part0021

Old Ancel waited for the doctor or he waited for death and Constantine cared little who claimed the man. Like many who find themselves in the profession, he had no desire to rush onward and take from the Devil what was his due. His position was that, whatever might be done for youth swallowed towards death by sickness or cannon shot, the old belonged as much to the next world as to this one. A doctor might ameliorate and attend but there was no tincture, no setting of bone; no use for hands, that might hold back that inevitable night. If Old Ancel was the prey of time and death and the Fate of the Born, then no turn in his own step would put Constantine between the wolves and their wounded. His feet crunched in the washed out fall of leaves and the slow crack of their stems and dry veins was like his point being etched into granite.

Old Ancel had occupied the shack in the woods for as long as anyone in the town could remember. Old Ancel had occupied the shack in the woods and had been known as Old Ancel since Constantine had been young. The boy had asked his Father:
“What does Old Ancel do?”
And his father had replied;
“He hunts and traps and sleeps when the sun goes down.”
“Like a wolf?” the boy had returned.
“Yes. I suppose so.”
“And so why does he not live amongst the humans when he is one, and not a wolf at all,” Young Constantine had enquired.
His father had only looked back into his newspaper and kicked at the ash on the hearth.

The boys at his school had told stories about Old Ancel. About how his nails were as long and sharp as a beast’s. How he tipped back his head and popped the still-beating hearts of the rabbits he killed onto his tongue like they were lemon drops. How Ancel would hunt anything that strayed too far into his forest.
When he had gotten a little older, Constantine and one of his friends had gone into the forest. Two boys of that shaky, uncertain age which is neither wholly child nor adult. They had come across Ancel checking his traps, the lank grey hair falling over his mucky face as he stooped in anticipation and then rose pitifully as he found them empty.
His friend had called out. Hurled mocking words and taunts and jibes. Constantine, too, had flung cruel insults at the man. With all the selfishness and insecurity and desperation of young boys they had cursed him, goading one another with the shrill, mindless laughter that belongs to boys and scavenger birds. But Constantine, some seed of the man or shadow of the father, had fallen silent when he saw the terrified, shameful face look up and desperately search the bushes in which they hid themselves. Just as they had clucked and hollered at the poor woodsman, it was the face of an animal. But not in the way that the heckles had accused. Not the face of a beast. It was like an animal in another way that the young Constantine could not have articulated. He took his friend’s arm and ushered him home as Old Ancel fled into the quiet forest to which he belonged.

The shack sat in a little clearing bathed in the dead grey light of morning. Its faded and decaying wooden face had the cast of a coffin spat forth from the earth. Constantine had expected to meet Defarge, the man who had sought him in town and described Old Ancel’s dire situation. Defarge the woodcutter had dashed off whilst Constantine finished attending his present patient. But Defarge had not returned to the woods or the shack or the dying man as Constantine had expected.

Constantine pushed gently at the door and it staggered agape with a creak and a whine. He stepped into the pall of gloomy darkness inside.
   “Ancel? It’s Dr. Fournier,” Constantine called in a voice that was, at once, soft for the sickened and dignified for the dead until the matter was settled and one or the other could be maintained.
   In the corner of the single room there was a body enshrouded in dirty blankets and laid on a bed of piled logs and boards. Constantine looked around the dirty shack with its meagre furnishings of salvaged table and chairs, its packed earth floor and its splintering wooden walls. It pricked his heart deep down where the boy had tormented the old man. He moved to the bed and laid a hand on the rough blanket beneath which the head lay.
   “No! The light!” came the voice from the shroud.
   Constantine jumped back. A soft and feeble groan came from beneath the blanket.
   “Ancel,” he said, kneeling at the bedside. “I’m here now. What is wrong?”
   The man beneath the shroud gave no reply. Constantine fetched the chair and settled its unsteady legs in the dirt by the bed. He sat and clasped his hands between his knees. The cold and his conscience urged them to move.
   “Ancel?” he whispered. “I need to pull back the blanket to treat you. There is no light, it is quite dark.”
   The old man only mumbled something that was as much an expression of pain as assent. Constantine put his hand on the blanket’s edge .

