Cocurès, Florac
He moved about the world, through time, from body to body of every age. He was in Edinburgh during his college days giving a paper at The Spec—Two Questions on the Relationship Between Christ’s Teachings and Modern Christianity—only all the faces in the audience were that of his father, looking pained and annoyed. Next, he was but a boy, coughing and coughing, his small frame shaking with every sputter that tore at his lungs, his nursemaid, Cummy, at his bedside, holding his hand, but in fact, it was not Cummy but his mother, who in reality had never been there. She shocked him into a new body and time with the words, “Smoutie, what’s that burning?”
Then, he was as he is now, twenty-eight years old, but naked amongst an eternity of trees. He heard a dog bark and he ran, but as he did he realized that he didn’t just appear there, he’d woken up there. Every part of his body ached and when he looked down, his hands were blood covered. Finally, he was older than he is now, much older, and barefoot on the bowsprit of a schooner. He could smell the ocean and taste the salt on his teeth, the wind yanking at his hair as they traveled full speed ahead, until the wood beneath his feet gave way and he plunged down into the sea.
He came to at Grez, awash in a salty ocean of sweat in his sickbed. Fanny looked to him from a chair across the room and simply shook her head.
*
He awoke exhausted to a melancholy morning and the sound of footsteps. His heart in his throat, he stretched to peer around the tree’s trunk only to find, much nearer than he’d expected, a peasant. The man trudged up a hard footpath that Louis had not noticed the previous day and passed without seeing him. Once the man was gone, Louis leapt from his sleeping sack and readied himself as quickly as possible. The workers were out to harvest and trim back the trees.
As he did, a man and a boy made their way down the incline, heading straight towards his encampment. They called to him, and he tried to respond cheerfully as he rushed around dressing. By the time they’d reached him, he had his boots on and was pulling on his gaiters when the man spoke.
“You have slept here,” the man stated rather than asked. The boy stood a little behind him, looking at Louis suspiciously.
“Yes,” answered Louis. “As you see.”
The man’s eyes scanned Louis’s camp and fell upon the revolver that lay upon the sack, in the open.
“Why?”
“My faith,” Louis sighed. “I was tired.”
“Where are you going?”
Louis pointed down to the road in the direction of Florac.
“What have you eaten?”
“Pardon?”
The man repeated his question, undeterred. Louis realized he was keeping track of his crop.
“Oh, I ate a meal from my pack.”
“C’est bien,” the man said, more to the boy than to Louis. And, without another word or gesture, the pair walked two trees away from where Louis had camped and began to prune.
Louis stowed the revolver into the waist of his trousers and after collecting Modestine and packing up, they were once again on the road. The morning light played prettily across the valley and the road dipped gradually to become level with the river. Here Louis made his toilet and Modestine slurped upstream from Louis’s sudsy ritual. As he shaved, he determined that he would ask every soul he met between here and Florac if they’d seen his cloaked man. Surely, he left the scene at Pont de Montvert before Louis, for he could no longer find him there.
When they were finished at the river, they continued on while Louis snacked on a piece of chocolate with one hand, and fed the donkey bits of black bread with the other. He’d passed several working men and boys heading up the road to where he’d slept the night before, all moving to their day’s work. Louis made his inquiry to each of them, but they’d either never seen such a person, or they’d seen far too many to discern the man he was looking for.
As he came around a bend, Modestine trotting briskly along, Louis stopped cold in his tracks. Ahead along the road, nearest the cliff side, was a hooded figure.
Louis stared at the form, whose head was lowered and whose feet shuffled along the edge of the road. He stuffed the chocolate he’d been carrying into a fold in Modestine’s pack and rested his now-empty hand on the butt of the pistol in his belt. They started forward again slowly, Louis pulling the donkey to the riverside, giving the stranger—who still didn’t seem to see him—a wide berth. But suddenly, as if operating with an additional sense, the person lurched toward Louis.
He gripped the handle of the gun and was about to pull it when the figure’s hood fell back just enough for him to see that it wasn’t a man at all, but a woman. She was a beggar, her clothes shabby and her hair knotted.
She said nothing, but motioned for alms. Louis let out a heavy breath and unhanded the gun quickly, happy to not have to use it. Then he dug around in a breast pocket and fished out a few coins for the woman. Before he handed them over, he spoke.
“Pardon me,” he began. “Have you seen a man—maybe your age—wearing a cloak of a dark grey color? Heading this way?” He pointed in the direction she was coming from.
