Chapter 21: Trou du Diable
The end of my second week as a vampire found me near a town called Sainte Casimir, running around in fields with that rose in my teeth like a goddamn fool, trying to dig up that St. Elmo’s fire.
It hurt. A lot.
The corners of my mouth were stinging terribly, and every tooth that touched the stem throbbed. I had chosen this exercise regime after awakening in my copse at sunset to discover that many of my repellents had lost their power considerably. I wasn’t so optimistic as to think that I had actually exposed myself enough and grown more tolerant already, so now I knew: as lemons, garlic and roses dried up, their influence faded away. The items sitting in the IGA for however many days had probably been far more potent before I had collected them.
Only the salt, the silver and the maple syrup were holding steady, so I was squeezing the last of the life out of this damn rose, the strongest item on my hardness scale that was fading fast . Running with it in my hands was too easy, maybe easier than jogging with Jean-Claude’s silver tapping against my heart. Last night the rose had been as difficult to touch as a hot piece of asphalt in summer, but today it was a cooling stove element. My mouth was still sensitive enough to suffer, but the rose would be a husk by the end of the night.
Unpacking and repacking my backpack upon arriving near Sainte Casimir, I had discovered two extra items from Mrs. Pleurd at the bottom of all my clothes. The first was a regional map, which I glanced across too casually, distracted by the second item. The second item explained why I had made such little progress hiking this night: it was a very tiny and very old Bible with a red leather cover was tucked away right at the bottom, making the bag heavy and my feet drag, and when it was out in the open it was scalding to the touch.
Multiple layers of plastic did nothing for the searing pain, so I had resorted to poking it with a stick and then wrapping it up in some spare shirts, though it needed to be stuffed away again entirely to stop frying my eyes and tickling my nerves. I had noticed that the repellent items that were symbols of religious influence lost most of their effect without a believer to wield them, so I could still expect trouble from a priest or nun waving their bible before me. If that happened the book wouldn’t need to touch to burn me then, but for now the mysterious power was mostly dormant.
After the encounter with the tiny Bible my fingertips were unambiguously glowing purple and blue and white. Jogging circuits with the rose, I eventually worked out that it needed to go between my teeth to get just a trickle of luminescent blood from my ‘true body’ at the corners of my mouth, which followed more ordinary bleeding. Losing blood didn’t hurt – it just made me thirsty, and I bounced the blood diamond off my knuckles again to fill back up after deciding that the rose wasn’t hurting enough. The tiny glow of St. Elmo’s fire diminished as I periodically wiped my mouth, and finally disappeared about an hour after midnight had brought the night’s global exhale. A second hit from the blood diamond left me feeling a little full but otherwise fresh, my mouth and fingertips intact.
Then, and only then, did I study the map in detail. Damn, I was young and stupid.
It was an ordinary map from a corner store, yes, but while I was passed out the thrift store owner had taken the care to cross off certain spots with a sharp X. Above, scribbled hastily, was ‘Stay away from X spots – MP’.
And, of course, she had crossed off Sainte Casimir, the town that was just one ribbon farm’s length to my north right now as I studied the map. Peering closer, I saw that the X was centered not on the town’s hub itself but on another feature nearby called ‘Trou du Diable’.
It was a bilingual map. She had written on the French side, of course, so I flipped it over for English.
‘Devil’s Hole Cave’
“Fuck,” I said, and I hated how scared I sounded. I had been running around in circles on the doorstep of … something.
I didn’t sleep when dawn came. Reduced to a human pace, I was getting the heck away from Sainte Casimir. Until noon I wouldn’t have any extra instincts to tell me if I was being followed.
The day was overcast and the sky was rumbling in the west, and I heard the rain coming long before it hit me for a few minutes, the bulk of the storm running south across the narrowing St. Lawrence. I felt very conspicuous as I walked across private properties with my big pink backpack, lurking in wooded areas and then racing across. Dogs barked in the distance as I slipped across one farm, and when noon was more than an hour away I found myself struggling to get over a high picket fence leading into woods when the property’s dogs barked again, much closer.
Smashing the pickets in the fence was no good – it was too new. Feeling my shoulders and elbows threaten to give out with that damn Bible, I tossed my pack of clothes over the fence, and made most of the climb. Then something lunged and grabbed an ankle to pull me down, gurgling and growling. I started to scream, then stopped – it was just a dog. I tried to stay calm. I think it was a German Shepherd, an ordinary beast, not one of those strange sundogs.
“Off!” I tried to send this with my mind, not sure if I had my telepathy so early in the day. Off! Now!
The dog wouldn’t let go, trying to tear away my leg and frothing, scratching my ankle. Offering no resistance usually calms a dog down somewhat, but this thing was absolutely furious. I must have smelled bad.
One heavy boot to the nose finally got me free. It retreated with a short whine, but didn’t turn tail, hunching and crawled left and right with rolling, terrible eyes as I got to my feet.
“Gaston!” There was a panting man’s voice coming over the last hill. “Reviens, reviens ici!” I had led the both of them on quite a chase.
I got over the fence just in time to see the silhouette of a middle-aged man in a red tracksuit through the pickets as I hunched in the brush, sliding away before he could approach the fence.
The damage to my ankle was all shallow scratches, Gaston’s work more panicky than murderous. As noon came so did the first of my extra powers, and inside a thick patch of woods interrupted only by power lines I stopped to watch the tiny cuts on my ankles fade away. No scars.
The rose, garlic, lemon and tea were all impotent today, so I left them behind. That was probably stupid, I thought several hours later, but I was trying to shrug off the anxiety over Trou du Diable and the general warning of wendigos. I was getting closer and closer to civilization, and it was the beginning of summer, and I was still south of most of Quebec. I couldn’t be so anxious all the time.
Picking up the pace after a careful study of the map, I decided to finish this day’s travel north of Trois-Rivieres. Three churches in the city were crossed out, but they were little crosses, local crosses. Several miles up the Sainte-Maurice River I found a desolate quarry half filled with still water, an open space that gave me a good view of the dying sun. I stopped here to rest, to finally feel the ache of lugging the Bible and everything else slowly fading from my limbs. When night came I would feed off a creature rather than this diamond, and I would think about getting my hands on more silver. Now I refused to think, forcing my mind to rest as the sky grew red and the trees darkened.
There was no sound, and no sudden movement – when I bolted up to my feet, with just the last of the day’s light touching my face, it was because I had finally noticed something that had been there for quite some time.
The dog was looking at me.
He was peering at me from over a small hill of rubble on the other side of the quarry, not moving, not barking. There was a sound, a sound I started to recognize, but it was an insect sound.
Gliding over without any weight, I got no reaction from the dog peaking its head up at me from behind those stones. When I climbed them and looked over the ledge, I felt my feet freeze to the Earth.
It was the same German Shepherd. It was definitely Gaston, from the neck up. Flies were buzzing everywhere because the rest of the dog was everywhere. On several boulders, on the trunks of trees; one limp paw dangled high up in a pine tree, swinging in the gentle breeze. There were no bones or organs, just fur and blood.
The dog’s head had been mounted on a stick planted firmly into the ground, dead eyes pointing where I had sat oblivious for quite some time, enjoying the sunset.
Then night came.
Chapter 22: Trois-Rivieres
Image credits: David Touzin, Graeme Main, Richard McNeil, Francisco Goya