The Sanatorium of the Sisters of Mercy occupied a windswept promontory in the northern province of Haute-Verdenne, where the land rose toward the snow-dusted peaks of the Col des Ombres and the air smelled permanently of pine resin and cold stone. It had been built in 1897 as a tuberculosis clinic, a sprawling granite structure with narrow windows and long corridors that echoed with the footsteps of nuns whose habits rustled like the wings of crows. The tuberculosis had long since been cured, and the nuns had long since been replaced by orderlies in pale green scrubs, but the sanatorium retained its original purpose: it was a place where inconvenient people were sent to be forgotten.
Aldric Neumann was among its longest-tenured residents. He had arrived six years earlier, transferred from a holding cell in the basement of the Ministry of the Interior under a medical order that classified him as suffering from "acute paranoid delusions with potential for self-harm." The diagnosis had been signed by a psychiatrist whom Neumann had once supervised at the Academy of Sciences, a man named Fournier who had made his career by discrediting his former mentor's work on collective psychopathology. Neumann had not fought the diagnosis. He had accepted it with the same weary equanimity with which he had accepted every other reversal in a life that had been, by any measure, a study in institutional rejection.
Korda had arranged the visit through Voss's network of contacts, a chain of favors and obligations that stretched from the capital's press corps to a sympathetic nurse in the sanatorium's night shift. The nurse had agreed to list him as Neumann's legal representative, a fiction that would hold for exactly as long as no one examined it too closely. He had taken a train north, then a bus, then a taxi driven by a man who spoke only the mountain dialect and asked no questions. By the time he reached the sanatorium gates, the afternoon sun was already beginning its slow descent behind the peaks, and the wind had acquired a bitter edge that cut through his jacket like a blade.
The reception area was a high-ceilinged room with a mosaic floor depicting the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary's upraised hands worn smooth by a century of footsteps. A woman in a pale green uniform sat behind a desk reading a romance novel. She looked up when Korda entered and regarded him with the expression of someone who had seen too many visitors come and go to find any of them particularly interesting.
"Dr. Neumann," Korda said. "I'm his legal representative. I called ahead."
The woman consulted a ledger, made a notation, and gestured toward a corridor that led away from the main building. "He's in the garden. He spends most afternoons there, when the weather permits. Follow the path to the east wall. You'll find him near the sundial."
The garden was a walled enclosure at the rear of the sanatorium, a square of struggling grass and ancient rosebushes that had been planted by the original nuns and had somehow survived a hundred winters of neglect. The east wall was covered in ivy, and at its base stood a stone sundial, its gnomon casting a long shadow across the dial's worn Roman numerals. On a wooden bench beside the sundial sat an old man in a gray wool coat, his hands folded in his lap, his face turned toward the mountains as if he were listening to something that Korda could not hear.
Aldric Neumann was seventy-six years old, but he looked older, the way that men who have spent too long in institutions always look older. His hair was white and thin, combed back from a high forehead. His eyes were pale blue and remarkably clear, the eyes of a man whose mind had not been dulled by age or medication or despair. He did not turn when Korda approached, but he spoke before Korda could announce himself.
"You're the prosecutor," he said. His voice was soft and faintly accented, the vowels shaped by a childhood spent in the Valdorian highlands. "The one who saw the masks. I've been expecting you for a long time."
"How did you know I was coming?"
Neumann smiled, a thin expression that did not reach his eyes. "I didn't, not specifically. But I knew that someone would come, eventually. The truth is a debt that accrues interest. Sooner or later, someone has to pay it." He gestured toward the bench. "Sit down, Monsieur Korda. The view is not beautiful, but it is honest. In this place, honesty is the only luxury I have left."
Korda sat. The stone was cold through his trousers, and the wind was stronger here, funneled through a gap in the mountains that the locals called the Devil's Throat. For a long moment, neither man spoke. The sundial's shadow crept across the dial, measuring time in a language that had been old when the Romans brought it to the mountains.
"Lena Voss sent me," Korda said finally. "She told me about your work. About the monograph. About what you called God's forgotten shadow."
"God's forgotten shadow." Neumann repeated the phrase with a kind of fondness, as if it were the name of a child he had lost. "I wrote that monograph in 1989, thirty years ago. It was published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology and promptly ignored by everyone who mattered. The Academy called it 'speculative theology dressed in clinical language.' The Church called it blasphemy. The Ministry of the Interior called it sedition, which was the only review that mattered. The monograph was withdrawn from circulation, and I was invited to resign my chair at the Academy. I refused. They dismissed me anyway."
