Read Chapter 7: The Forgotten Village

The trail switchbacked up through dwarf pines and wind-scoured scree, each bend exposing more of the valley floor below. Étienne moved at the front, rifle slung across his back, watching the ground more than the horizon. Behind him, Claire’s breathing had gone labored half an hour ago, but she hadn’t complained once. Giancarlo brought up the rear, his pack rattling with gear he claimed was “essential” and Étienne suspected was mostly grappa.

“There,” Étienne said, pointing to a fold in the mountain where the pines gave way to a bowl of ruined stone. “Roches Perdues.”

The hamlet had been abandoned for decades, and the mountains had reclaimed it greedily. Roofs had caved in, walls slumped into their own foundations, and the single narrow street was a channel of drifted soil and gravel. But at the far end, where the slope steepened into the Tourne Massif’s eastern flank, one building still stood with its gable intact and its shuttered windows defiant against the weather.

“That’s where the shepherd was found,” Étienne said. “The last attack. Three weeks ago.”

Giancarlo spat. “Looks like a ghost town. The kind where you find things that should stay buried.”

Claire brushed past them both, already unclipping her pack. “The clinic was in that building. The gendarmerie report said the body was moved there after they found him.” She looked at Étienne. “You didn’t tell me you’d already been here.”

“I hadn’t. The report was detailed enough.”

She gave him a long look, then turned and started down the slope toward the hamlet. Étienne followed, feeling Giancarlo’s eyes on his back.

The clinic’s door had been forced open years ago, but someone had rigged a crude latch since—fresh wire twisted around the frame, the cut ends bright. Étienne pushed through, and the smell hit him first: iodine and rot, layered so deep into the walls it had calcified into something permanent.

Inside, the room was a wreck of overturned cabinets and shattered glass, but the center had been cleared. A long metal examination table sat beneath the intact window, its surface scrubbed clean. Fresh straps hung from its rails, supple leather, recently oiled.

“This wasn’t here three weeks ago,” Étienne said, running a thumb along one strap. “Or it was cleaned since.”

Claire had gone to the back wall, where a heavy wooden cabinet lay on its side. She pulled at it, grunting with effort, and Étienne moved to help her right it. The cabinet’s doors swung open, revealing rows of surgical instruments on neat cloth rolls. Scalpels, forceps, retractors—all steel, all gleaming with a particular kind of polish that came from regular care, not storage.

“This isn’t a field kit,” Claire said softly, lifting a scalpel to the light. “This is a proper surgical set. Bone saws, trephine bits… whoever kept this place maintained it for real procedures.”

“The dead doctor,” Étienne said. “Mercer. He practiced out of here for thirty years.”

Claire shook her head. “This isn’t general practice equipment. This is surgical—specialized. You don’t keep this for setting broken legs and delivering calves.” She turned the scalpel over, and the light caught something scratched into the brass handle. Initials. S.H. “The shepherd’s body—the wounds. You said you didn’t see it fresh.”

“I saw the photos. Claw marks, mostly. Deep, parallel lacerations. Lungs punctured, ribs shattered inward.”

Claire set the scalpel down, and her face had gone pale beneath its windburn. “Because that’s what the photos showed. But I did the autopsy, Étienne. I saw the body.”

He stepped closer. “And?”

“There were claw wounds, yes. Upper torso, arms—defensive, you’d expect. But there was something underneath the official record. A secondary wound pattern that didn’t match the claws at all.” She pulled a folded paper from her coat—a photocopy of a diagram, the shepherd’s body rendered in clinical lines. “Here.”

She pointed to the lower abdomen, where a small, precise mark crossed the tissue diagram. “A single incision. Clean, sharp-edged, made by a blade, not a claw. It had been closed with sutures before the animal wounds were inflicted. Someone sewed him up after opening him, then let the beast tear him open again to hide the evidence.”

The room went cold. Étienne heard Giancarlo’s boots shift on the floorboards behind him, heard the man’s breath catch.

“What did they take?” Étienne asked.

Claire folded the diagram, and for the first time since he’d met her, she looked uncertain. “I don’t know. But I’ve been asking around. There was a man who worked with the local archives—he showed me records from Mercer’s practice that shouldn’t have existed.”

