There were, in fact, some establishments open in Monastier at dawn. Surprisingly, Surrel had Louis meet him in a quiet billiard room off le Place du Vallat. Still bristling from the old man’s treatment of his beloved Modestine the day before, Louis sat with his shoulder to the man and refrained from joining him after he’d ordered his glass of brandy. Surrel nipped daintily at his payment, smiling at Louis, who fidgeted with the cigarette pinched between his fingers. They spoke French.
“So, what brings a gangly-looking thing like you to my country?” Surrel asked.
Louis stared at the man.
“I said I would make payment of one glass of brandy, but there was nothing in our agreement that said I should sit here and drink it with you.” Louis made to stand. “Good day.”
“Oh, come,” the old man said, reaching a hand out to Louis’s velveteen jacket and tugging it down. “You are too sensitive. Like a woman.”
Again, Louis’s hackles stirred as he sat back down.
“I’ve things to do, you know,” he said to the old man. “Certainly better things than sit here and—”
“You are heading down into Gévaudan, I hear,” said Surrel. He sipped his brandy. His hands were covered with paper cuts in various states of mend, a hazard of his trade.
“Yes, south by way of Lozère,” Louis said, interested to know why the man had acted as if he didn’t know Louis’s business and more interested to know how he did. “It hasn’t been called Gévaudan since the Revolution. Surely, you’re not that old.”
“Some days, I feel it,” Surrel said. “And sometimes, I think, when a place has been soaked with so much blood, you can never change its name.” He looked at Louis from the corner of his eye, seeing if his words had the desired effect.
Louis stared at the old man for a moment.
“Don’t tell me,” he began. “Robbers, probably murderers. And wolves.”
“Wolves are murderers,” Surrel answered.
“They are animals.”
“Not always.” Surrel took another drink. “Just like not all men are men.”
“You would think that after centuries of dealing with wolves, your people would have mastered the art by now,” Louis said. “I’ve got a pistol and if there’s trouble, man or beast, I will let fly the bullet. Simple.”
Surrel shook his head and Louis could no longer control himself.
“Stop it. Stop shaking your head. French necks are full of ball bearings,” he said, exasperated. “They cannot keep them straight.”
“The English don’t know how to deal with beasts,” the old man shot back.
“Says the man who beats his donkey, one smaller than a dog,” Louis parried.
Surrel laughed.
“Your Modestine will break your heart, Monsieur,” he said, and then leveled Louis with a look hot enough to melt the ice between them if only enough to get the message through. “But your heart, Steams, is the least of your worries.”
Louis thought of Fanny and doubted that very much. He lit another cigarette.
“And what should I be worried about?” Louis asked, falling back into his chair and flopping one leg over the other, extending them both long out in front of him.
Surrel leaned over the café table between them, close so as to not rouse the alarm of the whole village.
“The men here will not tell you because they are as afraid as the women, and the women, let me tell you, are like the children that flew off the back of your ass in the courtyard.”
Louis leaned a little closer, but still looked away, watching a solitary man knock billiard balls around a green felt field and exclaiming “a-ya!” each time he sank one.
“Gévaudan is Gévaudan and will always be Gévaudan, so long as the blood of the children and the women push its vegetables up from the soil and the citizens eat of the terror that once roamed its hills,” Surrel continued. “This I believe. And not only that, I do believe that the terror still roams. It still hunts. It kills.”
Louis was now looking at the old man, tracing the lines on his face that ran down his throat and into the collar of his shirt. Although he was old, his eyes pinned Louis.
“What,” Louis said, “on earth are you talking about?”
Surrel leaned so far over as to almost touch noses with Louis and hissed.
“The beast!”
Louis shut his eyes to the man’s flying spittle and used the tablecloth to wipe it from his lids.
“Sit back, man,” he demanded, but Surrel was animated now.
“If you can’t stomach a little bit of saliva, you will no doubt faint away from the spit of loup-garou.”
Louis’s eyes fixed on the old man and refused to budge.
“Wait just a moment,” he said and then he slapped his hand on the table. “I am a fool.”
Surrel nodded, but Louis shook it away.
“No, not in the way you think. You are the fool in that way. You and everyone else in Monastier. I should have put it together right away. The Beast, or Beasts, of Gévaudan!”
Surrel’s face lit up and he threw his hands into the air.
“Yes!”
“No!” Louis shook his head and then it was his turn to lean to Surrel. “Look here, this journey will be difficult enough without you and your countrymen needlessly frightening the breeches off me with your silly tales of werewolves.”
Surrel crossed himself. Louis rolled his eyes.
“First, how long ago was that? If memory serves, it was the 1760s, even before your bloody Revolution, which, by the way, proved your countrymen to be as vicious as any wolf on the country side.”
“But we are not talking wolves, monsieur,” Surrel growled and glared.
“You aren’t. I am. I am talking about the tragic deaths of poor villagers,” Louis argued.
“Two hundred!” Surrel yelled.
“Who were nothing more than the unlucky victims of a couple of particularly large wolves.”
“One hundred of whom were eaten!”
“When the men your king hired to hunt them down found them—”
“Jean Charles Marc Antoine Vaumesle d’Enneval and his brave son Jean-François, on September twenty-first, 1765, killed Le Loup de Chazes. Sixty kilos, two meters in length, and when they dragged its wicked carcass back to the village and stored it overnight in a citizen’s grain room, the next day it was gone.” Surrel snapped his fingers. “And in its place—”
“A man,” Louis finished. “Who?”
“They did not know his name, nor where he came from. It was what it was.”
“This is ridiculous,” Louis leaned back into his chair.
The old man emptied his glass.
“You cannot say, monsieur, that you have not been warned.”
Louis had been warned of a lot of things. He’d been warned by his father not to lose his faith in God; he’d been warned by his friends not to put faith in Fanny; and now he was being warned by these crazy Frenchmen to not embark on this journey, for fear of . . . werewolves.
“I have been warned,” he said to Surrel. “Merci.”
“Merci to you.” Surrel tipped his empty glass to Louis. “And may God have mercy on you.”
Louis thought of his father—both of his parents. He’d never seen two more broken people in his life since the day he’d admitted—after a particularly deadly episode of ill health—that he’d given up on the possibility of God. The sun, he’d thought, would never shine on the Stevenson household again, nor did he think still to this day that, if there were a God, he would smile mercifully on RLS. With his current predicament, with his heart strewn over an ocean and a continent, surely God hadn’t been merciful so far.
Louis looked at Surrel for one more moment, taking in the details of his face and hair, his garments and his smell, for his nightly notes.
“Without Modestine, how will you move your cart around?” Louis asked.
“The children!” Surrel answered and laughed.
And with that, Louis left the billiard room for his own quarters to take inventory of his pack and assemble everything for departure.
Lee Harper Oswald 
Sock it to me...