Seven Days

by Patrick Senécal

  “That dog again! That damn dog!”

  “Dog . . . what dog?”

  “That dog won’t leave me alone, it won’t stop whimpering and growling. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I can’t take it anymore!”

  Still holding the mike, he paced up and down the kitchen, looking wildly around him. Sylvie, her voice frantic, kept asking him to explain, but Bruno wasn’t listening anymore. He had suddenly realized that the whimpering was coming from the speakers, mixed with Sylvie’s sobbing. He pointed and screamed, “He’s there! He’s in there!”

  “Where? What? For goodness’ sake, Bruno, what . . .”

  Bruno dropped the mike and slammed the computer with the flat of his hand, repeating, “He’s in there! In there!”

  He stopped hitting and listened. He could hear Sylvie crying . . . and the whimpering of the dog, still there.

  He pounded the keyboard with his fists, hitting all the keys at the same time, screaming, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” until the machine went dead.

  He suddenly calmed down and stared at his dead computer, dazed.

  The dog was silent.

  Bruno rubbed his face. God, what was happening to him? He had to get ahold of himself. This was crazy!

  Had he broken the computer? He turned it on. No, everything seemed okay. He made sure everything was working properly, that each step was executed as usual, that he wasn’t forgetting anything . . .

  He leaned against the wall, put his hands on his head, and took several deep breaths.

  It didn’t make sense to get so upset. And it was careless. It was the fourth day, so it was possible—improbable, but possible—that the police would discover that Longueuil was a ruse, and would trace him to Charette. And yet, he had just burst into the apartment without taking any precautions. What if the police had been there waiting for him?

  He had to be more careful. For example, he should avoid coming to this apartment. And if he had to come back, he should make sure the coast was clear.

  So he opened the curtains wide and let the light in. When he went out and got into his car, he looked at the window. You could see the inside of the apartment perfectly. Excellent.

  He had been driving for almost ten minutes and he felt more and more calm. But at the same time, the dryness of his throat was becoming intolerable. Christ, he needed a beer! But there wasn’t any more at the cottage. Too bad, he wouldn’t drink anymore, that was all! It was probably for the best anyway. If he had lost control before, wasn’t it because of the seven or eight beers he’d had today?

  For a few minutes, his face was impassive and he kept his eyes fixed on the road lighted by his two headlights. Then he swore. Good God! He needed a beer!

  Going to a store, facing customers and maybe even talking to a clerk, was really risky, wasn’t it?

  Three hundred meters ahead, lighted by a row of streetlights, was the turnoff onto the little road to the center of the village of Saint-Mathieu-du-Parc. Normally, he would continue straight ahead to go to the cottage . . .

  He clenched his teeth. Shit! He didn’t need alcohol! It was just something he liked, a little pleasure! But alcohol made him too impulsive!

  But wasn’t there a risk that the lack of alcohol could make him even more nervous? And therefore careless?

  He hit the steering wheel twice with his fist, and at the last second, he turned onto the little road to Saint-Mathieu.

  When he reached the village, his nervousness increased. In the dark, Saint-Mathieu-du-Parc suddenly seemed threatening and full of traps. The rain had stopped, but the wet streets shone ominously under the streetlights. He drove through the calm streets, which were practically empty of traffic. He saw a few pedestrians, but no one paid any attention to his car.

  There it was, the lighted sign of a store . . .

  He stopped the car and looked around, waiting until there were no more pedestrians nearby. There was really no reason to worry—everybody thought he was in Longueuil, so no one expected to see him here in this remote hamlet. And he was disguised. He just needed to calm down. He adjusted his false beard and finally got out of the car. With a normal, confident walk, he headed toward the store entrance.

  Four customers inside. And they all turned toward him, making him freeze on the spot. A real conspiracy! Two of them, an elderly man and an obese woman, even seemed a bit curious, but Bruno told himself it was the normal reaction of a villager seeing a stranger. Nothing more.

