The Devourer of Men

by Ben Stevens

  ‘One rainy night everything was ready. The boat was waiting for me at a point of the river that ran close by the hospital block – the river that led straight to the sea and freedom. I managed to overpower the single screw who guarded my ward; but I must have hit him too hard – instead of knocking him out – which had been my intention – I killed him. Although he was only a screw his death saddened me. Up until this point I’d never murdered anyone.

  ‘I found my boat, paid some character the other half of the agreed fee, and by chance rather than by judgement – and half-dead with thirst, hunger and exposure – I reached Venezuela.

  ‘Seven years later this would prove to be my liberation; but now it was under Gomez’s wicked rule and so I was forced to work building roads with a gang of native prisoners. Conditions were hard; men died everyday from underfeeding and the brutal ill-treatment of the guards; but I was blessed with an iron-hard constitution and so I survived.

  ‘Two years of this I suffered, until finally the French authorities were alerted to my whereabouts and a boat was sent to get me. Back in French Guiana I was tried for the crimes of escape in the first degree and murder – this in itself carried an automatic death-sentence.

  ‘By stoutly defending myself I managed to get the murder charge reduced to one of manslaughter, and then I was given my sentence: a year’s solitary confinement for escaping, coupled with five years for manslaughter – to be served concurrently. Six years’ solitary in all.

  ‘So, Pierre, it was straight to the island of Saint-Joseph and the Reclusion Disciplinaire – or, as it was better nicknamed by the lags in penal, ‘The Devourer of Men’. It was certainly sadists of your type of warped mentality who designed this prison within a prison, with its countless dim tiny cells in which a man was compelled to live in absolute silence; never seeing another person, never hearing a word being said.

  ‘Through a small hatch in the iron door food was given three times a day, and a dreadfully poor amount at that. Deprived of all stimuli, shut up like a wild animal for X amount of years, is it any wonder that men frequently chose suicide as their only way of release?

  ‘I have tried to recreate your cell in a similar fashion. This is why I had to wait a month before I could bring you here – and, of course, I also used this time in order to gain your trust.

  ‘First I dug out a great deal of the cellar, so that I would have enough height for this walkway; and then I built what holds you now. Look at these thick steel bars on top of your cell, as I did once upon a time, and imagine screws wearing slippers – so that there should not even be the noise of footsteps – walked ceaselessly back and forth along the walkway, staring down into the dim murky pits at…

  ‘At what? At men sat with their head in their hands, at men masturbating as the only way of relieving the eternal tedium, at men swinging from a noose made out of their own trousers? This was hell: a hell lost and forgotten on some tiny tropical island.’

  Henri paused long enough to light another cigarette.

  ‘I was put into my cell – number 136 – and for a long, long while I stared at the notice written above the door: It is forbidden to open this door without administrative order. This was all I would be reading in six years. I was twenty-seven – I would be thirty-three upon my release, and as likely as not hopelessly mad. No other convict had ever been given a six-year sentence before: four or at the very most five was deemed to be the limit of any man’s endurance.

  ‘I tackled the problem logistically: five years was next to impossible to come through; and yet a few men had done just this, without committing suicide and without going mad. So what was another three hundred and sixty-five days?

  ‘I vowed to myself that this enforced solitude would be only a temporary hiccup to my plans of escape and revenge: that upon my release I would make another, ultimately successful break.

  ‘Having done this, I took to pacing my cell for sixteen hours each and every day; then, absolutely exhausted, I would fall into a deep sleep during which I dreamed vividly – of family, friends, past loves, beautiful landscapes. Such was how I obtained my temporary release from this living death.

  ‘How slowly days, weeks, months and years pass without another soul to talk to! There in the passing, nightmare twilight and then complete darkness of a Reclusion cell I fought to stay alive and sane, grimly focusing my mind on the fact that all the time, time was passing. An obvious thing to say, but what significance this had to my situation and what strength it gave me.

