Mephista

by Maurice Limat

  Now, it was well into the night.

  Arsène, the magician Harsen, familiarly called Lack-o-Luck, watched in anguish, as he could no longer contain the visions that rushed faster and faster through Vassia. She was in a state of tension that worried him. It was impossible to put her into a normal sleep. With her eyes opened wide, she was describing the scenes she saw and predicting great calamity upon the circus troupe.

  They were not alone in their trailer. Lise Wildor, Bertha, the Ringmaster, Vera Zigano and the others had all come to join them. No one at the Crucifer Circus wanted to sleep tonight.

  They knew that Fever Blister, through her reliable instinct as a medium, had denounced the intruder who had deceived them, and who was now going through hell. They also knew something else: that Mirk the sorcerer, Mirk the scarlet clown, whom Fever Blister was the only who had not pursued, was about to try an awful experiment that he claimed was magic.

  In fact, they were all here, ready for anything to get normal faces again, even accepting the terrible schemes exacted by the infernal gnome. Each of them had participated in the sinister adventure in Péronne, in the violation of Viviane’s coffin, and in Agnes’ kidnapping; this Agnes whom they knew was being guarded by Lina the musician; Agnes, whom they all thought, secretly, might bear the cost of the cursed scheme that was supposed—truth or illusion?—to give them new faces, a new existence.

  Now, they were starting to worry. They all knew that Fever Blister, with her reasonable, sensible nature, did not usually shout out warnings in outlandish ways. They believed in Mirk and his magic, but they had much more faith in the talents of Vassia the medium.

  Silently, their faces blank, but their eyes showing their anxiety, the carnies listened to the broken speech of Fever Blister who could no longer escape her invisible guides.

  “They’re spilling blood… The clown is red, more red than ever… and he’s bringing calamity down upon us…”

  “But the clown is going to free us!” Vera Zigano objected.

  The clairvoyant’s body twitched and jerked and she sneered:

  “Free us? More like ruin us… and his promises… the masks… yes, I see them, the masks of flesh that he promised us…”

  “Oh!” Bertha whispered. “Tell us, Vassia, tell us that he’s going to save us, that we’ll be different than we are… I want to be beautiful. I want to be like other women.”

  Leaning toward the medium they awaited her reaction.

  The hideous little mummified face, squashed under make-up and rouge, tensed up.

  “The masks… They’re rotting… They’re decomposing… It’s death…”

  She stopped talking, foaming at the lips, and fell backward, exhausted by the visions.

  A mortal silence filled the trailer.

  They were all gathered here, clowns, acrobats, jugglers. Only the quartet of Crucifer, Miss Mahlia, Lina and the scarlet clown were missing. What were they doing right now?

  In theory, they were working to find the promised solution, but it could not be forgotten that they had two prisoners with them: little Agnes, snatched from her parents’ house, heedless of all respect for humanity, and young Jacques, the fake vitriol victim, whose role in the Crucifer Circus was completely unknown.

  The Zigano girl, who had come with the others, was sobbing, saying that she was scared and she did not want them to hurt Jacques “because she was the one who found him,” which she repeated relentlessly.

  Then the cursed carnies started talking together around Fever Blister. They sobered up. The collective hysteria, which had been cleverly maintained by both Mirk and Crucifer, was starting to dissipate and make room for reason.

  Fever Blister’s visions showed the future in a menacing light.

  The Ringmaster grumbled:

  “It can’t go on like this. It’ll bring trouble. The police. The cops aren’t idiots. We can do whatever we want here… but we opened a coffin, took pictures of corpses… we kidnapped a girl! What else is going to happen to us?”

  “I’ll be pretty. Mirk promised me!” the Zigano girl wept.

  She was answered with jeering laughs. They no longer believed. They were seeing clearly. It was not possible to live for long outside the law, to violate all the norms of life. The situation was going to hell and Fever Blister’s warnings had to be taken into consideration.

