Floats the Dark Shadow

by Yves Fey

  Theo felt a weird mix of reluctance and amusement. “Yes. I think perhaps it was true as well. The cards said I would be in a battle of good and evil.”

  Again a look of blank disbelief. “Indeed?”

  Theo enjoyed trying to perturb him. “I think that you may have been represented as well—as a knight who would be involved in the same battle but would disagree with me.”

  A smile flashed briefly across his face. “A knight?”

  “The Knight of Swords.” She saw the card again, the charging knight in his shining black armor with a windswept plume on his helmet and upraised sword.

  “That seems appropriate.” He smiled once again. It lasted a second, then vanished utterly. “Did the Tarot reveal the killer?” he asked sardonically.

  “The Tarot thinks the killer is in league with The Devil,” she answered.

  “I think we can all agree on that, if only symbolically. Do you have his name?”

  “No.” Amusement flipped to annoyance. She most certainly would not mention the poetic Page of Cups. She pursued her other idea. “Carmine has some friends who have studied the occult, the Mathers. If the killer’s cross has some deeper meaning, perhaps they will recognize it.”

  “You should not involve yourself in such a dangerous enterprise.” His voice hardened.

  “Yet only the other day, you told me I must have courage.”

  “And now I tell you not to be foolhardy. Searching out black magicians—” he began.

  “Not all occultists practice black magic.” Theo wished now she had not revealed their names. “Her friends are scholars. Surely not everyone in Paris is suspect?”

  “Until they are cleared, yes.” There was only the faintest lift of an eyebrow to lighten the statement. Then his voice hardened into a command. “I have my own source for this information, mademoiselle. Do not interfere further.”

  He could not command her obedience. Angry again, Theo stood. “I will continue to investigate. If I learn anything of interest from my interference, I will let you know.”

  She made it to the door before he said, “Mlle. Faraday.”

  She turned, reluctant to argue further, but he only added, “Please—be cautious.”

  His voice was cool, but there was true concern in his eyes. Her emotions went topsy-turvy again, and she smiled with amusement. “Do not fear, Inspecteur Devaux. I will call for you—if I have need of a knight.”

  Chapter Thirty

  I saw the low sun daubed with mystic horrors

  Lit up with long, livid, curdles of light,

  Like actors playing out an ancient drama….

  ~ Arthur Rimbaud

  AFTER THEO left, Michel spent the early afternoon conferring with his men about any last suspicious incidents at the viewing in the morgue. He assigned one to investigate the schedule he’d obtained that morning of Doctor Urbain Charron’s whereabouts at the time of the kidnappings. Then he made the initial arrangements for Alicia to be sent to the funeral home that had volunteered its services. There had been a huge outpouring of money and gifts. She would be treated better in death than she ever had been in life. He dreaded the hordes that would come to the funeral, but he must attend. If—when—he captured her killer, he would visit her grave and tell her even though he did not believe she would hear him.

  Before he went to his delayed appointment with Huysmans, Michel checked in briefly with Cochefert about Theo’s occult scholars, the Mathers. The chief blinked and looked upward, perusing his memory. After a moment, he said, “MacGregor Mathers. Moina Mathers. Promise of ancient Egyptian ceremonies—fancy dress and all that.”

  Egyptian ceremonies sounded far better than a Black Mass with children sacrificed on the Devil’s altar. But who knew what was actually involved? Michel pictured people tottering about with gilded jackal heads and skimpy linen kilts, totally failing to evoke the somber beauty of the authentic art he’d seen in the Louvre.

  “British. Bookish.” Cochefert smoothed his moustache with care. “Nothing against them so far.”

  Michel was dubious, if only because these supposed scholars could influence Theo Faraday. But he did not think all such dabblers were necessarily dishonest, only foolish. Was he being foolish to dismiss them? Remembering what Theo had said about the Tarot reading, he felt puzzled and deeply uneasy.

  The question about the Mathers had diverted Cochefert. He was telling Michel about one of the prominent Parisian occultists. “Sar Péladan started out as a bank clerk, you know, but managed to transform himself into mystic royalty. Sar is Assyrian for King….”

