The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 3: The Triumph of the Nyctalope

by Jean de La Hire

  The Baron took a leather purse from his pocket and extracted a tiny flat key, which he introduced into the lock on the gate. He opened it, went through and closed it carefully behind him. He went straight through the garden, climbed the three steps that led to the door of the house, and opened it with the same key, only putting it half way into the lock. He went in and closed he door.

  A bull’s eye clock in the hallway marked 10 a.m. Outside, it was a beautiful spring day. Through windows with little panes of colored glass, the Sun projected long rays of yellow, blue, red and green light on to the waxed floor.

  Glô von Warteck stood still for a moment, meditatively, his face and body fantastically illuminated by these multicolored rays. He had come in without making a noise. Nothing troubled the silence that surrounded him, save for the monotonous tick-tock of the bull’s-eye.

  Eventually, the Baron came to a decision. He went rapidly along the hallway and climbed a stairway of waxed wood, whose carpet was held in place by nickel stair-rods. On the first-floor landing, he bumped into a young woman who was making a hurried exit from a room on the left, with a feather duster in her hand.

  “Oh! Our Lord!” the young woman cried, surprised, confused and fearful.

  “Is my mother ready, Elsa?” the Baron said.

  “Yes, Our Lord!”

  “Good. Get on with your work.”

  He went past, took a corridor to the right, and rapped on the first door with his knuckles. Without waiting for a reply, he opened it and went in. There was a minuscule antechamber and another door, curtained on both sides, then a large bedroom with three windows.

  A log fire was burning in the grate. A woman was sitting idly in an armchair in front of the fire, clutching the arm-rests and presenting feet shod in sturdy buttoned boots to the warmth of the flames. The chair was placed in such a fashion that its occupant had only to lift her head and turn slightly to one side, on hearing the slight noise of the Baron’s entrance, to face her visitor.

  “Good morning, mother,” said the Baron, with evident respect.

  “Good morning, my son,” the woman replied, in a harsh voice. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’m ready. Are we going?”

  “Right away?”

  “Yes, of course! Right away.” She got up abruptly, in a graceless, almost brutal manner.

  She was a large, stout woman of about 60. Her white hair was formed into a fringe over her broad forehead and temples and a thick, heavy bun at the nape of her neck. Her face was almost masculine, square and somewhat wrinkled. She had cold grey eyes, an aquiline nose, thin lips, heavy jaws and a prominent chin.

  She was dressed in a steel-grey stiff-collared costume with a military cut. With rapid and confident gestures, she took up a plain grey bonnet from a table and fastened it in position, not without a certain cavalier elegance, then donned her gloves and threw a magnificent squirrel-fur stole over her shoulders. In her right hand, she picked up a traveling-bag, which was of medium dimensions but rather heavy, but which the Baron did not offer to carry. “Let’s go!” she said.

  He bowed as she went past him.

  As he had entered the room, the Baron had had his hat in his hand. As he went out behind his mother, he put it back on.

  The maid with the feather-duster was on the landing.

  “Elsa,” said her mistress, “you and Glawitz are forbidden to let anyone into the house.”

  “Will the Baroness be gone for a long time?” Elsa asked, respectfully.

  Diana von Warteck turned to her son and queried: “Much later than June 10?”

  “No, mother,” Glô replied, with a proud smile. “No. You’ll return by aeroplane on June 11, 12 at the latest.”

  Diana turned back to the maid and said: “You heard my son. But don’t forget that, from a distance as from nearby, today, tomorrow and every day, I shall know what is happening here. Do you understand? Woe betide you and Glawitz if you get up to anything!”

  Else went pale, her blue eyes suddenly expressing a sharp fear. Immediately lowering her eyelids, however, and bending her knee in a humble curtsey, she stammered: “I’ll be sensible, mistress.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  Three minutes later, Diana and Glô von Warteck were in the street.

  “A carriage, mother?” the Baron said.

  “No. I prefer to walk.”

  Side by side, they strode rapidly through the town, without exchanging a word, stiffly maintaining impassive expressions.

