The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

by Brian Stableford

  In spite of the rough way he had been treated, Jean Funeste was careful to make a copy of his report on the previous night’s occurrences, and he took Odo and Furalor with him to present it to the mayor and Paul Mansard. He did not include an account of his final conversation with the magistrate in his written report, but he did explain his thesis to the merchant and the mayor. Odo and Furalor confirmed that this verbal account was accurate, and added their own endorsements to Jean Funeste’s logical conclusion.

  “I fear,” said Furalor, sorrowfully, “that our beloved magistrate has gone mad. He is seeing things that are not there—indeed, he is shooting at things that are not there. He stealing from his own treasure-chests, and blaming the thefts of a product of his imagination. Perhaps there is black magic at work, but I doubt it. Monsieur Sevanter may need to be committed to the lunatic asylum in Is, if he is not to be held accountable in law for what he has done.”

  “Furalor is right,” said Odo, decisively. “Magic is probably not involved; the ghost is a mere hallucination of Monsieur Sevanter’s enfevered brain; the clandestine removal of the objects from the chests is proof of that. There is no demonic possession here, and no witchcraft—but there is madness; of that I have no doubt. The lunatic asylum might be the answer, if the punishment decreed by law is to be avoided.”

  “These worthy gentlemen are undoubtedly justified in their conclusion,” Jean Funeste put in, “but I feel, gentlemen, that they are being a little harsh. That my old friend has been driven to the end of his tether, and that his mind has given way to some degree, are undeniable. There has always been madness in his family, as you know, and his robust appearance should not cause us to forget that he is heir to a long tradition of inbreeding and degeneracy—but when we take that into account, we must acknowledge that Monsieur Sevanter has actually held up far better than could have been expected under the burden of his long service to the ideals of justice. I have been alongside him as he worked throughout these last twenty-five years, and I can testify to the pressure put on the imagination by the ceaselessly exposure to crime and criminals. All the horrors that lurk beneath the surface of Teirbrun’s society eventually become manifest in its court-room, in which Monsieur Sevanter has heroically borne the burden of magistracy, on his own, for an entire generation. It is not unnatural that he should become a little unbalanced, after all that time—but what we are dealing with is a matter of slight imbalance, curable by rest. He does not need to be committed to an asylum, and I, Jean Funeste, will not hear of any such horrid eventuality. What he needs is to go home, to his father’s house, for three months. During that time, Monsieur Mayor, you must apply to the Royal Court of Is to be replaced on the circuit of its Court of Assizes—purely as a temporary measure, of course.”

  “That’s all very well,” the ever-pragmatic Paul Mansard put in, “but where’s the loot?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” said Jean Funeste.

  “Where are all the things that the Phantom has stolen? Can they be recovered? Can restitution be made?”

  “Ah!” said Jean Funeste. “Well, sir, I can testify that the Phantom’s spoils are not hidden in Monsieur Sevanter’s house—I know every last nook and cranny of it. Logic suggests that they must be hidden somewhere in his father’s house, or its grounds. If the mayor can spare a few constables, perhaps a discreet search might be mounted. I should have thought of it myself—it would provide the final proof of the chain of reasoning.”

  “I’ll do it,” the mayor was quick to say. “Better than that—I’ll supervise the search personally. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to restore their property to the citizens of my town.”

  “I can believe that,” Paul Mansard observed.

  “But in the meantime, gentlemen,” Jean Funeste, “I must ask you to promise not to make any further move against Monsieur Sevanter. We must protect him as carefully from himself as we would protect him from any malicious enemy, and must nurse him through this crisis in his affairs. Tonight, he expects to confront the Phantom for the last time; if he comes through that crisis alive and well, I believe we shall be able to restore him to health without any need to think in terms of the lunatic asylum.”

  “You have ever been a good and steadfast friend to my son-in-law, Master Funeste” said Paul Mansard. “I am sure that the mayor will take no further action without consulting you, no matter how lowly your supposed status might be.”

  “Certainly not,” the mayor hastened to say. “The Town Council will be very glad to have your advice, Master Clerk.”

  VII.

  By nightfall, the story of the quarrel between Alphonse Sevanter and Jean Funeste was all around the town, as was the starling revelation that the notorious Phantom was none other than Monsieur Sevanter himself, who had gone mad. Many of the poorer folk—especially those who had come under suspicion by virtue of their own past misdemeanors or those of their relatives—immediately began to assert that he had been mad for years, and that his peculiar sentencing policies had been clear evidence of the slow but steady corruption of his brain. Some, however, asserted that he was not mad at all, but had simply turned to a life of crime by virtue of his excessive arrogance and manifest impiety. Even a few people of quality, who had never imagined such a possibility, ventured to say that they had always suspected something, and had long feared that some such crisis might materialize eventually.

  Shortly after nightfall, another rumor began to make the rounds, to the effect that the mayor himself had supervised a search by town constables of the grounds of the so-called Manse d’Ys, and that they had found a substantial cache of stolen valuables hidden in the carefully-shaped ornamental bushes of the so-called Duc’s garden. Although no detailed inventory had yet been made, it seemed likely that the greater part of the gems and silver-plate stolen by the Phantom would soon be returned to his victims, although the cash had all been spent and the comestibles consumed. The instruments of domestic discipline and most of the weapons also seemed to be missing.

