| General Fiction posted November 11, 2024 |
  |
A tale of Revolutionary France
The Parisian Necromancer
by Patrick Bernardy
The author has placed a warning on this post for violence.
__________________________________________________________________
I stole away with Mademoiselle Eléonore's head just after the blade fell. I replaced it in the drop bucket with a half-rotten cantaloupe and covered it with a linen handkerchief. I then slid her head into the vegetable basket at my feet. Well practiced, the sleight of hand took no more than two seconds and was performed with an illusionniste's nonchalance.
I looked around. No one seemed to notice. Eléonore may have, but I wasn't sure. I hadn't had a chance to ask her yet.
The executioner scowled and kicked Eléonore's twitching body out of the way. "Wretched woman," he said. "One less traitor's mouth eating my daily bread."
Speaking of daily bread, the meager fares of the Revolution taverns were by now summoning hungry stomachs. Dinner candles in the windows of the Hôtel de Crillon grew brighter in the fading sunlight, and a pocket of mumbling scarecrows filed westward down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
Mademoiselle Eléonore had been the seventh enemy of the state beheaded today and the last until a half-hour past daybreak tomorrow. Then the Place de la Revolution would once again crowd with bored and stunned revolutionaries—minus a few who would be captured, tried, and convicted in the night of countering the new republic.
I gathered my vegetable basket and moved with casual speed toward my cottage just off Rue Saint-Honoré. The breezy, late summer evening would surely go unappreciated by most, for the denizens of Paris were preoccupied, hushed by fear and weak with hunger.
I passed skinny whores and begging children, many of the former the mothers of the latter. I kept my gaze down, ignoring the sickly bare breasts and splotched legs I knew were on offer.
"Your fruit is rotten, Monsieur," a dirty little girl said, trailing behind me. "It's dripping. Perhaps you may spare some?"
"Begone, waif," I said without stopping.
Using an obscene string of phrases she no doubt learned from the whores around her, the girl wished agonizing pain and dismemberment on my privates as reward for my stinginess.
I picked up my pace. As I neared my home, the sun set on September 4th, 1793.
* * * * * *
Mademoiselle Eléonore may have once been an attractive young woman, but she certainly wasn't now, with all of the blood drained from her head; she would have blushed fiercely at the indecency of being without her body, otherwise. Instead, her cheeks were the color of milk, her eyes were three-quarters closed and dry, and her mouth hung slack as if she were indifferent to the whole thing.
Her head faced me across the candlelit pages of my experiment journal, clamped upright in a wooden tripod I had constructed for the purpose.
"Mademoiselle Eléonore," I said.
No response.
I knew she was in there, but cowering, unsure of what her consciousness was experiencing. All five of the senses were present in the head, and many still worked long after a head was separated from its body. It was through the ears, though, that I was able to reach them. The lack of any trauma to either the ears or the brain after a decapitation made this the most potent gateway to their hiding place.
"Eléonore!" I said sharply, slamming my palm down on my journal.
There! Her eyelids lifted, unmasking a clouded stare through her sapphire-blue irises.
"Look at me, Mademoiselle!"
Her eyeballs pivoted just slightly in their dry sockets; her pupils grew larger in the dim candlelight and focused on my own.
"Mademoiselle, I am Jean-Claude Veilleux, a priest. I'm the instrument of Our Lord's judgment. Do you understand? If you do, blink your eyes once."
Eléonore blinked her eyes as if she were shocked she could do so, a languid and deliberate motion.
"Do you remember what happened to you? Do you remember being beheaded?"
She blinked once.
"It's my task to hear your after-death confession, to determine if you will descend to the Hell of the Damned or undergo purification in Purgatory. Do you understand?"
Another singular blink.
"God favors the Revolution and the Jacobins," I said. "You have been charged with conspiring against the righteous order of God's will."
Eléonore's eyes widened, her irises surrounded completely by dull white.
"Yes, you understand, Mademoiselle. I'm sure you spent much of your life anticipating Judgment. What it would be like, what you would see and hear, whether you would be deemed worthy of Heaven. Blink if you understand."
Her wide eyes blinked like window shutters slamming closed in a storm. She was impatient for me to continue.
