by Bill Hussey
‘The warning, then,’ said the librarian. ‘Each visitor is given the amount of reading time I deem necessary for his needs. This hourglass represents your allotted time. If you are still in this room when the last grain of sand is spent, then here you will stay. You shall never leave, but endure through the ages, confined within these walls. Like the good doctor, you shall simply disappear from the world. You shall, of course, have all the books you want. Even Mr Marlowe, however, has found that the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake grows rather irksome after a few centuries. Are you ready?’
Jack took his seat. He brushed the parchment with his fingers, fearful that it would crumble at his touch. The paper was strong, however, and merely crackled. The text was written in Italian, but scrawled in a hurried hand on the notebook beside it was a translation.
The librarian turned over the hourglass.
‘Then begin.’
Twenty-five
THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS.
1600 Anno Domini. Anon.
Translation from the original Italian by Father Asher Brody – 1976.
Know then that many of the beliefs of our pagan forefathers were based upon blasphemous precepts, but not all their erudition was at fault. There were kernels of knowledge that the philosophers of antiquity plucked from a greater body of Truth than they could know. We blessed generations, who have come after the Advent of the Lord, should not discard the old learning, but instead focus it through the perspective glass of the True Faith. Then might we not see the Glory of Creation in subtler tones, and better recognise the snares of the Devil before they draw tight about us? I say all this to defend myself from a charge of heresy, for my story touches on the accuracy of a particular ancient, though heretical, belief.
To begin: I propose to tell you nothing about myself or my history. To do so would make me easily marked. The most you will know is that, for five years before the dread events of which I write, I had been travelling through Wallachia and Transylvania, collecting stories of the most fantastic kind, with a view to compiling a volume of Folk Myth and Rhyme. Many of these tales came from the town of Bistritz, on the trail of the Borgo Pass, which was at that time plagued by a pack of lycanthropes and other night creatures.
Leaving Transylvania in the summer of 1593, I made my way through Hungary, into Austria and then north into Bohemia, where I settled for a while. I had not planned to stay long. I was keen to reach Saxony before the New Year, where I had heard that a magician was to be brought before the Leipzig Supreme Court accused of reanimating his dead wife. I was tired, however, from many months on the road, and so I decided to rest for a week in a small town that nestled on the River Oder, overlooking the Prussian diocese of Breslau.
I will not give a name to the town. Suffice to say it was a pretty backwater, with meadows of corn poppies, bluebells and sweet red campions. I took a room at the inn and, indolence not being among my vices, I made my name known by purchasing drinks for the house. I soon found myself sat among grateful companions, who regaled me with the myths of the locality. When I retired to my room, I had a thirst from the yeasty ale and a catalogue of trite tales, variations of which I had heard many times before. Here was the story of the little orphan children lured to the crone’s sugared cottage. And there, the tale of the wicked nobleman who murdered all his wives and stored their bodies in a bloody chamber (the origin of this last I had long ago traced to the monstrous alchemist, Gilles de Rais). Perhaps resting for a week in this place had been a mistake.
By the third day, I had packed my trunk and purchased a trap to take me as far as Prague. It was late when I finished arranging my portmanteau, and I was about to take my rest, when a note was slipped under my door. The letter, unsigned, was written on weighty paper, folded thrice and sealed with wax.
Mr Dear Sir (it ran)
Word has reached me of your fascinating employment. If it would suit you to pay me a visit this evening, I believe I could furnish you with a most singular experience to add to your collection. My carriage awaits downstairs at your convenience.
I was full of curiosity and, pausing only to collect my cloak, I descended to the public bar. To my surprise, the place was in darkness. I left my host a note, saying I would return late and asking him not to bar the door.
Outside, a fine closed carriage awaited me, drawn by a pair of palomino beauties worthy of the chiefs of Saladin. The driver was a jovial fellow, always laughing when he spoke. He threw me a bearskin and said that I should get some rest, as we had a fair distance to cover. The air was cold, which I thought would sharpen my senses, but ensconced in the carriage I fell into a deep sleep. I could not guess the duration of our journey, for when I woke there was no moon to gauge the night’s progress.
