The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  “Is it like that for others? Is it always the same, that…journey?”

  I think not. I think that some are able to retain more memory, even some characteristics of a former form—eye color, mannerisms, temperament…. And so it is that some infants are born not with knowledge, per se, but knowing. This, I believe, accounts for the range of wisdom among men. Some souls are born old, marked by lives already lived, lessons already learned.

  “Are all of us…?” I began.

  Are we all reincarnated, are we all comprised of residual soul?

  “Yes,” I said.

  No, said the succubus, I don’t think so; some beings are newly born, products of mere, or rather pure Creation.

  “But tell me,” I pressed, “tell me what happened when you were actually born?”

  At parturition?…Ah, yes. Well, I saw a sight-obscuring light, the very same light I’d seen when I died. But mark me here: it was not a light that leads one toward it, that beckons; one hears the hysterics talk entirely too much about that sort of light. No, it was a light like…like shattering glass. A celestial fracture, if you will. And it was followed hard by an instant—an ineffable instant—of battling Chaos and calm—that, I believe, is common to every birth and death.

  As that light faded I heard the slowing of first one heart and then the other. This was attended by a precipitous descent from warmth to coldness, a coldness like…like the ice at the earth’s core. And then a recurring crash of light confirmed it: I, or rather my infant host, had died, and so too had its mother.

  I rose then, again, ascended to the state I’d long known. Lifeless. Deathless…. This!

  Madeleine hesitated. She mourned not those lost lives, but rather the lost opportunities; and this, strangely, did not seem callous to me. After that particular disappointment, she resumed, shyly, I raged. I raged for decades and did things I will not speak of…. Vengeful, cacodemonic things.

  Father Louis sat expressionless and silent; if he knew what “things” the succubus spoke of, he’d not speak of them either.

  “Did you ever try again?” I asked. “Try again to access or gain life in that way?”

  I tried twice more, answered the succubus, and with similar result. Once the fetus failed in the second month, and I rose up leaving the mother awash in blood. The second time I rode my host to term—and retained a great deal more wisdom as the birth date drew near—but the birth was complicated and again I ascended, having known less than a quarter hour of life.

  “That quarter hour, it was not enough to allow you to…to live and die, as you wished?”

  Apparently not. The infant died, but I did not. I would have thought that span of life sufficient, but…But those rites read over my mortal remains, that curse cast over my immortal soul, those tricks of the Church, prevented my soul’s escape…. Or so it seems.

  “And those are the rites you seek to undo at the crossroads?”

  Yes.

  “You know,” said I, quite suddenly, “I’ve no confidence I can do that. What if I do not have the power to—”

  You do not need power, said the succubus; and she paused before adding, Witch, you are power.

  37

  The Carcass Waxer

  SHOCK? WHAT IS the word to describe what one feels upon hearing truths that man has sought for centuries?…Did I hear the elementals as certain saints are said to have heard the voice of God? Those saints heard the Word with neither shock nor surprise, for their faith had prepared them for it, led them to expect it; it seemed their reward. Might I say that I had faith, have faith of a kind? Might I say that I heard the words of the elementals as a sort of reward? Ah, but I indulge myself here. Certainly, I am no saint, no mystic. As we passed among the olive, the asphodel, the cypress, the laurel, and the vine—I peeked out from behind the drawn blind—it was Father Louis who turned our conversation from Madeleine’s “avenues” to Paris, segueing with words similar to these:

  “We tread the border of life and death,” said he, “and that is a place quite often marked by violence.” And so it seemed he’d speak of…of violence; but no: he spoke instead of meeting Sebastiana and Asmodei in Paris during the last decade of the last century. He’d gone on at length before I understood that he’d not changed his subject at all: speaking of Paris, he spoke still of violence.

  The elementals told of events that transpired many years ago, some twenty years before my birth. Of course, to the elementals my lifespan was nothing, for they’d each endured ten such spans. To them life was a long unbroken line; and as their memories proved suspect in terms of dates and such, I augmented their tales with what I knew.

