Devil's Score: A Tale of decadent omen….

by Edouard Jourdan

- Come on, ma'am!

  - The one we are looking for is Johan Bansberg, sir. The other bowed, without expression.

  They went out of company.

  The cold was increasing, but the night was lit up with torches that spread a blaze of furnace. By bad luck, only one side of the scrum had been lit, and that was the one Katarina had already traveled.

  - The projector will illuminate the other! said an engineer.

  The doctor seized a lantern, and, skirting the black and disorderly mass where the torches stirred light and shadows; they began their exploration by the tail of the buffered convoy.

  The first emergency train arrived on a side lane, with a cautious slowness.

  The last cars had suffered little. They were passable - and empty. But the dark chaos that ensued gave the researchers the most discouraging spectacle. They were only twists, cuts, tears, splinters, lint and shreds.

  - There! There! Katarina gasped.

  The lantern brought to light a piece of squared cloth.

  - Looks like his jacket ..., a piece of his jacket ...

  She pulled: a pocket appeared. She searched: a handkerchief came.

  - J. B. His initials! It's him. Oh! Sir! Oh! ...

  From her little hands, gloved with suede, she seized the boards bristling with splinters, so abruptly that she hung the lantern, which fell and went out.

  "I do not have my lighter," the doctor complained.

  "You'll come back later," she said. Let's not waste our time…

  The piece of cloth was all that detected the presence of a buried body. Johan's pocket protruded from a pile of battens and battens that had to be the ceiling of a car. Katarina and her help set out to free the buried man.

  They worked in the darkness. The man was robust.

  "Let me do it," he said. I think all that will give in one piece ...

  He braced himself. A crackling occurred, and, as if this cracking had been fastened to a mysterious mechanism, at the same moment a dazzling light, a sudden ray of sun illuminated things. The searchlight of the emergency train was working, pointed at them.

  Katarina had retreated.

  Unmasked by the clearing, emerged from the rubble, immobile and standing, a ghost, who was not Johan, stared at her cadaverous eyes. His costume was blindingly white. His red hair combed him with fiery crimps. His green eyes, veiled by death, enshrined in the white marble of his face two extinct emeralds. His little goatee beard, his mustache, and his raised eyebrows gave him a devilish air. He was straight like an I. Amethysts shone on the rings of his hands. And he spread his arms, as if to forbid us to touch the companion he was covering.

  What companion? Johan, this time.

  As soon as the emergency train arrived, a troop of stretcher-bearers and workers had passed the road. We called them. The corpse of the unknown was carried away. And first of all, it was thought that there was only to treat Johan in the same way.

  He too had remained standing but sagging. His right thigh was at a worrying angle. Supported by the armpit with some hardware, his arms twisted and his head oddly upset, he seemed to be engaged in a dislocation of a snake-man. Her eyelids were closed and her blood was streaming.

  - Slowly! Slowly! recommended the doctor to those who handled the poor body.

  Katarina, more dead than alive, hardly dared to touch it. Everything crumbled for her in desperate consternation.

  We had laid Johan on a stretcher.

  "He lives, Madame," said the doctor.

  Katarina knelt. She came back to the surface of herself.

  - What to do? ... she stammered.

  His huge eyes, flooded with light, showed that they were blue and haggard.

  But the projector turned. The doctor, squatting in the chiaroscuro, felt the wound with all sorts of care. Red with blood from head to foot, the unfortunate Johan breathed as one snores, with little precipitous breaths that rolled up his nostrils. His two arms and his right leg were playing in all directions. Behind the left ear was a hideous recess where the black hair was wet like a sponge.

  His kepi thrown back, the doctor frowned.

  "He should be taken immediately," he said.

  - I have my car there.

  - God be praised! Let's hurry. Hop! Two porters! ... It's all about a man's life!

  The doctor took the head of the little procession. Katarina followed the stretcher like a hearse. She staggered ...

  But, suddenly, she stiffened in the terror of a hallucination.

  She was not alone in following the stretcher. The unknown dead followed her too. She saw him slip silently backwards, standing between her and her husband in the supreme immobility of her first appearance, rigid and with open arms, as if to make it plain that Johan belonged to her. Only the dead man had lost his brilliant whiteness. It was a black form that stood between Johan and Katarina at this time.

  She made an effort of her whole being, and gathered her minds. Hurrying pace, horrified by a fearful fright, and risking the contact of an unimaginable substance, she held out a hand to the dead.

  2 – MIRACLE DOCTOR

  She had to stop abruptly so as not to hit the man carrying the back of the stretcher.

  The apparition had maintained its distance. She had retreated according to the advance of Katarina, through the man, through the stretcher; and she was standing farther on, a dark specter whose contours were edged with a thin blaze.

  A ghost! A real specter in real life!

