I understand; I lied that I did. In truth, that—the omnipotent will—seems destined to remain a mystery to me.

  I don’t recall the name of the village, but it doesn’t matter. Neither does it matter that the priest involved in events there was one Monseigneur de Pericaud, the first priest I’d hear read the rite of excommunication.

  The situation, I should say, was this: the mute stood accused of strangling, bare-handed, two women of that town. One victim was a widowed midwife, little better than a witch, it was said…dispensable, in other words. But the second victim was the pregnant wife of the mayor’s son; and so a condemnable man was sought. It was easily decided that the mute who lived without family on the edge of the village, caring for hens and carrying their eggs to market weekly, would make a convenient suspect. The evidence was easily arranged. The trial was quick, the verdict unanimous. Interestingly, the mute was not to be strangled, as would have been customary: an eye for an eye, and so on. No, he was to be excommunicated, for he was of the Faith. And so, though his life would be spared, his soul would be cast off into damnation eternal. This, for the mute, was a fate worse than death. But it suited his accusers, for it spared their consciences—if not their souls.