Louis thought to call his bluff, thinking somewhat gallantly that his life was secure so long as he and he alone could write this maniac’s story. This man needed him to provide his ultimate ambition—to be a famous killer of monsters, slayer of beasts. But the wavering passion in his voice betrayed his insanity, and with that, Louis knew the state of affairs was truly volatile.
Louis pulled his pistol slowly from his belt. He was damned no matter his answer.
“I will write not one single word of you and your exploits. You will die, as you have lived, in insignificance.”
The man stood still for a fraction of an instant.
“C’est la vie,” he said, and Louis heard the man’s footsteps hurry toward him. He readied his pistol, hands shaking, horrified at what evil sort of monster was but moments away from lunging into the room, this small pocket of light.
At that moment, louder than he had expected, the hinge of the entrance screamed through the passageway, and the cloaked man’s footsteps stopped.
The door slammed shut.
“Is that your priest?” the man asked and sighed as if he just couldn’t be bothered.
Louis said nothing, but listened, closing his eyes the better to hear. He thought he could detect a faint padding sound, and then a low growl. It sounded one or two times, deep and indistinct, but then grew in intensity.
The cloaked man said nothing, but Louis knew he had him. If the other side was occupied by what he suspected, he guessed the man would prefer to run towards himself.
“If you approach,” Louis called. “I will shoot.”
He leveled the barrel at the door once more and thought he could hear some muttering, swearing under breath. And then, quite suddenly, there was a struggle.
Louis ran to the door and looked blindly down the corridor, but the thrashing occurred around a corner and it was too dark to see anyway. A door opened, but did not shut, and the man started screaming.
The sound froze Louis to the spot. His mind urged him forward, unsure as to whether he intended to assist the man or the beast, but his instinct for self-preservation grounded him firmly. He cursed and fought to free himself from his fear.
The noise shifted—the screaming and the growling, the scraping of shoe soles and the metallic clank of those vicious metal claws—sounding as if it was moving. And then, running footsteps.
Louis readied his aim once more, but the sound moved away instead of toward him. The distant door bawled and slammed shut, and then again almost immediately. Upon that second exit, Louis most certainly heard Modestine wail.
Without thinking, Louis ran into the darkness. He slammed against every wall that leapt before him, sliding into the corners and swiftly, if awkwardly, followed the passage’s shifting directions. Finally, he crashed into the entry, felt desperately for the handle, and was almost deafened by the door’s squeal.
He hadn’t been aware of how oppressive the prison cellar was until now, as the fresh night air rushed into his lungs and brought him closer to his senses.
From the lighted guards’ room to the exterior of the prison, the black corridor between helped him adjust his sight so that here, now, he was able to discern the arrangement. Modestine blocked the cloaked man’s escape and compelled him to evade the violent abuse of her small, but sharp hooves.
“Damnable beast!” the man yelled, but there was panic in his voice.
In chorus with the donkey’s cries and the man’s angry, frightened yelling, Louis could distinguish another sound—the low growl he’d heard from the prison passageway. And to his left, Louis saw it—it was a beast, of Le Famille de la Bête.
Louis raised his revolver to the man, but in the dark he could not make a true aim. If he fired, he risked shooting the poor, terrified animal whom he had grown to consider a stubborn, but endearing friend.
Finally, the frenzied donkey let forth an agonizing screech and lurched sideways. The fiend had managed to get close enough to use his weapon. Louis’s throat constricted at the sound of her distress, and as the man made his way around her still bucking form, Louis aimed and fired.
The whole picture played out over an age. As Louis heard the refrain of the shot, and the field before him lit up with the blast, the beast flew, a mass of coarse fur and teeth.
Louis’s brain either conflated this with his experience at Our Lady of the Snows, or in reality, this creature looked almost identical to the one whom he had wounded, the one they called Alphonse, the man from Fouzilhac. Its back bristled auburn and black stripes; its yellow eyes flashed and rolled in their strange, otherworldly hollows.
Modestine reared again, and then came down and braced herself to kick. When she did, she clipped the man’s shoulder, enough to send him stumbling backwards, into the clutches of the creature.
It snarled at the brutal connection with its foe, taking the man to the ground with little effort.
The cloaked man screamed, and by the anemic moonlight Louis could scarcely make out their struggle, though he was more relieved at this than not. Modestine stood nearby, panting and grunting from her efforts. He was glad to see her upright and hoped her wound wasn’t severe enough that she might not stay that way. In the dark, he made his way to her cautiously for fear of startling her, then he laid his hand on her neck gently.
“Now, now, my little heroine,” he said softly to her. She must have recognized his smell, or his voice, for she leaned into him and calmed almost immediately.
Meanwhile, the cloaked man kicked and flailed in his attempt to free himself from the grip of the thing that pinned him. Louis led Modestine a little further away, leaving the animal to do its work when from the darkness emerged yet another Beast of Gévaudan!
“My God . . .” he breathed, but no one and nothing heard him but the donkey, who had calmed at Louis’s touch, and breathed deeply and evenly.
The second beast swiftly approached the combating enemies and pushed the first beast from the man. As the two creatures sized each other up, the man labored to his feet, his balance unsure.
“Shoot them!” he yelled to Louis. The absurdity of the man’s request struck him so that he actually tore his eyes from the confrontation he was able to detect in the dark and look to him.
