The Dream Killer of Paris

by Fabrice Bourland

  VIII

  TOO MUCH READING CAN DAMAGE YOUR SLEEP

  We spent most of the evening sitting outside a brasserie on Rue Saint-Martin, sipping glasses of Dubonnet. As promised, I brought James up to date with the details of Superintendent Fourier’s investigation.

  ‘What’s your feeling about this case, Andrew?’ he asked when I’d finished. ‘Do you really think this Öberlin fellow had anything to do with those deaths?’

  ‘It’s just supposition at the moment. The fact that this strange Austrian professor—’

  ‘But is he a professor? Is he even Austrian?’ James interrupted.

  ‘We don’t know anything for certain. Anyway, the fact that this person met both victims—’

  ‘Because you’re convinced that the men who visited the Marquis and the poet a few days before they died were one and the same person?’

  ‘It’s one of the few leads we’ve got. We have no choice but to follow it up.’

  ‘What about Jacques Lacroix? As the superintendent said, he was in touch with Ducros and the Marquis as well. Do you think he’s in the clear?’

  ‘If he had had anything to do with the Austrian, why would he have written that article in Paris-Soir? After all, it’s thanks to him that we know the two cases are connected.’

  ‘Hmm! If it were the same visitor and if we can show that he also tried to see Percival Crowles, the doctor from Queen Square hospital, that really would change things. It’s a pity I’m not in London to investigate.’

  ‘A pity indeed,’ I agreed, drawing greedily on my Turkish cigarette.

  ‘This fellow may also simply have wanted to meet them to warn them of danger. If that’s the case, then he’s a good Samaritan!’

  ‘But remember that neither the Marquis de Brindillac nor Pierre Ducros seemed to be thrilled to see him.’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean he’s guilty, does it? And, of course, they might have died of natural causes. There’s still everything to prove in that respect.’

  ‘True, frightening someone to death in their sleep isn’t yet on the statute book.’

  ‘Fine, so to sum up: on the one hand, we have two victims (three now), and possibly more in the future, with no actual proof of foul play, and the only thing the victims share is their interest in sleep and dreams. On the other hand, we have an untraceable suspect whose guilt has yet to be proved.’

  ‘Exactly, James! An excellent summary!’

  ‘You said earlier that the Austrian was one of the few leads we’ve got. As far as I can see, it’s the only one. We must find this fellow.’

  ‘There is a second lead which you just mentioned.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The victims’ interest in sleep and dreams, be it scientific or artistic. I’m convinced it plays a crucial role in this case.’

  ‘Maybe Fourier was right to talk in terms of an epidemic. Could it be a new form of bacteria which has suddenly appeared and has a fatal effect while you’re dreaming? Great sleepers like me and vivid dreamers like you, Andrew, should beware.’

  ‘The Bacillus somnii!’ I added, amused by this theory.

  My partner stretched his arms above his head, yawning, and drained his glass of Dubonnet in one gulp.

  ‘I don’t know about you but I’m exhausted. Tomorrow will be a long and fascinating day. I think I’ll defy our Bacillus now and get my strength back.’

  ‘I have absolutely no desire to go to bed myself,’ I replied, lighting another cigarette. ‘I think I’ll go for a walk. See you tomorrow, James.’

  I went to bed very late that night. Wishing to clear my head from the effects of alcohol and lack of sleep, I strolled leisurely past the Louvre, Place Vendôme and up to the area around Opéra, where I caught the last omnibus back.

  I wanted to delay the moment of sleep for as long as possible. All evening we had speculated about the inexplicable deaths of the Marquis de Brindillac, Pierre Ducros and Percival Crowles. Such a gloomy discussion about so-called Deadly Sleep certainly did not encourage one to slip into the arms of Morpheus.

  But that was not the only reason. I had not thought about the previous night’s dream since recording it in my notebook that morning before joining Fourier at the Gare d’Orsay. It had completely slipped my mind. As I returned to my room it suddenly came flooding back.

