Giraud began to feel lightheaded. “Something…? No, no, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Come on, you don’t know what you’re saying. We need to get you to a hosp...”
The Nyctalope’s hand was suddenly at his throat. “That man said you knew I would be here tonight,” he whispered. “If that’s true, then you must know what I came for. Where is it?”
Giraud reached into his pocket and produced the locket. Saint-Clair released him and took it. He gazed at it for a moment, then dropped it into his coat. He turned and walked toward the door.
“You did do it,” Giraud said, his voice shaking. “I didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to think that you could…You beat that man to a pulp, mutilated him, and left him for dead. What kind of a man are you?”
The Nyctalope stopped. “What kind of man are you?” he asked without turning around. “A washed up old collabo working as a lackey for a terrorist. Who are you to judge me?”
Giraud’s eyes were stinging, and his wounded ear felt as if it were on fire. “I’m nobody,” he said. “A washed up old collabo, just as you say. But I thought you were better than me. I thought you were a hero.”
Saint-Clair turned and looked into Giraud’s eyes. His features softened for a moment, and Giraud saw him as he once was; a handsome young Charlemagne, immortal, invincible.
“I thought that too,” the Nyctalope said with a sad smile. “I suppose we were both wrong.”
A moment later, Giraud was alone with the dead men.
What do I do now? he wondered.
I will tell you, Giraud, Poirot said. You thank the good God that you are alive, and you leave this place before you find yourself answering some very awkward questions.
Giraud took his advice.
Removing the bullet is difficult and painful, but he manages. I have survived far worse, he tells himself, but that does not lessen the agony of each breath.
He lies on the bed in his small basement apartment, blood and sweat soaking through the bandages. There are no lights in that cool darkness, but he can see as clearly as if it were midday, so he keeps his eyes shut tight. Helped along by a generous amount of inexpensive liquor, he topples into a restless, fitful sleep.
The pain follows him into his slumber, and yet, in spite of this, there are times in the night when he smiles.
For in his sleep, he dreams.
And in dreams, they love him still.
Afterword
Further Considerations on the
Life and Times of the Nyctalope
L’Assassinat du Nyctalope [The Assassination of the Nyctalope], translated here as Enter the Nyctalope, was Jean de La Hire’s eleventh novel to feature his signature hero, Leo Saint-Clair, a.k.a. The Nyctalope.
The Nyctalope had made his first appearance in Le Mystère des XV (translated as The Nyctalope on Mars, ISBN 978-1-934543-46-7) (1911). La Hire initially intended the book to be a straightforward science fiction story taking place in the “future,” i.e.: the 1930s, but, perhaps bowing to editorial pressure, he changed his mind in mid-stream and firmly relocated the narrative in the present.
That had the effect of pushing back in time by 25 years the previous novel in the saga, L’Homme qui peut vivre dans l’eau [The Man Who Could Live Underwater] (1909), which had featured the Nyctalope’s father, Jean Saint(e)-Clair(e). Thus, in one stroke of the pen, Leo’s fictional birthdate had become 1877, instead of the late 1890s.
In the Black Coat Press edition of The Nyctalope vs. Lucifer (ISBN 978-1-932983-98-2), we offered a biography and timeline of the Nyctalope’s adventures, while noting that there were other works by Jean de La Hire, whose connections to Leo’s life remained to be investigated.
Thanks to the research of French scholar Emmanuel Gorlier, we are now able to add several more books to the list. First of these is Le Corsaire Sous-Marin [The Underwater Corsair], serialized by Ferenczi in 1912-13, then again in 1936-37.
In 1912, Léo de Malterre, a.k.a. The Black Corsair, steals a prototype submarine of revolutionary design from the French Navy, then declares war upon society. To further his anarchistic designs, de Malterre assembles a vast, criminal organization. Eventually, an armistice of sorts is reached with de Malterre and all his men are pardoned. The short story Black and Gold by Gorlier in this volume references these events.
Leo makes an appearance in issue No. 36 of the serial, when he comes to reclaim the body of his friend, Roger Ciserat. He also finds the so-called “scientific testament” of the great scientist Korridès, which Ciserat had somehow obtained. Leo then goes on to give Korridès’ scientific secrets to the French Government.
After World War I, the Nyctalope returned in the aforementioned The Nyctalope vs. Lucifer (1921). One might be tempted to see this book as a “reboot” of the series, but later, in La Captive du Démon [The Captive of the Demon] (1927), when Sylvie MacDhul first meets Leo, she recognizes him as “the hero behind the exploration of planet Mars” and the man “who defeated the monster known as Lucifer,” thereby firmly keeping the earlier volumes in the series.
Jean de La Hire was notoriously dismissive of his own continuity, and yet, by the time he decided to write the origins of the Nyctalope in 1933, he realized that his character was a somewhat unlikely 56 year-old hero in an unaging 40 year-old body.
Therefore, in Enter the Nyctalope, La Hire decided to move Leo’s life-story forward in time by 15 years, stating that he was 20 in 1912, meaning that he was born in 1892, not in 1877 as previously established.
