The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 1: Enter Lucifer!

by Jean de La Hire

  “No–my eyes will open at the stated hour.”

  “Very well. On awakening, you have only to ring and Louis will wake Corsat–and everything will be ready. Will you eat before leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Monsieur Charles did not leave the Nyctalope alone until he had been rapidly assured that the room and the bathroom reserved for him had everything that a guest might need.

  Hours passed, while some of the inhabitants of The Willows devoted themselves to peaceful sleep and others maintained an excited vigil. At 3:05 a.m., on a damp, dark and starless night, the Moon being almost continuously veiled by enormous black clouds moving slowly across the sky, three men left the villa’s grounds by the little iron gate at the rear of the gardens. It let them out on to a broad path following the right bank of the Lauch.

  These three men were the Nyctalope, Louis Nortmund and Corsat. They all wore little Basque berets of the kind that cling to the skull, which the wind cannot blow off and which never fall off in a struggle or during strenuous exercise. Corsat was wearing a belt furnished with leather pockets filled with various objects.

  The distance from the iron gate to the wall encircling the red house was three kilometers. The hands of Louis’ watch stood at 3:45 a.m. when they arrived.

  Louis only knew the little red house by virtue of having seen it a hundred times while passing along the riverside path when out walking or hunting. The path curved around an ancient but well-constructed wall, surrounding a garden in the middle of which stood the house. All of it–ground floor, first floor and a mansard roof enclosing the attics–was visible the path. The garden seemed to be abandoned, its fruit-trees having reverted to their wild state, while tall grass and brambles had invaded every part of it. The house seemed dead, the doors and windows permanently closed. Along the Lauch, the encircling wall plunged into water that was almost stagnant at that point, replete with viscous vegetation and reeds. On the western side, the wall was pierced by a gateway from which extended a path some 20 meters long, at right angles to the road.

  The house reportedly belonged to a bachelor from Strasbourg, whom no one knew and had ever seen. The place was very isolated, far from any frequent traffic. The riverside path had nothing but wild hedges for two kilometers downstream and three kilometers upstream. These hedges protected a strip of fallow land five kilometers long and half a kilometer wide, belonging to the same mysterious proprietor of the red house. The riverside path did not, in fact, lead anywhere; at the extremity of the strip of abandoned fields, it ended in a cul-de-sac in a little fir-wood.

  All these details had been given to Saint-Clair by Louis during their walk to the house.

  When Louis said “Stop!” in a low voice, they were at the place on the path which overlooked the wall. Corsat and Louis knew that the Nyctalope could see everything in the now-total darkness as clearly as in daylight: the wall, the unkempt garden, and the house, which appeared to them only as variously-nuanced shadows.

  After two minutes of observation, Saint-Clair whispered to Louis: “Thank you, my dear Monsieur. I have no further need of you now, but you may wait for me here if you wish. It is impossible for you to follow me into the house without a light; you would bump into everything and make too much noise. Corsat, on the other hand, is used to following me through the darkness...”

  “I’ll stay here and wait for you. One word, though...”

  “What?”

  “If I were to make too much noise, as you say, who would hear me? Do you suppose that the little house might be inhabited?”

  “The red-haired man brought Edwige here twice. If there is anyone in there, we have no reason to believe that it will be anyone but him.”

  “That’s true. I’ll wait here, then. But I’m strong enough to climb the wall. If I hear a gunshot, I’ll come running.”

  “Yes, a gunshot or a whistle-blast,” said Saint-Clair. Without another word, he moved off, not towards the wall but along the road, in the direction of a little path leading to a gateway in one of the other “terrestrial” walls, the “aquatic” side only being bordered by a narrow strip of vegetation.

  Corsat followed him, his footsteps muffled. He was guided by his hearing, instinct and habit more than by sight, for the night was pitch dark. A cold wind blew in gusts, not high in the atmosphere but almost at ground level. The crowns of the poplars were scarcely rippled, but the bushes were trembling.