  In all my life I had never had a dream that was so vivid or so acutely realistic, leaving me so confused upon waking. I had been too busy to think about it during the day. Yet there was much to ponder. During the dream I had had a feeling of singularly intense emotion, of sexual excitement towards the unknown young woman, and part of me wanted to feel that emotion and that excitement again. Another part vigorously rejected it. If she truly existed (something I was beginning to doubt; my memory of our meeting on the steamer had taken on the quality of a dream), I felt guilty about entertaining such feelings.

  Was I not unwillingly a bit like the incubi Lacroix and I had discussed earlier? And did this not indicate that those tales of immaterial unions were nothing more than vague repressed desires?

  A bottomless chasm was opening beneath me, filled with my frustrations, obsessions and weaknesses.

  The hotel was relatively quiet at that time of year so James had been given the room next to mine. I could hear him snoring as I passed his door.

  Despite my tiredness, I found it very difficult to fall asleep. I had brushed aside the memory of my dream but reason would not surrender so easily. I kept going over the events of the day in my head. One point in particular continued to intrigue me. I was convinced that I had recently come across a reference to Le Comte de Gabalis or its author. And at that moment I thought I remembered where.

  Impatient to settle the matter, I turned the bedside light on again and picked up one of the volumes of the complete works of Gérard de Nerval which included Les Illuminés. This was a collection of disparate texts in which the writer outlined his favourite eccentrics, characters both impassioned and inclined to dreaming. The fifth was dedicated to Jacques Cazotte, an author from the eighteenth century who was remembered for a delightful novel, Le Diable amoureux, which had been inspired (as Nerval noted) by a book written a hundred years before by a certain Abbé Montfaucon de Villars: Le Comte de Gabalis. What is more, I found the anecdote Jacques Lacroix had mentioned about Villars’s death.

  I now remembered reading Le Diable amoureux a few years earlier. It was a half-mischievous, half-serious book about the adventures of a young officer in the king’s guard in Naples who, after a bet with his regimental comrades about the alleged powers of the cabbala, tried to invoke the occult forces of nature one evening in the ruins at Portici. A terrifying ghost that looked like a camel’s head appeared and then revealed itself to be a gracious sylph-like creature prepared to grant all his wishes. At the end of the tale the author, lapsing into tragedy, intimated that it was the devil in person who had taken on female form the better to trick the young officer.

  Later in the article, there was a brief digression on the nature of these elemental spirits. Eusèbe, Saint Augustine, Cazotte and Abbé de Villars were convinced they existed in a state of perfect innocence from the Christian point of view.

  I closed the book and, wanting to find out more about Le Comte de Gabalis, picked up the 1921 edition I had found at Château B—. I read all five discourses (it was only about a hundred pages long) and flicked through the commentary which accompanied them as well.

  Jacques Lacroix had summarised the book accurately. The discourses of Gabalis, a German lord and famous occultist, reported by one of his French disciples, covered the existence of ‘elementals’ and the means of contacting them.

  According to the Count of Gabalis, many races, whose women and girls are formidably beautiful, inhabit the four elements which make up the universe: sylphs and sylphids fill the air, fire teems with salamanders, the rivers and the seas are home to water sprites and nymphs, and the centre of the earth contains male and female gnomes. When the world wa
s created, Adam, made from what was purest in the elements, was the natural king of these creatures, who appeared proud but were actually docile and devoted to their master. However, after his sin deprived him of his throne and corrupted the principles from which he had been created, he lost sovereignty over the invisible peoples. Only a philosopher, whose bodily form had been regenerated and exalted through the assiduous study of the secret sciences, would be able to establish communication with them again.

  That being so, the Count of Gabalis did not conceal the fact that he had renounced the charms of human females in order to devote himself exclusively to his invisible mistresses and their delectable embraces.

  Cazotte, Abbé de Villars, the Count of Gabalis, elemental spirits, sensual cabbalistic pleasures … After more than two hours of attentive reading, a feeling of mellow drowsiness eventually stole over me. I put the book on the chair and drifted off almost immediately.

