The Nyctalope Steps In

by Jean de La Hire

  “You’re joking,” he said. “I don’t know if I like that, but I understand that you don’t mean any harm. Actually, it’s photographs that I want to talk to you about. I’d like to give you a tip, some information about where you might get some good pictures.”

  I told him that I was interested, and he said that I should be near the square by the Continental at around eleven twenty-five.

  “What happens then?” I asked.

  “A demonstration,” says he.

  “Of what?”

  “It would be best if would just go and see for yourself.”

  I went back and forth with him for a few minutes, but he refused to give anything more. All he would do was emphasize that I should be near the square, not in it. Looking back, I can’t believe that I didn’t see any danger in that particular distinction, especially considering the rumors about him. It just never occurred to me, not even once, that an overgrown little boy like Pyle could be involved in anything where people might actually get hurt…

  Adrien finished his story, then smiled as he waited for his listener’s inevitable protest of disbelief. The man did not disappoint.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Leo said. His lip was curled in disdain, but his voice lacked conviction.

  In his soul, he knows it is true, Villiers-Pagan thought. Perhaps he has known all along, but never dared to openly consider it, to absorb its full implications.

  “You’re familiar with the written account,” the doctor said. “The facts were very well-publicized by your biographer…”

  “And dismissed by anyone with a modicum of common sense. He was prone to the wildest exaggerations, which was something I frankly encouraged. It was safer for everyone involved.”

  “There is something in what you say, but he told the plain truth more often than I think you would like to admit. Or, in this case, even realize. When you were stabbed by Grigoryi Alexandrovitch, your heart suffered a mortal wound. You were clinically dead for at least five minutes before I got to you, and you didn’t register a pulse until after the heart transplant was completed several hours after that.”

  Leo gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “If that’s correct, then I would have suffered catastrophic brain damage. I would be a complete vegetable, and I flatter myself that that is obviously not the case.”

  “You would have under normal circumstances,” Villiers-Pagan said. “In fact, that is exactly what I expected to happen.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Though I proclaimed otherwise at the time, I truly did not believe I could restore you to any semblance of health and vitality. When I was brought to you, I saw immediately that your wound was fatal, and that there was no hope of implanting the artificial heart before brain death. But I decided to go forward because you were an ideal test subject for the heart.”

  “But…you would have been sentencing me to a living death,” Leo said, more amazed than angry. “I would have been nothing but a soulless husk kept alive by your machine.”

  “Not for long. Your mother, if no one else, would have certainly intervened and demanded that you be allowed to die with dignity. By that point, however, the thing would have been accomplished. You would have died a hero, a martyr to one of the greatest advancements in the history of medical science.”

  Leo gave a smile that was glacial in its coldness. “Well,” he said, “maybe it would have been better for everyone if that is what had happened. But it did not. Why?”

  “An unexpected side effect.”

  “From what?”

  “When I was initially brought to you, I injected you with a serum I created to preserve tissue in cases exactly like the one I was then facing. Theoretically, it would place the body in a state of temporary suspended animation until the successful completion of a life-saving procedure. In your case, it was done purely as a matter of form. I never expected the formula to work for more than an hour, ninety minutes at the very most.”

  “Clearly it succeeded far beyond your expectations,” Leo said.

  “Far, far beyond,” the doctor replied. “ As with the heart, you were my alpha patient. The serum had never before been tested on a human subject. When it became clear that not only were you going to survive, but survive in a state of perfect health…”

  Villiers-Pagan shook his head, as if still reeling from the astonishment he had felt, and so skillfully hidden, on that long ago night. The patient will make a full recovery, he had announced with a suave air of professional satisfaction. But inside, he had been fairly screaming. This is impossible! Impossible! What in God’s name have I done here?

  You have conquered death, replied a voice from the darkest part of his soul. You hold the greatest dream of mankind in the palm of your hand.

  “I became obsessed,” the doctor continued. “I felt as if I had been elevated to godhood. I had visions of entire nations bending their knee to beg for my secret. I lost all semblance of detachment, objectivity. And in a moment of weakness, I did something incredibly foolish…”

  “You couldn’t resist trying it on yourself.”

  “No. I could not.”

  “And the result?”

  “You see it before you. I am over one hundred years old, but I have the body I possessed at fifty! Oh, I have a few more gray hairs, some lines around the eyes, but I have not suffered so much as a common cold since the turn of the century.”

  Leo nodded. “Yes, yes, I can see all that. But that doesn’t explain why you abandoned your family and position. As you have said, you could have had the world. Why did you run away?”

  “I came to my senses, and thank God for it! Think of the lengths that some would go in order to possess this power, to have it all for their own. Once my secret became known, what would my life have been worth? I may have been safe from the depredations of age and disease, but not murder or imprisonment. How could I ever be safe with such deadly knowledge? How could my family?”

  “And so you fled.”

  “I saw no other choice.”

  “Faked your death and disappeared.”

  “It was the only way to be sure my family would be safe.”

  “No.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It was not the only way. You could have come to me.”

