by F. R. Tallis
‘I need evidence.’
‘You already have it.’
‘Yes, but not enough. And in the meantime I have my reputation to consider.’
She raised herself up on an elbow, stroked my forehead, and said in a hushed half-whisper, ‘You will be famous.’
The seed was planted. Ambition fed on the compost of my vanity.
I imagined myself eclipsing Charcot, installed in a mansion on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, feted, entertained by ambassadors, kings and potentates, lauded in the society pages – the modern Odysseus – and in this fantasy, always, Thérèse Courbertin was by my side.
An idea arose in my mind that floated, kite-like, above my everyday thoughts. At first it seemed too fanciful a notion to be taken seriously, but the more I reflected on it the more I persuaded myself that a favourable outcome was not unlikely.
‘Interesting,’ said Soulignac, ‘but what you are proposing could never be accomplished. The risks are too great.’
‘When I was working at the Saint-Sébastien mission hospital, I learned of a poison that paralyses the diaphragm and slows the heart. It is found most abundantly in the skin of the puffer fish.’ I explained how the poison had been exploited for centuries by the native priests of the Antilles. ‘A precise quantity – determined through experiments on animals – might produce a temporary suspension of vital functions in a human subject. And then, such a subject could be returned to life in the usual manner.’
Soulignac pulled at his beard. He looked sceptical.
‘I know this poison is effective,’ I continued, ‘I once saw . . .’It had been a long time since I had thought of Aristide’s murder. Images of blood and fire tumbled into my mind. ‘I once saw a village boy who had been declared dead, risen from his grave – breathing and walking.’
‘What were the circumstances?’ asked Soulignac.
I hesitated. The bokor had made me swear never to reveal what I had witnessed. I remembered his bony finger poking my chest, his chilling cry and the discoloured whites of his eyes.
Soulignac was still frowning at me. ‘Well?’
Tavernier had said that the magic of the bokors was chemical, not supernatural, and that their religion was nonsense, gibberish. What was there to fear?
I lit a cigar and began to describe the events of that terrible night: the meeting in the village, the journey into the jungle and Aristide’s decapitation. Recollecting the rain of blood still sent a shiver down my spine. When I had finished, Soulignac produced a lengthy exhalation and said, ‘That is a very remarkable tale.’
‘And every word of it is true.’
My companion tapped his fingers on the table and said, ‘Where would you get this poison from? We are a long way from the Antilles now!’
‘Indeed,’ I replied. ‘But we are not so very far away from a zoo.’
The head keeper was most obliging. He was a widower whose wife had suffered a painful death. When I told him that I was trying to develop a new anaesthetic compound, he was eager to assist. There were puffer fish in the aquarium, and in the reptile house I found a tank of frogs from the Saint-Sébastien archipelago. It was relatively easy to isolate the poison by filtration, and I soon had enough to begin experiments on animals. The poison had several interesting properties. It was consistent in its action, making it easy to establish a clear relationship between dosage and effect. Moreover, the arrest of functioning it produced was more easily reversed by electrical stimulation than the arrest of functioning produced by chloroform. Thus, I achieved a higher number of successful resuscitations, particularly after extended periods of lifelessness.
‘Think of it,’ I said to Soulignac. ‘For millennia, men have dreamed of voyaging to the other side, and returning. And now it is possible. Indisputable proof of an existence beyond the grave: not the makeshift proof of the theologian with his unconvincing arguments and dusty authorities, or the groundless proof of the priest exhorting us to pray for the gift of faith, but the strong, unshakeable proof of direct experience. It has fallen upon us – you and I – to penetrate the mystery.’ Then, trembling with excitement I added, ‘I want to go.’
When I told Bazile of my intentions, he was silent for a very long time. Then, removing his pipe from his mouth, he said, ‘The Lord forbids self-slaughter.’
‘I won’t be committing suicide,’ I responded, ‘just submitting my body to a state of temporary suspension.’
‘But at the moment when you stop breathing and your heart stops, you will be dead.’
‘Yes, but only for a minute or so. Then, I will be brought back to life.’
As I said these words, I realized that I had become like a bokor; I now exercised fearful powers.
