He had to face the fact that he was lost. Or at least, the village of Plaume was lost, misplaced in some way. That was almost easier to believe because he hadn’t gotten lost since he was eight. He was too skilled.

Lamont was a little nervous. If he were an ordinary man, he would have been afraid. Walking alone across the French countryside at night, at the tail end of a war, that could be risky. But Lamont had never been ordinary, and he was pretty sure he could handle himself. It wasn’t like being in a city where bombs could fall just about anywhere. The solitude was reassuring.

It was people who were dangerous these days, trigger-happy allied soldiers, Nazis on the lam, desperate DPs… Lamont knew when he was being watched, noticed, and he knew there was nobody around. It was just him and the stars tonight.

He’d given up on Plaume, doubled back. The idea of staying the night at the villa with Voclain didn’t appeal to him. Instead, Lamont would hole up in that room in the ruins. One good thing about being talented was, you never really went hungry and could travel light.

He’d have an apple or two once he’d reached shelter. They were always a little mealy, never as good as the ones he grew back home and he was getting kind of sick of them, but they did keep his belly full. Hell. Why wait? With a quick flick of his hand, he conjured up an apple and chewed it thoughtfully as he walked.

Rene Voclain had not been what he’d expected. Based on his letter, Lamont had imagined someone weasily and anxious, a little, bespectacled man peeking fearfully over Lamont’s shoulder as he answered the door. They couldn’t meet in Paris or anyplace like that, no, it had to be in the villa near the godforsaken little village of Plaume where Voclain was holed up, and once Lamont arrived in France he could see the guy’s point.

People were acting crazy, pointing fingers and, Lamont suspected, sometimes settling old scores. There were things Lamont had seen that he wished he could unsee.

Who knew whether Voclain had been a collaborator or not? Not Lamont. He just wanted to hear what Voclain could tell him before somebody either lynched or imprisoned the man.

Lamont was the only person to get off the train at Plaume. People were there, but they were pretty ragged and scared looking. Its one miserable little inn was open, even though the windows were boarded up. Lamont had stopped long enough take a room and to tell the skinny, glowering man who opened the door to say he’d be back later that evening. His bag he left on the bed, knowing it would be there when he returned, no matter how that scrag of an innkeeper’s eyes lit up when he saw Lamont leave without it.

He’d been both relieved and suspicious when he saw the villa where Voclain lived, unkempt as it was. On the one hand, there was a chance at getting a full meal, on the other, he couldn’t see it and believe Voclain had come through the war with clean hands.

Lamont paused for a moment, even sniffed the air slightly. Something wasn’t right.

He concentrated. No, there was nobody. Not even a large animal. He was alone, but the sense of wrongness remained. He looked. There was that hill, there were those trees, yes, he recognized them. He was heading in the right direction. And yet he was lost. He couldn’t shake that conviction.

He began walking again, but a little more quickly.

Voclain let him in through a side door. Instead of a skinny, frightened little bookworm, he proved to be a tough customer with a face like an an ape’s, holding up a lantern to get a good look at Lamont. “Duday?” he asked, and Lamont nodded.

The man led Lamont down a short, dark corridor to the little space where he’d set up camp, a store-room crammed with a table and various supplies apparently hauled up from a pantry. There was even a handsome portrait hanging on the wall of a rather elegant man in out of date clothes. It had probably been over the fireplace of a now boarded up and abandoned parlor in another wing.

“My father,” said Voclain, when he noticed Lamont looking at it, and Voclain made a quick, ironic toast to it with the glass he was holding. Voclain motioned Lamont towards a chair at the table, poured him a generous portion of scotch. It was pretty early in the afternoon, but, Lamont thought, what the Hell. It might as well be midnight in this stuffy little room.

Voclain sat down next to Lamont with a long weary huff, then downed a long drink.

“Were you followed?” Voclain asked.

“No.”

“You are sure?”

“I would know if I were followed.”

“Oh you would? How? You are an expert spy? Some great detective, eh Monsieur Auguste Dupin?”

The man was drunk.

“Nobody followed me,” said Lamont.

“They want to kill me, Duday, the yids, the Communists. They tell lies about me.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“No, you don’t, do you?”

Voclain took another long drink. “Hm. You’re here about Montandon. My book. You come all the way from England to talk to me about it. At a time like this. Now why would you be so interested in that, eh? That’s what I’m curous about.”

“The war is over. I’ll be going home soon. I wanted to talk to you before I left Europe.”

“Before my neck is stretched, you mean.”

“Nobody can tell the future,” said Lamont.

Voclain seemed to contemplate this for a moment.

Lamont decided to take a chance on a little flattery. “It was a masterful work, your book.”

Voclain nodded, his expression unchanged. “He was a great, great man,” he said. “I poured my heart into that biography. So you have read Montandon?”

“Yes.” A small lending library in London had, along with Rene Voclain’s worshipful magnum opus, several of Montandon’s books, including Tous Les Sorcieres. Apparently, the man had had a bit of a following in England thirty years ago, when Crowley and the rest of that crowd were making their hay. Most of it was crap, the usual half-baked occultism, racialism and madness tarted up with a scientific veneeer, but Les Sorcieres — that had been, as Papa had warned him, uncomfortably close to the mark.

“I was the only one left in the end,” Voclain said. “All his students abandoned him, but not me. Not me. Never. Do you know, he died upstairs?”

“No kidding?” Lamont took a sip of his drink and checked. Hollow rooms, darkness, the usual echoes of laughter and tears in an old house, two or three nonentities boo-hooing about old mistakes, but not Montandon. He had definitely moved on. Not a trace of him, in fact, which was a bit odd if he’d truly died there.

“Your French is very good,” said Voclain. “And you don’t look American to me.”

Lamont fell back on the lie he’d told everyone since coming overseas. “Believe me, I’m American. My mother’s Cuban, though.”

“You don’t have an American accent. You know what you sound like? You sound like you come from around here.” Voclain sighed. “You want to know about his last book, Les Sorcieres, don’t you? That’s what you’re here about. Not my book at all.”

There was a note of resignation in his voice that piqued Lamont’s interest. “Have other people come here to ask you about that book?”

“If they have, I do not remember them. But that is why you are here, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You want to know where it was, the village. Fourche.”

“Was?”

Voclain made a quick motion with one hand, pressing his fingers together and then spreading them. “Boum,” he half-whispered.

Here it was, at last. The wall the beginning of the ruins. Lamont was struck by how relieved he was. Really, that conversation with Voclain had him spooked.

If he walked long enough, he’d find the entrance, and once he found that, he could get inside to that little room, make some light, get rid of this chill that had settled into his stomach, the sense of something being wrong, and getting more and more wrong.

Sleep, that’s what he needed, even if it was just sitting on a stone floor and propped up against a wall.

Lamont was not frightened by the dark, the night, or the supernatural. It held little mystery for him. Ghosts were bores, lycanthropy a barely manageable illness, magic a talent that resulted less in fantastic rewards than in increased convenience and irritating Duday family politics.

But that talk with Voclain bothered him. Not the talk they’d had in that dark, stuffy little room in a house haunted by old regrets.

No, it was what Lamont had seen and heard in broad daylight that worried him.