No Rest for the Wicked
I: Into France. Cryptosoctoma. Robbery. Hugh.
We survived.
I’m neither bragging nor seeking pity; instead, I’m simply explaining how Whitnail, Arthur the snipe, and I went from Portugal, which was tolerable if you stayed out of the countryside, to Spain, which under Franco was intolerable pretty much everywhere we went, to the Free Zone in France, which was utter chaos morning, noon, and night. The Germans were near, the Italians were near, starvation was near, panic was near, and we were greeted with suspicion and distrust by everyone we got near.
La Horgne, where my sister Agnes had been living, was behind enemy lines in the German-occupied north. St. Valery-en-Caux, where my brother Elijah’s division had been crushed and captured, was also in the north, but I decided that going there would prove pointless. The battle was long over, and the prisoners the Germans had taken had undoubtedly been moved somewhere else. My thoughts were divided so many different ways at that time, but finding out where those prisoners had been sent was one inflexible segment of those divisions. If Elijah lived, he wouldn’t be at St. Valery-en-Caux—though I imagined I might find his corpse among the fallen if I went to that battlefield after all.
I was disillusioned by the fall of the Pavilions. Every day, I rehashed that final clash between the murderous Caster Enigma Coalition and their equally homicidal foe, Blake Loughty the Black. Every night, I was plagued in my sleep such that I never felt rested when we moved on again. We had crossed into the Free Zone of France from Spain and were temporarily holing up in a fortress city called Carcassonne. Whitnail stood out in every crowd we passed through, yet the Vichy French police—who were everywhere (Whitnail described them as “grown guttersnipes with guns,” and then he apologized to little Arthur the snipe, who understood nothing)—either took no notice of him or, more likely, chose to ignore him. Whenever those men in their black uniforms came near me, I took shelter behind the albino’s towering presence.
We stayed at a stone-walled guesthouse, an auberge, called Hotel Le Donjon, a name that made me uncomfortable from the very beginning.
“It means ‘keep’ or ‘tower,’” Whitnail said.
“Okay. But it sounds like ‘dungeon,’” I said.
“But it means—”
“Right. But it still sounds like—”
And so it went. I was on edge and utterly out of my element. And I never learned much French. C’est la vie.
Whitnail had managed to procure travel papers for us even before we reached France—he spoke Castilian Spanish with a local accent and seemed to know people in Barcelona. I waited in a rented room in the home of the Ribas family, whose patriarch had been killed during the Spanish Civil War that had recently ended. Whitnail explained how hotels and guesthouses would ask for papers; a private family would not.
“Aren’t we endangering them then?” I asked.
Whitnail considered, then said, “If anyone comes to ask too many questions, I would say you let them ask Bloody Mary, and then we will move on.”
But that wasn’t necessary, thankfully, and before we bid goodbye to the Ribas family, Whitnail traded British pounds for French francs with the matron of the house at a terrible exchange rate for us. Even I knew we were getting a right drubbing, and Whitnail was giving them quite a wealth of our savings.
“What are they going to do with twenty quid anyway?” I asked.
“You will learn more about the black market as we travel,” Whitnail answered.
By then, he had papers that would get us across the border into France. But he warned me that they might not give us enough security to pass the Demarcation Line, the border that would take us from the Vichy-controlled Free Zone in the south into the German-occupied zone in the north.
“I think,” he said, “it would have been better if you had been mapping flying cryptids instead of dogs and kelpies.”
I could hardly disagree.
Our first night in Carcassonne, I was thinking once again of berets and bombs and Blake. In the darkness of our small room, our one window shuttered against the wet and chilly night air of January in France, I asked the question that had been surfacing in my mind before diving into deep waters again in hopes that I’d forget to ask.
I asked Whitnail: “Are there any good casters?”
He was tossing and turning—the beds were not built to his dimensions. I could hear his creaking in the darkness. Every time he did, Arthur the snipe, who slept on his pillow, made a displeased grunt. “Yes, of course.”
“Many?”
“Shall I count you among them?”
“Yes, please.”
“Then one for certain.”
I found this even less comforting than the ever-present Vichy police.
There were no Vichy that second night when Whitnail and I were headed back to our rooms not long after dark—which came about three hours before we even had our dinner—and saw something that stopped us both in our tracks. A small animal, not much bigger than a hare, was squared off against a baker who was apparently in the middle of closing his shop. He jabbed at it with a broom, and the creature made a strange little chittering noise and retreated, only to lunge forward again when the baker hesitated.
The animal had wings. Antlers. A body that might have been a squirrel or maybe an emaciated rabbit. Its coloring was that of a fox mixed with a pheasant. It snapped little fangs when it advanced. But for all its aggression, it struck me as a weak little thing that was lucky Noah had let even one of them on the ark.
