Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

At the Haunted House, the grub is homemade and cheap, you eat listening to hard rock in a cavernous light. One of those curious places covered with morbid frescoes, where a shady crowd of night people, owls, badgers, hyenas, and vampires come to meet. Behind the bar the owner looks like a barbarian Gaul, with his long blond hair, his bushy mustache, and his fringed vest; he seems to have a complete understanding of the world as it is, impassibly drawing his pints of beer. On the wall behind him there’s a sign in capital letters: CREDIT IS DEAD AND SO ARE YOU IF YOU DON’T PAY UP. A pool table has replaced the stage ever since the old farts on the neighborhood committee complained about the cacophony of the live music, but you still have to talk loudly to be heard over the sound system. The place isn’t very intimate, but it’s pleasant, and the lovers manage to find a quiet table on the mezzanine. After the potato, bacon, and cheese tartlet and two dishes of stuffed beef rolls à la Provençal, Sarah is done telling her life story; Maurice pretended to be interested and listened attentively. She’s going for a degree in commercial art at Saint Joseph les Maristes; the road worker’s daughter is into infography, a new field he knows nothing about; apparently it’s about drawing with a computer.

“Soon everyone will have their own personal computer at home,” she prophesies.

I doubt it, Maurice thinks, without daring to contradict her; as if people have nothing else to do all day but deaden their minds in front of a screen — TV’s quite enough for that. All he cares about is roaming the streets with his colleagues and making noise on the neck of his guitar.

All you have to do to is lean over the railing to order a beer; you grab your bottle between the cables of the railing so the owner doesn’t have to climb the stairs. Time goes by fast when you drink beer, tongues loosen, intimacy becomes more pressing and lips soften in the dusky light. From time to time you do have to get up to go take a piss, which takes some courage because it’s all the way downstairs.

The clock had struck midnight, the hour of crime, several hours earlier when the guitarist of the Sex Toys and his lady leave the hellhole on rue Vian.

In the sweetness of the night, Maurice has taken Sarah’s hand. Do they know where they’re going? The municipal lighting gives a piss-colored shade to the dull façades of the old buildings which occupy most of the neighborhood, which is bathed in a uniformly pallid light, crossed by narrow streets, totally deserted at this ungodly hour. Their footsteps resound on the pavement. Suddenly the young buck pulls hard on his conquest’s arm, dragging her under the entrance of a building. Sarah doesn’t resist. Now she’s backed against a scaly wall while Maurice is assailing her neck with kisses. They greedily attack each other’s mouths amidst the smells of garbage cans. A soup of tongues in the stinking darkness disturbed only by the scurrying of the rats all around. Sarah can’t get enough of those slobbery kisses. But Maurice quickly grows tired of them. He tells himself she’s hot and it’s high time to stick a finger in her; he’s a methodical boy. He slips his right hand between the young woman’s thighs. He did try to peek all evening, but in vain: stockings or tights?. Yes! He grazes the garter: the naughty girl is wearing the kind of stockings that attach to a garter belt, how convenient! Under his caresses, the satin of the little panties feels like the skin of an invisible animal, all feverish with desire. The fabric has come alive under his fingers, soon fusing with the juicy place it is no longer protecting. Sarah lifts a pink flamingo leg, planting one of her heels on the wall to open up to more pleasure, already moaning. All he has to do now is. That’s when they hear the loud click of a timer switch turning on lights.

A bull’s-eye lights up, revealing a massive wooden door behind Maurice. Sarah doesn’t open her eyes right away, totally entranced by her own pleasure. But that ill-timed ray of light on her neck is enough to distract the young man, who suspends his activity. They don’t call it a switch for nothing, he thinks, piqued. They hear shoes dragging over the hall. The door creaks open and Maurice turns around. Sarah closes back up like a flower. The fat guy looks more surprised than they do. A gelatinous colossus, evoking for the young woman, a former reader of fairy tales, the giant of the magic beanstalk. Something hairy shoots between her legs. A Yorkshire terrier, who makes straight for the rats.

“Hey, don’t mind me, guys!” The master of the premises seems to be waxing indignant. He stands there, on his step, his garbage bag in his hand. In his underpants and slippers. The heavy door has closed slowly behind him.

“We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re leaving!” replies Maurice.

“Already?” The fat guy shoots forward with a speed that is astonishing for a pachyderm. In one bound, he’s now blocking the passage. Without putting down his garbage bag.

The little window of light goes out, returning the entrance to the night. A medallion of light surrounds the dark silhouette of the fat guy blocking the exit; the street, just a step away, seems inaccessible, unless they walk through his body. Maurice feels Sarah’s hand squeeze his own more tightly.

“Let us through, sir,” he says without raising his voice, as calmly as possible, but with all the authority he can muster.

Facing him, silence. Their eyes get used to the darkness little by little, and in the whites of the fat guy’s eyes, Maurice thinks he can see a lecherous gleam. His breath stinks of garlic and liquor, two things that spell solitude, not to mention the Yorkshire terrier.

“I don’t want to harm you,” the man finally declares with a sugary voice. “Just, couldn’t we play together a little?” The bag thuds dully to the ground at his slippered feet. The fat guy extends his hand to them. “Just a little caress for the miss. It’s my home here — to enter, you have to pay customs.”

Sarah moves away, pulling Maurice backward. The fat guy steps forward.

“Don’t be scared. ”

The entrance is a dead end leading to closed doors. If the young people thought of it, all they’d have to do is grope for the doorbell to wake up the whole block. But they remain frozen there, wide-eyed and fascinated, with their backs to the wall, staring at a danger they can hardly see. A danger whose breath they can feel upon them, a danger whose animal movements they glimpse in the darkness.

“Don’t play shy, baby, I know you’re a little slut. ” the voice murmurs softly. “And your boyfriend is cute too. You’re young, you need some new experiences. ”

Caressing, touching. The young man feels fingers running over his crotch. The obese heap of a man crushing them, those obscene tentacles squeezing them in, that smell — a mix of sweat and pastis. Terror paralyzing them. That hypnotic voice is advising them to just let themselves go, like a big snake wrapping itself around them.

“I’m sure you’re going to like it,” says the voice rubbing against him.

When Maurice finally reacts, he tries a blind knee-kick and only hits fat.

“Leave us alone!” Sarah begs without managing to scream.

“Come on, be good sports!” the voice orders.

The hand of a gorilla makes the skull of the Sex Toys’ leader bounce against the wall. More than pain, vertigo instantly empties all Maurice’s strength. As he faints, he can hear Sarah still begging.

When he comes to, a few seconds or a thousand years have gone by. He’s lying on the floor, his nose in the garbage bags at the foot of a dumpster. It all comes back to him. Over his head, Sarah is struggling and sobbing. Words are no longer coming out of the girl’s throat, which he guesses has been forced into silence. Maurice hears the giant whispering breathlessly, without understanding a word of the poison he’s distilling into his victim’s ear. The fat pig is completely absorbed. There’s no light shining on the façades, just nothingness. Despite Sarah’s coquetry in veiling herself in thin nylon, it’s not yet the season for sleeping with the windows open. And anyway, in this neighborhood the silence is broken every night by the songs of drunks, the shouts from fights, and gunshots, when there’s not an explosion a few streets over that makes your windows shake.