"It's the judgment of myself and God that the only way you can avoid an eternity in Hell is to confess your conspiracy and give up the identity of those who conspired with you. If you do this to my satisfaction, I'll beseech Our Lord to claim you as a righteous penitent."
Eléonore let her gaze fall onto the white pages of my journal. If there had been any mechanism in her head capable of producing moisture, tears may have rolled down her ashen cheeks.
"I'm going to read a series of names of suspected Girondist sympathizers and organizers. After each name, I want you to blink if you know these people to be counter to the Jacobins and the Revolution. If you do this, I can assure you that Our Lord will be merciful in his judgment."
She lifted her gaze again and blinked.
I looked down at my journal and the list of thirty-five names I had recorded from other sources. I picked up a quill with my right hand and read the first name: "Monsieur Jacques Mavreau."
Eléonore wasted no time in blinking once, and I added a checked tally beside the name. In this way, the Mademoiselle and I navigated the list. By the end, only three names had occasioned a double-blink from my informant, and I suspected that she just didn't know them and thus added them to another list of names for later investigation.
"You've done well, Mademoiselle," I said. "Our Lord will be pleased, I think."
Her eyes twinkled, an affectionate expression of gratitude. Her mouth twitched just a bit at the corners as she tried to smile, but her slack lips were too heavy, and she seemed to give up.
I patted the side of her head as I might a dutiful young daughter eager to please. "It's time for you to pass on, Eléonore." I stood from my chair and gathered her head from the tripod, holding it in both hands with reverence. I brought it even with mine so that she could look into my eyes. A patch of congealed blood dripped from her neck onto the top of my left shoe. "God shall be merciful. Go to sleep, penitent, and awaken to a second chance at paradise." I pressed my lips to her dry forehead, a farewell kiss. I then walked her head across the room and laid it atop the logs of my blazing hearth fire.
She kept the affection for me in her eyes until they melted away.
* * * * * *
It had taken a fortnight of beheadings and interrogations, but I had compiled a registry of four hundred and forty-one counter revolutionaries still at large in Paris. Eléonore's skull was still smoldering when I hurried from my cottage with the list rolled and tucked under my arm.
My benefactor was the most honorable Maximilien de Robespierre, President of the National Convention and member of the Committee for Public Safety and the Jacobin Club—the most powerful and influential man in Revolutionary France. As it happened, he resided just down Rue Saint-Honoré, a quick jaunt in the breezy night air.
I was let into his library, a sprawling mass of stacked books, discarded quills, crumpled pamphlets, and shredded leaflets. In stark contrast to the disorder of the room, a copy of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, venerated like one of the original Gospels, was contained within a glass display case, slanted for viewing against purple velvet.
Le Président looked up from a thick tome when I entered, his eyes shrewd with vigorous youth behind spectacles, for the accoutrements of the Enlightenment were at the height of Parisian fashion for those who held enough power to care about such things.
"Necromancer," he said, blinking in the dim candlelight. "How comes your list?"
"Complete, Monsieur President."
"Let me see it. How many?"
"Some hundreds." I handed him the scroll.
He unrolled it and held it closer to the candle flame. "These were given to you by the dead?" He showed avid interest as he browsed the names.
"Yes, Monsieur. I queried nine in the last two weeks. I've corrected the list for those already arrested or executed. There were hundreds more, but your other nets have gotten to them already."
"Very good."
"Has there been any mention of the thefts?" I asked.
Robespierre leaned back in his chair and laughed. "A priest dissembled for an hour in this very library just the other day, apologizing to me and invoking all the Saints and Apostles for mercy that so many heads were being stolen as souvenirs. No, your activities are safe between us ... for now."
He meant to use this as leverage to insure my obedience and silence. This was inevitable. I was no fool.
He stood, adjusting his wig. Smiling, he walked around his desk and put his arm around my shoulder. "Tomorrow, Necromancer. Tomorrow begins the Terror! I will feed the guillotine with this list of enemies. And you, like a dutiful pig seeking truffles, will root out still more from their severed heads. Vive la révolution!"
"Vive la révolution, Monsieur President."
