The Lost Goddess

14

The air was still and cold above the Cham des Bondons. The stars looked down, protectively, on the standing stones. And on Annika’s little cottage, in the abandoned village. Vayssière.

Hunched over her laptop in the low-ceilinged sitting room, Annika was drinking wine and typing furiously. And drinking wine.

Her fingers paused. She squinted. The ambient light was rich and low and yellow in the room, cast by her antique table lamp with the lemon silk shade. The light from her screen was harsher, and brighter — and it stung her eyes.

Or was this stinging actually tears? Annika rarely if ever cried. She was proud of her scientific logic; she was proud of her coolness. But the emotion of confessing, after so long, was profound. Agony and relief at the same time. Because it was so hard to be honest. That’s why she was drinking, that’s why she was drunk: she needed the courage to do this. To wrench the lies away.

The years of complicity and deceit, with Ghislaine, meant the deceit had become part of her, grown deeply into her being. She was like one of those sad old trees on the Cham: a tree that had grown too close to barbed wire, so that the tree had eventually grown around the wire, and absorbed it, slowly and painfully, until the cruel iron wire was part of the tree itself. But she had to rip out the lies, because they were killing her, slowly.

Another slug of wine. Côtes du Rhone.

Her fingers tapped again, for a minute or more. She was an expert typist, even after a bottle of red. Yet now she had reached the crux. This needed a pause. A significant pause. And a deep breath.

Annika stared through the small open window of her living room, across the barren Cham. The silhouetted and distant stones looked like Victorian scholars, dressed in black and posed in thought. The chill autumn wind was gusting through the window, making her shiver.

Werewolves. Werewolves on the Margeride. Sometimes she wondered what exactly was out there. She knew it was something terrible. She didn’t know it all, but she knew enough, and that’s what she had to confess, before it was too late. Just tell the plain truth. Because the truth was terrifying enough, and more terrifying than any werewolf.

But first — another slurp of wine. Some more courage. Another pause.

She stood and stepped and leaned to the window, swaying slightly, gazing into the darkness. Waiting. Waiting for what? Death. Or worse.

The wind answered her questions, the cold, cold wind and nothing else. Shivering in the chill, she shut the window tight, and her heart filled her throat with terror at the face she saw.

But then she almost laughed, in shock. It was herself, reflected: she was gasping at her own reflection in the dark glazing. The living room interior, unlit and reflected.

Momentarily, she regarded her own aging face. How would she describe it? How did one describe a face? How accurate could one be with just a glimpse?

A few days ago, someone had come forward with a description of the possible killer, or, at least, of someone acting suspiciously near Ghislaine’s house, on the night the archaeologist was butchered. A neighbor had been walking his dog along the semirural road near Marvejols and had glimpsed a strange figure over a hedge. Why would anyone be skulking in a field on a very dark and wet evening?

But the description of the killer was so bizarre: short, slender, very probably a young woman; long dark hair, a chalky-white face. Could a woman do all that? It seemed a little incredible. Something else was assuredly out there. Something stronger, stranger, more brutal than the police conceived. And more people were dying. Annika had to confess, to admit what she knew — before the murders got worse, before they were completed.

Annika walked back to her desk, wineglass in hand, gazing around the room as she paced: at her pictures from the Ice Age caves: of the mute and wounded Hands of Gargas, the great black frieze of Niaux.

This tableau of a life seemed slightly insulting now. Once, these pictures, these mementos, they had meant everything — truly everything — but now all this, her life’s work, the ceaseless work and the tireless lies and the childless journey she had shared with Ghislaine, it was a historical, ideological, and actual dead end: it had literally ended in death.

Ghislaine had been cut open like the bison of Lascaux, his intestines falling to the floor. And more people would follow if Annika did not confess. There was no reason to maintain the deception one moment longer.

She set down her glass with an unsteady and unhappy hand, and she pulled out her chair, and she sat at her lonely desk, and reopened her e-mail. But even as she tapped the first words she hesitated. There was a large, agitated shadow on the wall. Cast by a moth. The moth must have flown in before she shut the window, and now the insect was trapped in the lampshade, its little wings beating desperately.

The dying struggle of the moth made the lamplight flicker on the walls, animating the pictures: the Hands of Gargas opened and closed, showing the severed fingers; the dying boys of Addaura struggled in the dust, watched by the men with sinister beaks.

Annika tried to type, to continue. But the moth was so desperate, trapped and hysterical.

Enough. Her thoughts were unraveling, the tears were not far away. She needed to rescue the moth, remove this last distraction, and then return to her computer and write it all down.

