The Returned (12 page)

A bird, decapitated and roughly butchered, still raw. He recognized it as a black grouse; its unplucked skin had been pulled back from the breast to give access to the meat, ragged pieces of
which still lay around the carcass, looking torn rather than cut. Its head and guts lay strewn across the table.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Toni, immediately ashamed for his blasphemy, another thing his mother had drilled into him.

Clean it up
, he told himself. Whoever had been here was gone. Some other hunter, presumably. Maybe they saw the dead wolf and fled, wanting no involvement.

Leaving such a mess.

He took a bin bag and gathered the pieces of flesh from around the bulk of the grouse carcass. Then he took hold of the legs and started to lift it.

He cried out suddenly and dropped it, then stared, horrified and bemused.
I just imagined it
, he said to himself. But the feeling had been so real: the flesh had twitched as he held it.
Just nerves firing
, he told himself.
It can happen.

He waited until his own nerves settled before cleaning it all up and scrubbing the blood off the table.

The wolf was waiting for him, the challenge of the taxidermy promising to take his mind off everything. He went through and lifted the animal down from the hook, then cut the binding rope. The
carcass was almost too big for his work area, a large, shallow steel basin over a metre across, but he had handled deer before so he knew he just had to take care. The sink was on a pedestal close
to the middle of the room, giving access all around.

First, he cut around the top of the animal’s shoulders, enough to let him start to skin it. He took the pelt carefully a little way back from the nape, then stopped to look. The fur was
glorious, deep black and flawless. He wondered if – maybe – he would forgo the sale of the pelt and keep it for himself. It was good money, though.

Before he really got on with the skinning he wanted to work out the extent of the mount, to make sure he retained enough of the fur beneath the head to make something magnificent. He sized it up
and cut around, peeling the fur back, taking some of the flesh away and exposing the bones of the shoulder.

He paused. He would have to think this through for a minute or so before he did anything else. Making a mistake with something like this would be unforgivable. He set down the blade and stepped
back to mull it over. And as he thought, he was glad of it. Glad that his mind could be taken up with something less miserable than a woman who was half-dead and all the memories that her attack
had brought back to him. And a family who, for all their faults, he had still loved.

Decision made, he reached for the knife again.

And he froze.

A growl had broken the silence. At first Toni thought the sound had come from outside, surely the only place it could have originated. But as he stared in horror, the half-flayed carcass before
him moved, the rear legs shifting slowly.
Just nerves firing
, he told himself as he had with the grouse, feeling his sanity start to fracture.

The growling became a whimper; the legs began to shunt rapidly, scrabbling on the metal surface. It lifted its head, and howled.

Toni felt the knife fall from his hand. Trembling, he backed away; he stumbled and fell. The animal began to writhe, then it fell over the back of the basin, hitting the floor with a wet
slap.

It was out of sight, now. Toni remembered to breathe, his mind telling him that none of what he’d seen had really happened. Staying on the floor, he backed away until he had retreated
through the door frame.

The growl started again, deep, loud and full of intent. Toni stood and put his hand up above the doorway to where his shotgun was kept, relieved when his hand found it, equally relieved when he
scrabbled desperately through the drawer in the hall and found that the cartridge box wasn’t empty. He loaded and took a step forward into the room, gun raised, moving in a slow arc, as far
from the sink area as he could get, tensing as the angle brought the creature into view.

The wolf stood there, whole, complete. No sign of injury. It took a second for the shock of the sight to hit home. It was like a replay of the encounter they’d already shared: Toni with
his raised gun, the wolf baring its teeth.

Then Toni fired. The wolf went down. He stepped closer and fired again, wanting the damn thing utterly destroyed. Its head came apart.

He reloaded and stood over the animal for ten minutes, watching. Just in case.

Shaking, he wrapped it in plastic and dragged the thing outside. He wanted it buried with a huge rock on top. He fetched a shovel and started to dig. Then he looked across the field, to beside
the fence thirty metres away where a simple wooden cross marked his mother’s grave. Beside it, a large round stone marked the grave of his brother. Tears started to come. His brother had been
another predator he’d buried under a rock.

