Haunted Castles (10 page)

I
felt shaken, almost faint, and experienced a sudden desire to talk to someone. Hoping Sellig was playing that night at the Théâtre Français, I took a carriage there and was told he could probably be found at his rooms. My informant mentioned an address to my driver, and before long, Sébastien seemed pleasantly surprised at the appearance of his unannounced guest.

Sellig's rooms were tastefully appointed. The drapes were tall, classic folds of deep blue. A few good pictures hung on the walls, the chairs were roomy and comfortable, and the mingled fragrances of tobacco and book leather gave the air a decidedly masculine musk. Over a small spirit lamp, Sellig was preparing a simple ragout. As he stood in his shirt sleeves, stirring the food, I talked.

“You said, the other evening, that the name Laval was not unknown to you.”

“That gentleman seems to hold you fascinated,” he observed.

“Is it an unhealthy fascination, would you say?” I asked, candidly.

Sellig laughed. “Well, he is not exactly an appealing personage.”

“Then you do know him?”

“In a sense. I have never seen him perform, however.”

“He is enormously talented. He dominates the stage. There are only two actors in Paris who can transfix an audience in that manner.”

“The other is . . . ?”

“You.”

“Ah. Thank you. And yet, you do not equate me with Laval?”

Quickly, I assured him: “No, not at all. In everything but that one quality you and he are utterly different. Diametrically opposed.”

“I am glad of that.”

“Have you known him long?” I asked.

“Laval? Yes. For quite some time.”

“He is not ‘an appealing personage,' you said just now. Would you say he is . . . morally reprehensible?”

Sellig turned to me. “I would be violating a strict confidence if I told you any more than this: if he is morally corrupt (and I am not saying that he is), he is not reprehensible. If he is evil, then he was evil even in his mother's womb.”

A popular song came to my mind, and I said, lightly, “More to be pitied than censured?”

Sellig received this remark seriously. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that is the point precisely. ‘The sins of the father . . .'” But then he broke off and served the ragout.

As he ate, I—who had no appetite—spoke of my troubled mind and general depression.

“Perhaps it is not good for you to stay alone tonight,” he said. “Would you like to sleep here? There is an extra bedroom.”

“It would inconvenience you . . .”

“Not at all. I should be glad of the company.”

I agreed to stay, for I was not looking forward to my lonely hotel suite, and not long after that we retired to our rooms. I fell asleep almost at once, but woke in a sweat about three in the morning. I arose, wrapped myself in one of Sellig's robes, and walked into the library for a book that might send me off to sleep again.

Sellig's collection of books was extensive, although heavily overbalanced by plays, volumes of theatrical criticism, biographies of actors, and so forth, a high percentage of them in English. I chose none of these: instead, I took down a weighty tome of French history. Its pedantic style and small type, as well as my imperfect command of the language, would combine to form the needed sedative. I took the book to bed with me.

My grasp of written French being somewhat firmer than my grasp of the conversational variety, I managed to labor through most of the first chapter before I began to turn the leaves in search of a more interesting section. It was quite by accident that my eyes fell upon a passage that seemed to thrust itself up from the page and stamp itself upon my brain. Though but a single sentence, I felt stunned by it. In a fever of curiosity, I read the other matter on that page, then turned back and read from an earlier point. I read in that volume for about ten minutes, or so I thought, but when I finished and looked up at the clock, I realized that I had read for over an hour. What I had read had numbed and shaken me.

I have never been a superstitious man. I have never believed in the existence of ghosts, or vampires, or other undead creatures out of lurid legend. They make excellent entertainment, but never before that shattering hour had I accepted them as anything more than entertainment. But as I sat in that bed, the book in my hands, the city outside silent, I had reason to feel as if a hand from some sub-zero hell had reached up and laid itself—oh, very gently—upon my heart. A shudder ran through my body. I looked down again at the book.

