by Kim Newman
Morpho, unhappy with the way this was going, came at her like a wrestler, arms out. If he caught her now, he’d break her spine over his knee.
Sultan’s rifle fell from above and slammed butt-first into Morpho’s head. His skull audibly cracked and his one eye went red then dull. He collapsed like a sack of bricks. The gun discharged as it hit the floor. Malita yelped, shot in the ankle. The ditchwater Duchess grabbed her by the hair and hauled her into the wings. Her screams grew higher in pitch.
At this point, the orphans – very sensibly – ran off. Slipping between stagehands’ legs, they zigzagged to avoid capture. Henriette and Louise barrelled through the blindfolded orchestra. The musicians made a racket as they missed their places, then stopped playing and tumbled into each other. In the kerfuffle, the children disappeared backstage.
Kate wished them luck and hoped they’d make a better choice for their next circus.
Now, everyone looked up. Kate smelled paraffin.
M. Erik had returned to his shadows.
Sultan was lowered slowly, in lurches, on a rope looped around his ankle. He twisted in the air, human hands stuck out of hampering hairy arms. He shook his head, as if trying to get his mask off. He yowled, throwing his voice – his cries seemed to come from all over the auditorium. Drops of liquid spattered on the oilcloth. The gorilla was soaked in paraffin.
‘What is this?’ cried Pradier.
‘It’s Poe,’ squawked Guignol. ‘The tale of “Hop-Frog”!’
Once, Erik had appeared at a masked ball as Edgar Allan Poe’s Red Death. Like Guignol, who’d written Dr Tarr and Professor Fether into his show, the Director of the Opera Ghost Agency was an admirer of the gloomy, sickly American poet. Kate preferred Walt Whitman, herself.
She remembered the story of ‘Hop-Frog’. The abused jester tricks the cruel king and his toadying courtiers into disguising themselves as orangutans with flammable pitch and flax, and then touches a torch to them.
A ribbon of flame ran down the rope and caught the fur of the paraffin-sodden gorilla man. With a whump, Sultan was enveloped in fire. Burning fur stank. A screech sounded, and was cut off as the ape-man sucked fire into his lungs. He kicked and struggled, swinging like a pendulum…
…then the rope burned through. Sultan fell, cracking boards. The props-master had the presence of mind to throw a bucket of water on the dead man. The fire hissed out. Smoke and steam rose. Pradier, an idiot, chittered in delight, taking this for part of the show.
Du Roy stood. He appeared calm, yet a vein throbbed in his forehead.
He looked around for the phantom who had wrecked the performance, then turned – suspicion pricked – to the veiled woman at his side. Kate wasn’t the only person who’d forgotten not to trust Clara Watson.
Du Roy drew a small pistol from inside his jacket. A ladies’ model. He jammed it up under the scarlet widow’s chin and ripped off her veil.
The Master of the Red Circle beheld a face he didn’t know.
Yuki shrugged out of the hooded cloak. She wore her kimono.
She even carried her parasol.
‘Surprise,’ gloated Guignol.
The select audience shrank away from Yuki. Gripped by a premonition.
‘Find the lady,’ said Guignol.
Mortain’s doxy pulled off her stiff yellow wig and shook out red hair.
So, Yuki was Clara and Clara was the blonde.
Only Kate was who she said she was – even in this apache outfit.
‘Whoever you are,’ said Du Roy, ‘you’ll die now…’
Du Roy stood back and straightened his arm, steadying his gun. The barrel was an inch from Yuki’s nose.
Faster than the eye could register, Yuki unsheathed a sword from her parasol and made a forceful, yet elegant, pass.
Du Roy looked at a red line around his wrist. His brows knit as he tried to pull the trigger. Wires were cut and the impulse from his brain couldn’t reach his fingers. Puzzled, airily irritated, he didn’t yet feel the pain.
His hand slid off his wrist and thumped on the floor, letting go of the gun.
Blood gouted like a fountain, which Yuki side-stepped.
‘Musicians,’ said Guignol, sharply. ‘Selection Thirteen, andante.’
The ensemble took heed, adjusted their blindfolds and assumed their playing positions, instruments ready.
