The Laws of the Skies

Grégoire Courtois, Rhonda Mullins, Rhonda Mullins

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781770565951
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

Winnie-the-Pooh meets The Blair Witch Project in this very grown-up tale of a camping trip gone horribly awry.

Twelve six-year-olds and their three adult chaperones head into the woods on a camping trip. None of them make it out alive. The Laws of the Skies tells the harrowing story of those days in the woods, of illness and accidents, and a murderous child.

Part fairy tale, part horror film, this macabre fable takes us through the minds of all the members of this doomed party, murderers and murdered alike.

"Excellent...crystalline." — New York Times, Summer Reads

I

The moms and dads had said goodbye to them through the school bus windows. Some of the children were crying as they waved goodbye, and others were chattering with each other as if they had never had parents. It was the first time any of them would be away from their home, their bed, and their blankie. Some of the parents were emotional; sending such young children away from their families, they thought, even well supervised, even just a handful of kilometres from home, was a big risk, maybe even traumatizing. But worried though they were, the parents weren’t going to go so far as to keep their children home from camp, weren’t going to let the others go while keeping their own precious offspring safe and sound, afraid they would miss out on memories and experiences that the group was going to have and would show off like shiny jewels.

So they all left, the twelve children from the Grade 1 class of the Claincy primary school in Yonne, accompanied by their teacher, Frédéric Brun, whom all the children called Fred; Sandra Rémy, Jade Rémy’s mother; and Nathalie Amselle, Hugo Amselle’s mother.

The bus pulled away along the village road, and the parents’ long shadows shrunk behind the condensation-covered windows.

And there you have it.

The children were on their way.

They would never return.

The lightly wooded plains to the south of Yonne start to blister and crack as you approach the Morvan mountain range. The carpet of green is dotted with taller and taller trees, and small rocks grow larger and larger until they split the earth and lift the ground. Very soon, as you continue south past Vézelay, the landscape becomes a curtain of tall trees and chaotic topography that strangle contour lines. In the undergrowth running alongside the bus’s route, you can detect the presence of more and more wild animals – deer, foxes, buzzards – but the unruly, excited, noisy children were not concerned by them, had not listened to Fred’s insightful explanations, and kept laughing, talking, singing, kicking each other under the seats.

‘Frédéric, I don’t know how you don’t have a headache every night when you get home,’ Sandra Rémy said.

‘They’re excited about the trip,’ the teacher said. ‘They’re not always this rowdy.’

He smiled, but his smile appeared frozen in worry rather than natural when he looked at Nathalie Amselle.

‘Are you okay, Nathalie?’ he asked.

‘I’m okay,’ Nathalie said. ‘My stomach is just a bit upset. Something I ate didn’t agree with me, I guess.’

Sandra Rémy saw the look exchanged between Nathalie and Frédéric, and in the space of an instant, the furtive thought crossed her mind that there might be something between the two of them, something beyond the cordial relationship expected between parents and teachers. Was she the foil for a class trip whose sole purpose was to indulge the desires of lovers having an extramarital affair? The mere shadow of this idea made her slump scowling in her seat, hoping her hunch would be quickly proven wrong.

‘I’m going to park over there, on the shoulder,’ the driver said. ‘The dirt road is just a hundred metres away, and if I head down it, we might get stuck in the mud.

‘Okay,’ Fred said, putting on his backpack.

Then, turning, he said, ‘Okay, kids, this is it! I want you to put all your trash in the trash bags, and don’t forget anything. Another bus will be picking us up, so take a good look around.’

The bus stopped, and the children’s clamour filled up the space, a terrible racket that went straight through the head of Sandra Rémy, who, wide-eyed, was horrified at the idea that the trip had just started and already she had the burning desire to scream and hit any one of the crazed little demons.

A few minutes later, the bus was pulling away in a nauseating cloud of thick smoke, and the little group, backpacks on, was headed to the dirt road that led into the forest.

‘Look carefully around you, children,’ Fred shouted, ‘and tell us if you recognize a plant or an animal that we studied in class, okay?’