* * * * * *
Robespierre was true to his word. The Reign of Terror killed thousands over the next year, a wild beast of political zealotry that consumed a queen and her young son as garnish; but in the end, it also ate its master.
The twenty-eighth day of July, 1794, late evening. Or as the Jacobins would claim, 11 Thermidore, Year II. Sitting in my wooden tripod was the head of Robespierre himself, half his lower jaw hanging in mangled shreds from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that had failed to kill him the day before. He had managed to survive overnight and into the next day, long enough to be guillotined without trial. It was poetic that fate steered the musket ball so that this mastermind of terror could be executed by the state he helped create ... in the very manner in which he had created it.
Mystic symmetry has always surrounded the guillotine in that way.
I slammed my hand on the desk and shouted "See!"
Robespierre awoke from his death.
"It is I ... Necromancer. Remember?"
His eyes focused and widened.
"You no doubt are wondering why I have summoned you, what with the Terror over and no one left to implicate. Blink if you understand."
He blinked.
"I've developed some other notions in my pursuit of this activity, mon ami. Speaking to the recently dead has its uses, as you well know, but they always die for good in a matter of hours. Good for information, but little else. No, I've come upon a method to not only keep them alive indefinitely, but to give them new bodies, new desires, and most importantly, new loyalties. And you will be the first, Monsieur President. Now it is time to serve my revolution as I served yours. Blink if you understand."
He blinked once.
Liberation is wonderment in the eyes; the fact of fresh freedom is the dawning of mad relief. The head of Maximilien Robespierre seemed to glisten with gratitude.
I wonder, will the indifferent God of my countrymen finally show mercy as my army of revenants retake the city? In brash confidence, I will wager my soul in favor of His continued absence from the turmoil of France, for what omnipotent God could watch over this hellish Earth without casting lightning bolts of rage at the demons that shatter the lives of men or at least bathing the doomed in tears of anguish?
No, there is no God. There is no damnation or salvation.
There is only the guillotine, the Revolution, and the Necromancer.
THE END
Horror Writing Contest contest entry
__________________________________________________________________
I stole away with Mademoiselle Eléonore's head just after the blade fell. I replaced it in the drop bucket with a half-rotten cantaloupe and covered it with a linen handkerchief. I then slid her head into the vegetable basket at my feet. Well practiced, the sleight of hand took no more than two seconds and was performed with an illusionniste's nonchalance.
I looked around. No one seemed to notice. Eléonore may have, but I wasn't sure. I hadn't had a chance to ask her yet.
The executioner scowled and kicked Eléonore's twitching body out of the way. "Wretched woman," he said. "One less traitor's mouth eating my daily bread."
Speaking of daily bread, the meager fares of the Revolution taverns were by now summoning hungry stomachs. Dinner candles in the windows of the Hôtel de Crillon grew brighter in the fading sunlight, and a pocket of mumbling scarecrows filed westward down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
Mademoiselle Eléonore had been the seventh enemy of the state beheaded today and the last until a half-hour past daybreak tomorrow. Then the Place de la Revolution would once again crowd with bored and stunned revolutionaries—minus a few who would be captured, tried, and convicted in the night of countering the new republic.
I gathered my vegetable basket and moved with casual speed toward my cottage just off Rue Saint-Honoré. The breezy, late summer evening would surely go unappreciated by most, for the denizens of Paris were preoccupied, hushed by fear and weak with hunger.
I passed skinny whores and begging children, many of the former the mothers of the latter. I kept my gaze down, ignoring the sickly bare breasts and splotched legs I knew were on offer.
"Your fruit is rotten, Monsieur," a dirty little girl said, trailing behind me. "It's dripping. Perhaps you may spare some?"
"Begone, waif," I said without stopping.
Using an obscene string of phrases she no doubt learned from the whores around her, the girl wished agonizing pain and dismemberment on my privates as reward for my stinginess.
I picked up my pace. As I neared my home, the sun set on September 4th, 1793.
