Thomas M. Disch

by The Priest

  Jekyll drinks in the movie when he wants to become Mr. Hyde. It sort of greased the hinges on the door. But the tattoo was the doorway.”

  Wolf put down the tattoo gun, took a Kleenex from a box on the counter, and dabbed blood from the zigzagging line of Satan’s teeth. “How’s it going?

  Startin’ to get into it?”

  Father Bryce nodded. He fixed his eyes on the filament of the bulb overhead and tried to will his mind into the same state of whited-out blankness.

  The pain began again almost at once, and Wolf went on: “I got a theory.

  It goes along with why I called this place Knightriders, which is not because of the movie. It’s to do with armor. This all comes out of another time I was getting tattooed, when I was dropping acid and I got this idea that the tattoos was like a coat of armor. I was close to having full coverage by then.

  It wasn’t like the tats was some kind of bulletproof protection—there’s guys who had that idea, but most of ‘em are dead—it was more like the knight is riding the horse, and armor is riding the knight. Like the armor is some kind of alien that takes over what you do. Like the tattoos get to be in charge.

  They ride us. Can you dig that, Damon?

  “Damon?”

  Father Bryce nodded once, he could dig it, and then, as the vomit he’d been trying to make himself swallow spilled down across his cheek, he fainted dead away.

  IV

  Silvanus de Roquefort, Bishop of Rodez and Montpellier-le-Vieux, was attired with unusual splendor to celebrate the Feast of Saint Macanus, which falls on the second of January, which was also the anniversary of his consecration. Ergo, all the pomp. But a more practical purpose was served by the layers of vestments in which he was encased—alb, tunicle, chasuble, and pallium, to mention only those that served to keep out the chill—for it was unusually cold in the abbey church of Notre Dame de Gevaudon. In the morning hours the church lay within the shadow of the escarpments of the fortress of Montpellier-le-Vieux, and only the dead who were interred there—many de Roqueforts among them—could have taken comfort in their surroundings. For the larger part of the congregation, who must stand beyond the altar screen in the as-yet-uncompleted nave, beneath a canopy of dripping rushes, there could be little sense of a holiday being celebrated—the third within eight days—but only of a mortification to be endured. As he ascended the pulpit to deliver his homily, the Bishop could not resist feeling a certain satisfaction in the evident misery of those assembled before him, for their presence attested eloquently to the power that had brought them here so much against the grain of their own fleshly will—the conjoint power of the Bishop de Roquefort and of Holy Mother Church.

  “My dear children,” the Bishop began, speaking not in Latin but in the language of his listeners, “the flesh is evil. In that matter the heretics among you are correct. Whether they go by the name of Cathars, or Albigensians, or Waldensians, heretics know that much. Heresy has a nose, and it can smell corruption. For what is our flesh but meat, and what does meat do after only a little while? It decays, it rots, it becomes a lodging house for maggots. You will all die—the fat merchant and squinch-eyed lime-burner, the gravid mother and the nursing child, priest and prince and prisoner—none will be spared, all will become dead meat, a feast for worms, a noxious thing that must be buried where it can’t be seen or smelled.

  “And then, when it has been lodged within the earth, when the soil is packed tight about its face as though it were an onion or a radish, why, what then? Why, that is only the beginning of your terrors. For then—and the day will be soon!—the trumpets of Judgment shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, like onions torn up from their bed, and merchant and mason and mother and child shall stand naked before their Judge, with their sins written on their skin as though it were parchment. On the merchant’s skin a dog gnaws a bone as a token of his greed and gluttony, and the Judge surrenders the merchant to the demons waiting to run him through with a spit, like a chicken that’s to be roasted, and then in the undying fires of hell he will be turned on the spit as he screams in endless pain. On the mason’s skin the Judge reads marks of sloth and lechery, and he is given over to the citadel of hell, where through eternity he is crushed by the weight of the stone he must bear up an endless steep incline as jeering demons scourge him with whips. And the mother’s skin is a veritable nest of vipers, as lusts that were invisible writhe up from within and spread across her skin, and she is given over to the demons, and how they deal with her I may not say, though you may all imagine it quite well. And her child that nursed at her breast? What of that child?

