The dining room of the Old Oak Inn was filled with a heavenly aroma. A rich, spicy scent, with notes of rosemary and red wine, drifted through the warm air of the room. At the center of the large, solid oak table sat a magnificent white cast-iron Dutch oven, from which an enticing steam escaped.
The Doctor lifted the lid with the pride of a Michelin-starred chef.
"Please, help yourselves," he announced in a warm voice. "It's an old family recipe. The meat has been marinating for forty-eight hours. It literally melts in your mouth."
Thomas already had his large spoon in hand. His eyes gleamed behind his crooked glasses. He looked like a castaway discovering an all-you-can-eat buffet. He plunged the ladle into the thick sauce and served himself a steaming mountain of food. Beside him, Sarah sniffed the dish with a polite smile, a piece of farmhouse bread already poised to be dipped into the dark gravy.
And then, there was me.
Sitting at the end of the table, I stared at my empty plate with the enthusiasm of a condemned man facing a firing squad. My stomach was a nautical knot impossible to undo. Between Gustave, the psychopathic butcher who was surely sharpening his blades in the cellar, and the creepy guy on the first floor who was noting our every move in his little notebook... the mere thought of swallowing a piece of meat in sauce gave me violent nausea.
My "antenna" had calmed down a bit in the presence of the benevolent Doctor, sure, but the overall stress had completely killed my appetite.
"Nothing for you, Eliot?" Montfort wondered, a perfectly groomed grey eyebrow rising above his half-moon glasses.
"Oh, er... no thanks, Doctor. It's really very kind of you, but my stomach is completely tied in knots," I half-lied, massaging my belly. "The car ride, probably. And I'm a bit fragile when it comes to digestion when I'm stressed."
I leaned down to rummage through my gym bag at my feet.
"But don't take it personally! I planned ahead."
I proudly placed my find on the beautiful lace tablecloth: a cardboard brick of "Eco-Plus" vegetable soup. The kind of stuff that costs sixty-five cents and has an ingredient list that looks more like a periodic table than a vegetable garden.
The Doctor's gaze fell upon my "poor man's soup." For a fraction of a second, I could swear I saw a muscle twitch at the corner of his jaw. An absolute insult to his gastronomy.
"I'm just going to heat this up in the microwave in the communal kitchen," I said, pushing back my chair to stand up.
It was at that precise moment that physics and my right shoelace decided to team up to create a horrific miracle.
As I stood up, my left foot stepped firmly on the untied lace of my right sneaker. My momentum was stopped dead. My shin struck the heavy leg of my chair violently, throwing me totally off balance. I tilted forward with the grace of a dead tree.
In a pathetic survival reflex, I tried to catch myself on the only thing within reach: the edge of the large oak table. Except that in my nosedive, my palms slipped. My shoulder slammed into the solid wood with all my weight. The shock made the entire table jump violently.
The heavy cast-iron pot, filled to the brim, teetered dangerously.
Thomas let out a muffled "Nooooo," his hand reaching out in slow motion.
The pot tipped. Three liters of brown sauce, candied vegetables, and tender chunks of flesh poured out in a loud, viscous SPLASH onto the ancient tiled floor. The heavy lid rolled with an infernal clatter right to Montfort's feet.
The silence that followed was heavier than lead.
I pulled myself up painfully from under the table, my knee on fire, a splash of brownish sauce on my cheek. My eyes first met Thomas's. He was staring at the carnage on the floor, arms dangling, in absolute mourning for his dinner.
Then, I looked at the Doctor.
Montfort was smiling. But it was a fixed, death-like smile that didn't reach his eyes at all. His knuckles were white from gripping the edge of the table. The vein in his temple throbbed at a disturbing rhythm.
"I... I am so, so sorry," I stammered, feeling a flush of heat rise to my face right up to my hairline. "I'll clean everything up! I'll pay you back for the ingredients! My lace... I slipped again."
"It's... nothing," the surgeon rasped in a voice so tense it threatened to break. "Accidents happen, Eliot. It's just... a shame. This meat was of a rare quality. Very difficult to come by."
But the worst part wasn't the Doctor's hidden murderous fury, nor my best friend's gastric distress. The worst part was Sarah.
I turned my head toward her. She had her hand pressed over her mouth. No laughing this time. Just palpable embarrassment. After our sweet, intimate moment by the fireplace where I'd already nearly killed myself facing a simple spider, here I was destroying our benevolent host's dinner like a five-year-old incapable of tying his shoes.
I turned scarlet. I wanted to die. Literally bury myself under the floorboards and never come out again.