  Walking more stiffly, he went directly to the fridges in the back and chose his beer. When the other customers were all gone, Bruno went to the counter with a case of twenty-four and put it down heavily. Another customer came in, greeted the woman at the cash register, and, without a glance at Bruno, walked to the magazine stand at the back.

  The cashier, a woman of about fifty with orangey-red hair, looked at Bruno for a moment, maybe a little too interestedly, and then, after punching in his purchase, announced the price in a dull voice. Bruno handed her a hundred-dollar bill, which seemed to impress her.

  Too many details that attracted attention, far too many!

  Nervously he looked down at the floor and noticed a pile of copies of a Montreal tabloid newspaper. The main headline announced a murder, a crime of passion, but he thought he saw his name in a smaller headline at the top. He bent slightly and read: STILL NO TRACE OF DR. HAMEL! He bent more to try to make out the words of the story.

  And that’s when the disaster occurred.

  A little tipsy after the eight beers he had drunk, he felt himself falling, and grabbed the counter to catch himself. The movement was too sudden. Was it because his balding skull was sweating? Or because he hadn’t put his wig on properly? In any case, the wig slid forward and fell off. He caught it just before it hit the floor, and frantically stuck it back on his head. He felt eyes on him and turned toward the counter.

  The cashier was holding his change, staring at him.

  In spite of the ice suddenly running through his veins, Bruno held out his hand for his change in as natural a gesture as possible, but his fingers were trembling. The cashier did not give him the money. In an even voice, speaking slowly, she said, “I recognize you.”

  Bruno felt the beer turning to acid in his belly and he grimaced with nausea. He glanced toward the magazine stand. The customer was skimming through porn magazines, lost in his fantasies. Bruno looked back at the cashier at a loss for what to do. He could always make a run for the door, but that would only delay the inevitable. The police would go through Saint-Mathieu-du-Parc with a fine-tooth comb and it would be all over for him in a few hours.

  Still, that would give him time to finish off the monster . . .

  So Bruno was tensing his muscles to sprint when the woman leaned over the counter and, looking into his eyes, whispered in a confiding tone, “I’m with you . . .”

  And she gave him a conspiratorial little smile.

  Bruno forgot to breathe. He should have felt relieved, and he did to some extent, but above all, he felt as if he had received an actual electric shock. His extended hand was no longer trembling. He had become a statue standing staring at the cashier, his mouth gaping.

  She looked natural again, and put the money in his hand, which he was still holding out. She said, “Thank you, good night.”

  Without another glance at Bruno, she went back to some papers she was filling out on the counter. But you could sense a quiet satisfaction emanating from her.

  Bruno finally moved. He pocketed the money, took the case of beer, and walked to the door. His movements were uncoordinated, as if his whole body was off balance. Before pushing the door open, he took one last glance at the cashier. She was looking after the other customer, who was now buying a magazine.

  On the way back, once out of the village, he suddenly understood what had just happened, and above all, what was going to happen. The cashier wouldn’t talk to anybody about this incident, it would be her secret, at least until Monday, when everything would be over, an
d she would tell her friends with pride and a clear conscience the incredible news that secretly, modestly, she had helped the avenger.

  Bruno braked abruptly. He got out of the car, opened the trunk, took out a beer, and gulped down half of it. He leaned against the hood and closed his eyes with a sigh.

  The dark road was deserted. It had begun raining again. On both sides, the forest was dark and quiet.

  The store cashier reappeared in his mind. Her knowing look, her conspiratorial smile . . .

  I’m with you . . .

  He gulped down the rest of the bottle of beer.

  * * *

  From the tape recorder on the little table in the living room came the sound of Sylvie crying, metallic and with some static.

  “Lord, it’s . . . You’re babbling. You’ve completely lost your mind!”

  “Stop saying that, you bitch! Stop it right now!”

