“Magic?” the magistrate echoed. “Do you confess, then, to being a witch, in league with the Devil?”
“There is more magic in the world that that bestowed by the Devil,” the Phantom retorted, “and better magic too.”
Privately, Alphonse Sevanter had never believed in the power of magic, and had always thought witchfinders as fraudulent in their dealings as charlatans like Furalor, but it was not an opinion he had ever dared express openly, even to Jean Funeste—although he had always suspected that Funeste’s apparent belief in magic and the power of the Church to resist it was as much a pretence as his own. He had only attempted to solicit a confession of witchcraft in the hope of putting some vigor into Odo’s rather listless “investigation”.
“Did Hernand not tell you that I would come to you within the week, Great Judge?” the Phantom continued, when Monsieur Sevanter made no reply to his last remark. “Did you doubt that I meant what I said? Was it not, therefore, rather silly as well as unnecessary to issue so public an invitation?”
“What do you want with me, thief?” asked Monsieur Sevanter, his own voice grating a little because his mouth was so dry.
“Only justice,” said the other, “and a punishment to fit your crime. I came tonight simply to pass sentence upon you—you must wait, as I have long waited, for the sentence to be carried out. I shall return again tomorrow to hear your plea for mercy...and on the third night, the sentence will take effect.”
“What sentence?” whispered Monsieur Sevanter, feeling an urgent wish to know what the Phantom planned.
“No ordinary fate,” said the voice from behind the mask. “Like yourself, I am not so lenient.” The figure moved then, perhaps extending an arm, but the light was too poor to allow Monsieur Sevanter to be sure—until there was a sudden explosion of brilliant white light, of the kind projected by naval flares. The magistrate’s dark-adjusted eyes were immediately overwhelmed by the flood of light, and he was blinded
Then, and only then, did the magistrate panic. He let loose a long scream whose echoes must have extended into every corridor and alcove in the house. As he screamed, some reflex made him raise his arms and place his hands in front of his face, as if to protect himself from an attack—but no attack came. When a seeming eternity had passed—although it was presumably no more than a few seconds—he dropped his arm again and blinked furiously, trying to recover the power of vision.
He had just enough time to see that the room seemed quite empty before the door was thrown back on its hinges, and Jean Funeste rushed in, clad in a capacious dark blue nightshirt and an absurd matching night-cap. The clerk was, however, brandishing a pistol in his left hand and a full three feet of polished blade in his right, ready to thrust or slash. At exactly the same moment, Furalor’s voice was heard emerging from the stairs to the attic, crying: “The alarm is triggered! The alarm is triggered! The judge’s door has been breached by magic!”
Within minutes the footman and the coachman arrived, then the yawning Odo, and finally the other weary servants, one after another, blades and cudgels at the ready. There was nothing for them to do, alas. There was no one in the room but Alphonse Sevanter, sitting up in bed and looking rather foolish, his pale face scrubbed clean of powder and paint. Servants were quickly sent to interrogate the watchmen, but they had seen no one enter the house and no one leave.
The room offered no obvious hiding places, except for the locked cupboard, but it was searched with absurd thoroughness. When the cupboard was unlocked, the three chests were found to be still inside, all securely locked. In the meantime, encouraged by Jean Funeste and Odo, Monsieur Sevanter gave a full and detailed account of his conversation with the Phantom. The clerk wrote it all down, in order that a copy might be sent to the mayor, and carefully ascertained that no detail was omitted. Even the substance of Monsieur Sevanter’s nightmares was recorded, along with the suggestive enquiry regarding witchcraft and its reply—which Odo, unsurprisingly, refused to accept as final proof that diabolism or heresy had played any part in the episode.
Furalor swore by the entire zodiac that no one could have passed through the magically-alarmed door before the alarm was raised. The militiamen patrolling the perimeter were summoned, and they too testified that no one could possibly have clambered over the wall without being seen. The watchmen were questioned again, more formally, and repeated their confident assertion that no one could possibly have reached any of the doors, or clambered up to any of the shuttered window—whose shutters were still closed tight—without being seen.