  On the quay alongside which the pretended Roosevelt was standing, watched by many idlers, the son went ahead of his mother to guide her through the curious crowd to the submarine’s gangway. They immediately became the focal point of every gaze–but not for long, for they went into the vessel immediately.

  Then the blast of a whistle sounded.

  Mariners in grey uniforms appeared on deck, barefoot and bare-headed, moving about methodically. An officer in a white cap, but similarly barefoot and clad in the same grey uniform, whose long sleeves were marked with three small blue stripes, barked orders at them. In a few minutes, everything was prepared for the submersion. One after the other, like puppets, with the officer bringing up the rear, the mariners disappeared. By that time, the submarine had moved away from the quay to a distance that was about twice as great as its visible length. The whole slender mass came slowly about, turning its stern to the quay–and the fake Roosevelt sailed away, while the gawkers dispersed, each one heading for some other idle spectacle or going to work.

  When it had doubled the final jetty and left the last signal-beacon far behind, the Kaiser-Gott submerged and put on speed rapidly, until it was gliding along beneath the surface at its normal cruising speed of 50 knots.

  Glô had led his mother to the apartment that Diana von Warteck had occupied several times before on journeys from Danzig to Stockholm, where she had a summer residence. He went into the apartment with her. Together, they went through a little vestibule, a minuscule dining-room and a miniature sitting-room, not pausing until they reached a bedroom with a single bed, as large as the other three rooms put together.

  In addition to the bed, there was a mirror-fronted wardrobe, a divan, a table, wall-hangings and rugs. The luxury of its furnishings was slightly overstated, but it was very comfortable. One of the walls as pierced by three portholes–closed, naturally, since the submarine was traveling underwater–partly masked by lace and velvet curtains. A ceiling-light and three electric lamps, already switched on when Diana and Glô entered the room, filled it with vivid light.

  Suddenly, something strange happened. The reciprocal attitudes of the mother and son were completely modified. While she put down her traveling-bag and took off her gloves, stole and bonnet, which she unfastened herself, she looked at her son and smiled affectionately. He no longer had the coldly respectful attitude that he had adopted in the house in the Schopenhauerstrasse and in the street, but the opposite: the free and easy manner of a superior man.

  The mother let herself fall heavily into an armchair and said in a soft voice: “Ah, now we have time to chat at our leisure. For several days, I’ve only had news of you by telephone. How are you?”

  He remained standing in front of her, looming over her, and he talked–sometimes standing still, sometimes pacing back and forth, stiff and supple at the same time, anxious, menacing and feline, simultaneously enraged and self-satisfied. “How am I? At the luminous dawn of victory–but still struggling against the darkness! What fumblings! What hesitations! What faults, even! I was nearly killed. Me!”

  “By a woman, I’ll wager!” Diana von Warteck put in, her affectionate pity leavened with scorn.

  He stopped short, furious, ready to react abusively, but she added, very gravely: “Womankind will ruin you, my son.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, scornful in his turn. “It’s your fault,” he replied, dryly. “When I came back from India and you learned about my experiments, your ambition and haste to see me triumph were so great that
they made you too docile a subject, even though I knew exactly what I had to contend with: the ordinary force of your soul, your personal pride, your rigid will, and the hardness of heart towards me of which you have given me so many proofs since my childhood in the Bermudas. At the end of those experiments, I thought I was much stronger than I am, and instead of waiting until I had finished the construction of the perfected Teledynamo, I wanted to act immediately with the force of my brain alone, solely by the power of my own magnetism, with the cards put into my hands by my occult science!”

  He stopped, clenched his fists and looked hard at his mother. She had slumped further into the armchair. Her eyes were open but glazed, like those of a dead woman. Her face was now expressionless. Shrugging his shoulders again, he went on: “Installed at Schwarzrock, I terrorized the 50 brutes and 20 girls that I made into my soldiers and servants. I transformed my brother Hunter into a puppet. I hypnotized servants and made them into unconscious messengers by suggestion. I cast a spell on a son from a distance, to get at the father...”

