Floats the Dark Shadow

by Yves Fey

  Averill lunged for him again, but Michel seized him and pushed him down into a chair. Abruptly, Averill doubled over with a sob. The sound spurred Theo forward. She knelt beside the chair and laid her hand on his shoulder. At her touch, a shudder ran through him. She did not move, only waited, acutely aware of him and of Michel, weighing and measuring each movement, marking it in the innocent or guilty columns of his mind. Silently, Theo wished him to hell.

  A long moment passed, then Averill lifted his head to face her. Tear tracks glistened on his cheeks but his gaze held a storm of fury as much as sorrow. His voice accused her. “I told you, there is too much darkness.”

  “Averill,” she whispered his name, only wanting him to know she loved him.

  He turned away from her. His manacled hands wrapped together, first a gesture of prayer, then a fist that he struck against his forehead. “A sea of darkness—inside and out. If I can go deep enough, submerge myself, I will find peace.”

  Theo did not know what to say. Silence settled like a pall. Averill was wretched. His father glared at them, his face warping from triumph to fury to fear and back again. At last Michel spoke. “How long have you known your sister did not die in the accident?”

  “Sometime after Christmas….”

  When he began drinking absinthe with such fervor, Theo realized. When he began acquiescing to his father.

  Urbain Charron glowered at him. “My efforts to prevent her shame from destroying us were futile. You have brought far worse scandal crashing down on us.”

  “He is innocent!” Theo exclaimed.

  “Is Averill innocent?” Her uncle asked Michel with a sneer.

  Michel gave him a cold smile. “I have not totally discounted the possibility.”

  But Theo did not believe him.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I dread sleep as one dreads a looming hole,

  Brimming with nameless horrors,

  A mouth opening to the unknown….

  ~ Charles Baudelaire

  WHITE HOT, the sun burned down. Michel staggered forward as rays like hot knives peeled away skin with each step. Ahead, the Sahara stretched endlessly, a vast dry sea that crunched beneath his feet. Blood dripped from his hands onto the sand. Not his own blood. Slowly the grains turned an ugly, clotted crimson. That darkness spread until the desert became an evil quagmire, sucking at his feet with every step. He began to sink.

  Michel saw his father—saw Guillame Devaux—walking toward him and reached out. He could still be saved. His father looked at him sadly, but would not give Michel his hand. He shimmered, vanished, a mirage of redemption. Slowly, Michel sank into the stinking morass that smelled like decomposing flesh.

  He woke with a cry. Throwing off the covers, he swung his legs around to sit on the edge of the bed. His breath came in gasps. He swallowed air greedily, like water. The dream returned over and over—that blood-soaked desert. He hated the terror. Hated the guilt that choked him. Suffocated him. Taut as vibrating wire, Michel went to the front room and stared blindly out the window, still locked in his own night. There was no point in trying to sleep. After Charron almost died, Michel knew the nightmares would return, as they had after the carnage of the bomber’s arrest. But he did not need these wretched dreams to summon the memory of Guillame Devaux’s death. Memory sank its teeth in his brain and shook him like prey.

  ~

  A tour in the Foreign Legion was five years. It took him four to find Luc. In Algiers, Michel forced himself to live solely by the Legion code of Valeur et Discipline. Both his fathers had taught him discipline. Valor was easy when he did not care if he lived or died. He volunteered for the disastrous campaign in Madagascar because Luc had named it as part of his travels. It was a pestilential hellhole. Early on Michel was shot, a head wound that he miraculously survived on the trip back to Algiers. He saw its crenelated walls, its domes and minarets again with thanksgiving. Most of the men he’d served with in Madagascar died, wasted with malaria.

  Recuperating from his wound, his Parisian French and clear hand got him an offer to work as secretary to a colonel. He took it, not for safety, or for the promotion that went with it, but for the chance to search through the intelligence. And so he found Luc outside Algiers—supplying arms to the dissidents. Freedom fighters he would have said, given the chance. But Michel gave him no chance.

