Three Cheers and a Tiger ~ Silver
Zachary Turner
Photo Credit: Alba Soler/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)
Future Me will be fine with this, I’m sure.
There I was, perusing Indeed.com while my élèves ate chips and scrolled on their phones—swipe right for yes, swipe left for no, swipe down perpetually to pass the hours along till you die.
Ugh. There had to be more to these kids than just… this.
“Aie, euh, Baptiste,” I started. “What is it you want to do after Brevet de Technicien Supérieur?”
“Bah… pth?”
Pth isn’t an acronym. It’s not a word either, but it is French. It’s a noise, like a little fart sound, meaning “I dunno.”
“Uh huh.” What did these kids think about? Sometimes the simplest questions were the hardest ones to translate though. I dumped the following bowl of word soup on Aurélien: “De quoi tu, euh… bréf, tu penses à quoi maintenant?”
He’ll figure it out.
“Rosa.”
Oh, a little classroom romance perhaps?
“She didn’t show up today.”
“I know,” I looked around the nearly empty classroom. “A lot of people didn’t show up today.”
“No, not to this class. To school. She didn’t come to any of our regular classes.”
Ok, ouch, I thought, this is still a regular class, you knob. I started turning my thoughts inward again.
“Regard.” Aurélien shoved his phone in my face, jolting me from my reverie. Irked by the distraction, I dismissively read:
FOUR GIRLS MISSING IN TWO MONTHS.
The article, published yesterday, chronicled the kidnapping of four girls from town over the past two months. Huh, I thought, that’s definitely worrying, Aurélien… but before I could follow up, the bell rang.
“Bonne journée, bon weekend,” I sighed, the boys offering passing good weekends and bye-byes as they bullrushed the door. It was always a mixed bag with these classes: half the time I left feeling fulfilled, and other times it sort of felt like I’d failed my anglophone identity. This BTS class was definitely the latter.
Tant pis, I told myself, it’s the weekend now, and I was meeting my boyfriend, Rémi, for a hike in the woods near Pons. Outside the classroom, kids were already lining up and I had to scoot through the masses before beelining for the stairs.
En route, I passed a girl reading by the window. Then it struck me just how rarely I saw anyone reading in the halls around here—I’d already taken the first step down the stairs before curiosity won over and I turned back.
“Whatcha reading?”
“Le Mystère de Capucine.”
Which was an archaeological text, she explained, as controversial as it was perplexing. It claimed that the oldest book, if you consider metal plates and clay blocks books, wasn’t the 2,500-year-old Etruscan Gold Book, but rather a Neolithic Era clay tablet found in Saint-Léger’s Grotte de Bois-Bertaud. Supposedly, a wandering troglodyte had pressed flowers into the clay slabs, creating a volume that included not only regional flora, but species they’d collected along their travels.
There was a photo of the slab, with its five impressions, the biggest by far a fat, five-petaled capucine in the center.
The controversy was that while archaeologists suspected that the single surviving slab came from a greater body of slabs, the other slabs had since disappeared. Obviously, the Bulgarian National Museum of History wasn’t keen on challengers to their golden book and dismissed the claim entirely.
The mystery was how the troglodyte had come to press a capucine, a flower indigenous to Latin America. Scientists considered it impossible that a European nomad, no matter how nomadic, could’ve crossed that species.
Yet there it was.
*
“Saint-Léger.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. In English, too, which I didn’t usually speak with Rémi, but sometimes surprise trumps habit, “Pardon, it’s just a weird coincidence.”
“How’s that?”
We were in Rémi’s shoebox car barreling down the D137 towards Bordeaux. He’d mentioned we’d be hiking around the Forêt de Pons, but I never really knew where that was. My regional geography was still a C- at best.
“Well, I saw this girl earlier today, reading a book…” I trailed off not long after, realizing the coincidence was more meaningful in my head. Out loud it sounded, well, quite ordinary.
Rémi shrugged amicably. He was lovely that way: no matter how lazy my French was, he was never cross with me.
“La Grotte de Bois-Bertaud? I know where that is. We’ll check it out.”
*
The first thing we came across on our hike was a grotto called the Rock Woman.
La Roche Madame opened up like a giant maw, and when I passed through it, I entered the belly of a giant frog. We crawled through the arms, the legs, and then ran screaming back out—this frog had eaten a colony of bats!
Beyond La Roche Madame lay the wood. A path cut through the bramble and felled trees, bounding merrily through the twilight forest.
The wood broke wide open. A hunting box lay to our left and we moved down the line, skirting the side of the clearing till we picked up the trail through the stumps and long grass. On the other side, a lumberyard tumbled down into the valley.
Walking through the lumberyard, deserted as it was, felt like we were crossing a tree cemetery. A shiver ran down my back.
“Qu’est-ce que vous foutez là?”
A gendarme was approaching from the foot of the valley. We weren’t arrested, but we were questioned. Someone had killed a girl in the lumberyard, dragged her body down into the valley, and marked the grave with a muddy insignia.
“What was the insignia?”
A fat, five-petaled flower, the girl’s namesake: Capucine.
I shuddered. Another coincidence.
There had been others as well: Iris, Lily, Daphné—all women named after flowers. All strangled to death. The gendarme turned us away with only a warning once we explained we’d only been looking for the grotto.
*
“We’ll come back tonight,” said Rémi.
