Enter, Night (60 page)

Though I would be hard pressed to explain how I knew, he appeared
to take some private amusement from my discomfiture, but hiding it
with the sort of slyness I would expect from the Savages, but not a white
man, let alone a priest. But in his face, there was nothing to raise an
alarum.

His voice was grave when he spoke. “Father Nyon, you must remove
your crucifix. Hang it here,” he said pointing to a spot over the window
adjacent to the doorway. “I will reveal all to you once we are inside. But
you must leave the crucifix outside, for your protection and mine. There
are forces afoot tonight that are beyond our power to fight, but which
may be kept at bay through the agency of the Blessed Virgin and her Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord. The cross will protect us.” Again, he pointed at the
spot, looking away from it as he pointed. “Hang it there. It will secure our
safety from what is afoot in this village.”

Of course I obeyed immediately, for who was I to doubt the older
priest?

I was a very young man, and it seemed clear that Father de Céligny
had some greater knowledge of what had brought the mission to doom,
and he had obviously survived the onslaught of those forces, whatever
they might be. I very much feared I might not survive them without his
help, guidance, and protection, for I was lost in an ocean of unanswered
questions and half-formed terrors.

Too, I was so enthralled by the notion of being no longer alone in
this devilish place, where day and night held equal menace, I would have
done anything to keep him close. I removed the crucifix and hung it
where he indicated.

Father de Céligny smiled, but it was a vulpine smile, not a reverent
one as might befit a gesture involving a holy object. Again I felt the
vertigo, and this time a prickle of fear accompanied it, a primal instinct
impelling flight, as one might feel upon discovering a snake. And then he
slipped like smoke across the threshold into the house.

The building was cold and the fire had almost burned out. I shivered. I
took a stick from the small pile I had assembled and stirred the embers.
I placed the stick on the small heap of smouldering ash and watched the
flickering tongues of flame shoot up from the ash to consume it. I added
a few more dry sticks. The fire bloomed, beckoning shadows from all
corners.

Across the room, Father de Céligny made no move to step towards
the fire; rather, he stood against the farthest wall of the room, save for
the whiteness of his face and hair, indistinct from the darkness of the
room that wrapped him like a cloak. Again, I felt that haunting sense of
dislocation and vertigo.

“Father,” I said, for I could no longer abide my frenzy of terror and ignorance, “please tell me what has happened here. Where are the
Indians? Why was the settlement abandoned? I was taught to look for
Satan’s work only after every other possibility had been exhausted, but I
confess that all possibilities
have
been exhausted. I am at sea.”

From the shadows, his voice came softly, more akin to a serpent’s
sibilant hiss than a sequence of words spoken by a human tongue, and it
appeared to issue from nowhere, yet everywhere. My senses swam, and
I staggered, righting myself in time not to fall. Again, he made no move
towards me to come to my aid.

“Are you cold, Father Nyon?” he said gently. “This country is very
cold, is it not? Very cold indeed. Cold and wild, and very dark in the winter.
Do you not find it so? Winter approaches, even now, and the hours of
daylight have grown so short. Do you see how dark it has become? Can
you feel the night enter?”

And indeed I did see how dark it was becoming. The room itself was
growing darker. The fire seemed very far away, and the only light in the
room seemed to come from his voice. I cannot better describe it than to
say that his words themselves seemed to me to shimmer in the growing
dark. It was as though I had stared too long at the sun and had gone blind,
and the sun had grown black, searing its image behind my eyes, blotting
out all else except that burning shower of falling black stars. And yet,
there
was
no sun. There
was
no light.

My knees buckled, and I fell to the dirt floor.

Father de Céligny’s mocking laughter came as though from a great
distance. “Poor little priest,” he said. He sounded almost regretful. “You
should never have come to St. Barthélemy. You should have believed the
stories you were told about what happened in this place.” I heard the
rustle of his robes and the sound of his feet as he walked slowly to where
I lay.

Even as I write these memories tonight, I am struck anew at how
they appear to be the ravings of a madman, even to me. And yet: I write
the truth of the events as they occurred; I swear it upon my soul.