"What did it say? The monograph?"
Neumann turned his head slightly, regarding Korda with those pale blue eyes. "It said that human beings, when gathered in sufficient numbers and deprived of individual identity, are capable of entering a state of consciousness that is neither waking nor dreaming nor madness, but something else entirely. A state in which the boundaries between selves dissolve and the group becomes a single organism, a single will, a single shadow. Theologians have a word for this phenomenon. They call it possession. But I am not a theologian. I am a psychiatrist. And I have spent my life trying to understand why it is that the most terrible crimes are so often committed not by individuals but by crowds."
"The masks," Korda said. "The choreography. You're saying the mob that killed Duvall wasn't a mob. It was something else."
"I am saying that what you witnessed on that balcony was not random violence. It was a ritual. A carefully designed ritual that had been performed before and will be performed again. The masks serve a dual purpose: they provide anonymity, yes, but they also provide identity. A new identity, a collective identity. When you put on the mask, you cease to be yourself. You become part of something larger. And if the ritual is conducted properly, if the conditions are right, if the participants have been prepared and the setting has been sanctified, then that larger something begins to think for itself. It begins to want things. And what it wants is always the same thing."
"Blood," Korda said.
"Blood is the sacrament. The thing itself is the annihilation of the individual. The ecstasy of dissolving into the group. That is what the Carnaval Society has been studying for sixty years. Not cultural preservation. Not folk tradition. The systematic cultivation of collective possession. They have been conducting experiments, Monsieur Korda. Experiments on human beings. And Armand Duvall was not their first subject. He was simply the one who came closest to exposing them."
Korda felt the cold seeping deeper into his bones. He thought about the shadow file, the memorandum addressed to "T.K.," the list of names in Steiner's handwriting. He thought about the fifteen identical masks and the choreography that had looked, from the balcony, like a dance.
"How do you know all this?"
"Because I helped them, once. Unwittingly. In 1985, a man named Tristan Kappel came to my office at the Academy. He was a young lawyer then, attached to the Ministry of Culture, working on a project to document traditional Carnival rituals in the mountain villages. He wanted my professional opinion on certain psychological aspects of the rituals—the use of masks, the role of anonymity, the relationship between individual inhibitions and group behavior. I was flattered. I gave him everything he asked for. I even wrote a confidential memorandum summarizing my theories on what I called 'induced collective dissociation.' I thought I was contributing to the preservation of cultural heritage."
"Kappel used your research."
"Kappel weaponized my research. He took my theories and applied them not to the understanding of Carnival but to its perversion. The Carnaval Society had already been experimenting with ritualized group violence for years, but they lacked a theoretical framework. I gave them one. By the time I realized what they were doing, it was too late. Two of my former students had joined the Society. One of them died in a car accident in 1987. The other simply disappeared. I tried to go to the authorities, but the authorities were already members of the Society. My monograph was suppressed, my chair was taken, and I was sent here, to this garden, where I have been waiting ever since for someone to come and ask me the questions you are asking now."
"The car accident," Korda said. "In 1987. Was it on a mountain road? Were the brake lines cut?"
Neumann's expression did not change, but something moved in his eyes. "No. That was later. That was Lena Voss's father, in 2007. My student's accident was different. He drove off a cliff near the Col des Ombres. The official report said he had been drinking. He had never touched alcohol in his life."
Korda stood and walked to the sundial. The shadow had moved another fraction of an inch, and the mountains were beginning to turn gold in the dying light. He thought about Neumann's monograph, and Kappel's memorandum, and the fifteen masks moving in their terrible synchrony across the Cathedral Square. He thought about the word "vestry" and what it meant: the room where ordinary men put on their robes and became instruments of divine will.
"You said the conditions have to be right," he said. "For the ritual to work. For the possession to take hold. What are the conditions?"
Neumann was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quieter than before, as if he were speaking from a great distance. "Three things. First, anonymity. The participants must believe that their individual identities are hidden, not only from others but from themselves. The masks provide this, but so does the crowd itself. A man in a crowd is invisible even without a mask. Second, permission. The participants must believe that the normal rules of morality have been suspended. This is the function of Carnival in traditional societies—a temporary suspension of law and custom, a licensed transgression that serves to reinforce the norms it temporarily violates. The Carnaval Society has perverted this function. They do not suspend the rules temporarily in order to reinforce them. They suspend them in order to destroy them. Third, and most important, a target. The group must have something to focus its collective will upon. A sacrifice. In the traditional rituals, the sacrifice was symbolic—a straw effigy, a scapegoat that was driven out of the village. But the Society's rituals are not symbolic. They are real. The sacrifice is real. And the ecstasy that the participants experience is proportional to the reality of the violence."