Old Ancel’s face was a dead man’s to which life only clung at the edges, like mist on a still lake. His unshaven cheeks were drawn in and his eyes possessed a horrifying brightness that struck Constantine like a shard of ice in the heart. He tried to ministrate to the dying man, but the piteous moans and whimpers were too much for him to bear. There was no use further upsetting the man in his short time left upon the Earth. In the end it was only like searching out the location of a leak in a bucket which you had no means to patch. A cause of death more accurate than “old age” would only calm his own curiosity. It would do nothing for the suffering of Old Ancel. Even his doctor’s log demanded no greater satisfaction than the broadest of strokes. Not for a man like this. He pulled the blankets back up to the old man’s throat and watched him feebly attempt to haul them up and over his head, mumbling about the light.
   “What is it that troubles you so, Ancel?” Constantine asked.
   “It comes down in the light,” the old man shivered out.
   “What does?”
   “The death. The death that gives no sound. The death that is the absorption into another life.”
   Constantine ran a hand over his face. His mind raced back to that day when his friend and he had tormented the man. A quiver of guilt shook him like a bough. The man was quite mad.
   “There is no reason to fear the light, Ancel. There is no more death by the day than by any other time. The sun gives a man his strength. Why, look at you! A woodsman and always under the open sky. You have the strength of ten city men,” he replied.
   The old man deserved the humanity and kind words that the world had withheld for so long. But only the sound of bitter tears came in reply.
   “I am no woodsman. I am no friend of the good sun. I am only a fugitive from the scene of a crime,” he wept.
   There was something more lucid in that tone of voice, from a man who was considered mad, than Constantine cared for.
   “What are you talking about?” he asked, quietly.
“I, too, lived in the city, once,” the old man said at length. “I was the clerk of a landlord.”
   Constantine looked around the grim little shack. A thin sliver of the rising sun slunk through the boards and pooled on the dirt floor.
   “One day, a man came to the offices,” Ancel continued. “A man who looked as if he needed a home more than any I had ever seen!” He uttered a rasping little laugh that sent a judder of revulsion across Constantine’s shoulder blades. “He looked as if he had never known a single one of the comforts that this age affords a man. I showed him the portfolio we had, and he shook his head at every address. He told me that the room he wished to lease was the one at St. Felice. I was taken aback. The room did not appear on the list which I had presented to him. In fact, it had not been advertised for so long that, had I started my employment with the firm a mere month later, I might not even have known that it was a part of our holdings. I tried to dissuade the man. I turned again to our list of properties and advocated that any of they would better suit his need, given that the area of St. Felice was in such an advanced situation of dilapidation and decay that we had as good as removed the room from the market until a suitable use could be found for it. He, however, was quite insistent and advised that he would sign a lengthy and binding lease with full indemnity ensuring no complaint could be raised in relation to the state of the lodgings. As he went on, I wondered how the man had even found the room to be amongst our holdings given its administrative obscurity, no less the fact that he appeared more a vagrant or tinker than a dealer in real estate. I told him that I would need to speak to Mr. Krauss, the owner, and that if he left an address we would be in touch. He responded that he could provide no address, but that he would return two days hence and hoped to find the decision made. And in his favour.”
   Ancel grimaced and pulled the blankets closer about him.
   “Mr. Krauss, perhaps for not having met the peculiar man and the strange aura he cast, was no less than thrilled to hear that the St. Felice property was going to begin to generate income. He showed some trepidation around the terms of the lease but, having been presented with a draft and finding it restrictive enough for his liking, he demanded it printed and turned his attention fully to other matters. I, on the other hand, went back to my desk to await the return of the odd gentleman with an apprehension of unknown genesis gnawing at my bowels.
   “True to his word, the man returned looking no more or less shabby than upon our first meeting. Having committed his signature to the document, an act he performed with a rancid smile, the first I had seen him display, it was now my unenviable duty to convey him to the room across town, show him inside and leave him with the key. He seemed put out by the requirement that I accompany him to the property in the first instance; at first politely declining what he thought to be a courtesy, before bemoaning the importunate nature of what he discovered was a convention.
   “In due course we made our way across town, he in a silence borne from sullenness and I in one whose root was in anxiety. The neighbourhood of St. Felice was no more prepossessing than the room itself. It’s cracked, curling pavements were highways for the shambling, down-looking figures that moved along them beside gutters filled with brackish water, rotting vegetation and scummy white animal fat. The building bore down on the streets with grey facades peppered with broken windows, which appeared like empty sockets in a skull. The smell in the air was of bleached linen, boiled cabbages and doused fires. I pulled my muffler about my face to suppress it, but my travelling companion seemed to be bothered not at all.”

