The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  I drew from a pocket of the coat—an inspired idea, stealing…no borrowing that coat—a single white taper, thick as my wrist, and lit it with some phosphorous matches. By its light I went grave to grave, crouching to read the dates, for I’d been directed to dig dirt from a fresh grave.

  The dates! Mon Dieu! Ages past. Here lie Avignon’s ancient dead, many of whom shared their year of demise. Cholera, no doubt. Or invading armies. What to do? What to do? I stepped from rough, clotted grass to dirt, and looking down, kneeling down, I saw what seemed a recently dug grave, for it showed no grass at all. The headstone was as yet uncarved, and free of lichen or moss; this eased me somewhat as I drove the spade down into the mounded dirt. I directed myself to dig. I was due at the crossroads by midnight. So dig I did, filling both bags with the worm-writhing soil. Begging pardon of its resident, I leveled the grave as best I could.

  I tied the two bags together with a length of rope—I’m embarrassed now to say that I’d foreseen every possible need, and that the pockets of the coat were chock full of rope and a hundred such sundries. I slung the bags over my shoulders, so that one hung before me and the other behind. I held the spade too, assuming I’d need it again at the crossroads. Snuffing the taper between two spit-wet fingertips—the same fingers with which I then sketched the sign of the cross on the air—I stole from the cemetery the way I’d come. I made my way back to the berlin and hurled the burlap bags into it. A clock tower of the town showed I’d less than two hours in which to make my way from Avignon to the crossroads.

  Soon I was on the road south, headed toward Les Baux.

  Now it was time to worry about the floodwaters. What if they rendered the roads impassable? What if…? But I soon saw that the road I was to take out of Avignon ascended toward Les Baux, and so it seemed to me safe. In fact, the road leading to Les Baux winds around the foot of the hills atop which that city sits, the whole rocky ruin of it seemingly ready to slip from the summit to which it clings. The road then passes into a sort of valley, from which the approach up to the city proper is easily made, even by a carriage as large as ours.

  In a day now centuries-past, Les Baux had been a great city. Indeed, more than a city: an empire. Then, the islanders of Sardinia and those nearer still—in Arles, in Marseilles—paid homage to the lords of Les Baux. These men, feudal proprietors all, never more than several hundred in number, and lords of fewer than five thousand subjects, were seneschals and captains-general of Piedmont, of Lombardy, and grand admirals of the kingdom of Naples; their daughters were coveted by the first princes of Europe.

  But that was a long time ago.

  How it all fell to ruin I’ve no idea. Doubtless the Revolution took its toll on whatever remained of the place years ago; but the fall of so great a place I cannot explain, can only date to the middle years of the seventeenth century (this according to Father Louis, who told me that much and no more later that night. “No questions now,” said he. “The hour has come.” As indeed it had). But I did learn this: Father Louis and Madeleine had lived and died in another city that sat at no great distance from Les Baux and is now so changed, so consumed by ruin as to be unrecognizable. On that place the mighty sculptor Time has had his way. What was once a city is now but a shade on the Map of Ages; it is not marked on the maps of our time. Neither will I locate it precisely here, other than to say again that it sits, or sat in a valley south of Les Baux and north of Arles.

  As I rode up into Les Baux that night I saw few signs of its former glory. I saw, by the lights of my outer lanterns, the stony shells of its houses, and walls that rose and fell like stilled waves. There was what appeared to be the foundation of a castle, on a sort of promontory, and in my mind’s eye the castle walls rose up gloriously and I could see their very windows and the sills on which prized ladies and honored men had once leaned, taking in the view of a world that belonged to them, or so it must have seemed. The streets were rough, narrow, and precipitous, and so my progress in the berlin was slow. This suited me. I wanted to see what I could, but I hadn’t the time to explore on foot: according to the map, I still had to turn here, turn there, descending first into one valley and then another, deep within which lay Madeleine’s grave.

  And so, I drove slowly past what remained of Les Baux—a few houses still standing, empty, absent of doors, their unshuttered windows gaping like the mouths of the dumb. It was…morbid, and only heightened that melancholia that seems my lot. So I was glad when, at the first sign of the road’s descent, the berlin sped up a bit beneath its own weight.

