I closed my eyes and fell to my knees, hands clasped in front of me. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin that my death would be pleasing in God’s sight, and that it would be over quickly, and with as little pain as possible. Or, if that were not God’s will, that I be granted as much strength to endure it as He had granted Askuwheteau.
But the wolves did not attack. Instead, they loped over to where the arrow-pierced skeleton of Father de Celigny lay on a bed of rocky soil and fallen leaves. They circled it, tentatively sniffing the pile of smoking bones, but giving it a wide enough berth to suggest they feared that the ossified remains might yet be something alive, something hellishly vivid that could hurt them as no bullet or arrow could.
Then, as though it had burned them, they leaped back from the pile of bones, cowering like mangy curs before a master’s whip. As one, they threw back their heads and howled. My poor words here cannot do justice to the effect of that unearthly, haunting sound as it rose into the night and fell down upon the tableau in which I knelt. Then the wolves turned and bounded into the forest without looking back, not aimlessly, but as if they were being pursued by a hunter and were in search of safety.
Again, I was alone-truly and utterly alone. I mourned my Indian friend Askuwheteau, this man whom I had dismissed as a Judas and a Savage, but who had shown the courage and faithfulness to come back to a place he feared in order to secure my safety. In all truth, he had saved my life, and he had died in my place. The tears I wept that night for Askuwheteau were the bitterest of my life, and none I’ve shed in the long years since that night have been harsher or more absinthial.
I drew the sign of the cross over what remained of his poor mauled face, and bowed my head. “Eternal rest grant unto thy servant Askuwheteau, O Lord,” I prayed. “And let perpetual light shine upon him. Grant him absolution, O Lord. May he rest in peace. Amen.”
Feeling my way through the darkness, I walked back to the village. I knew that there were perhaps more of these demons hiding in the forest watching me, but I cared little of it, so heavy was I with the weight of grief and guilt. If the Devil and his minions had been so able to use a priest as a vessel to serve his will as he had with Father de Celigny, then my life, and my immortal soul, were in God’s hands, as they always had been. But my work that night was far from over.
Inside the Jesuit house, I found a torch of cedar and pitch. I lit the torch, then put a second torch in my bag. There was a shovel leaning against one wall. The heft of it gave me comfort, for I believed I could make a decent weapon of it if it came to that.
The path back to the caves through the trees was easier this time because of the light of the torch. Easier in one sense, for the path was well-lit and I made good progress. Harder in another, for I now knew, beyond any measure of a doubt, what monsters, earthly and unearthly, could hide outside that ring of torch-light.
Upon arriving at the caves, I saw that the two piles of bones were as I had left them. The first pile, the remains of my poor Askuwheteau, I would bury. Though it was against the customs of his people to lay them beneath the earth, Askuwheteau had fought and died as bravely as any Christian, and it was only natural that he be buried as one. I lamented the fact that I had not had the chance to baptize him before he died so horribly. After I had completed my most pressing task, I swore to him that I would attend to his burial with due reverence.
The second pile of bones, the bones of de Celigny, I approached with dread. I pushed the torch close to the charred skeleton. At first I doubted the proof of my own eyes, for it surely seemed as though the creature whose body I had watched crumble and dissolve once pierced by the arrow would have found some way to render itself vivid once again.
And yet, as I said, it was where I’d left it, and as I left it. I wedged the base of the torch between two boulders and, by its guttering light, I surveyed the grotesque thing.
I raised the shovel over my head and brought it down squarely across the neck, severing the skull from the body with a single blow.
In my hubris and vanity, I half-expected to hear a sound, perhaps a scream from beyond the shadow of the Valley, or the trumpets of angels and the beating of their wings as they celebrated my triumph over the forces of Darkness. But there was nothing save the sound of the wind high in the trees that danced in the moonlight.
Using the shovel, I scooped the dreadful mix of bones and ash into my bag. I lit the second torch by the fire of the one wedged between the boulders and by its light I made my way to the mouth of that abhorrent place, carrying my ghastly burden in my other hand. To say that the blackness of the cave was forbidding by daylight is to render the description of it at night, by torchlight, almost beyond possibility.
