by John Shirley
I had to butt in. “Idiot. Who taught you to read Latin? And you went to seminary school.”
Both of them looked at me. “Claviculae is a metaphor in that usage. First of all, you had no business looking in the Abbé’s own diary; for shame. But …” I took a breath. “If you had any understanding of the nuances in the language, what he was saying was that the only things like keys he can find are in the five oldest books here in the house. The … special books. How did you get …”
I had to stop and think. I was shuffling Latinate roots in my head, trying to imagine how even Alfred could have gone off on such a tangent. But Nyarlah was shushing me with those eyes, bidding me to fade back.
“Unimportant,” he began, as I moved back toward the kitchen door like a good housekeeper, trying to go find something to pretend to do.
When I came back in, Alfred was screaming. Nyarlah had those gigantic hands on both sides of Alfred’s pale, bloated face and he was sucking, sucking, sucking something out of his mouth and nose that looked like snot at first, then black smoke, then wavering snow. Snow made of light, sparks, Impressionist sparks that all stayed one muted, drunken color.
We had the walking remains committed in Paris. It cost the Earth, but better to keep it out of the papers. The Abbé and I had several little ‘come-to-Jesus meetings’ about the matter, you may rest assured.
***
Father worked right up to the bell, as the schoolchildren used to say. Even while stripped of his duties, there was a need for priests, with a war on. Father continuing to say masses for the troops kept up our own front. It kept many different sorts of eyes away from what we were really doing. What we’ve just finished, and I can finish up for myself with my own Change.…
***
“What I found were brought here by Arab spice-traders after the fall of Atlantis. Dear Marie, my contemporary, my friend, my hands and eyes, they are the sigils of the very goddess who lives beneath these hills … Tsathoggua. La mère des crapauds.”
But I was nodding at every little godlet in the glass case. “I have seen these before, Père. My family in this valley predate the Roman colonials’ discovery of the Old People in the caves. I know my history …”
***
I think those words again. Ecclesiastes tells us that there is nothing new under the sun, and that there are a time, season and purpose to all things. Even, perhaps, the gravest annoyances.
This is not the first time treasure-hunters … or Beasts … have come to the Abbey. When I drew the curtain in the rectory, of course they came up to the front door and knocked, pretending to have just arrived.
“Ah, the good housekeeper greets us. Marie-chère!” Colonel Rauffenstein oozed at me in execrable French from behind the latch chain. The white officer’s gloves he wore were not stained with the blood of the hart. He was out of breath. A vein stood out in the side of his pasty, stubbly head, snaking out from under his cap like the tentacle of some sea-beast. “Mlle. Denarnaud—”
“Call me Miss again and this old toad tears your throat out,” I said softly but clearly in High German. Rauffenstein winced. His two toadies hung back, muttering at each other in Slovak, which they probably thought I couldn’t understand.
(It was not God who gave me the gift of tongues. That came more recently, with the memorization of certain verses, the sacrifice of certain kinds of blood, the walking of certain Dreams. As it says in the Book of Hebrews, the substance of the Future, and the evidence behind the Present …)
“Cowboy her and let’s search the grounds.”
“This is a house of God, pig. Be silent and listen.”
“Oh, God, my foot. Have you heard of some of the—”
“SHUT IT AND LISTEN! Pardonnez-moi, Madame. Je … uhhh, je m’excuse. Continuez …”
I continued at his partner, in Slovak. “I could kill you where you stand, capon,” then at the colonel, before the moon-faced lad in his too-large greatcoat had time to gape, “My good Colonel, my dear employer and friend and Father Confessor the Abbé is newly dead, and I fear I am not far behind. He left us last night. His nerves, you see. He worked himself right into a great big heart-attack.”
I feigned weariness, letting them see that aspect of my face. Lighting it up, in the ways I could light up other aspects.
