Falling Idols

by Brian Hodge

  Guillaume swallowed down his disgust and tried to offer a reassuring smile. “You doubted?”

  Nomad patted the horse’s mane, then hurried out of the stall with great jerking movements. Crossing the stable with the self-conscious embarrassment of one who lived in the humblest of abodes yet sought still to be a proper host. The sight was a travesty of everything human, and at last it bid him join itself, seated on bales of hay.

  “Giselle?” it asked. “Is she…?”

  “Come to no harm.”

  And how could something so appalling as that face show such relief? It must have been a trick of light.

  “Not yet,” Guillaume added, and yes, that face showed its true wretchedness at once. “With the Germans, who can tell what they will do? Who can wake up each morning with the assurance that there’s no bullet or bayonet for them that day?”

  Nomad plucked loose pieces of straw from the bale, let them fall to the floor. “Is there no love in them for anything good and kind and gentle?”

  “None. They love only conquest.”

  Guillaume watched the thing go through the motions of thought and anguish. These seeds he was planting were falling on fertile soil, he could tell, needing only the proper watering to bear the terrible fruits for which he hoped.

  He pressed on: “You have a great and tremendous rage within you, do you not?”

  “I once did,” said Nomad, in a voice of something lost. “I once, long ago, told my creator, ‘If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.’ And how I devoted myself to that heinous mission. But now I believe that even devils must tire of provoking suffering, when suffering faces are all they see. And I have even come to believe that those same devils must despair themselves as amateurs when compared to the likes of Mankind. You have, yourselves, taken over their task with so much more efficiency.” Nomad lifted his gaze, then his arm, to the stable door and beyond. “How many wars have I seen? I no longer remember. So what fear can I cause that would not be welcomed over an invading army?”

  “Ah,” said Father Guillaume, and he must not be swayed by this creature’s pretense to remorse, “but what of the fear you might bring to the invading army itself? Is it possible that your natural inclinations might then be put to a greater good?” He let that sink in, then clinched it: “If for no other’s sake than that of Giselle’s.”

  The thing turned a wide, watery eye upon him. “How can you wear those robes and ask this of me?”

  “I care more for the oppressed than the oppressor. It’s no more complicated than that.” He drew a breath and tried not to choke on the next words. “And if you do this for me, for Giselle, I will then offer you my hand, in friendship … and in love.”

  “Love,” said Nomad, musing the sound and taste of the word, as if something foreign. “Then I ask one thing of you beforehand. Please, allow what I do to be a holy task. Bring me your sacraments.”

  Guillaume drew back, could not help himself. “What?”

  “The bread, the wine. The blessing.”

  This thing was asking too much, and for what? He doubted very much that it even possessed a soul, and surely, in all its years, no priest would have offered it baptism. He would play no part in desecrating the Eucharist. Would not see his church reduced to giving legitimacy to monstrosities which by all that was right and holy should not exist at all. He would not, would not—

  “As you wish,” Guillaume heard himself say, and felt his feet take him to the door.

  *

  She came suddenly awake in the night, and moved only enough to reassure herself of the warm, familiar nest of her own bed. She blinked, then looked over at Sister Anna-Marie, whose slow and even breaths continued undisturbed.

  Had she been dreaming? Something had pierced sleep.

  There — again, and Giselle sat upright in her bed, as at once the world expanded beyond her to include the whole of her village.

  From below, down the hill, came the crack of a rifle, lonely and desolate and full of terrible foreboding. A cry, then, of mortal anguish, and next a rip of machine pistol fire. The after-ring of each sound hung in the silent crystalline perfection of the November night.

  Giselle cast aside the quilts and bolted from her bed, then wrapped her cloak about her and didn’t bother with shoes. For a moment she paused near Anna-Marie’s bed, in debate. The old nun slept deeply. Well, let her sleep on. Perhaps she was dreaming of fields in summer, and youth.

  Giselle ran into the night, the grass chilly and damp beneath her feet, and as the sounds, with increasing frequency, continued to roll up the hill, she pounded on the Father’s door. There was but a moment’s pause before, calmly, he called for her to enter. He sounded as if he’d been awake all night.