  The two men soon reached the door in the wall. “It’s tarred wood, solid and firmly shut,” said Saint-Clair, in a voice that only Corsat could hear. “The keyhole is shiny. Someone has been here in the recent past, more often than the Nortmunds and others suppose. Pass me skeleton key No. 8.”

  There was a slight click of steel and Corsat, having verified with his fingertips the number engraved on the shaft of one of the instruments contained in one of his leather pockets, passed the requested skeleton key to his boss.

  In 20 seconds, the door opened silently. They crossed the threshold and the Nyctalope pushed the door to without engaging the lock, so that they would be able to get out again without resorting to the skeleton key.

  A winding path extended from the wall to the house through a minuscule virgin forest comprised by inextricably interwoven branches, shrubs, bushes, brambles and grass. The Nyctalope observed that the path was frayed to a greater extent than the abandoned appearance of the house might lead one to expect.

  Someone comes here often, Saint-Clair thought. Might I find a bird in the nest? While he walked on soundlessly, silently followed by Corsat, all his senses were acute; his nyctalopic eyes distinguished the least detail in the gloom, including shades of color and subtle contours. His nostrils flared, discerning the various odors of the Earth, the plants and the nearby water. His ears perceived a multiplicity of nocturnal sounds. All his nerves were raised to an attentive pitch of sensitivity. On the trail of a mystery, the Nyctalope became a force as scrupulous in his perceptions as he was formidable in his effects.

  The minuscule forest extended all the way to the wall of the house. The sinuous pathway led to a low-set door in a recess in that wall. The Nyctalope stopped; behind him, Corsat immediately became still.

  “There’s no window in this façade,” Saint-Clair whispered. “There’s only one entrance–this one, closed off by a wooden door with two tiny holes for special keys. Pass me the two.”

  With his customary skill, Corsat touched, chose and seized the requisite key. Saint-Clair tried it in one of the locks, but in vain. It had no more success in the other lock. “The three!” he demanded.

  The second attempt was similarly checked by both locks. “We’d have to cut through the door around the hinges,” he said. “Too long. Follow me.”

  He moved along the wall, followed by Corsat. The branches and bushes that their hands pushed aside gave rise to sounds that blended in with those of the wind in the trees. The two men rounded a corner of the house and moved along the façade parallel to the wall bordering the water, a dozen meters distant. There were neither bushes nor grass there; the ground was clear, stony and flattened.

  “There’s a flight of three steps,” Saint-Clair whispered to Corsat. “A door flanked by two windows; two more on the first floor; wooden shutters, closed.” He climbed the three steps and examined the door. “The same double lock as down below. No point in trying. We’ll go up to the roof. The rope! Don’t move.”

  Corsat opened one of his leather pockets and took out a skein of rope, which the Nyctalope took from his fingers. It was a sort of silken lasso the thickness of his index finger, about 20 meters long, admirably light, flexible and sturdy, with knots placed at intervals. A ball, made of lead shot and rubber inside a felt capsule, was fixed at one end.

  With the lasso in hand, Saint-Clair stepped back to the riverside wall. He looked at the roof of the house and saw two chimneys. He chose the closer one. He rolled one end of the rope around his left wrist, while his right hand gripped the cord s
ome 50 centimeters from the ball. He swung it, whirled it rapidly around, then threw it–and the ball, lifting the rope behind it, looped itself around the chimney, along with four meters of the lasso. Saint-Clair pulled it tight. The rope dangled down the wall as far as the steps, where the Nyctalope rejoined Corsat.

  “I’ll go up first,” Saint-Clair said. “Here’s the rope–get hold of it! When I pull on it, climb up.”

  The two men were wearing rubber-soled shoes. Their hands went from knot to knot; their feet made no sound on the old roughcast façade. Under the pressure of the taut rope the cast-iron guttering creaked–a slight noise lost in the sounds of the windswept night.

  On the roof, on the far side of the chimney, the skylight of an attic interrupted the uniform alignment of the slates. This skylight, whose glass was rippled and murky, stood 20 centimeters ajar.

  Saint-Clair smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “One can pose as Lucifer,” he said, “but one can’t think of everything.”