Approaching the lamp stand, she reached her hands inside the shade. A subtle shiver drove through her as she touched the madly flapping wings of the moth; she still nurtured childhood fears of moths trapped in her hair, flying into the mouths of sleepers, choking them on dusty wings.

An absurd phobia. Clutching her hands carefully, Annika caught the struggling thing between her fingers, caging it, not killing it. Slowly she moved to the nearest window, a small, leaded medieval window; it was unlatched. She just had to nudge the handle with her elbow and she could release the moth into the night. Just like this.

A white face passed in the darkness outside.

The shock was arctic. Liquidly chilling. What was that? What had she seen? Surely she had seen a face: it was meters away, a chalky-white face, staring, barely visible in the gloom, like a ghost. And now it was gone.

But had she? Had it even been there? Yes, perhaps no. Perhaps yes. She was quite drunk. Maybe she had imagined it. Her thoughts were fierce and turbulent and melting. She calmed herself as best she could. It was probably her deeper anxiety making her foolish — she had surely imagined it, and now it was gone. So she could return to her computer.

A noise rattled across the garden.

Annika spoke, timidly.

“Hello?”

It was so black out there, almost moonless. A deserted village with no streetlights. A dark so dark it could play tricks. But there — there! — that noise again. Was it just the wind, rattling an ancient door — or something lurking among the crumbling walls, maybe in the neighboring, wholly ruined cottage.

Annika leaned farther out of the tiny window.

“Bonsoir? Hello?” Were these words in her head? It was all doubt. “Is there someone there?” She felt absurd as she did this. A drunken old woman imagining things, talking to the silence; it was the last indignity.

Silence. Then more silence. Annika pulled back a fraction.

The face loomed again. The white face was rushing toward the window at incredible speed.

Annika choked with shock.

A dark hand was reaching in. Gripping her.

Who was this?

What was this? An angry face, showing animal anger, growling, murderous. Bestial. Shameless. And now the body of this white-faced creature was pouring through the open window, pushing her back, hands enormously strong, muffling her mouth, all over her. Annika was grabbed by the throat and her arms and her legs: she was grappled by something unexpectedly and luridly powerful. Like a monster. A childhood monster.

A jab of sharp pain pierced her neck, just under her chin. She had been injected. At once she felt the cold of paralysis slam into every limb, yet her brain was quite functional, she could sense and think and fear, and feel her heart straining at the terror.

Annika tried to scream — but the paralysis was too strong. Yet she could feel pain, too, searing pain. She was being dragged by the killer, this brutish mutant, this beast from Gévaudan. She was being dragged out of her sitting room by her own hair, yanked at the roots in her scalp.

Her hip bone banged against a table; now she was in the kitchen, her elbows knocking against the fridge, the oven, the door. The kitchen door. Lights dazzled her eyes and then more lights, and then she felt coldness and darkness. They were outside. She was being dragged over the front doorstep and along. By her hair.

The attacker was effortlessly potent. Annika was tugged and pulled all the way down her path, past her trash cans, past her little flower bed, out onto the track that led to the Cham des Bondons. Sharp, cold skies sang the night; Capricorn spun above her.

Where were they going? The stones? It had to be. She, it, this white-faced thing, this monster was dragging Annika to the stones. Again the Belgian woman tried to scream; again she heard nothing. Had she gone deaf?

No. She wasn’t deaf. She could hear the coarse and rasping breaths of the killer, the animal-like panting. She could hear the sounds of her own body slishing over the dewy turf as she was hauled along by the hair.

The stones awaited.

The nearest stone to her cottage was one of the tallest, the Soldier, three brutal meters of impervious granite, a pillar of black in the black of the night: she saw it coming toward her. The stone was standing like an executioner, medieval, in a horrible black hood, waiting to do a silent duty. The killer lifted Annika into position. He, she, it — this thing jerked back Annika’s head. The monster was going to smash her head against the rock. Just slam her skull into the stone, crushing the cranium. The front of the cranium. Yes, of course.

In her last moments Annika thought of her e-mail, in her laptop, waiting. Pulsing in the light. Unfinished. Everything she had done in her life had come to nothing; even this one last attempt at honesty. The first hot tears ran down Annika’s face as she stared up at the sky, as the killer pulled her head back as far as it would go. Ready. Ready to slam her forehead against the rock. To smash open her skull and pulp her living brain.

Annika wept for the end of her life. The stars above the stones were like a million fireflies, in a dark and freezing jungle.