“You see, you can choose.”
“Choose?” Gerard was choked up.
What monstrous choice was he talking about?
As if it was the most natural thing in the world, the scarlet clown replied:
“Well… yours… whatever you like.”
“No, I don’t…”
“Oh, don’t be stupid, boy. You were probably not bad-looking once. You became ugly because a girl was jealous. What wouldn’t you give to became beautiful again like before, eh?”
His little laugh squealed.
“A beautiful boy… who will make the girls swoon. Because right now, to tell you the truth, unless you meet some perverted hag, I don’t think the chicks have any desire to roll around with you.”
Another unpleasant laugh while the gnome continued thumbing through the album, stopping at the pictures of young men around Gerard’s age, except that they had been photographed dead.
“So, my boy, are you with me? Do you want me to make you beautiful again… with one of these?”
Gerard did not fake his shudder. In this situation, in this place, he forgot poor Jacques and became Gerard, lost on an adventure that was more frightening than he had ever been on with Teddy Verano.
“But how? How is it possible? I’m…” Instinctively, not playing a role, he brought his hand to his face.
“How?” Mirk giggled. “Ah, that’s the snag. Patience and you’ll understand.”
He started ferreting around in the shadows. While his back was turned Gerard, whose eyes were getting used to the darkness that the meager lamp barely dispelled, noticed different shapes and vaguely glistening things like big, dislodged eyeballs. He knew. They were cameras. Mirk must have had a nice collection of cameras, and these weird eyes were just the flashes.
The whole room was apparently devoted to photography. But what kind of photography?
There was no doubt about it. Mirk was the one who had photographed young Claire’s corpse in Péronne. Mirk had opened the coffin of Viviane Lefort to take pictures of her face. Mirk had committed such crimes ten times, a hundred times over.
Had Mirk kidnapped poor Agnes? That was still to be proven, but everything pointed to it just as Teddy Verano had expected.
“Here we are,” Mirk said.
He was panting, carrying a huge chest as black as everything else.
“Help me! Watch out, it’s fragile… very fragile!” He kept repeating under his labored breath, “Fragile… Fragile…”
As the fake Jacques gave him a hand to put the big box on the table next to the morbid album, he explained secretively:
“They are so delicate, aren’t they?”
Gerard did not ask anything this time. He was about to find out.
The scarlet clown stretched his crooked hands over the chest, which was at least three feet long and half as wide and deep.
“My boy, you who are a monster… like us, all of us… you who deserve beauty… beauty that gives everything… life, women… you’re about to see something you’ve never seen before, something few living people can say they’ve ever seen…”
He started fiddling with the lock.
“They are alive, you hear. They are alive… Oh, not yet like I want and that’s why everything’s failed so far. Crucifer’s threatened me. Crucifer is impatient. The others too… and Mahlia... They thirst for beauty, for a newfound life and I’m going to give it them.”
He straightened up a little and when he looked at Gerard his beady eyes glowed like never before.
“Life… But I know where I went wrong. I was stuck on death when there’s nothing there… From now on, I’m going to work on those who are just about to die. Do you follow me?”
Yes, Gerard could have asked him a thousand questions. But he did not dare. He no longer knew what to say or ask… Besides, wasn’t it all totally useless?
His thoughts were speeding by, very fast, through his feverish brain. In these apparently insane words of the scarlet clown, he saw what his stepfather had gleaned among all the crazy shouting during that insane night at the Crucifer Circus.
Had not Mirk promised menacing Crucifer that he would succeed by getting it “in between” life and death? Mirk’s last statement put such assertions in an eerie light.
Once again, he felt the repulsive contact of the gnome’s twisted hands tugging on his arm.
“Come. Don’t be scared. You’re going to see them. The living… no, the almost-living. And when I’ve succeeded to perfection… living. Like you and me.”
