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

by Edouard Jourdan

  The stage rose at the end of the place, and Johan, while he was leading, turned his back on the public, a circumstance which very happily facilitated the conduct of Katarina in the event we are going to know.

  The small orchestra, under the direction of Johan, performed the “Danse Macabre”, and the melody evoked, not without hiccups, the hope that the study of darkness had aroused in her ...

  Katarina sat close to her, her eyes at the height of her flower basket. The little girl carried this basket with both hands, and her left hand held a letter, of which Katarina, without moving, could read the address.

  This letter was addressed to "Mr. Johan Bansberg", without further indication.

  With an inconceivable rapidity, Katarina made a sign to the girl, handed him a twenty-franc note, seized the letter, drew the child and whispered to him:

  "Be quiet, I will give this letter to his address.

  Who was amazed? It was the flower girl. She wanted to resume her letter, but Katarina had retracted it.

  - I tell you it will be postponed! Hush! And, finger on the mouth, she was severe:

  - Who gave you this letter?

  - I do not know, Madam, I swear! Give it back to me ... At least, give it to the gentleman without it being seen, as recommended to me ...

  - Who recommended you that?

  - A man I do not know, ma'am.

  - How was he dressed?

  - Like everyone, Madam. I do not know who it is.

  She seemed to be telling the truth. Katarina, who was holding her, let her go.

  We applauded. The music had, of its magnitude, covered the dialogue. Johan turned around. His wife smiled at him. The flower girl, placid, perhaps cynical, offered a stall in stalls her lean and red roses.

  When she left with a glance of complicity for Katarina, and during the first steps of the afternoon Prelude of a fauna, the letter reappeared in the light.

  The writing of the envelope awakened in Katarina no remembrance. She opened.

  A terse, anonymous note bore these words:

  "The TENS rule. They want blood. Obey. Record your acts with their blood. Do not forget the SCARLET BANNER. "

  Katarina felt her brain beating like her heart. Since the disaster of Saint Maur, the weather behind it was growing longer and more like a space full of night. An empurpled flash had cast a dramatic light on it; after which, I do not know what dreadful dawn persisted, which showed, in the shade, sketches even more frightful than the primitive night.

  So, the worst assumptions came true! The meaning of the signs was confirmed, the language of the knives became clear! Johan was summoned to shed blood! ... whose blood? And by whom summoned? Who were these people of prey? How did they take on Johan such an ascendancy? What had he done to fall under their thumb? Ah! the unfortunate! the poor beloved! What damnation his own! ...

  Ten. They were ten. Was this an indication? Alas! Paris is not Venice, and the twentieth century has nothing to do with the most suspicious era of the Serene Republic. The Council of Ten had no more than the value of a historical fact, however terrible enough to give the thrill through time. No doubt the author of the mysterious note had played this unquenchable terror, by lending to his style this absolute, tyrannical, omnipotent trick ...

  Ten, The Scarlet Banner. The secret association consisted of ten members. And among them, "Demonoplasm"? Among them, the one who stuck the knives, the one who stole the jewels, the one who restored them?

  The writing of the ticket was not the same as the writing of the two cards found in the jewelry chest ...

  But, after all, what did Katarina care about the identity of the tormentors! The essential thing was to know that Johan was in their hands as an instrument; that he was on the point of abdicating all resistance and that he was going to obey them, unless there was a swift and vigorous intervention. Did not one see him slip into the abyss, day by day? Did not the aggravation of her hypochondria reveal the progress of her fall? This man was rolling on the precipice! No doubt his persecutors had multiplied the signs and the orders, without Katarina noticing them. This ticket was not the first! And so, Johan's despair was explained, at the return of the Purple Orchestra ... but these despairing also took him at other times, without him being released! ...

  Then, all that was inexplicable and even fantastic in the carousel of the scarlet banner assaulted Katarina's worried soul, since the first appearance of "Demonoplasm" behind the stretcher of Saint Maur, until his last getaway in the frame with photography. The incomprehensible maneuver relative to the jewels harassed his ignorance, and his anxious glances followed the golden streaks that Johan's rings made in space, while he beat the complicated measure of Debussy.

  The admirable musical poem was drawing to a close. An intermission would follow. Katarina swayed if it was better to rip the ticket or send it to the destination; finally, she folded it and hid it in her closed hand.

  When the conductor came to sit beside her to spend the fifteen minutes of rest, he did not feel the small light hand insinuating the message in the left pocket of his waistcoat.

  Musicians joined them: the first violin, the flute and the bass.

  As they got up for the concert, the poet Hortons made his entrance. He was familiar with the place, more of a music lover than a versifier. He was loved for the good nature of his manners and the safety of his taste. Sometimes, when Johan was taking some of his colleagues to his house, Hortons, at his insistence, would join in and recite verses between a sonata and a trio.

  Katarina and the poet remained side by side.

  The Sorcerer's Apprentice unfolded his ingenious and powerful humor.

