I spent my days studying how to save men, and my nights figuring out how to kill a monster.

  I had never hunted an animal in the past—if I could call a man-eating carriage an animal—but I approached the matter like a biology class: first I would investigate my target in order to learn its habits and behavior, and then I would exploit them to lay a trap.

  When it appeared the night after I met Mr. Devereaux in Belleville, I immediately noticed that its coachman had changed. In place of the previous driver stood the monster’s last passenger, now a pallid corpse with black and empty holes for eyes. It didn’t take me long to figure out the awful truth.

  Tonight’s meal would become tomorrow’s lure.

  If I wasn’t already willing to destroy the Coach-Eater, then that fact would have sealed its fate.

  I thus spent the better part of the week visiting Belleville after my studies and working at the asylum to observe the creature from afar. Mr. Devereaux didn’t try to contact me, so I had all the time in the world to dedicate myself to this task.

  I quickly noticed a behavioral pattern. From what I could observe, the Coach-Eater only stopped once a night to pick up a client along an unchanging itinerary across Belleville. I’d first assumed that it had to rest somewhere to sleep like an animal, but as far as I could tell it simply appeared and vanished out of thin air at dusk and dawn respectively. Did it somehow slip through an invisible portal to whatever nightmarish realm spawned it? Or did it simply move to another city around the world to prey on a fresh new street filled with victims?

  I could not tell, and that frustrated me.

  Moreover, The Coach-Eater did not leave any evidence of its depredations behind. A living being should expel indigestible pellets of bones, clothes, or metal. Not this creature. Whatever way that monster consumed us humans, it destroyed everything in the process.

  Only its victims’ faces remained to be worn on the next night. I suspected that the driver was little more than a lure or puppet, since I’d never heard it speak to its victims. The corpse would at best nod or move the horses’ reins, but the stiffness of the gestures leaned towards the mechanical; like a dog wagging its tail.

  I couldn’t tell whether the change in driver was the creature’s crude attempt at changing its disguise to avoid being recognized, or a sign that the poor sods’ corpses were actually becoming parts of that infernal coach; and for once, I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to that question.

  It did not kill immediately though. The coach’s windows offered me a peek of the cabin inside; so while the darkness of night obviously limited what I could see during that time, it let me catch a glimpse of its occupants. The victims showed no sign of distress for a few minutes until the monster took them to an isolated, narrow alley at 20th Arrondissement’s Frontier. I’d managed to climb onto a nearby building’s roof to observe it from above.

  The Coach-Eater’s curtains always closed once it reached the area, and the cabin was always empty when they opened up again.

  I… I was very much tempted to warn the victims each time it stopped to pick someone up. I tried to prevent a man from boarding it on the third night by striking a conversation before he could climb onto the Coach-Eater, but the creature quickly responded by driving a few steps forward and taking another person instead.

  It was then that I realized that the monster never stopped for couples or families. It only went after isolated individuals and fled from any groups, perhaps for fear of attracting too much attention; and if it couldn’t find a suitable catch on a given night, it would simply move on and leave empty-handed. The narrow alley where it consumed its victims was also coincidentally almost always deserted late at night.

  That kind of stratagem could only mean one thing.

  This otherworldly predator possessed the gift of intelligence.

  I steeled myself and stuck to mere observation after that. If the entity had the ability to think and I began to catch its attention by denying it its meals, then it might learn to identify and avoid me. I would only have one chance at taking that Coach-Eater by surprise and I couldn’t waste it.

  I told myself that those deaths were a small sacrifice to gather the information required to put down the creature for good. If the Coach-Eater had been stalking our capital’s streets for years and consumed a victim each day on average, then its body count was likely astronomical. Adding seven lives to the tally today would be a cheap price to spare a thousand tomorrow.

  Moreover, the Book of the Lost Deaths implied that slaying this creature would put an end to all coach-related deaths across the world. I had no idea how this would even work—the prospect still sounded absurd in my head—but simply reducing the risk of coach-related accidents at all would spare countless lives. These few victims were a handful of martyrs in the grand scheme of things.

  It wasn’t like I could inform the police either. The Coach-Eater left no traces of its activities, and it only preyed on people unlikely to be missed. No one would believe me, nor care.

  Which left me with a simple question: “How does a lone man kill a living carriage?”

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  I knew I would only have one shot at the task and it would likely require more than an axe. Failure would likely cause the creature to either change its behavior or warily move on to another hunting ground. I had to ensure its utter destruction in a single attempt.

  The obvious solution would be a bomb set in the alley, but beside the fact that blowing up a street would get me labeled as an anarchist and promptly guillotined, I had no access to effective explosives on a medical student’s budget.

  Moreover, such detonation might only impair or faintly damage the creature. Carriages were built to last nowadays. If I considered the cabin like a beast’s gullet, then the Coach-Eater’s insides would likely be its most vulnerable part.

  Should I use poison? This would have worked on an animal, but the Coach-Eater clearly did not follow the normal rules of nature. It didn’t produce waste from its victims, so it might not even have a digestive system to speak of.

  Which left only one surefire solution, which would require lowering the Coach-Eater’s vigilance and avoiding making a scene that would lead to my arrest. The best place to do so would be the narrow alley where it killed its victims, but it would never let an outsider approach it there.