  Diana interrupted him. “Maladroit cruelty!” she said, in a bleak voice. “If you had consulted me, I would have set you straight regarding the father’s psychology. You can’t intimidate an Alexandre Prillant!”

  He did not seem to have heard. He continued: “I cast a spell on Irène...”

  Diana interrupted again. “Stupid impatience! When you want to possess a woman, you don’t start by rendering yourself odious and inflicting physical suffering...”

  Still indifferent, at least in appearance, he was still continuing: “I drew Laurence Païli to me, by the force of my will-power alone...”

  Diana cut in again, obstinately. “Puerile contradiction! You force her to come to you and demand that she gives herself to you freely!”

  He made no reply. He went on: “I cast a spell on Matthias Narbonne...”

  Again she cut in: “Stupid caprice! You could, by simple suggestion, have had all the capitalists in the world sign checks in your favor worth millions, and send them to you.”

  “I hated Narbonne when he was alive!” he retorted, brutally. “I still hate him now that he’s dead!”

  “You’ve killed him?”

  “I’ve killed him.”

  “Stupidity!”

  “Vengeance.”

  “A Lucifer does not avenge himself–he heads straight to his goal. You’ve been petty and stupid.”

  “Mother!”

  “Go on, my son.”

  He ground his teeth with rage. Then, doubtless seized once again by pride in the certainty of his accomplishment, he said: “You may be right, mother. But why did you not make me insensible to material pleasures? Why did you send me out into the world like the sons of other men? Who is responsible for my sensuality, if not you?”

  “Haven’t I told you, Glô, that it’s necessary to be patient and self-restrained? To remain chaste and cold until the day after the definitive victory? What did the Hindu teach you, if not that?”

  “I understood it too late. I only understood it when that accursed Nyctalope escaped my power, even at close quarters, just as Prillant, Lourmel, Mattol and others escaped it at a distance. I understood, especially, when Rupert VI, although a captive, managed to operate the electric switch that turned the entire Hollow Rock into a vast multiple echo-chamber in which every sound was instantly reproduced by the microradiotelephone, clearly and distinctly, in the listening room at Schwarzrock.

  “Then, mother, I completely abandoned my impassioned and incomplete enterprises after a long conversation with my other self in the Mental Concentration Chamber. I devoted myself entirely to the last necessary experiments in vivisection and spell-casting, transfusing vital fluids into my Teledynamo’s accumulators. I reiterated my orders and instructions to Wilfried, who is expecting us at the Pole from hour to hour. Thus–as you desired, mother–I vanquished myself.”

  “It is on that sole condition that you will vanquish other men, Glô!” the hard and massive woman pronounced, solemnly.

  He recovered himself then, diabolically superb: “I shall vanquish! In a few days, my Teledynamo will be established at the magnetic pole of the boreal hemisphere–which is the hemisphere of the old world, where all the world’s true powers are: Europe, modern Asia, the United States of America. It’s also the hemisphere in which men preserve the sacred traditions of the mysteries of Isis, Eleusis, Moloch, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva–for Egypt, Arabia and India are all north of the equator. As imaginary meridians radiate across maps of the world, so the all-powerful fluids, irresistible propagators of my will, will radiate from the North Pole to the equator, and I shall capture to my profit the thoughts of all that humankind which swarms upon the Earth, criss-crosses the seas and attempts to scale the Heavens! I shall domesticate their intelligence, direct their will-power according to my whim, destroy or subjugate their organized forces, overturn, drain or dissipate as it might suit me their material and fiduciary fortunes... And humankind entire will eventually obey me, more loyally than a Palatine slave obeyed Caesar!”

  He fell silent, standing over Diana von Warteck, domineering and terrible. The monster’s mother was no longer slumped in the armchair; her eyes were no longer glazed, like those of a corpse. She was still seated, but was stiff and upright, her mouth arched by the violent contraction of her features. Her grey eyes sparkling, she stared at the man to whom she had given birth, in whom were concentrated, for the purposes of a practical realization that was now certain, all the rancors, hatreds, visions, hopes, wraths and avidities of the tenebrous race of the Wartecks.

