Tales of the Shadowmen 4: Lords of Terror

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

  He immediately began to work his fingertips to find purchase on the elusive, slight edges of the brick that seemed intent to tortuously writhe free of the mortar that had held it in place for centuries.

  The ends of his fingers were quickly scraped, and still the brick had yet to progress. Kane looked about his cell for some tool with which to work. His eyes fixed on a dingy, metal spoon he had been given to eat the occasional bowl of gruel. Rising hastily, hefting the heavy chain behind him, he crossed his cell floor, snatched it up, and returned to the wall. There, he dropped on his knees and descended upon the squirming brick with the spoon handle’s end.

  He chipped at the mortar. Digging a fourth of an inch deep on the right side of the brick, he then dug a similar trench on its left. Then he scraped along its top and bottom.

  Meanwhile, as though the person on the other side sensed what Kane was doing and took heart from his efforts added to hers, the brick began to squirm about more vigorously. Finally, he tossed the spoon aside and once again dug the ends of his fingers into the shallow troughs he had made in the mortar. Now, he had purchase, now he pulled...

  The brick tugged free, and he let it fall. Kane immediately peered inside, but the chamber beyond was dark. Dust particles swarmed in the air that issued in: a stale, sepulchral air, redolent of a long-sealed charnel house. Kane flinched at the offending odor.

  His mind was tossed between Fausta’s irreconcilable dealings with his fellow captive. Why did Fausta feed her a princess’s dainties and house her in conditions so foul? Some exquisite torture of that witch, he was certain.

  The rapping was now a frantic scratching from the floor on the other side of the opening, a sound like the scurrying of a rat’s tiny, scaly talons over slate.

  “Can you hear me? Who are you?” he called into the hole. No response. He placed his mouth to the opening in the wall, calling out again. The dust of unsettled ancient masonry coated his tongue and the back of his throat. Kane coughed, recoiling.

  The scratching receded into the further reaches of the chamber and he was certain now that rats were indeed its source. The woman who had knocked so eagerly before must have swooned, and he shuddered at the thought of her unconscious person vulnerable to such vermin. He reached with both hands into the opening he had made, and, grasping the brick above it, pulled with all his strength and tore it free.

  When he had removed a few more in this manner, he lay on his back before the small breach, and powered by the force of thighs strengthened through years of travel over rough terrain, he repeatedly thrust his boot heels against those bricks surrounding the aperture.

  They quickly gave way, and now Kane had ingress large enough to slide his body through. First, he thrust his arm into the opening to find how deep it was, and was soon up to his shoulder. He withdrew.

  This, then, looked to be the bricked-up doorway of which the Horla told him. Undoubtedly, his fellow prisoner had discovered this as well, which is why her knocking had directed him to this spot. He hesitated now, on his side of what would have been the threshold, feeling a sudden sense of foreboding. He shook it off contemptuously. A woman needed his aid! Lying on his stomach, facing the opening, he slid through, dragging his heavy chain with him.

  In a moment he was inside the chamber, one not much larger than his own.

  And one without occupant.

  Kane scowled. Had someone become alerted to his efforts in reaching his fellow prisoner and ushered her away before he could establish contact? As his eyes began to adjust to the dark, he pulled himself free of the opening and stood aright. A door, not bars, had been restored to this chamber’s hallway entrance. He stepped forward, and then the slack of his chain became taut and he was firmly tethered.

  The room was coated with dust, of which the initial opening of the wall had been harbinger. Its walls were lined with bookshelves that reached to the ceiling. Various texts, bound volumes and parchments, were strewn about a reading table, where the dust appeared recently disturbed. He snatched up a book at random, a copy of Translation of Secretum by Petrarch. Opening it, and bringing it close to his eyes, Kane read, Often have I wondered with much curiosity as to our coming into this world and what will follow our departure.

  Such idle speculation baffled him. This world was made by God for man–what, then, could possibly follow mankind? With a contemptuous expulsion of breath, he tossed this record of an exercise in futility back to the table.

