Michael Rowe - Enter, Night

I propped myself up on one elbow and glanced around. Nothing seemed amiss in the camp. The surrounding woods were silent as tombs, and I could see my breath in the air in front of me by firelight. I peered into the blackness, trying to ascertain what had roused me, for the sense was growing in me that I was being watched by something, or someone, beyond the tree line.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I thought I saw a shadow moving slyly towards us. Terror leaped in my chest, for I could think of only two things: that it could be some deadly animal, a wolf, or some terrible bear, the stories of which I had heard even before boarding at Dieppe. That, or an armed, bloodthirsty Hiroquois scouting party.

As I stared, the shadow itself divided into two smaller shadows, forms human in shape and contour.

I rubbed my eyes, marvelling at what I saw before me, for standing at the edge of the coppice of trees were two Savage children, a girl of perhaps nine years, holding hands with a small boy who could not have been more than five. The girl wore a simple buckskin shift, and her arms and feet were bare in the bitter cold. The boy was completely naked, though the lower half of his face, his neck, and his upper chest appeared to be smeared with mud, or some other blackish substance.

I thought it a curious trick of the firelight, but even from my vantage point in the doorway, I could clearly see their eyes shining through the trees, even though their faces were deeply painted with shadow.

The two children stared fixedly at our assemblage. They could have been a brother and sister on a walk through the woods on a summer day but for the fact that, by the position of the moon in the sky, it was well past midnight, dawn hours away. And though their state of nakedness would have been tolerable in the heat of August, we were already in the mouth of winter and yet they seemed entirely insensible to the bitter cold. The wind whipped the girl’s long black hair wildly about her face, but she made no move to push it back with her hands, or to cover her body against the deadly wind.

The thought came to me again that I might be dreaming, for it seemed impossible that they could survive, so lightly dressed in such cold, or that their appearance had not wakened Askuwheteau or his men, who could practically hear the day pass into night. But no, I pinched my own face and knew I was awake.

And lo! I realized that the children must be from the settlement at St. Barthélemy! If they were alive, then surely others must be also! But in this cold, I knew they would not survive, especially the naked little boy.

Carefully, so as not to wake the others, I pushed back my blanket and stood up. The cold struck me at once, and with terrible force. My teeth began to clatter and my body reacted with a violent spasm of shivering, but my only concern in that moment was for the two children. I stepped back inside and took up the blanket that had been covering me and wrapped it about me like a cloak. Carefully, I placed another log on the fire. It crackled, and then slowly caught the heat from the embers. Flames encircled it and a plume of smoke rose into the air. From one of the packs, I took another blanket, intending to swaddle the naked little boy with it before his poor little body froze.

I whispered to the children in my crude Ojibwa, indicating that they should come near the fire. I sensed, rather than saw, their response, for they stood as still as statues. And yet somehow I knew their bodies had tensed in anticipation. I beckoned with one arm, making sure to keep my own blanket wrapped about me for my own warmth. Still, they stood motionless.

Then, slowly, the girl raised her own arm and beckoned to me.

The gesture was a perfect facsimile of my own, an invitation to move away from the camp and come to where she was standing. Willingly, I took a step towards her. She and the boy took a reactive step backwards, farther into the trees. But at the same time, the girl beckoned me again. This time, her brother (for that is how I had come to think of him) gestured as well, as though imitating his sister’s invitation to me .

Then they took two more steps backward until they were nearly invisible.

I called out to them again in Ojibwa as I walked into the forest. I stared hard, straining my eyes to see where they stood. And while I could barely make out the shape of them, I again thought I saw the strange crimson firelight glow of their eyes winking in the blackness like sputtering reddish candlelight. I felt my way through the trees, occasionally colliding painfully with hard branches and stinging needles of pine. I glanced backward and saw that I had walked a considerably farther distance away from the camp than I had first thought. The whole sequence of events had taken on the qualities of a nightmare. But still I pushed through the trees in search of the naked little boy and his sister.

I heard a sigh, and then soft breathing, and I looked down. The children were standing directly in front of me, silent and unmoving. I reached out my hand to touch the little boy’s shoulder. His skin was unearthly cold, and it seemed a miracle to me that he could be alive, even given the legendary hardiness of these people.

Unfurling the blanket I carried under my arm, I draped it as best I could around the little boy’s body and drew him to me. I felt his tiny hand on my leg, stroking it as though to assure himself that I was there. From the other side, I felt his sister’s hands on my other leg, her fingers moving under the blanket, like spiders along the inside of my thigh through my robe. When the child’s fingers caressed my manhood with an insinuating knowledge surely beyond her years, I pulled back in shock. I reached down roughly and pushed her fingers away.

What happened next must have occurred in a matter of seconds, but I remember it as though it was hours instead, and it still haunts my nightmares today.

My hand was seized in a vise-like grip. It was not the grip of a little girl, though the fingers grasping mine gave every appearance of belonging to a human child. I screamed in pain, for it felt as though the bones in my hand would surely crack under the pressure. At the same moment, the gentle caress of the little boy became a heavy, vicious clamp on my thigh. A row of dagger-sharp fingernails ripped into the flesh of my leg and dug deeper, securing the little boy’s grip. I screamed again, and I heard a horrible serpentine hiss issue from the little boy’s mouth. I pushed him away with all my might, but still he held fast. The little girl, too, refused to relinquish her excruciating grip on my hand.

I shrieked in pain, twisted my body every way in a vain attempt to shake them off. I lost my footing and tripped, falling to the ground with the children still on top of me. The little boy’s teeth, impossibly long and sharp, sank into the meat of my thigh.

I screamed out to Askuwheteau, beseeching him to come to my aid. Behind me, I thought I heard faint shouts from the Indians, but it was impossible to be certain in the din. The little girl’s fingers entwined in my hair, brutally pulling my head backwards. I felt her other hand on my chest. She ripped at the blanket, clawing it as though she sought to shred it in order to expose the naked flesh of my chest underneath. I lay contorted on the ground with the two child-demons writhing on top of me, trying to push them away and calling out to God and the Indians to help me, for in that moment the two seemed interchangeable.

And then her hand brushed against the crucifix I wore. A dazzling flash of blue light lit up the surrounding trees, and I smelled an awful foulness, like burning flesh.

The little Savage girl-for I could now clearly see her in the supernatural viridian glow-leaped back into a crouching position in front of me, snarling like some cornered, feral creature. Her mouth, ringed with the jagged teeth of a shark, was open in a perfect oval of agony. Peal after peal, she rent the night with her torment, flailing her charred and smoking hand in the air as though to put out a fire. At the sight of his sister’s injury, the little boy also relinquished his grip and scuttled away from me in a sequence of crablike movements, taking up a cowering position behind her. His own cries of thwarted outrage blended with hers in an infernal cacophony such as I imagine must occur in the very bowels of deepest Hell. She lurched forward, baring her teeth at me and spitting like a cat, but again seemed to be stopped short by my crucifix, the effect of which upon her was not unlike that which might have occurred if she had hurled herself against a stone wall.