Despite Benoît’s warning at the inn in Bouchet, Louis saw no alternative to staying the night in Langogne. More populated than Bouchet, he chose one of two inns, the one closest to the other side of the town, his morning departure point.
The evening was, much to his relief, uneventful. He was not accosted by members of a cultish wolf-family; he was not bothered unduly at all. Though he knew he should be throwing off his gloom and recording in his journal all the details of the town, the people, the rooms and the talk, he could only think of the foal’s black, staring eyes.
Louis ate a good, hot bowl of stew, so good he sopped the remainder with a requested extra hunk of bread. Full to the point of bursting, he donned his coat and fur hat, went outside for not one, but two cigarettes, allowing the rustic medicine in his belly to sooth the wounds of the day.
Two men joined him outside, but not too closely. Beside him, they spoke of the horrific find just outside the next town—the mutilated foal. They prattled and gossiped. Louis stubbed out his second cigarette half-smoked and forced himself to retire early on a straw-stuffed cot in a corner of a warm room. Here he scribbled away in his journal until he fell asleep, dreaming disjointed dreams that would evade his waking memory and be lost in his psyche forever.
He set out early the following day with the innkeeper’s prediction that a man could walk to Le Cheylard l’Évêque in an hour and a half. With Modestine, he guessed perhaps four hours. He breakfasted as he walked on a final piece of bread and followed it with a cigarette he sheltered in his sleeve. The weather had not improved since his crossing into Langogne the evening before, and, in fact, was significantly worse. It alternated rain and hail, and the wind never ceased, hastening every breed of cloud known to man: wispy, gauze-like wraiths; soupy, misshapen ogres; out-of-place, fluffy pillows; and jagged, black fiends that seemed to bare teeth to bite. They came and went overhead, sometimes drenching, sometimes merely shading, but on and on they went, running swiftly in the opposite direction, back from whence the two travelers came.
Once they crested the steep hill that led up and away from Langogne, the terrain changed dramatically. Gone were the fields and oxen, gone were the laborers of dirt and hay. Louis found himself in a landscape infinitely more familiar to him—a marshy wetland of heather greeted them and it worked more to lighten his mood than anything had since the previous day. It was almost as if his homeland had heard his heart breaking and sent along a message to say it would all be well. Admittedly, at home, the barren tracts of the Scottish moors had never been the most uplifting scenes, but they were home, and this was as close to home as he could be. Thin and twisted pines mingled amongst the yellowing birch and grey stones that protruded from the earth, skirted by lush grasses soon doomed to an early frost.
The way to Cheylard was as circuitous as a path could be and the multitude of interconnecting tracks this way and that did little to ease the journey. It was late in the afternoon when they passed through Sagnerousse, a tiny hamlet signaling the start of the Cheylard territory. Then, following two hours lost in a forest of fir, he emerged seemingly no closer to his destination—in marshes and amongst a tangle of paths over twisted hills—with dusk falling rapidly.
For some time, he’d been hearing the clank of cows’ bells that seemed to bounce from tree to tree within the wood he traveled, and now that he was clear of the wood, he was presented with about a dozen head of cattle. Beyond them, hard to distinguish in the gloaming, danced small, shadowy figures. Louis squinted, trying to force his vision to accomplish more than it ever could under such conditions; the limbs of the figures distorted in the murky evening, giving the devilish impression of imps. As he and Modestine passed, he could now see that these strange, unearthly beings were, in fact, children. Young herders like the girl in Bochet.
They followed each other in a circular pattern, round and round, joining hands and letting go, calling some rhyme that Louis could not make out. In any other setting, in a better light, at a more clear time of day, the dancing and playing of children would have warmed the heart and eased the adult mind. But here, on the yawning French moors, surrounded by a creeping, malevolent fog that swirled about the trees like a serpent, the vision was unsettling.