  In the confusion of my initial nocturnal visions – the ones which appear as soon as the brain gently succumbs to sleep – it crossed my mind that I had left my dream notebook in my jacket. I didn’t have the energy to get up though, so the book remained where it was.

  As I expected, as I both hoped and feared with the same intensity, I woke up in the middle of the night, shaken by a new dream.

  DREAM 2

  NIGHT OF 18-19 OCTOBER

  Bedtime: 12.25 a.m.

  Approximate time when fell asleep: 2.20 a.m.

  Time awoken: 3.55 a.m.

  I am stretched out on my bed in my room at the Hôtel Saint-Merri and I am dreaming that I am asleep. Like last night, I dream while fully aware that I am dreaming.

  I know that the stranger from the steamer will join me soon. She promised; it’s inevitable. In the meantime, I sleep peacefully. My dreams are connected to events of the day, the visit to Château B— with Superintendent Fourier, the investigation into the death of the Marquis, James’s arrival in Paris. While dreaming, I hear myself telling myself that these are just memories from my daytime existence because, in reality, I am dreaming.

  Suddenly, I sense that the door has just opened and someone has entered the room. It is her, I’m sure of it. I open my eyes slowly, without experiencing the slightly dazed feeling one normally has on waking, as if there were no difference between sleep and the reality before me.

  It is her, the young woman from the steamer, wearing a fine red satin dress which shows off the delicate outline of her hips and chest perfectly. Her blond hair floats in the air as she approaches the bed, smiling. She gives off a sort of phosphorescence which glows all around her.

  She sits on the edge of my bed and, in the same movement, her alluring lips touch mine. Her skin is soft, like the softest silk.

  Then I hear her whisper, ‘Do you remember Fata Morgana? You must remember.’

  Before I can answer, she moves her face away and looks at me intensely as if feeling sudden anxiety.

  ‘Dark forces are preparing to turn the world upside down. I am afraid for you, Andrew. You must believe in me – your life depends on it.’

  ‘What forces? What are you talking about?’

  Her expression hardens suddenly.

  I want to keep hold of her because I feel that she is going to escape again. I would like her to stay so much! While raising her hand to tell me to be quiet, she rises and glides towards the chair, takes my dream notebook out of my jacket and, seeming to float above the floor, places it at the foot of the bed.

  Then, just like the day before and despite my desire, despite my disappointment, she moves away towards the door, pointing at the book.

  When the door closes, I wake up with a start.

  NOTES UPON WAKING

  1. When I opened my eyes I only had to reach out my arm to pick up my notebook at the end of the bed. What am I to make of it? Could it be knowing I would need it, I had placed it there automatically before going to bed? Was everything else just my mind playing tricks on me?

  2. I feel feverish and nervous. I still have the taste of her lips on mine. I can smell the fragrance of her skin, feel the softness of her caresses on my body. How can a simple dream seem so real? I fear that sleep has abandoned me for the rest of the night.

  IX

  AN OMINOUS INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF CASES

  My cigarette-holder hung from my lips. I had been engrossed in the biography of Nerval all morning.

  It had been impossible to go back to sleep after my dream. In vain I had hoped for a few more hours’ rest but I abandoned my bed in desperation as soon as the first rays of the sun appeared. After a frugal meal for which I had no appetite, I dreaded returning to a room in which my mind had demonstrated an excessive tendency to dream so I sat at one of the hotel’s reading tables near the lobby.

  ‘Oh, what I wouldn’t give just to have a quick look at that damned police file!’ I exclaimed, looking up at the reception desk.

  ‘I fear that you’ll have to give up that idea,’ replied a familiar voice from over my shoulder. ‘The file was destroyed by the Communards in a fire in 1871, as was part of the Préfecture’s archives.’

  Jacques Lacroix was standing behind me.

  ‘Nerval’s death is a subject for endless speculation,’ he continued, ‘and that biography you’re reading, by Aristide Marie, is fairly well researched.’

  ‘“Fairly well” is somewhat qualified, isn’t it?’