‘Dear God,’ said Bazile. ‘What you are about to do is so very extraordinary.’
Before entering the Hôtel Dieu, where Soulignac had prepared an operating theatre, I paused to look up at the great towers of Notre-Dame. Clouds were racing across the sky and the light was just beginning to fade. ‘Father,’ I whispered, ‘into thy hands I commit my spirit.’
4
I lay on the operating table, stripped to the waist, my bare feet pressed up against a metal footplate. A trolley was positioned next to the table and on the trolley were two batteries: a new chloride of silver, and beneath it, an older, volta-faradic apparatus. Soulignac produced a syringe and injected me with morphine. Its purpose was to ease the distress caused by the poison, which was already coursing through my veins and causing my lungs to labour. A pleasant warmth spread through my body and I began to feel detached from the world. I heard Soulignac say, ‘Good luck, my friend.’ His voice sounded distant. The hiss of the gas jets and buzzing of the batteries seemed to get louder and when I closed my eyes, I started to feel sleepy. I was aware of pain in my chest, the inflexibility of my ribcage, and the effortful exertion of my weakening heart, but all the time, my consciousness was dimming, until at last, all that remained was a flickering sense of self, trembling at the very edge of oblivion, and then, non-being, nullity, absence.
There was no slow awakening, no gentle return of intelligence, but a sudden and disorientating jolt. I did not, as I had expected, find myself floating beneath the ceiling, looking down at my body. Instead, I was hovering in the air, high above the hospital. Beyond the river, I could see the rooftops of the Latin Quarter and the dome of the Pantheon. I drifted out, over the parvis, turning in space until I was facing the cathedral. Its Gothic detail was bathed in a soft red light emanating from above. Veils of luminescence circled above the central spire, blushing and shimmering, dissolving into points of slowly descending brilliance: the phenomenon was in a constant state of flux, the dissolution of one veil presaging the appearance of another. Delicate tendrils of crimson lightning spread through the entire system, defining its awesome height and circumference. I was so entranced by this wondrous sight, so entirely emptied of thought by its hypnotic beauty that it was only when I passed between the blunt towers of the cathedral that I realized I was being drawn towards its core. Below, I could see a row of gargoyles. Winged, devilish creatures, staring balefully over the city.
I rose up through a crackling mist and halted directly above the spire. The copper statues, ascending the slope where the nave and south transept connected, looked as if they had been sculpted from blocks of ruby. I began to rotate in synchrony with the clockwise motion of the cloud, and through glittering sheets observed every compass point of the horizon. Suddenly, awe became fear and I screamed, and the scream was so all-consuming that I was, for a moment, nothing but the medium for its raw expression. I was no longer a person, recognizably human, but a scrap of terror, confronted by forces beyond my comprehension. And then I plummeted into darkness.
It seemed that I was falling down a shaft, sunk deep into the earth. This impression was reinforced by the appearance of an oval aperture, faintly glowing at some abysmal remove. The aperture expanded, and, dropping through its centre, I found myself disgorged above a pit o
f astounding immensity: a funnel of concentric tiers that shrank, step by step, towards its lowest point. It would have been impossible to discern the geography of this benighted landscape were it not for various incendiary events: conflagrations, eruptions, winking fires and thin reticulations of scarlet.
My descent continued. I saw jagged mountains, lakes of filth, blasted forests and plains of ash, and when I descended further still, sufficient to discriminate the motion of figures on a human scale, what I saw next made my soul convulse with horror: a stampede of naked men and women, stumbling, slipping and scrambling, pursued by winged, reptilian creatures – hopelessly attempting to evade capture. Those at the rear of the herd were lashed with chains, flayed and beaten until their bodies were reduced to a bloody pulp. From my elevated vantage I could see demons in flight, hunting prey, swooping down to impale their quarry on pitchforks. Victims were tossed into the air, mercilessly butchered and eviscerated with indifference.
The beat of leathery wings alerted me to two devils rising up from below, a struggling woman in their clutches. I glimpsed her contorted face as the fiends took hold of her arms and legs and began to draw apart, until all four limbs popped out of their sockets and what remained of her fell back to the ground. I watched the head and torso shatter, producing a burgundy sunburst.