The instructions made the somewhat ordered ranks of the fragile procession fall out, and the children started amusing themselves in uneven clumps on either side of the road. The walk was seriously slowed: the children were crouching and kneeling, some were even lying on the ground to observe moss, lichen, dead wood, beetles, and slugs, in a noisy assortment of exclamations, invectives, and vague questions for the teacher, although none of them listened to the answers.

‘What happens when you crush a snail?’ Enzo asked Lilou.

She stared at him, eyes wide with terror, before turning to look at his raised foot, which was threatening to come crashing down on a little snail’s bright yellow shell. Enzo was sporting his usual smile, and it was hard to tell whether it was the smile of a deranged child or a deliriously happy one. Regardless, anyone who met Enzo found him to be a creepy little boy, even if it was just an unpleasant sense of foreboding. The violence that came through in everything he did and everything he said made him a danger to be avoided. In his presence, people got in touch with their primitive survival instincts. Without realizing it, they tried to avoid him, and when they found themselves stuck with him, they feared the situation could degenerate at any moment. Little Lilou had that very feeling when Enzo slowly lowered his foot onto the snail, in silence, so that the sinister crack of the shell being crushed could be heard loud and clear. An irrepressible sob rose in her throat.

‘A crushed snail is just a slug!’ Enzo yelled, laughing like a boy unhinged.

And he took off running, zigzagging through the tree trunks on the carpet of rotting leaves. Lilou swallowed her saliva, came back to her senses as if waking from a dream, and looked around her. A few metres away, Sandra, Jade’s mom, was petrified. She had seen what had happened without daring to intervene. Lilou knit her brow, her eyes dark and lightly veiled with tears, and ran toward a group of friends. Enzo’s laugh echoed through the undergrowth.

Nathan, Louis, and Océane were the best friends in the world. They did everything together, gathered together every day at recess and would have liked to sit together in class, if Fred hadn’t separated them because of their endless chatter. On weekends, they went over to each other’s houses and sometimes even managed to talk their parents into letting them spend a few days of vacation together. None of them knew it was love, but clearly Nathan loved Océane, Océane loved Louis, and Louis loved his two friends with pure, unshakable devotion.

Today, as was their habit, they wandered away from the other students, carried off in a fantasy of their making, entering the woods by diving stealthily from thicket to thicket, from holly bush to bright bramble patch. Océane was hunting forest trolls. She was commanding the elements, making the treetops bow, rendering water potable, and conjuring flames with just her voice. Nathan was her faithful assistant, whose duties consisted of carrying her things and collecting ingredients for his mistress’s spells and potions. As for Louis, he was pretending to be a mysterious wild man, half human, half wolf, whom the enchantress had just met and who offered to guide her to the trolls’ secret lair. The three friends blazed a trail through the trees and seemed to be heading into the depths of the dense, fabulous forest, but, in fact, the children’s path was merely tracing a line parallel with the dirt road, their fear and diligent obedience ensuring that they never lost sight of it.

‘What was that sound?’ Nathan asked.

Louis tried to offer a fantastic explanation in keeping with his role as a wolf man, but he was somewhat worried and settled for shrugging his shoulders. The three children looked at each other in silence, and Océane winked before setting off at a brisk pace in the direction of the mysterious sound. Caught off guard, the two boys had no choice but to trot shamefully behind her. A few metres later, they discovered their friend lying on her belly near the trunk of an ash, her face contorted, wide-eyed, staring at a pale shape raising its flaccid roundness some fifty centimetres above the ground. There was no doubt that this was where the awful noise, and other more disgusting things, was coming from, producing a thundering roar, a thick gurgling punctuated by muffled explosions, the echo of which rebounded off the bark of the trees.