At this Old Ancel became quiet. His eyes continued to rove in the midst of remembrance, but his lips stopped moving save for the slightest quiver. Constantine reached out his hand to feel the patient’s forehead and, as his shadow fell across Ancel’s face, the old man drew a huge juddering breath and continued his recounting.
   “We climbed the old and narrow stair to the room in the upper reach of the St. Felice building. The inside of the rooming house was no more welcoming than its locale, but the strange gentleman seemed thrilled to be nearing our destination as he jostled me on a stair that could only be climbed in single file. We reached the top floor and he pushed ahead of me on the long, equally narrow, landing with a singular recklessness. I was forced to cling to the rickety bannister to prevent myself being sent up and over it. He stood there at the door, his hands pressed to its face, looking at me with furious impatience as I moved closer and withdrew the key from my pocket. I barely had it turned in the lock when he was leaning on me and, by proxy, the door and barging his way inside as if the greatest of banquet halls, throne rooms or treasure hordes awaited him. I stepped into the room.”
   Ancel stopped and sucked at his lips. Constantine went in search of water. The morning outside the shack was bold and clear now, the winter sun beginning to burn away the mist and chill which had followed him through the forest. In the trees that encircled the clearing he heard the jackdaw’s racking call. He found a tin pitcher of dull, stale water and brought it to Ancel, alongside a beaker. Having drunk at length of the poor fare, Ancel continued his story;
   “The room seemed barely fit to store goods, even animals, let alone humans . The floor was thick with a carpet of wiry dust. The walls were only fresh where the plaster had begun to crumble; where it still clung they were stained with the marks of water, weather and wear. There was not a single item of furnishing. The only signs of habitation were those that the animals and vermin had left behind; cobwebs, droppings and the little piles of sawdust on the boards that the termites had left in their wake. I looked around that barren cell with a thin bile rising in my throat and the acrid dust stinging my sinus. It seemed barely a place to spend five minutes let alone the lengthy lease that the gentleman had signed.
   “None of the disgust that so filled my own heart seemed to have registered with him. He paced the groaning floorboards leaving deep, dark grey footprints wherever he trod. One hand was stretched out to the wall as he walked and he cocked his head towards it, almost as if he were listening for something behind the plaster. I issued a little cough and he looked at me as if he had forgotten that I was there. And he gave no word and no sign and no utterance. He only looked back at me. I edged away. I cannot explain it, but the most horrible and strangling fear had come over me. I backed to the door, which was still flung wide and, as I stepped over the threshold, I placed the key in the nest of dust by the jamb of the door. The strange man, still, only looked back. And then, all at once, his expression of curiosity and mild irritation exploded into a wild eyed and rictus grin that would look shocking staring out from between the bars of some house of the condemned. He made no sound; there was no laugh or hoot or scream. He just looked at me, his hands inert at his side, with that inhuman maniac’s leer on his face, that silent, mocking grin that distorted his features so, it was as if he burned. I turned and I ran. ”

Ancel’s breathing had grown short and ragged. Constantine held his own breath between each exhalation and the resumption of life’s rhythm. The old man was trying to continue his story. It was only with prolonged and forceful efforts that Constantine was able to calm him and convince Ancel that he was compelled to preserve his waning energy. Ancel drifted into a thin and fitful sleep. Constantine quietly moved his chair back to the table and sat facing towards the hovel’s lone window. He considered his position. The old man would not live but, at the same time, there was no telling how much life was still left. It might be measured better in hours than days but what, in the end, was a whole day composed of? Constantine could not leave the man to die alone, but neither could he stay until the night and beyond. It was not a long time in the grand scheme of things but, for he and Ancel both, it was made longer by relativity.
Constantine sat in the sun and let the light crawl from his hands and up his chest and on to his face. Ancel’s breath was so shallow that he could not hear it even at that short distance and in the dead silence of the forest. He periodically glanced across to the bed to ensure that the man’s chest was still gently rising and falling. He thought about the strange tale that Ancel had been telling. Though the man suffered and though his passing would be a gift and a kindness, Constantine, somewhere, thought that to lose him before the tale was concluded would be a bittersweet end to events.

There came a sound from the bed and Constantine rushed to his patient’s side. Old Ancel was thrashing under the sheet as if he were being turned by some roiling wave. He screeched and hollered in a manner almost unintelligible. The only word that Constantine could make out amongst the frightful tears and prayers was “light”.
   “Ancel? Ancel!?” he called.
   Ancel still writhed and moaned in what appeared a delirium. But Constantine had seen deliriums enough to notice the differences in what occurred here before him. What he saw in Old Ancel’s eyes was not mindless railing against a hollow dream, it was the panic and ferocity of a man opposing a corporeal threat. What Old Ancel fought against in this, his drawing hour, was so real that Constantine imagined he might catch its image reflected in the man’s eye.
   Ancel continued to jerk against whatever unseen effect oppressed him. His shouts had become no less wild or desperate, but some of their clarity had come back. Constantine began to pick out elements of coherent speech.
   “It comes down… they… in the light… come to rest… the light of those who’ve seen…”
   Constantine continued to try and still the pani,c but found the frail and dying man in possession of a strength far beyond his apparent condition.
   “In the body of those… fleeting… they are no more to them than we are!”
   The man continued to rave. Constantine placed both hands on Ancel’s shoulders and called out:
   “Ancel! You must conserve your strength; nothing is here to hurt you!”
    And the old man stopped his wild thrashing and looked up at, and almost through, Constantine. On his withered face was a look of such sympathy and worry that it made Constantine’s breath catch in his throat.
   “You do not know what I saw,” the old man, now quite lucid, whispered.
   “Tell me,” Constantine replied.