I tried to rise to my feet but my limbs refused to obey the commands
of my brain. I was powerless to move. Were it witchcraft or some other
dark art, I was trapped in its spell, unable to move, as though I had found
myself at the bottom of a vast dark sea, holding my breath and struggling
desperately to swim to the surface before my chest exploded and I took in
all that cold, black water.

“Can you hear me, little priest?” de Céligny said, leaning close to my
face.

I tried to answer, but found that, though my wits were still my own,
I could not even speak—though I knew that if he commanded me to
speak, the words would come, even if they were not my own words, but
his. But I was able to move my eyes. I saw his face with a hellish clarity
that had heretofore eluded me, and with that awful sight came another
surety: that I had, God help me, found the author of the malefaction that
had proved the undoing of the settlement.

O, how can I describe what I saw as I gazed upon the visage of Father
de Céligny, the murderer of St. Barthélemy?

Shall I say that his eyes glared with a reddened light unlike any fire
of God’s earth, the same burning crimson that I had seen in the eyes of
the Savage children two nights ago? That they stood out like beacons in
the waxen pallor of his face?

Where I thought I had seen aristocracy I now saw the visage of a
devil—a degenerate, ravenous archfiend wearing a well-tailored mask of
human flesh. His foul mouth was open, and I could see the dull gleam
where his teeth lay against his lower lip, and the smell of rotted meat,
and worse, issued from his mouth.

“Do you see?” the beast said. “Do you understand?”

“Monster,” I whispered, my voice suddenly my own again. “Monster.
Monster. Monster. What have you wrought here?”

“I carried the seed inside me,” he said. “The gift was in my blood, as
it was in the blood of my ancestors. It is my inheritance, an inheritance
I have brought with me to this new, unspoiled world. I have shared its
light generously with these poor, lost people, to whom I have given a new
catechism: mine. And now, they will have two priests. You will stay here
with me and we will minister to our new congregation.” He cocked his
head mockingly. “Does that please you, little Jesuit?” he said. “That we
bring the true light of our darkness to this unspoiled place?”

“I will stop you,” I said. “I will save these people. And I will kill you,
and I will do it in God’s name, and to His glory, devil.”

“No,” Father de Céligny said. His voice sounded almost pitying. “You
will not.”

Then, by the grace of God, three things happened in quick succession.
A slumbering log on the fire exploded behind us, sending up a shower of
sparks, the retort as sharp as the crack of a cannon. Father de Céligny
hissed, startled by the noise of the fire. And in the moment he turned
away from me, the spell was broken. I found I could again move my limbs.

I pushed my body away from where I lay, leaping to my feet. My
hands instinctively went to my chest, where the crucifix usually lay. With
horror, I remembered that devious creature had tricked me into hanging
it outside the hut. I was defenceless, as I had always been intended to be.

De Céligny turned slowly towards me. His smile was one of pure,
hellish triumph, for we both knew it was my time to die. I closed my eyes
and made the sign of the cross in the air in front of me.

There was a terrible snap, like a lightning strike, and de Céligny
screamed. I opened my eyes to see him flinching away, as though from
a terrible, searing heat. I made the sign of the cross again, and again he
screamed. As I stared, he fell forward as though to collapse on the ground.

But before his hands even struck the ground, yet another
wonderment occurred, though this one was as malign as the other was
divine. In the first second, I had beheld the falling human form of Father
de Céligny, but what landed on the ground instead was the shape of a
colossal, towering black wolf with blazing red eyes and the jagged teeth
of a stone-carved gargoyle.

I cried out in shock and stumbled backwards away from this new
incarnation of the monster. From its gullet came a roar of rage such as
I have never heard from any animal. The wolf crouched before me, as
though poised to strike, but instead it turned and leaped easily over my
prone body and ran out through the doorway into the night.

I reached for the remaining pile of sticks by the fire, and seized
two slender ones. These I crossed, one over the other, in the shape of a
makeshift crucifix. Thus armed, I held it in front of me and pursued the
creature through the doorway.

In the unearthly brightness of the full moon, I beheld the entire
village. But tonight, the village was not empty, not deserted.

