The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  It was then I sat suddenly upright. And I knew: those whom Agnes had woken had discovered us together, Peronette and I.

  “Certainly he’s come. He is here now!”

  “Look at them! He is within her, and he’s claimed the other!”

  “No,” I said. “Stop it! Go away! We only…”

  Something flew at me, end over end. It struck me on the cheek. I felt the skin split and the pain flare; soon the blood flow seeped into my mouth. The biting thing had fallen into my lap. It was a small crucifix of wrought silver.

  The blanket and sheet were pulled back. My smock had settled up around my hips. I struggled now to pull it down, lest it…lest I be…

  The screams were deafening. Agnes’s and all the others. They prevented thought: I could not think. I saw, I sensed that nearly the whole sorority surrounded my cot. Spit landed on my leg. A bowl of cold water—holy water—was thrown.

  And there I sat cowering at the center of all this, my knees drawn to my chest, holding my shift down against those hands that sought to raise it. (“See it? Did you see it?”) Other hands pulled at my hair. Scratched at my bare hands, my forearms.

  I turned to Peronette and…

  She was gone. How had she slipped from the cot? Where was she? And then I saw her standing at the side of the bed in her rumpled and…and bloodstained shift. Her stance puzzled me: she stood slightly hunched, with her hands pressed into her groin, where a roseate stain had spread. She raised her red fingers up.

  She would not look at me. I saw her face in profile—a hideous mask it seemed—and wondered were her tears real or part of a plan quickly hatched.

  Look at me, I wanted to scream. Look at me! But I could not speak. And then suddenly someone—Sister Catherine of the Holy Child, I believe—wheeled on Peronette, asking…. I cannot recall the question; but I remember the response:

  In a gesture that stopped my heart, Peronette slowly raised her hand—to help me? to pull me away? But then her first finger crawled from her fist like a worm from an apple. To point. At me. And in so doing, accuse. Turning to face me full on, and grinding her fists deeper into her groin, against her sex, Peronette said, tearfully, angrily, grotesquely:

  “You…you are unnatural!” She turned from me disgustedly, and disappeared.

  The breath flew from me like a bird from its cage.

  And so it was decided: I was the Devil. I was the Darkness that had been visited upon C——. The storm, Elizaveta’s fire-haired dancer, her stigmata—it had all been my doing.

  I sat trapped on my cot. Too shocked to cry. Too confused to scream. I realize now that my silence, my impassivity, only spurred the girls on. For what seemed an eternity, for what was an eternity, spit and holy water and statuary and crucifixes and bibles and strings of rosary beads…all manner of talismans, sacred and profane, were rained down upon me. Trying to rise from the cot, I was thrown back upon it, time and again.

  No escape. No defense.

  Suddenly, finally, the sorority parted at the foot of my cot, and there appeared Sister Claire de Sazilly. Surely she’d come to restore order, to end all this, to ease my shame and save me. Surely…But no: her smile had already opened into horrible bloom.

  5

  Attack

  SISTER CLAIRE DE SAZILLY. Where to begin? I never knew her well, no one did. Christ and the cellarer were her sole companions. I know nothing of her beginnings. Her speech was flat, unaccented; from it one could infer nothing. By now, I’d learned that she coveted the place of the Mother Superior. She was ambitious and simple—in a word: dangerous.

  Sister Claire was not old—perhaps in her late thirties, several years older than Mother Marie—yet for years she’d calculated, counted every step of her slow and steady ascent, only to be bested by “the Actress’s” wealth and connections. Years more she’d had to plot; and this effort of patience showed on her plain face.

  I stood a full two heads taller than Sister Claire. Squat and strong, she was as useful in the field as any farm animal. She pleasured in manual labor, and could often be seen digging in the dirt; she contentedly tore vegetables, flowers, plants, and weeds from the earth by their roots. With the agility of a mountain goat, she’d scramble out onto the roof to secure loose slates or shoo nesting birds from the chimneys. She seemed happiest when sweating in her makeshift smithy, pounding white-hot nails into shape.

