The French Executioner

by C. C. Humphreys

  How long they waited, the Fugger had no clue, for time was absent from these dark reaches. To stay awake, he paced out the limits of his large cell, seeking some little hope in the near darkness. But the walls that funnelled up in smoke were clammy and sheer, the water that surged beneath the wooden stopper – he had dared to prise it open and look – was a maelstrom, terror for a strong swimmer, death to one such as he.

  The only way out was the way in. He paused before the door for the fiftieth time, scanning its strong oak beams, iron bands and studs. The only hope is beyond, he thought, and as he thought it he heard a noise and such little hope as there was ended with it, for the noise developed into a chant that he recognised. It was the Latin Mass. Yet the words were a corruption of that tongue, and within its deep repetitions he heard the high, shrill note of desperate weeping.

  A scraping of a key in the lock and the door moved slowly inwards, the chanting surged and he knew what was wrong with it. He was still scholar enough to understand what they were doing, these eight cowled figures who moved steadily, two by two, into the chamber, swinging censers filled with burning sandalwood. As they swung they chanted, and they were indeed reciting the High Mass. But they were reciting it backwards.

  He reeled away from the cortège and fled to the side to press himself into the rock as if it could be made to melt and he to disappear through it. Yet he could only slip down the walls and curl up, press hand and stump to his ears, try not to hear.

  The Devil was abroad in the world, everyone knew. All had to be vigilant against him. Had not even his own beloved Luther been confronted by him, hurled a Bible at him back in Augsburg? And these men were now inviting the Devil to join them in this chamber. The Fugger had heard how such invitations were issued and now the preparations began to make an awful sense, more so as the rest of the procession entered the room.

  A woman followed the cowled, chanting figures, as naked and open as they were covered and hid. Only the flimsiest of silk loincloths adorned her, her full breasts rising and falling as she matched the monks’ steady pace, now hidden, now revealed by the unbridled tresses of her hair. The swaying of her ample figure betrayed, it seemed to the Fugger, her voluptuous nature, disclosed again in the secret smile beneath a leather eye mask. She reminded him instantly of the statue at the Fonte Gaia. He was drawn by the memory, repelled by it, could not look away. She entered the glass chamber on bare feet, gliding through the two lines the monks had made, and took her place before the altar.

  The female form that followed her could not have provided more of a contrast. She was covered neck to foot in linen of purest and unsullied white, gold sandals on her feet, her hair held in a wreath of blue and yellow cornflowers. Even with the concealing robe, the Fugger could see she was barely a woman – a thin girl’s body, a pale and freckled face, smirched by tears flowing ceaselessly, the desperation of her weeping increasing as she saw into what place she entered.

  A man in black armour held her in his arms, marching at the funereal pace the chanting dictated. Faceless, a visor of the same dark sheen, the slits in it the bars of a cage within a cage. The stride remorseless, the blows of the girl’s hands the weak flutterings of a moth against lamp glass. He too marched into the kaleidoscope and straight up to the altar where he laid the girl before the inverted cross. Out of his arms, she seemed suddenly calmer, until the Fugger recognised a new aspect to her demeanour, one so familiar to him – an animal in a trap, paralysed by fear.

  The armoured man moved from the glass dome to pick up Abraham from his cot, depositing him on the floor inside. Then he emerged again and raised one gauntleted hand to beckon the Fugger. He knew who summoned him. He had seen, staring through the slits in the visor, the eyes of Heinrich von Solingen. If there had been anywhere to flee, he might have made the attempt. But there was no escape, only this inevitability. Rising, he passed the black armoured sentinel and found that his pace was matching the rhythm of the chants, which seemed to rise in a crescendo as he entered, then ceased altogether when the glass door lowered, entombing them all.

  Thirteen, he thought, counting the occupants. Dear God, thirteen. Holy Father, protect thy servant.

  Silence, untainted even by the girl’s whimpering, stretched for several heartbeats, broken finally by a cowled figure at the front who lowered the censer he’d been wielding to the ground, picked up a hazel wand as tall as himself and rapped its iron-shod tip three times upon the floor.