  “I don’t recall the year,” said the priest at one point, rather characteristically, laughingly adding, “I haven’t had recourse to a calendar for some time. In fact, the last one I saw was that of Fabre d’Églantine, that ridiculous Revolutionary calendar before which all were supposed to bow. How that amused me! Really, now: Thermidor, Messidor…Frimaire, Nivôse…How absurdly arrogant to rename time’s component parts!” The priest referred, of course, to the short-lived calendar put forth in the first years after the Revolution—or Années I and II; it was held that a new day had dawned, a new day deserving of a new name.

  “It was, I think,” continued the priest, “’92, perhaps ’93.”

  The King, of course, was newly dead, offered Madeleine.

  “Yes, yes he was,” said Father Louis, “but the Queen was not; she was not yet dead, was she?” They turned to me. The first date that came to mind was that of the King’s execution:

  “21 January,” I said. “The King was killed on 21 January of ’93.”

  “Ah, yes; so he was,” mused Father Louis. He closed his eyes; when he opened them, he added, with a wry smile, “You, witch, may recall the date, but I recall the day.”

  “You were there?”

  We were there, of course, said Madeleine. All of Paris was there. Indeed, the Commune had to lock the city down, finally, to stop the flow of people into the capital. The city gates were shut, and the streets were lined with soldiers. It was said a thousand soldiers accompanied the King’s coach to the scaffold.

  “Although, at that point no one dared call him King. Louis the Last, perhaps, or Citizen Capet, or the Pig of Varennes—most popularly, and finally, Louis the Shortened.”

  The “shortening” ended all sorts of other indignities, observed Madeleine. And then, rather sadly, she added, I wonder if it wasn’t in a way welcome?

  “My dear, you persist in thinking that everyone wishes to die!” chided Father Louis. “I’m sure, given a choice, the Royals would have chosen to live out their fat and happy days in some gilded refuge, far from the rabble…. That said, it is true, the King was made to suffer all sorts of petty indignities in his final days.”

  I asked the priest what he meant, and he explained further: “Well, for example, while the King was imprisoned in the Temple, his jailers refused to do such things as remove their hats in his presence, and if they were seated when he passed they remained so. He was not allowed to wear his decorations when he went out for his daily walk…things like that—petty indignities, but bad enough in their way for a former King. Of course, those abuses progressed to verbal and finally physical abuse of”—here he smiled—“of the capital sort.”

  How it went from funny little nicknames and courtly slights to the lopping off of his head…I must confess, said Madeleine, that road—the steep slope down to Revolution—remains a mystery to me…. But to return to the day in question…

  That day, with the King slated to go to the scaffold, Paris was a festival of death! All through the enormous crowd were little clearings in which the people danced the carmagnole. It seemed every second man had a drum, drums to mimic the quickening pulse of the people.

  “So you were actually there, in the crowd, when the King was killed?”

  No, not “in the crowd,” as you put it—we were above the crowd, discarnate. Madeleine looked to the priest. W
e were everywhere then, said she, everywhere life was likely to end suddenly and violently. But rarely did we take shape: a body would have been a hindrance, would have held us to one place at a time.

  “You can be in more than one place at a time?” I asked, knowing Madeleine’s answer would call into question the very Trinity, the omnipresence of God and—

  Well, said she, not exactly.

  The priest elaborated: “Not like that. Not like you’ve been taught. What Madeleine means is that—discarnate, without the burden of a body—we could, rather we can, by means of the will, move quickly, very, very quickly, from place to place.”

  Indeed, laughed the succubus, I once witnessed two executions at opposite ends of the city—one in the Place du Carrousel; the other I forget where—and the next day’s paper held that both executions had happened at the very stroke of noon! I’d never seen the succubus so animated; she was acting like a girl. Ah yes, one of the executed was a boy, not yet twenty, court-martialed for kissing the embroidered fleur-de-lis on his old uniform. How the poor sot cried as he climbed up to the Blade.