  I never saw Sister Claire smile, but when she spoke, or prayed—and she would sometimes close her eyes tightly, tilt back her head, and pray quite violently—she showed a whitish bank of gums on the left side of her mouth, and stuck into this like sticks in snow were several mud-colored teeth. Her eyes were closely spaced, dark as night; and their lids seemed always moist, set off as they were by the scaly, sere skin of her cheeks, which would, in winter, crack and bleed. Her lips were a bitter red twist, and a long thin nose rambled down crookedly above them. She was…severe.

  If, when walking down the corridors of C——at daylight, or better, with a torch in hand, one were to stoop to inspect those cold walls of carved stone, there, waist-high, one would see faint red marks scattered about. Traces of blood; flecks of flesh. Sister Claire, while making her rounds, deep in reflection or intent on some disciplinary mission, was wont to drag the backs of her hands along these walls. It was a means of mortification, and a habit; and an act that perhaps pleasured her. Her knuckles were constantly red, raw; like meat fresh from the knife. Her every step was penitential, her every act contrite. She schemed always, and artfully. And in the manner of a true zealot, she could convince herself of anything; and indeed she’d long ago convinced herself that her faith was true.

  Sister Claire slept on a thin pallet, beneath one worn blanket. Often, she deprived herself of the pallet and slept on the stone floor of her cell. That she slept at all is a wonder, for sewn into the sides of her burlap shift were nettles and rose stems, their thorns large and hard and dark with her dried blood. They would stick her as she turned in her sleep. Wounds along her sides were opened anew every night. Scars—and I would be told this soon by one who’d seen them—attested to the fact that Sister Claire had been sleeping like this for years; the scars, it was said, resembled the work of a blind seamstress. When her wounds became infected, Sister Claire would wash them herself with holy water and seal them with hog’s lard; or, ecstatically, she’d suffer their suppuration.

  Such was the character of Sister Claire, the woman who would serve as my introduction to hatred: both hers and mine.

  Now here stood the infirmarian, Sister Clothilde, alongside Sister Catherine of the Holy Child. I saw these two look at each other, questioningly. I saw Sister Catherine—not two years into her vows—fall to staring at Sister Claire; unknowingly, it seemed, she shook her head as Sister Claire extricated testimony from the hysterical Agnes before that girl was led away. With this nodding she seemed to ask of the senior nun, What now? What scheme might this be? Soon she, Sister Catherine, set to soothing the youngest girls, with little success.

  Sister Margarethe came too, of course; arriving late, the cellarer clamped her fat hands to her fatter cheeks when told of Agnes’s claims. “A miracle!” said she. “It’s a true miracle!” And it was she—that stupid, stupid woman—who invoked the name of Maria de Moerl, causing those girls who were doubtful still to suddenly call out for their salvation, and to join in the fight against the Holy Darkness, against me. (Not long ago, at a sister House somewhere in the Tyrol, three girls had suffered “Visitations,” shown stigmatic symptoms. Maria de Moerl—whose name was known to all of us, as we’d been made to pray for her—had shown signs of the Five Wounds on the very day of the Corpus Christi procession.)

  There stood Sister Claire in her bloodstained burlap shift, at the foot of my cot in the company of my captors.

  I reached out to her. I implored her. I don’t know if I spoke; if I did it was to say, Save me. Help me. In a near fetal curl, I sat cowering against the thin rails of the low headboard that rose from my cot like a
prison grate.

  All around me I heard the girls in accusatory chorus:

  “We woke to find her atop Peronette…”

  “And where has Peronette gone?” asked Sister Claire. “I want her as well.”

  “She slipped away, and we thought it best to let her go in case—”

  “Find her!” commanded Sister Claire.

  “And if she’s gone to Mother Marie?”

  “Find her!”

  “Oui, ma mère,” came the ominous response.