  Then his eyes scanned the other texts that lay there. There was a copy of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and a handwritten manuscript with the heading “The Miller’s Tale” from the depraved Canterbury Tales. While still a boy, he had been warned away from Chaucer by his village parson. And he remembered the discovery of a young woman in Devonshire reading Ovid–she had been marked with the Scarlet Letter ever afterward, at least in the eyes of the villagers.

  Nearby lay a painting depicting Mary and the infant Jesus, surrounded by an admiring Heavenly Host. Though the Madonna with Child smacked to Kane’s Puritan sensibilities of Catholic idolatry, he found strangely more disconcerting how something held sacred was now casually profaned by its proximity to Ovid’s and Chaucer’s texts.

  There was another painting, this of a fair-skinned woman with a breast exposed. Kane could not know that this was a portrait of none other than Fausta’s esteemed ancestress, Lucrezia Borgia, nor did he linger over what was to him an image of the coarsest wanton. By this portrait, spread out in a fan over the table, was a hand of upturned Tarot cards, the Papessa raised above the others.

  His now fully accustomed eyes gleaned from the gloom of the room a draped altar before a crowned woman whose outstretched arms invitingly exposed her multiple rows of breasts. This was a statue of Diana, brought to Avignon when it was a Phoenician outpost and dug from the ground on which the Papal palace now stood.

  “ ’Tis an idol of pagan harlotry, preserved in this wretched place, beckoning me to embrace her rows of witch’s dugs,” he spoke aloud and spat. What had brought him to this room, and why, he knew not, but he would return to his cell, seal the wall, and never return.

  It was then that he noticed the hanging of the altar’s drapery suggested a human being underneath it...

  He called. No response. He stretched toward the altar, finding his chain heavier than before. Still he reached out, leaning forward on the balls of his feet... and the effort cost him–sweat beaded his forehead.

  Now that wretched scratching of scaly talons sounded all about him, though no rats scampered into view–

  –as he snatched away the draping veil, let it pile in silken folds at the base of the altar–

  –to reveal a human skeleton, the pelvis unmistakably that of a woman.

  The sweat drenched him now, and the rodent scratching increased in magnitude from the walls, the ceiling...

  He remembered now: it was the same he had heard back in Devonshire, when he was a boy, in the home of Goody Cloyse, whom some said had fled to the New England colonies when she was warned she would be brought to the council for consorting with demons–

  And Avignon had ever been the occult Mecca for the necromancer, the alchemist and the astrologer. It had never ceased to be, even in the days of the Papacy. Avignon–the “city of the winds,” and Scripture schooled Kane that Satan was the power of the air. Here, then, was where those powers found crags to roost.

  “I am prisoner in Babylon, the habitation of devils, the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hateful bird!” Kane cried out the words of John the Divine as he swooned against the table of books and sent fluttering the divination cards. “If I can make it back,” he said, focusing on the hole through which he had passed.

  The chain weighed him down, and falling prone, he crawled for the egress. And now he heard the aerial tones of the Horla.

  “You are sick, Solomon. It was set that you should be so once you breathed the air of this chamber. I can control this contagion, on the level of your coarse cells, that it
not damage irreparably your tissues, for I am aerie and of more subtle stuff. Take me in, I implore you, and serve my cause!”

  “I will not serve you. Bowed though I am, I still do not bow to you, Horla.”

  “Then you have nothing, and you will die.”

  “I have faith in God,” Kane said as he inched for the opening, dragging his belly over the floor. “Aye, and I have a will, a will that God has granted me authority to hold inviolate. And I will not bring it under your yoke!”

  Sweat blurring his vision, Kane became aware that, despite his efforts, he was moving not at all. Still his hand beckoned out, even as his consciousness passed.

  He came to on a soft pallet of satin pillows, feeling the first sun he had in days. Sweet fragrances, fresh air, sounds of birds from boughs bobbing with the wind which blew through the large, open windows and billowed the tapestry of one wall...