  “Tell me more about the King,” said I, straining to see Madeleine in the inconstant light of the cab, and leaving the landscape to roll by unadmired.

  Well, let me see…he wore gray—gray stockings and gray culottes; and a pink waistcoat under a brown coat of silk. I remember that well. And his hair, it was coifed—

  “And cut off in the back,” added the priest, “so no braid would impede the Blade.”

  And he was calm, said Madeleine. Or appeared so at first. He ascended the scaffold and shook hands, as was customary, with Sanson and his son. But then an argument ensued.

  “It was clear to the crowd,” said Father Louis, “that Louis Capet did not want his hands tied behind his back. Sanson insisted. Finally, a priest intervened, whispering to the King, who relented. He hadn’t much choice by then.”

  There was a moment when it seemed the mob might act.

  “Yes.”

  Some shouted support for the King.

  “Yes,” said Father Louis, “though the law, posted everywhere, read something like this: ‘Those applauding the King as he passes to the Timbers of Justice will be beaten; those cursing the King will be hanged.’ I tell you: it was a time of great contradictions! There was a report in the journals the day after the King’s execution that told of two men arrested along the King’s route: the one had addressed the King as such, and the second had refused to do so.”

  And weren’t both men killed? asked Madeleine. I believe they were—the monarchist by the Tribunal, sentenced without trial, and the insulter by his fellows in prison.

  “Yes,” said the priest, “I believe you are right.”

  “The prison massacres?” I asked reflexively.

  “No, dear. That was a bit earlier, in ’92,” said the priest. He was amused. “But tell me, what do you know of the massacres?”

  “I’ve read accounts of those atrocities. But surely you were witness to them. Tell me what you saw.”

  “Ah, but why, witch? If you know anything at all of those massacres you already know too much. And what’s to say but that a band of fifteen or so citizens—far fewer than one imagines—riled by talk of the supposed sedition being stirred in the prisons, burst into several of them one late afternoon armed with blades. And the rest was butchery.”

  Don’t let’s speak of the prisons, pleaded Madeleine, not now…. The King, Louis; speak of the King.

  “All that there is to say of the King, finally, is that they killed him. Sanson fils let fall the Blade at his father’s order, and the head of the King of the French fell like a thousand others.”

  Can you believe, laughed Madeleine, that some expected the King’s blood to be blue? There were bets, and a mad rush toward the scaffold to see it spurt from the neck. Some tasted it, even, and said that it was pré-salé, salted like the flesh of the livestock that grow fat on the salt marshes. After all, it was asked, hadn’t the King lived off the land, too…

  “Sanson held up the head; the crowd went still, silent. Then, slowly, rolling from the back of the crowd, washing forward to break like a wave on the scaffold, there came a dull and primal roar…It was quite eerie, that rumbling cheer…

  “And so the people had killed their King.”

  Think of it, said Madeleine to me. Think of it! I knew the world had changed when I saw the schoolboys of the Quatre-Nations toss their hats in the air.

  “The two parts of the King’s corpse were carted off to a common burial,” said the priest. “Sanson stayed behind to oversee the selling of souvenirs, handkerchiefs dipped in the King’s blood, et cetera, for such was his right as Executioner.”

  And a lucrative right it was, added the succubus. Sanson, I tell you, was rich! He lived well…. He would sit fireside with his family at night—Gabriel, his eldest son, would later die of a broken neck: he’d fall from the scaffold while stretching to show the mob a head. And there was Henri, the second son, and the grandson, Henri-Clément, each of whom would become Monsieur Paris in his turn—they’d all sit fireside and Sanson père would draw a slow bow over his cello, or teach his parakeet the songs of his youth. And death—murder, really—was as common a topic of conversation as any other. I know: I visited Sanson several times.

  “Visited?” I led. “You visited Sanson?”

  No, no, no, said the succubus, not like that! No, I wanted just to watch him, see how it was he lived. And it was strange indeed to see Sanson kill the King, having watched him days earlier as he tended his tulip garden. Sanson, you see, was a dealer in death; and so I trailed him, convinced that if only I were present, and watching closely enough, I’d see, I’d discover…a rupture, some rent in the fabric of life, of death.

