The Returned Read online

  Copyright © 2014, 2015 by Seth Patrick

  Cover and internal design © 2015 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover image © Mohamad Itani/Plainpicture

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Logos © Haut et Court 2012. A book series based on a series created by Fabrice Gobert: The Returned, aka Les Revenants. Based on They Came Back, a film by Robin Campillo. Directed by Fabrice Gobert and Frédéric Pierrot, Clotilde Hesme, Céline Sallette, Samir Guesmi, Grégory Gadebois, Guillaume Gouix, Pierre Perrier, Jean François Sivadier, Alix Poisson, Yara Pilartz, Jenna Thiam, Swann Nambotin, Ana Giradot. A Haut et Court TV production, CANAL+ Original Programming, with the participation of JIMMY, Ciné+, in association with Backup Films and B Media Export, with the support of Rhône-Alpes Regional Fund, CNC, Media a European Union’s Program, Procirep-Angoa, Zodiak Rights. © Haut et Court TV.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

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  www.sourcebooks.com

  Originally published in 2014 in the United Kingdom by Pan Books, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Patrick, Seth.

  The returned : a novel / Seth Patrick.

  pages ; cm

  (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PR6116.A8455R48 2015

  823’.92—dc23

  2015002456

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

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  18

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  40

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  42

  43

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  45

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  48

  49

  50

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  53

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  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

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  92

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  About the Author

  Back Cover

  1

  The girl paused on her way across the top of the dam and looked out over the town far below.

  The sun was setting, she noted, dipping behind the mountains; lights blazed in the distant windows of the town, car headlights weaving through its streets. How was it so late? The last thing she could recall was sitting on a bus heading out on a school trip, bright morning sun outside as she watched the pines fly past her window. She’d been listening to music, trying to drown out the lecturing voice of her teacher.

  How many hours ago had that been? And how had she gotten here now? She tried to remember, tried to bring it back. All that came was a sense of panic. Panic, then darkness. And then nothing.

  Something had happened.

  She continued walking hurriedly over the dam, the temperature falling as night came. She should have felt cold, she knew. Her cardigan was thin—she’d been dressed for the heat of a midsummer’s day, not the bitter chill of night air. But somehow she didn’t feel cold, not even slightly. Instead, she felt scared. And she felt hungry.

  She picked up her pace, her breathing tight and fast. She thought of her parents. Her mother would be out of her mind with worry, her father angry. She thought of her sister. And she thought of Frédéric.

  They’d be waiting for her. They’d help her find out what had happened, help her fill in those missing hours. She felt such a longing then—so fierce in her chest that it stole her breath away.

  Home, she thought.

  It was time to go home.

  2

  Anton Chabou stood on the dam and watched the still water. The first time he’d seen the lake, eleven months before, low clouds had flowed slowly down the valley to cover the water’s surface. They had rolled onward, over the top of the dam, like the ghost of a waterfall, heading for the town below.

  Now, an hour after the sun had gone down, the air was clear. The lake’s surface was like black glass. Behind him, occasional cars drove by. The dam acted as a bridge for all but the heaviest vehicles, the fastest route out of town for those heading north and prepared to make the climb up the steep valley-side roads. He’d even seen a young woman crossing on foot earlier, shortly before he’d left the control room. It was a rare sight. Most people who wanted to savor the view came by car.

  His phone was in his hand. He didn’t want to make the call, but he knew it had to be done, even if he was the new guy. Eric, his partner for the shift, had been on the job for ten years, and Eric had shaken his head, muttering, wanting nothing to do with it.

  “Wait until the shift change,” Eric had said. “Act like we just noticed it, and let them make the call.” Then Eric had sat in the control room, storm faced, refusing to discuss it further.

  Anton had already made the preliminary checks required of him, before raising it with Eric. A remote visual examination of the abutments showed no sign of seepage, and the flow measurements seemed correct. Getting a better idea of the current water intake would be necessary, but even if every source of water into the reservoir had done the impossible and conspired to stop, they simply weren’t taking enough water out to result in the fall he’d seen since coming to work that morning.

  The lake was emptying, and he had no idea how.

  As the senior engineer on the shift, Eric’s advice to wait almost amounted to a command, but it was
advice Anton knew he would have to ignore. He had spent the next hour satisfying himself that nothing obvious was wrong. That meant taking the central maintenance shaft down to the upper and lower inspection galleries.