  This new rumor probably set a new speed record in traveling through the space within the town’s walls, save for one tiny black spot; no one brought it to the attention of Monsieur Sevanter. Jean Funeste’s request that the Great Judge be let alone, in order that no further pressure should be added to his climactic confrontation with his inner demons, was universally honored.

  Jean Funeste and Paul Mansard went to the magistrate’s house together in order to speak to all the watchmen and servants within its grounds, although Odo and Furalor had declined a request to accompany them. Jean Funeste impressed upon all the servants the absolute necessity of leaving Monsieur Sevanter to himself, save for the customary duties that they were obliged to carry out, and he insisted that these duties should be carried out with the utmost efficiency and quietness.

  “Your master will not hang for the crimes that he has unwittingly committed,” the clerk assured Monsieur Sevanter’s staff, “nor will he be committed to the asylum in Is. Your positions are quite safe, provided that you exercise the utmost discretion until this tragic matter can be settled—which it will be, I hope and expect, tomorrow.”

  “If you can take care of the situation here, Master Funeste,” Paul Mansard added, “I will take all the necessary measures to return the man items of stolen property to Monsieur Sevanter’s victims, and add up the sums in cash of which he will need to make restitution—covering food and wine too, of course.”

  “You have always been a good friend to Monsieur Sevanter, sir,” said Jean Funeste, “and I am extremely glad to have your assistance in this tortuous matter.”

  Thanks to the tireless efforts of Jean Funeste, Monsieur Sevanter went to bed that night as tranquil as any man in his situation could possibly be. He knew that he was a less admirable man, in the estimation of his poorer neighbors, than he had been before, but he did not know the extent to which his reputation had been tarnished in the eyes of his own class. In his own mind, he was absolutely certain that he was not guilty
of the perverse charges that Funeste had so unexpectedly leveled against him, and he was very enthusiastic to prove it in whatever manner he could. He was looking forward with feverish anticipation to the Phantom’s promised return, and was determined to capture him this time, alive or dead.

  Better to capture him alive, the magistrate told himself, in order that he can tell us what magic he used to work his seeming miracles—but better to have him dead than not to have him at all.

  He distributed his servants about the house as before, placed the four watchmen that still remained to him about the grounds, and carefully checked the locks on all his doors—including his bedroom door, which would now require a better guard than Jean Funeste’s hammock—and all his windows. He gathered all the keys together under his pillow, along with the pistol. He did not waste any effort on such frippery as “magical alarms”.

  Before he went to bed, though, the magistrate carefully searched through one of the treasure-chests and removed from it a small oval portrait of his dead wife, which had been painted before their marriage, and presented to him as a token of her respect. She had ever been a respectful woman, who had never taken advantage of their intimacy to excuse any lapse of politeness. He could not be entirely certain that the portrait was the article most likely to be sought by the Phantom in his final raid, but it seemed altogether likely. He locked the chest and the cupboard again, and then placed the portrait and the keys beneath his pillow. He lit five wax candles, as he had on the previous night.

  Having carefully inspected the bullet-hole in the paneling of his bedroom wall, Monsieur Sevanter was by now convinced that he had missed his shot on the previous night because he had failed to hold the pistol’s barrel straight when he was startled by the smoke and the recoil, but that he could only have missed hitting the Phantom by a mere whisker. He was determined that his hand should be steady enough this time, if he had the opportunity to fire another shot.

  The process of taking these precautions, with minute care, calmed the magistrate’s anxiety somewhat, but they could not entirely quiet his residual wrath at the suggestion that his persecution was all in his mind. He did, however, conclude that he might have over-reacted when Jean Funeste had made the suggestion, given that the poor fellow had indeed, only been tracing a chain of reasoning, and had assured his friend that he did not believe for a moment that the Great Judge had deceived anyone intentionally. Despite forming a resolution to forgive his old friend, though, he felt as he went to bed as if an iron band had been drawn around his waist, squeezing his belly.

  His head seemed calm enough when he first laid it on the pillow, but it did not stay calm for long. Before an hour had elapsed it had turned into a seething cauldron of thoughts and images, with wild ideas bursting randomly like punctured soap-bubbles within his consciousness. He did not need to fall asleep to fall prey to a menacing delirium.

  Two images from his previous nightmares kept coming back to him while he waited: the image of the graveyard in which the dead were rising from their tombs, bent on keeping their appointment with the man who had sentenced them to death; and the image of his long-dead wife, as contained in the portrait beneath his pillow.

  Because these images kept rising into his mind, in spite the fact that he was still awake, he forced himself to search for something more solid to look at, fixing his eyes in turn upon the locked door, the windows, and the place in the opposite wall where the bullet had struck. Finally, though, he took the portrait from his pillow, and occupied himself in staring at the face of the young girl whose wise and careful father had done him the honor of accepting his most generous offer for her hand.

  Remarkably, the sight of the picture calmed him more than anything else he had looked at. As he stared into the painted eyes, he became convinced that, if this really was the face of the fiend that haunted him, then the ghost had certainly not risen of its own volition, but had been torn from its rest by the foulest necromancy.