It comes from the eyes. It is a gift and a sigil and a telling from the eyes. They began to listen a little more. It wouldn’t last, but there is a dance in the old dame yet. I try. They listened while it lasted
“Be reasonable, meinen herren. There was no Priory of Sion, no treasure of the Cathars or whatever the version is this week. Every schoolchild knows this hereabouts. We are in mourning, however, and that is quite real enough. Please, show us some respect. I beg. No more. As your wise adjutant points out, this is a house of God.”
I spoke the truth. There was going to be quite a Requiem for Abbé Saunière. Quite a Requiem indeed. Those Kraut barbarians needed to keep this abbey clear of their poking noses, and every other part of them. They needed to get back to the front and stay out of our business. Les Anglais, aussi. Barbarians on both sides.
There are not very many townsfolk. We all have our common way, when the moon is high, no matter the views we hold. Many have helped us fake this funeral for photographs and the eyes of any outsiders that may stumble in and be eaten at the Wake.
Perhaps, I thought, I would pre-empt that, with those three. Presently, the adjutant gaped at what he thought was my command of Slovak (I’d pulled the meanings from their breath, their minds, the vibrations of their words,) and the colonel blushed to the center of his vast, luminescent pate, which I saw when he removed his hat and stammered apologies. “We come merely to pay our respects, having just in fact heard that—”
My answer, though lengthy, was not in fact ladylike, and does not bear repetition. I made myself understood, and in so doing shooed the big bald jackanapes and his other two stooges from the front porch of the rectory as my peasant mother did with men when she was my age.
While I did, I used some of the same curse words as Memère, and that made me marvel at the passage of time and the telling of blood. Blood that will soon change, but is still me. And her. More than I foresaw, that bittersweet mark, so like the kiss of the Sleeper of N’Kai, which all may receive but few in this life even partially undertake.
The Sleeper’s kiss that touches the very groundwater in our town, the plants and the soil and the air, and makes us all come together after our own fashion. The way we do out here, particularly Out Here. Not like a church, or a hive of bees, or a squadron of soldiers marching as to war. But like neighbors.
The Bishopric tried to reconsecrate the grounds out here, in the spring. When the toads were out. The Abbé humored their little wishes. They’ve hauled my employer into court off and on for years, the Bishopric and the schoolmaster and the bill-collectors and the whole lot of them, always trying to get more money, though the gold never ran out and the payments were always on time.
“What of this stairway, beneath the Abbey?” their seconds always sniped, “The one that goes down, and down, and down, to the vault? The vault full of gold?”
’Twas not a vault, ever, but only several pieces of a white-gold metal that has no name. Those metal pieces call the gold, never the Ark of the Covenant or Templar nonsense. Only some items found on a ship. Sealed in a cask of mortar in the hold of a ship that sank off the coast of Corsica, and travelled to Rennes.
Sometimes, Father Saunière calls the little godlets Babylonian, sometimes Sumerian. The one that looks almost human, with the same face repeating twice in number, the one with legs and wings and a mouth full of tentacles, calls fish from the rivers and … all sorts of things … from the sea, and blind-robins and eels from the freshwater springs and limestone caves that catacomb this beautiful old Abbey on all sides, into the water table and further toward the center of the Earth. Eels … and trout, trout for days, swimming upstream toward the sound of their Mother’s voice.
/> The other two godlets repeat in the architecture around here with much more frequency. They are twins of the same form, one a reflection of the thing in formless black shadow-shape, and one the thing itself, crouching. Squatting. Croaking.
Father would touch both of them at the same time. In that case, they called more gold, when the right words were said over them, the right obeisances made and powders burnt. The gold showed up in the squared circle, down the stairway they couldn’t find. Floating in the freshwater spring in the squared circle of stones. Sometimes it was Spanish doubloons, or Dutch guilders. Sometimes it was melted down. But it always came, when he said that particular rite.
Enough gold has come from that rite to sink the plots of three mansions, one in my name until the public outcry forced a change just as work on the Tour Magdala began in earnest.
