The Black Rats Of Sark by Marlin Bressi
The Black Rats Of Sark by Marlin Bressi
On the famine-drenched isle of Sark, the necks of the islanders swell with goiter while they starve, presenting the incongruous appearance of bloated gluttony and crippling poverty at the same time. Only the rats, the descendants of uninvited passengers aboard the pirate ships marauding the channel between the port of Cherbourg and the caves of Torquay, have enough to eat. Where they find food on this barren island, only the Stone Mother knows. Meanwhile, the remaining residents watch the skeletal forms ambling along La Coupée with selfish anticipation. Sweating sickness, the flux, or even a strong wind, could send a traveler tumbling into the sea, or onto the sharp rocks below.
“Stumble, damn you!” croaks one of the monks from a salty cove a hundred meters below the narrow road atop the high ridge connecting Sark to its smaller sibling. “Why won’t she fall, Alberic?” he shouts. The stiff wind and crashing waves conceal his frustrated cries, but the maniacal glint in his eyes fail to hide his hunger. Alberic makes the sign of the cross and stares upward to the tottering young figure attempting to cross La Coupée. Murder is a sin, but accidents are an act of God.
“She’s a native, of course,” the older monk finally replies. “Her people have been crossing La Coupée on their feet since the road built by the Romans. Before that, they crossed the ridge on their hands and knees.” The younger monk, whose eyes are keener, notices a bundle in her hand.
“Feathers!” He spits in contempt. “That witch-brat is going to visit that heathen statue. Look, Alberic! She has an offering for the Stone Mother.” Frère Martin, like many of the Benedictine monks, was still licking his wounds over his order’s failure to break the timeless bond between the indigenous Sarks and their pagan customs. More than a thousand years earlier the Romans had also failed to tame these feral creatures. Just like the monks, they had decided to move on, leaving behind assorted ruins of military garrisons and roadways like the Grand Rue and the stony dragon’s neck the French pirates took to calling La Coupée.
“Well, let us return to the priory, Frère Martin,” grumbles Alberic, but the younger monk suggests staying until another traveler crosses the high, narrow land bridge. It’s a windy day, he says, and the French aren’t as sure-footed as the heathens. Alberic sighs.
& & &
Jean Gaudin pushes his wagon along Grand Rue north of the village. In happier times this wagon was drawn by a fine white mare and carried a variety of wares to the public market. Sometimes it carried barley and potatoes, other times it transported wool brought by flat-bottomed boat from Guernsey. For the past two years, Gaudin’s wagon has transported the island’s dead to the hilly graveyard across the cattle trail from an ancient dolmen, said by the natives to be the gateway to the Fairy Kingdom. This grotto is guarded by a massive granite monolith, crudely hewn by long-dead hands and bearing only the slightest resemblance to the female form. Though Gaudin had arrived in Sark twenty years earlier, the Stone Mother still makes him shudder. He wonders if it makes the monks feel the same way. He wonders how many of them remain. He has never had an occasion to bury a monk, but their numbers are dwindling just the same. He stops at an upright stone which marks the spot where his brother Wynstan and his wife are buried. It has been nine years since the black death called them home, leaving behind an orphaned infant who vanished one morning as has never been found, and was presumed to have fallen over the lip of a cliff into the sea after wandering away. Gaudin remembers the battle he fought with Seigneur Montmorency over the burial of Wynstan’s wife, an indigenous Sark who was not a member of the Church. Eventually, Gaudin got his way.
Gaudin is tugging at the heels of an emaciated corpse when he sees the young woman in the woolen shawl. She walks solemnly along the cattle trail. She stops and kneels at the foot of the massive stone and places her daily offering in a well-worn indentation on a flat rock capping the entrance to the sacred grotto. Now she stands and smiles at the gravedigger.
“Didn’t think you’d make it today, Marie,” says Gaudin, as he drags the stiff body to the lip of the grave. “Only a fool would try to cross La Coupée on a day this windy.” As usual, Marie Trahan giggles demurely, draws her hood over her wild tangle of black hair and sprints away in the direction of the home she shares with her mother on Little Sark. Strange girl, Gaudin says to himself. Strange family, too. The mother, Aalis, is something of a recluse, which is an admirable achievement on an island this small. They live in a stone cottage on the southernmost tip of the island. Gaudin’s stomach rumbles in unison with the slate-colored clouds.