  Gallery, he’d always thought, was an odd word for what was really just a cramped, gray, circular tunnel running through the structure of the dam, sickly lighting strung along one side and barely enough room to stand. He had to keep his head down to avoid constantly scraping his hard hat on the cold concrete above.

  By the time he’d walked the upper gallery, his neck was aching and his mood was sour. But he’d bitten his lip and gone down, down, to the lower gallery. In theory, the lower was indistinguishable from the upper. The same restricted space, the same weak lighting. The same cold gray. But every time he went down there, it made him claustrophobic in a way the upper gallery never did. He was somehow vividly conscious of the weight of the water above him; reaching the end of the tunnel and turning back, he always had the same image flash in his mind of dark water rushing toward him, icy and vengeful.

  His impromptu inspection revealed no problems. The next stage would be to log the measurements on each of the ninety expansion strips throughout the galleries and compare them with the last recorded values, normally a weekly chore that took up most of the shift of whoever drew the short straw. He would go down again and make a start on it, once he’d had a break from the confinement and a little fresh air.

  Once he’d made the call.

  And so he was back at the top of the dam, phone in hand. He hunted for the number he’d been given almost a year before, when he’d first taken the job. The breeze picked up, suddenly bitter, but he preferred the dry sharpness to the damp chill of the tunnels below, a chill that got deep into your bones and was hard to get rid of.

  He dialed.

  “Yes?” said a man’s voice.

  “This is Anton Chabou, sir. The water level is dropping. We can’t account for it.”

  For a moment, the voice stayed silent. Then: “You’re sure?”

  Anton was about to give a typical engineer’s response: explain the possibilities that remained, explain the procedures they would follow to fully assess the integrity of the dam. But the voice knew all of that. All he wanted from Anton was a single word. Yes or no.

  “Yes,” Anton said.

  “I’ll be there within two hours.”

  “There’s a chance it could just be…” Anton started, but the man had already hung up.

  Anton put his phone in his pocket, readying himself to go back down to the galleries and begin taking measurements. Feeling cold, he stamped his feet and moved around, trying to rid himself of the chill in his bones. It made little difference.

  He stared out across the lake and thought about what lay underneath. He thought about what he’d been told officially when he took the job and about what he’d heard in the months since—rumors, inconsistent, conflicting. He thought about what he believed.

  Shivering, he started to descend.

  3

  Jérôme Séguret sat in his car outside the Lake Pub and wondered what the hell he’d done to deserve it all.

  Disappointed and confused, he’d just left Lucy Clarsen in the room above the pub.

  “Sorry,” she’d said. “It can’t work every time.”

  He’d given her the usual money, even though things hadn’t gone to plan. When he had asked if he could see her again the next week, she had shrugged and said something noncommittal, completely at ease with a situation that he found painfully awkward. He had avoided eye contact and wondered how he could kid himself that there was anything good about their sessions. On his way out to the car, he’d seen his daughter Léna by the bar with her friends. He was too slow. She’d spotted him, and who he’d been with. The look in her eyes was a blend of irritation and disgust. He’d slunk outside to his car, angry with himself.

  He flipped down the sun visor, slid back the cover of the mirror, and glared. It wasn’t that long ago, he thought, since everything had felt right, had felt normal. The family finances had been solid; he’d had a wife he adored and two daughters who made him proud, even as they were entering the hard teens. He’d had a smile back then.

  Now the haunted eyes staring at him in the mirror were those of a different man. He was forty-four, by rights. Four years ago, he’d felt younger than his age and had looked it. Now? Hell, he could be taken for a decade older, maybe more. His hairline was decimated, his skin mottled, and his eyes…

  “Christ,” he muttered and flipped the visor back up. He couldn’t meet anyone’s gaze anymore. Especially not his own. Shame and guilt, in equal parts. That was all his eyes held now. Hope, like his smile, was long gone. Extinguished on the day they’d lost Camille.

  His daughter had died in a bus accident that ended the lives of the driver, one teacher, and thirty-eight children from the town’s largest school, all in the same grade. There had been two children booked on the biology field trip who had happened to miss it. One, David Follin, had shattered his ankle two days before while trying to take on the town’s highest set of steps with his skateboard, his best friend Martin filming it on his phone. Martin had put the footage on YouTube the night before he himself had died in the crash.

