Seeking Whom He May Devour (6 page)

“I’ll deal with the soil pipe,” Camille said. “I’ll go and get my gear.”

Shortly before eight in the evening there was still no sign of returning hunters, which suggested that the animal had remained elusive. Camille was finishing off the last job on her list, putting the cowling back on the old boiler and adjusting the pressure. Only two hours left. Then night would fall and the search would have to be suspended until dawn.

From the outdoor washing trough that overlooked the whole village Camille kept watch for men coming back. She had laid her loaf and cheese on the ledge that was still warm from the day’s sun, and she was nibbling at her food, making the meal stretch out as long as possible. Just before ten, cars flooded into the square, doors slammed,
and
guys now looking quite worn slithered out and unfolded their stiffened limbs. Their shuffling stride and glum tone, as well as the dogs’ tired whelps, made it plain to Camille that they had drawn a blank. The beast had given them the slip. Camille flashed mental congratulations to the wolf. Be seeing you, old buddy.

Only then did Camille decide to go home. Before switching on the synthesiser, she called Johnstone. There had been no incursions by the hunters. Sibellius had not been seen, nor had Crassus the Bald. On Day One of the war, the combatants had stayed on side.

But the campaign wasn’t over. The hunt would resume at dawn. And the day after next, on Saturday, there would be five times as many men available. Johnstone would stay in position, high up in the hills.

IX

THE LAST TWO
days of the week – before Sunday’s rest day – witnessed the same departures, the same tensions, and then the same silence settling on the village like a lid. On Saturday afternoon Camille escaped with a long walk up to St Peter’s Stone, a lump of rock that was supposed to cure impotence, sterility and disappointments in love, provided you sat on it correctly. Camille had never been able to learn exactly what that meant, apparently it was vaguely embarrassing. Anyway, she reckoned that if the stone could sort out so many troubles, then it really ought to relieve her grumpiness, her doubts, her low spirits and lack of musical inspiration, all of which were no more than secondary indications of impotence.

Camille took her metal-tipped walking stick and her copy of
The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft
. It was the sort of thing she most liked to leaf through at special moments – at breakfast, in her coffee break, or whenever she felt her heart sinking. Apart from that Camille had more or less ordinary tastes in reading.

Johnstone did not take kindly to Camille’s liking for materials and crafts, and he’d thrown the
A to Z
out with the rubbish alongside other advertising bumf. It was quite enough for Camille to be a plumber, she did not have to drool over toolkits for every trade under the sun. Camille rescued the somewhat stained catalogue without making a fuss. Johnstone’s overweening hopefulness about women paradoxically made him rather conservative. He saw women as belonging to a higher level of creation, he granted them mastery over instinctual reality, and believed that their task was to raise men above mere matter. He wanted them to be sublime and not vulgar, he aspired to their being almost immaterial, and not at all pragmatic. Such idealisation could hardly be squared with
The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft
. Camille did not dispute Johnstone’s right to have his daydreams, but she considered herself equally entitled to like tools – same as any other fuckwit, as Suzanne would have said.

She shoved the
A to Z
, a loaf and some water into her backpack and left the village by the flight of steps that climbed steeply to the west. It took her nearly three hours of walking to get to the stone. You can’t, after all, earn fertility just by snapping your fingers. Stones of that kind are never in your neighbour’s back yard, that would be no better than cheating. They’re always stuck in impossible places. When she got to the top of the rise where the worn old stone sat, Camille found herself staring at a fresh-painted sign politely warning ramblers to be wary of the guard dogs now used by local shepherds. The last paragraph ended optimistically:
DO NOT SCREAM AND DO
NOT THROW STONES AT THE DOGS. AFTER OBSERVING STRANGERS FOR A CERTAIN TIME, THEY WILL NORMALLY LEAVE OF THEIR OWN ACCORD.
And abnormally, Camille added for symmetry, they’ll jump at my throat. Instinctively, she altered her grip on her metal-tipped stick and looked around. What with wolves and dogs on the loose, the mountainside had become a wilderness once more.