  ‘Actually, there are several contradictory versions of events. For example, the theory that Nerval was still alive when he was cut down from the rope by the policeman is at odds with another, not mentioned in the biography, according to which his body had been lifeless for a long time.’

  ‘Ha! It’s definitely hard to get to the bottom of what happened. But do I take it that you’re interested in Nerval’s death?’

  ‘He was the model poet for the Surrealists. In the First Manifesto Breton wrote that “Nerval possessed to a marvellous degree that spirit with which we claim kinship”. Although I am no longer a member of the group, I still share many cultural references with them.’

  ‘Yes, I remember Monsieur Breton’s homage. Before opting for “Surrealism” as a name, he almost chose “Supernaturalism” – in reference, of course, to Les Filles du feu.’

  ‘Monsieur Singleton, your knowledge of French literature is absolutely amazing. A literary detective, it’s certainly original.’

  ‘In libris est verum. I simply apply this adage and extend the principle to the art of investigation.’

  ‘Well, as I’m dealing with a connoisseur, and to return to Nerval’s death, I would like to tell you a secret, my friend. A few years ago, I had an adventure that was quite incredible, even surreal, one might say. It was late afternoon and I was climbing up to the top of Tour Saint-Jacques when a peculiar character approached me. He claimed to have followed the investigation into the tragedy at Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne closely. He even said that he had been involved in some way. The poet had been dead for nearly seventy years by then and, frankly, the stranger didn’t look that decrepit. I thought he was pulling my leg. But later I checked the papers from February and March 1855 in detail and I had to admit that most of what he’d told me was true.’

  Needless to say, I was finding it very difficult to take the journalist seriously.

  ‘Do you think he was some mad literary historian?’ was all I said.

  Lacroix laughed. ‘Possibly. Anyway, before disappearing, this man entrusted me with a document which would greatly interest you. If we manage to solve our case, I promise I’ll show it to you.’

  There was a hint of irony in his smile. A new document? Handed over by a stranger at the top of Tour Saint-Jacques? Whatever next! Lacroix must be making fun of me.

  ‘It’s almost time for our meeting,’ I said, changing the subject.

  I compared my pocket watch with the Swiss clock behind the reception desk. My watch was three minutes faster.

  ‘Yes. Actually, I think our friend Fourier is just arriving.
Is your partner not here yet?’

  ‘James is not an early riser but he should be here soon. Yes, that must be him I can hear on the stairs.’

  Looking dashing in a pale linen suit, James came down the last step just as Superintendent Fourier pushed open the hotel’s glass doors.

  ‘Gentlemen!’ my associate said brightly. ‘Good morning! Superintendent, I recognised your bowler hat from the window of my room. But what has happened to your bodyguard?’

  ‘He is at the Café de la Place Blanche,’ replied Fourier. ‘He and another of my men are under orders to take it in turns to watch the place all day.’

  ‘Did yesterday’s surveillance of the Surrealists’ headquarters yield anything?’ asked Lacroix.

  While James and the journalist had each grabbed a chair and sat down next to me, Fourier was clearly reluctant to sit. He took off his hat and, holding it in his left hand, smoothed the long solitary lock of hair on top of his head with the other hand.

  ‘When I met them last night at the brasserie, my officers indicated that at about half past seven they had seen an individual who appeared to match the description provided by Suzanne Ducros.’

  ‘Suzanne Ducros?’ repeated Lacroix, who could not believe his ears.

  ‘Yes. He had all the grotesque features she described to you: top hat, long, dull white hair, round glasses and a wooden cane. He was sitting nursing a glass of beer, not far from Breton and his friends.’

  ‘Well! That completely confirms my theory! Hans-Rudolf von Öberlin and Andreas Eberlin are the same person. I don’t know why but it seems our man has swapped the get-up of the first character for the second.’

  Lacroix’s face suddenly darkened and he looked at the superintendent with abrupt concern.

  ‘Was he in the brasserie when you joined your men? Did you see him?’

  ‘Good heavens, no, it was after half past eight when I arrived. The man had left nearly an hour earlier.’