Tales of the Shadowmen 1: The Modern Babylon

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

  Oh how grand, thought Françoise. At least, I will be able to slip out from there and proceed home.

  She followed the driver’s arm toward the curtains and slipped behind them. The placard to the side announced the show as Exquisite Corpse by Guy L’Lampern, Artiste.

  Fascinax choked out the words, “Again… har-der.”

  Scott hit him again. Nothing. Fascinax still wasn’t breathing. The Doctor choked out the last of his air, “Hit me you spineless…!”

  Whack! Scott increased the force of his blow. On a lesser man, it would have broken his jaw, but Fascinax wasn’t responding! Scott reared back and hit Fascinax again! And again! And again, building his rage, as killing blows rained down on the Doctor. Scott didn’t know how much more of this he could take, much less Fascinax. Whack!

  Suddenly, Fascinax’s hand shot up at supernatural speed and halted Scott’s fist in mid-air. Steel-like sinews gripped the detective’s and sent burning agony through his muscles. “That will be quite enough, Detective Scott. I am back.”

  “Thank goodness,” said the detective, nursing his hand, “and thank goodness, I was able to overcome your paralysis. I do however, take offense at your commentary.”

  “But I am alive because of it. I do apologize, Scott, a side-effect of being linked to that thing,” uttered the now-breathing Fascinax. It was a statement of fact, said with such finality that Scott was confused.

  “Numa Pergyll is gone.”

  Fascinax could see the puzzlement on Detective Scott’s face. “Numa is dead to be sure, but there’s no residual energy in his body. This is a shell. Numa’s mind is… elsewhere. It was taken out of his body.”

  Scott couldn’t believe what he was hearing, even though he had no doubts that Fascinax was telling the truth. The Doctor was too far exhausted to have undergone anything other than the most hellish of experiences.

  “Transferred? But where could someone transfer a mind? There must be a clue around here somewhere.” Scott began canvassing the room.

  Fascinax hung his head in exhaustion. Using his body to its full capacity took everything from him. But he had to recover, and quickly. If Numa had developed the ability to transfer his energy, then he could be unstoppable. He turned and saw Scott padding over to the painting, ripping the canvas off the work. There, in oil paint, was a surrealistic nightmare self-portrait of Numa, screaming in agony.

  No, it wasn’t agony.

  It was rage.

  “Scott, don’t look!” but Fascinax knew it was already too late. Numa had him.

  Scott’s blood ran cold. He “felt” like he was drowning, and couldn’t find any air. Yet, there he was, standing in that artist’s loft. He had taken a look at the painting–its colors and textures and design. Odd, geometric, hardly realistic and yet, compelling. Compelling–that was an apt description. There was something compelling about it; something that drew him in. And when the words suddenly came out of his mouth, he knew he could do nothing to stop them. He could only listen and know he was doomed.

  Fascinax crouched on the floor as the body that was once Detective Scott, but was now in Numa Pergyll’s thrall, held the pistol up to its head.

  “Greetings, mighty Fascinax! How does it feel to have a pistol drawn to your head, knowing that your greatest enemy has declared checkmate?”

  Fascinax instantly surmised that the painting had been for him, and not Scott. It had been “instructed” to mesmerize him and give him a message from Numa Pergyll.

  “It must be quite daunting to realize that you have somehow lost. I imagine your superior brain is wondering how I did it. The truth is if you hadn’t destroyed my complex in Paris, I wouldn’t have explored my psyche to the extent I needed to cure myself. You have but yourself to blame for your loss tonight.”

  A wicked laugh escaped Scott’s lips as his eyes began to bleed.

  Cure himself? Fascinax concentrated on every word, fighting back his own rage.

  “Though you will never get to see it, I have had a cancerous tumor in my skull. A tumor, which doctors around the world have said was inoperable. A tumor, I later discovered, that endowed me with all of my superior intellect and mental ability. It is a conduit for all areas of my brain, allowing them to work in complete concert. I determined to defeat this irony one way or another. Radical surgery was one option, but that would have left me ‘normal,’ and I, and my organization, are anything but normal. Therefore, after the Paris debacle, I turned inward and unleashed my creativity.”

