James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

‘You have a hunch?’

Mme Morille caressed his palm. Good heavens . . .

‘You take me for the person who kidnapped little Théo? I didn’t do it, but there is a lot of nasty gossip. I know the town considers me a witch: I treat, I cure, I heal . . . Sometimes I make predictions with my tarot cards and read palms. But people don’t like that. They are quick to blame me for their misfortunes. You have a feeling about me?’

‘No!’ exclaimed Despérine.

Mme Morille had kept the young inspector’s hand in hers and had again trapped him against the wall. He was unable to get loose except by resorting to violence against her. The little old woman mumbled, her nose in the neck of his overly large raincoat.

‘I have a feeling about you.’

‘About what you said a minute ago?’

‘About the infusions?’

‘No, about the . . .’

The inspector stammered. Mme Morille looked at him with a diffident expression, with eyes that hadn’t grasped the meaning of his question. Her head full of white hair swayed from left to right.

‘What did I say a minute ago?’

‘That doesn’t matter. What feeling did you have about me?’

‘You are a good person. That is why you stayed. It’s after the bustle of work, when you are alone, that you think the best and you succeed.’

‘Where are you going with this?’

‘I feel your heart as though I was holding it still warm between my hands.’

André Despérine wanted to flee the premises at top speed, but his legs didn’t respond. Good God, what is she saying?

‘What are you saying?’

‘I sense your goodness and the innocence you keep deep inside you. I would love to help you in your search! But for that, you would first have to grant me that favor.’

The inspector stammered before the absurdity of the situation: grant Mme Morille the favor of assisting in the investigation? Despérine shrugged his shoulders, scratched the back of his head, tapped the tip of his shoe on the wood floor and finally pulled his hand away from the woman’s.

‘Yes, yes, I tell you yes! Help me?’

‘Then come! Follow me!’

When she invited him to follow her, she pushed him through the living room to the kitchen. There was a little wooden door painted in a hideous manner, white with sky-­blue trim, squeezed between the stove and the refrigerator. Mme Morille hung her aprons from it.

André Despérine was forced to open this little door in order not to be crushed by the healing woman’s shoves. The panel opened onto a narrow stairway that led down into the darkness. The inspector hurtled down the several steps faster than he would have expected; he no longer felt Mme Morille’s palms on his back. She had remained upstairs and for a second he thought he saw her eyes penetrating the backlit silhouette.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll turn on the light!’

The yellow glare of a bare bulb illuminated the little cellar, done up as a reception area for Mme Morille’s ‘business’. A round table covered in a checkered cloth was framed by four varnished wood chairs. The cellar walls must not have been well kept – you could smell an odor of mustiness and dust – for they were entirely covered by dark-­colored curtains. In one corner, on a console table, languished a voice recorder and underneath, an empty cat basket.

‘He left without warning,’ explained Mme Morille with a stab of sadness in her throat. ‘Poupi never came back.’

She had taken hold of the inspector’s left hand again. He was pulled towards the table and sat down, happy to be at a comfortable height. Mme Morille leaned towards him, her white curls falling over her face. She had a wide smile, like a little girl excited at the idea of going into a doll store.

‘I have a wondrous power!’

Despérine smiled to hide his unease.

‘Really?’

‘I can bring Théo back, make him reappear here. Just like that, investigation over! But it is dangerous, you must not move.’

André Despérine had a hard time understanding what the healer’s game was, but his mother had always advised him never to stop someone carried away by their own momentum. He let her proceed. From a camouflaged drawer under the tablecloth she took out a candle stuck into a bronze holder. She lit the candle and placed it in the center of the table. Then she took the inspector’s hand once more and with a gesture of her index finger asked him to give her his other palm as well. He gave it to her a little reluctantly.

Entirely caught in the witch’s trap, André Despérine thus attended a spiritualistic séance for the first time in his life. Mme Morille intoned a psalmody barely whispered between her teeth. The young man seemed to recognize the words, but he couldn’t have said what they were – an indigenous language perhaps, smooth and flowing, but strangely incisive. The arcane chant lasted several minutes, which passed very quickly for the bewitched Despérine. The healer softened the sound of her voice, her lips still moved, but the esoteric phrases became inaudible.

Without forewarning, Mme Morille’s grip on Despérine’s palms tightened again at the same time as the artificial light from the ceiling flickered. The inspector stifled a little cry of surprise. The old woman held him too tightly for him to get free. Little by little the light dimmed; it became subdued without Despérine’s being able to identify the cause. He knew he was toppling into a world outside his control when he felt a slight draft of air at the nape of his neck.

Despérine raised his eyes towards the staircase and the door leading to the kitchen. It was closed. The curtains moved imperceptibly and a dark emptiness settled in around them. There was only the light of the candle to illuminate the room when Mme Morille gave an enormous start.

This time, the cadet inspector really cried out. Good God! The seer didn’t seem to notice, plunged in her trance, her lips animated by a faint monody, her closed eyes suddenly rolling upwards, wide open. Despérine wanted to let himself slide down underneath his chair, but a superhuman force holding his arms kept him at the table. He kept his eyes wide open, seized with a great terror. He thought he would vomit when the ghostly faces began to appear, a thousand decapitated heads turning around them faster and faster, they too monotonously reciting an unknown poem.

Then, in the center of the tornado, above the flame from the candlestick, a complete silhouette formed. Smoke spread out from the candle like incense, the hazy outlines of a child’s body materialized before the inspector. Mme Morille was still in a mystical ecstasy, disembodied or possessed. The force she was exerting on the young man was almost enough to break his bones, but the pain was so deafening Despérine felt incapable of crying out; it climbed up his arms all the way to his ears, squeezing his cranium like a gigantic vise.

André Despertine witnessed, powerless, the inexplicable apparition of little Théo, who, judging from his green tint, seemed terrified at having materialized floating in the center of a spectral whirlwind. He was suspended with his arms folded and, starting to shout, he drowned out the deafening silence that filled the cellar. From the other side of the round table, Mme Morille was suddenly racked with convulsions. She shook her head in every direction with movements so sudden that André Despérine expected to see her neck break. But the witch opened her mouth wide, a thick and viscous drool at the corners of her lips.

‘You will be eaten! Eaten, Despérine! Eaten!’

She threw herself at him, her hands reaching out for his throat, but he was faster than her and dropped to the ground. Getting back up, he grabbed the bronze candlestick, which had rolled away, and before the witch could pick herself up, he smashed her curly-­haired skull repeatedly, spreading a bloody mush on the checkered tablecloth. The tempest of poltergeists ceased immediately, and when his fit of madness had subsided, Despérine was speechless, almost forgetting the young boy who was curled up at his feet on the stone floor.