The Sorrows of the Past

Outside, the wind was howling.
Pally pulled the blanket up to his chin. He was five years old, and in his five-year-old head the wind beating against the panes of his bedroom wasn't wind. It was something. Something big, something trying to get in. The storm had risen in the middle of the afternoon, and since sundown it had become a monster. The blizzard roared against the house, rattling the shutters, making the glass of the windows tremble in their lead frames, tearing from the trees of the park creakings that sounded like voices.
He was trembling. Not only from cold. His room was well heated, with the great stone fireplace at the back spitting orange shadows onto the walls of dark panelling. The fire licked gently at the logs, and their smell of warm resin filled the room with a heat that usually made him smile. But not tonight. Tonight the wind was too strong. And he was too small.
He clutched his pillow against him. He looked at the canopy above his head, at the silver embroidery tracing stars on the white fabric, stars he sometimes counted before falling asleep. But tonight, the stars were not enough. The stars were inside, and outside there was the monster beating against the windows.
A gust stronger than the others slammed a shutter against the wall.
Pally jumped and his eyes filled with tears at once, the way they do at that age, without warning, without permission, simply because fear overflows and has to spill out somewhere.
“Mama,” he murmured first, to himself, to steady himself.
The shutter slammed again. And a gust laden with snow struck the panes like a fist.
“Mama!” he called, this time aloud.
His voice echoed through the great room, too empty for a child alone. He sat up a little in the bed, the blanket pulled high, his eyes fixed on the half-open door. The door was so far away. The door was at the other end of the world.
“Mama! I'm scared!”
A silence. And then, in the corridor, the sound he had hoped for.
Footsteps.
Soft. Light. Footsteps he would have recognised among a thousand. Footsteps coming toward him.
He almost sighed before she even appeared, and it was as if his whole small body had been holding its breath since the storm began.
She came in.
She wore a long gown of a deep blue, like the curtains, like the sky that sleeps beneath the snow. And around her neck hung the medallion.
That medallion, Pally knew by heart. She always wore it. It was small, delicately wrought in polished ebony wood, dark and smooth, almost velvet to the touch. Adorned with silver motifs in the shape of constellations, as though it trapped a fragment of the night sky. Tiny rubies, set with an almost dreamlike precision, marked certain points of the constellations, representing the brightest stars. A fine silver chain, subtly worked with links engraved with similar motifs, allowed it to be worn against her heart, literally and symbolically.
She approached the bed without a word. And Pally felt himself breathe for the first time since the wind had begun.
“My heart,” she said softly, and her voice was like a hand laid upon him.
She sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress sank slightly beneath her weight, very close to him, and he caught her scent, that scent he could not have described in words because he did not yet know enough words, but which he would have recognised among all the scents of the world. A blend of incense and orchid.
She patted her lap to invite him to rest his head there, which Pally did.
“What frightened you?”
“The storm,” Pally breathed. “The wind, Mama, it's beating against the windows, it's like it wants to come in…”
She smiled. He could not see her smile. But he heard it in her voice when she replied.
“The wind is only the wind, my heart. It makes noise because it is big and doesn't know how else to speak. But it can't come in. It never has. And it never will.”
“I don't like winter…”
She placed her hand on his brow. Her fingers were cool and light. They brushed aside a few blond curls that had stuck to his skin, and that simple gesture did more to calm his heart than a thousand words.
“Look at me,” she whispered.
He looked at her.
“There is nothing in this house that can harm you while I am here. Do you hear me?”
He nodded, and a tear slid down his cheek, a tear he hadn't even felt rising.
She chased it away with her thumb.
“Shhh…,” she said gently. And with her free hand, softly, she opened the medallion that hung at her neck.
The mechanism clicked open with a small silvery sound. Pally knew that sound by heart. It always marked the border between the waking world and the world where nothing could touch him. A melody rose at once from the medallion, of an enchanting purity, as though it emanated directly from the stars drawn on the wood. Crystalline notes, slow, spaced out, that filled the room more completely than the fire ever had.
She gently unfastened the medallion from her neck and laid it open on the little nightstand beside the bed. The rubies of the constellations caught the light of the flames and began to glow like real stars.
Then she leaned over Pally. She ran a hand through his curls, lingered there, the way one caresses something very precious that one is afraid of damaging. And she began to sing.

