by Libba Bray
“Would you mind if I used your bathroom?” I asked as he took a breath between sentences.
This request caught Henri off guard for a moment, and he fumbled with his cigarette a little.
“Yes…of course. The toilet is at the top of the stairs.”
Henri’s house was much nicer than ours, but that made sense, as he actually lived there. The living room was very neat. There was no television in there—just a lot of bookcases, some camera equipment, a massive printer, and what seemed to be a nice stereo. The walls were covered in artsy photographs: some of the landscape and some of Henri and a woman, who I presumed was his wife. In one, near the top of the stairs, the woman was completely naked…but it was very tasteful and French and kind of touching. There were piles of books absolutely everywhere and a few dog toys on the floor.
The bathroom was right at the top of the steps, as he said. It was a stark room with blue tiles. There were no towels, no bath mat, no curtains, no toilet paper, no shower curtain—nothing soft. No soap, even. It was as if no one lived here, no one used this bathroom at all.
When I came back downstairs, Henri was standing in the wide-open doorway. A wind had kicked up, and the big red door banged away on the hinges into the face of the house. The wind whipped into the hall and sent things fluttering all over the place. None of this seemed to bother Henri.
“A storm, I think,” he said. “I think tonight. Can I offer you something to eat?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I should get back. My sister…she’ll worry.”
“Ah, yes. Your sister.”
“The pictures are really nice,” I said. “Is that your wife?”
He looked as if he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
“The pictures along the stairs,” I said, pointing back at the dozen or more framed prints.
“My wife,” he repeated. “Yes. My wife.”
“We’ll be around for a while,” I said, slipping past him and out the door. “And I’ll keep an eye out for a lost dog.”
I walked back toward our house quickly, wanting to put as much distance between Henri and me as possible. The wind blew like hell the whole way back, throwing dirt and pollen in my eyes. I was a half-blind wheezing mess when I got back to our bedroom, where Marylou was in the same exact position, her tiny feet tucked up on the chair. She had closed the heavy blue shutters on the bedroom window to block out the wind, so now the room was fairly dark, lit only by an ancient lamp in the corner.
“People around here are weird,” I said.
Marylou looked up from The Big Book of Crazy.
“Define weird,” she said.
“Weird as in I passed one house on the way, and the guy in it was just standing around like a zombie looking for his dog, and all he talked about was the French Revolution and the spirit of murder and something about some suspect law. He was very creepy. He didn’t have anything in his bathroom—”
“Charlie,” she said, putting her thumb in her book and closing it. “I thought you stopped that.”
“I’m serious.”
But it was clear that she didn’t believe me.
“We should just go back to Paris,” I said. “Get back to town, take the same train we came in on. This place sucks.”
“Except that Claude’s probably on his way here. So we’d get there and have nowhere to go. Didn’t you have any luck with the phone?”
I shook my head.
“Well, Erique brought the groceries while you were out. We should eat, I guess.”
Erique had brought delicious food for us—roast chicken, bread, tomatoes, and soft cheese full of lavender. There was yet more warm Orangina. The wind battered the house as Marylou set our Hobbit-y table with the heavy blue-and-white plates from the cupboard. She closed the kitchen shutters as well, and the room went dark. I sat on one of the benches, staring at the pattern of knots and ridges in the wood of the table.
“Come on,” she said. “Eat. It’s not that bad here. Try this.”
She tore off some of the chicken with a fork and cut me a hunk of the cheese and bread. It was all delicious—the crisp chicken studded with thyme, the cheese with the pretty purple flecks of lavender. I think I should have felt content and French, safe and snug inside, with the wind whistling outside. But I didn’t. I felt just slightly sick.
“What is with you?” she asked.
“It was that guy and his weird-ass story.”
“All right,” she said, spreading cheese thick on a piece of bread. “What did he say that freaked you out so much?”
So I told her everything I could remember about Henri’s story, going to great lengths to stick to the facts exactly as I’d heard them. When I finished, Marylou just shook her head.
“So he likes history,” she said. “And he’s a little morbid. You can’t just write him off as crazy, Charlie.”
“That’s not the word we like to use,” I corrected her.
Marylou laughed at this. I felt a little better once I’d gotten the story out. The wind didn’t seem so blustery. I took a big piece of chicken, and we talked about other things for a while, like the fact that Marylou had found a set of Ping-Pong paddles and balls when I was gone and how we could convert our table into a Ping-Pong paradise. We were just finishing up when we were startled by a knock at the door. Marylou jumped to answer it.
It wasn’t Claude, as we’d both been hoping. The news was actually a bit better than that. It was a guy, maybe Marylou’s age. He was tall and lanky, with dark curly hair cut short but uneven. He was wearing a threadbare Led Zeppelin T-shirt and ragged jeans chopped off at the knee. He had a sprig of green something or other in his hair, something off one of the many forms of plant life around us. And he was sweating profusely. All of that aside, he was pretty good looking. Well, very, actually.
He opened his mouth to speak, but I got there first, just to get it out of the way.
“Sorry,” I said. “We don’t speak French.”
