The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  On three consecutive Sundays the priest rang a large bell on the steps of the wooden church, distinguished only by the shortness of its spire, an embarrassment to the villagers, for it formed the town’s sole renown. At the pealing of this bell, the villagers assembled. The monseigneur asked were there any present who might bear witness to the mute’s innocence. No one spoke. Finally, on the fourth Sunday—and I assure you, by now I was ready for the rite to be read; I’d grown quite impatient, and I’d already ensured that the actual strangler would strangle no more—on that fourth Sunday, with no one speaking on behalf of the condemned, the verdict stood. The ritual commenced at noon.

  A thick white taper, representing the soul of the condemned, was set on the church’s top step.

  “The rite is read outside?” I asked.

  Not typically, said Madeleine, but too many people had come to see the mute’s soul cast out, and that ramshackle church, its timbers rotted, the whole resembling nothing if not a piece of carved coal, could not accommodate the crowd.

  “What happened then?” I asked. “Did the mute—”

  Madeleine’s slow turning…no, the corpse’s slow turning toward me, accompanied by a terrible…cracking, told me wordlessly that I ought not to interrupt. Lest I misunderstand, the succubus added: It’s a short tale, witch; and I’ll tell it fast.

  …The taper was lit, and a glass cylinder was placed over it, against the wind. More bells were rung. As some of these were brass, I suffered a bit, had to surrender the shape I’d taken, that of an old hag, ignored at the edge of the crowd. No one noticed as the shawl I abandoned sank to the ground. I rose up unseen, hovered above the crowd and watched, disembodied.

  “The bells…?” I prompted. “Why brass?”

  To ward off those demons who’d ascend to fight for the outcast soul.

  “And were there demons?”

  Again, that slow turning of the veiled face toward mine. Just me, said Madeleine; and the corners of the corpse’s lips twitched, convulsed into a sickly smile.

  “But you weren’t there for the soul of the mute. It was the body you wanted, no?”

  Yes, it was a body I sought, initially; but the strange verdict had fouled my plan. Still, I grew intrigued: if the soul and body were indeed to be separated, with some part of the soul of a still-living man cast off into the void…If this spell of the Church’s worked, and body and soul were somehow severed…well then, I might be shown some avenue I’d not contemplated before.

  Madeleine hesitated, lowered her voice till it was nearly inaudible. I wonder, did she worry what might happen when she recited those words, there in the cathedral? She did, after all, believe; she’d reason to. But then, in full voice, causing the grieving man before the votives to turn, Madeleine recited those words she’d first heard a century and a half earlier:

  “We exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church,” said she, her voice so deep, her words so deliberate it seemed I was listening to the monseigneur himself; and I wondered did the elementals’ talents for mimicry, effigy, and shape-shifting extend to the replication of voices lost to time? “…And we judge him condemned to Holy Fire with Satan and his Angels and all the Reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of his demons, do penance, and satisfy the Church.”

  Madeleine fell silent. The left leg of the redheaded woman twitched terribly, so terribly I thought Madeleine had meant to kick me. It seems this body is dying still, said she lightly, in fast apology; and then she spoke on:

  With more of the rite read, the monseigneur closed his dark text and tucked it up under his arm. The wind twisted his black shift about his legs and he, along with all those assembled, stared not at the mute but at the dancing flame behind the glass, emblematic of the mute’s soul. Carefully, the glass was lifted off the candle and the priest, quick as a cat, snatched up the taper and waved it in the air. The flame blew out, and just as quickly the mute’s soul was cast from God’s sight. The priest then, quite showily—this angered me, for it is not part of the prescribed rite—tossed the taper into the crowd, where, with shouts and cries and prayers, the assembled faithful shrank from it.

  “And the mute?”

  Yes, well, the mute…Nothing. He simply walked from the village under a shower of stones, all his worldly goods slung over his shoulder, tied into a square of soiled canvas.

  “His soul…?”

  Unaffected.

  “The rite, then, it didn’t…”

  “Sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Such rites, you see, if they are to work at all, must be read by one who is “pure.” The Roman Ritual, the rite of exorcism, states it plainly: the reading priest must be pure.

