Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  His potential fascinates me.

  We speak the same language, though his usages are blunt and inelegant. We share a mother tongue, and little else.

  Now that he has agreed to allow me to share in his most secret ways, he bubbles over with excitement.

  I must wear a monk’s robe.

  A hooded cloak will do, I suggest.

  No. A monk’s robe only. I accede and send Charles out to procure one. I will not ask how. I never do. It suits me that my wishes are always obeyed and I do not know exactly how.

  He tells me that I must hide myself and stay hidden, no matter what happens.

  This has the autocratic feel of an old fairy tale, as if I would turn to stone if I disobeyed his slightest instruction, so I agree solemnly, swearing on the rough wooden crucifix he produces for the purpose, though I get a sliver in my palm that will prove almost impossible to remove later and will fester for some time.

  I have gold and silver and amethyst and malachite and rock crystal crucifixes, that I have collected on my travels, but they are curiosities, and of some value, that is all. I am long past crucifixes.

  But not past crucifixions.

  He is as nervous as a bride, dressing in his soiled peasant blouse and loose trousers as if they were wedding regalia. I have offered him new clothing, but he is in love with his own smell, like a beast.

  He adores the excesses that seep through the folds of his crude clothes.

  It is a pity I am a fastidious person. Perhaps I would understand him better were I able to sink to his animal level. But I am master, and he is beast, and we both satisfy each other enormously on our separate levels.

  He makes me kneel and pray before we depart at 10:00 P.M. He pushes my hands together in the traditional steeple of prayer, wraps the tin rosary beads around them like bonds.

  He swears me to the monk’s robe. Swears me to silent observance, like a monk. Laughs, and then swears me to chastity and obedience.

  “Poverty?” I ask.

  He shakes his unkempt head. Only chastity and obedience, and only for tonight.

  I admit my heart pounds. I find acceding to his wild demands a novelty. I am not used to agreeing to anyone else’s wishes. I find his staring, caressing, careless pale eyes invincible. I find the impending promise of his total lack of control exciting beyond all my previous manipulations.

  I am used to lurking and watching, to setting events in motion.

  The events tonight, I know, will have nothing to do with what I want or wish or arrange. They will be madly random. They will be mad.

  I am very excited.

  He sees the anticipation in my eyes and laughs, ripping the rosary beads from my hands as if freeing me from bonds.

  He is young, ignorant, crude, and no doubt crazy.

  And yet he feels my equal.

  What a fascinating beast.

  And he is mine, as everyone else is his.

  We walk. A long way. I trail him in my Gothic monk’s robe.

  The cobblestones are damp, and he takes the obscure ways, through narrow streets. I smell the river, moist and moribund. I smell frying sausages and the fetid gutters. I smell the damp wool of my heavy robe, the hood literally weighing my head down in a modestholy?—position of submission, like a beast of burden.

  I will be as mute as a beast tonight, no matter what happens. I swear this to myself, the only god I recognize.

  My palm throbs. The sliver from the crucifix has proven stubborn, painful. I am such a good monk, I even abuse myself for the cause, for the unholy exultation in being a humble observer of life’s mysteries.

  When I see the wall of Notre Dame ahead of us I pause. Here I go, bowed over like Quasimodo, clothed in scratchy Holy Mother Church wool, like a walking scapular, following my Caliban of Christianity under the shadow of the most holy cathedral in Christendom . . . or fair France, at least.

  For a moment my religious childhood resurrects itself. I fear bands of avenging angels come to strike the impious down . . . but those were the fairy tales, as I have often found out in later life, and the reality is the evil that men do, not the gods or angels who would stop them from evil. These are the myths.

  He tugs on my deep sleeve, pulls me against a squat tangle of buildings in front of the louring church. We are alone in the universe, and his breath stinks of stale beer.

  “You will say nothing from now on. When I push you back, you will stay there.”

  “What is this place?”

