A Coming Evil

by Vivian Vande Velde

  Anne reached out a hand. "Soft," she said, which it wasn't, really, not like, for instance, a cat.

  "We could call her Mimi," Lisette suggested.

  "That's a girl's name," Etienne said in disgust. "How about Spitfire or Hawker Hurricane?"

  "Those are planes," Lisette protested.

  Obviously Etienne knew. He pulled his gas mask down over his face to look like an airplane pilot's mask, then he put his arms out and started making plane noises while divebombing Anne.

  But Lisette wasn't going to let herself get drawn into this. "You choose. Anne, you get to make the final decision." If she could have had baby Rachel choose, she would.

  "Where are you going?" Louis Jerome demanded.

  "For a walk."

  "But what if—"

  "Everything will be fine. Etienne, keep the noise down and stay close to the house."

  Etienne ignored her, which was normal.

  14.

  Wednesday, September 4, 1940

  For the first time, Lisette saw Gerard right away, without having to call him. In fact, he was waiting for her, crouched by the edge of the hill. Thankfully, it was the edge that she could see. His elbow was resting on knee, his chin on his hand, the picture of bored anticipation.

  He stood as she approached and extended his hand to help her. But then he remembered and instead stepped out of her way. "Hello, Lisette." He gave that wonderful smile. "I am happy,"—she heard the slight break as he caught himself and shifted to the more modern pronoun—"you could come."

  "And I'm happy to see you," she told him. "Have you been waiting long?"

  "A day."

  She raised her eyebrows, unsure if he was only acknowledging what she'd said previously, that she came once a day. But he continued, "This time I could feel the whole remainder of the day pass. And the night. And half the morning?"

  "Just about," she agreed. "That isn't normal?"

  He shook his head.

  "I'm sorry I can't come more often," she told him.

  "I understand. Thy aunt would not permit it."

  "Your," she corrected.

  Now he raised his eyebrows at her.

  "Your aunt would not permit it," she explained.

  "My aunt," Gerard said, "has not expressed an opinion. It is thy aunt who will not permit it." He kept a serious expression just long enough for her to wonder if he'd honestly misunderstood, then he smiled.

  Lisette fought to keep her face from showing that her heart was breaking at the unfairness of his being dead. She sat down on the ground, fussing more than was necessary to make sure her dress covered her knees. It wasn't fair. He looked perfectly healthy. She could no longer see the background through him, and realized this had nothing to do with the light. If he'd looked like this that first day, she wouldn't have even guessed he was a ghost. Well, maybe she might have guessed, she had to admit. But she wouldn't have known.

  Gerard sat crosslegged, facing her. "Thy—your," he said.

  She nodded.

  "Thine?"

  "Yours."

  He didn't speak the word, but she could see him try it out. Then he nodded.

  Then a thought occurred to him. "Does everyone in your world talk as you do?"

  "Well, no," she admitted. He looked startled, and she finished, "Only the people who speak French."

  Again the flash of teeth as he smiled, then he said something totally unintelligible.

  "What?"

  The smile faded and he repeated the same gibberish.

  "What?"

  "Can you not hear me?" he asked, raising his voice, looking as though he was about to panic, no doubt remembering those first two days.

  "I can hear you," Lisette assured him. "I just couldn't understand what you said."

  "I said, that is why we have Latin,"—he was watching her as he translated and his voice got slower and fainter—"so everybody ... can understand ... everybody." He leaned back, looking at her quizzically. "You do not speak Latin?"

  "No," she admitted.

  "You seem educated."

  "Well, thank you." She was insulted. After all, he was the one who couldn't read. "I'm only going to be starting to learn Latin this year. We just use Latin in the Mass now. You know, Hoc est enim corpus meum."

  He was obviously shocked that she would use the words of the consecration so lightly. He made the sign of the cross, but apparently that was somehow different.

  "I didn't mean that disrespectfully," she told him. "I just meant that I can understand Gloria in excelsis deo, or mea culpa, or Kyrie eleison —no, wait, that's Greek, isn't it?—but—"

  He was looking at her as though her hair had turned green.

