“The fever is consuming her. Father, her body is burning.”
“I know, my son. We have done all we can for her.”
“Will she ever wake again?”
“It's up to God, now.”
Alone in my cold, dank room, sweat beaded on my skin as I lay inert upon a stone floor. Only a meager woolen blanket was draped over me to ward off the chill of that forgotten place, a small, crowded square room fifteen feet to a side. My condition required quarantine, the swollen, purpling lumps at my neck and groin having sealed my fate days ago. And what made the room cramped? Corpses. Stacks of them. Bodies had been piled in the corners at least ten deep, awaiting burial. Dark puddles of leakage dried on the floor beneath the stacks while those bodies at the top were uncovered. Their grotesque discolored faces pulled tight into silent screams of horror around yellowed teeth and blackened tongues. Months ago the abbey had run out of sheets to spare for wrapping the dead, and months before that the graveyards had been filled to capacity as the Black Plague had begun to sweep its way through France in the winter of 1348. All that could be done now was to chip out burial pits in the frozen earth.
Some villages had been spared, while some, like the one nearest to the abbey, had been blighted entirely. Abandoned houses creaked and groaned as the wet wind passed through open doors and windows, wafting up the stench of mud and rot and rustling the stained rags and hair of the corpses within. Rats and ravens were the only creatures that survived at first, thriving and feasting upon the flesh of the dead. And then came the dogs, feasting on the rest and claiming it for their own. Entire villages became filled with packs of mongrels, leaving little more than bones. No one knew just how many had been lost; no one came near those god-forsaken places.
Back in that horrible storage room, I lay in a troubled half-sleep. My starving body convulsed gently from time to time, my back arching and legs curling until my raw heels dug into the mattress beneath me, disrupting the insects within it. Black and purple patches on my arms and legs looked like spills of ink, my fingers and hands completely black as if I had apprenticed to a book maker. Of course I had had no such formal training. I was barely more than a girl and I'd come from a poor farming family in Montfort-sur-Risle. With all of them lost to the plague I had walked alone for days towards the Abbaye Notre-Dame du Bec in Le Bec-Hellouin. There I had been clothed and fed and put to work tending to the sick. Many had thought that I'd been blessed with immunity. The sickness seemed to pass me by for weeks as I comforted the dying. Yet in time I, too, began to feel ill. Terrified, I'd hidden my discolorations beneath long sleeves for as long as I could, trying desperately to hide the truth from everyone including myself, but in the end the swellings at my throat had betrayed me.
Writhing on my bed, my thinning black hair stuck to my wet skin, my naked, wasted body hurting no matter what position I took. Only one slim window allowed in the night air, and in the moonlight I could see the stacks of the dead all around me. Through my hazy vision I could see that my keepers had left me there with no intention of tending to my comfort; they had left me there to die. Fear overcame my pain and made me lucid, the fog of my fever dream brushed away as I forced my body to move. For nearly ten minutes I grit my teeth and shifted slowly, my muscles sluggishly obeying me in bits and pieces until I finally got to my numbed and gangrenous feet. Every step ached from the knees up, my muscles tight for want of all the water I was sweating away. I thought that if only I could get out I might have a chance, having no plan beyond getting past the closed door. Perhaps such a plan was foolish, but I was delirious at the time and thought, "who would know that I was here if I died in this room? Would God? Even in his own house, would He think to look for me among so many dead in this small space?"
I shuffled weakly towards the heavy door, reaching towards the handle with my bruised and claw-like fingers. The pain of forcing my dying hands to grip the handle made me sob with the effort. My heart stopped in my chest when the door didn't budge, locked from the outside by the Friar and his acolyte. My scream of despair was little more than a dry screech, like the death-cry of a rabbit. Incensed and desperate to get out, all I could manage to do was lean lightly against the wood, shaking with fatigue.
What's worse, my hands wouldn't let go of the handle, bound there in a death grip. “I am dying...” I gasped, sinking slowly to my knees as I still gripped the door. “I am dying! Oh God, please help me!” There was hardly enough water left in my body for my voice to be any louder than a whisper. My clammy forehead pressed against the old wood in despair and I husked, “Please do not forget me, my Lord. Please do not let me die alone, here. Not like this.” I felt so entirely betrayed by my creator that I was certain only Hell waited for me.
