The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 1: Enter Lucifer!

by Jean de La Hire

“So Corsat, Pilou, my orders are: Keep your will-power taut, so that it cannot be subjugated for a second time. Is that understood?”

  “Understood,” the Burgundian and the Provençal said, quite simply, in unison.

  “Well, now we have only to wait,” Saint-Clair concluded. “Since it is evidently impossible for us to control the circumstances, we must fight the kind of war dictated to us by the circumstances created by Lucifer.”

  Ah, if only the Nyctalope had been able to foresee that it would be Laurence Païli who would have to prepare herself to create the “circumstances” in the midst of which the supreme battle would unfold! But he could not foresee that–and it was better, moreover, that he could not foresee it. It would have caused him more suffering than the threat of death.

  “Nevertheless,” he continued, in a cheerful tone that was terrible in its faintness, as he rose to his feet, “there is no known case of prisoners who are condemned to death, but who are determined not to die, who do not first dedicate themselves to a minute examination of their prison. Let’s subject it to intense scrutiny; it might perhaps be helpful.”

  “The examination won’t take long,” said Pilou.

  “Wolf!” called Corsat.

  “What?” During Saint-Clair’s discourse, the man had remained immobile on the edge of his bed, prostrated by a sort of resigned stupor.

  “What time did the processions past the condemned in which you took part take place?”

  “It was shortly before the midday meal on each occasion.”

  “We won’t have a long time to wait, then,” the Burgundian stated. He added: “I’m eager to see the faces in the procession. It ought to be funny, for they’ll surely be open-mouthed, and then we’ll be certain that...”

  “Do you need that to be certain, idiot?” asked Pilou, mockingly.

  “It’ll be a sort of sentence for us, that procession... regarding the condemnation, inasmuch as the sentence isn’t communicated to the condemned man...”

  Corsat and Pilou continued their idle chatter in a whisper, while watching their employer make a slow tour of the room.

  Saint-Clair tipped over the four beds, measured the four glazed loopholes with his hand–each of them was a handspan-and-a-half wide and five deep–and examine the two facing doors. The latter were black-painted iron, exactly fitted to their granite frames without any visible locking mechanism; struck with the hilt of a dagger they resounded vibrantly, the noise echoing in the depths of corridors, staircases and immense rooms.

  “Wolf!” said the Nyctalope.

  “Yes, Monsieur?”

  “By which door did you enter?”

  “That one.” Wolf pointed to the one on the left of his own bed, which was facing Saint-Clair’s.

  “Good–so you went out of that one?”

  “Ja.”

  “How did you approach the first? Enumerate.”

  Docilely, Wolf enumerated: “Guardroom; straight staircase; corridor at right-angles; spiral staircase hollowed out of the thickness of the tower wall; the door.”

  “Good.” Saint-Clair paused, pensively. He remembered what Laurence had said–word for word, for he had a powerful memory: “a narrow spiral staircase, and, finally, a vast round room with five windows, from which one can see the whole of a circle of mountains.” And in that room, Saint-Clair said to himself, is the mysterious machine: the machine that will give Lucifer so much power that he claims that, with its aid, he will have the entire universe at his feet. Now, there’s only one round tower with windows and loopholes which overlooks the other parts of the castle. I observed that from outside. The height of its windows is greater than the height of the mountains. Here are the loopholes, from which I too have seen the entire circle of mountains. I must, therefore, be immediately underneath the room in which the mysterious machine is hidden. That’s important–very important.

  “Corsat! Pilou!” In a low voice–for there might be a listening device, and what the Nyctalope had just realized had to be kept secret from everyone except his two associates–he communicated his discovery to Pilou and Corsat. Then he said to Wolf: “And the other door?”

  “Descending spiral staircase within the wall; circular corridor; then the right-angled corridor, the straight staircase and the guardroom.”

  “Good. Listen, Wolf. You’re broad-shouldered and square-backed, with solid thighs and calves. Could you bear the weight of two men for ten minutes, one atop the other?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “Very well...when you’re fatigued, say so, and Corsat will replace you. Place yourself here, between the table and your bed. Pilou, climb on to Wolf’s shoulders, standing upright. Perfect! Now me. Provided that no one’s spying on us through some hole...!”