  That unbaptized child? Its skin is black with the stain of original sin, and that child is forfeited to hell as well, as are all who die unbaptized or unshriven. Without the sacraments, outside the Church, there is no salvation!

  This is what Augustine says: Noli credere, nec dicere, nec docere, infantes ante quam baptizentur morte praeventos posse ad originalium indulgentiam peccatorum, si vis esse catholicus. Which is to say, Do not believe, or say, or teach that the unbaptized infant can be forgiven original sin—not if you wish to be a Catholic.

  “My dear children, this is why heresy must be hunted down and extirpated. This is why there can be no clemency or compromise, for the aim of heresy is nothing less than the destruction of the Church and the triumph of Satan. The heretics would pull us all down to the pit with them, if they could have their way. I have heard some say that the Crusaders were cruel and merciless after the capture of Béziers. That the slaughter of so many of the city’s inhabitants—in fact, of all of them—was merciless and un-Christian.

  But against heresy there can be no mercy, not from God, nor yet by God’s deputy here on earth, His Holiness the Pope, in whose name and at whose urging the Crusaders fought. There was opportunity for the citizens to leave Béziers with their Bishop, and that opportunity was refused. And before that they might have surrendered the heretics among themselves, but no, that demand could not be met, for it violated their rights as the free citizens of Béziers.”

  The Bishop paused to savor the irony of that phrase. He knew there were those among his congregation who had claimed a similar autonomy for the “free citizens” of Montpellier-le-Vieux, who felt that heresy was a sin like other sins, a matter for the conscience and the confessional.

  “And so, my dear children, those free citizens of Béziers stood upon the ramparts of their city, thinking themselves safe from retribution, and taunted the armies assembled below them and hailed down missiles on the cavalry in their armor and the routiers in their rags. But it was those ragged mercenaries who breached the gate and threw into confusion those free citizens—but let us call them by their true name— those contumacious heretics! And slew them, man, woman, and child! And burned their free city of Béziers to the ground. The very cathedral was sundered in two as a judgment for having sheltered heresy.

  “0 my dear children, accept the fate of that city as a warning to yourselves. Surrender your heretics to the Holy Inquisition. You may speak to your confessors in confidence, or if you lack confidence in your confessor, if you fear he may not be zealous, then you may approach the Holy Office directly. If you have but doubts or misgivings concerning a friend, a neighbor, even a relative, share them with us that the cleansing may begin. If you do not, if you shirk the hard task now, you may pay a terrible price later, when your shepherd will not be present to protect you.”

  The Bishop lifted .his crozier, symbol of his pastoral authority. He scanned the faces of the congregation before him and took note of those whose eyes dared meet his own. Among them were those of Bonamico, the master mason from Lombardy, whom the Bishop knew to be a skeptic and libertine, like so many of his confraternity. Bonamico resented having been impressed into the Bishop’s service, along with some thirty other Lombard workmen who had been employed, at much better wages, in repairing the fortifications of Carcassonne. Their employer, the Viscount of Aude, had not been in a position to gainsay the Bishop’s r
equest, since he was beholden to him for his appointment as the military governor of the newly pacified region. Bonamico’s work had been near completion, in any case. The mason resented his forced service in the construction of Notre Dame de Gevaudon and had twice attempted to flee his obligation, for which the Bishop had been obliged to make an example of him. After these floggings the man’s baleful glare was not to be wondered at. The Bishop did not care about dark looks or mumbled curses, so long as Bonamico and his Lombards accomplished the special, covert task assigned to them. Then he might receive the wages of his insolence.

  Nearer the pulpit from which the Bishop regarded his flock was a figure toward whom it was more difficult to maintain an attitude of tolerance and forbearance. Though her face was obscured by a veil of black lace, the Bishop was certain that the eyes of Marquesia de Gaillac, could they be seen, would have shone with an enmity and malice more implacable than Bonamico’s. One of the woman’s daughters had been married to a known Cathar, Jean Cambitor, and the Bishop was quite sure that the faith of Madame de Gaillac was cut from the same heretical cloth. Indeed, he suspected that she was a perftcta—the Cathars, among their other abominations, admitted women into the ranks of their apostate clergy.