  The attack would have to be carried out from the inside by a passenger.

  Which begged another question: “How does a lone man survive killing a living carriage while inside its gullet?”

  Whatever method the Coach-Eater used to kill its victims only took a minute at best, and it locked the doors leading outside. This left only a very narrow window of opportunity if the executioner expected to survive.

  I… I guessed I didn’t have to do it myself. I could pay some money-hungry chap to proceed with the operation and… supervise…

  …

  No.

  No, no, definitively not. That was a dangerous trail of thought. I studied medicine to save lives, not take them. Watching the Coach-Eater’s feeding habits to study it was one thing, but willingly sending a fellow human being to their death was a line too far.

  Besides… besides I had no guarantee anyone foolish enough to take such a deal would actually follow through with it. I would have only one chance to kill the Coach-Eater, and that was what the Book of the Lost Deaths asked of me.

  This was my test. My ordeal. My chance to prove my skills.

  I would have to do it myself.

  It took me three days to prepare and Germaine’s cooperation before I felt confident enough to strike.

  No… no, that was a lie. I was about as nervous as a condemned man facing the guillotine, and I would rather have waited another week to gather more information. Alas, every passing day increased the risk of someone spotting me. I couldn’t risk a Belleville local reporting my description to an area linked to a set of mysterious disappearances.

  I still had no news from Mr. Devereaux either. I was starting to wonder if he had skipped town or forgotten about my request.

  In any case, I mustered up the courage to show up that night. My scarf and heavy coat suffocated me. The weight of the tools I hid underneath the latter exhausted me. I’d never been more accurately aware of my lack of exercise than tonight. I was no Heracles coming to challenge the Nemean Lion to a wrestling match, but a Ulysses about to confront the Cyclops.

  I had left the Book of the Lost Deaths at the asylum for Pierre to open up should… should I not return. My gravekeeper friend appeared puzzled by my request, and I hoped he wouldn’t have to learn of its true significance.

  I heard hooves stomping on the pavement, and then my blood went cold.

  The Coach-Eater stepped out of the shadows, its eyeless driver staring into the distance with empty eyes filled with starless darkness. It moved for the streetlight on which I waited with the steady and casual stroll of a predator about to pick an easy prey.

  I looked up at the driver, and the image of my eyeless face staring back at me from atop the coach immediately struck me. Fear overtook me, and my knees weakened. Every fiber of my body was telling me to run away, to abandon my plan and save myself.

  I clenched my fist to suppress my trembling fingers. I had dealt with enough inmates suffering from panic attacks or worse to know how to anchor myself. Latin phrases usually worked wonders for me.

  Dum spiro spero, I told myself. Memento vivere.

  I dared to raise my hand, and the Coach-Eater stopped right in front of me. Its door-maw opened to reveal a facsimile of a cabin and lock-teeth which only I could see.

  I took a deep and long breath, then stepped inside. Two red couches awaited me within the cabin, alongside a set of narrow windows barely large enough for a man to slip through. I barely had time to sit before the door closed behind me.

  The couch was as red as it was rough. Its texture was of a leathery sort, but a bit too moist to the touch. It didn’t take me long to identify it for what it truly was.

  A tongue.

  Alea iacta est, I told myself when I heard the teeth-lock creaking and trapping me inside. Alea iacta est.

  “Bring me to the Rue de la Réunion,” I said. The Coach-Eater began to drive across Belleville in response. I knew from prior observation that it would pretend to follow the correct itinerary at first so as not to arouse its passenger’s suspicions, but it would inevitably subtly deviate and bring us to its killing ground.

  I had no idea how the creature perceived things from inside its cabin, so I erred on the side of caution. I had to beat it at its own game; pretend to be a normal passenger the same way it mimicked a coach until I could spring my trap.

  I grabbed a cigarette and a match from my coat, both of which I borrowed from Germaine. She mocked me mercilessly for trying out smoking after I admonished her about it often before, but I had no intention of taking up the activity. This poison’s mere taste almost made me puke.

  But I now had a fuse.

  I took a moment to observe my surroundings. There was no clear frontier between the glass windows and the wooden door, nor the red curtains; all of them melded together harmoniously like spots on a canvas of skin. As I suspected, there was no way for me to open the windows without the use of force.

  I looked through them and swiftly recognized the narrow walls of a dark alley tainted with piss and alcohol spots. I had spent enough time in Belleville to identify my location.

  My time was up.

  My hand moved under my coat and brought out a bottle filled with a dark and murky substance of my own creation. I opened it and then carefully spilled it over on the couch in front of me, the floor, the walls, and part of the doors while leaving myself a safe path to use. My potion stuck to everything like a thick glue.

  I quickly sensed my seat shuddering beneath me. The Coach-Eater was starting to grow suspicious, but it was far too late to make a difference.

  The Bureau had done a good job of censoring alchemical treaties, but information always slipped through. It had only been a matter of cross-referencing morsels of truth with my own chemistry classes to figure it all out.

  The Byzantines guarded their Greek Fire formula so tightly that their invention was now lost to time; but I daresay I was quite proud of my imitation.

  “I hope this hurts,” I said aloud.

  I tossed my cigarette into the substance, and then there was light.

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