  “Glô, my son,” she croaked, in a voice choked with emotion, “forgive my just and necessary reproaches. I have found you again. This is what I love and admire in you!”

  “Oh, mother, so it must be,” Lucifer replied, with a mocking laugh. “But afterwards, when I am the omnipotent and omniscient master of living humanity, and when I attempt to extend the tentacles of my science and my power into the realm of the dead, don’t come to importune me with your belated lessons if I satisfy, without limit, those passions for blood and flesh which your flesh and your blood have put into me! I know that my appetite for all women has merely been awakened, at present, by Irène and La Païli! My hatred of all men, likewise, is concentrated for the present on one man: Leo Saint-Clair! On the very next day after my victory, June 11, I intend simultaneously to possess Irène and to have Saint-Clair tortured materially, in human terms, with nothing occult about it. That same day, I also intend to possess La Païli and to make Saint-Clair watch me! Ah, how he shall suffer! He has been my rival, and still is. He has failed to defeat me, and fights on. I shall have him, in the end, and he shall suffer! Oh! How he shall suffer!”

  He was fuming with rage, joy and ferocious hatred.

  His mother made a gesture of indifference and slowly pronounced words that immediately calmed the monster: “On June 11, my son, I shall return to my house in Danzig, where I shall be well placed to enjoy, in a restricted but adequate circle, the universal triumph of the Wartecks.” Without pause, she added, in a changed voice that was hard and glacial: “What have you done with La Païli’s mother?”

  He smiled sardonically. “Unharmed, captive here,” was his laconic reply.

  “Will you give her to me?”

  “I will give her to you.”

  “That’s good–for I too have my petty hatreds. I want the person who was once the beautiful Donella to see me, to recognize me, to beg me in tears and curse me...”

  “You may use her as you wish.”

  “Thank you. And what have you done with Minna Zucht?”

  “Experiments–dead.”

  “And the three Zuchts?”

  “Dangerous–dead.”

  “I regret Berthold. He pleased me.”

  “You’ll find others, mother,” he jeered, in a low and ferocious voice.

  “I certainly hope so!” she said, simply. And the old woman’s eyes had a cryptic and disquieting glimmer.
At that moment, the mother and the son–one stout and heavy, the other tall and thin–resembled one another solely by virtue of the frightful and repulsive expressions on their faces.

  But at that moment, the man was not worthy of the immense and fulgurant name of Lucifer! And the woman was not worthy of having brought into the world a genius of rebellion! Neither of them, however far they had fallen, had fallen from as high as Lucifer, the Angel of Light who had become a demon of Darkness–but they had both fallen much lower.

  IV. At the North Pole

  When Commander Peary reached the North Pole in 1908, he only found what he had found in 1906 below the 87th degree of latitude and what Nansen had found in 1895, on the other side of the Pole, at a similar latitude: fields of snow and ice chaotically studded with blocks and crevices, without the slightest trace of land: a scene of terrible and mortal desolation, absolute aridity and continual instability–for the thickness of the immense ice-sheet is often subject to convulsion, deformed by temporary melting and sudden freezing, which incessantly modify its details while preserving a desperate uniformity in the whole.

  Neither Nansen nor Perry, although they might have had some slight suspicion, discovered what the infernal genius Glô von Warteck discovered a few years later, and which the science and industry of his formidable family had immediately put to use.

  This discovery was that the North Pole is not, as everyone has had to accept until now, for lack of contrary evidence, at a point on the globe occupied by the abyssal waters of the glacial Arctic Ocean. Beneath a layer of snow and ice of relatively mediocre thickness, just above what would have been the maximum level of the Ocean, had some abnormal increase in temperature permitted the immediate environs of the Pole to become liquid, there was land–or, rather a rock: a large rocky plateau linked by submarine mountains to one side of Franz Josef land, which is north of Novaya Zemlya, on the far side of the Arctic circle from Ellesmere Island and Greenland.