  Fascinax tried to increase his adrenaline flow and force his lungs to process more oxygen into his bloodstream. He tried to focus on the gun. If he could just get that pistol away…

  Scott gyrated as he fought, with every ounce of his being, the demon inside his skull. Pulling the strings and watching him dance. Blood streamed down his cheeks and was matched by rivulets from his ears.

  “I would say goodbye now, Fascinax, but I have your funeral to attend. I told you I would leave you with an exquisite corpse–your own.”

  Fascinax moved as Scott’s hand tightened on the trigger, but the bullet tore through Scott’s skull and streamed grey matter across the white plaster walls before Fascinax could reach him. The detective hit the floor, and Fascinax could already hear the Bobbies rushing upstairs. He grabbed the painting and tore it to pieces.

  And then, he saw the signature at the bottom of the canvas.

  “Who is the artist?” asked Françoise of her escort as they walked past the curtains.

  “One moment, madam, as I must turn up the lights,” replied the servant. As the soft glow of the gas lamps rose, Françoise saw the menagerie of artwork before her. A multitude of paintings placed randomly about the room. In the center was a circle, supposedly where one stood to see the panoply of work. Françoise gazed at the variety of color around her as she moved into the circle.

  Then, just as she reached the nexus of the exhibit, she could see them all. Each painting was a little story of its own, but all a part of the greater tale to be told. She was immediately entranced, drawn in by the textures and the color. The surrealists were not usually her artistic ideal, but these paintings…

  “Oh, this is quite lovely,” she gasped as her eyes darted this way and that. “It’s a tale isn’t it? Like the newspaper strips?”

  “Oh no, madam,” murmured the driver, “this is something far greater than that. My master says it speaks to you. He is a new artiste of the surrealists. I am pleased to present the life’s work of Mr. Guy L’lampern!”

  And then, Françoise watched as the walls themselves began to move around her. She could see it now, each wall was held by a car rolling on a track around the room. As the paintings moved she stood in rapt attention.

  “Oh, I see. This is like a kinescope! This will be fun!”

  As the walls picked up speed…

  Fascinax struggled against his manacles as Bobbies tore plaster away from the wall revealing more bodies. Some could barely keep their dinner down as they looked at the bloated, pustuled skins of the victims. Each one was tortured without mercy, and in specific ways. Some were bludgeoned with something dull. Others looked as if they had specific organs removed. And yet others were killed in ways too horrid to contemplate.

  Fascinax was dressed in his clothes, which he had managed to drag on before the officers broke the door in. He had to get out of here!

  “Please! If you will call the Home Office, they will explain!” he cried.

  “Home Office! No, we’re going straight to the Yard, we are,” replied the slough-eyed officer. Fascinax knew they had already made up their minds about him. He couldn’t afford to waste any more time. He concentrated on his hands, compressed the muscles and tendons and slipped off the manacles. He launched one of the officers away with all his remaining energy and raced for the window.

  He crashed through the cheap glass and flew into the night. As he fell toward the ground, he tightened his muscles just so, reached out for the gas lamppost and swung around to t
he street. He raced down the cobblestones and disappeared into the night as whistles broke the silence.

  Françoise eyes grew heavy as the whirling paintings indeed formed a kinescope in front of her. This image and that flowed together forming pictures in her mind: Pictures she couldn’t turn away from. Pictures that spoke to her. Pictures of evil.

  And as the images floated about, coming off their canvases, they became part of her. Each picture one speck in a huge collage. A collage of pain and suffering; of genius and madness; pleasure and perversion.

  Françoise felt the story these paintings were telling. Experienced the images that assaulted her mind, infiltrating her very being and nesting within the electrochemical bonds of her memory. Tears flowed out of her eyes as she tried to turn away, but couldn’t. In her mind, she pictured herself doing the very things that the pictures depicted–rape, torture, murder, death, destruction, manipulation.

