The Blue Peril

by Maurice Renard

  “Let’s go back, I tell you. In half an hour we’ll be able to verify the species that had bled. Let’s go back; this splash is turning my stomach—I’m in a hurry to analyze it, to be able to wipe it off.”

  The bloody hand contracted with horror—and yet, that might well have been Monsieur Monbardeau’s own blood: that of his son or his daughter…

  They got back into the car. A ballistic whistle, increasingly loud and sharp, became audible above the canopy, and ended with the plop of an object falling in water.

  They turned their heads. A second whistle scored the sky and ended with a sound of breaking branches.

  “Aeroliths?” said Monsieur Monbardeau.

  Behind the walls of Talissieu, the sounds of fortification were audible, then that silence of silences, which is that of a crowd that one cannot see and which is keeping quiet.

  The automobilists went to the edge of the stream that ran through the wood and moved along the bank, following the current. The clear water was suddenly disturbed, and swept along a cloud of mud, which had just been lifted up by the impact of the fallen object. The waited for the mud to settle, then were able to distinguish, embedded in the stony mud of the stream bed, a human head—which stared at the three anguished faces leaning over it, with one lidless eye and one eyeless orbit…and saw the three recoil in fright.

  The mechanic’s recoil was so forceful that he sat down in the middle of a bush. He sprang out again with a single bound, as if he had touched the Burning Bush, and pointed to something that was lodged there: the second aerolith. It was a man’s leg, flayed, red and bleeding.

  “But…but…” stammered the doctor, “that’s been done by…by someone professional…someone used to handling a scalpel…it’s a preparation! Ugh! What’s that, there?”

  He bent down over something small that had, at that very moment, flicked his hat, and picked it up. Lord! It was a meticulously-severed little finger.

  “Watch out!” howled the mechanic. “It’s starting again!”

  More whistling…a confusion of whistling sounds…

  Around them, as they stood there sick with repugnance, fell a horrid hail of viscera, feet, arms and legs: an entire dissected cadaver, each fragment of which was a hideous but remarkable anatomical preparation; an entire body worked on by virtuoso medical students, coming from a part of the sky where nothing existed.

  “Will you stand by your allegation?” stammered Monsieur Le Tellier. “That it’s a dissection!”

  The doctor made an expert examination of the debris. The horrible head was pulled out of the mire. The two fathers resembled the poor fellows of the times of the alchemists and Gilles de Retz who, having lost their children, trembled at the thought of finding them with their throats cut on some philosopher’s workbench.

  “Yes,” Monsieur Monbardeau asserted, “they’re limbs and organs that have been dissected…if not vivisected! This forearm might well have been prepared while still alive.”

  “Oh!” cried Monsieur Le Tellier, on the point of fainting. A terrible apprehension gripped his heart. Who was the dead man?

  “The head’s unrecognizable,” said the doctor. “It’s that of a man, of course, but how can we identify…oh, my God! My God!” He moaned, madly. “One might think…no, I’m mistaken, aren’t I? No! Look at the teeth: It’s no one. I mean…it’s not one of ours….”

  The astronomer stared into space with a fearful expression. “So,” he said, slowly, “there must be criminal experimenters up there, refugees beyond the reach of ordinary folk, in an impregnable fortress where some ignominious research is being carried out?”

  “I’m not sure. When all’s said and done, these are simple preparations, very skillfully executed, but not in conformity with the classical rules of dissecting-theaters…”

  “Think—these probably aren’t the first wastes to have fallen in the vicinity. We might search the surrounding area…”

  Having buried the debris, they set out on the investigation, each of them by himself—and each of them made a further discovery.

  Monsieur Le Tellier found the branches of an ash tree, oddly split and bizarrely decorticated, with strips and cross-sections botanically excised.

  Monsieur Monbardeau found the bones of a calf or a heifer. The bones were dispersed, but in a particular manner: here the vertebral column, there a shoulder, elsewhere the pelvis. He counted them; the skeleton lacked a left hind leg. The doctor called Monsieur Le Tellier and told him that the animal had been thrown from the sky in pieces, like the dead man they had just buried. “Insects and carnivorous animals have undertaken to clean the bones, with the result that we cannot discover, under the remains, the bruises that they must have inflicted on the moss in falling from such a height. The moss, after all, is a shock-absorbing cushion that recovers promptly.”