  He followed him to a desert meeting. When the others were gone, he knocked out Luc’s bodyguard then faced his cousin at last. Luc could see words were of no use. They fought ruthlessly, a struggle of pouring sweat and blood, the grit of sand in mouth and eyes, brutal kicks and vicious knife cuts. The end came quickly, for it only took one misstep. Michel hooked his arms around Luc and broke his neck.

  Michel had expected—what? Release. Finality. A sense of justice.

  He looked down at his dead cousin, now about the age his first father had been when shot by the Versailles firing squad. Luc looked almost exactly like him. Michel felt he had murdered his father twice over.

  He had nothing. There was only the vast desert within that matched the desert stretching out before him, blank and dry and relentless. He stood under its pitiless eye. He would wish it undone if he could, yet he knew that his own unyielding nature would not have rested until he found his vengeance.

  Guillame Devaux would not have approved. For the first time, Michel understood why, not only in his brain, but in body and soul. He had sought darkness, found it, become it. He could feel the abyss calling. Having killed, nothing would be easier than to go on killing until someone killed him. Rough justice. It was only the memory of Guillame Devaux that made him turn away.

  Back in France, with the influence of his adoptive father’s friends, he was permitted to complete his required army service without reprisal. Ironically, he was sent back to Algiers. Finally, he returned to Paris and joined the police. There had never been any question that he would be accepted. His father had been liked and respected by all but the most corrupt. His son was welcomed back. Michel swore then that he would work within the law. It would be his ongoing penance to Guillame Devaux, who had made Michel his son and died for it. His adoptive mother had waited for that final step. She never accused him in words, but her eyes did, when she could bear to look at him. One day, he returned to find she’d moved back to her parents’ home. They did not speak again.

  Michel worked hard and found he had a talent for investigation. Some guessed that he had joined the Legion to hunt down the killer and asked if he’d found what he was looking for there.

  “No.”

  It was still his answer.

  ~

  Michel stood at his window, watching the flow of the Seine, a glitter of gold and black through the shadowy net of the leaves.

  He did not want to see Averill Charron’s head rolling across the dream sands of the Sahara.

  He did not dare be wrong about the killer.

  For the first time in years Michel had been tempted to betray his oath. It had been the glimmer of temptation only, when Charron had said the killer would be declared insane. But a glimmer could become a blinding glare. For five years in the Legion everything he saw was ignited by a white blaze of hatred. He must not allow it to happen again.

  Michel was almost grateful to Blaise Dancier for the attempt on Charron’s life. Seeing others violate that trust had pulled him back into the world of law, however flawed it might be.

  Could such a detestable murderer of children be set free? Someone as clever as this faux Gilles de Rais might contrive to be declared insane. But however mad his motives, this killer had plotted his crimes with a cold and calculating sanity. He sought out suffering, not only the suffering of the children he tortured and murdered, but the suffering of their families and of his own friends. He ruled a kingdom of pain. Whoever he was, he deserved the guillotine. But was it Charron? The evidence said so. Michel believed that his killer was an excellent actor, wearing his ordinary persona like a costume over the evil within. In the Leg
ion they called the identity you assumed the anonymat—the myth you created for yourself.

  Michel had seen the butchery of battle. He had seen terrible murders—an old lady hacked to bits with an axe, a woman’s body broken to fit inside a trunk. He had seen children brutally killed by their own parents for no other reason than they had cried when beaten. But this insidious evil was unlike anything he had experienced. Even the cruelty, the barbaric prejudice he had witnessed in the Legion was more comprehensible.

  With a sigh, Michel sat at his table and lit the lamp. If he could not sleep, he would review the evidence. He had brought the folders home with him and now he set them out, looking through the photographs first. He examined the list of possible kidnapped victims he had complied with the help of Cochefert and Dancier. A few he had since dismissed as too young, or old enough to be runaways. The parents he’d suspected had been arrested when their child’s body was found buried in the back yard. One child had returned unharmed. There were still a dozen cases that were possible, at least half of which felt like his killer’s work.

