In The Valley of Dry Bones

by Jason Rolfe

A shadow swept across the rue Notre Dame, stirring leaves and dust and the cautious curiosity of a small black cat. The breeze carried with it a crispness that strangled the last desperate and dying hints of summer. Fall had arrived, and with it a dark harbinger of winter’s cold promise. Nine months ago the body of a young priest had been found outside the gates of the Seminaire de St-Sulpice. His name was Jonathan Quitely. He was a prodigal son whose last steps had been taken outside those very gates and in the Gothic shadows of Montreal’s Basilique Notre Dame. For the better part of ten years that man had also been my closest friend. The priests found him clutching a gun in his right hand and a book in his left, holding both as if they were the only two things that mattered in the end. I’d never even known he’d owned a gun, and given everything I know now, I honestly believe that it was the book that killed him.

“Has it really been nine months?” Genevieve asked. We’d met outside the seminary gates. The ground was still stained by Jon’s death and while she spoke, Genevieve placed a small bouquet of flowers against the wrought iron gate. I hadn’t heard from her in months, and when I finally did, she told me she was dying. Cancer, she said. They’d found it too late. She wouldn’t tell me how much time she had, only that she was going out on her own terms. She was fierce that way. Strong willed and stubborn and I couldn’t help but love her for it.

As if to prove her point, she pulled a match from her coat pocket and struck it against the harsh brick of the seminary wall. She used its flame to light both our cigarettes. I sucked back the richness, felt it burn my lungs. I exhaled. Serpentine wisps of sweet smelling smoke filled the space between us.

“What happened to the book? Did you end up selling it?”

I shook my head. “You know Jon had it with him when he died?”

She looked back at me and frowned. She wore the elegant clothing of the rich and a look of stubborn determination that left me feeling slightly guilty for my own frailties. Her eyes were long and almond shaped, framed in black and irrevocably intoxicating. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, but guilt and despair held my tongue.

“The police told me about it.” Her breath smelled like cigarettes and cinnamon and gave life to the ghosts of our collective past. She offered me a melancholy smile. I turned away from her and watched the wind dance with the leaves in the street. “They told me that Jonathan had listed you as his next of kin. They said they gave the book to you.”

I nodded.

“Buy me a coffee,” she said. “Somewhere we can talk.”

***

We found a small coffee house off the place Jacques-Cartier, a quiet cafe warmed by the rich scent of freshly ground coffee and the constant snaps and pops of a pinewood fire. We claimed an empty table near the hearth and sank back into our chairs. A girl stood near the bar, smiling and taking orders both in French and English. I tried waving her over.

“So what do you know about this mysterious book of ours?” Genevieve said.

“It’s an interesting piece,” I said. “Latin and German written in parallel. Watermarks throughout suggest it was printed in Germany, maybe the Netherlands, and probably by the Brethren of Common Life. It seems a bit too esoteric for their liking, but who knows? I’m sure they had their reasons. I can’t imagine they believed any of it.”

I overheard the waitress speaking to a young couple.

They were tourists. “He was smoking when he did it. People claim to have smelled cigarette smoke near the seminary gates at night.” The waitress meant Jonathan. Jon had shot himself onto the pages of the local papers and into the myths and legends and the overactive imaginations of countless Montréalers.

Genevieve smiled. “The things people believe.” She lit us each another cigarette. The match, a brief burst of flame, seemed lost in the shadowed caverns of her eyes. I’d met her at an antiquarian bookstore on rue Saint-Denis three years earlier. The store had been pleasantly abstruse, housing rare and curious books on ancient sciences, the occult and more particularly alchemy, astrology, freemasonry, philosophy, utopianism, and oddly – if not aptly – psychiatry.

“You said the book was too esoteric. What did you mean by that?”

“Well, it’s a mix of magic and mysticism. I’d almost call it theurgy.”

“It’s Jewish,” she said. The conviction in her voice startled me. I’d never seen her take more than a passing interest in the book. I thought the point she was trying to make was Jon’s, not hers. I was wrong. “The book had a Jewish origin.” She paused to absorb her cigarette. “In the book Jerusalem was made the very heart of the world’s devotion, and the right rule of prayer was to turn not toward the east, but toward Jerusalem. The names of the book were formed from Hebraic roots and the Holy Spirit was represented as a woman – very Aramaic. Plus, the book ordered compliance with ordinances of the Jewish Law.”

“But it condemned sacrifice,” I told her. “And it stressed the physical resurrection of the body.”

She responded with a quote from The Acts of the Apostles that seemed to prove my point. “There will be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust.”

I glanced up at our neighbours. The waitress had abandoned them, but they were still discussing her tale with tourist-like enthusiasm. “Can you imagine?” the woman remarked. “It creeps me out just thinking about it. Imagine. Suicide. A priest.” I watched as curls of steam rose above their gold-rimmed cups to catch the line of autumn air that had slipped past less than vigilant windows.