  “They call this something in this city.” He spits out the word “city” as if it were cursed. “In my land, we burrowed into the heartless ground below, to hold our ceremonies. Here we must make our own burrows, and we have.

  “Below and hidden is our chapel,” he goes on, “that we have made with our own hands and hearts.” He jerks his rough-shaven chin at the towers behind us. “It is older than that whited sepulchre of stone and rich incense and corruption. Below we make our own cathedral, we call down our own God. And He comes. You will see.”

  I follow him into the ancient erection of stone and sour wood.

  He moves through a decrepit door, and I follow. My robe catches on splinters as possessive as the grasping hands of beggars. I have never given alms.

  I hear the wool shriek as I pull it free again and again, and then . . . cool underground air. We are stumbling down rough stone steps.

  There is no light. I follow him by smell.

  Amazing! I am used to civilized odors, and here I am tracking him like a hound. I almost laugh out loud, save he has enjoined silence.

  My self has shrunk into an avid witness inside this irritating cocoon of itchy wool. I know not where I am or what will happen when we arrive there. It is delicious! What a find my winter werewolf is! If only Tiger could see me now, piercing such wilderness at the heart and soul of that most civilized of cities, Paris, mon amour.

  I must keep myself from laughing like a hyena scenting prey.

  The dark and the closeness and the mystery are intoxicating.

  The steps end, and I pause.

  He grabs my sleeve, pulls me forward a few steps, then thrusts me into a niche of rock.

  Stones shift, tumble, and click as brittle as castanets at my feet.

  “Stay!” his harsh whisper orders. “You are a statue. You are a saint. Saint . . . Eyebright.”

  The fact that I watch has excited him as much as it has me.

  There are words for this in forbidden books, but I prefer to read the great hidebound Book of Life and Death.

  I hear a bottle break, glass scattering like tinkling chimes.

  A match flares in the blackness. Candle wax takes fire and melts into a holy odor. Holy order.

  I am back again in the chapels of my childhood, dark-visaged madonnas seeming to change expression in a hundred dancing candle flames.

  Dancing. There will be dancing.

  I hear the shuffle of crude wooden soles along the path he and I have trod.

  Matches spit sulphur, and flare. A Milky Way of thick, misshapen candles reveals a grotto.

  I look down. The stones at my feet are skulls and leg bones.

  I am crammed into an ossuary. Into a niche in an ancient catacomb. My feet trample Roman bones. No wonder he laughed and named me a saint.

  I stand on the remnants of another time, deep enough into the sarcophagus of earth that I shall not be seen except as a shadow of the dead.

  Around me, they assemble from who knows where? Gypsies, wanderers, peasant nomads, thousands of miles from home, from the crude bunkers dug deep into the soil of the home villages that he has told me of.

  Here the earth has been moved centuries before. Here they nestle into an ancient amphitheater, a chapel where gods Roman and Christian have been worshiped in whatever way suits.

  A strange sour odor of raw power fills the space.

  By the many ill-smelling candles I can see that each man has brought a bottle. Bottles of all sizes and colors, crude bottles of pottery. My be
ast has been busy. He has jammed a tin grater into an ancient wooden pillar holding back the stone like a tree.

  The men crowd around to scrape off the wax sealing their bottles on the grater edge.

  And what men! Bearded and barefoot, many of them, like beasts. Clothed in shreds of denim trousers and torn shirts, their skin showing through like filthy parchment, strange shoes tied to some of their feet with mere strings.

  They mob the grater, scraping their bottle tops at it, rutting stags. Red wax seals the bottles and soon coats the grater like coagulating blood.

  Then one man pulls his bottle away, strikes the bottom with a single mighty blow as if he were slapping a newborn into squalling life.

  A cork shoots out like a bullet, hitting the low rock ceiling.

  The man’s head is already tilted straight back as pure liquid fire slakes his throat and a strangely narcotic, sickly-sweet smell fills the rocky grotto.

