Vacations from Hell

I could see Marylou testing out the plausibility of my story in her head. I have to say, I gave a magnificent performance. What I was saying wasn’t exactly true, but the sentiment behind it certainly was. My fear was real. And I had his flashlight. And she had probably seen him running. There was a lot to back up my story.



Marylou got up and paced the kitchen while she weighed the facts. I saw acceptance flash over her face.



“How old do you think he was?” she asked. “Eighteen? Nineteen? It’s common for people that age to experience a minor psychotic break.”



“That’s reassuring,” I said, swallowing hard.



“If he’s out there, we need to stay in here. We need to lock everything.”



“No,” I countered quickly. “He said he’d come back. He said he’d get in. This is our only shot. If we go right now, we could get to town before he catches up with us.”



Marylou stepped back from the bench and put her hands on her hips, looking worriedly around the room.



“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Here.”



She went to the hooks at the back of the kitchen and pulled down two of the heavy green rain slickers that were hanging there.



“Put that on,” she said, dropping one of the slickers on the table. “It’s going to rain.”



She rattled around in one of the kitchen drawers and produced a heavy carving knife, which she passed to me.



“Put this in something,” she said.



“What’s this for?”



“Protection. I’m going to close the rest of the shutters upstairs. You do the ones down here.”



Up the stairs she went. I went into the other two rooms and shut the shutters against nothing, then put on my slicker.



“I found this too,” she said, running back down the stairs. It was a piece of heavy pipe, about a foot long, that looked like a section of something much larger. “If he comes near us, this will knock him out.”



My sister was surprisingly good with the improvised weaponry, especially for someone who couldn’t even handle a spider. If Gerard was watching, I prayed that he just avoided us.



The air tasted moist, and everything smelled deeply of earth and wet lavender. It was a strange sky, everything going soft and fuzzy in the greenish diffused light. The frogs were out in full froggy force, and we practically had to dance down the path to avoid them. Aside from the wildly chirping cicadas, there was no noise except our feet on the gravel. The trees and heavy air seemed to soak up and muffle all other noise.



We saw no one on our walk. Marylou had the pipe at the ready the entire time. It started to rain after the first mile or so. It came down hard, making a deafening racket on the hoods of the heavy slickers. The pits in the road filled with water and were impossible to see, so we kept tripping into them.



The rain had one advantage, though. It made visibility poor. When we got to Henri’s cottage, it was easy to block Marylou’s field of vision and keep her looking the other way so she couldn’t spot it through the trees. We got past it, about another quarter mile or so, before my illusions of safety were shattered. We found him standing in the road, staring at nothing. Henri raised a hand in distracted greeting. He didn’t seem to notice the pounding rain. A cigarette disintegrated in his hand.



“My dog,” he said loudly. “I cannot find my dog.”



There was nothing I could do. Marylou was instantly rambling our dilemma at Henri, who didn’t seem to understand a word of it, but he pointed back toward his house. Marylou followed. So I did too.



It was humid in the kitchen now. Henri had been cutting onions. Loads of them. They were piled on the counter, a dozen or so. The cutting board on the table was piled high with them, sliced and chopped, an overflowing bowl next to it as well.



“I am making soup,” he said tonelessly. “Onion soup.”



A small television and DVD player sat on the end of the table, and Mission: Impossible (in French of course) was on, and Tom Cruise was doing his little Tom Cruise run.



“We need to call the police,” Marylou said. “A guy came to our cottage today. What was his name? Ger…Gerald?”



I made no effort to correct her, but it was a small village and Henri knew who she meant.



“There is a Gerard,” he said.



“That’s him,” Marylou said, nodding. “Kind of tall? Dark curly hair?”



“That sounds like Gerard.”



Henri didn’t seem too concerned about all of this. He pulled a bulb of garlic from a rope hanging in the corner and sat down at his cutting board. He took a moment to put a fresh cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. Then he picked up the enormous knife. I reached for Marylou to pull her back, but he merely gave the garlic a massive thwack with the side of the knife to break it into cloves.