Gaudin is drenched in rain when he nudges open the door. His frail wife, Lise, is skimming an oily film of liquid from an iron pot over the hearth fire. The smell assaults his nostrils, but he smiles. She does the best she can with whatever scraps she can find. Husks, rinds, and the occasional meat from a horned lark or a scrub-jay comprise the ingredients of the daily stew. Gilles, the son of the village blacksmith, stones them with a sling, and since the sling is made from the leather of Gaudin’s beloved white mare, Gilles accepts nothing from the gravedigger’s wife when she attempts to pay Gilles for the birds. Lise coughs, staggers before the fire and then catches herself, and Jean knows that it is only a matter of time. As they sit down to their stew, Gaudin encourages her to stay strong. He makes the usual promise.
“Jean, you’ve always been so careful with your money, but you’ve been saving before the famine even began,” says Lise. “Someday, you might leave Sark. As for myself– ” Her voice trails off.
“Don’t talk like that, Lise!” he roars, before softening his tone. “I was down by the harbor this morning and met a sailor from Torquay. He says that, whenever we’re ready, he will take us to Guernsey for ten groats.”
“Ten groats!” cried Lise. “A King’s ransom for a place not much better than Sark.”
“It is a chance worth taking, Lise.”
& & &
Frère Alexander was not happy.
“Prithee, Frère Alberic, why can’t we eat one of the rats?” he begs. “Meat is meat, is it not?”
“Touch not the unclean thing, saith the Lord,” he reminds Alexander. “Would you risk damning your soul for all eternity for the temporary comfort of some meat in your belly?” Alberic isn’t sure if his refusal to feast upon the rodents has more to do with ecclesiastical dogma or the superstitions of the Sarks.
“We shall starve!” protests Frère Martin. He directs the monk’s gaze across the dark, churning Grune Gouliot to the deserted Isle of Merchants, once a thriving tenement of Sark. The “Just like they have.”
“Mind your tongue, Frère,” warns Alberic. “The men and women of Sark have endured worse hardships. So shall we.” Frère Alexander wisely bites his tongue. Amid the pirate troubles, the bishop had recalled the monks to Mont-Saint-Michel years earlier, leaving the century-old priory in the hands of a determined few who vowed to remain on the island until their impossible mission was complete. Of these twenty souls, only seven remain, and these seven men presently stand on the parched grass, ghostly gray in the moonlight, in front of the monastery. The monks have been acclimating their eyes to the darkness for several minutes; Alberic feels they are ready. The tide has gone out at last.
“Alexander and Martin, take the shoreline anon,” commands Alberic. “There may be fish among the pools. The rest of us shall scour the north portion, near the old fort.”
Alexander grumbles but obeys. Without sheep, there can be no rendered mutton fat; without rendered fat there can be no candles. The monks know that flames attract fish to the shore, and the two young men are rankled by the futility of their assignment. Martin grudgingly leads the way down a gentle slope toward the sea. He stops abruptly and points to a flickering pale blue light– dim one instant, now gone in a blink, now brighter and more insistent. It winks and bobs along the rocky trail several perches ahead of the men. Perplexed, they follow the vaporous trail of light shed by the glimmering orb, which disappears into a black void.
When the sun rises, only five monks remain on Sark.
& & &
Gaudin’s wife is too weak to move. A persistent drizzle needles the thatched roof. The damp chill worries him. Like the others, he has a precious bundle of wood stacked in the corner, remnants of boats broken up and torn asunder by order of Seigneur Montmorency. Once this wood is gone, there will be no more fires in the hearth. The seigneur, a feudal lord educated at the college of Sorbonne, says it is better to break up the boats than to cut down the few trees remaining on the island. Centuries of grazing, eons of farming, have left the island tonsured like the heads of the Benedictine monks. In time, says the seigneur, the trees will return and new boats can be built. To fell them now would be akin to signing Sark’s death warrant. In defiance of the chill, Gaudin removes his woolen jersey and drapes it over his shivering wife.
His sudden movements elicit a scampering of tiny feet. A fat black rat scurries behind the ever-shrinking woodpile in the corner. Gaudin, salivating, instinctively reaches for a copper pot, then remembers Seigneur Montmorency’s edict against eating rats. He looks at Lise and studies her sallow complexion, her hollowed cheeks.
