Paranormal Story Archives
June 2001
– Page 5
The Boys
Who Live Forever
by Timmistral
My entire family comes from Brittany (part of France), and though I was born in the US, I lived in Quimper, Brittany for a few years and went to college in Brest, Brittany. I have lots of family in that part of the world, and I speak, read and write French as well as I do English. While living in Quimper (the third largest city in Brittany) I had a friend named Joel, an exceptional person, who, though not well educated, seemed to know everything. Joel was a native of Quimper, but he was also an orphan. A fairly well-to-do lady had taken him and his brother in as foundlings. Both Joel and his brother Patrick were violent, reckless, dangerous young men. They had been in jail many times for disregarding the law. If, say, they wanted a car, they stole it. If they wanted to climb up to the top of a 500 foot cathedral spire and tie on their shirts to show they'd been there, they did it despite the Quimper municipal authorities. If they wanted to go to Ireland for a few days, they commandeered a boat and sailed over - not a small task considering the coasts of both Ireland and Brittany. Both were excellent sailors, athletes, etc.; in fact, what made them so scary is that there seemed to be nothing they were incapable of doing. I remember others immediately dropping out of athletic contests when Patrick and Joel were involved (and not in jail). And speaking of jail, Joel broke out of the gendarmerie jail in Quimper four times because he "knew the way out."
In Brittany, buildings like cathedrals, city halls and even jails are ancient, some dating initially to medieval times. Joel and Patrick knew everything about every building, especially the ancient ones. They knew which stones moved revealing unknown passages, etc. I once accompanied Joel in the middle of the night into an abandoned medieval chateau, a property of the French state. He knew a passage from outside which was totally invisible. I also went into the Quimper city hall with him through an unused sewer. He broke into these kind of places for fun...or to say he could do it because he "knew the town" and "knew all its secrets." This seemed to be true in incident after incident. He knew things that were true in Quimper families hundreds of years ago - like skeletons in the closet. He held his foster mother hostage because of things he knew about illicit land deals in the early l9th Century which would have jeopardized her holdings in the present.
His foster mother tried to have him (and Patrick) incarcerated several times because she was afraid of this... and other things. Many, many people in Quimper were afraid of Joel and Patrick. I was afraid of them too, and I was glad Joel had for some reason chosen me as a friend, because, frankly, these two were ominous. Good rumor had it that Patrick had gouged someone's eyes out and that Joel had killed someone. I say good rumor because it was repeated by so many normal-seeming people. All around Quimper there are tiny Breton towns. Joel was known by the damnest people in all of them.... extremely old sailors, cafe owners, pea farmers... peasants - especially what we'd call peasants. Lots and lots of really old people knew and feared Joel and Patrick. All of what I written happened in my 20s.
Joel and Patrick were respectively one year and two years younger than me, more or less 21-26 years old. Both considered themselves better than anyone, aristocratic even, superior. Both knew Nazi-types left over from the occupation of Brittany. They endorsed vehemently ideas of racial and ethnic superiority. They called themselves "evolutionary mutants" and told others that, while they possessed no supernatural powers, they were evolutionarily superior in all other ways. And their looks, brains, connections, language, points of reference, and physical abilities seemed to confirm it. School dropouts, they should have been country bumpkins, but Joel, for example, could quote entire pages of Nietzche and Kant (especially Nietzche) by heart. They spoke no language but French, but their intellectual range also seemed to be boundless. Joel always claimed that he had had a mysterious life, but refused to speak about it during the time that we were best friends, but a few very old peasant types told me that Joel had "been around for ever." "I knew him when I was a child," one said, "he had a different name and lived on a farm a little ways out of town, but it was him."
Other old people in Breton villages said more or less the same thing: Joel and Patrick didn't age. They just changed names from era to era and reappeared in different homes. The time we broke into the Quimper city hall, Joel found a folder, I think it was an old police folder, which had perfect - I mean perfect - likenesses of him and his brother in middle 19th Century garb surrounded by strangers. "My ancestors," Joel said in a way that I didn't believe him. The pictures were of him and Patrick - period. And he'd pulled them out of a forgotten locker in a subbasement of an ancient building. These and many other things convinced me that Joel and Patrick were indeed superannuaries. This all happened between 1970 and 79. Both boys have since disappeared. Relatives of mine in Quimper say they are not gone but living somewhere else in Brittany, some other village, under new names. There seems to be evidence of this.
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