‘Here we are, Sir,’ the driver called. ‘You look fair rested.’
‘Is your master’s house in this great glen?’ I asked, stepping from the carriage.
‘Follow the path leading into the valley and you will see what you shall see.’
‘What? See here, I shall not gallivant up hill and down dale …’
‘I should do as you are told,’ the driver laughed.
He pulled up his doublet, exposing the dagger slung from his belt. I had met with dangers before on my travels, and had never seen the merit of risking one’s life for the sake of arrogant notions of bravery. Pulling my cloak close about me, I began to move down the treacherous incline.
The forest was dense and, halfway down the vale, I cursed myself for not having demanded the brute give me his lantern. The darkness began to work at my imagination. I recalled in an instant all the tales I had been told, from Sicily to the Baltic, from Seville to the Black Sea. Faces grew from the shadows around me: incubi, succubi, vampyr, and the fading gods of the old religions, their aspects changed into mischievous imps and fairies. Like Dante’s pilgrim, set about by malevolent forces, I descended into the unknown.
I came out suddenly into a glade. At its centre burned a fire, stoked by a young woman who possessed a hard kind of prettiness. She sang a coarse tavern ditty as she worked. Like a midwife attending her patient, she would sometimes press her hand against the big round belly of the stewing pot which hung over the fire. Then she would shake her head and feed twigs into the flames, the lights of which danced gaily against the sleeping trees.
The woman paid me no heed, and I was about to creep away when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It is easy to say that, from the moment he touched me, I had a presentiment of Evil, but perhaps hindsight darkens my memory. He was a man of average height, slow and graceful in movement and voice. That is all I can tell you, for he wore a hood pulled low over his face. I gave my name and bowed.
‘You have seen much,’ he said, raising my face to the light, ‘but you wear your learning as a fop wears the latest fashions; proud of how it looks to others, but having little comprehension of the subtlety of its stitching. You have a chance tonight, my fine chronicler, to understand something momentous, something exquisite.’
In other circumstances, I might have been insulted by his words, but dread had overwhelmed me. I had heard of these covens many times, and they were always most secret affairs. Orgies of depravity in which Lucifer was summoned and often appeared. There was little chance, I thought, that having witnessed this blasphemy I would be allowed to live. But he had called me ‘chronicler’. What did that suggest?
‘Time is short,’ he said, taking my elbow and guiding me towards the fire. ‘You must tell me quickly, what do you know of Metempsychosis?’
‘I confess, I have not heard of it,’ I replied.
‘You surprise me,’ he said, sarcastically. ‘Well then, Metempsychosis is a rather ill-defined belief, with many variations the world over, but at its heart is the idea that a soul may be transferred between organisms at the point of death. Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians were the first to recognise it. Pythagoras instituted societies for the spreading of the belief. It was even accepted as a pa
ssage of new life by a few Gnostic sects of the early Church. For years, I searched for a fabled book, often spoken of in the poetic accounts of the old philosophers, which contained a ritual of rebirth. A manual, if you will, describing a form of metempsychosis in which a man might, by design, transfer his soul into a new vessel. Two years ago, I found a copy of the volume in the private collection of an old Castilian cleric who had retired to Granada. He gave it up rather … unwillingly.’
His hood did not cover the lower half of his face, and I saw a smile play across his lips. It was as he reached into his robes, taking out a small book covered in what appeared to be dried pig’s skin, that I noticed his fingernails. Long and sharp, those talons were, pitted and grooved, like well-worn bone.
‘It is the Ritual of the Transmigration of Souls. To my knowledge, the rite has not been attempted in a millennia. It is your task to record it in a new gospel.’
‘This is an affront to God,’ I said.
‘You are free to leave if you wish,’ he replied.