  The other child to miss the trip had been Léna, Camille’s twin sister. She’d claimed illness that morning. Jérôme’s wife, Claire, had suspected Léna was faking it but had given her the benefit of the doubt. He still didn’t know the truth of it, and it wasn’t a topic he ever wanted to raise. It had been Claire who had attended the counseling sessions with Léna, Claire who had held the girl for the long nights that followed Camille’s death. Jérôme had seen the distance growing between him and his daughter, and between him and his wife, but consumed by his own grief, he’d felt powerless to do anything about it.

  He and David Follin’s father, Vincent, had been friends before the accident and found themselves becoming drinking partners in the aftermath.

  “David can’t cope with it,” Vincent had said. “Whenever he sees a parent, a friend, a sibling of one of those who died, he believes they’re thinking, ‘Why you? Why did you live?’ He wants to get away from it. The boy can’t even breathe without feeling guilty.” Within a year, David and his family had moved back to Vincent’s hometown of Cholet.

  Jérôme had missed the company on those nights when he couldn’t bear being sober. For over two years following the accident, that had been most nights.

  Now, he drank less, and in his own living room. It was cheaper, and he preferred the solitude: he lived in a shitty apartment in town, not in the house on the outskirts where Claire and Léna still lived. He needed to be careful with money, and not just because of the rent he was paying; he’d been seeing Lucy Clarsen more often than he could really afford.

  Everything had been right in his life four years before. Then a bus had veered off a mountain road and taken his life down with it.

  • • •

  It was a ten-minute drive to the Helping Hand, a shelter co-funded by the church and the town hall. Jérôme had managed to bury his frustration a little by the time he got there for the regular parents’ support meeting.

  The parents. Well, those who were left.

  He’d added it up one night. He’d actually gone to the trouble of enumerating the grief.

  Thirty-eight children, thirty-eight families: seventy-six parents, twenty-nine siblings. The bus driver had a wife and two sons in their early twenties. The teacher was married but childless.

  One hundred nine immediate relatives, and he’d stopped counting. So much for arithmetic.

  Like David Follin’s family, many had moved away. Too many memories. Of those parents who had stayed, most had other children still at the school and had decided against dragging a grieving child away from their friends, from all that was familiar and comforting to them.

  For al
most all of those parents with no other children, staying had been impossible. Jérôme had often wondered what would have happened to him and Claire if Léna had gone on the trip that morning. He found it hard to imagine feeling emptier than he already did, but he was certain that if both girls had died, Claire would have been another fatality of the accident.

  Léna. Jesus Christ, Léna. So cold toward her parents now. So closed off and untouchable. She and Camille hadn’t just been twins; they’d been identical twins. When she walked around town after the crash, people looked at her with a wariness greater than Jérôme had ever felt himself. Greater, surely, than David Follin had experienced.

  When people saw her, they also saw Camille. Their whole lives, the girls had played on the confusion, each pretending to be the other when it suited them, amused that people couldn’t tell them apart even when (they insisted) it was so obvious. Once Camille was dead, it was as if that confusion was still present, as if people couldn’t remember which of the two had been on the bus. Some found themselves meeting Léna and calling her Camille, silenced by the horror of their mistake and the distress on the face of the young girl. Léna had become a ghost, a walking, talking reminder of everything they’d lost.

  I’m not dead. That had been Léna’s cry to her parents whenever their frustration with her increasingly wild behavior had boiled over into a shouting match. I’m not dead. Maybe if it had been me who’d died, you’d be happy.

  And while Claire had attended the support groups for a time, she’d stopped when her relationship with Pierre, who ran the Helping Hand, had started to evolve into something closer.

  Jérôme had been oblivious at first. He’d taken her at her word that she’d simply grown tired of the group and knew Jérôme got more out of it than she did. It was only when she’d finally told Jérôme about her and Pierre that it really made sense.

  The ensuing argument had led to him packing his bags. There had been no question of who would go, of course. Léna needed her mother more than she needed him.

  • • •

  Jérôme paused outside the entrance to the Helping Hand. The shelter consisted of a main building and several outbuildings, sited high on the valley slope overlooking the town. It was a peaceful place. Out of the way, but with the town laid out in front of you, it never felt isolated. Perfect for mending broken souls, Jérôme supposed.