“You have an intimate knowledge of horrors, Monsieur Laval,” I said.
He shrugged. “C’est mon métier.”
“Will you drink red wine?”
“Since you are paying, I will drink whisky,” he said; adding, “if they have it here.”
They did, an excellent Scotch and quite expensive. I decided to join him. He downed the first portion as soon as it was poured—not waiting for even a perfunctory toast—and instantly demanded another. This, too, he flung down his throat in one movement, smacking his bestial lips. I could not help thinking how much more graphic than our “he drinks like a fish” or “like a drainpipe” is the equivalent French figure of speech: “He drinks like a hole.”
“Now then, M’sieu’…Pendragon?…”
“Glencannon.”
“Yes. You wished to speak with me.”
I nodded.
“Speak,” he said, gesturing to the barmaid for another drink.
“Why,” I began, “I’m afraid I have nothing in particular to say, except that I admire your acting…”
“Many people do.”
What a graceless boor, I told myself, but I continued: “Rightfully so, Monsieur Laval. I am new to Paris, but I have seen much theatre here these past few weeks, and to my mind yours is a towering talent, in the front rank of contemporary artistes, perhaps second only to—”
“Eh? Second?” He swallowed the fresh drink and looked up at me, his unwholesome eyes flaming. “Second to—whom, would you say?”
“I was going to say Sellig.”
Laval laughed. It was not a warming sound. His face grew uglier. “Sellig! Indeed. Sellig, the handsome. Sellig, the classicist. Sellig, the noble. Bah!”
I was growing uncomfortable. “Come, sir,” I said, “surely you are not being fair…”
“Fair. That is oh so important to you English, is it not? Well, let me tell you, M’sieu’ Whatever-your-name-is—the lofty strutting of the mountebank Sellig makes me sick! What he can do, fools can do. Who cannot pompously declaim the cold, measured alexandrines of Racine and Corneille and Molière? Stop any schoolboy on the street and ask him to recite a bit of Phèdre or Tartuffe and he will oblige you, in that same stately classroom drone Sellig employs. Do not speak to me of this Sellig. He is a fraud; worse—he is a bore.”
“He is also,” I said, “my friend.”
“A sorry comment on your taste.”
“And yet it is a taste that can also appreciate you.”
“To some, champagne and seltzer water taste the same.”
“You know, sir, you are really quite rude.”
“True.”
“You must have few friends.”
“Wrong. I have none.”
“But that is distressing! Surely—”
He interrupted. “There is a verse of the late Rostand’s. Perhaps you know it. ‘A force de vous voir vous faire des amis…’ et cetera?”
“My French is poor.”
“You need not remind me. I will give you a rough translation. ‘Seeing the sort of friends you others have in tow, I cry with joy: send me another foe!’ ”
“And yet,” I said, persisting, “all men need friends…”
Laval’s eyes glittered like dark gems. “I am no ordinary man,” he said. “I was born under the sign of Sagittarius. Perhaps you know nothing of astrology? Or, if you do, perhaps you think of Sagittarius as merely the innocuous sign of the Archer? Remember, then, just who that archer is—not a simple bear or bull or crab or pair of fish, not a man, not a creature at all, but a very unnatural creature half human, half bestial. Sagittarius: the Man-Beast. And I tell you this, M’sieu’…” He dispatched the whisky in one gulp and banged the empty glass on the table to attract the attention of the barmaid. “I tell you this,” he repeated. “So potent was the star under which I was born, that I have done what no one in the world has done—nor ever can do!”
The sentence was like a hot iron, searing my brain. I was to meet it once again before I left Paris. But now, sitting across the table from the mad—for he indeed seemed mad—Laval, I said, softly, “And what is it you have done, Monsieur?”
He chuckled nastily. “That,” he said, “is a professional secret.”
I tried another approach. “Monsieur Laval…”
“Yes?”
“I believe we have a mutual friend.”
“Who may that be?”
“A lady.”
“Oh? And her name?”
“She calls herself Clothilde. I do not know her last name.”
“Then I gather she is not, after all, a lady.”
I shrugged. “Do you know her?”
“I know many women,” he said; and his face clouding with bitterness, he added, “Do you find that surprising—with this face?”
“Not at all. But you have not answered my question.”
“I may know your Mam’selle Clothilde; I cannot be certain. May I have another drink?”
“To be sure.” I signalled the waitress, and turned again to Laval. “She told me she knew you in her—professional capacity.”
“It may be so. I do not clot my mind with memories of such women.” The waitress poured out another portion of Scotch and Laval downed it. “Why do you ask?”
“For two reasons. First, because she told me she detested you.”
“It is a common complaint. And the second reason?”
“Because she is dead.”
“Ah?”
“Murdered. Mutilated. Obscenely disfigured.”
“Quel dommage.”
“It is not a situation to be met with a platitude, Monsieur!”
Laval smiled. It made him look like a lizard. “Is it not? How must I meet it, then? With tears? With a clucking of the tongue? With a beating of my breast and a rending of my garments? Come, M’sieu’…she was a woman of the streets…I scarcely knew her, if indeed I knew her at all…”
“Why did she detest you?” I suddenly demanded.
