The Returned

by Seth Patrick

  Julie felt her stomach clench and gave her neighbor a withering look. Oh, I can think of worse, she thought.

  “Good-bye, Mademoiselle Payet,” she said and went into her apartment.

  • • •

  Victor was in the kitchen, in what seemed to be his usual state: silent and eating. He gave her a gentle smile as she walked in.

  Julie sighed. She needed answers from him. “Victor? You have to talk to me now. I went to the police station. No one is looking for you. You have to tell me where you got lost or why you ran away. Was it a different town?” Victor took another bite of a cookie and watched her, smiling. He always looked as though he knew something she didn’t, and it unnerved her.

  “I can’t keep you,” she said. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t. And…I don’t have any toys. Nothing for children. You’ll be bored here.” Not even a flicker. Shit. It still felt like a staring contest, and the boy wasn’t going to blink any time soon.

  A few more days then, she thought. But no more. She would have to find a way to make some discreet inquiries, and in the meantime hope he would open up to her. Otherwise she would have no choice: hand him over to the police and throw him to the mercy of fate. Even the thought of doing that made her feel ill. She had experience with how merciful fate could be.

  He sat there looking at her, seemingly straight into her heart. Still silent, still smiling. Julie shook her head, exasperated. “Come here then. I want you to try something on.”

  A coat. She’d thought of it after leaving the police station. If nobody was looking for him, there was little need to keep him cooped up indoors all the time. And if he was going to go outside, she needed to dress him better, keep him warm. His hands were always a little cold, she reckoned.

  And she would have to get him some toys. Some paper and crayons. Something to do while she was out working, when there was no choice but to leave him in the apartment.

  Victor got down from the table. The coat was a good fit. She snipped the price tag off and hung the coat beside her own, liking how the two looked together. She thought about how odd it was, that she should be so taken by Victor and feel such a bond in so short a time.

  When she turned back to him, she gasped. The living room window was wide open, and Victor was calmly sitting on the windowsill. The apartment was four floors up. He smiled at her, then fell through the open window, out of sight.

  Horrified, she cried out and ran to the window. She looked down. Nothing was there.

  She ran down the stairs and out, breathless, still fully expecting to see a small, crumpled form lying on the ground before her. But there was nothing. It wasn’t possible. She looked up to the window of her apartment above and saw him there, watching, smiling. He waved. She stared at him, wondering if she was losing her mind. She waved back cautiously.

  Had she even seen him fall? Had she imagined it, while Victor had been inside the whole time?

  Confusion swamped her, suddenly one thought foremost. Was Victor even real? Nobody had interacted with him, perhaps he was…

  Then she thought of Nathalie Payet, and for the only time in her life she was glad her neighbor existed. She had seen him. She was the proof. The boy was real, and Julie’s mind was sound.

  More or less.

  Thinking of her neighbor reminded her of Monsieur Costa and of the woman’s comment. The worst of sins. Maybe that was all that the vision of Victor falling from the window had been: suicide on her mind. If she was honest, it had been on her mind for seven years, as an option to consider. And now she’d projected it out of herself, onto someone she’d started to feel strongly for.

  Feel. It had crept up on her. She’d started to feel strongly for another person. It was something she hadn’t allowed herself since that night in the underpass, when her life and everything in it had gone to hell.

  That evening she and Victor sat watching TV, eating dinner. She talked for both of them, asking questions and then providing the answers as he watched her with adoring eyes. Despite the strangeness of the situation it was the most normal she’d felt in a long, long time. It was good to have someone there. It was good to stop feeling so alone, so dead to the world around her.

  Come nightfall, with Victor tucked in on the sofa, Julie went to have a shower. She undressed, then looked at herself in the mirror, deliberately examining the patchwork of scars, the ghosts of the slashes and stabs and incisions she’d suffered that New Year’s Eve seven years before.

  She started to cry. But it wasn’t despair she felt. It was something much rarer, something she almost didn’t recognize. Something that had come to her the moment she’d begun to think the boy might stay, just for a while.

  Hope.

  19

  When the police came to the Lake Pub for Toni, he thought it was the wolf that had brought them.

  He had been out at dawn, hunting deer in the woods surrounding the lake, when he’d seen it: a dark shape at the far edge of a large clearing. He thought it was a dog at first. For all the whispered talk of wolves coming back to the area, he’d never seen one himself. It had probably been eighty years since the animals had had any real presence in this valley.

  It had a dark pelt—almost black—and he struggled to make out the shape as it slunk out of the shadows of the trees. It was the striking white flash on the top of the head that had first caught his attention, but when he noted the length of the legs, he realized what he was looking at. Not a dog—a wolf.

  Fascinated, he had to get closer. A big man, Toni found it hard to move in silence. His brother, Serge, had always been the natural hunter, quiet, quick, and deadly. Now, though, Toni had no choice. If he wanted to see the animal better, he had to move. He cursed gently to himself as he made his awkward way, worried that every rustle of clothing or leaves would send the animal scurrying off, but each time he stopped and looked to where the wolf had been, he had a surprise.

