“What is with you?” she asked.
“It was that guy and his weird-ass story.”
“All right,” she said, spreading cheese thick on a piece of bread. “What did he say that freaked you out so much?”
So I told her everything I could remember about Henri’s story, going to great lengths to stick to the facts exactly as I’d heard them. When I finished, Marylou just shook her head.
“So he likes history,” she said. “And he’s a little morbid. You can’t just write him off as crazy, Charlie.”
“That’s not the word we like to use,” I corrected her.
Marylou laughed at this. I felt a little better once I’d gotten the story out. The wind didn’t seem so blustery. I took a big piece of chicken, and we talked about other things for a while, like the fact that Marylou had found a set of Ping-Pong paddles and balls when I was gone and how we could convert our table into a Ping-Pong paradise. We were just finishing up when we were startled by a knock at the door. Marylou jumped to answer it.
It wasn’t Claude, as we’d both been hoping. The news was actually a bit better than that. It was a guy, maybe Marylou’s age. He was tall and lanky, with dark curly hair cut short but uneven. He was wearing a threadbare Led Zeppelin T-shirt and ragged jeans chopped off at the knee. He had a sprig of green something or other in his hair, something off one of the many forms of plant life around us. And he was sweating profusely. All of that aside, he was pretty good looking. Well, very, actually.
He opened his mouth to speak, but I got there first, just to get it out of the way.
“Sorry,” I said. “We don’t speak French.”
“My English is so-so,” he said, coming into the room shyly and looking around our little Shire kitchen. “I am Gerard. I live in the village. I saw you earlier, walking the path. I thought I would come, say hello.”
We gazed at him stupidly. Turns out, if you’re stuck in a French cabin for days on end and a guy shows up, you basically lose your mind. Socials skills right out the window.
“Hello,” Marylou finally said. “Do you want…um…some chicken? Or cheese or…”
She pointed at the picked-apart chicken carcass on the table and the mostly eaten cheese and the remains of the bread.
“A drink!” I said, remembering the earlier hospitality. “We have Orangina!”
“A drink. Thank you.”
I poured Gerard some Orangina, and he sat at the table with us. He looked down at the glass shyly. He was a strapping boy, the kind who looked like he had been raised in these glorious fields, developing strong muscles through cheese-rolling or whatever it was you did when you were a tall French guy who grew up in a lovely village in the middle of nowhere.
“You are?” he asked.
“I’m Charlie. Charlotte.”
“Charlie Charlotte?”
“Either one,” I mumbled.
“And I’m Marylou,” my sister added. She had seen my fumble, and she wasn’t going the French-name route.
“What are you doing ’ere?” he asked.
I got in ahead of Marylou and started telling Gerard the story of Mr. 56E, Claude, the little suits of armor, Erique, the tiny frogs, all the way through Henri and his tale of woe, doom, and weirdness. This last bit seemed to catch Gerard’s attention, because he looked up at me the entire time I was talking, his bright brown eyes looking right into mine.
“Henri likes ’istory,” he said, but he certainly didn’t sound happy about it. I gathered Henri made a habit of talking death and mayhem and history to anyone who got near. Gerard just had that look on his face like he’d heard it all before.
“What do you do?” Marylou asked.
“I go to university in Lyon. I study psychology.”
Oh, the joy on Marylou’s face. A kindred spirit. She started rambling on about all the good times she’d had in the psych lab tormenting other students for eight dollars an hour. Gerard nodded and occasionally added a comment. I gathered that he was nineteen, had been at university for a year, and wasn’t as excited about being a psych major as Marylou. (No one could be, really.) He listened for a good solid hour, but I noticed that he looked at me a lot more than at Marylou.
Which was a bit odd. I just figured that Gerard would be more interested in the one that seemed a little older, saner, and into his subject, but this wasn’t the case. Every time Marylou looked away, his eyes met mine with definite interest, and I would twitch a little in excitement. I didn’t mind France at all with Gerard in the picture.
“This DS…DS…” he said in response to something Marylou was saying.
“The DSM-IV,” she said.
“Yes. I would very much like to see eet. You say you have eet?”
“Sure!” Marylou was out of her seat in a shot and up the steps to our room. The moment she left, Gerard leaned across the table, coming close to my face.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Eef you want to live, eef you love your sister, follow me now.”