In spite of his nauseating disgust, Gerard let himself be pulled closer. He was scared, terribly scared. He had the feeling that he was about to see something atrocious, abominable. And yet, even if he were free to run away, he could not do it. He wanted to see, to know. He had reached a point where the horror itself was fascinating, where man refuses to flee so that he can go all the way to the deepest depths of this exquisite horror.
Mirk threw open the chest. Gerard leaned over in the dark room and looked…
The dim glow from the lamp heightened the unusual, funereal aspect of everything. However, what was in the chest needed no special lighting to strike the imagination. Gerard saw masks. Anatomical masks in perfect relief lying against a black background, carefully placed on the bottom of the chest.
Mirk’s squeaky voice came to him like the icy breath of a ghost.
“They’re going to be alive.”
Gerard thought, they already are alive.
What were they made of? He could have sworn that it was human flesh. In any case, it was synthesized to perfection. And one could think that if one touched these face masks they would really be human. But humans who had already stopped living, and Gerard felt horrible shivers run down his spine.
“Touch,” the scarlet clown whispered.
He had grabbed Gerard’s wrist to feel the young man’s pulse.
“Going all the way. It’s for you. For you to become as beautiful as before… Better even, since you’ll choose the face you wish to wear. But I know what you’re thinking... You have to know… the whole thing.”
He pulled his wrist and Gerard clenched his teeth. He got control of himself in time, although he felt the strong desire to grab the scarlet clown, whack him on the head, destroy everything in the infernal room and, in his nausea, smash the chest containing the death masks.
But he thought about his mission. Teddy Verano had initiated him into his business, into his duty. Like him, he had to fight evil. Not only common criminals but everyone using the Occult, the mysterious forces of the world, for wicked and harmful ends.
Gerard knew how to control himself. He let his hand go and almost closed his eyes when Mirk put his fingers on one of the weird faces. He shuddered at the touch, but was not surprised to feel the typical coldness of death.
Mirk let go of his wrist and Gerard, with a kind of sigh of relief, pulled back his hand, but he had the awful feeling that the tips of his fingers still clung to that horrifying chill that opens to the beyond.
“You understand… they have to be alive. I haven’t got there yet. But tonight, you hear, tonight…”
Gerard heard nothing more in his fog. Looking more closely, taming his emotions, he had just seen, among the synthetic faces—was this really the right word?—in the black chest, two masks that looked familiar. Two faces. Female faces. He had not recognized them right away because death had changed them peculiarly. Now, he knew, and everything that Teddy had investigated and corroborated came together in his mind. He who had sorted the files, asked for photos, studied and compared them, knew who these faces belonged to, these death-frozen faces that the demon clown said he could bring back to life.
This woman, whom life had abandoned too young, this woman who must have been very beautiful, was Viviane Lefort, whose grave had been violated in the small Picardy cemetery.
And this girl, so young that she looked like she was sleeping, the icy forehead that Mirk had made Gerard’s trembling finge
rs touch, was it not young Claire, whom poor Agnes had been watching over when the monster showed up with his horrible camera?
He got dizzy. If Mirk seemed to be talking pure fantasy so far, he wondered now what was true and what was not. He found himself on the borders of reality and nightmare, when everything impossible was starting to appear possible to him.
Abruptly, he noticed that, in the black room full of photos of the dead, he was no longer alone with Mirk. Two people had come in, silently.
A man and a woman.
Crucifer, with his half-lively and beautiful face, half-gashed permanently by the claws of a raging wild beast. And a woman wearing a black mask that hid her face. Or what passed for a face. A woman with voluptuous curves in a dark, shiny dress.
Gerard did not even think of Miss Mahlia. He remembered their past adventures and saw only... Mephista!
CHAPTER XIII
With a cigarette between her lips, she came forward, a smile on what could be seen of her face: a gorgeously shaped mouth, sensual and spiritual, but with that crease of callous irony that marked ambitious women who were rarely given to sentimentality.