  “Say it again,” commanded Sister Claire of another girl, “you found them how? In what state? Naked before you? Entwined in shame and—”

  “Yes…. No…. Not naked,” said one of the girls, “but Hélène swears she saw…” and here poor Hélène, to whom all turned, struggled for words; other voices rose to bolster her testimony: “Hélène says when this one’s nightshirt rode up on her hips…” “…that she saw…that she had la partie honteuse d’un vrai démon!” What were they saying? I didn’t know who spoke. The voices were as one. “…And the sheet that covered them…we stripped them of it: we knew you would want to see it, for it is proof of—”

  “Proof of what?” demanded Sister Claire. Before any girl dared answer, the Head screamed her question a second time: “Proof of what? Say what you mean to say!” Several of the girls began to cry. Others ran from the dormitory. Did I stand a chance yet? Was Sister Claire going to deny these lies, punish their tellers?

  Another girl spoke, an older girl: “Here then is all the proof needed.” Girls parted to let this witness approach Sister Claire. She did so, bearing the sheet they’d stripped from us, holding it far from her body…. Instantly, shamefully, I understood.

  The white bundle fell to the floor at Sister Claire’s bare feet. Extending her arms cross-vigil, in imitation of Christ’s on the cross, the Head began to pray, loudly, ecstatically, in Latin. She bade the others join her, and the majority did. All the while she glared at me with those horrible dark eyes, a trace of a smile at play on her bitter lips.

  …Let me now say what I must about the sheets:

  In the long months leading up to…up to my identification as Satan Himself, strange things had been happening in the night. To my body. I had never led much of a dream life; yet within those few months my dreams grew increasingly vivid, and sexual. I could recall them in titillating detail the next day, but I would not: the recollection shamed me. Rather, I tried to resist the recollection. How better to say it than this: my body began to dream.

  And in the morning, on sheets stale with sweat, I would wake to find the dream distilled to nightsalt. A discharge. The viscid milk of the dream.

  When first I woke with this wetness beneath me, I’d no idea what it was, or where it had come from. I looked up at the ceiling to see if a skylight or some part of the roof had given way. I did not think that I had produced it. I did not know that the body, let alone my body, was capable of such. No, this thought did not occur to me until the second discovery, several mornings later, and the subsequent recollection of the preceding night’s dream, which produced in me that now familiar shame…. These dreams were exciting, confusing, and, when recollected, deeply shameful. They showed me things I did not know from life…. Enfin, it was some time before I realized, understood, that it was the dreams that brought the nightsalt, brought it forth from me.

  I knew to hide this, and to pray against it. I knew, knew this to be the manifestation of the strangeness, the differentness I felt. Surely I was impure—what proof did I need besides this, my own body’s betrayal? I would be punished if these emissions were discovered. For a long while I believed I should be punished; still, I kept my secret.

  Thankfully, I would wake early those mornings when the nightsalt had come. I would rise before the others, strip my cot in the darkness, dress, and slip from the dormitory. Then I would quit the house, steal in absolute darkness along the cold dark corridors and shuttered galleries, perfectly silent. I would be slipperless, lest those satiny soles be heard sliding along the stone floors. Whatever the weather, I would exit through the kitchen door—only then did I dare light a lamp—and make my way through the cellarer’s garden, along the rutted rows of tomatoes, seeming to beat like black hearts in the dark, tied with twine to their spinal stakes; it seemed too that the pumpkins in autumn would tilt their plump and dumb heads quizzically up to stare at me as I passed, and that the summer corn, tall in its resplendent dress, mocked my ugliness and shame. I would pass fast through the garden and continue on to the dovecote, some distance beyond the laundry, far from the main house. No one ever went to that small stone outbuilding, which sat in disrepair, unused but by the bats, which hung head-down in its eaves. There, behind the building, I kept a bucket. I changed its water twice weekly; and no one looked askance if I were spied carrying buckets of water toward the laundry, or from the kitchen. Often I’d have to shove the soiled sheet down into the bucket through a thin layer of ice that had formed overnight. By moon- or starlight I would scrub the nightsalt from the sheets in the iced water. My hands would freeze, turn red and raw. I would scrub till my nails bled: this was my mortification. I would squat before that bucket, shivering, never far from tears, and all the while I would pray. My prayers consisted of questions. Was this nightsalt proof I was bad? Evil? Was there meaning in this? What had I done? When would I live at ease in the world? Such questions came to me, and I would offer them up as prayer. My final prayer, just before I’d trace the cross over my face and chest with numb and bloodied fingers—in nomine Patris, Filius et Spiritus Sanctus—my final prayer was always the same: I’d ask for answers.