  Michel listened with half his attention. Péladan was all too familiar, with his gaudy satin robes and his luxuriant curling beard. Had Vipèrine taken his costume cue from Péladan? Not necessarily. Such theatrics were quite common. Expected. No one would believe you possessed magical powers if you dressed like a dreary bank clerk. While Cochefert expounded, Michel brooded on Theo’s visit. Should he offer to accompany her when she visited these Mathers? Probably she would refuse him. Would she ask Charron to escort her? Michel frowned. He thought not. Theo did think of this as her investigation. She did not want to believe her Revenants guilty, but neither did she want them influencing her impressions.

  Occultists would distrust a detective as much as Michel did them. If the Mathers did have information, they would tell Theo more if she came unimpeded by a policeman. And if anything would be likely to make them help, it was murdered children. He might have more information to work with, but Theo would make a far more emotional appeal.

  On the other hand, he could gauge if they were lying only by being there.

  “Péladan believed the artist should be a knight,” the chief was saying.

  “A knight?” Michel asked, surprised to have the image presented twice within an hour.

  “Yes. The act of artistic creation was to be the quest for a kind of Holy Grail,” Cochefert told him. “The enemy was once again those evil stiflers, the bourgeoisie. Artists were to engage in a perpetual war with them—swift strokes of paintbrush and pen against the ponderous bludgeon of convention.”

  “I have my own quest,” Michel said. “I am going to brave Huysmans in his den.”

  “He breathes not fire, but fumes of acid,” Cochefert warned. Michel smiled at the chief and took his leave.

  Once outside, he decided to take a fiacre rather than walk as he had planned. Having cancelled once, he could no longer afford to play the flâneur and wander through the Jardin des Tuileries, pleasant as it would be. Michel did have the driver take him past the gardens before turning off to the Place Beauvau. The Ministry of the Interior wasn’t far from the fashionable Champs Élysées. Would Huysmans be able to help? Michel had condescended to Theo about her occult source, but his own, however famous, was also dubious. Curious stories still circulated from when he wrote Là Bas. The Abbé Boullan, the defrocked priest Huysmans had consulted about diabolic rites, once warned him to avoid his office. Huysmans stayed home. That day a great mirror fell across his office desk and shattered. It would have killed him. Uncanny coincidence? An elaborate plot? The incident made a believer of Huysmans.

  The Abbé’s fatal heart attack only increased Huysmans’ fervor and terror. Michel presumed Boullan’s sudden death was presaged by decades of debauchery. Huysmans believed he had been murdered magically by his rivals and claimed further vicious attacks on himself. He could no longer sleep at night because he was pummeled by invisible fists. Huysmans had declared his cat suffered from these attacks as well. It was all too perfectly preposterous.

  The fiacre brought Michel to the gates of the Ministry. Set around a square courtyard, it was an elegant traditional building of creamy limestone, tall narrow windows, and a steep lead roof. Armed with his briefcase of photos, he entered. Everyone within knew of Huysmans, the famous author who constantly complained of having his true calling interrupted by the demands of his job. At present, he was chef de division in the Sûreté Générale, identifying undesirable alie
ns for deportation. Michel was swiftly directed to his office and knocked on the door.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Monsieur Huysmans,” Michel said when his knock was answered.

  The author was a small, neat man of restive energy, with dark, compelling eyes. In person, he radiated the same bitter discontent that permeated his novels. “I could hardly refuse the detective who captured the Montmartre anarcho.”

  Michel gave a small nod at the compliment. Huysmans gestured him to a chair and returned to his own seat behind the desk. On the wall above and behind him hung a small mirror—no longer of a size to kill him if it fell. Files belonging to the department were scattered about on the desk and tables, but far more books and papers were obviously dedicated to Huysmans’ current project. Michel saw various editions of the Bible and the lives of the saints. A book on Gothic art lay open to drawings of Chartres Cathedral. Huysmans’ last book, En Route, had described his surrogate character’s emersion in the rituals of a Trappist monastery. Evidently, the author was continuing that religious journey. It was a difficult one for a scornful intelligence easily overcome with disgust at all the stupidity and corruption that plagued the Church. Yet those difficulties were the substance of his work, played against the seductive purity of faith and the inspiration of its art. And perhaps, for such a complex intelligence, a longing for simple goodness was a temptation sweeter than any lust.