The grand gastronomic dinner ultimately consisted of a few slices of dry bread and a piece of somewhat hard Comté cheese that Thomas had kept in reserve. No one spoke much. I swallowed my lukewarm, budget-brand soup, head tucked into my shoulders, literally gnawed by shame.
I didn't suspect for a single second that my miserable brick of dehydrated vegetables had just saved us from a one-way trip to lifelong psychological trauma—but I digress.
After the meal, we all went to sleep in a deafening silence. It must have been around three in the morning. Outside, the storm continued to batter our bedroom shutters with the fury of a vengeful god. Inside, Thomas was snoring with the power of a diesel engine.
And me? I was staring at the peeling ceiling, eyes wide open in the darkness. My stomach had just let out a gurgle so loud and sinister that it briefly drowned out the sound of the thunder. My sixty-five-cent "Eco-Plus" vegetable soup had been nothing but an illusion. It was literally water flavored with sadness. My body was screaming for calories.
After the absolute humiliation of the ruined dinner, I hadn't dared swallow anything else, preferring to flee to my room to die of shame in peace. But now, the hunger was becoming painful. The primal survival instinct (that of a broke, starving student) took over the anxiety of running into the bulging-eyed butcher or the prowler with the black notebook.
I had to find the kitchen. A piece of bread, an old dry biscuit, anything.
I slid out of my sheets with the discretion of an asthmatic ninja. I put on my sneakers—taking great care, this time, to tie a double knot so tight it cut off my circulation—and slipped into the hallway.
The inn was plunged into inky darkness. The yellowish bulb on the first floor had given up the ghost. I pulled out my phone and switched on the flashlight. The beam of light swept over the moldy wallpaper, creating dancing, nightmarish shadows.
I went down the stairs holding my breath, praying the floorboards wouldn't betray my position. Reaching the ground floor, I skirted the communal lounge (where the fireplace was now just a pile of smoldering ash) and slipped through the double doors of the large kitchen.
It was a rustic, immense kitchen, with stainless steel countertops and old copper utensils hanging from the ceiling. The place still stank of the spices and brown sauce I had spilled earlier. My stomach growled again, frustrated.
I swept the beam of my flashlight across the walls, looking for the pantry door. I spotted a heavy, isolated metal door at the back of the room, closed by a thick steel latch.
"That's the larder," I told myself victoriously. "Gustave the butcher must store his terrines and cheeses there, safe from the mice."
I approached. The handle was ice-cold. I lifted the heavy metal latch, trying not to make a sound. It gave way with a sharp click, and I pulled the door toward me.
A blast of polar air instantly hit my face.
This wasn't a simple pantry. I had opened the inn's industrial cold room. The place was vast, entirely tiled in white, and the low hum of the refrigeration motor echoed in the chamber. My breath formed a small cloud of mist in the -18°C air.
I took a step inside, shivering in my hoodie, and raised my phone's flashlight to scan the shelves for a jar of jam or a sausage.
The light first swept across the ribbed tiled floor. Then, it slowly moved toward the back of the room. It illuminated shoes. Decathlon hiking boots. Then faded jeans.
I frowned, my brain categorically refusing to process the image it was being sent. Why would Gustave dress his pigs as hikers? It's in very poor taste.
I raised the beam a bit higher.
The air left my lungs with the violence of a punch. My blood froze. My heart didn't just skip a beat: it stopped entirely.
It wasn't a pig. It was a man.
He was hanging by his feet from a massive butcher's hook attached to a rail on the ceiling. His skin was bluish, covered in a thin film of frost. His eyes were wide open, glassy, frozen in an expression of unspeakable terror. His throat had been slit with clinical precision.
And he wasn't alone.
My trembling hand slid the light to the left. Another body. A woman, this time, dressed in summer cycling gear. Then another. Three corpses in total, lined up like simple quarters of meat, carefully drained of their blood, waiting to be "aged."
The former tourists. The customers who had never left a review on TripAdvisor.
The room began to spin around me. The family recipe. The "very special" meat. The tender flesh. My accident with the pot... My God. My untied shoelace hadn't made us miss a gourmet dinner. It had just stopped us from eating the cyclist hanging at the back of the room.
The bulging-eyed butcher had nothing to do with it. The antisocial guy on the first floor had nothing to do with it.
It was the "good" Doctor Montfort. The clinically clean retired surgeon, with his perfect elocution and benevolent smiles.
Absolute terror washed over me, paralyzing me on the spot. My legs refused to move. I wanted to scream, but my throat was sealed by panic. I was in a monster's fridge. I was next on the shopping list.