Terrified as I was, my love of learning and spectacle would not allow me to flee the grove. Was it possible? Could a man truly eclipse one soul with another?
‘Observe and learn, hypocrite,’ my host laughed. ‘You shall see that God has withered on the vine of mythology, like Pan and Odin before him. This world, which Man has tried to order, was thrown together in that firmament,’ he pointed to the heavens, ‘and there is nothing there but cold, dark chaos. No love, no compassion, just indifferent eternity. The universe does not care what we do here. It has a single lesson for us: Exist. At all costs, Exist.
Bring out the children.’
I had been so spellbound by this eulogy to the cosmos that his injunction shocked me out of a kind of trance. I had once seen a conjuror from the East mesmerise a serpent by playing a sweet harmony on his flute, and I wondered then whether my host’s mellifluous tones had had a similar effect upon my own senses.
The young woman brought forth three ragged children from the forest. They were bound together by the wrists, blindfolded, gagged and without clothes. I guessed the oldest to be perhaps thirteen; the youngest no more than ten. They were clearly peasant children. I noticed that they did not struggle as they entered the clearing. It was as if the will had been drained out of them and replaced with the unquestioning compliance of a dumb animal. At my host’s instruction their blindfolds were removed.
The two younger boys were brutish-looking things, but the older was quite beautiful. As golden-haired and fair-faced as Paris. He seemed insensible, staring at us without expression as he was tethered to a tree. His two companions were lashed to stakes beside the fire. They were obviously very weak, and it was only when the pretty woman unsheathed her knife that they began to scream. Strident yelps, as a pig makes when its throat is to be slit.
‘What do you mean to do?’ I asked. ‘For pity’s sake, these are but children.’
‘They are keys. Only keys,’ my host said.
Circling behind the boys, the woman took her time with the initial selection. She examined her knife in the firelight, running her thumb along the belly of the blade. Satisfied with its sharpness, she approached one of the boys, hooked his ankles with her foot, grabbed a handful of hair, and thrust his head forward. She then grazed the tip of the knife along the length of his spine. Watching her, I was reminded of diviners using their rods to seek out underground springs. Whatever forces guided her, she made her choice. Slowly, by fractions of inches, she slipped the blade into the bucking child. Screams roared out of the clearing as the knife worried a route through sinew and puckered the awning of skin. The cries did not move her. She worked diligently, cutting three intersecting lines. Blood dripped from the hilt of her dagger and stained her snow-white hands. Weakened, the fight had left the boy, and he did no more than shudder and writhe like a fish expiring upon the deck. A grimace, worked by exhausted muscles, bunched his features, as the lady pushed her fingers into the cuts across his back and prised a hunk of meat loose. The boy saw his flesh passed before his eyes and fell in a dead faint against the post that held him.
The worst of it was the cold indifference with which the beautiful creature accomplished her work. If she was mad she might have enjoyed it; if she had a soul, she would have run in horror from it. As it was, her glacial eyes said: I do not care; these children are so much meat to me. As if to prove this point, she threw the flesh into the cauldron and watched as it roasted over the flames.
The other child had come to his senses. He pulled away from the stake so hard that his bonds cut into his wrists. When the woman approached, he kicked out at her and somehow managed to break free. In a flash, he was halfway to the woods. My heart raced with him, my spirit willing him to escape. Just as he reached the trees, however, the laughing coachman stepped across his path.
‘What’s your hurry, boy?’ he said. ‘Come warm yourself by the fire.’
With that, he struck the child hard in the temple. The boy staggered back, clutching his head. Picking up the little body as if it weighed no more than a feather pillow, the driver strode towards us. He threw the pitiful creature on the ground and the witch went to her work. Soon she was drenched in the blood of two innocents. She eased the last cut from the unconscious boy and threw it into the pot.
I began to weep. I looked down at my shoes and saw them red in the firelight. Blood was still pouring from the boy who had been delivered by the coachman, but the first child was now utterly drained. With his lips drawn back across his teeth, his eyes, pain-crinkled at their edges, it looked as if he were trying to imitate an aged man.