“Bavarian,” Whitnail said.
“Probably,” I said, squinting in the dark. “That baker we visited yesterday still had some, though. We could go back there. What does that have to do with this?”
“Not the dessert, Abraham.” Whitnail could say my name with exasperation that almost shamed me. Arthur the snipe, tucked underneath Whitnail’s coat folds, made an equally disparaging noise that I resented. “The cryptid. It is a wolpertinger. It is from Bavaria.”
I watched it jump toward the baker again, who gave a little cry and backed away. I could just make out a shadow of someone standing near the boulangerie-pâtisserie—I was proud to have remembered the French word for bakery—who didn’t seem worried about the confrontation at all.
“But why would a Bavarian cryptid be in Carca—? Oh.” I felt a moment of foolishness that rapidly gave way to distaste. “Right. We’re not having this.”
I had my spellbook out of its bag by the time I had closed the distance enough to see the other caster. She was perhaps thirteen, blonde, bedraggled, and scowled like an owl roused in the blinding white of midday. She had her own spellbook out and one hand placed on its contents, but her focus was entirely on her little Frankenstein’s monster of a cryptid harassing the baker.
I touched a card on the first page of my book. And then I silently instructed my cryptid to make her cry.
The dog that launched itself at her—Black Shuck, the same terrifying cryptid Blake had used to stage Chansey the clown’s death in his act, the one I had mapped in a graveyard in East Anglia—was far bigger than she was. With a saddle, she might even have been able to ride it. It stopped a few meters from her, reeling back on its haunches, but its sudden presence and inexplicable threat of violence was enough to knock her off her feet. She went down on the sidewalk, her spellbook clutched in both hands, her face turned away from Black Shuck’s snarling snout. Her wolpertinger—the Bavarian mish-mash, I would always think of it—disappeared. She did not cry, much to my displeasure. I dismissed Black Shuck.
The four of us stood in silence for a moment. I expected her to bolt—I certainly would have run for it—but instead, she faced me and began to address us in a curt tone. French is a beautiful language, making even the most unpleasant words sound sweet, but I still recognized berating in her stance and gestures.
Whitnail responded to her in French, and she indicated the baker, who had edged closer with his broom at the ready. I heard her say the word sucre more than once. Given his reaction, the baker had heard it from her, too, before we arrived.
I said, “What is ‘sucre?”
Whitnail said to me, “Sugar.”
The girl finally began to cry, but I wasn’t fooled now; I’d used the same tactic on my brothers in my youth. As the baker sighed, shook his head, and retreated back into his darkened shop, I stepped up to the girl and took her spellbook from her. It only had one page with three cryptids: a gnome-like creature holding turnips, a snipe, of course, and the Bavarian mish-mash. I took the last one out of her book and asked Whitnail to translate.
“This is not what casters do with the cryptids they map,” I said to her. As Whitnail repeated my words in French, I made a gesture of putting her card into my book. Her tears took on a pathetic understanding then. I could not use her Bavarian mish-mash card, of course, as we weren’t related, and her legitimate sobs almost made me hand it back. Instead, I took a blank card from my book and put it in hers as a replacement. Cards were a valuable and rare asset, and I was trying to teach a lesson about not stealing here after all. I gave her book back to her.
The baker emerged from his shop with a small paper bag. He knelt and handed it to the girl.
“Sucre,” he said.
“Sugar,” Whitnail said to me, but I waved him off.
“Wait. This defeats the point here,” I started to say, but the little girl curtseyed—curtseyed—for the baker. He said something more to the little girl, who lowered her eyes in shame, and I knew immediately that she was a good girl who’d done a bad thing, and he’d forgiven her.
I was not pleased.
“Merci,” she said. “Merci beaucoup.”
“Sois sage,” the baker said as he stood again, and without any fanfare, both of them turned and departed in different directions. In moments, it was just Whitnail and me again standing on a dark, damp, empty street. Arthur made a disappointed sound.
“Yes,” I said, “me, too.”
“It was a good lesson,” Whitnail said. “You taught her that if you cry, you can still get what you want.”
“I should have let her rob him,” I said as we headed for our room once more. “A policeman would have, and then he would have stolen the sugar from her.”
I was very aware that the Vichy authorities were, really, not much more then extensions of the Nazis who controlled the north, but they didn’t strike me as dangerous because of their general indifference to us. There were even times when I had the unnerving feeling that didn’t even see us, as if they were blind or we were invisible.
As a result, Carcassonne was where I began to develop a theory that I would write about much later in a book I called Nowhere to Hide. Cryptids, I argued, have a wide variety of ways to escape notice, many of them deliberate, whether calculated or instinctive. That said, however, some cryptids have an inherent trait that dissuades the average human eye from taking them in. I called this cryptoscotoma, or “cryptid blind spot,” the secretion of a pheromone-like chemical in some cryptids that produces a temporary selective blindness in humans, rendering a cryptid essentially invisible by filling in the physical space a cryptid occupies with background elements to hide it.
