Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/91

Rh ville set out from Dôle, armed with a writ of attachment and a very businesslike sword, and accompanied by six stalwart arquebusiers. Guided by the peasant who claimed to have recognized the little girl's assailant, the party hastened through the forest of St. Bonnot to the home of one Gilles Garnier, which stood beside the banks of a woodland tarn not far from the village of Arnanges.

Gilles Garnier, the man they sought, was a sombre, ill-favored fellow, surly and taciturn. He walked with a pronounced stoop and a shuffling gait, looking neither to right nor left, and usually muttering half crazily to himself. His pale face, repulsive features and livid complexion repelled all advances from those who met him, and little was known of his personal habits. But because of his long, unkempt beard, his filthy and ragged clothing (uncleanliness was next to godliness in those days) and his solitary life, he was popularly known as the hermit of St. Bonnot.

This title, however, carried with it no implication of sanctity. Quite the reverse. Persons with property to lose were wont to lock it up securely when the hermit was known to be in the vicinity, and many a hen roost owed its depreciated population to his evening visits.

The hermit's hut was as dilapidated as its tenant. Its crude roof was made of squares of sod laid across rickety rafters, and its walls of uncemented stones, irregularly piled one upon another, were encrusted with lichen. The floor was of trodden clay and the rough timber door hung crazily on hinges of rawhide. The windows were unglazed, and stopped against the weather with aprons of untanned skins.

The sergeant deployed four of his half-dozen followers in an enveloping movement about the hut, while, accompanied by the remaining two and his guide, he approached the hut and knocked thunderously on its sagging door with the hilt of his sword.

"Who calls?" Gilles Garnier peered evilly from a window.

"I do," the sergeant answered. "Open in the name of the law!"

"What seek ye here?" the hermit parleyed'

"I seek thee, accursed of God—werewolf, slayer of little children," the officer replied. "Come forth and yield ye, or, by'r Lady, I'll come in for thee."

Gilles Garnier bared his long, yellow teeth in an ugly snarl and hunched his rounded shoulders as if to spring upon the messenger of justice, but a second look at the arquebusiers showed him the futility of resistance.

The arquebus was grandfather to the flintlock musket of Revolutionary days, and great-great-grandfather to the modern rifle. It was nearly as tall as a man, had a bore larger than the modern twelve-gauge shotgun, and was fired by its bearer thrusting a glowing fuse, or gun-match, into a touchhole at its breech. Even with the inferior gunpowder of those days it had a range twice that of the strongest crossbow, and though it was anything but accurate in aim, it carried a charge of leaden slugs and broken nails which scattered almost over a half-acre lot. If one of the soldiers had opened fire at point-blank range, Gilles Garnier would have been mangled almost beyond human recognition.

Gilles Garnier thought it prudent to come out and surrender.

His arms and legs firmly manacled, an iron chain about his neck binding him fast to the sergeant's stirrup, the werewolf of St. Bonnot was brought to Dôle.

OR a time there was a controversy whether state or ecclesiastical courts should take jurisdiction. The clerics maintained that the prisoner had committed his crimes in the form of a wolf, and, since he had sold his soul to the Devil in order to become a werewolf, it was a matter cognizable only in the courts spiritual.

The civil authorities declared it had not yet been proven that the accused had committed any crime, and so, if he had committed any, whether as man or beast, it followed he must be tried before the temporal courts.

The civil lawyers won and the trial commenced.

Witnesses were summoned to prove the deaths of children and the condition in which their bodies were found; shepherds appeared to tell of their missing sheep; the two minstrels and their servant told of the attack made on them the previous September.

The little maid rescued by the peasants identified the prisoner positively as her assailant, and showed the court the scars left by his teeth and nails.

Then came the examination of the prisoner. In anticipation of his claims to innocence, a choice collection of racks, thumbscrews, leg-crushers and branding irons was made ready, and the official torturers looked forward to a busy morning. But the prisoner not only confessed all the crimes charged against him, but volunteered information concerning a number of others unknown to the court.

On the last day of Michaelmas (September 29), near the wood of La Serre, while in the form of a wolf, he had attacked and slain with his teeth and claws a little girl of ten or twelve years, drawn her into a thicket and gnawed the flesh from her arms and legs.

On the fourteenth day after All Saints (November 14), also in the form of a wolf, he had seized a little boy, strangled him, and partially eaten him.

Asked how he could have strangled the child if he were in wolf's form at the time, he was at first vague in his replies, but finally recollected that his hands had not been changed, so he still had the use of his fingers.

On the Friday before St. Bartholomew's Day he had seized a boy of twelve or thirteen near the village of Perrouze and killed him, but was prevented from eating him by the approach of some peasants. These men were found and corroborated the prisoner's statement.

Although the little girl whose rescue was the cause of his arrest declared the prisoner had been in human form when he attacked her, Gilles Garnier stoutly maintained he had been in wolf's shape at the time. And to prove his power to change into a wolf at will, he suddenly sank to his all-fours on the court room floor, began capering about in grotesque imitation of a wolf, and emitted a series of howls, yelps and growls which perfectly simulated those of a ferocious beast of prey.

The court deliberated over his case, decided he had imitated wolf calls only to terrify his victims, but had never actually assumed wolf's form, and consequently voted him guilty of simple murder, unaccompanied by sorcery. As a murderer, he was punishable only by the civil authorities.

Sentence followed hard upon the verdict. On the tenth day following his arrest, Gilles Garnier, the self-confessed werewolf of St. Bonnot was dragged by ropes attached to his ankles over a rough road for a distance of nearly a mile, bound to a stake and burned to death.

''The reader must be aware that Gilles Garnier was the victim of that form of insanity known as zoomania, where the patient believes himself an animal. Zoomania, or that branch of it known as loupomania, where the lunatic imagines himself a wolf, is, fortunately, relatively uncommon today, yet frequent enough to be recognized by medico-legal authorities: If it be remembered that Gilles Garnier was obviously a man, of feeble intellect, and that all France, indeed all Europe of that day reeked with terror tales concerning the which tales Garnier had heard (and implicitly''