  Giselle shivered within her cloak, and found him sitting at his table. No lamp burned, but he’d left the curtains at his dining window pushed aside. He was a black cassock and a pale face immobile in a silver-blue flood of moonlight.

  “Sit,” he said, with hand proffered toward a chair. “We’ll wait.”

  “Do you not hear?” she cried. “They’re killing the people—”

  “No.” Slowly, Father Guillaume shook his head. “They are defending themselves. And I dare hope they finally know the taste of defeat.” He tilted his ear — such bliss! — as if the faraway crash of shattering wood were a faint strain of music. “After so many lifetimes of avoiding the eyes of men, how silent and stealthy must that creature be, when it wishes. And how powerful.”

  Giselle felt her knees go weak and she collapsed onto the chair he had offered.

  “And what lengths it will go to for the sake of love.”

  “You set Nomad to this killing?” she cried. “How could you? How could you?”

  “Because it is what Nomad does, Giselle. It is what Nomad is.” She sought his eyes but they were beyond seeing; his round spectacles were flat replicas of the moon. “In my own heart God is first, and my flock second. On their behalf, He did not answer. So I turned to one that would. Though perhaps Nomad was the answer to prayer.”

  Bile rose in her throat and she forced it down. “How dare you presume such a thing.”

  Father Guillaume spread his hands. “Samson slew an army of Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Did it just happen to be there? And God smiled. So before you judge … listen.”

  She had no more heart with which to argue — it hurt too much. Hers must be the same as the grieving hearts of mothers who see their sons grow out of playful innocence to be hanged as convicted murderers. All mourn for the dead, yes, but they mourn no less for the passing of what potential might have been fulfilled in the living.

  And so she listened.

  To the frantic cracks of rifles, the bursts of automatic fire. Here a scream, there the concussive blast of a grenade. And still the cries went on. The brittle sound of splintering, as she learned to distinguish wood from bone. Learned to distinguish cry of fear from cry of mortality, and the breaking point in a long, suffering wail when the former became the latter.

  And so she listened.

  As the deliverance of Château-sur-Lac went on, and on, and on.

  *

  They didn’t leave the table until after moonlight gave way to dawn, and for two hours or more it had done so in silence. Dawn came with none of its usual innocence and hope, but instead a pall of guilt and apprehension, heavy as clouds.

  “Get up, come along,” Giselle told him. “At least see what you’ve done.”

  They left the rectory and trudged out upon the hill, far enough beyond the church so that it did not block their view of the village below. Beneath the lightening sky they gazed down upon an eerie tableau where nothing moved but a wafting haze of smoke, and in a place or two, the licking tongues of dying fires. Several bodies in gray uniforms lay strewn about, more than one broken into impossible angles. Another hung limp in a charred black hole blasted through the stone wall of a cottage. Yet another had been slammed halfway through a roof. One in the street had been
run through with a shattered length of timber. And the rest? Giselle hoped not to have to see them, inside their charnel houses.

  “Where is everyone else?” said Father Guillaume. “I dared believe by now they would be rejoicing.”

  “They’re terrified even to look out their windows. Would you be any different, if you didn’t know?” Giselle looked at him without pity. “Be proud. He served you well.”

  She left him to dog her footsteps through the clinging mist, and returned to the rectory, the warmth of its fire that had fed well through the night. Giselle huddled at the table and wondered why she hadn’t gone back to the priory instead, then realized she had more to say. She waited until Guillaume hunkered at the fire to add a fresh log.

  “Tell me,” she said. “How do you justify this before God? Aside from your feelings about the Germans — I know those well enough — but instead, Nomad? How do you justify condemning him to carry such added burdens to his soul?”

  Father Guillaume straightened at the fireplace with a weary groan. “Nomad doesn’t have a soul, Giselle.”

  “By what authority do you make that decision?” she cried.

  “By the authority of the Church!” He returned to the table and sat heavily, angrily, in his chair.