At the end of the day, his fellow priests thought he was selling Masses short at twice the price. They called us Communards, and progressives, and anti-government, and everything but a priest and his housekeeper.
But we needed to draw in new parishioners, you see. For the real church, the heresy, the schism which could not manifest. Yet.
Not then. Everyone is distracted now, though. It feels like the Last Times, though I know better. The imaginary countries of the world pour out their hatred down shell-holes through the corpus of their young men. Europe gnaws at its own entrails. Things look outwardly dire.
Every country in the world seems to have forgotten what War meant, going into this one. There hadn’t been one of consequence for a century and a half, I dare say. The Fiddler must always be paid.
The August Madness was carefully planned and orchestrated. We turned a regional conflict in the Balkans into the bloodiest, most needless war in human history. But Triple Entente or Triple Alliance, the last thing those great houses want is the dissolution of big countries. Heavens, no.
Humans are worse than any Elder God in our inventiveness. We discovered poison gas, barbed wire and machine-guns, sub-marine and trench warfare and the Bombardier tank, fulfilling the darkest nightmares of Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne in blood.
Millions have died. But I know one who cannot. Not now. And I’m next in line.…
***
I must have nodded off, just then. I dreamed those damned deserters were camped in the yard, circling, looking for holes in the wall. They more than likely are. My dreams are rarely wrong.
It is night now. The long night after the Working. I must spend a few such long nights here alone. And while I do, I must feed this forward, and be fed in turn.
It will take more wars to wake the Elders with blood. But they stir. And this morning, my employer went to join them. So may I, too. Though tonight will be very long, and this room feels very empty, so may I, too.
The good Father told me that enough sacrifice to Tsathoggua guarantees a return, just as it was done when they called her the Magna Mater and burned peat and sea-coal to her in bronze braziers…
Enough blood, and the land will wake. Enough sacrifice and, like Abbé Saunière, I, too, may change form, and travel far under the earth, to our ancestral home. To the great Mother at the Central Fire …
I can feel a unit of fresh young Anglais, four or five in number, stumbling back to their barracks through the woods. There are a few such units locally. They’ll be shipping out soon. Father is gone. I must feed the altar. They’ll do.
They’ll do.
Now I must begin to call the toads …
In nomine Mater et Fili, et Signum Crocus
In Tsathoggua’s name, eternal swampy wellspring
between the circle of five peaks, beneath,
deep. Deep beneath.
Thirteenth. From your eggs of earth and frost,
Make it snow.
Ask your Mother. Ask your Mother.
Make it snow …
Sauvons la caisse, père,
frère, maître … Ami.
Chacun pour soi.
Pour toi …
2
AND OFFERED VICTIMS AT YOUR ALTARS FALL
It snowed it snowed it snowed. Like yesteryear. Like home. Like Hope.
On a dark and snowy night on a windswept hillside in northern Gaul where hot springs boiled to the surface through thousands of feet of limestone, a long-in-the-tooth lieutenant named Hodgson teetered on the brink of the nearest steaming pool, plunging his grazed hand in up to the wrist.
The water. The primal water. When can I ever get away from the sea? Every time I get near it, my heart starts to pound. They all love the sea-stories, but they don’t understand the impetus.…
Out of turn, out of sequence, he remembered the tentacle snagging his hand with infernal rapidity, forming into a webbed, three-fingered claw of the same perilous stuff, soft as a bog and sharp as edged metal.
Hodgson’s scream made rippling echoes for a mile or more, mostly unimpeded. It was more than a little cold. The eyes in the forest may have been wolves. It didn’t matter now. He’d saved a round for himself. And the left hand still worked.
It snowed. It snowed. It snowed. Time grayed out for him for a little while
Something had made his brain go foggy. Something he had seen while in his cups. They were just coming back to kip. In their cups. Not even shipped out yet. Then the thing. That fragmented everything like stained glass. Happened.
Happened. The absinthe had numbed him to it at first. He didn’t want to remember how. It was … Germans. Deserters, probably. A ragtag and bobtail band of deserters. Had to be.
