by Neil Gaiman
The confession stated that Marie Delort, along with her daughter, had for three years been giving herself over to a pair of demons, from Friday midnight through to Saturday dawn, and had assisted at a series of conjurings in the company of others. According to the deacon Katherine had testified that her association began when one evening, washing her family’s linen outside of town, she saw before her a man with a curved back and pointed ears whose eyes were like emeralds in an ash pit. He called for her to give herself to him and she answered that she would. He then gentled her cheeks with both hands, his palms softly furred, and flooded her mouth with his breath, and from then on each Friday night she was carried to a gathering from her own bed, simply by willing herself free. At the gathering place she shed her night-dress and was approached, every time having been made to wait for a period alone in the darkness, by the same man leading a gigantic he-goat, which knelt before her, and to both apparitions she abandoned herself.
The sacristan then read her mother’s corroboration of this account, which further detailed the strange trance during which she was also transported from her bed, and their mutual adoration of the goat and the man, and their not only bathing in but also taking in all sorts of offensive liquids, with satiation being the object of their every clutch and gesture.
I was born Etienne Corillaut of Pouzauges, in the diocese of Luçon, and am known as Poitou, and I am now of twenty-two years of age, and here acknowledge to the best of my abilities the reasons for those acts that have made this name along with my master’s the object of hatred throughout the region. I here also address the questions that my kinsmen hear from every stable hand, every innkeeper, every farmer in his field: What transpired in his mind that allowed a young person to have acted in such a manner and then to have lived apparently untroubled among his fellows? What enabled him to have stepped forward into the sunlight and Nature’s bounty for six years of such iniquity?
My master is Gilles de Rais, whom I have served as page and then bodyservant for these last six years; and for the past three, since he first offered access to the full chamber of his secrets, he and I, with five others I will name, have been responsible for the entrapment and mutilation and dismemberment and death of one hundred and forty-two children between the ages of five and fifteen. Coming in the Year of Our Lord 1440, this admission dates the full vigor of my offenses back to the winter of 1437. But even before he chose to sweep back the curtain on the full extent of his ferocity, I knew myself to be already standing outside the ring of salvation, having failed so signally as a neighbor and a brother and a Christian and a son.
My father failed no one, having been brought up in honesty and industry with a mild and peaceable disposition, and my first memory of my mother is of the two of us gathering into her basket rue and southernwood in bright sunlight. I remember her saying one sweltering morning that the forest, our edge of pastureland, and a hive of bees were our only livelihood. I remember her tears. Later there was a shed and a little tower with a dovecote. We raised rye and beans and pot-herbs. As I grew stronger I was given suitable responsibilities, my first being light weeding during the day and laying the table and filling the hand basin after sunset. Before that my contributions had been limited to fanning the wasps out of my little sister’s sweet milk.
At that time I was devout. I retired each morning to pray and refused refreshment for a quarter of an hour afterward. And I displayed other singularities. My brother and sister avoided me, which I attributed to acts of stupidity that somehow had discredited me forever. I played alone, chopping at roadside weeds with my special stick. “Still fighting your cabbages?” my brother asked one day, having seen me thrash some wild collards.
My mother liked to claim that all she brought to the marriage was a bench, bed, and chest, and I first registered their sadness while hiding in the fields watching my father cut clover. My mother brought him soup, ladling it out in the shade of an elm, and he said, “Will you kiss me?” and she answered, “We all have our needs.” He then told her to take back her soup, for he didn’t want it, and scythed all the clover without eating and returned hungry to the house.
He complained later that it was as if his accounts were tallied small coin by small coin. She confided in my brother, her favorite, that she lived in dread of bad weather, during which his father would pass the hours in the kitchen, his resentment turning from the weather to her. We slept with pounding hearts when they fought.
And during a rainy October the day after my eleventh birthday my brother fell sick of a malady of the brain. We moved him to a room off the kitchen with a hearth that backed on to our stove, where during sickness or bloodletting or weaning, a greater warmth could be maintained. My mother made him an egg dish into which she chopped dittany, tansy, marjoram, fennel, parsley, beets, violet leaves, and pounded ginger. He was seized with convulsions and his writhing was such that she couldn’t stay in the room. He died at cock’s crow two mornings after he was first afflicted.
