Floats the Dark Shadow (46 page)

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 Legion 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.”