  …And here I am these long years later, searching still.

  The elementals told me more about the King, most of it, they said, they knew from Asmodei. It seems that for Asmodei, the King was something of a hobby. He would pose as a courtier; once, when the King went to the Temple, Asmodei was posted as a jailer, advancing in short order to the post of Shaver to the Former King. Yes, they said, Asmodei was often quite close to the King, whom Father Louis laughingly described as “inept, distracted at best, conniving at worst,” and “led by his quite willful wife.” He called the King a “moon-calf,” and at this Madeleine joined him in laughter.

  Louis, said she, I’ve not heard that word in a century! A moon-calf, indeed!

  The priest, spurred by an admiring audience, spoke on: “Yes, imagine the bastard child of a god and a cow and…voilà! That’s what he was—a moon-calf, a dolt!”

  “Surely he wasn’t as bad as all that,” I began. “It is said that he had a way with numbers and riddles and—”

  “It’s true,” opined the priest, “he was not stupid; and there’s the true tragedy. He might have been, could have been, a good king. Capable of ruling, he was not able to rule, for he’d been far too disinterested for far too long; and so it was too late when crisis finally came.”

  The situation, or “crisis,” at the time in question—that is, when my four saviors’ paths crossed in Paris—was this:

  The long habit of excess—Du Barry, Antoinette, the hundreds, the thousands of their privileged predecessors at Court—had brought the monarchy, and by extension the country, to the brink of ruin. France was bankrupt. And this situation, when finally it had to be recognized, was compounded by the dire effects of what I will call, rightly or not, Sebastiana’s Winter.

  The monarchy, spoiled by centuries of self-indulgence, epitomized now by a foreign-born Queen, was inert. It was a machine whose wheels were turned by money, as free-flowing water works a mill. There could be no monarchy without money. And was it really true that there was no money? That was the question on the pursed lips of the privileged—no matter that the starving poor of Paris ought to have been proof enough.

  The King, when finally forced to act—and in what would be but the first of many tactical b
lunders—called together the Estates General in May of 1789. It was a legislative body that had been inactive for centuries and was all but forgotten. The first estate was comprised of the nobility; the second the clergy; and the third, in numbers far greater than the first two estates, the people. The King would leave it to them to somehow solve the state’s financial crisis; they, eventually, would strive to do much, much more.

  After days of debate the King was presented with nothing less than a new constitution.

  “Capet,” opined the priest, “ought to have kept his tiny mouth shut and just signed the blasted thing! Work around it if he wished, ignore it if he could—but if he’d just signed the thing he could have kept his crown, as well as a head to rest it on!” Instead, the King fought the people, slyly at first, denying them at every turn; and so, when finally he had no choice but to accede to “the People’s will,” his support was known to be insincere.

  Meanwhile, said Madeleine, the people grew hungrier and hungrier. They took the Bastille in an attempt to amass arms. The women of Paris, refusing to watch their children starve, marched on Versailles, and when they returned to Paris proper, muddy from the long day’s march in the rain, they had with them the Royals, whom they forcibly installed in the old, unused palace of the Tuileries.

  “Where they could be watched,” added the incubus. “By now a murderous hatred of the Queen had sprung up among the mob. And the people were actively working against the King, just as he worked against them.” Of course, along with this internal unrest, France had also to contend with the advance of the Austro-Prussian armies.

  In Paris, politics fast devolved to the cult of personality. The mob was swayed by men such as Danton (brusque, ugly, vulgar, and well-loved for a long while), Robespierre (brittle, bitter, and blood-thirsty) and Marat (who, in his “L’Ami du Peuple,” called repeatedly for the heads of all his enemies). Around these and other men there swirled storms of devotion, loyalty, hatred, and betrayal. Groups would rise—Danton’s Cordeliers, Robespierre’s Jacobins, the Girondins—and fall in their turn, losing first their influence, then their position, and finally their heads.