From this theory and the research I did to support it, I extrapolated a second theory: that some casters might be able to unconsciously do something very similar. It was challenging to find enough data to support this theory because of the randomness with which it occurs and a decided inability to even contemplate a control group. But under very precise circumstances, I felt it happen in my own life, which was enough for me to at least consider it as a legitimate aspect of cryptids and casters.
And my first brush with this idea was when we were at risk of the Vichy police seeing and detaining us.
Carcassonne was on its way to becoming a hotbed of French resistance to the German occupation, but such activity made everyone on the street paranoid. Rationing was problematic, and as strangers, we drew some looks, most of them directed at Whitnail, who soon took to wearing facial covering to disguise his albinism. We were fortunate that it was winter, which allowed him to wear gloves and hats, but he could do little to hide his height.
“I am a giant among men,” he moaned. “It is not a good thing.”
It wasn’t the average baker or wine merchant whose stares troubled me, though; instead, my heart would hammer “like a watch enveloped in cotton,” as Edgar Allan Poe described it, every time we came within sight of the Vichy police. We had travel papers, of course, but their mindset was very much akin to that of the Nazis who supervised them from afar: they were schoolyard bullies with pistols. And they detested anyone who did not wear the same uniform of intolerance.
Anyone and anything.
It was on our last day in Carcassonne. We were up early, which had been our routine—neither of us slept well at all, and speaking for myself, I was exhausted much of the time. We were bartering for what few supplies we could carry in packs when we left the city and started making our way northwest to Toulouse, three or four days away on foot. The weather was still passive enough for us to travel without snow or rain tormenting us, especially when we needed to leave Route Nationale 113 if we spotted Vichy forces along the road.
We were buying bread from a street vendor when it happened.
A day earlier, Whitnail returned to our room with a new friend. I was hunched over a hand-drawn map of France that he had acquired from a fellow traveler who was headed back the way we’d come toward Spain; it had circles and arrows to indicate Vichy police movements and activities. And though it was likely already outdated, I was studying it more than I ever had any schoolbook.
“I am returned,” Whitnail said.
“Fine,” I said.
“And so is Arthur.”
I was about to respond when Arthur quacked and cooed so erratically that he sounded like multiple snipes. This was enough cacophony to make me look up. In fact, Arthur was now one of two snipes. Our new addition was smaller and looked at me with seemingly blank eyes as if assessing whether or not I were real.
“What do we have here?” I asked, scowling as the new snipe struggled up onto the bed and leaned out to reach a plate of biscuits on the side table. It quacked appreciatively.
“This is Hugh,” Whitnail said with certainty, as if the snipe had told him so.
“You’re not fooling me,” I said, thinking of Hugh the Magnetic Man. My late friend. “You named him that so I’d accept him.”
I watched this new snipe share his pilfered biscuits with Arthur, who cooed agreeably, and realized I already thought of him as Hugh.
“You’re a right bastard, Whitnail,” I said.
“That is not factually accurate,” he said, “but I understand your meaning. I think ‘manipulative’ is a much better descriptor.”
And as easily as that, we were a foursome. Having a second snipe with us was an interesting education from a caster’s perspective. Arthur, we’d acquired in England, Hugh in France, and yet they both understood whether I spoke English or Whitnail spoke French that night. I tested a bit of Scots and a little less Gaelic on them, and they both seemed to understand those as well. I decided I’d have Whitnail try some Spanish on them as well, just to see if perhaps cryptids came with a natural language translation ability. As we were drifting to sleep on that last night in Carcassonne, I suggested this to Whitnail.
In the dark, he answered, “I have also never seen a dog act as if it didn’t understand what you were saying.”
I fell asleep on that note.
As was becoming the norm, I dreamt of creatures with tentacles. I would often wake in the middle of the night, sweaty and missing the days when Bloody Mary was my source for nightmares.
At the baker’s cart the next day, Whitnail was handling the negotiations—in French, of course—while I sat on a bench nearby. The bench was damp, and I was disgruntled that my trousers were getting wet. Arthur and Hugh were moving in and out of the shadows of the bench and the alleyway off to my right, occasionally waddling into Whitnail’s line of sight while ensuring the baker didn’t see them. Despite the gravity of the living conditions of Carcassonne, both Whitnail and the baker seemed at ease, chatting about les temps, which I found out meant “weather” when Whitnail saw me looking at my watch (les temps also means “time,” it turns out) while listening to them. He shook his head at me and pointed at the sky. I looked up, confused.