She afterward seemed so bereft and storm-tossed that our neighbors called her “the Wind’s Wife.” November imprisoned the farm with its load of ice, sheathing both sickle and hoe. In our little pond fish hung motionless and petrified with cold. My mother kept to herself in the kitchen, puzzled and drained by our questions, her smile gloomy and terrible in its simplicity. Our father sat on a stool drawn up near the door, a hermit paying his visit to a sister hermit.
And even after the winter seemed well ended it suffered a relapse, piling snow deeper atop our work. My sister and I offered ourselves to our mother without success. On this side and that, she seemed to find only sore constraint and bitter captivity. Her blood turned thin as water and she developed scrofulous complaints. When at her angriest, she wiped my nose, violently, and said it was oppressive to be looked at so reproachfully by children. If we asked for too much, her panicked response frightened us further.
Her own presence seemed to distress her. She fell endlessly behind in her work. She was found at all hours bent in half and rubbing her back. She couldn’t warm her hands. One palm on the table would quiver, and, seeing us notice, she’d cover it with the other.
Our animals sickened as if bewitched. Our cat died of hunger. When the weather permitted my mother sat in the field as far as possible from the house. When storms drove us inside, on occasion I glimpsed her before she had composed her expression. One sleeting morning she taught my sister a game, based on the stations of a woman’s life, that she called Tired, Exhausted, Dying, and Dead.
At night when I was visited by strange dreams and pleaded for her company, she told me she’d seen witches lying in the fields on their backs, naked up to the navel. She fixed on a story from a neighboring town of a man who’d confessed that he’d killed seven successive boys in his wife’s womb by means of his magic, and that he’d also withered the offspring of his father-in-law’s herd. She told us that lost girls were cooked in a cauldron until the flesh entire came away from the bone, from which the witches made an unguent that was a great aid to their arts and pleasures. She followed closely the sensational story of de Giac, the king’s favorite, who confessed he had given one of his hands to the Devil, and who asked when condemned that this hand be severed and burned before he was put to death.
She took her life with a series of plants that my father said she had gathered from the most sinister localities. We discovered her early one bright morning. I remained in place near her bed, remembering her hand slipping off my inhospitable arm the evening before when she’d been trying to negotiate some ice on our doorstep.
I was fourteen. My sister was nine. We discussed what had happened as though it all belonged to a period now concluded. Our day-to-day world having fallen away, something else would take its place.
After that I paid only distracted attention to the ordinary round of life. If others came too close, I made signs with my hands as if to repair the harm I’d done them. At times during chores I would halt as if seized by my own vacancy. I saw very we
ll how people looked upon me. I despised in my heart those who despised me. And when my father saw me in such torments, he thought: he loved her so much he’s still weeping.
All I desired, morning in and evening out, was a love with its arms thrown wide. But the contrary is the common lot, everyone’s family telling him furiously that everything hurts, always. The nest makes the bird.
This potter’s wheel of futility and despair would have continued had our parish priest not singled out my voice for his choir, and detected in me what he claimed were aptitudes, especially for the sciences. What he offered as appreciation I took to be pity. It was suggested to my father that I be turned over to the monastic school at Pont-à-Sevre. But even before that decision could be made, Henriet Griart, having heard the choir, brought me to his lord de Rais’s attention. He was then seventeen, and quick-eyed and enterprising in his service as steward.
Thus does this chronicle turn, harsh and bleak as it is, from one misfortune to another. I was presented at Tiffauges, which was so tall that its towers were cloud-capped when I first saw them, and orange in the setting sun. Out of its windows summer had never been so mild, dusk so vivid, or the surrounding hills so shady in their grateful abundance of streams and gardens. My sponsor, who’d refused converse during the carriage ride, provided some instruction on etiquette while we waited in the great hall, adding that if I behaved he’d see that my promotion was advanced with great ingenuity.
