Le: Bete 1975

When I emerged into the dawn, the mistral had stopped. The lavender fields were silent. And I understood that le bête was not a monster that killed. It was a monster that waited — for the right summer, the right hunger, the right child to leave a door unlocked.

I was twelve that year. My name is Lucien, and I am the one who found the nest.

It was a Thursday. I had snuck out before dawn to prove to my friends I wasn’t afraid. I took my father’s old carbide lamp and a pocketknife and walked up the track bed, past the wild blackberries and the broken signal post. The air grew cold—unnaturally cold, the kind of cold that smells of wet stone and something metallic, like a dropped coin after a lightning strike. The tunnel mouth was a black half-circle, fanged with broken bricks. le bete 1975

The summer of 1975 was the hottest anyone in Sainte-Marguerite could remember. The sun didn’t just shine; it pressed down, flattening the lavender fields into silver-grey carpets and turning the dirt roads into bone-dry powder. Children slept on rooftop terraces. Old men forgot to close their shutters. And in the forests above the village, la bête woke up.

I did not touch the egg. I did not run. I walked backward very slowly, counting my steps to keep calm: 1975, 1975, 1975 . When I emerged into the dawn, the mistral had stopped

By August, the village had given it a name: Le Bête de 1975 — not a wolf, not a bear, not a lynx. Something older. The priest said it was a punishment for the discotheque they’d opened in the old abbey. The schoolteacher said it was a rogue military experiment from the base near Draguignan. The children, who were always the first to see things, said it lived in the abandoned railway tunnel where the mistral wind sounded like a voice whispering numbers: 1975, 1975, 1975 .

I lit the lamp. The flame burned green for three heartbeats, then steadied. It was a monster that waited — for

The last thing I saw before I ran home was my own shadow, stretching long behind me on the white dust of the road. For just a second, it had too many joints, too.