  Just the sight of the woman, standing before him with every outward sign of respect, infuriated the Bishop, who was stirred thereby to take his homily in a direction he had not planned, telling his flock the instructive story of a certain man of Brabant who discovered the unholy practice of certain midwives who, when they deliver a child, dedicate its life to the devil. The man had hidden himself and seen his own daughter act in this manner in the delivery of his own son, and he’d seen his newly delivered son climbing up the chain by which the cooking pots were suspended. In terror at what he’d seen, the man insisted that his child at once be baptized. When the child was being carried to the next village, where there was a church, they had to cross a bridge. The man would not allow his daughter to carry the child over the bridge but, putting a sword to her throat, insisted that the child must cross the bridge by himself. Being compelled, the midwife put down the child and invoked the devil by her art, and suddenly the child was seen on the other side of the bridge.

  The Bishop paused at this point in his remarkable tale to allow its fearful import to be digested. There was much to mull over: the perfidy of women, and of midwives in particular; the extraordinary power of Satan and of those, even infants, dedicated to his service; and—this above all!—the obligation of a good Catholic to prefer the Church’s well-being above his own or his family’s. For the conclusion of the story, as the Bishop now related, was that the man accused both his daughter and his wife before the Inquisition, and the two women, after a period of purgation, were burned at the stake.

  Did Madame de Gaillac feel the particular relevance of this tale? Did she shudder within her dark veil? Did she have some premonition that she might share such a fiery fate? Those leagued with the devil sometimes are gifted with second sight, but never in matters touching their own welfare. In these they are blind, or even deceived, for the Father of Lies is impartial in the matter of deception.

  The Bishop concluded his homily with a tribute to Saint Macanus, who was a pupil of Saint Anthony and one of the Desert Fathers. The Bishop told how the skull of a pagan had spoken to Macanus, revealing secrets concerning the governance of hell, where the Jews were consigned to a deeper pit than the pagans. But deeper than the Jews, the skull revealed, was the place reserved for unregenerate and heretical Christians, closest to where Satan himself, the Archfiend, was bound to a burning gridiron with red-hot chains. As he screamed, he would reach out and seize the damned and press them, like clusters of grapes, into his insatiable maw. Not all of these details derived from the particular revelation of Saint Macanus. The Bishop collated many sources in painting his picture of the afterlife that awaited the Church’s enemies. His aim was not scholarly exactitude but vividness, and when he descended from his pulpit, he felt he had achieved his aim.

  In the sacristy, the Bishop dismissed the abbot and the deacons of Notre Dame who had assisted at the Mass and was divested with the aid only of his famulus, Abbé St-Loup, who had acted today as thurifer and as a result still gave off a penetrating odor of frankincense. Abbé St-Loup was a short, plump cleric of fifty-four years notable rather for his skill at beekeeping and viticulture than for his piety. He was also, unfortunately, the Bishop’s half brother, one of many such offspring that the Bishop’s father, Aimeric III, Count of Roquefort, had sired in his headstrong youth outside the bonds of wedlock. Most of these blots on the good name of the family had found places of service in the de Roquefort household or had been shipped off to the Crusades, either to the Holy Land or to Toulouse, where they’d killed infidels and heretics and, such was God’s will, been killed themselves. Of all Aimeric’s bastards, only St-Loup survived, thanks to his having been dedicated to the service of the cross rather than that of the sword. For that reason as well, he had become the particular charge of his ten-years-younger, legitimate half brother, Silvanus, who felt toward him a temperate but implacable detestation that St-Loup answered with a fawning deference and sly insinuations of fraternal affection. He was a thorn in the Bishop’s side but, as so often in such cases, the Bishop could not be quit of him. He was a wound that would not heal for picking at the scab. The Bishop needed to have his half brother about to torment, and by having him about he secured his own misery as well.

  “Your Grace was most eloquent today in his homily,” St-Loup declared with a cringe of reverence as he accepted the crozier from the Bishop’s hand and began to remove the enamel pins that secured the seamless fabric of the pallium. Then, lest this seem insufficient: “Your Grace is always eloquent.”