  Saint-Clair climbed up Pilou’s body, which was standing on Wolf’s shoulders, and stood up on the Provençal’s shoulders. In this manner, with his two arms half-extended above his head, he could touch the round ceiling of the room–the vault above which was the floor of the room containing the machine. Taking a dagger from its sheath, he had no difficulty introducing the blade into a narrow and short crack that he had noticed from below, and which he believed to be an interstice produced by the slight displacement of two badly-set stones.

  Immediately, he let out a soft laugh.

  “Down!” he said, in a low voice.

  He climbed down, then helped Pilou down, and said: “Even Lucifer doesn’t think of everything. Does he know that vault is only an optical illusion? To begin with, the tower must only have had one floor: a tube, with a large staircase with landings extending all the way from the ground to the high platform serving the loopholes and the battlements. Then the stairway was taken down and stairwells hollowed out in the rock, and the tower was divided into several floors, each with one room, with ordinary floorboards and ceilings. To give the stone-walled rooms a medieval appearance, though, vaults were fashioned out of flexible laths of chestnut and skimmed with cement, as if to paint an optical illusion. We’ll wait until after the midday meal. In less than a quarter of an hour, thanks to our mechanical cutter, that vault, ceiling and the floorboards above will be pierced by three parallel holes large enough to let us pass through. And then, as for the machine... everything will be easy, if Lucifer has not thought to establish a fluid wall around us, or one of his other scientific sorceries...”

  Saint-Clair fell silent and cocked his ear, as did his three companions. A bell was ringing, its sound muffled by distance.

  Wolf shivered, and murmured: “The procession!”

  “That’s it, then,” said Pilou. “We’re condemned to death?”

  “Ja.”

  Wolf, letting himself fall to the edge of his bed, sat there as if petrified.

  “This will be curious,” said Corsat, simply.

  “Sung in the key of D,” said Pilou, mockingly.

  “Will-power! Will-power, my friends!” said the Nyctalope, gravely. He sat down at the foot of his bed, his hands on his knees. Corsat and Pilou sat down too, one of them upright, the other with his legs folded, his heels tucked up against his thighs, his arms crossed and his chin on his wrist. They waited with great interest, determined to preserve their composure and to remain masters of their own will. They soon perceived the muffled tread of rapidly-approaching feet.

  Suddenly, without the slightest noise, one of the iron doors opened wide and a man appeared. It was the hauptmann. As he came in, he searched the three French prisoners with his eyes, studying them with such a hostile expression that Saint-Clair murmured to Corsat and Pilou: “What pleasure that man will take in making us suffer, if ever he has us in his power!”

  The hauptmann immediately took up a position at the foot of Wolf’s bed. With Saint-Clair, Corsat and Pilou before his eyes, he watched the procession. He had an automatic pistol in his right hand.

  Is that a precaution against us? Saint-Clair wondered Or against someone who... but no, it cant be against anyone but us. Hasn’t Lucifer enveloped the hau
ptmann in a wall of protective fluid, then? Why have we been left to think and act so freely? It’s true that it’s within this prison, firmly closed and doubtless carefully watched... Since I got into Schwarzrock I’ve established the existence of enigmas that seem to me to be entirely contradictory. If these contradictions are not deliberate on Lucifer’s part, might it be that Lucifer is only possessed of a limited and intermittent power? Hmm–all that’s very interesting. To all the peremptory motives I already have for wanting to live and emerge victorious, I can add another: to know; to understand and elucidate these enigmas, explain the mysteries, draw down the veil of the Occult...

  While maintaining this internal monologue, the Nyctalope, even more attentively than Corsat and Pilou, watched the procession–but he did not count the men passing before him, because he knew that Corsat and Pilou were counting. Instead, he studied their faces.