Cruel and cold like winds in the sea
Will you ever return to me
Hear my voice sing when the tide
My love will never die...

His mother's voice. Her voice, hers alone, round and low, a little veiled, with something in it that held sorrow and peace and love all at once. From the very first syllables, Pally breathed out almost all the air from his lungs, as if his whole body were emptying itself of every fear it had gathered since infancy. Then he drew in a great breath, long and deep, and with that breath the storm receded. The wind was no longer the wind. There was no longer a monster behind the window. There was only that voice, that hand in his curls, that room floating outside of time.

Over waves and deep in the blue
I will give up my heart for you
Ten long years I'll wait to go by
My love will never die...

He did not understand the words. He had never understood them. He had tried, once, to ask her what they meant. She had laughed softly and told him: one day you will know, my heart. Not now. Not tonight. And that had been enough for him. Because when she sang, he did not need to understand. He only needed to listen.

The notes of the medallion accompanied her voice, wound about it like two threads braiding together. And Pally felt his eyelids growing heavy. One by one, the fears he had gathered fell from him like dead leaves. The storm. The slamming shutter. The shadows on the ceiling. Everything was leaving, everything was going away, and there remained only the voice, and the hand, and the warmth.
He fell asleep just before the last note.
He fell asleep telling himself, without really putting it into words, because he did not yet have the words for it, that he never wanted to be anywhere but here. That if every evening could be like this one, he would be happy forever.