And that was exactly when the heavy metal door creaked behind my back.
The yellowish light from the hallway cut a silhouette into the doorway. I spun around, the trembling light of my phone pointed straight ahead. Doctor Armand Montfort stood there.
He had swapped his cashmere turtleneck for a massive, thick plastic apron, the kind used in industrial slaughterhouses. He was no longer smiling with that bourgeois benevolence that had so reassured me hours earlier. His lips were stretched into an almost animalistic snarl, revealing teeth that were too white. And in his right hand, firmly gripped, gleamed a rectangular butcher's cleaver, the blade of which was easily the size of a tablet screen.
"Feeling a bit peckish, Eliot?" he asked in a soft, almost singsong voice that echoed lugubriously off the frozen tiles.
I wanted to answer, but my voice had vanished. All that came out of my mouth was a pitiful little hiccup, accompanied by a cloud of mist.
The retired surgeon took a step into the cold room, slowly closing the door behind him without locking it. The biting cold seemed to have no effect on him.
"I must admit your little stunt tonight put me in a bit of a bind," he continued, stroking the flat of his cleaver with his thumb, his eyes fixed on my neck. "That cyclist..." — he pointed to the hanging corpse behind me with a small movement of his head — "...had reached perfect maturation. A flesh of exquisite tenderness. It's a very delicate process, you know. Stress ruins the flavor of the meat. Death must be swift. Surgical."
He took another step toward me. My back hit the frozen tiles of the back wall. I was trapped between a frozen human carcass and a geriatric Hannibal Lecter on steroids.
"You deprived me of my dinner, young man," Montfort sighed with a gaze that suddenly filled with pure murderous madness. "It is therefore only logical that your flesh—young, nervous, but full of potential—should restock my larder."
The Doctor's elegance evaporated. Without a single cry, with a terrifying vivacity for a sixty-year-old man, the cannibal charged. He raised his giant cleaver above his head, ready to split my skull in two from the crown to the chin.
Absolute panic surged through my veins. I was going to die here, in improvised pajamas, on an empty stomach, in the middle of the Aube region. I closed my eyes, let out a yelp of terror worthy of a frightened puppy, and braced myself to feel the steel slice through my bones.
And then... the miracle happened.
It wasn't a total "blackout" like in Prague or the nightclub. My brain remained conscious, but it was as if my body had just switched autopilots. The "muscle memory" within me took over with thunderous authority.
Without me having time to formulate a single thought, my hips pivoted. A movement of absolute fluidity and energy economy, worthy of a martial arts master.
Fwouisch.
The heavy cleaver sliced through the icy air exactly one millimeter from my nose. The draft from the blade sent my rebellious lock of hair flying. The blade struck empty air, the violence of the blow carrying the Doctor's arm downward.
Surprised to have missed his target, the surgeon grunted, spun on his heels, and instantly followed up with a ferocious backhand—a horizontal circular cleaver strike intended to decapitate me cleanly.
But my body was still one step ahead.
My knees buckled all at once. I crouched with the flexibility of a spring, back perfectly straight. The deadly blade whistled just above my head, grazing the pompon of my hoodie, and struck the aluminum rail behind me in a crash of sparks.
I opened my eyes. I was crouching on the tiles. I was breathing. I still had my head on my shoulders. I looked at my own hands, then at Doctor Montfort, who was panting slightly, off-balance from his missed strike, staring at me with wide eyes of incomprehension.
I had just dodged a lethal combo in a frozen telephone booth.
Survival instinct handed the controls back to my anxious student brain, which hurried to rationalize the impossible so as not to sink into madness.
"Well, at the same time..." I thought, blinking, my heart rate at two hundred beats per minute. "The old guy's in his sixties! His joints must creak louder than the inn's floorboards. Honestly, even my grandma is faster than that. Anyone with good reflexes would have dodged it. It's just basic survival instinct."
I reassured myself as best I could, superbly ignoring the perfection of my maneuver. But now was not the time for self-congratulation. The cannibal surgeon had just regained his balance, and the fury distorting his features clearly indicated he wasn't going to miss his third attempt.
Doctor Montfort no longer looked anything like the charming retiree who loved great literature. His face was distorted by pure rage, his features twisted into a wild beast's snarl. He had just been humiliated by a scrawny kid in a hoodie, and his predator's ego couldn't stand it.
He let out a hoarse roar. The vein in his temple throbbed so hard it threatened to burst under his skin.