  “Oh, good God! You forget that you were barely more than a boy then!”

  “Did that stop you from making me the subject of your experiments?”

  Villiers-Pagan fell silent.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” Leo said, “that I had the right to be taken in to your confidence?”

  “I was too focused on myself,” the doctor said softly. “I am sorry, Leo. I am sorry, but I never gave you a second thought.”

  Leo nodded. He looked down at his hands, and his brow furrowed. His hands curled into fists.

  Villiers-Pagan felt his pulse pick up. He was, after all, facing a man who was no stranger to violence. What was going through the Nyctalope’s mind? The doctor decided to venture a guess. “You’ve never really thought about it, have you?”

  Leo did not move or speak.

  “Yes,” Villiers-Pagan said, “I can see. I understand. You were so accustomed to your health… your energy… your strength… You never considered how strange it was that they never ebbed, never faded.”

  Leo looked up. “Will we ever die?” he asked quietly.

  “Eventually,” the doctor said, “but not before everything we have ever known or loved has fallen away.”

  I showed up in front of the Continental about twenty minutes ahead of schedule. I had my eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary, but it was just like any other day. It wasn’t long before I got impatient and started wandering around the square. After a moment or two, I found myself standing near a milk bar (yes, there are really are such things). My eye fell on of a couple on a couple of somber-looking guys who appeared to be in some kind of deep philosophical discussion. One of them struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t place where I
had seen him before. I was really working my brain, trying to figure out how I knew him, when he looked up and made eye contact with me. I was pretty embarrassed, because I realized I had been staring. He said something to me in French, and I just shook my head. I was about to head back into the street, when his friend turned around and looked at me. He was younger than the other guy and, by the looks of him, a hell of a lot meaner.

  “British?” he said.

  “American,” I said.

  He pointed at his buddy. “Do you have business with this man?”

  “No. I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just… I thought he might be someone I knew.”

  “That is quite impossible,” he said. Then he smiled. “No one knows him, or me. We are strangers even to ourselves.”

  Now, I tend to be really annoyed by people who make cryptic remarks like that, and I usually pay them back in their own smart-assed coin. But, in this case, I decided to let the guy have his little joke, or whatever it was. After all, I had been the one doing the gawking. I just said, “Sorry to interrupt,” and turned to walk away.

  I had gone about thirty feet when the world exploded…

  “You know,” Adrien said, “I believe I do know that fellow. In fact…”

  His sentence, never to be completed, was lost in a deafening thunderclap that slammed Leo sprawling into the street. For a moment, he was too stunned to move. Then his mind, trained to ways of battle, recovered itself. Bomb, he thought, and a big one too. Am I injured? I can’t hear a damned thing, but that’s no surprise…

  He forced himself to his knees, and winced as a sharp pain registered in his left shoulder. He looked down to see a large shard of glass, probably part of a windowpane, embedded in his flesh. He thought of Adrien, and cast his eyes about for the old doctor.

  A moment later, he found him.

  The shockwave sent me rolling ass over teakettle, and I’m pretty sure I blacked out for at least a few seconds. I got knocked around pretty good, but mostly just bruises and scrapes. I’m embarrassed to say that, when I started to recover myself, the first thing I was concerned about was my camera. Can you believe it? I had just been in the middle of a bombing and all I could think about was my damn Kodak. All I can say is, I was still pretty young and maybe entitled to being a little stupid and selfish. Anyway, it turned out the camera was busted all to hell. Grace of God that it wasn’t my head that got cracked open instead.

  Looking back now, my strongest impression of those first few minutes after the blast is the silence. I was surrounded by people who were weeping and screaming, covered with blood and dirt. But I couldn’t hear them. I was temporarily deafened by the blast, so I couldn’t hear their cries. I could just see their twisted up faces, their tears making lines through the gore on their cheeks.

  I got to my feet and started to stumble around. I hadn’t completely got my act together, and I wasn’t sure exactly what to do. None of it seemed real. Even after my hearing started to come back, and all that death and horror started ringing in my ears, it all still felt like something that I was experiencing through someone else’s senses. Then I heard a familiar voice, and I was suddenly myself again. The voice was desperate and not at all laced with the usual arrogance, but there was still no mistaking that it was Thomas Fowler, my buddy from the Times. He was standing on the other side of a hastily erected cordon, waving his hands and shouting at a policeman, demanding to be let through. For some reason I fixated on him as my true north, and headed straight for him through the smoke and the milling throng. I tried to call his name, but all that came out was a nasty-sounding cough and some blood. It was no big deal, just a cut inside my mouth, but it probably looked terrible to anyone who happened to notice.

  I was about to try again when I saw another acquaintance step up and grab his attention.

  “Pyle,” Fowler said. “For Christ’s sake where’s your Legation pass. We’ve got to get across. Phuong’s in the milk bar.”

  By now I was standing right behind the officer who had blocked Fowler. My mouth was open to say something to them, but something kept me silent. Neither of them noticed me. They were completely absorbed in one another, and if I was in the corner of their eye it was as just another of the dusty red walking wounded.

