The Future Is Ours

by Hoch Edward D.

  “Who’s there?” he asked. “Is anyone there?”

  No answer came.

  In waking, a subconscious thought had worked its way forward in his mind. He remembered it now and moved forward, heading toward the backstage storage area.

  Something, something here—

  There was the squeak of a floorboard off to his right and he was immediately on guard. He raised the lantern high over his head, and saw in the shadows the dim figure of a man.

  “Who are you?” Vinding asked.

  The figure took a step forward and the journalist saw the long black cloak, the mask that covered the entire face—

  “The Phantom!” he breathed, almost to himself. He raised the revolver in his other hand.

  The figure leaped forward, and Vinding saw the lantern light reflected on the blade of a dagger.

  * * * *

  The body of Franz Vinding was found in the morning, when the painters arrived to continue their work on the Opera House. Before eight o’clock, Inspector Clovus of the Paris Police was on the scene. He glanced over the assembled workmen and let his narrow eyes settle on a gentleman dressed for the street. “Who are you, sir?”

  Bernard Mosaven introduced himself. “I fear this terrible tragedy is the fault of a stupid wager. I dared Franz to spend the night alone in the Opera House, and was to pay him twenty-five gold louis if he remained until morning. When I arrived a half-hour ago, the painters had already discovered his body on the stage.”

  Inspector Clovus, a short man with a large mustache, stepped forward to view the body. “Knife wounds?”

  “Three, Inspector,” one of his men answered. “He couldn’t have lived more than a few minutes.”

  “What are these words?” He indicated three scrawled French words that seemed to be written in the victim’s blood: Fantome non acte—

  “Phantom no act,” Mosaven said. “He was telling us that the Phantom of the Opera is real. He had the greatest story of his career and he never had an opportunity to write it.”

  “Is there any doubt the dead man wrote that?” Clovus asked.

  “None,” the officer said. “His index finger still has blood on it.”

  “Where is the night watchman?”

  The man named Chastel was brought in. He stared dumbfounded at the body on the stage, unable to explain it. “I would swear that no one entered the building after Mr. Vinding. The killer must have been hiding here all the time.”

  “The Opera ghost? The one some call the Phantom?”

  The watchman stared down at the bloody message. “I have never believed in him till now.”

  “You’re certain all the doors were locked?”

  Ramos Chastel nodded. “Every one. Nobody could have entered, except through the stage door where I sit.”

  “You heard nothing? You never checked to see that Franz Vinding was all right?”

  “Mr. Mosaven told me they had a bet. He said Vinding was supposed to remain there alone for the entire night. I stayed away.”

  The inspector nodded, then turned toward Mosaven. “When did you leave the building?”

  “Shortly after Franz arrived.”

  “Were you seen by anyone?”

  “No. I believe the watchman was away making his rounds.”

  “I’d have been checking that the doors were locked,” Chastel explained. “If Mr. Mosaven had gone out in my absence, the door would have locked after him. No one could have entered.”

  “But Mr. Mosaven could have remained in the building, correct?”

  “Remained?”

  “Remained hidden,” the inspector said.

  Bernard Mosaven turned to face him. “Why would I have remained?”

  “In order to kill Franz Vinding. Your animosity toward one another is well known, especially over the new Eiffel Tower.”

  “My God! He was my friend! I didn’t kill him!”

  “Then am I to believe a ghost did it?”

  One of his men came up to Inspector Clovus. “Sir, there’s something you should see. We found some bloodstains in the wings, some distance from the body.”

  Inspector Clovus followed the man to the spot indicated. There were indeed a few small bloodstains on the floorboards. “At least thirty feet from the body,” the inspector mused. He knelt down and produced a magnifying glass from his pocket. Crawling along the floor between the bloodstains and the body he found more traces of blood. “The body was dragged across here and the bloody trail was wiped up.”

  “Then the man’s dying message is a hoax.”

  “Not necessarily. The wounds may not have been immediately fatal. Left alone by the killer, Vinding may still have lived long enough to scrawl those words.” He got to his feet. “Mr. Mosaven, I’ll have to ask you to accompany me to my office for further questioning.”

  “This is outrageous!” Bernard stormed. “You can’t believe I killed him!”

  “We shall see.”

  * * * *

  The Sûreté offices were alive with activity when Inspector Clovus returned. He saw at once the blond young woman who waited on the visitors’ bench and leaped up when she noticed Mosaven entering behind him.

  “Bernard, I just heard the news about Franz! I came here to find out what happened.”

  “The inspector thinks I might be implicated in his death because of our foolish wager.”

  “I knew this would come to no good!” She turned to Clovus. “I did not approve of Bernard’s goading Franz to stay in the Opera overnight, but I assure you he did not kill the man. Bernard would be incapable of harming a fly.”

  Clovus merely responded, “We are investigating all the possibilities, mademoiselle.”

  He questioned them both at length, about the wager and about their relations with the dead man, but in the end he was no closer to a solution. Would a man like Mosaven commit murder to save himself twenty-five gold louis? It seemed unlikely. Still, there was the dispute over the new tower, in which the younger man had an interest as an employee of the company. And, Inspector Clovus admitted to himself, there was this lovely young lady. A man like Mosaven might kill for her.

