The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (37 page)

Hervé’s archaic plague dog had meanwhile slipped into the basin, where it floated apparently inert and prudently enamel blue. Hammerhead and glassy stilts and all, it had contracted to a seamless ovoid, an imitation cobble on the beach. The professor took this change in stride. Nothing new to him, I gathered, whereas I had to grimace at the lowbrow output of my guttering brain, which rudely likened Hervé’s monumental find to a turd in the punchbowl. And no excuse for my vulgarity in being right, for how else would his animate relic be received by any mainstream biochemist or biologist or paleontologist? I couldn’t altogether blame the professor if at heart he’d quarantined his “pet” to ensure a peaceful retirement, as opposed to endless controversy.

“Your eyelids have begun to droop, have they not?” he noted. Had he really been stone blind to my progressive deterioration since I’d arrived? Was this a case of that selective vision, a less endearing trait of his I’d forgotten in the past year? “Unless you object, let us retire. Mine is the room up the stairs, adjacent to yours. To access the bathroom, you go outside and to the right, and it is the first door around the corner. And tomorrow, who can tell? Our cosmic joker may have another trick or two for us.”

Prospects of grossly overdue bed rest lent my feet rickety wings to help me fetch my toothbrush and otherwise perform ablutions around the corner. After I’d doused my doorway lamp and flopped upon the extra firm mattress, I wondered if I’d be too wound-up and full of revelations to fall asleep, and how perversely unjust would that be? In fact, I promptly shorted out, without a volt of energy for worrying about the vengeful mate of extirpated scorpion. I awoke more than once to the banging of shutters, but never for longer than it took to reflect that Clairette’s bones had correctly forecast the winds in flux.

Then the sun was glaring through the slit between the shutters, goading me like an external conscience for sleeping in when Hervé must have been champing at the bit for further dialogue. I checked my Swatch at bedside. It told me 10 A.M., but adjusting for my normal longitude, it was scarely dawn really. From that perspective, I wasn’t so disgraceful a slouch.

Anyway, most pressing things first. I made a blinkered rush for the bathroom and gave no thought to seeing Hervé nowhere en route. Clairette was fixing my breakfast when I re-entered the kitchen. She gestured for me to sit and brought a bowl of café au lait and half a baguette smeared with Brie. I asked when the professor had eaten. As best I could decode her idiom, he hadn’t eaten but had bolted outdoors on some unstated errand soon after she’d come in. “The mistral is always accused of fanning passions and rash actions.” She threw up her hands at the inevitable. “Some people go crazy. It is capricious like a spirit.” Her freighted language in regard to her employer running an errand puzzled me, and I’m open to the charge of mistranslating it and much of what she said thereafter.

Clairette had also sagely forecast the less oppressive temperature, though upstart breezes barging in through open door and tousling my hair were already becoming oppressive in their own right. But that was no real issue, was it? I’d be out of here in two or three days tops, loath to push my luck with Hervé’s hospitality, and on to other scenic regions of France.

She accepted my thanks for the meal with an all-purpose
“Très bieng”
and commenced washing dishes. I excused myself and tossed a figurative coin. Heads meant a likely wild goose chase for the professor somewhere between here and Boulbon. Tails meant a second gander at his captive miracle. Tails won.

The dining-room door was partway open. I could tiptoe in with an inch of clearance for my shoulders. But where was the distasteful, mucky smell? Clean air should have tipped me off that I was wading into grief. A temperate draft was coursing from the entrance to the pair of windows in the opposite wall. The inward-facing panes hadn’t been disturbed, but the green shutters were fastened straight outward, letting in broad shafts of daylight. I wouldn’t need a glowing chandelier to find my fellow houseguest on the table. There was the bisected block of coal, and there was the blue basin of water, and then I went weak-kneed at apprehending why Hervé had rushed outside. I squinted frantically at every square centimeter of marble till I was sure.

A vagrant surge of air must have scooped featherweight specimen up and out of a window. Hervé had clearly assumed the same, since he’d dashed off to comb the grounds without first overturning skulls and books and furniture for hideaways.