On considering these facts, everyone except Monsieur Sevanter eventually came to the conclusion that no one had entered the room at all, and that the magistrate must have dreamed his encounter with the Phantom, as a continuation of his earlier sequence of nightmares. In order to save the magistrate’s feelings, however, his servants assured him that he must have been the victim of a magic spell, which had compelled him to see someone who was not physically present.
Although he had his own private doubts by now, the magistrate did not like to think that such panic had been aroused in him by a mere illusion, and he continued to insist that the Phantom really had been there. Furalor muttered darkly about the possible involvement of a more robust kind of magic, but Odo hastened to assure the astrologer that the black magicians of Bretagne, numerous as they might be, were incapable of flying through the air, walking through walls and vanishing into thin air. The monk’s expert opinion was that, if any magic at all had been involved, it could only have been of the suggestive sort mentioned by the servants.
Unfortunately, the conclusion that Monsieur Sevanter had only dreamed his encounter with the Phantom, or had been deluded into imagining it by some subtle spell, came to seem slightly less probable later that morning, when he and Jean Funeste decided to make another inventory of the three chests of valuables, in order to make sure that nothing was missing. Although none of the locks—including the lock on the cupboard door—appeared to have been forced, a single item appeared to have been removed from each of the chests. Each of the objects was far from being the most valuable in its respective strongbox, the most costly of them all being a silver comb, with which the Madame Sevanter had often used to put up her lovely hair, but the fact of their theft was indubitable.
“There is a pattern here, Jean,” Monsieur Sevanter immediately said to his friend. “All three objects belonged to my late wife; in addition to the comb, the enameled brooch and the lacquered fan were also hers, as you very probably remember. My father, my children, my long-dead wife…it’s as if the Phantom were weaving an intricate web around me, approaching me with all possible indirection while refusing to attack me directly. What can it all mean?”
“I hardly know what to say,” Jean Funeste replied. “It is a profound mystery.”
Monsieur Sevanter swore all those involved in the affair to the utmost secrecy regarding the details of the raid—with the inevitable result that every single item was all around the town by noon, being earnestly studied and discussed by beldames and bakers, schoolteachers and soldiers, and even road-sweepers and ragamuffins.
V.
There is only one thing that the poor people of a town love more than a heroic villain, and that is a mystery. The citizens of Teirbrun traded questions with avid interest. The mere matter of the Phantom’s identity faded into the background, largely displaced by more exotic matters of concern. What black magic or ingenious trickery had allowed the burglar to enter the magistrate’s house and escape again undetected? Why had he told the magistrate that he would return twice more, and then gone away without attempting to hurt him? How and why had he taken the silver comb and other carefully locked-up objects belonging to the long-dead Madame Sevanter? All these puzzles received careful consideration, but none of course could compare in fascination with the most intriguing question of all. What sentence had been passed on Teirbrun’s Great Judge? What punishment, to fit what crime?
The common people racked the
ir memories once again to recall every criminal on whom Monsieur Sevanter had ever passed sentence, living or dead. The scrutiny to which the surviving victims of Monsieur Sevanter’s justice had already been subject was expanded to include the children of those who had not survived it. “What other significance can possibly be attached to the targeting of Monsieur Sevanter’s family?” the street-corner philosophers asked one another. “This is no more matter of violent revenge; the person who is doing this must have had his life blighted by the removal of someone beloved.”
The rumor spread like wildfire that some unlucky person singled out by the Great Judge for a particularly nasty punishment must in fact have been innocent of his crime, and that the bloody libel of his false conviction, whose burden had fallen upon his entirely family, was finally about to be wiped out, and the penalty repaid in full measure, not merely by the magistrate himself but by all the magistrate’s relatives and friends. Alphonse Sevanter did not stir from his house that day, but that did not prevent him from hearing the cries and cheers of the ragged and hungry children of the street, several of whom informed him with delighted squeals that he was doomed, and that the second morrow thereafter would be the most miserable of his whole existence.
