A few weeks ago.
"I can't believe we're actually doing this..."
In the shadows of the dim lights of an infamous Paris area's street, two black dressed men were quietly for one, and not so much for the other, suspiciously attempting to open the manhole cover in front of them.
And they were no city cleaning teams civil servers.
"Oh come on, get over it already !"
Nabil, who was getting pissed off by this somewhat sissy ass new coworker of his, finally couldn't take it anymore.
He can't even bear cleaning up a body, just what the hell was the boss thinking ?
Julien, a bit startled by Nabil's not quite friendly reply, stopped grumbling as quietly focused completely on opening the manhole cover to open the sewers way. Half a meter behind him Nabil was pulling a black man shaped bag on the ground out of the car's boot parked ahead out of any passer-by's sight at such a late hour.
There was no need to be a genius to understand what was inside.
As Julien finally took off the hole's cover, he heard Nabil behind him asking out for help as he prepared himself to lift up the body to throw it inside.
What a pig ! This guy must have been such a waste of food.
A pretty gruesome noise was heard as the quite big body fell onto the floor down below.
"We'll have to get down there too, we can't leave this on the sewers floor down the stairs like that or it'll be found tomorrow morning. The waste waters canal should be just besides it." Saying no more, Nabil quickly began climbing down the stairs. An unwilling sounding sigh softly escaped Julien's mouth at the idea of going down as he heard Nabil, but he knew he was right and quickly followed suit down the stairs.
"Ergh.. It really smells like crap !"
"What were you expecting ? Tss.."
Quickly locating the waters, and a few rats, despite the lack the light which was just a couple feet away, they didn't even bother picking the body up and simply pushed it with their feet down the smelly liquid wastes, disappearing to never be seen again.
"Alright it's done let's out get out of this shit trap, it really smells like your mother's asshole."
"My mother's ass- How could you even know that ? Fucking prick."
As they started bickering whilst climbing back up the stairs, they didn't notice that the black bag containing the corpse now in the water broke open when it fell down from above, and the smell of the leaking blood that was now pouring in the water had been concealed by the already strong wastes odors.
But the few rats noses definitely did.
☆☆☆
Casting aside the remaining world wars survivors the years didn't kill till our days, most people in western countries would agree to say that 2020 has been the worst year of their lives, for some obvious reasons.
And France was definitely among the concerned countries, cumulating a total of almost seven months of lockdown up to the beginning of 2021. The economy was almost on the verge of collapse, its people stressed, worried and not very hopeful about the future.
And although he loved his nation very much, Camael wasn't feeling very concerned about it anymore. At the age of twenty, he was among those who mostly failed in every important things they were doing. He had talent for a lot of things and knew it, yet somehow in the end he always seemed to fail every actually important things in his life.
He may be really good at making friends, yet they would stay in touch for a few months before not being heard of again. The small new online web shopping company he started a few months earlier ? Not a single purchase, and abandoned. His education ? Sure he did get his baccalaureate with jury's felicitations and excellent grades, yet in his first year as he went to Paris into further education in an excellent school he curiously messed up and dropped off... As he was dumped off by his girlfriend, whom he naively thought he would marry soon after his studies.
Ah... Life is harsh.
So as he went back in his Normand countryside house with his mom and his brother, like a loser, he soon fell into an actually worrying, profound, clinical depression as he shut himself down in his bedroom.
How could he not ?
At least he had a home. When a man loses everything, many simply become homeless alcoholics.
And this went on for a year.
If his mother used to be attentive about him at first as she knew how hurtful his loss had been for him, she soon became dissatisfied with this son of her which simply seemed to have become a waste.
She didn't bother much with him, and when she did shopping for groceries she would only buy the cheapest, simplest food so he simply would not starve.
Having lived only a bit better than homeless people for a year, one would understand that when he would see people on internet complain about 2020 being the worst year ever, Camael would sneer inwardly a bit in shadenfreude.
A year after he shut himself when the covid came up, nothing really changed for him. If anything, it was even a bit better as he was already past his tiresome mental breakdown. The "worst year ever" for him already started a year ago.
And from a handsome, cheerful and hardworking young man he became a somber quiet and leery person as social isolation changed him.
In the silence of his bedroom, from a modern, atheist and material success-striving youth, behind his laptop keyboard realisations after realisations stroke him as months went by, and slowly the world he was living in slowly started to disgust him more and more.
The world seemed to end for him when straight in eyes who he was looking forward to take for wife coldly told him that away from her studying in Paris, his absence made way for someone else in her life.
Sure he was burning in fury, but what could he do ? Was she in the wrong ? Was it bad ? She technically was in her right, and didn't conceal it from him... But how could that be right ? His chest was burning in pain. It even hurt so much that he almost fainted down the floor on the spot.
Worse than that, pain didn't subside. When he got back in class shortly after, he had simply no way to concentrate. His head was spinning in grief and nevrose, and after three weeks out of school to get over it, how could he catch up ?
In the end, who was guilty of all fo this ? The bastard who stole her from him ? Her and her selfishness ? Down there he knew. Fidelity, faithfulness and virtue were all christian values, slowly disappearing of western civilisation as progressism and atheism were replacing Christianity.