“Bishrewe the seigneur and his damned edicts!” he sneers, raising the pot over his head. He stalks toward the woodpile with soft, measured steps. With the toe of a mud-caked boot he gently nudges a weathered plank. The rat dares Gaudin with its eyes and the old gravedigger knows that no one will ever find out. He will keep it a secret to his dying day. He raises the pot higher, until it scrapes the bottom of the sooty joist of the low ceiling. Just as his muscles twitch into action, a loud slap shatters the tense silence. He lowers the pot and walks to the door.
& & &
Despite the slippery cobblestones, Gaudin crosses La Coupée with ease for a man of his advanced years. It has been several weeks since he last visited Little Sark, when his ghastly profession compelled him to come. Once, a dozen families lived here, tending the ridges and furrows which have now grown over with gorse and bracken. Now, only Aalis Trahan and her daughter remain. It is the Trahans he wishes to visit.
Two men from the village are gathering gorse flowers in baskets. Gaudin feels pity for the villagers. Though the flowers are edible and plentiful in the late autumn, they are not very nourishing. The men whisper to each other and point when they see Gaudin walking toward the Trahan cottage. They wear an expression of disbelief and they wonder what earthly business a Frenchman has with the witch-brat and her reclusive mother. Gaudin walks with his head down until her reaches the lichen-crusted rocks forming a meandering path to the cottage. A blue wisp of smoke drifts from the chimney and Gaudin is certain that he can smell roasted meat. He must be delirious, he thinks. Yes, he certainly must be delirious; the last sheep was slaughtered months ago. Suspecting that he might be feverish, Gaudin touches his forehead, but can’t tell if the warmth is from sickness or exertion. The door swings open before he can decide, and before him stands Aalis Trahan, large and gray like the Stone Mother.
“What do you want?” she demands in Sercquiais. Though it is a language dying as quickly as the islanders, disappearing as surely as the monks, Gaudin understands enough of it to get by.
“Prithee, I wish to speak to Marie,” he replies. Aalis stares at him with cold eyes. Like most of the island’s indigenous inhabitants, Aalis Trahan is leery of the French, just as her Gallic ancestors were leery of the other uninvited guests, from the Normans to the English.
“Marie has gone to gather fuel for the fire,” says Aalis. Gaudin asks if he can wait inside until she returns, but the furrow of the old crone’s brow answers his question. “You can find her among the bracken, down by the Venus Pool,” she says, reaching for Gaudin’s shoulder and steering him in the direction of the gorse-pickers, who continue to stare in awe. Gaudin looks over his shoulder. The coals inside the hearth are smoldering, and a tin plate on the table attracts his attention, but not as much as the half-eaten rat upon it. Gaudin opens his mouth to speak, but the door slams shut.
The Venus Pool, just over the hill from the cottage, is a small natural pool formed by the peculiar rocky sockets of the southern coastline. A favorite bathing hole of the ancients, it has been seldom visited since the arrival of the monks, who immediately gave the Sarks a severe tongue-lashing about immodesty upon learning of its existence. Gaudin finds Marie Trahan examining the brush and grasses for anything suitable to burn. Considering the recent rains, this is not an easy task.
“Marie,” says Gaudin, “why did you leave a chop of mutton on my doorstep this morning?” The girl tilts her head, as if in a state of confusion. “Come now, child! I know that it was you. I saw you running along the Grand Rue before ducking behind Serge Boncourt’s house.”
“It was a gift,” she answers with reluctance. “Your wife is ill, and the meat will give her strength.”
“But where did you get the mutton? There are no flocks left on Sark, and surely you could not have gone to Guernsey by yourself.” A thought flashed though Gaudin’s disordered mind.
“Of course it was mutton,” Marie replies, as if reading the gravedigger’s thoughts. “The ancestors have told us rats are sacred,” says Marie. “They are animated by the spirits of the dead. If you aventure to kill a rat, its spirit will demand repayment in kind, and one of your own shall die.” Gaudin shook his head fiercely.
“That is a lie, Marie,” he replies. “For I have just visited your mother, and what did I see on her tin plate but a half-eaten rat.”
“It is not so!” the girl protests.
“Forsooth, it is so!” shouts the incredulous gravedigger. Marie seems stunned, but then a wry smile dimples her chin. She giggles.
“What you have seen on Aalis’s dinner plate, Jean Gaudin, was no rat.”
“I do not understand, Marie,” replies Gaudin. “It is also obscene to refer to your mother in such a familiar way.”
“Aalis has raised me, forsooth, but she is not my mother. It is not your duty to understand,” she replies. “It is only your duty to care for your wife.”
“But why should you have any interest in the welfare of a Frenchman?” asks Gaudin. “Aalis seems to regard us as pests.”