  The astronomer claimed, however, that these remains might be quite old, that the country was covered with similar carcasses, and that it was not necessary to see sarvants everywhere, just because…

  The mechanic’s voice interrupted him. Having finished his tour, which he judged sufficient, the servant had been coming back when he had looked more closely at the crown of the sycamore at the foot of which the two brothers-in-law were holding their discussion. “What’s that moving up there?” he asked. “If the gentlemen care to stand aside, God willing, I’ll shoot it down!”

  He pulled a revolver out of his pocket and fired.

  The tree lost a few leaves and crows took flight, leaving visible the leg of a white heifer—or a white calf—caught in the topmost fork of the sycamore. Such was the mechanic’s find. It was revealing. The calf—or the heifer—had fallen out of the sky quite recently, and one of its pieces had stuck in that elevated spot, where animals were not accustomed to go to die, entire or in lots.

  Monsieur Monbardeau formulated his judgment in the following fashion: “You see, Jean—let’s not try to delude ourselves. Above us, in his impregnable belvedere, a biologist with neither faith nor law is devoting himself to ferocious experiments in comparative anatomy.” After a pause, frightened by what he had dared to say, he went on: “If the sarvant is the biologist in question, of course, he must have been somewhat short of human material for some time—listen to this desert!”

  Their search had drawn them away from the village and close to the railway. The only sounds they could hear were the rustling of foliage, the buzz of mosquitoes, the chirping of birds and—most of all—the cawing, croaking and yapping of all the feathered and furry undertakers that held sway over the province. By the evidence of the ears, one might have thought that the sons of Adam no longer reigned.

  As if to protest, a locomotive and its carriages filed past, with a particularly ostentatious blast of its horn. That breathing and whistling iron hydra had at least 400 heads, of both sexes; 400 traveling faces ornamented its windows, on which the fear of passing through Bugey, in tow behind a boiler susceptible to breakdowns, was clearly legible.

  The Mirastelians went back.

  “What’s odd,” said Monsieur Monbardeau, “is that they don’t go beyond that circle…”

  “What’s odd,” said Monsieur Le Tellier, “is that the things they’re throwing away aren’t being thrown from the patch, since it’s not overhead…”

  “Bah! The patch is a floating dock, which can be moved at will!”

  “I can’t admit that.”

  In fact, the brown patch had not moved. It was still in the dead center of the blue circle, in the telescope in the tower.

  At the zenith, there was nothing.

  Monsieur Le Tellier went down to Maxime’s laboratory to confer with Monsieur Monbardeau, who, for his part, had been getting to grips with the red stain—but the astronomer, who expected to surprise the doctor, was petrified by what he was told.

  The analysis of the blood revealed animal corpuscles mingled with human corpuscles. The blood might be the blood of a hybrid creature similar to the centaurs, satyrs and sirens of fabu
lous Antiquity! Was the sarvant, then, called Dr. Lerne or Dr. Moreau?

  During the following week, the whistle of falling objects was heard many times, by night. The objects made holes in the ground. There were stones, neatly sawn through or bearing evidence of chemical attack, branches excised by the knife of an experienced naturalist. There was also the flesh of birds, fish and mammals, all very carefully butchered, and many humans in little pieces…many dead people, who were difficult to identify…

  VI. The Bait

  In the midst of troubled sleep, Monsieur Le Tellier thought he felt a hand touching him. He woke up suddenly. Madame Arquedouve was standing next to his bed in the light of dawn. The château was asleep. The chiming clock, that nightlight of silence, was the only thing making a sound. It was 4 a.m.

  “Jean! They’re here!”

  They, pronounced in such a tone, were the sarvants.

  Monsieur Le Tellier leapt out of bed; hastily putting on a dressing-gown, he asked the blind woman: “Can you hear them?”

  “The hum, yes. I’ve been hearing it for a quarter of an hour. I was in doubt…fearful of being mistaken…but it’s them.”

