“Will you open up the tomb for me?”
“You forget something in there?”
“There’s something that I want to see. Come on, I’ll show you how to get in.”
It seemed rude to refuse the request. “Who was it that built this place?”
“You know him well enough, Dermot. You’ve even seen his likeness. It was commissioned by my illustrious predecessor, who hung our persistent witch. A bit grandiose, don’t you think? I think he overcompensated for the doubt the girl had sown.”
“Do you think he half-believed her, then, when she cursed him off to hell?”
“I think she scared him witless, and I happen to agree.”
“For a grave it seems rather large. Was he planning for a dynasty, then?”
“He was hoping for one. And almost all of us are here. It looks big from the outside, but you’ll see how tight it is. We stack the bones to make more room.”
“Very cozy.”
“I find the idea reassuring. A comfort, that’s what it is. To be surrounded by the family.” He smiled again, and this time Dermot saw him in profile but down his marked scarred face. “I’ve always liked graveyards, Dermot, even before I was dead. A couple of generations and you can barely read all the names, just like all these poor sods out here.” He gestured with his pipe. “I find that very peaceful. Don’t you?”
“You’re a right cheery bugger, Arthur. OK. How the hell do we get in?”
“The key’s up on the right side. Do you see that cherub there? Yes, that one. Up behind him.”
“Hang on a minute.” Dermot scrambled and hoisted himself two feet off the ground, his foot resting on the face of a frog prince worn smooth from the boot soles of the past. The frog was generous, uncomplaining and solid, clearly used to such disrespect, a prince who had learned humility by serving others’ needs. It was a reach to get the key – God help a shorter man – and then his fingertips closed on something thin and alien to the rock. “Got it!” he said, triumphant. The oiled lock smoothly turned. “After you.” Arthur slipped through the door and Dermot closed it behind them. He didn’t want unwelcome eyes asking what he was doing.
Dermot struck a paper match and fished for a candle stub.
The room was eerily familiar: The rows of coffins looked like bunks in the trenches, stacked high up to the roof. They were housed in slots, cut out from the wall, wide enough for a man to slip into. One fresh casket stood apart, perched on sawhorses right by the door – an elaborate box of polished wood with brass handles that reflected the flame.
“Michel Malenfer, my brother,” Arthur pronounced, there being no plaque upon its surface. “They’ll have to shift it for Pierre. I wonder if he’ll get such a coffin? No telling with my mother.”
“Young Michel, who died of the flu?”
“That’s him that lies before us.”
And so, by the light of a fading candle, Dermot told Arthur his story. He spoke of his suspicions and conjectures, just as he had to Simonne. The ghost’s face darkened as he went further on, and he ground on the stem of his pipe. “It just seems so cold,” he said at the conclusion after Dermot had told him everything.
“You’ll help, then?”
Arthur laid a hand on Michel’s coffin. “Of course I will. Any way I can. But you’re wrong about the curse.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ve seen the witch, Dermot. I’ve seen her; I’ve heard her. She’s very real, you know. She was the girl I saw at the mill, I understand that now. That’s what I’ve been doing out here, trying to figure out what’s to be done. She’s not giving up, Dermot, and the curse of the Malenfers... it is real. It lives along with her.”
“The dead can’t hurt the living, Arthur. You’re proof of that.”
“No? You don’t think I killed Pierre? I killed him as surely as firing the gun. His blood is on my hands. She means us harm, Élise Beauvais, she wants my family dead. She’s twisted now, she hunts us down, she’s human in form alone. Do you know the real reason you found me here, Dermot? Because I’m scared of her.”
The Beauvais Witch, a harbinger of death. Was Simonne not a Malenfer too? “What are you suggesting, Arthur?”
“She must be stopped. Convinced to end her feud with us, one way or another.”
“How the hell are you going to do that?”
“We’ve lived with the fear far too long. I’ve thought about this while hiding here, and there’s something I want to try. I need two things: a little of your help – again – and a little bait.”