  She saw her father, no, not her father, but someone she recognized as a father beating her repeatedly. She felt the headaches in the back of her skull. She heard the words of the physicians as they told her that it was an inoperable brain tumor. She heard that it would only get worse, and indeed they were right.

  She saw the lifetime of potions and addictions to subvert the pain. She saw the quacks and the treatments and the explorations of the mind and the body brought to her by the ever-faithful Franz Krypfer, her servant. And then she saw the first time she had sex (for it could never be called “making love”), when she raped the head of a crime family in front of his wife for refusing to obey her wishes. She beat the man with a baton. Then she raped the wife with it. In the last moments of their lives, she wallowed in their blood, painting her naked body with the slick fluids. She was 16.

  And after that moment of revengeful horror, she saw her only relief from the slicing pain in her skull being the infliction of that pain on others. Thus began an unending darkness of pain and misery that haunted her thoughts.

  No, not her thoughts, not quite yet…

  Because slowly, methodically, as her mind was being raped by the images, she knew that her George, her Fascinax would somehow avenge her. Nothing would ever come between them.

  And as her eyes shed their last soulful tear, she blinked; and those orbs of crystal blue turned green.

  Françoise de la Cruz, daughter of Ricardo and Lita, lover of Fascinax was gone.

  He rounded the corner, and Fascinax saw the blaze of orange engulfing the building. The fire brigade was already there hosing down the structure. Dozens of patrons watched as the gallery was consumed by the inferno.

  Fascinax ran through the crowd, trying to find Françoise, disregarding the fact that the sensory barrage about him assaulted his mind. He shouted her name, but none could hear over the roar of the flames. He pushed aside the crowd and began a frenzied search, tearing further toward the flames. Faces blurred together. It was if he were blind. Colors/scents/sounds/tastes/emotions washed over him. Like daggers of steel, they ripped him asunder. It was too much.

  And the superman the tabloids had dubbed “Fascinax” fell to his knees and cried.

  Far down the street, Numa Pergyll watched through the curtains of her limousine. Her green eyes felt the pain and suffering of the young Doctor who tore through the crowd behind her, and it was the sweetest honey she had ever tasted.

  “Franz?”

  “Yes, Master–forgive me, Mistress?” the driver offered, unfamiliar with the tones, if not the manner, in which he was addressed.

  “We shall call a meeting of all my lieutenants. We shall meet in Germany. There is much work to do there, and I want them all to know that there is a new head of the organization.”

  Numa smiled for the first time in a long time as Franz Krypfer drove them out into the London darkness.

  Epilogue: Germany, 1934

  Adolph Hitler began a Top Secret program to selectively breed a pure Aryan superman–Der Ubermensch. Heading the project for the Fuhrer was a mysterious, unidentified green-eyed woman. The project was abandoned after the debacle of Aryan athletes losing to black runner Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympic Games. The green-eyed woman has never resurfaced.

  Terrance Dicks is not only the man who masterminded Doctor Who for years, but he is also a huge fan of detective fiction, a genre which he has ably essayed with his own young adult series, The Baker Street Irregulars. In this story, Terrance has brought together two of his idols, Maigret, a character whom, at one time, he tried to produce for the BBC, and G-man Lemmy Caution, who seems forever incarnated by expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine, and asked himself what happened…

  Terrance Dicks: When Lemmy Met Jules

  Paris, 1951

  So I am kickin’ my heels on temporary assignment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, chasing some guys who been selling oil-wells with no oil in ’em to some mugs in New York with more dollars than brains when the Agent-in-Charge sends for me.

  “Lemmy, you’re off the hook. We gotta tip your old friend Willie-the Goof Santana cleared half-a-million on the Zelda Van Huyten kidnap and took off for foreign parts with the loot.”

  “Did they get the girl back?”

  “Yeah. Dead. Willie don’t like witnesses.”