“Oh, my dear sir! If I knew the answers to such questions, I would be clairvoyant. Because I have the face of a Notre Dame gargoyle, perhaps. Because she did not like the way I combed my hair. Because I left her too small a fee. Who knows? I assure you, her detestation does not perturb me in the slightest.”
“To speak plainly, you relish it.”
“Yes. Yes, I relish it.”
“Do you also relish”—I toyed with my glass—“blood, freshly spilt?”
He looked at me blankly for a moment. Then he threw back his head and roared with amusement. “I see,” he said at last. “I understand now. You suspect I murdered this trollop?”
“She is dead, sir. It ill becomes you to malign her.”
“This lady, then. You really think I killed her?”
“I accuse you of nothing, Monsieur Laval. But…”
“But?”
“But it strikes me as a distinct possibility.”
He smiled again. “How interesting. How very, very interesting. Because she detested me?”
“That is one reason.”
He pushed his glass to one side. “I will be frank with you, M’sieu’. Yes, I knew Clothilde, briefly. Yes, it is true she loathed me. She found me disgusting. But can you not guess why?”
I shook my head. Laval leaned forward and spoke more softly. “You and I, M’sieu’, we are men of the world…and surely you can understand that there are things…certain little things…that an imaginative man might require of such a woman? Things which—if she were overly fastidious—she might find objectionable?” Still again, he smiled. “I assure you, her detestation of me had no other ground than that. She was a silly little bourgeoise. She had no flair for her profession. She was easily shocked.” Conspiratorially, he added: “Shall I be more specific?”
“That will not be necessary.” I caught the eye of the waitress and paid her. To Laval, I said, “I must not detain you further, Monsieur.”
“Oh, am I being sent off?” he said, mockin
gly, rising. “Thank you for the whisky, M’sieu’. It was excellent.” And, laughing hideously, he left.
VI
The Monster
I felt shaken, almost faint, and experienced a sudden desire to talk to someone. Hoping Sellig was playing that night at the Théâtre Français, I took a carriage there and was told he could probably be found at his rooms. My informant mentioned an address to my driver, and before long, Sébastien seemed pleasantly surprised at the appearance of his announced guest.
Sellig’s rooms were tastefully appointed. The drapes were tall, classic folds of deep blue. A few good pictures hung on the walls, the chairs were roomy and comfortable, and the mingled fragrances of tobacco and book leather gave the air a decidedly masculine musk. Over a small spirit lamp, Sellig was preparing a simple ragout. As he stood in his shirt sleeves, stirring the food, I talked.
“You said, the other evening, that the name Laval was not unknown to you.”
“That gentleman seems to hold you fascinated,” he observed.
“Is it an unhealthy fascination, would you say?” I asked, candidly.
Sellig laughed. “Well, he is not exactly an appealing personage.”
“Then you do know him?”
“In a sense. I have never seen him perform, however.”
“He is enormously talented. He dominates the stage. There are only two actors in Paris who can transfix an audience in that manner.”
“The other is…?”
“You.”
“Ah. Thank you. And yet, you do not equate me with Laval?”
Quickly, I assured him: “No, not at all. In everything but that one quality you and he are utterly different. Diametrically opposed.”
“I am glad of that.”
“Have you known him long?” I asked.
“Laval? Yes. For quite some time.”
“He is not ‘an appealing personage,’ you said just now. Would you say he is…morally reprehensible?”
Sellig turned to me. “I would be violating a strict confidence if I told you any more than this: if he is morally corrupt (and I am not saying that he is), he is not reprehensible. If he is evil, then he was evil even in his mother’s womb.”
A popular song came to my mind, and I said, lightly, “More to be pitied than censured?”
Sellig received this remark seriously. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that is the point precisely. ‘The sins of the father…’ ” But then he broke off and served the ragout.
As he ate, I—who had no appetite—spoke of my troubled mind and general depression.
“Perhaps it is not good for you to stay alone tonight,” he said. “Would you like to sleep here? There is an extra bedroom.”
“It would inconvenience you…”
“Not at all. I should be glad of the company.”
I agreed to stay, for I was not looking forward to my lonely hotel suite, and not long after that we retired to our rooms. I fell asleep almost at once, but woke in a sweat about three in the morning. I arose, wrapped myself in one of Sellig’s robes, and walked into the library for a book that might send me off to sleep again.
Sellig’s collection of books was extensive, although heavily overbalanced by plays, volumes of theatrical criticism, biographies of actors, and so forth, a high percentage of them in English. I chose none of these: instead, I took down a weighty tome of French history. Its pedantic style and small type, as well as my imperfect command of the language, would combine to form the needed sedative. I took the book to bed with me.
My grasp of written French being somewhat firmer than my grasp of the conversational variety, I managed to labor through most of the first chapter before I began to turn the leaves in search of a more interesting section. It was quite by accident that my eyes fell upon a passage that seemed to thrust itself up from the page and stamp itself upon my brain. Though but a single sentence, I felt stunned by it. In a fever of curiosity, I read the other matter on that page, then turned back and read from an earlier point. I read in that volume for about ten minutes, or so I thought, but when I finished and looked up at the clock, I realized that I had read for over an hour. What I had read had numbed and shaken me.
