I.
ANDRÉ DESPÉRINE’S FIRST GLORY
Autumn had descended over Valdecèze like a heavy cloak falling on a pair of shoulders. It had smothered the small French département under a cover of gray clouds through which the sunlight barely filtered, rendering the houses of the town of Sacqueroy drab and lifeless. All week it had rained and the summer’s heat was gone for good.
André Despérine was just out of the police academy and for a start his superiors had sent him to buy coffee and croissants at the bistro on the corner of rue Lesoule. He strode along the sidewalk with a certain awkwardness, three coffee cups squeezed between his fingers and a paper bag filled with pastries clenched between his teeth. He zigzagged between the puddles, walking with hurried little steps so that the coffee wouldn’t get cold while at the same time making sure not to spill a single drop. He arrived very quickly at number 21 only to discover, after having traversed the small garden, that he was incapable of knocking on the door or ringing the bell.
‘Bloody hell,’ he murmured.
He hesitated a moment, staring at the threshold of the doorway with a perplexed expression, then kicked three times, leaving traces of mud on the red-painted wood. Inspector Hébiart opened the door instantly.
‘You took your time, Despérine.’
Hébiart didn’t help relieve him of the coffee cups or the bag of croissants. He returned directly to the living room, where he settled in, after a slight hesitation, in a mauve velvet armchair, beside Inspector Mélion and the chief inspector, M. Gontan, who were sitting on a spinach green sofa. They were all three questioning the woman who owned the house: a little old lady with curly hair who, hunched up on a wobbly stool, appeared ill at ease.
Cadet Inspector Despérine entered the room still taking small steps, placed the three cups and the croissants on the low table and went back to close the front door under the oppressive looks of his silent colleagues, who were waiting for him to stop bustling around so they could resume the course of their interrogation.
‘All right, Mme Morille, where were we? You had indicated to us that you weren’t in the vicinity of the Saint-Ange School last Thursday at the time class was dismissed,’ Gontan said. ‘You claim to have an alibi for the kidnapping of young Théo Juvignan, seven years old.’
The old woman hiccuped. With her left hand brought up to her neck, she fiddled with a heavy-knit red wool scarf. Her other hand was rumpling her dress at knee-level, the fabric riding up as she clutched at it, allowing a glimpse of her bare ankles above small slippers.
‘I was at the park.’
‘Montcalm Park?’
‘The one downtown, yes. With those truly lovely tall trees.’
‘What do they matter?’ Gontan interrupted.
He jotted some lines in his notebook before shaking his thick moustache with an adroit movement of his nose, as he was in the habit of doing whenever he wasn’t convinced.
‘And what were you doing at Montcalm?’
‘I was picking some herbs: among the trees I find plants to use in my infusions.’
Gontan took a deep breath. To his right, Mélion was staring at Mme Morille without moving a muscle. Hébiart was lost in contemplation of a stuffed owl sitting proudly atop a pedestal table.
‘Does that have to do with your . . . professional activities?’ Gontan went on.
‘As a healer, I often advise my clients to drink infusions of medicinal plants . . .’
‘Which you pick under the plane trees in Montcalm Park.’
The chief inspector made an imperceptible movement of his eyelids: he didn’t believe in this charlatanry. He tucked his notebook into the inner pocket of his raincoat and stood up abruptly.
‘Well! I think we’re finished with you for the moment.’
‘And the coffee?’ said Mélion, astonished all of a sudden.
‘Shit, yes: the coffee.’
Gontan sat down again, pulled a cup towards him, took a croissant from the sack and dipped the end twice in the hot beverage. He cast a quick glance at his cadet inspector, standing ramrod straight in a corner of the living room.
‘Hey, Despérine, don’t just stand there. Sit down!’
André Despérine looked all around him; there were no more chairs available and it would have been rude in his view to squeeze in on the sofa between his two superiors. With a timid smile, old Mme Morille pointed to a little stuffed cushion pushed against the wall. He sat down and found himself with his chin in his knees, but kept his arms crossed as he watched the others eat their breakfast. While they were stuffing down their first mouthfuls, the healer of Sacqueroy stood up, suddenly looking down at them from above, her eyes half closed and her face solemn.