  “Then the Church is wrong!”

  Guillaume pointed wildly in the direction of the village. “That creature was never conceived like a man. Even a horse, or an ox, or a dog comes into this world by natural birth, but we don’t consider them to possess souls. How much lesser a being than them is Nomad, then? In Nomad I endangered nothing. Because there is no soul within to endanger!”

  She drew into herself then, feet like ice, heart like broken fragments of stone. There would be no arguing with the Father, for there was nothing in his mind left open. And what of Nomad? She could not believe that he too lay below in a cottage, one more casualty of the night. Had he wreaked his havoc, then fled, unable to face her? He had to know she could forgive him anything.

  Sadly, though, there were more immediate and pressing matters to be concerned with.

  “What of the Germans’ reinforcements?” she asked. “They will come, you know. Later today, tomorrow. How do you propose to explain where the first have gone?”

  “It’s not our duty to explain anything a German decides to do,” he said. “We take the bodies and we bury them, or hide them beneath haystacks, or haul them by ox-cart to the lake and weight them with stones and sink them to the bottom. We clean up their blood. And they remain the secret of this village. For as long as it takes.” He shook his head. “They were here, and they left. That is all we know.”

  Giselle tried to keep from shivering. Dawn was cold, but this priest’s heart was colder still. How gentle he’d seemed, for years, while concealing the scheming heart of a murderer.

  She was about to leave his table when she heard a scraping outside the door. Heavy feet upon flagstones, unsteady, and then the door swung open.

  He filled the doorway, Nomad did, then entered with the slow and painful gait of one who ignores wounds. She sought his eyes, and when their gazes met, the yellow smoldering fury in them seemed to soften, and she knew him capable of tears he would never allow. He had purpose, and now, at least, she was not it.

  He strode past her, and after a brief pause to glance about the cottage, continued to the bookcase where Father Guillaume’s dusty and cherished volumes sat like wise old friends. One arm swung up, to add something to their company.

  “For the love of God!” Father Guillaume screamed. “You brought that here? Here?”

  Giselle shut her eyes, quickly, grateful she could, so she didn’t have to see those of Lieutenant Streckenbach staring dimly from across the room. His mouth hung frozen half-open in perpetual surprise, and by now the skin of the head was waxy and pale.

  “I thought you would be pleased,” explained Nomad, in loss and sorrow and the pain of lifetimes of broken promises.

  He shuffled a few more steps to sag to the floor, before the hearth, and when Giselle moved to help him he seemed to plead with his eyes, No, I am beyond your help forever, and she could only gaze upon him in tears. His rude clothing was splotched with blood, surely not all his own, but then, surely some of it had to be. How many wounds could such a formidable body withstand? How many bullets, how many blows, how many piercing slivers from the heart of a grenade?

  From the floor, he looked over to Father Guillaume, who sat in his chair, shocked into silence by a revulsion beyond even his own comprehension. Had Judas looked this way, Giselle wondered, in realizing the enormity of his crime?

  “I have a soul,” said Nomad, in blood and quiet dignity, and she then wondered how long he had been outside to listen. “I do. I can feel it, and I know that is what it is, because nothing else could ache so deeply. Though I may not have been born with a soul, I know that I have built one of my own over time. With every year I live … with every deed, with every sorrow and indignity and wound I suffer, with every humiliation and hour of loneliness … I know I build that soul a little more. These things that tear human hearts to pieces? These are my bricks, and my mortar.”

  Father Guillaume managed to find his voice after all. “You take much for granted.”

  Nomad seemed almost to laugh. “And you do not?”

  And thus Giselle wondered: Did she, as well?

  For a while Nomad turned his head to gaze into the fireplace, where the fresh log was beginning to blaze anew. “I planned once to kill myself. On the frozen north seas, I left my creator behind in the bed where he died, and I told the captain of that vessel that my only intention was to then build my own funeral pyre, and climb atop it, and let the winds take my ashes to the sea. What a fine dream that was…

  “But as I made my way south again, another dream took hold, and on that day when snow and ice were behind me, and wood to burn before me, I knew I could not. Because of my incomplete soul.”

