by Неизвестный
It was the fact that Malnéant appeared to be wearing a waxen mask that covered his entire face. To be sure, it was an exceptionally lifelike mask, with artfully constructed holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth, and devised so cunningly that it seemed to meld naturally into the hairline above the forehead and the sides of the head. But a mask it nonetheless was, and the stark immobility of the placid-seeming countenance was disquieting, even vaguely horrifying.
Had Malnéant suffered some hideous facial injury? Had he been born deformed, requiring a mask so that his interlocutors wouldn’t flee in terror at the first sight of him? Or was his disguise some inexplicable feature of the strange religion to which he subscribed and of which he was apparently the leader?
Before his two guests had a chance to speak, Malnéant himself made an utterance. If the mask could be said to have lit up, it did so when the fish eyes of its owner turned their gaze toward the philosopher.
“M. de Voltaire!” he cried with a kind of forced affability. “I have long wished to meet you. Your celebrity as a philosophe extends even to this humble abode.”
Voltaire quickly sensed that Malnéant was engaging in ill-disguised mockery. He spoke severely.
“We have not come to exchange pleasantries. There is a matter of the utmost seriousness to discuss.”
Again, it somehow seemed to Voltaire that the mask changed expression—although he knew that was impossible—from feigned geniality to equally feigned concern.
“My, my,” said Malnéant. “This sounds grave indeed.”
At this point, Rigaud took over, crisply explaining the murder of the child—a matter of which Malnéant seemed tolerably well informed—and, more ominously, the trail of bloodstains that led right up to the door of the ill-regarded church.
Malnéant responded to the veiled accusation with decision. “This is most distressing,” he said. “I would hate to learn that one of my parishioners had committed such a heinous act. We must get to the bottom of this at once.”
With that, he quickly stalked out of his house, shutting the door firmly behind him, and marched to the nearby church edifice. Taking a key from the pocket of his robe, he opened the door and invited Voltaire, Rigaud, and the accompanying policemen to enter.
Because of the absence of windows, Malnéant was compelled to light a series of sconces around the inner wall of the structure, which proved to consist of a single immense room with a surprisingly small number of chairs laid out—not in rows, as if they were pews, but in a circular fashion. They were surrounding what looked like a crude altar of stone, rectangular and about waist high. Even at this distance and in the dim light, it was evident that the altar had a groove running all round the top edge.
Voltaire urged the others to remain on the doorstep until Malnéant had lit enough sconces to provide sufficient light so that further investigation could take place. It took him little time to ascertain that the trail of blood led right to the altar. And he gasped when he saw what was on the altar itself.
In its direct center was a small human heart—or what remained of it after it had been chewed and gouged.
Without a word, Voltaire pointed to it and stared coldly at Malnéant.
By this time, the others had made their way into the edifice. Rigaud uttered an explosive epithet when he saw the grisly thing on the altar, then turned quickly to the church leader.
“Pierre Malnéant, I arrest you for the murder of Marceline Bedard.”
Had the case been so simple as this, Voltaire would not have felt the need to record it in his private diary. But the matter took a number of further turns in the succeeding days.
For the fact was that there was nothing directly linking Malnéant to the crime—as opposed to any of the other parishioners, each of whom proved to have a key to the church and could therefore have committed the crime as easily as he. Kept in the city jail for a few days, Malnéant was ultimately released. As the leader of his sect, he was not likely to flee, and the chances of securing a conviction without additional evidence were small. Thorough interviews with each of his “parishioners” elicited nothing. None had adequate alibis for the evening in question, but then no one had seen any of them at the crime scene.
The case may well have remained unsolved if help had not come from an unexpected direction.
A week after that fateful morning when Voltaire had first investigated the poor mangled body of little Marceline, his butler announced an unexpected guest. In a sepulchral voice, the servant told Voltaire, who was writing in his study, “M. Diderot has come.”
Voltaire sprang to attention. He knew that something extraordinary must have lured Denis Diderot away from the fashionable salons—and bedrooms—of Paris, and he was quick to greet his visitor. Diderot had, for the past decade, been staying one step ahead of the authorities, as successive volumes of his Encyclopédie—of which he was co-editor, with Jean le Rond d’Alembert, and to which he had contributed hundreds of entries already—had been published, outraging both church and state with their iconoclasm and blasphemy. Even before starting to work on the Encyclopédie, he had anonymously published the scandalous, bawdy novel, The Indiscreet Jewels—the jewels in question being a woman’s private parts. Diderot was even more hostile to religion than Voltaire, and word had gotten out that he had written a novel called The Nun, which exposed the repressiveness of Catholic doctrine and practice as few works had done before.
The open, honest countenance of Denis Diderot was at the moment clouded with concern, even a bit of fear, as he extended his hand to grasp Voltaire’s. In his other hand was an immense book—at least a folio, if not a double folio—bound with metal clasps and with a decaying leather binding so old that it was leaving a trail of flakes behind.
After the customary pleasantries, Voltaire directed his attention to the tome.
“What on earth is that unholy relic of antiquity?”