  “Your anarcho proved to be Russian, I believe,” Huysmans said.

  “Originally, yes.”

  “You saved me the work of deporting him.” He gave a cynical smile. “Instead, the guillotine will insure his departure.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “We have enough radicals of our own. I don’t know why we need to import them as well,” Huysmans complained. “But what can you expect when the Jews and Freemasons are running rampant in France?” He paused and looked at Michel expectantly.

  “Ummm.” Michel managed a small, noncommittal sound.

  Mistaking it for approval, Huysmans continued, “Once, when I complained of the fortune we spent tracking anarchos, the poet Valéry suggested that it would be cheaper simply to give them the money instead.”

  “Some would instantly become bourgeois and settle into comfort,” Michel replied. “But others would stock up on dynamite.”

  Huysmans nodded glumly. He sat back in his chair to watch Michel. “Your note said that you are investigating a murder.”

  “More than one. I’ve come here because of a mark at the crime scenes, perhaps a religious symbol, perhaps something more. One of my suspects calls himself a Satanist though it may be nothing but amateur theatrics.”

  “I have left off those investigations.” Huysmans gazed at Michel with solemn intensity. “I ventured into the blackest darkness. It was not possible to emerge unscathed. I found I must make a definitive choice—either the muzzle of a revolver or the foot of the cross.”

  To Michel, such portentousness seemed another form of theatrics. He tried to direct Huysmans' ego to the matter at hand. “Still, your memory of occultism may assist me.”

  Huysmans’ mouth turned down in an expression of disgust. “The whole world comes knocking on my door, searching for access to this obscene knowledge. I once refused a countess who came begging to wallow in sin and degradation.”

  “I have no desire to wallow. I want to stop a killer.”

  “That is not a request I can refuse.” Huysmans regarded him glumly.

  Michel opened his briefcase and evaluated the photographs of the winged cross. Alicia’s gravestone was the clearest, but Theo thought it crude. He chose the photograph from the Montmartre alleyway and laid it down on the desk. “Does this have any meaning for you?”

  Huysmans looked at it for a few seconds, then stared at Michel in blatant disbelief. “Is this some sort of joke?” His lip curled in a sneer. “I will not be made a mockery.”

  Startled, Michel lifted one hand in a placating gesture. It was odd to feel so much on the defensive. “I assure you, the question is sincere.”

  “Sincere.” Huysmans bit off the syllables, his lips and nostrils pinched and quivering.

  A fierce rush of energy swept away Michel’s first surprise. If Huysmans was angry, there was something to be angry about. “What does it mean?” he demanded.

  Still glaring, Huysmans was silent long enough that Michel wanted to shake him. At last Huysmans said, “We know the black cross was on his shield. The swan is disputed—but there are many who believe the swan was set on his crest.”

  “Whose crest?” Michel’s throat was tight.

  Huysmans' voice dripped disdain. “Gilles de Laval, baron de Rais.”

  For a moment, Michel felt completely disoriented. “Gilles de Rais was burned at the stake five hundred years ago.”

  “For crimes of perfidy, sodomy, murder, witchcraft, and heresy.” It was a litany.

  Michel heard Theo’s voice in his mind, accusing Vipèrine at the morgue. “He likes to imagine himself as Gilles de Rais, who murdered more children than they know how to count.”

  It seemed his killer was even more insane than he’d imagined. To Huysmans, he said, “I am afraid his spirit lives on.”

  Huysmans blinked, looking as disoriented as Michel had felt a moment ago. Then he asked, “Just the one mark? One murder?”

  “Many mysterious disappearances. One discovered murder.” He hesitated, then added, “Five marks found so far.”

  “Five cannot be chance.”

  “No.”

  “There was no fleur de lys? For his service in the war, the king granted him the right to use the fleur de lys as well.”

  Michel shook his head. “None that we’ve found.”