Panic may have blinded him to something new upon the marble. I could now account for the second scorpion. It was the length of my index finger, not a strapping example of its biological order, and it was dead, literally belly up, stiff legs and tail askew. In its brown flank was an inflamed hole, like an inverted pimple, rimmed by tiny granulations that had radiated in a sunburst pattern. Nocturnal prowler may have easily scaled the palisade of printed matter, but then the feast on the table had proven far from defenseless. And Hervé, already ailing thanks to days of proximity to his “pet” and ignorant of its “new trick,” was incautiously chasing it among weeds and bushes. Was he slated to end up as captor or victim? I wasn’t wildly optimistic.

Meanwhile, I had to award Clairette yet more points for aptly comparing invasive wind to a “capricious spirit.” It made as good an explanation as any for the quirk of the mistral that had freed the rarest of prisoners while sidestepping a defunct scorpion.

On the other hand, how many demerits should I assign her for aiding in the fugitive’s escape? The professor would hardly have run the risk of parting the shutters on this blustery day. That leveled the blame at Clairette, who after unreckoned years here must have learned the secret to working the shutters from outside.

I hustled into the kitchen, fretting that she may have withdrawn to the undisclosed location of her apartment. No, not quite. She was draping damp dishtowel over refrigerator handle. I put it to her, aiming for a non-confrontational tone, “Were you aware of anything different about Professor Bayard’s private study before he ran off this morning?”

She reacted as if I’d scalded her or, worse, charged her with heresy. She swore by a flock of strictly Languedoc saints how she would never disobey monsieur’s instructions, and especially would never cross the threshold into “that chamber.” But yes, when she passed the dining-room door and the churning wind carried that “evil smell” to her, she had to open the door
“un petit peu seulement”
and go out to unlatch the shutters and start a draft to dispel the rottenness, because “you cannot eat in a place like that. You will fall sick just to breathe in there.” She fiercely added that not one toe, not one finger of hers had entered forbidden territory.

When had she last seen “monsieur”? She pouted as if volunteering such information was not her job. “A couple of hours.” Her rugged face contained no inkling that her conduct had influenced Hervé’s. I couldn’t marshal the French to insinuate it had. Nor could I picture what good that would do.

I conveyed my intent to canvass the Domaine for sightings of the errant professor. Clairette was none too encouraging. Everyone was on holiday except the nearest neighbor, but beware of her. She was a deranged old countess who kenneled a pack of half-wild foxhounds,
“tout méchants,”
and Clairette was surprised their usual dawn rampage through the woods hadn’t wakened me. I took her warning to heart, though as it turned out she needn’t have bothered, because I hadn’t finished searching the home acreage as of lunchtime.

In fact, I made my first and only relevant observation, if it were indeed relevant, the second the sun hit my eyes. The cicadas, strident as buzzsaws yesterday, were mute today. The weather, the hour, any number of stimuli peculiar to cicadas may have shushed them. Or had scent or more esoteric signals from Hervé’s stray anachronism startled modern insects into instinctive silence, according to mechanisms latent for eons? What did their hardwiring know about relict organism that the professor and I didn’t?

For whatever reason, the morning continued unnervingly quiet while I scoured the landscape, shouting Hervé’s name and poking into the underbrush. I watched my step lest I tread on the “cosmic joke” that had backfired so horribly. I had no desire ever to see it again. By noon, I’d arguably earned a break to rehydrate and refuel myself and reconsider how to proceed. I was disappointed but not at all shocked that Hervé hadn’t meanwhile sauntered home under his own steam.

Had Clairette seen me coming? She dished out a fairly greasy croque monsieur as soon as I walked in, but hadn’t prepared two servings. From this I inferred she took for granted I’d be lunching alone. I couldn’t shake the premature dread he’d permanently disappeared, and did Clairette feel any differently? In any case, my plans to gallivant across France were null and void. I’d stay and search till Hervé resurfaced or I had to fly back for the fall semester. I owed him that much and more. It further dawned on me that to beat the bushes for him by myself was a fool’s errand.

The black phone on the counter was a clunky rotary model, and I barely suppressed a patronizing double-take when a dial tone affirmed it worked. Clairette’s advice on reaching the police consisted of a laconic “Seventeen,” which also worked.

