The night sky was clear and Louis was able to trace a discernible path as the roads were new and the moon, though small, was assisted by the stars. They walked until the sun appeared grudgingly from the horizon, Louis’s pace as slow as Modestine’s when their journey had first begun; so slow, in fact, that the donkey sometimes stopped, as she loved to do, to munch on some patches of grass.
For the first few hours, his brain played the night’s events over and over—the shouting, the screams. As much as he didn’t want to, so long as he could smell the smoke from the burning house, he couldn’t help it. The stink followed him to Pont de Montvert and beyond—it poisoned the air. Even after he was out of the deathly miasma, the stench clung to his clothes and to Modestine’s mousy fur. It was more time still before the wind had cleared the odor from them. Only then was he able to distract himself.
The sun was up and they were well into morning proper. Louis walked, eyes to the ground, tapping his leg with the goad.
He had expected to arrive in London—his next stop after this trip before heading home to Edinburgh—a new man, a changed man. In this, he was not wrong. A new and changed man he would be. He shuddered to think of the impact all of this would have. He was not built for this sort of death. A kind of death, certainly. His periods of illness had conditioned him to believe that—of his friends—he would be the one to lead them to the grave, many, many years before their time. It was something he’d come closer and closer to accepting, to the extent that the prospect didn’t incite the fear it once did.
But outright murder? The killing of innocents? This was not something he’d ever become accustomed to, surely not if he could help it. But it had been done now. He could not reverse it. Its effects were already being felt in the way his mind reeled when he thought of Clarisse and their conversation in the inn’s kitchen at Pont de Montvert, in the way his stomach lurched when he thought, not of the live, burning figures on the ground, but of the very acts of the mob. It wasn’t the visceral verity of the flesh, but the sickening debasement of the crowd; people he had so recently dined with and enjoyed the company of. Louis did not know if he could ever trust the character of anyone ever again.
How on earth could he ever explain any of this to his people? How would he describe this to Fanny? Because if he couldn’t, how could he give himself to her completely, of which he had—still had—every intention of doing. Fanny had seen so much more of life than he had. Married, had children, lived and survived along the American frontier. She rolled her own cigarettes and was a better shot with a pistol than himself. He had thought, just a short time ago, that they could go a lifetime together and he would never catch up to her in terms of experience. But he doubted that she’d seen a family burned to death in their own home. And while she might have taken the odd pot shot at some dubious native in the West, he doubted she’d ever taken aim at such an unholy beast, a werewolf. This morning, walking along a dusty French road in the Highlands, he wondered how he might explain what had happened to him in a way that would allow her to catch up to him.
But perhaps there would be nothing to catch up to, for she may just laugh and send him on his way. And he wondered if that might be a better blessing to her. For him, though, it might just be the blow that did him in.
Louis was abruptly stopped by Modestine’s ass—he’d walked right into her. She snorted and he looked up. The road they traveled was sandy and ran about halfway up from the Tarn twisting in the valley below. Above there were cliffs edged in ash trees with its lower gradients covered in Spanish chestnuts. It was a beautiful day, and the river called up to him with its rugged, throaty roar. On the breeze floated the trees’ scent as autumn worked its way around the perimeters of their green leaves, dappling everything in russet.
According to his map, they would be in the valley for some time still, and his reverie had cost them daylight and kilometers. Although it would be some time before the sun set, it was already making its way out of the gorge, leaving them in the tall shadows that grew like the trees themselves.
As they walked along, it dawned on Louis that the terrain was not changing—a road: on one side straight down, and on the other, straight up. There would be no making the next town by nightfall, and his only condolence was that he’d neither seen nor heard another human intonation or footstep for most of the day.
He scanned the cliff wall to his right, looking for more gentle inclines, which would still prevent his sleeping on them, or else he might roll down to the road, or worse, over the road and down to the river. Eventually, his eyes fell on what looked to be not one ledge, but three—the first about sixty feet up, the next about the same distance from the first, and the third still further up.
Louis goaded and pushed Modestine up to the first ledge, picking their way around the chestnuts and occasionally leaning on them for a rest. Once they reached the plateau, it was barely big enough for the both of them, so Louis unloaded Modestine and pushed her further up to the second ledge, that had just enough room for her to lie down, should she want to. He then left her with an early dinner of black bread.
He stumbled and half-slid back down to his own ledge and made his camp behind the shelter of a reasonably wide tree, sweeping as many fallen chestnuts from the path of his sleeping sack as possible. So long as Modestine stayed quiet—as she generally was prone to do—they should stay all but invisible up here. Louis arranged everything he might need nearby and resolved to be in his sack and ready to fall asleep by the time the sun went down. He would not light a lamp, or fire. He would only strike a match to light a cigarette. Until then, he had a few hours to update his journal with the latest goings on, as much as he hated to revisit them.
Before he knew it, he was straining to see his words on the paper before him. The day was making a hasty retreat far beyond the cliffs, he imagined, over fields and meadows, over cities and towns, over warm inns and burnt-out homes. Over the living and the dead.
The valley was still warm and would stay that way for most of the night. Soon, the trill of frogs from the Tarn below rose up to sing Louis to sleep, and then a wind picked up, swaying the boughs above him and reminding him, uncomfortably, of the nightmares he suffered as a child. Storms upon storms, the wind howling at every eave of the family home, blowing and blowing. He closed his eyes and without much more of a thought, he was asleep.
The night was a seemingly endless succession of waking and dreaming. First, there was a scrambling in the leaves near his head, once, twice, then three times, before he sprang up to find nothing but suspected rats. Then there was the biting and tickling of the ants crawling about his person. After that, the buzzing of mosquitoes investigating the orifices of his ears and the flapping of bats swooping down from the trees.
Between these episodes—and Louis thought likely caused by the ongoing actions of these pesky creatures as he slept—his unconscious was awash with images, voices, colors, shapes, and faces.
Sock it to me...