  Quickly, they put their heads together. Huddled up, whispering softly around Vassia, who was tired and said nothing, but watched them out of the small, black eyes in her mummy face, they made a snap decision, not well thought out, as crazy as every other decision they usually made together.

  Meanwhile, two men in the chilly night were wandering around the circus in Amiens, sneaking among the stalls. They had come in a DS. They had alerted the police, but, according to the law, no search could be made before sunrise.

  The police chief had told Teddy Verano:

  “Monsieur Verano, I respect private detectives, but our officers are also on the trail. After all these weird stories, and especially after Agnes Percheron’s disappearance, we’ve been looking at the strange behavior of the Crucifer troupe. At dawn, we do plan to search them.”

  But it was winter and the sun did not rise until 7:41 a.m.

  Teddy Verano had thanked the chief. He already knew that he would have to act that very night, even if it was against regulation. Because Gerard was with Crucifer, and God knows under what conditions. And because Agnes must be there too, and the detective feared the occult madness that was spurring on the scarlet clown and his wretched disciples.

  Someone was with him. Someone who knew everything and had offered to help, ready for anything to put an end to these people who had violated his wife’s coffin. Jean-Michel Lefort.

  The official police were not far away, certainly. It was 4 a.m. now, well into the night that surrounded the circus before the dawn. But what was happening there?

  The two men were prowling around the trailers when they heard the tumult. And they witnessed one of those group events that seemed to strike up among the Crucifer people from time to time. They saw them marching in the snow, heading for one of the trailers, shouting, swearing, ranting, trying to break into it.

  Teddy Verano came out of hiding, gun in hand, and rushed forward.

  “Follow me, Lefort!”

  He saw the carnies climbing up the steps to the trailer, banging on the door and the windows, shrieking and yelling for Crucifer, Mahlia and Lina, saying that they wanted in, that it had to end, and other things that made no sense.

  “Let me through! Police!”

  Teddy Verano had said this word, magic in its own way, that always deeply affected anyone whose conscience was not totally clear. They moved aside and, in spite of the darkness, he saw one of them smiling at him: Vassia, poor Fever Blister.

  “I was expecting you,” she said. “But the calamity is already here…”

  “What’s happening in there?” Teddy Verano raised his voice.

  “We don’t know,” the Ringmaster said. “They won’t answer.”

  “Who’s in there?”

  They were all talking at the same time, but neither Teddy Verano nor Jean-Michel were listening.

  “We have to break down the door.”

  Wildor and Zigano, the two big fellows, took over. It did not take long for the door to yield. They all rushed inside and, right away, screams of horror rang out.

  In the dim purple light, they saw Agnes’ almost naked body lying on a white table. It was not moving. It would never move again.

  Like a frozen lightning bolt, a long, steel needle was sticking out of her heart and blood was flowing, flowing, a stream that formed a growing stain on the white sheet covering the death bed.

  Teddy Verano turned pale and leaned over the poor girl, shaking his head.

  “Dead, I’m afraid. Oh, the monsters!”

  Jean-Michel’s teeth were chattering. Teddy Verano turned to him and suddenly saw the frightened, frightening faces of the carnies
.

  “It’s your fault too!” he yelled. “All of you! With your crazy ideas! You’re guilty… guilty… You killed her! Killed her!”

  They started babbling and shouting:

  “No, not us… It was Mirk! Mirk! Mirk!”

  They searched the trailer, but no one was there except for a man tied up in the corner, whom Teddy quickly freed with a sigh of relief. It as Gerard, safe and sound, apart from a few superficial wounds to his face.

  “Teddy! Teddy!” he cried out when the gag came off. “It was her! It was… Mephista!”

  “What happened?”

  “They tried… some demented experiment. And they killed Agnes. They wanted to photograph her at the very moment of death. And Mirk yelled, ‘For nothing! For nothing! She’s dead for nothing! Everything’s failed’”

  “And then? After that? Come on, tell me…”

  “They left. Mahlia, meaning Olga, and the lion-tamer, who seemed to have gone crazy, and the chinless woman…”

  “Come on! Let’s go, Lefort. We have to find them.”