‘Eat well, for you too shall be eaten! All of you here, it is your destiny.’
She prophesied these words with an otherworldly voice that was not her own. Gontan, nonplussed, stopped chewing mid-bite; Hébiart, almost choking, swallowed his coffee with difficulty, and Mme Morille, once more taking on a lucid expression, resumed the submissive and hunched posture she had displayed a few seconds earlier. Mélion put down his cup with a calculated slowness, then addressed a nod to the chief inspector. The latter hesitated.
‘Well, well, well . . . We have to question some other suspects. Meanwhile, I would ask you to please stay here in your lovely home.’
The officers got up and made their way back to the threshold. Mme Morille remained alone at the low living-room table, apparently overwhelmed by events. André Despérine was preparing to cross the doorstep when Gontan pushed him back inside. The chief inspector addressed him in the patronizing tone he used with all new recruits while he looked disdainfully at the enormous beige raincoat Despérine was floating in.
‘No, not you. You stay here. I have serious doubts about that loony there’ – Gontan twitched his moustache – ‘so you stay. You’re not coming.’
André Despérine leaned forward slightly and ended by catching his superior’s glance in his. Gontan then summarized the gist of his instructions.
‘You stay here to watch her, but if you have a moment this afternoon – yes, it’s already past noon – you’ll take the coffee cups back to the corner bistro.’
Believing the chief inspector was finished with him, Despérine went to close the door, but Gontan stopped him again.
‘Oh! And one question, Cadet Despérine: do you know what the advantage of living in Sacqueroy is?’
The young inspector, still wet between the ears, didn’t know what to answer.
‘Valdecèze is the smallest département in France; so small that it contains only one town, three hamlets, and some cows. This isn’t Paris: here, everything gets found out quickly. The incompetent are fired very quickly, just as the best are very quickly rewarded. So I say this to you frankly: don’t get smart with us, and do your share of the work. Can you manage that?’
André Despérine nodded three times in agreement. Gontan’s moustache twitched excitedly under his swollen nostrils, then the old fellow went off to join his subordinates on the other side of the street, where they awaited him in a police car. After the door had closed, Despérine was startled at feeling Mme Morille’s hand slip into his. She had gotten up from her little stool without his noticing it and was now huddled close to him, pressing her chest firmly, but with a certain gentleness, against the cadet inspector’s back.
‘You’re staying?’
Despérine moved away brusquely, nearly knocking a picture frame off the wall.
‘I’m staying, on the chief inspector’s orders.’ Good God, what is she doing?
‘You have a hunch?’
Mme Morille caressed his palm. Good heavens . . .
‘You take me for the person who kidnapped little Théo? I didn’t do it, but there is a lot of nasty gossip. I know the town considers me a witch: I treat, I
cure, I heal . . . Sometimes I make predictions with my tarot cards and read palms. But people don’t like that. They are quick to blame me for their misfortunes. You have a feeling about me?’
‘No!’ exclaimed Despérine.
Mme Morille had kept the young inspector’s hand in hers and had again trapped him against the wall. He was unable to get loose except by resorting to violence against her. The little old woman mumbled, her nose in the neck of his overly large raincoat.
‘I have a feeling about you.’
‘About what you said a minute ago?’
‘About the infusions?’
‘No, about the . . .’
The inspector stammered. Mme Morille looked at him with a diffident expression, with eyes that hadn’t grasped the meaning of his question. Her head full of white hair swayed from left to right.
‘What did I say a minute ago?’
‘That doesn’t matter. What feeling did you have about me?’
‘You are a good person. That is why you stayed. It’s after the bustle of work, when you are alone, that you think the best and you succeed.’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘I feel your heart as though I was holding it still warm between my hands.’
