“So they brought me here, those… insects. They strapped me into their torture chamber, and sent me off into that faraway place, that mad space inside an evil man’s skull, and I had to watch from inside that space as he raped, as he tortured and killed, as he dismembered child after innocent child, and I was unable to return, and as you can tell I still live in that hateful room inside the monster’s skull!”
“Ask him if he means de Rais,” Gandhi said. “He is speaking of Gilles de Rais, isn’t he?”
“You mean Gilles de Rais,” Lenin said.
There was a pause. “Who gave you permission to use my name?” The shredded voice was quite different, heavily accented and somewhat musical, but as if the music were coming out of a torn and battered instrument.
Lenin took a half-step back. Daniel quickly took his place. The werewolf looked different, his eyes dark and piercing, his posture erect. Daniel tried to be formal. “We did not mean to offend, Sir. We are at your service.”
The werewolf blinked, then appeared to relax a bit. “It is no bother, you could not know. It is a difficult thing, understanding how a person should behave. I never knew how to behave. I never understood the power. I could do anything I wanted. I could kill a peasant like you, just on a whim, particularly during war time. But of course you do not understand the problem. When you can do anything you want, how then do you know what you should do?”
“Listen to God, perhaps? Is that what you did?”
The werewolf threw his head back, and Daniel did not think he could bear to hear the howl again. But the werewolf laughed instead. “I did that. I spoke to Our Lord God for years. I was good, I was pious, I was the most devout. I was the very best of men. But in the end it did not get me where I wanted, not that I could have told anyone what I wanted. Nor could I now. It’s maddening!”
He revolved suddenly on one foot, his laugh a rumble deep in his throat. When he came back around he looked embarrassed. “I took the family to church every weekend, the wife, my babies—we did it as a family. But my babies didn’t understand what they were hearing, of course. And I knew I was a hypocrite, even as I tried to be a good man. Maybe if I’d really been a good man I would have gained some joy from it, but I was so full of need and dissatisfaction. I think my wife got some strength out of it. Maybe it helped her deal with the likes of me.”
He spat on the floor and a bit of blood trailed down his chin.
He lunged toward the door. Daniel had an urge to retreat, but held fast. “Tell me,” the werewolf said. “Are you angel, or are you human? No, do not tell me. Let me hope. Let me at last have a voice that will tell me what I should do. That bitch Jeanne d’Arc, she had her voices, all her mad voices. When we served together at Orléans I had to suffer that bitch’s voices. They would command her what to do, and then she would command us what to do. Charles demanded that it be this way, and we obeyed. And then she became the saint and I became the monster! Where is the justice?”
The more the werewolf spoke the faster the raw quality in his voice faded, so that at some point Daniel could see him as more or less a typical human being, and then there came a point beyond that when a certain serenity bled through, a calmness in the eyes and a reverence in posture, that made Daniel think of portraits of saints.
“Not that I am doubting her miracles. I would never deny them. She believed in God. She listened, answered and obeyed. ‘Here I am Lord!’ she said. ‘I come to do Your will!’ She recognized the Dauphin, Charles the VII, on sight, although she had never seen him before—she picked him out even when he was dressed as an ordinary man and attempted to blend with the rest of us. She changed the direction of the wind at Orléans so we could cross the river. The men loved her! Even I was not immune to her charms! The way she rode across the field in her white armor, waving her standard with a field sown with lilies, Christ holding the world with an angel on each side! She survived an arrow to the breast that would have killed a vigorous man. She won a battle no man could win! The vision of her will forever haunt me, that maid, that bitch, that whore! I tell you we all loved her!
“But I grew weary of her voices, always her voices! What about mine? No one wanted to know of the things speaking to me!
“I had followers of my own, of course, but I had to pay them for their loyalty. For a time everywhere I went I was preceded by royal escort, accompanied by an ecclesiastical assembly and two hundred armed men and trumpeters, all on my payroll. I wanted to fascinate the crowd, I wanted to dazzle them! I discovered I could do anything I wanted—the peasants could not object for fear of their lives—can you even imagine how frightening that was for me?”
The werewolf closed his eyes and sighed, growled, and then began to speak again. “My wife told me she was going to leave and take the babies. Not that I wanted the babies. Oh, I loved them, even though they hadn’t much in the way of personalities, but clearly I wasn’t the nurturing one—I could never have taken care of them by myself.
“But to be rejected that way by the person who had promised to love me forever—how humiliating! I was nothing!” His voice fell deeper with the last few words, and the eyes told Daniel this was the wolf again.
“No one could understand how a man could spend his wealth this way. Certainly not my family, certainly not my old bastard of a grandfather. He was an indifferent guardian—he let us do as we liked. Our nurse raised us, but of course she could not control us. In only a short time we realized we were above the law, or the law was applied differently to those of our position in society. But I must say it did not make us feel safer in the world.
“When you have such resources, does it not compel you to use them in the most creative, most dramatic way? I cared nothing for the riches. I wanted to be an artist who would be remembered for all time. So wealth was like my paint, and the world the background where I could create anything I desired. My Le mistère du Siège d’Orléans, surely no one before or since has mounted so grand a production! If wealth had been my prime motivator, would I have staged such an elaborate and expensive spectacle? One hundred forty speaking parts and over five hundred extras. In an attempt to preserve the purity of my vision the six hundred costumes were worn once, discarded, then recreated for each new performance. The grand scaffolding erected and taken down and then erected again. And of course we had to feed our audience, otherwise they might not have come! My family was livid over the expenditures, but they were not possessed of my vision! Should I apologize because I was driven by my imagination? In order to create something grand, something everyone will remember, you have to be willing to sacrifice yourself to extravagance!”
Daniel decided to try a different tactic. “You hold an innocent man inside you.” He wasn’t sure if this was exactly true, but he had no proof otherwise. “His name is Henry. You have no right to keep him prisoner. Please, won’t you release him?”
But the werewolf acted as if Daniel hadn’t spoken at all. “Eventually, of course, they had their way. They appealed to the king and I was allowed to sell no more of my property in order to finance such magnificence. Never mind that it was no business of theirs. Never mind that I had created something that had never existed before!”
Suddenly he stopped speaking. “My mouth is like a desert cave. Could I have some water, please?”
Daniel looked questioningly at the others. “There’s no water here.” Lenin shrugged.
“I’m sorry,” Danielsaid. “We have none.”
The werewolf winced, and there was movement along the inside of the cheek. When he next opened his mouth blood spilled from the corners. “I needed moisture, to speak.