“Some pests are worse than others,” says Marie. As if on cue, three monks appear over the crest of the hill. They look down upon the Venus Pool. One of the monks, whom Gaudin recognizes as Frère Gerard, asks if they have seen Martin and Alexander.
“They wandered away last evening,” adds one of the Benedictines. “We have scoured the island from tip to tip and can find no sign of our brothers.” Gaudin and Marie exchange glances. No, they reply in unison, they have not seen the missing monks. Gaudin turns to Marie and waits expectantly.
“Unlike the others, you have always shown kindness to me, Master Gaudin,” said Marie with a bowed head. The gentle breeze from the sea tousles her straight black hair. “And soon I may need it more than ever,” she adds in a lost voice, turning her head toward home. Though he and Lise never had children of their own, Gaudin has always had a fondness for the young. It is only the children who do not turn away when they see him pushing his death cart through the village. Though surrounded by it, they are unaffected by death. The grown, on the other hand, cover their eyes, mumble prayers, clutch their amulets.
“Is there trouble at home, Marie?” Gaudin asks in an avuncular tone. Marie says the troubles are darker than the Venus Pool on a moonless night. Her eyes scan the sea. It is high tide.
“Aalis has been horribly persecuted– as a heathen by the English, and as a witch by the French monks. She has suffered terribly for her beliefs, and will suffer terribly until the monks are driven away from Sark. Alas, her skills in the dark arts are weak. Much weaker than mine, I’m afraid.” Gaudin looks uneasy. He is not a religious man, nor does he place much stock in heathen superstitions. The struggle to feed himself and Lise occupies every waking hour and torments him during the sleeping ones. A person is free to believe in anything they like, he believes.
“Meet me tonight at low tide, please, Master Gaudin?” she pleads. “At the Stone Mother. There is something I must show you. Then perhaps you shall understand.” Gaudin insists on hearing more, but Marie is growing impatient. “Please, you must go anon.”
& & &
Having no luck at the Venus Pool, the three monks scour the cleaved coastline of Little Sark, shouting for Martin and Alexander over the crashing waves. The gorse pickers have not seen the missing men. They are reluctant to visit the cottage of Marie Trahan, who curses and spits at them. “All was well on the island until you started poking your noses into things,” she once told Frère Alberic before chasing him away with a broom. They decide to return to the monastery along the Grand Rue. Far ahead they see the bobbing figure of Jean Gaudin, who is speeding along as fast as his old legs can carry him. The gravedigger crosses La Coupée with the effortless grace of a native. The much younger monks, however, are winded. “Let us stop and rest a while,” says Frère Gerard, lowering himself onto a boulder on an untenanted farm grown wild with neglect.
“Do you suppose our brothers were abducted?” asks Frère Thomas as he looks over the frothy straight to the Isle of Merchants, recalling the days when pirates tormented the inhabitants of Sark and its deserted neighbor to the west. The other monks scoff at the notion; surely the appearance of a ship in the harbor would have caused a great sensation. Merchant vessels stopped dropping anchor in the harbor when the islanders stopped having the money to buy their wares. According to the few seamen who stumble ashore and into the village, the famine has afflicted all of the Channel Islands, from Alderney to Guernsey.
Suddenly, a formidable figure emerges from a large crevice in the outcropping of boulders. It tentatively paws the earth with its hooves, rooting for food.
“A boar!” exclaims Frère Gerard. “On Little Sark! Now what do you make of that?”
“What difference does it make?” asks Thomas, leaping to his feet in joy. The extraordinary sight has chased the fatigue from his body. “The Lord may not have delivered us from this hell, but He hath certainly provided for us.” Frère Jerome, however, says that he wouldn’t be too sure about that– for the monks have no weapons, no means of capturing and subduing the wild beast.
“It must be a feral pig escaped from the old manor farm during last year’s drought,” surmises Gerard. “See how it shows no fear of us? I have an idea. Perhaps we can chase it over La Coupée. If we raise a hue and cry maybe Gaudin will hear us, or some able-bodied villager might block its passage to the mainland. If we can trap the pig, we can likely drive it o’er the edge.”