The woman shook her head and held out her hand.
“Are you sure? He came this way.”
Still the woman shook her head, her eyes on the coins in his hand.
Then it struck him.
“His cloak was probably stained with blood.”
Her eyes met his and grew wide. Then she pointed back down the road, in the direction Louis was heading.
“Florac?”
The woman nodded and Louis gave her the coins, which sent her shuffling along her way, perhaps a little faster than she had been before.
Had Louis asked every peasant along the way if they’d seen a man in a bloody cloak, he suspected he’d have gotten a few affirmations. He and Modestine moved on, only to be overtaken a few minutes later by an older man, followed by a little girl driving a goat and two sheep. For a few steps, Louis was in line with the girl and feeling a little awkward, but the man slowed his pace a bit and positioned himself beside Louis.
Louis saw that the man’s face betrayed a mature age beyond what he initially thought, and he wore a tea-colored nightcap as a hat.
“You are going to Cocurès?” the man asked, smiling.
“I will get breakfast there, but then I will move on to Florac,” Louis answered, returning the smile. It was good to see a warm, welcoming face.
“Ah,” the man said as his eyes darkened. “There are bad things afoot.”
“Oh?”
“Two nights ago, a family was killed, horribly, by a crazed mob, and last night, from what I’ve heard, mysterious murders have begun at Florac.”
Louis stopped and everyone almost went on without him—Modestine, the man, the girl and her wards. But the man also stopped and came back to him, and so they all stopped.
“What do you mean, in Florac?” Louis asked the man, and they slowly began walking again, eventually regaining their pace.
“A traveler told me early this morning that they had found the bodies of three villagers past the outskirts of the town. All unrelated.”
Louis listened. Somehow, the cloaked man had made it to Florac, perhaps before Louis had even bedded down in the chestnut orchard last night.
“Terrible. People torn limb from limb.”
“Wolves?” Louis asked quietly, not knowing what sort of answer he might get.
“We in this region know wolves. This was no wolf. Nor was it the family of la Bête.”
“But how do you know?” Louis stunned himself by falling so comfortably into this conversation, as if he were a local peasant, as if he believed in werewolves. But he did. He must. He saw what he saw. And this man didn’t lose a breath.
“We know because the people of Florac are different. La Famille de la Bête live peaceably, side by side with their neighbors.”
Louis eyed the man, reluctant to ask what he felt compelled to ask.
“The members of,” he paused, “la Bête family; they manage their condition?”
“The families of this area who are cursed with the change, they raise their children, before they even begin to show the signs, that to kill is wrong. And if they begin to make the change, they get a special education.”
“And you are not of this family.”
“Non, I am not, but I have many friends of that family. All good men and women.”
They walked without speaking for a moment, listening to the bleating of the girl’s flock and the tiny tinkling of their little bells.
“I know that, in the north of the mountains, the feelings for this family are very different. And the family also recognizes that not all members have adopted their way of living.” The man shrugged. “It is what it is. There is a priest in Cocurès that I will introduce you to. He knows more about this than anyone.”
Louis winced and nodded. He thought to ask about the cloaked man, but then remembered that this fellow had come from behind, from the direction Louis had come, and so wouldn’t have seen him.
“Tragedy, what happened at Pont de Montvert,” the man thought he was changing the subject, when in fact, he was not.
“I was there.”
This time the old man stopped, but then, catching himself, started up again and trotted to regain his place.
“You were there?”
“A boy was killed. A man riled up the townspeople,” Louis explained. “It didn’t take much and once they were going, there was nothing anyone could do. I know; I tried.”
The old man patted Louis on the back and nodded.
“You were good to try,” he said.
“I’m afraid that does little to console me,” Louis replied. “But tell me, did no one survive?”
The old man sucked on his teeth and watched the ground move under his spritely feet.
“At first, both daughters had somehow made it out. The older was badly burned, and she died later that night.”
“Clarisse,” Louis said softly.
“I am sorry.” The old man’s eyes teared up at the realization that Louis knew the dead girl in some capacity.
“Her sister?”
“Alive.”
Louis nodded. That was, at least, one small saving grace, but his heart still broke when he thought of how she might go on without her mother and father, without the kinship of her sister. And had Louis not passed through? Had he not led the cloaked man straight to them? They would be having breakfast right now.
The group walked on in silence, save the sheep and goat, the rest of the way to Cocurès, where Louis ordered breakfast after stabling Modestine for her own, and the old man went off in search of the priest.
Sock it to me...