  I would hang the sheets to dry. I’d strung a line, stretched it hook-to-hook across the dovecote’s back wall; I would weight the hem of the sheet with rocks so it lay flush and unseen against that wall, no matter how strong a breeze blew. Over these months of shame, I’d managed to steal extra sheets from the infirmary—which crime, had it been discovered, would have been punishable by a half-year’s worth of stable duty, or worse. I didn’t care. I’d shovel waste till Christ came again if it meant I could keep my secrets. Eventually, I had four sheets in rotation. One would always be hung out behind the dovecote. Another I kept wrapped in paper and hidden behind a statue of the Blessed Mother, which sat in an alcove on the second-floor landing. The third I hid in the sacristy, at the bottom of the pile of white sheets used to cover the altar. A fourth, of course, was always in use.

  In this way the secret of the nightsalt went untold. Until that morning. The morning I woke with Peronette in my arms. The morning after that active and wondrous night when I…

  …Sister Claire, yes.

  …Daring finally to lift the sheet from the floor beside my cot, Sister Claire de Sazilly examined it, and, in a manner worthy of the Inquisitor she would soon become, pronounced:

  “It is icy cold, this…this ejaculate. This demon seed!” She fell so hard, so fast to her knees, that I heard the meeting of bone and stone. She fairly screamed a prayer. Several girls did the same; others shied from Sister Claire’s pronouncement, from that theatrical dropping-down onto her knees.

  I lay prostrate, perfectly still; the slightest movement, or a single word, could only further condemn me. Sister Claire rose and came around the side of the cot; the sea of girls parted for her. She retrieved the crucifix from the floor beside the cot. She held it…she brandished it. She took up her prayers, reciting them in Latin; though she mumbled, unintelligibly, I was certain I had never heard these prayers before. Finally, she stopped speaking; she could not have been any nearer to me. I felt her weight against the thin frame of the cot. The remaining girls—fifteen, twenty?—were silent; they stared at Sister Claire. “Step back!” she warned. “Take to prayer!” And indeed they all fell back and cried out in chorus as Sister Claire de Sazilly leapt up catlike upon the cot! Fast, so very fast, she fell to kneel on my chest, crowding the air from my lungs. I swung blindly at the nun, thrashed at her, but quickly she pinned my arms
to my sides with her legs. Her knees would leave bruises where they ground against the cage of my ribs.

  Again, the incantatory Latin. Sister Claire lowered her face to mine. Her face! That hideous mask, that contorted mass of blood-flushed flesh and bone! Silver and gold spurs shone at the center of her pitch-filled pupils. The whites of her eyes were yellowed, mottled as eggshells are. Her cracked and colorless lips bled where she’d bit down into them. Her horrible teeth were clenched so that her jaw pulsed, her nostrils flared; from her came breath reeking of rot. She breathed thickly, like an animal, with an effort that belied her still stance atop me. At one point—this comes back to me with such revulsion, I shiver—at one point, as she lowered her face to mine, the oily wheels of her mind already at work, she said, with sinister glee, and so only I could hear her, “The stigmata, you fools?…Will it be that easy? You must thank your delicate friend for me,” and spittle slid down from her mouth into mine.

  I spat and gasped for air. I begged for release.

  Sister Claire leaned back, shifted her weight just slightly—I drew a deep breath—and just when it seemed she might release me, quickly she brought that silver crucifix up to my face. She held it before me and seemed to bless it before bringing it down, grinding it down against, into my forehead. The pain was blinding! Tears slid from my wide-open eyes. Trying to turn away only worsened the pain. I held as still as I could. Sister Claire leaned down into me, held the crucifix fast against my forehead till the tiny figure of Christ cut into my flesh. With all her weight she pressed her Savior against me, praying all the while, cursing the devils I harbored, the devil I was. This was pain of a kind I’d never known. Defending myself, I suffered cuts all over my hands and wrists. Then I let fall my arms: I would surrender, take what punishment the Head had to give.