Whispers of the Flesh (8 page)

Nine

I
SHOULD TURN BACK,
David thought after his foot slid for the second time on the deer trail, mud-slicked from yesterday’s rain, that he was climbing through the densely forested north face of Alp Albiorix with the aid of a covered lantern and a walking stick. It would be arduous enough to negotiate such rough terrain at midday in good weather, but this misty predawn gloom made it especially perilous—as did the craggy ravine dropping off just to his right, in which a stream burbled about eighty feet below.

He wouldn’t be out here, risking life and limb, were he not leaving Grotte Cachée tomorrow. This was his next to last chance to locate the little bedchamber where Serges Bourgoin had a book snatched away from him by an invisible hand—or so he claimed. Bourgoin was a drunk, after all, and the events he recounted had occurred many years before.

Having abandoned any hope of locating the chamber from within the mind-skewing, mazelike cave, for the past five days, David had risen in the wee hours of the morning to try to find the entrance that Bourgoin had described as being hidden behind a pair of walnut trees that looked like
“les jambes des soldats géants.”

It was grueling work, though, especially today, with this choking fog and treacherous footing. He would prefer to do his exploring in full daylight—surely he wouldn’t be the first houseguest to hike up this mountain for sport—but for the time it would steal from his landscaping work. Not only would that raise questions, but David had found himself taking pleasure in that work to a degree that he would not have anticipated.

For the first time, he was in a position to put to practical use the horticultural and artistic disciplines that had consumed his adolescent mind, and he found it immensely gratifying. He frequently got so wrapped up in his plans for Grotte Cachée’s gardens and parklands that he had to force himself to put them aside so as to address his primary objective, that of determining whether the valley had been the site of demonic activity for centuries.

During his self-guided excursions through the nearly impenetrable woods that blanketed the valley, David had come upon trees growing in eerily twisted shapes, as well as a stone altar in a clearing in the woods—a freshly mowed clearing—that looked as if it dated back to the ancient Gauls. These things, like the magnetic force in the cave, the satyr statues, and Dusivæsus, while curious, were not necessarily indicative of a demoniacal presence.

David doubted he would be able to contrive an audience with
le seigneur,
and the recluse called Darius remained equally elusive. The other denizens of this place, residents and staff alike, had revealed nothing of import either in response to David’s subtle interrogations or during conversations in French on which he eavesdropped while presumably unable to understand a word. From time to time, he revisited the subject of demons with Lili, but thus far, none of their conversations had borne fruit.

His lack of progress was frustrating, as was every second he spent in the company of Lili, whose flirtatious glances and beguiling smiles put his vow of chastity to continual test. He hadn’t kissed her since their enchanted interlude in
la Galerie des Diamants Noirs
five days ago, hadn’t even touched her except to escort her by the arm on their occasional strolls about the grounds. What transpired between them that afternoon would surely never have occurred but for the unbridling influence of
le magnétisme hallucinatoire.

David recalled, with a bitter chuckle, what he’d written with such smug assurance to Bishop Sullivan.
It goes without saying that I shall refrain from becoming too familiar with those whom I meet here, so as to avoid jeopardizing the credibility of my conclusions.
Eighteen hours later, he’d had his face between Lili’s thighs.

He had resolved, upon coming to his senses afterward, to confess the incident in full to Father Cullen, but hard as he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to truly regret it. Nor could he manage to put it out of his mind. Indeed, he relived it every night as he lay in bed aching with unrelieved lust.

Even now, as David picked his way up this blasted mountain one painstaking step after another, he grew half hard remembering the feel and smell and taste of her, the way her sex squeezed his fingers when she came, the way she thrashed and moaned and cried out—especially the first time. She climaxed perhaps a dozen times in all, a veritable riot of pleasure.

It was a pleasure he could have shared. “
Have you never wanted to lie with a woman, David? You must have wondered how it would feel to have a woman pleasure you with her mouth.”
Resisting her entreaties had taken every scrap of moral strength at his disposal, especially given the effect of
le magnétisme.
His satisfaction in having done so, however, gave him little solace, underscored as it was by a self-righteousness that he couldn’t seem to banish either by prayer or force of will.

It was a struggle with which David was familiar. “
A priest should be, first and foremost, a man of faith, not an exemplar of correct behavior—or a slave to it.”

David flinched as something hard struck the crown of his hat and rolled off, landing on the path in front of him. He crouched down, holding his lantern close to the ground, although the sky had paled enough that it served little point.

Lying on a slab of stone half buried in mud was a small green sphere that he recognized as the outer husk of a walnut; several more were scattered nearby. Peering up through the milky haze, he made out a canopy of heavily leafed branches bearing clusters of the ripe nuts.

The tree itself, which grew on the far side of a clearing to the left, was extraordinarily tall, with a massive trunk and gnarled roots that crawled over and around an oblong boulder at its base. A similar tree stood nearby, each of them swathed, from the root-covered boulder to a point about twenty feet up the trunk, in a mantle of woolly green moss.

David smiled as he took in the pair of monumental trees with their boots of moss.
“Les jambes des soldats géants,”
he whispered.

A mesh of underbrush, saplings, and vines between the trees obscured what lay beyond—but David suspected he knew what he would find there. As he crossed the clearing, he noticed a trampled-down path in the spongy grass that bore the imprints of booted feet; it emerged from the woods to the west, disappearing behind the soldiers’ legs. This David followed, circling the barrier to find a nearly vertical wall of rock with two openings, one fitted out with shutters, the other with a door; both were painted green.