The humble people of Teirbrun were not the only ones who were struggling to recall some particular case that might give a clue to the Phantom’s identity. Paul Mansard—the only member of his wife’s dining-club who had not yet been robbed—was very anxious to avoid that eventuality, and he demanded that the mayor call an extraordinary meeting of the Town Council to discuss the “crisis”.
Monsieur Sevanter was as determined as anyone to find the vital clue that might lead to the Phantom’s identification and arrest, and he demanded that Jean Funeste fetch the court records and read them aloud to him while he listened with closed eyes and cast his mind back, trying to convert the scrupulously-compiled lists of indictments into the images faces and voices, and trying desperately to obtain some intuition therefrom.
The loyal clerk did as he was asked, for hours on end. Monsieur Sevanter told him to pause several times—when he mentioned three highway thieves whose feet he had ordered flayed, so that they might never walk the roads again; when he named two prostitutes convicted of picking their clients’ pockets, whose own “pockets” the magistrate had ordered to be sown up tightly with catgut; when he pronounced the names of a tax-evader who had been castrated in order to remind them of the condition that the town would be in if adequate provision were not to be made for its defense against marauders—but none of the chords struck by those names resonated sufficiently to persuade the magistrate that they held the key.
“All those were relatively trivial matters,” Monsieur Sevanter opined, with a sigh, when Funeste was only a tenth of the way through the list. “All things considered, the only kind of case likely to have evoked such an extraordinary response as the Phantom’s is a case of murder. From now on, only read out the names of individuals convinced of murder.”
Funeste continued enumerating the murderers condemned to death by Monsieur Sevanter, who eventually turned out to number two hundred and fifty-two—barely one a month, averaged over their long tenure. In the main, it was a conspicuously tedious list. The additional cleverness with which the deaths of some of the accused had been contrived had usually added little enough suffering to the ordeals prescribed by the law. There seemed to be no one on the list who had not fully merited death, and no one whose family had any good reason to take particular umbrage.
Monsieur Sevanter then decided that they ought to concentrate their attention on people who had committed crimes allegedly involving magic—for he was increasingly sure in his own mind that the Phantom’s references to magic must hold some significance, even if no material magic could have been involved in the remarkable events of the night. Alas, Jean Funeste did not need to consult the records closely in order to remind Monsieur Sevanter that he had never had occasion to pass sentence on an authentic wizard, or even a witch who could be convincingly asserted to have been a regular attendee at the Devil’s sabbats. If such a person had ever committed crimes in Teirbrun, he or she had not been apprehended—a fact which, on reflection, could hardly be deemed surprising.
In the previous twenty-five years, a rapid survey of the unread names ascertained, the ever-vigilant watchmen and constables—aided and abetted by the Church’s agents—had contrived to arrest thirteen practitioners of unorthodox medicine, half a dozen confidence tricksters posing as alchemists and four hagwives accused of trivial spell-casting. The most dangerous of the lot had been one of the herbalists, whose potions had turned out to be mildly poisonous—but one could say the same about half the town’s licensed physicians. In any case, his punishment had been relatively mild and not particularly unusual—he had been buried in the earth up to his neck and subjected to a shower of dung and small stones hurled in an entirely unmagical fashion by his victims, which had driven him mad and resulted in his incarceration in the notorious lunatic asylum of Is, from which he had never returned.
“Perhaps we are overlooking the obvious,” Monsieur Sevanter said, with a sight. “The Phantom is, after all, a thief—but thieves constitute the vast majority of names on the list.”
“And almost all of them suffered the commonplace penalties of losing a hand and carrying a brand,” Funeste observed. “Fates that are unlikely to generate any particular animosity even in the most devoted brother or son.”
