The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 1: Enter Lucifer!

by Jean de La Hire

  When the human skeleton appeared, marching towards them, holding its two metal cylinders, they had been rooted to the spot for several seconds. Already, with a gesture as mechanical as its gait, the skeleton had slowly raised its arms, at the end of which the cylinders gleamed–but this gesture revealed something to Saint-Clair, which the skeleton’s left arm had previously hidden. That thing was a long spiral of insulated electrical wire, attached to the wall at a socket and trailing behind the skeleton’s left foot, disappearing into the heel.

  “Get down!” ordered Saint-Clair, in a voice that was contained, dry and imperious.

  He fell to the ground on his side, immediately imitated by his three companions.

  “Corsat–the scissors, quickly!”

  Two seconds later, he had a pair of scissors in his hand. Reaching forwards with lightning speed, he cut the spiral wire close to the heel. The skeleton, no longer maintained in equilibrium by the automatism of its march, abruptly fell forwards, as if hit by a bludgeon, and collapsed entirely, with a rattle of bones.

  “Get up!” Saint-Clair ordered.

  A door had just opened in front of them–the door behind which the red-haired Hunter and Fritz the hauptmann were waiting, which had finally opened when Hunter had touched the three stones for a third time. Every mechanism, however perfect it might be, has its malfunctions, which are often inexplicable, and it was some such malfunction that had kept the door shut twice when it ought to have opened.

  At the sight of the two men and their bewildered attitude, Saint-Clair understood that the red-haired man was not the real Baron Glô von Warteck but merely his double–a servant devoid of any occult power. He laughed briefly and said, in French: “Corsat! Pilou! We, who knew how to cut off the electricity and make the skeleton collapse, know how make it impossible for these men to...” He broke off and said, in German, changing his tone to one of command: “Hands up, you two, or I’ll shoot!”

  He pointed his silent Browning at the hauptmann–but it was the red-haired man who cried “Living men! We need living men!” He leapt to his left, towards a copper lever that was glinting in the sunlight, and pulled it down.

  The hauptmann had not put up his hands and Saint-Clair had pulled the trigger–but the big man had dropped to his knees. The bullet ripped through his right ear. Coming to his feet, the hauptmann threw himself head first at Saint-Clair. The latter, struck in the side, lost his balance. He staggered, trying to stay on his feet, but he was grabbed by the legs and brought down.

  Corsat immediately leapt on to the hauptmann’s shoulders.

  “No!” Saint-Clair cried. “My hands are free–stand aside!”

  Corsat understood, and leapt back, at the same instant that Saint-Clair shoved the barrel of his weapon against the hauptmann’s forehead and pressed the trigger again. There was no smoke and no noise, save for a brief groan and the collapse of a heavy body. Fritz the hauptmann was dead, his extended body and wide-flung arms sprawling on the floor.

  Saint-Clair got to his feet with a single motion. He saw immediately that Pilou had disappeared. “Where has he gone?”

  “In pursuit of the red-haired man,” Corsat replied.

  “Where?”

  “There!” Corsat pointed to the doorway, now closed again, through which the hauptmann and that red-haired man had appeared.

  “He’ll get back to us, or we’ll get back to him. There’s not a moment to lose. I know which way to go. Come here, Corsat, Wolf!”

  Saint-Clair recalled the young woman’s words very well: “This room, a corridor, a large staircase, a dining-room, a library, then a little corridor, perfectly straight, and a narrow spiral staircase...” With the incalculable rapidity of overstimulated thought, he said to himself: If we follow that itinerary in a contrary sense, we’ll arrive at the door of her room. Whatever the cause may be, we are not subject to Lucifer’s control; the invisible wall is no longer around me, so there is a chance that it’s no longer around her either. As for the electrified doors, it’s merely a matter of finding and cutting the electrical conductor...

  It did not take him more than a minute to discover the secret mechanism that opened the little door beyond which he saw, as he had expected, a spiral staircase. It was pitch dark, but the Nyctalope did not even notice that. As he went down the stairs four at a time, turning vertiginously around the central column, Corsat switched on the pocket-lamp and followed him.22

  Wolf followed Corsat; he had not understood the words spoken in French but he had guessed, having heard his name pronounced, that he was to go with Corsat. He knew, besides, that there was no salvation for him, save by the hand of this extraordinary man–extraordinary in his presence and his actions, if not his goals, of which the poor chap knew nothing–so he followed Corsat, who ran after the Nyctalope.