  The animal was still there.

  It was watching him.

  It doesn’t see me as a threat, Toni thought. And he wasn’t really. Hunting a wolf was illegal, whatever the price he could get for the pelt or the mounted head. Or even a full animal.

  The idea had appeal, of course; taxidermy was something he was good at, a hobby he enjoyed. He’d worked on plenty of foxes in his time, but a wolf would be a challenge. As he got closer, he rehearsed in his mind how he would go about it.

  It stayed where it was, watching him fearlessly, almost aggressively. That wasn’t what he expected at all, and he found it unnerving to have such an animal stand its ground like the beast of legend.

  He’d been brought up on the old superstitions surrounding the area. They were in his blood, put there by his mother and father—mainly by his mother, though. He’d only been four when his father had died. Serge, three years older, had spent much more time in the man’s company. Which, perhaps, explained how things had turned out.

  Those natural fears were bubbling up within him as the wolf watched him, but despite his cautiousness, Toni’s feet were bringing him closer, closer. It was a fascinating creature, and a beautiful one.

  And then he knew he’d come too far.

  Fifty feet away, the wolf curled its lip. The growl that came from it was deep and slow. Full of intent, and unlike the growl of any dog he’d ever heard. He could feel his bowels rumble at the noise. Instinct screamed at him to run, yet his blood seemed to chill and thicken in his legs because he found himself unable to move.

  The wolf had no such problem. It came for him.

  For an instant he was paralyzed with fear, seeing the bared teeth and imagining them ripping at his throat. With shaking arms he raised his gun. Then the long years of hunting took over, the years of Serge’s patient teaching, and he heard his dead brother’s voice in his mind: Steady, Toni. Steady.

  He shot it as it ran, bringing it down in one. It had covered half the distance
between them by the time he pulled the trigger, tumbling in a spray of leaves as its momentum carried it almost to his feet. When it breathed its last, Toni let out a cry of both victory and relief, then suddenly thought of the trouble he could find himself in.

  He had taken the carcass back to the old stone cottage, the house where he had grown up. For four years after Serge’s death, he and his mother had continued to live there together, Toni suffering his mother’s acrimony. When she’d died, he’d moved to the town, keeping the old house mainly as a hunting base, high above the lake and surrounded by pristine wilderness. The home where his mother had died, where his brother had breathed his last. Rather than be buried in the town’s cemetery beside her husband, she’d wanted to be buried beside her beloved son. Beside Serge, with a view of the valley.

  By the time Toni had gotten to the Lake Pub to open up, he’d already called a few contacts, inquiring how easy it would be to find black market buyers for a wolf. Not hard, it turned out. Within two hours, he had a firm offer for the pelt and another for the head, mounted. Satisfied with his morning, he’d had a cheerful day.

  Right up until the police walked in.

  His first thought was that the buyers had really been part of a police operation, and he’d walked straight into it. But the police would tell him nothing. A few questions down at the station, they said, that was all.

  When they got there, Toni was put in a room where he sat and waited, hoping the worst they could do was slap him with a fine. He could explain that it was self-defense, of course, given that the wolf had been about to attack him, but there was a risk they would see it as a cynical lie, making them even less sympathetic.

  Then the interview began, and he realized he’d gotten it all completely wrong. It was nothing to do with the wolf. It was much, much worse.

  The initial questions about Lucy made him think she was the one the police were targeting. He knew what people said about her, and about the men she brought up to the room above the Lake Pub. He’d always turned a blind eye to it, but perhaps it was inevitable the police would take an interest sooner or later.

  Then they’d mentioned the charges of murder and attempted murder they’d thrown at him seven years before and followed it up with the photographs of Lucy’s horrifying injuries. All he could do was stare. Lucy, attacked in exactly the same way the women had been back then.

  It wasn’t possible.

  Because Toni knew who had killed those two women and who had attacked the third. It was knowledge that he’d buried deep up on the mountain, something the police had come close to unearthing when they’d put Toni’s life under a microscope seven years ago.

  It had been Serge. And Serge was dead.

  After seeing the photographs, he didn’t hear much of what the female officer shouted at him. He was lost in a world of memories, of blood and death. The police left him for a few minutes, the captain and a different officer returning to complete the questioning. Toni gave a dazed account of the night before.

  Soon enough he was taken back to the Lake Pub. He wasn’t sure if they believed him or simply had their hands tied without evidence. He fervently hoped it was the former. The last time, people eventually seemed to accept that he’d had nothing to do with it and moved on, but he couldn’t go through all that again.

  And now a copycat killer had taken a liking to Serge’s old hobby.

  Toni found he couldn’t concentrate at the pub. He left early, putting Samuel in charge for the rest of the day. He tried to put Lucy’s attack out of his mind as much as he could. He had the wolf to deal with, and it would distract him.

  He prayed for Lucy to live. It was partly a selfish prayer, he knew, because although he liked the girl and hoped she would pull through for her own sake, if she did survive she would identify the attacker. The previous attacks would be blamed on whoever it was too, Toni’s name truly cleared at last. And there would be no chance of his life going under the microscope again, no risk of old secrets being dug up at last.

