The Marbled Swarm (3 page)

I’d never seen a ghost, nor thought death gives its inmates visitation rights. Still, I’d watched my share of so-called paranormal sighting clips on YouTube when bored enough, and, I’m sorry, but I’d never seen a ghost show up anywhere, no matter how opulent the haunted house, in full color and in high-definition like this supposed Claude.

“If he’d looked like that when I killed him, I wouldn’t have done it,” Serge slurred. “I wonder what it means.”

Suddenly, as though incensed or bored by Serge’s quibbling, the apparition, well, less dematerialized, as one expects of thinning fog, than switched off, lamp-like, accompanied by the same muffled, grinding noise I’d heard earlier.

Now, a hefty chunk of wall rattled free of its foundations. Reborn as a crude door, it swung open to expose a large and very bare-boned closet, although the vestibule seemed less a niche set aside for worldly extras than a kind of world unto its own, no more servile to the bedroom than an attic is a secondary ceiling.

Standing in the heart of this compartment, partly obscured by viscid dust, whose fog-like whirling briefly lent him the aura of, say, the aging Johnny Hallyday in concert, was a disheveled Jean-Paul, his eyes glaring at his audience of two.

“Is that true, Serge?” he asked evenly, the kind of evenness that would allow brain surgeons to win every steady hands contest if such a prize existed.

By then, my eyes had grown conditioned to the weakened light inside the inlet, or at least enough to parse a strange black lump of shadow on the floor as an old Sanyo projection TV circa the early ’90s. I might have thought its silhouette was Jean-Paul’s robotic Egor were I three years old and had I not grown up watching a television of its very make and model.

In that second, the so-called ghost was debunked, its molecules re-boxed, and its perpetrator busted.

I was so preoccupied that, by the time I felt the mattress roil and quake beneath me, it was an aftershock. Serge had disappeared, leaving only an anemic stink of champagne crossed with whiffs of hair gel, and most likely a commotion that was happening down the hall.

Jean-Paul looked strangely nonplussed for a man who’d turned a boring wall into a channel, much less a father who’d just seen an alleged killer in his own child’s face.

I hardly knew which newfound thing to question first, but while the vestiges of Serge’s fingering nearly dug my hand into the pocket full of letters, then fanned them like a winning hand of cards, erotica, as should be clear by now, cannot compete for my affections with an interest in subverting its effect.

Allow me to edit Jean-Paul’s press conference to smithereens because, while its gist does need to fortify your intake, this story will be headier if it leapfrogs this peculiar episode. Plus, I need to start herding this section back to Paris.

As for Serge’s guilty plea regarding Claude’s death, Jean-Paul pronounced it destitute. The corpse’s single injury had been a gash in the head’s corroded crown. Thus, Serge, whose height failed his older brother’s by at least half a meter, would have had to lie in wait with a ladder or have perched amid the treetops with a slingshot, and his restrictive jeans alone would have prevented that.

As for the ghost trick, it was artless enough. To function as a door, the mobile portion of the wall had been hollowed out—its consistency akin to stretched and painted canvas. Thus, any image projected at its homely, somewhat porous underside seeped into the bedroom and degraded mystically enough.

As for why the ruse was called for, it seems Jean-Paul had wildly overdrawn the family’s bank account for reasons he left blank. The chateau’s value formed the only refill, but Claire would never have agreed to sell without discovering his debt, a bombshell he said he simply couldn’t chance.

Fortunately, Claire blamed ghosts for every misplaced car key, so he’d put that quirk and their tragedy together, asked their hysterical housekeeper to clean Claude’s room, switched on the projector, then run to investigate her screaming and yelled his head off too.

Once Claire was scared into a mumbling insomniac for several days, Jean-Paul had casually reminded her that Claude’s last known words were, “Die, you fucking bitch,” whereupon the chateau was on the market within a week.

As for the threshold he was standing in, he described it as the lobby of a secret labyrinth, and he invited me inside after a warning that, while I would safely reemerge, my outfit mightn’t, whereupon I crossed the room and stood uncomfortably close as he shut the groaning door behind us.