  “And the monseigneur?”

  Impure, said Madeleine flatly. As are so many, for it seems to me the Church holds to a standard quite apart from life. Mind you, I make no excuses for the impure, none at all.

  “The mute…?”

  Unchanged, as regarded the state of his soul. This I’ve told you—

  “Yes, but did you tell him this? If he was a faithful man, then—”

  No, I did not. I was, you understand, quite disappointed myself, for I’d learned nothing I did not know. And neither am I inclined to impart confidences to mortals; in this I do them a favor, for not everyone suffers as well as you the acquaintance of eudemons.

  “Yes, but—”

  Leave off, witch! It is over and done, and all those concerned have long since passed to their just reward. Would you have me somehow turn back time to talk to a mute?

  Silence then.

  But I believe still, said Madeleine, that there is something to that rite. I’ve long wondered what it—or a rite derived from it—might effect if read by one who is pure. Pure as you are.

  Still we knelt shoulder to shoulder. The cathedral was empty and nearly dark now, the stained glass faintly aglow with the last light of day. I sat looking up at the windows when suddenly Madeleine abandoned her host and it—the redheaded corpse—toppled toward me like a felled tree! I scrambled out from under it to see Madeleine standing in the church’s center aisle. She appeared as always, in her cerements, wild-looking. I saw clearly her ragged wound; free now of the obscuring blood, it was even more horrible. But then…above the throat, there floated her ethereal face, her beautiful face, frozen forever in her youth yet masking such a very old soul.

  Madeleine held my gaze so long I nearly looked away. “What…what will become of her?” The corpse lay stiffening on the hard pew. There rose from it a smell I’ve not the stomach to describe, not now, not with these waves at work beneath me.

  Madeleine made no answer, said only, I’m leaving now, witch. I suggest you do the same. We’ve the calendar to consider. Already she was one with the shadows, and gone.

  “Pure as you are.” Her words resounded in my head as I moved up the center aisle, out of the church. Indeed, I’d hear those words again and again, hear them as I stole back to the berlin from the cathedral, hear them as we retook the Coast Road to ride into the night.

  33

  I Wake to a Surprise

  WE’D BEEN traveling some days now. Lately, our course was that of the river Loire. It was not the most direct route—indeed, since Angers we’d traveled, as best I could tell, due east. In time, we’d transfer our allegiance to the Rhône, and in so doing take to a directly southern route. Of course, I had little say in mapping our way; Father Louis did that. And though I would sometimes insist on stopping here and there, and sometimes spending a night in an actual bed, it was the lunar calendar that set our pace, for we needed to arrive at the crossroads before the new moon rose; a new moon, I was told, would aid me in my work. And should we miss the coming new moon, we’d have to wait a lunar cycle for its return. This I did not wish to do: if I were going, and I was, I would go.

  And so I would see that we arrived in advance of the new moon in that part of Provence where the elementals had lived their actual, their mortal lives. And there, at the suicides’ cros
sroads, beyond a ruined city I will not name, in the darkness cast by the blind side of a new moon, I would do what I could to free Madeleine; and then I would…. In truth, I did not know what I would do then.

  …The dream I’d induced beyond Rennes had left me enervated. My breath was labored for a long while, my heart not quite right, and my limbs bore a lassitude that I could only attribute to the exertion of “seeing.” The divining had a disorienting effect. So too did the work I’d done upon Madeleine in Angers, and all I’d learned in Tours. Which is to say, I was unspeakably tired.

  I took up a map to try, without success, to situate myself, to find Bourges. I’d no idea what time it was, no idea at all. I saw that the moon was high, and the night deep. Alors, I sat so listlessly, contentedly staring out at the play of moonlight on the river, nodding off now and again.

  The bright light of the moon lit the land blue, and so it was that I would see Blois—only later would I learn it was Blois; north, and off the expected route—on the bank of the Loire, in a pale and ghostly cast, the facades of its buildings aglow, banks of poplars swaying forward to admire themselves in the silvered river. Narrow streets rose steeply up from the river and wound their way out of sight. Overhanging the city was the great château, bright as a secondary moon. A timbered inn, riverside, tempted me; but no…We drove on.