  Sitting on the table were Michel’s copy of Là Bas and the biography he’d bought of Gilles de Rais. He laid a hand on each book, recalling what he’d read. Neither had said anything about the winged cross, but Huysmans had come across the knowledge somewhere in his research. If need be, he could be called upon to testify at the trial. The killer didn’t need to have the literary leanings of the Revenants to have discovered it—he needed only to have been told it by someone who did. Even Corbeau could have overheard it. Perhaps one of the Revenants had fleshed out the fantasy for him. But instinct insisted Corbeau had claimed the raven as his emblem, as Vipèrine had the snake.

  The killer would know Gilles’ history. But perhaps he had become Gilles because of some similarity. Michel had brought home the research he and his men had gathered on the Revenants’ backgrounds. He set aside the Hyphens, who felt peripheral to the inner circle. He did the same with Paul Noret, who seemed far too stricken about Ninette to be able to torture someone else’s child. He topped the pile with Urbain Charron, who had an alibi with witnesses for an entire week surrounding one abduction. He could not afford to dismiss them, but he would begin with his chief suspects, Averill Charron, Jules Loisel, and Casimir Estarlian.

  Michel laid out Charron’s poems. Having rescued the poet, Michel had turned him into an innocent victim in his mind. A purely emotional reaction he was unaware of until the discovery of the poems revealed his mistake. He’d been furious with himself. Lifting the pantoum, he read the last stanza aloud.

  Là où t’attendent des énigmes menaçantes,

  Son corps s’ouvre comme une porte.

  Cette peau rosée cache des horreurs ondulantes.

  Elle t’invite à sonder la mort.

  Where menacing enigmas await, her body opens like a door. This rosy skin hides twisting horrors. She invites you to explore death. The words evoked Alicia’s appalling torture but they fit the anatomical Venus as well. Was the wax figure simply a macabre creation which haunted the poet’s mind, or was it an inspiration for the murders?

  Charron said he’d destroyed the poem about Alicia because of Theo. Was that true, or did Charron see that some phrase implicated him? Then why not also destroy the suggestive poem about the Venus?

  Leafing through the rest, Michel read one about madness—was it about Averill’s sister, or himself? The next visited the secret chambers of the catacombs. Was Dondre’s body hidden within them? He found another, half-finished, about Gilles de Rais, but it depicted the fairy tale Bluebeard who had murdered his wives. That seemed odd. If he was Gilles, wouldn’t Charron write about the medieval baron rather than the later imaginary killer?

  Michel shook his head. These poems might be just as Charron described them, a poet’s quest to exorcise haunting evils—but coupled with his having discovered the body and dragged his friends to see the corpse at the morgue, the pendulum was again swinging towards guilt. The attack on his father proved he was capable of violence. And anyone who had grown up with Urbain Charron for a father would have their spirit twisted, one way or another.

  Even if Charron was telling the truth about his attempted rescue, he might still be Gilles, working on his own murderous agenda. If he’d succeeded in rescuing Ninette, he would indeed have been a hero and deflected suspicion.

  Michel had all but discounted Vipèrine. One of the interrogators had discovered the brothel keeper from Rouen among the revelers at the Black Mass. This was l’Anguille, the same slippery Eel that Lilias had mentioned. The madam made a deal and talked. Ninette was to be hers after the ceremony. The girl would have vanished into a brothel in another city. An equivalent innocent would have been gifted to her sister, who kept a house here. Michel did not think the modern Gilles would surrender his chosen prey.

  The madam had known Vipèrine’s mother, a lesser courtesan who’d formed an alliance with a cut-rate spiritualist, seducing the unwary in one form or another. Their son, then inaptly named Percival, had worked with them as a child and as an adolescent. Approaching twenty, he struck out on his own, pimping for l’Anguille and playing pornographic games in her brothel. After a chance meeting with the Abbé Boullan, he realized that Satanism would get him both sex and perverted adoration. Vipèrine was born.

  The snake refused to talk until Michel confronted him with l’Anguille’s confession. Already shaken, he’d been terrified when accused of the murders. “The child in Montmartre cemetery, the one you showed in the morgue?”