The pages I had read told of a monster—a real monster who had lived in France centuries before. The Marquis de Sade, in comparison, was a mischievous schoolboy. This was a man of high birth and high aspirations, a marshal of France who at the peak of his power had been the richest noble in all of Europe and who had fought side by side with Joan of Arc, but who had later fallen into such depths of degeneracy that he had been tried and sentenced to the stake by a shocked legislature. In a search for immortality, a yearning to avoid death, he had carried out disgusting experiments on the living bodies of youths and maidens and little children. Seven or eight hundred had died in the laboratory of his castle, died howling in pain and insanity, the victims of a “science” that was more like the unholy rites of the Black Mass. “The accused,” read one of the charges at his trial, “has taken innocent boys and girls, and inhumanly butchered, killed, dismembered, burned and otherwise tortured them, and the said accused has immolated the bodies of the said innocents to devils, invoked and sacrificed to evil spirits, and has foully committed sin with young boys and in other ways lusted against nature after young girls, while they were alive or sometimes dead or even sometimes during their death throes.” Another charge spoke of “the hand, the eyes, and the heart of one of these said children, with its blood in a glass vase . . .” And yet this madman, this miscreant monster, had offered no resistance when arrested, had felt justified for his actions, had said proudly and defiantly under the legislated torture:
“So potent was the star under which I was born that I have done what no one in the world has done nor ever can do.”

His name was Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais, and he became known for all time and to all the world, of course, as Bluebeard.

I was out of bed in an instant, and found myself pounding like a madman on the door of Sellig's bedroom. When there was no response, I opened the door and went in. He was not in his bed. Behind me, I heard another door open. I turned.

Sellig was coming out of yet another room, hardly more than a closet: behind him, just before he closed the door and locked it, I caught a glimpse of bottles and glass trays—I remember surmising, in that instant, that perhaps he was a devotee of the new art of photography, but I had no wish to dwell further on this, for I was bursting with what I wanted to say. “Sébastien!” I cried. “I must tell you something . . .”

“What are you doing up at this hour, my friend?”

“. . . Something incredible . . . terrifying . . .” (It did not occur to me to echo his question.)

“But you are distraught. Here, sit down . . . let me fetch you some cognac . . .”

The words tumbled out of me pell-mell, and I could see they made very little sense to Sellig. He wore the expression of one confronted by a lunatic. His eyes remained fixed on my face, as if he were alert for the first sign of total disintegration and violence. At length, out of breath, I stopped talking and drank the cognac he had placed in my hand.

Sellig spoke. “Let me see if I understand you,” he began. “You met Laval this evening . . . and he said something about his star, and the accomplishment of something no other man has ever accomplished . . . and just now, in this book, you find the same statement attributed to Bluebeard . . . and, from this, you are trying to tell me that Laval . . .”

I nodded. “I know it sounds mad . . .”

“It does.”

“. . . But consider, Sébastien: the names, first of all, are identical—Bluebeard's name was Gilles de
Laval
. In the shadow of the stake, he boasted of doing what no man had ever done, of succeeding at his ambition . . . and are you aware of the nature of his ambition? To live forever! It was to that end that he butchered hundreds of innocents, trying to wrest the very riddle of life from their bodies!”

“But you say he was burned at the stake . . .”

“No!
Sentenced
to be burned! In return for not revoking the confessions he made under torture, he was granted the mercy of strangulation before burning . . .”

“Even so—”

“Listen to me! His relatives were allowed to remove his strangled body from the pyre before the flames reached it! That is a historical fact! They took it away—so they
said!
—to inter it in a Carmelite church in the vicinity. But don't you see what they really did?”

“No . . .”

“Don't you see, Sébastien, that this monster had found the key to eternal life, and had instructed his helots to revive his strangled body by use of those same loathsome arts he had practised? Don't you see that he went on living? That he lives still? That he tortures and murders still? That even when his hands are not drenched in human blood, they are drenched in the mock blood of the Guignol? That the actor Laval and the Laval of old are one and the same?”

Sellig looked at me strangely. It infuriated me. “I am not mad!” I said. I rose and screamed at him:
“Don't you understand?”

And then—what with the lack of food, and the wine I had drunk with Laval, and the cognac, and the tremulous state of my nerves—the room began to tilt, then shrink, then spin, then burst into a star-shower, and I dimly saw Sellig reach out for me as I fell forward into blackness.