Louis felt superstition crawl slowly up his back and over his shoulder, whispering some pestilence in his ear. He shook it off and recalled that he was a reader of Herbert Spencer, refusing to fall victim to such folly. He tried to steer Modestine on, and so long as she was on a path she moved fairly forward, but once off and amid the heather, she became disoriented. Her step took on the circular course of lost travelers and if left on her own, she’d wander in circles until daybreak.
For Louis, between the dancing of the children and the circles Modestine seemed intent on tracing, the effect was dizzying. He hauled her by the bridle to right her way as much as he could see to. The children and cattle were now disbanding, save for two girls who followed him as he made his way to a collection of houses.
The first man he asked direction simply went into his abode and shut the door. The second man pointed to some vague course that led Louis nowhere and plainly watched him with amusement as he turned Modestine back to the houses in frustration. Finally, Louis turned to the two girls, who’d been standing by observing with pleasure.
“The way to Cheylard, s’il vous plait,” he said. There was a brief break in the rain and the wind lowed to a strong breeze that whistled around the dwellings.
One girl stuck her tongue out at him, and then both girls performed childish gestures that Louis could not interpret but knew could not be flattering. He sighed. The girls were blond, and yet one cultivated the thickest eyebrows Louis had ever seen on any young face, and dark as his own mustache.
“Why don’t you follow the cows?” the heavy-browed girl said, and she elbowed her companion who giggled uncontrollably.
Surely, Louis thought, La Bête du Gévaudan must have had good reason to eat so many children of this region. He turned from them as true night hung by a slender fiber over their heads.
Louis had, by this time, forgotten anything that Benoît, the man at Bouchet with the wounded wife, had warned. The immediate situation was too pressing, and he trudged on through the boggy evening, through another copse of trees, and finally onto a reasonably traveled road. Opposite the trees he found the hamlet of Fouzilhic—three houses nestled in the side of a hill covered with birch. The name itself brought the warnings from Bouchet back to him. Fouzilhic. Steer clear.
But he’d already made it through Langogne unscathed, and when he now came upon a charming old man, he knew this must not be the collection of families that harbored the infamous one unnamed. The man walked with Louis in the intermittent rain and set him securely on the road to Cheylard. When Louis insisted on rewarding him, he flatly refused, and upon being pressed on the matter, he shook his hands above his head menacingly, fingers crooked, and shrieking his rejection. Louis accepted this as some strange local convention and goaded Modestine forward after many thanks.
Despite the rain, which came harder now, Louis felt more at ease than he had all day. So long as he kept to the road, he should find himself at Cheylard in no time, drying out before a fire and sitting down to a proper meal. And then, almost all at once, night plummeted down about them. The pale of the road before him disappeared, so black was this night. The faint gleam of a rock was no longer helpful in determining the way and could have indicated a path off in any direction. Louis could not see his own hands, let alone the goad, and even less Modestine’s rump to prod, nor could he distinguish the sky from the horizon, so pitch-black was this night.
Louis shuffled along the track, Modestine’s bridle in hand, pulling her whenever she tended toward another circular course. So long as he felt gravel under his feet, he could be plausibly sure of the road, but when a sudden clump of turf claimed his toe and movement in all directions indicated a split in as many routes, Louis heaved a deep sigh and decided to let his partner chose the way. Perhaps her animal instinct would prove better than his human judgment. Certainly, his human judgment had failed, for soon she wandered aimlessly off the road and over the stony sod. She had the instincts of an ass. And now, all signs of the path had vanished, eaten up by the hungry dark.
He thought for a moment to just stop and camp, but without water to drink—though drenched to the bone—it would be an unpleasant night indeed, and so he rallied his fellow traveler and turned around, resolving to return to Fouzilhic.
Adrift and somewhat bewildered by the blind terrain—a wind that blew in all directions at once, unscalable rocky barriers, and shin-deep bogs that sent up smells worse than the filthiest gutters of Paris—Louis and Modestine pushed forward, which was now back, or so he hoped. Eventually, perseverance paid off and a scatter of warmly lighted windows appeared through the oppressive darkness.
Sock it to me...