by Libba Bray
“I do not want to believe eet myself. But my cousin and her husband are dead. And Henri has just buried a body in his garden. And he has told you a story exactly as I described. The next steps are clear. Henri will die, and either you or your sister will be infected. It can only be one. Before the night is over, one will kill the other, and then commit suicide.”
This was not possible. None of it was possible. But there was a hand. And I remembered how I felt after Henri spoke to me. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t normal. Something had happened.
“According to his notes,” he said, “there is a way. There have been cases where people have been spared because they went to safety, or were alone. You must both put yourself in a place where you cannot hurt anyone.”
A silence fell between us. From far away, I heard Marylou calling for me. This brought me back to the reality of being in the woods with Gerard and the hand.
“Please, Charlie,” he begged, getting up. “Do not go back. Look. I have…I have water and food. Here. Enough for one night.”
More things were produced from the bag. A bottle of water. Some candy bars. A small flashlight. He set the food on the ground and pressed the flashlight into my hand.
“Henri knows what he has done. He has passed the story on. His time is ending. Eef you go now, eef you can get through until morning, then you will be fine. You simply need to be isolated. Take these things and spend the night out here, as far from the house as you can get. As far from the village. You get lost.”
“Oh,” I said, laughing now. “I see. I get lost in the woods for the night. Sounds great, Gerard. Sounds like a plan. And why did you have to tell this to me out here?”
“Your sister would not believe me,” he said simply. “But I felt you would. I hope you do.”
The sky had gotten darker and the air soupier. The storm Henri had promised earlier was sitting on top of us, waiting to erupt. I stared at the water and the candy. Food that had been in a bag with a severed hand.
“You’re right about one thing,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”
I turned and started walking back. I heard Gerard calling to me, pleading. But I kept going. He did not follow me.
As I pushed back through the branches, following the sound of Marylou’s voice to the house, I assessed my situation. That it was a real hand, I was sure. That was the big thing here. Someone was dead. And Henri’s bare bathroom, stripped of anything that might…soak up blood. Towels and paper. If I was going to cut up a body, I’d do it in a tub. Then I’d wash the tub and bleach it. Then I’d get rid of everything else. Yes, that made sense. So Gerard had had a trauma and thought this was all based on some story. Grief and guilt had confused him. But there was still a danger here, and that danger was Henri. Henri knew where we lived. He knew our phones didn’t work. He knew we were alone. Which meant that I had to convince Marylou that we needed to get out right now.
Everything looked blurry and odd. I started to run, paying no attention to the tiny frogs that might be under my feet, feeling like I was bouncing high with each step. The slowly darkening sky looked like one of the landscapes that Van Gogh used to paint here: swirly clouds against a bright palette of sunset colors. The view of the house throbbed in time with my pulse. Marylou was waiting for me at the open door, looking furious, still holding her trusty DSM-IV.
“There you are!” she said. “I left for two minutes and you were gone! What the hell is going on?”
I pushed her inside and bolted the door behind me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked as I slumped on one of the kitchen benches. “Charlie, you look sick. You’re so pale.”
She was not going to believe the hand. Not, not, not going to believe it. It would take something else, something more plausible. It would take a lie. A megaton of a lie.
I had one in a second.
“Gerard,” I said. “That guy. He’s nuts. He stole my phone, and he ran out. I chased him, and he tried to attack me. I just barely got away. He’s still out there. We have to get out of here.”
“What?” she said, coming to sit by me and putting an arm around my shoulders. “Charlie…did he hurt you?”
“I’m fine. I hit him. With this.” I held up the flashlight. “I don’t know what he was going to do with it, but I got it off of him and I hit him with it. I whacked him in the head, hard, and he kind of ran off. Now we have to get out, get to the village, and get help. This is not a lie. Look at me.”
I could see Marylou testing out the plausibility of my story in her head. I have to say, I gave a magnificent performance. What I was saying wasn’t exactly true, but the sentiment behind it certainly was. My fear was real. And I had his flashlight. And she had probably seen him running. There was a lot to back up my story.
Marylou got up and paced the kitchen while she weighed the facts. I saw acceptance flash over her face.
“How old do you think he was?” she asked. “Eighteen? Nineteen? It’s common for people that age to experience a minor psychotic break.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said, swallowing hard.
“If he’s out there, we need to stay in here. We need to lock everything.”
“No,” I countered quickly. “He said he’d come back. He said he’d get in. This is our only shot. If we go right now, we could get to town before he catches up with us.”
Marylou stepped back from the bench and put her hands on her hips, looking worriedly around the room.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Here.”
She went to the hooks at the back of the kitchen and pulled down two of the heavy green rain slickers that were hanging there.
“Put that on,” she said, dropping one of the slickers on the table. “It’s going to rain.”
She rattled around in one of the kitchen drawers and produced a heavy carving knife, which she passed to me.
“Put this in something,” she said.
“What’s this for?”
“Protection. I’m going to close the rest of the shutters upstairs. You do the ones down here.”
Up the stairs she went. I went into the other two rooms and shut the shutters against nothing, then put on my slicker.