“Or it will charge us in a fit of rage, and drive us o’er the edge,” counters Jerome. Despite his protestations, the other monks agree to the plan, and the pig seems more than happy to oblige, trotting before the monks at a leisurely pace. Frère Thomas, who has taken charge of the impromptu hunt, instructs the others to follow the animal in silence. They are not to raise their cry until halfway across the precarious causeway. The mission proceeds as planned until the men approach the midway point and the pig bristles and stops in its tracks. When the creature turns on the narrow causeway to face the monks, they see it is now wearing the hideous, warted face of an old crone with glowing yellow slits for eyes. The pig-demon issues a bone-chilling cackle of human laughter, and the sound of the roiling sea swallows the screams as the three men plunge a hundred feet onto the sharp rocks.
& & &
It was Frère Raymond who found the body, but it was the rats who chewed away the face and fingers. The disjointed blossom of bones, protruding from the shredded flesh at haphazard angles, might have belonged to either Gerard or Thomas, who shared a similar stature. As for what remained of Jerome, whose fringe of coppery hair would have solved the mystery of the lifeless monk’s identity, Raymond could not say. “A current must have swept him out to sea,” the ruddy-cheeked monk says to Alberic, who is kneeling at the hearth, stirring the embers with an iron poker. Alberic reaches for the last bundle of wood in the priory, the remnants of the chapel’s altar rail. Once this wood is consumed, all that remains will be cold, impassive stone save for the ceiling and the handle of the axe which the monks have used to chop the chairs, tables and doors into fuel for the fire. And once their departed brother is consumed, there will be only two monks left on Sark.
& & &
Their journey to the Trahan cottage is a silent march across barren fields beneath the scant light of a waxing crescent moon. Alberic and Raymond have chosen to avoid the Grand Rue, lest they be seen. Only when the men are safely across La Coupée and on the lonesome soil of Little Sark do they dare to speak, and even then the words are exchanged in low, conspiratorial whispers.
“That wretched heathen is the wellspring of our woes,” insists Frère Raymond. “There may be hope for Marie– for she is scarcely a child– but Aalis is beyond salvation.”
“Even if Aalis and her witch-brat daughter have broken the first and second commandments, Frère Raymond, we shall not break the sixth,” reiterates Alberic. The younger monk, who had fought in the army of Charles the Fair at Saint-Sardos before his conversion, had vowed revenge since the disappearance of Alexander and Martin, but Alberic attempts to subdue Raymond’s anger by quoting from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: Repay no one for evil. Live peaceably with all men. For it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine’. Raymond snorts derisively.
“I am more than willing to live peaceably with all men, Alberic, but demons are where I draw the line.”
“There may be just two of us left, but do not forget that I am still the abbot,” warns Alberic. “We must not forget the Vulgate. If thine enemy hunger, feed him. If he thirst, give him drink. For in doing so thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.”
“And what does the Vulgate teach us about eating our fellow man?” demands Raymond.
“Need I remind you that eating the body and blood of Christ is our holiest sacrament?” asks Alberic. Raymond stops abruptly.
“Forsooth, there are but two of us, abbot– but I see no further benefit in prolonging this ordeal. If you refuse to slay this wicked beast, then I shall find a way back to France on my own.”
“Then so be it, Frère Raymond,” declares Alberic in an emotionless tone. “Then so be it.”
Raymond skulks away in the darkness, leaving the abbot in the depths of solitude. The eerie forms of boulders and crumbling cottages in the darkness almost make Alberic happy to see the cottage of Aalis Trahan at the foot of the hill, though it is dark and lifeless as the rest of Little Sark. No doubt the witch is sleeping. As he raises his hand to knock, the door opens inward on its own accord. “Only the wind,” he mumbles. Alberic cannot help but feel that this is an omen, though he cannot decide if it is good or evil. The moonlight streaming through the open door and the holes in the roof illuminate a patch of floor, where Aalis Trahan lies with a grin of peace etched into her stony face.
& & &
Marie is not surprised to discover Frère Raymond on the footpath; she knew what was going to happen, she had seen its reflection in the Venus Pool. Perhaps a torch might have prevented him from falling over a weathered root and fracturing his skull on a paving stone. She daintily steps over the corpse and, despite the inky blackness of the landscape, has no difficulty navigating the pebbled path. She has summoned the energy of her ancestors, and the pale blue orb guides her safely along.
Jean Gaudin lovingly strokes his wife’s cheek and walks to the graveyard. Sure enough, Marie is waiting near the Stone Mother, sitting atop the rock which guards the opening of the grotto. Gaudin’s heart skips when he hears another voice, and it is the voice of a man whispering in the shadows. The whispering stops as the old gravedigger advances toward the raven-haired youth, the witch-brat of Little Sark. Gaudin wonders if she is playing a trick on him.
