The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

meters of advancement that would probably be lost the following day.

They said the Americans changed it all, with their energy and their numbers and their willingness to get killed. The Americans, big and hearty, like their women, who were stupid but lucky and somehow managed to end the war.

They liked him, these American women. They thought him their pet Frenchman. They thought his accent “quaint,” his smile “romantic,” his desire to write novels “almost American,” even though the French had been writing novels before America was a country.

He charmed them, relaxed them, promised them he would show them the sights-and he did. He did. He showed them their own venal faces in the Seine before he raised their skirts, ripped off their stockings, and proved to them that French men hadn’t lost all of their dignity in the trenches.

His mother, before she died, said he had lost his soul on the battlefield, that he had come home a shell, not a man at all, filled with dark compulsions not French. She tried to take him to church, but he would not go, not even to her funeral, after she had died, stepping in front of one of the automobiles that she so despised for ruining the lovely streets of Paris.

Stepping-that is what he told the police. She had lost track of where she was in the conversation, and she had stepped-

But she had not stepped. She had stumbled, after a shove, after she called him a monster, and said she wished he had died on the battlefield along with his soul.

Sometimes he thought she was right. He had seen the darkness coming for him those early days in the woods, lurking beyond the tanks and the flying machines, past the machine guns with their rat-a-tat-tats and their spray of bullets, the bodies falling, falling, falling in the mud. Beyond that, the darkness rose over the fields and extended across Europe, and he saw it coming toward him, then filling him, until there was no room for anything else.

He could pass on the darkness-he had done so with that beautiful American-but as he watched the hope die in her eyes, he remembered how that felt, and he could not, he would not, let her live with that. So he took the life from her, knowing (although she did not know) that it was no longer worth living.

He had taken her St. Christopher’s medal because it should not touch darkness. He had left the medal and the ring she wore in the poor box at Notre Dame. He did such things, venturing into churches only for that, then escaping before the darkness polluted them as well.

Sometimes he thought he should have stumbled in front of that automobile instead of sending his mother there. Sometimes he thought he should have died, just as she said, in the mud-and-blood soaked fields, along with his friends. Sometimes he thought.

And sometimes, he did not.

Decker could not look at what he had written. He stacked the paper inside one of his folders and tied it shut with a ribbon, just like he used to tie the pages of his novel inside the folder, proud of his day’s work.

This day-this night-he was not proud. He was spent.

He had seen things he had hoped to never see again.

Corpse Vision, the old man’s grandson had called it.

Whatever it was, Decker despised it, much as the man he had written about, this Etienne, had despised the darkness in himself.

As Decker walked to the Dome the following night, the folder under his arm, he saw the darkness lurking. It hid in the shadows, wearing uniforms he did not recognize-that symbol the grandson had drawn-marching in lock- step.

Nightmares seeping backwards.

But Etienne had been a nightmare seeping forward.

Decker winced. He did not want to think about it.

He hadn’t had a drink in three days. His alcoholic wave was over.

He also hadn’t been to the Tribune in three days. He wondered what Root would think, what Thurber would say. Maybe they were already searching for him, although no one had come to his room at the Hotel de Lisbonne-or if they had, he had been too absorbed to hear their knock.

This time, Decker arrived before the old man. Decker sat at the old man’s table, sipping coffee and eating ham, cheese, and bread, much to the disapproval of his waiter, who wanted to serve the coffee long after the meal was done.

Know-it-all Hemingway sat in a corner, scribbling in his journal. He did not look up as Decker came onto the terrace, and Decker did not call attention to himself.

But as he looked at Hemingway now, he saw something that startled him-an insecurity, a fear, so deep that Hemingway might not have known it existed. Superimposed over Hemingway-like a ghost in a Dadaist painting-was an old man with a white beard and haunted eyes. He hefted a shotgun and rubbed its barrel against his mouth.

Decker looked away.

The old man-his old man, not the spirit surrounding Hemingway-sat at the table, his grandson beside him.

Decker didn’t ask where they came from. He didn’t remark on their silent entrance. Instead, he handed the folder to the old man.

The old man untied the folder, opened it, and scanned the pages, handing them one by one to his grandson.

Decker read upside down, embarrassed by the words, their lack of cohesion, their meandering viewpoint. When the grandson saw the name Etienne Netter, he stood.

“My thanks,” he said and bowed to Decker. Then he walked away, leaving the pages beside Decker’s plate.

Decker did not touch them. The old man picked them up and put them back in the folder, which he tied shut, making a careful bow.

“It is more than I could have hoped for,” he said. “You have saved lives.”

Decker shook his head. “I didn’t do anything.”

“This man, this Netter, he is a new breed. You have heard of Jack the Red, no? Saucy Jack?”

“The Ripper,” Decker said. “Decades ago. In London.”

“The first of his kind, we think,” the old man said. “If there had been one such as you, perhaps he would have been stopped.”

“He was stopped,” Decker said. “He only killed five.”

“That we know of,” the old man said.

He set the papers under his own plate, then extended his hand. “I am Pierre LeBeau. I run Noir, the central newspaper in the City of Dark.”

Decker couldn’t take the misstatements any more. “City of Light,” he said. “We call Paris the City of Light.”

LeBeau nodded. “Light has its opposite. You have seen the dark. You write of it. You know what is coming.”

“Only because you tell me that it is,” Decker said. He sipped his coffee, pleased that his hand remained steady.