  Just to put you guys are in the picture, this Willie-the Goof is a small-time hood from Chi. His gimmick is he looks and acts like a sap, not to mention he looks like Mickey Mouse’s sidekick. He looks like a clown but Willie’s mean as they come. He’s a quick-draw artist too. Last time we meet he puts a slug in me before I could unsling my rod… Lucky for me, Willie is a vain kinda guy and packs a .22 so as not to spoil the set of his suit. I have time to break his jaw before I keel over.

  I say, “Willie’s going up in the world. Holding up Mom-and-Pop grocery stores used to be his limit.”

  The boss shrugged. “So he branched out and got lucky. Anyway, the Director wants you should go and bring him back before he spends all the Van Huyten spondulicks.”

  “Do we know where he’s at?”

  “He’s gone where all good Americans go when they die–Paris, France! Since you been there before on a couple of jobs, not to mention you and Willie are old buddies, you’re a natural for the assignment.”

  So I shake off the dust of Tulsa–believe me, they got plenty of dust in Tulsa–and head for Gay Paree…

  When I arrive, I report to the main cop joint on the Quai des Orfèvres and show my credentials to the Chief. He says in the interest of Anglo-American relations, he’ll assign me one of their top guys to help. He goes off for a minute and comes back with this big, sleepy-looking pipe-smoking guy, who looks more like some hick farmer than a cop. To be honest with you mugs, I’m wondering just how much use he’s gonna be. He looks half-asleep, dead on his feet.

  The pipe-smoking guy tells he is currently tied up having a little chat with some poor mug who took a knife to some dame who gave him the air. This chat has been going on for 18 hours, and he reckons the guy will crack in another three, tops, after which he personally will be going home to catch a few z’s. He suggests we meet for a drink later that night.

  I say this is fine by me as I am a guy that will take a drink anytime and Willie is the sorta louse who won’t show himself in daylight anyway…

  They sat at a corner table in a Montmartre nightclub called Picratt’s. Two big men, one considerably older and heavier than the other. There was a bottle of champagne on the table, but it was only for show. The older man sipped a glass of cool white wine from the Loire and placidly smoked a pipe. The younger, a broad-shouldered tough-looking type with a pleasantly ugly face, drank Bourbon and smoked cigarettes from a pack of Lucky Strikes on the table before him.

  The little nightclub was crowded, the air full of the buzz of excited chatter and the drifting fumes of Gauloise. On the tiny stage, a plump young girl removed a spangled G-string, the last of her clothes, posed awkwardly for a moment in the spotlight, then disappeared through the door behind her, to a scattering of desultory applause.

>   Immediately, another girl took her place.

  The younger man gazed at her with approval. “Back home, girls get arrested for an act like that.”

  His French was fluent and idiomatic, though with a broad American accent.

  The other raised his eyebrows. “C’est vrai? I understood le striptease was originally an American invention.”

  “Maybe so. With us, there’s always more tease than strip! Swell joint this, Jules.”

  “You asked to see one of our typical Parisian boites. A place where American tourists might come.”

  The other looked around. “Don’t see any.”

  “It’s early yet. The boss of this place bribes taxi-drivers and the doormen of other clubs to hand out cards to departing clients… ‘Finish the night at Picratt’s, the hottest spot in Paris.’ ”

  “And is it?”

  The French detective shrugged. “The place pretends to be very wicked but it is harmless enough really. That’s Fred Alfonsi, the Proprietor.” He nodded towards a short, thick-set man in evening dress standing close to the stage. “One of his girls was murdered a while ago. A messy business, one of my young inspectors was in love with her. Fred was a suspect for a while, turned out to be innocent–well, innocent of the murder. He’s a rogue, but likeable in his way. Somehow we became almost friends.”

  The younger man nodded. “I noticed we weren’t being hustled any.”

  In between doing their acts, girls were circulating amongst the tables and booths, blandishing the customers into buying them champagne. Always champagne– if you believed the label. They made no attempt to approach the corner table, though several nodded and smiled at the pipe-smoker and stared appreciatively at his companion.