When I looked down again, a Vichy policeman with two silver chevrons on his sleeve had come around the corner and was staring with alarm in our direction.
“Whitnail,” I said, trying to sound calm, “We need to leave.”
Whitnail looked over at me. Then he turned his head to see the policeman as the Vichy officer—a senior brigadier, by the chevrons—reached for his pistol.
I did not realize the officer could see the snipes; perhaps, in a different time and place, he might have been caster material, given his ability to detect them, but this was neither. It was only after he fired a single shot that I understood what his intentions were, and though both Whitnail and I cried out, his aim was horribly true.
The bullet spun little Hugh around in a circle and flung him underneath the baker’s cart. He made a sound, a miserable honk, and vanished into the shadows and out of sight. The baker cried out and ran toward the alley, away from his cart and the policeman. Whitnail turned to face the officer, and I darted to the backside of the cart, where the baker had just been standing, and fell to my knees on the wet pavement. Arthur was right behind me; I felt him squirm underneath my coat and up my back, giving the impression that I had a small hunch over one shoulder. I could feel him trembling.
I looked beneath the cart. There was nothing to see. Hugh was gone as if he’d never been.
The brigadier pushed past Whitnail, his gun still in his hand, and dropped to look for his kill as well. Mystified when he found nothing, he came back to his feet again as the baker slowly returned, speaking in a shaky voice, undoubtedly asking, What is wrong with you, you madman? Or something equivalent.
Whitnail had me by one shoulder and steered me away from the baker’s cart. He thrust a parcel into my hands—the bread we’d come to buy, though I could not recall if he had paid for it. It didn’t matter in the least because we weren’t going back. I glanced up at him, and the look in his eyes, all that I could see above the scarf he kept over the lower half of his face, told me he was in danger of crying.
We did not speak until we were outside Carcassonne’s walls, but once we had left the city before midday, Whitnail came to a halt and turned to me on the road.
“Ahead is Bram,” he said. “It is small and rural, but there is a prison camp just outside of it that was used to hold prisoners during the Spanish Civil War. Do not go near it.”
“I am taking it off my list of tour sites,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, but Whitnail was not listening.
“There will be guesthouses like the Ribas’s. Find one with a tavern attached along the 113—tell them you work for the railroad but don’t offer any other details. Show your papers if you must, but do not volunteer them.”
“Why are you telling me this? You’re going to be with me.”
“No,” he said. “I have forgotten something in Carcassonne. I will go back for it. But I will catch up to you if I can. It will take you perhaps five hours to reach Bram. I will hurry and perhaps still meet you on the road. But if I do not, I will find you at the first guesthouse with a tavern.”
He gave me money and made me memorize an expression—Auriez-vous une chambre à me proposer?—to ask for a room. He ran me through a few possible questions the innkeeper might ask, especially related to money and papers, and then he leaned in and whispered in my ear.
“You will be safe. Do not be afraid. You have Jack and Mary to protect you if you need them.” He hesitated, then said, “Nothing will go wrong. If it does, I will make it right.”
I looked at the road ahead, where there was no movement at this moment in the late morning, and I looked back at Whitnail. “That’s because you’re the best of us.”
“And you,” he said, wrapping his face, “are the most sentimental of us. I will see you tonight.”
I watched him pass back into Carcassonne, showing his papers at the gate, and then I turned toward the 113 and the walk to Bram. Beneath my jacket, Arthur squirmed around to the front, peering out of my coat pressed against my chest, and quacked a mournful sound as we left Whitnail behind.
II: Silver Chevrons.
It was past dark. I’d found a guesthouse and, after some confusing negotiations accompanied by gestures to suggest I was deaf, had a room. I managed to get food, no meat, and was eating by the light of a single lamp when there was a knock at the room’s door. I looked through the keyhole but could see no one. So, I pressed my ear to the wood and listened as I answered.
“Oui?” I said.
“You have a Scottish accent,” Whitnail said from the hallway.
I let him in, and as he took off his outerwear, I locked the door once more, the relief so strong in me that I wanted to laugh and clap, and then I brought my plate and bowl to him. Arthur crawled out from under the bed and locked himself around Whitnail’s leg like a leaf to the branch, quacking with obvious contentment.
“Sorry. Just eggs with chives,” I said, passing him a spoon. “And watered wine, too. I don’t know what all is in the soup, so don’t think about it too much while you eat it.”
He nodded and accepted the tableware.
I knew what I was asking, but I asked just the same. “What did you need to go back for?”
He reached into his pocket and very gently removed something and laid it on the table near to me as he began to test the temperature of the soup. I reached over and picked it up—a pin of two silver chevrons. It was sticky to the touch. When I took my fingers away, I could see the blood in the lamplight.
Whitnail said, “Tomorrow, we will leave Bram early. Before they come.”
And so, we did.