You would have to have no sense of sight, sound, or smell not to realize that Nathalie Amselle was truly sick, and the stunned children faced with this excremental scene realized it in the most shocking of ways, cheek to cheek with the rosy posterior of a woman who seemed to contain more poop than the septic tank they sometimes spotted when peering down the hole of the old-fashioned squat toilets in the aging recreation centre buildings. Unaware that three little sets of eyes were staring at her backside, Nathalie was crouched and moaning, contorting herself to expel the ochre pulp from her body, finally collapsing onto her hands and knees to vomit whatever lingered in her stomach. Her soiled bum exposed, bile dripping down her chin, her eyes met those of the children and, although a wave of shame initially washed over her, the compassionate, concerned, understanding looks of the three friends prevented her from feeling too pathetic.

‘Are you sick, ma’am? Do you want me to get Fred?’ Océane offered.

‘Oh, no. Please don’t! No, thank you, children,’ Nathalie replied, wiping her bum with a handful of dead leaves. ‘I’ll be fine. Go back and join the others and don’t stray too far from the path.’

The enchantress, her assistant, and the wolf man nodded, and the three set off running in the direction of their classmates’ cries and laughter.

‘Fred! Enzo kicked me!’

Yasmine was holding her knee, aping intense pain, and limping along the dirt road, leaning on her friend Emma.

‘Enzo!’ Fred yelled. ‘Come here!’

‘I’m right here,’ said a flat voice behind him, making Fred jump in surprise and, without wanting to admit it, a bit in fear as well, realizing that this child seemed to have the power to appear behind his victims and maybe even disappear just as quickly if threatened or cornered. He had never known how to talk to Enzo or how to make him understand the basic rules of life in society. Every explanation and admonition slid off him like water off sheet metal: smooth, cold, insensitive, sharp. And yet, out of habit or because he had exhausted every other pedagogical approach in his arsenal, Fred continued to scold Enzo when he caught him doing something wrong. His words fell on deaf ears, but at least the other students would see that no one was above the rules. This was the absurd song and dance that had just started.

‘Why did you kick Yasmine?’ Fred asked.

‘Because she was in my way,’ Enzo replied.

‘And you couldn’t just talk to her about it?’

‘There’s no point talking to some people. You have to smack them. It’s the only thing they understand.’

Fred stared, wide-eyed. ‘That’s not the least bit true! Who told you that?’

‘My dad,’ Enzo replied coldly, ‘and he knows what he’s talking about.’

‘Well, I don’t agree with your father,’ Fred sputtered, ‘and I’ll tell him so when I see him. There is always room for discussion. There is no need to resort to violence.’

‘But you want to hit me right now. Why don’t you hit me?’

Fred was slack-jawed for a moment. ‘No I don’t. I have never wanted to use violence, not with adults and particularly not with children. There is always a way to –’

Enzo lifted his hand solemnly, shutting Fred up. ‘Then you’re weak. That’s what my dad says, and he’s right. Strong people hit; weak people get hit.’

The child’s scowl pierced Fred’s heart like a poison arrow. At just six years and a few months, this puny little being embodied the impotence the teacher sometimes felt.

‘You should hit me if you feel like it,’ Enzo said.

Watching this frosty duel, Yasmine had completely forgotten her pain.

‘That’s enough now,’ Fred said, grabbing the child firmly by the arm.

‘Ouch,’ Enzo whined, and that was all it took for Fred to get angry with himself.

‘Stop your nonsense right now and stay with me until we get to camp. You are not allowed to play in the woods with the others. That’s your punishment. That’s it – march!’

Enzo’s dark eyes flared. He looked from Fred to Yasmine, and then to Emma. The two little girls felt a buzzing in their chests. They weren’t sure whether they wanted to burst into tears or pee their pants. In solidarity, they just held hands.

When the little group arrived at the campsite, Enzo was still being punished, Louis was still a wolf man, and Nathalie was still so pale she seemed to glow with a ghostly phosphorescence in the shadows as the evening fell. Her son Hugo had noticed and had slowly moved away from his classmates and toward her to soothe her with a symbolic hand on her back and comforting words.