T
he bedroom was full of noonday sunlight when I awoke. It lacerated my eyes. I turned away from it and saw someone sitting next to the bed. My eyes focussed, not without difficulty, and I realized it was a woman—a woman of exceptional beauty. Before I could speak, she said, “My name is Madame Pelletier. I am Sébastien's friend. He has asked me to care for you. You were ill last night.”

“You must be . . . Lise . . .”

She nodded. “Can you sit up now?”

“I think so.”

“Then you must take a little bouillon.”

At the mention of food, I was instantly very hungry. Madame Pelletier helped me sit up, propped pillows at my back and began to feed me broth with a spoon. At first, I resisted this, but upon discovering that my trembling hand would not support the weight of the spoon, I surrendered to her ministrations.

Soon, I asked, “And where is Sébastien now?”

“At the Théâtre. A rehearsal of
Oedipe.”
With a faintly deprecatory inflection, she added, “Voltaire's.”

I smiled at this, and said, “Your theatrical tastes are as pristine as Sébastien's.”

She smiled in return. “It was not always so, perhaps. But when one knows a man like Sébastien, a man dedicated, noble, with impeccable taste and living a life beyond reproach . . . one climbs up to his level, or tries to.”

“You esteem him highly.”

“I love him, M'sieu'.”

I had not forgotten my revelation of the night before. True, it seemed less credible in daylight, but it continued to stick in my mind like a burr. I asked myself what I should do with my fantastic theory. Blurt it out to this charming lady and have her think me demented? Take it to the
commissaire
and have him think me the same? Try to place it again before Sébastien, in more orderly fashion, and solicit his aid? I decided on the last course, and informed my lovely nurse that I felt well enough to leave. She protested; I assured her my strength was restored; and at last she left the bedroom and allowed me to dress. I did so quickly, and left the Sellig rooms immediately thereafter.

By this time, they knew me at the Théâtre Français, and I was allowed to stand in the wings while the Voltaire tragedy was being rehearsed. When the scene was finished, I sought out Sellig, drew him aside, and spoke to him, phrasing my suspicions with more calm than I had before.

“My dear friend,” he said, “I flatter myself that my imagination is broad and ranging, that my mind is open, that I can give credence to many wonders at which other men might scoff. But
this—”

“I know, I know,” I said hastily, “and I do not profess to believe it entirely myself—but it is a clue, if nothing more, to Laval's character; a solution, perhaps, to a living puzzle . . .”

Sellig was a patient man. “Very well. I will have a bit of time after this rehearsal and before tonight's performance. Come back later and we will . . .” His voice trailed off. “And we will talk, at least. I do not know what else we can do.”

I agreed to leave. I went directly to the Guignol, even though I knew that, being midafternoon, it would not be open. Arriving there, I found an elderly functionary, asked if Monsieur Laval was inside, perhaps rehearsing, and was told there was no one in the theatre. Then, after pressing a bank note into the old man's hand, I persuaded him to give me Laval's address. He did, and I immediately hailed a passing carriage.

As it carried me away from Montmartre, I tried to govern my thoughts. Why was I seeking out Laval? What would I say to him once I had found him? Would I point a finger at him and dramatically accuse him of being Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais, a man of the Fifteenth Century? He would laugh at me, and have me committed as a madman. I still had not decided on a plan of attack when the carriage stopped, and the driver opened the door and said, “We are here, M'sieu'.”

I stepped out, paid him, and looked at the place to which I had been taken. Dumbfounded, I turned to the driver and said, “But this is not—”

“It is the address M'sieu' gave me.” He was correct. It was. I thanked him and the carriage drove off. My mind churning, I entered the building.

It was the same one which contained Sellig's rooms. Summoning the concierge, I asked the number of Laval's apartment. He told me no such person lived there. I described Laval. He nodded and said, “Ah. The ugly one. Yes, he lives here, but his name is not Laval. It is De Retz.”

Rayx, Rays, Retz, Rais—according to the history book, they were different spellings of the same name. “And the number of his suite?” I asked, impatiently.