  ‘And the silence – dear God, the absolute dead silence! Occasionally some poor bastard would reach the end of his tether and shout and scream – something which played on my nerves horribly. It is quite depressing to hear a man going mad. It was then that I considered the silence to indeed be preferable.

  ‘The cells of the suicides were always opened in the dead of night – or, at least, what I judged to be the dead of night. Both men either side of me chose to end their torment this way, and on each occasion I heard the soft voices of two screws talking as they cut the man down.

  ‘Sometimes… Sometimes a black mood fell upon me, and once I actually took off my trousers before I managed to get a grip on myself. There was no doubt that the odds against me making another, successful escape were high indeed: just how many men had tried and failed already? But even if I was to die while attempting to escape, surely this was better than hanging myself in this small dark hole.

  ‘Morning: wake up and walk – one, two, three, four, five, about-turn. One, two… Coffee and bread given to me through my hatch: eat this and continue walking. Lunch – soup or something similar; dinner a lump of boiled meat. Hardly enough food to keep body and soul together, and I was certainly burning more calories than I could afford through my ceaseless exercise.

  ‘But walk I must, on and on and on. Christ knows how many thousands of miles I tallied up during those endless years. And what did I frequently think about as I walked? I’ll tell you: somehow getting back to France and cutting out a fat prosecutor’s tongue.

  ‘Yes: first his tongue; and then a few days later I’d put out his sharp cruel eyes. That fat shit, he’d take a week to die. How encouraging such thoughts were – this idea that some fine day I’d have this flabby poof on toast.

  ‘But anyway – six years I got, but the authorities weren’t as cruel as all that: I got a year’s remission for excellent behaviour, for never making a row like so many of the other luckless sods.

  ‘My door was opened, the Governor himself looking at me almost with admiration and saying, ‘‘Grandet, your sentence is over. This is the 25 November 1939.’’

  ‘I staggered out of the accursed Reclusion and into the sunlight, which seemed almost to burn out my eyes. God, how beautiful that blue sky was! And the white birds, and the foamy sea! I – I who had never believed in God before now – there in front of three screws and the Governor I fell to my knees and I wept, thanking Him for having given me the strength to survive what I had. Even there in that dim timeless cell lost amongst countless others He’d found me, giving me courage in the dark.

  ‘Then, quite suddenly – ‘‘You have suffered and you will suffer again, my son, but this time you will do so as a free man.’’

  ‘Did I imagine those words in my mind, or did I really hear them? Filled with wonder by this and everything that I saw, I made my way towards whatever it was that fate had in store for me.

  ‘Do I weary you, Pradel, with my somewhat lengthy account? Certainly your concerns are rather more for your present situation than my history, that’s for sure. So I’ll cut a long story short. It was now wartime, France was under the German yoke, and consequently the sentence for a captured escapee was death: escaping was construed as being a desire to join the Free French forces.

  ‘In any case I was as yet in no hurry to go. I’d never imagined that the five years I’d spent buried in a dark hole could have damaged my mind so greatly, so that I’d have trouble talking to anyone and concentrating on even
the simplest of matters for any length of time.

  ‘Thank God, this mental damage wasn’t permanent. I had a few good friends who fought hard to rehabilitate me, and given the Lord’s help I displayed a certain hardiness and desire to get better myself.

  ‘Two years passed before I could be thought as being ‘normal’ – a balanced man who no longer talked to himself and who interacted with others in the usual way. I was still on Saint Joseph, which had at its top the grim Reclusion, and now I started planning my escape.

  ‘A boat: I needed a boat to be built for me. By virtue of my good friends and the money I still had in my charger – this had never left me – one was indeed prepared; but with painful slowness, for as you can imagine construction had to take place in absolute secrecy, with the boat’s different sections being concealed at various points around the island.