“Though the people of that tenement in St. Felice were of the most abject and base character,” Ancel began, “even they were appalled by what they saw and heard transpire around the room and its new occupant. In time these reports came to our offices. Stories of men, women and children, sometimes in huge groups, coming and going to the room at odd hours. Sometimes the numbers leaving being starkly fewer than that which entered. What was said of the type of people and the sounds that came from the room during their occupancy I can barely repeat. There were tales of objects, food and domestic animals going missing throughout the building. Of signs scratched into wood left in their place. There were tales of songs that were played in instruments unknown and accompanied in languages unrecognized. Finally, a tale of a child who had come down from the top floor entirely catatonic and covered in what looked like insect bites forced us to act. We employed the services of two members of the constabulary and they and I were dispatched to the premises at noon the following day.
    “We arrived and the tenants watched us with a mixture of fear and relief upon their faces through the cracks in their doors. I stepped up to the door on that upper floor and hammered upon it as the officers stood in file behind me, their coshes drawn. The gentleman answered in the same casual aspect and dissolute state of appearance as when I had last seen him some months ago. He did not appear at all perturbed by the officers being in my company. A horrible shadow of that unnatural puppet’s grin he had worn flitted across my mind and made me shudder. He invited my attendants and I into the room quite at ease with the situation.
   “The room was exactly as I had last seen it. If one had inspected it down to the last water stain on the wall or crumb of dust on the floor, I swear you would have found it unchanged. He stood, quite calm, in the middle of the filthy room whilst the officers roamed its corners. Based on what the other residents had reported, I believe they were expecting, if not a site of complete disorder, at least some trace of the coarse rituals that were suggested to be taking place. But the room was in no more or less a defiled state than that in which it had been delivered to its new tenant. I could see that the officers were growing impatient with a situation they perceived to be a waste of their time. They asked a few perfunctory questions which the man answered plausibly and with an air of bafflement at the accusations which had been levelled at him. I perceived that the officers were preparing to wrap up and leave. I had a duty to ensure the man was evicted but realized that, without any sign of impropriety, the officers would not be assisting me in this, purely civil, matter. I felt my time running short and my mind and heart both raced. And then the door slammed shut.”
   Ancel, as if he were reliving each moment of the tale, jerked violently at the this final syllable. Constantine leaned in and Ancel gripped his sleeve and began to race on frantically.
   “It happened in an instant, I swear it! Like a nightmare sweeping through still and sleeping veins. I could not have stopped it!” he cried. “The man was no longer there, stood calm in the centre of the room…. He was… on the ceiling, clinging to it like a fly clinging to the skin of putrid fruit. He… it … skittered about the ceiling on all fours, the limbs cracking and twisting into ghoulish angles, at a speed unholy. The officers were shouting. One of them… was screaming. Like a child. The room took him first. As if the stink of his fear had alerted it to the palatability of his flesh. He was backing towards the furthest wall and… it came alive. It just took him. It was as if a sink hole had appeared in its hard surface. A veil of writhing, crawling insects behind which he tumbled, and which closed on him, their shining black and blue bodies swallowing and smothering him. He opened his mouth to scream and they flooded his gullet, a glut of pestilence, before any sound might emerge. And then he was gone.”
   Ancel paused, breathless, his eyes wide and flitting desperately here and there.
   “I watched him be consumed by that wicked portal of crawling death,” the terrified man continued, “without lifting a finger to aid him. It was shock, not fear or cowardice that rendered me unable, I swear it! I heard the desperate rattling of the door in its frame and turned to see the other officer trying to wrench open our only exit. The… thing… on the roof, hearing this, now made its way towards him. It scrambled on those sickeningly disjointed limbs to the ceiling above the door and began to crawl down. The officer had only a second to see its awful form as he looked up, before it was upon him and his eyes were closed forever. The thing, that chimera of man and twitching parasite, began to rend and tear his flesh with the bristling, barbed appendages that the limbs had become. The constable’s screams were smothered by the hissing and ticking of that bloated monstrosity and then… they were cut short by the cracking of bone as his skull popped like an apple under a cart wheel.”

