kicked its legs as though it were running. Then there was silence as the wolf lay on its side, tongue lolling out of its maw.
The first wolf, the injured one, whined pitifully and licked its fellow as though trying to wake it. Ruthlessly, I forced down my pity. Climbing partway down, I took aim at the first wolf with my bow and the one remaining arrow. Snarling defiantly in spite of its broken ribs, it began to back away from the body of the second wolf as though to take shelter, its hate-filled yellow eyes not leaving mine for an instant. In the same moment it turned to run, I pulled back on the string and sent the arrow home.
The arrow transfixed the wolf through the thick of its neck. Its body went rigid and from its throat came a wet, choking sound, as though it were trying to bark, or scream, but could not. Blood gushed from its mouth. Its eyes rolled to one side and it collapsed on the ground near the body of the second wolf.
I exhaled audibly, surprising myself with the sound. I did not even realize I had been holding my breath. What I felt in that moment was more than the sin of pride or vanity, though it encompassed both of those things. I felt as though God Himself was guiding my hand, moving me ever closer to my goal. My robe was soaked with sweat, and it felt cold and damp against my back and chest in the chilling afternoon light.
I cast one last glance at the bodies of the two dead wolves, as though to assure myself that they were truly dead. There was no time to tarry. Squinting, my eyes explored the rock face, searching desperately for some clue.
And then, my heart suddenly felt as though it had ceased beating, and my breath caught again. My eye had been drawn to a patch of recessed shadow between two jutting promontories of rock a short distance above where I now stood. It appeared, even from the distance at which I stood, to be a sort of opening, or cave mouth.
Upon reaching it, I used the tinderbox to light the candle I had brought with me. Shielding the flame with my hand I squeezed myself through the portal of natural rock outcropping and found myself inside a space tall enough for me to stand without encumbrance.
By candlelight, the cavern seemed enormous, though that might have merely been an illusion caused by the twisting shadows. I felt along the cave walls, walking carefully in the near-darkness, for I knew that if I fell here, or was otherwise injured, one of two things would happen: I would either die of some combination of hunger, thirst, or my wounds, or worse still, I would become helpless to defend myself against the devils’ depredations.
And then I made the discovery that has haunted both my nightmares and my waking hours for nearly twenty years. Even writing it now, tonight, I am overcome with the horror of my memory of it.
I cannot have gone any great distance into the cave, though it seemed like I must have, so smothering was the blackness, when I felt something move in the darkness. I say felt rather than heard, for there was no sound, but rather some displacement of the air above me. I raised the candle and looked up.
Hanging upside down, toes bent slightly for impossible purchase on the rock ledge, were the brother and sister I had met in the forest on the last night before my arrival at St. Barthelemy. Their arms folded against their bodies like wings.
The little boy was still naked. His legs wrapped around his sister’s middle-section in a grotesque parody of vile, incestuous carnality. Hers were likewise entwined around his middle-section. Her dress had fallen downwards, and her maidenhead was plainly visible through her brother’s spindly bronze legs.
And then I lowered the candle and looked down.
Strewn all around me lay the bodies of the Indians of St. Barthelemy in similar positions of repose, or death. Their eyes were closed, their arms crossed against their bodies as though for warmth, or comfort. Their chests neither rose nor fell, nor did any sound of breathing issue from their mouths. I put the candle very near the face of one, a woman. Her face was calm, and oddly beautiful. The candle’s light sculpted her high cheekbones with shadow. Her lips were full and voluptuous, and yet there protruded from those lips the sharp points of two white teeth, human in shape but somehow resembling the fangs of an animal.
I counted five, ten, fifteen of them in the immediate vicinity where I stood. There were doubtless more of them beyond the circle of my candlelight.
Holding my crucifix tightly in my hand, I nudged the woman’s body with the tip of my boot. I braced for her to awaken, but again there was nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing to indicate that I was anywhere other than an ordinary tomb, surrounded by the natural dead.
Without thinking, I placed my hands under the woman’s armpits, and tugged. Her body seemed very nearly weightless, certainly unlike any human body I had ever touched. It was as though, along with their souls, the curse that had been visited upon them had taken their physical heft. I glanced upwards at the two obscene children hanging by their toes from the ledge and wondered if this condition was what enabled them to suspend themselves in that manner.
The woman did not stir as I dragged her towards the opening of the cave. I was not sure what I would do with her once I brought her outside, but I had some vague memory of stories about these monsters’ abomination of sunlight and was hoping that there might be some truth to it.
As I approached the entrance with my burden, the darkness of the cavern brightened until I could see the actual rock opening. I felt a shudder move through the woman’s body, though she retained her sleeping posture and made no sound.
And then, as I stepped through the entrance to the cave, into the light, she awoke.
Her eyes flew open and she shrieked as though prodded with redhot iron tongs. Her mouth yawned open, exposing her full arsenal of sharp white teeth. The woman pulled away from me and began clawing at the ground as though to bury herself in the stone. Her screams rent the afternoon air, recalling to me the stories of the terrible witch burnings, and how the condemned women shrieked in the flames to which they had been sentenced.
For indeed, this Savage woman appeared to be burning alive in the sunlight.
In one second, her skin was clear and unblemished; in the next, it was festooned with enormous blisters that blossomed all over her body, seemingly all at once. The air was suddenly full of the smell of burning meat and something darker and fouler. White smoke poured from her body, rising from her limbs, her face, her hair, from any part of her that was exposed to the light. Still screaming, she looked at me with pleading, tortured eyes, and reached for me as though to beg my help, or at least my pity. In the instant our eyes met, I believe I saw her human soul, trapped in that terrible state between life and death and I knew that these creatures were not beyond the grace of God after all.
I crossed myself and gave her absolution, speaking the words “
The heat of fire that consumed the Savage woman’s earthly flesh was not of this earth. In less than a minute, the flames had reduced the woman’s body to ash, leaving no fragment of bone unconsumed, and the charnel house stink was everywhere.
This gruesome exercise I repeated twenty times or more, dragging each of these creatures to meet their second death, the final death, in the waning sunlight outside the cave. I blessed each one in its final moments as a soul to be saved and sent to its eternal rest in the arms of God. I absolved each one, for whatever their sins in life, this terrible end to which they came was not of their own choosing.
The two children, the brother and sister, I took last.
I carried them into the sunlight together, and they died together there. In their last moments, they seemed to again become children, innocent and trusting and terrified, and something in my soul died as they lay screaming in agony as the sun reduced their small, frail bodies to dust. It was children I saw being burned alive before my eyes, not monsters. The memory of it seared itself into my soul forever. Was I now a murderer of children? Was this the final curse that had been laid upon my head by the monster still inside the caves? Would God forgive me for this, even if I could never forgive myself?
All around me were smoking heaps of ash. My clothing was nearly white with it, and I knew it was in my hair and it burned in my eyes as well. I was grateful not to be able to see myself in a mirror at that moment, for I fear I would have seen a monster in my shape staring back at me through the glass.
The sun was dangerously low in the sky, and a cold wind had sprung up, scattering the smoking ash across the rock face and into the forest in spiralling whirlwinds. Around me, the shadows were beginning to lengthen in the forest, and I still had not found the author of all this grief. Resolutely, I turned back towards the cave, praying it would be for the last time.