Diderot chuckled. “You speak better than you know, François.” He was one of the few people whom Voltaire allowed to address him by his given name. In all the years that he had been M. de Voltaire, he had virtually forgotten that he had been born François Marie Arouet. “I think you will find something of interest in this.”
Diderot approached a nearby table and dumped the book unceremoniously upon it, unleashing a small cloud of dust and leather particles.
“You had written me about that horrible murder here,” Diderot went on, “and I couldn’t help mentioning it to Baron d’Holbach. You know, he is much more learned than I—in book learning, at any rate. He told me there was a book in the Bibliothèque Nationale that might be of relevance to the matter. So I, how shall we say, borrowed it.”
Voltaire frowned at the mention of d’Holbach. Paul-Henry Thiry, Baron d’Holbach was not only the host of one of the most sought-after salons in Paris, attended by all the leading philosophes, bluestockings, and their aristocratic and intellectual hangers-on, but he was also the most outspoken atheist in France. It was said that he was working on an immense treatise, Système de la Nature, which would be the most exhaustive exposition of atheism ever written regarding science, politics, morals, and society. Voltaire could well believe it; d’Holbach was learned, to be sure, but he was also insufferably pompous, verbose, and arrogant. It was one thing to attack orthodox Christianity, as he had done in the recent polemic Christianity Unveiled; it was quite another thing to espouse atheism openly.
Voltaire could not go that far. He was happy to be a deist, envisioning the cosmos to have been fashioned by a god who had started the mechanism going, like a clock, then sat back to admire his handiwork. In any case, Voltaire could not imagine how the argument from design could be evaded. How could blind nature have fashioned the human eye, the human hand, and so many other such things that embodied such a perfect harmony between means and ends? Moreover, religion was a useful means of taming an unruly populace. Had he not said repeatedly, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”? In any case, those atheists wer
e such libertines.
But there was no denying that d’Holbach was smart, and if he had something to add that would help this floundering murder investigation, then Voltaire would welcome it willingly.
“So what is this?” he said, nodding toward the ponderous book.
“It’s called, I believe,” Diderot replied, “Cultes des Goules, by one
Comte d’Erlette. You know, d’Holbach has made a fairly exhaustive reading of these occult books, as he calls them. He regards them as even more foolish than the Christian scripture itself, and it tickles him to lampoon them without mercy. He has learned that d’Erlette was a nobleman living two or three centuries ago in Lyons. There were persistent rumors that he was somehow involved in the witch cult, but he managed to escape the stake. A bit luckier,” he added with a chuckle, “than his fellow noble of a century or so earlier, Gilles de Rais. “Anyway, that is all beside the point. What is of interest to us now is this.”
And with a flamboyant gesture, Diderot opened the book to a page that he had marked with a red ribbon.
Voltaire gasped when he saw the image staring at him on that page. Depicted in a surprisingly precise and well-crafted woodcut was a winged, hybrid creature—not altogether a crow, nor a mole, nor a buzzard, nor an ant, nor a vampire bat, nor a decomposed human being, but something that shared nameless elements from each of them. Its leathery wings must have spanned four meters, all told, and its body was curiously misshapen—a thin, almost puny head with beady eyes and a curved, pointed beak; a long neck; and a heavy, almost corpulent body supported by minuscule but seemingly powerful legs. It was portrayed as flying rather low to the ground. And in its beak was the dangling body of a little child.
The wings each bore a claw with four long, vicious-looking nails.
Voltaire looked at his fellow philosophe. He had no need of words. Diderot had of course not seen the mangled body of poor Marceline, but Voltaire’s description of it in his letter had been all too exact, for Diderot also said nothing for a time.
Voltaire finally broke the silence. “What does d’Erlette say about this…this entity?” He was peering at the portion of text accompanying the baleful illustration, but the crudity of the archaic French offended him almost as much as the picture itself.
“I haven’t read the book myself,” said Diderot, “but d’Holbach says this creature was some kind of familiar or guardian for witches, warlocks, and Satanists of all sorts. That, at any rate, was what lunatics like d’Erlette believed. D’Holbach thinks this is all one more indictment of the folly and insanity of the occultists…but now I wonder.”
“Surely,” Voltaire expostulated, “you can’t imagine that such a creature is flying about all around us! The very idea is preposterous. We’ve worked so hard—you and I and others—to banish superstition from the world, and now you ask that I subscribe to something like this!”
“I ask nothing, François,” Diderot replied calmly. “I just present evidence.”
“What evidence!” Voltaire exploded. “What does this picture prove?”
“Not a thing. I think it is suggestive, that is all.”
There was a deep silence, as the two thinkers pondered this new turn of events. Neither was prepared to believe in the supernatural, but neither could overlook the fact that this creature, if it existed, would be a highly plausible culprit as the killer of little Marceline. Voltaire’s grounding in science was not as strong as Diderot’s, but he was well aware that some of the sciences had only now begun to make strides, after long centuries of quiescence when the church was dominant and snuffed out all intellectual inquiry that threatened its dogmas. We do not have all the answers, he reflected. Hamlet said as much to Horatio.
“Well,” he said, sighing heavily, “there’s only one thing to do. We have to go back to that accursed church.”