André Despérine wanted to flee the premises at top speed, but his legs didn’t respond. Good God, what is she saying?
‘What are you saying?’
‘I sense your goodness and the innocence you keep deep inside you. I would love to help you in your search! But for that, you would first have to grant me that favor.’
The inspector stammered before the absurdity of the situation: grant Mme Morille the favor of assisting in the investigation? Despérine shrugged his shoulders, scratched the back of his head, tapped the tip of his shoe on the wood floor and finally pulled his hand away from the woman’s.
‘Yes, yes, I tell you yes! Help me?’
‘Then come! Follow me!’
When she invited him to follow her, she pushed him through the living room to the kitchen. There was a little wooden door painted in a hideous manner, white with sky-blue trim, squeezed between the stove and the refrigerator. Mme Morille hung her aprons from it.
André Despérine was forced to open this little door in order not to be crushed by the healing woman’s shoves. The panel opened onto a narrow stairway that led down into the darkness. The inspector hurtled down the several steps faster than he would have expected; he no longer felt Mme Morille’s palms on his back. She had remained upstairs and for a second he thought he saw her eyes penetrating the backlit silhouette.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll turn on the light!’
The yellow glare of a bare bulb illuminated the little cellar, done up as a reception area for Mme Morille’s ‘business’. A round table covered in a checkered cloth was framed by four varnished wood chairs. The cellar walls must not have been well kept – you could smell an odor of mustiness and dust – for they were entirely covered by dark-colored curtains. In one corner, on a console table, languished a voice recorder and underneath, an empty cat basket.
‘He left without warning,’ explained Mme Morille with a stab of sadness in her throat. ‘Poupi never came back.’
She had taken hold of the inspector’s left hand again. He was pulled towards the table and sat down, happy to be at a comfortable height. Mme Morille leaned towards him, her white curls falling over her face. She had a wide smile, like a little girl excited at the idea of going into a doll store.
‘I have a wondrous power!’
Despérine smiled to hide his unease.
‘Really?’
‘I can bring Théo back, make him reappear here. Just like that, investigation over! But it is dangerous, you must not move.’
André Despérine had a hard time understanding what the healer’s game was, but his mother had always advised him never to stop someone carried away by their own momentum. He let her proceed. From a camouflaged drawer under the tablecloth she took out a candle stuck into a bronze holder. She lit the candle and placed it in the center of the table. Then she took the inspector’s hand once more and with a gesture of her index finger asked him to give her his other palm as well. He gave it to her a little reluctantly.
Entirely caught in the witch’s trap, André Despérine thus attended a spiritualistic séance for the first time in his life. Mme Morille intoned a psalmody barely whispered between her teeth. The young man seemed to recognize the words, but he couldn’t have said what they were – an indigenous language perhaps, smooth and flowing, but strangely incisive. The arcane chant lasted several minutes, which passed very quickly for the bewitched Despérine. The healer softened the sound of her voice, her lips still moved, but the esoteric phrases became inaudible.
Without forewarning, Mme Morille’s grip on Despérine’s palms tightened again at the same time as the artificial light from the ceiling flickered. The inspector stifled a little cry of surprise. The old woman held him too tightly for him to get free. Little by little the light dimmed; it became subdued without Despérine’s being able to identify the cause. He knew he was toppling into a world outside his control when he felt a slight draft of air at the nape of his neck.
Despérine raised his eyes towards the staircase and the door leading to the kitchen. It was closed. The curtains moved imperceptibly and a dark emptiness settled in around them. There was only the light of the candle to illuminate the room when Mme Morille gave an enormous start.
This time, the cadet inspector really cried out. Good God! The seer didn’t seem to notice, plunged in her trance, her lips animated by a faint monody, her closed eyes suddenly rolling upwards, wide open. Despérine wanted to let himself slide down underneath his chair, but a superhuman force holding his arms kept him at the table. He kept his eyes wide open, seized with a great terror. He thought he would vomit when the ghostly faces began to appear, a thousand decapitated heads turning around them faster and faster, they too monotonously reciting an unknown poem.