“My English is so-so,” he said, coming into the room shyly and looking around our little Shire kitchen. “I am Gerard. I live in the village. I saw you earlier, walking the path. I thought I would come, say hello.”
We gazed at him stupidly. Turns out, if you’re stuck in a French cabin for days on end and a guy shows up, you basically lose your mind. Socials skills right out the window.
“Hello,” Marylou finally said. “Do you want…um…some chicken? Or cheese or…”
She pointed at the picked-apart chicken carcass on the table and the mostly eaten cheese and the remains of the bread.
“A drink!” I said, remembering the earlier hospitality. “We have Orangina!”
“A drink. Thank you.”
I poured Gerard some Orangina, and he sat at the table with us. He looked down at the glass shyly. He was a strapping boy, the kind who looked like he had been raised in these glorious fields, developing strong muscles through cheese-rolling or whatever it was you did when you were a tall French guy who grew up in a lovely village in the middle of nowhere.
“You are?” he asked.
“I’m Charlie. Charlotte.”
“Charlie Charlotte?”
“Either one,” I mumbled.
“And I’m Marylou,” my sister added. She had seen my fumble, and she wasn’t going the French-name route.
“What are you doing ’ere?” he asked.
I got in ahead of Marylou and started telling Gerard the story of Mr. 56E, Claude, the little suits of armor, Erique, the tiny frogs, all the way through Henri and his tale of woe, doom, and weirdness. This last bit seemed to catch Gerard’s attention, because he looked up at me the entire time I was talking, his bright brown eyes looking right into mine.
“Henri likes ’istory,” he said, but he certainly didn’t sound happy about it. I gathered Henri made a habit of talking death and mayhem and history to anyone who got near. Gerard just had that look on his face like he’d heard it all before.
“What do you do?�
� Marylou asked.
“I go to university in Lyon. I study psychology.”
Oh, the joy on Marylou’s face. A kindred spirit. She started rambling on about all the good times she’d had in the psych lab tormenting other students for eight dollars an hour. Gerard nodded and occasionally added a comment. I gathered that he was nineteen, had been at university for a year, and wasn’t as excited about being a psych major as Marylou. (No one could be, really.) He listened for a good solid hour, but I noticed that he looked at me a lot more than at Marylou.
Which was a bit odd. I just figured that Gerard would be more interested in the one that seemed a little older, saner, and into his subject, but this wasn’t the case. Every time Marylou looked away, his eyes met mine with definite interest, and I would twitch a little in excitement. I didn’t mind France at all with Gerard in the picture.
“This DS…DS…” he said in response to something Marylou was saying.
“The DSM-IV,” she said.
“Yes. I would very much like to see eet. You say you have eet?”
“Sure!” Marylou was out of her seat in a shot and up the steps to our room. The moment she left, Gerard leaned across the table, coming close to my face.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Eef you want to live, eef you love your sister, follow me now.”
“What?”
But with that he grabbed my phone and ran.
Okay, so. You’re me. You’re sitting there with one of the most beautiful guys you’ve ever seen. And he asks you if you want to live. And he steals your phone. And says you have to follow.
You follow him, right? Because what else are you going to do?
Right?
Maybe not everyone would have done that. I think some people would have immediately bolted the door behind him and started screaming. If I had been like you, if you’re one of those people, this story would have turned out a lot differently.
But I went tearing down the path after him, screaming his name. Gerard was fast, and tall, with much longer legs. He quickly outpaced me. I followed him all the way down to the dirt road, where he made a sharp turn, then he headed into the trees. I followed.
Then he was gone. I was just standing in the middle of the woods.
“I am not going to hurt you,” Gerard said.
He stepped out from a tree behind me. I backed up, finally realizing that following a thief into the middle of nowhere is a really dumb move.
“Oh,” I said.
“This is important, Charlie,” he said, stepping closer. “Did you tell your sister the story? The one Henri told you. Did you repeat eet?”
This was the last thing I was expecting to hear, and probably not the kind of thing a person who plans on attacking you says.
“What?”
“You must tell me, Charlie! Did you tell her the story? About the Law of Suspects?”
“Story?” I repeated. “That stupid story Henri told me? Yes! I told her!”
This hit him like a blow. All the muscles in his face seemed to go lax and he fell back against a tree and looked up into the branches in despair. He exhaled once, very slowly, and looked back at me.
“I’m showing you something,” he said. “You will not like eet. But you need to see eet to understand what is going on.”
He pulled his messenger bag from around his shoulders. From it he removed what appeared to be some trash. Just a bundle of plastic shopping bags. He gave them a shake, and something plopped out onto the path. Something small, like a bird. A dead one.
And I remember thinking, Why the hell is he carrying around a dead bird? So my brain kept working on the problem, and eventually it decided that the thing on the path was not a bird. So that was the good news. The bad news was…
It was a hand.
Unattached to a body.
A bluish white, bloodless, dismembered hand—cut very neatly about the spot where you’d wear a watch. It was very dirty. It was a smallish hand, but maybe all hands look small when they’re…disconnected.
