pitch nor form, but somehow communicated a fierce, inhuman hunger that would, I realized, brook no denial.
Instinctively, I lifted my torch in my own defence as it leaped. The effect upon the creature was instantaneous. To my wonder, the thing retreated, as though terrified by the fire. Emboldened, I advanced on it with the torch. It screamed in rage and continued to recoil. I expected any moment for it to shift its shape, as I had seen these things do. I knew that if it did transform itself, it would effect an escape.
The thought filled me with terrible, righteous rage. In that moment, I saw it as the incarnation of all the pain and fear I had encountered since arriving in that Godforsaken spot. Now, worse still, it had even profaned the site of Askuwheteau’s grave. With an oath, I shoved my torch in the creature’s face.
Its hair exploded into flame. Shrieking in agony, the thing clawed at its face and hair attempting to put out the fire. Alas, for the creature, the fire only burned brighter and hotter, spreading to its face and arms by some supernatural providence.
The demon flung out its arms in an aspect of crucifixion, and before my eyes its body appeared to shimmer, dwindling and yet appearing to stretch, but becoming smaller. The arms elongated, becoming as the wings of a bird, or an enormous bat, beating furiously as it rose into the night, still burning, still transforming as it took flight into the darkness like a fireball streaking towards the village of St. Barthelemy. My eyes followed its upward trajectory for a few seconds, and then watched in awe as it crashed to the earth. Its screams as it fell to its death-or what I prayed was its death-were the pitiable lamentations of a damned thing.
But by then, my only emotion was joy, and I delighted in the foul creature’s death, a death I prayed had been agonizing beyond endurance.
And then, like a benediction, the air was full of snow, falling in heavy flakes as pure white as the wings of any angel, and in the red light of dawn’s advance in the east, winter was upon me with a hunter’s killing stealth.
On the edge of the village, the spectral shapes formed themselves out of the falling snow, moving wraithlike towards me. Exhausted, starving, blind with sweat, drenched in dried blood, I fell to my knees and accepted my death, for I was beyond fighting further, beyond the ability to endure any more of these horrors. When they reached for me, I closed my eyes and commended my spirit into the hands of Almighty God, and waited for the end.
And then I heard the sound of human voices speaking in a language I did not understand. Warm hands touched my face and my own hands. Strong arms lifted me and bore me aloft, carrying me through the deserted village. The snow continued to fall in a heavy sheet of cold, cleansing white. My eyelids fluttered and the light swam.
Before I lost consciousness and yielded to the tide of new darkness rushing towards me, I smelled the awful stink of burning flesh, and something worse. I looked down and saw the smouldering remains of the monster I had burned with my torch.
It had not survived the fire. Perhaps it had died attempting to cast off its shape, attempting to return to its human aspect. Its body was manlike in shape, but where its arms would have been were the webbed wings of a giant bat, ending in human hands with nails that were like the claws of a great Oriental tiger. Its face was a half- human, half-basilisk nightmare.
I turned my head away from the abomination lying on the ground, already beginning to be covered by the falling snow. Around me, I saw that some of the men were setting fire to the village. I heard the crackle of wood and smelled new smoke.
A wave of heat came to me, and my first thought was to stretch towards it. I cannot tell with any certainty as I write this if my impulse was to throw myself on the growing pyre, or merely to warm myself by it. And then, my eyes closed and I yielded to the mercy of complete insensibility.
When I awoke, though I had no bearings, I sensed that I was very far from that haunted place. I was on a sort of sledge, wrapped in furs. Above me the trees were heavy with snow, and we were moving silently through the endless, damnable forest that binds this Godforsaken country like a slave’s chain.
The Indians cared for me with a mercy and a tenderness that put Christian charity to shame. I travelled with them to their winter hunting grounds and lived as their guest and under their protection for the long months of ice and snow. In time, I came to understand that they regarded me as some sort of deliverer, and in exchange for that delivery, they were prepared to extend to me an acceptance that I would, as a Black Robe, never otherwise experience.
I heard the word “Weetigo” many times. It was a word I knew well, though I knew none of the others they spoke. It was the word I had first heard in Trois-Rivieres from the drunkard Dumont, and then later from my saviour Askuwheteau, who died that I might live. I understand the word now, as an old man who has spent his life among these people, in a way I could not have understood it as a young man.
To my shame, I believe that the Savages who rescued me believed I had defeated just such a monster in St. Barthelemy, for they saw the remains of the demon creature that had fallen from the sky wreathed in fire. In it, they had seen the incarnation of their most terrifying legend; in a sense, I had made their word flesh.
At that time, I had not the words to explain to them that what they had seen was not what they called a “Weetigo,” but rather something that we ourselves had brought from the Old World to the New. I suspect that the scarcity of those words likely saved my life, for I could not have answered for their rage if they had known the truth of what Father de Celigny, or whatever the monster’s real name was, had wrought there.
That they saw me as a saviour instead of merely an extension of the same corruption that destroyed an entire village of souls-a village of innocent men, women, and children, who died without the blessing of baptism and God’s mercy, suited my cowardly purposes, though I wept with shame and grief and guilt that winter when I was alone.
In my nightmares that winter, I revisited that terrible day when I dragged the sleeping bodies of those poor creatures into the sunlight and listened to their agonized screaming as the sunlight turned them to ash, especially the children. It haunts me that I never discovered if they could have been saved, or returned to their natural state, and if my actions had been a mercy, or merely an extension of the blasphemy.
In the spring, the Indians passed me on to a brigade of
Father de Varennes wept with joy, for he had counted me as dead. Together we praised God and the tender mercies of the Blessed Virgin for my safe return from the perils of the wilderness and the incivility of the Savages. We said a Mass for Father de Celigny, our most recent blessed martyr to the barbarous cruelty of the Savages.
As we said that Mass, Askuwheteau’s face rose up in my mind like an unquiet, reproachful ghost. I added a silent prayer for his forgiveness for all the lies I was about to tell.
I told Father de Varennes that the Indians had left me near the site of St. Barthelemy. I told him that I had made my way to the mission and had found it burned to the ground.
I told him I had a sense that a rival tribe, perhaps even the Hiroquois, had slaughtered everyone in the village and left the carrion for the wild animals. I told him that I had found bodies and that I had buried them. I told him I had not found the body of Father de Celigny. I told him that I had thrown myself at the mercy of the Savages who found me, and that I had paid them with gold I had found buried beneath the remains of the Jesuit house.
Even as I told those lies, I realized that the winter snow and ice would have obliterated any possible evidentiary challenge to my account, even if it were doubted, which it was not. Who would doubt the word of a priest, especially one who had survived such an ordeal?
I covered myself in shame by blaming the Savages for the massacre of the settlement of St. Barthelemy when I knew that what happened to all of those poor people was something that we, the French had brought into their midst, something that corrupted and afflicted them, and eventually killed them.
More than anything, I told the lies to prevent anyone from ever returning to the site of the Mission of St. Barthelemy and discovering the secret that I buried in those caves eighteen years ago.
I am dying now, Your Reverence. I have asked for Father Vimont, who comes shortly to collect this document for your perusal, but also to give me Last Rites and absolve me for my sins, which have been many.
My body burns with fever from the pox. I fear that the very effort of writing to you this last Relation has hastened my inevitable commendation of my soul to Christ. This Relation is my confession of the things I did, but it is also as I said my true Testament of the things I saw with my own eyes, and I swear to it on peril of my Immortal Soul.
I know that some who read it will think it the ravings of a madman in the last deliria of fever. I pray that Your Reverence will not number among them, and that you will be able to see into my heart and know that I speak the