The invasion of Malnéant’s church was going to be a tricky affair. Rigaud had said that ceremonies or rituals or gatherings could occur at any time of day or not, and so an unauthorized entrance could prove highly problematical. Voltaire was not seriously concerned about what would happen if he were caught breaking into the edifice; bit of embarrassment, a hastily expressed apology, and he would presumably be on his way. He would rely on what seemed to be at least the façade of Malnéant’s genuine respect for his intellectual standing in Europe.
It was decided that Voltaire and Diderot would undertake the task without informing Rigaud. It was doubtful that the mayor would sanction such flagrant lawbreaking, and the fewer involved in this phase of the enterprise, the better. The two philosophes spent the day discussing and making preparations, but the hours hung heavy. By sunset, they made their way to the little hut of the Bedard family, believing that the poor peasants would be sympathetic to the thinkers’ ongoing attempts to find their daughter’s killer. Several more hours passed wearily, as Voltaire did not think it safe to approach the structure until well after midnight.
When no figures seemed to be in the church, and no sounds emanated from it at all that evening, Voltaire and Diderot felt they were in the clear.
The air was chillier than they had expected, and their greatcoats provided insufficient protection from the cold and damp that seemed to permeate the area. Voltaire had a lighted lantern with him, but he kept it under his cloak, lest anyone detect their presence. They were aware that many of the cottages nearby were those of church members who would look askance at any invasion of their sanctum sanctorum. As they came to the door, Diderot pulled out a thin metal object—something like a nail file.
Voltaire scowled at him as Diderot inserted it into the lock and twisted it gently.
“A useful device,” Diderot whispered, “when entering or leaving a married lady’s boudoir or some other delicate place.”
Voltaire did not have the time to grimace cynically; in a matter of moments, Diderot had picked the lock.
The interior of the place was, if possible, even darker than the area outside. Here, it seemed as if the darkness was a positive quality, blossoming out to envelop them in its dank coils and tentacles. But the two thinkers strode boldly inside, closing the door so that their entrance would not be detected.
Voltaire remembered the sconces that lined the walls of the structure. Unearthing his lantern from under his greatcoat, he made his way along the nearest wall. In short order, he found the nearest sconce and managed to light it with the lantern.
The interior blazed with light, as if from a flash of lightning, but then the sconce dimmed anomalously, as if a giant hand were on the brink of extinguishing it. Its flame held, however, and Voltaire lifted the sconce out of its framework and carried it about. He lit a second one and handed it to Diderot.
“What, precisely, are we looking for?” the Parisian asked.
“I haven’t the least idea,” said Voltaire. “But if the answer to this mystery is anywhere, it must be here.”
As Diderot canvassed the exterior of the immense room, Voltaire made a direct line to the stone altar at its center. The thing seemed ungainly, crude, primitive, as if it were a relic from a prehistoric era that had no business even existing in this Age of Enlightenment. He scowled in disdain when he saw traces of blood on its surface, especially in the groove that ran all around the top edge. God! Could these benighted votaries have actually conducted sacrifices of living creatures—animals or even humans? It was an affront even to think of it.
Suddenly, Voltaire noticed something that struck him as significant. Gesturing to Diderot that he approach quickly, he knelt down to the base of the altar and pointed to a dark, encrusted spot there.
“What is it, François?” Diderot said.
“Look at that,” Voltaire said sharply.
“What do you see there?”
“I can only think,” Diderot said heavily, “that it is blood.”
There was a glint in Voltaire’s eyes—a mixture of outrage, disgust, and a strange kind of determination. “Blood it is, Denis. But not only that. Look at the way tha
t bloodstain appears there.” His hand reached down so closely that its outstretched finger almost touched the dried splotch. “Note how it has spread a bit on the floor but has not touched the side of the altar. Don’t you see what it means?”
The query was made in such a harried manner that Diderot was alarmed. “I’m not following…”
“The bloodstain”—Voltaire was becoming increasingly agitated—”proceeds under the altar! There must be something underneath this stone pile.”
The implications of this conclusion stunned them both for a time. But with surprising agility, Voltaire sprang to his feet, and laying his sconce aside, he began putting his weight against the side of the altar in an attempt to move it.
“François,” Diderot objected, “that thing must weigh tons! There is not a chance we can budge it…”
“We will have to try,” Voltaire replied shortly.
Diderot, shrugging with despair, put his sconce down and sought to help his friend. To their surprise, the altar did indeed budge—and more than budge. After only a few minutes, a cavity opened up underneath the altar. The two thinkers were so engulfed in their task that they did not immediately notice the vile, mephitic stench that emerged from the pit, but soon they were coughing and retching to such a degree that they had to withdraw a distance. After a time, they seemed to become accustomed to the loathsome aroma.
As they approached the pit, they saw what looked like a set of rough stone steps leading downward.
“I’m going down,” said Voltaire without emotion.
“I’ll go too,” Diderot said quickly.
“No. You stay here. If there is some…interruption, you may need to come to my aid. Call out if Malnéant or some other votary enters the building. In any event, if something untoward were to happen to me, you at least would still be alive to tell of it.”