The Sentinels

Germaine Velacourt closed her eyes and concentrated on slowing her breathing, purging her mind of the anxieties of the day. Long inhale, a count of three, long slow exhale. Within five minutes, the countenance of her face matched the calmed down, steady beat of her heart.

She opened her eyes, and as they grew accustomed to the dark, the bayou sang to her like a heartbreakingly melancholy choir: in turn, she focused on the chirruping tree frogs, the contented trill of a sated screech owl, the shrill barks of a momma grey fox accompanied by the excited yips of her kits…the agitated cheaping of an opossum eager to make it back to its den before the rain fell.

As she looked up at the clouds, pale and dappled like fat appaloosa horses gathering to stomp up a storm, their edges outlined by the high wattage whiteness of the full moon, the humid air grew heavy and flat. The calm before the storm.

The first drops were refreshingly cool against her hot, sweaty skin and brought forth a welcome respite from the muggy August night. The wind picked up as if a switch had been flicked on, whipping her thick, dark curls around her face. She put up the hood of her windbreaker and stood but was not ready to go back home yet.

When she was a little girl, she’d tried spelling herself repeatedly for the eyes of a cat so she could see in the dark. Now, at fourteen, she’s relieved to not have blinded herself accidentally. She lit the lantern and carried it before her at thigh level.

The tall, willowy teen was a dark phantom in the storm, only her bare legs slightly visible as she strode along the narrow path towards the river. The cypress crowded in on both sides, the Spanish moss that adorned their gnarled branches hung like feathery grey tinsel on a Christmas tree for trolls. Here and there, she crept carefully over exposed roots; she knew where the most treacherous ones grew out of the hard packed earth, for she knew the path like the back of her hand.

A half mile later, the old wooden bridge loomed ahead, ominously gothic-looking in the night. It was arched, with tire-wide grooves from over two centuries of traffic. Germaine pictured horse drawn carts and wagons, then carriages and motor driven old-timey cars like the one the Munsters drove. When she was old enough to drive, she wanted one just like it.

The deluge was slanted against her now, the fat bullet-like drops stinging her face. She subconsciously noted something amiss with her favorite refuge before ducking quickly around the first abutment on the right and then crouching to center her balance as she clambered down the slope carefully. She had twenty feet or so of damp earth to the grass and marsh reeds that grew along the banks and hid the drop-off. Though not a far drop, it was muddy amongst the plants there, the thick, gooey, shoe stealing kind.

Sitting with her back against the abutment, she dowsed the gas lantern. This was her favorite weather. The power of nature, honed to an ecstatic level, was made for midnight spells. Good spells. White spells. She tried to find that meditative state, to concentrate her power…but her mind kept going back to the bridge…specifically, what was different about it. Her mind wandered to the past…

***

“Hush child. Do as you’re told.” It was the stern voice of Aunt Velma, sharp as a cracking whip. “And don’t cringe like that! Hold your head up. Now recite to me the words in your native tongue.” As her voice grew calmer, the accent grew thicker. It was so unlike the dirty sounding patois of the soiled and toiling Cajun men at the docks. Aunt Velma’s voice, when not raised and angry, was made musical by the lilting and romantic language of France.

Her native land, not mine, thought Germaine.

Aunt Velma, her guardian from the time Germaine was one and a half, was a witch. At four, Germaine didn’t understand the difference between black and white witches. She assumed Auntie V was a good witch. After all, she’d taken in her sister’s child to raise as her own. By four, Germaine barely remembered her long lost parents, and Auntie V didn’t allow questions about them. Germaine assumed she was just as devastated by their deaths as she had been.

She recited the words.

“There. That was just fine.” She offered up an encouraging smile. “Now go out and bring me those things on the list.”

“Yes, Auntie.” She offered up her own timid smile. Foraging in the woods was her favorite thing to do.

***

At the age of eight, Germaine knew all the words by heart…as well as the names of the demons who waited in the wings, just off the side of the stage, to be conjured into the play produced by black garbed directors.

That summer Uncle Morrissey stayed with her and her aunt for nearly two months. He was a schoolteacher up north in Irvington and had the summer off. He adored the bayou and taught his classrooms all about its ecosystem. He’d grown up in Bayou La Batre, with his two sisters, in the very house his older sister Velma had inherited.

Uncle Mo and Germaine sat at the bank of the River Noire, the great wooden Bouzage Bridge loomed behind them to the left. As the afternoon grew late, its shadow ensconced them.

Germaine said, “Uncle Mo? Why doesn’t Auntie V like Bobby?”

Bobby was Morrissey’s best friend while growing up in Bayou La Batre.

He said, “Heh heh…well, you know how little boys are. We were brats and took out our mischievous energy on our sisters. You know, frogs in their beds…uh…mice in their pockets, that sort of thing.”