Twenty, perhaps thirty Savages, men, women, children, young and
old, stood ranked in a motionless perimeter like statues, eyes fixed upon
me, fixed upon the makeshift cross I held in front of me, neither moving
towards me nor backing away.

In the centre of the crowd stood Father de Céligny. Our eyes met. He
stared at me with deep hatred. When finally he spoke, his words echoed
only in my mind, for his lips did not move.

We will come for you tomorrow night, little priest, when the sun is
down. We will come for you then, and nothing—neither your crosses, nor your
prayers—will keep us from you.

A cutting wind sprang up suddenly from the north, carrying with
it the knife-edge of winter. One by one, the shapes of the Savages and
Father de Céligny shimmered, becoming misty and indistinct, then
vanishing entirely as though carried away into the darkness beyond the
trees and the rock cliffs by the sudden blast of frigid air.

I stood there till the first fingers of dawn coaxed the tentative
morning from the night’s entombment. Some vestiges of my courage
returned with the daylight. I let my aching body fall stiffly to my knees
in a prayer of thanks, and an invocation for the strength I would need for
what would—what
must
—come next.

I ate the remainder of the dried meat and corn mush that had been left
to me by Askuwheteau’s band before deserting me, and I drank some
of the water I had drawn the previous day, for my thirst was fierce. Had
it only been two days ago that I arrived at the godforsaken ruins of St.
Barthélemy? It seemed as though I had been there for an eternity, for
time had begun to turn inwards on itself with the progression of this
waking nightmare.

Despite my febrile, sleepless state, I remembered as a boy growing
up in Beauce, I had heard the legends and tales of these revenant
creatures, the
morts-vivants
who slumbered in their coffins beneath
the earth in churchyards and sepulchres and rose from their graves at
sundown to nourish themselves on the blood of the living. In the legends
I recalled, these creatures would never die unless a shaft of wood was
driven through their heart and, afterwards, the head stricken from the
body. Even as a child, I had dismissed these stories as peasant folk-tales
or, at worst, the blasphemous heresy that the Lord would allow the dead
to leave their tombs in order to walk about among the living before the
great Day of Judgement. And yet, here was that very abomination in the
flesh, and I had seen it with my own eyes.

I knew then as I had not known before what my true, God-ordained
mission was to be. I would have to kill this creature that had devilishly
disguised itself as a priest, and consign it to whatever Hell its soul was
destined.

As well, I was duty-bound to free the souls of the Savages who had
died to slake this monster’s unholy thirst. I owed it not only to these poor
people, but also to the honour of the Society of Jesus, for we were the
ones that provided its blasphemous disguise.

If the stories were true, and if Father de Céligny had brought his
plague with him from the Old World to the New, then he and the Savages
would have had to find a place to rest during the daylight hours. There
were no obvious graves (nor would there have been, in light of the
Savages animosity towards the interment of their dead, preferring, as
I understood the custom, to raise the departed one’s body on a sort of
platform above ground).

A thought came to me then, as a blessing from God. I remembered
the diabolical wolves that had stalked me without attacking when I came
too close to the cliffs outside the village yesterday morning. The very
same wolves that had proved such ruthlessly efficient jailers, which had
kept me inside the house until sunset when these creatures would once
again walk unencumbered through the night. If control of the wolves
through supernatural agency was within de Céligny’s power, than it
could only mean that they were protecting him while he slept.

Which meant, simply, that the place where he—where they—slept
could only be the place where the cliffs rose up. Perhaps there were caves.
Dark places where the light would not reach, wild places where they could
sleep undisturbed.

I searched the huts in the village and was in despair of finding what
I needed until I came to the last one, which seemed to be a storehouse
of some sort. In that hut, beneath a pungent heap of dried animal hides,
I found a bundle wrapped tightly beneath the skins. Eagerly, I pulled
it open and found a smallish bow and two crude arrows. Even to my
untrained eye it seemed old and warped, and more like a child’s toy than
an actual weapon. But I took it gladly, adding it to my poor arsenal, along
with a candle, and a tinderbox.