Franck Thilliez: Syndrome E

Next sequence. Something had changed in the little girl’s eyes. A kind of permanent sadness. The image was very dark. All around her swirled the same drenching fog. The camera moved forward, then back, as if taunting her; the girl pushed it away, both hands in front of her, as if she were chasing away an insect. Lucie felt out of place as she viewed the film. She felt like an intruder, a voyeur secretly watching a scene that might be taking place between father and daughter.

Just as suddenly it tipped into another sequence. Lucie’s eyes widened, taking in the scene: a stretch of grass surrounded by fences, the sky black, stormy, chaotic, and not quite natural—a special effect? At the far end of the pasture, the same girl waited, arms hanging along her body. In her right hand she held a butcher’s knife, so out of proportion to her small, innocent fingers.

Zoom in on her eyes. They stared at the void, pupils visibly dilated. Something had shattered that child; Lucie could feel it. The camera, placed behind the fences, spun rapidly to the right to focus on a furious bull. The animal, monstrously powerful, foamed at the mouth, pawed at the ground, and butted against the barriers. Its horns pointed forward like sabers.

Lucie’s hand flew to her mouth. They weren’t really going to…

She leaned against the back of a seat, head bent toward the screen. Her nails dug into the leatherette.

Abruptly an unidentified arm entered the field of vision and lifted a latch. The person doing this had taken care to remain offscreen. The pen was opened. The overexcited beast charged straight ahead. Its body expressed power of the purest, most violent kind. How much did it weigh—a ton? It stopped in the middle of the field, pivoted around, and then seemed to focus its attention on the little girl, who remained motionless.

Lucie considered running back into the projection booth and shutting off the film. Playtime was over; it was no longer about swings, smiles, or complicity—this was sinking into the inconceivable. Lucie, a finger on her mouth, could not turn her gaze from that satanic screen. The film was sucking her in. In the sky, the black clouds swelled, grew darker, as if preparing for a tragic ending. Lucie suddenly had the sense of a staged battle: Good versus Evil. An outsized, all-powerful, unassailable Evil. David against Goliath.

The bull charged.

The silence of the sound track and the absence of music added to the feeling of suffocation. One could imagine, without hearing it, the sound each hoof made as it fell, the snorting from the animal’s greasy snout. The camera now contained both subjects in its field: the bull on the left, the little girl on the right. The distance between the monster and the stationary child was growing shorter. Thirty yards, twenty… How could the girl not be moving? Why wasn’t she running, screaming for her life? Lucie thought briefly of the kid’s dilated pupils: Drugs? Hypnosis?

She was going to let herself be gored.

Ten yards. Nine, eight…

Five yards.

Suddenly, the bull came to a halt, its muscles twitching, while clumps of earth flew from the ground. It froze completely, barely one yard away from its target. Lucie thought it must have been a freeze-frame; she couldn’t breathe. Inevitably it would start up again, and the tragedy would occur. But nothing moved. And yet, the monster continued to pant, frothing at the mouth. One could read in its enraged eyes the desire to continue, to kill, but its hulk refused to obey.

“Paralyzed” would be the best word to describe it.

The girl stared at it without blinking. She took a step forward and slid beneath the head of this beast forty or fifty times her weight. Without betraying the slightest emotion, she raised her knife and slit its throat with a clean swipe. A black cascade began to flow and, as if vanquished by a demented matador, the beast fell over onto one side, raising a cloud of dust.

Suddenly, a black screen, as at the start. Slowly the white circle at the upper right faded out.

And then flickers in the room, like applause of light. The film was taking a bow.

Lucie remained frozen in place. She felt shaken to the core, and very cold. She nervously rubbed her forehead. Had she really seen an enraged bull stop short in front of a little girl and let its throat be slashed without reacting, all of it in one continuous shot with no visible edits?

With a shudder, she returned to the booth and sharply flipped the switch. The rumbling ceased, the neon flickered on again. Lucie felt infinite relief. What twisted mind could have filmed such deliria? She could still see that dingy fog spreading over the screen, those close-ups of the eyes, the opening and closing scenes of such unspeakable violence. There was something in this short that classic horror films couldn’t provide: realism. The girl, seven or eight at most, didn’t appear to be acting. Or if she was, she did it exceptionally well.

Lucie was about to head back upstairs when she heard a noise above her head. The crunch of a shoe on glass. She held her breath. Had the tension of the film caused her to imagine things? She moved forward cautiously, step-by-step, finally reaching the entrance foyer.

The door was open.

Lucie rushed forward, certain she’d locked it when she’d come in.

No one outside.

Dumbfounded, she went back in the house and looked around. At first glance, nothing had been touched. She moved on to the main hallway and checked the other rooms. Bathroom, kitchen, and… study.

The study—where Ludovic kept his many films.

Here again, the door was open. Lucie ventured into the stacks of reels. Dozens of canisters lay scattered about the floor. Celluloid spilled out in all directions. The cop noticed that only the canisters without labels—the ones that indicated neither title, director, nor year of production—had been disturbed.

Someone had been in here looking for something specific.

An anonymous film.

Ludovic had told her he’d acquired some reels the day before from a collector, including the one she’d just been watching. She hesitated, studied the room. Calling in a team to make a report seemed pointless. There was no break-in or vandalism, no theft. She nonetheless went back down to the cellar and packed up the strange film, so she could bring it to the restorer whose card Ludovic had given her. She couldn’t recall ever having seen such a psychologically taxing piece of work. She—who’d been used to autopsies and crime scenes for years—felt drained.

Back outside she thought to herself that, all in all, that glare of sunlight in her face wasn’t such a bad thing.

“What did you do before going to Violent Crimes, Chief Inspector Sharko?”

“To keep it simple, let’s say I put in a lot of time in CI.”

“Very well…”

Georges Péresse, chief of the Criminal Investigations unit in Rouen, which had caught the case, was a hard-faced man. In the car, Lucas Poirier had described him as a rigid, tenacious fellow who hated any sort of intrusion on his turf. Floating in his gray suit, Péresse measured barely five foot three but could boom out a voice like Barry White. It felt like the air was vibrating when he blew his stack.

“We’re not really accustomed to working with… behavioral analysts. I hope you’ll be able to manage by yourself—we’re understaffed as it is and my men are very busy.”

Sharko sat opposite, hands on his knees. The heat was stifling.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be as quiet as an autopsy report. In two or three days I’ll probably scram with a stack of Xeroxes under my arm. The main thing is for me to have access to the info”—he pressed his finger against the gleaming desk—“all the info, I mean, and for my hotel room to have a bathtub, because I like to take a cold bath when the temperature gets like this.”