  41

  At the Crossroads

  BY MIDNIGHT I was where I needed to be: at the southernmost edge of that valley beyond Les Baux, beyond the fallen walls of a ruined city I cannot name, at the confluence of not two roads (as I’d imagined) but three. The crossroads.

  But where was the grave? How would I find the grave? Wild lilac overgrew the whole, and the air was sweet from the gorse that would have shone like gold under the sun; yes, though it was dark and I saw no true colors, I will always envision that crossroads as a place of purple and gold. My question regarding the grave was soon answered.

  Beside the road that headed due south there’d recently been cleared a rectangle of ground. Shaped as it was, even in that faint, faint moonlight, less strong than the lantern’s light, the clearing would have put anyone in mind of a grave, a coffin.

  The horses were restless, agitated; I worried that they’d rear, and I was not prepared to deal with anything out of the ordinary as far as the horses were concerned. I stopped the berlin. I came down from the driver’s box to feed the horses what scraps of carrot and radish I’d stuffed in a pocket of the wagoner’s coat; this seemed to distract, if not calm them. I walked away from the horses backward; I wonder if I was wary of them, or wary of approaching the grave head-on.

  Standing over it, I saw that low tangles of catbrier and heath had been cleared from the site, and the top layer of sandy soil had been turned, as if by hand. At the head of the grave lay a small crucifix of white stone, or stone that had once been white but was now pocked and filthy, its marble edges friable. Had it been upright—which it purposefully was not—it would have stood no higher than my shin; it bore no inscription. From long habit, I crossed myself.

  I felt then a strange admixture of anger and hope, of eagerness, of Crusader-like righteousness coupled with a “vengeance-that-would-be-ours.” I felt a burgeoning strength. I would return to the berlin and retrieve the spade and the consecrated soil and begin to—But I stopped and stood stock-still when I saw the elementals across that narrow road, beside the berlin. They shone far brighter than the light of the moon allowed; I cannot account for that. (At sea I have seen patches of phosphorescence caused by sea creatures that emit a light all their own; perhaps that is akin to what the watery elementals did that night, I don’t know.)…Let me add that I’ve no idea what I would have done if I’d taken up that soil and spade, if I’d started to dig without direction. I shudder to think what I might have uncovered on my own, for what Father Louis and I unearthed was frightful enough.

  Oddly, when first I saw the elementals, I looked up to the sky. I opened my hands and tilted my face, as one does when expecting rain. I gauged the wind. I listened for the oncoming storm I had expected. But all was still. Still as death. I hoped then that Madeleine had laid the river down, calmed it, if in fact it was she, was they who, intentionally or not, had hastened its rising.

  We stood across the road from one another for a long while. The elementals stood hand in hand, their shapes quite strong and, yes, eerily bright—moon-fed, it seemed. The priest wore his standard black; his white collar showed silver in the light. Madeleine wore her cerecloth rags, and though I’d long seen her in them, only then did I understand that such were the gummed, waxen remains of the dress she’d worn when interred.

  I realized, then, that I’d never seen the elementals touch each other. I’d assumed that they could not; this, I know, is illogical, for certainl
y they’d touched me. But there they stood, joined in an almost child-like innocence. They seemed as eager as I; scared and saddened too. Clearly, their thoughts were one, for together they said:

  You’ve come. Their conjoined voice laid open the silence, split it like a blade.

  “I have,” said I.

  Thank you.

  “Do you have the…the Church’s earth?” Father Louis seemed angered at having to ask the question. He was not angry at me, I knew; rather he resented needing that earth, resented the strength resident in the consecrated soil.

  “I do.” I pointed to the cab behind them, where the two bags lay.

  “Good,” said the priest. “Get it.”

  Please, added Madeleine, with a smile and a tug at the priest’s hand.

  “Please,” repeated the priest. “You’ve done well, witch, to get the dirt and drive it here. I thank you.” He looked at Madeleine. “We both thank you.”

  Soon we all three of us stood graveside, staring down. I held the spade. The bags lay at either end of the grave. No one spoke. I heard the distant barking of wild dogs; thankfully, it remained distant. I heard too the cry of the raven, much nearer, and from it I took both confidence and comfort.

