Jean-Martin had grown accustomed to sleepless nights. Sometimes, in the silence of his London flat where the softness of the mattress threatened to swallow him, he had sat motionless on the edge of his bed for hours. The silence, then, had mocked him: more cacophonous for its emptiness than a whole battery of '75s. Better to stay up this way, he thought in that Cornish graveyard: from purpose rather than helplessness, where the freezing air could fill his lungs and clear his head, and the silence seemed to carry a rich stillness rather than the weight of absence.
It had been the same the previous night. Eleanor had been up in the bell tower of the church then, as she was now. Harriet Salt, then as now, had placed on the ground a board painted with some sort of intricate magical seal, and solemnly enjoined the team not to fire until she had lured the creature over it. Then as now, Salt had knelt before a tomb, while Jean-Martin concealed himself behind a yew tree at the edge of the courtyard. And, then as now, he had waited for hours, contentedly sleepless as the icy wind cut through his coat, tasting the stillness of the cemetery at the back of his mouth and pondering how death could seem so peaceful after all.
The previous night had passed away entirely like that, and Jean-Martin had too much common sense to be disappointed when the sun rose and no sign of the monster had appeared. He was relieved enough, in fact, to feel quietly nauseous with shame when the team found Inspector Jago waiting at the inn with news of another attack. The price of Jean-Martin's quiet night had been a death: "a young woman from a good family," Jago reported.
Jean-Martin had looked at Eleanor then, and thought of how easy it was to reduce people to a single sentence. Maybe that is all that's left, when we're gone: the silhouette of a life, all color and individuality lost. Interchangeable with a thousand others.
Jean-Martin did not sleep that day, either. But when night came, and he found himself back in the shadow of the yew tree, no weariness weighed down his eyelids. His pistol, loaded and cocked, rested in the deep pocket of his overcoat, gripped loosely in his right hand. In the narrow watches of the morning, the cold soaked through his left sleeve, and his stump throbbed with numbing pain.
Light: three flashes of green light from the tower. Eleanor had seen something. Jean-Martin felt panic surge, and his pupils dilated, and the fear moved up from the pit of his stomach to underneath his sternum to the base of his throat -
- and then, somehow, it was very far away. Jean-Martin took his pistol out of his pocket, and was suddenly aware of the delicacy, the precision of that motion: like picking up a scalpel from the tray. He leaned out from under the tree, and walked his gaze carefully from one end of the graveyard to the other: taking efficient and methodical note of what he saw, forestalling passion and judgment. Diagnosis, he realized. That's all. Just being willing to see what is in front of your eyes.
What he saw was something large - quite large - and very dark. It was, Jean-Martin noticed, keeping deliberately to the shadow of the church, out of the moonlight. Something about the way it moved - unhurried, graceful, inexorable - reminded Jean-Martin powerfully of the lions that he had hunted in the Atlas Mountains as a boy. And it reminded him of something else, too: of his grand-mère's stories of Gévaudan, of tiny villages deep in the primeval depths of those mountains, where man was not predator but prey. Who is the hunter now? Jean-Martin wondered distantly.
They would find out soon enough. From where he stood, Jean-Martin could see Boone: his head swiveling, pistol aimed hither and yon at shadows. Victoria and Adam were still hiding behind gravestones. Viviette seemed to be aiming her pistol directly at Harriet Salt, presumably in the hope that if the creature attacked she would be lucky enough to hit the beast and not the woman. Salt herself whirled, dropped to one knee, and aimed her gun into the night.
Then things happened very quickly.
The black massive form came out of the shadow of the church and was, quite suddenly, behind Salt. She twisted, raised her gun - and for a moment, neither woman nor monster moved. Jean-Martin could see, with surgical clarity, the hackles bristling on the creature's back, and the white gleam of its teeth. He could almost hear its breathing. Then Salt fired twice - muzzle flash blinding in the night, the gunshots like thunder. Boone was shooting too, and so was Viviette, and Salt was screaming "To me! To me!" while Boone bellowed something about "boxing it in" and Viviette prayed in a hushed voice - and mostly, Jean-Martin realized, he felt intense annoyance at all this silly shouting, as if someone had let the travelling circus into his operating theater during a particularly delicate procedure. The fear still seemed very far away; only the next thirty seconds were real; only the gun in his hand mattered. His whole being faded, somehow; he was a steady hand on the scalpel, and nothing more.
Jean-Martin walked briskly over to Victoria. "Up," the doctor said emphatically: with the sort of bedside-manner firmness with which he might have told her to take her pills. "You too, Adam. All together, please." He ushered the stragglers into the tight knot of men and women that had formed around Salt. Jean-Martin turned to Salt, but his gaze remained fixed on the church behind him. "When it approached you," he told her, "it used the shadows deliberately - strategically." Jean-Martin's voice, in his own ears, sounded absurdly calm: as if he were asking a nurse for the retractors, please. "Alors, it will be in the lee of something large enough to cover it in shadow: a tree, a very large gravestone, the church itself." Once again, Jean-Martin moved his gaze systematically across the churchyard - and if he heard his pulse hammering in his ears, now, then it was still almost as if that heart belonged to someone else. "There are only so many possibilities."
