Chương 4: Memento Vivere

Fire. Fire was the friend who never betrayed you. You could always count on it to burn all it touched. When I was a child, I saw one of my classmates—a young child by the name of Thomas Flagel—catch fire without explanation. He carried no match, nothing to smoke, and no tool which could have caused the ignition. His flesh simply caught fire while we were playing ball.

It was only luck that he managed to survive by jumping into a nearby river, and even then he still bore marks that remained with him for the rest of his life. Not only had this incident been the height of strangeness for me at the time, but I'd soon learned that his elder brother André also caught fire at the exact same time on the other side of town; except he had burned to ashes.

Their sister, Agnès, was left so traumatized by the event that investigators could hardly make sense out of her testimony, but between her sobs and ramblings they discerned two words:"ghost" and"fire." It was that incident of spontaneous human combustion that first convinced me of the supernatural's existence. I'd first applied to Portenoire when I heard Agnès had been interned there after being involved in another similar case in Paris.

She was too traumatized to speak about it, but I knew deep within myself that she had taken a glimpse past the curtain. The fire I summoned within the Coach-Eater's belly was no supernatural event. Its blue sulfur flames were an act of science, research, and industry. My substance would continue to burn until it had exhausted all fuel, and not even water would quench its appetite. The Coach-Eater screamed as the couch ahead of me and part of the floor began to burn.

Its tongues wavered and flailed with such frenzy that I was nearly thrown off them. A deep and inhuman wail of agony arose from beneath my feet, and I could hear the bellowing growl of undead horses outside. The monster was in pain. It almost put a smile on my face. I had no time to waste though, lest I burn with the coach. I had to break the window and make my way outside. Thankfully, it was disturbingly easy to buy a handaxe in Paris.

I grabbed the one I'd hidden beneath my coat, rose from my couch by stepping past the rising flames, and then smashed the window with all my strength. It cracked and bled. A black and viscous substance colder than ice sprayed my weapon and hands. Its mere touch hurt the few patches of skin it managed to reach. It burned not like an all-consuming fire, but the cruelest of chills, one which reached all the way to my bones.

Pulsating veins appeared on the window around the point where I struck it, the glass turning into a moist substance which I immediately recognized. A sclera. The windows were eyes, and the curtains were eyelids. That realization didn't stop me though. I hit it again and again until the window shattered and my hands were sprayed with thick black blood. The false glass broke and opened the way to the outside world, freeing smoke to escape into the cold night outside.

The hole was now large enough for me to slip through, and I immediately powered through the pain and struggled to crawl to the other side. I was halfway through when hands grabbed me by the legs. I dared to look over my shoulder, and then I saw them. I now knew why the Coach-Eater never expelled waste after digesting its passengers. It never let them go. The coach's floor had collapsed, revealing a gaping pit that seemed to go far below what its form should allow.

Pale, eyeless corpses wailed below in between rows of mechanical wheels crushing their legs and backs like one of those infernal Prussian wood chippers. They wailed and screamed as the wheels pulled them deeper into the horrible contraption, their hands grabbing my ankles in an attempt to either follow me to freedom or drag me down to suffer with them. I recognized faces from past nights' victims among them, their final expressions frozen in terror. That was how the Coach-Eater killed them.

It simply opened up its floor and crushed its passengers alive. I didn't think, I just kicked. I tried to push these corpses back, but they insisted. Their hands closed on my legs and tried to pull on me… only to release their grip with wails of pain and surprise. They had hit the barbs. Prior to approaching the Coach-Eater, I had taken the time to envelop my limbs and chest with barbed wire hidden below the coat. It had been a safety measure in case the monster tried to swallow me ahead of time.

I assumed these metal spikes would have hurt it during digestion and forced it to spit me out. I guess I had been half-right. The barbs wouldn't have saved me from being crushed to death, but they did hurt the corpses enough for them to let me go. A terrible realization washed over me as I escaped their grasp. They were dead, but not dead enough to be free from pain. I managed to slip out of the cabin and hit the alley's cold cobblestone floor below, shoulder first.