  “A quarter of an hour! What are they doing, then? Where are they?”

  “I think they were circling the château, at first. Now, it seems, they’re no longer moving. Don’t open your window—it’s futile. I think they’re on the other side of the château, behind.”

  “That’s odd—I can’t hear anything at all. You’re right: from here, one can’t see anything at all in front of Mirastel.”

  “Come into the gallery,” advised Madame Arquedouve. “You’ll be able to see from there—but take great care going past Lucie’s door; remember that the slightest alarm might provoke a relapse!”

  They went on tiptoe to the gallery. That was what they called a broad corridor that ran along the rear wall on the first floor.

  “The hum’s getting closer,” the blind woman murmured. “Or rather, we’re getting closer to it. Can’t you hear it, Jean? It’s very soft, though.”

  “Yes, I’m beginning to,” whispered Monsieur Le Tellier. “It’s like a little fly imprisoned in one’s heart. Let’s stop here.” They were about to reach the first window in the gallery. “Don’t show yourself, Mother—I’ll go on, on the sly…”

  The window-panes were quivering imperceptibly. Monsieur Le Tellier carefully stuck out his head. He imagined the landscape that would appear—the sloping lawn, girdled by woods, the upper slopes of the Colombier—and he was greatly excited by the expectation of finding some individuals or some machine inhabiting that landscape.

  Behind him, Madame Arquedove held her breath, waiting for him to speak.

  Through the window-frame, he saw the trees of the farm, the slope of the mountain, the woods, the edge of the lawn-clearing…a quarter of it, a third, half…

  “What’s out there, Jean? You’re shivering…so tell me…”

  “Oh, it’s joy, Mother!” Monsieur Le Tellier cried, delightedly. “Maxime—Maxime’s there! He must have escaped. Ah, Maxime, my boy! I’m coming!”

  “But Jean—is Maxime alone?”

  “Yes, alone in the middle of the lawn. He’s sitting in the middle of the lawn. Let me go down, run…I think he needs someone to take care of him…”

  “Go! Go quickly!” the grandmother repeated, joyfully. “Maxime has come back!”

  And she went through the whole château, waking her daughters, the doctor and the servants, telling them the wonderful news: “Maxime’s come back! He’s escaped from up there! Come! Come!”

  Meanwhile, the astronomer went out on to the perron and shouted to his son: “Why aren’t you coming in, my boy? Are you ill? You should have called us…”

  At the sight of his father, though, Maxime stood up, and from afar, with a voice and gestures redolent with catastrophe, he shouted: “Don’t come any closer! In the name of God, stay in the house!”

  Monsieur Le Tellier stopped. It was not the sarvants that frightened him, but his son. He could see him more clearly than he had from the window, being much closer.

  Maxime was standing up. His expression was sad, so very sad…he was thin and dirty; his torn waistcoat hung in tatters; he had no hat—and on top of all that, the expression of terror that seemed to be invading his horror-widened eyes…all of it bathed by the returning light of the rising Sun.

  Maxime is mad! thought Monsieur Le Tellier. This adventure has completed the work of insanity that the story of the little Jeantaz girl began…Maxime is mad!

  Without taking a further step, in order not to upset him, he spoke in a calm voice: “It’s all right; I won’t budge. But come here, then—come! We’ll wait for you. You can’t stay there…”

  The young man made a gesture of despair. Large tears ran down his emaciated cheeks. “Papa! I can’t come! I can’t!”

  “Come on, my dear boy—pull yourself together. Is your sister with you? Where were you? What about Suzanne? And Henri? Fabienne? Have you seen Robert?”

  “I’ve only seen Robert. And more!”

  Above him, there was considerable agitation in the château. All the people Madame Arquedouve had woken up were emerging in front of Maxime, half-dressed, with delighted expressions: his grandmother, his mother, his uncle and his aunt, the old servants…and he, convulsively and imperiously, howled: “Don’t come any closer! No one! Go away! Go back inside! They’ll take you too! They’re lying in wait for you. Can’t you hear the hum!”

  Halt! The hum! That’s right! Everyone heard it then…but what was making it? Their eyes scanned the surrounding wood; that was the only hiding-place where the sarvants might be lying in ambush.