Another casual dismissal of previously established continuity was that Leo’s father, who until then had been called Jean, and had been a French Navy Ensign and a diplomat, was now called Pierre and was a scientist.
To reconcile the events of Enter the Nyctalope with the books that came before it, one is forced to relocate its events to 1897, despite any topical references. It is possible to speculate that one of the unintended consequences of Doctor de Villiers-Pagan’s radical heart surgery was to extend Leo’s natural life-span, hence the necessity to enlist La Hire, Leo’s biographer, to pretend that the Nyctalope was born later than he really was in order to not attract public attention.
Strangely, as Leo is about to die, having already suffered from a night of torture (p. 149), he is said to experience a vision of “eternal life” which may be an expression of religious belief, or a precognitive experience of what the future has in store for him.
The other two works warranting inclusion in the Nyctalope’s bibliography are:
* Le Trésor dans l’Abîme [The Treasure of the Abyss], serialized in L’Echo de Paris (1906-07), reprinted in book form by Boivin in 1907, Rouff in 1922, and Tallandier, 1936). In this novel, which takes place from 1900 to 1907, John Dogg, an American millionaire, seeks to find a sunken treasure and, in order to do so, breaks the mad scientist Maur Korridès out from the asylum where he was kept. Korridès designs a deep sea diving vehicle made of heliose, a synthetic substance of his own invention. Heliose is somewhat similar to cavorite, in that it repels, or is attracted by, various natural forces. Eventually, as the two partners reach their goal, they discover that gold causes heliose to become unstable. Dogg perishes in the ensuing explosion, and Korridès is believed to have died as well. We then discover in an epilog that Korridès and his wife, Marguerite Dormach, did not perish at the end of the novel, but found refuge, under a secret identity, in America. Several years later, Korridès built a new heliose sphere and he and Marguerite went to Mars.13
* Les Chasseurs de Mystère [The Mystery Hunters], serialized in Le Matin (1932) and reprinted as two books, Les Chasseurs de Mystère and La Mort… L’Amour [Death… Love] byFayard in 1933. In this novel, which takes place in 1932, we follow the adventures of Rex Sainclair, a.k.a. The Kleptomorph, who has the power to mimic the appearance of any man he chooses. Rex is trying to prevent a second World War, but his megalomaniacal methods, such as the assembling of an advanced fleet of pirate airplanes, have turned him into a villain in the eyes
of the world. The so-called “Mystery Hunters” are a team of detectives and adventurers sent to capture him. In the end, Rex is murdered by a German agent.
Leo has a brief cameo during the course of the novel. He is actually on Mars, for reasons left unexplained (further exploration? Visiting the grave of his first wife Xaviere?) and is contacted via space radio by Jean de La Hire himself, who wants to know if Rex Sainclair is related to him. Leo denies it vehemently. Whether he is telling the truth remains unknown.
Finally, two corrections to our previous article:
We had written: “After Les Mystères de Lyon, neither Sylvie nor Pierre (either of them) ever makes a reappearance. Leo behaves as if he is single again, although he does not remarry. One is led to wonder if the couple separated, possibly because of the Nyctalope’s continued infidelities.” Le Sphinx du Maroc makes it clear that Sylvie died three years prior, i.e.: in 1931, and that Leo is a widower again.
We also noted that “L’Enfant perdu [The Lost Child] tells of an adventure that the Nyctalope and Gnô Mitang experienced during the June 1940 exodus after France was invaded by the Nazis.” The Nyctalope and his friend do witness the kidnapping of the child by gypsies in 1940, but the story really ends in 1942 when they free the boy with the help of a young gypsy girl.
Jean-Marc Lofficier
Notes
1 Both the year in which the story is supposed to take place and the first name of the Nyctalope’s father are discussed at some length in the afterword.
2 La Hire inserts a footnote here to observe that sixty kph was a very fast speed in 1912.
3 A croquignole is a small, crisp pastry or a flick of the finger administered to the nose. The noun is feminine, but its masculinization as Croquignol creates a kinship with guignol, a term applied to a grotesque glove-puppet akin to the English Punch (as in the Grand-Guignol theater).
4 What Degains actually says is “Possible que je sois Poil-de-carotte, mais je ne suis pas Poil-dans-la-main!” The wordplay is untranslatable.
5 The reference is presumably to rugby positions, although only one of the four friends (Champeau) seems to be built for the scrum and he is not present at this point; the designation is, however, used again on other occasions with no more obvious propriety.
6 The radio-wave detector invented by Edouard Branly (1844-1940) in 1890 is better known as a coherer, although Branly called it a radio-conductor. It was an integral part of the apparatus used by Marconi and other pioneers and was still in use long after 1912.
7 La Nouvelle Idole by François, Vicomte de Curel (1854-1928) was first produced in Paris in 1899, but might well have been playing in Geneva in 1912. The eponymous idol is science, of whose worship Curel did not approve at all. There does not appear to be any reason within the story for La Hire to cite it here, but he was not the sort of writer who valued aesthetic coherence—or, indeed, any other kind.