For all practical purposes, Gerard nodded a greeting to which Miss Mahlia did not respond. She stood in front of him for a minute, smoking, and through the holes in her mask, he saw an unusual glimmer in her eyes.
Gerard had no doubt about it.
In spite of the carefully arranged mask covering her face from the base of the nose up, he could swear it was really her.
Crucifer was still standing by the wall of drapes. He, too, was looking at Gerard. A Gerard feeling more and more uncomfortable, and who would have given anything to feel next to him, even among these disturbing people, the reassuring presence of Teddy Verano, who had promised to act on his own. But when?
Miss Mahlia, or maybe Mephista, carelessly blew smoke into his face as he forced himself to put up a good front and act like a real numbskull.
Mirk did not move a muscle. Crouching by his weird chest with its even weirder contents, the scarlet clown was the perfect image of a spider waiting in its web, hiding there, both out of fear and to prepare its next attack.
Finally Mahlia went and sat casually on the edge of the table near the chest.
“Cigarette?” she asked.
Gerard was not expecting this. The masked woman kindly offered her pack of cigarettes. Teddy Verano’s stepson was stunned for a split second, but reacted quickly and accepted.
It was Crucifer who held out the lighter. Right next to his face, he could see the hairy, powerful hand of the lion-tamer and also his face, bizarrely half-normal and half-awful, in the glow of the little gas flame.
“So, this is our new ring boy,” she said. “Hmm! He won’t spoil the collection. What do you think, Cruci?”
The tamer laughed sharply.
“If he spoils it, he won’t spoil it for long, I swear. I’ll put him in a state that will give Mirk another nice subject to experiment on.”
Mahlia broke out laughing. A pretty, female laugh full of charm… But what kind of charms… All the sensual spells, all the fearsome magic a creature is capable of when she uses her beauty, her natural gifts, to do what it takes to reach her goal, no matter what that goal is. Yes, there was no mistaking it. The laugh, the mouth, the body, the voice, these eyes could belong only to Mephista.
Mirk’s raspy laugh echoed the beguiling laugh of the magnificent dancer.
“Are you happy here with us?” she asked.
“Yes. Oh, yes, Mademoiselle.”
“Did Mirk tell you what’s awaiting you?”
“Yes… he did… he told me…”
“He showed you the masks? Come on, look at them with me.”
She hopped down, grabbed Gerard’s arm, pulled him close to her in front of the eerie chest and forced him to lean over with her. He felt the body contact against him, the quivering flesh bursting with a thousand desires, from which emanated an unbelievable aura of exquisite delight.
Gerard, who had followed the Mephista adventures every step of the way, understood why, when it was necessary to find a starlet to replace Edwige Hossegor, no one had hesitated to choose this girl who, from the start, had turned all heads, but whose budding career had been so tragically interrupted.
She was here, with him, next to him, alive, and suddenly fascinated by the masks of the scarlet clown.
In her company, Gerard looked at them again, as if trapped by a lover, no longer able to stop gazing at them. They scared him and they attracted him irresistibly. Mahlia/Mephista also seemed under their spell. She was devouring them with her eyes and he saw her lips part, whispering something under her breath. He felt her trembling with a strange joy, a joy that made him even more scared.
“You know now, boy… You know what you wanted to know…”
“I…. I didn’t know… I wasn’t looking for…”
“So then,” Crucifer’s hard voice cut in, “you take us for a bunch of idiots?”
He did not say much, but it was full of meaning.
Gerard’s heart froze. Mephista’s hand clasped his.
“You’re shaking?”
“I… I...”
Crucifer approached them and gripped Gerard hard by the collar.
“Women like to play games. Cat and mouse. Very nice and all, but me, I have no time to waste.”
“Monsieur Crucifer…”
“Shut up and answer my questions! Who sent you?”
Despite his dizziness, Gerard was perfectly clear-minded this time, and knew that everything was ruined, that the play was over, and was about to turn into a tragedy.