  It is a habit dear to more than one kapellmeister to put the index finger in the left pocket of the vest, while waving the right arm to chant the rhythms. Johan did not miss it.

  Katarina saw the gesture she was waiting for. She saw also the sudden pallor, that she did not wait less.

  His opinion was made. The ordeal had been harder for her than for Johan. It was not without pain that she had inflicted on him the hideous surprise. Johan, having not approached any suspect, must have wondered with terror how his pocket could suddenly contain one of those despotic notes which he guessed the inflexible content. But now she knew! She knew the source of the cold sweats, the origin of the tremors, the cause of the anxiety? And to know, for her, that was all!

  He struggled in the claws of darkness, alone, silently, without calling for help. Why? Was he guilty of a misdeed that is not admitted? Him? Come on! It was necessary to believe, rather, that a threat weighed on his silence. To speak would have been to divulge some bad action which chance had made him witness. To speak would have been to unleash the anger of some brute. It would have been disobedient. And disobeying, maybe it was triggering an unimaginable misfortune! ...

  The orchestra was silent, and Hortons chanted Mallarme's verses in a low voice. She still heard the music, and did not hear the poet like lost in a drilling fog.

  At last Johan arrived, hat on his head. Katarina concentrated all her life to grin with a smile his languid features. The poet saluted her. We shook hands. They went out.

  Sleepless night.

  Katarina was up at dawn. Johan, agitated, struggled against the ghosts of a nightmare. Twice she had seen him get up, his eyes open but full of sleep, wander at random in the room and, pursuing his dream, stammer out complaints and supplications. But it was in vain that she had listened: the words of the sleepwalker were only unformed rumors, and her mind, prey to the pangs of delirium, no longer projected out the phantasms that peopled her.

  At eight o'clock, wrapped in a bathrobe, he went to the Hand's Room. Then Katarina and Regina conferred among them; and here is what followed:

  Katarina, dressed as for a morning outing, said very loudly, through the door of the "Hand's Room":

  - We're both out. Races in the neighborhood. If you ring, do you want to open?

  - Its good! replied Johan. See you later, my boy!

 
Now Regina went out noisily, making a noise like two, and Katarina remained standing in front of the enigmatic door, Johan thinking herself alone at home.

  She sat down on her feet, stretched out one hand to the wall, stretched the other against the door itself, in order to block the game, she could have and that a sudden movement might have resumed unfortunately ...

  At that moment, suddenly, two shocks shook the leaf with a dry sound. Katarina drew back first, rather moved; but as the door had not opened, she resumed her arrangements.

  A third shock occurred - a rock thrown, it seemed - and, as the observer's eye was reaching the goal, a fourth shock, more violent, shook the carpentry.

  Katarina screamed and withdrew her hand instinctively. Something had stung her badly. In the middle of his palm, a wound was bleeding.

  Without realizing it, she risked her eye on the keyhole.

  Johan, disheveled, pale, looking mad, holding up the sleeve of his bathrobe with one hand, stood at the back of the room. A ferrule-knife, marked with the evil number, gleamed on the plate of his hand. His arm, pulled back, relaxed in front, and the weapon, pirouetting in a flash of steel, came to fuse, vibrating, not far from the lock. Katarina, fumbling, felt the tip that was protruding.

  She still lives Johan, stranded on a chair, burst into tears ...

  But it was too much. Blood ran down the pretty fingers. More dead than alive, the poor woman dragged herself into the kitchen, dressed as she could with her burning hand, and, by the service staircase, escaped at random, in the Rue, to the open air.

  Worms purred in his ear, haunting; Baudelaire verses, that

  Hortons liked to recite:

  ... seven knives, hammers, tools and tinsels

  Well sharpened. And as a Venetian juggler,

  Taking the deepest of your love for the target,

  I will plant them all in your panting heart,

  Crushing your sobbing body, slicing your dripping limbs!

  Ah yes! It was in his very heart that he had planted them, those knives! And his heart was streaming,

  She went, without knowing and without seeing, and repeated, stupid:

  - A Venetian juggler ... A Venetian juggler ...

  2 – “DEMONOPLASM”

  These weapons, she held them in her bandaged hand ... They spoke to her the claws of the Devil.

  And it was the same day, afternoon.

  Johan absent until the evening, Katarina and Regina had planned to enter the "Hand's Room". To do this, the black-eyed servant, under the pretext of having lost her keyring, had obtained from gallant locksmith some dozen nightingales strung on a circle of wire.

  All in all, it was only a question of crocheting the door and opening three cassettes seen through the keyhole and which it was reasonable to suppose closed.

  They were indeed, but contained only the first of the pharmacy, the second as massage utensils, the third as the interchangeable parts of the electric machines.

