by Seth Patrick
The growling became a whimper. The legs began to shunt rapidly, scrabbling on the metal surface. It lifted its head and howled.
Toni felt the knife fall from his hand. Trembling, he backed away. He stumbled and fell. The animal began to writhe, then it fell over the back of the basin, hitting the floor with a wet slap.
It was out of sight now. Toni remembered to breathe, his mind telling him that none of what he’d seen had really happened. Staying on the floor, he backed away until he had retreated through the door frame.
The growl started again, deep, loud, and full of intent. Toni stood and put his hand up above the doorway to where his shotgun was kept, relieved when his hand found it, equally relieved when he scrabbled desperately through the drawer in the hall and found that the cartridge box wasn’t empty. He loaded and took a step forward into the room, gun raised, moving in a slow arc, as far from the sink area as he could get, tensing as the angle brought the creature into view.
The wolf stood there, whole, complete. No sign of injury. It took a second for the shock of the sight to hit home. It was like a replay of the encounter they’d already shared: Toni with his raised gun, the wolf baring its teeth.
Then Toni fired. The wolf went down. He stepped closer and fired again, wanting the damn thing utterly destroyed. Its head came apart.
He reloaded and stood over the animal for ten minutes, watching. Just in case.
Shaking, he wrapped it in plastic and dragged the thing outside. He wanted it buried with a huge rock on top. He fetched a shovel and started to dig. Then he looked across the field, to beside the fence fifty feet away, where a simple wooden cross marked his mother’s grave. Beside it, a large round stone marked the grave of his brother. Tears started to come. His brother had been another predator he’d buried under a rock.
When the hole was a few feet deep, he heard a voice from right behind him. A voice he’d never expected to hear again.
“What did the poor creature ever do to you?” it said.
Toni stood up and turned, shovel in hand. He stared.
Serge. Standing right there, fifty feet from his own grave.
Toni looked at his brother. He looked at his own hands. Then he swung the flat of the shovel hard at his brother’s head.
Serge went down, groaning. Toni dropped the shovel and wandered away, confused. A nightmare, he knew, and he just wanted to wake up. As he headed to the house, he turned to look back and caught movement. Serge was up again, up and running toward him, rage in his face.
Toni made it inside and closed the door just as Serge reached it and kicked it hard, again and again, yelling. He realized he’d left the key on the kitchen table and had no way to lock it.
“Why did you hit me? Are you fucking insane? Open up!”
Toni began to mutter as he put his considerable weight against the door. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women…”
Serge kicked harder, but Toni’s sheer bulk was enough to keep the door shut.
“It’s me, Toni,” yelled Serge. “Jesus Christ, open the door!”
“…and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners…”
Serge was screaming now, screaming and pushing harder than ever. And even though as an adult Toni dwarfed his big brother, Serge’s strength was considerably greater than it had ever been—almost too much for Toni to withstand. It was only the adrenaline of fear that gave Toni enough reserves to hold the door closed, as if his life depended upon it.
“…now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
It all stopped: all the screaming and the pushing. Silence. Toni drew breath and stood his ground until the passing minutes brought with them a hope that this trial, whatever its cause, had come to an end. That Serge’s vengeful ghost had returned to the grave. That Toni had been punished enough.
He waited fifteen more minutes before he opened the door and stepped outside. He went down cold when the shovel hit him from behind.
• • •
It was dusk when he finally came to. Serge stood over him, shotgun in hand. Toni looked at his brother properly now; he was wearing precisely the clothes he’d worn when he died. The clothes I buried him in, Toni thought.
“What’s going on?” Serge asked. He looked distressed. “Why was the house locked? Where’s Mum? Did something happen to her?”
“She’s dead,” said Toni. He sat up carefully, watching his brother. Serge seemed real enough, and surely a vengeful ghost would remember why it had come back from the grave. Serge didn’t seem to remember anything. Not even dying.
“What happened? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” said Toni, looking at the ground. It wasn’t quite the truth. His mother hadn’t cared much about living once Serge had gone—once Toni had dealt with him.
“When did she die?”
“Three years ago.”
Serge was shouting now, crying, “What are you talking about? Why don’t I remember it?”
“Because you weren’t here,” Toni said, his voice quiet.
“Where was I?”
Toni pointed over at the wooden cross marking her grave. “You were with her,” he said. “In the ground.”
Serge lowered the gun and fell to his knees.
My big brother, thought Toni. And look at him now. So young. So lost.
Serge started to sob. Toni stood and went over to hold him, comforting him with the words their mum had always used whenever they cried.
“There, there,” said Toni. “No need for tears.” Serge had come back, and this time Toni would be a better brother. He wouldn’t fail him. Not again. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s over.”
20
For Anton Chabou, work had become a strain. Having made the original call about the decrease in water level, he had earned the suspicion of most of the other engineers. Eric had been the only one to defend him openly, perhaps because Eric had known how close he had come to being in the same position.
“Ignore them,” Eric had said. “They don’t know what’s really going on, any more than the rest of us. All they have is rumor.”
