Floats the Dark Shadow (38 page)

Not understanding, Theo felt ill at ease but knew she must make an effort to be more receptive. Closing her eyes, she drew a calming breath, and another, pacing her breathing to the exotic sounds. Slowly the unknown words become a kind of poetry, music, evoking images from pure sound. The soft intonations slowly created a quivering vibration in the room. The very air seemed to hum. Behind the darkness of her closed lids, Theo pictured the black cross with its upswept wings. What did it mean?

Suddenly, the lines quivered and moved, taking on dimension. The white of the paper condensed within them, forming a great, gleaming swan, fantastical and vividly alive. The wings flashed out, fire soaring from the tips of the quills. A corona of crimson light surrounded the bird and bled across the pale feathers. The wings closed, shadow and smoke pouring down.

“I see a swan,” Moina said.

And MacGregor replied, “A swan in flames.”

Theo gasped. The image vanished. She opened her eyes, staring at Moina, who had not moved but continued to commune with her husband.

Beside her, Yeats counseled softly, “Do not question now. Open yourself.”

Shivers drizzled over Theo’s back, fear and excitement mingled. She closed her eyes again, recalling the swan, but she could summon only a pale memory of the vibrant image that had blazed in her mind.

“He comes. He rides a black horse in the center of a procession,” MacGregor said. Theo clasped her hands tightly and bit her lip in frustration. She did not see a man on a black horse.

“There is a great pageant, a performance.” Moina said. “He has spent a fortune on the costumes, the livery. Even the beggars’ rags are made of shredded silk.”

Then, as if she were a hovering bird, Theo did see a vast procession winding slowly through a medieval city. Was it only because Moina evoked it? The images wavered, vanished, reappeared. Theo heard singing and found herself standing in the crowd, watching as the procession passed. Passing pageboys sang hymns in their exquisite voices. Young women flung handfuls of rose petals in the street. And finally, there in the midst of the others, was a knight in silver armor. On the crest of his helmet, a bird lifted its shimmering wings.

“The swan crowns his head,” Moina said, again echoing Theo’s vision. “He bears the cross on his shield.”

With the certainty of a dream, Theo knew the identity of the knight.
Gilles de Rais.
No—she had read about the pageant in the book. But she had not talked about
Là Bas
with Moina or MacGregor. With her denial the images wavered, faded, but this time they did not vanish. She watched the knight pass by her.

“
Le Mis
t
è
re du S
i
è
ge d’Or
l
é
a
ns
,” Moina said. “It is the tenth anniversary of the Maid’s victory. They will perform the play he has written in her honor.”

A young woman rode a white horse, her banner rippling in the wind. Theo knew that she saw Jeanne of Arc, not the Jeanne portrayed in the pageant but the real Jeanne, her cropped hair whipped by the same sharp wind, black and shining. Her face glowing with the fierce certainty of victory as she rode—not to Orléans but to Paris. Her soldiers, her lieutenants turned to her, faith alight in their eyes as they approached devastation.
 
Like transparent scrims, the images overlapped in Theo’s mind. The staged triumph mingled with the blood and sweat of ruin.

Then, even more strangely, Theo saw the black horse Gilles had ridden led into a dimly lit stable. It was all very furtive. She watched as the black horse and eight others were sold along with their lavish trappings—sold for a pittance.

“Casse-noissette was his favorite,” Moina said. “He is bankrupt.”

“Like his coffers, his soul is empty,” MacGregor intoned. “There is no alchemy that can transform his sin.”

Theo saw Gilles kneeling, hands squeezing his temples as if he could crush the images there. He screamed silently as demons battled in his mind. Behind a locked door, a necromancer beat a mattress and screamed aloud as if he were being murdered. “He seeks to rule the Devil but is already his servant,” MacGregor said.

“His faith was burned.” Moina’s voice was almost a sob.

Her armor stripped away, Jeanne walked forward, dressed in penitent’s garb. She asked for a cross. An English soldier broke his lance and bound the pieces together, then handed her his gift. She clasped the cross to her. Theo saw her chained to the stake, the oiled wood lit beneath her. The fire ignited, the smoke billowed. The flames leaped higher and higher, terror mounting as the blaze soared. Theo could no longer see Jeanne, only a wall of flame.

The wall became the wall of a room, burning. A house, burning. A girl with long black hair ran through it, barefoot, her white nightdress catching flame. She stumbled. Fell.

Theo sobbed aloud, memories of Mélanie igniting in her mind.

Like an echo came other sobs. Weeping, endless weeping—a child crying, alone in the dark. The fault is his. His hatred has brought her death. Love has been incinerated with her.

“Jeanne!” Moina’s cry is full of grief.

Theo sees the square where Jeanne was burned, the blackened stake. An image drifts over it on a cloud of smoke, a twisted, charred corpse pinned under a fallen timber. Everywhere the reek of ashes, reek of despair. Gilles wants to buy Jeanne’s heart, but they have thrown it in the Seine.

The weeping goes on and on, sobs of the grieving child weave with Gilles’ choir of innocents singing of salvation.

Then another fire, a furnace with a great fiery maw. Two men appear, lieutenants who had ridden beside Gilles in the parade. They carry a blood-stained canvas and lay it down before the furnace. Pulling back the canvas, they reveal the body of a child, his curling hair matted with blood, his eyes staring into nothingness. With small axes and knives, they hack the boy into pieces and throw him into the flames.

