The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 3: The Triumph of the Nyctalope

by Jean de La Hire

  “They are, indeed, possessed,” he murmured.

  “Ah,” Raymond went on, “I can see our route as if I had the chart in front of my eyes–but there’s no map here, Irène, since it’s your room. Follow me! We’ll go through the Bahamas and head straight for the Bermudas–ah, the Bermudas! God bless the Nyctalope! We shan’t stop there, naturally. Full speed, always full speed, to Cape Newfoundland, which we’ll leave behind us in the west. Northwards, northwards! The Davis Strait between Greenland and America, then Baffin Bay–and afterwards, the same route as Peary. The Smith Strait, the Lincoln Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the ice-cap–under the ice-cap, of course! And the North Pole! Luc, have you counted up? How many miles, at the shortest?”

  “Five thousand miles–five and a half thousand at the most.”

  “Ah! The Lampas can do 50 miles an hour, so... Bonnery?”

  “A hundred and ten hours!”

  “A hundred and ten hours!” Raymond cried. “Do you hear, Mattol? Do you understand, Irène? In 110 hours–between four or five days, at the most–we’ll be as close as possible to the Pole. Today’s...”

  “June 3, 17:00.”

  “On June 7 or 8, then... Ah, the North Pole! We’ll have to buy furs, Irène! Bah! We’ll find everything we need in Newfoundland! Well, Irène, Louis, what do you say to that?”

  “Yes, what do you say to that?”

  The two hallucinated and possessed men rubbed their hands in glee.

  It required less than an hour for Irène and Mattol to ascertain that all the crew members had similarly fallen victim to Lucifer’s hypnotic power, none harboring any thought or performing any action that was not prompted by the distant and mysterious Teledynamo.

  In the ensuing days and nights, Irène and Mattol had to hold their tongues. They were alone, aboard the Lampas, in being able to think and act freely. But what good was that liberty?

  Once and for all, Irène had made the sacrifice of her happiness and her life. Every hour was a station in her abominable calvary, for she was suffering atrociously, and her thoughts, dominated as they were by the red-haired sorcerer, could not be other than painful. She would have liked to be able to annihilate herself in a dreamless sleep akin to death, but she could achieve no more than a superficial somnolence disturbed by nightmares. “Oh, why did the monster not entrance me?” she moaned. “Why is he letting me suffer in this way? Is it not unnecessarily cruel, given that I have consented?”

  The depressed and pensive Mattol also asked himself why Lucifer had left him free and conscious. Conscious, yes, he said to himself, but free? To do what? He wanted to experiment with his liberty, to see what its limits might be.

  On June 4, while the Lampas was heading for the fatal Pole at top speed, its entire hull shuddering, Louis Mattol took it upon himself to talk to Irène, to argue against her decision, to restore her confidence in the Nyctalope and to persuade her, if possible, to cheat Lucifer.

  “Wherever Saint-Clair might be,” he said, “he’s certainly continuing the war against Lucifer.”

  “What good is that?” Irène replied. “Can he halt this vessel that my own husband is steering towards the monster? No. What, then? Besides, my dear Louis, do you know what has become of Saint-Clair? Since British Guiana, we’ve had no news of him. How many days have gone by? Do you think that Lucifer would make the mistake of leaving the Nyctalope free to act? Saint-Clair is probably dead.”

  Mattol was obstinate. “No! Something inside me tells me that he’s alive! But let’s put Saint-Clair aside–I have an idea.”

  Irène looked at him pityingly. She no longer belonged to the world in which she had been happy, in which a husband lived whom she adored–but whom she no longer recognized, so extensively had he been changed by the truly diabolical possession whose victim he was. That contributed more than a little to the rendering the poor woman’s martyrdom more painful and more desperate.

  Condescendingly, she said: “What idea?”

  “Would you care to conduct an experiment?” Mattol’s voice was hesitant. He was frightened precisely because the experiment, or rather test, would determine the limit of the illusory liberty left to him by the dreadful sorcerer.

  “An experiment?” Irène repeated, with a slight shrug of her shoulders. “What would it involve?”