Yes, thought Anton. Rumor, and the extra money in their salary every month. Everyone at the dam was paid at least 30 percent more than they could get for the same role elsewhere. Discretion was always emphasized, and being indiscreet had led—in the past at least—to pay reduction or dismissal. To Anton’s knowledge it had been years since any of the staff had been punished this way, because they knew what was expected of them.
The man Anton had contacted had given his name as Dreyfus when he’d arrived. By then it had been time for a shift change, but Anton and Eric had both been asked to stay for a few hours more. Dreyfus requested a permanent volunteer to assist him while he was there; naturally, Anton found himself nominated by the others.
“Has this happened before?” he asked Dreyfus, getting nothing but a glare in reply.
Anton had gone home to an uneasy sleep and had come back the next morning to an old man’s ragged corpse being scraped from the base of the dam.
“Old Monsieur Costa,” Eric told him.
“You knew the man?”
“I knew of him. He was a teacher, well respected. His older brother used to be mayor.”
Then Dreyfus had taken him to one side and given him a list of tests to oversee. Small submersible drones were on their way and would let them examine the upstream face of the dam. The staff members accompanying the drones were outsiders, and Dreyfus wanted everything to be played down, made to seem routine.
But this was anything but routine. The water level kept dropping, yet the water wasn’t seeping through and appearing anywhere else. Despite Dreyfus’s insistence that speculation should be avoided, Anton couldn’t help it. A fissure, perhaps? Should they get divers in
to check the lake bed?
Dreyfus looked pale at the thought. “First things first,” he said.
And the rumors continued.
When he and Eric finished their shift at dusk and walked to their cars, Eric stopped and looked out over the water. “You know,” Eric said, “there has been a settlement on the site of the old village since the Bronze Age. Maybe longer. When the old dam failed, they found small voids in the rock near the abutments—caves nine or ten feet across at the widest. Not noted by the original surveys. And in one of those caves, they found the skeleton of a large boar. They brought someone in, someone local they trusted. The earliest inhabitants would have been precursors of the Celts, animal worshippers. The boar would have been one of their most sacred animals. There were marks on the boar’s vertebrae that, they said, could be sacrificial wounds.”
Anton felt the cold wind pick up. He looked out over the lake, to the far side where the old dam had been. After the dam had failed three decades ago, what remained of it had been demolished, and the vegetation on the valley side hid the scars. A tragedy hidden in plain sight, invisible unless you knew what you were looking at.
And now there was a new lake, and a new dam, built with curious haste. When the site for the original dam had been chosen, two possibilities had been available. One was simpler and cheaper, but it would have required the flooding of the old village and meant everyone had to move down to the town; the other option was higher upstream, but construction would have been considerably more expensive, and more complicated. The villagers had mounted a campaign to protect their homes, the townspeople had joined them, and together the more expensive plan was chosen.
Then the dam had failed, flooding the village after all, with the loss of more than one hundred lives. The dam was unsalvageable, but the time-consuming planning and surveying work on the alternative site had already been completed, so they built another one there. The rush to rebuild was a crass way to distract from the tragedy and call it progress. Disrespectful, at the very least; at worst, it bordered on desecration.
“They took the bones from the cave,” Eric continued, “and had them dated. They expected them to be ancient, maybe a find of historical importance. When the results came back, they were disappointed. The remains had been dated to the time of the dam’s construction.”
Anton looked at him, surprised. Eric seemed to read this as skepticism.
“Seriously,” Eric said. “You ask around enough, you can find all that out for yourself. But there’s one thing nobody will tell you.” He lowered his voice. “They found a child’s skull in that cave.”
21
Thomas sat at his desk and watched the streams from the cameras set up around his own home. He went through each of them again and again: living room, bedrooms, bathroom. All empty, of course; Chloé was at school, and Adèle was at the library. Checking the live images was habit more than anything else.
The cameras were a secret. He’d installed them himself two years ago, after Adèle’s close call. Neither Adèle nor Chloé knew they existed, but it was the way it had to be. Whenever he was worried, he could watch and be sure that no harm had come to his family. From outside, or from within.
His nerves were on edge, his temper short. The night before, he had gone up to the attic while Adèle slept and had hunted through the box where she kept everything from her old life—her life with Simon Delaître.
Even as he had opened the box, he had known he was being a fool, that the man in custody must have been an old acquaintance of Delaître. Yet the first time he’d seen the guy, the feeling of recognition had shocked him. He’d only ever seen Delaître alive in photographs—photographs he’d never looked at closely, only glimpsed. He’d seen the body at the time, of course, but nobody could have recognized the living man from that shattered face. It had to be his mind playing tricks on him. Surely.
And then he’d found Adèle’s photographs and had seen.
It was him. It was no failure of Thomas’s memory.
