“I already explained that. It was one of the dogs.”
“A siren like that for a dog? Is this like a hellhound, Cerberus- type dog? It all seemed a little extreme for a dog. And my doors were open last night, too, not just this morning. Was that the cleaning staff, too? In the middle of the night?”
Whatever uncertainty he’d been feeling now gone, he smiled, a comfortable, brilliant smile, and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.
“I have no idea. Maybe keep your doors locked. A year ago, that would have been a ridiculous thing to say, but since Isabelle disappeared, this place hasn’t felt the same.”
“What do you think really happened to her?” After last night, her disappearance had taken on a decidedly more ominous tone.
He shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”
I sat on the stone bench at the center of the garden and stared up at him. “You don’t seem especially bothered by it.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re not worried about her?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“But everyone else is despondent. Dorian called her an angel. Everyone else keeps talking about what a genius she was and how much you needed her work.”
He shook his head. “They’ve all got it wrong. Look, she was gifted or whatever, but the work she was doing, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t ethical. I’m glad she’s gone.”
“You’reglad?”
“Okay, fine,” he said, sighing deeply and gazing skyward. “Someone will probably tell you, so why not me? I couldn’t stand Isabelle. Despised her, even. And it was mutual. Most likely she disliked me because I knew what a terrible person she was. She was pissed she didn’t have me fooled. We were enemies, in fact. Sounds silly to say, but it was true.”
“You’re not answering my question, though. What do you think happened to her?”
“I told you already,” he said, patting me on the head. “Fuck if I know.” And with that, he left the cabana.
1.6WITCHCRAFT
That there is a Devil, is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influences of the Devil.
—COTTONMATHER,ONWITCHCRAFT
I intended to get dressed and head up to the house to see what the others had to say about the previous night, but I found myself sitting on the couch staring into space for quite some time. I began to wonder where exactly I was. I’d been so determined to best Charles that I’d jumped at this opportunity without a modicum of the research I might have given to, say, buying a new pair of sneakers. Sure, it had seemed like this place was respected and historic (there was a photo of Winston Churchill on the website!), but there was precious little to lead the casual reader to think there might be night sirens and threats of uncontained hellhounds.
And what was it exactly that I’d imagined I’d seen standing at the foot of my bed? There was no way it could have been real, and yet itfeltreal. Its head had seemed vaguely canine, but I’d seen horns atop its head, not to mention the fact that it stood upright. The most obvious explanation was that I had experienced some kind of waking dream in which I’d hallucinated a manifestation of Margaret Murray’s horned god. My research was simply bleeding into my subconscious.
And yet the idea of upright-walking canids was a fantasy that mankind had inexplicably clung to for millennia. Maybe my subconscious was trying to communicate with me. Taking a deep breath, I ran through what associations it brought up. There was, of course, Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of death who sported the body of a man and the head of a jackal. Saint Christopher was said to be one of the cynocephali, or dogheaded men, some of whom were thought to eat human flesh. Indeed, Saint Christopher is often pictured sporting a canine head in religious iconography. Some fringe academics even linked the cynocephali to the famous sixteenth-century Piri Reis map. Discovered in 1923, it showed a fairly accurate rendering of South America and featured depictions of various animals, including what appear to be dancing dog-headed men.
And then there was the werewolf. Unlike its dog-headed cousins, the werewolf had proven singular in its capacity to provoke a deep, primal fear. Was it simply the fact that wolves were more dangerous than dogs, or was there something that inherently made the idea of a werewolf more plausible?
Almost without thinking, I grabbed my laptop and opened it. My most recent association with werewolves was Sabine Étienne. Her mauling—her supposed werewolf attack—had been the catalyst for my initial interest in Hildegard. And now here I was hearing mysterious howls in the middle of the night and seeing monsters at the foot of my bed.
Quickly I reminded myself of the details of the case. Sabine Étienne had worked at a local tavern called La Tanière de Loup. A well-liked young woman, she’d lived at home with her parents and her younger brother, Guillaume Étienne. On an unseasonably temperate evening five months ago, she’d left the tavern and had started home. On the way, she’d met up with some friendsand had told them she’d come over to their cottage for a bottle of wine after stopping by her house to change. Unfortunately, she never made it.
When she didn’t arrive at her friends’ cottage, they assumed she’d gone to bed. Likewise, her parents assumed she’d spent the evening with friends. It wasn’t until the next afternoon, when she missed a shift at work, that anyone realized there was something wrong. Her brother, who also worked at the tavern, was the first to raise the alarm. It wasn’t long before her body was found, just off a path that led through an area of the woods locally known asle bosquet de la sorcière. Her death was written up as an animal attack, but a local veterinarian weighed in that the bite marks didn’t match those of any known local predators. In the end, though, it was decided to have been an animal, most likely a bear. The only problem was that according to my research, black bears almost never attack humans, and there were no brown bears in Colorado. And then there were those quotes from the locals, the whispers of something more malevolent stalking the woods. The termwerewolf,or more precisely,loup-garou,was thrown around. And then the stranger’s testimony—that phrase that, upon a second reading, struck a note of fear into me:
They breed them up there.
Shaking my head as if to cast off my fear, I pulled away from my computer. I needed to get myself together and head up to breakfast.
Up at the house, I found Lexi, Dorian, and Aspen sitting at the dining table. They all were looking very serious, but as soon as they noticed me, they broke into smiles.
“You’re up!” Dorian bellowed, standing to greet me.
