Enter, Night Page 44

  My joy at this was boundless for, at the very least, this meant that I would have shelter tonight, barring any discovery of a gruesome nature inside the buildings themselves.

  As I drew close to the Jesuit house, I was met with a distressing sight: the wooden cross that stood in front of the residence building housing the chapel had been torn down. That is to say, while the pine pole, which formed the primary pillar of the cross, was still firmly entrenched in the earth, the crossbeams had been broken off, or pulled down. I told myself that it had been caused by some storm of wind and rain, for surely if the intent had been desecration, the entire cross would have been demolished.

  I climbed the small hill with trepidation and pushed open the door. In the dimness of the chapel, nothing seemed immediately awry, though dirt from the outside lay heavily on the floor, and even the altar. Here too, there was no evidence of the symbol of Our Lord’s martyrdom, though neither was there anything suggesting destruction or other mischief, though again I was aware of that unnerving, tomb-like silence that lay over the chapel like a pall.

  Instinctively I sniffed the air, at once terrified that I would catch the smell of death and relieved that I did not. The smell was one of general airlessness—lifelessness, even.

  I walked slowly through the two “rooms” of the house, only to find more of the same.

  In the section that obviously served as a kitchen, there was a crude table with cutlery and plates laid out as though for supper, but they too were covered with a dusting of dirt, as though those meant to dine had simply walked out and not returned. In the dead hearth, a black iron pot hung from a hook. In the pot, I observed, a spoon was encased in a dried mulch of some sort of grain stew that had petrified, but even from the pot there was no odour, for this meal had been cooked and abandoned a very long time ago.

  The trappers who had reported back to Samuel de Champlain had not been wrong: St. Barthélemy was indeed entirely deserted. While there was ample evidence of the settlement having been inhabited, there was quite literally no trace of any living person in any part of it.

  Feeling again that infernal chill, I stepped outside to retrieve some wood from the stack I’d noticed near the entrance. On a table, I found a tinder-box. I struck the steel and flint to some straw and built a fire in the hearth to warm myself. In the crude cupboards I found several bottle of wine, as well as stores of dry goods: beans, corn and the like.

  I opened one of the bottles of wine and poured a healthy draught into one of the tankards on the table, caring little for its cleanliness after those many weeks on the water with the Indians. The taste of the wine on my tongue was wonderful. I had drunk nothing but lake water since we had left Trois-Rivières and my palette was starved for variance of flavour.

  Before sunset, I hiked back to the lake and drew water, both for drinking and for cooking. It was a more arduous walk back carrying the water, but I made haste and imagine an hour or less passed between my departure and my return.

  I boiled some of the beans on the hearth and ate plentifully for the first time in many days.

  After I had eaten, I washed the plate and went back inside, where I found a crude bed made of a sheet of bark. Above it was a shelf. Clearly this had been the abode of Father de Céligny, for there I found some books and some clothes. His Bible and crucifix were not among the store. I dragged the bark-bed close enough to the hearth that I would be warm as I slept. I arranged the blankets on top of it and lay down, but not before bolting the door from the inside. Without thinking, I removed my own heavy crucifix for the sake of comfort.

  The exhaustion of the past week on the water, coupled with my ordeal of abandonment by the Indians, had exhausted me beyond endurance and I fell deeply asleep before I could say any prayers for my own safety and protection during the night.

  And then, there was a hand on my shoulder, shaking me gently awake. I opened my eyes. In the glow of the embers in the fireplace I beheld the figure of a pale old man bending over me, dressed entirely in the black robes of the Jesuit.

  My eyes widened in disbelief and for a moment I wondered if I was beholding a ghost, merely one more in a long line of nightmarish sights in this godforsaken Land.

  The figure lovingly caressed my face. His fingers felt cold, as though he had just come in from outside. He pulled back the blanket and lifted my robe, exposing my leg where the child had bitten me. This he touched, tracing the injury with his finger, gently, as though he were a surgeon inspecting an infected wound. Then he leaned down and kissed me on both cheeks, a chaste kiss of welcome.

  “You have found us,” he said in French—the first proper French I had heard since leaving Trois-Rivières. His voice was cultured, even aristocratic, a far cry from the coarse guttural peasant French of the voyageurs and hivernants in Trois-Rivières. “Praise God. I had given up hope that anyone would. I have been waiting for so very long.”

  I struggled to sit up. Through eyes suddenly full of tears of joy and relief, I said, “Father de Céligny? Can it really be you?” I grasped his arms, finding them solid and real, not spectral. “I—we, all of us in TroisRivières—we feared you had been killed by the Hiroquois.”

  “Yes, Father,” he replied. “I am de Céligny. I am not dead. Now, rest. We will speak tomorrow. All is well. You are safe, here, from harm. Sleep, now.”

  “But the Hiroquois . . .”

  My eyelids were heavy. I heard Father de Céligny’s voice as from a great distance, urging me to sleep. I tried to open my eyes, and with seemingly superhuman strength, I half-raised my lids to see him drawing away into blackness as he stepped from my bedside. I saw the glint of reflected firelight in his eyes, and then he was gone.