Deeper and deeper into the cavern’s depths I went, the aureole of torchlight illuminating only the area immediately around it. The silence was the silence of the grave. No sound broke that silence; no sounds save for that of my feet on the rock and, from far away in its recesses, the steady drip of water on stone. The weight of the bag seemed to grow heavier with every step I took into that obsidian blackness.
And then, suddenly, there was a sound. I stopped in my tracks, straining to identify what I heard, or what I only thought I’d heard. My torch sputtered and for one terrible moment, the fire burned low as though some wind had blown it out.
In that moment, as the darkness swam towards me, I heard the sound again. It was the sound of breathing- not my own, but coming from somewhere in the lightless recesses of the cave. And then I felt the horrible dead heft of the bag twitch against my leg as though there were something inside it, trapped, but still alive.
I screamed and dropped the bag on the floor of the cavern. Wildly I swung the dying torch in front of me. The low-burning flame revealed only the walls of the cave, appearing and vanishing like a chimera with every sweep of the torch. And the sound of breathing was no more, if indeed it had ever been.
I brought the torch, which again blazed to life, close to the bag containing the bones of Father de Celigny and bent down to examine it. The sweat soaked my hair and ran down into my eyes, but when I wiped it away with the back of my hand, and squinted to see, the bag was where I had dropped it, and it was still, unmoving.
Had I imagined it? Had the nightmare sensation of carrying a trapped animal that had been merely stunned, but was waking, been nothing more than a phantasm born of my terror? I had no answer but this: that the bag was not moving and my torch would not burn forever. I had to do what I had to do; I had to hide the remains of this monster where they would never be found, where no human hands would soil themselves with the contagion it represented. I crossed myself and pushed farther into the cave.
I have only a blind man’s reckoning of how much farther and deeper into the cave, and then underground, I went before I found what I was looking for-a natural recession in the rock, oblong and shaped like an sarcophagus, surely carved by centuries of natural erosion, a natural coffin for my most unnatural and unwholesome freight. Surely here, in the wildest, darkest part of this wild, dark wilderness, the bones of this monster would remain unmolested till the end of time.
I placed the bag into the recession and covered it with the weight of some of the large stones and boulders I found scattered about. The work was arduous and the rocks were heavy, and by the time I placed the last one on top of the makeshift grave, my hands were bleeding with my exertion. I wiped my hands on the robe, leaving the traces of my stigmata on the coarse fabric.
Then, taking up the torch again, I turned and began to retrace my steps through the blackness. After an eternity, I came to the mouth of the cave. I wept joy when I saw the glimmer of the first torch, the one I’d left outside the cave, wedged between the rocks.
From the position of the moon in the sky, I ascertained that I had been about my mission for the better part of the night, though dawn was still a few hours away. I took up the shovel and began to dig. By the time I had dug a grave deep enough to bury Askuwheteau, the sky had begun to lighten in the distance, pale violet streaks, and dark blue lifting from the blackness like celestial foam on a wave.
I laid his body reverently into the grave. I was surprised to find that I still had tears in me left to shed, but I did, and I shed them there as I covered his body with the dark, flinty soil upon which he had so bravely died. I bowed my head and prayed for the progression of his immortal soul on its journey towards the Light of God.
And then, from overhead, came a sound like the flapping of giant sails in a strong wind.
In the light of the torch, the creature dropped from some unknown height. As it landed, crouching like an animal about to spring, I had a brief, vivid impression of giant, unfolded wings, but the wings seemed to melt away, leaving in their place a pair of thick, muscled arms. Its head was bowed, and long dark hair streamed from its scalp like a black halo.
When it stood, I saw that it was of vast height, taller than any Savage I had encountered, but Savage it was-or, rather, Savage it had been in its original, God-ordained life. Now, reborn, its eyes burned with that familiar crimson fire and its teeth were deadly and terrible. From that mouth issued a high, shrill whistle that was human in neither