  “Putting you into a trace and interrogating you.” He got to his feet–and the intellectual’s earnest and honest face suddenly reflected such a forceful hope that Irène was impressed.

  “My God!” she said, sighing. “Who knows? Put me into a trance? Interrogate me? Perhaps I do, indeed, know things, and can tell you... Oh, Louis, if you could...”

  Then they went pale, however, and a great tremor took hold of them. Their eyes, despairing again, filled with tears and they looked at one another, racked by sobs...

  They had just heard loud mocking laughter erupt between and around them: the cruel, savage, sardonic and ferociously joyful laughter of Lucifer!

  It was indeed Lucifer who was laughing; his laughter, bursting out at the North Pole, was reproduced for Irène and Mattol thousands of leagues away, in the cabin on the Lampas. It was indeed the Lord Baron Glô von Warteck, the 13th of that name, alias Lucifer, spell-caster, sorcerer and master of the Hermetic sciences.

  On that morning of June 4, he was at the very top of Fort Warteck, in the great copper-framed cupola of thick clear crystal. He was not alone; he was in conversation with the commander of the polar station, his cousin Wilfried.

  The crystal cupola was so broad and tall that it formed a globe in which 20 men could have performed exercises under the instructions of an officer on horseback. Its inner edges were embedded between two concentric felt-lined copper rings, inscribed in a thickly-carpeted floor of oak. In the middle of this circular plane was a pedestal three meters square and two meters high. On one of its four faces, a door was visible, which gave access to the cupola. The pedestal’s inferior base formed a landing perforated by the head of a staircase communicating with Glô von Warteck’s study-library.

  The cupola was furnished with two curved divans, several stools–upholstered or wooden–and various cupboards, all set around the periphery, at a height not exceeding that of the circular base of felt-lined copper that supported the immense crystal bell-jar.

  Against the side of the pedestal parallel to the one in which the door was set, a flight of felt-lined iron steps climbed up to a cornice, which was a meter and a half wide and furnished with a guard-rail, By means of this cornice, one could make a circular tour of the platform above the pedestal–and it was on this platform that the Teledynamo was set.

  Varnished wooden tables topped with thick plates of glass were set against the other faces of the pedestal; Glô and Wilfried were sitting at one of these tables, the former in his smoking jacket with the turned-down collar and white silk shirt and the latter in a grey woolen cycling-costume with grey stockings and grey felt sandals. They were both bare-headed. Both men were leaning over, peering into the clear water in a crystal bowl placed on the table. It was a very large bowl with no supporting feet, which, half-full, held a good three liters of water. A soft continuous snoring sound was audible, coming from above, and that monotonous sonic base was overlaid, at intervals of about a minute, by the crackling of outbursts of electric sparks.

  This is what the two men saw as they looked into the transparent water in the bowl: two little people, alive and naturally colored, described with the precision and fine detail of a carefully-focused microscope; two figurines which moved back and forth, sat down, made gestures, and spoke to one another: Irène and Mattol!

  Yes, Irène and Mattol, there in the bowl, very tiny, but exactly as they were in their normal proportions, thousands of leagues from the North Pole, in a cabin on the submarine Lampas–and around their reproduction, minuscule but faithful in every respect, the décor of the cabin could be seen in the transparency of the water, in perspective, fading away at the edges. In brief, it was an image of Irène and Matto
l in their actual present surroundings.

  Glô and Wilfried were observing the active life of these two other people in the magnetic bowl. They were also listening to their impassioned words, for two electric wires hung down from the Teledynamo, each one divided at the bottom into two branches, which terminated in microphones embedded in earpieces worn by Glô and Wilfried.

  The two Wartecks had been there for a quarter of an hour, watching and listening to Irène and Mattol, when Glô burst out laughing–laughter that was loud and mocking, cruel, savage, sardonic and ferociously joyful...

  It was at that moment that Irène de Ciserat, aboard the Lampas, thousands of leagues from the Pole, had just said to Louis Mattol, “Perhaps I do, indeed, know things, and can tell you... Oh, Louis, if you could...”–and Lucifer’s laughter had cut Irène’s speech abruptly short.

