Floating Girl, Sunken Man

After the business of shooting Anne was over, Denys alone was to take care of the witch notes. She had given no instruction on how to safely do it. Indeed, she had denied they carried the touch of the devil at all, which left him blessing a bolt of linen and shearing it into strips. He made mitts of them and fashioned a sling to carry the slippery tan stacks, spurning the touch of their gleaming bodies.

He took them to the woods to burn. Once lit they produced a foul scent, burning in slow, shrinking clumps. There was little natural soot to speak of. They conjoined together in a blackened rock of boils and scars. One of the immaculately replicated faces glared off the top, largely unscathed. A black patch had spoiled one eye, but the rest of him watched Denys. Had watched him strike the flint and rouse the flames, seated atop the mound and rippling down to meld with his brothers, never once breaking his gaze. “I see you,” he might have said, “and I will remember.”

Denys touched his cross and said his prayers. He read aloud from the book despite his doubts. This was not an exorcism, it was a cleansing of the devil’s tools. Surely it required independent sections of scripture. Scouring the book last evening illuminated nothing, and he wished desperately for a consult. None could read aside from him, and after the priest took sick a fortnight ago he inherited sole authority of the Church.

Though he wished sorely for the matter to be finished, Antoine was waiting at his stoop when he returned, a rucksack reclined by his ankles. “More artifacts,” he groused, and carried off without further word.

He left the sack beside his door for an hour, preferring to coax his hearth to heat and preparing a drink. The affair sat uneasy on his mind. They ought not have shot her, he kept thinking to himself. There had been neither injury nor phenomena that could be attributed to spirits. Just the witch notes, driven into posts on Jean and Claudine’s coop by soundly battered nails. Anne had always been clumsy, and now her witchery too was marked by ineptitude. If the notes were not cast on glassy parchment, nor glittering, nor riddled with phrases unknown, she might still live. No one could account for their nature and her story was absurd, so it must have been an undiscovered devilry. It was then assumed the priest had fallen ill under her ministrations, though a search of his home and the church produced no further notes. The decision had been unanimous, and at dawn this morning she was taken to the northern fence and shot.

Denys thought it a rushed conclusion. He believed Anne’s testimony came honestly and her cries of fear were genuine, her declarations of love for Christ compelling. He spoke none of this aloud. Far be it from him to show his belly when there was need of a firm hand. If only the priest had not died. He could not even curse his luck, for he must assume it was by the Lord’s design. There must be purpose in this, his assuming the right to interpret the Will of God in a time of crisis. Elsewise the fiasco would have festered in wait for the new priest, whomever he would be. They would not see one until next year with this winter, which had come strong and swift.

Unfolding the sack revealed a flat box case with a handle, swathed in rippled leather, marred by stains.

“I took the man from the water,” Anne had said of her devil. “He was bleeding from the head but he was drowning first.”

Denys hesitated. He rose to fetch the wrappings he had blessed before and fit them on his hands once again.

Some clever thinking was needed to pry the case open. Denys had prodded, tipped it over, dropped it on the ground and scantly wedged the side open with a knife, but it was the two knobs on the front that were the key. Once pushed in simultaneously the case clicked and the lid rose. He lifted it with due caution and found it would only sit at a rigid, upright angle to its bottom half.

Within there were more stacks of the witch notes. Denys grimaced at his luck. The sun was already setting and that was reason enough to burn them tomorrow, he decided. Though the notes appeared dry the lining of the case was damp, on the verge of going fetid. He scowled as he restacked the notes into piles on the left, irritated by their disarray. Beneath them, he found the book.

It was taut and black like the case, but the cover was like smooth sailcloth. He dared not touch it with his bare hands, from sight alone he could tell it was not a fabric but some other substance. Like the notes themselves and yet unlike them. They had been featurelessly flat where this book was grooved and mottled. A thin ribbon closed it from front to back which stretched and snapped when pulled. He slipped it loose and split the damp pages.

What he feared was not what he found.