He had sweet dreams. Dreams he would not even remember on waking, because beautiful dreams pass more quickly than nightmares and leave fewer traces. There was light in his dreams. Water, perhaps. A hand holding his.
Then a sound.
Not a sound of storm. A lower sound, deeper. A sound that came from below, from the very heart of the manor, a dull and powerful sound that rose through the floorboards and reached into his sleep to find him.
Pally opened his eyes.
The room was in darkness. The fire in the hearth was no more than dying red embers. The medallion on the nightstand had ceased to play. How much time had passed? He did not know. He only knew, at once, that something was wrong. Something inside him, that small clock children have for sensing when grown-ups are lying, when the house is no longer the house, when the world has slipped slightly out of its place, that small clock was sounding the alarm.
He searched the darkness for his mother.
No one.
She was no longer there. Of course she was no longer there, she had gone back to bed when he had fallen asleep, it was normal, it was like that every evening. But tonight, something was not like every other evening.
The sound downstairs. Again. Louder.
And then other sounds layered over it. Voices. Not normal voices. Voices that were screaming. Voices of horror.
Pally sat up in his bed. His heart began to beat in his chest as if it wanted to leap out of it. He called:
“Mama?”
No answer.
“Mama?”
Louder this time. There were already tears in his voice. He did not understand. She should have come. She always came.
He got out of bed. His bare feet touched the icy floorboards, and the cold went through him from his feet to the top of his head. He ran to the window, more by instinct than by reason, and drew aside the blue curtain.
Outside, the world was burning.
Flames. Everywhere. The houses of the village at the foot of the hill, the dwellings that encircled the manor, everything was on fire. The flames danced in the storm as if the blizzard fed them strength instead of putting them out. And in the orange light, he saw shapes. Silhouettes running. Silhouettes falling. Other silhouettes, slower, heavier, that did not look like men, that bent over those who had fallen.
He saw blood in the snow.
He saw a great deal of blood.
Pally stepped back from the window, his heart beating against his ribs like a trapped bird, and there, at that precise instant, the child he was understood something no child should ever have to understand. He understood that his mother had not come because she could not come. He understood that he would have to go, himself. That he had to find her.
He pushed open the door of his room.
The corridor of the manor lay in a gloom shot through with red gleams that came from the distant windows. The wall sconces were out. The curtains beat against the panes. Somewhere, a door was slamming by itself, rhythmically, like a metronome gone mad.
“Mama!” he cried, and his voice was lost in the long corridor. “MAMA!”
He ran. His bare feet slipped on the cold floorboards, he nearly fell twice, he did not fall. He was five years old and no longer knew how to breathe properly, the air came into his lungs in jolts, cut off by sobs he could not hold back. He ran to his mother's room, the great room at the end of the corridor, the one with the carved door, and he shoved the door so hard it banged against the wall.
Empty.
The bed had not been unmade. The curtains were drawn. A candle had recently been blown out; one could still see its smoke rising in a thin thread toward the ceiling.
“Mama…”
He staggered out and ran toward another room. The small drawing room. Empty. The armchairs overturned. A broken cup on the rug. He went on. The dining room. The doors wide open. The long table covered with the remains of dinner. And, at the foot of a chair, a shape.
Pally stopped.
It was Marta. Old Marta, the cook who had given him honey bread that very morning, the woman in the flour-streaked apron who laughed loudly when he was up to mischief. Marta was lying there, on the rug. Her eyes were open and fixed on the ceiling. There was too much red around her. The red had flowed along the polished wood of the floor and formed a pool that was slowly widening.
And something had opened her belly. Not cleanly. Not neatly. As though teeth had gone through it.
Pally gagged. His knees gave way. He let himself drop to the floor, bent double, and threw up the cream he had eaten for dessert. He was crying while vomiting. He was vomiting while crying. He could no longer tell the difference.
“Mama…” he breathed between two spasms.
He got back up. He did not know how he found the strength to get back up. He stepped over Marta without looking at her and ran out of the dining room.
He went on. From one room to the next. His grandfather's smoking room, empty. The great drawing room, empty. The study, its door torn from its hinges, papers scattered, a chair smashed. And everywhere, on his way, bodies.
Bodies he recognised.
Tomas the butler, slumped against a cabinet, one hand still clenched on a kitchen knife he must have seized in desperation.
Emma, the young maidservant, stretched out on the staircase, her head turned in a direction a head is not meant to turn.
Old Heinrich, the gardener, half-in the fireplace, as though he had tried to find a last refuge there.
Pally called them all by their names as he passed them. He was no longer shouting; his voice had broken somewhere between the cook and the butler. He whispered. Marta. Tomas. Emma. Heinrich. As if he could wake them by naming them. As if naming them were enough not to leave them alone.
And everywhere in the manor, that dreadful silence. Not silence. Silence would have been bearable. It was the absence of human voices where there had always been some. The absence of Marta's laugh, of the butler's cough, of Heinrich's whistling as he gardened beneath his window. The entire manor had become a sepulchre, and he walked through it, barefoot, in his nightshirt, searching for the only person who could save him.
There remained one room he had not yet visited.
The prayer room.
It stood on the upper floor, in the west tower of the manor. It was the highest room, the quietest, the one where his mother sometimes withdrew when she needed silence. Pally almost never went up there. It was a room that did not really belong to him.
He climbed the spiral stone staircase, his feet frozen, his legs trembling. At each step he whispered mama, like a prayer that had replaced all the others. The door of the prayer room rose before him, tall, of dark wood, adorned with a symbol he had never really looked at.
He stretched out both hands. He pushed.
And he screamed.
“MAMA!”