  VIII. The Teledynamo

  Of all the Wartecks, Wilfried was the only one for whom Glô truly felt and manifested feelings of affection. It was mainly for that reason that the Baron had entrusted to his cousin the command of Fort Warteck, which would one day be the headquarters of his worldwide operations and the receptacle of the Teledynamo.

  It is only fair to add that Wilfried had a vast intelligence, that he possessed encyclopedic knowledge, and that his was a character of rare energy. With Glô’s mother, Diana, Wilfried shared the confidence of the Supreme Lord, the uncontested head of the Warteck family, and he knew the full extent and ambitions of Lucifer’s projects. There was nothing he did not know about Glô’s passions, large or small, and Glô had deemed him worthy of knowing every detail of the scientific means at his disposal in placing the entire world at his mercy.

  With Irène de Ciserat and the Lampas as objectives, Glô had elected to give the Teledynamo a first trial run–and the two men had been able to convince themselves that the experiment was quite conclusive.

  After Lucifer had put an end to the loud laughter with which he had greeted Mattol’s test of emancipation and Irène’s timid hope, he said to Wilfried, who was still leaning over the magic bowl: “That’s good enough, I think, my dear chap! You’ll observe that Irène and Mattol, struck by my laughter, consider themselves conclusively defeated, since they’re turning away from one another and drawing apart. Although they’re no longer talking, they’re thinking–you can hear the murmur that their thoughts being translated into distinct words make in the Teledynamo’s earpieces–and they’ve given up. Mattol is deciding to follow the desperate adventure to the end, with the clear intention of committing suicide, if he can, when he sees that all is definitely lost, convinced as he is that even Raymond, if I were to return his free will, would not want to survive the disappearance of his wife.

  “Poor Mattol does not know, my dear Wilfried, that one second after zero hour on June 11, all humankind will only live or commit suicide according to my wishes. All intentional actions will only be able to reach accomplishment in the measure that I have fixed, both for humankind collectively and for particular individuals. As for Irène, she is definitely resolved to save all the people she loves from torture and from the spectacle of her own degraded existence. Let us, therefore, pass on, leaving the Lampas under the ever-active influence of the Teledynamo...

  “Get up! I intend not only to authorize you to look at the machine, but also to explain what you didn’t understand at first sight.” So saying, Glô rose to his feet, imitated by Wilfried.

  The two men took out their earpieces, which were small black spheres pierced with tiny holes, just small enough to fit snugly into the auricular canal. These spheres, still dangling from the electrical wires emerging from the Teledynamo, were deposited in the water in the magic bowl. They did not float on the surface, nor did they fall to the bottom; they remained suspended half way, all four of them at exactly the same level.

  Glô, who was hirsutely red-headed, with the profile of vulture, went up the ladder that led to the Teledynamo ahead of his cousin, whose flat hair was a dull blond and who had the face of a Kalmuk. When they reached the top of the staircase, whose top step was large and rounded, the two men stopped and leaned back against the guard-rail. The Teledynamo was before them, in such a fashion that all its workings were visible without their having to shift their gaze from one to another.

  “You see, my dear Wilfried,” Glô said, “that the Teledynamo, as a whole, is somewhat reminiscent of a more complex version of the alternating current generator constructed in accordance with the latest discoveries of the great physicist Nikola Tesla.9 That’s mere appearance, though, as is the similarity that might cause those four coils to make you think of Ruhmkorff.10 They’re certainly transformers, though! That projector up there, at the extremity of the pylon atop the mass of the workings, does not emit luminous rays but magnetic ones, which are comparable, though far superior, to X-rays, in that they can not only pass through a limited number of solid materials but all matter, made up of whatever elements, if I wish. I’m the one who determines the wavelength of the rays; I’m the one who tells them: you shall go this far, and no further–and they obey. I call them Omega rays.”

  “I understand their effects, “Wilfried put in, earnestly. “The Omega rays transmit your irresistible will over long distances. Furthermore, they work in both directions, consequently reporting back to you the distant effects of the manifestation of your will. Such reports recorded by the Teledynamo, and communicated to you by mans of the earpieces and the magic bowl...”

  “Very good, Wilfried.”

