by Inc. HDWP
“Where’d they all go?” Marcel asked. He’d come over to see if we knew what had changed all of a sudden, but we all just shrugged. The crowd of locals kept growing, and it wasn’t till about ten o’clock that Keeno came in, looking fidgety, like he kept waiting for a firecracker to go off under his hat or something, only it never did.
“No sign of them anywhere in town,” he reported. “It’s like they all just flew off.”
People chittered and nattered about it for a while, but eventually, Mel put up his hand. “No use in guessing,” he said. “Stu, go fetch the school bus. Let’s take a run down to the junction and see what’s what.”
I’d expected we might need it again today, though, so I’d brought it along with me and it was parked outside in the lot. Denny sprung for a huge box of Jimmy Bites and a barrel of coffee, and we were on the bus and heading down the south road in no time. The further south we drove, the quieter folks got. Not a vehicle in sight, coming up the northbound side. No SUVs. No Hummers. No motorcycles, station wagons, pick-up trucks or nothing. It was dead quiet.
Maggie was the first one to spot the traffic. “Look! Where are they going?”
Down the road a stretch, we were coming up on the junction. Just this side, there were still bits of wood and cement lying in the middle of the road. That’d be “Ground Zero,” where the boys had put their sign the other morning. But that was all. Just beyond that was the main highway, running east-west, full of cars. Across the highway, a long line of visitors streamed toward us from the south stretch, but they were turning left or right at the junction, heading over to Culver or into Medicine Falls.
But none of them was coming north into Saint Croix.
“Where are they going?” Mel asked. “What’s Culver got that we don’t got?” Suzie shushed him down.
I pulled over to the side of the road next to Ground Zero, so we could watch the traffic flowing left and right without actually pulling all the way up to the intersection. It was eerie. Like a force-field was splitting traffic before it could reach us. Some great, invisible power that repelled them with such force, that they turned aside and ran, rather than mess with whatever horror awaited them up our way.
It was Keeno who decided he wanted to get out and look around. I opened up the folding door for him, and he stepped down to the gravel shoulder, cautious, like he was still expecting that firework to pop off under his hat. The rest of the folks just kept their seats and held their breath, watching bug-eyed, as Sgt. Kierny of the Mounted Police walked slowly forward, inspecting the grass, and the gravel, looking at the bits of broken sign and spilled paint on the road. But there was nothing to explain the strange behavior of that line of cars dividing like a red, white and blue sea across from him. As each northbound vehicle arrived at the junction, a look of complete horror came over their faces, and suddenly the car would swerve―some left, the others right―but not a single one of ‘em had the stones to cross that highway and forge on north into Saint Croix. Keeno stood in the middle of the road and watched it all for a bit, then he turned around to come back.
And that’s when he saw it. I could see his eyes flick to the little sign at the side of the road. No bigger than any other little sign you might see on the shoulder of a county highway. Nothing big and belligerent like the Ground Zero sign had been. Just a nice, polite travel advisory. I watched as Keeno’s eyes scanned the sign. And then he bust out laughing. After a good, long yuk, he waved folks out to come see for themselves―see what miraculous little sign had saved them and their children from the ravenous zombie hordes still zooming past behind him.
Soon all the folks were out there. Just staring at first, reading, and then a sudden burst of laughter, depending on their reading speed. Before long, they were all slapping their knees and yukking it up, just like Keeno had done. Maggie was kind enough to bring me back a picture of the sign on her little magic phone, but I didn’t need to look. I already knew what it said. I’d figured Grandad was right when he’d told me what he figured out that morning, when the locusts had boiled in a frenzy and then just took off into the sky. The point wasn’t why they’d boiled like they had, but why they’d vanished. Not because someone told them to, he’d said. But because, for some reason, they’d all just decided that they’d wanted to. So I’d taken that piece of Grandad’s wisdom and painted it up onto a little wooden board by myself. Then I’d nailed it there at the side of the junction, right under the welcome sign, just a few hours ago, on my way into town. So I already knew it by heart.