  Nothing suspicious at first. Confusion Many vials and little pots on a shelf. The electrotherapy devices housed in their painted boxes their mechanism of copper, coils and springs. Above the table a bookshelf contained some two hundred volumes of any size. The typewriter occupied his support; the silent keyboard crossed its trestles; on the table, a great disorder entangled a crowd of disparate and unspecified objects, as one sees on the desks of men without care.

  The dark weapons were found behind the books, inserted between the wall and the base of the shelf, which had been cut for this purpose. In short, well hidden. But it was not just those sordid daggers. Katarina also found a hammer, a billhook ...

  There were five. Five tools including two of those switchblades that thugs liked, as everyone knows.

  In truth, there was something to tremble, so these blades seemed to be part of a museum of crime, and seemed unhooked of a panoply full of murderous instruments: blades, clubs, punches and revolvers, without count ordinary things such as bottles, feet of chairs, andirons and other improvised clubs, debonair by destination, and which are even more horrible than pistols of assassins and daggers of slaughterers, when the blood of a murder is on them.

  Yet the dread came from this disparate set of tools. This clearly manifested their nature. They were signs, and nothing else. They looked alike like the business cards of the same person astonishment.

  Only the "666" was later than the purchase. Small imperfections revealed that this white metal letter had been encrusted in the horn of the neck by a workman whose specialty it was not. Hasty in his monstrous task ...

  "666" ... The Beast ... The Devil ... The Evil One ... Evil.

  The translation of these numbers ... Why? She could not say it. No doubt this translation contained too many concessions to the occult, a too absolute recognition of the religious principle. Science does not proceed by means of leaps; it passes from one discovery to another by the gentle slope of an easy staircase. From the disturbing Doctor Petiot to the existence of impious creatures, there was a leap over an abyss; and Katarina, with her head rested, could no longer believe that this jump was possible.

  No, that number meant something else.

  "666". Why this brand of mystery? These knives, these signs, were addressed to Johan. But they could only frighten him if their provenance was known to him. So, he knew what personality was hiding under that number. And this number did not pretend to its usual meaning, "666" did not wish to represent evil, shadow, and original fault. This number was not a digital mask. As much to say it: this "666" was not a triple 6!

  However, "666" certainly meant the scarlet banner ... "For sure"? no; but apparently; and it had to be demonstrated.

  The scarlet banner ... A band, then, who made use of occult rites? …

  But did not she know anything more about this band, Katarina? Did she not know more certain indications than those of enigmatic and troubled acts? Safe indications? The Purple Orchestra ticket:

  She read it in her memory:

  The TENS order. They want blood. Obey. Do not forget the SCARLET BANNER.

  The Ten Commandments of Murder ...

  It was, it will be said, very little. And a wall was still standing between Johan and the occult world.

  Okay. But Katarina welcomed with pleasure a proof which confirmed his presumption by showing him that the amateurs of sharp blades were none other than the scarlet bandits, and that the enemy, decidedly, was unified. Then, the fact of having dissipated so little that it was darkness which surrounded it constituted for her an extraordinary encouragement; and the joyful vanity of successes animated him with a new zeal.

  She put the five utensils back in their cache, promising to look for how three of them had come into Johan's possession without her knowing. Of these five knives, in fact, she had only seen that of the Rue Lesueur and that of the Boulevard Montparnasse.

  In doing so, and as she put the books back on the shelves, what was her surprise to see that these books did not all deal with anatomy or medicine, but that she had Lombroso's work in front of her eyes! ... Without being a scholar, she knew enough that these were works of criminal anthropology ...

  Now, Lombroso's work was not translated here into French, but it was in the Italian. Johan, who spoke several languages, had he wanted to detect the indiscreet? ...

  She continued the examination of the library, and perceived that the study of the occult was some kind of mind escape for her husband. One particular book literally grasped her attention…” Le Dictionnaire Infernal” by some obscure French occultist Katarina forced herself to not open the pearly gates of her imagination to the hideous illustrations…Grinning demons, satanic goats, mischievous creatures…All dedicated in a baroque fashion to torment the lost lamb.

  Regina was trying to open the drawer of the table. Katarina, in spite of the confidence which her collaborator inspired her, took advantage of the fact to conceal her confusion, and congratulated herself that these foreign books were unintelligible to the primaries of her kind.
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  The drawer, open, contained only anatomical boards, descriptive tables of massage, hands of skinned cardboard, showing the natural muscles, veins or nerves, skeleton hands, whose bones were mounted on springs, like those of Honoré, a palmistry manual, a little rubber stamp with the number 7, with its stamp, and finally many newspapers carefully folded.

  These newspapers bore the same dates: 14th, 15th December, and gave a detailed account of the catastrophe of Saint Maur, which occurred on the night of the 13th to the 14th.

  The drawer thus contained only one ambiguous object, namely the stamp bearing the number 7.

  Figures 10 and 7 dominated the mystery.

  Seven was the old fateful number, but Katarina knew no more, and saw nothing that could be counted in this affair by seven, let alone 666!