She climbed onto the stone whence you could see down over the whole valley. She could make out the white streak of the line of cars belonging to the men of the hunting party. Distant halloos wafted up to her. So, basically, it wasn’t much quieter up here, on her own. Basically, she was a bit scared.

She got out her bread and water and the tool catalogue. It was an exhaustive listing with sections on
compressed air, soldering, scaffolding, lifting gear
, and scores of similarly promising headings. Camille read every entry from start to finish, including detailed specifications like
jumbo weed hog, 1.1HP petrol engine, anti-recoil bar, low-vibration solid transmission with reverse thrust, electronic ignition, weight 5.6 kilograms
. Such descriptions – and catalogues were full of them – gave her profound intellectual satisfaction (understanding the object, how it fitted together, how it worked) as well as intense lyrical pleasure. On top of the underlying fantasy of solving all the world’s problems with a
combined-cycle milling machine
or a
universal chuck tool
, the catalogue represented the hope of using a combination of power and ingenuity to overcome all of life’s shitty obstacles. A false
hope
, to be sure, but a hope nonetheless. Thus did Camille draw her vital energy from two sources: musical composition and
The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft
. Ten years younger and she had also drawn on love, but she had really lost interest in that overused well. Love could give you wings, but it also knocked you off your feet, so it wasn’t much of a bargain overall. Far less so than a
ten-ton hydraulic jack
, for instance. Broadly speaking, love meant that men stayed around when you didn’t love them and ran off when you did. The system was simple, entirely predictable, and never failed to engender either massive boredom or catastrophe. To put up with all that just for twenty days’ wonder, no, it really wasn’t worth it. Lasting love, love on which you can build, love that brings strength, nobility, sanctity, purity and succour, in a word all the stuff you believe love can be before you really try the thing out, well, that was stuff and nonsense. That was where Camille was at, after years of try-outs, numerous mishaps and a really sore patch. A scam for the naïve and a godsend for narcissists, love was a rubbish idea. Which is to say that as far as the heart was concerned, Camille was halfway to becoming a complete cynic, and she felt neither contentment nor regret about that. The thick skin she had grown did not stop her loving Johnstone sincerely, after her own fashion. It allowed her to appreciate him, even admire him, and snuggle up to him. But not to entertain the smallest hope of anything. Camille had retained only immediate desires and short-range emotions, she had bricked up all ideals, hopes, and grandeur. She expected virtually nothing from anybody, or almost. That was the only way
she
could love nowadays: with greediness and goodwill verging on utter indifference.

Camille moved further into the shade, took off her jacket, and immersed herself for two good hours in close study of a
Water-cooled grinder with abrasive disk
, a
Turbocharged double-protection sump pump
, and other clever contraptions that brought her both reassurance and instruction. But her eyes kept wandering from the page and peering into the far distance. She was not entirely at ease. She was holding her walking stick tight. Suddenly she heard something rustling, and then bushes being trampled. In a flash she was up on top of the stone, her heart racing and her stick on guard. A wild boar came out of the undergrowth ten metres away, saw her standing there, and then went back into the scrub. Camille took a deep breath, buckled up her bag, and went back down the path to Saint-Victor. It was not a good time for being on the mountain.

At dusk she perched on the rim of the trough in the village square, with her legs crossed under her, and the bread and cheese laid out beside her. Awaiting the hunters’ return, she could hear the muffled thuds of disappointment and defeat. From her lookout she also saw Johnstone coming back on his motorbike. Instead of parking it on its kickstand on the square, as he usually did, he drove on this evening, passed his weary companions, and rode straight up the steep incline to the house.

Camille found him sitting on the top step, lost in thought, his helmet still in his hand. She sat down next
to
him and he put an arm round her shoulders.

“Any change?”

Johnstone shook his head.

“Any trouble?”

Repeat gesture.

“Sibellius?”

“Found him. With his brother Porcus. Their territory is right down in the south-east. In a really nasty mood. Nasty but in clover. The hunters are going to try to get tranquillisers into them.”

“What for?”

“So as to get a cast of their jaws.”