  ‘Corpus Hermeticum,’ a silky voice said from within the folds of cloth. ‘Let us seek the wisdom of Hermes. Let us speak the true words of Thoth.’

  As he spoke, Giancarlo Cibo threw off his monkish robes. He was naked but for a shift of silk wrapped round his thin waist. Turning to face his followers, he cried out, ‘Let malefaction reign!’

  ‘Malefaction!’ came the roared echo as seven more robes were discarded and the monks, clad even as their master, began to gather items from around the walls. When each was ready they formed a circle around the cauldron, the naked shape of the mistress at their centre, Cibo to her right. Only the girl, immobile in terror on the altar, von Solingen in his blank black armour, the unseeing Abraham and the unwilling Fugger now remained beyond their ring.

  The circle slowly started to move widdershins, against the clock. When the naked woman reached the central place before the altar again, she raised a bundle over the cauldron, a sack bound in twine that twisted and wriggled in the rising heat. Despite the desperate jerking, she held the bag there, leading the circle around. Then she began to chant.

  Toad and the stool

  Which he cowers under,

  Brain of bat

  With head split asunder

  And she dropped the wriggling bag into the cauldron.

  The bag sparked and flashed, what was within twisted and shrieked as it landed in the bubbling liquid. Then everyone joined her in the next words.

  Stir it into

  Satan’s broth,

  Sacrifice

  To conjure Thoth

  The next participant reached the apex of the circle, a jowly, tonsured monk who cried, as he threw his bundle,

  Hemlock and henbane,

  Belladonna, nightshade,

  Opium for dreams

  God has not made

  And the cry, in unison:

  Stir it into

  Satan’s broth,

  Sacrifice

  To conjure Thoth

  The next man stepped up, chanted, threw.

  Mandrake shaped

  Like the nub of man,

  Shroud from a plague pit,

  Courtesan’s fan

  A chorus, another verse, the speaking coming faster:

  Tooth of tiger,

  Silver adder’s tongue,

  Entrails of she-wolf

  That never had young

  Faster now, the circle speeding around. The stench coming from the cauldron, flesh and plants of power combined, was piercing, acrid fumes making the Fugger’s eyes run, his nostrils stream. The whirling made him nauseous and he rested his head, tried to block out the words, managed not to listen to all the verses. But when that familiar silky voice spoke out, he couldn’t help but be drawn out again into the spell.

  Blood from baby

  Torn from Mother’s hug,

  Churchyard earth

  From grave new dug

  The circle was spinning so fast now that people were beginning to cry out, in fear, in exhilaration. On Cibo’s last words, when his clod of soaked earth hit the pot, there was a unanimous cry, the last chorus seeming to come from one voice:

  Stir it into

  Satan’s broth,

  Sacrifice

  To conjure THOTH!

  A giant flame shot from the cauldron. The circle crashed to a halt, bodies falling outwards. One maddened monk barrelled into the silent, black armoured figure and bounced off. The Fugger buried his head again as another monk fell on him.

  Only one man was still moving, his left hand spilling c
oloured sand in a large circle on the floor. He quickly filled the circle with the lines of a five-pointed star. Within that pentangle he wrote, with the falling, gore-red sand, the words ‘suproc tse coh’.

  Something was shaken out of a velvet bag to fall into the centre of the star of sand, onto the reversed words.

  ‘Suproc tse coh!’ cried the Archbishop of Siena. ‘Hoc est corpus!’

  And, gazing down upon the six-fingered hand of Anne Boleyn, the coven set about the raising of the dead.

  High above them, yet already far below the surface, something moved slowly through a tunnel of infinite dark. At points, the chimney was so narrow that the blindworm creature was forced to dig its face into the earth, to hold its breath and push its head through tiny gaps, propelled by scrabbling feet and the clawing fingers of just one hand, trying never to release the woollen thread stretching out into the blackness.