I was still huddled down, desperately trying to merge with the frozen tiles behind me. I had no escape.
"I'm going to mince you, my little Eliot!" he spat, resetting his stance.
The surgeon raised his massive cleaver with both hands, brandishing it high above his head to deliver the killing blow. He took a deep breath, gathered all the strength of his sixty years of existence, and lunged forward with unheard-of brutality.
But he took one step too many.
His left foot, elegantly shod in an Italian leather loafer—a monumental tactical error when fighting in a clandestine slaughterhouse—landed violently on the floor. More precisely: right in the middle of a large, dark, and hideously viscous puddle stagnating on the tiles.
Please, let it be pig fat. Or truffle oil. Anything but the cyclist's blood, prayed my overheating brain, unable to stop fixating on sordid details even a second away from death.
Physics is a cruel mistress, and she cares nothing for gastronomic ambitions.
The grip vanished instantly. The luxury loafer skidded with a sickening suction noise. Totally carried away by the titanic force he had put into his attack, Montfort's center of gravity took a hike.
Both his feet left the ground at the same time.
For a fraction of a second, the great Doctor levitated almost horizontally, cleaver still in the air, looking as sincerely surprised as I was. Then, momentum did its work. He shot across the cold room like a human torpedo in a white apron.
He flew straight ahead and slammed head-first, with incredible violence, against the back wall.
CLONG. The sound of his skull hitting the hard tile (and probably the edge of a stainless steel shelf) echoed through the room. The cleaver slipped from his hands and bounced noisily on the tiles. Montfort collapsed onto the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut. A small, muffled groan escaped his lips, and he lay there, sprawled out, half-conscious beneath the feet of the corpse.
I didn't wait around. The time for rationalization was over.
I scrambled to my feet, nearly slipping myself, and bolted out of the cold room with the energy of despair. I burst through the doorway and spun around. I grabbed the heavy metal handle of the reinforced door and pulled with all my might.
The hinges creaked, and the heavy insulating wall slammed into its frame with a dull BOOM that made the copper pots hanging in the kitchen rattle.
With a frantic gesture, I grabbed the heavy external steel latch and slammed it down.
CLICK. Locked.
I leaned against the metal door, my legs like jelly, my heart drumming hard enough to crack my ribs. My lungs burned as I sucked in great gulps of air, desperately trying to bring down my adrenaline levels.
I pressed my ear against the cold metal. Nothing. Not a sound from the other side. The cold room's soundproofing was perfect.
The great predator of the Old Oak Inn had just locked himself in his own storage box. The digital dial, embedded just above the handle, displayed a relentless blood-red glow in the gloom of the kitchen: -18°C.
I let out a small, hysterical, nervous laugh, wiping the cold sweat from my forehead.
"Enjoy the aging process, old man," I whispered in the deserted kitchen.
My relaxing weekend in the country was definitely going exactly as planned.
The next morning, the storm had given way to a bright blue sky and birdsong. A perfectly bucolic morning. Except for Thomas, who was pacing the communal lounge, shaking his phone at the ceiling as if trying to catch alien signals.
"I have a bar! I have one bar of signal!" he cried, panicked. "I'm calling the cops. Doctor Montfort has disappeared! He must have gone out to gather wood or mushrooms last night and got lost in the forest during the storm. At his age, that's super dangerous!"
Sitting on the sofa, with a mug filled with bad coffee trembling in my hands, I carefully avoided his gaze. I stared at the hideous pattern of the Persian rug (the very one where I'd fought the spider) with the intensity of a Zen monk.
If he only knew his mushroom-picking grandpa is currently doing a frozen fish finger cosplay with a cleaver in his hand... I thought, swallowing my spit the wrong way.
Half an hour later, two local police cars swerved onto the gravel. The officers, alerted for a simple "concerning disappearance of an elderly person," began a routine search of the Inn.
It didn't take long.
A young officer decided to take a look in the large kitchen. He noticed the cold room light indicated -18°C, unlocked the external latch, and opened the heavy reinforced door.
He threw up his breakfast right there on the tiles.
Inside, amidst the hanging bodies of the former tourists (which made Thomas faint), Doctor Montfort sat enthroned at the back of the room. He was slumped against the wall, covered in frost from head to toe, his face frozen in a grimace of absolute hatred, his giant cleaver still firmly fused to his hand, frozen by death and ice.
While the forensic team (completely overwhelmed by events) turned the inn into a crime scene, the officers questioned the other residents in the lounge.
That was when I realized the full extent of my own stupidity. I was eavesdropping, and every revelation was a slap in the face.