They launched into Guignol’s idea of an appropriate tune. ‘Three Little Maids from School’ by Gilbert and Sullivan, from The Mikado.
Yuki set about her precise, bloody work – more surgery than butchery.
Among the Red Circle, she lashed out. She held her sword hilt up and struck down, adopting a series of poses, face impassive, ignoring the gouts of gore. She was not hobbled by her dress which, Kate only now realised, was slit to the waist to allow for ease of movement. Her habitual tiny Japanese steps were misdirection.
Screams. Intestines uncoiled. Limbs and heads flew.
The Red Circle got their fill of horrors now.
Three little maids from school are we,
Pert as a schoolgirl well can be,
Filled to the brim with girlish glee,
Three little maids from school!
Père de Kern tried to flee, but his imps gripped his train and he was tugged back onto the killing floor. Yuki laid open his spine. He bucked like a cut-open caterpillar.
Everything is a source of fun…
Mortain lost his innards. Pradier lost his head.
Nobody’s safe for we care for none!
Assolant stood up and slid his face onto Yuki’s sword-edge. His domino mask fell apart. He detached his skull from the blade, hand pressed over the spurting slice.
Life is a joke that’s just begun!
Kate picked up Sultan’s rifle. She worked the bolt, ejected the spent cartridge, chambered another. She covered the stagehands.
Morpho and Malita were dead.
Dr Orloff watched, open-mouthed, as his patrons fell.
Three little maids from school! Three little maids from school!
Yuki didn’t waste effort. She maimed and killed as she would compose a haiku – in seconds, with strictly limited moves.
The orchestra finished the tune.
Yuki sheathed her blade and opened the parasol. She gave a tiny, formal curtsey.
Only now did Kate remember to be terrified.
But not incapacitated. She took a bucket of water from a stagehand and scrubbed the backs of de Kern’s imps, scraping enough paint so the children wouldn’t die of clogged pores. Whoever they were, she trusted they’d be grateful.
Assolant and Du Roy were still alive.
‘Katie dear,’ said Clara, sweetly. ‘Would you free our client?’
Catching on at once, Kate helped Guignol get loose. He got the enforced straightness out of his bones and kinked up properly.
‘That’s the way to do it,’ he swazzled.
So, Guignol had been coerced into letting the Red Circle take over his theatre. He had taken steps to break their hold over his company.
‘You’re finished, Hulot,’ spat Du Roy.
Guignol mimed a shrug.
Another mystery solved – the secret identity of Guignol. He was Jacques Hulot, once hailed as the funniest man in France, then believed a suicide. Reborn as the maestro of horrors.
‘Comedy didn’t pay,’ he explained to Kate. ‘The mob wanted gore, and gore encore… So I got a new act. I told truths, showed the world the way it was.’
He capered over to Du Roy.
‘But the mob are less bloodthirsty than you, you pathetic wretch. My horrors are a mirror – they do not represent the world as I wish it to be. They are a caution, not a blueprint. Only a few mistake it for one. And few of them have the want of feeling that would admit them to your circle. It takes refinement to be so dreadful. Are you satisfied now? Have you finally had your fill of blood, you monster of France?’
Du Roy let go of his seeping wrist and died.
So there were no heirs of
Monsieur Hulot. Guignol, the management of the theatre, was Hulot himself, transformed … and the Théâtre des Horreurs was the risen spectre of the Théâtre des Plaisantins.
Amid all the carnage, the clown couldn’t help himself. Guignol was still funny.
The tableau at the end of his show, the waxworks of the Légion d’Horreur, was a specific charge, accusing the Brothers of the Red Circle. Another living signpost, marking the way for the Angels of Music. These are the guilty men, these are your guilty men. Come and stop them, for I – Guignol – am in their power and cannot. Kate had looked for hidden meaning, when it was obvious enough to be understood in the rear stalls.
General Assolant still stood, half his face red. His famous battles were fought and finished well before he arrived at the bloody field to supervise the executions. Now, he’d have real scars to go with his medals.
The officer who despised cowards was trembling.