“What?” Back at the car, I was scraping the mud off my trainers, but I stopped just long enough to throw him an incredulous glance. “T’es sérieux?”
“Yeah, I mean, it’s a cave. It’s gonna be dark regardless.”
“It’s not that,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “Obviously. But what if there’s—”
“A little troglodyte?” Rémi laughed, “Doubt it.”
*
We did return that night: past the giant frog, along the bounding trail—the woods were really something else after nightfall. I know Hansel & Gretel were born a door over, but I could well envision a witch pitching a tent somewhere behind these walls of moonlight, hidden in the thorny brush.
A final bump in the trail before the clearing, the hunting box, the long grass and…
…a shard of light struck her body, resting in middle of the lumberyard. Below her naval gleamed a white rose, oneiric in the lunar glow.
Rémi moved to get a closer look before I grasped his arm—there was a figure hovering over the girl. Veiled behind the celestial drape, the specter towered rigidly over the night, only distinguishable by the twin twinkles reflected in his eyes.
We should run, I thought, we should definitely run. But the specter beat us to the punch, bolting into the wood.
“We should—” Both of us were standing somewhere between what was possibly right and what was definitely smart. I took the lead, advancing toward the girl, Rémi following close behind.
Rosa. Even bleached by death and moonlight, I recognized her, wearing the same leather jacket she’d had on in class a week ago. Dazed, I sunk low, crouching beside her. I leaned forward, plucked the flower…
This was a crime scene. We were in the middle of a crime scene, and I was holding the evidence.
“Aie! Don’t move!” A beam of yellow light cut through the clearing—the gendarme from before was approaching from down in the valley.
“What are you kids doing back here, what…” His voiced trailed off as his eyes settled on the body at my feet and the flower in my hands.
“Put your hands where I can see them.”
“Officer.” Remi and I were both panicking, and Remi’s words came out in shaky fragments. “Someone else is in the woods, the assassin…”
Crrrrk.
All three of us pivoted at the snapping of a branch down in the valley.
“I can’t leave you two here. Follow me and stay close.”
We gave chase. Against our own footfalls, the murderer’s steps were scantly heard, but we kept the trail all the same, taking us to the opening of the Grotte de Bois-Bertaud. With no choice but to follow him in, we all clambered down the narrow entryway, into the cavern below.
Intermittent echoes traveled back to us. Over the din of our own labored breathing, we overheard some very guttural woofing sounds as he fled, always a bend ahead of our torchlight. Finally, rounding the last rocky corner, the gendarme’s light struck the man as he was shimmying frantically through a crevice. For the first time, we got a good look at the murderer and what we saw was— a caveman? He was short, hairy, and, well, naked. Nothing like the looming shadow we’d glimpsed over the girl’s body. It was enough to give me pause, but Rémi and the gendarme plowed on regardless, scooting through the crack in hot pursuit.
From the other side, I watched their bodies contract, like they were being flattened by mighty stone jaws. I gasped, stifling a cry as they suddenly vanished before my eyes, pulled through a wormhole…
No questions now, I didn’t have a choice. I wriggled between the rocks, and just as the claustrophobia set in, I felt my body being stretched, pulled and then spat out onto the muddy floor on the other side of the cavern.
The lads had caught up with the time-traveling troglodyte. The gendarme was pushing his hairy visage deep into the clay floor with the nose of his rifle while Rémi had his arms pinned behind his back, fighting to keep him down. Desperate as the scene before me was, I still spared a look for the surrounding cave.
I nearly fainted.
My face flushed, burning red-hot, and I looked through tears along at the gallery of clay tablets lining the cave wall. Each block held five flower prints—there must have been about ten in total. Violets and tulips, jasmine flowers, a whole menagerie of flora and—
Wait.
“Espèce de gros con,” growled the officer. “You killed those innocent—”
“Stop!”
Silence fell quick and heavy, like darkness in a cave.
“I don’t think he killed them. There’s no iris. No lily or daffodil either…”
I was standing in front of the last, unfinished slab. There was only one print, right smack-dab in the middle: the fat, five-petaled capucine. Pulling the white rose from my jacket pocket, I pressed it into the clay below its sister impression.
“He dragged the bodies down from the lumberyard into the valley and buried them. He was paying respect to them.”
I looked down the line at all the murders that hadn’t happened… yet.
“It’s some sort of time catapult?” I paced the length of the gallery. “With diminishing returns it looks like— I think the cave is launching him through time with less and less force whenever he goes through it.”
“Ok, but that still doesn’t tell us who killed these girls.”
“No, but this will solve the case.”
“How do you know?”
“Five thousand years of history. Five thousand years of people coming in and out of this cave and never finding the other slabs.”
Rémi caught on before the gendarme. “Oh, putain…”
“I don’t understand,” said the gendarme, now agitated. “How does that solve the case?”
“I dunno, but,” Rémi explained, “you can’t find what doesn’t exist. Once we go back through that hole, these tablets never happen, our friend here never finds their flowers. Because the case will be solved.”
We watched realization spread over the gendarme’s face. Oh…
Then, “So, what do we do now?”
“We run, are you kidding me?” I said, already back to the portal. “He’s still a f—king caveman and we just assaulted him. Allons-y!”
Zachary Turner graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2017 with a degree in French Literature and now writes on his site, American-Fables.com. Email: snowturnerz[at]gmail.com