Pure product of what he slowly became to despise, he slowly grew more and more interested in Christianity, before becoming Christian himself. His father was a Britishman who disappeared when he was young as he broke up with his mom, and his mom was a Congolese woman whose family immigrated in France in the early seventies. They weren't married, either.
But he loved France, which he recognized as his only fatherland. France and its people paid together to make him born, through the taxes for healthcare system who helped his mother give birth, and therefore took care of his well being throughout his life. France paid for his education, although he failed it in the end.
In the end, he knew he was profoundly endebted to France. In today's society most only care about their rights, the left's eternal fight. But not many actually were conscious about what they owed. He wasn't french by blood, but by soul.
January of the new year was slowly coming to its later half, and on a winter cold yet sunny morning, Camael was sitting on a chair he placed near the pond in the field in the back of their property in the countryside.
Liting up a cigarett, it was yet again a new occurance of this somewhat ritual habit he grew this last two years. He would not smoke inside his home, so he didn't really know when it began but he would always come here smoke and drink coffee or tea in the morning.
He had never noticed before he went to Paris, but Normandy's air was insanely refreshing. Well maybe it was rather rather Paris smells that were just that awful and polluted, but lately these days more than ever it really seems like that for the few couple tens of minutes he was passing outside him bedroom next to this pond the air was doing something inside of him that made him surprisingly relaxed and refreshed for the whole day.
I can't even tell if I want those days to end... He thought with a soft sigh, pulling the last time on his cigarett before throwing it in his empty cup of tea.
There was really times where he felt like an old man. He was getting really out of his time in almost everything, he didn't want to party or see people anymore, although he loved music more than most thing it wasn't rap or any modern genres. As a pianist in a family of musician he has always been more into classical, and that wasn't ready to change.
And although he considered those two years as the worst of his life, feeling inextricably tied to this house and unable to restart his life back up he also started being emotionaly alienated to this life. There was something in him somewhat afraid of going back to the world of responsabilities far from the calm he was despite him enjoying.
These two years made him exceptionally tired despite the fact that he wasn't living a life of stress and work. He was really tall at over 184 centimeters, but also really skinny and underweight for a male at less than 62 kilograms.
He had a straight but curly hair, a bit long on the top yet headdressed backward and a undercut he always maintained despite his current retreated life. It wasn't really striking, especially with his now underweight build, stern expression and mishaved beard, but he was handsome, with very well defined facial features. That was something he wouldn't lose despite all his troubles at least.
As he was going to head back inside, something attracted his attention as he looked back to the usually deathly calm pond. Riples were slowly waving out from a dot small spot in the center of it.
Dot that was slowly getting bigger, millimeters by millimeters.
Oh.. ? That's a bit weird.
His brows frowned as he stays still, observing. It wasn't anything unusual to see riples on this still water's pond, but there's weren't any frogs nor bugs in January. There was no small animal or rain either, and there wasn't any fish in this pond to his knowledge.
Curious, he sat back on his chair and before he knew it, Camael lit another cigarett, observing.
And as the minutes went by, the riples slowly grew fiercer and more agitated. To Camael's astonishment, the dot who was now a few centimeters wide was in fact a small whirlpool, the kind that you would see when emptying your bathtub.
Just what the hell is going on...
To say he was astonished would be an understatement. It was as if something was slowly drowning the water and the air inside, he could the previously calm wind swirling toward it in a small breeze.
It couldn't possibly be an animal drinking out water like a hole to the abyss, so it had to be something else. Maybe there was an empty cavity under the ground that opened ?
That would make sense. The region was full of those underground cavities, called marnes. They were remnants of 19th century marl miners, a kind of clay widely used back then.
The probleme was that many mining sites were simply not declared and mapped back then, so from time to time one would hear in the newspapers how hundred or thousands of square meters of ground would collapse on itself twenty or thirty meters below.
That was extremely dangerous.
And if such a thing was currently under the property things could turn disastrous. But although this was probably the most likely probablility, there was something off. It made sense for water to be drawn in, but why was the air too ? It wasn't very noticeable, but he was sure the air was also being drawn in sensible proportion, which didn't made much sense.
But he didn't think about it much more and quickly took out his iPhone, dialling his mom.
"Mom, we have a problem."
"... Hm ? What is it ? I'm in class you know." She replied, a bit unhappy about it. She was a history and English teacher in a nearby high school. She knew her son wouldn't call for no reason as he wouldn't call her for no reason so there must be a serious occurance.
Camael didn't mind and said what he had to.
"I think we have a marne near, or even under the garden."
"... What ? Are you messing with me ? How could you even know that ?"
He quickly told her what happened. She was surprised but also was quite dubious about it. Usually marnes weren't appearing under properties, because there was many pre-construct ground studies done all around to prevent such cases. But that was also when she recalled how old the house was and it was also possible that none were being done back then.
Still, it wasn't said it was that as well. The best thing to do would be calling the municipality to have professionals inquiring.
"Alright, call the town hall. I'll be back around 2 pm. Don't go near the pond, if a hole to a marne appeared now maybe the ground is weakening so get away now."
"Alright." Camael quickly ended the call, before looking back at the small swirl. His mom told him what to do, yet he still wanted to wait a bit. Maybe that wasn't what they thought it was, and it would simply recede in a few minute. If he called the town hall now he would look like a fool by then.
He stayed a few more minute, and yet the whirlpool didn't seem to be getting smaller.