At 50 years of age, Professor Lourmel, holder of the chair of neuropsychology in the Faculty of Medicine, clinical director of Sainte-Anne Asylum and member of the Academy of Sciences, was one of the busiest men in Paris. Without neglecting his professorial, therapeutic and academic duties in the slightest, he found the time to contribute assiduously to the Revue des sciences psychiques, to write a monthly column for the Annales de la psycho-névrose and to make a brief study tour every six months, in the course of which he visited two or three provincial or foreign psychiatric hospitals.
Despite working so hard, Professor Lourmel–a robust, cheerful and sociable–did not turn his back on the world. In the exceedingly comfortable house he owned in Auteuil, he had created an environment eminently representative of Science and Frenchness. That environment was also redolent with grace, elegance and beauty, for the Professor liked pretty women, frequented the theaters and reserved one of the best boxes at the Opera by subscription.
A bachelor, Professor Lourmel left the practical management of his existence to his sister Luce, who was five years his junior, but Mademoiselle Luce could not be anything more than the finest of stewards, and the Professor would have suffered what he would have described as “emotional solitude” had he not devoted all his tenderness to his orphan niece, Irène. He had seen to her careful upbringing and had married her off to a young man whom she had met during her vacations in the house in Auteuil. On the threshold of her 20th year, Irène had realized every young girl’s dream by marrying Raymond de Ciserat, a naval lieutenant, the son of the illustrious gynaecologist C.-G. de Ciserat, a colleague and friend of Professor Lourmel. “Old Ciserat,” as he was known in the Faculty of Medicine, had died on the day that his son graduated from the naval college, and Professor Lourmel had served as Raymond’s father thereafter. On the eve of the marriage, he said, not without emotion: “I had two children. I shall have them always, since I have married them to one another. They know that my house is theirs whenever they desire, as they desire, and to the extent that they desire.”
Raymond and Irène knew this so well that they spent the two weeks following their marriage at the house in Auteuil, and it was only after devoting a fortnight to “Uncle Onésime” that they left to spend a long honeymoon touring Italy and Sicily. After that journey–which was to last four months, from April to July inclusive–Raymond de Ciserat, with he full permission of the Admiralty, was due to organize and direct a submarine expedition financed by the recently created Subtranslatlantic Company. It was understood that Irène, who was as intrepid as she was beautiful, would accompany her husband in this routine mission.
Throughout the month of April, Uncle Onésime received a letter every day bearing the joint signatures of Irène and Raymond. They came to him from Nice, San Remo, Genoa, Florence, Milan and Venice. On May 1, however, he received no letter. There was none on May 2 either. Anxious, and already quite angry–for the famous Professor was extremely irascible by nature–Lourmel sent a telegram to Venice, to the last address given by the young couple.
May 3 went by without his receiving a letter or a reply to his telegram. Mademoiselle Luce, who was helpless, had a terrible time. The Professor’s dolorous anxiety and irrepressible wrath were, in combination, a frightful thing to behold. All the same, it would have been a mere comedy, in the end, if Raymond and Irène’s silence had had some banal cause–an abrupt departure from one place to another, postal delays or a few days’ excursion into a region devoid of modern communications. Mademoiselle Luce patiently enumerated all these possible explanations; Lourmel acknowledged their plausibility, but his anxiety and anger were not at all diminished.
On May 4, that anxiety and that anger were suddenly transformed into an inexpressible anguish and a powerful fury, repressed by a cold determination–because Lourmel had received a letter, which was expressed in these terms:
Uncle, I could not use the telegraph for I would be thought insane–and if I expressed myself in a telegram, in discreet terms, you would not understand me. Today, I see that I must speak clearly, to say this: Irène is under a spell. I am in torment. It will surely be the death of me. Come–come to our aid! I am in despair. Come!
Raymond
Hotel Danieli, Venice.