  Finally, directed to do so, I set to digging.

  The earth was dry and light, sandy. This valley had escaped the floodwaters. It occurred to me that I’d not passed any river on the way to the crossroads, neither a lake nor a stream. So how was it that the elementals held such strong shapes, strong enough for them to stand graveside, hand in hand? I cannot say. They, no doubt, would attribute it to the strength of the will, and perhaps that is the truest answer. I think too that the moon played its part, and that it…Ah, but I must be careful here—witches, I have read, too easily attribute all strangeness to the moon. I revert to what it was I first heard at C——: There exists the inexplicable.

  I worked fast. Soon the shallow grave lay open. I stood in it up to the knee. Mounds of rock-laden earth lay graveside. When suddenly I felt the spade strike and splinter the rotted wood of a casket, I stopped. I lowered the lantern into the grave. A casket. I looked up at—

  Continue, said Madeleine. The priest nodded down to me.

  I laid bare the whole coffin, digging the sandy soil from around its four sides. With a rag—actually, it was a blouse drawn from the nécessair earlier that night, when first I’d dirtied my hands digging in the cemetery—I wiped the dirt from atop the casket. The wood was rotted, yes, but intact and fairly smooth to the touch. The tapered shape of the casket betrayed the body’s positioning within it, and so I stood looking down at where the head would be, half-expecting the casket to open of its own accord, some other Madeleine pushing up from within. But there’d be no surprises, no tricks; I knew this when I looked up at the elementals and saw that they were…what is the word: scared, awed, expectant?…As for me, well, I was all that and more.

  Time passed. Moments—minutes, perhaps—in which I cleaned the coffin off, swept away the sand, the dirt that lay deeper down, the pebbles, and…And what we all knew, but no one said, was that the coffin did not need to be cleaned; but we were all of us hesitant to…

  “Will you open it, witch?” asked the priest, deferentially; some odd table had turned and the elementals were reliant on me now, to do what I’d no idea. No idea at all.

  I sat on the edge of the grave, digging the soft sandy dirt from the coffin with my bare hands. And before I understood my actions, I’d curled my fingers under the casket’s lid and lifted. Expecting some resistance—nails, or pegs, or even rusted hinges—I perhaps pulled too hard; there was no resistance at all, and I nearly toppled back before hearing the priest:

  “No!” It was a hiss, urgent. “No! Not yet! The bags…” he began, and I quickly replaced the lid. Rather I let fall the lid, and it settled into place as if it had not been disturbed. I’d seen nothing inside the casket, but a cold, fetid scent had escaped it, and from this I turned away.

  The priest was pointing at the burlap bags, one at either end of the grave. “First have the bags open and ready!” he commanded.

  I opened one bag and then the other, folding down the rough rims of each. I remember well the contrast of the two soils: the Church’s earth dark and rich as ground coffee, and the lighter soil of the crossroads like browned sugar.

  What happened next is a bit confused in my mind though it happened but days ago. I was at once participant and observer.

  Father Louis produced a book, a book like the Bible but not; that is, it looked like a Bible and had about it that book’s weighty aspect, but it was not the Bible. Just what it was I don’t know, I cannot say. He handed it down to me where I sat on the grave’s edge. It fell open across my two hands. Did I see the passage marked? I did, I said. I was to begin reading that passage backward, bottom to top, right to left, word by word, aloud; and when I’d read it through once, I was to begin again. While reading it I was to hold my right hand high, raised to the new moon; my fingers, he said, were to remain splayed. (This he stressed.) I was to read till he told me to stop, stringing those words—it was Latin, of course—stringing them one by one onto a nonsensical chain. I cannot say what it was I read that night; nor could I cull the slightest sense from the recitation as I spoke it. They were merely, simply, purely words. All I can say for certain is that had they been read as written—that is, forward—they would have constituted some rite of the Roman Church. As I read them—widdershins—they were mere words, as I say; but words which worked themselves somehow into a spell. And oh, what I was to witness when that spell—

  …It was Father Louis who opened the casket, slowly, the second time. The wood gave with a sound like breaking ice. All the while I read. Reading like that—in Latin, backward, keeping my right hand open to the moon—well, need I say that it took some doing, and fierce concentration? Thus occupied, I did not see the contents of the casket when first they were revealed. Neither did I see that event that happened simultaneously, or so I think: the succubus’s disappearance, her fast descent into her mortal grave.