  “It was the Phantom that killed him!” Nadine said at last. “Why won’t you accept Franz’s dying word for it?”

  They had discussed the words written in blood by Vinding, but the inspector was oddly dissatisfied with them. “Why would he write Phantom no act, a somewhat odd phrase, when the words Phantom is real could have been written just as easily and made his point more directly?”

  “You are the detective,” Bernard pointed out. “While you puzzle over it, I have other duties to perform. Am I free to go?”

  Clovus sighed. “You may go, but I will want to question you again. I am not yet ready to conclude that Vinding was killed by your so-called Opera ghost.”

  He watched them leave together, and even walked to the front window to observe them outside the building.

  Nadine had taken Bernard’s hand, and they were walking side by side across the street to the park. To share their mutual loss, he wondered, or—?

  * * * *

  Clovus was still pondering the case after dinner that night. Instead of going home he ate in a café near the Sûreté and decided to visit the Opera after dark. He wanted to view the scene of the crime at night, by lantern light, as Franz Vinding would have seen it in his dying moments.

  The watchman admitted him and he made his way through the storage area to the great stage itself. Clovus had never been a fan of the Paris Opera, and he marveled at the vast space that seemed necessary for the elaborate productions. He stood at center stage, hands on hips, and stared up into the darkness. Are you there, Phantom? Are you watching me?

  He took his bull’s-eye lantern and retraced the rout
e Vinding must have followed from the table and chair to the point where he was stabbed. When he reached the fatal area, he began to examine the crates and boxes piled there.

  Suddenly there was a sound above his head. Acting on reflex, he threw himself to one side as a heavy sandbag counterweight came crashing down with a bone-breaking thud. It had missed him by inches.

  Clovus rolled over on the dusty floor, out of range of the lantern’s glow, and pulled out his revolver. “Surrender or I’ll fire!” he shouted. “This is the police!”

  There were running footsteps on the catwalk above his head, and then the sounds of a struggle. He heard a man’s grunt, then a scream, as a black-caped body hurtled down from the darkness onto the stage.

  Inspector Clovus rose unsteadily to his feet, gun poised, and crossed the stage to where the body lay. He adjusted the bull’s-eye lantern and saw the mask across the face. Those who had seen the Opera ghost described him as wearing just such a mask.

  He felt the man’s pulse, but he could see from the angle of his head that the fall had broken his neck. The Phantom was dead.

  Clovus removed the mask and stared into the face of the watchman, Ramos Chastel.

  “If you will put down your gun,” a voice behind him said, “I will tell you why he murdered Franz Vinding.”

  Clovus slowly turned and stared into the eyes of a second masked man, dressed almost identically in a black cape. “Who—who are you?”

  “My name is unimportant. I have been called Erik, and the Angel of Music, and the Opera ghost. Some of the more sensational writers speak of me as the Phantom.”

  “Then you really exist.”

  “Oh, yes. I live beneath the Opera and I harm no one unless it becomes necessary. This man tried to kill you, as he killed Vinding last night. We tussled and he took an unfortunate fall from the catwalk. He wore the mask and cloak while pretending to be me.”

  “Chastel, the watchman? But why?”

  “To safeguard his secret. I overheard your conversation this morning when the body was found. I saw Vinding’s message in blood and I knew what it really meant.” The voice was full and melodious, almost like that of a singer. “Vinding observed something as he entered the backstage area. He saw crates of scenery for the September production of Verdi’s Don Carlos. One of them is clearly marked Act V. As a former opera reviewer, Vinding must have remembered that Verdi rewrote Don Carlos three years ago, in ’84, to eliminate the first act. It is always performed now in just four acts, not five.”

  “If there is no fifth act, what is in the crate?”

  “Vinding must have wondered the same thing. When he tried to examine the crate he was stabbed. The killer then dragged him back across stage to his table and chair, rather than attract attention to the spot near the crate where he was really killed. Vinding was not quite dead and after naming the Phantom he attempted to write no act V, but he died before he could finish it. I looked in the crate earlier today. It is carefully packed with rifles and ammunition, perhaps for a new French Revolution. I leave it to the authorities to uncover the exact nature of the plot. But certainly the Opera storage area was a perfect hiding place for the arms, at least until September.”

  Clovus turned to gaze at the body on the floor. “You have done us a great service, sir, not only in saving my life but in—”

  He looked up and saw that the masked man was no longer there. He had faded back into the shadows from which he came.

  ABOUT “DRACULA 1944”

  Among my favorite Edward Hoch stories is “The Vorpal Blade” (1981), in which a former Nazi officer shares memories of a youthful duel that ended up in murder. The following story has little in common other than the prominence of German Nazis, the camp setting, and the rich storytelling flavor with which Hoch tells it. Yet it’s an interesting sidenote that an adaptation of “The Vorpal Blade” for the British television series “Tales of the Unexpected” starred Peter Cushing, who was perhaps best known for his portrayal of vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing in Hammer Films movies based on Dracula.