Essentially, we were packed inside a wooden box, the sort of grand yet chaste container that must have carted
Venus de Milo
to the Louvre. In one direction, a second doorway had been sawed with minimal efficiency, and, through it I could see a hallway sculpted from the space between the chateau’s widely separated walls.

To negotiate this narrow thoroughfare, we had to jerk our bodies sideways, duck beneath its low-slung grater of a ceiling, then scoot along in little increments, scraping dust from everywhere until we’d inched into another roomy crate.

Jean-Paul’s fingers traced one wall until they felt a pierce or tiny gap. Once this gouge was capped off with an eye, it became a peephole, round yet not quite circular, like a prostitute’s asshole, that allowed one to spy on a surprising portion of the chateau’s master bedroom and, in my eye’s case, an inhabitant as well, specifically the half-undressed and napping Claire.

Had my faculties been less congested, I might have seen or thought I’d seen an unknown actor who’d been playing her up to that point. Her long blond locks were flowing down a head-shaped clump of Styrofoam, and the short-haired, topless body snoring on the bed had everything a teenaged boy could use.

My surprise was such that, as Jean-Paul and I began to venture farther through the maze, I risked a quip about his wife’s androgyny, which he brushed off as a common side effect inside the tunnels, perhaps resulting from a gas leak, whereby the non-secret world could start to look too vivid.

Another passageway, as crimping as the first but L-shaped and wrapped around a chimney, snuck us to a third, slightly more livable compartment. In truth, were the trek and puzzle to locate it not so testing, I might have guessed a homeless man had set up shop there.

A metal high stool accessorized this alcove’s peephole. To its right, a plastic garbage can was filled with crumpled papers, each ball graffitied by a hasty, scribbled text. While it’s possible this can’s unpleasant stench came from the gas leak Jean-Paul mentioned, it reeked of sperm.

Sitting on the stool, I peeked into a room that, while not formally introduced as such, was, between the hogging drum set and an unmade, bloodstained bed, not exactly crying out for Serge’s passport.

If I had hoped to spot a gun left smoking by our chatter in the basement, and I can’t say that was precisely my intention, the only quirk lay in a checkerboard of posters that occupied one wall. Owing to the angle, I first mistook one poster’s subject for an image of myself, then, as my paranoia eased away, for a dated souvenir from Pierre Clémenti’s youngest days, until I finally realized the boy was Claude, his hair longish but not yet codified by Emo.

When I returned my eyesight to the secret vestibule, Jean-Paul was waiting in a corner where, gulping at his feet, a more or less square hole had been sawed out of the floorboards and framed with a fluorescent strip of tape long since too crispy and burnt out to be of help.

We stepped inside, Jean-Paul first at my insistence, whereupon a simple ladder dropped us to the ground floor. There, another secret chamber, this one lofty and more mindful of a chapel than a carton, formed the anchor for another set of passages and rooms, whose hidden door and peephole combinations menaced the living room, Jean-Paul’s study, and the kitchen respectively.

Jean-Paul snatched a flashlight from some inlet and, after clicking to ascertain it was workable, we descended through another pitch-black square, where the ancient-smelling air signaled we were fully underground.

The room in which our feet touched down, the seventh by my count, looked to be a naturally occurring cavern prearranged by craggy rounded walls and an uneven hard dirt floor.

In one direction, the cavern seemed to dilate into a cave, and while Jean-Paul claimed it was no deeper than your average bathroom, he declined to tilt his flashlight and re-
assure me.

Directly opposite this so-called dent was a final exit that, when pushed, transformed one of the basement’s grungy jail cells into a turnstile, which, despite its girth and weight, spun as lightly on its axis as the revolving doors at Galeries Lafayette.

To say I felt amazed by what I’d seen would be forcing things a little. “Amazed” is not the problematic word, but rather
the idea that what had been uncovered was miraculous. For while my awe, which coalesced within a privacy where you remain unwelcome, was not inconsequential, it emanated from a very strange coincidence.

You see, the home in which I’d spent the greatest portion of my life also hid a scrawny, ill-lit secret realm similarly fashioned from the hollows of the normal-looking house, and, while far less of an involving place than the chateau’s, I assure you it was just as wicked.

I tidied up my outfit, plucking splinters from my coat sleeves and slapping dust out of my trousers, while Jean-Paul, now quite agitated with excitement from having made a confidant, began telling me the secret tunnels’ curious history.