The fall hurt, doubly so when some of the barbs broke on impact and cut my skin, but it beat being crushed to death. I rolled up against a wall that smelled of piss while the Coach-Eater hit another. I smiled as I watched it burn. My flames soon filled the cabin and had begun to consume the wood making up the bulk of the infernal vehicle. I heard the screams of its victims coming from within, the shadow of the consumed corpses dancing in the sulfur light.

The horses stopped and began to rot away years in the span of seconds. Their desiccated flesh turned to dust in an instant, leaving nothing in their wake… but it was the driver that spooked me the most. It went through dozens of faces in the span of seconds, wearing the visage of its victims one after the other in chronological order, until it finally transformed back into what I assumed was its true self. The creature looked at me with black, smoking wheel-shaped holes for eyes.

It had no mouth, no nose, not even ears; only a smooth mask of pallid blue skin that never belonged to a human being in the first place. I sensed the gleam of a malevolent intelligence staring back from the darkness, and the cold expression of a primal emotion which I immediately recognized. Hate. It was then, at the very moment when I gazed into that bottomless abyss of seething loathing, that I understood that this thing didn't kill men because it required our flesh to survive.

This was no beast driven by instinct, no karmic bureaucrat following through with a task it never chose. This Death did not hunt us out of cold indifference or out of a desire to balance some cosmic sheet. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. It killed us out of malice. The coach's burning door opened to reveal a maw of teeth that let out a final howl. The strident, high-pitched screams of hundreds of murdered victims wailing forced me to cover my ears.

My vision blurred as the flames consumed the Coach-Eater whole. I sensed a vibration spread through the air; a wave that seeped its way through the air, the stones, and my very bones. Paris, nay, the entire world shuddered when Death by Coaches at last met its end. The universe flickered for an instant, and then it was gone. I remained still along the stone wall, staring at a bed of ashes and dust covering the alley's floor. The chilling night wind carried them away into the sky in an instant.

The Coach-Eater had left neither bones nor a trace of its existence; nothing except the thick black blood that now stained my axe and coat. I had killed a Death, and none would know it. I returned to the asylum, stored the Coach-Eater's blood in a glass vial, tended to my wounds, took a large dose of morphine when the pain proved too horrendous, and then slept for a full day. This caused me to miss my first university course since I began my attendance.

I knew that it was an absurd thought to have after what I went through last night, but it underlined a very simple fact about my life: it would never be normal again. When I woke up the next day in my bed, part of me briefly wondered if I had hallucinated everything; that I had simply woken up from a dark nightmare which I would soon forget.

It only took me a moment to glance at the thick black blood vial next to the Lost Deaths, followed by the sharp pain coursing through my body from small wounds and burns, to realize otherwise. Unveiling my bandages to clean them only confirmed it. My skin showed an advanced stage of necrosis wherever the Coach-Eater's blood touched it. Thick black patches marred my hands and wrists, though thankfully not so far that I couldn't hide them beneath sleeves and gloves.

Working at an asylum thankfully meant I had access to medical supplies. I'd never understood how painful necrosis could actually be until now. I felt the Coach-Eater's chilling cold in those patches every time I moved or cleaned my bandages; and more than that, I remembered the hungry touch of those wailing corpses in its gullet. The morphine only dulled the pain so far, and it would take weeks for the wounds to fully heal. No normal substance could have caused such degradation so quickly. I hadn't been dreaming.

It had all been real. I had killed a monster and lived to tell the tale. I would be lying if I said it didn't bring some contentment. I had fulfilled my agreement with the Lost Deaths and slain a beast that had preyed on hundreds of lives, thus saving many more. I knew that I had made the world a better place. Nonetheless, I couldn't stop thinking about those… those screaming corpses in the beast's gullet, nor the baleful glare the Coach-Eater sent me before perishing. That…

that had been evil, true evil; the kind of fiend which religions warned us against but whose depthless malice they could never truly fathom. This creature had only been a minor Mortality according to the Lost Deaths. What other horrors lurked among us, unseen and ever-hungry? I was too spooked to question the Lost Deaths immediately nor undergo its ritual. I needed to clear my mind, and so I did. I cleaned up and then invited Germaine to visit the Universal Exposition with me. She kindly accepted.