WELCOME TO SAINT CROIX
WARNING: SERVICE NOW ONLY IN FRENCH
The Several Monsters
of Sainte-Sara-la-Noire
Michael G. Williams
I saw the village monster when I was fourteen years of age.
We were running hand in hand, Madame Beauchene leading me and me leading Jaelle. Madame Beauchene opened her mouth to call out for Madame Renard as we rounded the corner behind her dilapidated hay barn, but rifle shots rang out and Madame Beauchene stopped so fast she tumbled forward. Jaelle cried out once, the sharp shriek of a frightened little girl, and I too thought Madame had been shot, but she scrambled to her feet. There were grass and mud stains marring her otherwise pristine dress, one she’d made after dying the fabric a pale orange-pink. It was the color of cream left behind after the sliced peaches have been eaten but now it was absolutely ruined. Taking me by the hand, my other still clutching Jaelle’s with the strange strength of the terrified, Madame Beauchene led us away in swift strides through tall grass. The crack-booms of the Nazi rifles had ricocheted around the old stone Renard house so that they sounded like dozens of guns, maybe hundreds, but I knew that was nonsense. There was only one of the Germans’ boxy military motorcars outside the town hall and that meant at most five soldiers. Their guns made them sound like many times that number, like an entire army had shown up to crush the handful of us still there. My heart was pounding, my voice frozen, and Madame Beauchene led us away from danger with the automatic confidence of an experienced village schoolteacher.
There were very few men left in the village by then. Most had gone away to fight or to scrounge for resources. Sainte-Sara-la-Noire was close to the line between the two Frances – one free, one occupied – and we had gone undisturbed by either side. We had also gone without support. We were remote, far from any of the main roads and without any resources more valuable than the game we hunted, a few animals we kept and the crops we grew. It was a beautiful place to have a quiet rural life. No one wanted to waste bullets bothering to conquer it. We had long stopped waiting for the young men to return, but at least we had each other and our quiet lives. Now there was someone shouting in German at the top of Madame Renard’s house; some soldier banging on a door no one was left to answer. His comrades searched it for other occupants but there were none. There was only the one old woman they had already executed.
I thought Madame Beauchene was praying under her breath, as she named Jaelle and me, but I quickly realized she was listing the names of all the children in the village, counting us off under her breath, forming a task list. She named Arthur who lived with his grandmother in a little house on the village square. Madame steered us in that direction just long enough to see that one of their windows had been shot out and there was smoke coming from the upstairs. She named Louis, who lived on the far side of the village, and tutted to herself as she turned back in the direction we were already going. She named Mathilde, who was an orphan. Mathilde had tended her brother’s sheep after Luc went north for supplies and never returned. We veered again.
We ran along the back of what was called Rue de la Mer because, Madame Beauchene once explained, if a person were to walk south on it long enough they would find themselves at the sea. We were crouched low and Madame had her ruined skirts bunched up in one hand in an attempt to make less noise. Presently we came to the pen where Mathilde’s sheep were kept at night and slipped into the shed through a side door. The sheep were all gathered
around Mathilde as in a crèche, hunkered down in shivering terror at the gunshots they’d heard as they grazed. Mathilde was pale as a ghost. “Who is shooting?” she whispered. Her voice shook like a leaf and I remember thinking she might bleat just like one of her flock.
“Nazis,” Madame Beauchene replied in a low voice, wasting no time. She ducked her head off in the direction of the stream and the woods and looked back at Mathilde. “Come now. We don’t have long.”
“Why are they here?” Mathilde was too frightened to move. She’d been fragile since her brother left. We’d all become accustomed to handling her gently but there was no time left for that now. “Are they here because they think we’re gypsies? My mother used to say we should change the name of the village. My mother used to say everyone believed we were gypsies because of the name.”
“We must leave now.” Madame was using her teacher voice, the one she used when someone was coming very close to facing the consequences of ill-considered actions.