My trajectory changed and I came to a desolate place, of narrow ravines and volcanic dust. It seemed to me that I had arrived in some dismal hinterland, set apart from the principal thoroughfares of damnation. The cries receded and the ground came up to meet me. My long descent ended when, with the natural precision of a snowflake, I landed on an expanse of black and magenta pumice. I had, until that instant, seemed discarnate, but now I was embodied. I could feel heat on my skin, smell foul vapours rising from vents in the earth and taste the bitter iron of fear in my mouth. My whole person was shaking and I was seized by an animal instinct to seek safety and find cover. I ran towards a fissure in a basalt outcrop and entered a narrow channel that proceeded between two smooth, glassy walls. I had not gone very far when I heard someone groaning, and looking up, saw an old man, hanging from the rock face, arms outstretched. Nails had been driven through his hands and feet. A bird-like creature was sitting on his shoulder, pecking at one of his eyes. It inserted its long beak into the socket and pulled out a grey-pink floret of brain tissue. I gasped: the bird swivelled its head around, fixing me with a curiously intelligent gaze. I ran the length of the channel and out onto a charred wasteland littered with boulders. This bleak arena was illuminated by pools of magma that coughed molten pellets into the air.
I had not been there for more than a few seconds when I heard a woman shrieking, and as the noise became louder, I also heard other voices. These were low, guttural and punctuated by rough barks. I crouched behind one of the boulders and peered around its edge. A troop of demons appeared over the nearest ridge, one of them carrying a young woman slung over his shoulder like a sack of coals. Her pale buttocks made a lunar circle next to the demon’s hideous, leering face. As they advanced, I drew back and waited for them to pass, but they halted before reaching my hiding place. I heard them, close by, yawping and growling, while the woman continued to shriek. Occasionally, the demons made a sound which was like laughter, a rasping cackle. There were hammer blows, rock splintered and the woman’s shriek became a howl of pain.
When I peered around the side of the boulder again, I saw that she had been nailed to a flat rock and her legs were hanging over the edge. There were five demons, all of them holding pitchforks. Their wings, when folded, arced elegantly from hooked prominences above the shoulders to tapering points beside their ankles. When spread out, they resembled the ribbed and scalloped wings of a bat. The demons were standing in a loose group, jeering and making lewd gestures while the woman writhed in agony.
One of their number parted the woman’s legs and positioned itself between her thighs. I saw it lunge forward, the woman juddered and she let out a piercing scream. The demon began to rut, its haunches moving backwards and forwards as its tail thrashed the ground, raising columns of grey dust. Its body was scaly and powerfully built, and each brutal thrust made me wince. The other demons stamped their feet, shook their forks, and flapped their wings, producing a ghastly parody of human applause.
The rutting demon raised its arm, revealing three great talons. It drew them across the woman’s belly, opened her up, and dragged out a length of colon. Looping the entrails around its neck, it looked to its audience for approval. The phosphorescence of the magma pools was reflected in the blood which splashed around the demon’s feet. Another demon vaulted over the woman’s body, leaving its pitchfork behind in her smashed ribcage, but she did not stop howling. There was no end to this torment, no release – because, of course – she was already dead. Moving with the slow grace of a python, the loop of colon was already beginning to free itself from the rutting demon’s shoulders. It climbed over the demon’s head, dropped onto the woman’s thighs, and insinuated itself back between the ragged lips of her abdominal rupture. I saw the woman’s blood defying gravity and flowing slowly back into her torn arteries. She was being reconstituted, renewed, so that her suffering could be sustained in perpetuity.
It was then that one of the demons, a fierce-looking monster with prominent forward-projecting horns, broke away from the group and sniffed the air. I saw its wide nostrils flaring. Its malevolent expression changed, and insofar as I could interpret its significance, confusion turned to surprise. It grunted and started towards my boulder. I drew back and cowered, naked, vulnerable, my bowels loosening, and terror – indescribable terror – rendered me insensible. I stood, jabbering, wringing my hands together, as I listened to the pumice breaking beneath its heavy tread.