When the hole was a metre deep, he heard a voice from right behind him. A voice he’d never expected to hear again.

‘What did the poor creature ever do to you?’ it said.

Toni stood up and turned, shovel in hand. He stared.

Serge. Standing right there, thirty metres from his own grave.

Toni looked at his brother. He looked at his own hands. Then he swung the flat of the shovel hard at his brother’s head.

Serge went down, groaning. Toni dropped the shovel and wandered away, confused. A nightmare, he knew, and he just wanted to wake up. As he headed to the house he turned to look back, and caught
movement. Serge was up again, up and running towards him, rage in his face.

Toni made it inside and closed the door just as Serge reached it and kicked it hard, again and again, yelling. He realized he’d left the key on the kitchen table, and had no way to lock
it.

‘Why did you hit me? Are you fucking insane? Open up!’

Toni began to mutter as he put his considerable weight against the door.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women . . .

Serge kicked harder, but Toni’s sheer bulk was enough to keep the door shut.

‘It’s me, Toni,’ yelled Serge. ‘Jesus Christ, open the door!’

. . . and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners . . .

Serge was screaming now, screaming and pushing harder than ever. And even though as an adult Toni dwarfed his big brother, Serge’s strength was considerably greater than it had ever been
– almost too much for Toni to withstand. It was only the adrenaline of fear that gave Toni enough reserves to hold the door closed, as if his life depended upon it.

. . . now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

It all stopped: all the screaming, and the pushing. Silence. Toni drew breath and stood his ground until the passing minutes brought with them a hope that this trial, whatever its cause, had
come to an end. That Serge’s vengeful ghost had returned to the grave. That Toni had been punished enough.

He waited fifteen more minutes before he opened the door and stepped outside. He went down cold when the shovel hit him from behind.

It was dusk when he finally came to. Serge stood over him, shotgun in hand. Toni looked at his brother properly now; he was wearing precisely the clothes he’d worn when
he died.
The clothes I buried him in
, Toni thought.

‘What’s going on?’ Serge asked. He looked distressed. ‘Why was the house locked? Where’s Mum? Did something happen to her?’

‘She’s dead,’ said Toni. He sat up carefully, watching his brother. Serge seemed real enough, and surely a vengeful ghost would remember why it had come back from the grave.
Serge didn’t seem to remember anything. Not even
dying
.

‘What happened? What did you do?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ said Toni, looking to the ground. It wasn’t quite the truth. His mother hadn’t cared much about living, once Serge had gone. Once Toni had
dealt with him.

‘When did she die?’

‘Three years ago.’

Serge was shouting now, crying: ‘What are you talking about? Why don’t I remember it?’

‘Because you weren’t here,’ Toni said, his voice quiet.

‘Where was I?’

Toni pointed over at the wooden cross marking her grave. ‘You were with her,’ he said. ‘In the ground.’

Serge lowered the gun, and fell to his knees.

My big brother
, thought Toni. And look at him now. So young. So lost.

Serge started to sob. Toni stood and went over to him, and held him, comforting him with the words their mum had always used whenever they cried.

‘There, there,’ said Toni. ‘No need for tears.’ Serge had come back, and this time Toni would be a better brother. He wouldn’t fail him. Not again.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’

For Anton Chabou, work had become a strain. Having made the original call about the decrease in water level, he had earned the suspicion of most of the other engineers. Eric
had been the only one to defend him openly, perhaps because Eric had known how close he had come to being in the same position.

‘Ignore them,’ Eric had said. ‘They don’t know what’s really going on, any more than the rest of us. All they have is rumour.’

Yes, thought Anton. Rumour, and the extra money in their salary every month. Everyone at the dam was paid at least 30 per cent more than they could get for the same role elsewhere. Discretion
was always emphasized, and being indiscreet had led – in the past at least – to pay reduction or dismissal. To Anton’s knowledge it had been years since any of the staff had been
punished this way, because they knew what was expected of them.