  “No, no,” Pyle said.

  “Pyle, she is. She always goes there. At eleven-thirty. We’ve got to find her.”

  “She isn’t there, Thomas.”

  “How do you know? Where’s your card?”

  “I warned her not to go.”

  Fowler turned away as if to resume his argument with the policeman, then froze as the significance of what Pyle had said struck home. It hit him about a tenth of a second after it registered with me.

  “Warn?” he said. “What do you mean warn?”

  That was an asinine question, since he knew exactly what he meant, as did I. This stupid, pointless exercise in mass murder was the “demonstration” that I had been scheduled to photograph. Pyle had certainly known about it, probably even orchestrated it. God only knew why. I never asked.

  Later, I became consumed with a killing rage that I thought was going to eat me alive, but not then. At that moment, all I felt was shock and an incredible wave of sadness for all the maimed and killed that surrounded me in the square.

  Pyle and Fowler kept jabbering at one another, but I have no idea what they said. I couldn’t stand the sight of them anymore. I turned and walked back into the chaos, determined to see if there was someone I could help. By that time policemen and paramedics with stretchers were already swarming through the destruction. I almost tripped over a priest who was giving last rites to a man whose legs had been blown off.

  Then, by the ruins of what was left of the milk bar, I spotted my two new pals, the Frenchmen who didn’t even know themselves. The older guy was flat on the ground and younger one, the hardcase, was kneeling beside him. Nobody was helping them, so I decided to see what I could do.

  When I came to them, it was clear that the old guy was a goner. A piece of shrapnel had gone through his neck and the blood was just gushing out of his carotid artery. The hardcase was trying to staunch the flow with his bare hands, but it wasn’t working. I knew it was futile, but I knelt and ripped off my shirt and held it out to him. He gave me a curt nod and pressed it to the man’s wound. It was sodden in a matter of seconds.

  Then the older fellow’s eyes fluttered open and looked at me, then at this friend…

  “Death has caught up with me,” Villiers-Pagan said.

  “Not yet,” Leo said. “Do not try to speak.”

  “Don’t be absurd. I can feel it. I can feel…”

  “Quiet, I say! There is still time…”

  “No, please listen. I need to know…I need…you…”

  “What?”

  “I…need…you…to…forgive…”

  They said some things to each other in French. I’m glad I couldn’t understand, because I’ve always felt that, whatever they exchanged, it would have been wrong for me to hear it. It’s bad enough having to live with what I heard pass between Fowler and Pyle. I will tell you this much. At the very end, the old man seemed to be asking his friend something. The younger man leaned over and whispered something in his ear, and whatever it was, it must have been something the guy needed to hear. He gave a kind of weak sob, lifted his arm, and gently placed his hand on the young man’s neck. It was so much like the way my own dad hugged me. The tenderness of the gesture, and the shock of its familiarity, moved me in a way that’s difficult to describe.

  I saw the life go out of the old man’s eyes. The young man rose up and turned to me. “Thank you,” he said, “for trying to help.”

  “I’m sorry about your father,” I said.

  He looked confused for a second, and I could hardly blame him. After all, he had never identified the dead man as his dad, but he didn’t have to. I knew that he was.

  “It is all right,” he said after a moment. “He lived a very full life. Let us hon
or his memory by helping some of these others.”

  I suppose we did just that, but the rest of that day is just a miserable blur. I got separated from my friend at some point, and I never saw him again.

  I tried to catch up with Pyle later, but without success. I had every intention of pounding the bastard within an inch of his life, but it turned out someone else got to him first. Unfortunately for Pyle, they didn’t allow him even the inch. He was stabbed and left to drown in the mud one night by the bridge to Dakow.

  I thought about attempting to talk to Fowler about it, but decided not to. What would have been the point? I saw him a few times at the Continental with an attractive young woman I’m pretty sure was the Phoenix they were both so consumed with. Fowler, gentleman that he was, had apparently elected himself to take care of the bereaved would-be Mrs. Pyle. Rather sporting of the old chap, I thought.

  One evening, a few months after the bombing, I was shuffling through some of my photos when I came across an image that startled me with the force of an electric shock.

  It was the picture, Jenny. The very one I have sent to you. Pick it up and take another look at it. As you can see, the focus of the image is the nun and the little children. But if you take a look in the shadows there on the right, you will see a portly but stylish-looking fellow looking on them with what I have always believed was a smile of genuine affection.

  It’s him, of course. That was how I recognized him that day, just before he was killed.

  The fact of the poor man’s death is not what makes this picture so important to me. I had seen people die before, and Lord knows I’ve seen plenty since. I treasure it because of the joy I caught there. See how the nun and the kids are all smiling and laughing? They weren’t doing that for the camera. I’m not sure if they even noticed me. They were simply enjoying a moment of perfect happiness, and I believe the man in the shadows felt happy for them.

  I used to hope that somehow, some day I would be able to give the picture to the man’s son, but I finally gave up on that. I’ll let you have it, along with the story. Maybe you can pass it on to your own grandkids one day.