* * * * * *
Mademoiselle Eléonore may have once been an attractive young woman, but she certainly wasn't now, with all of the blood drained from her head; she would have blushed fiercely at the indecency of being without her body, otherwise. Instead, her cheeks were the color of milk, her eyes were three-quarters closed and dry, and her mouth hung slack as if she were indifferent to the whole thing.
Her head faced me across the candlelit pages of my experiment journal, clamped upright in a wooden tripod I had constructed for the purpose.
"Mademoiselle Eléonore," I said.
No response.
I knew she was in there, but cowering, unsure of what her consciousness was experiencing. All five of the senses were present in the head, and many still worked long after a head was separated from its body. It was through the ears, though, that I was able to reach them. The lack of any trauma to either the ears or the brain after a decapitation made this the most potent gateway to their hiding place.
"Eléonore!" I said sharply, slamming my palm down on my journal.
There! Her eyelids lifted, unmasking a clouded stare through her sapphire-blue irises.
"Look at me, Mademoiselle!"
Her eyeballs pivoted just slightly in their dry sockets; her pupils grew larger in the dim candlelight and focused on my own.
"Mademoiselle, I am Jean-Claude Veilleux, a priest. I'm the instrument of Our Lord's judgment. Do you understand? If you do, blink your eyes once."
Eléonore blinked her eyes as if she were shocked she could do so, a languid and deliberate motion.
"Do you remember what happened to you? Do you remember being beheaded?"
She blinked once.
"It's my task to hear your after-death confession, to determine if you will descend to the Hell of the Damned or undergo purification in Purgatory. Do you understand?"
Another singular blink.
"God favors the Revolution and the Jacobins," I said. "You have been charged with conspiring against the righteous order of God's will."
Eléonore's eyes widened, her irises surrounded completely by dull white.
"Yes, you understand, Mademoiselle. I'm sure you spent much of your life anticipating Judgment. What it would be like, what you would see and hear, whether you would be deemed worthy of Heaven. Blink if you understand."
Her wide eyes blinked like window shutters slamming closed in a storm. She was impatient for me to continue.
"It's the judgment of myself and God that the only way you can avoid an eternity in Hell is to confess your conspiracy and give up the identity of those who conspired with you. If you do this to my satisfaction, I'll beseech Our Lord to claim you as a righteous penitent."
Eléonore let her gaze fall onto the white pages of my journal. If there had been any mechanism in her head capable of producing moisture, tears may have rolled down her ashen cheeks.
"I'm going to read a series of names of suspected Girondist sympathizers and organizers. After each name, I want you to blink if you know these people to be counter to the Jacobins and the Revolution. If you do this, I can assure you that Our Lord will be merciful in his judgment."
She lifted her gaze again and blinked.
I looked down at my journal and the list of thirty-five names I had recorded from other sources. I picked up a quill with my right hand and read the first name: "Monsieur Jacques Mavreau."
Eléonore wasted no time in blinking once, and I added a checked tally beside the name. In this way, the Mademoiselle and I navigated the list. By the end, only three names had occasioned a double-blink from my informant, and I suspected that she just didn't know them and thus added them to another list of names for later investigation.
"You've done well, Mademoiselle," I said. "Our Lord will be pleased, I think."
Her eyes twinkled, an affectionate expression of gratitude. Her mouth twitched just a bit at the corners as she tried to smile, but her slack lips were too heavy, and she seemed to give up.
I patted the side of her head as I might a dutiful young daughter eager to please. "It's time for you to pass on, Eléonore." I stood from my chair and gathered her head from the tripod, holding it in both hands with reverence. I brought it even with mine so that she could look into my eyes. A patch of congealed blood dripped from her neck onto the top of my left shoe. "God shall be merciful. Go to sleep, penitent, and awaken to a second chance at paradise." I pressed my lips to her dry forehead, a farewell kiss. I then walked her head across the room and laid it atop the logs of my blazing hearth fire.
She kept the affection for me in her eyes until they melted away.
* * * * * *
It had taken a fortnight of beheadings and interrogations, but I had compiled a registry of four hundred and forty-one counter revolutionaries still at large in Paris. Eléonore's skull was still smoldering when I hurried from my cottage with the list rolled and tucked under my arm.