  But that, he thought, can hardly be possible. So-called magic is all delusion, all trickery. I am an educated man and a student of the law. Jean Funeste was correct in one thing, although he was drawn to a false conclusion by some mistaken premise: the key to this affair is reason, not superstition, and logic will solve it, if only it is correctly and wisely applied.

  Having reached this conclusion, Monsieur Sevanter found himself thinking more lucidly again, like a Great Judge and as a man of unusual cleverness and wit. He realized then how clouded his mind had been before—for days rather than hours—by wrath and irritation.

  And then, quite suddenly, he saw everything that had happened in a clearer light, and understood, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who the Phantom must be.

  Monsieur Sevanter looked up then, and saw that the Phantom was already with him, standing at the foot of the bed, looking at him, exactly as he had on the previous night and the night before that, through the holes of his mask. In the glow of the five candles, the Phantom seemed a good deal clearer this time than he had before, but the loose-hanging cloak still hid his body, while the black silk mask and the hood concealed his face and hair. All of that, Monsieur Sevanter decided, grimly, would only serve to make him a more obvious target

  Monsieur Sevanter took out the pistol, as he had on the previous night, and pointed it at the mask, but did not hasten to fire. “My hand is much steadier tonight, Jean Funeste,” he said. “I promise that you I will not miss again, now that I know who and what you are.”

  Jean Funeste released a slight sigh, and then reached up without delay to remove the mask from his face and the hood from his head, as if he were tired of the masquerade. He dropped the mask on the floor, but tucked the hood carefully away inside the clothes he was wearing under the cloak. Monsieur Sevanter had the distinct impression that it was not the same cloak that the Phantom had worn on the previous two occasions—which would make sense, if the other one had merely been a blue night-shirt turned inside out, facilitating the clerk’s rapid transformation from apparent haunter to apparent ally.

  In the meantime, Jean Funeste looked at the magistrate with eyes as hard as flints, and said: “I knew that you would work it out once I had shown you the way—but I knew that you would have to calm down first, giving me time to complete my work. You should not try to kill me, for I have not tried to kill you. I deserve a more ingeniously fitting punishment, just as you have”

  Alphonse Sevanter licked his lips, and stared into the naked face of the man who was most definitely no longer his friend, and must have been his enemy for far longer than he cared to think.

  “I admit that you have been very ingenious in planning this assassination of my character, Jean” he whispered, “but I deny that I have committed any crime that deserves such a horrid and convoluted punishment—or, indeed, any crime at all. No, I should not try to kill you, and I will not, provided that you behave yourself. You are the villain in this matter, and everyone in Teirbrun will know it by nightfall tomorrow. I shall have you in my court before the week is out—and all your victims will be there to see what ingenious punishment I might contrive.”

  “Perhaps,” said Jean Funeste. “If it will reassure you, I promise that I shall not try to run away this time. When your servants burst through that door to seize the Phantom, I shall be here, standing meekly by the bed. In the meantime, I shall be glad to enlighten you as to the crimes you have committed, and the revenge that they demanded. You no longer need to be enlightened, I suppose, as to the means by which I stole your possessions.”

  “Logic did that,” the magistrate replied, calmly. “The same logic that you used to demonstrate that, from your point of view, only I could have done it, served to demonstrate that, from mine, only you could have done it. When you left the room after taking the inventory, you took the items with you, heaving secreted them about your person by sleight of hand. I should have realized that immediately—or, indeed, two days ago—but I thought that you were above suspicion. Whatever secret hatreds you have nursed, you must
allow that I have always trusted you implicitly. I have always treated you with the utmost condescension, in spite of the difference in our stations, and never suspected you capable of the horrid envy that you must have harbored all along. I am a generous and kindly man, Jean—worthier by far than you have turned out to be.”

  “I agree that you have always treated me with the utmost condescension,” said Funeste, “and I am well aware of the extent to which you overestimate your worth as a man, while remaining blithely unaware of your own failings.”

  Monsieur Sevanter’s finger tightened a little on the trigger of his weapon, but he did not press it. He was no longer frightened, now that he knew who it was that he had to face, but he was genuinely disappointed.

  “I truly thought you were my friend, Jean,” he said, sadly. “Why were you not my friend, when I was always such a good friend to you?”

  “You hold the answer in your hand,” replied Jean Funeste.

  Monsieur Sevanter looked down at the pistol—but then he realized that the clerk must mean the other hand, which was still gripping the portrait of his dead wife.

  “I could have forgiven you the rest,” the clerk said. “I could have forgiven you for winning every other contest in which we took part as boys or men, by virtue of the unearned start in life that your station gave you, even though I was always the stronger and the cleverer of us. I could have forgiven you for becoming a magistrate while I remained a clerk, even though my understanding of the law was superior to yours. I could even have forgiven you for becoming famous for all those cunning sentences you passed, which earned you the title of the Great Judge, although more than three in every four were ideas that I put into your head. I was always the man who fit punishments neatly to crimes—and I still am. I am merely taking my career to its logical conclusion.”