“He is, moreover, as master thief,” Monsieur Sevanter went on, ignoring the interjection. “There are, I dare say, schools of larceny in Is—universities of larceny, even—whose students are thoroughly schooled in the arts of stealth, lock-picking and the like as well as the use of weapons, but there is nothing in our records to tell us whether any dispossessed sons of Teirbrun might have attended such schools in the recent or distant past.”
“On the whole,” said Jean Funeste, “I think it unlikely. Having been privileged to share your own education—without, alas, the advantage of your superior intelligence—I know how direly difficult it is for a common man to acquire expertise in any art. This Phantom must have worked extremely hard to educate himself, if he is not, as some rumor-mongers allege, a gentleman.”
“There’s not a gentleman in town who has not suffered at his hands,” Monsieur Sevanter said, intemperately.
“It’s not impossible that the Phantom might have robbed his own house by way of distraction,” Jean Funeste suggested. “And your generalization is not quite correct. There is one man who has not yet been targeted—the richest of them all, if rumor can be believed.”
“Paul Mansard,” the magistrate said, taking the inference without difficulty. “But he has suffered while I have suffered, for my children are his grandchildren. It’s absurd even to think that he would have offended the guests at his own table, ticking them off his carefully-ordered list one by one.”
“Of course it is,” Jean Funeste agreed. “He is busy as we speak trying to rouse the mayor to more urgent action—and I believe that he is quite ready to assume mayoral office himself if necessary. He is a man of action, and I dare say that he would exercise municipal authority in the manner of a true merchant prince, the equal of any in Is.”
“Idle chatter is not helping us,” Monsieur Sevanter reminded him. “Forget my father-in-law and focus on my persecutor.”
The clerk obeyed—but it was all to no avail.
Their utter failure to find any inspiration in the court lists only served to redouble Monsieur Sevanter’s determination to protect himself from the second promised visit of the Phantom. The permanently-patrolling guard outside the house was increased to eight, and the number of stationary watchmen inside the grounds was similarly doubled. All of the servants, trained or not, were issued with blades.
Jean Funeste re-checked both the dueling-pistols to make certain that they were properly loaded, and that the firing-mechanisms were in good working order. He suggested to his friend that there
was no point in holding further conversations with the burglar, and that the magistrate should simply shoot the villain down like a dog. Monsieur Sevanter agreed that this was the only course of action likely to be effective were the Phantom to succeed, against all the odds, in gaining entry to his bedroom again. In order to leave no possible precaution in a state neglect, however, he permitted Funeste to ask Furalor to reinforce his alarm spells and to implore Odo to increase the urgency of his prayers.
Again, Jean Funeste placed himself immediately outside the magistrate’s unlocked bedroom door, as a final line of external defense. He added an extra padlock to the door of the cupboard where the treasure-chests were stored, and hid the key very carefully in a cranny between the bedroom’s floorboards, keeping that depository secret from everyone except himself and Monsieur Sevanter.
When darkness came, Monsieur Sevanter made no attempt to go to sleep, having resolved this time to remain awake. He kept no less than five wax candles burning in his room. Alas, as the night wore on, his determination to stay alert was put to an increasingly severe test by a seductive drowsiness that continually crept up on him.
Four or five times the magistrate drifted off to sleep, only to dream each time that all the men he had ever condemned to death were rising from their graves and marching through the streets of Teirbrun, calling out to him to meet them at a place assigned by destiny, to which he knew that he would in time be drawn—and this time, he was certain that the meeting would not be in a graveyard or a church, although he could not quite determine exactly where it would take pace.
No sooner had Monsieur Sevanter lost count of the occasions on which this happened than he opened his eyes with a sudden start, and realized that all but one of the candles had gone out, perhaps deliberately extinguished. By the light of the one remaining candle he saw a vague figure standing at the foot of the bed, seemingly wrapped around by a dark cloak. Shadowed eyes were staring at him through two almond-shaped holes cut in a mask.
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Page 6