‘Go have fun, sweetheart,’ Nathalie said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

But Hugo stayed, gripped by an uncertain feeling he didn’t understand that was threatening to spread through his entire body, the feeling of suddenly finding himself alone, without his mother, in a hostile forest that was growing darker, surrounded by people incidental to his life who could never understand or take the place of his mother, who, despite her frequent absences, always listened to him, always heard what he had to say, and was the only one who could anticipate his needs and allay his fears. Hugo didn’t say any of this, not even to himself, but because of the irrational fear that an animal was crouched not far off in the bushes, somewhere, anywhere, lying in wait for him, the feeling was gnawing at him. That his mother could die, or at least disappear, leaving him forever lost and alone in the unsettling forest of his peers, was a possibility he had never really considered, let alone felt in his bones, until this faint twilight.

The campsite was made up of a half-dozen large tents solidly anchored to the ground and the surrounding trees, a plywood shed with the food stores for their stay, kitchen utensils, a first-aid kit, and an assortment of tools to deal with the problems that could arise in the great outdoors. A long, rough wooden table, lined with two benches hewn from a tree trunk, and a circular firepit with stones blackened from the many campfires the site had seen made up the spot that was to be home to the twelve children and their three chaperones for three days and three nights. The site remained set up all summer, and dozens of groups of children went there to discover the joys of the outdoors.

After dropping their backpacks, the children flitted around the campsite like a flock of starlings, while Sandra and Fred approached Nathalie, whose legs were now barely holding her up. She was trembling and sweating, feeling the effects of wind and thermal air movements unrelated to the coolness of the late day, of which the humidity of the soil and the moss was taking advantage in the growing dusk to rise up from the ground, filling the space with acrid and strangely metallic odours. The teacher placed his hand on the young woman’s feverish brow and said that there was no point in her staying.

‘I’m going to call my husband,’ Sandra said. ‘He can come pick you up and drive you home. You can’t spend the night outdoors, the state you’re in.’

Nathalie nodded her head at each remark, unable to signal her agreement in any other way.

‘I’ll stay with the children,’ Fred said, ‘and you go with Nathalie to the road. Normally, I shouldn’t be alone with so many children, but this is an emergency.’

He heard a cry. Then a burst of laughter.

‘And you’ll be back soon,’ Fred added.

‘Can I go play with the others now?’

The three adults turned and saw Enzo’s puny profile, standing beside them as if he had not left their side since his punishment had started.

‘No, Enzo, no,’ Fred said, distracted. ‘Now’s not the time.’

Enzo’s face grew even darker, twitching with the rage that swept over it, his teeth clenched so hard they could have shattered.

What’s with him? the child thought. What is going on in that moron’s head?

What was going on in Fred’s head was all the worst scenarios imaginable, which kept crashing into one another, the result of the decision he had just made. But was there another option? Calling an ambulance to come to the campsite to avoid finding himself alone, even for a few minutes, in charge of twelve children, which was formally prohibited? They could hardly bother doctors, maybe forcing them to use a vehicle specially designed for the woods, just for a stomach bug. And at school, with his double class, he was often alone with twenty children. No one ever said anything about that, certainly not the Department of Education, which kept eliminating teaching positions and filling up classes like chicken battery cages. It was only for a few minutes. The children would eat and, when Sandra returned, they wouldn’t even know she had been gone. Nothing would happen, Fred thought. Nothing ever happened, so this time would be like all the others. Nothing would happen this time either.

‘She really isn’t feeling well,’ Sandra said to her husband on the phone. ‘Yes, right away.’

The cry of a bird in the treetops nearby, followed by a furious flapping of wings, triggered a chorus of alarmed squeals, along with mocking laughter from the children.

Sandra waited a few seconds for calm to be restored to explain to her husband how to find the spot where the bus had dropped them off.

‘No, don’t delay. Come right away. We’ll be waiting for you on the shoulder.’

Then she hung up and said to Fred and Nathalie, ‘Let’s go before it gets dark.’

Olivier put his glass of whisky down on the coffee table and heaved an alcohol-soaked sigh.

‘Christ, I don’t believe this,’ he grumbled, his eyes closed, while in his skull his brain seemed to be spinning as if in reverse on a rickety roller coaster. Three, four? How many drin...