“They destroy the evidence of the murder.” Moina faltered.

Theo knew it was not the first body fed to the flames and would not be the last.

“So many—” Moina’s voice broke. She pitched forward but MacGregor caught her. “I cannot watch this!”

Theo opened her eyes to see MacGregor looking at her over his wife’s shoulder. “We can do no more.”

They were all visibly shaken. Theo did not doubt that they had shared a vision, however piecemeal the images. Moina turned to her. “Do you know who we saw?”

Theo spoke the name aloud. “It was Gilles de Rais.”

“Yes.” Macgregor handed her back the drawing. “The cross was his, and the swan, but this mark you found is only a symbol, an evocation. Did you learn the identity of the man who uses it?”

Theo sat on the divan, swept by a wave of frustration. She had learned a horrible truth, but how could it help her solve the murders? “No. I think perhaps I glimpsed him. Not everything I saw was from the medieval era. But it was too vague, too quick.”

Moina sat beside her. “Your Devil has fused Gilles de Rais’ identity with his own.”

The shivers returned, slithering along Theo’s nerves. Almost from the first, Gilles de Rais had become her own symbol of the killer. It was too bizarre to find the killer had chosen him as well. The chill of horror was quickly followed by a thrill of triumph. She had come full circle—back to the question she meant to ask before the Mathers had allowed her into their strange ceremony. “Do you know a man called Vipèrine?”

Yeats only looked curious, but the Mathers glanced at each other with expressions of disgust. MacGregor expounded. “Not a fool, but undeniably a charlatan. A villain who builds his power on seductive parlor tricks and tainted charisma. He is not interested in knowledge, only in power and manipulation.”

“Do you think he is involved in these terrible crimes?” Moina asked.

“He plays at being sinister, but I believe it is more than an act,” Theo said with growing certainty. She remembered Vipèrine’s cold, lustful stare and cruel smile. “When I first saw him, he had a blue beard in imitation of Gilles de Rais.”

“That is extraordinary,” Moina said.

“Yet
Là Bas
may have tempted others to play with such malevolence.” Yeats voiced her hidden fear. The Revenants all knew of Gilles de Rais.

“Vipèrine has appeared at the wrong place at the wrong time—but so have others,” Theo admitted. She wanted it to be Vipèrine. It could not be Averill. It must not be one of her poets. But she hoped the killer was someone the police already suspected. If they were watching him, then he might be caught before he killed again. Was there anything in today’s strange events that provided a clue for Inspecteur Devaux? She turned to MacGregor. “Have you seen a historical depiction of the shield, or the swan?”

“Little survives from that era,” MacGregor answered. “Perhaps the concept seemed familiar because I read of it in heraldry. Gilles de Rais was not someone I studied extensively. His crimes were horrific, but he was not a powerful magician or even a serious alchemist.”

Moina gestured to the drawing. “The choice of the swan is so perverse. They are the symbol of purity.”

“But also of lust—remember Zeus took the form of a swan to ravish Leda,” Yeats said. “In many ways they are creatures of contrast. Their movements embody the grace of the feminine, their necks the virile thrust of the masculine. In that union, they also represent the hermaphrodite.”

“In medieval times, they were called hypocritical creatures, vain and deceitful, for the black flesh hidden beneath their white down,” MacGregor argued. “Just so, this killer hides his corruption.”

“Death,” Theo said, thinking of the children. “Don’t swans symbolize death?”

Moina nodded. “The myth says that mute swans sing only at their deaths.”

Yeats leaned forward, intense and earnest. His slender hands were clasped together, almost in prayer, as he spoke directly to her. “There is great danger here, Miss Faraday. There are elemental forces, entities which shape our art and our lives. To imitate them is to summon them. The imagination is a more potent force than most realize.”

“Such forces can inhabit us. We are always at risk.” Once again, MacGregor gazed inward. Theo felt unnerved by the glassy intensity of his eyes. Moina touched his arm lightly and he looked round at them. “Such evil must be exorcised, or it will destroy whomever it inhabits. It will swallow them whole and take them into the abyss.”

All the Revenants believed in looking into the abyss. No coward, Theo too believed in looking—but not in flinging stones into the darkness to see what demons could be stirred. “You think Vipèrine might be inhabited by such a spirit?”

Yeats said, “Perhaps the killer who now stalks Paris and Gilles de Rais were both inhabited by the same darkness.”

There was a brooding pause. They were all still disturbed by the vision. Theo did not think she would find any more clarity, and she was too perturbed to sit and drink mint tea. “If you hear news of Vipèrine or of anyone else suspicious, can you let me know?” she asked the Mathers.

“You will take this information to the police?” MacGregor frowned.

“I know a detective who is discreet.”

“Such persons are discreet at their
own discretion,” MacGregor said. “They cannot understand our purpose and so distrust us all. It may serve their purposes to discredit us as well as capture this villain.”

“There is no way to prevent the ignorant from throwing us all in the same stewpot,” Yeats said. “We should do what is right.”

“Such darkness shadows the light of those like us, who seek wisdom rather than power,” Moina said.

MacGregor hesitated then gave a sharp nod. Turning to Theo, he said, “We do not tolerate evil. If we hear of anything suspicious, we will inform you.”