His kindness moved me. And when the doors opened for the castle’s master and his retinue, tears sprang to my eyes. My interview was conducted through that blur of weeping. This was the lord whom even I knew to be one of the richest in France. Who’d fought side by side with Joan the year our country had pulled herself from her knees. Who’d drawn the bolt from the Maid’s shoulder and in her vanguard had raised the siege of Orleans.
The sun was fully set. Boys in special surplices moved from candelabra to candelabra with delicate, whiplike tapers. All of the wall tapestries featured hunting scenes. His first words, seeming to come from somewhere behind him, were that I was a little angel. He had reddish hair and a trimmed red beard. A blue satin ruff. His face in the candlelight was like a half-veiled lamp.
Henriet was told to prepare me. I was pulled into an antechamber where my clothes were stripped from me and burned on a grate. I was fitted with a doublet of green and brown velvet and loose-fitting breeches and shoes, then taken through a small passageway bolted with an iron gate on either end and set with chevrons along its length to what looked like a side-chapel arranged with painted screens. Above the screens loomed the worked canopy of a gigantic bed. In the firelight the embroidered tigers flexed and clawed their mates. Benches with saw-tooth serrations above the headrests lined the walls. This seemed a secret room constructed where roof trusses converged from the projecting base.
A boy near the door was identified by Henriet as the aquebajulus: custodian of the holy water. He held before him a small bronze bowl. Upon entering, each of the lords dipped two fingers in it and made the Sign of the Cross, and then the boy departed.
Those present in that chamber besides myself, Henriet, and the lord de Rais were his lord’s cousins Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville. That night while they took their ease on those benches and drank hippocras from a silver beaker that the steward had fetched, I was made to shed the doublet I had just donned and to lie across the billowy down of the bed’s snowy comforter and to receive onto my belly the ejaculate of his lord’s member. He knelt above me, having finished, attentive to my face with his head cocked as though listening for something, and then Roger de Briqueville handed him a jeweled dagger, the tip of which he pressed to my Adam’s apple, and the sting caused me to squint before his other cousin cleared his throat and reminded him of my uncommon beauty, suggesting I be retained as a page. The lord de Rais turned his gaze to Henriet, who looked at me. In his eyes I saw my mother’s gloomy and drained consideration. He shrugged, and nodded. With that shrug his lord returned his attention to my features. He set the dagger on the coverlet between us, touched his semen with a fingertip, and drew a line to my throat with it. Then he dismounted the bed. I was ignored through the conversation that followed.
Lying there, not yet having been granted leave to move, I experienced the ongoing impression that all this was inexplicably directed at me. The lord remarked that when he was three, his brother, René de la Suze, was born, upsetting the entire household, and that relations between them had never been cordial. He added that when at eleven he’d lost both parents, his father gored by a boar and his mother carried off by an inflammation of the brain. That same autumn had brought the disgrace of Agincourt, with the loss of his maternal grandfather’s lone son and heir.
When he stopped the only sounds were the logs on the fire. Henriet caught my eyes with his but I couldn’t tell what he hoped to communicate. And the lord de Rais, as though he’d already asked more than once, bade everyone to leave. When I rose, he instructed me to stay.
The firelight shimmered because I was weeping with terror. He asked my age in a gentle voice and, when answered, exclaimed “Fifteen!” with a kind of graciousness, as if at an unexpected gift.
He asked if I had heard of the emperor Nero. When I could not stop my tears, he went on to inform me that Nero never wore the same clothes twice. That he almost never traveled with a train of less than one thousand carriages. That his mules were shod with silver and his muleteers wore coats of Carnusian wool.
He said that at my age he knew already the men who were to influence the entire course of his life. That these great souls had taught him that to venture little was to venture much, and the risk the same.
He returned to the bed and eased himself down beside me, sympathetic to my shivering and heaving. While touching me he explained that balked desire, seeing itself checked as if by a cruel spell, undergoes a hideous metamorphosis. And steep and slippery then became the slope between voluptuous delight and rage. He said he was still undecided as to whether he was of a mind to let me rest and that only a straw turned the scale which kept me there. He lay beside me in silence for some moments while I regained custody of my emotions. Then he made me swear I would reveal none of the secrets about to be entrusted to me, prefatory to the oath administered a few hours later before the altar in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity. In swearing so I understood I was gathering to my heart the secrets of sins both committed and to come. This oath was taken in the presence of the same gathering that had witnessed the initial events in the secret room. And following the oath I was seated at the lord de Rais’s right hand for a dinner of roast goose with sausages, a stew of hares, white leeks with capons, plovers, dressed pigs, a fish jelly, bitterns, and herons in claret, with rice in milk and saffron afterward.