Genevieve shivered. “What if I told you the knowledge in that book was born in Egypt?”

“I thought you said it was Jewish.”

“And where were the Jews before the Exodus?”

“It really doesn’t matter who wrote it, where it was written or when it was printed. It’s done nothing during that time but fuel the foolish imaginations of men like Jon and I. We spent far too much time reading books about Templar treasures, holy grails and wandering Jews. The book was a novelty, a mystery we thought we’d be able to unravel. That’s it. Excuse me,” I called out to the waitress.

“I’m sorry.” She smiled as she slipped a fresh pot of coffee onto the neighbouring table. She slid the pen from behind her ear. “I didn’t see you come in. What can I get for you?”

“Something dark. Arabic if you’ve got it.” I said.

Genevieve ordered coffee with cinnamon and looked at me expectantly. I pushed the last of my cigarette into the glass and plastic bowl that centred our table. “Arabic, Egyptian, Aramaic, Ante-Reformation, I’m not even sure the spells were original.”

“You think the spells were forgeries?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Some fifteenth century German bibliophile picks up on Alcibiades in Hippolytus or Origen and his imagination takes flight.”

“Alcibiades?”

“Hippolytus mentions him in his Refutation of All Heresies. He calls him a cunning and desperate man. Alcibiades brought the Book of Elchasai to Rome. The contents, he claimed, had been revealed by an angel.”

“Sorry, I don’t see the connection between that book and ours.”

“Alcibiades sparked a great deal of debate among the early church fathers because he claimed to have the correct formula for baptism.”

“Formula?”

“Magic,” I said. “His book contained a spell that, if followed correctly, guaranteed the remission of sins.”

“Our book contains a similar spell,” Genevieve said, suddenly earnest. “It all but guarantees a place in paradise.”

“You almost sound as if you believe it.”

“I do,” she said. “And so did Jonathan.”

“Jon believed a lot of things.” I shrugged off my sullenness and smiled at the waitress. The coffee she’d brought looked dark enough to swallow light. I was sure its bitter scent could wake the dead.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Jonathan saw something in the book that he believed in,” Genevieve said. “Call it Gnostic, call it magic, call it rubbish if you want but he called it faith.”

“No.” I lowered my voice and leaned into her sweet dark eyes. “Faith is believing in something without guarantees. Jon wasn’t looking for faith in that book. He was looking for a sure thing.”

“He was looking for redemption.”

“Then he was looking in the wrong place.”

“I always thought getting into heaven meant living a good life. That if we led a bad one, if we sinned against God, we went to hell. But what if that isn’t the case?” she said. “What if the book is right and it isn’t about being good or bad? What if it’s about knowledge, about knowing what to do when you die?”

I looked down into my coffee and frowned at my reflection. The dark liquid seemed to mirror my burgeoning mood. “Why was he looking for redemption?”

She did not answer, at least not immediately. I had the impression that she wasn’t thinking about how to answer the question. She was thinking up ways to avoid it altogether. “We were in love.”

“He was a priest,” I said. My reflection hadn’t changed. I brought the coffee to my lips and drank its darkness.

“He was a man.”

“Of the cloth.”

“And I was pregnant.”

I spilled my coffee. The rich liquid formed a dark brown pool on the table between us and as I dropped my napkin into its midst a million thoughts swam through my mind. I felt jealous. Not fear for my dead friend’s soul, not compassion for Genevieve’s torturous guilt, but a Neolithic jealousy that burned shame into my cheeks. “And?”

“And I had an abortion. I didn’t want to, but I did anyway. I never should have told him.”

I was suddenly overcome by three years worth of hopes and prayers and pain-filled regrets. I would have given anything to hear her say she was wrong; to have her tell me that she loved me all along and that everything else had been a terrible mistake.

“He was looking for redemption,” was all she said. “So am I.”

“Maybe we all are,” I replied. She began coughing. It was deep and decidedly meaningful. “What can I do?”

Her answer lingered in the air between us, smoke-like and sinister and burdened by the weight of an almost tangible regret. “Help me find it.”

At first I wasn’t sure what she was asking. When her words finally sank in, I closed my eyes and looked away. She wanted the book, the spell it contained and the truths that it claimed. She wanted me to help her die. “I can’t.”

“Less than a month,” she told me. “Three weeks if I’m lucky. Can you believe the doctor actually said that? If I’m lucky. I need this Chris. I need to go out on my own terms, and I need to know that I still have a chance. For God’s sake I need something to look forward to. If it doesn’t work I’m dead anyway.”

“And if it does work?”