Camille nodded to show she understood. “And Crassus?” she asked.

Johnstone moved his head once again. “Not a sign,” he said.

Camille finished her piece of cheese in silence. Dragging words out of the Canadian phrase by phrase could be tiresome.

“So nobody can find the beast,” she concluded. “They can’t, and you can’t.”

“Can’t be found,” Johnstone agreed. “But he must leave a scent, the dogs ought to pick it up.”

“And so?”

“He must be one tough guy. Real tough.”

Camille pursed her lips. She wasn’t convinced. It was true, of course, that they’d taken a hell of a long time to close in on the Beast of Gévaudan all that time ago. Assuming what they’d got really had been the right one. There had never been any definite proof. As a result of
which
, the Beast still preyed on people’s minds after more than two hundred years.

“Well, well,” she mumbled with her chin on her knees, “I’m really surprised.”

Johnstone stroked her hair for a long moment.

“There’s someone who’s not surprised at all,” he said.

Camille turned to look at him. It was quite dark now, and she couldn’t see his face properly. She waited. At night he had to say more because his sign language couldn’t be seen. In the dark he could be almost fluent.

“Someone who doesn’t believe in it,” he said.

“In the hunt?”

“In the beast.”

Another pause.

“Don’t get it,” Camille said. She sometimes fell into involuntary imitation and compacted her own sentences by clipping the first word.

“Who doesn’t believe there is a beast,” Johnstone explained, with effort. “No beast. And who told me, confidentially.”

“I see,” Camille said. “So what does this someone believe it is, then? A dream?”

“No.”

“A hallucination? A collective delusion?”

“No. Someone who does not believe there is a beast.”

“Nor sheep torn to bits?”

“No. Of course not. Sheep, yes. But no beast.”

Camille shrugged her shoulders in despair. “So what does this someone believe it is, then?”

“A man.”

Camille sat up straight and shook her head. “A man? Who kills sheep with his teeth? And what about those bite marks?”

Johnstone pulled a face in the dark. “The person thinks it’s a werewolf.”

Another pause. Then Camille put her hand on Johnstone’s arm.

“A werewolf?” she whispered instinctively, as if the evil word could not be spoken out loud. “A werewolf? You mean a nutter?”

“No, no, a werewolf. There’s a person around here who thinks it really is a werewolf.”

Camille tried to make out Johnstone’s face in the dark, to see whether he was having her on, or what. But the Canadian’s expression remained stony and serious.

“Are you talking about the kind of guy who turns into a monster at night with claws that grow and hair that sprouts all over and canines that stick out over his lower lip? The sort of guy who goes around eating people lost at night in the woods and then stuffs his hairy chest inside his suit jacket in the morning before going in to the office?”

“You got it,” said Johnstone, seriously. “A werewolf.”

“And we’re supposed to have one around here?”

“Yup.”

“And it’s supposed to have eaten all those sheep since the end of winter?”

“Anyway the last twenty of them.”

“What about you?” Camille asked hesitantly. “Do you believe in it?”

Johnstone smiled vaguely and shrugged his shoulders.

“Good Lord, no,” he said.

Camille stood up, smiled herself, and waved her arms as if she was chasing shadows away.

“So who’s the oaf who told you all that?”

“Suzanne Rosselin.”

Camille, dumbfounded, stared hard at the Canadian still sitting on the step with his helmet in his hand, and still as calm.

“Is that true, Lawrence?”

“Yup. The other evening, when you were fixing the leak. She said it was a fucking idiot of a werewolf that was holding the whole region to ransom. That was why the tooth-prints weren’t normal.”

“Suzanne said that? You really mean Suzanne?”

“Sure. The old bag.”

Camille stood there in dismay, her arms hanging loose by her side.

“What she said,” Johnstone specified, “was that the fucking idiot of a werewolf had been –” he hunted for the right word “– had been awoken by the return of the wolves and that now he was taking advantage of their raids, which allowed him to cloak his own crimes under their mantle.”

“Suzanne is not crazy,” Camille muttered.

“You know very well she’s completely round the bend.”