My host left me in the care of the driver, and approached the fire. The woman ladled the juices from the cooked child-flesh into an earthenware container. This she passed to her master.
‘This is the viscous fluid of the sacrificed,’ he said. ‘I drink it, to take of their essence. To power the change.’
He tipped the jug to his mouth. I heard the fat sizzle against his lips.
‘Bring the swaddling clothes,’ he gargled.
The woman took a bundle of tattered cloth from the ground beside her and held it before him, as if she were paying homage.
‘These are the clothes of the baptised dead,’ he said. ‘The dresses worn by the infant siblings of the sacrificed. They are burned to show my passage.’
He threw the dresses into the flames. Immediately, a strange black smoke rose from them. As if it had some conscious purpose, it curled around his form and did not dissipate into the night. It wound itself tight and then threaded out, snaking across the fire in a dense coil. It approached the fair child, who had remained so calm and glassy-eyed during the murder of his friends. With black fingers, the smoke probed his handsome face. At last the vapour touched his lips and flowed into his mouth. For the first time, a spark of intelligence showed in his eyes.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘What’s happening? Fingers touch inside me. They dirty me.’
His eyes surveyed the carnage before him: the unmoving corpse of the first, the still twitching form of the second. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came forth. Without a word, my host went to the boy. He pulled back his hood and the child found his voice. From my viewpoint, I could not see the face that was revealed. I thanked God for that at least.
This man, this thing, then squatted down and, to my horror, began to tear at the child’s breast. The attack was one of concentrated frenzy. Skin hung in tapering strips from those husk-like nails. The outer layer was soon breached. I could hear the rending of stronger tissue. Strands of dripping matter garlanded the monster’s wrists and forearms. He cleaved ever deeper, ploughed into the secret flesh of the poor child, the hot blood he spilt steaming the air. He thrust the meat between ravenous jaws, palming as much as he could into his swollen mouth. The boy, his lungs now unable to give vent to his cries, shivered violently. Something about the way he quaked spoke of a terrible finality. Even on the far side of the grove, I could make out the scrape of f
ingernails upon exposed bone. The inner frame of the child had been reached. Surely the madness must now draw to an end.
The sounds of slaughter aside, there was only the crackle of fire to be heard. The coachman had long since ceased his laughing. Only that black-souled woman continued to look on unaffectedly.
‘Do it now.’ The command was choked from a gorged mouth.
She did not hesitate. She crossed the glade, pulled back her master’s head and swept the blade across his throat. My eyes were lowered, but I heard thick, guttural noises, like sucking mud on boots.
When I looked up the child was dead. His mouth gaped. A hole, rived from his chest, glistened darkly. Within it, I fancied I could see the white of rib-bone and the ruddy, unmoving sacs that were his lungs.
What devilry now, I thought. I was soon answered. In a single impossible collapse the body of my host crumbled to the ground. Nothing remained, except an exposed skull and skeleton and strips of grey skin that fluttered away in motes on the night air. At first I did not see the dull red light that burned low in the folds of his cloak. It rose, growing brighter as it ascended. I felt my soul shrink from it and my skin crawl as it bathed me. The little orb made straight for the dead child. It plunged into his mouth and I saw the back of his throat lit scarlet. There was stillness for a time. The fire cracked. The wind whispered. We waited.
The boy’s eyes snapped open.
I had seen murder that night. I had seen cannibalism. I had seen depravity of the most wicked kind. But nothing chilled me so much as those beautiful eyes focusing again on the world. As I watched, the child’s lungs inflated. Fibres laced across the wound that had been rent out of his chest. He was whole. He was living.
The woman went to the boy, cut him loose and kissed him. The dead face smiled and he looked in my direction. He passed over his former body, kicking through the desiccation so that it powdered his feet. He stood before me. I almost cried, for I saw something infernal, impious, perverse and beautiful.