It was however on an order from Mélion that André Despérine had found himself on the picket line at three a.m., a few meters from the hamlet of Branolin – which consisted of only two houses and a small shed at the bend in a wooded path. On a stakeout in the underbrush, the inspector had the impression of being frozen from head to toe. Several days earlier he had finally managed to have his overly large raincoat changed for another one exactly his size. But this new raincoat didn’t allow him to wear a thick sweater as a liner; in the end, Despérine regretted his recent acquisition. He was cold.
The inspector was standing against a tree, shivering slightly in the dark and under the watchful eyes of – he thought – an owl; he had heard it moving among the tree’s branches, but he hadn’t been able to see it, for it was a moonless night. Despérine was cold and would have liked to pour himself a cup of the coffee he was keeping warm in a thermos, but Mélion and Hébiart were supposed to arrive in a few seconds and wouldn’t have liked him to drink without them.
Indeed it was when this idea dissipated that the police car arrived noiselessly on the outskirts of the hamlet. Hébiart had let the car glide in neutral the last fifty meters, controlling the speed with only the brake. They stopped with precision under the trees; Mélion got out first and came to greet Despérine.
For three days now Mélion had been the new chief inspector of the Sacqueroy police department: Inspector Gontan had taken a leave of absence to take part in an African safari and hadn’t returned. Shaking his colleague’s hand, André Despérine hesitated whether to present a face distorted by sadness or a complaisant smile congratulating Mélion on his new promotion. The grimace he sketched left his new superior unmoved.
‘It’s awful . . . That animal must have been a hell of a beast to drag down M. Gontan by its teeth.’
‘You always have to beware of felines,’ Mélion had responded.
Despérine offered him the thermos of coffee and while he was greeting Hébiart, Mélion drank the first cup, then passed it on.
‘All right! Gentlemen, this will be a delicate operation, I fear. Our gang of burglars is definitely using this hamlet to move jewels and bundles of counterfeit bills between Dijon and Sacqueroy. We don’t know if the place is guarded, but we’ll surely be able to seize some of the goods.’
Mélion pulled a sheet of paper rolled in a rubber band from the inside pocket of his raincoat. He handed it to Hébiart without looking at him; Mélion was staring strangely at the hamlet, as if he had been hypnotized by the three buildings of wood and stone.
‘The warrant, Hébiart! The warrant! Keep it safe!’
Then the chief inspector set forth at a determined pace towards the village. Despérine and Hébiart followed him hesitantly, fearing to be noticed by its occupants. Both had the feeling they were being watched. In the heavy silence only the sound of their shoes on the gravel road marked the rhythm of their progress, and Despérine wished the owl would hoot once or twice. But nothing happened until they were all in the courtyard of the first house. Mélion opened the door by turning a brass handle in the shape of a cat’s head; it wasn’t bolted and that didn’t bode well.
The dwelling was empty: no furniture, a tapestry in shreds, some spiders weaving their webs and, on the ground, scattered rat droppings. Mélion pulled out his firearm from under his armpit, then took out a flashlight, which he lit.
‘Let’s take a look around. We’ll see what we find.’
They surveyed the different rooms of the house with an exaggerated slowness. Despérine hadn’t had time to taste the coffee, but the slight tension hovering around them was warming him up little by little.
‘Monsieur Mélion,’ he murmured, ‘there’s nothing here. Let’s try the other house!’
‘Shush!’
Mélion raised his arm. With the beam of the flashlight he indicated a door which, half open, led to the bathroom.
‘Hébiart, go look in there!’
Inspector Hébiart slowly approached the panel, which he pushed with his fingertips. The bathroom had been deboned of its sink and bathtub. There was nothing on the walls but several cracked white ceramic tiles. Yet he took a step back.
‘That stinks! Damn, that really reeks!’
‘Go in!’ Mélion ordered, illuminating the small room.
‘It’s like a corpse decomposed in here. Light up the ceiling for me, there’s a trap door!’