  When finally I stole a glance down into the casket what I saw was this:

  There lay a leathery corpse clad in those familiar rags. Its face was featureless. Its positioning in the narrow box of pine is best described as fetal: curled on its left side, its knees drawn up, its head bent down…. It was not what I expected to see. I’d expected to see one of two things: Madeleine as I knew her, or an unrecognizable pile of bones—a common skeleton. What I saw was neither one nor the other; it was…it was both. As I sat graveside, reading that rite, trying too to see into the casket…I saw that the corpse was no longer a corpse! What had been dead when uncovered was now animate.

  Madeleine, the Madeleine I knew, had somehow descended to claim her remains. Had I peered into the casket when first Father Louis had opened it, I believe I would have seen the simple remains of a mortal. Dust. Bones. Perhaps better preserved than most. But by the time I saw her, it, there in the grave, Madeleine had already begun the reclamation. What I witnessed, glancing back again and again to the page from which I read, was the full reclamation of her remains. The remains—that mortal mass of time-darkened skin stretched tautly over bone—became, once again, Madeleine. The living—or so it seemed—Madeleine de la Mettrie. It remained so for but a short while. A very short while.

  I saw the leathery skin grow supple, saw the desiccated flesh fill out, saw bones reattach themselves at the joints. The skin regained its mortal hue. The hair and the nails began to…to grow, to verily flow from the body at a rate unknown to mortals. And then…then I saw the neck, which moments earlier had been but a notched bone, turn. Madeleine’s profile ceded, slowly, to the whole of her face, and she lay staring up at the priest. I saw this! Was witness to it! I remember the last word of the spell I spoke—Dominus—before I saw Madeleine’s eyelids open and there—so horribly!—was the viscid gel that then congealed into eyes, beautiful brown eyes. With those eyes Madeleine smiled, smiled at Father
Louis a long while.

  Looking up at the priest, I saw tears slide from his eyes, tears that iced on his cheeks as he struggled through rites of his own. He had a silver flacon of oil; with it he wet his thumb and, in a stunted wave, set to crossing and recrossing the air over the grave, all the while reciting the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam. Extreme unction, it was, said for her salvation. “…help you with the Grace of the Holy Spirit; and may the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.”

  Madeleine’s reclamation was complete when I saw the corpse’s hideously long nails, curled like the claws of an animal, rescind; and her hair, which had grown into a black tangle, shrink back to the length it had been, presumably, when she died;…but not before Father Louis reached down and claimed a fistful of hair and two, perhaps three whole nails, which came from the fingers easily. And there she lay, flat on her back, looking much as she’d looked the day of her death, beautiful but for the torn-away throat.

  Father Louis now busied himself with a rite of a different sort. I saw him take from the folds of his shift a cast-iron kettle, ovoid, not much longer than his hand; and in it he placed the tangled hair, the slivers of nail, and the rest of the oil from his silver flacon. He muttered all the while, and the only words I distinguished were these: lavende et miel—lavender and honey—which he then added to the kettle, and, holding it tightly, he…he caused the kettle to heat—I cannot say how—till finally steam hissed from a hole in its top.

  Still I read on. It might have been the tenth, the twentieth time I read that passage.

  …That state to which Madeleine had aspired for centuries was short-lived. Her beauty began to turn, and putrefaction began.

  “Quickly!” said the priest. “Quickly, now!” Not knowing what it was he meant me to do, I could only mimic his actions. He dragged one of the bags nearer Madeleine’s head; I dragged the other to the end of the casket. I resumed reading, but with a wave of his hand the priest stopped me. “It’s done,” he said. The spell had been cast. Or perhaps the Church’s spell had been broken…. The priest said nothing. His eyes were trained on Madeleine, who turned from life to death’s processes. Again, all I could do was follow the priest: so I took up fistfuls of dirt and I too dropped them into the grave, onto Madeleine where she lay, alive, still, the slightest smile discernible on her face and in her wide open eyes.