Dermot had misgivings. “What do you mean by bait?”
Arthur told Dermot his plan.
The candle dimmed and died. In the pitch dark, the black of a mining tunnel, the darkness of a tomb, the smell of smoke and formaldehyde lingered amid the breath of man.
“The ghosting hour approaches,” Ward spoke softly.
“How appropriate.”
Arthur sat in the dressing chair from which Dermot had removed the dust sheet. The once-hidden door had been pried open according to his wishes, and the bolted window of his bedroom left open to the cold. Dermot had obliged in every particular in returning him to his old room. Arthur had then asked for solitude. “I must do this next part alone.”
The specter that had once been Élise Beauvais had told him that she would find him. Arthur settled as best he could and waited for the fulfillment of her promise. He’d refused the well-meant offer of a lantern or a fire, but outside the snow had begun to fall, which lent the room a brightness. Arthur pulled up his collar, fished for his pipe and matches, and then nestled in with one ear cocked to await the ancient tormentor.
This was his place in which he sat – its stones had seen him through manhood – and not a room in the house knew Arthur better than these walls that cradled his presence. There was a comfort here, despite his goal, and with the passing hours his mind wandered.
There was a scratching.
Arthur sat bolt upright, his pipe long cold in his hand. There it was again! The rhythmic tapping of hardened nails or the burrowing of an animal; a rat, perhaps, clawing out a hole between the beams in the wall hollow. The sound was distinctive and clear, for the wind had now quit, and outside snow was still falling.
He looked to the doorway, open a crack, hinting of the passageway beyond it, but the sound came from the open window – it was somewhere out in the night. Arthur rose and crept quietly towards it. Forward. Forward towards it. Forward till he held the edge of the frame and leaned out over the white world. And then the hush, the deafness of first snow. A smothering of nature, beautiful in its silence. Arthur stared down upon it. Not a soul, living or dead, wandered into view.
There was nothing there, the noise was gone, just tiers of shuttered windows; and then the shadow fell upon him – a darkness blocking the moon.
Arthur pulled back just in time as the witch lashed out with fury, yet she caught him with a glancing swipe that opened his cheek up deeply, a blow that bit his bloodless flesh but might have ripped his throat out.
Arthur backed away from the ledge but stumbled and fell on the carpet. Before him the spirit climbed through the window, her loose dress billowing about her. “No, girl! Don’t!” he cried. She advanced unbidden on all fours, her feet and hands both gripping. He recoiled as he saw she was unshod of boot and that her feet bore toes like talons.
“Listen, please!” Arthur retreated on his elbows while the witch grew tall before him. It was no girl that bore over him, no young lady by the mill site; Arthur, so often indomitable, flinched before the unnatural creature.
The Beauvais witch had kept her pretty nose and a brow lined deep with sorrows, but her jaw was swollen full of teeth that were spiked and sharp and rotten. Before, her eyes had showed a human hate, but now they glowed with demonic fervor. An appetite for revenge and death had stoked their juice with luster.
“Élise Beauvais!” Arthur bellowed her name, and at the mention she halted her progress. Arthur didn’t st
op to give it thought, but ran his words while he had the chance to. “Élise Beauvais, you have long been ill-treated and I, Arthur Malenfer, say so! I, eldest born, heir to the name, the family that wounded you, say so!”
Arthur had thought through his speech at the crypt, how he would try to reason with her, but the words that came in his desperation spilled out without rehearsal. As the girl paused, appearing to listen, he knew he had one chance to save himself. “I know what they did to you,” he spluttered. “What we did to you... and I know what we did to your family! And it was wrong, and we knew it, yet we lived off the profits, and we’ll answer to God for our actions. But end this! End your hate now, please. Let those that are left know solace.
“They’re innocents,” he implored, “the few that are left, the young who are left of this family. They love and they’re loved, and why should they not? Put an end to your curse and your pain!”
He could see through the girl – she was a girl again – through to the still falling snow. His momentary reprieve gave him encouragement and he let his tongue run on.