  “Yes–but what is the cause, the means of this prodigy? How does your Teledynamo–whose name comes from tele, meaning distant, and dynamis, meaning force–project your will instead of familiar waves and rays, such as Hertzian waves or Roentgen rays.” 11

  “Look at those seven skulls, Wilfried.”

  Seven skeletal skulls were arranged along the machine’s flank, mounted at 25 centimeter intervals on a slender platinum rod, linked to one another by electrical wires, and to the machine by others five times as thick–effectively, small cables. These skulls lent the Teledynamo a macabre and sinister physiognomy. The electrical wires emerged from their dark orbits; the cables went in through the mouths between the polished teeth and came out through the cavity into which the vertebral columns had been slotted when they skulls had been filled with grey matter, furnished with sensory organs and clad in flesh and skin: the living heads of living people!

  There was a momentary silence, during which the formidable Glô von Warteck contemplated the skulls with a solemnity equal to Wilfried’s. Then the Baron spoke, suddenly and pompously. “There, in truth, is the marvelous discovery which, brought to perfection, will make me master of the world. Listen! In the Wahallarah, the ancient, secret subterranean temple of Delhi–of which the English are ignorant, and which is known to only a dozen Brahmins cut off from the world that thrives on the Earth’s surface–I read about a substance that was known some 18 centuries before the Christian Era, which had the property of absorbing human thought and re-emitting it with an amplification subject to infinite increase. I made a thorough study of all the parts of the Wahallarah that referred to this marvelous substance, and arrived at the conclusion that it was none other than radium! Yes, our modern radium–the radium that the Curies and Monsieur Bémont have rediscovered, thousands of years after the Tibetan mages experimented with it.12 Doubtless frightened by the properties of this divine matter, the mages had not revealed its existence, and died without confiding the secret, save to the Hermetic pages of Wahallarah!”

  Glô paused. Wilfried was listening with his eyes closed, impassively. After a moment’s meditation, the Baron continued: “You must remember, cousin, that three grams of radium were stolen from Edison’s laboratory a few years ago–it made a great deal of noise in that sonorous sphere which is the world of men.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Wilfried said, in a low voice.

  “And you’ve guessed that the thief was me. I needed radium right away. Could I extract it? Years
of work! Could I buy it? There were only 50 grams in the entire world at that time, a gram here, a gram there, jealously guarded, watched over, eked out in a miserly fashion, infinitely slowly. The greatest aggregation–three grams–was in Edison’s possession, so I went to Madison Square. There’s no need to tell you how I went about it. I was already a grand master of hypnosis. I obtained my radium. And with the Wahallarah before my eyes, in the unknown temple of Delhi, I worked...”

  There was another pause, during which Glô’s face became terrible and truly Luciferian. “What long nights! What pains! How many tortures inflicted, how much blood spilled! A thousand human brains, extracted alive from trepanned skulls, were treated according to a formula that I had succeeded in extracting from the arcana of Wahallarah; they produced three grams of a grey substance...

  “That was an era, Wilfried, in which a mature man could not stray into the forest around the temple at dusk without being attacked, dragged way, laid on a stone, scalped, trepanned, de-brained...

  “Three grams of that grey substance submitted to the emanations of radium for 30 hours made a condenser, an amplifier, and a projector for my thought, by means of a rudimentary apparatus. After that, the Brahmins had no further need to send their slaves into the forest to capture men... I had only to think, and the men came of their own accord.

  “That went on for three years. How many did I kill to obtain the grey matter of which their brains were constituted? The English government, which did not understand what was happening, attributed the near-total depopulation of an entire district to a fictitious famine. But I had enough of the grey substance to fill seven skulls...”

  He paused again. This time, it was Wilfried who broke the silence. “Why skulls, and not some other, more scientific, receptacle?”

  “Symbolism, Wilfried!” Glô murmured, with a smile. “Symbolism, reminiscence, homage... Yes, thanks to the Wahallarah, I had created a human brain of quasi-divine power; that brain I reproduced seven times over. Was it not only just that the receptacles, the tabernacles, of those brains–superhuman, but composed of human brain-tissue–should be human skulls?”