  ‘But at last it was finished, and I would set sail that night from the remotest part of the island: farewell penal, farewell those good friends of mine whom I’d come to love as brothers! They wept as they embraced me goodbye, certain that I would be captured and killed. Not one accepted my offer to come with me. Let the screws capture me, let them kill me. I don’t give a damn.

  ‘Escape, escape: escape or die! And the guillotine seemed preferable to another spell in the Reclusion were I to be caught.

  ‘As you know, I wasn’t. That is why I am here now, looking down at you contained in a cage similar to the one that held me for five long years. See, I have even placed a sign reading ‘‘It is forbidden to open this door without administrative order’’ above your door!’

  Pierre Pradel nodded slowly, his fat features devoid of expression as he stared up at Henri.

  ‘So it is Dumas’ recipe, then – your revenge will be as it was in The Count of Monte Christo. You will leave me here to starve,’ he said in a quiet, resigned voice.

  With a brusque shake of his head, Henri contradicted this assumption.

  ‘That’s no recompense for the time and effort it took me to build this cell. No, I will not leave you to starve – and neither will my revenge be as I’d first imagined, with your tongue being cut out just for starters.

  ‘The good book says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: because of you I spent five years of my life buried in a Reclusion cell, so now the same fate must befall you, for the same period of time.

  ‘So the interior of this cell is all that you will see for the following sixty months, Pradel. The light above you will remain on and every week someone will bring you seven days’ worth of food. It is possible that you will lose a little weight.

  ‘In keeping with the rules of solitary confinement, you will not speak to the person who opens the trap in the door to pass you your provisions: if you do so, you will be given a warning to desist. Disobey this, and the light will go out for a week. See, it is pitch-black without it.’

  Turning off the bulb, Henri succinctly demonstrated his point.

  As he turned it back on, the hatch in the cell door opened and he said, ‘This is your first week’s supply of food, Pradel. Hurry up and take it.’

  Feverishly hoping that this was a nightmare from which he would soon awake, the former prosecutor took the four baguettes and the large bag of dried fish and fruit from whomever was on the other side of the door. The hatch was too small even to see the person’s hand.

  ‘I will try to ensure that you receive some variation in your diet, Pradel, but obviously we have to give you food that will not perish too quickly. Water you can get from the tap, as much as you like. I hope that you live to see your release.’

  Making a determined attempt to check his despairing cry, Pradel then forced a sneering tone to his voice as he said, ‘Do you think that you will get away with this, Grandet? I have friends, people who will alert the police, people who will – ’

  ‘You have no one,’ said Henri in a soft, chiding voice. ‘No one at all. You are as friendless as you have always been. Admit to yourself now that nobody will report you as missing. No one cares. You are as inconsequential to society as a down-and-out, which is pretty much what you are anyway.’

  This was true, this was true – death Pradel could have borne bravely, even if torture had preceded it. In some strange way this concept had seemed noble to his mind. It would have proved that he’d been right to have dealt with this man so all those years ago.

  But this…

  This was a living death.

  Five years? Good God, when released he’d be aged –

  ‘Henri! You can’t do this! Have…’

  ‘Yes, Pierre?’

  ‘Have…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have pity!’ Pradel finally blurted, as tears began to course down his flabby cheeks. He knew that, as yet, he would not be able to kill himself. There was no bravery or nobility in suicide.

  In fact he could not see how he could kill himself, even if he wanted to. The bars seemed too high to be able to reach so to hang himself, for he stood at little more than five and a half foot. And the tiny sink hardly leant itself to any designs of death by drowning...

  ‘The pity that you showed myself and so many others; men whom you knew way down in that black heart of yours were innocent, victims of a plot cooked up by the pigs?’ asked Henri after a pause.

  ‘Please...’

  ‘It’s no use,’ Henri replied, suddenly sounding weary. He turned to walk away as a sudden, wildly encouraging thought struck Pradel.