  They ran across the grounds. The wild animals were starting to roar and the carnival around the Amiens circus was starting to wake up.

  “Call the police!” Teddy Verano screamed to anyone listening. “There’s been a murder committed at Crucifer’s!”

  Followed by his stepson and Jean-Michel Lefort, he searched the fairgrounds. They found Lina, lying senseless, obviously drugged, who couldn’t tell them anything.

  Then, they found another body, lying motionless in a trailer. It was Crucifer’s. Understanding at last the worthlessness of the scarlet clown’s magic, he had blown his brains out.

  But there was no trace of Miss Mahlia, or rather Olga Mervil, Mephista, the disfigured Mephista, whom it would be hard to identity from now on.

  Since the wild beasts were roaring more than ever, Teddy Verano and his partners headed over there just as the police sirens started wailing in the distance.

  They arrived too late.

  Raging mad, knowing that everything they had done was against the law, their delusions were over, the freaks of the Crucifer Circus, feeling cheated and betrayed in their insane hopes, guilty of various crimes at the behest of the scarlet clown, had tracked him down, accused him of being responsible for all their problems, and everything that would happen to them from now on…

  They harassed him, slapped him, insulted him, hit him and hit him again and again… The women even more than the men unleashed their fury.

  And Mirk screamed in horror as he was thrown against the cages.

  A tiger’s paw snatched him and broke his skull. He gasped and fell in a pool of his own blood, stomped by the angry carnies, while the wild animals, excited by the smell of blood, jumped around like lunatics in their cages.

  The police arrived and several cars invaded the circus. They were going to do what they had to do, but, as always, Teddy Verano wanted to finish his investigation.

  After he had been freed, Gerard had told him briefly what he had learned during his one day in the circus, and the events of the frightful night that followed.

  They returned to the trailer that served as Mirk’s lair. Lefort went with them. In the doorway, the three men were struck by a strange, sickening smell coming from the back of the room surrounded by the black curtains.

  “That’s awful! It reeks!”

  “It’s like… the smell of a rotting corpse.”

  They searched and found the black chest, the chest where Mirk the scarlet clown hid his famous masks that seemed to be made of flesh, made from photographing the dead, and that he claimed could replace the faces deformed by nature.

  They opened it.

  And they recoiled in horror at the vision, nauseated by the foul stench.

  The masks of false life were now just masks of death, decomposing faces of flesh that were rotting away, as if they had really passed on from life to death.

  They were all that remained of the demented experiment of the scarlet clown, the sad, foul-smelling testimony of the attempts of all these poor people who were willing, just like Mephista, to commit the worst crimes to get a new face, to try the impossible, to obtain an unattainable redemption…

  The Man of a Million Words

  Maurice Limat by Maurice Limat

  My Childhood

  I was born into a family of average workers. My dear mother would have also liked to become a writer, but never managed it. As for me, I wanted to write as soon as I began to learn how to read. I felt that I was destined to become a writer. After school, my mother, who had a certain literary flair, made me do dictations 9 drawn from the best literary works.

  Between the ages of eight and twelve, my holidays were spent keeping an eye on the cows and turkeys in a farm in the Loiret region. My mother, who did not have much money, always managed to send me illustrated books and magazines which I devoured. I read L’Intrépide and the novels of José Moselli 10 and Jo Valle. Since my older brother worked in the newspaper business, I also received copies of girls’ magazines, such as Fillette and Lilie, which included fairy tales, which I loved reading.

  Three times a year, I worked on the farm, mostly daydreaming about the stories I’d read. If I was reading pirate stories, I imagined them cruising on the local lakes. I thought there were fairies, elves and wizards in the woods. I populated the countryside with all kinds of fantastic creatures. I read a lot of books while keeping an eye on the animals.