“I found this too,” she said, running back down the stairs. It was a piece of heavy pipe, about a foot long, that looked like a section of something much larger. “If he comes near us, this will knock him out.”
My sister was surprisingly good with the improvised weaponry, especially for someone who couldn’t even handle a spider. If Gerard was watching, I prayed that he just avoided us.
The air tasted moist, and everything smelled deeply of earth and wet lavender. It was a strange sky, everything going soft and fuzzy in the greenish diffused light. The frogs were out in full froggy force, and we practically had to dance down the path to avoid them. Aside from the wildly chirping cicadas, there was no noise except our feet on the gravel. The trees and heavy air seemed to soak up and muffle all other noise.
We saw no one on our walk. Marylou had the pipe at the ready the entire time. It started to rain after the first mile or so. It came down hard, making a deafening racket on the hoods of the heavy slickers. The pits in the road filled with water and were impossible to see, so we kept tripping into them.
The rain had one advantage, though. It made visibility poor. When we got to Henri’s cottage, it was easy to block Marylou’s field of vision and keep her looking the other way so she couldn’t spot it through the trees. We got past it, about another quarter mile or so, before my illusions of safety were shattered. We found him standing in the road, staring at nothing. Henri raised a hand in distracted greeting. He didn’t seem to notice the pounding rain. A cigarette disintegrated in his hand.
“My dog,” he said loudly. “I cannot find my dog.”
There was nothing I could do. Marylou was instantly rambling our dilemma at Henri, who didn’t seem to understand a word of it, but he pointed back toward his house. Marylou followed. So I did too.
It
was humid in the kitchen now. Henri had been cutting onions. Loads of them. They were piled on the counter, a dozen or so. The cutting board on the table was piled high with them, sliced and chopped, an overflowing bowl next to it as well.
“I am making soup,” he said tonelessly. “Onion soup.”
A small television and DVD player sat on the end of the table, and Mission: Impossible (in French of course) was on, and Tom Cruise was doing his little Tom Cruise run.
“We need to call the police,” Marylou said. “A guy came to our cottage today. What was his name? Ger…Gerald?”
I made no effort to correct her, but it was a small village and Henri knew who she meant.
“There is a Gerard,” he said.
“That’s him,” Marylou said, nodding. “Kind of tall? Dark curly hair?”
“That sounds like Gerard.”
Henri didn’t seem too concerned about all of this. He pulled a bulb of garlic from a rope hanging in the corner and sat down at his cutting board. He took a moment to put a fresh cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. Then he picked up the enormous knife. I reached for Marylou to pull her back, but he merely gave the garlic a massive thwack with the side of the knife to break it into cloves.
“My mother would cook the onions for hours,” he said. “In two bottles of wine. She would add them slowly, drip by drip.”
Smack, smack, smack. He whacked each clove of garlic, shattering the papery skin and breaking it off with his fingers. Marylou looked at me sideways and tried again. The heat and humid stench of onions in the room took my breath away.
“A phone,” she said. “We need to call the police. He attacked Charlie.”
“He attacked you?” Henri asked, not sounding overly concerned. “This surprises me.”
“He did,” Marylou assured him, thus spreading my lie. “Well, he cannot hurt you here. Sit down. It will be fine here. You are safe here. My wife…but she is not here right now.”
There was a strange omission in the sentence.
“Do you know this movie?” he asked, pointing the onion-sticky knife at the screen. “It is very American, but I enjoy it. Watch.”
“The police,” Marylou said again.
Henri went right on chopping. I had to do something—look around for a phone, a computer, something. Marylou had stashed the pipe under her slicker. If anything went wrong, hopefully she would use it.
“The bathroom,” I said, falling back on my old excuse. “Could I…”
He waved the knife as permission.
In the dark, knowing what I knew now…nothing was more horrible than those dark steps, the dozen photos of Henri’s wife. I have never felt so frightened. So alone. So doomed.
So when I got to the top of the steps and Gerard clapped his hand over my mouth and pulled me into the bathroom, I was actually quite relieved. His other arm wrapped around my body, holding me still. He leaned in very close to me, so close that I could feel his warmth and smell the light smell of sweat and the outdoors and feel his breath on my ear.
“I followed you here,” he said very quietly. “I climbed up a tree and came in through the window. I weel let you go. Do not scream. I trust you not to scream.”
He released my mouth and then me.
“Why did you say I attacked you?” he asked.
“I had to say something,” I whispered to him. “Something to get Marylou to leave.”
Gerard looked a bit hurt but nodded.
“You should never have come here….”
“It was Marylou,” I said.
“Henri has a car. I don’t know where the keys are. When you go downstairs, you find the keys, and you take them. And then you put your sister in the car and drive out of here. You are all right as long as Henri is alive. Get to safety. Get to the police—”
“You want me to steal his car?”
“Eet is better than the alternative. Do what I say this time. Please.”
I don’t know why I was listening to Gerard. Of the two people involved in this, he was considerably weirder. All Henri had done was tell us history and make soup. Gerard won the crazy race by a mile, on the face of things, but still…I believed him. I believed that Henri had done something very, very terrible and that we were in a lot of danger.