A breeze trickled in through the window, its caress serpentine and cool as it slid around the room, disrupting the stale air. The moonlight was soon obscured by a growing shadow, as if something wanted the celestial light all for its own. A voice, slight and young, issued from the center of the room to ask sweetly, “How, then, would you prefer to die, ma chère fille?”
My dry eyes creaked in their sockets as I turned my gaze towards the speaker, whereupon I saw a small child, a girl hardly older than ten. I froze in shock; where had she come from? Didn't she know the danger here? Couldn't she smell the putrefaction? “How did you get in?” I croaked, swallowing past the tight and painful swellings in my neck.
“I come and go as I please.” A cloak hid her features from the moonlight, and only the curve of her cheek and her innocent mouth were barely visible. The shadow of wings rose and fell behind her, though no such limbs were visible to my eye. “But you have not answered my question. If this death is not acceptable, then what death would be?”
As I stared at her until my body, seized by a light convulsion, wrenched my hands free of their grip on the door. My body curled up on the cold floor like an insect as I struggled to breathe. From this vantage point I watched the girl approach on feet clad in silk slippers. The girl's entire body was covered and warmed by a long matching cloak, red like her shoes. Gathering up her skirts, the girl crouched by my wretched body, examining me with eyes that held only mild interest and no traces of pity, eyes that were entirely black and featureless, inhuman wells that consumed rather than expressed any emotion. Such dark pits were set into a face painted like a decorated skull.
The mask of death upon the unearthly child frightened me, even more than the fact that I was minutes from dying. Was this an angel sent to me in my final hour? Did it matter? I don't know if I actually said these words aloud or merely thought them, but I vaguely remember my words: “Anything but this.”
The girl crouching above me narrowed her eyes and then finally closed them, inclining her head solemnly as if in acquiescence. Her right hand lifted towards the wall where the piles of corpses were stacked and a quick flick of the child's wrist and a spread of her fingers sent a sharp, audible crack into the stone, a glowing blue fissure looking like the welt of a whip's lash. A harsh growl of grating stone purred into the cold night air as the two halves of the crack pulled apart, the wall little more than a privacy screen. The stacked bodies nearby trembled and slid stiffly down to the floor, and one came to rest almost face to face with me. I gasped and tried to move away, lifting my gaze from the pruned eyes of the corpse to the new doorway. Beyond the widening aperture I could see a hallway lit with candle light.
Even lying upon the floor in a nest woven of death and ruin, I marveled at this new portal. My strength was leaving me and my pain was great, but to see such magic distracted me from the torment at the very end. At first I didn't notice when the small child reached down with her right hand, fingers and palm still outspread, and placed it over the greatest swelling on my neck. A pervasive feeling of soothing cool flowed through me, and my swellings subsided and disappeared altogether, and the pain in my arms and legs went away. Even my wasted flesh filled out once again and my terrible need for food and drink was gone. I looked at myself in amazement as I sat up, and it looked as if I'd never been sick. In a pool of fluid nearby I could see my reflection and stared at it in amazement. My hair was once again lustrous, black, and draped down to my mid-back, and my skin was lightly tanned once more, and now longer the sallow color of an aging candle. No longer were my eyes sunken pits staring down the days until death, but once more wide and beautiful sapphire gems ringed by full lashes and set beneath dark brows.
I could hardly believe what was happening to me as I cautiously rose to my feet, feeling no pain for the first time in weeks. By my side the mysterious girl rose up and proceeded towards the cleft in the wall. It was an impossible gap, for as soon as I approached the new passage I could see out the window right beside it. There was no new hallway on the outside. There was nothing there at all. Only moonlight bathed the miserable countryside, thawing slowly into a terrible spring. The expansive Abbey seemed like a palace amidst the dark, naked forest, its pale walls gleaming in the sickly light like boiled bones rising from blackened meat. Only a few monks were working outside beneath a small lantern, laboring to till the frozen earth for a new burial pit at the edge of the skeletal trees.
“Ma chère,” called the girl, who stood now at the threshold of this mysterious hallway. Beneath the skull makeup her unnatural eyes narrowed in expectation, waiting upon my decision like a parent waits upon the fickle desires of a toddler.
I turned away from the window, closing my eyes. The shadow of death seemed to press down over the entire countryside like a suffocating black shroud. There was nothing out there to hope for; the world was ending. God had given his children all the chances they were ever to have, and he had grown tired of continual disappointment. Surely that was the cause of all this, wasn't it? With one last breath, I took up my stained, woolen blanket and wrapped it around my body, joining the little girl as we both began to walk into the hallway together.
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