Jean-Patrick Manchette - The Mad and the Bad

“I’m all right,” the girl murmured. “I’ll be okay.”

Clinging to the car, she got to her feet. She staggered a little.

“We’ll continue on foot,” she said.

“Oh drat!” said Peter. “I’m fed up with walking.”

“If you’d rather,” said Julie evenly, “I’ll leave you here on the edge of these deep woods haunted by big gray owls.”

“Shut up! Shut up!” exclaimed the little boy. “Okay, okay.”

Julie started off, unsteady on her feet. Peter trotted behind her. Darkness began creeping into the hollows, but beyond the crest of the hill ahead the sun was a pool of copper. The road, narrow and potholed, was deserted. Since the 2CV had left Montbrison the two travelers had encountered very few vehicles and only the odd pedestrian in the close vicinity of the town. For the last hour or more they had seen no one, and no sign of habitation.

Julie and Peter climbed towards the sunlit heights. A track crossed the little road. An improvised sign dangled from a post at the intersection. It bore the name of a hamlet that meant nothing to Julie.

Maybe, she thought, I’ll get to the top of this hill, then I’ll lie down and die and nothing will have mattered at all.

Her head drooped. She walked on like an automaton.

“Carry me,” Peter asked.

She made no reply. She kept on walking. The sky was misting over. Behind Julie, high above her, the clouds were taking on a blue-gray hue.

When the girl reached the top of the hill she almost failed to notice. But since the ground was no longer rising, her chin bumped against her chest and she raised her head and stopped short, swaying, before a glorious setting sun that whacked her full in the face with its light.

Below her feet lay a somewhat nondescript valley full of trees. Beyond it, almost immediately, the ground rose once more, precipitously, forming a mountainside even higher than the one the fugitives had just climbed. At Julie’s eye level, the trees vanished from its darkening slopes, and the summit sprang up above like a greenish skull. And there, far off, silhouetted against the sunset, and pointed out so to speak by the sun, a low, chaotic, grotesque structure adhered to that skull close to the summit.

“Look at the castle!” exclaimed Peter.

“That’s Hartog’s Moorish Tower,” Julie stammered.

“It’s all squished! It’s not a tower. It’s ugly.”

“No, no,” said Julie. “Come on. Let’s go down.”

The road looped into the valley, then followed the valley floor, leading away from the distant structure. Julie set off again, abandoning the dilapidated road, cutting straight down across fields and skirting copses. On the steep slope, helped by her own weight, she broke into a run. As she tried to slow down, her heels slammed into the ground and the shock carried to her injured arm. Peter frolicked around her, his fatigue forgotten.

The sun disappeared behind the Moorish Tower. Julie and Peter reached the bottom of the valley, where a fast-moving stream tumbled along. Anxiously, Julie contemplated its white eddies swirling in the shadows. Peter pulled her by the sleeve.

“There’s a bridge.”

He was pointing to a crude conglomeration of branches, planks, and logs a short way upstream. Julie followed him towards it.

The makeshift bridge, like something built by drunken boy scouts, was precariously balanced on large round rocks. The ropes that had once moored it securely to nearby trees were frayed, and so rotted that they almost crumbled at Julie’s touch. The plank walkway had holes in it at several points. Below, the water seethed black and gray.

By now night had fallen in the valley. Julie started onto the walkway and felt the breath of the torrent below upon her face. The girl clung to the rudimentary handrail that ran alongside the planking. The bridge trembled beneath her and she trembled along with it. She had the impression of being enormously heavy. The planks bowed beneath her feet and squeaked. Julie stopped halfway across and watched in horrible fascination as a rusty nail emerged slowly, like a penis, from the wood of a plank. The plank split, the twisted nail flew into the air and fell into the foam below, and Julie’s foot slipped through the walkway. The girl bruised herself as she grabbed onto the planking. Everything was shaking, around her and inside her head. She found herself on all fours, crawling along above the boiling race, desperately looking around for Peter. She heard the little boy call her, then saw him, already on the other side, hopping up and down with impatience.

“Hey, can’t you hurry up?”

The bridge gave way, and Julie flung herself forward. She ended up kneeling in the mud of the bank. Behind her, the walkway overturned. One end crashed into the creek. The whole contraption swung round into alignment with the current and plunged swiftly into the foaming waters, bouncing off rocks, coming apart, disintegrating, and disappearing with startling speed. The darkness swallowed it up.

Smeared with mud, Julie clambered up the bank. She was burning up with fever. She did not know where Peter was. She was driven on by a single idea: a hundred meters, fifty meters from where she was now, once past the foot of the mountain, there would be nothing ahead but a vast carpet of grass and flowers, and upon it would be the Moorish Tower, where Hartog was waiting for her.

Hartog, his features drawn and his lower lip covered with cold sores and fading bite marks, was slumped in a chaise lounge on a tiled deck. An enormous glass with a sprig of mint trailing in it sat on the ground beside him alongside an overflowing ashtray. A stained cigarette dangled from the redhead’s mouth. Dark glasses hid his eyes. He was wearing white pants and a mesh undershirt.

Dédé, the driver, wearing a dark suit, tiptoed up to him from behind.

“Any news?” asked the redhead between gritted teeth.

“The second goon died on the way to the hospital. The roadblocks have come up with nothing yet. The police are combing the region by helicopter.”

“I don’t understand what happened,” muttered Hartog. “Where has she gone, that loony bitch?”

The driver shrugged, stuck his hands in his pockets, and let his gaze wander over the Mediterranean, which was slapping at the pebbles below the deck.

Close up, the Moorish Tower appeared even more peculiar than in photographs. The place was obviously built upon several preexisting structures-the mountain cattle sheds that the Auvergnats call jasseries. But these had been literally buried by masonry, by low domes, barely level terraces, and formless piles of stones. There was nothing towerlike about the Moorish Tower. It had spread across the surface of the mountain without growing upward. It was like a Siamese temple flattened by power hammers.

Peter had halted near an outgrowth of the building with a dark opening like the entrance to a tunnel. Julie joined him, panting. She was shivering. The sky was violet, shadows cloaked the mountainside, and a pitted, yellowish moon floated at the horizon.

“There’s nobody here,” said Peter.

The labyrinthine stonework was indistinct. Julie approached the dark opening, stumbling amid pebbles and wild grass. Something rolled and clattered beneath her feet; she thought it was a can of food. A vague light twinkled in the tunnel. Julie went farther in and her forehead struck a bead curtain which began to jiggle and clink. Between its glass and wooden beads a room was visible. With a brusque movement of her left arm, Julie pushed the curtain aside and went on in.

She found herself at the side of a vaulted chamber furnished in nondescript fashion. A kitchen table, chairs, an ugly tiled floor.