  Twice Beck had let it go when forced to pull with the strength of both hands to wriggle through a near-impossible opening. Once, when briefly climbing upwards again, she had snagged and split the thread, just at a fork in the tunnel. She’d struggled up the left channel for a dozen pulls of her body before deciding to go back and take the right channel where, after much panicky groping in the complete darkness, she recovered the thread. Thereafter, it remained locked in her grasp, making the way slower, but surer.

  There was little air, and what there was of it was tainted with sulphurous smoke. Beck coughed, choked, spat mud but crept ever downward. Time passed but made no sense. There was only this blackness, the twistings of rock and clay, an occasional cave where she could sense space above her, where she could straighten for a moment and stretch her bunched limbs. Then, inevitably, the thread would lead her down again to a narrow hole and, with a last shrug and shift, she would thrust her head into it, squeeze her shoulders through, renew the painful scrabbling descent.

  As a ward against the terror that constantly threatened to engulf her, she began to talk. At first it was nothing – childhood rhymes, snatches of psalms, the song of Solomon. Gradually, these words adapted themselves to her surroundings as if her life had only ever been this space, merging with the earth and mud, the foul air and the things she carried with her, her destiny dangling at the end of a red thread. ‘Lord, though I crawl through the valley of dark death, yet I have my weapons clutched to my side. Though I breathe the poison of the air, yet am I strong. Knife and stone, slingshot and string. Follow the trail wherever it leads. To my father. To my father. To my father.’

  The tunnel widened a little and, raising her face, Beck inhaled something different, redolent of both sweetness and corruption. It made her suddenly, fiercely hungry, yet at the same time nauseated, as if her hunger could only be sated by something foul and unnatural. She breathed again deeply, both drawn and disgusted, eyes closed to this breeze. Then something hit her in the face. A body. It ran into her, was repelled, then ran into her shoulders, scrambled up and over them. She cried out then and thrust her face into the mud before her, burying her scream, as wave upon wave of furred bodies, large and small, ran into the top of her head and on over her, tiny feet scampering down her back, running down her legs, hundreds, thousands of them.

  It went on for what seemed like an age and then they were gone. She dared to raise her head, to suck in deep that repellent air, to thank her loving God for meeting them there and not ten paces further back when she was wedged in the narrowest gap. Then she took the thread again into her hand and pushed herself forward through the sickly-sweet smoke, towards a horror even the rats had fled.

  Within the kaleidoscope of light, a kaleidoscope of sound. Shrieks, garbled pleading, maniacal laughter suddenly cut off, replaced by a desperate sobbing. The grunts of the lustful, the insatiable, cries of orgasmic delight, of rapine torment, prayers uttered as curses, curses as prayers. No relief for those who suffered, no satiation for those who craved. The endlessness of desire, the prolonging of sweet and terrible pain.

  Nowhere to look; everywhere the horrors, the pleasures, the two so enmeshed it was impossible to see where one ended and the other began. One moment the Fugger was weeping with a depth of desolation he’d never known, even in the darkest nights of the midden, the next he was laughing as if his jaws would split from his face, as if some howling dog would burst from them, dragged out by the imps sat atop his cheekbones dangling fish hooks in his lips, pulling them back to speed the passage of this demon he was giving birth to. And above him no respite, just the revolving chambers of glass spinning now in frenzy, vomiting forth roses that grew and withered in an instant, amulets and eye sockets exploding in rainbow shades, dissolving and re-forming into the legions of the damned.

  And everywhere the bodies. Joined on the floor, perched on the ends of the altar; men grappled with men while the naked woman took one after another, yelling her encouragement, her mockery, urging them on to greater acts of sweaty degradation either side of the white-clad virgin whose only movement was the endless flow of her tears. These soaked a handkerchief laid there for the purpose. Someone would wring this out regularly into a jewelled chalice beside her on the altar. It was already half full.

  And the Fugger knew, somewhere in the small part of him that still could think, that all this was a result of the awful cauldron’s contents, which had been stirred and heated and chanted over until it was ready to be painted onto the naked bodies, at armpit, nostril and groin. His struggles had meant that maybe his skin absorbed less of the thick liquid than some of the others who had willingly, joyfully daubed themselves. But he also knew that whatever was inside him was not diminishing in force but building, that the small part of him that still could reason was dissipating to nothing.