Its eyes were yellow – evoking something putrid – and broken by thin, vertical ellipses. The retraction of its lips produced a smile of cruel intent, made more sinister by the length of its fangs and the slithering of its forked tongue. There was still something like disbelief lingering in its expression as its wings rose up and it positioned itself in readiness to pounce.
There was a mighty pull, as if I was being yanked backwards. The demon’s eyes seemed to stay with me for a moment, then they vanished; such was the magnitude of the impact that followed that I might have been hit by a steam train.
Soulignac was shouting: ‘Breathe, Clément, for God’s sake, breathe!’ He pressed electrodes against my bare chest and I felt a painful electric shock. My back arched and fell back heavily on the operating table. ‘Speak to me, Clément! Can you hear me? Say something!’ My torso felt as if it had been wrapped in metal hoops. ‘Come on, take a breath.’ I gasped, and my lungs seemed to fill with fire. ‘That’s it, and again.’ Soulignac’s expression was wild and his forehead glistened with perspiration. I opened my mouth and sucked at the air. ‘Well done, Clément. Keep going.’ Gradually, my breathing became regular and Soulignac gripped my hand, ‘You’ve been gone for three minutes. I thought I’d lost you.’ He wiped his brow. ‘You’re not out of danger yet. I’m going to stimulate the phrenic nerve.’ I nodded, and closed my eyes, submitting to his ministrations. ‘No, Clément. Keep your eyes open. Stay awake.’ Several minutes passed before he removed the electrodes and helped me to sit up. ‘Well,’ said Soulignac, ‘what did you see?’
I shook my head and replied: ‘Nothing.’
PART TWO
Possession
5
For the next two weeks I was confined to my bed. Soulignac, who nursed me through the initial stages of the sickness, wanted to consult a specialist in respiratory disorders.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘It’s unnecessary.’
‘But I am concerned,’ Soulignac implored. ‘The poison may have caused some bronchial damage.’
‘A few more days,’ I responded. ‘I’m sure I’ll be better in a few more days.’
Bazile came to see me and was obviously disturbed by my appearance. He rearranged my pillows and set a vase of
flowers by my bedside. ‘A present from my wife,’ he said, pulling the curtains apart.
‘No,’ I called out, covering my eyes. ‘The light gives me headaches.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bazile, quickly drawing the curtains again. He sat down and lit his. pipe. ‘Well, my friend, what happened?’
‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘I lost consciousness – died – and was brought back to life. I saw nothing, only darkness. It was like going to sleep.’
Bazile stroked his beard and after a lengthy silence said, ‘We know already that not all patients who are resuscitated are granted a preview of eternity. One must assume, therefore, that such experiences – the tunnel, the light, encounters with divine presences – do not follow automatically from death, but are afforded only to those who are in some sense ready.’
For a while, he elaborated on this theme, but thereafter our conversation was rather stilted. I was too tired to talk, and realizing this, Bazile stood to leave. ‘You are exhausted, poor fellow. If you need anything, anything at all, let me know and I’ll return as soon as I can.’ I thanked him and he left the room.
Turning my head to one side, I gazed at Madame Bazile’s flowers: white amaryllis, chrysanthemums and sea lavender. I felt curiously numb, incomplete, as if my resuscitation had been only partially successful, and that a part of me, perhaps the most significant part, was still dead. Reaching out, I took a petal between my thumb and forefinger. The sensation was pleasurable and familiar, but strangely deficient, as if I were observing someone else performing the action, rather than feeling the velvety softness directly for myself.
I dozed off and was beset by bad dreams. I saw demons rolling rocks over a heap of squirming bodies, cavorting with prodigies that crawled from fissures in the earth; I saw a great vortex made of wailing humanity, spinning across a boundless flatland and leaving in its wake a trail of gore. I saw myself standing behind a boulder, naked, incontinent, shaking uncontrollably, knees knocking together, hands clasped protectively over my genitals, mouthing gibberish. And then I awoke, still yammering, the bedclothes soaked in perspiration, the awful vision of my utter helplessness still impressed on the darkness, persisting until its gradual dissolution released me from a suffocating terror.