Had to be. They could have been surrounded. They were a long f-----g way from their CO. And now he was lost.
Lost. The ravine below ate at his eyes. There was a cave, far back there. He was trying to find something to wrap the wound with, knowing it was clean enough now.
Breathing through the pain. From the wound that came from a webbed, swiping claw, and no gun. The webbed swiping claw of something that walked on two legs, lurching up out of the fog, forming from formless ooze.
The perimeter was clear. He withdrew his hand slowly, reaching at his belt for the entrenching-tool that could club, and chop, and most importantly stab, quite handily in field combat. The lieutenant preferred to box, but all was fair tonight. Oh, yes, tonight.
He thought of his Bessie, sitting by the window in the cold morning light before work, the cold January light of home, Merrie Olde England regular as treacle and tap water and nothing … ever … like what he was seeing now.
The fragile meniscus of the hot spring was stirring like bubbles in yeast, tearing into a stump on a neck. Black yeast, undulant, ophidian. Black stump.
Eyes, turning to blip-blip-blink. Gold-ringed eyes with diamond pupils, staring at him with primal malignity. The black spawn reached for him with opposable thumbs and anthropophagic intentions. Terror stole the lieutenant’s speech.
But not his boots. When he stopped bolting pell-mell through the woods, he nearly tripped over a tiny stone fountain with some kind of frog sitting in the middle, protruding from the roots of a century oak.
You hallucinated that, the survivor part of his brain told him, the skeptic part that had once tightened the cuffs on the greatest skeptic of them all, Harry Houdini. He’d only started writing fiction because it was what sold. But the fiction was nothing compared to the life that spawned it.
He made himself not let the side down. The sun finished sinking in a welter of blood, and the great shouting, gibbering Dark reared up and whacked him like a hand. He was conscious first of every star overhead; so many, in bands and charts burnt into his eyes from an early age. He was conscious of his place within that Infinite darkness, too, a secret vessel alive and hunting and hunted.
Hunted. He’d breasted that hill and come out in a little stand of trees, and done no more than stand still for a second behind a tree when the … thing … clipped his hand.
His dumb right hand. He made the left one work. He had a copy of the Roman Ritual in that pocket. This valley
was supposed to be a strange place.
His right hand sure didn’t know what his left hand was doing. The bleeding had stopped.
***
Out of tune. Out of true. Out of time. The last voice he held in his ears was Private Pegg from their company, grousing about needing a ball of string just to get through two miles of woods. Pegg was so pissed on midnight-requisition Scotch he couldn’t have lain down on the ground if one instructed him how, and most of the men weren’t much better off.
This was War. These things … happened, no matter what form in which anyone was prepared to accept their coming. But this felt different than Jerry. Worse. Local. Old.
***
After a time, he bound the wound again and continued, stumbling on hailstones that were still coming down and headstones that looked too old to be patching the path, at parts, splintered sections of them showing pale knights and pale kings, or complicated Latin poems.
He was thirty-six, his brain babbled at him in the extremity of his terror. Too old for the 117th, though he’d passed the Medical Boards on Boxing Day and they were getting ready to ship out to Belgium.…
Out of sequence. His aquiline nose twitched toward the smell of blood. Blood on the leaves. A human handprint. Someone stumbling. One of them came this way.… Even as his mind came apart, he kept tracking his comrades, and whatever had taken them. He was an Army lifer. That was just how his kind were made.
There was another handprint up ahead, and lying in the brush … No, not a hand and arm. Yet. Wooden stock … gleam of metal … Enfield. The lieutenant crossed himself, and slapped his pocket full of reloads.
Bending down to grab it, the lieutenant reckoned it would have to be broken and cleaned soon. The blood on it stunk of brains, and worse. This did not bode well, but he didn’t think about it until there was another end placed on it. At the moment, there was a rifle. And by the reassuring clack-clack, it still worked.