Old Gustave, the scary butcher with the bulging eyes? A passionate craftsman, just a bit on the autistic spectrum, unable to look people in the eye. The knife? He really was preparing a wild boar terrine for the winter. And the comment about Thomas's calves? A simple country butcher's joke that had fallen totally flat.
But the worst part was the interrogation of the "creepy" guy from the first floor.
The man in his forties was shaking like a leaf before the officer. His name was Yu. He was an antisocial novelist, terrified of the slightest human interaction. The cops searched his famous "black notebook of death." It contained no list of future victims... just dozens of poems in alexandrine verse about great tits and messy notes for a fantasy novel he'd never manage to finish.
"And why were you prowling in front of Room 8, Monsieur?" barked the officer.
"F-for this..." stammered Yu, pulling a red scarf from his pocket. "The... the young lady had d-dropped it on the stairs. I wanted to return it. But I was too t-timid to knock... I was afraid of disturbing her..."
I buried my face in my hands, slumped in a corner of the hall. My famous "Spidey-Sense," the infallible antenna, was the worst radar in human history. I had spent my day terrorizing a poet and an autistic butcher, all while drinking tea with the region's greatest cannibal.
Meanwhile, three hundred kilometers away, in the dusty offices of the Paris Judicial Police.
It was Sunday morning. Inspector Vasseur, on duty, stirred a lukewarm coffee in a plastic cup while watching the rain fall through the window. He was savoring the calm. Since the nightclub case and the pop star's pyrotechnic explosion, he felt like he'd aged ten years.
Suddenly, the office's old fax machine let out a long, high-pitched beep.
Bzzzzrt.
A sheet of paper slowly emerged from the machine. It was the automated report of fatal incidents in the region, sent to cross-reference national databases.
Vasseur sighed, set down his coffee, and grabbed the sheet with a weary gesture. He scanned the lines.
Location: Old Oak Inn.
Nature: Discovery of a cannibal serial killer (Dr. A. Montfort).
Status: Found frozen in his cold room following a fall.
Vasseur raised his eyebrows. Another nutjob slipping on his own tiles, he thought, vaguely amused. Karma, sometimes...
He lowered his eyes to the last line of the report.
Primary witness and potential survivor of the assault: Eliot G. (Student).
The coffee cup slipped from Vasseur's hands. It hit the linoleum with a miserable splash, splattering the bottom of his trousers, but the Inspector didn't even blink.
His face turned from a normal color to a localized ashen grey. The air left his lungs. His eyes widened, and—a rare occurrence for a cop of his caliber—two large tears of pure, childlike terror welled up at the corners of his eyelids.
He didn't scream. He didn't get angry.
In a state of absolute, almost transcendental calm, Vasseur rose from his chair. His movements were robotic, surgical. He took the official fax, walked to the paper shredder in the corner of the office, and inserted the sheet. The machine swallowed the report with a mechanical growl, reducing it to confetti.
His deputy, a young lieutenant fresh out of the academy, entered the office at that moment with files under his arm.
"Everything okay, boss? You're pale as a ghost."
Vasseur didn't look at him. He returned to his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a blank form, and grabbed his pen. He wrote with a surprisingly steady hand.
"Boss?" the young lieutenant insisted.
Vasseur set down his pen and handed the form to his subordinate. It was a request for two months of sick leave. The reason stated in capital letters was: SEVERE PSYCHIATRIC BURNOUT.
"Listen to me carefully, kid," Vasseur whispered in a flat voice, gaze fixed on the horizon beyond the window. "You're taking over. I'm leaving."
"You... you're leaving where? On vacation?"
"No. I'm going to raise goats," the old inspector replied solemnly, putting on his crumpled raincoat. "In the Ardèche. Far from civilization. Far from the phone network. (Yes, civilization hasn't reached that stage there yet)."
"And above all... far from this city. Out there, the Demon won't be able to find me."
Vasseur left the office without a backward glance, leaving his deputy alone with a puddle of coffee and the mystery of a boss suddenly struck by grace.
Cause of Death: Severe hypothermia and instant freezing (following minor head trauma against a wall and a monumental slip on a fatty substance of dubious origin).
Verdict: Obvious self-defense against a culinary predator overconfident in the grip of his luxury loafers.
Red Flag for a Cannibal: Never run with a cleaver in a cold room when the floor isn't up to hygiene standards, especially if a clumsy (but strangely flexible) student is standing near the door.
PS: The Inn is now permanently closed on Booking.
End of Chapter 11.