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He stepped out from a tree behind me. I backed up, finally realizing that following a thief into the middle of nowhere is a really dumb move.
“Oh,” I said.
“This is important, Charlie,” he said, stepping closer. “Did you tell your sister the story? The one Henri told you. Did you repeat eet?”
This was the last thing I was expecting to hear, and probably not the kind of thing a person who plans on attacking you says.
“What?”
“You must tell me, Charlie! Did you tell her the story? About the Law of Suspects?”
“Story?” I repeated. “That stupid story Henri told me? Yes! I told her!”
This hit him like a blow. All the muscles in his face seemed to go lax and he fell back against a tree and looked up into the branches in despair. He exhaled once, very slowly, and looked back at me.
“I’m showing you something,” he said. “You will not like eet. But you need to see eet to understand what is going on.”
He pulled his messenger bag from around his shoulders. From it he removed what appeared to be some trash. Just a bundle of plastic shopping bags. He gave them a shake, and something plopped out onto the path. Something small, like a bird. A dead one.
And I remember thinking, Why the hell is he carrying around a dead bird? So my brain kept working on the problem, and eventually it decided that the thing on the path was not a bird. So that was the good news. The bad news was…
It was a hand.
Unattached to a body.
A bluish white, bloodless, dismembered hand—cut very neatly about the spot where you’d wear a watch. It was very dirty. It was a smallish hand, but maybe all hands look small when they’re…disconnected.
For a moment I felt nothing at all, then I got very giddy. I cycled through a lot of emotions, in fact. There was a high, floaty feeling in my head. I laughed. I coughed. I stumbled and went down on all fours.
“I found eet at Henri’s house,” he said, as if my reaction was exactly what he had been expecting. “Eet was ’alf-buried in the garden by the aubergines. Something dug eet up and left eet exposed. I believe this is Henri’s wife. Well, ’er hand. The rest of her…I think is also there. Now you must listen to me. Your life is depending on eet.”
I put my face against the dirt, accidentally sniffing some of it up my nose. I think I was breathing very fast. It smelled mushroomy up this close.
“Charlie,” Gerard said, “you may feel sick but this is not the time….”
“It’s not?”
I was laughing again and snorting more dirt. He hoisted me up under my arms and got me to my feet.
“Police,” I mumbled.
“We do not have time,” he said, backing me against a tree and letting me get myself balanced. “Now you must listen, and you must try to understand. We cannot help this person….”
He pointed at the hand, which was still just flopped there, palm up, and taking in our conversation in a passive, disembodied-hand kind of way.
“But we can save you. And your sister. Either one of you could be infected. You could have passed eet to her.”
“What…are…you…talking…about?”
“This is my fault,” he said mournfully. “I must fix this.”
Gerard picked up a stick and used it to push the plastic over the hand a little, so that I would stop staring at it. He tipped my chin up to look him in the eye.
“Three weeks ago,” he began, “a very famous psychologist died in a car crash along with his wife. He left his library and papers to my university. Thousands of books and papers. I am one of five students asked to go through the papers, read them, sort them. I read through a dozen boxes, maybe more. A few days ago I came home to stay with my cousin for a visit. I was allowed to bring some papers with me. I read them on the train. Many of them were very boring, but then, I find a bundle of papers that looked very old. Attached to them is a note in the psychologist’s handwriting that says, ‘Do not read.’ So I read them. Or most of them. Eet seems that he was studying the murder impulse—how normal people can murder.”
I almost laughed and almost said, “Normal isn’t a word we like to use.” But I was pretty sure that if I tried to talk, I would throw up.
“This psychologist,” Gerard went on, “he was a great man, but as he got older, he started to study things many find ridiculous, very unusual areas of psychology. These notes of his talked of a story that made people kill once they heard eet. The story was about the revolution, about the spirit of murder. About the Law of Suspects. Once you hear eet, you will kill someone close to you before the next morning. The papers went on to say that only one person is…infected…at a time. Like a curse. Once the person murders, they are compelled to tell the story to someone else, then they kill themselves.