“Oh, he shares a suite,” he said. “He shares a suite with M'sieu' Sellig . . .”

I masked my astonishment and ran up the stairs, growing more angry with each step. To think that Sébastien had concealed this from me! Why? For what reason? And yet Laval had not shared the apartment the night before . . . What did it mean?

Etiquette discarded, I did not knock but threw open the door and burst in. “Laval!” I shouted. “Laval, I know you are here! You cannot hide from me!”

There was no answer. I stalked furiously through the rooms. They were empty. “Madame?” I called. “Madame Pelletier?” And then, standing in Sellig's bedroom, I saw that the place had been ransacked. Drawers of chiffoniers had been pulled out and relieved of their contents. It appeared very much as if the occupant had taken sudden flight.

Then I remembered the little room or closet I had seen Sellig leaving in the small hours. Going to it, I turned the knob and found it locked. Desperation and anger flooded my arms with strength, and yelling unseemly oaths, I broke into the room.

It was chaos.

The glass phials and demijohns had been smashed into shards, as if someone had flailed methodically among them with a cane. What purpose they had served was now a mystery. Perhaps a chemist could have analyzed certain residues among the debris, but I could not. Yet, somehow, these ruins did not seem, as I had first assumed, equipment for the development of photographic plates.

Again, supernatural awe turned me cold. Was this the dread laboratory of Bluebeard? Had these bottles and jars contained human blood and vital organs? In this Paris apartment, with Sellig as his conscripted assistant, had Laval distilled, out of death itself, the inmost secrets of life?

Quaking, I backed out of the little room, and in so doing, displaced a corner of one of the blue draperies. Odd things flicker through one's mind in the direst of circumstances—for some reason, I remembered having once heard that blue is sometimes a mortuary color used in covering the coffins of young persons . . . and also that it is a symbol of eternity and human immortality . . . blue coffins . . . blue drapes . . . Bluebeard . . .

I looked down at the displaced drape and saw something that was to delay my return to London, to involve me with the police for many days until they would finally judge me innocent and release me. On the floor at my feet, only half hidden by the blue drapes, was the naked, butchered, dead body of Madame Pelletier.

I think I screamed. I know I must have dashed from those rooms like a possessed thing. I cannot remember my flight, nor the hailing of any carriage, but I do know I returned to the Théâtre Français, a babbling, incoherent maniac who demanded that the rehearsal be stopped, who insisted upon seeing Sébastien Sellig.

The manager finally succeeded in breaking through the wall of my hysteria. He said only one thing, but that one thing served as the cohesive substance that made everything fall into place in an instant.

“He is not here, M'sieu',” he said. “It is very odd . . . he has never missed a rehearsal or a performance before today . . . he was here earlier, but now . . . an understudy has taken his place . . . I hope nothing has happened to him . . . but M'sieu' Sellig, believe me, is not to be found.”

I stumbled out into the street, my brain a kaleidoscope. I thought of that little laboratory . . . and of those two utterly opposite men, the sublime Sellig and the depraved Laval, living in the same suite . . . I thought of Sagittarius, the Man-Beast . . . I thought of the phrase “The sins of the fathers,” and of a banal tune, “More to be Pitied than Censured.” . . . I realized now why Laval was absent from the Guignol on certain nights, the very nights Sellig appeared at the Théâtre Français . . . I heard my own voice, on that first night, inviting Sellig to accompany us to the Guignol: “Will you come? Or perhaps you have a performance?” And Sellig's answer: “I do have a performance” (yes, but
where?)
 . . . I heard Sellig's voice in other scraps:
I have not watched a Guignol performance for several years; I have never seen Laval perform . . .

Of course not! How could he, when he and Laval . . .

I accosted a gendarme, seized his lapels, and roared into his astonished face: “Don't you see? How is it possible I overlooked it? It is so absurdly simple! It is the crudest . . . the most childish . . . the most transparent of cryptograms!”

“What
is, M'sieu'?” he demanded.

I laughed—or wept.
“Sellig!”
I cried. “One has only to spell it backward!”