  I must grasp at the stone and bones to keep myself from swooning.

  Somehow, in the excitement of opening the bottles, I had failed to notice that women had entered the dark chapel under Notre Dame.

  They wear white, which they must have donned after entering the narrow shaft into the crypt.

  These are gowns with wide sleeves, almost Druidic, although these people are mountains removed from the Druids of Ireland. Colored girdles wrap their waists, and, as they circle and dance, right to left, singing, I feel as if I am watching some subterranean reflection of the Ballet Russe. There is meaning in their motion.

  The men have squatted on their heels in a circle against the crudely piled stones. They drink, slap their knees, huskily cheer the dancers on.

  The virginal white gowns snap back and forth as the women gyrate faster. One moment I am watching nuns, the next, nymphs. One instant vestal virgins, the next, temple prostitutes.

  The men at the edges are suffering the same subdivision of the mind and perceptions.

  They rise, twine amongst the whirling women, tearing off their shirts to lash them into greater speed and spinning and frenzy with fabric whips. Their heads tip up to their rampant bottles like babies’ mouths to their mothers’ breasts.

  The air grows steamy with breath and body heat. I suffocate within my monk’s robe, but dare not shed it.

  The candlelight warms the women’s glistening faces, which glow with fever spots.

  The men dance freely among them now, my protégé everywhere, every woman’s eyes and hands upon him as if he were the center of the universe.

  There is no denying the frantic ecstasy of the dance. Voices lift in strange syllables. Men and women begin trembling, falling down.

  On the rock-strewn floor they writhe like snakes, and like snakes bare limbs emerge . . . arms, legs, the male organ. And merge. Speaking in tongues has become speaking with tongues. They fall upon each other like wolves. It is a Roman orgy as Romans had never the imagination to mount. The air reeks with the scent of sin and salvation, liquor and burning beeswax. Ecstasy sensual and religious.

  I stand in my hidden niche, behind my veil of wet wool, unseen, unsensed, untouched.

  This is a dance both greater and more debased than the Gypsies’. It is a ballet of the primitive soul. The meaningless syllables echo off the bones of dead martyrs. One man stands aloof from the rest.

  But he watches with fevered eyes and suddenly rips apart his trousers at the crotch.

  Gaping wounds make a mask of tragedy where his sexual organs should be.

  “Ecce homo!” someone cries in badly accented Latin, only one of the Babel of languages I have heard snatches of during this mad ceremony.

  Behold the man. Behold the unmanned, I think as I view the castratus. I cannot help shuddering.

  The sight of his mutilation and pride in it spurs the congregation to further orgiastic fever. I hear the snap of a whip and close my eyes.

  I had thought nothing was too much for me, but I have been proven wrong.

  My beast has outdone himself, and me.

  Anything is possible.

  I grit my teeth against the sounds, the moans, the blood, the reeking fluids of all kinds, the excess, the insanity, the power, the glory.

  I will wait until all is done and my beast comes to lead me home.

  Then I may let myself do with him what I will.

  Or not.

  I am still the master, even if I only rule madness.

  26.

  La Mort Double

  Women were the foremost in pushing to the front.

  —THE LONDON MORNING ADVERTISER

  FROM A JOURNAL

  Luckily, I sleep very lightly.

  When I heard a creak in the main room, I rose from my bed and crept out, drawing the privacy curtains gently open so that the rings didn’t scrape the rods.

  Imagine my fright to glimpse a dark-trousered figure moving stealthily through the chamber in the dim light from the windows.

  Though we had retired early upon Irene’s suggestion, I had been restless and far from ready for sleep. The report she and Nell made on the Paris Morgue drove me to distraction and frustration. How unkind of them to exclude me from such a fascinating expedition! No amount of Nell’s bemoaning the dreadful pathos of the scene could quench my curiosity. I was beginning to regret joining them, and was ready to bolt. I am used to being on my own. I am used to leading, rather than following.