Mathilde looked at her sheep for a moment; they blinked back with equal incomprehension. Madame drew a breath that sounded of deep exhaustion and whispered, “Mathilde, we must leave now. Your brother will be disappointed if you don’t do as you’re told.”
That was all it required. Mathilde was on her feet and running for the door. Her mind was so broken she didn’t think to question: the invocation of her brother was more than enough to make her obey. She started to say something but she ran headlong into Mayor Durand as he tried to barrel through her into the shed. They collided, Mathilde rebounding and the Mayor staggering forward, and they both wound up inside with us as he slammed the door behind him.
“Germans!” He gasped it in shock at Madame Beauchene. “Germans, here! They’re killing everyone!”
“Yes.” Beauchene’s voice was just as even as ever. I swore in that moment, on all the Bibles I had ever seen, that I would always obey Madame Beauchene’s instructions. Anyone that calm demanded respect. “They are going house to house and killing everyone. At least one house is on fire. I heard cries from its basement as we ran nearby.”
That must have been Arthur’s house, but I had heard nothing. Perhaps she was wrong, or perhaps I had been too scared, but I was shocked to the core at the mere idea of being trapped in a root cellar while a burning house came down around me. It was both unthinkable and yet all too easy to imagine. I shuddered from head to toe and Jaelle gave out another yelp with a knife’s edge. It was high and piercing and I was sure the Germans would hear it if they were listening for activity in the village.
“We must go somewhere safe,” Mayor Durand said. He was middle-aged, shaped like an egg, and had spent his entire life tending a small farm where he confronted few problems. My mother called him a “gentle old fool” and rolled her eyes whenever anyone expected him to make a decision about something. I wondered now where my mother was. She had left early to find chanterelles in the forest. I wondered if she would return to a dead village or if they had killed her on their way here. In either case, we were parted. Another shudder ran through me. Madame’s hand tightened on mine.
“I’m leading these children to the Old Place,” she said, “But we have to hurry. The Germans may not know it exists. We may be able to hide there and wait until they leave. If we tarry too long and they see us running...” Shocked silence filled the little sheep shed. None of us would have considered going there on our own. Glances were exchanged between all of us – even collision-stunned, fate-shocked Mathilde – and hearing no objection Madame Beauchene led me around the mayor and back out the door. “Come now, children,” she ordered. “We must run and we must be as quiet as possible.”
Two minutes later we were soaking wet from crossing the mountain-cold creek and we had gotten that way in anything but silence. Cries and splashes had accompanied our traversal of that unofficial boundary between civilization and entropy on the south side of our village, and we were soon running without caution or restraint within sight of – but not on – Rue de la Mer. I think I was almost as frightened to run towards the crumbling ancient farmhouse in the shadow of the forest as I was to flee the murder of nearly everyone I had ever met. The Old Place, which is all anyone had ever known to call it, was the ruin of a stone house from centuries before. It was small and the dull gray stones had been painted with black moss then bleached white again by centuries of rain. It held the horror and fascination of a place people no longer occupied. Its dilapidated walls seemed ready to give way under the weight of abandoned effort.
As children we were warned to be good or the ghosts of the Old Place would get us. My brother, before he went away to join the war, had boasted of the bravery he showed by going there with our cousin to drink the vinegary dregs of old wine. Now Madame Beauchene thought it was our last refuge. Only barely visible from the Rue, surely the Nazis would never think anyone lived there if they managed to notice it at all.
“We should have changed the name of the village.” Mathilde had said this over and over again for a time as we ran. Finally, as we approached the house, she said it once more and Mayor Durand paused long enough to raise his hand, ready to slap her. Madame Beauchene caught his arm and held him back. Her voice was like the strike of a snake when she told him he was not allowed to discipline her students. I was grateful to have her protecting us but I was sympathetic to the mayor’s desire. Mathilde could be trying at the best of times. I had grown more frightened each time she spoke.
