Chapter 4

The woods were mad. Thick smells mixed with invisible sounds and clung to her like broken wings. Trees, swaying and creaking, stabbed crooked fingers into each other’s ribs. A bitter north-easterly scattered piercing needles of ice beneath the skin. The firs had nothing christmassy about them at all.
Odette stumbled forwards, drunk with fear. They reached a low cave, its entrance part obscured by shrubs, and Guy rummaged beneath a pile of rocks. Odette shivered. Her teeth began to chatter but she was unaware of the cold. It was all part of it. He found what he was looking for and directed her into the cave.
Placing two candles on ledges, he lit them and the slight flames glowed on the dull grey stains of wax beneath. Odette waited, dumb.
Genuine terror has a mind of its own. Sometimes, just obeying is enough to keep a glimmer of hope. The main thing is now, that nothing happens now. And nothing, absolutely nothing must be done to disturb the brittle fiction and make it shatter. She took her jacket off. She was wearing a thick jumper. He lifted the bottom. Odette raised her arms automatically and he pulled it over her head. For a while, he looked at the shapes of her body, then nodded. She removed the remaining clothes. She smelled strongly of sweat. All that running maybe. The cold air rapidly attenuated it.
Her breasts were cold and hard. The glow of a candle threw the outline of one onto the other. He could see two tiny, gleaming reflections of down. Kneeling in front of her, he folded his knuckles and rubbed the back of his fore- and middle-fingers over her tight, pale brown nipple. Then the ring-finger. Nothing. He bent down and rubbed his nose, then his lips. He gripped the teat between his lips and squeezed. Sucked. He didn’t bite, it made too much noise. Later.
Odette’s arms were bolted to her sides.
Guy straightened up and looked into her face. Loathing and horror. All her muscles screwed up into a tight ball of refusal. Her eyelids, a mass of bulging wrinkles.
He turned her round and picked up the razor. The frozen blade slithered over her skin, following the spine from top to bottom. The denim made a low, staggered noise as the taut cloth split apart.
Naked, cold, pandemonium, quivering, beautiful.
“Lie on your back.”
He opened her thighs and knelt between them, looking. The skin was soft and white. Holding the razor between thumb and two fingers, he shaved her hairs off neatly and placed them in a transparent, self-sealing plastic bag, then closed it.
Oil of almonds, cyanide, the smell was important to him. Picking up the small glass jar, he poured out a trickle of pale amber and massaged it in.
Odette was crying, silent tears running down her face to her ears and into her hair. As he picked up the razor to wipe it, a thin beam of faint white light flashed across her vision. She knew what was going to happen. She closed her eyes, whimpered and waited, frozen with agony.
The dividing line began.

Driving back to Paris, Guy kicked himself for a bloody fool. Picking off somebody from a group! What an idiot! The place would be swarming with police and do-it-yourself vigilantes within twenty-four hours.

He had to find somewhere. Fast. His flat was clean, nobody could find anything there. Unless a detailed search were carried out, and even then...
The problem was his trophy room.
He had to change tactics completely. The whole thing was getting far too dangerous. For a second he thought about a safe-deposit box, then kicked himself again. He needed a very methodical clear-out. But not yet. Had some serious thinking and planning to do. Something big coming up, very big. Keep a low profile.
Had to do something about the bodies too, it was getting ridiculous. He knew some pretty obscure parts of the woods, but there was still chance, and dogs. It had to be perfect. Nothing less was good enough.
Then he laughed. He’d taken his precautions. Even if they did find the corpse, what could they do? Same as last time: put it in the ‘pending’ tray and tell the papers a hungry fox found it. Doesn’t do to scare the public.
No, it was getting too dangerous. He pulled up for a second to think, then turned round and drove back for a good blitz. Purification through fire. Bridges are made to be burnt. He wouldn’t go there again.

That night, again, he had nightmares. The next morning he woke with such an overwhelming sense of pain and emptiness, he couldn’t get up. He pulled the covers back over his head, rolled into a ball, and fell immediately back to sleep.
Guy’s mood changes were sharp but invisible. Only the good mood showed. He reserved his ill-humour for alone or the periodic victim who triggered its logical conclusion. In theory, he shouldn’t be working at the moment, Odette was an accident, a sudden compulsion. She wasn’t even blonde. He was meant to be concentrating on finding somewhere. But he’d failed and was furious with himself.
In the beginning, the perpetual night of the crypts offered him a cloak of invisibility. He was soon disappointed. He’d gone down there hoping to find something. On and off, he spent five months of sporadic visits wandering around its darkened alleys. But he was never alone, too may people. It was beginning to irritate him. People started recognising him and tried to be friendly. He avoided them, he didn’t want to be seen, to be spied upon.
Anonymity. It was one of his fundamental contradictions, his hatred of people, their knowing him, no matter how slightly, and his need for someone. As yet, that someone did not exist. The template was in his mind. She was perfect and the encounter, when it happened, would be right, immediate, the missing piece of the jigsaw.
Somewhere down there, a pale-faced figure with eyes staring in mute despair was waiting for the one who would rescue her. Frail and weak, her body wasted slightly from her endless watch, all she needed was his appearance to regain the full splendour of her beauty. The timid flower awaiting the sun. Somewhere, at the end of a passage, hidden behind a ten-foot wall, she was there, waiting. She was alone, there would be no-one to see them, just him and her, and then he would be born.
In his confused fantasy, he was everyone: Odysseus, Perseus, Theseus... and the Nausicaa-Andromeda-Ariadne fused with naïads, wood-nymphs and sea-nymphs in an impossible tangle of unattainable idealism. The crypts were Hades, and she was a myth. He knew it couldn’t happen. Deep down, he knew the swirling mass of dreamed-up situations could never exist outside his own imagination.
Predictably, as he explored the lightless labyrinth, his blind hope evaporated. There was no thread. The myth had failed again. Maybe he knew it had to, maybe he even wanted it to.
He gave up and went back to his everyday routine, staying in his flat, thinking and brooding. And then, one morning, something dawned on him. What, unwittingly, had prevented him from venturing further afield was his incongruous need to keep near the people he hated. And people were gregarious; like rats, they stuck to well-known routes and familiar places. If he just moved away, far from all the crowds, he had to find something.
His depression vanished. He returned to the catacombs with renewed determination. This time, he moved deeper into the warren of obscure, winding passages. For months on end, he spent night after night, entire weekends, exploring, making mind-maps of the increasingly deserted areas he dug out. Now he was getting somewhere. The jungle became his. He found short-cuts, unknown passages, galleries that followed one above the other on two separate layers, he stumbled upon unused vaults, condemned cellars and strange, meaningless dead-ends. For every dead-end, there had to be something on the other side. All that remained was to find out. He worked efficiently - directions, levels, forks, hiding places, squat stalagmites, fat columns, elegant arches and countless other details were all dissected, indexed and cross-referenced in his mind. Guy was thorough, the further he went, the more selective he became, the more rigorous his search. Highly-frequented areas, he simply discounted.
He still hadn’t found what he wanted, but he knew he was getting near. He had already found three chambers that were almost ideal. Almost, but not secluded or private enough. There were even mushrooms growing in one; that probably meant humans. But if he’d found three, he could find more.
Above ground, using his car and manhole-cover contraption, he kept up with his underground routes. With his customary perseverance, he unearthed some delightful secrets beneath Paris’s pavements. He knew he would find what he was looking for. It was just a matter of time. ¶ 2:08 AM