When this letter was brought to him and he read it, Professor Lourmel was in his office at Sainte-Anne Asylum, in the company of his laboratory assistant, Louis Mattol. Mattol, his most distinguished student, was impassioned by the difficult task of turning the so-called “occult sciences” into exact sciences. As white as a corpse, with sparkling eyes and a hoarse voice, Lourmel said to his astonished assistant: “Listen, Mattol!” And he read Raymond de Ciserat’s amazing letter aloud, emphasizing the words. Mattol went pale, just as the Professor had. He loved Raymond and Irène like an older brother. Although he addressed the young woman politely as “vous,” he always addressed the young officer as “tu.”
When the letter ended, the Professor looked at his assistant without adding a word, with the searching and surgical expression he used to hypnotize the occupants of the asylum. Mattol understood the question implicit in that insupportable gaze, and simply said in a firm voice: “Master, I believe in the reality of what are called spells.”
“Do you know of actual cases?” the Professor asked, dryly.
“I know of three.”
“Irrefutable?”
“Inexplicable–other than in term of psychic compulsion.”
Professor Lourmel read Raymond’s letter again and put it on his desk. Then, his voice still dry and hard, although his body was seized by a sudden tremor, he asked: “Did you ever meet Colonel de Rochas, Mattol?” 1
“I never met him,” the assistant replied, “but I’ve read his books and made notes on them.”
“I met him. Listen! One day, this happened: on one side of a large room, a woman was sitting, facing the wall. In the most distant corner was a table, and on that table was a photograph of the woman. Standing at the table, Colonel de Rochas touched the photograph with his fingertip. Immediately, the woman felt the touch. The Colonel scratched the image twice with his fingernail, on the right hand and the left arm. At the same instant, two red stigmata–the bloody scratches of a fingernail–appeared on the woman’s left arm and right hand. This was witnessed by the mathematician Poincaré, the gynaecologist Ciserat and I, the neuropsycholologist Onésime Lourmel. The Colonel called it the first stage of bewitchment.”
The Professor fell silent.
“The incident is known to me,” Mattol murmured, impassively. “The story was published in La Justice on August 2, 1892. Colonel de Rochas did more thereafter, Professor.”
“I know.”
No longer able to contain himself, Lourmel got up abruptly and thumped his desk hard with his fist, causing several books, pencils, a penholder and bottles of ink to jump into the air. He let out a terrible growl, his entire body agitated by wrath, while tears of anguish sprang from his eyes.
“Mattol,” he said, “we’ll leave this evening for Venice. I’ll inquire, investigate... It’s necessary to identify the spell-caster, to find him, to capture him. By all the gods that men have invented, and by the God they suspect but do not know how to define, I swear that I shall strangle this villain with these very hands!” He raised his clenched and quivering fists above his head, then let them fall heavily back upon the desk. “Go to my house, Mattol,” he said, dully. “Tell Luce to make the necessary preparations for the journey, then go pack your own suitcase. Meet me at the Gare de Lyon at 8 p.m. We’ll take the Paris-Milan train. I’ll send a telegram to Raymond. Do you have a revolver?”
“Yes, a Browning.”
“Bring it–and buy one for me; I don’t own one myself. Perhaps before strangling the man, I’ll be obliged to put bullets into his legs so that he can’t escape. Strong though I am, I’m also slow; I’m not 20 years old any longer, and I can’t run very fast. Go, my friend, go!”
Mattol went out.
After a
pause, Lourmel groaned. “But if I arrive too late to save her, then... Oh, then I shall have to devise tortures for that monster... Slow tortures!”
In Venice, nor far from San Marco, stands the Hotel Danieli, a palatial old building with exceedingly comfortable rooms. At 6 p.m. on May 5, two people were alone in one of its sitting-rooms: Irène and Raymond de Ciserat. They were seated beside a round table charged with refreshments. Irène was stretched out in a rocking-chair, with her head slumped on her left shoulder and her eyes shut. Raymond, seated in an armchair, had turned towards his wife and was looking at her with passionate tenderness. They were each as pale as the other. Irène’s face, with lowered eyelids, wore an expression of suffering, while Raymond’s, with eyes wide open, bore the marks of fatigue, insomnia and an extraordinary nervous tension. His hands were on his knees, clutching a newspaper, convulsively tearing it up without his being aware of it.