For a moment I felt nothing at all, then I got very giddy. I cycled through a lot of emotions, in fact. There was a high, floaty feeling in my head. I laughed. I coughed. I stumbled and went down on all fours.
“I found eet at Henri’s house,” he said, as if my reaction was exactly what he had been expecting. “Eet was ’alf-buried in the garden by the aubergines. Something dug eet up and left eet exposed. I believe this is Henri’s wife. Well, ’er hand. The rest of her…I think is also there. Now you must listen to me. Your life is depending on eet.”
I put my face against the dirt, accidentally sniffing some of it up my nose. I think I was breathing very fast. It smelled mushroomy up this close.
“Charlie,” Gerard said, “you may feel sick but this is not the time….”
“It’s not?”
I was laughing again and snorting more dirt. He hoisted me up under my arms and got me to my feet.
“Police,” I mumbled.
“We do not have time,” he said, backing me against a tree and letting me get myself balanced. “Now you must listen, and you must try to understand. We cannot help this person….”
He pointed at the hand, which was still just flopped there, palm up, and taking in our conversation in a passive, disembodied-hand kind of way.
“But we can save you. And your sister. Either one of you could be infected. You could have passed eet to her.”
“What…are…you…talking…about?”
“This is my fault,” he said mournfully. “I must fix this.”
Gerard picked up a stick and used it to push the plastic over the hand a little, so that I would stop staring at it. He tipped my chin up to look him in the eye.
“Three weeks ago,” he began, “a very famous psychologist died in a car crash along with his wife. He left his library and papers to my university. Thousands of books and papers. I am one of five students asked to go through the papers, read them, sort them. I read through a dozen boxes, maybe more. A few days ago I came home to stay with my cousin for a visit. I was allowed to bring some papers with me. I read them on the train. Many of them were very boring, but then, I find a bundle of papers that looked very old. Attached to them is a note in the psychologist’s handwriting that says, ‘Do not read.’ So I read them. Or most of them. Eet seems that he was studying the murder impulse—how normal people can murder.”
I almost laughed and almost said, “Normal isn’t a word we like to use.” But I was pretty sure that if I tried to talk, I would throw up.
“This psychologist,” Gerard went on, “he was a great man, but as he got older, he started to study things many find ridiculous, very unusual areas of psychology. These notes of his talked of a story that made people kill once they heard eet. The story was about the revolution, about the spirit of murder. About the Law of Suspects. Once you hear eet, you will kill someone close to you before the next morning. The papers went on to say that only one person is…infected…at a time. Like a curse. Once the person murders, they are compelled to tell the story to someone else, then they kill themselves.
“A copy of this deadly story was attached, along with many notes of warning. There was no indication that he had read eet. In fact, eet seemed he had not. He had simply located the last known copy and kept eet. An academic impulse. You cannot get rid of an important document, no matter how dangerous. The notes indicated that eet was in a letter dated 1804. Eet had been lost for many, many years, but he had uncovered eet and wished he hadn’t. I did not take eet seriously. Eet is unscientific. Ridiculous. So I stopped reading and fell asleep.”
At this, he shook his head miserably.
“When I got to my cousin’s, I told her the story over a coffee. She laughed and asked to see the papers. They are not secret, so I showed her. That night I went out with friends. I stayed out very late. I came in and went right to sleep….”
It was obviously hard for Gerard to say these things. But I had no doubt that they were true. Liars are good
at seeing the truth. The color had gone from his face and he was grabbing at his hair. The shock caused by the hand deepened into dread, a dread that sank into my bones and made me unable to move.
“The next morning the house was quiet. My cousin and her husband made no noise. After some time I was worried. So I opened the bedroom door. That is when I found her husband. He had been stabbed with a corkscrew, deep into the ear. My cousin was in the closet. She had hung herself with the…the tie…from around the waist of her dressing gown. This was three days ago.”
I remembered the police car and the ambulance. That must have been the house. We had gone right past it and had no idea.
“The police thought she had perhaps gone insane, gone into a jealous rage, but I knew my cousin. There was nothing wrong with her until she read that story. I do not know how this works or why. The Law of Suspects story is real, and I brought eet back by bringing those papers here. I wasn’t able to get back into the house for a day, but when I did…the papers were nowhere. I asked the police eef they had taken them, but they had not. I remembered that the psychologist claimed the story would be passed on before death. I thought my cousin had posted the papers to someone. For the last two days I have watched her friends. I saw Henri in the village this morning, picking up some post. Later I went along to his house. I saw you there. I saw him fresh from the garden, acting very strange. I went to the garden while you were inside with him. I found this….”
He gestured toward the plastic-covered hand.
“I have not seen his wife. Have you?”
“No,” I said, managing to find my voice. “He said he was looking for his dog.”
“His dog,” he said, nodding. “Yes. That makes sense. The dog was always with his wife. When he attacked her, I imagine the dog tried to stop him. The dog must also be dead.”
“So you’re saying,” I said, “that Henri is infected by some story in a letter, and he killed his wife.”