“This curious little… What a pity! He was charming.” Miss Mahlia was back on the edge of the table, taking out a cigarette. “A light, Cruci?”
Without taking his eyes off Gerard, still holding him by the collar, Crucifer turned slightly to her, held out his lighter, flicked it and then put it back in his pocket. In this movement, Gerard could feel the incomparable strength of the lion-tamer. A Hercules. And he, in his youth, despite his muscles already trained by Teddy Verano, he knew that he was no match for him.
“Are you going to answer?”
“But… I don’t know… I’m telling you…”
Play stupid all the way to the end. That was his plan. His stepfather had lectured him in case it came to this. Keep your secret as long as possible. Gain some time in case of a heavy blow.
The heavy blow had fallen. Hard.
Gerard wanted to fight back. He was suddenly thrown down on the table, crushed by Crucifer’s strong hands, right up against the box of masks, his head resting on Miss Mahlia’s fleshy thigh. As she watched the scene, her eyes sparkled with interest behind her mask.
“Mirk, give me something to tie him up.”
Gerard struggled.
“But I don’t want this! I protest!”
This expression made she whom he believed was Mephista break out laughing.
“He protests. Really, did you hear that? Oh, the boy’s a comedian.”
Mirk brought what was asked and Gerard, in a heartbeat, was tied up by the lion-tamer and the scarlet clown. Now he could say his melancholy goodbyes to the glory that crowns the mission of every good detective. He was caught like a rat in a cage and if Teddy Verano did not intervene in time…
At any rate, he had failed and there was no help coming from his stepfather in this adventure.
“What were you doing here?” Miss Mahlia asked, smoking elegantly, with a certain nonchalance that suited her to a tee.
“He’s curious and me too. I’ll show him what Mirk promised to do for us. He’ll watch the experiment because it’s tonight, right, Mirk?”
“Yes,” the diabolical clown said. “We can’t wait any longer. Especially since the main ingredient are in our hands.”
“He’s curious and me too,” Crucifer repeated. “So, he’ll tell us… everything he has to tell us.”
“But… I have nothing to tell you,” Gerard protes
ted, still playing innocent.
He got a couple of hard slaps.
“Enough! You’ll talk when we tell you to. Mirk, are you ready? Can we start?”
Miss Mahlia hopped onto her feet again.
“Mirk! Mirk! Is it true? You found it? Are you sure? You can do it?”
“I promised you Mahlia. You’ll be beautiful! The face I chose will be yours… Alive! And no one will believe that you weren’t born with it. And you’ll be another woman, even more beautiful, more desirable, more…”
“Shut up!” Crucifer barked.
There was silence. The lion-tamer stepped up to Gerard, grabbed him like a sack of potatoes and threw him over his shoulder without too much effort it seemed. Gerard’s upside down head, however, could still see what was happening.
“Well? Are you ready, Mirk?”
“One second… I have to wake up my treasures.”
He brought out a weird, deformed flask made of some indefinable material. He leaned over the chest and sprinkled it over the masks like he was blessing them.
“They’re fragile… so fragile. You have to take care of them, preserve their life, otherwise death will come back.”
Crucifer obviously gave in to such good reasoning because he said nothing. Nearby, however, Miss Mahlia looked like she was burning up with impatience.
“I want to see… to know… to experience…”
Once the action was complete, Mirk closed the chest and put it back in a corner with extra special care, covering it right away with a black cloth.
“The mask?”
“It’s over there. Lina has prepared everything.”
They left the black lair and walked out of the trailer. The night outside was cold. Gerard thought of yelling and screaming, but he was in the middle of the fair, surrounded by the trailers of the Crucifer Circus. His voice would be lost and then…
In any event, his mission was to go all the way to the end.
Gerard knew that the crazy experiment that Teddy Verano suspected was about to take place. By some unknown process, Mirk claimed he could give beauty to all the monsters of the Crucifer troupe. And he was starting with Miss Mahlia.
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