"And the participants? Do they remember what they've done?"
"Some do. Some don't. The ones who remember describe it as a form of liberation, a shedding of the burden of conscience. They say they felt as if they were not acting but being acted through. As if something else had taken possession of their bodies and used them for its own purposes. The ones who don't remember wake up the next morning with blood on their hands and no idea how it got there. Both responses are useful to the Society. The ones who remember become loyal initiates, eager to experience the ecstasy again. The ones who don't remember become liabilities, and the Society deals with liabilities in the usual way."
"The car accidents. The disappearances. The convenient cancers at Montfaucon."
"Precisely."
Korda turned away from the sundial and faced the old man on the bench. "Lena Voss says there's a mask maker in Saint-Aubin-de-Pierre. A blind man named Matthias. She says he keeps a ledger of every commission he's ever received. If I find that ledger, will it tell me who ordered the masks that killed Duvall?"
Neumann nodded slowly. "Matthias is the last of his family, a lineage of mask makers that stretches back to the seventeenth century. The Carnaval Society has used his family's services for generations. He is blind, but his hands see what his eyes cannot. He knows every mask he has ever made, every commission he has ever fulfilled. And yes, he keeps a ledger. It is his only connection to a world he can no longer see. If you can persuade him to show it to you, you will have the names of every member of the Society who ordered a mask for the 2009 Carnival."
"And if I can't persuade him?"
"Then you will have nothing. Matthias is old, and afraid, and protected by the Society in ways that are not immediately visible. He will not trust you. Why should he? You are a stranger, a disgraced prosecutor, a man whose own government tried to destroy. You have nothing to offer him except danger." Neumann paused. "But you also have something else. Something that may matter to him more than safety."
"What?"
"The truth. Matthias is a devout man, Monsieur Korda. He believes that his masks are works of art, expressions of a folk tradition that honors God by allowing men to become, for one night, something other than themselves. He does not know—or has chosen not to know—what the Society does with his masks. If you can show him the truth, if you can make him understand what his creations have been used for, he may decide that his ledger is worth more as a confession than as a secret."
The sun had nearly set. The mountains were dark silhouettes against a sky that was fading from gold to purple to black. An orderly appeared at the garden gate and called Neumann's name. Visiting hours were over. Korda had no more time.
"One last question," he said. "The fourth name on Steiner's list. Lena Voss. She was twenty-six years old in 2009. She was a student. Why would the Society have her on a list of targets before Duvall was even killed?"
Neumann stood, his joints creaking, and wrapped his coat more tightly around his thin shoulders. "I don't know. But I can guess. The Society keeps files, Monsieur Korda. Extensive files. They have been tracking potential threats for decades. Anyone who might expose them, anyone who might interfere with their rituals, anyone whose curiosity brings them too close to the truth. Lena Voss was on that list because her father was on that list. And her father was on that list because of me. Because of my research. Because of what I told him, years ago, when he came to interview me for his newspaper. The sins of the fathers, Monsieur Korda. They have a longer half-life than anyone imagines."
He turned and walked toward the gate, his figure growing smaller and darker against the fading light. Korda watched him go, and then he looked back at the sundial, whose shadow had disappeared entirely now, swallowed by the night. The garden was silent except for the wind in the ivy and the distant sound of the orderlies locking the doors.
He had what he had come for: a framework, a theory, a way of understanding what he had seen from the balcony ten years ago. But understanding was not enough. He needed proof. He needed the ledger. And to get the ledger, he needed to find a blind old man in a mountain village and persuade him to betray the only people who had ever valued his work.
He left the garden and walked back through the sanatorium's echoing corridors, past the mosaic Annunciation and the woman with the romance novel and the iron gates that closed behind him with a sound like the falling of a guillotine. The taxi was waiting, its driver still silent, its headlights cutting two pale tunnels through the mountain dark. Korda climbed into the back seat and watched the sanatorium recede in the rear window until it was nothing but a dim rectangle of light on a distant promontory, a place where inconvenient people were sent to be forgotten, and where Aldric Neumann had been waiting for thirty years for someone to come and ask him the questions that would finally set him free.
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