  “Perhaps your killer discounts Gilles the warrior. It is Gilles the aspiring magician he emulates. The swan is the alchemist’s symbol for mercury, you know.”

  Michel didn’t know or care unless it led him to his killer. “He slaughtered children. So does this man.”

  “I visited Tiffauges.” Huysmans’ voice lowered to a confessional whisper. “I saw the crypt where the children were sacrificed, the chamber where the remains were incinerated. The castle was imbued with a kind of stale horror, an invisible smoke that tainted the nostrils and throat.”

  The castle was far afield from Michel’s concerns, and Huysmans’ morbid memories farther still. “What can you tell me about Gilles de Rais?”

  “You have not read Là Bas?” Huysmans regarded him suspiciously.

  “I read it when it was first published,” Michel quickly assured him. “But I remember only bits and pieces of it. As a Parisian, the contemporary section had the most impact.”

  Mollified, Huysmans gave him a brief history. “Gilles’ parents died when he was about ten. After that, he was raised by his grandfather, Jean de Craon, an old man even then, and thoroughly corrupt. As a boy, Gilles was allowed to run wild. He was married off young, a marriage that was essentially meaningless. Soon he sought out the court, where his youth and riches let him cut a dashing figure. He had his own army which the dauphin was most pleased to use. Gilles was judged a courageous, even a reckless warrior.”

  “And he served under Jeanne d’Arc.” Michel’s heart clenched tight inside his chest.

  “He was there when Jeanne first knelt before the dauphin, recognizing him even though he was in disguise. It was her first miracle, but not as great to Gilles as her triumph in battle. He rode to victory after victory by her side. He reached a glorious pinnacle of faith and fame.” Huysmans paused. “Her capture and death were devastating blows from which he never recovered. After her death in the flames, he began his quest for a magical solution.”

  “Solution to what?”

  “Despair, I would say. Gilles de Rais would probably have said he wanted immortality, infinite wealth, and ultimate knowledge.” Huysmans paused again. “In his quest, he descended into a bottomless pit of depravity and madness. His few remaining acts of good, all his acts of evil—everything w
as done in extraordinary excess, at extraordinary expense. The richest man in France was wholly bankrupt when he was arrested for heresy.”

  “Not murder?” Michel frowned.

  “They would not arrest an aristocrat for the murder of meaningless peasant children. In that era, they were little better than livestock.” Huysmans made a moue of distaste. “But heresy threatened the power of the Church. Once there was proof of that, the evidence of the murders could be included.”

  “What else?”

  “I see no need to recount information I spent months—years—gathering. Read my book. Read a biography.” He continued in a less aggrieved tone, “If you want to show me other evidence, perhaps I will know something directly relevant.”

  Michel pushed aside his own possessiveness about the case and evaluated the remaining documents and photographs he had brought with him. There was no need to show Huysmans the hideous photos of Alicia’s wounds. Michel did remember that Gilles de Rais sometimes eviscerated his victims though that was not his only mode of murder. He indulged in other atrocities, slow strangulation, dismemberment, bludgeoning. Michel picked out the list of missing children. “Do you see any correlation to Gilles’ victims? Their work? Their names?”

  “Usually the children were anonymous, known to us only as the son or daughter of the grieving parent. Sometimes the age was given,” Huysmans said as he took the pages. But when he actually looked through them, he paled. “This is extraordinary. We know a half dozen or so names of the hundreds he may have murdered. But the first known victim is the son of a man named Jean Jeudon. The first victim on your list is also the son of a man named Jeudon. And here too, Jamet—a boy chosen by Gilles de Rais for demonic sacrifice.”

  Michel wished the bouquiniste had a more common name than Jeudon. And Jamet had been the boy Dancier said he was training as a pickpocket.

  Huysmans looked over the names again and shook his head. “Nothing else emerges. The other names mean nothing to me.”

  Jeudon was the first on Michel’s list. Was he truly the first victim? Perhaps that name was all the killer needed to begin this orgy of slaughter. Once the modern Gilles had murdered an innocent child, he could follow no other path but madness. “A medieval monster comes to life,” he said, more to himself than Huysmans.