Enter, Night

From the shadows, his voice came softly, more akin to a serpent’s sibilant hiss than a sequence of words spoken by a human tongue, and it appeared to issue from nowhere, yet everywhere. My senses swam, and I staggered, righting myself in time not to fall. Again, he made no move towards me to come to my aid.

“Are you cold, Father Nyon?” he said gently. “This country is very cold, is it not? Very cold indeed. Cold and wild, and very dark in the winter. Do you not find it so? Winter approaches, even now, and the hours of daylight have grown so short. Do you see how dark it has become? Can you feel the night enter?”

And indeed I did see how dark it was becoming. The room itself was growing darker. The fire seemed very far away, and the only light in the room seemed to come from his voice. I cannot better describe it than to say that his words themselves seemed to me to shimmer in the growing dark. It was as though I had stared too long at the sun and had gone blind, and the sun had grown black, searing its image behind my eyes, blotting out all else except that burning shower of falling black stars. And yet, there was no sun. There was no light.

My knees buckled, and I fell to the dirt floor.

Father de Celigny’s mocking laughter came as though from a great distance. “Poor little priest,” he said. He sounded almost regretful. “You should never have come to St. Barthelemy. You should have believed the stories you were told about what happened in this place.” I heard the rustle of his robes and the sound of his feet as he walked slowly to where I lay.

Even as I write these memories tonight, I am struck anew at how they appear to be the ravings of a madman, even to me. And yet: I write the truth of the events as they occurred; I swear it upon my soul.

I tried to rise to my feet but my limbs refused to obey the commands of my brain. I was powerless to move. Were it witchcraft or some other dark art, I was trapped in its spell, unable to move, as though I had found myself at the bottom of a vast dark sea, holding my breath and struggling desperately to swim to the surface before my chest exploded and I took in all that cold, black water.

“Can you hear me, little priest?” de Celigny said, leaning close to my face.

I tried to answer, but found that, though my wits were still my own, I could not even speak-though I knew that if he commanded me to speak, the words would come, even if they were not my own words, but his. But I was able to move my eyes. I saw his face with a hellish clarity that had heretofore eluded me, and with that awful sight came another surety: that I had, God help me, found the author of the malefaction that had proved the undoing of the settlement.

O, how can I describe what I saw as I gazed upon the visage of Father de Celigny, the murderer of St. Barthelemy?

Shall I say that his eyes glared with a reddened light unlike any fire of God’s earth, the same burning crimson that I had seen in the eyes of the Savage children two nights ago? That they stood out like beacons in the waxen pallor of his face?

Where I thought I had seen aristocracy I now saw the visage of a devil-a degenerate, ravenous archfiend wearing a well-tailored mask of human flesh. His foul mouth was open, and I could see the dull gleam where his teeth lay against his lower lip, and the smell of rotted meat, and worse, issued from his mouth.

“Do you see?” the beast said. “Do you understand?”

“Monster,” I whispered, my voice suddenly my own again. “Monster. Monster. Monster. What have you wrought here?”

“I carried the seed inside me,” he said. “The gift was in my blood, as it was in the blood of my ancestors. It is my inheritance, an inheritance I have brought with me to this new, unspoiled world. I have shared its light generously with these poor, lost people, to whom I have given a new catechism: mine. And now, they will have two priests. You will stay here with me and we will minister to our new congregation.” He cocked his head mockingly. “Does that please you, little Jesuit?” he said. “That we bring the true light of our darkness to this unspoiled place?”

“I will stop you,” I said. “I will save these people. And I will kill you, and I will do it in God’s name, and to His glory, devil.”

“No,” Father de Celigny said. His voice sounded almost pitying. “You will not.”

Then, by the grace of God, three things happened in quick succession. A slumbering log on the fire exploded behind us, sending up a shower of sparks, the retort as sharp as the crack of a cannon. Father de Celigny hissed, startled by the noise of the fire. And in the moment he turned away from me, the spell was broken. I found I could again move my limbs.

I pushed my body away from where I lay, leaping to my feet. My hands instinctively went to my chest, where the crucifix usually lay. With horror, I remembered that devious creature had tricked me into hanging it outside the hut. I was defenceless, as I had always been intended to be.

De Celigny turned slowly towards me. His smile was one of pure, hellish triumph, for we both knew it was my time to die. I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross in the air in front of me.

There was a terrible snap, like a lightning strike, and de Celigny screamed. I opened my eyes to see him flinching away, as though from a terrible, searing heat. I made the sign of the cross again, and again he screamed. As I stared, he fell forward as though to collapse on the ground.

But before his hands even struck the ground, yet another wonderment occurred, though this one was as malign as the other was divine. In the first second, I had beheld the falling human form of Father de Celigny, but what landed on the ground instead was the shape of a colossal, towering black wolf with blazing red eyes and the jagged teeth of a stone-carved gargoyle.

I cried out in shock and stumbled backwards away from this new incarnation of the monster. From its gullet came a roar of rage such as I have never heard from any animal. The wolf crouched before me, as though poised to strike, but instead it turned and leaped easily over my prone body and ran out through the doorway into the night.

I reached for the remaining pile of sticks by the fire, and seized two slender ones. These I crossed, one over the other, in the shape of a makeshift crucifix. Thus armed, I held it in front of me and pursued the creature through the doorway.

In the unearthly brightness of the full moon, I beheld the entire village. But tonight, the village was not empty, not deserted.

Twenty, perhaps thirty Savages, men, women, children, young and old, stood ranked in a motionless perimeter like statues, eyes fixed upon me, fixed upon the makeshift cross I held in front of me, neither moving towards me nor backing away.

In the centre of the crowd stood Father de Celigny. Our eyes met. He stared at me with deep hatred. When finally he spoke, his words echoed only in my mind, for his lips did not move.

We will come for you tomorrow night, little priest, when the sun is down. We will come for you then, and nothing-neither your crosses, nor your prayers-will keep us from you.

A cutting wind sprang up suddenly from the north, carrying with it the knife-edge of winter. One by one, the shapes of the Savages and Father de Celigny shimmered, becoming misty and indistinct, then vanishing entirely as though carried away into the darkness beyond the trees and the rock cliffs by the sudden blast of frigid air.

I stood there till the first fingers of dawn coaxed the tentative morning from the night’s entombment. Some vestiges of my courage returned with the daylight. I let my aching body fall stiffly to my knees in a prayer of thanks, and an invocation for the strength I would need for what would-what must-come next.

I ate the remainder of the dried meat and corn mush that had been left to me by Askuwheteau’s band before deserting me, and I drank some of the water I had drawn the previous day, for my thirst was fierce. Had it only been two days ago that I arrived at the godforsaken ruins of St. Barthelemy? It seemed as though I had been there for an eternity, for time had begun to turn inwards on itself with the progression of this waking nightmare.

Despite my febrile, sleepless state, I remembered as a boy growing up in Beauce, I had heard the legends and tales of these revenant creatures, the morts-vivants who slumbered in their coffins beneath the earth in churchyards and sepulchres and rose from their graves at sundown to nourish themselves on the blood of the living. In the legends I recalled, these creatures would never die unless a shaft of wood was driven through their heart and, afterwards, the head stricken from the body. Even as a child, I had dismissed these stories as peasant folk-tales or, at worst, the blasphemous heresy that the Lord would allow the dead to leave their tombs in order to walk about among the living before the great Day of Judgement. And yet, here was that very