‘Don’t be alarmed, General,’ said Clara. ‘You must remain alive, to tell any others… any of the Red Circle not present, any who might share its inclinations. Your run is over. The show is closed by the order of… Messieurs Guignol and Erik. You understand? Your marching orders are given. Now get out of this place before my dainty friend changes her mind and plays parasol games again.’
Assolant didn’t need to be told twice. He scarpered, the sword he hadn’t thought to draw rattling at his side.
Kate took a moment and put all her weight into slapping Clara.
The English widow licked a bead of blood from her lip and shrugged.
‘You couldn’t be told, Katie. You’re a good journalist, but no actress.’
‘Why didn’t you stop the show before it began?’ she asked, as much of Yuki as Clara. ‘Before anyone was hurt.’
‘Your friend Sultan had to be removed,’ said Clara. ‘A tricky situation.’
Kate saw the sense, but still burned. Stage Door Jeannot had paid for Erik’s tardiness.
Nini, the Aztec princess, came forward. She’d taken off her headdress.
‘My father’s letters?’
‘Will be returned to you,’ said Guignol, kissing her hand.
Satisfied, Nini left the stage.
Guignol looked at the smiling props-master, the nervous stagehands and the now-sighted orchestra.
‘I know you were suborned to this by Orloff. You are on probation, but you keep your jobs… except you, Rollo. You enjoyed this too much. Go find other employment and take your knives with you.’
Rollo shrugged, gathered up a selection of implements and departed.
‘Orloff,’ said Guignol, drawing out the name, ‘you are a mockery of a man, barely a human creature. We have a vacancy for you. You’ll find your gorilla suit in the costumes closet. It’ll be sewn on. The mask will be fixed to your face with glue, permanently. And you’ll gibber amusingly, play the star role when we stage “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and submit entirely to my will… or else you’ll share the fate of your predecessor Sultan. Do you understand me?’
Orloff, white with terror, sank to his knees, surrounded by parts of his patrons. They were now literally a Red Circle.
‘Now, I want this stage washed and this mess cleared,’ ordered Guignol. ‘Tomorrow night, and every night, we have a show to put on. The Théâtre des Horreurs does not go dark!’
XIII
THE ANGELS SAT with the Persian in the Café de la Paix. Yuki ate ice cream and Clara drank China tea.
Kate was still irritated.
The job was done – the Red Circle sundered, the Montmartre murders stopped – and the client satisfied.
She had thought she understood why Clara betrayed her, but it turned out that the Englishwoman had shammed her way into the Red Circle. Now, Kate was bewildered again. It had made so much sense for Clara Watson to defect. She was a self-declared connoisseur of torture. Whatever was wrong with Du Roy was wrong with her too – perhaps far more so. Erik had taken her on precisely because of this defect.
‘What was it, Clara?’ she asked. ‘Why were you so set against them?’
‘The Légion d’Horreur were bourgeois hypocrites – salivating in secret, rather than proudly taking their pleasures in the open. Besides, I wanted to see a true artist perform… and I have. I shall treasure the memory.’
‘Guignol?’
‘Oh, he’s adorable… but no. Not Guignol.’
Clara raised her teacup to Yuki, who dipped her head modestly.
‘Grace. Elegance. Minimalism. Mutilation. Execution. Perfect.’
Kate would never understand. For her, horrors were just horrors.
She looked up at the frontage of the Opera House and fancied a gargoyle was up there, watching over them.
She’d never understand him either. As a reporter, as a detective, she needed only to know the facts; only as Kate Reed did she want to know more.
The Persian laid a dossier of press cuttings on the table.
‘Now, les filles, another matter has come to the attention of the Agency. Kate, you will be interested. In the Louvre, guards have been assaulted. It is rumoured that treasures have disappeared. Some talk of a curse upon the building. A strange figure has been seen, drifting through the halls by night, cloaked and silent, wearing the headdress and golden death-mask of a pharaoh…’
ACT FOUR: THE MARK OF KANE
‘Mr Carter, if the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.’
Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles,
Citizen Kane (1941)
I
A TICKET HAD BEEN delivered by pneumatique. The Special Performance would commence, unusually, at half past ten in the morning.