From time to time, the young officer’s eyes went to the clock to measure the passing of time. He had received the Professor’s telegram the previous night; Irène and he were both awaiting the arrival of their learned, powerful, ingenious and energetic uncle, in whom their only hope of salvation rested. Raymond had decided to blow his brains out if his wife succumbed to the frightful and capricious sickness that had mysteriously descended upon her.
Suddenly, Irène opened her eyes–her beautiful blue eyes, formerly so bright with happiness, now horrified and flooded with tears. She looked at her husband and found the loving strength to smile at him. Then, in a feeble but fearful voice, she asked: “What time is it?”
“6:15,” Raymond replied. Letting go of the rumpled, twisted and torn newspaper, he reached out tenderly to take his wife’s hands in his, adding: “The train arrived 20 minutes ago. Uncle and Louis will waste no time...”
At that moment, a resounding voice was heard on the quayside outside, crying: “Wait, Mattol!”
“They’re here!” Raymond said, getting to his feet. “I’ll go welcome them. Will you go to your room?”
“Yes–call Lili.”
Lili was Irène’s foster-sister. Having become Madame de Ciserat, Irène had taken on little Emilie Dupal–usually known as Lili–as her chambermaid. Intelligent, devoted and alert, the young woman was the perfect servant for the new bride. Raymond had only to make a gesture to bring Lili running–she had been doing a little sewing in an adjacent waiting-room. Immediately, with a firmer tread than might have been expected, in view of her seemingly-infinite lassitude, Irène de Ciserat went into the little three-room apartment that the newlyweds occupied on the first floor of the hotel. Lili followed her.
Two minutes later, Professor Lourmel erupted into the sitting-room, with Raymond de Ciserat and Louis Mattol to either side of him. “I want to see her right away!” the Professor said, with contained violence. “She isn’t in bed, you say? You went out this morning? Good–that reassures me a little, but I must see her. Take me to her! Take care of the suitcases, Mattol, I beg you.”
While Mattol occupied himself with the luggage and the rooms that the naval officer had reserved for them that morning, Raymond led Lourmel up to the first-floor apartment. Lili had gone. In the little room where she was waiting, Irène leapt up to put her arms around the Professor’s neck and hug him, then immediately let herself fall into an armchair. Covering her face with her hands, she burst into tears.
“There, there!” said Lourmel. “Calm down, little one. I must know everything, in detail. We must talk calmly, if we are to act effectively thereafter.” He took off his hat and gloves and threw them on a table. Taking the young woman’s hands in his, he drew them aside and studied her tearful face. “You can hardly sleep,” he said, “and you can scarcely eat anything. A few more days of that and you’d be a complete mess. We must take countermeasures. We shall fight, and fighting is always healthy sport. There–you’re better already! Don’t cry any more. Raymond, sit down in that armchair. That’s good. You must both answer my questions clearly, concisely and without digression. We shall conduct a sort of medico-legal inquest. A certain coolness and serenity is required.”
The Professor’s voice, words and expression seemed to enliven Irène. She raised herself up; her cheeks became less pale, her eyes less fearful.
“Mattol has come with me, little one,” Lourmel went on, addressing himself to Irène. “He’ll be useful to us, as much by virtue of his specialist knowledge as his character. I swear to you that we shall save you. Enough preliminaries–I shall begin the interrogation. How did this affair begin?”
Irène and Raymond looked at one another. The young woman drew the necessary courage from her husband’s ardent eyes. She turned to her uncle, who was sitting facing her and slightly to the right, and she spoke in an emotional voice, her forehead pink with embarrassment.
“It was during the night of April 28. I woke up suddenly, convinced that someone had kissed me on the left cheek. I thought that it was Raymond and I put out my hand–but as I opened my eyes, I saw, by the light of the electric night-light, that Raymond was asleep. I thought I had been dreaming and closed my eyes again, smiling–but the sensation of being kissed was immediately renewed, on the right cheek this time, and as if the lips were moving over the skin. I sat up, astonished, and passed my hands over my face. Then, the kisses were on my hands, along my arms, so strong and so strange that I was afraid. I cried out: ‘Raymond! Raymond!’ Immediately, the kisses ceased, but I felt such a violent blow on my left shoulder that it thrust me back upon the pillow.”
She fell silent, shivering.