Hébiart leaned against a wall and, leaping, caught the handle of the trap door. The flap broke under his weight, the slab of rotten wood came crashing down, the odor of death was suddenly unbearable and a cat, very much alive, fell onto the inspector’s face. In the flashlight beam, Mélion and Despérine saw the animal slash Inspector Hébiart’s cheeks. The latter tried to get out of the ambush, but found himself huddled on the floor, in a corner of the little bathroom. The cat hissed, leapt, and yowled all around him. It ended by flinging itself on Hébiart, planting its claws in his scalp.
Hébiart’s cry was a howl of pain.
‘He ate my ear!’
The cat made a quick getaway between Mélion’s legs. Hébiart made a move to catch it, it or his ear, but finally remained hunched over, one bloody hand stuck to his temple.
‘He ate my ear, fuck!’
‘Let’s get out of here!’ Mélion ordered.
The chief inspector took a step forward to lift him by his armpit. Helped by Despérine, he dragged him five meters to what used to be the living room. In their haste, the flashlight slipped out of Mélion’s hands and rolled across the dusty floor. In front of them, barring access to the front door, and all around them, about twenty cats observed them in silence. Mélion lifted his subordinate up and they all unholstered their revolvers. In the semi-darkness, Hébiart thought he recognized the ear-ripper and fired. The bullet missed its target, but, alerted by the detonation, all the cats swooped in on the inspectors like a single wave crashing on a reef.
It was a stampede. Mélion dived to the floor to recover the flashlight and got up whipping the empty air with his arms. Despérine was using his legs, kicking the felines like footballs as soon as one got too close and avoiding those that leapt at him by making little sidesteps. In a fleeting movement of the flashlight beam he thought he saw Hébiart with three cats at his throat. Mélion was two steps from him, worked up like a devil, beating his arms like a baby bird jumping from its nest. With a clumsy gesture, the chief inspector hit Hébiart’s head with his flashlight. The light went out in a sound of broken glass. Despérine considered the situation a lost cause and jumped through the first window opening he saw. He found himself face down on a lawn damp with the night’s coolness.
André Despérine crawled on all fours for several meters and as quickly as possible, with the sole desire of escaping that army of cats. He found refuge in the barn on the other side of the little lawn and hid behind an old tractor that stank of diesel, incapable of thinking up a plan for getting out of this trouble. He had dropped his gun on the grass. For several minutes he heard only Hébiart’s inhuman cries. And then silence fell once more with the dull stamping of a thousand paws disappearing into the night. Despérine took a deep breath. He swore inwardly, his heart wouldn’t stop pounding. And Mélion called him.
‘Despérine, where are you?’
‘In the barn!’
‘Don’t move!’
The stamping of feet resumed: a horde was moving in the dark around the barn. Mélion was walking in the middle of it.
‘Poor fool! You still don’t understand?’
Despérine frowned. No, he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand what the new chief inspector meant.
‘Understand what, Mélion?’
‘I’m going to kill you, Despérine! Like I killed Gontan, like I killed Hébiart. It’s your turn!’
The gate to the shed turned heavily on its hinges. André Despérine discerned Mé
lion’s silhouette in the center of the opening and those of the cats, who, furtively, made their way into the wooden building.
‘Good heavens! Are you joking? Gontan died in Africa!’
Despérine was looking for a way to flee, his fingers inadvertently touched the sharp edge of a harrow positioned at the front of the farm vehicle.
‘I was the lion!’ retorted Inspector Mélion. ‘These cats are mine! You must always beware of felines, I told you. There can be only one inspector in Sacqueroy and you’re the last obstacle to my success. You understand?’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘You’re the ridiculous one, Despérine! Since your arrival in Valdecèze, there’s never been anyone more incompetent and opportunistic than you!’
Mélion advanced slowly and Despérine felt like he was being squeezed in a vise; he sensed the cats’ breath at the nape of his neck. He had to react fast and decided to charge full speed ahead. He ran straight forward, ignoring the assaults of the cats that scratched and bit him, and collided head-on with Mélion. He would have liked to knock him backwards – he would have had a small chance of being the first one out of the barn – but the chief inspector was steady on his legs and he absorbed the shock with a disconcerting ease. He sent Despérine sprawling to the floor, throwing him to the back of the nearest nook shrouded in darkness, by the wooden gate.