  Now I might have to take the lead in confronting a burglar, with no weapon to hand but my own wits.

  Usually I relied upon those innocuous modern accessories which the wise woman realizes are also her best defense: an umbrella and a hatpin.

  One may walk the streets in any quarter of the world so accoutered and be ready for all that circumstance and the minds of evil men may throw at her.

  Alas, one’s nightclothes do not call for either accessory, so my mind rummaged wildly for a domestic equivalent. The only item that sprang to mind, and hand, was a bronze lamp on a nearby end table.

  This I seized, prepared to do battle, and accidentally disturbed some knickknack on the table beside it, causing a sharp scrape across the marble top.

  The figure became a statue. While my eyes were still trying to realign its position in the room, a leather-gloved hand tightened like a manacle around my wrist that held the lamp.

  “Shhh!” a voice ordered my ear. “You will wake Nell.”

  The hand that had custody of my wrist reversed my direction and dragged me back into the privacy of my sleeping alcove. Once there, the unlit lamp was removed from my grip and placed atop a bureau.

  My curtains were not drawn so tight as those in the outer room so I could plainly recognize Irene Adler Norton despite the men’s dress she wore.

  “Mrs. Norton! Irene.”

  She moved to draw the curtains behind us shut, then put her arms akimbo on her hips to regard me as a French nanny might a misbehaving child or an errant poodle.

  “What am I to do with you, Miss Pink?” she demanded.

  “Where are you going?” I demanded back in the same urgent, hushed tone.

  “None of your business.”

  “I’m afraid it is, now that I’ve caught you sneaking out of your own rooms at some dreadful hour.”

  “It is only eleven o’clock.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Perhaps I have an assignation.”

  “Not to hear Nell tell of your devotion to the devilishly attractive yet sainted Godfrey. I am most eager to meet such a paradox.”

  “When did you have occasion to hear of Godfrey?”

  “When I spared a moment to listen to your friend, who is not a bit shy in praising her associates and damning mine.”

  “Really.” Silence stepped between us. Finally, she said, “You are not who you pretend to be.”

  “I suppose so. But you often masquerade as who you are not. What is the difference?”

  “The difference is that I have worked as a private inquiry agent, and you have not.”


  “No, I have not done that. Yet.”

  “Nell was right to call you a minx.”

  “I accept the title with pride.”

  “You will keep silent about this evening’s expedition.”

  “Yes. If I also go.”

  She breathed out an expletive that was muffled by her vocal intensity. I believe it was French. “You have no idea where I go, to do what.”

  “That is why it will be a terrific adventure.”

  “I am not taking Nell, who has accompanied me into a crypt beneath Prague and into the presence of two drowned men. Why should I take you?”

  “Because I have found you out and must be silenced?” I inquired innocently. I can still produce a girlish tone. It is my third most effective weapon.

  “An impudent minx.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are not dressed for it.”

  “Tell me what to wear?”

  “Your darkest, most nondescript clothing. Something in which you could pass as Nell.”

  “I have just the thing in wool plaid, a very muted charcoal-andtan plaid.”

  “Very well. Be fast about it.”

  She left me then, for the other room, leaving me to hook myself into my corsets and boots unaided. My fingers flew through the arduous tasks, while my heart beat with triumph. I was sure that Irene Adler Norton was going somewhere that no decent woman would visit at this hour. And she had planned to go alone. What a woman!

  Were there more like her, my job would be so much easier.

  I slipped into the outer chamber, where she awaited me at the door. I noticed then that the curtains had been pulled and pinned closed, to keep the light at bay. She had planned this expedition down to the smallest detail.

  Except for my restless mind and keen ears.

  Once we were in the hotel passage she led me to the rear servants’ stairs.

  “Soften your steps,” she advised me sternly.

  Indeed, the servants’ stairs were uncarpeted, so we tiptoed down their endless turns like naughty children. At last we exited into the night, onto damp cobblestones and into a cool mist.