“I thought you were going to be alone,” he says to Marie. The girl apologizes, but says that her explanation will make more sense when he meets Alfred. At the mention of his name, a rugged, wide-shouldered boy materializes from behind the massive stone idol. Gaudin recognizes him. It is the sailor from England who has promised to take the Gaudins to Guernsey for ten groats. “What is the meaning of this?” asks Gaudin.
“Master Gaudin, I’d like you to meet Alfred,” says Marie. “The man I wish to marry.” Gaudin shakes his head, mildly amused.
“Child, what business is it of mine?” he replies, adding that Marie doesn’t need his permission to marry. “It is your mother’s blessing you should seek.” Marie’s smile fades and she bows her head. She reminds Gaudin that Aalis is not her mother.
“Marie Trahan! Stop playing your games and tell me the meaning of this,” he insists. Marie is taken aback by Gaudin’s severe tone, but Alfred breaks his silence.
“Beg pardon, Master Gaudin, but perhaps this will help you make sense of Marie’s situation,” he says. His hands move to the girl’s throat. Gaudin instinctively steps forward to protect her, but realizes that Alfred means her no harm. Instead, the young man reaches for a leather cord Marie is wearing as a necklace. He lifts it over her wild, disheveled mane and hands it to Gaudin, who immediately identifies the amulet on the necklace as the one worn by his brother, Wynstan. “It was given to her by her father, when Marie was but a babe,” Alfred says.
“That is a lie!” exclaims Gaudin. “That amulet belonged to my younger brother.”
“Forsooth, Master Gaudin,” replies the young sailor. “Marie is your niece. She has always known, but, until very recently, was afraid to tell you. She thought you would disavow her on account of her heathen upbringing. When your brother and his wife succumbed to the black death several years ago, Marie was taken to Little Sark by Aalis, who raised her as her own, lest she fall into Christian hands. I learned this only yesterday, when I brought the Trahans a sheep from Guernsey.” Now Gaudin understands how Marie had gotten the mutton to leave on his doorstep. “I pray thee, Master Gaudin, for your forgiveness. Had I known you were related by blood to Marie, I never would have demanded payment for you and your wife’s passage to Guernsey– if that is where you still wish to go.”
“Is Tante Lise well enough to travel?” asks Marie. The ship’s crew has returned for Marie and Alfred with their small picard, which is anchored in the harbor, and the tide is high. They must leave tonight. Gaudin fumbles for words.
“What shall become of… what about Aalis?”
“Do you remember what I told you this morning? That it was not a rat on her dinner plate?” asks Marie. Gaudin nods. “There is something you must see, though I fear it will terrify you.” The old gravedigger waves his arm dismissively; for he has seen the ghastliest of sights and there is nothing that could shock him. Or so he thinks, until Marie reverently places the amulet atop the stone altar at the foot of the Stone Mother and recites an invocation to an ancient deity. “Blessed Arduinna, guardian of the animal spirits, keeper of many eternal secrets, come to me now in this sacred place and join with me in showing my uncle the fate of our tormenters. Dea Arduinna. Dea Arduinna. Dea Arduinna.” A soft blue glow appears inside the grotto, accompanied by a faint chorus of screaming inhuman voices. Marie urges Gaudin to look inside, and he sees a horde of back rats viciously scratching and gnawing at each other. One rat attempts to scurry out of the grotto, but squeaks in pain as it encounters a powerful invisible force.
“Gaudin! Gaudin!” it squeals in torment and anguish. “Save me! Won’t you save me? It is I, Frere Martin!”
& & &
As the cleaved cliffs of Sark recede in the wan light of the waxing moon, the Gaudins and their newly-adopted daughter lean over the stern and take a final look at the island. Marie has finished her tale, and there is nothing to hear but the waves slapping the sides of the boat. The old gravedigger is not a religious man, but he says a silent prayer- to the god of the Christians, to the goddess Arduinna, to the Stone Mother, or to anyone else who is listening– pleading for the safe arrival of Aalis Trahan’s soul to the hereafter. Despite her sins, her last act had been one of great generosity. She had released the animating spirit of the black rat, knowing the penalty would be the soul of one whose veins course with the same blood, of which there were none but herself. Aalis had guided the witch-brat this far, and now it was up to Alfred, Uncle Jean and Aunt Lise to guide her the rest of the way home.
* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Marlin Bressi 2025