“Is it fair that they pay for the wrong of another, in this century when all seem to suffer?” If she made reason of his words he could not tell; if she accepted his request he was no wiser.
“Élise Beauvais.” When he spoke her name she seemed blown by a gust of memory. “I have but one son remaining, and he, like me, has known loss. Feed your grief with these children no longer! Blacken your heart no more! Leave us be and make your peace however you are able.”
He saw Élise Beauvais as she once might have been: a fresh young woman with bows in her braids and a new spring dress for a baptism. A smiling young lady flush with good health and the warmth of friendship upon her. For a moment Arthur thought he’d touched her soul and calmed her troubled spirit.
But only for a moment.
Because the wrong and the hurt and the hatred of years in a life beyond life beyond meaning rose again inside Élise and with it the nightmare creature. Arthur cringed before the fiend and knew the entirety of his failure. “Dermot – help!” he managed to yell, and then the witch drove her hand through his belly.
Arthur’s world exploded.
He looked to his stomach where he was coming apart, as if he had flesh and it was flayed from his body. Her fingernails cut and rent him inside like barbed wire tearing into a body. But it wasn’t just his own pain which he felt that caused him to lose his mind. Her touch was like a shattered mirror, each shard a memory, every one of them poison and vile.
He didn’t know what he was seeing at first; the vision shifted, and then came sharply to focus. He was standing in a bedroom: The chamber seemed familiar, and there was a man leaning over a bed. He felt the panic and the helpless trembling of the boy pinned beneath the pillow. Arthur tried to gasp for breath and found there was none coming.
Then the picture shifted, splintered and moved, and he was in one of the manor’s staircases. There was an older man stumbling in the dark and the sensation of a sudden push. Down he slipped, over and over. Arthur felt each blow. His broken windpipe and shattered neck that lay at a crooked angle. His father’s face looked up at him, just as the family had found him.
Again it changed, and Arthur was following a boy running along a glade. He didn’t recognize the child who slipped and went down a wet bank into the river. He was underneath the water with him, watching him grasp desperately for tree roots, but a tug at the boy’s ankle – it might have been the current – pulled them from his fingers. Arthur floated with the boy face down till the stones on the stream bed lost focus.
A boisterous man at a full Christmas table, slicing open a roasted hen. Arthur felt his hand slip as he was driving the knife, the edge of it slicing his hand. The skin flapped open wide at his wrist; it was the shock of it more than anything. It looked like nothing, the pain was numb, but the blood just wouldn’t stop coming.
A rider not clearing a fence.
A boy on a wall, his arms wind-milling, reaching out to a hay fork for balance.
A woman up a tree, wild dogs down below, and the branch she was on giving way.
A young girl sliding down a rope into a well from which the mewing of a cat could be heard.
A powdered dandy being ridden by a whore whose discharge smelled of the clap.
A fusilier in burnished chest plate riding bravely towards the canons.
A mother in labor, squeezing out twins, feeling herself start to tear.
And then the last.
A tree. A single tree. The branches of a tree, turning slowly around. And in the sky a plume of smoke and the smell of sizzling hot pitch.
Arthur fought for breath.
He was pulled by a strength he thought only possessed by those who were still with the living. Beauvais dragged him by the guts towards the wide open window. “No! God, no!” he shrieked, clawing at the floor, but he was snared and barbed on her fingers. It was a hopeless pain, like in the back of the ambulance, which the dead should by rights be spared. He thought of Émile and then of his niece before sensation rent his reason. There was only the agony and the panic of hell into which he knew she was taking him.
“Help me, Dermot! Oh, please God no.” The floor of his room slid beneath him. He’d been pulled half up onto the window ledge when Simonne burst in through the doorway.
25
Entente
The man approached the tiered stone arches with a soft and stealthy step, a scarf tied high around his face and darkness covering the rest. He left a line of solitary footprints on the unbroken snow around him, down towards the railway bridge that spanned the broad Suize river.