8 La Hire inserts a footnote here to remind his readers that the story is set in 1912, when automobiles were still relatively remarkable luxury items.
9 La Hire inserts a footnote here: “It is the shorthand record of this story, scribbled on the right-hand pages of a vulgar notebook, that we have been able to receive in communication, thanks to which this chronicle of the Nyctalope’s first exploits has been written. Several pages of the notebook were stained in blood.” Readers who consider it perverse of La Hire to leave the heart of his story untold in this casual fashion might feel that a footnote informing them that he has a document in his possession that would have done the job, but that he has no intention of sharing it, is adding insult to injury.
10 Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899) was the author’s last novel, and was so eagerly expected that it rapidly outsold Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Many readers were, however, bitterly disappointed—and not a few annoyed—by its harrowing indictment of human justice and exploitation, as discovered by its hero, a penitent nobleman who visits the maid he once ruined in Siberia after she is wrongly convicted of murder. It is not at all obvious how reading Resurrection could have given birth to Saint-Clair’s dreams of “saving” Aurora from the attractions of radical politics, rather than making him want to join her. The young hero of J. W. Goethe’s quasi-autobiographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) commits suicide as a consequence of unrequited love, and the novel really does seem to have encouraged some of its more impressionable readers to follow suit. Perhaps, in view of Saint-Clair’s reckless stupidity and blatant dereliction of duty in not telling his companions what they need to know—which would have allowed the entire affair to be tidied up without further ado—the latter was the book that had actually made the deeper impression on him.
11 Veronal—the best-known of the brand names under which the first barbiturate, discovered in 1903 by Emil Fischer and Joseph von Mering, was marketed—was already notorious in 1912 for causing death by what were conventionally reported as accidental overdoses.
12 This did, indeed, occur.
13 A story by Emmanuel Gorlier untangling the various mysteries associated with Korridès and his son, Hugues Mézarek, a.k.a. Belzebuth, will be published in Tales of the Shadowmen 6: Grand-Guignol (ISBN 978-1-934543-90-0) in 2010.
FRENCH MYSTERIES COLLECTION
M. Allain & P. Souvestre. The Daughter of Fantômas
A. Anicet-Bourgeois, Lucien Dabril. Rocambole
Guy d’Armen. Doc Ardan and The City of Gold and Lepers
A. Bernède. Belphegor
A. Bernède. Judex (w/Louis Feuillade)
A. Bernède. The Return of Judex (w/Louis Feuillade)
A. Bisson & G. Livet. Nick Carter vs. Fantômas
V. Darlay & H. de Gorsse. Lupin vs. Holmes: The Stage Play
Paul Feval. Gentlemen of the Night
Paul Feval. John Devil
Paul Feval. ’Salem Street
Paul Feval. The Invisible Weapon
Paul Feval. The Parisian Jungle
Paul Feval. The Companions of the Treasure
Paul Feval. Heart of Steel
Paul Feval. The Cadet Gang
Paul Feval. The Sword-Swallower
Emile Gaboriau. Monsieur Lecoq
Goron & Gautier. Spawn of the Penitentiary
Jean de La Hire. Enter the Nyctalope
Jean de La Hire. The Nyctalope on Mars
Jean de La Hire. The Nyctalope vs Lucifer
Jean de La Hire. The Nyctalope Steps In
Jean de La Hire. Night of the Nyctalope
Maurice Leblanc. Arsène Lupin vs. Countess Cagliostro
Maurice Leblanc. The Blonde Phantom
Maurice Leblanc. The Hollow Needle
Maurice Leblanc. The Many Faces of Arsène Lupin
Gaston Leroux. Chéri-Bibi
Gaston Leroux. The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux. Rouletabille & the Mystery of the Yellow Room
Gaston Leroux. Rouletabille at Krupp’s
Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. Tales of the Shadowmen 1
Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. Tales of the Shadowmen 2
Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. Tales of the Shadowmen 3
Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. Tales of the Shadowmen 4
Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. Tales of the Shadowmen 5
Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. Tales of the Shadowmen 6
Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. Tales of the Shadowmen 7
Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. Tales of the Shadowmen 8
Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier. Tales of the Shadowmen 9
Frank J. Morlock. Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper
P.-A. Ponson du Terrail. Rocambole
Antonin Reschal. The Adventures of Miss Boston
P. de Wattyne & Y. Walter. Sherlock Holmes vs. Fantômas
David White. Fantômas in America
Enter the Nyctalope: English adaptation Copyright 2009 by Brian Stableford.
Black and Gold: Copyright 2009 by Emmanuel Gorlier.
Marguerite: Copyright 2006 by Jean-Marc Lofficier.
The Heart of a Man: Copyright 2009 by Roman Leary.
Afterword: Copyright 2009 by Jean-Marc Lofficier.
Cover illustration Copyright 2009 by Denis Rodier.
Visit our website at www.blackcoatpress.com
ISBN 978-1-934543-99-3. First Printing. July 2009. Published by Black Coat Press, an imprint of Hollywood Comics.com, LLC, P.O. Box 17270, Encino, CA 91416. All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The stories and characters depicted in this novel are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.
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