It made no sense. All Thomas could do was keep him in custody as long as possible and keep all of it away from Adèle. There were only two weeks until the wedding and…
Perhaps that was it. After all, Delaître had died on the morning of his wedding to Adèle. To come back when she was about to marry someone else did make a kind of sense. Thomas had enough belief in the paranormal to accept the idea of ghosts, but he was also a supremely practical man. Whatever kind of ghost Delaître was, and whatever his intentions, Thomas wasn’t going to give in to fear. There had to be things that could be done. There always were.
After all, Delaître was safely in the cells now, wasn’t he?
There was a knock on his office door. “Enter,” he said, closing the images from his home cameras.
Laure and Alcide came in.
“Update on the Clarsen case, sir,” said Laure. Thomas nodded for her to go ahead. “We’ve been questioning everyone who lives near the tunnel. We have nothing new to add to the CCTV footage. No one saw a thing. It’s deserted at night.”
“And Pascal?” asked Thomas. Pascal was the officer he had tasked with attempting to track where the attacker had gone after leaving the tunnel. Twenty-four hours of footage from thirty cameras spread across the town was a tough job for one officer, but Pascal had a knack for it. And besides, they weren’t exactly overstaffed.
“He’s certain the offender didn’t reappear within the sight of any of the nearby cameras,” said Laure. “It limits the routes he could have taken, but it’s not that helpful. And so far he’s found no sign of him reappearing elsewhere.”
Thomas nodded.
“Sir?” said Alcide. “We could question that woman, Julie Meyer. Our file says she was attacked in the same place seven years ago. She may have remembered something since then.”
Thomas saw Laure stiffen. “I know the case,” he said, reining in his sarcasm. Alcide, keen as a puppy, and only on the force for two years.
“I can question her,” said Laure. “If you like.”
“We need to talk to her anyway,” said Thomas. “To let her know what’s happened and assess her personal security. But there’s no need for you to do it, Laure.” It was always important to keep private life and the job separate, Thomas thought, before remembering Delaître in the cells downstairs.
“I want to, sir.”
“Fine then. Take Alcide with you.”
“It’s OK,” said Laure. “I’ll go alone.” She looked at Alcide. “You find out more about Lucy Clarsen.”
Alcide nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” His voice was uneven, Thomas noted, the young officer still affected by his fondness for the woman.
“Close the door on your way out,” said Thomas. And once it was closed, he opened the camera feeds again, and watched. He had a nose for trouble. He could smell it now, but he’d be damned if it was going to ruin his wedding.
Thomas wondered how long you could keep a ghost in jail.
22
Pierre made sure he was at Michel Costa’s funeral early. It was held in the old chapel graveyard, high on the valley slope, looking down on the town. If the Helping Hand was to achieve the goals he envisaged, he needed the community to support it. As such, he made it his business to know all that he could about the townspeople, to forge links, and to keep as high a profile as he could.
He took in the view of the town. It seemed subtly changed to him, he realized, knowing what had happened with Camille, but he was by no means sure that his suspicions about her return were correct, that it was the beginning of something that would change the lives of everyone out there. Of everyone in the world.
All he could do was pray for guidance and see what happened next. See if there would be others like Camille.
Slowly, people started to arrive. So many had known Michel Costa; so many had been taught by him. But there were fewer attendees than might have be
en expected. There was the manner of his death to consider, thought Pierre. Suicide carried a considerable stigma, especially in a town so bogged down in traditions, so unwilling to accept new truths.
Pierre had been on the phone to various people that morning, asking if they would be coming to the funeral. Most had told him they would have come if only the man hadn’t died in such disgrace. A few had expressed surprise that the burial was being allowed at all, their outrage barely concealed.
Pierre saw the police captain and approached, greeting him. The police were always useful allies, of course. He moved on, spotting the captain’s wife-to-be.
“Hello, Adèle,” Pierre said. “I heard about your wedding. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Pierre,” she said. And she looked happy. Happier than all the times she had come to him for bereavement counseling over the last decade.
When he saw Claire arrive with Léna—Jérôme absent, of course, because someone had to stay at home with Camille—he waited until they had finished speaking to others in the graveyard before going over to them.
“And how is Camille doing?” he asked quietly.
“She’s going stir-crazy,” said Claire. She was glancing left and right as she spoke, wary of people nearby, her voice muted. “We only allow her to go outside if she stays in the back garden. It’s secluded enough that nobody would see her.”
“She must be patient,” he said. “It’s vital that she keeps out of sight.”
Claire suddenly gripped his arm. “Pierre, do you think there might be others? I know none of the other parents have said anything, but…”
It felt to Pierre as if the air had become charged, loaded with some kind of potential. He tried to keep his voice calm. “Why do you ask?”
“Léna thinks she met one.”
Pierre turned to Léna, keeping his eagerness masked. “Where?”
“The Lake Pub,” said Léna, almost reluctantly. “But I’m probably wrong about him.” She was looking at Pierre with genuine dislike. He’d not had much contact with Léna; while the Helping Hand had arranged the counseling of parents after the bus accident, it had been the school that had provided direct support for the affected children. Given his relationship with Claire, it was reasonable that she should show such distrust. As long as it didn’t tip over into disrespect, it didn’t really bother him.