“Hm. I suppose Auntie V does hang on to old shit a long time.”

Morrissey shot his niece a look and she blushed.

“Sorry. I guess…um…she…” Germaine fluttered her hands in frustration and looked near tears.

“Oh honey. It’s okay. I won’t tell you said a bad word. What we talk about is just between us. Okay?” He hugged her close. His flannel shirt was sun-warmed; she smelled the ripe odor under his arms.

She laughed and pushed him away. “Uncle Mo, tu puuuueeees.” She waved a hand over her nose.

He laughed and pulled her closer for a head noughy, pushing her nose into his armpit.

She squealed, laughing.

He let her go and said, “C’mon. Let’s go fry up these catfish.”

Dinner was winding to an end. The day was dusky indigo and the scent of damp cypress and fetid swamp wafted in on the warm muggy air through the open kitchen windows. The shrill sound of a small motorbike intensified as it came around the bend in the road. Dust puffed, ballooned, dissipated.

Aunt Velma’s face stiffened like stone. Germaine thought she looked like the stone gargoyles that guarded the entrance to Bouzage Bridge. Brows furrowed, mouth a line curving down in an upside-down V.

Joseph Bouzage had built the bridge himself, way back in 1786, when he founded the town. It was rumored that he had worked on the Notre Dame in France before emigrating to the US. He had the gargoyles fabricated from granite in the image of the ones that adorned the famous cathedral.

Even Auntie V’s ears appeared to be flattened against her tight-bunned head.

Germaine didn’t dare giggle.

Morrissey got up. “Thanks for supper V…and little G. Gotta go.” He pushed in his chair, took his plate to the sink, and took off out the door.

“Have fun Uncle Mo!” Germaine cried out in his wake.

Aunt Velma turned her gargoyle gaze upon the child. The look was one her school chums called ‘stink eye’. In the sharp whip-crack voice devoid of French charm, she said, “Damn that man.”

Germaine knew she was speaking of Bobby. Her smile flashed off like a pub’s neon sign at 2am.

“I mean. Literally. Damn that man.” Velma stood so abruptly as the sound of Morrissey’s jeep buzzed off into the distance, she nearly upended her chair. “Come child. Suis moi.”

She led Germaine through the old Victorian house and approached the stairs. Germaine faltered, fearing what was coming next. “En haut! Maintenant!”

Germaine scurried up the stairs to the attic.

Aunt Velma lit the candles around the double circle on the old oak floor. Germaine obediently etched the names of the four demons in each compass point. She looked up at her aunt who nodded solemnly.

Germaine knelt in the center of the circle. Velma hands her an ancient French broadsword that had belonged to her grandfather and said to have the blood of a thousand Englishmen infused into its steel. She raises it and says the words she knows by heart. She feels her arm muscles burn and fears dropping the sword. The sage and incense smoke are cloyingly sweet.

At last, her aunt opens a window, the candles blow out in a gust of wind, and the air cools satisfactorily. She lowers the sword and scrambles from the charcoal circle.

Aunt Velma’s face by the pale silvery moonlight is smiling and ghastly.

The next morning, Morrissey is not in his room.

He’s in the hospital. He and Bobby had traded rides. He took Bobby’s bike so his friend could take his jeep for whatever reason.

The bottom line for Germaine is that she had caused it.

Never again would she work black magic spells. Her beloved uncle would forever walk with a limp. Because of her.

***

As Germaine reminisces on the past under the bridge, she is staring at the river she can’t see but only hear. A whitish shape flashes in her peripheral vision, about ten feet away and she immediately snaps to the present.

What the hell was that?  

The storm was still storming, though the rain was petering off a bit…there!

The whitish-grey thing, nearly glowing in contrast to the dark morning peeked around the abutment across from hers then flashed out of view so fast she thought she might have spelled her eyesight after all. She sat up straight as a gibbet. Her eyes were atune to the dark though she’d been in her trance. She had seen a creature not of this world. She was sure of that. A bald monkey? An albino bald monkey? Perhaps escaped from the zoo in Fernland? But I thought I saw wings…what the…?

I’m going nuts. As nuts as Auntie V is now. Soon I’ll be as catatonic.

She sits alert as a lighthouse, aware the rain has stopped and the clouds in the sky are enveloped in coronas of pale violet light. She’d be in trouble if Aunt Velma wasn’t so…the way she is now.

Aunt Velma lies in her bed. She has a small black and white tv on her dresser. Germaine has cared for her for the last four years, coming home immediately after school to do so. Her aunt lies there, mostly motionless, sometimes she mutters softly- though never in English. In some ways it’s pleasanter than her whip-crack harping.