My benefactor was the most honorable Maximilien de Robespierre, President of the National Convention and member of the Committee for Public Safety and the Jacobin Club—the most powerful and influential man in Revolutionary France. As it happened, he resided just down Rue Saint-Honoré, a quick jaunt in the breezy night air.
I was let into his library, a sprawling mass of stacked books, discarded quills, crumpled pamphlets, and shredded leaflets. In stark contrast to the disorder of the room, a copy of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, venerated like one of the original Gospels, was contained within a glass display case, slanted for viewing against purple velvet.
Le Président looked up from a thick tome when I entered, his eyes shrewd with vigorous youth behind spectacles, for the accoutrements of the Enlightenment were at the height of Parisian fashion for those who held enough power to care about such things.
"Necromancer," he said, blinking in the dim candlelight. "How comes your list?"
"Complete, Monsieur President."
"Let me see it. How many?"
"Some hundreds." I handed him the scroll.
He unrolled it and held it closer to the candle flame. "These were given to you by the dead?" He showed avid interest as he browsed the names.
"Yes, Monsieur. I queried nine in the last two weeks. I've corrected the list for those already arrested or executed. There were hundreds more, but your other nets have gotten to them already."
"Very good."
"Has there been any mention of the thefts?" I asked.
Robespierre leaned back in his chair and laughed. "A priest dissembled for an hour in this very library just the other day, apologizing to me and invoking all the Saints and Apostles for mercy that so many heads were being stolen as souvenirs. No, your activities are safe between us ... for now."
He meant to use this as leverage to insure my obedience and silence. This was inevitable. I was no fool.
He stood, adjusting his wig. Smiling, he walked around his desk and put his arm around my shoulder. "Tomorrow, Necromancer. Tomorrow begins the Terror! I will feed the guillotine with this list of enemies. And you, like a dutiful pig seeking truffles, will root out still more from their severed heads. Vive la révolution!"
"Vive la révolution, Monsieur President."
* * * * * *
Robespierre was true to his word. The Reign of Terror killed thousands over the next year, a wild beast of political zealotry that consumed a queen and her young son as garnish; but in the end, it also ate its master.
The twenty-eighth day of July, 1794, late evening. Or as the Jacobins would claim, 11 Thermidore, Year II. Sitting in my wooden tripod was the head of Robespierre himself, half his lower jaw hanging in mangled shreds from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that had failed to kill him the day before. He had managed to survive overnight and into the next day, long enough to be guillotined without trial. It was poetic that fate steered the musket ball so that this mastermind of terror could be executed by the state he helped create ... in the very manner in which he had created it.
Mystic symmetry has always surrounded the guillotine in that way.
I slammed my hand on the desk and shouted "See!"
Robespierre awoke from his death.
"It is I ... Necromancer. Remember?"
His eyes focused and widened.
"You no doubt are wondering why I have summoned you, what with the Terror over and no one left to implicate. Blink if you understand."
He blinked.
"I've developed some other notions in my pursuit of this activity, mon ami. Speaking to the recently dead has its uses, as you well know, but they always die for good in a matter of hours. Good for information, but little else. No, I've come upon a method to not only keep them alive indefinitely, but to give them new bodies, new desires, and most importantly, new loyalties. And you will be the first, Monsieur President. Now it is time to serve my revolution as I served yours. Blink if you understand."
He blinked once.
Liberation is wonderment in the eyes; the fact of fresh freedom is the dawning of mad relief. The head of Maximilien Robespierre seemed to glisten with gratitude.
I wonder, will the indifferent God of my countrymen finally show mercy as my army of revenants retake the city? In brash confidence, I will wager my soul in favor of His continued absence from the turmoil of France, for what omnipotent God could watch over this hellish Earth without casting lightning bolts of rage at the demons that shatter the lives of men or at least bathing the doomed in tears of anguish?
No, there is no God. There is no damnation or salvation.
There is only the guillotine, the Revolution, and the Necromancer.
THE END
 Recognized |
You need to login or register to write reviews. It's quick! We only ask four questions to new members.
© Copyright 2024. Patrick Bernardy All rights reserved.
Patrick Bernardy has granted FanStory.com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.