He entered his box via the trapdoor. Plush upholstery matched the velvet curtains, soft and rich in the electric lamplight. A phonograph apparatus stood on a trolley. A programme lay on his chair. It was an unfamiliar design – not from the Paris Opéra, but a theatre in Chicago.
The half-hour chimed. He cranked the phonograph and raised the needle-arm to the revolving cylinder. After a few seconds’ hiss, an anonymous voice issued from the bell.
‘Good morning, Monsieur Erik…’
He opened the programme as indicated by a tasselled bookmark. A full-page rotogravure portrait showed a plump, smiling, expensively dressed patron.
‘The man you are looking at is Charles Foster Kane, the American millionaire and press magnate. Kane believes his financial and political interests, and those of the United States of America, would be served by war among the Great Powers of Europe. Presently, he is summering at Royale-les-Eaux, a spa town north of Dieppe where he has substantial holdings, ostensibly to acquire works of ancient and modern art for his private collection. In truth, Kane has convened a gathering of powerful, like-minded or simply malign individuals and plans to found a cartel dedicated to bringing about a catastrophic conflict.’
Kane had small, piggy eyes; a ridiculous nose, perhaps artificial; fat, complacent cheeks; and an impertinent double-flick of a moustache.
‘Your commission, should you be inclined to accept it, is to ensure this offensive organisation does not come into being and that Charles Kane is dissuaded from further meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations other than his own. As before, should you or any of your angelic associates be apprehended or eliminated, the Minister will profess never to have heard of such fantastical individuals. Long live France. This cylinder will perish within a matter of moments…’
A bar of magnesium fizzed blindingly inside the works of the phonograph. Box Five smelled like a burning wax museum. The cylinder resolved into molten residue.
The Special Performance was at an end.
II
THE YOUNG WIDOW Gilberte Lachaille, following the Persian’s instructions, carefully made her way through the labyrinth beneath the Opéra. She avoided the rat-traps, and negotiated several ingenious devices set to inconvenience mammals somewhat larger than the average sewer rat. Out of respect for poor Gaston, she wore a black dress. S
he left off the veil because it was dark enough under the streets of Paris. Gilberte did not care to vanish entirely into the shadows – though, it occurred to her, disappearance might be the whole purpose of the invitation from Monsieur Erik.
In the absence of the fortune her late husband’s lawyers were withholding, she must find means of making a way in the world. Her hard-earned respectable name counted for little, though it was scarcely her fault – no matter what the Sûreté might imply – that her bridegroom proved incapable of surviving his own honeymoon. Without consulting her, the foolish soul had elected to fortify himself with a philtre to put ‘lead in his pencil’. He had misjudged the dosage, to everyone’s inconvenience – not least his own. For a reputed man of the world, Gaston turned out to be something of a stiff, in all senses of the term. Aunt Alicia said dead husbands were generally the best of the breed, but also conceded that society was liable to be leery of Gilberte for now. In Grandmama’s day, you had to bury at least two husbands in mysterious circumstances before being categorised as a ‘black widow’. In this impatient, young, electrified century, a single hasty funeral sufficed.
A skiff waited at the shore of the underground lake. She lifted her skirts and stepped in. No sooner was she settled than the boat began to glide soundlessly across the still surface. It was on a pulley, like a fairground ride.
Gilberte had heard whispers of the masked creature – Monsieur Erik, the Phantom – who kept a lair beneath the Opéra and retained the services of hard-to-place young women in a discreet agency which had been in operation for some years. Many and varied adventuresses had worked for the Phantom. The Angels might be fleeting but Erik’s primary lieutenant was always the Persian. This fellow was known to le tout Paris. Some believed him the true master of the Opera Ghost Agency.
The Persian stood on the jetty to which the skiff was pulled. Erik’s assistant wore a heavy coat with a good astrakhan collar, and a fez. Gold dotted his person – rings, stickpin, shirt-studs, cufflinks, spectacles-chain, fez tassels, watch and fob, two prominent teeth. Courteously, the Persian extended a hand and helped Gilberte ashore. She thanked him, modestly.