  Mercure was sitting in a chair near the table with his hands folded, listening with a certain discomfort to this terrible conversation. Sylvie was standing near the bookcase trying to look dignified, but her despair was palpable. Her sister Josée had tactfully gone back to the kitchen.

  Less than an hour before, Mercure had been at the station viewing the last of the four cassettes of the Jutras-Hamel family. He must have had about forty-five minutes left to watch when someone came to tell him that the bug they had put on Sylvie’s telephone had been activated. Sylvie was talking to Hamel. Mercure had dashed into Wagner’s office to ask if the triangulation was operational.

  “No, only in an hour. The boys in Longueuil just got the equipment and . . .”

  Mercure had almost lost his temper, but had stopped himself and hurried over to Sylvie’s house.

  “That dog again! That damn dog!”

  “Dog . . . what dog?”

  Mercure leaned his head forward, frowning.

  “That dog won’t leave me alone, it won’t stop whimpering and growling. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I can’t take it anymore!”

  Then came the sound of angry blows, while Hamel repeated several times, “Shut up!” Suddenly there was a click, and then the dial tone indicated that the line had been cut.

  Mercure leaned back in his armchair, stroking his cheek with the tips of his fingers.

  “He was hitting something, like a keyboard . . . a computer keyboard . . .”

  He took out his notebook to make a few notes.

  “Anything missing from his office?”

  “As I told you the other day, I didn’t notice anything, but I never go into that room, so . . .”

  He reread one or two of the preceding pages and asked, “You really don’t have any idea what that business with the dog might mean?”

  Sylvie finally sat down with a sigh. Mercure regretted harassing her this way. Obviously, she felt like going to bed . . . and waking up in a month, maybe later.

  “Sorry, but I don’t understand it any more than you do.”

  “It seems like he’s getting more and more obsessive about those dog sounds. They even made him completely lose control.”

  Was there something they could do with this obsession? Mercure thought there was something there, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it yet. He leafed through his notebook, thinking, and then said, “The Picasso painting, upstairs, uh . . .”

  “Guernica? It’s such a violent painting.”

  “Precisely. You told me your partner was a pacifist, against violence.”

  “You can be against violence and still be fascinated by it, don’t you think?”

  “That’s true.”

  And he suddenly thought of his wife and of Demers and his visits to him.

  “That’s exactly the case with Bruno,” continued Sylvie. “The painting shows it very clearly too. It shows that man is the victim of war, but also that war is made by man. That is what’s represented by that awful bull’s head in the painting: civilized people can become monsters.”

  “Is that what Picasso was trying to show with that bull?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s how Bruno saw it. It fascinated and terrified him at the same time.”

  Mercure nodded. It seemed to him that a clearer image was developing in his mind, even though it was one of unfathomable darkness.

  When he was leaving, with one foot already out the door, he said, “If he calls again, phone the station, even during the night.”

  “He won’t call again.”

  She had said that with a certain coldness. Holding the door open, she had such a hard look on her face that every trace of despair had disappeared from it.

  “What do you mean?” asked Mercure.

  “You heard him on the tape recorder . . . Nothing is possible between us anymore. However this story ends, there can’t be anything between us after that.”

  “You really think so? You don’t love him anymore?”

  A hint of despair finally showed through her mask of ice.

  “I loved Bruno Hamel. I can’t love a bull . . .”

  * * *

  He got back to the cottage at six fifty-five. He put several bottles of beer in the fridge and, reeling a bit, took one with him and went and sat down in the living room, where he took a big swig. He was drunk, and now he knew it. He had to stop drinking or soon he would no longer be capable of amusing himself with the monster. An hour or two of TV would sober him up. He put his beer down on the floor and decided not to finish it. His eyes dull, he started watching a game show.

  But he was still thinking about Sylvie, about what she had said. So after barely thirty minutes, he abruptly shut off the TV, plunging the living room into darkness. He’d had enough stupidity for one night. He went to his prisoner’s room.