She looked down at her coffee. She looked up at the door and above the fireplace at an antique map entitled Carte de l’Isle d’Anjouan. If she was right, if the knowledge in that book did guarantee a place in heaven, what would it mean for her and how would I ever know? She would be dead and my heart would still be broken. “It takes two people.”

“Where?” I asked, but as I followed her gaze I realized that I already knew the answer. She was staring out the window, staring past the traffic and the Palais de Justice, beyond the maze of buildings that made up the university and the shadowed outlines of Mount Royal. She was staring at the cemetery and the strange tombstone she had placed above his head. She was staring at Jon’s ghost. “When?”

“Meet me there in three hours. Bring the book.”

***

When I left the cafe the air seemed colder. I’d hoped the walk would clear my head, but Genevieve’s news kept poking at my thoughts. I hadn’t opened the book, hadn’t even looked at it since Jon’s death. The fact that he’d died holding it still bothered me. The fact that it contained arcane spells still frightened me.

Jon had found the book tucked between Simonde de Sismondi’s History of the Crusades against the Albigenses and de Villars’ blasphemous Discourses. Hand-written notes appeared throughout the text, etched in Latin and French, and written with the care of a long-since vanished generation. None offered clues as to the book’s origin. Most only added to the books mystique. Hand-written names like LePrestre, Olier and Bretonvilliers leapt off the page with alarming consistency, yet left our questions to the fevered mercy of imagination.

I wish I’d never kept it, that I’d sold it before meeting Genevieve for coffee that night. But I had kept it. I’d hidden it in an old wooden box my grandfather once used to store screws and nails and odd-sized drill bits. When I pulled it out that night, the book smelled like crumbling leather, old pine and WD-40 and despite everything it made me smile.

I drove to the rue Rachel, parked, and began walking, past darkened tennis courts and soccer fields and a paddling pool whose water had been replaced by dead leaves. A monument to Sir George-Etienne Cartier stood watch over Parc du Mont-Royal’s main entrance. I looked past it to the chemin Olmsted, a small gravel path meant for horse-drawn carriages.

Twenty minutes past the entrance, the trees opened onto a small man-made lake. I left the gravel path and walked around that lake toward the shadows of its dark pavilion. Genevieve had brought me there once. We’d skated dimly lit trails that ran through nearby trees, bought steaming cups of hot chocolate, and discussed books and films and ’what if’ moments in history. Jon loathed the game, but Genevieve loved slipping into the thick mists of consequence. “What if Pilate had pardoned Jesus,” had been her masterpiece.

The pavilion still echoed with the sound of her voice. I could smell her, the strange mixture of sunflowers and hot chocolate that tickled my imagination.

“Imagination,” I told myself. The pavilion was silent.

I stepped through a thin row of trees onto the chemin Remembrance. The Cimetiere Notre-Dame-des-Neiges filled the world before me, a sea of lost lives and listless spirits. I turned and looked back at the mountain. A thirty meter high cross stood near the Chalet, a tribute to de Maisonneuve and the wooden cross he’d carried up that mountain in 1643. When I was a student I went there every day. There were gaps in the trees that offered hints of the city’s northern expanse and sometimes I would sit and stare at Montreal and wonder. The city was a living, breathing beast filled with joys and pains and countless questions.

“You came.”

Her voice chased the memory from my mind. It was dark, and she was standing in the shadows of the cemetery fence, but I could still see the grass and dirt that stained her knees. I could see the tears in her eyes and the mud beneath her nails and I thought I understood the depths of her despair. Had I really understood, I would have walked away. But I didn’t know, and so I shrugged and said, “What if?”

She offered me a weary smile. “What if what?”

“What if we’d never found the book?”

Genevieve shrugged. “I don’t know, Chris.”

We were on opposite sides of the road, me with my back to the cross and her with her back to the dead, a symbolic purgatory. “Do you think things would have been different? Better?”

“We can make things better,” she said. She turned and led me into the maze of stones and flowers.

Jon had done more than simply translate the book, he’d delved into the darkness that lived and breathed in every single word. The book had consumed him. The deeper he’d gone, the less he would talk about the things he found. The book became a secret Jon was no longer willing to share. At least not with me. “What did he tell you about the book?”

“He told me that it terrified him.”

“Jon called me the night before he died. He mentioned something called the consolamentum. Do you know what he meant?”

Genevieve nodded. “It’s a spell, Chris. The consolamentum is a spell that guarantees the soul’s ascension after death.”

I fell silent, lost in my own thoughts and unrequited dreams. Earlier that night, when Genevieve had called, I was surprised to learn that the wolves of hope were still biting at my heart. I was still foolish enough to believe she might care.

“We’re here,” she said, pointing toward the open grave. She had planted the shovel in the grass to the left of the abyss.

