He could wait for it to pass, proving himself to be a coward. Or, of course, he could go and see up close. He didn’t want to stay here feeling cowardly, the way he had felt when facing Liem and Travis, on the day they had made the killer remark that still made him wince. It was one of those things people say in the heat of the moment, but it had hit home. So he dwelled on what they had said; three months later it still felt like a poison arrow that would never stop spreading its venom, and every time he thought back to that moment he wanted to kill them … Especially as he hadn’t responded at the time. He had been so shocked that he had not been able to think of a comeback. But he had since imagined a thousand things he could have said, and it drove him crazy thinking about it.

The noises were frenzied now, but more disturbing was a shape just below, a dark mass skirting the walls of the house, some large creature or person crawling on all fours. He went downstairs, annoyed that fear was getting the better of him, that ghosts were trying to unhinge him. As he crossed the kitchen, he had the presence of mind or the dubious impulse to go over to the drawer by the sink, feeling around for a knife, the biggest possible. Strangely, having a knife in his hand did not calm him for long. Grabbing hold of a blade in anticipation of danger creates the illusion of safety only momentarily, because the blade very quickly becomes a nuisance, the thick handle is hard to hold and it means you can’t use that hand for anything else. Going out with a knife in your hand is oddly not reassuring. Quite the opposite, it adds to your fear rather than alleviating it.

September 1914

September 1914

On 3 August 1882 the local Parlement passed a law declaring war on wolves. They were all to be destroyed. Thirty years later, Mayor Fernand still had the bounty dockets in his drawer and was ready to pay one hundred francs to anyone who killed a she-wolf and half that amount for a male or wolf cubs. The bounty hunting had calmed people’s terror of wolves in the countryside, but anything could set it off again. Fernand knew his citizens, and he saw that the wild cats were stirring up old fears, reviving memories of rabid wolves that not so long ago had attacked women and children. And although the packs of wolves had supposedly moved on to the Cézallier plateau, towards Cantal, the lions were right there, just a hundred and twenty metres above the village.