The man paused. He stared ahead into the columns that rose up from the bank. At last he made out a small cloaked figure crouched beneath the viaduct, and when he did he retraced his steps and then circled back down lower.
“Hello, Simonne.” The figure jerked upright, startled by his closeness. He stood behind her, only an arm’s length away. “You didn’t hear me coming?” He couldn’t keep the smile from his voice; it gratified his ego. “I’ve come all alone, just the two of us, just as your message asked. Now what was it you wanted to talk to me about, all this way out in the snow?” Old Crevel spoke with a jackal’s sneer. He restrained his lascivious hands.
The figure spun around to face him, and then cast back the deep hood.
“What? What’s the meaning here?” Crevel stuttered, recognizing the man immediately. He staggered back as he collected his thoughts, thrown off balance but recovering.
“Surely you remember me, Mister Mayor?” Dermot rose to his full height now. His powerful shoulders rolled back, his hands ready at his sides. “I’m ‘the common soldier,’ the unwanted guest full of ‘base desires’ without a shred of honor. Didn’t you say that? You remember that, don’t you?” Crevel backed off a little further. “Do you know what else I am, Mister Mayor? I’m the spanner in the works, the fool that sentenced the twins to die. But I’m back to make amends.”
Crevel stumbled in the snow, the temporary shelter of the elevated track no longer sheltering the ground. He held his hands defensively out in front of him. “What are you talking about? Spanners and twins!” His eyes beaded, black holes of malice, and his finger stretched out and pointed. “Why are you here to bother me, boy? Why haven’t you left this place? You’re nothing but a waster that Madame threw out with his tail between his legs!” He was puffed up with indignation now. “Are you after money, is that it? Have you sunk so low as that?” His voice grew in confidence and aggression as he recovered from his first shock. “What have you done with Simonne?” Crevel demanded to know.
Dermot the while had circled around so that Crevel’s back was towards the bridge. “I’m sure Mademoiselle will be very pleased to hear of your concern for her health,” he growled, “at least until she’s married your spawn.”
“What do you mean by that?” Crevel puffed. “Why did you bring me out here?” His political mind, suspicious and neurotic, whir
led and parried. Simonne.
Simonne had talked to Robert that day, alone and by herself. She’d used his son to set up the meeting beneath the viaduct.
“Why?” Crevel had asked his boy, when he’d disturbed him with the request. “What does she mean, ‘Come before dawn,’ and what does she want with me there?” But Crevel had his suspicions, and was already working on how it should play.
“She wouldn’t tell me, Father!” Robert had been adamant, his too-honest face devoid of sense or guile or hint of danger. “She just said to come alone.”
“Don’t worry,” Crevel had said cheerily, calming his son, laying his concerns to rest. “It’s bound to be some flutter of the heart she’s had about the wedding. Some trivial detail she’s turned into a burning wish of hers.” He’d treated the summons as an elaborate fancy, reassuring his pliable boy. “She probably doesn’t want you to know about it, something she’s keeping as a surprise. I suspect it costs a little money, and her own mother has refused to comply. I’ll take care of everything, don’t worry about it at all.” And when Crevel was alone at last, and he’d seen Robert off to bed, the cogs of his mind ground industrially away, reviewing scenarios of survival and danger.
There was only a murmur from the riverbanks below them belying the power that it channeled, and a faint distant whistle of a train engine carried, the sound trickling in through the quiet. These noises and the inconvenient Irishman were his only company here.
The old politician sized him up with his keen intelligent eye. “Why have you dragged me out here under pretense, Mr. Ward? I admit I am curious to that.” He forced a smile upon his face and kept up his charade.
“You lied, Crevel,” Dermot’s voice was low and cold and flat; the time for platitudes was over. Unconsciously Ward leaned his shoulders in, but the older man did not rile.
Dermot wrestled down the impulse to cross the five yards between them. Much that was dear to him depended on his patience. Ward felt justice close at hand; it was time for retribution. “You lied,” he said once more.
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