  After the spiral staircase, there was an iron door, a narrow corridor, short and straight, an iron grille, a wooden door, a large room furnished as a library, a second wooden door, a padded enclosure, a little dining-room decked out in a luxurious Medieval style, two padded wooden doors, a curtain, a large landing and a monumentally large descending staircase with only twenty steps, another landing similar to the one above, a corridor sumptuously hung with ancient tapestries, a door...

  “There it is!” said Saint-Clair–and stopped in front of the door.

  Corsat and Wolf stopped behind him.

  VIII. From Minute to Minute

  The things that one expects to be the most extraordinarily difficult and complicated are sometimes the simplest and easiest, as human anticipations are often thwarted by destiny.

  The door in front of which the Nyctalope, Corsat and Wolf came to a halt was that of the apartment in which the celebrated Laurence Païli–Laure, the woman that Leo Saint-Clair loved–was held captive. Between himself and that door–or, at least, the opening of that door–the explorer had expected to find a thousand obstacles.

  Now, the door was unmasked by any curtain. Tall, broad, with only one panel in sculpted and polished oak, it had a gleaming brass handle to the left, a third of the way up. In the case of an ordinary door, if it is unlocked, one turns a handle more or less similar to that one, and the door opens. But this door would undoubtedly be better defended than the garden of the Hesperides, and the invisible dragon that guarded it would not be as easy to slay as the one that Hercules had to dispense with before collecting the golden apples from the three daughters of Atlas! 23

  With his heart beating rapidly, Saint-Clair said to himself: If it were sufficient, in order for me to avoid electrocution, to insulate myself before leaning on the handle long enough to open the door...

  In the meantime, he slid his fingers and hands into a pair of gloves taken from one of the pockets in his leotard–and he depressed the handle very, very gently. His eyes and ears were alert, attentive to the least indication of danger.

  Little by little, the handle turned, just like an ordinary handle–but without any noise, because the mechanism was carefully maintained. When the handle was fully depressed, Saint-Clair instinctively made the gesture that one makes when one has just turned a door-handle–which is to say that he pushed. He pushed–and the door opened! It simply opened–and nothing else happened!

  To Saint-Clair’s great amazement, he was able to cross the threshold. Corsat and Wolf followed him. Behind the three of them, the door remained open.

  They found themselves in a large antechamber hung with old tapestries, with waiting-chairs to the right and the left but no other furniture. There was no window; a fretted brass lamp, converted into an electric light hanging from the ceiling, shed a soft light. There was only one other door, facing the first. Saint-Clair went straight to it, and–this time without taking any precaution–tried it. It did not resist. With an expansive gesture, he pushed it abruptly open to reveal a large rectangle of sunlit brightness, and the vision of a large and high-ceilinged room flooded with light, fully carpeted, filled with furniture, luxurious ornaments–and, at the back
, the balcony of the overhanging turret...

  “Don’t come in! Oh, don’t come in!” exclaimed Saint-Clair, in a voice that was as fearful as it was unexpected–choked, imperious and pleading at the same time, and furious too.

  He slammed the door violently behind him and ran forwards.

  What a spectacle confronted him!

  Stretched out on the huge low divan, with her bare legs hanging down and her feet lost in the fur of a polar bear skin, Laurence Païli lay as if dead. A tunic of white silk and lace, crumpled and ripped to shreds, scarcely covered her body. Her spreading hair covered her right shoulder and side, while a trickle of blood ran over her bare left shoulder. Her arms, one of which was dangling down as far as the white bearskin, were wide apart, forming a cross. Her lips were slightly apart and her eyes were closed; her face, turned towards the sunlit turret, had the pallor and calmness of death.

  Next to the divan, on the Persian carpet beyond the edge of the white bearskin, a red-haired man, similar in every respect to the red-haired man who had fled up above with the Provençal on his heels, was lying on his side. His legs were folded and his arms were outstretched in front of him; his clenched fingers were plunged into the pile of the carpet. He too had the livid face of a corpse, but with a fixed expression of frightful rage, for his eyes were still open, terrible in their fixity!

