DEVIL’S SCORE
Edouard JOURDAN
This story is a fiction. All the names, events and places are used for fictional purpose only. Any resemblance with past or actual people or events would be strictly involuntary.
FOREWORD
What you’re about to read is my very first novel. Perhaps the last one, we never know but then I’m no longer virgin in literature. My purpose was to forge a style. A style that would be able to work like a time machine. Yes, I admit, I’m a man of style…Well…My purpose was to create a novel that would offer to a reading tourist a journey back in time. A journey into Paris, at the turn of the last century, in the vicious swirls of baroque and depravity, macabre and grotesque. This literary elevator will take you at every floor of sins and oddity. The year doesn’t need to be particularly clear, only the era is important. Paris in the aftermath of WWI. An era of contrasts, tainted by new inventions and plagued by old and new perversions…The taste for the occult and the birth of new criminals. Two faces of the same coin. And this coin is the capital of lights with all the shades that such a place supposes. So, what about the style. I did want to forge some kind of hybrid literature that would be a reflection to the historic setting of the story. A weird mix of mannerism and spontaneity. In this tremendous exercise, I did choose to use from times to times French words, “rue” meaning street for example. I wanted that you feel a kind of weirdness in the style; a trick to convey a feeling of desuetude and uncanny.
A famous Romanian philosopher said that writers used books to express what they just couldn’t tell in the real life. I think it’s definitely true. Thus, you will find further down the book gruesome crimes, mystery and plain old-fashioned horror. I can reasonably assert that readers typology who has been attracted by the cover or the title feel delighted by this kind of thrills. Therefore, you will discover that the real fabric of this book is some kind of criminal phantasmagoric fantasy with famous actors. Yes, it’s true, some of the characters had their heydays…I made a particular emphasis to let those figures in some kind of shadowy state. They lurk much more than they act. And as well so did some places, mentioned in the novel. Some places still exist, some don’t. But be sure that some people, buried deep in the ground of Paris cemeteries, are staring at you from the limbos of death. And the real star of the book, the devil himself, you will understand, is some kind of puppet masters…enjoying pushing mortals on the edge of the abyss.
I hope you will enjoy reading this book as much as I did writing it. One last thing…There is a riddle in the book that goes off limits of fiction to step into reality. Hope you will find the clues and decipher it…
FIRST PART – Signs
1 – BLOOD ON TRACKS
Me, Jean Théodore Désirée Ray, journalist, son of an office clerk who evolved into a socialite by the blessing of coal mines.
Me, a broken journalist, who lives actually in “The Zone” …A derelict swampy belt of rags and shacks around the very heart of Paris, the City of Lights.
I went back from the battlefields of the Great War with not so much hope that making a career of what I love the most: watching and writing. So, I became a reporter.
My signature merchandise was crime. I covered a lot of them but I made myself an actor of the fatal one. The one which pushed me into depression and depravity. Nowadays, I spent most of my times into smelly bars and shady places. Sometimes I sleep in the subway trains…
Today, I carried my old carcass into a tavern within the boundary of “Magic City”, a not so magic place which never appealed to decent families for slides and smiles but which dragged homosexuals, hoodlums and prostitutes in its amusement arcades and dusty rides.
I will slide gently into the course of this tale down further…You will fully understand my part in this passion play.
Then, for now, I spent my last francs into a bottle…A liquor of absinth so bitter that I counted every drop of it into dirty tap water. 26 drops of despair. 26 chapters in my story. And the first one has the sound of thundering train…I’m falling into myself…
With regard to Ms. Bansberg, the story begins on December 13, at 23:23. That's when the white-cap employee crossed that part of the "Gare de l'Est", where the Eastbound trains converged. Out of an office, he went to the docks, running and shouting: Stop the train!
Then Mrs. Bansberg's presentiments changed into anguish. And she knew at the same time that this discomfort she had suffered all day long, was this: presentiments.
Because it is the characteristic of presentiments to reveal their true identity only after having disappeared and when the facts came to confirm to the creature that it had good reasons to be sad, worried, nervous. Good future reasons.
Until then, Katarina Bansberg had not known she was dark in anticipation. This vague melancholy, that latent fright, which had seized upon her in the morning, was not for her unpublished. A superlative woman, being blonde and Parisian, she sometimes saw everything darken, as if a cloud had hidden the sun temporarily. She did not know why. She did not try to find out. "Everyone is like that. The next day, on waking, the cloud had passed, and life was once again sunny.
But this time it was not the same thing! Oh no! She convinced himself afterwards. Especially as the joy of finding Johan should have driven this day all black butterfly! ...
Johan?
Johan. Her beloved husband. Johan Bansberg, the famous virtuoso pianist, simply.