  “Never mind my eloquence. Mind the pins!”

  “Indeed, Your Grace! The pins—and the pallium! Such a privilege to be allowed to assist in your disrobing when you wear the pallium. I feel almost as though I were touching the garment of our Savior Himself.”

  The Bishop was, in fact, somewhat vain concerning the pallium. It was a vestment usually reserved for the use of the Pope and of archbishops. Its wool came from special lambs that had been blessed by His Holiness on the feast day of Saint Agnes, January twenty-first, and then entrusted to the canons of St.

  John Lateran and raised by nuns of an order particularly devoted to this task until they were ready to be shorn. In all Europe there were only eight episcopal sees whose bishops were privileged to wear the pallium: Autun, Bamberg, Dol, Lucca, Ostia, Pavia, Verona, and the Bishop’s own diocese of Rodez and Montpellier-le-Vieux. It was a distinction that the Bishop could not help but suppose prefigured further distinctions to come. But to hear Abbé St-Loup speak of it in his tone of oily sycophancy was a defilement, as though the garment’s white wool had been besmirched with excrement.

  “Oh, look at this!” the Abbé marveled, holding up the rarest of ±e pins for the Bishop’s closer admiration. “Is this an amethyst? Or is it a chip from very heaven’s dome?”

  The man exposed the black stumps of his teeth in a grimace of pious cupidity, and the Bishop, unable to repress his annoyance, swatted at the hand holding the pin as at a fly.

  St-Loup yelped as the point of the gold pin penetrated the soft heel of his hand. A gout of blood formed where the skin was pierced, and before the Bishop could back away from him, the gout swelled to the size of a small grape and dropped down across the pallium, where it formed a slantwise red mark like a virgule just below the Bishop’s pectoral cross.

  “Clod!” the Bishop screamed in dismay, for he knew, at the first sight of the stain on the wool, that it was indelible, that some faint trace of St-Loup’s blood would always remain upon the pallium, which itself was irreplaceable and inalienable—almost, in a way, the Bishop’s second skin, for whoever received the pallium knew that he was destined to be buried in it.

  Even to lend it to another cleric, howsoever high his office, was not permitted. And now the Bishop’s
pallium had been soiled forever by this oafish prelate’s mongrel blood.

  The Bishop grasped hold of his crozier and struck Abbé St-Loup across the face. The gilded and bejeweled shepherd’s crook made a formidable weapon.

  The Abbé covered his face with his hands and fell to his knees, begging forgiveness. The Bishop struck him again, slamming the bottom end of the staff into the small of his back.

  “Mercy, my lord!” the Abbé gasped.

  Not by any impulse of mercy but from a sudden, searing pain that spread across his own chest, the Bishop desisted. Now it was his turn to gasp, and to fall to his knees. But of whom could he beg for mercy? What instrument had dealt this terrible pain? He tore at the vestments that wrapped him, layer upon precious layer, trying to discover the source of his suffering and to assuage it. He dropped the crozier, cast off his miter, clawed at the golden chain from which his pectoral cross hung pendant, but he no more had the power to remove the chain than if he’d been a blackamoor trying to tear off his fetters.

  The pain was unbearable. It was as though he were being flayed alive. As though the single enameled pin that had pierced the Abbé’s flesh were now puncturing his—not once but infinitely many times.

  The Abbé, still prostrated on the stony floor, saw the Bishop’s paroxysms with such astonishment that he forgot, at first, to be fearful. “My lord?” he ventured timidly.

  But the Bishop had become quite oblivious of him. It almost seemed—but this was a terrible thought—that he had been possessed. The Abbé scrambled to his feet and backed toward the heavy oak door of the sacristy.

  The Bishop summoned up the strength to command: “Leave me!”

  The Abbé left with no more persuasion.

  The pain continued, but with some abatement, so that the Bishop was able to remove his pectoral cross and to slip the pallium from his shoulders. But with the folds of the pallium bunched about his knees, he found it impossible to untangle himself from chasuble, tunicle, alb. He collapsed to the floor with his arms spread across his chest, his fingers clutching his shoulders, as though to protect himself from his invisible torturer.