Whispers of the Flesh

by Louisa Burton

  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?”

  I cannot fail in this, he thought as he crossed to the door. He mustn’t fail.

  Were there nonhuman entities here or not? That was the question. It was his responsibility—his mission—to answer it.

  He stepped on a hard little ball that pitched him forward as it rolled away with a silvery jingle.

  Shit! David stumbled and fell, grabbing automatically at the nearby bed. Landing on the floor with a grunt, he found himself clutching the arm of the sleeping man, now bolting out of bed, his book tumbling to the floor as he flung David halfway across the room.

  “Qui est-tu?” demanded Darius, standing over David with an expression of fury. He was tall, with dark, overgrown hair in sleepy disarray, and fierce black eyes. “Qu’est-ce que tu fais?”


  “E-excusez-moi,” David stammered as he sat up, hands raised in a gesture of appeasement. “Je ne voulais pas—”

  “You,” Darius said in a gravelly, just-awakened voice, his vague accent nominally French, but with a trace of something older, almost primeval. “The English gardener.”

  “Er . . . Yes. Yes. I am, indeed.” David grabbed his hat and went to push himself off the floor, pausing as his hand brushed the little ball that had tripped him up. He lifted it, squinting in bewilderment.

  It was a walnut, sans husk, the two halves of the shell held together with a network of carefully knotted gold thread. Two threads dangled off it like tails, each one terminating in a tiny silver bell. “What the devil . . . ?”

  Darius sat on the bed with a sigh. “It’s . . .” He scraped a hand over his jaw with an expression that struck David as almost embarrassed. “. . . something I play with. Inigo made it for me.”

  David looked from Darius to the walnut, wondering how to respond to that. Before he could decide, Darius said, “You speak French remarkably well for a man who doesn’t speak French, Mr. Beckett.”

  Shit. David rose slowly to his feet as he dusted off his trousers, thinking Shit shit shit shit shit.

  Ten

  WHAT ARE YOU doing here?” demanded Darius, appalled to think that a stranger had found the well-hidden entrance to the footpath that led here.

  No sooner had he asked the question than he knew the answer. He’d known it on some level since the moment he’d sprung awake, bombarded by this human’s needs and desires, his arm buzzing ever so slightly where the bastard had grabbed him.

  Are there nonhuman entities here or not? That is the question. It is my responsibility to answer it.

  Just as it was now Darius’s responsibility—his undeniable compulsion, now that Beckett had touched him—to provide that answer.

  Fuck, thought Darius. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. The little hairs quivered from his nape right down to his tailbone. Were he in his feline persona right now, his fur would be bristling, his back arched.

  “You have me at a disadvantage, sir,” said Beckett. “You know who I am, but I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of—”

  “We’ve met.”

  Beckett regarded him with guarded curiosity. “When—”

  “Several times. My name, as I suspect you are already aware, is Darius.”

  “You must forgive me, but I do not recall having made your acquaintance.”

  With a resigned sigh, Darius said, “I can become invisible when forced into contact with humans. More commonly, I will adopt the guise of a cat, or sometimes a blue rock thrush. You’ve seen me in both of those incarnations.”

  Beckett’s nonplussed expression turned knowing. “I think Lili has told you that I credit the existence of demons, so you’ve decided to have a bit of fun at my expense. You’re not the first to do so, and I daresay you won’t be the last.”

  “I’m afraid the notion of ‘fun’ has been quite foreign to me for some time, and in any event, I do not lie.”

  “At all?”

  “Yes, I know,” Darius said. “Most people have trouble believing that it’s possible to go through life without telling the occasional—”

  “No, it’s not that. I believe it’s possible. I mean, I don’t lie, so—”

  “Christ, why the devil not?” Darius would if he could, at least when his survival was at stake.

  “I took a vow as a boy,” Beckett said.

  “It is a rare boy who exhibits such extraordinary righteousness.”

  “I did it at the behest of my nursery governess, but I was old enough to know what I was doing. Truth is a special virtue. We men are social animals, so each man naturally owes the other whatever is necessary for the preservation of human society. It would be impossible for men to live together unless we knew we could believe one another, speak the truth to one another.”

  Darius greeted this soliloquy with a few indolent claps. “Well done, Father.”

  Beckett looked taken aback, as Darius had expected.

  “You are a churchman, are you not?” Darius asked as he crossed to the corner cupboard and fetched a half-full bottle of wine. “That little speech about truth is straight out of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. Part two, question one hundred nine, article . . . two?”

  “Three.”

  Darius set two glasses on the marble table and squeaked the cork out of the bottle. “It is generally only ecclesiastics who can recite chapter and verse from the writings of the Church fathers.”