To hear him, they’d lain dormant in the chateau’s walls for many years. But one night, amid a burst of curiosity about his fellow townsfolk, whom he had long dismissed on sight as Jean-Marie Le Pen fans, he’d ventured to a popular café and ordered several drinks.

Most of the patrons certified his base suspicions, but one man, whose outsized taste for cocktails seemed to make him something of an outcast, had introduced himself and asked Jean-Paul if the scuttlebutt was true that he was living in the chateau known to locals as the weird one.

Several Kir Royales later, the woozy gentleman confided that the chateau’s prior inhabitant had offered him a tour in return for oral sex when he was younger, a tit for tat he’d only agreed to since he was reading and enjoying a novel by Jean Genet at the time.

The secret passages this gentleman described were, first of all, too infinite and city-like to hide within the chateau’s modest structure, and, second, had been faded by his years of heavy drinking, leaving lots of creepy talk but not the vaguest hint of how this alleged kingdom might be entered.

It had taken a wary but bewitched Jean-Paul several months to find a strangely fulsome wall crack, then, using the old credit card trick popular with movie burglars, swipe an unassuming kitchen cabinet into a creaking, abstruse entrance.

It was then my iPhone pinged, and I excused myself, taking several steps into the basement. When I saw my driver’s number, I nearly slipped the phone into my pocket, but, perhaps hoping to enjoy a few more seconds to myself, I dutifully clicked “Read.”

“Some boy . . .” his text began, had asked to hide out in my car and return with us to Paris—a bad idea, he thought, but one the boy claimed had my preapproval.

Based on what you’ve read thus far, you must think Pavlov’s dog could have texted him my answer. While your assumption is correct, I’ll instruct you once again that jumping to nefarious conclusions won’t flatter you much longer.

For the record, I authenticated Serge’s lies and suggested that my driver fold him up inside the trunk.

I would have offered Jean-Paul my hand in parting had he not seen it coming and insisted that, before it clasped his, we share a single drink upstairs and dot the
i
on one or two outstanding matters, as he put it.

After using the official staircase as a shortcut, Jean-Paul ducked into the chateau’s pantry and retrieved an uncorked Sauternes and two glasses before leading me outside and onto what I believe is called a veranda.

It held a single café table and two painted, sun-grilled metal chairs that would have roasted us, but, before I could suggest a walk instead, Jean-Paul dragged the ensemble beneath an ivy-strewn overhang.

First we sipped, gazing at the acreage that was just a signature away from being infamously mine. I weighed a grassy alcove between two gingko trees and then a flower bed boxed inside a waist-high hedge as likely candidates for Serge’s grave site, while a grim and staring Jean-Paul seemed to mourn the property itself.

“The truth is . . .” he said. “It was I who murdered Claude.”

His eyes were swooping in accordance with a vast flock of birds that circled high over the backyard at that very moment for its own and fractured reasons.

“Some months ago,” he continued, “Serge confessed or lied to me that Claude had been raping him for years. The shock was . . . well, calling it a shock will surely do. You can’t imagine how profoundly these alleged, covert acts attracted me since I have no ideas in that regard myself.

“Serge is gay, you must agree, and you . . . well, you’re whatever style of predator you are, but my perversions don’t explain it. No, there was something else. I knew Serge was fabricating, or I knew he had to be. I would have seen them through the peepholes, and, if I’d seen them, I would have called in the police like any father.

“I’ve watched my sons masturbate a hundred times, and those flares of unseen skin and stiffened penises never engineered even the least tingling of sensations. No, it was the idea, the concept, the product of Claude sodomizing Serge I was obsessed with. It seemed so cataclysmic next to what I had been seeing.

“I told my family I was writing a novel—a strange premise, perhaps, but I had written one when younger, imitative of Robbe-Grillet and unpublished, of course. Thus, I would be locked inside my study for lengthy periods of time. Instead, I wandered in the chateau’s secret passages for months on end, hoping to get lucky.

“I did in fact write and quite voraciously, as you might have gathered from the overflowing trash can in the small observatory next to Serge’s room, but, in that unusual case, words proved to be a mere emasculation of reality.