  In spite of her despair as a loving wife, Katarina was seized with regret at not being able to go to the hall of the dead, to inquire about the unknown traveler and to know what was this strange corpse that could split in white and black.

  This young woman had read many novels, and saw many films; the education of the soap opera and the cinema had jaded her on a thousand and one points; the narrative and the spectacle of impossible events had prepared her not to be astonished at the most implausible phenomenon. All the same, her terror was not without stupefaction, and the doctor's voice drew her from a kind of torpor, close to fainting.

  The spectrum had dissipated; she did not know how. We were in front of the station, among cars.

  - Where is the car? asked the doctor.

  - There she is…

  The ceiling light of the limo gave its raw clarity. Somehow a bunk was improvised, and Johan lay there.

  The doctor, anxious, pulled his kit and gave a hypodermic injection to the patient's forearm.

  What seeing, Katarina says to him:

  "Doctor, will you render me a service of which I will be grateful to you all my life? Join us in Paris ... I'm so scared of the trip! ... My poor husband seems so low, so low ... As long as he has a syncope...

  "It will be better, indeed. Let's go ...

  - In Paris, Victor!

  The skeletal trees were already passing.

  "Besides," continued the doctor, "I live in Paris, and I have nothing to do in Saint Maur that night.

  Sitting on a folding seat, he watched his patient.

  Katarina, in the back of the car, was resting her tiredness with soft cushion. She could not take it anymore. Her beautiful, abandoned head flipped over.

  - Where are we going? said the Major after a moment.

  - But ... at home, Rue Lesueur ...

  - This is not possible. You have to take your husband to a clinic, to a first-rate practitioner. Do you have a preference?

  - A preference? ...

  At that time, a name dominated surgery as that of Foch had dominated the war. Dr. Petiot was the ace of surgery. His celebrity spread all over the globe. Everyone knew the life of this brilliant Frenchman, revealed to the admiration of the world by his triumphant struggle against the most frightful ravages of murderous machines, and since then, continuing on Rue Galilée, in his clinic, the marvelous prowess which had earned him every day more honors and more recognition.

  If she could, Katarina would have mobilized God himself to heal Johan. In the absence of this illustration
, she chose Petiot, who was more within reach and represented on earth what was best in the required genre.

  "Either," said the doctor with an ambiguous grimace. A genius like Petiot will not be too much.

  He said that in such a bitter tone that Katarina worried:

  - Do you ... do not trust him, doctor? The other raised his shoulders:

  - I do not want to take away your illusions. I consider Petiot as a conjurer of the scalpel. But there is in his case a side that displeases me. This fame ... is not correct, that. And then, and then ...

  He shook his head, with a knowing air.

  - And then what?

  - I would not want to discourage you. But finally, ... These tricks, these operations of sleight-of-hand, it's very good ... But I heard about experiences ..., daring ... I also heard other rumors less flattering.

  Alas! Jealousy would have liked to be incarnated, that she would have chosen no other face than that of this sad physician-major, scowling with failure and yellow with envy!

  Katarina noticed it, but asked no less:

  - What experiences? What audacity? What rumors?

  "This is not the time to see the bad side of things," said the accursed major. The future will tell whether Petiot's surgery is a stage of progress or a dead end.

  - But, see, did not Dr. Petiot get any unexpected results? Has not he made a specialty of operations to the head?

  - Yes, Madam, and I recognize that from this point of view you could choose worse. However, …

  Because, obviously, unless internal lesions (that I could not diagnose), it is especially the fracture of the occipital which endangers the life of Mr. Bansberg.

  Katarina shook her heart with both hands. She choked, and looked at Johan as if she had looked at his tomb.

  To say that this bleeding victim was his beloved, his all, his great man. His little man!

  The appearance of the wounded was horrible. The doctor turned the dome light switch.

  - Do not look, ma'am. Rest. You will need all your nervous potential these days. Fear nothing: I hold Mr. Bansberg's wrist; if the pulse faltered, I would act on the spot.

  In the purring of the car, Katarina reflected. She was now hesitant to lead Johan to Petiot's house. But the great voice of fame soon covered the vague and tendentious objections of the doctor-major. And when the car entered Paris, she said to Victor:

  - Rue Galilée!

  It was quickly there, the tracks, at this hour, being free.

  The clinic, white palace, lit up.

  As soon as Johan was placed on a rolling table, the doctor-major took leave of Katarina, leaving him his card and words of hope which made him rise somewhat in the esteem of the young woman.

  The night intern, dressed in a pristine blouse, said:

  - We just phoned Dr Petiot. The master will be there in a moment.

  This sentence was for Katarina a balm of infinite sweetness. Professor, Doctor, this spiral of titles intoxicated him, in a way. She had dreaded so much fear that this prince of science was absent, or that he consented to see Johan only the next day! He was there! He was coming! Him! How she loved to be in Paris and to be so helpful, being so learned!