I knew why Mathilde’s mother had said this, of course. Our village was named for the patron saint of the Gitans: the gypsies. Our village had been named at some point in the distant past, farther back than the occupation of the Old Place. Officially no one knew if it meant our village was founded by la bohémiens or if someone had simply liked the story of the Egyptian handmaiden to the Virgin’s sister, “the other Mary”. Of course, I knew: grandmother’s old chest of secrets and cards was as plainly read as a book of lore. We were gypsies, or we had been, or some of us had been, and everyone knew it. Everyone also knew what the Germans were doing in the North Zone. We were being moved around, never seen again. Word travels fast among our people, or my grandmother’s people, or whatever way one might wish to phrase it. My mother said Sara the Black – Sara e Kali – would keep us safe in a place bearing her name: a village with a road that ran all the way to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where she and her mistresses were venerated by our people in a pilgrimage every year. I had believed her because my mother and grandmother had been so certain of their overlapping and competing faiths. Now I was shaken to find myself realizing I had never believed. I had only believed in my elders and now each was probably as dead as the other.
Madame Beauchene and Mayor Durand both angled around the back of the Old Place and went directly to its faded, time-blacked cellar door. Everyone who had ever grown up in our village had seen that door, I guessed, but it was utterly incomprehensible to me to fix on it as a goal. Even my brother, half-drunk on half-wine, had never dared to venture into the place. If Arthur’s burning house had made me imagine a tomb of fire then the Old Place suggested a tomb of sharp ice. It looked cold in the heat of summer and there had never been a pile of rocks arranged to look less safe.
The sound of the Germans’ car coming south down the Rue de la Mer and something shouted in our direction was more than enough to make us dive towards that dank and crumbled portal. Mayor Durand put his back into it and the door screeched open on rusted hinges. We ran through, he slammed it shut behind us and we found ourselves standing in almost total darkness. There were shafts of light here and there shooting through gaps in the rotting timbers above us. By them we could only perceive irregular patches before us: a little bit of floor, another little bit of stone wall. The light glinted on a rusty old lamp. We all would have run for the far end of the room, I imagine, but the darkness was so nearly complete that we stopped where we were.
Something crunched like tiny gravel beneath our feet; but gravel, I knew, did not also snap like
twigs. Mayor Durand shushed us softly and Madame Beauchene squeezed my hand to keep me still. We strained to listen but we could hear nothing: no car, no running boots, no gunshots. I felt my heart thud in my chest a dozen times, and a dozen more, before Mayor Durand reached for the old lamp and took it down. “We should wait a few minutes,” he whispered. “In the meantime, let’s see if there’s another way out.” The reservoir gurgled as with fresh oil and it didn’t occur to me to wonder why on earth it would be full, why anyone would keep oil here. Mayor Durand produced a folding book of matches from his pocket and just managed to get the flame onto the wick before the match went out. Shielding the lantern with his other hand, he swung his arm in a slow arc to try to illuminate the room. It was a root cellar, but huge – much larger than the Old Place appeared to be from above ground. Splintered pieces of ancient casks and pottery were visible here and there, evidence of a day when people had made this their home, but the thing we all noticed most readily was the floor. We had not stepped on gravel: we were standing on a carpet of tiny bones.
We were people of a rural province and we had all seen bones before. There were mouse bones and bird bones and squirrel bones and other kinds I could not readily identify. None of us had ever seen so many, though. I nudged them with the toe of my boot and realized I could not shove them aside and put my foot on earth. They were deeper than that, deeper than I could see by the dim light of the lantern. If this root cellar were, say, three meters from bare floor to ceiling then one half-meter of that might have been the tiny, perfectly white bones on which we stood. Jaelle was too young to realize it but Mathilde – keeper of the sheep whose flesh we knew we would eventually eat – gasped and clapped a hand over her own mouth as though to push the sound back in and hide it away. Madame Beauchene and Mayor Durand said nothing.