The Domaine fell under Boulbon’s jurisdiction. I reported an elderly resident was missing. Gone for six hours, I reluctantly admitted, leery the authorities wouldn’t step in till he’d been AWOL overnight or longer. So when the French equivalent of a desk sergeant asked if this were someone suffering from dementia, I shamelessly said yes. Might as well play the dumb foreigner card for maximum worth and later claim, if necessary, I hadn’t understood the question. Forgive me, professor, wherever you are.

I ended up joining the constabulary and their volunteer deputies on a daily sweep of the area. These were likable homegrown sons, good-humored and stolid, who preferred the sporadic excitement of law enforcement to cultivating alfalfa. The countess and her dogs were not as deranged and wild, respectively, as Clairette had warned, at least not in front of uniformed officers. The chorus of cicadas had gradually reconvened that first afternoon, and the mistral always tagged along. Of the professor, though, we recovered no trace, as I’d bleakly anticipated. His “cosmic joke” had also vanished like a mirage, whether it had holed up somewhere or met an ignominious demise.

If her employer’s possible demise tapped any emotions, Clairette scrupulously bottled them up. Out of professionalism, I conjectured, or habitual reserve. Or else what? I’ve been coming to grips with that ever since. She was manifestly able-bodied but never made herself available for search parties. Could be she was avoiding me, or did my peregrinations from breakfast till supper have something to do with avoiding her? As if magically, meals were always ready on the stove when I tromped in. And her dealings were perfunctory but with good graces, as if cooking for me were an extension of her duties to Hervé. All told, she really owed me nothing, and her gruff exterior, I theorized, must have hid a genuinely nice core for her to feed and put up with me those two weeks.

Typically, sometime while casting about in fields and glades and family plots and ravines, I realized how I should have contested Hervé’s presumptions about his captive chimera, that first logy, jetlagged night. Say the creature had been born into a much more oxygen-rich environment, wouldn’t sealing it in rock have made its chances of long- or short-term survival all the more infinitesimal? Sealed its fate, so to speak? Why not posit instead a microorganism that wriggled through a seam of coal into a cavity, thriving in isolation to fill its stygian house? Did it even have to be ancient or the beneficiary of suspended animation? If Hervé had released a Guinness-record specimen of amphibious plankton, a supersized mite, would that be any less extraordinary, freakish, or provocative than a Carboniferous holdover?

I wished with all my soul I could dispute these points with the professor, but I had the morose hunch he’d stumbled on his “pet,” and in the aftermath of that reunion, I shouldn’t even count on recognizing his remains. Nor was it consoling to reflect that his first breath upon sundering the coal may have fatally infected him.

Hervé must have apprised Clairette of my departure date, for on my last evening, over a plate of coq au vin and frites, she announced that she would drop me at the airport. Maybe she’d been such a good sport all along because she’d always had the end in sight.

We had to get an early start, before the milky overcast burnt off. She drove the archetypal
“bagnole,”
a sputtering Citroën that might have left the factory in 1948 or 1988. For fetching groceries it was fine, but illegal on high-speed auto routes, obliging her to navigate tortuous back roads.

Half an hour along I’d heard nothing from her except the wheezing of her majestic nose. Content, was she, to wrap up our acquaintance in silence? Not I. Not in my now-or-never position to solve a nagging mystery or two. Should worse come to worst, I could live with alienating her for twenty-odd minutes. “Did you have any idea what the professor had confined in the dining room?”

Her answer spent a good while percolating. “Did he have something in the dining room? I thought to have experienced that evil smell once earlier. But it was many years ago, when other people were in the house. They found an ugly little animal in the coal bin, and that one vanished also, as God required. It was unclean, profane. It could not be permitted in a decent home.”

As always, my running translation might have been prone to error, though I’d hazard my ear for the dialect had markedly improved during this stay. And from the nuances, the implications of her statement sprang such a host of questions that I rode dumbstruck for the duration, which may or may not have been her intention. When the chugging engine ceased, so did my useless ruminations: what had Clairette done accidentally or deliberately, what were her motives, how attached was she to the truth? Hoisting the backpack from between my feet, I bumbled out the door and mustered the composure to thank her lavishly for everything and wish her the best. She restricted her valediction to
“Très bieng.”