  "Maybe priests talk to each other in Latin when they don't want the rest of us to understand," she said.

  Gerard ran his hand over his forehead as though he was beginning to get a headache. "Let us not talk of Latin anymore," he suggested.

  "That's a fine idea," Lisette told him. "What shall we talk about?"

  "You spoke of war," Gerard said.

  She nodded.

  "With Germans?"

  Again she nodded.

  "Who are Germans?"

  "I could bring a book with a map," she said, trying to remember history and geography at the same time. "Umm, Prussians?"

  He gave her another of those Lisette-has-green-hair looks.

  "Not from Italy or Spain. Not the Ottoman Empire, I don't think. Do any of those names sound familiar?" Apparently not. "Uh, Berlin. Bremen. It's where Mozart came from, maybe, and Beethoven, I'm pretty sure. The Hapsburg princes, I think, with the big noses and the lips..." She started to indicate how big, but she could tell from his face that he'd never seen the portraits that were reproduced in her history book. "Uh, Rhineland. Hamburg—"

  "Rhineland!" Gerard practically jumped on the word.

  "Rhineland," Lisette repeated. "Yes. Wonderful." It suddenly came to her: "Holy Roman Empire. I think."

  "Franks," Gerard said.

  "Franks," Lisette agreed.

  "The Franks were our allies," Gerard said, not arguing with her, just considering out loud. "The Teutonic knights."

  Teutonic: There was another word she could have used.

  "They were ... fierce. Not very smart, generally speaking, but fierce. They wore white robes with black crosses."

  Lisette shook her head to indicate none of this was familiar. "The English are our allies now," she said, "but they aren't very good allies. They bombed some of our ships just so the Germans wouldn't get them. Brigitte—she's my best friend—Brigitte's cousin's husband drowned. The Germans have posters in Paris that say, 'The English are always willing to fight until the last Frenchman is dead.' We're hoping the Americans will be better."

  It was hard to tell how much of this Gerard understood. Enough, apparently, for he said, "There were times I know of, too, when our allies caused more harm than our enemies." Then he asked, "Does the war with the Germans have anything to do with Outremer?"

  "Outremer?" she repeated.

  "The Holy Land."

  "No," she said. "You're talking about the Crusades, aren't you?" Did they call them Crusades back then? They must have, because he was nodding. "The last one was 13-something." She'd just looked up the date but couldn't remember. "Before—" She couldn't say that: Before you died. "Early. Early 1300s." He knew what she meant just the same. "Were you a knight?" she asked. He looked so natural as a boy, she kept forgetting that he had the memories of a twenty-seven-year-old man. A twenty-seven-year-old who'd been dead for six centuries. "Like Lancelot and Galahad and Percival?"

  "Who?"

  Lisette tried to think back further. "Roland and Oliver?"

  At least he knew the names. "No," Gerard said. "Not really. I belonged to the Order of the Temple of Solomon, who are monks as well as knights."

  "Templars. I've heard of them." Lisette said, delighted finally to be able to say so. "We learned about them when we studied the Crusades: Knights Templars and Kni
ghts Hospitallers."

  By his expression, Gerard didn't think too highly of her lumping together his order with that of the Knights Hospitallers. More bad allies, she guessed. But he only asked, "So they survived?"

  "Who?"

  "The Templars."

  "Oh," Lisette said. "No." He went all pale, reminding her of when she'd told him the year was 1940. It seemed she was always breaking bad news to him. "It's not just the Templars. There aren't any knights anymore." That certainly wasn't what he wanted to hear, she could tell, so she added, "Well, maybe there are ceremonial kinds of knights to guard the king of Belgium or the queen of the Netherlands. I'm not sure. But not, you know, to ride horses into battle or anything like that. Not anymore. Although maybe there are still Templars at parades and grand openings and things like that." She wasn't helping. "I don't know. Maybe." Lisette bit her lip to keep herself from babbling any further. She definitely wasn't helping. Gerard was resting his head in his hands, looking once more as though his head ached.