Immediately, Raymond took up the story: “Her cry woke me up. I leaned towards her–and the terrified expression on her face made me leap out of bed. I turned up the electric light. Assuming that Irène had had a nightmare, I took her in my arms to comfort her, for she was trembling in every limb. She was reassured, little by little. Laughing and crying at the same time, she told me what she had just felt. Naturally, I thought it was a nightmare, and I uncovered her left shoulder to kiss it, as one does with a child who has suffered a minor injury–but I was stunned by amazement. The shoulder was reddened, already slightly swollen, exactly as if she had received a blow from a little hammer! Instinctively, I put my finger on it, and Irène let out a cry; the bruise was extremely painful.
“The idea of a hammer-blow only came to me later, uncle, when I reflected on the dimensions and form of the little contusion. At first, though, once the initial shock had passed, what I thought and told Irène was that her nightmare had caused her to make a violent movement and that she had bumped into the bedhead or the corner of the night-stand. I held Irène in my arms and it wasn’t long before she went peacefully to sleep.”
“Good!” said the Professor. “What happened next?”
Irène, now very pale and making an effort to suppress her nervousness, continued: “I was quite tranquil during the next day. Raymond and I spent almost all of it visiting various churches. The bruise on my shoulder troubled me slightly, but in the belief that I had had a nightmare, I laughed about it. That evening, at 6 p.m., while Raymond stayed in the hall to smoke a cigarette, I came into the bedroom to change my dress. I was undressed, facing the full-length mirror, while Lili was rummaging in my trunk, when... Oh, uncle!”
“Go on, child, go on!” said Lourmel, taking hold of the tremulous hands that Irène had held out towards him, as if imploring his aid.
“Well, I felt myself seized around the waist, from behind, while burning lips showered rapid kisses on my shoulders and the nape of my neck, brutally. I was petrified. All at once, I felt a bite on my left shoulder, very close to the wound inflicted the previous night–and in the mirror, I saw tooth-marks appear on my flesh! But there was no one there, no one behind me! Lili was on the other side of the room, half-buried in the trunk. No, there was no one! I suddenly felt ill... Oh...!”
Wrenching her hands way from her uncle’s fingers, Irène covered her face and threw herself violently backwards, in the grip of a terrible
nervous tremor.
Professor Lourmel, impassive but pale and tight-lipped, stopped Raymond with a gesture as the young man was leaning towards his wife. Then he took a little box from his waistcoat pocket, from which he extracted a Pravaz syringe and a needle.2 The syringe was full of liquid, slightly tinted with yellow. “Give me your right arm, Irène,” he said, in a voice of irresistible authority.
She obeyed, and shielded her eyes with her left hand. The Professor turned back the sleeve of her silk dress; with a sure hand, he plunged the needle into the white flesh of the plump arm. The piston forced the liquid in. The needle was withdrawn, carefully wiped and returned with the syringe to the box. Replacing it in his pocket, the Professor said to Raymond: “We’ll let her rest. Continue.”
The anxious officer pulled himself together, and spoke in a clear and rapid voice. “I was called into the room by Lili, who came on to the staircase and said: ‘Madame has cried out and fainted!’ I found Irène stretched out like a corpse on the bedroom carpet. I carried her to the bed. Straight away, I noticed the new wound, which was exactly like a nasty bite. The skin was not broken, but the marks of teeth stood out whitely in the middle of a violet bruise.
“I questioned Lili. She didn’t know anything. Our attentions revived Irène and I was able to obtain an account of the frightful event from her. This time, there was no question of any unconscious gestures, nightmarish sensations or involuntary contusions. Irène was wide awake, calm, smiling and happy when she had felt the hands pressing her waist, the lips kissing her shoulders and neck and the teeth biting into her flesh–and the bite was there!
“We were unable to eat dinner or sleep. Not until morning did we become drowsy, after having said a thousand stupid things–anxiously on my part, in terror on Irène’s. Finally, though, we got up again. On the following day, as the weather was beautiful, we resolved to carry through the plan we had formulated the previous afternoon: an excursion to the monastery of Saint-Lazare.
The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 1: Enter Lucifer! Page 3