The man Anton had contacted had given his name as Dreyfus when he’d arrived. By then it had been time for a shift change, but Anton and Eric had both been asked to stay for a few hours
more. Dreyfus requested a permanent volunteer to assist him while he was there; naturally, Anton found himself nominated by the others.

‘Has this happened before?’ he asked Dreyfus, getting nothing but a glare in reply.

Anton had gone home to an uneasy sleep, and had come back the next morning to an old man’s ragged corpse being scraped from the base of the dam.

‘Old Monsieur Costa,’ Eric told him.

‘You knew the man?’

‘I knew
of
him. He was a teacher, well respected. His older brother used to be mayor.’

Then Dreyfus had taken him to one side and given him a list of tests to oversee. Small submersible drones were on their way, and would let them examine the upstream face of the dam. The staff
accompanying the drones were outsiders, and Dreyfus wanted everything to be played down. Made to seem routine.

But this was anything but routine. The water level kept dropping, yet the water wasn’t seeping through and appearing anywhere else. Despite Dreyfus’s insistence that speculation
should be avoided, Anton couldn’t help it. A fissure, perhaps? Should they get divers in to check the lake bed?

Dreyfus looked pale at the thought. ‘First things first,’ he said.

And the rumours continued.

When he and Eric finished their shift at dusk and walked to their cars, Eric stopped and looked out over the water. ‘You know,’ Eric said, ‘there had been a settlement on the
site of the old village since the Bronze Age. Maybe longer. When the old dam failed, they found small voids in the rock near the abutments. Caves, two or three metres across at the widest. Not
noted by the original surveys. And in one of those caves, they found the skeleton of a large boar. They brought someone in, someone local who they trusted. The earliest inhabitants would have been
precursors of the Celts, animal worshippers. The boar would have been one of their most sacred animals. There were marks on the boar’s vertebrae that, they said, could be sacrificial
wounds.’

Anton felt the cold wind pick up. He looked out over the lake, to the far side where the old dam had been. After the dam had failed three decades ago, what remained of it had been demolished,
and the vegetation on the valley side hid the scars. A tragedy hidden in plain sight, invisible unless you knew what you were looking at.

And now there was a new lake, and a new dam, built with curious haste. When the site for the original dam had been chosen, two possibilities had been available. One was simpler and cheaper, but
it would have required the flooding of the old village and meant everyone had to move down to the town; the other option was higher upstream, but construction would be considerably more expensive,
and more complicated. The villagers had mounted a campaign to protect their homes; the townspeople had joined them, and together the more expensive plan was chosen.

Then the dam had failed, flooding the village after all, with the loss of more than a hundred lives. The dam was unsalvageable, but the time-consuming planning and surveying work on the
alternative site had already been completed, so they built another one there. The rush to rebuild was a crass way to distract from the tragedy and call it progress. Disrespectful, at the very
least; at worst, it bordered on desecration.

‘They took the bones from the cave,’ Eric continued, ‘and had them dated. They expected them to be ancient, maybe a find of historical importance. When the results came back,
they were disappointed. The remains had been dated to the time of the dam’s construction.’

Anton looked at him, surprised. Eric seemed to read this as scepticism.

‘Seriously,’ Eric said. ‘You ask around enough, you can find all that out for yourself. But there’s one thing nobody will tell you.’ He lowered his voice.
‘They found a child’s skull in that cave.’

Thomas sat at his desk and watched the streams from the hidden cameras that were set up around his own home. He went through each of them again and again: living room,
bedrooms, bathroom. All empty, of course; Chloé was at school, and Adèle was at the library. Checking the live images was habit more than anything else.

The cameras were a secret. He’d installed them himself two years ago, after Adèle’s close call. Neither Adèle nor Chloé knew they existed, but it was the way it
had to be. Whenever he was worried, he could watch, and be sure that no harm had come to his family. From outside, or from within.