  His eyes were clinched against the light. A rustle of gown and slippers, and then, lowering herself to her knees by his side, Fausta, now lifting and placing his head on her silken lap. Kane’s eyes opened on the beauty of her exotic oval face, which floated against her black, diamond-braided hair like a starry sky. Her lush scarlet lips parted eagerly to reveal her white teeth

  “A flock of sheep, all evenly shorn,” a feverish Kane spoke in Puritan bliss, then his gaze dropped to her low-cut bodice. “ ‘Breasts like twin roes...’ ”

  “Why, is that the Song of Solomon, I hear?” Fausta asked as her mouth resolved into a beautiful smile, tainted by the slight peal of mockery in her voice. “Are you wooing me, Kane?”

  Kane was distracted from his appreciative contemplation when a filmy veil seemed to drop from a full length mirror visible over Fausta’s shoulder, and his own ugliness shocked him, as though his craggy countenance had been revealed to him for the first time. He suddenly felt poignantly aware of her thin gown, and that more than the dress’s silken fabric, his head rested on Fausta’s silky thighs.

  He moved to rise, but found himself too weak, sweat suddenly sheathing his face and body.

  “Shhh,” Fausta said, passing her hand over his wet brow. “Your fever is breaking. Take more rest, Solomon. Rest...”

  He yielded to the gentle pressure of the small hand now against his chest, relaxed, and closed his eyes. Soon, he slept again.

  When he awoke, a golden salver had been placed by his pallet, with milk, bread, wine and strawberries. He sat up, grabbed the foodstuffs by the handfuls, cramming them into his mouth, then taking deep draughts of the milk. The wine, he purposefully did not touch, for he wished full command of his faculties.

  Suddenly aware of a flurry of silk coming from behind him, he looked to see Fausta moving to lower herself by his side. The sudden reddening of Solomon’s ears and cheeks heralded that he had not forgotten where his head had rested when last he awoke.

  “Good morning, Puritan. Yes, eat your fill. You must needs be strong for the work to which I shall set your hand.”

  He lay the remaining bit of bread back on the salver and sought to rise to his feet, feeling keenly Fausta’s red lacquered fingertips pressing to restrain him. Her touch was like tiny daggers of ice-laced fire, tantalizingly cold and hot at the same time.

  He did not attempt to rise further, feeling yet unsure of his legs, but molding his features into pious scorn he looked at her and said: “Serve you? You are the scarlet woman riding the unclean beast that is the Papal palace of Avignon.”

  “The beast, alas, has lost its legs, Solomon,” Fausta said, her expression bitter yet wistful. “My contingent has deserted me, and without the support of men and arms, my plan to replace Gregory has failed ere it began.”

  Kane’s eyes narrowed. “Why desert you?”

  “You carry in your own body the cause. Your illness is not isolated. ’Twas a plague that invaded the whole palace. Before news of the contagion could spread and the palace could be quarantined, my entourage fled.”

  “I find it difficult to believe that you did not do likewise,” Kane said, as he struggled to look beyond the beauty of the face to see if a lie lay incarnate there.

  “Alas, I was one of the first to succumb. It seems this pestilence slept in one of the sealed rooms below, and when I opened it, ’twas awakened and released to do its worst. When I was no longer the imperious Fausta of the blood of Popes, but a woman weak and near death as any other, I was deserted.”

  “Yet you have recovered splendidly. Enough to tend me. Did no one nurse you?”

  There fell on him then a leaden gaze from Fausta as she resolutely drew up her shoulders: “I am Fausta; my will is iron and resolute. ’Twas all I needed to raise myself from my sick bed.”

  Suddenly, her gaze was soft again. “Your will is also strong, Solomon Kane.”

  “So is my faith in God. The same, I think, cannot be said of you.”

  “Yet we were both stricken, and both recovered. Is it not odd, this indifference?”

  “My Lord schools me that he sends his rain on both the just and the unjust. Your healing is, perhaps, his graciousness toward you, that you should have time to repent and not perish. Aye, and I find myself grateful for his kindness toward you.”

  Fausta smiled again and pressed close to Kane. “I think you have come to love me, Kane, you who came to take me captive.”

  “You have ministered to me in my need, but you have so done without just cause, and that, lass, troubles me.”