  First publication—The Ultimate Dracula, ed. Byron Preiss; Dell Books, 1991.

  DRACULA 1944

  Captain Schellenberg’s office window overlooked the railroad siding at Bergen-Belsen, and when he was at his desk he could observe the arrival of each new trainload of prisoners. Sometimes now there would be a train every day, with men, women, and children crowded into the boxcars like cattle. Sometimes when they arrived there would be crying and screaming from those who had heard rumors of the death camps. He always wanted to go down there and shout to them how lucky they were.

  Bergen-Belsen was primarily a work camp, not an extermination camp. There were no gas chambers here. Those who came on the trains—the Jews and Gypsies, the homosexuals and criminals—would not be lined up and led to their death. True, they might be worked until they dropped, worked to death on short rations and beaten if they did not perform well. But they would not be systematically murdered. That was for the extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka and the others. The pace was quickening there. It was the summer of 1944 and the enemy had landed in France.

  The job of Captain Schellenberg at Bergen-Belsen was to keep track of the number of able-bodied men and women available each day for the slave labor detachments. If the death rate proved unusually high and the number sank below a certain level, an extra train might be put on to increase the flow. If, on the other hand, the prisoners at Bergen-Belsen exceeded the camp’s capacity, it was Schellenberg’s job to send a trainload of the least healthy on to one of the extermination camps. For this purpose he kept charts of the other camps, and he could rattle off the statistics at a moment’s notice. Auschwitz, for example, had four huge gas chambers, each capable of accommodating two thousand people at one time. Treblinka had ten gas chambers, but they could hold only two hundred people each.

  Promptly at nine each morning he left his office to check on the work details, striding purposefully down the line of barracks, returning salutes with a quick snap of his arm. At this particular time many of the buildings housed Gypsy prisoners, but there was nothing unusual about that. Bergen-Belsen had been established when the first roundups of Gypsies began, even before the camps for Jews.

  “Captain Schellenberg!”

  It was one of his sergeants, standing at attention to deliver his report. “At ease, Kronker. Any deaths overnight?”

  “A prisoner in barracks 44.” He hesitated. “And one guard.”

  “A guard?”

  “A new man. He may have fallen asleep on duty.”

  “You suspect foul play?”

  Sergeant Kronker did not want to say what he suspected. “He died from loss of blood.”

  “Were all the prisoners locked in?”

  “Yes, sir. No one was missing.”

  “Send a report to me.”

  He continued on his rounds, stopping occasionally to check out one of the grim gray buildings. “Everyone working today?” he would ask, and then check off the barracks number in his notebook. The routine was broken only once, when he encountered a plump old Gypsy woman outside one of the buildings.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” Schellenberg asked. “We have much labor for a healthy woman like you.”

  “I tend to the ill. It is my job,” she answered, speaking German with an odd, unfamiliar accent.

  “What is your name, woman? Where are you from?”

  “Olga Helsing, sir. I come from Romania with this band of Gypsy wanderers. We were seized in the night by a German patrol.”

  The captain motioned toward the building. “Where is the ill person you tend to? Show me!”

  She led the way and he followed, bracing himself against the foul odors he’d encountered so many times before. Near the end of the row of bunks, in the darkest part of the building, she pau
sed over a blanket-covered form.

  “What’s wrong with him?” the captain asked.

  “He cannot work by day. The sun would rot his skin. It is a rare illness that can be fatal.”

  Schellenberg lifted the blanket and gazed at the thin, pale face of a man in his late fifties. He did not stir on the bunk, and he could have been dead. “This is a labor camp,” the captain told her. “Everyone works here.” He walked to the foot of the bunk and inspected the prisoner’s name and birthdate: Vlad Tepes, 8 November 1887. “Have him out tomorrow morning or he will be shot.”

  Striding out of the building, Schellenberg wondered why he had been even that generous. In the past he might have had such a malingerer shot to death on the spot, or at least beaten as an example to others. He continued on his morning rounds, but the image of the old Gypsy asleep on the dark bunk stayed with him.

  Often, after sundown, Captain Schellenberg liked to walk alone around the perimeter of the camp’s main section. It was a peaceful place with the coming of darkness, and he was even able to fantasize that he was back home strolling the hills of the family farm. He tried not to look at the high twin fences that encircled the prisoner barracks, though it was difficult at times when the searchlights in the guard towers played upon them.

  Returning to the officers’ quarters he took a shortcut close to barracks 52, forgetting for the moment that it was here he had encountered the sleeping Gypsy. As he passed near the darkened building, a voice spoke his name. “Captain Schellenberg!”

  He turned, expecting to see one of the guards who patrolled the area. Instead he could barely make out a tall, slim figure who stood in the building’s shadow. “Yes?” he responded. “Who is it?”

  “We have not met formally.”

  Schellenberg took a step closer and then immediately retreated as he recognized the gray prison uniform. “You are out of your barracks! I must summon the guards!”