  Looking at my map, now, I see that we would have achieved Amboise before Blois; though the map is irrefutable, that’s not how I remember it…. Ah, but the tired hours of that night are so confused in my memory…Confused too was our route, from which the elementals had us stray.

  …I do, however, recall Amboise. Indeed, I can see the dark mass of its château above the river, its crenellations and platforms and balconies, its niched windows, its shadowed profile cut with machicoulis to which tiny cannons would have been wheeled in medieval defense. Seeing it through heavy-lidded eyes, I did not regret rolling on, owing perhaps to a historical tidbit that came back to me then: it was from the balconies of the château at Amboise that the heads of Huguenots had been displayed as the grimmest of ornamentation after the discovery of the long-ago conspiracy at La Renaudie. The silence that night in Amboise as we rode beside the river seemed the silence of those severed heads. Rolling on, I worried that they’d speak in my dreams.

  …Eventually, Morpheus triumphed: I felt my neck go suddenly slack and roll heavily this way and that; my hand fell from my lap, heavy as a stone…. Soon I was fast asleep.

  When I woke it was to the unmistakable sound of gravel being ground under the large wheels of the berlin. We were driving slowly, owing, I supposed, to a bad stretch of road. I remember hearing two other strange sounds immediately upon waking: a silence which said we were no longer beside the river, and the nearby cry of the raven. Had Sebastiana sent Maluenda, as raven, to watch over me…or was she, Sebastiana, watching me through the raven’s eyes? Impossible! But then again, I’d taken to the raven’s eyes in my dream; and hadn’t I already learned enough to banish that word—impossible—from my vocabulary?

  (Here at sea, aboard this ship, I spy a certain fat black rat in my cabin on occasion. I’ll look up from these pages, considering a certain sentence, or perhaps to dip my pen, and there it’ll be, staring up at me from over beside the larder. Almost as large as a cat, I’m sure the rat fends nicely for itself on board, but I feed it nonetheless, leaving wedges of cheese and rinds of bacon scattered about. I verily host the thing. And sometimes—this is embarrassing—I smile at the rat and tell myself the smile is seen by Sebastiana…. And yes, sometimes I speak to it. I’m sounding like a fool here; and so I’ll stop.)

  …As I say, there was something about that combination of sounds to which I woke—the gravel; silence where there’d been the steady song of the river; the ravensong—that piqued my curiosity. The gravel was particularly curious—the roads we’d traveled over were, for the most part, smoothly packed dirt, pocked here and there, or else they were impossibly bad, slowing us to a crawl for long stretches. Gravel? No; there’d been no gravel. Only a private drive, one especially well tended, would be covered in a gravel deep and fine enough to grind like this beneath the wheels…

  And that’s when I sat forward, looked out the window of the berlin, and saw there, there, looming ever nearer, a city wrought all in silver!

  The sight took my breath away, literally: seeing that city spread before me, the breath rushed from my lungs audibly, as though I’d suffered a blow. And had I had a traveling companion, a mortal companion, he or she would have heard me utter an expletive or two, occasioned by awe, once I’d regained sufficient breath to do so.

  The very instant I saw the city, my mind began to beat back my imagination, and I reasoned that this was no mythical place, no Camelot or Xanadu, no Atlantis rising from a sea of night, but rather that edifice known to every French schoolchild: the château de Chambord.

  We had doubled back from Blois. But why?

  I saw outlined against the dark sky the even darker roof: a compilation of cupolas, chimneys, pinnacles, spires, and towers. The walls, rising up out of the disfeatured park, the peasant’s landscape, shone like sculpted ivory. The glass of a thousand windows glistened, gave back the moonlight as a prism would. It all glistened! It all glowed, all four-hundred-odd stone-carved rooms.

  The château de Chambord. I will not offer here a detailed description of the place; I haven’t the time. I’m told we sail ever-nearer port and I despair of finishing this record. For now, let me offer this, culled from a pamphlet I would purchase in Arles.