  “But there’s nothing to be seen!” said Monsieur Le Tellier. “Are they in the woods, Maxime?”

  “You don’t understand—but do as I say. We’ve no time to waste in explanations. Do as I say—don’t come any closer. There’s nothing to be seen, but they’re holding me just the same. I’m here as bait…a lure to attract people…because they haven’t been able to capture any more for some time. Do you understand? Don’t come any closer, then. If you love me, let them carry me off alone.”

  A muffled scream greeted that plea, and Madame Le Tellier ran back into the château, madly. Several servants followed her, very frightened. Their fearful remarks and the unfortunate mother’s exclamations were audible as they fled: “They’re going to carry him off again! They’re going to carry him off again! Oh, they’re going to carry him off again! Oh! Oh!”

  Monsieur Monbardeau was more rational. “Listen, Jean: I think your son’s exaggerating. Think! There’s nothing to be seen, damn it! And there aren’t any clouds! Maxime must be trapped by some electromagnetic fluid, whose production causes the hum—a fluid controlled from the height of the patch. It’s one of your own hypotheses, remember—the animal magnet. Only, follow me carefully—the sarvants have never abducted more than three people at a time. I’m sure that if five of us stay together, and rush Maxime—you, me, the gardener, your chauffeur and the coachman…yes? Are you in, Jean? Are you in, Célestin? Clément? Gauthier? Get ready, then—I’ll count to three. At three, we’ll charge Monsieur Maxime, and bring him back to the château. One…two…three!”

  The doctor’s calculation was correct; the sarvant was not able to take five people at a time. The rescue party was half way to the prisoner without a prison when an enigmatic force, lifting Maxime up, set him down again 20 meters further away, on the edge of the wood. The hum, now more high-pitched, resumed in the darkness. The runners had stopped.

  What a scene! It would have required something akin to the sardonic pencil of Jean Veber29 to describe that château behind that lawn: the terrified faces of bonnet-less housemaids in night-shirts at the windows; in front of the perron, a few male servants gathered around Madame Monbardeau, who was rigid with fright beneath her night-gown, and Madame Arquedouve, whose blind eyes were enlarged with the desire to see. On the lawn, the five men—the doctor’s pyjamas, th
e gardener’s apron, the astronomer’s dressing-gown, the coachman’s striped waistcoat and the mechanic’s blue overall—were all huddled together, making calamitous faces. Then, all alone confronting all those gazes, there was the lamentable object of so much emotion, collapsed in the grass and weeping like Jesus falling down for the third time. All of that was in an atmosphere in which the legendary and the quotidian were juxtaposed, and hence burlesque.

  “But what can we do? What can we do?” bleated Monsieur Le Tellier. “Tell us, Maxime—what should we do?”

  “Alas! If they catch one of you, they’ll carry me off! And if they don’t catch anyone, they’ll carry me off just the same! Let’s try to make it hard—it’s so terrible up there! There are tortures!”

  Suddenly, Monsieur Le Tellier cried out in alarm: “Who’s there? I saw someone sliding through the woods. Who’s there? A shadow, I tell you, which…ah!”

  A spark flared up among the branches; a detonation resounded in the wood, very close to Maxime, and white smoke appeared. The young man fell down heavily. His mother emerged from the smoke, rifle in hand. A woman made of snow could not have been paler.

  “That way, he won’t suffer any more! He’s no longer suffering! I love him more than that!”

  “Unfortunate woman!” shouted Monsieur Le Tellier. “Don’t come out! Hide! Hide, then!”

  The madwoman recoiled into the undergrowth, then disappeared.

  At that moment, Maxime’s body was seized by a violent somersault, then fell back. The stupor of the witnesses was prolonged. Like a serpent’s hypnotic gaze, the sarvant’s hum exercised a magnetic influence on their ears. Then that deep and obscure sound suddenly seemed to weaken, drawing away from the depths of their breasts, and they could hear nothing but the natural sounds of the morning.

  Monsieur Le Tellier spoke sharply to Madame Arquedouve. He was so upset that he blind woman could not make out what he said.