  Although none of them attained the gigantic proportions of the hauptmann, the bodies passing before him were almost all athletic–but their indifferent or resigned physiognomies displayed mediocre intelligence. Many had the faces of brutes, with the cruel and avid eyes of pigs at a full trough. They marched heavily and rhythmically, falling into step in response to an order given outside the entry door–a cadence that continued through the exit door, but was forcibly disturbed as they reached the staircase. They were all dressed in the same uniform. Every tenth man had one, two or three canary-yellow chevrons on his sleeve.

  Then, without any gap, there were the women: plump women from northern Germany or tall, broad women from the Teutonic cantons of Switzerland. Their expressions were mostly bewildered. Saint-Clair noticed that they were all beautiful or very pretty, young, hale and sturdy. They were uniformly dressed in the picturesque Tyrolean costume popularized by laïtou singers in the music-halls of the world.19 Their skirts were very short, their arms bare, their blouses and bodices low-cut.

  As they passed by, the men and women looked to their left and right at the condemned men. There was stupidity and cruel joy in the eyes of the men, perfect indifference in the eyes of the women, who did not even show curiosity. Several passed without turning their heads to the left or the right.

  Suddenly, there were no more tramping feet at the entrance. The hauptmann left his place, fell in behind the last woman and left, after turning his head momentarily to dart a second glance of hatred and ferocious joy at the Frenchmen.

  One after the other, the doors closed again, soundlessly. The procession was over. Saint-Clair had not thought to measure the time it had taken. “How many men?” he asked.

  “Fifty-eight,” replied Corsat.

  Saint-Clair turned to the German. “Wolf!” he said. “Twenty-eight more than those you know, including you and Ragh. How many women, Pilou?”

  “Thirty,” the Provençal replied. “Even if that’s all, it’s a large staff.”

  “Which knowledge teaches us nothing,” Saint-Clair concluded. “Wolf!”

  “Mein herr?”

  “When will they bring us a meal?”

  “Never,” Wolf replied. “We’re condemned to death. We’ll have nothing more to eat and drink, and no one else will come to see us. If we’re executed after the usual interval, it will be tomorrow. This afternoon and tonight, we can rest easy.”

  “Very well, this afternoon and tonight, we’ll be working to get out of here. Corsat! Pilou!”

  “Boss!”

  “Do you feel that your heads are quite free, your brains clear? Have you a clear consciousness of your hope of escaping death, and your determination to realize that hope?”

  “Yes, boss, yes!” replied the two men.

  “Perfect. If you feel your thinking becoming foggy, your hope faltering and your determination becoming hesitant, tell me immediately! By uniting our mental strength, we’ll be better able to resist when Lucifer judges it useful to nullify our free will. Now, silence for an hour!”

  The Nyctalope lay down on his bed, closed his eyes and started thinking about everything that had happened to him since Monsieur Prillant had summoned him. Only nine days had passed since then, but what events, enigmas and mysteries those nine days had brought! The Nyctalope applied himself to the task of examining those facts one by one, connecting them logically and deducing hypotheses. In brief, according to his own expression, he studied the map.

  It was a disconcerting map, in which the blanks of unknown countries were more numerous than the colors and annotations of explored regions–but the latter were no longer isolated from one another, as they had been at first. I’m beginning to get my bearings here, Saint-Clair said to himself. Work prevented him from thinking about the probability of imminent torture and death.

  As for Corsat and Pilou, they lay down like Saint-Clair, to Wolf’s bewilderment, and soon went to sleep.

  When the hour was up, Saint-Clair woke them up. They stood up, rubbed their eyes and were instantly ready for action. By their frank expressions and smiles, their employer saw that they were as free as he was.

  “Let’s go to work,” he said. “Stand there, Wolf. Pilou, get on top of him. Corsat, pass me the cutter–then watch the doors. If anyone comes in, kill him! Make certain–use the mute Browning. It’s no longer a matter of being careful of what might happen; every obstacle must be struck down pitilessly. Our lives and other lives that are dear to us–and useful to he world–are dependent on our victory. We must conquer or we shall surely die.”

  This was said in a tone that engraved the words even within Wolf’s soul and exalted him to the point of regaining his courage and confidence. In the position of an athlete carrying a “human pyramid,” he made the solid pedestal on which Pilou and Saint-Clair stood, one atop the other.