  He stood, a long and painful process, and left the comforts of the hearth.

  “Every day I build that soul a little more. And whether it takes another year, or ten, or a thousand, only then will I consent to die. So that I can stand whole before whatever God there may be … and demand of Him one thing: ‘Why?’”

  Giselle bit her lip and drew blood. Better this pain than that of having nothing to say to him, no balm to soothe either an anguished brow or soul. With eyes shut, she felt his vast presence pass her side, then pause, as a huge, callused palm caressed her cheek with such tenderness it belied the fury of the night.

  “I remember something from a poem,” he said. “A poem about love, and simple pleasures. I remember but a few words … ’a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thee.’ I once dared hope that even these simple things would not be beyond me, if only for a day.” He withdrew his hand and reserved his last baleful look for Father Guillaume. “Only poets tell no lies.”

  Giselle lowered her head to the tabletop as she listened to the thud of the door and the scrape of his unsteady feet across flagstones as he was lost to the mist, the smoke, and the everlasting dawn.

  A spellbound wretch

  In his futile gropings,

  In order to flee a serpent-filled place,

  Looking for light and a key;

  One damned descending without lamp,

  On the edge of an abyss whose stench

  Betrays the wet depths

  Of endless stairways with no rail…

  — Baudelaire

  Blind Idiot Lovecraft

  It is true that our conjurings have wreaked much havoc upon the autumnal hills surrounding Arkham, yet I hope to show by this testimony that fault lies not with us alone, but with malefactors who hungered for profit at the expense of learning.

  Through my student years I had lived quite peaceably in my tiny garret, under the rafters of a Georgian house that squatted atop the hummock of Howard’s Hill like a troglodyte upon a chamber pot. My northern window commanded a view so splendid that during those hours I wa
s not immersing myself in dog-eared sheafs teeming with the unsettling lore of the region’s hillfolk, whose family trees did so scarcely deviate beyond their mouldering trunks that both their eyes often made homes within the same socket, I would find myself brooding for hours over a cityscape bristling with eldritch spires and cruel gambrels, and cramped with slouching hovels and streets whose spectral denizens scurried from shadow to shadow … until I had utterly lost track of whatever thoughts filled my head when I’d first sat down for a quick breath of fresh air.

  In time I realized that my reveries were not unnoticed, and I, the watcher in the window, had become the watched. The man who was to lead me to insanity’s brink made frequent trips through the street below, pushing his wheeled cart like a raw-boned, ill-suited Sisyphus, a peddler of crustaceans of decidedly peculiar anatomies. His passing stares grew more bold, lingering day by day until I called down to him, demanding to know that which he found so fascinating. Imagine, then, my vexation to hear him call back that he thought I would make a fine apprentice crab-monger, as I appeared to have ample time on my hands and, as I’d yet to tumble from my window, sufficient dexterity to suit the demands of the cart. My hasty refusal was as swiftly regretted, when examination of my wallet reminded me that I had never worked a day in my scholarly life and, more mysteriously, could not account for the origins of those few meager dollars I did possess.

  When finally I caught up to him, he, with a temper as crusty as the shells of his wares, docked me a day’s wages for insolence.

  How much better for me — for Arkham itself — had I given in to my umbrage, taking my solipsistic leave then and there. How much better for him — o damnable geezer! — had talk of my australopithic studies not awakened within him the curiosities of his ancestral hills, whose netherbowers sang of mysteries beyond space and time. How much better for you, my reader, if I just cut to the chase.

  Knowledge of Arkham’s variegated streets was written deep within my mentor’s pickled brain, taking us along skewed lanes rarely traversed by those free of portentous motive. How I now wish that we had never disturbed the dust of the curio shop where we uncovered our prize whose cost has proved beyond reckoning: a lone — and curiously slim — volume of the dreaded Necronomicon, penned by that mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, at great personal peril and many a rumored grumpy night.