“Marylou is not going to come along if I steal a car,” I said, steadying myself against the wall.
“No,” he said with a nod. “She will have to be taken unwillingly. Knock her out. I can help you with that. I will wait outside, and when you come out with the keys, I will punch her. Eet will be very quick. She will feel eet later, but eet is better than the alternative.”
Here he was with “the alternative” again, all the while casually talking about creeping out of the darkness and punching my sister in the face.
“What?” I said.
“I know how to do eet.”
“How?”
“I was a lifeguard,” he said plainly. “You learn to do this when people struggle in the water. You need to hit the jaw. Getting punched is—”
“I know,” I said. Clearly the phrase “better than the alternative” was one Gerard had mastered in his English lessons. Not that I knew what he meant. “Isn’t there another way? And are you saying that this alternative—”
“You do not have time to wait. Go back down there and look for the keys and—”
Before he could say any more, the door swung open, and Henri stood there, with a small hunting rifle in his hands.
“Bonsoir, Gerard,” he said.
Henri moved us both down to the kitchen. His gun was on Gerard the entire time, but I felt pretty certain that he wouldn’t have particularly objected to using it on me. When we got down there, he made Gerard sit in a chair, and politely asked Marylou to tie him to it with a spool of rope he had by the door: ankles and wrists.
“You have to call the police,” Marylou said, for what had to be the tenth time.
“We must secure him first,” he said. “Please make sure that it is tight.”
Marylou didn’t look happy, but she got down on her knees behind Gerard and tied him up, knotting the rope over and over. Gerard winced but never once took his eyes from Henri’s face.
“So why don’t we take your car into town?” Gerard asked. “You want to turn me in to the police, go ahead.”
“No petrol. I was going to walk and get some more in the morning. Now…”
For a moment he seemed distracted by the sight of Tom Cruise on his tiny television, but soon he refocused on the situation at hand.
“You’ve been giving these girls some trouble,” he said. “You’ve snuck into my house. What exactly are you doing, Gerard?”
“Open my bag and see.”
Henri pulled Gerard’s ragged messenger bag closer with his foot, bent and pulled open the snap with one hand, and dumped the contents to the floor. The candy bars and water bottles were in there; Gerard must have picked them back up. There was also a utility blade.
“What is this?” Henri said, holding it up.
“Well,” I said quickly, “we have a knife too.”
“Charlie!” Marylou yelled, wheeling around to stare at me.
“Do you?” Henri asked, sounding profoundly unconcerned.
“Because of him,” Marylou said, pointing at Gerard. “We brought it for protection.”
I tried to communicate “We would not have stabbed you, or at least I wouldn’t have” with my eyes, but that seemed a hard sentiment to get across. I’m not even sure if Gerard cared at this point. We were all armed to the teeth, but Henri was the most armed, and Gerard was tied to a chair, so the knife count was moot.
Anyway, there was a much bigger problem in that bag, and Henri was just getting to it. He had reached the bundle of plastic bags and was unraveling them with a series of sharp shakes.
Then the hand hit the floor. Gerard and I knew what it was, but Henri and Marylou had to take a better look.
“Is that a dead bird?” Marylou asked, grim
acing.
“It doesn’t look like a bird,” Henri said grimly. He figured it out fairly quickly, I think. It took Marylou another moment, and then she screamed. In my ear.
“I found that in the garden, just outside of this house,” Gerard said. “Did the dog dig eet up, Henri? Or was eet some other animal? Did the dog try to stop you when you killed your wife? Did you even know what you were doing? Where is your wife, Henri? Where is your wife?”
The silence that followed had a horrible, sucking quality to it. Marylou’s gasps were snuffed out in a moment. The air was heavy with the onion sting, and the tension made it suddenly, painfully hot.
Henri picked up the remote control and switched off the television.
“I think it is safer if you two stay upstairs,” Henri said, mostly to Marylou. “There is a good lock on the front bedroom door. Take your sister and go there.”
“I’m not leaving,” I heard myself say. I was completely convinced that if we walked away, Henri would kill Gerard. There was no way I was leaving him bound and helpless.
“Go,” Henri said. And there was a note in his voice that told me that this is what I had to do or he would shoot Gerard right now. I could see Gerard from behind quietly straining at the ropes that bound him. Marylou had me by the arm. Her nails were digging in, and she was crying and saying, “Come on, Charlie; come on, Charlie” over and over. Gerard managed to turn his head enough to look at me. He was afraid. But he nodded, telling me to go. I let Marylou drag me up the steps.
The bedroom was stripped in the same eerie way as the bathroom. There were no sheets, no blankets, no curtains. Marylou was trembling but maintained her poise, pacing the room. I heard muffled voices from downstairs, but it was hard to hear and all in French. It sounded calm, though.
“Marylou,” I said. “It’s not Gerard. I lied. He never attacked me. I wasn’t running from him.”
“What?” she said, wheeling around.
“It’s too complicated to explain….”
“Try!”
“It was Henri,” I snapped. “That hand. It’s Henri…. It’s his wife…her hand. Gerard was trying to warn us away. I didn’t think you’d believe me so I said he attacked me.”