My account proceeds by gaps, not unlike my life. The castle at Champtocé was an apparition out of a fairy story: black and grave, sprouting crooked tall towers with battlements like broken teeth. Grimly flattened fields surrounded it. But everything inside was transformed by braziers of light and furniture of gold leaf, by statues and bound manuscripts of worked silver. My sponsor explained the tumult of passing men-at-arms by informing me that our lord kept a personal army of two hundred and fifty, each equipped with the finest mounts and armor, as well as complete new liveries three times a year. He traveled, Henriet explained, from residence to residence and kept an open house at each, so that anyone, high-born or low, could stop for food and drink. As for the low, it was well-known that this invitation was extended only to young and beautiful children, either unaccompanied or, if not, left behind to dine at their leisure.
He unlocked a curved black grate guarding access to a spiral stairwell ascending the north tower, and led me up the stone steps and at the top we paused before a room, also locked. The smell was startling. Henriet held a small cloth soaked in cloves over his nose and mouth. He did not offer to share it. Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, was to take possession of the castle in forty-eight hours, h
e said, so this work had to be completed by then. We were joined by Gilles de Sillé and another servant who did not give his name. Inside the room we found the skeletons, heaped in a colossal faggot-box set near the hearth, of forty-two children. The skin was shrunken and dried about the bones and flaked off to the touch. The box was the height of our chins and the jumble of bones inside as high as our chests. A stool was brought to help Henriet and myself climb up and in, each of us using a staff to clear space for our legs. This disturbed the beetles and flies and other insects to which the bones had been abandoned, as well as a kind of powdery dust that settled in our mouths and eyes. No one spoke except about how best to bundle the loads into large coffers bound with iron and already waiting in the middle of the room. When filled, each was to be double-bound with rope as a proof against the failure of the iron bands. Eight in all were required. I distinguished the number of children by counting the skulls. Our purchase of everything was increasingly complicated by hands turned white and greasy with a slimy ash.
We became aware of noises at the door’s peephole, though none of my co-workers seemed troubled. I heard a woman’s soft laughter. Henriet warned me to keep guardianship of my eyes. He later explained that Roger de Briqueville at times invited noble ladies of the district to watch such operations in progress.
We swept the last bits into the faggot-box, and a layer of resin wood and ground aromatics was spread to mask the smell. The coffers were carried down the spiral steps at nightfall to waiting wagons, which were driven to a quay on the Loire and loaded onto barges to be poled down to Machecoul. There, before sunrise, they were hauled up to what Henriet revealed was our lord’s own bedroom. And there they were emptied and the bones burned in his presence. And when each pyre cooled, it was our task to dump the ashes into the moat.
Henriet lost patience with my periodic torpor. When I complained about his anger, he widened his eyes and affected a fool’s expression as though imitating someone. I was quartered near his wash basin and chamber-pot stand, and told not to touch his things. We took our meals together. After some weeks we began conversing at night once our chambers were dark. He said that from his earliest childhood he’d felt himself an affliction to those around him and had banished himself to the woods, where he couldn’t be spied and only answered after having been called many times. Sometimes he hid in caves. He remembered asking his father if a hermit could live on plants and roots. One day during the harvest they found him looking in the hedges and hayfields for wild saffron bulbs to eat. He’d made a bow with which to kill birds, but hadn’t managed to hit any. He was nothing like his younger brother, who in January ran beside the plow with a goad until he was hoarse from the cold and the shouting. At my age he had frightened his mother by pointing into the fireplace and claiming to have seen old Mourelle grinding her teeth. Mourelle was their mare, and of her he was deeply afraid. He also feared hens. But he was a lesson, he thought, for at some point he had applied himself diligently to discover what he should do to cease being reclusive and live among men.