  “I owed you. You were right. I was not innocent of how you were dealt with by Rochefort. But I think your discomfort is not that of being dealt with kindly by a mind you perceive to be villainous. Nay, I think it is the nearness of my young body, my ripe lips, to your own and the knowledge that you might take me now and know that lushness of woman for which you secretly ache. You only have to act, Solomon. Besides, we are already more intimate than you know. Who do you think bathed and put fresh clothing on you? Rochefort?”

  At this, she grabbed his head, pulling it toward her own. Kane fell back, crying out: “Woman, do you think to mount me as you did the scarlet beast?”

  In response, Fausta pressed her leverage and fell atop him, bringing her lips close to his ear and hissing:

  “That is exactly what I intend, you pious fool! If you want to live, do not resist me. I promise you, maiden, that your virtue shall remain intact. ’Tis the Horla I seek to beguile, not you.”

  Kane started to speak, but Fausta laid a slender finger across his mouth. Then she slowly slid it over his lips as her own descended to meet his. Kane was awkward as her lips plied his, but the ungainly clinch seemed to satisfy Fausta. She withdrew, rose, smiled at him, then seemed to float in her gown across the floor to the door of the chamber. She opened it, paused to look back at him, still smiling, then stepped outside, closing the door behind her.

  Without Fausta to restrain him, Kane decided to try his legs again. He swayed a bit once he had risen to his full height, but he had had to gain sea legs before, and found the sensation similar. He looked about the chamber for his weapons, though he had little hope of finding them there.

  His search was interrupted by the sound of the door opening and closing behind him, and he turned to see Fausta returned. From under a satin draped divan, she produced his sword, dagger and slouch hat. She glided to him within an arm’s length of distance. Kane stepped back.

  “No, no, my Puritan,” she said. “You have nothing to fear from me. Certainly, no more love-making. I had to convince the Horla that I was too self-conscious with his presence in this room to complete my seduction. Yes, he was here, observing all. If I could compromise you to venture outside God’s grace, then you would be given over to the Horla. And he much desires you as his vessel.”

  Kane’s expression soured. “ ’Tis a creature of the pit.”

  “Thanks to your natural awkwardness, he saw that that my work was cut out for me, and agreed to give us privacy. But we shan’t have it for long, so take these your weapons and listen.”

  “Speak,
then,” Kane said as he donned his hat, strapped his sword to his waist and his dagger to his calf.

  “I came to the palace of Avignon, as I told you before, because it gave me proximity to the Catholic-Huguenot conflict. But there was another reason. An... occult reason. Avignon has a rich history in the dark arts, something that was not unknown to the Popes during their time here. Certain artifacts and writings were collected–but not destroyed. Strange, is it not, that good men allow this foothold to darkness? Visitation was allowed by dispensation to this secret archive in the Pope’s treasury, and it was thus allowed to wield its influence over the minds of monks and scribes. Other texts were added to it over the years before Pope Gregory XI left Avignon and the Papacy returned to Rome. The occult archive was secreted, sealed and forgotten... intentionally so.

  “But, as you pointed out to me, dear Solomon, there is little that Fausta does not know that she desires to know.”

  “You have yet to say why, lass: why open that accursed crypt?”

  “Necromancy, Kane,” she answered curtly. “Aye, I see your countenance darken at the word. Would that mine had as well. But I had found the bones of she to whom I am inheritor. These earthly remains, I was told, in a place of dark power, could draw forth her soul; more, here her spirit would enter me, filling me with the wisdom of Pope Joan.”

  “But the delicacies on the salver–those were for a skeleton?”

  “For Joan’s spirit, when she inhabited my flesh. They were to give her pleasure. But it was not Joan who took possession of me–or savored my dainties.”

  “The Horla,” Kane said, the name seeming to simmer on his tongue.

  “He had been imprisoned in the archive as well. No doubt the last Pope of Avignon saw to that before he left. I believe the pestilence was placed in the cell to finish the Horla. The contagion did not, for he was resilient beyond human kind. Like a hellish locust, the Horla lingered, waiting until his time came.

  “Then, I opened the archive. It seems the pestilence had also lingered. The men who unwalled the chamber were first to succumb, but it was I who spread it among my own people. When the Horla was inside me, he kept my body whole, yet I breathed out the plague on those who were not so protected.