Ancel stopped, overcome by sobbing. He still looked about him in panic, but all the energy was stripped from him as if he had clung to life only for the opportunity to unburden himself of the terrible knowledge he had carried out into the woods to suffer with, alone. Constantine took his trembling hand and pressed it:
   “How did you escape, Ancel?” he said.
   “I never did escape. Not truly. I may have retained my life that day… at the cost of…”
   Ancel’s voice faltered.
   “I hide here from much. But nothing so much as myself. Still, they will find me. They do not move in the dark. It is man’s fear and ignorance that deceives him along that line. They move in the light, because it is the light that blinds, that bleaches and that obliterates. They move in the light and in that which crawls in and amongst the earth. We imagine that they want our bodies and souls, but that is far from the truth. They have no use for what we might call a soul or the angelic mechanism of flesh in which it might hide. They want only one thing.”
   His breathing staggered and all of his limbs were wrenched by a violent palsy of the muscles. Ancel’s eyes widened until they seemed ready to burst in their sockets.
   “What!?” Constantine cried, yelling both in an apex of desperation and across a noise that had been growing and growing without his notice.
   “The death that will break the turning wheel…” the old man breathed and, though he sucked at the atmosphere with his lips, it was the last true breath that he was afforded. Constantine watched Ancel’s eyes moisten, flare and then turn to marble as he had seen in a hundred other faces. It was never less than like watching the moon pass before the sun or the bringing of life into the world; it echoed with a heavy toll in a part of the mind that lay dormant in other times. He closed the man’s eyelids with his fingers and turned into the shadow that fell on him from behind, but which had not yet registered in his conscious mind.

The branches of the trees trembled in a warm breeze that betokened the resurrection of Spring. But perhaps they quaked for reasons other than that? Perhaps for the dreary gloaming that had fallen upon them in defiance of the bright, bare sun that was, still, somewhere in its heaven? Perhaps for the disturbance in the air from tens of thousands, nay, millions, of tiny wings that now beat amongst the air? Perhaps, and this is how it seemed to Constantine; perhaps their very roots, at one and intertwined with the earth, shook in horror and awe for the event that was now overcoming all laws of nature and goodness? For, from above their trembling boughs, and is if they were being poured down from within the sun itself like a stream of boiling pitch, came a swarm of obsidian black butterflies so numerous that they blotted out the best of the light. What still glittered through the cloak of dusty, fragile wings fell on the ground tainted with the colour of rust or dried blood.

Constantine stood in the doorway and looked up at the falling sky of insect bodies. The atmosphere vibrated with the hum of those multitudinous wings beating. Like a million whispers that, gathered, became a scream. He slammed shut the door and wedged the chair against it. Stood in the middle of the room his legs shook as he heard the swarm draw near. He looked at Ancel’s body. The thought that he should have fled beneath the descending swarm and into the trees beyond instead of seeking shelter in the hut tore at him. But it was too late. The door was rattling in its frame. The very boards of the shack were rattling. He heard millions of tiny wings brushing and beating against the walls. A few had already begun to slip through where the holding was not firm. They flitted around in the dusty air on large, jet black wings. Constantine ducked from the path of their careless flight as if the things were ridden with plague. He stood in the gloomy shack, staring at the mass of insect bodies twisting and writhing against the single windowpane. The weight of a single butterfly was nothing; but what was the weight of a single drop of water and yet, what composed a wave that could split a ship in two? Already he heard the glass begin to creak.

Constantine felt tears begin to prick his eyes. What had been terror collapsed in on itself and became a resignation like a weight of iron on his chest. He heard the swarm, relentless, against every inch of the shack. A fine dust that was both the outcome of his shelter’s slow collapse and the shattered bodies of his oppressors, rained down from the ceiling. He looked at Ancel’s body.
“What did you do, old man?” he said. “What did you pay that room for what remained of your life?”
Ancel’s eyelids moved, but only as they were lit upon by one of the butterflies that had managed their way inside, even whilst the rest of the swarm hammered against the walls outside in ever growing numbers. It folded its delicate wings and sat there waiting. A single tear rolled down Constantine’s cheek and, when he heard the first splinter of wood, he closed his eyes. There was no tincture, no setting of bone and no use for hands. When he heard the first loud crack of sundered wood he did not even scream. He could taste the rotten bark aroma of their bodies already in the back of his throat. The lights behind his eyes danced in what meagre rust coloured light still came into the shack. He felt himself go down under the weight of a million bodies; lighter than air. And then the lights were gone.