The window shutters stood open. Through them, David could see a frayed old tapestry hanging on the far wall and the foot of a narrow cast iron bed. Setting down his lantern and walking stick, he approached the window slowly, cursing the dried leaves that crackled underfoot.

A dark-haired man clad in a shirt and trousers, braces dangling, feet bare, lay faceup on the pillow-heaped bed with his head turned toward the wall and a book open on his chest. David read the title upside down:
Jacques le Fataliste
by Denis Diderot.

David knew of this book. It had been condemned by the French government two or three years ago on moral and religious grounds, and all copies of it had been destroyed—except, apparently, the one this fellow had been reading when he fell asleep. On a little table next to the bed stood an unlit oil lamp and a short stack of other books with titles in French, English, Latin, and some other language with an unfamiliar and exotic alphabet.

Was this, at long last, the mysterious Darius? Who else could he be? He lived in a cave, after all; was there a more hermitlike abode? It was an abode David was eager to explore.

He stood there for a minute considering his options. He could come back later in the day, but there was no guarantee that Darius wouldn’t still be there, and a very good chance that David’s absence from the château and its immediate environs would be noted. From the slow, steady rise and fall of the man’s chest, David gathered he was in a deep sleep. As a boy, David had acquired a talent for moving about noiselessly in order to avoid a cuff in the head should he awaken his brother Peter, with whom he shared a room.

David tried the door; it was unlocked, and the knob turned without squeaking. He took off his boots, eased the door open, and passed through it on stockinged feet, grateful to find the stone floor within carpeted with a scruffy old Persian rug; it would help to muffle his footfalls.

By the grayish dawn light, he took stock of the
petite salle confortable
with its walls of rough volcanic stone and its incongruously homey furnishings. In one corner, next to a row of pegs hung with clothing, stood a green-painted cupboard; in another, a large trunk of Oriental design. A leather chair and a little marble table faced a stone fireplace with a chimney that disappeared into a cave shaft.

The chamber’s most remarkable feature was a pair of shelves supported between two snarled rootlike formations that emerged from the ceiling and disappeared through the floor. At first, David took them for something akin to stalactites, but on closer examination, they were indeed the roots of ancient trees that had somehow become calcified.

A row of books, one of them a Bible, occupied the top shelf, with various bottles and flasks arranged on the bottom, as well as a crucible, a scale, and a microscope. Braced between a mortar and pestle and a blue and white porcelain leech jar was a book which David pulled out, noting without surprise that it was not wrested from him by an invisible force. The title was stamped in gilt on the cover.

BELL’S
GREAT OPERATIONS
OF SURGERY
_________________
PRICE FIVE GUINEAS

He opened the book to the first illustration, a large and skillfully executed color lithograph of a negro man—a cadaver, hopefully—with his head sliced open, the various layers of flesh peeled back to expose the brain. Swallowing down the sting of bile in his throat, he shut the book and returned it to its place.

A volume on the top shelf caught his eye:
Les Liaisons dangereuses
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Sliding it out, he found it to be an older edition than that which Peter had kept hidden under his mattress to read in secret, their father having banned it for depicting the French aristocracy as wicked and decadent. David flipped to the title page, which gave the date of publication as 1782. It was a first printing, and signed by the author, to boot, judging from the inscription inked across the page.

Octobre 1782
Pour Darius, de Votre Ami Dévoué, Pierre

For Darius, eh? David turned to look at the sleeping man, whose robust physique and unlined face would suggest that he was no older than thirty. The book had been signed forty-seven years earlier. Assuming the occupant of the bed was, indeed, the Darius of whom Archer and the others had spoken, he had to be the namesake of the father or grandfather to whom the book had been inscribed.

David padded cautiously over to the tapestry, which he pulled aside. There was, indeed, a cavernous chamber on the other side, its walls lined floor to ceiling with fully stocked bookshelves. Two small shafts to the outside, located near the lofty ceiling, provided just enough light to see by as David stepped into the
bibliothèque secrete
and pulled a book at random from its shelf.

No unseen hand snatched it away. He withdrew several more, from different shelves; nothing. He did feel slightly light-headed, but that was to be expected, given the cave’s magnetic charge.

David returned to the bedchamber, exasperated at his failure to get to the root of the various accounts, over the past four centuries, of diabolical occurrences at Grotte Cachée.

Bourgoin’s ravishment by a
“Démon féminin,”
real though it had seemed to him the following morning, could very well have been a dream not unlike that which David himself had experienced during his first night here.

The medieval chambermaid who saw a woman turn into a man may, indeed, have been delusional.

Domenico Vitturi’s memoir of courtesans being schooled in debauchery by two men of unnatural sexual capacities, one of them evidently a satyr, may simply have been a bawdy tale to amuse his friends.

A satyr was also mentioned in the letter “from one little red fox to another” about the depraved slave auction in which they’d sold themselves to rich libertines. Coincidence? Or was it, perchance, the opium delusion of a young woman surrounded by statues of men with tails and horns and pointed ears?

Would he ever know for sure? To return to England with no clear conclusions for his superiors, no way to advise them as to the need for exorcism of the buildings or inhabitants of Grotte Cachée, was a humiliating prospect. Despite his youth, David had acquired, in ecclesiastical circles at any rate, a reputation as a brilliant demonologist. Had not Cardinal Lazzari himself requested him for this mission after reading
Dæmonia
and pronouncing it “an erudite and persuasive treatment of an increasingly enigmatic subject?”