  ‘Ha, fool!’ he cried. ‘You forget one thing! Where have I been everyday for so many years, hey? Who has grown so used to my presence – and my money – that they will surely alert the police to the fact that I am missing? Who will give the police a detailed description of you? I am at least remembered as having been a great figure in French justice, and those flics of whom you speak so disparagingly will mount a search operation that is second to none.’

  Henri again gripped the handrail, and as Pradel finished speaking he smiled.

  ‘Such is your dreadful memory for faces, Pierre, that for many years you’ve been staring straight at a man whom you had sent to penal for bicycle theft.’

  And at Henri’s side there now appeared a man whose weasel-face burnt not only with triumph, but also with his disbelief that everything had gone so exactly to plan.

  ‘Dubois!’ blurted Pradel.

  ‘You fat pig,’ was all the café owner’s husband felt able to say. He was almost entirely overcome with emotion.

  ‘I am leaving for Venezuela soon, Pradel,’ Henri stated. ‘I will return to France when and if I judge that it is safe to do so, for I go now to deliver a package of explosives to the police headquarters in Paris. By tonight who can say how many pigs will be dead?’

  Conscious that time and indeed hope were fast running out, Pradel fixed his trembling gaze on Jean-Luc Dubois.

  ‘Jean... Jean...’ he mewed pitifully, entirely out of keeping in comparison to how he’d always addressed the thin man before. ‘This man is mad, surely you can see that? This house was bought in your name, wasn’t it? When it is known that I am missing, the police – knowing that I frequent your wife’s café – will certainly go through your history and discover the link between us. They’ll be onto you and this little plan quicker than you can say knife. Think about that, Jean-Luc Dubois, just think about that!’

  For a moment Pradel looked as satisfied as if he’d just given the final, extraordinary piece of evidence to a packed courtroom. And appearing suitably concerned, Jean-Luc appealed with his stupid, docile eyes for Henri’s assistance.

  ‘You know, you know,’ repeated Henri quietly, a little wearily. ‘We’ve talked about this before.’

  ‘No one knows you, Pierre Pradel,’ Jean-Luc said at length, in little more than a whisper. ‘No one will report you missing. All I have to make sure is that no one’s following me when I come to feed you, just in case. That’s all.’

  ‘My landlord will notice!’ Pradel cried.

  This time H
enri intervened. ‘You said to me once that you’d bought your room outright many years back. I took care to find this out, of course. Come now, I’ve not got the time for games. You have a five year solitary sentence to begin, and I hopefully have many flics to kill.’

  ‘YOUR WIFE!’ screamed Pradel to Jean-Luc. ‘What are you going to say to her each week, hey man? I mean, when you come here to feed me? She’ll notice something’s up, and what do you think she’ll think of this?’

  Reluctantly, Henri motioned to someone away from him and his friend to join them. Pradel gave a hideous, canine whine as the fat figure of Madame Dubois bounded into view, her piggy eyes blazing with hate. It was now obvious as to who’d just given him his week’s worth of rations.

  ‘You took my man away from me for eight long years! Ten it was meant to be, for sure, but eight was just as bad! And now, Pradel, you shall taste the terror, the utter misery, of the unjustly imprisoned. When my man told me who you were, all those years ago when you first entered the café, I pleaded with him to do something. It seemed unbelievable that you didn’t recognise him. But do not imagine that he is as weak-willed as all that: he refused point blank to do take any revenge, and nothing I could say could persuade him otherwise. Oh – I had my ideas! Poisoning your brandy, for example.

  ‘It took Henri to talk Jean-Luc round, and here we are. Do not imagine that I hate you any less then these two men, even though it was they who suffered at your hands. If it was down to me you’d be eaten alive by rats!’

  ‘Madame Dubois, I was only doing my job, can’t you see that – ’

  ‘Silence!’ the woman shrieked. ‘I’ll be taking it in turns with my hubby to drive here and give you your week’s food, and one peep out of you and I’ll turn that light off, you hear? It’ll be a thousand times worse in the dark.’

  With this, the three turned as one and began walking away.