The room was lit by a hundred candles. Some had fallen, overturned, still burning on the rug. The ceiling was painted with old frescoes, figures of saints and constellations intertwined, and these paintings trembled in the restless light of the flames. At the far end, a stone altar. And before the altar, she.
She was not standing.
She was laid out, stretched upon the stone of the altar as upon a bed, and the thing was crouched above her, massive, its back to the door. Pally saw only its back. A broad back, arched, musculated with a musculature that belonged to no earthly creature, covered in a skin that resembled burnt leather, black as the inside of a well. It bent over his mother with the slowness of a predator savouring its kill. And on its back, on the creature's back, two masses quivered.
Wings.
Two great membranous wings that were literally growing before Pally's eyes. They were still half folded, but they were spreading slowly, unfurling a little more with each second, swelling, feeding, alive. The more the creature drank, the more they grew. His mother's blood, as it flowed, was turning into wingspan. Every gulp was one more centimetre of wing. Each beat of a vein that ceased beneath those fangs was a feather of shadow added to the monster.
Of his mother, Pally saw almost nothing. The creature's arms hid her for the most part, its claws planted in her held her motionless. But her head overhung on the right of the demon. Just her head. Thrown back on the stone of the altar, her black hair spread around her like a pool of ink, her throat offered up to the maw that would not release it.
And her eyes. Her eyes were open.
They fixed on the ceiling first, as if she were trying to recall the frescoes she knew, the saints, the constellations. She had no voice left. Her lips moved once, twice, without any sound coming out. She was trying to speak. She could not.
Pally did not scream. He would have wanted to. He would have screamed until he tore his throat. But his voice no longer obeyed him. It had stayed somewhere, in the corridor, beside Marta's body. All that came from his mouth was a tiny sound. A little whimper of a child watching something die that he should never have seen die.
His mother heard him.
She could not move. The claws held her. The maw was upon her, drinking still, still feeding the wings that grew. But her eyes, they could still move. They left the ceiling and slid slowly, to the side, toward the door. Toward him.
And Pally saw her eyes.
He had never known how to describe them. He had always known they were beautiful, but he had never had the words. That night, for the first and last time, he understood what they meant. Those eyes said my heart, forgive me. Those eyes said I would have wanted to protect you from this, I would have wanted you never to have to see this, I would have wanted you to stay in your bed, for the song to go on forever, for you to sleep, for you to sleep, for you to sleep. Those eyes said go away, my heart, go away, I beg you, do not stay here. Those eyes said I love you. I love you. I love you.
Those eyes said all of that at once. And no word, because she could no longer speak.
The creature felt her gaze.
It followed it.
It released his mother's neck, slowly, almost with regret, and turned its head.
One eye first, over its shoulder. Then it turned entirely. It rose up on its hind legs, abandoning his mother's body on the stone of the altar. Its claws slid out of her flesh, one by one, and the body slumped softly, the head that had hung to the side now rolling in another direction. The black hair fell over the edge of the altar like a curtain of night.
She was dead before the creature had entirely turned toward Pally.
He knew it.
He knew it because he felt something leave the room, the air, him.
He tried to speak. He tried to say mama. But his lips moved without producing any sound. He tried to step back. He tried to run. His feet were nailed to the rug.
The creature rose to its full height, tall, immense, and its wings spread wide in the room too small to contain them. It had to fold them halfway against the frescoes of the ceiling. It took a step toward Pally. Then a second. Without haste. It was taking its time. It was savouring.
Its claws were red with his mother's blood.
Its smile widened.
Pally had no voice left, he had no legs left, he had no tears left, he had nothing left. His whole little five-year-old body had been transformed into a single thing, a single sensation, a pure and white horror that emptied him from the inside. He heard someone screaming. Very far away. As though through three doors. It took him a few seconds to understand that it was him. That he was screaming at last. That a cry had come out of his mouth without his realising it, a cry that was no longer a child's cry, a cry that was no longer quite human either, a cry that carried within it all the loss a being can contain before breaking.
The creature gathered its wings against its back and crouched low on its hind legs. It was going to charge.
And at that precise moment, at that exact second, something struck Pally at the back of the skull.
A great blow. Dull. Clean.
The darkness began to appear. Hearing began to fail. And all of it, in a rush of regular and irregular joltings, carried him far from the horror. The candles became blurred flames. The frescoes of the ceiling smeared together. The creature's smile dissolved into the black. His mother's body on the rug became an indistinct blot, a blot of blue and black, a shape that no longer had a shape.
A form of relief settled in that letting go. He did not understand what was happening to him. He no longer tried to understand. Perhaps he was going to leave this life and join the one he loved. Perhaps that was what dying was, just this gentleness that comes down, this warmth that replaces fear, this invisible hand that comes to fetch children and bring them back to their mother.
He closed his eyes.
And the world went out.