  "Who fights," he asked, his voice muffled by his hands, "if there are no knights?"

  "Just regular soldiers," she told him.

  "Regular soldiers?"

  "They don't wear armor because they have guns now, and guns can shoot through armor. Except the kind of armor on tanks, but they can't have a tank for each soldier, and besides tanks can't go very fast and they get stuck in the mud, which is like horses, I guess, but that's why there are no cars anymore, because they're using all the gasoline for the tanks. And there are airplanes now, too, which they didn't have back in your time. They travel in the sky." Shut up, Lisette! she told herself.

  Gerard suddenly swept to his feet. "I'm going now."

  "Where?" It was definitely her fault. "I'm sorry, I know I haven't been saying this right—"

  He yelled at her, "I don't know where I'm going. Wherever it is I exist when thou aren't there." More softly, he finished, "I am tired and I am cold and I am hungry, and I have heard enough."

  "Wait," she called after him as he started running down the slope. Guiltily she remembered how he'd called after her that day he'd gained his voice, and how she, afraid, had not looked back.

  Gerard didn't look back either. He made it almost to the bottom of the hill before disappearing, which was quite a bit farther than he'd made it the day before.

  Lisette could understand that he was upset. She'd been saying one thing after another to get him upset ever since they'd first met.

  But how could a ghost possibly be tired or cold or hungry?

  15.

  Wednesday, September 4, 1940

  As Lisette started down the hill back to the house, she saw that there was a bicycle leaning against the bushes by the front door. It wasn't Aunt Josephine's or Cecile's.

  Oh no, she thought. The children. Now what?

  She wished longingly for the days in Paris when her parents worried about her and she wasn't responsible for anyone. But while she wished, she swung by the chrysanthemum field and grabbed handfuls of blossoms: an excuse, if the visitor, whoever it was, had not already discovered the children and was still open to excuses.

  As she circled round toward the front of the house, she saw that it was a woman who had come to call. That was better than a German officer, whoever she might be and whatever her reason for being here. The woman was sitting on the front step, though that didn't prove that she hadn't looked in the house before settling there, for the door was not locked. There were five or six cigarette butts crushed out by the woman's feet, an indication that she'd been waiting for a while. Lisette wouldn't have thought she'd been away long enough for someone to smoke five or six cigarettes, but even as she watched, the woman was lighting a new one from the end of the one she was just finishing.

  "Hello, Madame," Lisette said, trying to sound neither guilty nor suspicious, but the way any normal thirteen-year-old would who'd just been out collecting fresh flowers and came back to discover a stranger on her aunt's doorstep.

  The woman drew heavily on her new cigarette and the end flared bright red. It smelled more like burning rope than regular tobacco and wasn't rolled tight and smooth, so it must have been homemade. Lisette's father smoked, but he'd already said that once real tobacco wasn't available he'd give it up rather than make do with corn silk. The woman was finally satisfied that her current cigarette wouldn't go out, so she crushed out the old one, all before saying, "Hello, my dear. Is your mother home?"

  "My mother doesn't live here," Lisette said, determined not to volunteer any information about Aunt Josephine, whom, she suspected, this woman did not know, or she wouldn't have mistaken Lisette for her daughter. The woman's movements were so precise, despite the fact that she seemed bristling with nervous energy, that she was making Lisette nervous. That was probably why she was so skinny, Lisette thought: nervous energy. Or maybe she was hungry. Some of the northern provinces had even less food than Paris. Had this woman come south begging? She looked to be closer in age to Lisette's father, who was fifty, than to Aunt Josephine. Her hair, which was cropped short and was all in curls, was almost midway in turning from black to gray. What was Lisette supposed to do about an elderly beggar woman?

  But the woman said, "You aren't Josephine LePage's daughter ... umm, Christine?" which proved that she at least knew Aunt Josephine, even if she wasn't a close friend.

  "I'm her niece."