‘Quit crawling, Despérine. I see you with my cat eyes. You can’t escape.’
Mélion approached again, the felines marching at his heels. Despérine tried again to knock his superior down. The leap was so sudden that it surprised Mélion. The chief inspector stumbled backward over one of the cats. Off balance, he took several recoiling steps and ended by falling heavily on the tractor harrow. It perforated his pelvis straight through.
Surprised at his own action, Inspector André Despérine almost forgot the oppressive presence of the cats. But seeing Mélion on the ground, they turned towards him and rushed forward to devour him.
Despérine left the premises as quickly as he could. It was only when he had returned to the wheel of the police car that he vomited the contents of his stomach on the passenger seat. The Branolin hamlet operation had gone terribly wrong, bringing about the deaths of his two colleagues. But, for the first time in his life, André Despérine found himself in sole command, chief inspector of the Sacqueroy police department.
III.
ANDRÉ DESPÉRINE’S FINAL INVESTIGATION
Police inspector André Despérine was a forewarned man. A witch had predicted his death, he had seen his superiors die, but he had always managed to thwart the Grim Reaper’s plans. And because forewarned is forearmed, Despérine took his work very much to heart. From arrest to arrest and from medal to medal, he had ended by finding himself, on this autumn afternoon, holding a simple scrap of a torn blouse in his right hand. It was here, under this tree, on the edge of Montcalm Park, that everything had finished for the girl, and it was here that Despérine’s investigation had begun. A murky affair like hundreds of others he had been through.
Despite being exactly the right person for the case, Despérine felt there was nothing he could do. His legendary logic was stalled. The kidnapping – if it had been one – had been perfectly orchestrated. No sign of struggle, no tracks, no blood . . . Nothing. Thus no clue, no lead. Only a pointless bit of cloth from one of the victim’s garments. Poor girl. She had been seen for the last time three days ago in front of this beech tree. It was the last place she had known, her final destination, here, under these branches, before disappearing. Bloody hell.
The past two days, the victim’s relatives had become more and more insistent. Nay, demanding. They had realized that in the small county of Valdecèze the only lawful authority who could find their daughter was Chief Inspector Despérine. That, no doubt, is why they got it into their heads to harass him with telephone calls and visits to the police station. No, we’re not making any progress, ma’am. Yes, we’re doing our best, sir. Tears and protests, or even outrage, seemed to be the common character trait of every member of that family. At first sympathetic, Despérine had quickly found himself experiencing pity, then indifference for those people. No, ma’am. Yes, sir. Could one of them have been behind it all? Was one of them the abductor of young Catherine? If that was the case, it had been perfect acting. Or maybe they were all the killers. But why would they have killed her? What was the motive? Despérine found no logic in it. His brain was empty.
No idea of what could have happened wanted to take root in his mind. So he had no explanation and thus would have no tolerance for the killer. Just as the family would have none for him if he failed. He felt truly disarmed facing this investigation and facing the others’ looks. However, he persisted in just standing there, even if all his subordinates had left again after yet another day of investigation. He felt obligated, liable for some moral debt. He had to stay longer and take time to reflect. Around the tree there remained only some yellow plastic banners: DO NOT CROSS. It was forbidden to the public to go any further, but of course he, Chief Inspector of the Sacqueroy police department, could do it. And Despérine wanted to cross the barrier. He had to know, to discover the truth. He felt that the secret wasn’t far. Not very far from this tree. This beech. Alone among all the plane trees in the park.
The inspector walked around the tree. The scrap of blouse had been found stuck between two pieces of bark. Here, precisely. He put the tip of his index finger in the hollow of the vertical crease. A grim story. And the family shouting their heads off and his colleagues who were starting to think that yes, You’d be better off retiring. What a fucking story.
The sharp clap of a gate was heard. Despérine turned around. About twenty meters downhill, a little old man had come out of his cabin. Despérine knew him, he was the only witness. Anyway, the last one to have seen the victim.