I shook my head and looked around and then I looked at her. The smell of damp soil and rotting flesh filled my senses. I felt sick. I stumbled back, lost my footing and fell between two headstones. I buried my face in my hands and groaned. “What have you done?”

“Christian,” she whispered and I opened my eyes. She was kneeling in the grass beside me, her breath soft and warm against my cheek. It still smelled like cigarettes and cinnamon. “I promise I’ll explain everything once we’ve finished the ritual. Everything’s going to be fine. You’ll see. I told you, we can make things better.”

“You dug up his grave?”

“It’s all right.” She smiled and pressed a delicate, dirt-stained finger against my dry lips.

“No it’s not alright. How can it be alright?”

Genevieve looked down at the grass and mud between us and sighed. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a small handgun. “Why are you being so difficult? I thought you’d want to help me, to help us.” She pressed the gun into my chest and asked, “What if?”

I felt trapped between her beautiful smile and her burning eyes. “What are you doing?”

“What if?”

“What if what?”

“What if we could bring him back? What if we could ’breathe life into these slain, that they may live’?”

She was quoting Ezekiel. “This isn’t about saving your soul is it?” I whispered. “It’s about resurrection. You think there’s a spell in here that can bring him back.”

“I know there is. Think about it, Chris. Think about the answers he can give us, the truths, and the knowledge. He’s been dead for nine months, he’s seen heaven. He’s seen the face of God.”

“He was a suicide.”

She shook her head and smiled at me. “The consolamentum, Chris. We followed the ritual perfectly. We guaranteed his place in paradise.”

“You said we. You were there? When he shot himself you were there?”

“He just needed a little push.”

“That’s when you told him about the baby, about the abortion.”

“He had to believe his soul was lost, that his one chance at redemption lay in the consolamentum. Without that belief, without his sacrifice, we would never have been given this opportunity.”

“Was it even true?”

“Does it really matter?”

I fought the tremor in my voice when I said, “Yes, yes it does matter. It matters to me and for God’s sake it mattered to Jon.”

“Then no,” she said. I could hear the subtle hints of anger in her voice.

“This is insane. Take the book, do whatever you want, but leave me out of this. Just let me go.”

“I can’t. I told you, it takes two people. Who else could I ask?”

“But you didn’t ask. You lied to me. I never would have come if I’d known what this was about. You’re sick. Maybe it’s the cancer, I don’t know. Whatever it is, you need help.”

Genevieve laughed. She wrapped her fist within the folds of my coat and pulled me to my feet. “I’m dying, Chris, or did you forget? I need to know it’s there – Heaven. I need to believe it. Start the ritual, please. Everything will be fine, I promise.”

I pulled the book from my coat pocket and handed it to her. “I loved you.”

“I know.”

I’d never told her. I’m not sure why. Maybe fear had kept my heart in check, or self-doubt. Maybe I was afraid that telling her would cost me the two friendships I valued more than anything else. Maybe I kept my heart to myself because I knew – deep down I knew – that Jon had been in love with her too.

She began flipping through the crumbling pages of the book. When she found what she was looking for, she pressed the open book against my chest and said, “Start the ritual.”

The spell was a litany, a psalm-like prayer meant to be read by two people. As I spoke I felt the gun against my ribs and the kiss of her breath against my cheek and I knew that I still loved her.

It was then that we first heard it. We finished the first verse when slithering sounds crept up from Jon’s grave. I thought about Ezekiel’s words, “and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.”

Genevieve pushed the gun deeper, urging me to continue, but I found the noise too terrifying, the prospect too nightmarish.

“We need to finish it.” There was a sense of urgency in her voice, an unspoken fear that something terrible might happen if we failed to complete the ritual. I should have recognized that fear for the warnings it contained. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Something moved in the grave, clawed at the roots and the damp soil with an urgency all its own.

“I can’t,” I cried. I dropped the book and I pushed myself away from her. I ran. I heard her scream. At first angry and then alarmed and as she pulled the trigger, desperate. I felt the bullet bite through my shoulder. I watched it leave, taking blood and skin and bits of clothing with it as it dragged me forward.

“We have to finish it,” she screamed. I scrambled forward, clutching at grass and flowers and marble headstones. I sobbed and gasped for breath as I pushed myself back to my feet and began running toward the mountain, toward the cross. I heard her scream one last time, one last word before silence came to reclaim the darkness.

“Jonathan.”

About the Author

Jason Rolfe lives, loves, works, and writes in Southwestern Ontario. His short fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, The Harrow and The Willows. He is an avid bibliophile with an eclectic collection of old and often unusual books, maps, and artifacts littering his basement office. These items often serve as Jason’s muse. Although he has a background in Communications Studies and Computer Science, his true passion (wife and daughter aside) is Speculative Fiction.

©2009 Jason Rolfe