“What?”
But with that he grabbed my phone and ran.
Okay, so. You’re me. You’re sitting there with one of the most beautiful guys you’ve ever seen. And he asks you if you want to live. And he steals your phone. And says you have to follow.
You follow him, right? Because what else are you going to do?
Right?
Maybe not everyone would have done that. I think some people would have immediately bolted the door behind him and started screaming. If I had been like you, if you’re one of those people, this story would have turned out a lot differently.
But I went tearing down the path after him, screaming his name. Gerard was fast, and tall, with much longer legs. He quickly outpaced me. I followed him all the way down to the dirt road, where he made a sharp turn, then he headed into the trees. I followed.
Then he was gone. I was just standing in the middle of the woods.
“I am not going to hurt you,” Gerard said.
He stepped out from a tree behind me. I backed up, finally realizing that following a thief into the middle of nowhere is a really dumb move.
“Oh,” I said.
“This is important, Charlie,” he said, stepping closer. “Did you tell your sister the story? The one Henri told you. Did you repeat eet?”
This was the last thing I was expecting to hear, and probably not the kind of thing a person who plans on attacking you says.
“What?”
“You must tell me, Charlie! Did you tell her the story? About the Law of Suspects?”
“Story?” I repeated. “That stupid story Henri told me? Yes! I told her!”
This hit him like a blow. All the muscles in his face seemed to go lax and he fell back against a tree and looked up into the branches in despair. He exhaled once, very slowly, and looked back at me.
“I’m showing you something,” he said. “You will not like eet. But you need to see eet to understand what is going on.”
He pulled his messenger bag from around his shoulders. From it he removed what appeared to be some trash. Just a bundle of plastic shopping bags. He gave them a shake, and something plopped out onto the path. Something small, like a bird. A dead one.
And I remember thinking, Why the hell is he carrying around a dead bird? So my brain kept working on the problem, and eventually it decided that the thing on the path was not a bird. So that was the good news. The bad news was…
It was a hand.
Unattached to a body.
A bluish white, bloodless, dismembered hand—cut very neatly about the spot where you’d wear a watch. It was very dirty. It was a smallish hand, but maybe all hands look small when they’re…disconnected.
For a moment I felt nothing at all, then I got very giddy. I cycled through a lot of emotions, in fact. There was a high, floaty feeling in my head. I laughed. I coughed. I stumbled and went down on all fours.
“I found eet at Henri’s house,” he said, as if my reaction was exactly what he had been expecting. “Eet was ’alf-buried in the garden by the aubergines. Something dug eet up and left eet exposed. I believe this is Henri’s wife. Well, ’er hand. The rest of her…I think is also there. Now you must listen to me. Your life is depending on eet.”
I put my face against the dirt, accidentally sniffing some of it up my nose. I think I was breathing very fast. It smelled mushroomy up this close.
“Charlie,” Gerard said, “you may feel sick but this is not the time….”
“It’s not?”
I was laughing again and snorting more dirt. He hoisted me up under my arms and got me to my feet.
“Police,” I mumbled.
“We do not have time,” he said, backing me against a tree and letting me get myself balanced. “Now you must listen, and you must try to understand. We cannot help this person….”
He pointed at the hand, which was still just flopped there, palm up, and taking in our conversation in a passive, disembodied-hand kind of way.
“But we can save you. And your sister. Either one of you could be infected. You could have passed eet to her.”
“What…are…you…talking…about?”
“This is my fault,” he said mournfully. “I must fix this.”
Gerard picked up a stick and used it to push the plastic over the hand a little, so that I would stop staring at it. He tipped my chin up to look him in the eye.
“Three weeks ago,” he began, “a very famous psychologist died in a car crash along with his wife. He left his library and papers to my university. Thousands of books and papers. I am one of five students asked to go through the papers, read them, sort them. I read through a dozen boxes, maybe more. A few days ago I came home to stay with my cousin for a visit. I was allowed to bring some papers with me. I read them on the train. Many of them were very boring, but then, I find a bundle of papers that looked very old. Attached to them is a note in the psychologist’s handwriting that says, ‘Do not read.’ So I read them. Or most of them. Eet seems that he was studying the murder impulse—how normal people can murder.”