Michael Rowe - Enter, Night

I crossed myself and gave her absolution, speaking the words “ Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen .” Then I stepped back, for the air around her suddenly shimmered and began to burn. And in the next instant, her body exploded into flame. Boiling blood poured from her nose and throat, thick steam rising from it, the stench beyond foul.

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.

I found the monster much farther back from the place where I’d found his flock, in a natural anteroom of sorts formed where the walls of the cave split off from the main section of the cavern. He lay upon a natural rising of rock, his arms folded across his chest in an aspect not unlike that of a stone-carved knight atop a sepulchre. His own noble ancestors in France, centuries dead, might have been buried inside a sarcophagus of that exact kind.

His face, by the light of the guttering candle, was beautiful. I cannot claim otherwise. It was the face of a handsome man in the latter prime of his life, with high cheekbones and well-formed features: a proud brow, and strong nose. It was the face of an aristocrat. Pale as death, he was, save for the redness of his lips. His mouth was half open and I shuddered at the length and sharpness of his terrible teeth.

But whereas the eyes of the others had been closed, his were open, fixed and staring into the darkness above his head.

I started in shock, but realized in an instant that he was no less immobilized by the sunlight than the others had been. I passed my hand in front of his eyes. He neither blinked nor gave any other sign that he was aware of my presence. Like the others, his chest neither rose nor fell, nor did breath issue from his mouth.

I yearned to drag him by his white hair along the cruel rocks of the cavern floor, but I feared, doubtless irrationally, that it might somehow wake him. Instead, I wedged the candle in a crevice, then placed my hands under him as I had the others, and half pulled, half carried him. Like the others, he was very nearly weightless.

The cave mouth was darker than it had been even a few minutes before. With a sinking heart, I realized the reason: the sun was setting. If it had not already set, it would set within minutes. I cried out to God and pulled harder, moving even more quickly through the gloom.

And then I felt a bony hand grasp my ankle, and sharp nails digging into the soft flesh there. It was too late, I thought. The sun had set, and the creature was awake.

I screamed and dropped Father de Céligny’s body, backing away from it until my back was parallel with the cave wall next to the entrance. As I watched, he rose to his feet with a dreadful, majestic, malefic grace. For a moment, he stared at me, his eyes full of hate, then he lunged towards me, arms outstretched, his teeth bared like an animal. I ducked through the opening of the cave into the dark red setting sunlight.

“Come and get me, demon!” I shouted, looking into the cave. “I have killed your congregation and undone your work here. Look at the ashes of your children! If it is your plan to punish me for killing them, I am here, you coward! Do not hide in your hole like a snake! If you were once a man, show it now! Night has fallen; come fight me on your own terms!” It was a gamble, for there were still some streaks of redness in the sky, but I counted on the fact that traces of the monster’s human vanity might have survived into its current state of existence.

De Céligny stepped through the entrance of the cave, into what was left of the sunset. There was a flash of light and the familiar abattoir smell of seared flesh. He shrieked and covered his face with his hands, stumbling backwards into the cave. When he removed his hands from his face, I could see that the skin was charred and blackened and smoking, as though he had fallen into an open fire. I held up my cross and stepped towards him. “Tonight you die, monster!” I cried out. “Tonight, one way or another, you will die! And if not tonight, then I will find you tomorrow wherever you hide and burn you in the sunlight like the beast you are!”

As I watched, from inside the shadows of the cave mouth, de Céligny lowered his head and closed his eyes. I saw his lips move, as though he recited a prayer, or an incantation of some sort. The sound of his voice carried across the space between us, though the words he whispered were unclear.

He opened his hands in the aspect of an invocation, extending his arms towards me, encompassing me, the forest behind me, even the night itself in his blessing.

Then he raised his head and began to laugh, a foul, cruel laugh entirely bereft of warmth, or joy, or indeed any human emotion, and stepped out of the cave into the new-fallen night. His eyes shone like rubies in the charred skull of his face, his teeth even longer and sharper than they had seemed mere moments before.

“We are coming for you, little priest,” the creature said. “We are coming for you now .”

Before I could reply, I heard the familiar hiss of an arrow in flight and felt the wind of it pass by my ear. The arrow struck Father de Céligny full in the chest. His eyes flew open in shock and pain. De Céligny grasped the arrow in his hands at the base in a vain attempt to pull it out of his body. He roared in fresh agony as a second arrow sang through the air, striking him just above the place where the first arrow had found purchase. Black blood streamed from the wound, drenching the front of his robe. His screams had risen in pitch to the point where he sounded more like an animal than something that had once been human.

Behind me I beheld a miracle the likes of which I had never dreamed I would see. It was an angel, or so it seemed, for Askuwheteau stood there in the darkness with his bow and arrow, taking a third from his quiver and aiming it at the monster who writhed in its death throes in front of the cave that had lately been its living grave.