No runes, no curses. No unholy scripture or demonic names invoked. It was a memoir, all dashed in blue. Half the words were illegible, through the bleed of water or the inattentive hand that wrote them. What remained was nonsense. Illustrations, plotted shapes, annotations. Words writ in English, he thought, and others too long and odd to pronounce. Large renderings of the same contraption, over and over, altered only in minutiae each time. The final pages contained lists. Several items were stricken, most were blotted beyond repair. Denys brought the candle closer to decipher what he could.

2067-march/April (?) – P + E @ H.o.Commons

2065 – party disbanded

2021-june 5 – E grad polisci @uot

1999 oct 16 – P par. divorce – move to O?

Denys sat back in his chair. He worked the inside of his lip with his teeth.

“He asked me the year.” Anne had looked to each of their faces. Seeking one eye to hold her gaze. A singular mercy. “I told him and he fell asleep. He would not wake, so I pushed him back in.”

The year.

With the wrappings his grip was slippery and so were the witch notes. Denys could not read English, but the numbers were clear and the notes contained both. He had been asked to relay their message for the trial. Shamefully, he said he could not understand it. In truth, the words read clear. It was the message that was muddied, and he could not say whether it bode ill or bode nothing at all. The unearthly basis of the note so spooked him that he allied with the common temper and abandoned the matter altogether.

Now he had time and a bolster in clarity. The number one hundred was obvious, repeated several times over the slip, but there was an inscription in vexatious miniature just below the portrait.

Sir Robert L. Borden Prime Minister/Premiere Ministre 1911-1920

His first thought in the haze of the trial had been Minister of What? He had ignored the numbers. With the quiet and the leather case and black book, with Anne dead and the hours gone slow with night, he considered them again.

He had asked her the year, she claimed. 1911-1920. 2067, 2065, 2021, 1999.

Denys fluttered the pages of the book until the contraption was laid flat before him. It looked small. A seat was implied in the middle. He turned to the next iteration and found it more clearly defined. A place where a man could sit, but no more than one. A compact creation.

Its significance was not yet revealed to him. There was something the matter between the book and the testimony. He wished again desperately for a consult. After this morning he could not name one soul he would trust with the book.

In spite of the dark and his earlier malaise, Denys shrugged into his coat and lit a lantern. He left the notes and case behind but slipped the book into his pocket.

“I done it to warn him, nothing more.” Anne had not looked fair when she cried. She had not looked fair when she smiled. Jean had averted his eyes at the trial while Claudine raised her chin higher. There was rumor of a love unrequited between Anne and Jean. There were more robust rumors about Anne and the Huron boys that crept through the brush. Which was true? Which rumor was it that dragged her to the northern fence this morning? “I done it to warn him away. That’s why I stuck them there, so he would be scared and stray no more.”

She was unwed and ungainly and she lived on the edge of the woods.

Denys’s lantern cast shadows like spikes. The trees were barren or prickled with green spines, and neither was comely in the dark. He knew there was a pond beyond Anne’s house, speckled with bulrushes and no fish worth the effort to catch. It would be frozen. A glassy topped spit, undisturbed. It must be.

He found it just as he lost feeling in his toes and the tips of his fingers. Denys raised the lantern.

In the centre of the ice was a jagged gash. It was as if a carriage had fallen through, straight from above. It struggled to freeze again, wispy webs of white pining to meet over black water. And here, the bulrushes were crushed. A mess made of the snowfall, indentations deep and wide.

Denys lowered the lantern and found the blood painted into the snow.

All wind was absent. New flakes fell unfettered from the stars above, thick things that stuck wherever they struck. They gathered on Denys’ shoulders, the cap over his head. He stood shivering at the edge of the water.

Would he find the man if he dove in? Would he find the finalized invention? Fit squarely into its seat? Would he drown as a man, or float as a witch? That was how they had tested once, long ago. Today they had forgone much of the old hysteria but committed a madness all their own.

If they took her to the water now, would Anne still float?