  A nurse introduced Katarina into an elegant and simple hall which, by dint of whiteness, seemed carved into an ice floe.

  The nurse, no less arctic, explained that Johan had been placed in an examination room, and inquired about Mrs. Bansberg's needs.

  On this we heard the muffled buzz of an engine; fast steps approached the vestibule; and Petiot, the master of the hour, appeared before Katarina.

  He was tall, slender, athletic, with an athlete's torso and a strangely pure and cold statue face.

  Without prior politeness, with as much compassion as sharpness, he asked what kind of accident was, asked questions in a hurry, concise, ingenious, and, familiarly, called Katarina "little Madame."

  In doing so, he had taken off his jacket, laid bare his muscular arms and passed the sleeveless blouse that another nurse presented to him almost liturgically.

  As he was leaving, a clock struck five o'clock. The night was still absolute.

  A butler placed a half-bottle of champagne on a pedestal table.

  Katarina, left alone, drank a glass of champagne, according as Petiot, it seems, prescribed it to her. She sat down in a tub of white morocco, with an almost cuddly hospitality. And the silence that surrounded him seemed formidable to him.

  What were we going to teach him just now? Somewhere in the depths of this snowy temple, one of the priests of the mind, bent over gaping wounds, like the diviners of antiquity, read there like them the future. Just now this white door would open on the harbinger of future times, the herald of life or death ...

  Ah! This door! She could not take her eyes off. The dazzling leaf made for her like a space that sank indefinitely ...

  And suddenly, at the very threshold of the door, rising with precision on the light background, a dark form rose, arms outstretched, in an inflexible and severe attitude.

  The ghost of the catastrophe haunted solitude. He was there.

  It was not an illusion, a mirage, but a real shadow, hemmed with a stroke of flame - a being finally, materially out of the mystery. He lacked only movement and speech. But what movement would have been more significant than this motionless gesture, and what word would have expressed this will more clearly: "We do not pass! "

  Katarina got up quickly. Anxiety was pinching icicles on his palms.

  But the door opened then. Instead of the black ghost, the white superman advanced.

  He attributed Mrs. Bansberg's confusion to the understandable nervousness of the wait, and tried to restore her confidence.

  "Little Madame," said he, "all is not lost. Far from it. But we have multiple fractures, including the right leg, arms, head (I forgive you technical terms). We will undergo in a few minutes a first operation, and tomorrow morning another, of which everything will depend.

  - Are there internal injuries? Katarina stammered.

  - No, and the broken skull is the only thing that worries me. I must say, however, that I am hopeful, and that I regard the wounded as saved, if we have no cerebral hemorrhage before twenty-four hours.

  The herald brought neither life nor death, but he brought hope; and that was enough for Katarina to bless him, this pioneer of knowledge, the man in advance, the man of tomorrow living today!

  He added:

  - Do you want a room here?

  She almost happily accepted. She felt light, as if the density of her flesh had diminished. For the first time, she thought of looking at herself.

  Her dress and her furs were ragged; his skinned shoes reminded him of his trampling in the middle of the debris. An ice-cream showed her weary beauty, pale, soiled with grease, dust and blood.

  Johan was already transported to an operating room. She could only see him in the afternoon. Katarina therefore resolved to go and tranquillize her people, wash her clothes and change her costume, then return to the clinic with all the necessary equipment to stay there for some time.

  The day was born.

  During the journey from Rue Galilée to LesueurStreet, the idea of​​the ghost obsessed Mrs. Bansberg's curiosity.

  Now that we could see clearly, now that hope was singing in her and the reaction was relaxing her nerves, this ghost was losing much of its consistency. She blamed herself for not looking behind her during her two appearances. This human spot, this dark larva may have been just someone's shadow. Did she know what she was doing tonight? Had she kept control of her senses? ...

  But the features of the corpse had been engraved in his memory. The Mephisto of Saint Maur, would she live a hundred years, would continue her reverie like certain characters of novel, theater or cinema.

  And such was Katarina's humor that, half serious and half joking, she named the ghost of a melodramatic name, and named it Mephistopheles!

  O power of youth, hope, dawn and champagne! She found herself smiling on
arriving at Rue Lesueur.

  She was received there by her three servants: Alexander, Esther his wife and Cécile the heavy cook.

  They had been watching all night.

  Drawing on their devotion for extra comfort, Katarina made the situation overly optimistic, and, refusing any service, sent them to a refreshing sleep. What they did eagerly.

  Katarina crossed the dining room.

  Prepared for Johan's return, supper was still up. The flowers, the two cutleries, had a demoralizing effect; and the deserted dwelling, in the light of a dull day, assumed an unexpected appearance that was not frolicsome.