But when Germain brings her her supper or must move her to change the soiled bedsheets, her aunt is silent. Silent but glaring. It’s creepy.

Shortly after the curse on the mailman who refused to come all the way to the front door, Auntie Velma had suffered a massive stroke. After the embolism, the whites of Velma’s eyes turned black.

Now she lies stiff like a stuffed taxidermist’s alligator, like the ones they sell down in the touristy part of town by the bay…a shriveled-up pile of sticks in a bed…but those eyes. They see into Germaine’s soul. They see the niece that turned Wiccan after the Bobby curse. And they hate her for it. Germaine feels the abhoration radiating out from those awful black eyes, but never again will she curse anyone. The devil may grant favors but it’s always on his terms and it always costs. How can someone so intelligent not get that? The devil sent that clot to your brain as surely as he loosened that brake cable. Day by day, her aunt turns to dust. The gargoyle, crumbling away.

“Hello Auntie. I’ve brought you some tea.”

Silence.

She wishes her aunt eternal, blessed sleep.

“Here. I’ll put on your shows.” She turns on Jeopardy…

…gargoyle!

It finally came to her. The gargoyles were missing! She’s back in the present. The rain has stopped; besides the pattering of droplets from drenched trees, it is deathly silent. She scrambles up the embankment and sure enough, the granite sentinels are no longer guarding the bridge. Stinking vandals! But as she thinks this, icy needles prick her spine like ghostly needlework.

“If you are still there, please come out. I won’t hurt you…,” she says, her voice raised, then she mumbles, “um, I don’t think I could anyways.” Louder again, “Please.”

After a couple of minutes, a pale form flickers at the corner of her sight, she whirls towards it.

Then, ever so slowly…a face peers out from behind the abutment.

“Oh!”

It ducks away and a second later it peeks out from the iron column where it once sat for over 200 years. It steps out from behind the post, crouching low, as if ready to dart away again.

Germaine sits on the old dirt road to make herself smaller and vulnerable. The creature stands taller and takes a step towards her. She raises her hands and tilts her open palms towards it. The creature imitates her. She giggles. It smiles.

The gargoyle has more details now in its face than she ever had seen before. It has dimples. And openly honest large eyes. As she watches, the irises of its eyes turn from granite, like the rest of it, to a deep moss-green. They twinkle in the subdued morning light. Its laid-back ears are perked forward on its simian head. The dawn is approaching fast and in the increasing purplish day, she sees every feather in detail as the thing flutters its wings.

It speaks. “You are pure of heart. Although once---”

“I can explain that!---”

“No need to child. Sometimes learning from your mistakes is better than never making them at all.”

She nods. “Where is the other gargoyle? I mean, that’s what you are, right?”

“Call me Stryga. Named for my ancestor that sits atop Notre Dame. My partner is Wyvern, she’s off to fulfill your desire.”

“What des---? For the past four years I’ve wished for Aunt Velma to come back…Oh! Oh no. Just earlier this evening I wished for her to perish. To be out of her misery.”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“We have to stop her!” Germaine stood and brushed at her wet, leafy bum.

“No child. Your heart’s desire is humane and kind. We could not grant the healing wish to a being as corrupt as that one…but we can grant you your request.”

As much as Germaine had grown to loathe the old scary lady, she had also grown to pity her. “Will it be---”

“Yes, not only quick, but actually quite pleasant. As you would want, n’est-ce pas vrai?”

“Y-yes. It is true.” Her salty tears mingled with the fresh rainwater dripping from above. The day was lightening to a lavender dawn, mist rising from the earth. “But I’ll be all alone…”

“You’ve been alone for quite some time now,” a statement not a question.

She nodded.

“Besides, now you have us.”

***

Back at the old Victorian house, Germaine, for the first time in over a decade, feels no dread as she crosses the threshold. She races down the hall to the lower guest bedroom that Velma had occupied since her brains had frazzled. There are voices in the hall. French.

Alive?

As Germaine peers round the corner, she sees it’s the tv and lets out her stored breath. It’s ‘Breathless’, with the subtitles turned off. As she turns it off, she’s aware that she’d left it on the local station for the game shows; now it’s on Turner Classic Movies.

She turns to face her dead aunt. She sees those black eyes. Glaring. Hating her for turning to the white.

She blinks and sees reality. Her Aunt Velma’s eyes are closed, and she has a smile on her face that makes her look less decayed, less mummified. She looks peaceful and almost pretty, as she had been sixty years past.

Germaine kisses her aunt’s cool bony cheek and covers her with the sheet.

Next to storms, dawn is her favorite force of nature. She makes a cup of chamomile tea and takes it outside to the porch.

On each side of the old wooden stairs to the dirt walkway down the drive are a pair of granite gargoyles.