He had given, the day before, a great concert in Luxembourg. His absence lasted only forty-eight hours. But Katarina could not leave him without desolation, and the days of reunion were great feasts in which her heart strutted.
A good fifteen minutes ago she was waiting for the arrival of the Metz Express.
The admiration of the men had enveloped her on the descent of her carriage, and some, to follow the young woman, had taken, like her, a quay ticket.
As always, Katarina Bansberg was an object of contemplation and desire. Twenty-three years, all the graces, a celebrity hair and the most interesting face that can be seen.
This face, all the jealousy found in it, was that the eyes were too big and the mouth too small. The most bitch had claimed that these were giant eyes and a dwarf mouth ... We understand the vanity of such critical. In truth, Katarina's eyes were the most admirable, whose angelic face had never blossomed. Not only were they immense, as if this child had been created to see - to see before anything else - but, with some unknown prestige, they reflected as much sweetness as intelligence and as much spirit as purity. And all these men, who looked at Katarina by the light of the electric arches, understood at once, when Katarina looked at them, that their ambition was to be limited to the pleasure of seeing.
So, they did not deprive themselves of it. As a result, most of them learned the bad news from the livid reflection she put on Mrs. Bansberg's face.
The man in white cap had just passed, and the express was late.
Katarina felt herself pale to the heart. Her eyelids, suddenly heavy, refused to stay up. Darkness veiled the world. She staggered. But no one dared to support her. The words of the stationmaster had sounded the alarm:
- Prevent the express from leaving!
This man, nobody knew him, but it was clear that he was not as usual and had an event figure.
A group surrounded him, followed him, swollen with people coming from all sides.
Katarina, trembling, interfered, saying like the others:
- What's the matter?
His eyes fixed, the stationmaster was on his way.
When he was assured that the express would not leave, he said finally, in a fierce and dismayed way:
- T
he express was stamped at Saint Maur ... A woman sank gently.
- There are victims? said a strangled voice.
- Probable ...
Others moaned. The questions assailed the official.
Without waiting, Katarina went to the exit, crossed the ignorant crowd waiting on the other side of the barriers and rushed to her car.
- Victor! In Saint Maur! Quick ... Monsieur's train derailed ... She was suffocating.
"Where is it, Saint Maur? asked the mechanic.
- I do not know. I know it's not far. On the line, of course. Follow the railway line.
- Follow the line, follow the line ..., repeated the other, shaking his head and not moving.
But some people came out of the station in a gust of wind. A gentleman, properly dressed, stopped:
- Do you want to go to Saint Maur? I know the way. I was waiting for someone,
"And you see what it is that of us," said a fat, voluminous father, "I, my daughter in law, was not to return until tomorrow; it took this idea that she had ...
The night was dark. The cold bit. We were already outside Paris. The car was spinning on a straight road, pushing in front of it the false moonlight of its headlights. Near the mechanic, the gentleman who knew where to go raised the collar of his coat. An old woman, sitting in a rabbit, wriggled her bony hand on the greaser.
The car stopped at a signpost and left. The soul of speed worked each one. Their organization furnished some unknown interior energy, no one knows what vain expense which had the secret pretension of helping the engine and contributing to the speed of the race.
However, Katarina was trying to build a Katarina full of self-control. She thought:
"Maybe he did not take this train ... Maybe he took it and is he only hurt ... If he is injured, it is perhaps to be nothing ... "
But, in spite of the efforts she made, the other hypothesis obsessed her, and also obsessed all the humans she saw without knowing them.
The big dad who had a go-lucky made a compressor movement, and said:
- We arrive.
A red glow shimmered in front of them. It was smoke that a fire was lighting up from below.
The catastrophe had occurred some distance from the station, towards Paris.
The service was not yet organized. Katarina was able to advance freely. Her Louis XV heels made her stumble in the shadows, on stones, clods hardened by frost, clumps, the thousand stumbling blocks of the rough ground. She shivered, and thought she fainted at the ominous sound of the disaster.
In the dark, there was tremendous chaos. Hard shapes set the silhouette of a heap of scrap. Lanterns, poor yellow stars, circled here and there. We could even see indoor lamps wander, which the wind was blowing badly. And still people running ...
The copper helmets were firing. In the glow of the fire, which firefighters were drowning, two locomotives up, twisted, telescoped, penetrated each other. And behind, the cries, the calls, the screams, the tears, the anxious orders, the panicked answers which made up the terrible infernal clamor, one felt with horror a silence as deep as death.
She screamed in a shrill voice, disfigured by anxiety:
- Johan! ... Johan! ... Johan! ...