  Begun under Francis I in 1519, the château bears his imprimatur all over: the flat and fairly plain F, and the royal (and repulsive!) salamander. Its luckless, loveless fate seems to have been ordained by Francis, who, it is said, chose the site in the soggy Sologne for no better reason than this: the Comtesse de Thoury, with whom the not-yet-ascendant Francis was smitten, had a manor in the vicinity. Francis’s heirs took up the care and construction of the château upon his death; eventually, with Versailles, St. Cloud, Fontainebleau, and St. Germain all within easier reach of the capital, sovereigns were little inclined to decamp to Chambord, in perhaps the least appealing part of the kingdom. In succession, the royal barrack hosted Henri II and Gaston d’Orléans—brother to Louis XIII; and, most markedly, Louis XIV. The adornments and additions made by the latter, the most decorative of kings, are easily imagined. There later came the perennially exiled King of the Poles, Stanislas Leczinski, father-in-law to Louis XV, and his queen, Catherine Opalinska by name. The Maréchal de Saxe was given the château after his victory at Fontenoy, in 1745; and at present the sad vastness is unoccupied as the heirs of the Maréchal de Berthier wage a litigious war with the Duc de Bordeaux, whose mother, the Duchesse de Berry, is pressing her son’s claim with great voice.

  The berlin came to a standstill in the inner court of the château, passing through La Porte royale. Finally, I thought, a place whose scale suits this conveyance of ours! I climbed down quickly from the cab, wondering should I dress down Michel for stopping here of his own volition, for not conferring with me, his master…. But of course, it was not Michelatop the box.

  There sat the smiling priest, holding fast to his own shape. “The driver?” I asked. “What have you done with the driver?”

  “Dismissed,” said the priest, “while you slept. Unharmed, newly rich, and…well, just a bit confused.”

  I could not help but smile—finally, Michel would get the rest he’d sought back in Angers; and I knew he’d do well, for his was a most adaptable nature. Just then I heard a horrible noise and turned to see an ancient set of iron-hinged doors—not often used, evidently—swing open across the inner courtyard. There stood Madeleine. With a sweep meant to take in the whole of the château, she said, smiling, and with the practiced grace of the greatest of chatelaines, We thought we’d pass the night here, grandly.

  “Grandly, indeed,” said I. Father Louis descended unseen from atop the berlin; and Madeleine came unnaturally fast fr
om across the courtyard. Both their shapes were full, strong; still, the moon seemed to penetrate them and they gave back its light—that is, they glowed; as did the great château.

  The château’s towers—it is comprised of a larger structure enclosing a smaller, each sporting four towers—…its towers and their adjoining walls rose up all around us, and the sculpted stone, the gargoyles staring down from atop every capital…the many shadows gave to the whole a depth, a texture that made it seem a living thing. I stood in that inner courtyard for a long while, turning this way and that, trying to take in the whole magical mass.

  Madeleine had disappeared, but there she was again, standing in the portal of the vestibule, which she’d somehow, soundlessly opened to us from inside the château. Shall we? she asked. So it was that I—like how many queens, how many kings before me?—entered the château de Chambord.

  The huge door shut behind me; the clap of cold wood on colder stone resounded for a long while. The light of the moon was lost; an instant later, there flared up before me a flame contained in an oil lamp held by Madeleine. I did not see her strike a match, nor otherwise light the lamp; how she raised the flame I’ve no idea, but neither did it really surprise me, for it seemed that one comprised primarily of air and water could surely put a bit of fire to purpose.

  Led by the light of her lamp, I followed Madeleine. Here and there the moon seeped through a narrow window to augment our light and I’d glimpse a tapestry, see a tall and unwound clock hulking in a shadowed corner. Father Louis was near, I knew, but if he held to his shape he did so beyond the light cast by our lamp. Shortly, Madeleine and I arrived at the foot of the château’s famed double staircase, its entwined stairwells designed to allow two persons (mistresses? rivals?) to come and go without encountering each other. There stood Father Louis, three or four steps up the stairway, leaning against the thick handrail, his shape weak but easily discerned. All that night the elementals would appear thin, almost translucent, struggling to draw what sustenance they could from the canal running near the château; they were too far from the Loire to draw on it for strength.