  “Exactly,” Michel answered. “You must have known you were a suspect.”

  “No. No! I thought you had men following me for…other things….” His gaze darted about the room, searching for somewhere to hide.

  “Perhaps an abortive poisoning attempt?”

  “I don’t know what you mean!” Terror flared in the black eyes, then transformed into defiance. “I thought it was only your animosity after I was released from jail.”

  Michel was anything but convinced. “You left a cross by the bakery.”

  “Jules told me the police were asking about a cross with big wings,” he said. Words began to tumble, an obvious rush of relief. “I thought it would be clever to put it nearby and deflect suspicion from my Black Mass onto this madman. Why not have the police chasing after him while I had the girl safe in my church?”

  “Why not indeed?” Michel asked coldly.

  “I am not this baby killer!” the snake screeched at him.

  “Ninette is scarcely older than Alicia.”

  Vipèrine clenched his jaw. “Jules said Alicia was a child.”

  Michel tried another approach. “What did you tell Charron about the Black Mass?”

  “Nothing once I decided Ninette would be the centerpiece. Averill is that weasel Noret’s pet. I could not afford to tell him or the baron. They would have betrayed the secret.”

  Michel would rather not have believed him, but he did. Instead, he followed this new thread. “Estarlian wanted to attend?”

  “He is an aristocrat. His presence would add elegance.” Vipèrine shrugged. “Years ago, I saw him at a Black Mass that the Abbé Boullan conducted. But he was no longer interested.”

  Or perhaps the baron only scorned Vipèrine’s offering? Either way, this was interesting. “How many years ago?”

  “A year before the Abbé’s death.”

  So Là Bas had been published and Gilles awakened. When Ninette was abducted, the baron was supposed to be in Dieppe consorting with the scandalous English writer just released from prison. Michel had dismissed him. But if the girl was taken only for the Black Mass and not for darker, deadlier games, then Estarlian remained a suspect.

  Michel paused. He had put the baron aside too soon, just as he had failed to suspect the cab driver. What other mistake could he be making? His men had located Jules Loisel. He had been hiding out in Noret’s apartment, supposedly waiting to beg forgiveness. When they searched Loisel’s own pathetic room, they di
scovered it filled with religious and sacrilegious objects and scribblings. But its centerpiece was an inverted pentagram, not a winged cross. Rambert had questioned him and believed his fear and regret to be genuine.

  But Loisel had told Vipèrine about the winged cross. He had told Vipèrine that Ninette was Noret’s daughter. Loisel and Corbeau might have constructed the whole drama and lingered to see it play out—their own Grand Guignol.

  There was a knock. It was after midnight, but his light was on. Was Rambert also finding sleep impossible? But when Michel opened the door, he found Blaise Dancier instead. Michel had gone hunting for him this morning. He’d been coldly furious then. Now he was too tired, too miserable, to lacerate him. He stood aside, gestured to a chair. Going to his cupboard, he took out his brandy. Michel bought the best he could reasonably afford but it didn’t approach the quality Dancier possessed. He poured two glasses. Sat. Waited. Neither of them drank.

  After a moment, Dancier said, “I’m here to apologize.”

  “Not to bribe me to let you murder my prisoner?” Michel was still angry but he felt hypocritical too. He held up a hand. “You betrayed my trust.”

  He could feel Dancier gather breath to argue. He was not used to being challenged. Nor was he used to apologizing. Michel did not care. “He invaded my territory,” Dancier snapped. “He tried to kill someone under my protection.”

  “I know why you attempted it.” Michel drank a swallow of the brandy, letting it burn. “You invaded my territory to try.”

  “I apologized.”

  “So you did.” Michel waited another breath. “I accept your apology, provided—”

  “It won’t happen again,” Dancier finished for him.

  Michel nodded. It was, after all, a rather extraordinary gesture, but he did not feel appeased. “Charron may not have killed the children.”

  Dancier looked aside, so his hirelings must have visited him. Better to have failed if Charron was innocent. Facing him, Dancier asked, “Then who did?”