Stretcher ways passed by, hastily. A crowd was moving in the shadows against the dislocated wagons. Someone yelps:
- Light, good God! Light! To which a dry and authoritative verb replied:
- The first emergency train will bring a searchlight. Calm, please. Katarina, distraught, turned on herself, addressing all those who passed:
- Sir, help me, say ... I'm looking for my husband ...
She did not say "Johan Bansberg, the pianist," because she had lived too long among the humble to ignore that a famous name is not always in all classes, and that it is sometimes vain to proclaim it.
But no one answered him. Each, taken by an exclusive task, an imperative duty, seemed an insensitive automaton, built for a single series of movements.
"There are no torches, then, God? the squeaky voice said.
- We cannot find one! We are going to light fires ... The cables were torn off in the accident ...
Extinguished the hearth of the locomotives, the night had closed greedily over the atrocities of the catastrophe. It was only visible thanks to the portable lanterns. Katarina rummaged through her sleeve and pulled out a tiny electric lamp. She played the contact. The jewel gave a shining glow of a worm, the pile being dying.
Walking at arm's length with this kind of cold embers, Mrs. Bansberg walked along the rubble where rescuers were working in groups. The round of reddish light showed him gradually a frightening pudding clumping wood, iron, flesh and all that one can dream when the nightmare holds you. The stamping had carried out incredible acrobatics: built, with the wagons, buildings with three floors; hold the dining-car straight, like a chimney, and reduce in one, by an integral telescoping, two long cars.
The critical moment of the accident, the thunderous shock that produced such an amalgam, was not evoked without shuddering.
The most terrible thing was that this cake contained beings: the dead, some of whom we saw appear here and there, in fractions, crushed, pierced, sometimes confused of color and form in the packed disorder that imprisoned them, sometimes lying, after being thrown in the air like puppets by a stupid bitch; the living also, those who were heard complaining, those who were seen agonizing under the inert embrace of matter, those who remained invisible in the ruins, the body married by a brutal case.
- Light! But give us light! And your lights? Are they lit, yes or no?
Fighting her failure, Katarina leaned over unrecognizable remains, questioning disjointed feet, ragged hands, coming out of the pile like nails coming out of a wall.
A gold cufflink, now a wrinkled lingerie around a pale wrist, caught his eye. She stepped over debris and approached ...
It was not what she had feared.
- Hey there! Wife! a voice said behind her. Should see to leave it alone! Come a little with me.
A policeman held her by the elbow.
- Oh! Sir, sir, I'm looking for my husband ... I beg you, help me!
At the sight of the big, pure eyes, the gendarme immediately understood his mistake, and let go of Katarina. He was not an ordinary policeman.
"Go to the station," he said. We made a hall and a room of wounded. Katarina began to run, holding back her falling fur.
" Who knows? she said to herself. He is so impressionable! Maybe he has nothing and he's gone crazy, in the countryside! With such nerves ... "
She saw in a waiting room the saved travelers. (My God, she had not thought about it!) It must have been stupid!) There were countless ladies and gentlemen, almost all bareheaded, who talked noisily.
She says very high, dominating the hubbub:
- Johan Bansberg! ... is Johan Bansberg here? ...
Silence came. She repeated her question. The palaver resumed. A shiver ran through her, and she thought:
"Maybe when I get back, I'll find a telegram: miss train, take next, tenderness ..."
- The wounded, where are they?
- Over there. “Messageries!” he called out without stopping. She entered. They were the dead.
Lying side by side, they made a hideous sidewalk around the room, a macabre flower bed that stretched out one unit whenever two men of the team unloaded their stretcher. These corpses were there like luggage.
Katarina reviewed them, sometimes prolonging her examination, before some miserable form deprived of any personal character. Ah! she would remember those minutes! ...
A collapsed being sobbed at the feet of a stiff woman; she recognized the gentleman who knew where Saint Maur was ... But a strange joy lifted her as she advanced! ... It is true that all the dead, alas, were not there, and that the wounded ...
The wounded lay in a sort of vast improvised dormitory on mattresses. Doctors, civilian and military, volunteer nurses gave them first aid. The air already smelled of hospital.
&nbs
p; Stealthy and discreet, Katarina made her turn.
No Johan.
That was very much a disappointment.
It was necessary to return to the places of the stamping ... But only, what could it?
She saw a doctor with three stripes, wiping her hands, looking with frightened eyes at her wide frightened eyes.
"Sir," said she boldly, "will you be so kind as to help me find my husband?" ... He's not here, and I see that stretchers are no longer coming ...
The doctor-major glanced at the wounded, saw that the medical personnel were more numerous than reason, and said with simplicity:
Devil's Score: A Tale of decadent omen…. Page 1