  The Nyctalope reached through the opening and seized the notched iron rod that served to open and close the window, which was soon wide open. The two men passed through, one at a time, the first giving the second the necessary instructions. As the darkness was still opaque, Saint-Clair said to his companion: “Attic lumber-room with floorboards. One trapdoor, three meters to the left. Come on.”

  They moved as lightly as cats. On one side, the trapdoor was furnished with a ring, to which a cord was attached. The cord passed over a little pulley suspended from a roof-beam, and descended again to pass through a hole in the floorboards. Saint-Clair wedged the cord between the casing and the wheel of the pulley so that it would not budge, and calmly lifted the trapdoor, setting it back completely. He looked through and saw a landing, a section of wall with red hangings, a banister and a flight of stairs, apparently descending all the way to the ground floor. There was a ladder mounted on the wall, hanging from an iron hook. The pull-cord hung down from the trapdoor to the landing.

  “The ladder’s too far away for me to grab it, even if I lean out as far as possible,” Saint-Clair said, “but the drop’s only three meters. We’ll suspend ourselves at arm’s length and let ourselves fall on to our toes, together. OK? Are you there? Now!”

  The floorboards creaked loudly under the weight of the two men. They stayed still, knees bent, in silence. For Corsat, the darkness was total. The Nyctalope saw a narrow corridor leading to the staircase, in whose rear wall there was an uncurtained window. There were two doors to the right and one to the left. There were numerous damp stains on the red cloth of the old wall hangings.

  Suddenly, the silence was broken by an exclamation: a brief, harsh and brutal “oh!”

  Instinctively, Saint-Clair and Corsat stood up and stiffened, avidly attentive. They both turned in the direction from which the sound had come–the partition wall with the two doors.

  A few seconds after the exclamation, there was a whole series of successive and simultaneous sounds: the metallic creaking of mattress-springs, the groans of a thick and coarse human voice, muffled footsteps on an uncarpeted floor, the scrape of a match...

  A beam of light showed under the nearer door,

  Almost immediately afterwards, Saint-Clair and Corsat heard the man behind the door getting dressed, muttering bad-temperedly and talking to himself in a low and slurred voice. It was impossible to make out a single word clearly, but the occasional syllable and the rough consonants testified that the monologue was in German. The man’s footfalls on the bare floor suggested that he was slow and heavy, presumably fat.

  Saint-Clair and Corsat had already taken action. They were flat against the wall to the right and left of the door, their heads slightly turned and their hands free, ready to leap, to grab, to hold. “When he opens the door,” the Nyctalope ordered, “grab him, cover his mouth, put him on his bed and roll him up in the blankets, stifling him.”

  “Yes, boss!”

  They waited, calm and joyful in their anticipation.

  The heavy tread approached; a clumsy hand drew back a bolt, turned a key; the door opened wide... and it was as if two lithe jaguars had leapt upon a gorilla!

  The enormous man scarcely had time to release a raucous groan and to raise his hands defensively. A large handkerchief was crammed into his mouth; he was gripped by four bruising hands of steel, while two human bodies frog-marched him backwards to his bed. He was rolled up in his bedclothes like a piece of meat in a pastry. Then, with the light curtains abruptly ripped from their rail, he was trussed up from his ankles to his shoulders. His head was uncovered, and he saw two men leaning over him, one to his right and one to his left.

  At the head of the bed, on a white wood night-stand, stood a candle in a wrought-iron candlestick, which illuminated the prisoner’s face. His brutal skull was covered in thick short-cropped red hair. He had blue-grey eyes and his coarse skin was clean-shaven, with neither beard not moustache. It was the head of a brute, to be sure, but an intelligent brute; the forehead was high and broad, the eyes expressive, the lips eloquent.

  If this man is a humble nonentity, the Nyctalope thought, scrutinizing the immobile features, he’s not a vulgar nonentity. If this man is truly devoted to Lucifer, he won’t talk unless he’s subjected to physical pressure. Before interrogating him, it’ll be as well to search the whole house.