  I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed of the young girl in the lake with the torn throat.

  In my dream, her eyes were not opaque and lightless; they sparkled with bright black life. I looked to the Indians for succour, but found I was alone in the canoe, floating on an endless ocean of ash-coloured water with no land or horizon anywhere in sight. As I stared, trying desperately to scream and being unable to, her throat healed itself before my eyes until there was no mark or blemish anywhere on the wet bronze skin.

  The dead girl swam up to the canoe, drifting snakelike through the water, her wet black hair plastered to her head and face. She reached up and grasped the gunwale of the canoe and began to rock it gently, and then with increasing violence. I believed she meant to swamp it and drown me, pulling me beneath the surface to live there with her there for a thousand years.

  “You have brought terrible things here with you,” she said in a voice full of cold dark water and rotted black pine needles. Her voice was the voice of Askuwheteau, my Judas-abandoner. “You have brought death, and worse.” Then she opened her mouth to smile, and I saw her terrible teeth.

  I woke myself with the sound of my own screams.

  In the weak daylight that crept through the windows and under the doors of that haunted place, I wondered if I had only dreamed the appearance of Father de Céligny, for the door was still crudely barred from the inside, just as I had left it before falling asleep. Otherwise, the room was undisturbed. The windows were likewise barred and there were no tracks in any direction upon the floor other than my own. From outside came the sound of the trees shuddering with rain.

  I touched the side of my face. I could still feel the imprint of the priest’s cold fingers on my cheek. If that was a dream, I told myself, it had been a most vivid and realistic one. Were dreams even dreams in this evil place, where the legends spoke of the dead walking in the forest, going about as they had when they were living? Or were they auguries, visions, or portents? I thought of my dream of the smiling dead girl in the water and I shuddered.

  After a Spartan breakfast and an hour of prayer, I set out to find Father de Céligny, if only to prove to myself that I hadn’t been dreaming. While there was no evidence of him anywhere in the building, I believed in my heart that he was real and that I had not b
een dreaming. The puzzle of the door barred from the inside was one I would consider later, I told myself. So eager was I to believe I was not the only living soul in St. Barthélemy, I was prepared to overlook even the evidence of my own senses.

  But if he were nowhere in the buildings, he must be nearby, perhaps in some secondary domicile, or perhaps dwelling among the Indians away from the village itself, however unlikely that seemed. I knew, for instance, that the Indians liked to visit our homes in the settlements, that they were attracted to objects of mystery to them, our crucifixes, our books, our writing instruments, and our clocks. But I had not seen them even in their own houses here, so why would they be elsewhere in the forest?

  A cold rain was indeed falling outside, mining the ground with puddles. I covered my head with a shawl against the rain and set out to explore the area for some sign of where Father de Céligny might have taken shelter.

  My intention had not been to wander too far from the village, for after inspecting every house I was able to ascertain that there was no human habitation at all within its confines and it did, indeed, appear to have been abandoned.

  But my source of primary bafflement remained the lack of evidence of any kind of struggle or bloodshed. There were no bodies, obvious graves, no stains. As I have already written, nothing had been burned. I inspected every house, first tentatively and then with more boldness as I realized I was entirely alone. So the mystery remained, surely an entire village could not have simply vanished into thin air? Or, for that matter, migrated to some other part of this land, leaving behind their belongings, including weapons and cooking utensils?

  Slowly and carefully I took my leave of the village and began walking towards the lake. The rain had not diminished. On the contrary, it fell in colder and more punishing sheets, seemingly with every step I took away from the settlement, into the forest and towards the lake.

  I had been walking perhaps a half-hour and had almost reached the rocky hills above the lake when I heard a sound that chilled me to the very marrow of my bones. It came from behind one of the boulders in my path, and it froze me in my tracks with a terror so primeval that it must surely have descended from generation to generation from Adam in the Garden of Eden, after the fall from Grace, when all wild things had become his enemy.

  A giant grey wolf had stepped into my path, its back low and arched in a menacing posture. Its black lips were pulled back from the cruellooking yellow fangs. Again, the wolf growled low in its throat. The murderous intent of this monster could not have been clearer.

  To my horror, it was joined by another, and yet another, until there were five of the creatures blocking my path, each more fearsome than the last. I had seen wolves in France, shot by hunters. They had always struck me as fearsome, but these wolves were larger and more terrifying than any European variant. And in their eyes, I could see only the muddy hatred of the human species and a fierce hunger for human flesh.

  The wolves advanced slowly, and in terrible unison, maintaining the half-circle around me with the precision of a military phalanx formation, driving me backwards. My eyes never left theirs, nor theirs mine, as they slowly forced me away from the caves.

  Praying under my breath, I remembered what I had been told in Trois-Rivières about this exact danger, and the importance of neither showing fear, nor running quickly, lest those actions provoke an attack from the marauding animal in question.

  The first wolf lowered its head even farther and from its throat again came a snarl of the purest menace. It moved aggressively forward. I looked around me for a stick that I might use as a weapon, but found none.