  “You can, and you’re not an ecclesiastic.” Placing his upturned hat on the marble table as a receptacle for his gloves, Beckett accepted the glass of wine Darius proffered. “You aren’t, are you?”

  “Hardly. À votre santé,” toasted Darius, raising his tumbler.

  “Santé.”

  Gesturing Beckett into the leather chair, Darius took a seat on his new Chinese book trunk. “My passion is not for religion, it is for feeding my greedy mind.” He sat back against the wall, crossing his legs as he brought his glass to his mouth. “I take it you’ve been sent here on a mission of exorcism. Else why would you be so intent upon determining whether there are ‘nonhuman entities’ here?”

  “How . . . that is, what makes you think I’m intent upon . . . ?”

  Prostrating himself once again at the altar of that merciless mistress, the Truth, Darius said, “When a human touches me, as you regrettably did just now, it sparks a psychic conduit that transmits, in the space of a split second, that human’s deepest desires—which I must then strive to fulfill, regardless of how they may inconvenience me, disturb me, even sicken me. This is intrinsic in my race, an involuntary physical reaction akin to an electrical current. I can no more prevent it than I could prevent my next breath.”

  With something very much like a smirk, Beckett said, “If you’re trying to convince me that you’re a demon, you shall have to—”

  “You humans throw that word ‘demon’ around rather cavalierly,” Darius said. “Any being who appears human, or roughly human, but is not must be either an angel or a devil in your scheme of things—either good or bad. Therefore, if I’m not an angel—and I promise you, I am not—I must be a servant of the Prince of Darkness, is that right?”

  “I suppose that’s the gist of it.”

  “Well, Father, as it happens, Old Scratch and I aren’t even on speaking terms, so you may want to save your holy water for some more meaningful purpose.”

  “It is not I who would perform the rite of exorcism. I’m not even a priest, not yet—I’m still in minor orders. I was sent here because I’m something of an expert on demonological matters. It strikes me as unlikely that an exorcism is called for, though. I have yet to encounter any actual proof that this place is inhabited by anyone other than normal human beings—such as yourself.” With a smile and a shrug, he said, “You cannot be what you claim to be, Darius. I felt your warmth through your shirtsleeve. Demons are cold to the touch.”

  “Actually, the body temperature of most Follets is about what is normal for humans, give or take a few degrees.” Grinning at the Englishman’s expression of bemused forbearance, Darius said, “Have you concluded yet that I am mad?”

  “If you are not, then it is as I said before. You are simply amusing yourself at my expense. After all, knowing who I am and why I’m here, why on earth would you freely admit to being a dem—a Follet?”

  Darius sighed as he refilled their glasses. “Because, as I have already explained, I am compelled by a physiological force beyond my control to satisfy your desire for the truth about the presence of our kind at Grotte Cachée. As for what I’m going to do about you to make sure you don’t go running to your Church superiors with the information I’m being forced to reveal . . .”

  Darius scratched his morning stubble as he thought about it. Beckett could not be permitted to leave here with this damning information. This valley had been a haven to him and his fellow Fo
llets for a very long time—a haven they would lose if outsiders were to discover the truth about them.

  “Christ, but I wish one of the others was here,” Darius muttered into his wineglass. “They know how to deal with humans.”

  “Others?”

  “I am not the only Follet who makes his home at Grotte Cachée. Lili, Elic, and Inigo are—”

  “Lili?”

  “She is what is commonly referred to as a succubus, although the Babylonians considered her a—”

  “That’s enough.” Beckett stood abruptly, wine sloshing from his glass. “You will leave her name out of this perverse heresy.”

  Oh, for pity’s sake. “For an expert on demons, you certainly are hard to convince.”

  Not only was Darius obligated to satisfy Beckett’s quest for answers about the Follets, he felt an increasingly fervent need to provide them. It always happened this way, with the human’s desires gradually insinuating themselves into Darius’s mind until he was utterly fixated on satisfying them. In essence, the human’s wants and needs became his wants and needs, usurping whatever else he cared about at the moment, including his own well-being. This psychic thralldom didn’t stop until the desire in question had been fulfilled.

  “Demonology is a science, not a superstition,” Beckett said. “I need to be persuaded by irrefutable evidence before I accept a claim as fact.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  Darius pulled his legs up and crouched on the trunk, arms bent and slightly outstretched. The more similar his position before and after the conversion, the less jolting it would be.

  “What are you doing?” Beckett asked.

  “Providing irrefutable evidence.” Darius closed his eyes, held his breath, and concentrated fiercely. Before his next heartbeat, he was tottering on eight spindly toes, wings fluttering for balance, eyes squeezed shut to block out his dizzyingly panoramic range of vision until he’d attained some equilibrium.