  Saint-Clair felt utterly overwhelmed and helpless. “Come on, then!” he groaned. He pulled himself together and stood there, with the two bodies in front of him.

  “She... dead? That blood... and him, dead too? How... why?” He was stammering. He understood. “Oh, no, no!” he moaned. “I must be calm... and act when necessary. Come on! I must regain my strength...”

  As he looked at the red-haired man, saying to himself, That one’s obviously Lucifer, he saw the recumbent body move, uncurling slightly. The fingers opened, extended... and the eyes...

  Then, there was a shout–many shouts, a tumult, Pilou’s voice, Corsat’s voice, calling: “Boss! Boss! To us! Here!”

  He turned round, ran to the door, opened it and saw Corsat and Pilou in the antechamber, holding the red-haired man and lifting him up like a mannequin, while he lashed out at their arms and legs, howling in German. Further away, in the corridor, a crowd of men was hesitantly pressing forward–but they were already being pushed aside by newcomers with resolute faces, armed with stout Brownings. They stopped in response to an abrupt command: “Halt!”

  Immediately, in response to a second command, the first four in the vanguard rushed upon Corsat, Pilou and Saint-Clair–but they bumped into one another; the Nyctalope had struck them down, with no other sound than the click of his Browning’s automatic loading device.

  There was a momentary stupor among the attackers. Pilou abandoned the weight of the red-haired man–who was no longer struggling–to Corsat and said to Saint-Clair: “There are 50 of them. Eventually, one or other of them will kill you, boss! I know how we can get out. Corsat can cover the retreat and shield himself with that living puppet...”

  “Wait!”

  Everything that had happened since Saint-Clair had emerged from the room in response to his comrades’ appeal had taken less than a minute. He turned round, ran back into the room, searched for a dressing-gown, found a cloak and wrapped it around Laurence Païli’s body–asking himself all the while, with atrocious anxiety, whether she was dead or had merely fainted. Carrying his lover’s body in his arms, he returned to the antechamber, where Pilou seized him by the elbow, drew him on and pushed him forward, preceded at a run by Wolf.

  Only then did detonations resound behind them.

  “You’ll kill him!” Corsat howled. “You’ll kill him!” He had set the red-haired man on his back, in such a manner as to shield himself completely. He ran after Saint-Clair and Pilou.

  Several seconds of running brought them into a wide corridor. Then Wolf stopped short, letting the emburdened Saint-Clair overtake him, along with Pilou, his Browning in his hand, and Corsat, with the red-haired man suspended behind him as a shield. When they had all passed by, Wolf slammed a door shut, the noise echoing from vault to vault like a cannon-shot.

  Immediately, shouts were raised behind the door, and blows rained upon the iron mass–but Wolf had taken the lead again and they all ran. They went down staircases at top speed, at the risk of stumbling and fracturing their skulls or limbs. They stopped abruptly in front of a main door.

  “Your cutter,” said Wolf.

  Pilou took it from Corsat’s satchel. Within a minute, the door was opened, the section of wood holding the lock having been excised. They were in a stable; there were horses and harnesses. A man stood up behind a shallow partition, but Wolf knocked him down with a blow of his fist.

  “The cutter–over there!” Wolf said to Pilou, pointing to another large door.

  While Pilou went to work, Wolf saddled a horse–an example so rapidly followed that two minutes later, four horses were galloping across the plain encircling Schwarzrock. On leaving the stables they had found themselves at the base of the enormous rock, in an ancient grotto communicating with the castle by means of a sloping gallery, in which a staircase had been built.24

  Gunshots sounded from above, fired from the ramparts and the towers, but they were out of range.

  The horses reached the bottom of a zigzag pathway, which climbed up to the principal pass serving as a communication link between the circular plain and the outer regions of the Black Forest.

  “Up there!” said Saint-Clair. “That’s salvation, for they won’t dare follow us up there in large numbers.”