  When I turned 14, I had to go to work. I was recruited by the Export Bureau. It was dreary work, and it lasted for my whole adolescence. I was scribbling a little here and there, short stories, embryos of plays, novels... I even tried my hand at poetry. I also was discovering many new authors. I joined the local library and I read Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac. At school, at age twelve, they’d made us read Eugénie Grandet, but it hadn’t thrilled me. However, after I found a discarded copy of The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, I became a huge fan of Balzac.

  I continued to scribble. My mother, who had been one of the first female typists in France, gave me a typewriter when I turned 18, so that encouraged me even more! I tried writing plays, then a novel... As my old master Chambreuil, of the Comédie Française,11 would have said: “It’s full of qualities and full of defects, but you should persevere!” So I did.

  The Start of my Literary Career

  At 20, my first novel was published. It was a very modest effort entitled L’Aéronef C-3 [The C3 Aircraft]—an adventure novel. It was published in 1936 by Ferenczi as No. 24 in their imprint Voyages & Aventures. When it came out, I was a soldier, having been conscripted a fortnight before. While I was studying to become a corporal, I felt motivated to continue writing on the side. Then, Ferenczi decided to launch a new imprint, Le Petit Roman d’Aventure [The little adventure novel] to publish novella-length works of about thirty-two printed pages. They sent a memo to all their writers, and that’s how I came to write La Montagne aux Vampires [The Mountain of Vampires]. I still remember it well: I wrote it during my evenings in the barracks, scribbling on the corner of a dining table. One night, I even had to write a chapter while another soldier was dancing on the table!

  I sent the manuscript to my mother, who typed it, and my father went and delivered it in person to himself. I wrote about 20 novels under the same conditions during my military service.

  Ferenczi wanted a healthy dose of realistic action in every book to satisfy their male customers, but we also had to include a little romance, for their female readers—but not too much, in order to not compete with their romance imprint. (I wrote a few books for that one as well.) One day, while I was on leave, I met their editor, who was a woman, and she said to me, “You’re very good with the adventure novels; have you considered trying your hand at detective fiction?” I was 21 then, and followed her advice. So, I wrote La Villa aux Squelettes [The House of Skeletons], which was the first Teddy Verano novel.

  After my military service, I was supposed to retur
n to the Export Bureau, but I decided to take a chance, quit, and become a full-time writer. I began a career as a journalist and did very well, but then the war started, so I was drafted again and promoted to Lieutenant. Then I was captured by the Germans and ended up in a hospital in Koblenz. With false papers, I became a male nurse for a year. It did not bother me, because I liked caring for the wounded. Also, I spoke a little German, which helped. We set up a small amateur theater, for which I directed my first play, Moliere’s Le Medecin Malgré Lui.

  We reported people as being much sicker than they really were, so that the Germans would send them home. Once we even had a man repatriated who was a trapeze artist for the Medrano Circus! Eventually, I became really sick myself—nothing too serious, fortunately—and ended up being sent home as well. I returned to live with my parents, who, at the time, had been reduced to a state of abject poverty. To make money, I worked for a while with a friend of mine who was selling so-called pharmaceutical wine. I still managed to get three or four books out during that period. It wasn’t much of a career, but it was fun. At the end of the war, I was able to resume my writing career full time.

  Working for Ferenczi

  It only took pocket change to buy any of the 32-page Petits Romans. The royalties they paid were equally small, but when one is 20, and earning the meager salary of a petty clerk in the Export Bureau, there is no pleasure comparable to holding one’s own books between one’s trembling fingers, no matter how little they paid.

  I was very proud to be published in the same imprint that had already published such hallowed names as Jean de La Hire,12 Max-André Dazergues, Sim (Georges Simenon) and Marcel Allain, the co-creator of Fantômas, as well as many more names now mostly forgotten, such as: Félix Léonnec, George Fronval, Albert Dubeux, Albert Bonneau, René Thevenin, and Marcel Priollet.