  There was a bunch of keys on the night-stand, next to the candlestick. Saint-Clair saw them and took them. “Corsat,” he said, in German, “this fellow must have Herculean strength. Don’t trust entirely in the blankets and curtains. Dagger in hand, my friend! If the prisoner shows any sign of trying to escape, stick the blade in his thigh, then in one or other of his arms, until he calms down. There’s no need to kill him, but if he gives any trouble, a few little cuts will thin his blood nicely. Watch him! I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Saint-Clair went out, perfectly calm, leaving behind the light of which he had no need. First, he wanted to make sure that there were no other men in the house. He drew his pistol by way of precaution as he went down to the ground floor. Thanks to the bunch of keys, he did not foresee any difficulty in the domestic expedition.

  The ground floor consisted of a corridor leading from the bottom of the staircase to the main entrance, one empty room, a cellar containing wood, coal and two cases of champagne–one of them opened–and a kitchen furnished with instruments indispensable for the exercise of the unrefined culinary arts. There was no living being there, but there was scarcely any dust to be seen; the furnished rooms gave the impression of having been used frequently, if not continually inhabited.

  Saint-Clair went back upstairs. He already knew that there were three doors there. One, which stood open, was the room where Corsat was guarding their prisoner. The second, on the same side of the corridor, gave access to a little bedroom furnished with a made-up bed, a dressing-table, a plush carpet and a full-length cheval-glass of superior quality. There were two sets of curtains on the window, a blue velvet door-curtain and blue cloth hangings surmounted by tasteful paintings. The wardrobe contained male clothing, hats, shoes and underwear, all devoid of marks of origin, bearing no owner’s monogram or initials.

  Saint-Clair went out, closed the door again and crossed the corridor diagonally to open the final door–but he quickly ascertained that none of the keys in the bunch would fit the lock, and saw that it was of such quality that a simple skeleton key would not suffice to open it.

  We’ll have to use the cutter, he thought.

  Saint-Clair only wanted to question his captive on matters he could not resolve for himself. To open the firmly-locked door and find out what was inside was something for which the Nyctalope did not need anyone else. He went back to Corsat. “The cutter,” he said, laconically.

  The Burgundian’s right hand was playing with a large-bladed knife, sharp-edged and pointed. His left hand opened a bag suspended from his leather belt and drew out an instrument somewhat reminiscent of a small, flat camera.

&nb
sp; Saint-Clair had put his Browning back in his pocket. He took the instrument, returned to the closed door, made two adjustments to one face of the apparatus–which was furnished with little buttons and winged screws–and set one of its narrow sides it against the wooden door, level with the lock and ten centimeters from the frame. A scarcely-perceptible scraping sound then became audible as something moved back and forth with an accelerating rhythm. Little by little, the Nyctalope moved the instrument downwards, and a groove two millimeters wide appeared above it. The apparatus was an automatic saw, operated by a compact electric battery of unprecedented power and capacity.

  Saint-Clair made three grooves, one parallel to the fame and the two others at right-angles to the first, The rectangle of wood thus detached contained the lock, which remained fixed–but the door yielded to a shove by the Nyctalope’s knee, after which he immediately dropped to a kneeling position.

  There was a loud bang, then another.

  “Don’t move, Corsat!” cried Saint-Clair. “It’s only an automatic pistol, fired by the opening of the door. There’ll be one more shot, I think.”

  “OK, boss.”

  The faint radiance that emerged obliquely from the prisoner’s room scarcely illuminated the threshold of the third room, but there was no darkness for the Nyctalope. Experienced, skillful and prudent–the kind of prudence that goes with courage and temerity, as will-power goes with love and passion–he waited for the third shot, kneeling down by the wall next to the door-frame. It was not long in sounding. As Saint-Clair had anticipated, the automatic pistol had a built-in delay for the third shot, but the bullet buried itself harmlessly in the wall, as its two predecessors had.

  Access to the dark room was now straightforward, and probably free of danger, but the Nyctalope waited, inspecting it carefully before entering. He had placed the electric cutter on the floor. His Browning, fitted with a silencer, was in his right hand. He moved forward darting glances into the corners he had not been able to see from the doorway.