  The woman sucked deeply on her cigarette. "Well, I'll tell you what, my dear: one of us had better give in or we'll both be sitting out here until the next full moon. And frankly, my behind is getting cold and sore from this step. My name is Eugenie Dumont, and I'm a friend of your aunt's, though she was not expecting me today. Shall I call you Josephine's niece, or Mademoiselle LePage, or what?"

  "My name is Lisette."

  Madame Dumont left the cigarette in her mouth and extended her hand to shake Lisette's. "Now, Lisette, are you going to go in and bolt the door behind you, or are you going to invite me in?"

  So she had tried the door and seen that it was unlocked, Lisette decided. Had she seen the children? Had the children seen her? Were they safely down in the basement where they belonged or were they lurking in corners, ready to be discovered if she let this woman in?

  "My dear," Madame Dumont said in exasperation, "eventually you are going to have to make a decision about something."

  Presumably Madame Dumont had knocked when she first came. If the children hadn't hidden then, it probably meant that they were making too much noise to have heard. And if they were making that much noise, then Madame Dumont had no doubt already heard them. Since she hadn't mentioned hearing noises from the supposedly empty house, maybe all was as it should be. Lisette went to open the door, saying: "I'm sorry. I'm from Paris and I'm not used to country manners." It was both to explain her hesitation and to warn the children that she was coming in with someone.

  Madame Dumont snorted before crushing out her cigarette.

  The house was totally still, the front room empty.

  "Would you like to wait here, Madame Dumont?" Lisette asked, raising her voice as much as she dared, a final warning that she wasn't alone. "Or would you like to come into the kitchen?"

  "I'd like something warm to drink," Madame Dumont said, raising her voice to match Lisette's, "if you don't mind."

  Lisette felt her cheeks grow pink. Either this woman knew exactly what was going on, or she thought Lisette was a total fool.

  Passing the staircase, she glanced up. No sign of anybody there.

  In the kitchen, all was as it should be. Lisette put the flowers she'd gathered on the table then set the kettle on the stove.

  Madame Dumont sat down at the table and lit another cigarette.

  "Let me fetch a vase for these flowers," Lisette said. She opened the basement door and was relieved to see that the flashlight was missing from its niche. Thank you, she mentally told God. At least the children were where they were safest. "No, wait," Lisette said out loud, "I think she keeps the vase unde
r the sink."

  She found a white vase that was a bit too small but she crammed the flowers in it. Hopefully they don't have any bugs, she thought as she set the vase on the counter.

  "We don't have any coffee left," she told Madame Dumont. "My aunt has been using bouillon."

  "That's fine." Madame Dumont was putting the ashes from her cigarette into her left hand, which hurt just to think about.

  As far as Lisette knew, Aunt Josephine didn't have any ashtrays, so she got out a bowl for her visitor to use. She was just passing the porch door when she heard a faint thump from there. Oh, no, she thought. Out loud she said, "Here you go, Madame Dumont." She put the bowl on the table, making as much noise about it as she could.

  Had Madame Dumont heard? She gave no indication that she had.

  From the porch came a noise as though someone was dragging something. What was the matter with them? Didn't those children have any sense at all? "So," Lisette said as brightly and as loudly as she could, "Madame Dumont. Would you like a cup or a mug?"

  "A cup would do nicely."

  Another thump.

  Lisette slammed the cup down on the table.

  Madame Dumont glanced from her to the porch to the cup and back to the porch.

  From which came the definite sound of something moving.

  Lisette leaned in close to demand Madame Dumont's attention. "Do you think you want a saucer, too?" she shouted at her.

  "My dear," Madame Dumont said, "I think we should see what's rattling around on your aunt's porch."

  "Porch?" Lisette asked.

  Another thump, and the sound of glass breaking.

  "Porch," Madame Dumont said.

  "I'm sure everything's fine there," Lisette said. "You know how old houses creak."

  Something big crashed—possibly a chair tipping over.

  Madame Dumont abandoned her cigarette to walk to the door. She opened it and Lisette tried to see past her. "I know your aunt is not a country woman," Madame Dumont said, "but, my dear, I would expect that even in Nice they would know better than to keep goats in the porch."