Then, in the center of the tornado, above the flame from the candlestick, a complete silhouette formed. Smoke spread out from the candle like incense, the hazy outlines of a child’s body materialized before the inspector. Mme Morille was still in a mystical ecstasy, disembodied or possessed. The force she was exerting on the young man was almost enough to break his bones, but the pain was so deafening Despérine felt incapable of crying out; it climbed up his arms all the way to his ears, squeezing his cranium like a gigantic vise.
André Despertine witnessed, powerless, the inexplicable apparition of little Théo, who, judging from his green tint, seemed terrified at having materialized floating in the center of a spectral whirlwind. He was suspended with his arms folded and, starting to shout, he drowned out the deafening silence that filled the cellar. From the other side of the round table, Mme Morille was suddenly racked with convulsions. She shook her head in every direction with movements so sudden that André Despérine expected to see her neck break. But the witch opened her mouth wide, a thick and viscous drool at the corners of her lips.
‘You will be eaten! Eaten, Despérine! Eaten!’
She threw herself at him, her hands reaching out for his throat, but he was faster than her and dropped to the ground. Getting back up, he grabbed the bronze candlestick, which had rolled away, and before the witch could pick herself up, he smashed her curly-haired skull repeatedly, spreading a bloody mush on the checkered tablecloth. The tempest of poltergeists ceased immediately, and when his fit of madness had subsided, Despérine was speechless, almost forgetting the young boy who was curled up at his feet on the stone floor.
The door at the top of the stairs flew open, and Mélion and Hébiart, preceded by Chief Inspector Gontan, rushed into the basement. The kitchen lights were on; night must have fallen.
‘Good heavens, what’s going on here?’ Gontan shouted.
/> He jumped the few remaining steps and rushed towards the cadet inspector and the young boy.
‘Explain yourself, Despérine!’
In his superior’s eye, instead of the black pupil, André Despérine perceived the reflection of a glorious medal of honor. The best are very quickly rewarded, Gontan had said. Despérine weighed carefully each word he said then.
‘I simply heard a noise, little Théo was in the cellar, Mme Morille tried to intervene, it was self-defense,’ he said.
II.
ANDRE DESPERINE VS. THE CATS
Valdecèze was without a doubt the smallest of France’s départements; so small that very few people could pinpoint it on a map. André Despérine himself was ignorant of its existence until he was appointed to the post of cadet inspector in the little town of Sacqueroy.
Located several kilometers to the north of Dijon, the territory of Valdecèze included, besides Sacqueroy, three hamlets, a little more than five thousand inhabitants and several hundred cows; an eighteen-wheeler could cross it in less than an hour, it was devoid of tourism. The population lived there secluded, piled on top of one other in the vicinity of Sacqueroy. The outrageous proximity of the residents – Despérine had noticed – encouraged a climate of constant criminality. That didn’t bother the inspector he had become, since it was his job to arrest the murderers and rapists.
Yet André Despérine was astonished by the supernatural turn taken by the investigations in which he participated. Sometimes he didn’t understand any of it – paranormal phenomena quite simply surpassed his comprehension, although he wondered whether he wouldn’t do better to think up some reasons for being scared. Despérine wasn’t scared, his mother had taught him to hold onto his courage with both hands and clench it like a little bird ready to fly away. And it was no doubt his sangfroid, he remembered, which had won him his first medal: he had found little Théo Juvignan locked up in a madwoman’s cellar.
A lot of water had flowed under the bridge since that day. He had ascended in rank, but he wasn’t more respected by his colleagues. Mélion and Hébiart relied on their years of experience to assign to Despérine as many futile, idiotic, or ridiculous activities as possible. Chasing down coffee in the morning, taming the copy machines, or giving his cheekbones a workout at the victims’ reception desk were his daily lot. Inspector André Despérine held out hope, however, for the situation had every chance of changing very soon: the number of medals of honor hanging above his desk grew each month.
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Page 16