I have never been a superstitious man. I have never believed in the existence of ghosts, or vampires, or other undead creatures out of lurid legend. They make excellent entertainment, but never before that shattering hour had I accepted them as anything more than entertainment. But as I sat in that bed, the book in my hands, the city outside silent, I had reason to feel as if a hand from some sub-zero hell had reached up and laid itself—oh, very gently—upon my heart. A shudder ran through my body. I looked down again at the book.
The pages I had read told of a monster—a real monster who had lived in France centuries before. The Marquis de Sade, in comparison, was a mischievous schoolboy. This was a man of high birth and high aspirations, a marshal of France who at the peak of his power had been the richest noble in all of Europe and who had fought side by side with Joan of Arc, but who had later fallen into such depths of degeneracy that he had been tried and sentenced to the stake by a shocked legislature. In a search for immortality, a yearning to avoid death, he had carried out disgusting experiments on the living bodies of youths and maidens and little children. Seven or eight hundred had died in the laboratory of his castle, died howling in pain and insanity, the victims of a “science” that was more like the unholy rites of the Black Mass. “The accused,” read one of the charges at his trial, “has taken innocent boys and girls, and inhumanly butchered, killed, dismembered, burned, and otherwise tortured them, and the said accused has immolated the bodies of the said innocents to devils, invoked and sacrificed to evil spirits, and has foully committed sin with young boys and in other ways lusted against nature after young girls, while they were alive or sometimes dead or even sometimes during their death throes.” Another charge spoke of “the hand, the eyes, and the heart of one of these said children, with its blood in a glass vase…” And yet this madman, this miscreant monster, had offered no resistance when arrested, had felt justified for his actions, had said proudly and defiantly under the legislated torture: “So potent was the star under which I was born that I have done what no one in the world has done nor ever can do.”
His name was Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais, and he became known for all time and to all the world, of course, as Bluebeard.
I was out of bed in an instant, and found myself pounding like a madman on the door of Sellig’s bedroom. When there was no response, I opened the door and went in. He was not in his bed. Behind me, I heard another door open. I turned.
Sellig was coming out of yet another room, hardly more than a closet: behind him, just before he closed the door and locked it, I caught a glimpse of bottles and glass trays—I remember surmising, in that instant, that perhaps he was a devotee of the new art of photography, but I had no wish to dwell further on this, for I was bursting with what I wanted to say. “Sébastien!” I cried. “I must tell you something…”
“What are you doing up at this hour, my friend?”
“…Something incredible…terrifying…” (It did not occur to me to echo his question.)
“But you are distraught. Here, sit down…let me fetch you some cognac…”
The words tumbled out of me pell-mell, and I could see they made very little sense to Sellig. He wore the expression of one confronted by a lunatic. His eyes remained fixed on my face, as if he were alert for the first sign of total disintegration and the cognac he had placed in my hand.
Sellig spoke. “Let me see if I understand you,” he began. “You met Laval this evening…and he said something about his star, and the accomplishment of something no other man has ever accomplished…and just now, in this book, you find the same statement attributed to Bluebeard…and, from this, you are trying to tell me that Laval…”
I nodded. “I know it sounds mad…”
“It does.”
“…But consider, Sébastien: the names, firs
t of all, are identical—Bluebeard’s name was Gilles de Laval. In the shadow of the stake, he boasted of doing what no man had ever done, of succeeding at his ambition…and are you aware of the nature of his ambition? To live forever! It was to that end that he butchered hundreds of innocents, trying to wrest the very riddle of life from their bodies!”
“But you say he was burned at the stake…”
“No! Sentenced to be burned! In return for not revoking the confessions he made under torture, he was granted the mercy of strangulation before burning…”
“Even so—”
“Listen to me! His relatives were allowed to remove his strangled body from the pyre before the flames reached it! That is a historical fact! They took it away—so they said!—to inter it in a Carmelite church in the vicinity. But don’t you see what they really did?”
“No…”
“Don’t you see, Sébastien, that this monster had found the key to eternal life, and had instructed his helots to revive his strangled body by use of those same loathsome arts he had practised? Don’t you see that he went on living? That he lives still? That he tortures and murders still? That even when his hands are not drenched in human blood, they are drenched in the mock blood of the Guignol? That the actor Laval and the Laval of old are one and the same?”
Sellig looked at me strangely. It infuriated me. “I am not mad!” I said. I rose and screamed at him: “Don’t you understand?”
And then—what with the lack of food, and the wine I had drunk with Laval, and the cognac, and the tremulous state of my nerves—the room began to tilt, then shrink, then spin, then burst into a star-shower, and I dimly saw Sellig reach out for me as I fell forward into blackness.
VII
A Transparent Cryptogram
The bedroom was full of noonday sunlight when I awoke. It lacerated my eyes. I turned away from it and saw someone sitting next to the bed. My eyes focussed, not without difficulty, and I realized it was a woman—a woman of exceptional beauty. Before I could speak, she said, “My name is Madame Pelletier. I am Sébastien’s friend. He has asked me to care for you. You were ill last night.”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 142
