Mistral

It all started with Fr. Marcusa's strays, those little midnight shadows that dipped through the dark and crooked alleys of St. Albansberg on feline paws. When they began to show up on the stairs of his rectory, sometimes still alive but near drained of blood, always dying within the hour, it caused the priest grave distress. He gave the next Sunday's homily like a warning to the boys and girls who he thought responsible, the older children of the medieval market town. The balding old man loved the cats, all of which he saw as his own, probably more than he loved most people. He may have been the only one to recognize that their deaths weren't from some natural cause, though, and the children drew nothing from his stern sermonizing.
Still, few could fail to realize that something was wrong in the old market town. It wasn't just the little bodies that began showing up all over the weaving streets. Something seemed to come down with the cold mistral winds. Something other than the storm clouds, colder than the misty rain that fell on those nights when the Northern blast howled between the village's townhouses and under their prominent jetties. No one seemed willing to walk outside at night, least of all through the town square with its bubbling fountain and chilled cobblestones. There were plenty of rational reasons, of course, but the feeling of being watched didn't seem to come from any human source. It was like all the shadows were filled with the hungry eyes of wolves, getting ready to pounce.
When the shadows began to take larger prey, recognition still did not seem to dawn on any of the townspeople. Just a greater sense of wariness, that some dark miasma came with the winter chill.
A head of cattle disappeared one night during a windstorm, one that the meteorological bureau in Paris called Cyclone Xerxes. Over the course of a few hours, the entire herd was gone from the rolling fields that stretched out into the countryside around the community. While in centuries past, the herdsmen might have had some inclination to blame the true culprit, those who lived there now saw a hole in the barbed wire made by a fallen oak as the perpetrator. The heifers must have gotten out into the cold dark.
Farmer Jacques searched high and low through the hill country for his wayward livestock. Finding only one, a rotting corpse in a stand of old-growth timber down by the river, he came to the conclusion that the cold had taken them. He could hardly have been blamed. It seemed like a fog had come over the villagers in their sleep, something that kept them from seeing the forest for the trees.
There were stories in newspapers across the South of France, about the mysterious animal disappearances in what had once been the territory of the Cathars, that old religious cult whose paragons had starved themselves to death in denial of the desires of the flesh. For the people of St. Albansberg, it was almost slander. Their town was a safe one, a place where families had never felt any need to call their children in until after the first stars came out in the night sky. Never mind that none of them had felt secure for a month now, or that none of the town's youth would want to stay outside near dark. Their town wasn't a place where terrible things happened, anymore than it had ever been.
There was an old castle set into a hillside above the town. At night, fires blazed behind its ancient walls, but no one paid them any mind. They were just hikers out of season, tourists who came to the Occitan bight every year.
When four children passed away one snowy evening, just after nightfall, it was a tragedy. Nothing more than that.
The circumstances were suspicious, to be sure. All had their windows thrown open from the outside, and just a few hours before they had been happy and healthy. There had been no clatter, no cries of alarm. Their bodies were drained of blood, just like the cats. One, the girl who lived with her family on the third floor of the Hotel Loire, had survived until dawn, just long enough for her family to find her in the morning, looking like she was still asleep in her bed. She had been difficult to rouse, and when she woke, her terrified eyes had danced across the room. They'd eventually gone to a shadowy corner. where she seemed to see something that caused her to scream wordlessly until she was out of breath. After that, she had fallen back into an unconsciousness from which she never woke.
The girl had passed a little over a day later, in the city hospital an hours drive away. There had been some discussion of performing an autopsy, since she was in such a strange condition. In the end, though, her family's protests had won out, and she was buried with the others in a small plot behind the church. Fr. Marcusa's words had done little to comfort her grieving family, and although most of the people came to the funerary mass held for her soul, few had really believed that she might be pulled from the flames of Purgatory by their intercession. The girl was gone, along with the other three. None would ever return.
Once the winter was over and the sun came back from the South, along with sea breezes to warm the small town, there was some hope that a sense of normalcy would return. Still, few beachgoers came through compared to the tide that the warm months usually brought. No cameras snapped photos inside of the small chapel where the children had been laid to rest. The people blamed the papers, the strange stories about a murderer who had descended on their idyllic little slice of Acadia. It wasn't their fault if some foreigners believed that their beloved home was the den of a killer.
Fall came again. The leaves changed and then blew from the trees. At last the cold and the dark reigned again in that place forgotten by the world. There were fewer people there when the frosts took the farmland again into their icey grip. Businesses and homes were shuttered. No one spoke of why they were leaving. There were no words to explain the fear that came over those people, that pushed them to warmer places where the force of the mistral didn't come with nameless terrors, and where the night didn't seem so haunted with ageless things too dark for human eyes to see.
It was only after some ghoul came and exhumed the last winter's tiny graves that Fr. Marcusa began to pack his bags to leave. He gave those few who still came out to Mass a parting message on his last day there. The Bishop in Avignon had given him permission to leave, to go to a larger parish under the banner of Mont Blanc. There was something terrible in the town, he said, and anyone hoping to avoid the danger would have to follow his lead. It didn't matter where they went, but to stay was death.
He seemed to leave before the next morning, without any of his luggage and with none of his affairs in order.
That was the last cold day of December, before the snowstorm that came in from the frigid North Atlantic. Its howling gusts chilled even the heartiest man to the bone, and the darkness that came when the power failed seemed alive with menace.
For years after that January blizzard, those few who remained in St. Albansberg would insist that nothing was wrong in the place that they called home. Even as their numbers thinned, as they grew old and pale and turned into frail shadows of themselves. The church was boarded up, and one by one the shops that lined the square followed. No one remained a decade later, and the roads filled with potholes that no one thought to repair. Eventually, they were blocked to through traffic. St. Albansberg became a ghost town, a favorite for urban explorers who posted images of the empty shells that lined its roads, and of the abandoned castle where fires still flickered on cold, clear nights under the river of the Milky Way.
Years later there was a story, hosted in an article on a travel website, about three young Americans who passed through, half a decade after the roads were closed off. One man and two women, all from UC-Irvine, had stayed there overnight, sleeping in the long abandoned upstairs of the Hotel Loire. They'd decided to make camp in the room where the girl had slept away her last night on Earth. One of the women took the bed, which still sat under the open window that looked out on the rolling river. The others unfurled sleeping bags and rested on the floor, sharing photos on Instagram of themselves roasting marshmallows over a fire pit on the cold wooden planks. During the night, they'd only gotten a few fitful hours of sleep. Some presence seemed to be watching over them, making rest a difficult prospect.
The next morning, in a hostel down by the Mediterranean coast, the woman who had slept on the bed came down with a fever. She lived for two weeks after that, dying from multiple organ failure in the intensive care ward at a hospital in Paris.
The others said that they had never let her know about the infamous picture they'd posted to Instagram. The other woman had taken a shot of herself laughing in the firelight. Behind her, the dark corner of the room was visible, just past the edge of the fire's glow.
Some thought that the image was a cruel joke. Others, that the poster couldn't be blamed. She hadn't known that her best friend would fall sick and die. Couldn't be expected to do more than take it down, even if others had downloaded it and shared the image all over the world. Of course she would never comment on the two figures, caught in the low glare of the fire. On the tall man with pale skin and milky white eyes, all sclera in the ruddy glow. On the little girl with her mouth lolling open, ringed with rust and full of teeth like long, jagged knives, caught for a moment by the warm light of the fire burning low.
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