  The monster, slumped on the floor, sat up slightly. He saw that his tormentor had been drinking, and fear appeared on his face . . . that constant, recurring fear.

  With quick but slightly clumsy movements, Bruno turned the crank, went over to the table and opened the rings. The monster started begging again, crying, saying he couldn’t take any more. Bruno didn’t even look at him. All this whining was starting to get on his nerves. Anger was brewing within him, fueled by drunkenness. Why this anger? Shouldn’t he have been excited?

  Three minutes later, the pitiful body was lying horizontally, with the table at the height of Bruno’s hips. His arms extended and shackled above his head, the monster was crying now without restraint, with not even the courage to beg any longer. Bruno went to his bag and came back to the monster, holding a scalpel with a long, very narrow blade. He looked at his victim for a moment . . .

  . . . and suddenly, the anger swelled, sweeping away everything else. Rage and alcohol made him so brutal, so uncontrolled that he experienced things in a series of chaotic flashes. The monster’s penis in his left hand . . . the blade cutting into the urethra, going deeper, hacking . . . blood spurting . . . apocalyptic screaming . . . How horribly Jasmine must have suffered . . . how horribly! And the flashes accelerated, the scalpel went in and out, in and out, finally cutting the glans in two.

  Bruno was becoming more and more enraged, unable to climb another rung on the ladder of satisfaction, unable to take pleasure in his torture, carried away by a flood of fury he could not contain in spite of the devastation his scalpel was wreaking.

  The screaming of the monster suddenly became continuous and shrill. It was no longer a human scream, it was totally animal now, it was becoming . . . it was becoming the long . . .

  . . . howl of a dog.

  Bruno stopped cutting and leapt back. Covered with blood, he looked in horror at the monster, who was pulling on his chains, his face convulsed with pain, and giving that long, interminable howl of a dying dog that filled the room, that filled Bruno’s drunken brain . . .

  Beside himself with rage, Bruno leapt forward and planted his scalpel in the monster’s scrotum. The blade went through a testicle and stopped against the wooden table. The howling stopped. The monster had lost consciousne
ss.

  Silence.

  Bruno remained motionless, his breathing shallow. His fury subsided, giving way to a more disturbing feeling.

  Frustration.

  But frustration with what?

  He would have liked to go at the monster again to get rid of the frustration . . . but what was the point, since he had lost consciousness?

  And Bruno felt too numb. With his fury gone, only the drunkenness remained, suddenly more tangible.

  He pulled the scalpel out of the monster’s scrotum and threw it limply into his bag. He walked to the door, reeling, and went straight to the bathroom. There was blood on his hands and face. He washed them with water. Dragging his feet, barely able to keep his balance, he went to Josh’s bedroom and took off his dirty clothes.

  His head was spinning. Nevertheless, he tried to mentally reconstruct the last few minutes. Since the coming of the darkness, he had been waiting for that moment, he had salivated at the thought of destroying that vile organ. Now he had finally done it, with a violence that should have been most satisfying . . . but the more he thought about it, the more his frustration grew.

  He went back to the bathroom and urinated for a long time, holding on to the wall with both hands. When he came out into the hallway, his peripheral vision caught a presence on his right, and he turned his head sharply.

  In the middle of the dark living room was a small silhouette, obviously that of a child. A little girl, judging by the long hair.

  Bruno stood still, holding his breath.

  He could not make out the face in the darkness. Scraps of clothing seemed to be hanging from the body. Turned toward him, the little girl remained silent and motionless.

  Bruno frantically looked for the light switch in the hallway. He turned on the light and looked into the living room. The silhouette had disappeared.

  He walked to the middle of the room and turned on a lamp. Nobody. Good God! He hadn’t drunk that much.

  Muttering, he slumped heavily into the chair, his arms dangling on either side. He stared into the emptiness, his eyes misty, cursing quietly from time to time. Because the frustration had taken root in him, deeply, inextricably, incomprehensibly.