  ‘What will I do when even that little is gone?’ he cried out, his voice drowned in the shrieking. Then he realised he did know, and so he clutched that thought to him, his only hope of salvation.

  Just when he thought the rock walls of the dungeon would burst apart, a command was called from the altar and all in the room froze, in mid-ecstasy or anguish, to look up. A stag-headed man stood there, antlers splayed and swaying, pointing over the crowd. And that small, thinking part of the Fugger remembered now that this stag, this Archbishop of Siena, was one of the small group who had not partaken of the foul broth, along with Abraham, the still-weeping virgin and the armoured Heinrich von Solingen.

  ‘Prince of Darkness! Come to us now!’ The voice emerging from the mouth of the stag was silky, low-pitched. ‘Prince of this world, Father of lies, of the Other Truths, Diabolus, Ahiram, you who have a name and no name in all the tongues of the earth, descend to be with us, your servants.’

  The heavy breathing of the disciples, the drip of water and of tears, the turning of the chambers, all noise was sucked away then, leaving a silence that yearned to be filled. As if somewhere someone had laid a hand against a door that would open upon them.

  No, not a hand, the Fugger realised. A cloven hoof.

  He heard a faint scratching, all heard it, and all looked up to the glass roof. Shadows, separate shapes, were moving together, forming into one dark cloud stretching over them. When all was obscure, when the shadow was upon them and they could feel its terrible weight, it paused there as if waiting for more.

  The silky voice issued again from the stag’s head. ‘What do you wish, dread Lord? Name it and it is thine. Life act or death stroke, it is thine. Any abomination, corruption, degradation, it is thine. Show us how to do thy work, to honour thee. Help us summon the spirit of this dead queen, this she-hag, this Hecate who once did thy command with her six fingers and can again, with thy favour. Help us join witch’s hand to beggar’s stump. Name thy price and it shall be paid. It is thine! Thine! Thine!’

  The scratching, faint at first, like a mouse running across a glass roof, grew louder with these words, seeming to come now from here, now from there, the upraised faces following the scurryings, some in terror, some in expectant joy. Soon it became a drumming, a steady beating u
pon the ceiling – thump! thump! thump! – and the glass began to bow, to bulge and push against its leaded restraints, forced inwards by claw, by finger, by palm of hairy hand.

  A terrible scream, and all looked now as the girl in virginal white, previously so still, began to writhe and groan. Her body was in the grip of unseen hands, twisted and pulled, her legs spread wide, the movements of her hips lascivious, inviting, while her face, blanched in pure terror, showed her desperation, her terrible struggle to control what was no longer under her command.

  ‘A sign! You have spoken! Thy will be done!’ Cibo raised both arms in invocation, then pointed at the girl and turned to the Black Knight. ‘Hold her! Hold her here for me!’

  Heinrich von Solingen began to march forward, his gait steady and slow. On the altar, the stag-headed Archbishop began to loosen the silk at his waist.

  It was then that the Fugger, unable to watch, looked down and saw a sight of more wonder than any yet paraded before him. There were two hands in his lap, and they were both his. He raised up the miracle. His new hand was the same to the touch, yet different, for he saw again the scars where the dog had bitten him as a child, the burn when he had been too eager to reach inside his mother’s cooking pot. He bunched the fingers, stretched them out, delighting in forgotten sensations. He was complete, and a strength and a courage he’d not felt in seven years filled him.

  It was at that moment he heard the voice.

  ‘Look at me.’

  A woman was standing within the pentangle, long dark hair, a horse’s mane of it, flowing down over bare shoulders, a simple circlet of gold on her brow, another of sapphires encircling a long and graceful neck. Her eyes were pools of depthless black. He gazed into them, saw the flaw within one, the question and the answer in the pair. And when she raised a hand from within her gown of immaculate white, he saw it had six fingers.