"So?" she asked me as I returned her matchbox to her, cleaned of all of the Coach-Eater's blood.

"How was your first smoke?"

"Terrible, but somehow I do not regret it," I replied a bit slower than usual. The painkillers slowed my wits.

"My apologies for not being available in the past few days. I've been busy."

"I can imagine, considering the hours at which you returned home." She smiled keenly at me.

"Do not tell me you've been taken with some girl?"

"I have no time for such frivolities." I had no interest in romance whatsoever and my work came ahead of everything else; especially now.

"Perhaps I will show you what I've been up to once I've advanced it a little more."

"I'm looking forward to it," she said as we exited the sanitarium.

"Would you kindly call a coach for us? My legs are old and tired." I winced.

"I would rather walk, if you don't mind the exercise. Carriages… carriages aren't too safe, nowadays." Germaine gave me the strangest of looks, and then the kind of expression a parent would reserve for a naïve and foolish child who had just said the stupidest thing in the world.

"Oh, silly Laurent," she said kindly.

"Carriages have never killed anyone." The most distasteful part of the Universal Exposition, in my mind, was the colonial wing at the Invalides, where the authorities paraded pavilions and indigenes from our colonies across the world. I never understood the appeal of watching so-called 'savages' pretending to live in recreations of their homes. I'd opened up enough corpses to tell that all men were bones and meat below the skin. The dead all looked the same to me.

Unfortunately, the authorities spared no expense in reminding us of France's great 'civilizational mission'—whoever invented that term ought to have been interned at Portenoire—and turned colonial pavilions into an unmissable part of the exposition. Germaine insisted that we visit the Sénégal one out of curiosity, and I didn't have the strength left to tell her no. And then… and then my entire world came crashing down. A month ago, an incident made national news.

Colonel Duchemin, the man in charge of this part of the expedition, ended up slain in a carriage crash in Sénégal alongside his wife and child. From what the newspaper said, the driver had lost control of the horses on their way to the port and the vehicle ended up thrown sideways, crushing all its passengers. The exposition's staff had to hastily replace Duchemin with someone else.

So imagine my surprise when I watched the colonel—someone who should be as dead as a man could get—give us a presentation of the 'senegalaise way of life.' I didn't remember anything about the lecture. I simply stared at the man for half an hour, all my thoughts coming to a halt the moment he introduced himself. He was the very picture of the fifty-something colonial officer, a man as vociferous as he was arrogant, with a crippled leg and a skin marred by an unforgiving sun; but most importantly, he was alive.

I felt his warmth when he shook my hand on our way out of the pavilion, the pain growing sharper when he accidentally pressed on the patches of necrosis beneath my gloves.

"If I may, my colonel?" I remember Germaine asking him.

"How is your son? I've heard he was wounded in that awful incident."

"My boy was spooked, but more afraid than hurt," the man replied with a warm chuckle, before glancing at his wounded leg.

"Not unlike his father, who will never walk straight again I'm afraid. I thank God each day to have spared our lives." I would have said that he was welcome if such a statement hadn't been the height of blasphemy. His words at least jolted me enough out of my shock to interrogate him. As it turned out, the accident did happen, but no one onboard the carriage perished. The colonel's leg was crushed by the fall and his wife broke an arm.

The man confessed that his lady did die a few days later from an infection caused by her injury—something he blamed on the lack of good doctors in the colonies—but it happened so long after the crash that I could hardly attribute it to it. After the visit, I made a stop at the nearest library and reviewed every report of carriage accidents over the last year. A task which proved difficult, since carriages had been called the 'world's safest means of transportation' and lived up to their reputation.

My memory of crashes and other incidents clashed with written accounts. As far as I could tell, no one had ever directly perished in a carriage accident since their creation. Crashes did happen—the laws of physics being what they were—but everyone involved in one simply survived with wounds. Many died later from complications, unrelated incidents, or very distant consequences such as infections, yet some formerly dead people still survived to this day.

Even an infamous incident where a French nobleman had a man run over by his own vehicle to death had changed. The new version reported that he simply crushed his victim's legs, and then walked down to finish him off with a bullet to the head. I had created a world in which death by carriage had become an impossible aberration. It was a good start.