Jean-Patrick Manchette - The Mad and the Bad

“Hey!” she shouted. “Anyone here?”

A post office calendar was pinned to the enamel-painted wall. The picture was of cats in a basket. It was hideous. Julie contemplated it, swaying. She blinked. The calendar was immense. Was it a hallucination? The girl hobbled over to the wall and touched her hand to the color print. It was fifty centimeters long, at least. Julie gave a strangled cry, backed away, bumped into a chair, and felt her hair stand on end. The seat came up to the middle of her body and the table was almost on a level with her chin.

“It’s the Giant’s Castle,” cried Peter.

Eyes wide with terror, Julie wheeled around and saw a man emerge from the darkness at the far end of the crazy room. He wore blue work overalls. Yellowish strands of hair fell down over his broad brow. It was Fuentès. Julie tried to step back and felt herself falling.

Thompson awoke sweltering. The sun was shining on his face through a gap in the foliage and the killer was bathed in sweat. Hastily he got into a crouch, his head swiveling like a weathervane, but the surrounding woods were calm. The singing of the birds and the sighing of the wind were the only sounds. Thompson consulted his watch. It had stopped. He looked up. Judging by the sun, the morning was well advanced. The man clicked his tongue with irritation. For years he had never slept so late.

He got to his feet. He felt ill. He had difficulty walking as far as the upper fringe of the wood. Prone in the grass, he scanned the round-topped mountains. Here and there, kilometers away and shimmering, were little brownish groupings of what were long-horned cattle. No human beings were to be seen.

Thompson scratched his cheek. His growth of beard itched. The killer was exasperated. He had to nourish himself, yet the very idea turned his stomach. If he could just manage to slip through the roadblocks, reach a town, and get in to see a doctor, perhaps he could be set to rights by a blood transfusion.

But no. The doctor would ask questions. And ask himself questions. The whole region must be in an uproar by now. “Massacre in Montbrison,” the headlines probably read. Thompson got up. His leg muscles were jittery beneath him. He made his way, under cover, to the stream. Once there, he lay on his stomach to drink.

As he lowered his lips to the running water something splashed downstream, then reached him in a flash of gray. Thompson extended his arm. He rolled over sideways, ending on his back in the grass with his fingers clasped about the gills of a wriggling trout. Thompson observed the fish’s struggles, how it opened and closed its mouth convulsively. It was interesting. The killer placed his thumbs beneath the throat and forced the trout’s head back. It fought even more frantically. Thompson increased the pressure and felt the neck snap in his hands. The killer felt a rush of happiness. He immediately gutted the fish with his fingers. It was no longer wriggling. He proceeded to devour its sides. The flesh was insipid and hard like that of raw mollusks. Thompson gulped it down feverishly. Bones scratched his throat but he forced himself to carry on, to swallow as much of the meat as he could while the creature’s death still filled him with exaltation.

His nausea did not return until twenty minutes later, once digestion had begun. So all was not lost from the nutritional point of view. Thompson waited for the spasms to end before going back to his vantage point on the bank of the stream to look out for another trout. As he waited he began to think. There was not just trout. There were little animals too. He had never thought of that. Never in his life had Thompson hunted. But the idea of catching an animal and-yes-breaking it was perhaps a temporary solution, a way of countering his lack of appetite, and of surviving, for a little while, yes.

When Julie came round for the first time, she was alone and naked in a low bed in the middle of a vaulted room. Anxiety gnawed at her insides. Where was Peter? She called out.

“Peter!”

She could hardly hear her own voice; she thought she must be deaf. She tried to sit up and managed only to get onto her elbows. Her head fell back onto a bolster without a pillowcase. With difficulty the girl rolled onto her side. Again she tried to call out.

“Uhh” was the only sound that issued from her dry throat.

Had that sound traveled sixty centimeters, it would have been like reaching the ends of the earth. Julie saw a flagged floor, a red perforated-plastic chair of the kind you see at the outdoor tables of provincial cafés, and a large bare stone wall with a French window. Outside the light was blindingly bright. Julie could see nothing beyond the glass except for milky shadows overwhelmed by whiteness.

A very short time later, the girl came to for a second time. The light had turned orange now. Julie pushed herself to the edge of the bed and let herself drop to the floor. There was a vague pain in her arm. She touched the spot. A crepe bandage encircled her biceps and she could not bend her right elbow. Fuentès appeared in the orange opening.

“What the hell are you doing on the floor?” he demanded.

“You murderer!” Julie responded feebly, looking about in vain for a weapon.

Fuentès leant down and took hold of the girl. He was bare-chested, wearing white linen pants, and their skin touched as he lifted Julie back into the bed.

“Where is Peter? Where is Hartog? What do you want? Are you going to rape me?”

It was exhausting Julie to talk. She sensed that the brute was tucking her in.

“Sleep. You have nothing to fear.”

The girl wanted to ask again where Peter was, but succeeded only in producing a bubble of saliva, like a newborn baby. After that she kept experiencing brief moments of relative lucidity. It was sometimes day outside, sometimes night. Fuentès had her drink broth through a straw. She would choke on it and spill most of it down her front, which was no longer naked, she noticed, because she was wearing a man’s shirt. Once she thought she saw Peter, but since he seemed to be wearing a wig she had to acknowledge that this was a dream.

“I’m able to talk now,” said the girl at last.

She opened her eyes, astonished to have said it. Fuentès was sitting next to the bed dressed in khaki shorts and an apple-green shirt, a gypsy shirt. He had a thick beard. His eyes had dark circles under them.

“Your fever has passed, at any rate.”

“I’m completely whacked,” said Julie.

She pressed her wound. The site was covered by a large square adhesive bandage. It did not hurt very much.

“Do you realize that you were fired at with an expanding bullet?” asked Fuentès. “Part of it was still in you. I got it out. The rest had come out by itself. You’re lucky you still have your arm. Who was the bastard that did it?”

“Thompson,” said Julie. “As if you didn’t know!”

“Oh yes, right,” he answered. “Peter told me all about it. How I was the chief killer and all that.”

“Peter? What have you done with him?”

Fuentès scratched his beard. Noisily. “He’s playing on the hillside.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Try a bit harder.”

Julie laughed nervously. Fuentès began to laugh too. He took a pack of Gitanes from the pocket of his apple-green shirt and lit up.

“I’m not offering you one. It would only make you cough. You’re not in any state.”

“Have I been here long?”

“Soon be eight days.”

Julie made an unintelligible exclamation. Fuentès shrugged.

“I haven’t killed you. Looked after you, more like.”

His tone was even. He was checking things off. He might as well have been counting on his stubby fingers.