  Plied by the experienced hands of the Nyctalope, the cutter began eating into the ceiling.

  Two, three, four minutes ran by.

  Suddenly, the cutter was no longer purring. “Curse it!” Saint-Clair groaned. “The invisible wall!”

  His hands and his head had just been violently pushed back. His knees had buckled and it seemed to him that his skull was touching the ceiling–although the deeply curved ceiling was now a meter above him. His hands, holding the cutter, could no longer be lifted above his head. He understood immediately.

  “The invisible wall! Down!”

  He leapt on to the table, and from there to the floor. Pilou got down from Wolf’s shoulders.

  “Ach!” the German said. Saint-Clair, Corsat and Pilou looked at him, and saw him become petrified, his face impassive and his eyes blank.

  The Nyctalope understood again; his companions guessed.

  “Beware, friends!” Saint-Clair said, in a forceful voice, as he seized both of them by the shoulders with fraternal pressure. “Beware! The invisible wall is surrounding us–it’s a perfidious assault against our freedom of thought, our will! We don’t want to give in, and we shall not give in!”

  He drew them backwards and sat them down beside him on a bed–and they looked at one another in turn, mingling their soul with his, mustering their strength. Then, when he saw that they were resisting hard, he spoke to them. They replied. If Wolf had been able to hear them, he would have heard them passionately recalling, sometimes earnestly and sometimes laughing, adventures they had previously undertaken in Africa and Oceania. To escape the present power of Lucifer, Saint-Clair, Corsat and Pilou were taking refuge in the past.

  That lasted for hours–hours of daylight and of darkness, and then of daylight again. During those hours, Saint-Clair, Corsat and Pilou were talking and fighting, uniting their strength–but they grew thirsty, then hungry and starved of sleep. They felt fatigue overcoming them. They became afraid that they might soon be too weak, and began to think that they could not hold out for another day...

  Wolf lying on his bed nearby, was like a dead man, his eyes closed and his breathing imperceptible.

  At noon on May 16, Saint-Clair, Corsat and Pilou could do no more. The felt their minds misting over and heard their
speech becoming thick and slurred.

  At 1 p.m., their sight became troubled.

  “No, no!” howled Saint-Clair, exasperated.

  With a last outburst of will-power, he repelled the infernal power and tore his companions away from it. Half an hour passed, during which they were able to retain the illusion that they could get the upper hand–but at 1:45 p.m., they were plunged into the fog again. At 2 p.m., they were desperately conscious that they were going under, and they clasped one another by the hand, sobbing...

  Now, it was on May 16, at the first stroke of 2 p.m. that Laurence Païli pronounced the words: “Baron Glô von Warteck, I summon you. Come!”

  What the young woman had learned, observed and deduced permitted her to pose the problem in these terms: Leo is in Lucifer’s power. If there were nothing but bolts, locks and walls between Leo and liberty, I would be unworried–but there are occult forces, the fluid barriers that the monster can dispose.

  Now, I know that at a certain moment yesterday, when Lucifer concentrated all his efforts go capture Leo, he “forgot” his other victims–or, rather, the psychic power that he had to employ against Saint-Clair alone diminished the intensity of his other fluidic actions. For one reason or another, or perhaps both, at the time when Lucifer overwhelmed Leo yesterday, the invisible wall ceased to exist and the three servants recovered their free will.

  At present, Leo is much more the prisoner of the monster’s psychic forces than of the doors and walls of Schwarzrock. I must, myself, put Lucifer into such a state of general forgetfulness that the effects of his fluidic action will cease everywhere. Leo, who is invariably attentive to all phenomena. will perceive the change and profit from his moral liberty to free himself physically. Perhaps he will even be able to procure weapons and return here–and then he will kill Lucifer!

  The only question is whether I can, by myself, throw Baron Glô von Warteck into such an state of ecstasy that he will be thoughtless for at leas an hour, devoid of will-power by virtue of being utterly consumed by sensations of pleasure...

  Laurence was so preoccupied with this question that she had no consciousness of the heroism and sublimity of the sacrifice she had just resolved to make.