  He drove back to the cottage. As he approached the door, he could feel that something was wrong. Then he saw that the door was slightly ajar. He was sure he’d locked it when he left. He took the hatchet from the woodpile, brandishing it as he went inside.

  For a moment he wondered if the police had come here while he was in custody, taking the opportunity to poke around while he was out of the way. There was a spare key hidden around the back of the house, not that hard to find. The thought enraged him: a violation of his privacy, and the knowledge that if they found the wolf now, they would come down on him as hard as they damn well could.

  But he didn’t think the police would have been able to carry out a search without much stronger justification, and they certainly wouldn’t have released him so soon. If not the police, though, then who?

  The idea of vagrants came to him, and his grip on the hatchet tightened. His mother had always had an obsession with the idea of people living rough in the forest and turning up at the house, something that—as far as Toni knew—had never happened, but it had been burned into his mind all his life.

  “There are crazy people who live deep in the woods,” she told him more than once. “Crazy people with crazy ideas. Kill you soon as look at you.” It was the kind of paranoia that had bred a distrust of everyone outside the immediate family and that, perhaps, had bred a far greater darkness in the heart of his brother.

  Cautiously, Toni went through to the back of the house, where he kept his hunting trophies. Two dozen stuffed animals glared his way with glassy eyes. Some were his favorites, and he liked them too much to part with. The others were a little ropey, early efforts that he wouldn’t ever try to sell. Too much sentimental value, anyway; he could look at each one and remember exactly the circumstances of the hunt, remember the laughter he and Serge had shared. And he remembered the love too: brothers finding adventure among the trees, looking out for each other.

  Yes, thought Toni. It’s possible to love monsters.

  Everything in the room seemed untouched. The wolf was still hanging from the wooden beams, trussed, a hook through the rope that bound its feet. This room was always cold, so he would have plenty of time over the rest of the day to do what needed doing before there was any risk of the carcass starting to spoil. First, though, he had to check all over the house and see if anything had been disturbed or stolen by whoever had broken in.

  He went up into the attic. There were still boxes and boxes of his mother’s possessions carefully packed away up there. He had kept everything, unable to part with any of her belongings when she’d died, or any of Serge’s—but he had wanted it out of his sight. Not in the house as a constant reminder of what he’d done, that terrible betrayal. His mother’s bedroom was the one exception. That, he’d left untouched.

  He went down from the attic and made a room-by-room check until he was in the kitchen. And there it was, the only other sign of activity besides the unlocked door.

  A bird, decapitated and roughly butchered, still raw. He recognized it as a black grouse. Its unplucked skin had been pulled back from the breast to give access to the meat, ragged pieces of which still lay around the carcass, looking torn rather than cut. Its head and guts lay strewn across the table.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Toni, immediately ashamed for his blasphemy, another thing his mother had drilled into him.

  Clean it up, he told himself. Whoever had been here was gone. Some other hunter, presumably. Maybe they saw the dead wolf and fled, wanting no involvement.

  Leaving such a mess.

  He took a trash bag and gathered the pieces of flesh from around the bulk of the grouse carcass. Then he took hold of the legs and started to lift it.

  He cried out suddenly and dropped it, then stared, horrified and bemused. I just imagined it, he said to himself. But the feeling had been so real: the flesh had twitched as he held it. Just nerves firing, he tol
d himself. It can happen.

  He waited until his own nerves settled before cleaning it all up and scrubbing the blood off the table.

  The wolf was waiting for him, the challenge of the taxidermy promising to take his mind off everything. He went through and lifted the animal down from the hook, then cut the binding rope. The carcass was almost too big for his work area, a large, shallow steel basin over three feet across, but he had handled deer before, so he knew he just had to take care. The sink was on a pedestal close to the middle of the room, giving access all around.

  First, he cut around the top of the animal’s shoulders, enough to let him start to skin it. He took the pelt carefully a little way back from the nape, then stopped to look. The fur was glorious, deep black and flawless. He wondered if—maybe—he would forgo the sale of the pelt and keep it for himself. It was good money, though.

  Before he really got on with the skinning, he wanted to work out the extent of the mount, to make sure he retained enough of the fur beneath the head to make something magnificent. He sized it up and cut around, peeling the fur back, taking some of the flesh away and exposing the bones of the shoulder.

  He paused. He would have to think this through for a minute or so before he did anything else. Making a mistake with something like this would be unforgivable. He set down the blade and stepped back to mull it over. And as he thought, he was glad of it—glad that his mind could be taken up with something less miserable than a woman who was half dead and all the memories that her attack had brought back to him. And a family who, for all their faults, he had still loved.

  Decision made, he reached for the knife again.

  And he froze.

  A growl had broken the silence. At first Toni thought the sound had come from outside, surely the only place it could have originated. But as he stared in horror, the half-flayed carcass before him moved, the rear legs shifting slowly. Just nerves firing, he told himself as he had with the grouse, feeling his sanity start to fracture.