“Shoot them, you fool!” the man shouted again.
Impulsively, confused, Louis raised his revolver, but aimed nowhere in particular and lowered it again. Then, coming near to his senses, he raised it once more, aiming it at the cloaked man, though he was hesitant as to the man’s precise location. He watched the unsteady shadow of a figure and tried to draw as sure a bead as possible. Before he could pull the trigger, the man turned and ran toward the path, in an attempt, Louis assumed, to make it to the light of Florac.
Without pause, the second beast to arrive on the scene broke into a run for the man and a moment later Louis heard the man scream, the sound of which ended with an abrupt jolt as he presumably hit the ground. The first beast—the one which chased the man from the prison—limped casually over to Louis, where it sat back on its haunches just a few feet away. Louis lowered his pistol and looked to the beast, who blinked matter-of-factly at him.
Louis was stunned.
He maintained eye contact with the monster, acutely aware of the thing’s size, its proximity, until it looked away, licking its lips, like a dog having filched scraps from the table.
As he tightened his grip on Modestine’s bridle—who seemed to care not that this hideous brute sat so close to them—Louis looked out into the darkness. He could tell by the quality and nature of his screams that the man was trying to crawl away, but was too grievously wounded to make it very far.
“Pour l’amour de Dieu! Shoot! Shoot!” His cries erupted desperately and with the ensuing cacophony of horror, Louis’s knees went weak and he sank beside Modestine, his fingers still hooked into her bridle. He leaned his forehead against her front leg. He could feel moisture there, probably where she was wounded, but she made no indication that it was tender to her, and so he stayed there. He tried to think of other things—anything—to block out the torturous, terrified shrieks of the cloaked man, and the pained yelps of the beast that tore him to shreds. It seemed to last for an eternity and the man’s screams occasionally rippled and bellowed out somewhat broken as the beast worked at his chest. He could hear the man’s cloak tearing and the wetness of his now mutilated form giving way to the claws of the creature. Louis thought he heard one of the clawed weapons bounce some distance from the struggle, and he thought only, and there goes half of your defenses. He thought this without pity.
Louis squeezed his eyes closed and tried to focus on the sound of Modestine’s breath, but he could only retract so far as the pant of the large beast that sat so close to him. Instead, he pictured the faces of his friends, one after another, in as much detail as he could manage. Then, he formed the faces of his parents, and then Cummy, his childhood nanny. Finally, he saw Fanny, looking as she did at Grez, tired and troubled, and she had never seemed so inviting as right now.
Had she ever said or done any of those things at Grez, or did she only at night, only when he slept, when he dreamed?
Just as he seemed to leave this place, if not in body but in mind, he became aware of what proved to be the cloaked man’s final, gurgling wail. Then, as suddenly as it had attacked, the beast had turned from the prone body of the man and walked back to its companion, snout sopping with gore. The two beasts seemed to confer, sniffing each other’s faces and blinking their alien eyes, and then the bloody muzzle turned toward Louis and exhaled what he could only interpret as some sort of acknowledgement.
Their eyes met, and Louis saw that this beast’s were not yellow like the first, nor like the one they called Alphonse, but they were a light blue, like an English teacup. He nodded to the creature and then both beasts up and trotted off into the night.
As they did, it struck Louis that, through the duration of the attack, he’d heard something, but he failed to realize it fully through the shock of it all. Though he heard it now, and it faded in the distance with the retreating werewolves—the soft tinkling of the foal’s bell.
Louis sat for a moment, one hand tangled in Modestine’s bridle, the other reaching up and petting her cheek. The revolver now lay at his knees on the ground. His mind raced over what had just occurred, and then he stretched a little and kissed the donkey’s nose.
Next, faintly, he heard a wheeze coming from the direction of the man. Louis’s blood froze. Then a gurgle and a halting gasp. The cloaked man, astonishingly, still lived.
Louis located his smoking matches, released Modestine’s bridle, and cautiously made his way to the man lying in the middle of the cattle path. Indeed, the man was alive, but only one limb—an arm—moved, slowly but spastically. Louis kept his distance to at least that arm’s length, as a precaution. He pulled a match from its little box, and after a moment’s hesitation, he struck it.
In the revealing, horrific flash, Louis saw a sight he could never unsee, one that he regretted instantly and, just as the flame flared and settled, he shook it out and moaned. He stood, night-blind from the burst of light, his mind reeling at the awful vision.
At his feet, in the darkest dark, the voice of the man rasped, clearly falling into an abyss from which he would never return.
“Tell me,” he struggled. “Did she break your heart, Monsieur Steams?”
And finally, Louis placed the voice—the voice he’d last knowingly heard in a billiard room on an early morning in Monastier. He’d bought this man a brandy.
Surrel.
Louis listened to the man’s labored breathing, and the simple image of the bully beating the poor donkey—let alone all the truly ghastly tragedies he’d authored since—dissolved whatever remaining trace of compassion he’d felt for the man.
He leaned down to the dying fiend, who twisted on the ground like a worm out of dirt, close enough for him to hear.
“Non,” Louis answered. “She saved me.”
He then stalked back to Modestine, leaving Surrel, the pamphleteer—the murderer, the monster—to die alone in the dark, on his back like an insect, and staring up at the heavens that would never accept his putrid soul.
Sock it to me...