‘Your Catherine used to come this way to relax, read, or draw little sketches,’ he had squeaked, stretching his time-worn fingers towards the large beech. ‘The tree’s roots were her favorite place, I guess.’ At the presumed moment of the tragedy, M. Beauligneux was gossiping with a neighbor woman, exchanging fruits and vegetables from his garden behind the little hovel. His alibi had been verified. He wasn’t the culprit.
The old man mumbled some inaudible words into his reddish beard and sat down on a rocking chair. He began to rock, making the chair crack like an old stump and looking at the inspector, his eyes round like marbles and surrounded by wrinkles. Despérine gave him a wave, which the octogenarian didn’t return. He simply took out a pipe, lit the bowl, then rubbed his thighs with one hand, like someone patiently waiting for his dinner.
The sun was setting. Night was coming and Despérine’s stomach was already growling. It was dinner time, but this business – bloody hell! – couldn’t go on any longer. He had to resolve it.
A squawking surprised Despérine in the midst of his worries. He raised his head. Perched on a little branch, a baby bird sang in an imaginary language. The man smiled at it. It was true that this place breathed the beauty of perfect nature. Catherine was quite right to come here and reflect. The grass under his feet seemed soft and welcoming and the gnarled tree roots offered a natural armchair. Sit on my lap, thought Despérine, with a honeyed voice that wasn’t his. There was also that business about the pedophile that he’d have to finish later. Another fucking story. He chased the vision from his brain.
Emptying his mind. In fact, that was what really mattered at the current moment. The inspector breathed deeply and surprised himself when he encircled the tree with his long arms. They went almost all the way around the trunk. He thought he had lost that kind of childish impulse long ago. Nose against bark, Despérine sniffed the beech, which gave off a sugary smell, with a little peppery aftertaste. Exquisite. A spicy candy. Gingerbread and a playground. Good God, what’s happening to me? Despérine relaxed his embrace and ran a hand over his
face, letting go at the same moment of the torn fabric that had suddenly become too heavy. He was fine! There. He sat down with his back against the trunk and smiled at the breeze that had risen. Transformed into a chill, it ran down his spine like a shiver as brief as a little laugh. The beech stretched its branches above him. Despérine observed them – had they moved? They had grown slightly and protected Despérine from an ever darker sky. He closed his eyes and he heard. The tree vibrated to the rhythm of a heart of sap. The inspector breathed deeply. It’s in your head. When he opened his eyes again, several branches had added themselves to the others. And other birds had come to complete the first one’s warbling. A fantastic idea awoke in him, of a marvelous creature of which he could perceive only a vague shape, a fuzzy outline behind opaque glass. Despérine rose calmly. He felt deep down that he had nothing to fear. Something told him to let himself be guided by his senses. His surprised smile grew, and he caressed the tree’s bark. The beech crackled slightly with pleasure, a renewed sensation. If the tree had a secret, it would give it to him.
The sweetened scent of this miraculous plant suddenly overwhelmed Despérine’s bronchial tubes. He grew a little dizzy, staggered, caught himself on a branch that was offering him a hand. Its colleagues had now bent down to the ground, and the light of the setting sun filtered through their leaves. They danced, carried away in a fairy dance, addressing joyous giggles to their guest. In its autumnal shell, Despérine found once more the sensations of a forgotten maternal womb. A thousand and one birds, blackbirds, jays, or robins, flew whirling around him. Their thousand and one colors, autumnal orange, poppy red, or tulip yellow, sparkled in a luminous concert. How beautiful it is! Caresses of wings on Despérine’s outstretched arms, kisses of beaks on his cheeks, and branches with a divine feminine sensuality filled him with happiness. God how good it is! Despérine was already laughing softly under the overpowering aromas, carried away by the flight of the birds; he kept his balance on the lowest branches. His hands came to meet the bark which twisted, crackled, reached out towards his touches. My tree! It was a secret that couldn’t be betrayed, nor even shared. It was his alone now! Euphoria. Transcendent joy. Despérine wanted to take it once more in his arms, but the trunk split in two to unveil an inhuman abyss.
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Page 17