  Even if I had, while a stick might have been of some use against one of these animals, there were five of them in total and any attempt to charge one of their number would have doubtless provoked an attack by the others in the pack.

  I backed away slowly, my eyes on theirs, and theirs on mine. Edging myself onto the trail, I realized that the wolves were “herding” me back onto the path, the path that would obviously take me back to the village, or at the very least, to open ground. They kept advancing forward with every step backwards I took.

  I stumbled towards the village, walking tortuously backward, my eyes on my pursuers. I flailed behind me with my arms, trying to anticipate the sharp branches behind me before they jabbed into my neck and back. When I failed, I tried to stifle my groans of pain.

  They followed me at a hunting distance, but did not attack. In the one instance where I stopped, however, to get my bearings, they began to growl again. One darted forward and made a feinting snap at my hand. I cried out and jumped back, and when I again began to move, the wolf kept its distance.

  Step by torturous step, always looking back over my shoulder, or walking backwards and glancing behind me to stay on the trail, occasionally stumbling painfully while the wolves moved like shadows and smoke among the boulders and low-growing trees and foliage as they stalked and herded me, I inched closer to what I hoped was the safety of the confines of St. Barthélemy. My terror was such that it felt as though it was hours before I saw the village, but obviously it could only have been a fraction of that time.

  And still, they did not attack, though they had every opportunity to tear me limb from limb. They did not break their deadly silence, nor was there any lessening in the obvious malignity of their intentions, and yet it was as though they were somehow tethered and held back by some entity I could not see. I doubted that whatever providential force held them at bay was Heavenly—if it had been, the force would have sent them back to whatever sylvan hell they sprang from instead of allowing them to stalk me like wounded animal prey.

  And then, finally yielding to my panic, I turned and broke into a run.

  In the minutes during which I ran, I had every expectation of feeling the foul weight of their heavy bodies hurling me to the ground, and their foetid, hot breath on my exposed skin, and the death-bite agony of their teeth on my throat. But I felt nothing of the kind, and made my way to safety inside Father de Céligny’s house without once turning my head.

  Upon entering, I looked out the window to see if the fiends had returned to their wilderness. My heart sank when I saw that they had not. Instead, they sat, poised like living gargoyles in a semi-circle in front of the entrance. As I watched, they cocked their heads as though listening to some master’s whistle, or to some command only they could hear. The entire tableau resembled a grisly sixteenth-century German woodcut depicting the fell horrors of werewolfery in some dark, forgotten forest.

  As the day progressed, the beasts sat, or lay with their paws crossed in front of them. They must have known that I was vulnerable, and doubtless they could smell my terror as I knelt to pray, and yet they did not charge the entrance.

  At one point in the late afternoon, I reached out with my hand to touch the door. As my fingers brushed it, a commotion erupted on the other side. A cacophony of howling and snarling greeted me.

  Although I knew it was impossible, still it was as though the wolves had somehow known that I had touched the door from the inside, and that I might possibly be contemplating egress from the safety of the house. The fury in their bestial voices left no doubt whatsoever in my mind of the fate that would be mine if I dared step over the threshold.

  I stepped backward towards the opposite wall and immediately they ceased their furor, again almost as though they knew my movements without seeing them. I realized that this must be more of the same deviltry that had plagued me since I left Trois-Rivières and it came to me then and there that I would very likely not survive that night. It came to me also that Father de Céligny had fallen to the same forces. If I had not dreamed his appearance by my bedside the previous night, whatever I saw could only have been his shade. I mourned Father de Céligny in that moment, and knelt to pray, for I didn’t doubt that I would soon join him on the other side.

  When I roused myself from my prayer, I looked out the window and saw that the sun had nearly set and the shadows were lengthen
ing across the abandoned village. The wolves were no longer sitting or lying by the door. They paced nervously, sniffing the air as though they could smell the sun setting and the entrance of night.

  As it grew darker, the wolves become more and more agitated. Two of them began to bark sharply and to whine nervously. Faster and faster the night came, more and more the wolves fretted and paced in circles. And then, in unison, they threw back their heads and began to howl. The plaintive sound, which I had heard before only in the distance, carried with it a quality of reverence, an aspect that was even somehow prayerful.

  For several long minutes the wolves lamented. Then, to my amazement, they turned tail and ran, abandoning their guard posts in front of my door for the path that led back to the lake.

  I stepped over the threshold in wonderment at what had just occurred. I looked left and right, but there was no trace of them anywhere.

  Above the rise of the distant cliffs, a gibbous moon had begun its ascent, not full, but bright enough to illuminate, however dully, the deserted village and the surrounding forests, which I could hear coming alive. In the distance, the chorus of the wolves came again, this time louder, as though more of them had gathered to celebrate the awakening of the night.

  Of a sudden, I imagined I saw movement among the huts—shadows flitting and darting. I rubbed my eyes, because the shadows were moving with inhuman, even preternatural, speed. They moved upright, and were human in shape, of medium height, and thin, or so they seemed—they vanished as quickly as the appeared, almost as if they were taunting me, for as soon as I was able to focus my eyes upon them they were gone.