  The horses set off along the steep path. Wolf’s was at the head; the second carried Saint-Clair and the still-inanimate Laurence; the third bore Corsat and the terrorized red-haired man; the fourth was mounted by Pilou.

  At that moment, Zucht and his two sons, Franz and Berthold, came running out of the house at the extremity of the valley; they were armed with rifles. Simultaneously, six saddled horses emerged from the stables of Schwarzrock, carrying six men armed with lassos.

  Three minutes later, the Zuchts and the horsemen met at a crossroads, and one of the men from Schwarzrock said to Zucht: “They must not be killed. They must be taken alive–those are the Baron’s orders. Shoot down the horses if our lassos are ineffectual or if we’re killed, and bring back the fugitives alive.”

  “How many are there?” asked father Zucht.

  “Four men, with one woman and Lord Hunter, whom they’ve kidnapped.”

  “We’ll take the short cut,” said father Zucht. “We’ll get to the pass before them.”

  “Good! We’ll follow the path. Two of their horses are doubly loaded, so they’ll make slower progress than we will. Above all, don’t kill them! Rather die than kill–that’s the order. There’s torture, remember!”

  “That’s understood!”

  The three Zuchts plunged into the trees, while the six horsemen urged their mounts on to the bare path that zigzagged up the mountain.

  Imagine that strange scene. In the 20th century, in the heart of a civilized country–in a steep and thickly-forested region, admittedly, but an inhabited and policed region, where tourism companies have planted signposts and installed benches at “viewpoints”–four men were fleeing on horseback, carrying a woman who was unconscious or dead and a subdued captive. These four men had Brownings in their fists and were determined to kill or be killed rather than being captured. Nine men were pursuing these fugitives resolutely, firmly determined to capture them or be killed! Did no policeman or forest ranger intervene? No–for the plain surrounding Schwarzrock was private property, the domain of Baron Glô von Warteck. His gamekeepers were the three Zuchts, and no policeman had the right to go into that immense domain without a legal warrant properly issued by the judiciary authorities.

  No one dreamed of asking the legal authorities to take action against whatever lay within that girdle of mountain and forest known as the domain and barony of Schwarzrock–for a baro
ny and its domain are regarded, in Germany, as an element of a nominally-defunct empire. The fugitives, therefore, could expect no help from anywhere or anyone against their pursuers; their entry into the castle had made them disappear. The pursuers knew that no one except the Baron would care if the fugitives were killed–but the Baron would send them to their deaths, if they did not succeed in capturing them.

  Once the pass was traversed and the fugitives were on the other side of the mountain, however, it would be a different matter. The domain of Schwarzrock finished at the horizon made by the mountain chain forming the circle. There was a low dry-stone wall up there, built years before and maintained on a daily basis by the Zuchts, which marked the boundary. On the other side of that wall, at intervals of 500 meters, stood trees with stripped trunks bearing placards on which it was written that any trespass within the bounds of the domain would be at the risk of death, by reason of numerous wolf-traps, and, furthermore, was formally prohibited, under penalty of imprisonment. In four places, facing one another in pairs, the wall allowed the passage of pathways by which one could enter or leave–paths framed by high rocks forming mountain passes–and although there was no gate closing them off, notices saying No Entry were continually renewed, painted in black on a white background.

  Once the pass had been traversed, therefore, and the wall left behind, one was no longer on Baron Glô von Warteck’s land, but in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Baden, which had been transformed since 1919 or 1920, at least in appearance, into something more-or-less democratic and republican. Then, any discharge of firearms would certainly attract policemen, forest rangers and other official guardians of Baden. On the other hand, it was necessary not to put overmuch trust in that, since it was incontestable that Baron Glô von Warteck, mysterious as his castle was, was not a man to whom the Baden authorities paid particularly close attention. And strangers wandering in the Black Forest often suffered accidents–the sort of accident that might involve a gunshot or a fall into a deep precipice. As for a fight, or a capture with a view to sequestration–and abduction–well, the policemen and forest rangers of Baden, if by chance they found themselves in proximity to such an occurrence, might well have the elementary prudence to see nothing. What good does it do, after all, to get mixed up in other people’s business, when one does not have specific orders in one’s pocket, with a duly signed arrest warrant?