“The Vatican-affiliated man,” Étienne said.

Claire’s head snapped up. “You knew?”

“I was told.” He didn’t elaborate. Wouldn’t—not yet. “What records?”

She hesitated, then reached into her pack and pulled out a slim manila folder, worn at the edges, the same kind every decade-old government file used. She handed it to him.

The folder contained patient records on a form Étienne recognized immediately—the standardized Alpine depopulation registry, used through the seventies and eighties. But the entries were in a steady, distinctive hand that didn’t match any clerk’s block script. Dates, symptoms, outcomes. Most entries were ordinary enough: broken bones, infections, a difficult birth. But the last page bore a single line, dated ten years ago, two weeks after the previous village doctor had vanished in the storm that buried Roches Perdues in six feet of snow.

*Subject remains viable. Continue observation. — S.H.*

“S.H.,” Étienne said. “Initials on the scalpel. And on these files.” He looked up at Claire. “The doctor before Mercer. The woman who disappeared with the village’s records. What was her name?”

Claire opened her mouth, then closed it. She took the folder back, flipped to the front sheet, and ran her finger down a column of names. When she stopped, her eyes widened.

“Sylvie Hartmann,” she said. “The village doctor before Mercer. But Mercer replaced her after she vanished, and the official record says she was never found. The gendarmerie closed the case as a hiking accident.” She looked at Étienne, who had one hand pressed to his forearm, feeling the familiar burn through his coat sleeve. “What is it?”

“The dates,” Étienne said, reading over her shoulder. “Hartmann’s last entry. It’s the same day Marc died.”

The three of them stood in the ruined clinic, the wind moaning through gaps in the walls, and for a long moment no one spoke.

Giancarlo broke the silence. “So this Hartmann woman was here, operating on someone, the same day your brother got torn apart on the mountain.” He crossed himself, the gesture quick and instinctive. “That’s not coincidence. That’s a pattern.”

Étienne’s mind was moving fast, assembling pieces like a kill diagram. The beast had killed the shepherd here, on this slope, in front of this building. The beast had killed Marc decades ago on a different face of the same massif—and here was a record, dated to that same day, of someone being cut open with surgical precision in a clinic that was supposedly abandoned years earlier.

“It’s not killing randomly,” he said slowly. “It’s drawing us here. Every attack, every body—they’re bread crumbs.”

Claire looked at him sharply. “The shepherd was found here. Your brother died thirty miles north. What’s the link?”

Étienne turned to the window. Through the cracked glass, he could see the eastern face of the Tourne Massif, its chasms hidden by the shoulder of the ridge. Three of them. Three possible sites for the beast’s den.

“We’re chasing it back toward the gap,” he said. “Every kill brings the next victim closer to the mountain’s heart. Marc was the first bread crumb.” He looked down at his scarred forearm. “I’m the second.”

Giancarlo’s hand moved to the knife at his belt. “And us?”

The word hung in the air. *Bait.*

Étienne turned to face them, and for the first time since assembling this unlikely trio—a doctor who kept secrets, a smuggler who owed a dead man a debt—he felt the shape of the truth solidify. The beast had not been hunting them.

It had been gathering them.

“We’re not bait,” he said. “We’re the crew it wants. All three of us.” He looked at Claire. “Whatever your Vatican man is looking for, whatever he thinks he’s hunting—he doesn’t have the one piece we do.”

He tapped the folder in her hands. “This. The beast doesn’t just exist on the mountain. It had a partner here. A surgeon. Someone who knew exactly where to cut.”

Claire frowned. “You think Hartmann was working with the creature?”

“I think Hartmann was operating *on* it,” Étienne said. “Or what it leaves behind. Ten years of records, then she vanishes the same day Marc dies. Whatever she learned, she learned it here—in this clinic, in this village.” He looked out the window at the falling dusk, at the lengthening shadows of the Tourne Massif. “And she’s waiting for us somewhere up there.”

The wind rose, rattling the shutters, and through the gap in the boards, Étienne saw something flicker at the hamlet’s edge—a silhouette that didn’t quite resolve into tree or stone before it vanished into shadow.

“We should make camp inside,” he said, pulling his rifle forward. “We’re not alone here.”